Opening the court-martial of U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, a military prosecutor charged Monday that he "harvested" a massive trove of classified information from secure networks and made it available to America's enemies by dumping it onto the Internet.
In a nearly hourlong statement to a packed courtroom, Capt. Joe Morrow described ways in which he said the disclosure of this information put the lives of Manning's fellow soldiers "at risk." The trial opened at this army installation 40 km northeast of Washington more than three years after Manning was arrested in Iraq in connection with the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history.
"This is a case about a soldier who harvested hundreds of thousands of documents and dumped them on the Internet where they would be available to the enemy," Morrow said. A slide show outlining "key evidence" that the prosecution intends to present included information from an external hard drive of Manning's personal computer and chat logs.