Prosecutors look to closely link Bradley Manning and Julian Assange
this stinks to high heaven.
Government prosecutors seeking life in prison for Army Pfc. Bradley Manning opened his court-martial Monday closely linking the young, nondescript enlistee from Oklahoma with the outsized Julian Assange, head of the anti-secrecy WikiLeaks website who used his world stage to post hundreds of thousands of Manning’s purloined documents in the largest leak of U.S. classified material in the nation’s history.
Army Cpt. Joe Morrow, prosecuting Manning on 21 charges, including endangering the U.S. and aiding the enemy, said Manning downloaded and sent to WikiLeaks more than 700,000 classified materials after the short, bespectacled Manning and the silver-haired media celebrity Assange quietly exchanged personal contact information and crafted Internet chat logs to expose the deepest secrets in the fight against terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That partnership, Morrow and other Army prosecutors alleged, blossomed to one where the unlikely pair discussed their own attempts at secrecy even as Manning methodically flipped documents to Assange and the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief routinely posted the material – including State Department cables, assessments of terror captives, prisoner interrogation videos and U.S. evaluations of foreign allies.
“These were massive, massive downloads,” Morrow said. “Packaged and out the door to WikiLeaks in some instances in a matter of minutes.”
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http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-bradley-manning-julian-assange-ties-20130603,0,6543200.story
