Bradley Manning’s Defense: No Harm, No Foul

The most famous gay soldier ever is going to be on trial soon for releasing hundreds of megs of classified information to Wikileaks. David Coombs, Manning’s defense lawyer who is famous for defending other army turncoats, notably Hasan Akbar, who rolled grenades into the tents of his commanders, announced his first salvo to defend his client: The data wasn’t really all that classified and nobody got too, too hurt by it. Yeah, let’s see how that flies.

From CNET here:

Bradley Manning’s attorney has suggested that the hundreds of megabytes of U.S. government data his client allegedly handed to WikiLeaks didn’t really harm national security after all.

The filing, which defense attorney David Coombs made public today, requests a copy of a White House “report detailing the rather benign nature of the leaks and the lack of any real damage to national security” caused by WikiLeaks. It also seeks similar documents from the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Justice Department.

Manning, an Army private, was originally charged last July with sending a military video to a person not authorized to receive it and with obtaining “more than 150,000 diplomatic cables” from the State Department. WikiLeaks began to release the department’s internal cables last fall, following its publication of military dispatches from Afghanistan and Iraq a few months earlier.

The U.S. Army added 22 additional charges against Manning earlier this year. One of the new charges is an allegation of aiding the enemy, which carries severe penalties.

If Manning did in fact provide classified data to WikiLeaks, steal “a record or thing of value of the United States,” exceed his “authorized access on a Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) computer,” and commit the other unlawful acts that prosecutors allege he engaged in, the extent of damage to U.S. national security won’t save him from being convicted.

So maybe Attorney Coombs is already planning on a conviction and is just trying to save Manning from the firing squad.