Military Trial of Bradley Manning Begins, Raising Secrecy Issues

Bradley Manning’s court-martial opened at Fort Meade this week, more than three years after his arrest — and press freedom advocates say the trial’s own procedural secrecy has become nearly as significant a story as the leak case at its center.

A Trial Three Years in the Making

Army Private First Class Manning, then 25, had already pleaded guilty to ten lesser offenses months earlier, admitting to sending more than 700,000 classified military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks — the largest leak of classified information in U.S. history. Those guilty pleas alone carry a potential 20-year sentence. But Manning still faces trial on 12 additional, more serious charges, including the government’s most severe allegation: aiding the enemy, by allegedly making classified material available in a form al-Qaeda could access. Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty, but a conviction on that charge alone carries a potential life sentence.

Opening statements set the tone for the trial’s fundamental dispute. Military prosecutor Captain Joe Morrow told the court, “This is a case about what happens when arrogance meets access to sensitive information,” while defense attorney David Coombs countered that Manning had been searching specifically for information that, if released, “would make the world a better place” — a framing dispute over motive that will run through the entirety of a trial expected to last at least twelve weeks and call some 150 witnesses.

A Fight Over Access That’s Become Its Own Story

What has drawn particular concern from press freedom organizations is how little of the pretrial process has actually been visible to the public. The Center for Constitutional Rights, representing a coalition of journalists including Amy Goodman, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, has fought for more than a year to secure public access to court filings, judicial orders, and hearing transcripts — none of which had been routinely released as the case proceeded. Goodman was blunt about the stakes: “Secret trials are commonplace in dictatorships, but have no place in this country,” she said, arguing that public access to the case “is vital to the public’s right to know to what lengths their government will go to keep secret their conduct of wars and occupations abroad.”

That fight has repeatedly lost in court on procedural, rather than substantive, grounds. In April, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces ruled 3-2 that it lacked jurisdiction to even hear the access challenge until after Manning’s trial concluded and sentencing was complete — a decision issued over two forceful dissents, with CCR warning that by the time any appellate court could weigh in, the damage to the proceeding’s transparency would already be irreversible. Denied relief in the military court system, the same coalition of journalists and CCR filed a fresh complaint in federal district court in Baltimore weeks before the trial began, seeking to force disclosure through the civilian courts instead.

A Press Corps Struggling to Cover Its Own Trial

The secrecy concerns extend beyond legal filings into the practical mechanics of covering the trial itself. Requests for media credentials to attend the proceedings in person numbered roughly 350; the court granted only 70. NPR and other outlets, working with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, formally requested the court allow a privately funded stenographer, given the absence of any routine, publicly available transcript of proceedings. Presiding judge Army Colonel Denise Lind has said redacted transcripts of the trial’s closed sessions will eventually be made public, but offered no timeline for when that might actually happen — leaving reporters covering one of the most significant national security trials in decades largely dependent on secondhand accounts and their own courtroom notes for the case’s most sensitive testimony.

A Trial Being Watched Well Beyond the Verdict

For press freedom advocates, the stakes of the access fight extend beyond Manning’s individual case. The same secrecy framework being tested here, CCR has noted, is likely to apply directly to other pending high-profile courts-martial, including the case against Maj. Nidal Hasan over the Fort Hood shooting — meaning whatever precedent Manning’s trial sets for public and press access to military justice proceedings will shape how the public can follow military trials well beyond this one specific case.

For related coverage of government transparency and whistleblower cases, see our piece on the Yale Law School panel on government secrecy, or browse our full Policy & Rights archive.