The pretrial hearing for Bradley Manning ended in a packed courtroom at Fort Meade with dramatic closing arguments Thursday morning, including a strong case from the prosecution with shocking, newly public chat logs between Manning and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Confronted with overwhelming evidence, the defense questioned what it called the governments overreaction and called for a reduction of the charges Manning faces.

Mannings lead attorney, David Coombs, opened the morning by directly addressing Lt. Col. Paul Almanza, the officer presiding over the hearing, to determine if Private Manning will be court-martialed and, if so, on what charges. Youre in a unique position here, Coombs said, to give the United States government something the United States government needs: a reality check. Coombs asked the investigating officer presiding to reduce Mannings 22 charges to three and to remove his most serious charge, aiding the enemy.

Coombs asserted that the United States has overreacted. The government has overcharged in this case, he said, to strong-arm a plea from my client. The maximum sentence for all but one of Mannings charges adds up to 150 yearsaiding the enemy carries a maximum penalty of death or life without the possibility of parole.

Coombs described Mannings long struggle with his gender identity, reading from an email Manning sent to a superior officer weeks before his arrest. His gender crisis, Manning wrote, makes my entire life feel like a bad dream that wont end ... Everyones concerned about me, and everyones afraid of me. And Im sorry, he wrote. Coombs denounced Mannings superiors for failing to respond to his clients pleas for help. It is the units lack of response to that which also smacks in the face of justice, he said.

The attorney went on to question the damage done by the documents release. What was the result of these leaks? he asked, adding it would have been nice if the original classifying authorities and the officials who claimed such harm had been done had testified, an allusion to the decision to deny Coombs most of the witnesses he requested. They are reinforcing the Chicken Little response from the U.S. military, he said.

But in the end, Coombs insisted, the leak hurt no one. It hasnt caused harm. If anything it has helped, he said. The sky is not falling. The sky is not falling. And the sky will not fall. Coombs highlighted Mannings youth and idealism. In your early 20s you believe you can change the world, he said. In your early 20s you believe. When the president of the United States says Yes, we can, you believe that.

Coombs closed his oratory with a soaring appeal to conscience. An individual who breaks a law and they do so because the law is unjust, and they risk jail to arouse the public, Coombs said, paraphrasing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, theyre really expressing the very highest respect for the law. Coombs ended by quoting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

In a fast-paced presentation aided by PowerPoint, Capt. Ashden Fein, lead attorney representing the government, methodically laid out its case against Private Manning. Fein described Manning as a trusted and well-trained soldier who betrayed his country. He used that training to defy our trust, to indiscriminately and systematically harm the United States.

The prosecution went through the evidence it had presented throughout the trial, illustrating step by step how, it says, Manning used his working hours in Iraq to download immense amounts of classified information, which he then transferred to his personal computer and uploaded to WikiLeaks. Fein hammered on Mannings betrayal, noting that he signed six nondisclosure agreements. Using a PowerPoint presentation on operational security that Manning himself had created as a student at Army intelligence school, Fein laid out the multiple dangers posed by spilling classified information.

In a dramatic turn, the prosecution showed chat logs of conversations between two people it asserted (with forensic evidence) were Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, allowing the logs to flash briefly on a screen for the benefit of the gallery.

Anyway, Im throwing everything Ive got on JTF Gitmo at you know. Should take a while to get up though, said the user Nobody, presumed to be Manning.

OK, great, said Nathaniel Frank, alleged to be Julian Assange.

Upload is at about 36 PCT.

ETA? asked Assange.

Eleven to twelve hours Im guessing since its been going six already.

The government also presented chats in which Assange appears to offer assistance to Manning in cracking a logon password to allow him to search anonymously on a computer.

Any good at LM hash cracking? asked Manning.

Yes, said Assange. We have rainbow tables for LM.

[Note: Chat logs appeared only briefly on a screen and remain, like other evidence and filings in the military proceeding, unreleased to the public. Logs as they appear in this and other articles are the result of collaborative note taking by journalists in the courtroom and those watching proceedings via live feed.]

Fein closed his statement with a video statement from Adam Gadahn, also known as Azzam al-Amriki, an American-born al Qaeda spokesperson, discussing the Collateral Murder video and the State Department cables Manning stands accused of leaking. Fein also alluded to evidence that an enemy of the United States has, or had, the CIDNE Afghanistan database Manning allegedly leaked, known to most of the world as the raw material of WikiLeakss Afghan War Diary.

This information, Fein said, is accessible to all enemies of the United States with Internet access. Fein insisted that Manning had received the training to know better than to leak classified information. He used that training to betray our trust, he said.

The investigating officer who presided over the hearing was Lt. Col. Paul Almanza, an officer in the Army reserve and a Department of Justice attorney until days before the hearing began. Almanza has a nonbinding deadline of Jan. 16 to issue his report announcing what charges, if any, will be brought against Manning in a court martial.

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Joanne McNeil (an occasional Reason contributor)reports from the Bradley Manning trial for Jacobin magazine, with some interesting observations, starting with the fact that he seems to have a lot of older fans, with:

a third of the people attending the trial as spectators could remember the bombing of Pearl Harbor as clearly as 9-11. And quite a number more looked like retired boomers. Has AARP thrown its weight behind hacktivist causes? Were they cypherpunks in elaborate disguise?

I started talking with a retired woman who drove down from Pennsylvania. I asked how she felt about the prosecution's depiction of WikiLeaks as a terrorist abettor. "Well, I'm not as concerned with that," she said. "I'm here because they were torturing that kid."

McNeil notes that this trial, of great importance to citizens' and the press' relationship with government and government crimes, isn't getting the attention it deserves:

How many people even know the trial is happening? Manning washeld for three years without a trial.That is plenty of time for the public to mistakenly assume there was already a court decision and sentencing. And why did they try this case at all? Manning already pled guilty to 10 charges and faces up to 20 years. The remaining charges are bizarrely exaggerated. Usingflimsy circumstantial evidence, the government is trying to argue that publishing documents on the internet assists terrorists. And for that they could lock him away for life.

Theprosecutors are in their early 30s nominally "digital natives" and should know better. "Do you know what WGet is?" they interrogate a witness, as if it is malicious spyware and not an everyday command line program. The government is capitalizing on asymmetric tech literacy and the failure of language when old laws are applied to the internet. At the peak of this absurdity: WikiLeaks cables are still formallyclassified, so despite being readily available to anyone with internet, closed sessions are required to discuss them.

Perhaps you heard theaudio of Bradley Manning's court statementlast November. That was leaked. No other recordings or visuals have come out of the trial, with the exception ofcourtroom sketches. Now imagine if there were a livestream. And imagine if everyone had tuned in to watchYochai Benkler's gripping expert witness testimonyon July 10th. He argued on behalf of the decentralization of media in the digital age, the blurred lines between activist and journalist, and that WikiLeaks was "providing a discrete but critical component of what in the past was always integrated in a single organization.".

Why did the prosecution ramp up charges against Manning? "Aiding the enemy" might have resulted in the death penalty. The answer came from Benkler under cross-examination. Summarizing an article he wrote, he explained in court, "it's very hard to suppress information once it's on WikiLeaks and that the core target needs to be on trust as the center of gravity. In other words, to undermine the concept that WikiLeaks is a place where a leaker can go and trust that they won't be revealed. So in order to prevent this distributed leaking, it's necessary to increase the fear, as it were, or the constraint on potential leakers."

That's justice in America: increasing the fear that anyone might help American citizens or journalists might have a chance of learning what's being done in our names, on our dimes.

Part of the public campaign against Manning is based on the notion that he, well, he just ain't right:

Manning was tortured in part because he signed a few letters from the brig as "Breanna Elizabeth." Marine Corps Master Sgt. Craig Blenis defended his cruelty in a December pre-trial hearing. Coombs asked why the marine thought Manning's gender dysphoria should factor into his"prevention of Injury"status. Blenis answered because"that's not normal, sir."

But it is normal. Manning's gender identity is as normal as his computer use. Using WGet, believing WikiLeaks to be a reputable news source in 2010, listening to Lady Gaga, identifying as a gender different from your assigned sex this is all normal. It just might take another generation to see this. What is out of the ordinary about Pfc Bradley Manning is his extraordinary courage.

Reason.TV was live from the Manning trial a few weeks ago:

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Bradley Manning: Is There Anyone More Normal? - reason.com

He is not being tortured. He made comments about killing himself so the guards took away anything that he could use to do it so he can stand trial for leaking sensitive information that humiliated the United States and put thousands of lives in danger.

Does he deserve it? No, he deserves much worse. He sold out his nation because he was "confused" over being a homosexual in the Army and his transvestite boyfriend told him to do it. Is it ethical? Its just as ethical as illegally copying classified files and then sending them to a site that published them on the internet.

As for the Army, this turd is lucky that he is still alive. It says leaps and bounds about the Army that he is just being put through a little hard time rather than being beaten on an hourly basis for the rest of his life, or being be-headed with a dull knife.

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The court-martial of US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning for the largest leak of classified documents in US history will hinge on whether he aided the enemy and violated the 1917 Espionage Act charges that some legal analysts say the Obama administration could have trouble proving.

Manning, whose trial begins Monday, is accused of passing more than 700,000 government and military documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. The polarizing figure, called a whistle-blowing hero by supporters and traitor by opponents, has been in detention since his arrest in Iraq in May 2010.

Manning faces more than 20 charges, including violating the Espionage Act and a military charge of aiding the enemy. If convicted, he could be sentenced to prison for life without parole.

In February during pretrial hearings, Manning admitted to 10 charges. He told military judge Army Col. Denise Lind he leaked the material to expose the American military's "blood lust" and disregard for human life in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said he did not believe the information would harm the United States and he wanted to start a debate on the role of the military and foreign policy.

The judge accepted his guilty plea to reduced charges for those charges, but prosecutors did not and moved forward with a court-martial.

Manning chose to have his court-martial heard by a judge instead of a jury. It is expected to run all summer. The case is the most high profile in a string of leak prosecutions by the Obama administration, which has come under criticism for its crackdown on leakers. The six prosecutions since Barack Obama took office is more than in all other presidencies combined.

The governments decision to proceed with the two most serious charges even after Manning admitted guilt took some legal analysts by surprise.

Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justices Liberty and National Security Program, told The Washington Post that Mannings leaks were reckless and a data dump. But he is not an enemy of the state and putting him behind bars for life is overreaching, she said.

First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams told The Wall Street Journal, His conduct in my view was neither lawful nor admirable, but the decision to persist in this prosecution seems unduly severe.

On the other side, prosecutors have said Manning must be held accountable: Private First Class Manning was a US analyst who we trained and trusted to use multiple intelligence systems ... and he used that training to defy our trust, said Maj. Ashden Fein, a prosecutor in the case, in one pretrial hearing.

Manning, he said, knowingly engaged in a six-month-long criminal enterprise of harvesting classified information to send to WikiLeaks, while knowing and understanding that enemies would have access to the information.

Some former prosecutors told The Washington Post it could be difficult to prove intent to harm the US.

A lot of times, you think something is damaging, said Baruch Weiss, a former federal prosecutor and an expert on the Espionage Act, and the reality proves to be otherwise.

But Ms. Goitein said that under a ruling by Lind, prosecutors will have to prove only that Manning had reason to believe that the documents disclosed could be used to harm the US or aid a foreign power. They need not prove that he intended to harm the US.

I suspect that the government can meet this burden on at least some of the counts, Goitein told the Post.

The material that WikiLeaks began publishing in 2010 documented complaints of Iraqi detainee abuses, contained a US tally of civilian deaths in Iraq, and described weak US support for the government of Tunisia a disclosure that Manning supporters said encouraged the popular uprising that ousted the Tunisian president in 2011 and helped trigger the Middle Eastern pro-democracy uprisings known as the Arab Spring.

In pretrial hearings, Manning also acknowledged sending WikiLeaks unclassified video of a 2007 US Apache helicopter attack that killed civilians, including a Reuters photographer. An internal military investigation concluded the troops reasonably mistook the camera equipment for weapons, while WikiLeaks dubbed the video "Collateral Murder."

The release of the cables and video embarrassed the US and its allies. The Obama administration has said it threatened valuable military and diplomatic sources and strained America's relations with other governments, but the specific amount of damage hasn't been publicly revealed and probably won't be during the trial.

Much of the evidence is classified, which means large portions of the trial are likely to be closed to reporters and the public. The judge tested alternatives to closing the courtroom, such as using code words and unclassified summaries, but she said it didn't work.

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About 20 Manning supporters demonstrated Monday morning in the rain outside the visitor gate at Fort Meade in Maryland, where the court-martial is taking place. They waved signs reading "free Bradley Manning" and "protect the truth," while chanting, "What do want? Free Bradley. When do we want it? Now."

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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Protesters march during a rally in support of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning outside Fort Meade, Md., on Saturday. Manning, who is scheduled to face a court-martial beginning Monday, is accused of sending hundreds of thousands of classified records to WikiLeaks while working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad. Patrick Semansky/AP hide caption

Protesters march during a rally in support of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning outside Fort Meade, Md., on Saturday. Manning, who is scheduled to face a court-martial beginning Monday, is accused of sending hundreds of thousands of classified records to WikiLeaks while working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad.

In the three years since his arrest, Bradley Manning, the slight Army private first class with close-cropped blond hair and thick military glasses, has become less of a character than a cause.

"Bradley Manning is a very polarizing figure. People either think that he is a hero or they think he's a traitor," says Elizabeth Goitein, who co-directs the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "I actually think that he's somewhere in between."

Manning is accused of one of the biggest leaks of classified information in history. Prosecutors say he downloaded thousands of diplomatic cables and war field reports and sent them to the website WikiLeaks.

Goitein will follow Manning's trial, which begins Monday at a military base in Maryland, for what it says about the government's system for handling secret material.

"I think this case really does illustrate one of the harms of overclassification, which is that when people, day in and day out, who are working with classified information see that there are so many documents that are completely innocuous that are classified, they lose respect for the system," she says.

Manning's supporters say he deserves an award for blowing the whistle on war crimes, civilian casualties and torture. Instead, they say, he was abused by the U.S. military, which held him in solitary confinement for months in a brig in Virginia.

Defense lawyer David Coombs made rare public remarks at a rally last year.

"Brad's treatment at Quantico will forever be etched, I believe, in our nation's history as a disgraceful moment in time," he said.

Bradley Manning is a very polarizing figure. People either think that he is a hero or they think he's a traitor. I actually think that he's somewhere in between.

Elizabeth Goitein, Brennan Center for Justice

Manning has already agreed to plead guilty to 10 lesser criminal charges, but not the most serious offenses including violations of the Espionage Act and aiding the enemy, which carries a possible life sentence.

The government will need to prove Manning had reason to believe the leaks would hurt national security. But Manning is expected to argue that he had no intent to harm anyone.

The case is already one of the longest and most complex in military history, says Eugene Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale.

"The unanswered question is why this train has run so badly off the tracks," he says.

Fidell says the military justice system is supposed to prize speed and efficiency, but the drift in the Manning prosecution and other failings undermine public confidence.

"It's unfolding at a time that may be a tipping point for the military justice system generally," he says. "And what I'm talking about specifically is the widespread consternation and dismay about how the military justice system deals with an entirely unrelated type of criminality, which is sexual assault."

The judge in the Manning case has ruled that some witnesses will testify behind closed doors. The case already has a rap for excessive secrecy, since many court filings have been impossible to view for reporters and Manning's vocal supporters.

One of them is Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who spoke about his frustration at that rally last year.

"It's hard to hear sometimes. You get no access to any of the court documents, none of the court orders, none of the motions filed nothing," he said. "And I'm a lawyer, and I sit in that courtroom and it seems like a completely secret proceeding to me."

The trial is expected to last 12 weeks.

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Intent To Harm At Center Of Bradley Manning's Trial : NPR