A military judge presiding over the court martial of the WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning has set the date for what is likely to be the biggest whistleblower trial in US history.
Judge Denise Lind set aside six weeks for the trial of the US soldier, between 4 February and 15 March. Manning faces 22 counts relating to charges that he leaked hundreds of thousands of secret US state documents, including war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq and diplomatic cables, to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
The trial start date looks likely to hold firm despite months of postponement. By February Manning would have been in custody for almost three years – far longer than the 120-day period normally allowed under military rules between charges being preferred and the start of a trial.
The judge made her ruling at the end of a three-day pre-trial hearing at Fort Meade in Maryland, which was attended by Manning. The soldier, who worked as an intelligence analyst at forward operating base Hammer outside Baghdad, where he was arrested in May 2010, faces life in military custody.
Two other issues dominated court proceedings this week. The first concerned a batch of emails between military personnel at Quantico marine base in Virginia, where Manning was held towards the start of his detention.
The soldier's lawyers, led by David Coombs, want the army to release all 1,384 emails to them in hope they will provide information that will allowing them to challenge Manning's ongoing incarceration on the grounds that he was subjected to cruel and unusual treatment during the 10 months he was held at Quantico.
A pre-trial hearing scheduled for 27 November will examine the issue. Manning's lawyers claim he was held in solitary confinement and subjected to a harsh regime that included being stripped of his clothes at night.
So far, the prosecution has released only 684 of the emails – 600 of them as recently as this week. Lind announced on Wednesday that she would review the remaining 700 emails before deciding whether to disclose them to the defence.
The hearing in November will be Manning's last real hope of avoiding many of the charges. Technically, Lind has the power to throw out the case in its entirety if she finds he was subjected to illegal pre-trial treatment.
The second pre-trial issue related to a YouTube video that Manning posted before his arrest, in which he discussed his daily life using sensitive words such as "top secret" and "classified". When his superiors found out about the video in 2008, they put him through "corrective training" designed to reinforce the idea that he should not share classified information with anyone unauthorised to receive it. The prosecution want to present the video to the jury at next year's court martial as a means of proving that Manning was fully aware of the consequences of making state secrets available on the internet.
The most serious charge against him is that he "aided the enemy", in this case al-Qaida, by providing confidential documents to WikiLeaks. "The evidence shows the accused has knowledge that information posted on the internet is accessible to and sought after by the enemy," prosecution lawyer Captain Angel Overgaard, told the hearing.
Lind ruled that Manning's YouTube video would be admissible.
