Eighteen months after his arrest in Iraq for allegedly orchestrating the largest leak of state secrets in American history, Bradley Manning has faced his military accusers for the first time, immediately turning the guns against them.
At the start of a preliminary hearing to establish whether the US soldier should face a full court martial for allegedly passing more than 250,000 US embassy cables to WikiLeaks, Manning issued a dramatic challenge to the investigating officer – the military equivalent to a judge – implying that the proceedings were biased and effectively rigged against him.
His lawyer, David Coombs, demanded that the investigating officer, Lt Colonel Paul Almanza, recuse himself from the case on the grounds that he works as a prosecutor for the US department of justice. The DoJ is involved in a criminal pursuit of Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, to which Manning is alleged to have transferred a huge trove of US embassy cables and other confidential materials.
At the end of a day of stuttering proceedings in which the court spent more time in recess than in active session, Almanza ruled that he would not remove himself from the case and that proceedings would continue on Saturday, Manning's 24th birthday. Almanza said that under the rules of military justice, a "reasonable person" would not conclude that he was incapable of conducting an impartial investigation into the charges against Manning.