Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army intelligence officer accused of leaking thousands of government documents to whistleblower group WikiLeaks, was deemed unfit for service in the military, according to reports unearthed by The Guardian.
Manning was so unstable prior to his deployment to Iraq that he wet himself, was prone to fits of rage directed at commanding officers and was frequently required to submit to psychiatric evaluations.
"I escorted Manning a couple of times to his 'psych' evaluations after his outbursts. They never should have trapped him in and recycled him in [to Iraq]. Never. Not that mess of a child I saw with my own two eyes. No one has mentioned the army's failure here – and the discharge unit who agreed to send him out there," said an officer who was at Fort Leonard Wood military base in Missouri with Manning in 2007.
In addition to Manning's instability, interviews with soldiers who served with him in Iraq revealed that security at the base was very lax, with passwords to classified network written on sticky notes and left out in the open, and that rank and file soldiers would watch graphic, classified "kill videos" for entertainment.
Jacob Sullivan served in Manning's unit.
"I would be there by myself and the laptops [would] be sitting there with passwords. Everyone would write their passwords down on sticky notes and set it by their computer," he said. "[There] wasn't a lot of security going on so no wonder something like this transpired."
No one else from Manning's base was charged in relation to WikiLeaks. Manning has denied all charges.
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