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Assessing the breach of the largest leak of classified data in U.S. history cost the military hundreds of thousands of dollars- retired Army officer says
Assessing the breach of the largest leak of classified data in U.S. history cost the military hundreds of thousands of dollars, a retired Army officer on Wednesday told the judge weighing the length of time soldier Bradley Manning will spend in prison, AP reported. Retired Colonel James McCarl said the release of hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, battlefield videos and other classified data on the WikiLeaks pro-transparency website prompted a flurry of activity as officials scrambled to assess the potential degree of impact on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Colonel Denise Lind, the military judge hearing Manning's court-martial, last week convicted the 25-year-old Army private first class on 19 charges that included espionage and theft. Manning was working as a low-level intelligence analyst in Baghdad more than three years ago when he was arrested and accused of releasing more than 700,000 secret documents to WikiLeaks. McCarl said commanders were concerned that enemy fighters might use the information released in 2010 to hone their strategies against the United States. An initial military review included assigning personnel to read the first 2,000 documents in a set of 110,000 that might include military information, then write a computer program to sort through them, said McCarl, who oversaw part of the review. The program would weigh the importance of batches of the documents. -- SPA 01:46 LOCAL TIME 22:46 GMT تغريد