The court-martial trail of Bradley Manning, the Army private who has admitted to sending more than 700,000 war-related and other classified U.S. documents to WikiLeaks, has begun.
The trial in the year-year-old espionage case has begun after months of pretrial hearings and will be held in Maryland, about 30 miles north of the White House.
According to Fox News, Manning is charged with indirectly helping the enemy by causing classified material to be published on WikiLeaks.
Manning has admitted to sending the material to Wikileaks after accessing a supposedly secure government computer network, then downloading the information.
He sent information about battlefield reports on Afghan and Iraq, State Department cables and video of a U.S. Apache helicopter attack.
The 25-year-old said that he leaked the material because he wanted people to know how the American military was fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with little regard for human life.
He got the information while working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad in 2010, the report added.