The American soldier at the centre of the WikiLeaks revelations was so mentally fragile before his deployment to Iraq that he wet himself, threw chairs around, shouted at his commanding officers and was regularly brought in for psychiatric evaluations, according to an investigative film produced by the Guardian. 
 
 Bradley Manning, who was detained a year ago on Sunday in connection with the biggest security leak in US military history, was a "mess of a child" who should never have been put through a tour of duty in Iraq, according to an officer from the Fort Leonard Wood military base in Missouri, where Manning trained in 2007. 
 
 The officer's words reinforce a leaked confidential military report that reveals that other senior officers thought he was unfit to go to Iraq. "He was harassed so much that he once pissed in his sweatpants," the officer said. 
 
 "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 the officer, who asked not to be identified because of the hostility towards Manning in the military. 
 
 "I live in an area where I would be persecuted if I said anything against the army or helped Manning," the officer said. 
 
 Despite several violent outbursts and a diagnosis of adjustment disorder, a condition that meant he was showing difficulty adjusting to military life, Manning was eventually sent to Iraq, where it is alleged he illegally downloaded thousands of sensitive military and diplomatic documents and passed them on to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. 
 
 In Iraq, Manning retained his security clearance to work as an intelligence specialist. 
 
 Two months after his arrival, the bolt was removed from his rifle because he was thought to be a danger, his lawyer, David Coombs, has confirmed. 
 
 A Guardian investigation focusing on soldiers who worked with Manning in Iraq has also discovered there was virtually no computer and intelligence security at Manning's station in Iraq, Forward Operating Base Hammer. According to eyewitnesses, the security was so lax that many of the 300 soldiers on the base had access to the computer room where Manning worked, and passwords to access the intelligence computers were stuck on "sticky notes" on the laptop screens. 
 
 Rank and file soldiers would watch grisly "kill mission" footage as a kind of entertainment on computers with access to the sensitive network of US diplomatic and military communications known as SIPRNet. 
 
 Jacob Sullivan, 28, of Phoenix, Arizona, a former chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear specialist, was stationed at FOB Hammer in Manning's unit. 
 
 "A lot of different people worked from that building and in pretty much every room there was a SIPRNet computer attached to a private soldier or a specialist," Sullivan said 
 
 "On the computers that I saw there was a [sticky label] either on the computer or next to the computer with the information to log on. I was never given permission to log on so I never used it but there were a lot of people who did." 
 
 He added: "If you saw a laptop with a red wire coming out of it, you knew it was a SIPRNet. 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. [There] wasn't a lot of security going on so no wonder something like this transpired." 
 
 Manning is facing multiple charges of downloading and passing on sensitive information. No one else at the base has been charged. Manning denies all the charges. If convicted he could face up to 55 years in jail. 
 
 The US Defence Security Service is also investigating why Manning, who had been sent for psychiatric counselling before he was deployed to Iraq, was not screened more fully before he was allowed to work in intelligence. 
 
 Eyewitness accounts by soldiers who served with him there and friends in the US who spoke to the Guardian paint a picture of an increasingly unstable and at times violent man. 
 
 One soldier who served with him describes him "blowing up and punching this chick in the face". 
 
 Additional reporting by Daniel Fisher ||||| Security at the military unit in Iraq where alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning worked was so lax that soldiers could watch pirated movies on army intelligence computers, it has been revealed. 
 
 Speaking on day three of the preliminary hearing regarding Private Manning, a senior officer in his "sensitive compartmented information facility" (SCIF)said it was common for analysts to bring in DVDs bought from Iraqis. 
 
 They also stored music and played games on computers used for handling classified information. 
 
 The disclosure, by Captain Casey Fulton, is the latest to indicate loose controls within the unit where Manning, 24, served as an intelligence analyst. 
 
 It has previously emerged that passwords to secure computers were left on Post-it notes stuck on terminals and that there was no system for checking that classified information was not removed from the building. 
 
 Fulton said she did not know it was wrong for soldiers to store music and films on a secured shared drive. 
 
 Under cross-examination, Fulton said that in her opinion the soldier should have been issued with a "derog" – a disciplinary notice – in December 2009 when he was involved in an incident in which he overturned a table and then made to grab a gun from a gun rack.She also said that it was her view that Manning should have been issued a "derog" on 7 May 2010 when he assaulted a fellow intelligence analyst. Fulton was in the unit at the time when the assault happened. 
 
 Earlier that day, she told the hearing, she had seen Manning on the floor curled up in a ball in a side room in the unit. Later that evening she had seen Manning pinned to the ground by his fellow worker, a female analyst called Specialist Shulman. 
 
 Others in the unit had witnessed Manning hit Shulman, and she had a red welt on her face, Fulton said. 
 
 Under questioning, Fulton confirmed that had a "derog" been issued, Manning could have had his security clearance withdrawn and he would no longer have access to the databases of confidential information. 
 
 Manning faces a 22-count indictment, including charges of aiding the enemy, in relation to the leak last year of 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. The current hearing is to establish whether he should face a full court-martial over the alleged crimes. ||||| 1 of 5. U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning is seen in a courtroom sketch during his Army Article 32 hearing in the courthouse at Fort Meade, Maryland, December 16, 2011. 
 
 FORT MEADE, MD (Reuters) - A key witness was excused from testifying in the case against Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning on Sunday after he invoked his right against self-incrimination at a hearing about the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history. 
 
 Sergeant First Class Paul Adkins invoked his right against self-incrimination as he began answering questions at a proceeding to determine whether there was sufficient evidence to court-martial the 24-year-old Manning on charges including aiding the enemy, which carries life imprisonment. 
 
 Manning is charged with downloading massive data files from the military's classified network when he was a U.S. Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, and providing them to anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. 
 
 The defense has portrayed Adkins, at the time a master sergeant in charge of security at the facility where Manning worked, as someone who should have recognized the private's troubled emotional state and acted to revoke the security clearance that gave him access to classified U.S. documents. 
 
 Manning's attorney, David Coombs, argued that Adkins should not be excused because he was not under criminal investigation in the case, but the prosecution declined to grant him immunity to testify and he was excused. 
 
 A second intelligence analyst who worked with Manning, Warrant Officer 1 Kyle Balonek, also invoked his right against self-incrimination and was excused from testifying on Sunday. He was one of the most experienced analysts in the unit. 
 
 Coombs argued on Saturday that Manning had displayed warning signs of emotional instability before his alleged wrongdoing and struggled with his gender identity. 
 
 In one incident, Manning "got furious and upset, flipped a table during the outburst" and sent a computer crashing to the ground, Coombs said. Manning had to be restrained over fears he was headed for a weapon. 
 
 Captain Casey Fulton, an Army intelligence officer who worked in the same secure facility as Manning, testified that another time she saw him curled up on the floor with his arms around his knees as Adkins spoke to him. 
 
 SHOULD HAVE BEEN DENIED ACCESS 
 
 Fulton also testified that later that night she overheard a commotion in which Manning allegedly struck a female superior, which was also reported to Adkins and resulted in Manning being moved to work in the supply division. 
 
 As it cross-examined prosecution witnesses on Sunday, the defense team continued to suggest that Manning should not have had access to classified documents, given his emotional state. 
 
 Fulton, who used Manning in her work preparing for the Iraqi election, rejected suggestions that supervision of lower-level analysts like Manning was lax. 
 
 "It's impossible to supervise 100 percent of the time," she said. "There's a limited amount of supervisors and you can't supervise everyone at every second of the day. (You) trust that they'll safeguard the material the way they've been taught." 
 
 Sergeant Chad Madaras, who worked in the same facility as Manning during the day and used the same computer, acknowledged that soldiers regularly used classified computers to play music, movies and video games. 
 
 Those recordings, movies and video games were kept on a classified network drive - where Fulton testified first seeing a helicopter gunsight video released by WikiLeaks last year. 
 
 The video shows a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists. U.S. investigators say they have found a rewritable CD with that video in Manning's possession. 
 
 Captain Thomas Cherepki, an information systems manager who oversaw networks at Manning's facility, said intelligence analysts like Manning had to have the ability to copy information from their classified machines onto discs to share data with each other and with locals. 
 
 DEFENSE FOCUS ON MENTAL STATE 
 
 "There was no technical restriction put in place by me or any of my soldiers to prevent that from happening," he said. "The only thing that would prevent that, in my view is trust that the soldier would do what's right." 
 
 The prosecution has portrayed Manning as a well-trained analyst who understood his responsibilities but violated them. The defense has tried to sidestep the question of blame and focus instead on his mental state. 
 
 Manning's brigade chief, Captain Steven Lim, on Saturday testified that Adkins had received an email in April 2010 in which Manning said he suffered from a gender identity disorder that was affecting his life, work and ability to think. 
 
 The email included a photo of Manning as a woman. Lim said Adkins did not tell him about the email until after Manning's arrest. Manning, it was disclosed during the proceedings, has created a female alter-ego online, Breanna Manning. 
 
 Manning was arrested last year after disclosing his data thefts to former hacker Adrian Lamo, who turned him in to U.S. authorities. 
 
 In Internet chats with Lamo, Manning said he would bring CDs to his workplace and load them with downloaded data from the military's Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, known as SIPRNet, Lamo told Reuters in a previous interview. 
 
 In his Web chats with Lamo, Manning appeared to acknowledge giving materials to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. 
 
 He wrote to Lamo: "I'm a high profile source ... and I've developed a relationship with Assange," according to details of the chats confirmed by Lamo to Reuters. 
 
 (Writing by David Alexander; editing by Vicki Allen and Todd Eastham)
– Bradley Manning never should have been let near Iraq, much less the classified trove he spilled to WikiLeaks, reports the Guardian in a look at the Army private's mental health. "He was harassed so much that he once pissed in his sweatpants," says an anonymous officer from the base where Manning trained, calling him "a mess of a child." Manning was prone to outbursts, regularly hauled in for psych evaluations, and once punched "a chick in the face"—yet sent on his way to Baghdad, security clearance intact. "Low-flying planes could have seen that kid wasn't suitable," says a former soldier who recalls Manning "curled up in a fetal position on his bunk." "He was a wreck." Couple that with security so lax that passwords were scrawled on sticky notes on laptops at Manning's base, and as a former comrade says, "no wonder something like this transpired." Watch the 19-minute Guardian video here.