FORT MEADE, Md. — A US military expert on militant Islamism testified Thursday that Al Qaeda members could have used the classified information Army Private First Class Bradley Manning disclosed through WikiLeaks to plan attacks on US forces, but said there’s no evidence they did.
Navy Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein, author of the book, ‘‘Militant Islamist Ideology,’’ and an adviser at the Pentagon’s Defense Combatting Terrorism Center, noted that the leaked information included reports of significant battlefield activities.
Based upon Al Qaeda’s previous use of training materials obtained from adversaries, ‘‘one can only deduce that out of the thousands of [significant battlefield activities] that have been leaked, they could possibly, potentially deduce a pattern of behavior by United States combat forces,’’ Aboul-Enein said.
Al Qaeda members could then create countermeasures and plan ambushes, Aboul-Einen said, testifying as a prosecution witness during Manning’s sentencing hearing at Fort Meade, near Baltimore.
The researcher testified on cross-examination that Al Qaeda has never claimed any tactical victories because of the information that WikiLeaks began publishing on its website in 2010.
Manning, a 25-year-old native of Crescent, Okla., faces up to 90 years in prison for giving more than 700,000 documents and some battlefield video to the antisecrecy group while working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2010.