Pvt. Bradley Manning has just been acquitted by a military judge on a charge of aiding the enemy by leaking sealed documents to WikiLeaks. However, he was convicted of other Espionage Act violations.
Manning had admitted to leaking documents to the website, which aims to expose government secrets from around the world. According to The New York Times, the documents he gave WikiLeaks include videos of civilians being killed by military strikes and incident reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He also leaked 250,000 diplomatic cables and dossiers on prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.
Manning did plead guilty on lesser charges that could land him in prison for up to 20 years, but the government still decided to pursue charges of aiding the enemy and violations of the Espionage act. Col. Denise Lind presided over the case as Manning requested to be tried without a jury.
According to USA Today, Lind acquitted him on the aiding the enemy charge, which carried a life sentence without parole. Still, she convicted him on five counts each of espionage and theft.
Manning, who was a low-level intelligence analyst before he leaked the documents, has been in military prisons since 2010.
WikiLeaks’ Julian assange told CNN that if Manning was convicted, “the precedent will be set where if you give information to a publisher, to a journalist, and they publish, then anyone in the world can read it, and the U.S. military is saying that means the enemy can be aided because al Qaeda, for example, could read that information.”
image: Wikimedia Commons
