LeaksManning found guilty of violating the Espionage Act, acquitted of aiding the enemy

A military judge earlier this afternoon (Tuesday) found Private Manning Pfc. Bradley Manning guilty of more than twenty counts of violating the Espionage Act. The judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, found Manning not guilty of aiding the enemy.

Manning admitted to being to source of the massive leaks of U.S. government documents and videos, leaks which came to be called WikiLeaks.

The New York Times reports that the leaked material contained videos of airstrikes in which civilians were killed in U.S. military operations, hundreds of thousands of front-line incident reports from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, dossiers on men being held without trial at the Guantánamo Bay prison, and about 250,000 diplomatic cables.

In all, Manning has leaked more than 700,000 documents.

Manning had pleaded guilty to lesser offenses that the charges the government wanted to bring against him, thus exposing himself to punishment of up to twenty years in prison.

The government, however, was determined to press ahead with a trial on the more serious charges, among them “aiding the enemy” and violations of the Espionage Act. The “aiding the enemy” charge could have resulted in a life sentence.

“The heart of this matter is the level of culpability,” retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, a former chief prosecutor at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, told the Washington Post. He noted that Manning has already pleaded guilty to some charges and admitted leaking secret documents that he felt exposed wartime misdeeds. “Beyond that is government overreach.”

The Post notes that the government relied on a case from the Civil War to bring the charge of aiding the enemy. In that trial, a Union Army private, Henry Vanderwater, was found guilty of aiding the enemy when he leaked a Union roster to an Alexandria newspaper. Vanderwater received a sentence of three months hard labor and was dishonorably discharged.

Violating several aspects of the Espionage Act could lead to punishment of up to 100 years in prison.

The Times notes that the case of Manning aside, the “aiding the enemy” charge, which has no precedent in a leak case, could have long-term ramifications for investigative journalism in the Internet era.

“The government’s theory was that providing defense-related information to an entity that published it for the world to see constituted aiding the enemy because the world includes adversaries, like members of Al Qaeda, who could read the documents online,” the Times reports.

“This ruling has far-reaching implications,” Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice said in a statement. “You don’t need specialized intelligence training to know that terrorists use the Internet. By this logic, any military officer who discloses information to the media or posts it on the Internet could be charged with aiding the enemy. That’s not consistent with the purpose of the law, and it could have a dramatic, chilling effect on would-be whistleblowers.”

The prosecution portrayed Manning as an anarchist and a traitor who was out to make a splash, while his defense, led by attorney David Coombs, portrayed him as a young, naïve, but well-intentioned humanist who wanted to trigger debate and bring about change.

The sentencing phase of the trial at Fort Meade, outside Baltimore, will begin Wednesday.

Manning will likely be serving his time at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Manning was arrested in Iraq in May 2010 and transferred to the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico in July 2010. He was kept alone in a windowless six-by-eight-foot cell 23 hours a day and forced while on suicide watch to sleep in a “suicide smock.”

Judge Lind ruled in January that any sentence the Army private receives should be reduced by 112 days because of his mistreatment in confinement.