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

Pfc. Bradley Manning being escorted to a court house in Fort Meade, MD // Source: chinanews.com

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. Judge Lind found Manning guilty on six counts of violating the Espionage Act, five of stealing government property, and one violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Each of these carries up to a 10-year sentence. She also found Manning guilty of various lesser charges, including multiple counts of disobeying orders.

Colonel Lind accepted Manning’s lesser guilty pleas on two counts, one of which involved leaking a video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a group of men.

She also acquitted him on the charge that he had leaked a video of an airstrike in Afghanistan in which numerous civilians had died in late 2009; Manning had admitted leaking it, but said he did so in the spring of 2010, after the date listed in the charge.

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