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| Bradley Manning being escorted to the Courthouse |
A military Judge in Fort Meade, Maryland, United States on Tuesday ruled that Pvt. Bradley Manning was not guilty of "aiding the enemy", but convicted him of multiple counts of violating the Espionage Act.
Manning had been accused of supplying millions of secrets of the United States government to WikiLeaks. Private Manning had already confessed to being WikiLeaks’ source for a huge cache of government documents, which included videos of airstrikes in which civilians were killed, hundreds of thousands of front-line incident reports from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, dossiers on men being held without trial at the Guantanamo Bay prison, and about 250,000 diplomatic cables.
But while Private Manning had pleaded guilty to a lesser version of the charges he was facing, which could expose him to up to 20 years in prison, the government decided to press forward with a trial on a more serious version of the charges, including “aiding the enemy” and violations of the Espionage Act.
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.
Manning was a low-level intelligence analyst, working at a forward operating base in Iraq when he gained access to the files. He used his computer savvy to gain access to sensitive government documents and communications.
The material he released included footage of a U.S. Army helicopter attack in Iraq in 2007 that killed at least nine men, including a Reuters journalist. Other documents revealed tepid U.S. support for the government in Tunisia. Manning's supporters say that helped bring about the revolution there that sparked the Arab Spring movement.
The verdict and sentence will be reviewed by the commander of the Military District of Washington. A hearing on his sentence is set to begin Wednesday.
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