Manning acquitted of aiding the enemy, found guilty of espionage

By Carlo Muñoz - 07/30/13 03:26 PM ET
Former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was acquitted on Tuesday of providing aid to the enemy, but found guilty of five espionage accounts.

The decision means Manning could spend the rest of his life behind bars; the maximum sentence for the charges would be 150 years.
But Army Judge Col. Denise Lind found the 25-year-old Army private guilty not guilty of the most serious charge he faced, of aiding the enemy. That charged carried a life sentence.
Lind also found Manning guilty of five charges of theft. He had already pleaded guilty to 10 other offenses.

Prior to Tuesday's ruling, Lind denied a request by Manning's defense team to have the aiding the enemy charge dropped. At the time, Lind said Manning's lawyers had not presented enough evidence to merit dismissing the charge.
Manning has admitted he provided classified information to WikiLeaks in an attempt to spark public debate on U.S. actions in Iraq and around the world.

Much of the information included classified State Department cables between Washington and various diplomatic outposts.
Manning also sent classified video of U.S. air strikes in Iraq where civilians were injured or killed.
He provided a video that showed American attack helicopters firing on foreign journalists in Iraq when the news crew was mistaken for a group of insurgents.

Manning supporters claim his actions shed much-needed light on flawed American diplomatic, military and intelligence operations.
However, Army prosecutors argued successfully that, by making that information public, Manning essentially hand-delivered U.S. state secrets to American adversaries like al Qaeda, the Taliban and other global terrorist organizations.

For several months, Manning abused his access to top secret information and “systematically harvested hundreds of thousands of classified documents and dumped them onto the Internet, into the hands of the enemy,” Army prosecutor Capt. Joe Morrow said during his opening statement.

Manning's attorneys argued he carefully picked out which documents to leak in an attempt to prevent any undue harm to his fellow soldiers still fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Civil rights activists claim Manning had been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment since being taken into custody in 2010 and is being unfairly persecuted by the Obama administration for disclosing the information.
This story was posted at 1:16 p.m. and updated at 3:26 p.m.


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