The aiding the enemy charge was the first in the list, and she said “not guilty.” But she quickly moved into a long list of guilty findings for the bulk of the remaining charges, including six counts of violating the Espionage Act, five of stealing government property, and one violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Each of those carries up to a 10-year sentence. She also found Private Manning guilty of various lesser charges, including multiple counts of disobeying orders. . But Colonel Lind accepted his 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 found him not guilty of the charge that he had leaked a video of an airstrike in Afghanistan in which numerous civilians had died in late 2009; Private Manning had admitted leaking it, but said he did so in the spring of 2010, after the date listed in the charge. . WikiLeaks, in a Twitter post, called the Espionage Act convictions “a very serious new precedent for supplying information to the press.” . Still, Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor who testified in Private Manning’s defense, praised the judge for making an “extremely important decision” to reject the aiding the enemy charge and thereby deny “the prosecution’s effort to launch the most dangerous assault on investigative journalism and the free press in the area of national security that we have seen in decades.” . But he said that the potential decades of imprisonment Private Manning still faces remains a major blow to “leakers and whistle-blowers,” and that the prospect of decades of imprisonment “is still too high a price for any democracy to demand of its whistle-blowers.” . Steve Aftergood, the director of the project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, called the outcome “a weighty verdict that the prosecution would count as a win,” but argued that the “larger significance of the case” may be limited. . nytimes/2013/07/31/us/bradley-manning-verdict.html?_r=1&
Posted on: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 20:50:01 +0000
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