Bradley Manning, the army private who gave classified documents to WikiLeaks, has been acquitted of aiding the enemy, the most serious charge against him, but convicted of multiple violations of the Espionage Act and stealing government property. The prosecution had argued that Manning should have known the leaked documents would make their way to al Qaeda, while Manning’s defense argued that he was a well-intentioned but naive whistleblower. He faces up to 136 years in prison,
While advocates of open government celebrated his acquittal on the most serious charge, the case still appears destined to stand as a fierce warning to any government employee who is tempted to make public vast numbers of secret documents. Private Manning’s actions lifted a veil on American military and diplomatic activities around the world, and engendered a broad debate over what information should become public, how the government treats leakers, and what happens to those who see themselves as whistle-blowers.
Gregg Leslie of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, adding, “Whistle-blowers always know they are taking risks, and the more they reveal the bigger the threat is against them.”
Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor who testified in Private Manning’s defense, praised the judge for making an “extremely important decision” that he portrayed as denying “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, the decades of imprisonment that Private Manning could face “is still too high a price for any democracy to demand of its whistle-blowers.”