Military judge finds Manning guilty on most charges

Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army solider who became a source for WikiLeaks, was found not guilty of "aiding the enemy." But he could still spend many decades in a military prison.

Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army soldier who faced a court martial for providing documents to WikiLeaks, in a 2012 file photo.

(Credit: Getty Images)



Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army soldier who provided WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified documents, was found guilty of nearly all the charges filed against him, but not guilty of aiding the enemy.



Col. Denise Lind, the judge presiding over an eight-week court martial in Fort Meade, Md., announced the verdict today, which could mean Manning will spend multiple decades in a military prison with only a slim chance of parole.



Manning's ultimate sentence, however, has not yet been determined, and is likely to be appealed. Manning's attorney, David Coombs, has previously said he planned to call as many as 24 witnesses during the sentencing portion of the proceedings.



Federal prosecutors had sought to portray Manning's decision to provide files to WikiLeaks as tantamount to providing them directly to Al Qaeda and other sworn enemies of the United States. "Worldwide distribution, that was his goal," Major Ashden Fein said during closing arguments last Friday (PDF). "Manning knew the entire world included the enemy... by giving intelligence to WikiLeaks, he was giving it to the enemy and specifically Al Qaeda."



That argument has alarmed First Amendment advocates and angered activists, who showed up outside the main gate at Fort Meade in anticipation of today's verdict.



In an unusual move last fall, Manning offered to plead guilty to a subset of the 22 charges -- the less serious ones -- but not aiding the enemy. That partial guilty plea is permitted under the military's Manual for Courts-Martial (PDF).



Adrian Lamo, the ex-hacker who turned Manning in to military authorities after a series of instant message chats told CNET in 2011 that he has no regrets about his role. "Sometimes you need to consider the good of the many versus the good of the one," said Lamo, who was vilified in the hacker community as a result of his disclosure.



An excerpt from the logs shows Manning wrestling with how to release the files:

(12:15:11 PM) bradass87: hypothetical question: if you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time...say, 8-9 months...and you saw incredible things, awful things...things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC...what would you do?

(12:16:38 PM) bradass87: or Guantanamo, Bagram, Bucca, Taji, VBC for that matter...

(12:17:47 PM) bradass87: things that would have an impact on 6.7 billion people

(12:21:24 PM) bradass87: say...a database of half a million events during the iraq war...from 2004 to 2009...with reports, date time groups, lat-lon locations, casualty figures...? or 260,000 state department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world, explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective?

(12:22:49 PM) bradass87: the air-gap has been penetrated... =L