Bradley Manning was found not guilty of aiding the enemy by military
judge Army Col. Denise Lind this afternoon. The "aiding and abetting"
charge was the most serious of the charges against Manning. He was found
guilty on 15 out of 16 counts of the other lesser charges.
Manning has spent three years in custody and was
accused of the largest leak of classified information US history.
Authorities have accused him of delivering three quarters of a
million pages of classified documents and videos to the secret-sharing
site WikiLeaks, which has never confirmed the soldier was the source of
its information. The material covered numerous aspects of U.S. military
strategy in Iraq, gave what some called a ground view of events in the
Afghanistan war and revealed the inner workings of U.S. State Department
diplomacy in leaked cables.
During Manning's plea to the lesser charges, he read a long statement explaining his position.
He said the information he passed on "upset" or "disturbed" him, but
there was nothing he thought would harm the United States if it became
public. Manning said he thought the documents were old and the
situations they referred to had changed or ended.
"I believed if the public was aware of the data, it would start a
public debate of the wars," he said during his court-martial. He was
"depressed about the situation there," meaning Iraq, where he was
stationed as an intelligence analyst.
No comments:
Post a Comment