Manning’s mixed verdict

A military court this week found Army Pfc. Bradley Manning guilty of violating the Espionage Act for handing more than 700,000 secret diplomatic cables and battlefield reports to the website WikiLeaks. But Judge Col. Denise Lind acquitted him on the more serious charge of “aiding the enemy,” dismissing the government’s claim that the former intelligence analyst knew that the material would end up in the hands of al Qaida. Open-government campaigners hailed that acquittal as a victory against the Obama administration’s crackdown on leakers.

A conviction for aiding the enemy would have put the 25-year-old private in jail for life without parole. Manning, described by his lawyer as a “good-intentioned” whistle-blower who wanted to show the American people the hidden horrors of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, could still face up to 136 years in military prison for espionage and stealing government property. Legal experts said the actual sentence, to be decided in the coming weeks, would likely be much shorter.

The court “seriously erred” in acquitting Manning of aiding the enemy, said John Yoo in NationalReview.com. He had to know “that posting anything on the Internet would make it available to al Qaida in Iraq, Afghanistan, and worldwide.” But he went ahead anyway with the largest leak of classified information in U.S. history, placing the lives of “American soldiers, agents, and allies at grave risk.”

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Anyone who believes in journalism and democracy should be grateful for this verdict, said Rem Rieder in USA Today. If Manning had been found guilty of aiding the enemy, then any member of the military who leaked classified information to the press—no matter how important to society—could have been charged with treason. That would have included the brave whistle-blower who exposed the torture of detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

Jailing leakers like Manning won’t solve the government’s secrecy problem, said Matthew Cooper in NationalJournal.com. The Army private was just one of 1.4 million government employees and contractors with access to “top secret” material. Since Manning’s leak, the Obama administration has made it harder to download secret data without raising suspicions. But as long as so many people are given “access to gold mines of classified data, this won’t be the last Bradley Manning.”