Army Pfc. Bradley Manning was convicted Tuesday of violating the Espionage Act
and faces up to 136 years in prison, but his acquittal on the even more
serious charge of aiding the enemy was hailed as a victory for the
press and the Internet against the government's crackdown on leaks of
classified information.
Manning's leak of more than 700,000 State Department
cables, terrorism detainee assessments, combat logs and videos was the
largest breach of classified secrets in U.S. history. Among the
information was a now-infamous 2007 video of an Apache combat helicopter
attack in Iraq in which U.S. soldiers fired on civilians and killed 12,
including two Reuters journalists.
Manning becomes one of only two people ever convicted under the
Espionage Act for making classified data available to the public; the
other, Samuel L. Morison, a government security analyst convicted in
1985, was pardoned by President Clinton on his final day in office.
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