An Army judge on Tuesday acquitted Pfc. Bradley Manning of aiding the enemy by disclosing a trove of secret U.S. government documents but found him guilty of espionage, a mixed verdict that dealt a rebuke to military prosecutors who sought to prove that the largest leak in U.S. history had assisted al-Qaeda.
The judge, Col. Denise Lind, found Manning guilty of
most of the more than 20 crimes he was charged with, including several violations of the Espionage Act. He could face a maximum of 136 years in prison.
The case, tried in a small courtroom at Fort Meade, Md., an installation that includes the National Security Agency, unfolded amid a heated national conversation about the right balance between government secrecy and civil liberties - a debate fueled by recent revelations about the scope of U.S. surveillance programs.
In charging Manning with aiding the enemy, government prosecutors argued that the former intelligence analyst's decision to release diplomatic cables and battlefield reports amounted to the highest form of treason.
Lind did not buy that argument. But her verdict, which marked the first major espionage conviction during the Obama administration, is certain to set markers in the ongoing debate over government secrecy and whistleblower protections.
Manning's attorney, David Coombs, said he was pleased by the verdict, but he signaled that the decisive moment will come during the sentencing phase of the court-martial, which opens Wednesday and could last several weeks.
"We won the battle, now we need to go win the war," Coombs said after leaving court. "Today is a good day, but Bradley is by no means out of the fire."
Comment:
Food shortages, planes falling from the sky, Internet permanently down, global infrastructure destroyed, billions killed... are we to believe these former CIA officials and other insiders are taking such scenarios very seriously... yet they think Iran or the turr'ist Mooslims (whom they control anyway!) are even remotely capable of producing such cataclysmic effects?
Some of them probably are that stupid, but others, with their 'FOR EYES ONLY' access to resources, trillion$ and data that is decades beyond anything the public has access to, must surely have worked out where the real threat is coming from.
Note how, in this recently published Washington Examiner article, the above-mentioned former CIA Director, R. James Woolsey, and others, are warning about this 'catastrophic EMP scenario' in the context of Carrington-class solar flares burped out by the sun. In fact, they claim that a Coronal Mass Ejection narrowly missed Earth just two weeks ago, "barely avoiding an EMP disaster". This is highly unlikely given that we're going through a pathetically weak solar maximum.
Between both scenarios - EMPs set off by Islamofascists and EMPs from Sol - the Powers That Be can, depending on the prevailing circumstances, blame Iran, terrorists or the sun whenever this happens in the U.S.
Military Hush-Up: Incoming Space Rocks Now Classified
CIA Says Global-Warming Intelligence Is 'Classified'
Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us
Pentagon, CIA Eye New Threat: Climate Change