WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange described the conviction of US army private Bradley Manning on espionage charges for leaking secret information as an abuse of his human rights and the US constitution.
Speaking a day after Manning was convicted by a US military judge on most charges facing him over the biggest leak in US intelligence history, Assange said the soldier’s court martial was “a show trial” from which no justice “can come about.”
While supporters welcomed Manning’s acquittal on the most serious charge of “aiding the enemy” Assange, whose website released the leaked documents, said the first-ever US espionage conviction of a whistleblower was a “dangerous precedent and an example of national security extremism.”
The Australian, who has sought refuge from criminal charges in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, noted that the 25-year-old low-ranking army intelligence analyst was still facing 136 years in prison on the remaining 20 charges of which he was convicted at his court-martial.
“Bradley Manning is now a martyr. He didn’t choose to be a martyr. I don’t think it’s a proper way for activists to behave, to choose to be martyrs,” he said.
“But these young men – allegedly in the case of Bradley Manning and clearly in the case of Edward Snowden – have risked their freedom, risked their lives for all of us. That makes them heroes.”
Assange commented as the sentencing phase of his trial began yesterday at a court on the Fort Meade military base outside Baltimore in Maryland.
Sentencing
Prosecutors, who said they would call up to 20 witnesses in the sentencing hearings, argued that Manning's leak had affected the entire system of granting access to classified information.
Manning’s lawyers will seek to reduce the potential sentence the soldier faces on 19 guilty charges by merging some counts, leaving him exposed to a maximum of 116 years in prison.
They are expected to argue that he was not seeking to jeopardise US national security by leaking 700,000 battlefield reports and videos on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and diplomatic cables.
There were mixed views on the implications of the Manning verdict on future of other whistleblowers and the ramifications for investigative journalism and its reliance on leakers for information.
Journalism group Reporters Without Borders said the ruling sent a chilling warning to whistleblowers “against whom the Obama administration has been waging an unprecedented offensive”.
Surveillance
Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who first reported details of National Security Agency surveillance based on leaks by former US intelligence contractor Snowden, said the not-guilty verdict on the aiding the enemy charge represented a "tiny sliver of justice."
Another famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, whose leak of thousands of documents in the 1970s exposed US government deceit about the Vietnam War, said “journalism and the free press dodged a bullet” on the acquittal of the aiding the enemy charge but that it was “still under attack”.
Former CIA director Michael Hayden said the soldier had been responsible for the “most significant leak of classified information in the history of the republic, so he put real people at real risk.”
Lou Snowden, the father of the NSA whistleblower, said there were key differences between the case of Manning and of his son, who is stuck in an airport in Moscow and sought by the US on espionage charges.
“First and foremost, I think my son has exercised discretion in the information that he has shared,” Mr Snowden said in an interview on CNN.
Manning’s family said they were disappointed by the guilty verdicts but happy that the judge agreed that he never intended to help America’s enemies.
“Brad loves his country and was proud to wear its uniform,” they said.
