Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier convicted of the biggest breach of classified data in the nation’s history by providing files to Wikileaks, was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Wednesday.
Judge Colonel Denise Lind, who last month convicted Manning of 20 charges including espionage and theft, could have sentenced him to as many as 90 years in prison. Prosecutors had asked for 60 years.
Manning, 25, will be dishonorably discharged from the U.S. military and forfeit some pay, Lind said. His rank will be reduced to private from private first class.
Manning would be eligible for parole after serving one-third of his sentence, which will be reduced by the time he has already served in prison plus 112 days.
In 2010, Manning turned over more than 700,000 classified files, battlefield videos and diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, the protransparency website, in a case that has commanded international attention.
Defense attorneys had not made a specific sentencing request but pleaded with Lind not to “rob him of his youth.”
Manning was working as a low-level intelligence analyst in Baghdad when he handed over the documents, catapulting WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, into the international spotlight.
The classified material that shocked many around the world included a 2007 gunsight video of a U.S. Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Baghdad. Among the dozen fatalities were two Reuters news staff. WikiLeaks dubbed the footage “Collateral Murder.”
The case highlighted the difficulty in keeping secrets in the Internet age. It raised strong passions on the part of the U.S. government, which said Manning had put American lives at risk, and anti-secrecy advocates, who maintained Manning was justified in releasing the information.
(Editing by Scott Malone and Jeffrey Benkoe)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/21/us-usa-wikileaks-manning-idUSBRE97J0JI20130821
My guess is six months before he’s freed by patriots.
Comment from zerohedge that should be on every bumper sticker and every lampost:
35 years for exposing war crimes, a Nobel Prize for committing them.
Let’s not forget the Multi-Million Dollar Vacation each month for 8 years free of charge on top of that.
Excellent comment. I’d like to see those stickers, t-shirts, baseball caps.
ALL involved in the prosecution of Bradley Manning did NOT keep the oath as lawfully required to continue meeting the lawful requirements of the positions they are occupying. That means they all need to be removed from those postitions.
There are many laws that apply to this, starting with the US Constitution – remember it and all that is PURSUANCE THEREOF it IS the Supreme law of this land. NOT the UN military (used to be US until Obama, Panetta, and dempsey gave authority over them to the UN), not the “military ‘courts'” – “courts” what a joke, whose laws were they using, not OURS.
They need to be prosecuted for THEIR crimes.
35 years? Yea that’ll be long enough time for the elite to get their NWO together and then they won’t have to worry about him when he gets released because they will have their control on the entire world by then.
In the meantime, I still have at least 35 more years of fight left in me and I sure as hell won’t make it easy for them. Death to the NWO!!!