Post date: Aug 21, 2013 7:11:58 PM
WikiLeaks hails the Bradley Manning case a strategic victory, while Amnesty International urges President Obama to commute the private's sentence.
INTERNET (AUGUST 21, 2013) (TWITTER.COM/WIKILEAKS) - WikiLeaks on Wednesday (August 21) said a 35-year jail term handed down to U.S. soldier Bradley Manning for leaking classified files to the pro-transparency organization was a "strategic victory" as it meant he was eligible for parole in less than a decade.
"Significant strategic victory in Bradley Manning case," WikiLeaks said on its officialTwitter feed. "Bradley Manning now eligible for release in less than 9 years, 4.4 in one calculation."WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously praised Manning as "the most important journalistic source that the world has ever seen", but has neither confirmed nor denied whether Manning supplied WikiLeaks with classified documents, saying the group never revealed its sources.
Human rights group Amnesty International called on U.S. President Barack Obamato commute Manning's sentence.
"Amnesty International is currently calling on the president to commute his sentence to time served because of all these extenuating circumstances of his case, but also to protect whistleblowers of the future -- future leakers, individuals who expose human rights violations -- and to actually go after individuals who commit human rights violations rather than the individuals who are actually exposing what the government is doing," explained Justin Mazzola, who was an official observer of the court proceedings for Amnesty during the Manning trial.
In 2010, Manning turned over more than 700,000 classified files, battlefield videos and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, the pro transparency website, in a case that has commanded international attention. The U.S. soldier was convicted of the biggest breach of classified data in the nation's history by leaking the material.
"A government has a right to keep information classified -- that is without a doubt -- except when those, the one exception to that is when the government is concealing evidence of human rights violations. The fact that Manning thought that or reasonably believed that what he was viewing and releasing related, or at least a portion was related, to human rights violations, he should have been able to raise that in his defense," added Mazzola, a trained lawyer.
Judge Colonel Denise Lind, who last month found Manning guilty 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.
"It goes well beyond any kind of retributive justice. It sets an example to anyone in the future that if you leak classified information, you're going to pay for it with your life, maybe not literally in terms of a death sentence but in terms of spending time in prison. So, this will have a chilling effect on people who are faced with this moral dilemma," said Mazzola.
Manning's trial at Fort Meade, Maryland, home of the ultra-secret National Security Agency, wound down as U.S. officials sought the return of Edward Snowden. The former NSA contractor, who disclosed details of secret U.S. programs that included monitoring the telephone and Internet traffic of Americans, has been given temporary asylum in Russia.
"Snowden and all the other leakers beyond, you're going to see the same type of overreach in terms of what he exposed and what they're going to charge him with. I would be surprised if they didn't charge him with violations of the espionage act beyond just the simple breaks of classified information and regulations that apply to that," said Mazzola.
"That's really his basis for not coming to the United States, or leaving the United States after the leaks were announced. He saw what Bradley Manning was going through and didn't want any part of that."
The Guardian said on Tuesday that British authorities had forced the newspaper to destroy materials leaked by Snowden.