The US
soldier convicted of handing a trove of secret government documents to
anti-secrecy website Wikileaks has been sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Pte First Class Bradley Manning, 25, was convicted in July of 20 charges
against him, including espionage.
In a statement read by his lawyer after the sentencing, Pte Manning said
he had acted "out of love for our country".
This was the inevitable conclusion
to this case and while I have some sympathy with Manning, as he believed he was
doing the right thing, it still doesn’t make up for the fact that revealed an
unprecedented amount of military secrets that compromised the security of
American troops, American military strategy and America’s reputation amongst their
allies.
And he’s actually quite lucky,
given the amount of things he was convicted of, that he wasn’t sentenced to
life in prison, and is lucky that he could be freed in as little as seven
years.
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