Bradley Manning, the source of one of WikiLeak's largest disclosures of U.S. secrets, was found guilty of most of the charges against him today, but not the most serious charge of aiding the enemy.

Manning had already pleaded guilty to 10 of the less serious of the 22 charges in a deal that at the time would've gotten him an expected 20 years in prison. Today a military judge announced the court's finding on the rest of the charges, a majority of them guilty verdicts, for espionage, theft and fraud. However, Manning managed to avoid the charge of aiding the enemy, which could have carried with it a life sentence.

Despite that finding, Manning could still face 136 years in prison for the other convictions, according to a legal expert briefing reports on the scene. The sentencing phase of Manning's trial begins Wednesday.

LIVE UPDATES: Bradley Manning Verdict

With his dress sleeves drooping well below his wrist line, almost to his fingertips, Manning stood rigid as military judge Col. Denise Lind briskly read the verdicts. More than two dozen spectators took seats in the courtroom, many of them Manning supporters who wore black t-shirts that read, simply, "truth." They remained silent throughout the proceeding, which lasted mere minutes.

When Manning first entered the courtroom, he appeared relaxed, but as the hour of his verdict drew near, he became more pensive, silently taking his seat.

Following the hearing, Manning's family released a statement to The Guardian newspaper, saying they are "obviously disappointed in today's verdicts, [but] are happy that Judge Lind agreed with us that Brad never intended to help America's enemies in any way."

"Brad loves his country and was proud to wear its uniform," the family said, according to The Guardian.

WikiLeaks tweeted that the verdict today was an example of "dangerous national security extremism from the Obama administration."

The court martial began three years after Manning, now 25, was first detained in Iraq for suspicion of having leaked the video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack that killed several Iraqi civilians. He was subsequently charged in relation to the November 2010 leak of the nearly three-quarter million classified or confidential documents. The release of the documents has been described as the most extensive leak of classified information in U.S. history.

READ: WikiLeaks Releases Confidential Diplomatic Cables

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has said that Manning was a "hero" for doing what he did. Prosecutors called him an anarchist and traitor.

As part of his earlier partial guilty plea, Manning read a 35-page statement in which he explained his motivations in releasing the classified documents. Manning said he had wanted "to spark a debate about foreign policy" and show "the true cost of war."

Manning did not testify during the nearly two-month court martial.

Army prosecutors argued that Manning showed "general evil intent" in aiding the enemy. They argued that given his intelligence training he knew that leaking classified information to the Internet would end up in the hands of al Qaeda.

Prosecutors provided evidence that some of the military battlefield reports had been found on a computer belonging to Osama bin Laden that had been seized during the U.S. military raid that killed the al Qaeda leader in May 2011.

READ: WikiLeaks Suspect Bradley Manning Chokes Up at Hearing

Prosecutors presented detailed computer forensics of Manning's computer activity during his deployment to Iraq in late 2009 to mid-2010. They said the evidence showed that within weeks of his arrival in Baghdad, Manning had begun searching classified military computer networks for materials that were of interest to WikiLeaks.

Manning's attorneys said Manning did not begin leaking information until February 2010. They described Manning's doubts about his military service following a Christmas Eve incident where an Iraqi family was injured by a roadside blast that had targeted soldiers from his unit.

"He couldn't forget the lives lost that day," said defense attorney David Coombs during opening arguments. He portrayed Manning as a young, naive soldier who decided to release the classified documents he had access to "because he thought he could make the world a better place."

In their closing arguments prosecutors dismissed those claims. "He was not a humanist, he was a hacker," said Maj. Ashden Fein.

Fein said the only naivete Manning displayed during the time he was sending classified documents to WikiLeaks was that "he actually thought he would get away with what he did and wouldn't get caught."

Fein was equally dismissive of the support Manning has received from civil liberties and anti-secrecy advocates who consider him a whistleblower.

"He was not a whistleblower, he was a traitor," said Fein as he concluded his lengthy closing arguments last Thursday.

Now being held at the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., Manning's initial detention at the Marine brig at Quantico, Va., became the subject of controversy after jailers deemed him a suicide risk.

Manning was forced to remain in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day and on a few occasions he was required to remain naked. His attorneys said the treatment merited dismissing the case against him because it amounted to cruel and unlawful punishment.

After a lengthy pre-trial hearing late last year, judge Lind found there was validity to some of the allegations and reduced any potential prison sentence by 112 days.

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Bradley Manning Guilty on Most Charges, But Not Aiding Enemy ...

Some time ago, I had intended to write a piece examining Barack Obamas switch on gay marriage, and the way in which that produced a huge surge in campaign contributions. I was interested in considering how that particular issue edged out many other contemporaneous matters in discussions of Obama, and how it affected the way people felt about him. Since I never did get around to it, I was intrigued to run across this essay on the same topic from the Australian journalist John Pilger.

Here it is, in full. Your comments are encouraged.

Never forget that Bradley Manning, not gay marriage, is the issueBy John Pilger16 May 2012

In the week Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he ordered bombing attacks on Yemen, killing a reported 63 people, 28 of them children. When Obama recently announced he supported same-sex marriage, American planes had not long blown 14 Afghan civilians to bits. In both cases, the mass murder was barely news. What mattered were the cynical vacuities of a political celebrity, the product of a zeitgeist driven by the forces of consumerism and the media with the aim of diverting the struggle for social and economic justice.

The award of the Nobel Prize to the first black president because he offered hope was both absurd and an authentic expression of the lifestyle liberalism that controls much of political debate in the west. Same-sex marriage is one such distraction. No issue diverts attention as successfully as this: not the free vote in Parliament on lowering the age of gay consent promoted by the noted libertarian and war criminal Tony Blair: not the cracks in glass ceilings that contribute nothing to womens liberation and merely amplify the demands of bourgeois privilege.

Legal obstacles should not prevent people marrying each other, regardless of gender. But this is a civil and private matter; bourgeois acceptability is not yet a human right. The rights historically associated with marriage are those of property: capitalism itself. Elevating the right of marriage above the right to life and real justice is as profane as seeking allies among those who deny life and justice to so many, from Afghanistan to Palestine.

On 9 May, hours before his Damascene declaration on same-sex marriage, Obama sent out messages to campaign donors making his new position clear. He asked for money. In response, according to the Washington Post, his campaign received a massive surge of contributions. The following evening, with the news now dominated by his conversion, he attended a fundraising party at the Los Angeles home of the actor George Clooney. Hollywood, reported the Associated Press, is home to some of the most high-profile backers of gay marriage, and the 150 donors who are paying $40,000 to attend Clooneys dinner will no doubt feel invigorated by Obamas watershed announcement the day before. The Clooney party is expected to raise a record $15 million for Obamas re-election and will be followed by yet another fundraiser in New York sponsored by gay and Latino Obama supporters.

The width of a cigarette paper separates the Democratic and Republican parties on economic and foreign policies. Both represent the super rich and the impoverishment of a nation from which trillions impoverishment of a nation from which trillions of tax dollars have been transferred to a permanent war industry and banks that are little more than criminal enterprises. Obama is as reactionary and violent as George W. Bush, and in some ways he is worse. His personal speciality is the use of Hellfire missile-armed drones against defenceless people. Under cover of a partial withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, he has sent US special forces to 120 countries where death squads are trained. He has revived the old cold war on two fronts: against China in Asia and with a shield of missiles aimed at Russia. The first black president has presided over the incarceration and surveillance of greater numbers of black people than were enslaved in 1850. He has prosecuted more whistleblowers truth-tellers than any of his predecessors. His vice-president, Joe Biden, a zealous warmonger, has called WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange a hi-tech terrorist. Biden has also converted to the cause of gay marriage.

One of Americas true heroes is the gay soldier Bradley Manning, the whistleblower alleged to have provided WikiLeaks with the epic evidence of American carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the Obama administration that smeared his homosexuality as weird, and it was Obama himself who declared a man convicted of no crime to be guilty.

Who among the fawners and luvvies at Clooneys Hollywood moneyfest shouted, Remember Bradley Manning? To my knowledge, no prominent spokesperson for gay rights has spoken against Obamas and Bidens hypocrisy in claiming to support same-sex marriage while terrorising a gay man whose courage should be an inspiration to all, regardless of sexual preference.

Obamas historic achievement as president of the United States has been to silence the anti-war and social justice movement associated with the Democratic Party. Such deference to an extremism disguised by and embodied in a clever, amoral operator, betrays the rich tradition of popular protest in the US. Perhaps the Occupy movement is said to be in this tradition; perhaps not.

The truth is that what matters to those who aspire to control our lives is not skin pigment or gender, or whether or not we are gay, but the class we serve. The goals are to ensure that we look inward on ourselves, not outward to others and never comprehend the sheer scale of undemocratic power, and to that we collaborate in isolating those who resist. This attrition of criminalising, brutalising and banning protest can too easily turn western democracies into states of fear.On 12 May, in Sydney, Australia, home of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, a protest parade in support of gay marriage filled the city centre. The police looked on benignly. It was a showcase of liberalism. Three days later, there was to be a march to commemorate the Nakba (The Catastrophe), the day of mourning when Israel expelled Palestinians from their land. A police ban had to be overturned by the Supreme Court.

That is why the people of Greece ought to be our inspiration. By their own painful experience they know their freedom can only be regained by standing up to the German Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and their own quislings in Athens. People across Latin America have achieved this: the indignados of Bolivia who saw off the water privateers and the Argentinians who told the IMF what to do with their debt. The courage of disobedience was their weapon. Remember Bradley Manning.

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It's been known for some time that Bradley Manning was so psychologically unstable that his psychologists suggested not allowing him access to weapons, or if he was given them, to have the bolt removed so they would not fire.

Why his access to classified material continued is unclear, and with his court appearance Friday that question rings more loudly than ever.

Raf Sanchez of The Telegraph reports that Manning's Fort Mead hearing included testimony that the Private sent pictures of himself dressed up as a woman to his superiors as proof of how emotionally unstable he really was, and nothing was done about it.

With the cross-dressing pictures sent to his immediate supervisor Master Sergeant Paul Watkins, Bradley confessed he was suffering from a gender identity issue. That plea for help never went any further up the chain of command.

Watkins only mentioned the incident after Manning sent thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.

The officer in command of Bradley's unit confessed his group was so undisciplined that the intelligence analysts played music and watched movies on the same computers they used to view classified intelligence.

It was the lax regulations that allowed Manning and his fellow soldiers to bring in CDs with music, games, and computer programs to their Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility. It was on one of those CDs that Manning downloaded the classified files.

About 15 US soldiers have so far been disciplined over Manning's actions.

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Bradley Manning's Cry For Help Included Sending Cross-Dressed ...

A U.S. Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking videos and documents to Wikileaks was charged Monday with eight violations of federal criminal law, including unauthorizedcomputer access, and transmittingclassified information to an unauthorized third party.

Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, was charged with two counts under the Uniform Code of Military Justice: one encompassing the eight alleged criminal offenses, and a second detailing four noncriminalviolationsof Army regulations governing the handling of classified information and computers.

According to the charge sheet, Manning downloaded a classified video of a military operation in Iraq and transmitted it to a third party, inviolationof a section of the Espionage Act, 18 U.S.C. 793(e), which involves passing classified information to an uncleared party, but not a foreign government.

The remaining criminal charges are for allegedly abusing access to the Secret-level SIPR networkto obtain more than 150,000 U.S. State Department cables, as well as an unspecified classified PowerPoint presentation.

Manning allegedly passed more than 50 classified diplomatic cables to an unauthorized party, but downloaded at least 150,000 unclassified State Department documents, according to Army spokesman Lt. Col. Eric Bloom. These numbers could change as the investigation continues, Bloom said. Both numbers are lower than the 260,000 cables Manning claimed, in online chats, to have passed to Wikileaks.

Between Jan. 13 and Feb. 19 this year, Manning allegedly passed one of the cables, titled Reykjavik 13, to an unauthorized party, the Army states. The Army doesnt name Wikileaks as the recipient of the document, but last February the site published a classified cable titled Reykjavik 9that describes a U.S. embassy meeting with the government of Iceland.

If convicted of all charges, Manning could face a prison sentence of as much as 52 years, Bloom said.

Manning was put under pretrial confinement at the end of May, after he disclosed to a former hacker that he was responsible for leaking classified information to Wikileaks. Hes currently being held at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait and has been assigned a military defense attorney, Capt. Paul Bouchard, who was not available for comment. Bloom said that Manning has not retained a civilian attorney, though Wikileaks stated recently that it commissioned unnamed attorneys to defend the soldier.

The next step in Mannings case is an Article 32 hearing, which is an evidentiary hearing similar to a grand jury hearing, to determine if the case should proceed to court-martial.

Manning, who comes from Potomac, Maryland, enlisted in the Army in 2007 and was an Army intelligence analyst who was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer 40 miles east of Baghdad, Iraq, last November. He held a Top Secret/SCI clearance.

In May, he began communicating online with a former hacker named Adrian Lamo. Very quickly in his exchange with the ex-hacker, Manning disclosed that he was responsible for leaking a headline-making Army video to Wikileaks. The classified video, which Wikileaks released April 5 under the title Collateral Murder, depicted a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad on a group of men, some of whom were armed, that the soldiers believed were insurgents.

The attack killed two Reuters employees and an unarmed Baghdad man who stumbled on the scene afterward and tried to rescue one of the wounded by pulling him into his van. The mans two children were in the van and suffered serious injuries in the hail of gunfire.

Manning also said he leaked a separate video to Wikileaks showing the notorious May 2009 air strike near Garani village in Afghanistan that the local government says killed nearly 100 civilians, most of them children. The Pentagon released a report about the incident last year, but backed down from a plan to show video of the attack to reporters.

Other classified leaks he claimed credit for included an Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat and a detailed Army chronology of events in the Iraq war. But the most startling revelation was a claim that he gave Wikileaks a database of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables, which Manning said exposed almost-criminal political back dealings.

Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public, Manning told Lamo in an online chat session.

Manning anticipated watching from the sidelines as his action bared the secret history of U.S. diplomacy around the world.

Everywhere theres a U.S. post, theres a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed, Manning wrote of the cables. Its open diplomacy. Worldwide anarchy in CSV format. Its Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. Its beautiful, and horrifying.

Wikileaks has acknowledged possessing the Afghanistan video and representatives of the organization indicated in media interviews that it will release the video soon. The organization has denied that it received 260,000 classified cables.

In his chats with Lamo, Manning discussed personal issues that got him into trouble with his Army superiors and left him socially isolated, and said he had been demoted and was headed for an early discharge from the military.

He claimed to have been rummaging through classified military and government networks for more than a year and said the networks contained incredible things, awful things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, D.C.

Manning discovered the Iraq video in late 2009, he said. He first contacted Wikileaks founder Julian Assange sometime around late November last year, he claimed, after Wikileaks posted 500,000 pager messages covering a 24-hour period surrounding the Sept. 11 terror attacks. I immediately recognized that they were from an NSA database, and I felt comfortable enough to come forward, he wrote to Lamo.

In January, while on leave in the United States, Manning visited a close friend in Boston and confessed hed gotten his hands on unspecified sensitive information, and was weighing leaking it, according to the friend. He wanted to do the right thing, 20-year-old Tyler Watkins told Wired.com. That was something I think he was struggling with.

Manning passed the video to Wikileaks in February, he told Lamo. After April 5 when the video was released and made headlines, Manning contacted Watkins from Iraq asking him about the reaction in the United States.

He would message me, Are people talking about it? Are the media saying anything? Watkins said. That was one of his major concerns, that once he had done this, was it really going to make a difference? He didnt want to do this just to cause a stir. He wanted people held accountable and wanted to see this didnt happen again.

Lamo decided to turn in Manning after the soldier told him that he leaked a quarter-million classified embassy cables. Lamo contacted the Army, and then met with Army CID investigators and the FBI to pass the agents a copy of the chat logs from his conversations with Manning. At their second meeting with Lamo on May 27, FBI agents from the Oakland Field Office told the hacker that Manning had been arrested the day before in Iraq by Army CID investigators.

As described by Manning in his chats with Lamo, his purported leaking was made possible by lax security online and off.

Manning had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRNET, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level.

The networks, he said, were both air gapped from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.

I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like Lady Gaga, erase the music then write a compressed split file, he wrote. No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.

[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gagas Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history, he added later. Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counterintelligence, inattentive signal analysis a perfect storm.

Manning told Lamo that the Garani video was left accessible in a directory on a U.S. Central Command server, centcom.smil.mil, by officers who investigated the incident. The video, he said, was an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file.

(This story has been updated repeatedly since posting, including a correction to a statement Bloom previously made about the maximum sentence Manning faces. Last updated 17:45 pm EDT)

Charge Sheet Redacted Manning

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Get you started to listen to the full audiobook Private: Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, and the Biggest Exposure of Official Secrets in American, free at our library.

Bradley Manning perpetrated the biggest breach of military security in American history. While serving as an Army intelligence analyst, he leaked an astounding amount of classified information to WikiLeaks: classified combat videos, plus hundreds of thousands of documents from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and from embassies around the globe. Nearly all of WikiLeaks' headline-making releases of information have come from a single source: Bradley Manning. The leaks affected governments the world over the Arab Spring may have been sparked, in part, by Manning's revelations. They propelled WikiLeaks to a level of international prominence it never had before and forever changed the delicate dance between secrecy and transparency. Bradley Manning's story is one of global significance, and yet he remains an enigma. Now, for the first time, the full truth will be told about a man who, at the age of only twenty-two, changed the world. Nicks' book paints a nuanced portrait of a man haunted by demons and driven by hope, impulsive and cocky yet idealistic enough to follow his conscience. Relying on numerous conversations with those who know Manning best and extensive chat logs published here for the first time, Nicks gives the full story of a bright, gay young man from middle America who signs on to serve his country but finds himself serving a cause he finds far more sinister. Manning's is the morally complex tale of a soldier who took matters into his own hands in order to fulfill what he saw as a higher purpose.

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Private: Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, and the Biggest Exposure of Official Secrets in American