Pfc. Bradley Manning was found guilty of more than 20 crimes, including several violations of the Espionage Act, but was significantly acquitted of the charge of aiding the enemy. The Washington Post reports:

The judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, found Manning guilty of most of the more than 20 crimes he was charged with, including several counts of violating the Espionage Act. She also acquitted him of one count of violating the Espionage Act that stemmed from his leak of a video that depicted a fatal U.S. military airstrike in Farah, Afghanistan. …

Had Manning been convicted of aiding the enemy, he would have faced a life sentence in prison without the possibility of parole. Civil libertarians feared that a conviction on that charge, which has not been used since the Civil War, would have sent a chilling message to would-be government whistle-blowers. …

Lind ruled in January that any sentence the Army private receives should be reduced by 112 days because of his mistreatment in confinement.

This past September, Chris Bray reviewed Chase Madar’s The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History, which he describes thusly: “Writing from what often seems to be a leftist perspective, Madar nevertheless builds on a deeply conservative explanatory foundation in which political illnesses have cultural causes.”

The book “necessarily and appropriately looks beyond the figure of Manning himself to ask how we understand information, how we perceive our relationship to state authority, and how people who serve the armed power of the state see their own place in its project.”

Bray describes how, “Pulling at the masks that cover neoconservative and neoliberal foreign policy, Manning seems to have been engaged in a small-r republican project, looking for ways to give informed citizens the knowledge to restrain state power.”

Read the rest of the review here.