When Private Bradley Manning, an American soldier, leaked a torrent of military and diplomatic secrets, "he was not a whistle-blower, he was a traitor", a military prosecutor insisted at his court martial in late July. This week the presiding officer agreed, up to a point. She found Mr Manning guilty of multiple violations of the Espionage Act, along with various lesser crimes. But she cleared him of the gravest charge, of "aiding the enemy". Mr Manning had confessed to passing vast numbers of secret files to the "information anarchists", as the prosecution put it, of WikiLeaks, a website that publishes such revelations. They included hundreds of thousands of reports from American soldiers on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and from American diplomats on the countries in which they were working. Although officials claimed at the time that the leaks put lives at risk, they seem mostly to have caused embarrassment, revealing that America's soldiers are sometimes trigger-happy and its diplomats occasionally duplicitous.
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