Via Newsmax:

Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier convicted of the biggest breach of classified data in the nation’s history, was sentenced to 35 years in a military prison Wednesday.

The 25-year-old private first class faced up to 90 years for turning over more than 700,000 classified files, battlefield videos and diplomatic cables to the pro-transparency website WikiLeaks, in a case that has commanded international attention since 2010.

The judge hearing Manning’s court-martial, Col. Denise Lind, ignored prosecutors’ call for a 60-year sentence but didn’t give in to defense laywers who asked her not to “rob him of his youth.”

Manning was working as a low-level intelligence analyst in Baghdad when he handed over the documents, catapulting WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, into the international spotlight.

In July, Lind found Manning guilty of 20 criminal counts including espionage and theft, but not of aiding the enemy, the most serious charge, which carried a possible sentence of life in prison without parole.

I agree with David Freddoso on the difference between Snowden and Manning:

I believe there are grounds for sympathizing with Edward Snowden, at least as far as his revelations of NSA spying are concerned. He bent the rules, yes, but he did it to alert Americans to something highly inappropriate the government was doing — and, importantly, in the course of doing so, he exercised some prudential judgment about what should and should not be made public.

I couldn’t possibly feel more different about Bradley Manning, who was convicted today for dumping hundreds of thousands of pages of sensitive and classified military and diplomatic information.

I point back again to the editorial we published at the Washington Examiner earlier this year. We explained first that Manning had broken his oath of office, but I still believe that even that could possibly be excused under the right circumstances. The problem in Manning’s case (as we explained in the excerpt below) is that he went out of his way to endanger as many lives as he possibly could. And ironically, his actions did nothing to advance the debate over war and peace, which had been going on for years.

Meanwhile, Manning exposed volumes of information about his comrades-in-arms’ procedures for engaging the enemy and neutralizing IEDs. On those grounds alone, it seems likely that Manning’s act of revenge against the military caused more U.S. soldiers to come home in body bags near the end of a war than would have otherwise.

HT: Michael