When was bradley manning arrested

Bradley Manning is escorted to a security vehicle outside a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md. Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Wednesday, after being convicted of espionage and other crimes related to the biggest intelligence breach in U. The U. Joe Morrow, a lawyer for the government, told the military court on Monday, according to a reporter who was in the courtroom.

In her ruling, Judge Col. Under military commission rules, the sentence must be reviewed by the Office of the Convening Authority, which has the power to set aside or amend the sentence — but not increase it. Manning was acquitted of the most serious charge he faced — aiding the enemy — which amounted to treason and would alone have sentenced him to life in prison.

But the judge found him guilty of leaking the information and of espionage. All told, the charges he was convicted of could have led to a maximum of years in prison. The judge later lowered that to a maximum of 90 years. Earlier government reports suggested that while the leaks were embarrassing because they showed U. During the sentencing hearing, Manning apologized for any damage he caused. An earlier recording smuggled out of the courtroom captured Manning in his own words explaining why he leaked the documents: He was troubled by U.

Assange, 42, has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than a year, as part of his efforts to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces allegations of sex crimes against two women — claims he denies. He says he fears he will eventually be extradited to the US, where a grand jury is believed to have indicted him over the publication of classified material. Meanwhile, a New York Times journalist, James Risen, has been told he faces a possible prison sentence if he does not cooperate with the prosecution of a CIA agent accused of leaks.

Military lawyers specifically urged Lind to jail Manning for the "majority of his remaining life" to deter potential future leakers from passing journalists documents on such a scale.

Captain Joe Morrow, a lawyer for the government, told the judge on Monday that is was her responsibility to ensure the military "never see" another leak on the scale of Manning's releases. Manning's sentence vastly outweighs any previous sentence given to a US leaker, although the nature and scale of Manning's disclosures was unprecedented.

Government workers successfully convicted for unauthorised disclosures in recent years include Shamai Leibowitz, an FBI translator who was sentenced to 20 months after passing secret transcripts to a blogger, and John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who was sentenced to 30 months after pleaded guilty last year to disclosing information about the waterboarding of terror suspects.

In , another government whistleblower, Thomas Drake, who shared information about National Security Agency technologies with a Baltimore Sun reporter, was sentenced to hours of community service after a plea bargain.

The sentence marks the end of a long journey for the soldier, which began in late , when he was stationed in the Iraq desert as an intelligence analyst. Disillusioned over the war, Manning, from Oklahoma, began downloading documents from classified computers onto CDs.

Manning passed , State Department cables and , Iraq and Afghanistan battlefield logs to WikiLeaks, as well as files pertaining to detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, and video of a attack by a US helicopter gunship in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists. WikiLeaks published some material on its site and also shared documents with a consortium of news organisations, led by the Guardian.

Manning was arrested in May , after Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker who conversed with the soldier in online chats, shopped him to the FBI. He pleaded guilty to some of the charges in February, and probably achieved some reduction of his sentence when he told the judge earlier this month that he regretted his actions and was sorry that his leaks "hurt the United States".

Unlike civilian courts, where there are federal tariffs or sentencing guidelines, the sentence in a military court is subject to the sole discretion of the judge. The case will now be automatically referred to the Army Court of Criminal Appeals, the first step in what could become a protracted legal battle that could potentially culminate at the US Supreme Court.

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 man's two children were in the van and suffered serious injuries in the hail of gunfire. But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer's directory. So I looked into it. In January, while on leave in the United States, Manning visited a close friend in Boston and confessed he'd gotten his hands on unspecified sensitive information, and was weighing leaking it, according to the friend.

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. Are the media saying anything? He didn't want to do this just to cause a stir He wanted people held accountable and wanted to see this didn't happen again. Watkins doesn't know what else Manning might have sent to Wikileaks.

But in his chats with Lamo, Manning took credit for a number of other disclosures. The second video he claimed to have leaked shows a May air strike near Garani village in Afghanistan that the local government says killed nearly 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. As described by Manning in his chats with Lamo, his purported leaking was made possible by lax security online and off.

The networks, he said, were both "air gapped" from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out. Manning told Lamo that the Garani video was left accessible in a directory on a U.

Central Command server, centcom. Manning's aunt, with whom he lived in the United States, had heard nothing about his arrest when first contacted by Wired. She described him as smart and seemingly untroubled, with a natural talent for computers and a keen interest in global politics. She said she became worried about her nephew recently after he disappeared from contact.

Then Manning finally called Van Alstyne collect on Saturday. He told her that he was okay, but that he couldn't discuss what was going on, Van Alstyne said.