Manning Is Acquitted of Aiding the Enemy By Alyssa Kim and Marcus Mabry Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency Inside the Bradley Manning Trial: A look at the case against the former Army intelligence analyst who leaked hundreds of thousands of secret documents to WikiLeaks. FORT MEADE, Md. - A military judge on Tuesday found Pfc. Bradley Manning not guilty of "aiding the enemy" for his release of hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. But she convicted him of multiple counts of violating the Espionage Act, stealing government property and other charges that could result in a maximum sentence of 136 years. In delivering the mixed verdict, the judge, Col. Denise Lind, pulled back from the government's effort to create a precedent that press freedom specialists had warned could have broad consequences for the future of investigative journalism about national security in the Internet era. Colonel Lind marched through a quick litany of the charges and specifications against Private Manning, 25, who stood quietly in his dress uniform as she spoke. She said she would issue findings later that would explain her ruling. The sentencing phase in the court-martial will begin on Wednesday with more than 20 witnesses each for the prosecution and the defense. It could last weeks; there is no minimum sentence in the military justice system. Subsequent appeals could take years, legal specialists said. Most reporters watched the proceedings from a closed-circuit feed in a filing center. One who was able to watch from inside the small courtroom here said Private Manning at first appeared relaxed when he entered the room, smiling and drinking from his water bottle. But as the hour drew near he grew more stoic, and he showed no emotion as Colonel Lind read her findings. The aiding the enemy charge was the first in the list, and she said "not guilty." But she quickly moved into a long list of guilty findings for the bulk of the remaining charges, including six counts of violating the Espionage Act, five of stealing government property, and one violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Each of those carries up to a 10-year sentence. She also found Private Manning guilty of various lesser charges, including multiple counts of disobeying orders. But Colonel Lind accepted his lesser guilty pleas on two counts, one of which involved leaking a video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a group of men. She also found him not guilty of the charge that he had leaked a video of an airstrike in Afghanistan in which numerous civilians had died in late 2009; Private Manning had admitted leaking it, but said he did so in the spring of 2010, after the date listed in the charge. WikiLeaks, in a Twitter post, called the Espionage Act convictions "a very serious new precedent for supplying information to the press." Still, Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor who testified in Private Manning's defense, praised the judge for making an "extremely important decision" to reject the aiding the enemy charge and thereby deny "the prosecution's effort to launch the most dangerous assault on investigative journalism and the free press in the area of national security that we have seen in decades." But he said that the potential decades of imprisonment Private Manning still faces remains a major blow to "leakers and whistle-blowers," and that the prospect of decades of imprisonment "is still too high a price for any democracy to demand of its whistle-blowers." Steve Aftergood, the director of the project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, called the outcome "a weighty verdict that the prosecution would count as a win," but argued that the "larger significance of the case" may be limited. "The unauthorized disclosures that Manning committed were completely unprecedented in their scope and volume," he said. Most investigative journalism does not involve the wholesale publication of confidential records, so the impact of these verdicts on working journalists may be confined. It's not good news for journalism, but it's not the end of the world either.