Bradley Manning pays price for Obama's manic crackdown Manning to ask Obama for pardon Bradley Manning, the US soldier sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking classified documents, plans to ask President Obama for a pardon his defence attorney reads in a statement. Fort Meade, Maryland: The figures don't add up. Compared with the vastly shorter sentences dealt to other leakers and taking into account that he might not be released until 10 years after the documents he leaked are declassified, WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning is being harshly punished - 35 years in a military prison. Back in 1985, the first government worker to be jailed for leaking to the media was a former United States Navy intelligence officer who gave classified satellite surveillance photographs to Jane's Defense Weekly - he went down for just two years. The Manning sentence seems way out of line with just 10 years for the ringleader in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. More recently, as the Obama administration cranked up an aggressive campaign to frighten would-be leakers into thinking twice, an FBI linguist went away for 20 months; a National Security Agency employee got off with a year on probation and community service; and a guy from the CIA went off for 30 months. Bradley Manning is escorted into court in Fort Meade on Wednesday, where he was sentenced to 35 years in jail. Given that Washington has failed to substantiate its huff-and-puff claims of gross damage to the US and the exposure of its employees and their sources to terrorist attacks, the Manning sentence seems way out of line with just 10 years for the ringleader in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal - who was released after serving just six-and-a-half years. Manning is also to serve a far longer sentence than the US soldier who tipped off Jordanian intelligence on the detail of the build-up to the first Iraq war and the US Marine who so kindly provided the KGB with floor plans to the American embassies in Moscow and Vienna. There were claims on Wednesday that Manning had got off lightly, but Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Speech and Technology Project, told reporters: When a soldier who shared information with the press and the public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system. Protesters in Washington, DC, march in support of Bradley Manning after he was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking documents to WikiLeaks. A legal system that doesn't distinguish between leaks to the press in the public interest and treason against the nation will not only produce unjust results, but will deprive the public of critical information that is necessary for democratic accountability. It was hard not to conclude after military judge Colonel Denise Lind took just two minutes to dispatch Manning on Wednesday that the 25-year-old was being so severely punished not so much because he damaged the US government or exposed its staff to risk, as that his gargantuan leaking embarrassed it. He has been called many things, but call him misguided - sitting on a mountain of classified material, he figured leaking it would spark a useful public debate about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In that, he showed the world the callousness of a US helicopter crew killing civilians - and the callousness of Washington in denying the existence of the video when the Reuters news agency, which employed two of the dead, was told the video did not exist. Bradley Manning's lawyer David Coombs addresses the media after Manning's sentencing. Manning revealed the abuse of detainees by Iraqi officers - as US minders turned a blind eye. And he showed that civilian deaths in the Iraq war probably were much higher than official estimates. All useful sorts of stuff in a caring, sharing democracy - yes? After a brief and tearful meeting with Manning and some of his family after the decision was handed down, his defence lawyer David Coombs told The Guardian: "Everyone ... was emotional, including myself ... The only person that wasn't emotional was Brad - he looked to us and said: 'It's OK, I'm going to move forward and I'm going to be all right."' But Coombs and his client are not surrendering - next week, a plea to the White House for a pardon. The lawyer read from a draft of a personal message for Barack Obama that will be included - "When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others. If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. Tell that to Edward Snowden, the source of a raft of spectacular leaks on the US government's covert surveillance at home and abroad. By opting for refuge in Russia, a country with lesser freedoms than the US, he's opting not to pay that heavy price for starting a national debate the US needed to have. And Manning has Buckley's chance if he thinks he can turn Obama, who ran for office as a champion of whistleblowers but these days presides over a manic and aggressive campaign to shut them down and lock them up. In the closing days of his court martial, government prosecutor Captain Joe Morrow told the judge that she had a responsibility to make sure the US military "never sees" another leak of this magnitude. Asking for Manning to be jailed for 60 years, he urged: "This court must send a message to any other soldier contemplating stealing classified information."