Bradley Manning: Less than treachery 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. With little doubt about the facts, the trial centred on Mr Manning's motives and intentions. He claimed to have acted out of misgivings about his country's conduct, and in the hope of sparking a debate about America's dealings with the rest of the world. Prosecutors argued that he wanted to "make a splash" in spite of the harm he knew it would do his country. When American soldiers killed Osama bin Laden, they noted, they found downloads of documents that Mr Manning had leaked in his house. The prosecution had argued that helping get government secrets published online was tantamount to aiding the enemy. That alarmed civil-liberties groups, which argued that such a finding would deter all whistle-blowing; they cheered the dismissal of the charge. But Mr Manning still faces a jail sentence of up to 136 years (hearings on sentencing began the day after the verdict, and may last weeks). His treatment while awaiting trial was harsh: he was kept in solitary confinement for months and repeatedly forced to strip, measures a spokesman for the State Department, who resigned shortly afterwards, called "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid." Moreover, Mr Manning is just one of seven people charged under the Espionage Act for leaking secrets to journalists since Barack Obama became president. Since its adoption, in 1917, the act has been invoked in this way only three times by previous presidents. One of the seven is Edward Snowden - but he, apparently mindful of Mr Manning's harsh treatment, fled the country before his bombshells were published.