Snowden to release `important statement` on Manning verdict – WikiLeaks

"Edward Snowden will release an important statement later today in light of the Manning trial verdict,” the tweet read.

The sentencing phase of the trial in a Fort Meade, Maryland court is expected to last until August 23.

On Tuesday, the court martial cleared Bradley Manning of the most serious charge of aiding the enemy, but convicted him on most of the remaining 20 counts, including espionage.

Pvt. Manning was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq, where he was serving. He confessed of having leaked to the whistle-blower website a video, which showed a 2007 attack by an American Apache helicopter gunship in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff, as well as some 250,000 US diplomatic cables.

Snowden has been stranded at a Moscow airport for over a month after leaking evidence of a US spy agency’s surveillance program that targeted other countries.

Manning’s disclosures to WikiLeaks not linked to a single soldier death

The first government’s sentencing witness in the case of Bradley Manning, a soldier who leaked over 700,000 classified US cables to the WikiLeaks website, has confessed under oath that the massive disclosure had never led to a single death of the country’s military personnel in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The astounding statement came in Wednesday trial where the former US soldier was convicted on almost all of the 20 charges thrown against him, two years after then-Army Chief of Staff Mike Mullen had claimed that Manning and WikiLeaks "might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”

Manning denied this allegation, saying he provided the website only with low-sensitivity categories of documents that he believed would shed light on US war fighting in hotspots. One of the leaked files contained a 2007 "collateral damage” video, which showed a US Apache helicopter shooting and killing 11 civilians, including a 22-year-old Reuters’ photojournalist and his driver. There was no investigation into the remaining nine deaths.

Another blow to the military's stand came later on Wednesday, when the former brigadier general who headed the Information Review Task Force investigating the leaks said he had never heard that a source named in the Afghan battlefield reports, commonly known as war logs, was killed.

Now-retired Brigadier General Robert Carr also wanted to testify about the Taliban's claim on Wednesday, but Colonel Denise Lind, the military judge in Manning's court martial, barred such testimony as inadmissible hearsay.

These fresh revelations support the assessment by ex Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that the rhetoric about the supposed harm caused by the disclosures was "fairly significantly overwrought.”

Questions have also been raised as to validity of the claims that the leaked documents exposed America’s cooperators in war zones. Carr acknowledged in court that none of the names listed in the war logs were identified as "human intelligence,” or "HumInt.” He added that some of these contacts could not be found, had died before the WikiLeaks disclosures, or had actually been insurgents rather than cooperators.

The lead prosecutor also claimed that Manning's leaks "impacted the entire system because of lack of trust of junior analysts,” a statement that his lawyers attacked as overbroad. They said the government was trying to throw the book at their defendant by putting "just about everything that ever happened at the feet of Pfc. Manning.”

Voice of Russia