Khazen

Army Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the soldier convicted of giving a trove of secret U.S. documents to the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks, was sentenced to 35 years in prison Wednesday in the largest public breach of classified data in history.

The judge, Col. Denise Lind, also demoted him to private and dishonorably discharged him from the Army at the brief hearing. She did not provide any reasoning for the sentence. Manning, 25, was convicted July 30 on 20 charges, including six under the Espionage Act, for downloading, copying and passing to WikiLeaks more than 700,000 raw U.S. military battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and State Department cables, all classified “Secret.”

He also provided WikiLeaks with a classified 2007 gun-sight video of a U.S. Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Baghdad. The video — which shows a dozen people, including two employees of the Reuters news agency, being mowed down amid casual chatter by the troops — was dubbed by WikiLeaks “Collateral Murder.” [Link]