The standard for claiming someone aided the enemy should be naming the enemy. Which enemy did Bradley Manning aid? Who are our enemies? Why are you talking about censoring the press during times of war when we are not officially at war?
Good points all, but at least the "aiding the enemy" charge didn't stick, perhaps for the obvious reason you cite. Now if the judge weren't too dense to understand "wget and IE are both web clients, with only superficial differences", the whole affair wouldn't have been quite such a travesty. Although IMHO locking someone up in solitary, incommunicado, without trial, for years (much of that time without clothing) is so damaging that a defendant must be assumed to have been left in no condition to vigorously defend himself, and all verdicts should have been "not guilty" for that alone.
O/T: when I typed "aiding the enemy" into G, the word it suggested next was "pokemon". LOL.
I listed an example, not the only example. Most spies, after all, only gave up their information to a single "enemy".
Like inductive reasoning, one example is all the law requires here, and for good reason.
For stuff that was actual whistleblowing of war crimes (i.e. the stuff actually beneficial to that nation of 300 million) there can be no charge of aiding the enemy. But for all the rest, there could have.
Luckily the judge threw in an extra element to the UCMJ (which was written for a pre-Internet age). But that still didn't help with most of the rest.
