By Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK: Investigator: Bradley Manning Leak Did Not Result in Deaths!

The US counter-intelligence official who led the Pentagon's review into the fallout from the Wiki Leaks disclosures of state secrets told the Bradley Manning sentencing hearing on Wednesday that no instances were found of any individual killed by enemy forces as a result of having been named in the releases. Brigadier general Robert Carr, a senior counter-intelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of Wiki Leaks disclosures on behalf of the Defense Department, told a court at Fort Meade, Maryland, that they had uncovered no specific examples of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet. "I don't have a specific example," he said. It has been one of the main criticisms of the Wiki-Leaks publications that they put lives at risk, particularly in Iran and Afghanistan. The admission by the Pentagon's chief investigator into the fallout from Wiki-Leaks that no such casualties were identified marks a significant undermining of such arguments. Carr, who retired from active duty in 2011 and now works for the private defence firm Northrop Grumman, was the first witness called by the US government in the sentencing phase of the prosecution of the army private. Manning was on Tuesday found guilty of 20 counts offences relating to his transmission of US state secrets to Wiki-Leaks, carrying a maximum sentence of 136 years in military jail. Carr initially told the judge presiding over the case, Colonel Denise Lind, that there had been an individual killed in Afghanistan as a result of the publication by Wiki-Leaks of the Afghan war logs that recorded military activities on the ground. "As a result of the Afghan logs I know of one individual killed an Afghan national who had a relationship with the US government and the Taliban came out and said publicly that they had killed him as a result of him being associated with information in these logs," Carr said. But under defence cross-examination Carr conceded that the victim's name had not be included in the war logs made public by Wiki-Leaks. Asked by Lind whether the individual who was killed was tied to the disclosures, Carr replied: "The Taliban killed him and tied him to the disclosures. We went back and looked for the name in the disclosures. The name of the individual was not in the disclosures." On the basis of the witness's clarification, Lind sustained an objection from the defence and scrubbed from the official record any reference to the alleged killing by the Taliban. Carr said that when his task force reviewed the Afghan war logs they found about 900 names of local nationals contained in the records.