25 year old Bradley Manning has been convicted on 20 charges - but not of aiding the enemy, a charge which could have led to the death sentence.
Private Manning has admitted leaking the documents to try to trigger a debate about U-S foreign policy.
Reacting to the verdict from inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has described Manning as the quintessential whistleblower.
Manning, 22 years old at the time, leaked more than 700,000 secret documents.
They included a graphic video of a helicopter attack in 2007 that killed a dozen people in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, including two from the Reuters news organisation.
The 20 offences he was convicted of include multiple espionage charges, which could amount to up to 136 years in jail.
Julian Assange says the verdict amounts to what he calls dangerous national-security extremism on the part of the U-S government, claiming the trial was never going to be fair.
"It is a short-sighted judgment that cannot be tolerated, and it must be reversed. The government kept Bradley Manning in a cage, stripped him naked and isolated him in order to break him, an act formally condemned by the United Nations special rapporteur for torture. This was never a fair trial, and it has not been a fair trial."
Amnesty International's Widney Brown says the case highlights something odd about the United States.
She told the BBC the government is prepared to pursue a whistleblower but not former president George W Bush, whose administration faced allegations it tortured prisoners.
"The military prosecutor went after Bradley Manning, but, in the meantime, even when a former president of the United States (George W Bush) has published an autobiography acknowledging that he ordered the torture of detainees in Guantanamo Bay, there's been no investigation into allegations of torture. So you go after a whistleblower, but you don't go after somebody who has acknowledged actually ordering torture. So there's something a little bit backwards when all the credible claims about torture that have been made over the last 12 years are not being investigated, let alone prosecuted, but somebody who tries to reveal information about actions that may have been unlawful gets the book thrown at them."*
In a joint statement, Democratic and Republican leaders of the intelligence committee say justice has been served.
They say Manning has harmed the country's national security and violated the public's trust.
Former Defense Department spokesman J D Gordon, who served under Donald Rumsfeld, told Al-Jazeera television Manning is a traitor and a criminal, not a whistleblower.
"I think he's involved in this 21st-century type of warfare, and he's basically become a special-forces soldier in the war of ideas. I think that, like Edward Snowden, he's trying to attack the United States, he's trying to tarnish our image and make things difficult for us. So, instead of a whistleblower, I think he's really more like a criminal. I think he basically decided he was going to be the judge, the jury and the executioner to, basically, give Wikileaks 700,000 classified documents. We're talking military-intelligence reports, diplomatic cables, videos that were taken out of context and used for enemy propaganda. So I'm pleased with the judge's decision today."
JD Gordon says Manning could have gone to his superiors with his concerns rather than WikiLeaks.
But Michael Ratner, a lawyer who acts for Julian Assange in the United States, says Bradley Manning had no other option but to do what he did.
"Going through your chain of command in the US military is probably the end of your career, if not the end of your life. That's absurd. Going to your Congressman doesn't do anything. Congressmen, as we have seen from the Ed Snowden revelations, are afraid to speak out about one thing. Bradley Manning took, I think, the only course he could as a matter of conscience. He saw mass crimes being committed in front of him when he saw pictures of the murder of the two Reuters journalists on the video, when he read documents about a torture centre being set up in Iraq and more. So he acted on principle. He's no criminal. He shouldn't have been prosecuted. The people who should be prosecuted should have been the people who were carrying out the crimes that he revealed."
Manning's sentencing hearing is set to begin later this week.
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