The defense of Pfc. Bradley Manning scored a minor victory on Tuesday but on the whole, the future still looks grim for the WikiLeaks contributor who rocked the world with the sensitive information he leaked.

Manning was exonerated on the charges that he "aided the enemy" by providing the now-infamous Julian Assange with damning information about the United States' wartime practices. Still, a military judge found that Manning was guilty of many other crimes for his role in the WikiLeaks scandal.

"The judge rejected the government's argument that Manning, by virtue of his training as an intelligence officer, must have known that the information he disclosed was likely to reach al Qaeda," said Elizabeth Goitein, a co-director of the non-partisan Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "But she also ruled that Manning had reason to believe his disclosures could harm the U.S., even if that was not his goal."

Despite being found not guilty on the most serious crime of aiding the enemy, Manning was still found guilty on a laundry list of other charges that could see him imprisoned for the rest of his life. The sentencing phase of his trial will begin on Wednesday, and it is possible that he could be sentenced to upwards of 136 years in jail for his crimes.

Manning was eventually outed as the source of WikiLeaks' information after he disclosed his actions to California hacker Adrian Lamo. Manning reached out to Lamo, who is well known in the hacking community, but Lamo in turn contacted government officials when he believed that Manning's information was a threat to national security.

"It seemed incomprehensible that someone could leak that massive amount of data and not have it endanger human life," Lamo said. "If I had acted for my own comfort and convenience and sat on my hands with that information, and I had endangered national security, I would have been the worst kind of coward," said Lamo.

The WikiLeaks documents gained instant notoriety after Julian Assange orchestrated their mass release on his site in 2010. Among the damning evidence found within them were questionable wartime practices by the U.S. government, which included a video of an Apache helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq.

"While we are obviously disappointed in today's verdicts, we are happy that Judge Lind agreed with us that Brad never intended to help America's enemies in any way. Brad loves his country and was proud to wear its uniform," said Manning's family in a statement to the Guardian.