Should Julian Assange Be Charged with Espionage?

With the most recent publications of US classified documents, Julian Assange has come under increased scrutiny by the public and numerous governments. Assange is the founder of the website, Wikileaks, and has been publishing more and more classified US military / government documents. He is now wanted by Swedish authorities for rape charges and he is also wanted in the US. I know that individuals have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, but when you are involving classified documents, this stirs up quite the controversy. I believe that no individual has the right to publish classified documents as they are, well, CLASSIFIED! There is a reason for those red letters surrounded by a red box stamped on a document.

This information was obviously handed over to Assange by someone in the US government or in the military and I'm sure he is paying the person(s) responsible for leaking this information. There have been numerous website hijackings by numerous hackers that claim to be working against this sort of activity and consider Assange a cyber-terrorist. I would definitely agree that Assange is a cyber-terrorist and he may have endangered the lives of US military personnel abroad by releasing these documents. Some of these documents involve questioning other governments on their activities, etc. and now they can see that the US has been inquiring about their activities. These are classified documents that are supposed to remain under lock and key and are not to be released because of something like this happening.

Julian Assange should be charged with espionage and his website should be shut down as terrorists now have full access to these documents. However, Assange has also threatened that if anything were to happen to him or Wikileaks, he would release a larger 'insurance' leak of documents to other websites. In this case, if he is holding blackmail against the US government, he should definitely be punished to the fullest extent. It's only a matter of time before Assange is caught and brought in for the appropriate charges. Unfortunately, I'm sure Julian Assange knows many other individuals that can continue to publish leaked documents if he is caught. The person responsible for leaking many of the classified documents has been reported to be 22-year old Army Private First Class Bradley Manning. What gives this guy the right to leak classified documents to Wikileaks? I think that Manning should be charged with espionage for which the consequence is capital punishment. I'm sure there have been other sources of the leaked documents as well, but it seems as if it all started with Manning. Now these documents are not only on Wikileaks, but also spread around the internet and I'm sure governments and terrorists have already downloaded the entire content of the website, since visitors of Wikileaks can readily download all of the documents in compressed format. Way to go Assange and Manning for endangering the US and it's soldiers overseas!