HONOLULU: A former civilian defence contractor working at the US military’s Pacific headquarters was sentenced to seven years and three months in prison on Wednesday for divulging military secrets to his Chinese girlfriend and keeping classified documents at his Honolulu home.

Benjamin Bishop demonstrated poor judgment and jeopardised national security because of an intimate relationship, said US District Court Judge Leslie Kobayashi during his sentencing hearing.

That he would risk everything showed the girlfriend “has control over you,” the judge told Bishop. Bishop’s move to contact the girlfriend from a halfway house he was allowed to stay at while awaiting trial, even though he was forbidden to do so, showed a continued lapse of judgment, she said.

“This makes the court question your ability to follow the law when it comes to this person,” Kobayashi said.Bishop, 60, will get credit for about a year he’s already spent at the federal detention center in Honolulu since his arrest in March 2013. He faced up to 10 years in prison for each of two counts. Defence attorney Birney Bervar argued Bishop should be sentenced to time served.

“He made an error, a serious error in judgment over the love of a woman. As one of his friends said in a letter quoting Shakespeare, ‘he loved not wisely, but too well,” Bervar told reporters.

Published in Dawn, September 19th, 2014