As lore and Bradley Manning’s
own accounts have it, the one-time Intelligence analyst and recently demoted
Pfc. walked into a forward operating base near Baghdad with a blank disc that
he had cleverly disguised as a Lady Gaga CD and proceeded to download a
treasure trove of diplomatic cables of varying levels of classification. Manning
then took that data and began passing it along to what he described as “a white-haired Aussie” we now know to be
editor-in-chief and founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange. Among the data
released was some 250,000 diplomatic cables and the now infamous “Collateral
Murder” video of a US Apache helicopter airstrike on unarmed Iraqi civilians in
2007. Manning was arrested shortly after the release of the Grenai Airstrike
video and is currently being detained at Fort Leavenworth awaiting trial. His
arrest was made possible when fellow hacker Adrian Lamo turned over to the FBI
chat logs between he and Manning, in which Manning told Lamo, in detail, about
how he had downloaded classified information on SIPRnet and leaked it to
Wikileaks.
Wikileaks
As lore and Bradley Manning’s
own accounts have it, the one-time Intelligence analyst and recently demoted
Pfc. walked into a forward operating base near Baghdad with a blank disc that
he had cleverly disguised as a Lady Gaga CD and proceeded to download a
treasure trove of diplomatic cables of varying levels of classification.
