Bradley Manning

Bradley E. Manning, born December 17, 1987 is a United States Army soldier who was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of having passed restricted material to the website WikiLeaks. He was charged in July that year with transferring classified data onto his personal computer, and communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source. An additional 22 charges were preferred in March 2011, including "aiding the enemy", a capital offense, though prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty. He was found fit to face court martial in April 2011, and currently awaits the first hearing.
Manning had been assigned in October 2009 to a unit of the 10th Mountain Division, based near Baghdad. There he had access to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), used by the United States government to transmit classified information. He was arrested after Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, reported to the FBI that Manning had told him during online chats in May 2010 that he had downloaded material from SIPRNet and passed it to WikiLeaks. The leaked material is said to have included 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables; footage of a July 2007 Baghdad airstrike; and footage of the May 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan.
Manning was held in maximum custody beginning in July 2010 in the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico, Virginia, which in effect meant solitary confinement, conditions that Amnesty International called harsh and punitive. In April 2011, 295 scholars, including legal scholars and philosophers signed a letter saying the conditions he experienced amounted to a violation of the U.S. Constitution; later that month the Pentagon transferred him to a medium-security facility in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, allowing him to interact with other pre-trial detainees.
An article 32 hearing will be held on December 16 in Fort Meade, Maryland.


He enlisted in the army in October 2007, doing his basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and after graduating in April 2008 moved to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where he trained as an intelligence analyst. Nicks writes that he was reprimanded while there for posting messages to friends on YouTube that apparently revealed sensitive information. In August 2008, he was sent to Fort Drum in Jefferson County, New York, where he waited to be sent to Iraq. It was while there in the fall of 2008 that he met Tyler Watkins, with whom he had his first serious relationship, posting happily on Facebook about it. Nicks writes that it appears to have ended by September 2009, though Leigh and Harding say it ended around May 5, 2010. Watkins was studying neuroscience and psychology at Brandeis University near Boston, and Manning would regularly travel there to visit him. It was at Brandeis that he was introduced to Watkins's network of friends, and the university's hacker community, as well as its ideas about the importance of information being free. He visited Boston University's "hackerspace" workshop, and met its founder, David House, the computer scientist and MIT researcher who has been allowed to visit him in jail twice a month.
While at Fort Drum, Manning had begun to lose control, according to Steve Fishman in New York magazine, falling out with roommates, and screaming at superior officers. He said he was being bullied for being gay, and by August 2009 had been referred to an Army mental-health counsellor. In October 2009, despite the doubts about his fitness to be deployed, he was sent to Iraq with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, based at Forward Operating Base Hammer, near Baghdad. His unhappiness and loneliness continued there. Analysts were working 14–15 hours at a time in what he described as "a dimly lit room crowded to the point you cant move an inch without having to quietly say ‘excuse me sir,’ ‘pardon me sergeant major’  ... cables trip you up everywhere, papers stacked everywhere ..." He called it Groundhog Day.
He was sent to a chaplain after officers noticed what ABC News said were "odd behaviors."[12] In November 2009—the same month he allegedly first contacted WikiLeaks—he wrote to a gender counselor in the United States, said he felt female, and discussed having surgery. The counselor said it was clear that he was in crisis, partly because of his gender confusion, but also because he was opposed to the kind of war that he now found himself involved in. On May 7, 2010, he reportedly punched a woman officer in the face, and was demoted from Specialist to Private First Class. He was also told he would be discharged from the army.


WikiLeaks was set up in late 2006 as a disclosure portal, initially using the Wikipedia model, where volunteers would write up and analyze classified or restricted material submitted by whistleblowers, or material that was in some other way legally threatened. It was Julian Assange—an Australian with a background in computer hacking, and the de facto editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks—who had the idea of creating what he saw as an "open-source, democratic intelligence agency." The wiki element was abandoned, but the site remained open for the anonymous submission of leaked documents, using OpenSSL, Freenet, PGP, and Tor.
The New York Times wrote in December 2010 that the U.S. government was trying to discover whether Assange had been a passive recipient of material from Manning, or had encouraged or helped him to extract the files; if the latter, Assange could be charged with conspiracy. According to Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former WikiLeaks spokesman, part of the WikiLeaks security concept was that they did not know who their sources were. WikiLeaks did not identify Manning as the source of the material, and according to NBC in January 2011, the U.S. government could find no evidence of direct contact between Manning and Assange. Manning told Lamo during their online chats in May 2010 that he had developed a relationship with Assange, but knew little about him. Lamo alleged later that Manning also said he had communicated directly with Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service, and that Assange had "coached" him. Lamo is the only source of these allegations; he said these statements from Manning were in the unpublished parts of the chat logs, but that the FBI had taken his hard drive so he no longer had access to the logs.


Manning is said to have first contacted WikiLeaks in November 2009, days after it posted 570,000 pager messages from the September 11, 2001, attacks. From his workstation in Iraq, Manning had access to SIPRNet and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, and in late 2009 he found the Apache helicopter video. He told Lamo: "At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter. No big deal ... about two dozen more where that came from, right? But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer’s directory. So I looked into it.
Manning's former partner, Tyler Watkins, told reporters that, while on leave in Boston in January 2010, Manning said he had found some sensitive information and was considering leaking it. During the same month Manning began posting on Facebook in a way that suggested he was upset about something. According to The Daily Telegraph, he wrote, "Bradley Manning didn't want this fight. Too much to lose, too fast," and said he was livid after being "lectured by ex-boyfriend."
On February 18, WikiLeaks posted the first of the material that allegedly came from him, a diplomatic cable dated January 13, 2010, from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik, Iceland—a document now known as Reykjavik13. In the chat log, Manning called this a "test" document. On March 15, WikiLeaks posted a 32-page report written in 2008 by the U.S. Department of Defense about WikiLeaks itself. On March 29, it posted U.S. State Department profiles of politicians in Iceland.
On April 5, it published the Apache helicopter video of the July 2007 Baghdad airstrike, which Manning is alleged to have passed on in February; WikiLeaks called it the "Collateral Murder" video, and it attracted widespread coverage. On July 25, it released the Afghan war documents, and in October the Iraq War documents, internal military war logs and diaries. Manning is also alleged to have given them 251,287 U.S. state department cables—written by 260 embassies and consulates in 180 countries—which were passed by Assange to several news organizations. Several thousand of them were published in stages, the first by WikiLeaks in February 2010 (the Reykjavik13 document), then from November 29 by The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, El País, and others. WikiLeaks said it was the largest set of confidential documents ever released into the public domain.


On May 7, 2010, after punching a female officer in the face, Manning was demoted and told he was about to be discharged. On May 20, he contacted Adrian Lamo, a former "grey hat" hacker convicted in 2004 of having accessed The New York Times computer network without permission. Lamo had been profiled that day by Kevin Poulsen in Wired magazine after being hospitalized and diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. Poulsen, now a reporter, is himself a former hacker who had used Lamo as a source several times over the years.
According to Lamo, Manning sent him several encrypted e-mails on May 20 after seeing a tweet from Lamo about WikiLeaks. Lamo said he was unable to decrypt the e-mails but replied anyway, not knowing the recipient or being able to read the content, and invited the e-mailer to chat on AOL IM. Manning sent him more e-mails, also encrypted. Lamo said he later turned these and the earlier e-mails over to the FBI without having read them.[22] In a series of chats from May 21 until May 25/26, Manning—using the handle "Bradass87"—apparently told Lamo that he had leaked classified material. He introduced himself to Lamo as "an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern Baghdad, pending discharge for 'adjustment disorder' in lieu of 'gender identity disorder'.
Just over 10 minutes later he asked Lamo: "If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do? Lamo told him: "I'm a journalist and a minister. You can pick either, and treat this as a confession or an interview (never to be published) & enjoy a modicum of legal protection." Manning told Lamo he felt isolated, and had "lost all of my emotional support channels ... family, boyfriend, trusting colleagues im a mess.