LittleAlexInWonderland | Spc. Manning was “turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online” to whom he “boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks”, they report. One of the videos reportedly leaked by him was the 2007 video of what’s been dubbed as the “West Baghdad Massacre”, where well over a dozen civilians—including a Reuters photojournalist—were gunned down from a helicopter, firing “indiscriminately”. Wikileaks released the video in April,under the title, Collateral Murder.

The Wired report adds that “he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession”. Garani (also translated as “Grenai”) is a village in the Afghan province of Farah, south of Herat, where, in 2009, U.S. warplanes repeatedly dropped bombs, killing up to 147 civilians—including up to 95 children. The operation has been dubbed the “Grenai Massacre” and Wikileaks editor Julian Assange has reported a video in his possession of a massacre in Afghanistan from 2009, which is yet to be released, that his team is working on.

The other two specific items reportedly leaked were: a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing ‘almost criminal political back dealings’, ” Mr. Poulson and Ms. Zetter add.

Of his “boasting”, they continue:

[…]

Manning told Lamo that he enlisted in the Army in 2007 and held a Top Secret/SCI clearance, details confirmed by his friends and family members. He claimed to have been rummaging through classified military and government networks for more than a year and said that the networks contained “incredible things, awful things … that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington D.C.”

He first contacted Wikileaks’ Julian Assange sometime around late November last year, he claimed, after Wikileaks posted 500,000 pager messages covering a 24-hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. “I immediately recognized that they were from an N.S.A. database, and I felt comfortable enough to come forward,” he wrote to Lamo. He said his role with Wikileaks was “a source, not quite a volunteer.”

[…]

“At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter,” Manning wrote of the video. “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.”

In January, while on leave in the U.S., Manning visited a close friend in Boston and confessed he’d gotten his hands on unspecified sensitive information, and was weighing leaking it, according to the friend. “He wanted to do the right thing,” says 20-year-old Tyler Watkins. “That was something I think he was struggling with.” Read Entire Article

By Little Alex


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