Wired.com is reporting that a US Army intelligence analyst who allegedly claimed to be the leaker of the infamous "Collateral Murder" video to Wikileaks has been arrested and is being held in Kuwait. SPC Bradley Manning, 22, was reportedly stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer forty miles outside of Baghdad. Manning was reportedly turned in by a well-known figure in the hacker community, Adrian Lamo and arrested two weeks ago by Army CID officers in Baghdad.
Lamo told Wired that Manning contacted him last month and bragged about his role in the Wikileaks video. "Manning had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRNET, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level," Wired reports, adding that Manning held a Top Secret/SCI clearance. According to chat logs Lamo provided to Wired, Manning asked him, "If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?”
While Manning’s arrest is certainly newsworthy, perhaps the biggest news in the Wired piece is Manning’s claim to have provided massive amounts of other classified documents to Wikileaks:
He said 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; 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 US diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing “almost criminal political back dealings.”
“Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning wrote.
Through its Twitter feed, Wikileaks today claimed, "Allegations in Wired that we have been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect." The group also tweeted: "If Brad Manning, 22, is the "Collateral Murder" & Garani massacre whistleblower then, without doubt, he’s a national hero."
Meanwhile, Lamo has spent a fair bit of time on his Twitter page responding to allegations he is a sell-out, a snitch and an informant. "I outed Brad Manning as an alleged leaker out of duty. I would never (and have never) out an Ordinary Decent Criminal. There’s a difference," Lamo tweeted. In another tweet Lamo writes, "I’m heartsick for Manning and his family. I hope they can forgive me some day for doing what I felt had to be done."
