Chelsea Manning

Bradley Manning
photograph
Born	(1987-12-17) December 17, 1987 Crescent, Oklahoma
Nationality	American
Occupation(s)	Soldier, United States Army
Known for	Allegedly passed classified data to Wikileaks
Criminal charge(s)	Transferring classified data onto his personal computer, and transmitting national defense information to an unauthorized source.
Parent(s)	Brian and Susan Manning

Bradley E. Manning (born December 17, 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was charged in July 2010 with the unauthorized disclosure of U.S. classified information. He is being held in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico, Virginia, and is expected to face a court-martial in the spring of 2011.

Manning was assigned to a support battalion with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, based at Contingency Operating Station Hammer, Iraq, which gave him access to SIPRNet—the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network—used by the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of State to transmit classified information. He was arrested in May 2010 after Adrian Lamo, a former computer hacker, reported to authorities that Manning had told him, during an online chat, that he had downloaded material from SIPRNet and passed it to Wikileaks. The material included the video of a July 2007 helicopter airstrike in Baghdad—the so-called "Collateral Murder" video, which Wikileaks published in April 2010—a video of the Granai airstrike, and a large number of diplomatic cables.

On July 5 Manning was charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for transferring classified data onto his personal computer and communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source between November 19, 2009 and May 27, 2010.

Background

Manning and his older sister, Casey, were born in Crescent, Oklahoma to an American father, Brian Manning, and his Welsh wife, Susan. His father had been in the United States Navy for five years; his parents met when Brian was stationed at Cawdor Barracks in Wales. Manning was raised in Crescent, where his father worked as an IT manager for Hertz Rent-a-Car. He was small for his age, good at the saxophone and science, and even in elementary school had talked about wanting to join the army. One neighbor said his mother had difficulty adjusting to life in the U.S., and his father was often away, so Manning was largely left to fend for himself. His father left home when Manning was 13, and he moved with his mother to Haverfordwest, Wales. One of his school friends from Tasker Milward School, where he sat his GCSEs, told The Guardian that Manning was a "hot-headed" computer nerd, known for having an attitude. Tom Dyer, a school friend, told Britain's Channel 4 News that Manning wanted to "right a big wrong." "If something went wrong," Dyer said, "he would speak up about it if he didn't agree with something. He would even have altercations with teachers if he thought something was not right." Dyer told Channel 4 that Manning was bullied at school because he was an American. He was also targeted for being effeminate; Denver Nicks writes that he had told his schoolfriends in Crescent that he was gay, but he was not open about it at school in Wales.

He returned to the United States after his exams, moved in with his father and sister in Oklahoma City, and took a job with a software company, Zoto. He fell out with his dad, in part because of his sexuality, and moved in with a friend in Tulsa, where he took low-paid jobs with Incredible Pizza Company and F.Y.E., an entertainment media retail chain. He apparently also lived in his car for a time. Nicks writes that he moved to Chicago, then went to live with an aunt in Potomac, Maryland, where he took classes at a local college, and worked for Starbucks, and Abercrombie and Fitch.

He enlisted in the army in the summer of 2007, doing his basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and after graduating in April 2008, he 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. By Christmas 2008 he was in a new relationship and apparently posting happily about it on Facebook, though Nicks writes that the relationship appears to have ended by September 2009.

Disclosure of classified material

Further information: Information published by WikiLeaks

SIPRNet access

Julian Assange of Wikileaks said he did not know whether Manning was the source of the leaks.

In October 2009, Manning was sent to Iraq to work for the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division, based at Contingency Operating Station Hammer, near Baghdad. According to ABC News, he was reprimanded while he was there for assaulting a fellow soldier, and was demoted from Specialist to Private First Class. He was also sent to a chaplain after officers noticed what ABC called "odd behaviors." He told Adrian Lamo in May that he was about to be discharged because of an "adjustment disorder."

While in Iraq, Manning was able to access SIPRNet from his workstation.. He was also said to have had access to the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System . He first contacted Julian Assange in late November 2009, after Wikileaks had posted 500,000 pager messages from the September 11, 2001 attacks. In January 2010, he told a friend while on leave in Boston that he was considering leaking classified material. During the same month he began posting on Facebook in a way that suggested he was upset about something. According to The Daily Telegraph, he wrote that "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 Manning. It was a diplomatic cable dated January 13, 2010 from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik, Iceland—a document now known as Reykjavik13. During his chats with Lamo, Manning called this a "test" document. In February he passed the video of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike to Wikileaks, which published it in April. On May 5 he wrote on Facebook that he was "not a piece of equipment," and was "beyond frustrated with people and society at large."

Chats with Adrian Lamo

According to the Washington Post, Adrian Lamo passed Manning's chat logs to the authorities because he feared lives were at risk.

On May 21, Manning went online to chat with Adrian Lamo, a former hacker. The Washington Post writes that Lamo had recently been profiled by Wired magazine, and Manning had e-mailed Lamo, introducing himself as "an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern baghdad, pending discharge for 'adjustment disorder.'" In a series of chats over a period of a week, he told Lamo what he had done. 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?" He told Lamo that he felt isolated and ignored at work, and was angered by some of the classified material he had read. He said he was a "wreck": "Ive been isolated so long ... i just wanted to figure out ways to survive ... smart enough to know whats going on, but helpless to do anything ... no-one took any notice of me," he wrote. He said he had been leaking files to a "white haired aussie," Julian Assange of Wikileaks. He said: "i'm exhausted ... in desperation to get somewhere in life ... i joined the army ... and that's proven to be a disaster now ... and now i'm quite possibly on the verge of being the most notorious 'hacktivist' or whatever you want to call it ... its all a big mess i've created."

On May 25, he told Lamo he had taken CD-RWs containing music to work, erased them and rewrote them with the downloaded documents. According to Wired, he wrote that he "listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's 'Telephone' while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history ... pretty simple, and unglamorous ..." Of the security he wrote: "it was vulnerable as fuck ... no-one suspected a thing ... =L kind of sad ... weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis... a perfect storm ". He asked Lamo "i mean what if i were someone more malicious," writing that he could have sold the material to Russia or China. When asked why he had not done that, he wrote: "it belongs in the public domain ... information should be free."

He said he had leaked the Baghdad airstrike video, a video of the Granai airstrike, and 260,000 diplomatic cables, and hoped the release of the material would lead to "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms ... if not ... than [sic] we’re doomed ... as a species ... i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens." He told Lamo he felt encouraged by the response to the Baghdad airstrike video: "the reaction to the video gave me immense hope ... CNN’s iReport was overwhelmed ... Twitter exploded ..." He said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and several thousand diplomats were "going to have a heart attack" when they discovered that an "entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format to the public ... everywhere there's a US post ... there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed." He wrote: "I want people to see the truth regardless of who they are because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."

Arrest

Template:Wikinews2 According to the Washington Post, Lamo reported what Manning had told him to federal authorities, because he was concerned that lives were at risk. Lamo told Wired that he had given money to Wikileaks in the past, and that the decision to go to the authorities had not been an easy one: "I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger. He was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air." Wired writes that Lamo met Army CID investigators and the FBI at a Starbucks near his home in California, where he showed them the chat logs. He met them again on May 27, at which point they told him Manning had been arrested in Iraq the day before. The news of the arrest was broken on June 6 by Kevin Poulsen, a friend of Lamo's who works for Wired.

Manning was at first held in a military jail at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. On July 5, 2010, he was charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) with violations of UCMJ Articles 92 and 134 for "transferring classified data onto his personal computer and adding unauthorized software to a classified computer system in connection with the leaking of a video of a helicopter attack in Iraq in 2007," and "communicating, transmitting and delivering national defense information to an unauthorized source and disclosing classified information concerning the national defense with reason to believe that the information could cause injury to the United States."

On July 29, he was moved to a military jail in Quantico, Virginia, where he was classified as a "Maximum Custody Detainee" . He is in solitary confinement 23 hours a day; is not allowed to exercise in his cell; has been denied a pillow and sheets; is under constant surveillance; and is allowed no contact, even indirectly, with the media. His friends say his mental and physical health are deteriorating. He faces a pretrial hearing under Article 32 of the UCMJ, after which his lawyer expects a court-martial in the spring of 2011. He has chosen former military attorney David Coombs to lead his defense team. The maximum jail sentence Manning faces is 52 years.

Response

Wikileaks has not identified Manning as the source of the material, and says its efforts to arrange for his legal defense were rebuffed, which the military denies. Wikileaks reportedly said in July that it would contribute to Manning's defense fund. A group has been formed, Courage to Resist, to raised money for the legal costs, but it said on December 8 that Wikileaks had so far not made a contribution. A Wikileaks spokesperson said the payment was being processed.

According to the Associated Press, the office of Manfred Nowak, a United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture until October 2010, was asked by one of Manning's supporters to look into allegations that he is being mistreated in custody. The film-maker Michael Moore and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg have launched a campaign to have him released, and public rallies have been held in his support in the U.S., Canada, the Netherlands, and Ireland. Ellsberg has said that Manning, along with Julian Assange, is a new hero of his. Assange has declared Manning an "unparalleled hero," insofar as he is alleged to be behind the leaks, and has said he regards Manning as a political prisoner.

See also

• Espionage Act of 1917
• Intelligence analysis