Adrian Lamo On The Stand: 'Did Manning Ever Say He Wanted To Help The Enemy?' 'Not In Those Words, No.'

from the 20-years-for-attempting-to-upset-the-status-quo dept

Bradley Manning is currently on trial, charged with "aiding an enemy" (including "classified" enemies) for turning over sensitive documents to Wikileaks. As Mike pointed out earlier, this latter charge doesn't add up. Manning never handed over anything directly to any enemies of America, classified or otherwise, and any documents these unnamed enemies had in their possession were already publicly available.

Adrian Lamo, the ex-hacker who turned Manning over to the feds (or rather, the Dept. of Defense with some assistance from the FBI), was on the stand on June 4th. Under cross examination by David Coombs of Manning's defense team, Lamo is unable to say Manning intended to "aid the enemy" by releasing these documents. In fact, Coombs exchange with Lamo depicts Manning as someone with idealistic aims who hoped that bringing governmental and military wrongdoing into the light would help change both entities for the better.

Q. At one point you asked him what his end game was, correct?
A. Yes, I did.
Q. And he told you, hopefully worldwide discussions, debates and reforms?
A. Yes, he did.
Q. And he said he wanted people to see the truth?
A. Correct.
Q. He said without information you can't make informed decision as a whole?
A. Yes, he did.
Q. And he told you to, he was hoping that people would actually change if they saw the information?
A. Correct.

At one point, the discussion turned to the possibility of aiding US enemies, but Manning still refused to view the information he had acquired as anything other than a contribution to public knowledge.

Q. And at one point you asked him why he didn't just sell the information to Russia or China?
A. Correct.
Q. And he told you that the information belonged in the public domain?
A. Yes, he did.
Q. He believed that information was in the public domain and should be for the public good?
A. Yes.

And when the questions became more direct, Lamo's answers became correspondingly vague.

Q. At anytime did he say he had no loyalty to America?
A. Not in those words, no.
Q. At anytime did he say the American flag didn't mean anything to him?
A. No.
Q. At anytime did he say he wanted to help the enemy?
A. Not in those words, no.

In what words, then? The transcripts of the chats between Lamo and Manning are public. There's no indication Manning wished to aid the enemy. There was the potential for harm to exposed operatives and sources, but that was greatly mitigated by the delay between delivery and publication of the documents, not to mention Lamo bringing this to the FBI's attention after the initial chat session. But the military has chosen to view the embarrassment and inconvenience caused by the documents' release as "aiding the enemy" -- whatever hurts us makes them stronger.

Filed Under: adrian lamo, bradley manning, enemy of the state, trial
Companies: wikileaks

Is The Arrest Of Bradley Manning Part Of A Coordinated Effort To Discredit Wikileaks?

from the conspiracy-theory-time dept

Like many folks, I've been following the bizarre story of the arrest of Bradly Manning, an US Army intelligence analyst, who supposedly "confessed" that he was leaking tons of information to Wikileaks. However, as this story has moved forward, it's actually raised a lot more questions than it's really answered. Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald is digging into some of the stranger parts of the story, some of which don't make much sense. Greenwald doesn't come out and make any direct accusations, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't trust or believe the stories being told by Adrian Lamo, who turned Manning in, or Kevin Poulsen, the reporter at Wired, who broke the story. Greenwald details the long and somewhat questionable history of Lamo and Poulsen -- both of whom were convicted on hacking charges at different points in their lives. I'd never noticed this, but apparently, Poulsen has basically served as Lamo's "go to" guy for getting press whenever he wants it. That could be meaningless, but there are large gaps in the details of the story that make the whole thing kind of questionable. It's also odd that, as Greenwald points out, after a few years out of the news, Poulsen just so happened to write an odd and not-very-newsworthy story about Lamo's mental health problems just a couple of weeks before this big story broke.

The other tidbit -- which very likely could be a coincidence, as it seems quite early to jump on the conspiracy theory bandwagon here -- is that back in 2008, a classified report by the US Army Counterintelligence Center suggested one way to discredit Wikileaks (which it viewed as a threat) would be the "Successful identification, prosecution, termination of employment, and exposure of persons leaking the information by the government... would damage and potentially destroy this center of gravity and deter others from taking similar actions." As Greenwald notes:

In other words, exactly what the U.S. Government wanted to happen in order to destroy WikiLeaks has happened here: news reports that a key WikiLeaks source has been identified and arrested, followed by announcements from anonymous government officials that there is now a worldwide "manhunt" for its Editor-in-Chief. Even though WikiLeaks did absolutely nothing (either in this case or ever) to compromise the identity of its source, isn't it easy to see how these screeching media reports -- WikiLeaks source arrested; worldwide manhunt for WikiLeaks; major national security threat -- would cause a prospective leaker to WikiLeaks to think twice, at least: exactly as the Pentagon Report sought to achieve? And that Pentagon Report was from 2008, before the Apache Video was released; imagine how intensified is the Pentagon's desire to destroy WikiLeaks now. Combine that with what both the NYT and Newsweek recently realized is the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistle-blowers, and one can't overstate the caution that's merited here before assuming one knows what happened.

Separately, Greenwald breaks down Lamo's story for why he turned in Manning, and finds the whole thing quite unconvincing. In fact, he notes that, beyond contradictory reports from Lamo about whether or not he implied or outright claimed that he would offer Manning confidentiality, most of the evidence suggests that Manning was a whistleblower, not particularly unlike Daniel Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers. That is, nothing in any of these conversations suggests an attempt to help enemies of the US, but rather to expose questionable behavior -- the very definition of whistleblowing, and the sort of thing that should be celebrated.

Admittedly, the whole story is rather strange, and lots of details are sadly hidden (another thing that Greenwald questions, since Wired or Lamo could fill in some of the big gaps to clear things up -- but neither seem willing to do so). I'm certainly not buying into any conspiracy theories at this point, but will admit that the whole story continues to raise more questions than it seems to answer.

Update: Don't miss Kevin Poulsen's response in the comments where he defends his reporting on this situation, and suggests Greenwald has it all wrong. I definitely don't buy the implication that Poulsen might be working with the US gov't -- that seems too out there to believe. However, the rest of the story still does seem weird. Lamo's turning in Manning story still doesn't add up, but it's likely an overreaction to suggest Poulsen was anything other than a reporter on this story.

Filed Under: adrian lamo, bradley manning, kevin poulsen
Companies: wikileaks