Wikileaks Critic Adrian Lamo Defends Manning Decision. ‘I Can’t Believe What I’m Confessing to You’: The Wikileaks Chats. On May 21, 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning initiated a series of online chats with former hacker Adrian Lamo after a story on Lamo was published at Wired.com.
The chats continued over several days, during which Manning claimed that he was responsible for leaking classified material to the whistleblower site Wikileaks. Lamo tipped off the FBI and the Army about Manning’s claims, and on May 26, Manning was seized by Army authorities and put into pre-trial detention in Kuwait. He remains in Kuwait while the Army Criminal Investigation Division and other agencies investigate whether he leaked classified information and determine if he should be charged with any crime.
Below are excerpts from the chat logs, which Lamo provided to Wired.com. As received by Wired, the logs contained timestamps but not dates, so the dates below are approximate. The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks - Glenn Greenwald. On June 6, Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter of Wired reported that a 22-year-old U.S.
Army Private in Iraq, Bradley Manning, had been detained after he “boasted” in an Internet chat — with convicted computer hacker Adrian Lamo — of leaking to WikiLeaks the now famous Apache Helicopter attack video, a yet-to-be-published video of a civilian-killing air attack in Afghanistan, and “hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records.” Lamo, who holds himself out as a “journalist” and told Manning he was one, acted instead as government informant, notifying federal authorities of what Manning allegedly told him, and then proceeded to question Manning for days as he met with federal agents, leading to Manning’s detention. From the start, this whole story was quite strange for numerous reasons. Reviewing everything that is known ultimately raises more questions than it answers. Below is my perspective on what happened here.