Army: Alleged Wikileaker Swiped Thousands of Files

WASHINGTON (July 6) -- The Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking a classified video of a U.S. helicopter strike in Iraq to a whistle-blower website also allegedly stole State Department cables and Defense Department PowerPoints, according to criminal charges released today.

Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Md., was charged with 12 counts of illegally transferring classified data onto his personal computer and giving it to an unauthorized source. The soldier, attached to the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division in Iraq, was arrested May 26 and is being held in detention at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait.

He allegedly committed the security breaches while stationed at Contingency Operating Station Hammer in Iraq between November and May.

Manning was first nabbed in connection with a video released in April by the website WikiLeaks, founded by an anti-secrecy crusader whose mission is a "public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public."

The classified video taken from an Apache helicopter documents a 2007 airstrike in Baghdad that killed 12 civilians, including two Reuters wire service journalists. It has been cited by opponents of the war as proof that innocents were being targeted by U.S. forces.

WikiLeaks wouldn't say where it got the graphic footage, but Wired.com reported that it came from Manning. According to Wired, Manning told a former computer hacker named Adrian Lamo that he leaked the footage after suffering a crisis of conscience over the military's conduct of the war in Iraq. Lamo, whose chats with Manning were published by Wired, tipped off the Army and the FBI, leading to Manning's arrest.

Nearly six weeks later, the military laid out its case. Manning is charged with violating Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice by "transferring classified data onto his personal computer and adding unauthorized software to a classified computer system." He is also charged under Article 134 of the code, which incorporates more serious criminal violations related to disclosing secrets "with reason to believe that the information could cause injury to the United States."

Highlights of the four-page charge sheet:

• In perhaps the most serious charge, Manning is accused of violating 18 U.S. Code 793(e) of the Espionage Act by having unauthorized possession of the classified July 12, 2007, Apache operation video and transmitting it to an unauthorized third party other than a foreign government. The purpose: "to bring discredit upon the armed forces."
• Manning is alleged to have illegally downloaded more than 150,000 diplomatic cables. Of those, he is charged with "willfully" leaking to a third party 50 classified State Department cables that "require protection against unauthorized disclosure for reasons of foreign relations."
• The charging document specifies that Manning passed a classified State Department cable titled "Reykjavik 13" to "a person not entitled to receive it." In February, WikiLeaks published a cable describing a meeting between U.S. Embassy officials and members of the government of Iceland.
• Manning is charged with misuse of the government's top-secret SIPRNet system, having allegedly exceeded his authorized access by downloading a classified Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.

"They're quite serious charges," said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice. "The government is extremely humorless about compromises of classified information."

Manning next goes before an Article 32 hearing -- the military equivalent of a grand jury hearing -- to determine if he will be tried in a court-martial.

The case comes at a time of heightened concerns about digital security and as a four-star general takes the reins of a new U.S. Cyber Command.

"It does show you an aspect of our modern, plugged-in world where the battlespace is wired like crazy and everybody's expectations about online access and everyone's facility with computer technology is mind-boggling," Fidell told AOL News. "It creates dangers in terms of foreign penetration, and it can create opportunities for compromise we didn't face in the past."

Although Manning isn't charged with spilling secrets to foreign governments, military intelligence veterans say he should have trusted his own government more if he was concerned about possible war crimes. Fidell cites the Pentagon's War of Law program, which is designed to provide an outlet for reporting abuses.

"It's clear we're committed in principle to investigating these things," he said. "One would certainly want to know what efforts he had made short of making these materials available to WikiLeaks or others to elevate his concerns."

Kenneth Allard, a retired Army intelligence officer and now a contributor to the Daily Beast, said that if Manning "thought someone did something wrong, he had an entire chain of command" to complain to. "If your conscience says something is wrong here, then by all means come forward -- but don't do what he did."

Claudia Kennedy, a retired three-star general and former Army chief of intelligence, agreed. "Why didn't he go to the inspector general? He could have gone to his commanding officer," she told AOL News. "I just can't imagine why anyone thinks their first line of dealing with a serious ethical question is to go to some blogger."

But Steve Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy, said while that's "true in the abstract, in real life things are rarely so simple." He said the Apache incident was well documented and was "essentially dismissed by higher ranks in the Army. The idea that the case would be reopened based on the say-so of a young private seems far-fetched."

Whether Manning did the right thing or not is a judgment call, he said. Noting that Reuters had been rebuffed in its efforts to get the video released, Aftergood said the tape "belonged in the public domain" because it "did not cause identifiable damage to national security and it did give the viewing public a visceral sense of what the conduct of war is like. That is a public service."

The new charges of swiping thousands of diplomatic cables and a classified PowerPoint presentation make it more difficult for even open-government advocates to defend Manning, however.

"Collectively, this suggests that he was not involved in a crisis of conscience over the Apache helicopter incident as much as he appeared bent on defying and disrupting the Army's classification practices," Aftergood said. "At some point you have to deal with the consequences of your actions. If he did what he's accused of doing, then he crossed a number of lines."