6.08.2010

u.s. army arrests alleged "collateral murder" video leaker

[redsock guest post]

Back in April, Laura posted about a video that had been sent to Wikileaks by someone in the US military. The video was filmed from an Apache helicopter gun-sight in 2007, "depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad".

Wired now reports that SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was arrested for leaking the video (and other information) roughly two weeks ago by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. He has not been formally charged with any crime.
[Manning] enlisted in the Army in 2007 and held a Top Secret/SCI clearance, details confirmed by his friends and family members. He claimed to have been rummaging through classified military and government networks for more than a year and said that the networks contained "incredible things, awful things ... that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC." ...

Manning had already been sifting through the classified networks for months when he discovered the Iraq video in late 2009, he said. The video, later released by Wikileaks under the title "Collateral Murder," shows a 2007 Army helicopter attack on a group of men, some of whom were armed, that the soldiers believed were insurgents. The attack killed two Reuters employees and an unarmed Baghdad man who stumbled on the scene afterward and tried to rescue one of the wounded by pulling him into his van. The man's two children were in the van and suffered serious injuries in the hail of gunfire. ...

In January, while on leave in the United States, Manning visited a close friend in Boston and confessed he'd gotten his hands on unspecified sensitive information, and was weighing leaking it ...

Manning passed the video to Wikileaks in February ...

The second video he claimed to have leaked shows a May 2009 air strike near Garani village in Afghanistan that the local government says killed nearly 100 civilians, most of them children. The Pentagon released a report about the incident last year, but backed down from a plan to show video of the attack to reporters.

The New Yorker has published a long, fascinating profile on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Much of the article concerns the preparation Assange and his co-workers were doing in a rented house in Reykjavik a week before the video was released. Raffi Khatchadourian writes:
Assange also wanted to insure that, once the video was posted online, it would be impossible to remove. He told me that WikiLeaks maintains its content on more than twenty servers around the world and on hundreds of domain names. ... Assange calls the site "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis," and a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself.

No comments: