Fears for Bradley Manning after Wikileaks ‘dump’

As journalists at the Guardian and the New York Times will attest after spending three weeks going through the material, the unloading of US secret military documents via Wikileaks was more of a "dump" than a "leak". A staggering 90,000 documents were given to Wikileaks and passed on to the two newspapers and the German magazine Der Spiegel in an effort to give the material maximum exposure.

Many of the details were already known and have been reported by correspondents in Afghanistan: the use of special forces 'black ops' teams to take out specific insurgent leaders, the Taliban's use of ground-to-air missiles against Nato forces, and the suspicion that Pakistan's military intelligence agency, the ISI, was working against Nato interests to support the insurgents.

It's the sheer mass of the documentation that is impressive. "It's quantity not quality," said Robert Fox, who writes on military and security matters for The First Post. "Almost all the detail was already known by journalists. There appears to be no silver bullet - no devastating fact of which we were all unaware."

That said, the leak has exposed a higher level of civilian casualties than has been reported, both as result of Nato missions going wrong and because of the growing use of roadside bombs by the Taliban.

Incidents of erroneous Nato attacks on civilians - termed 'blue on white' in military speak - revealed in the leaked documents include French troops strafing a bus full of children in 2008, a US patrol machine-gunning a bus, and Polish troops mortaring a village in an apparent revenge attack. Members of a wedding party, including a pregnant woman, were killed in the Polish attack.

The leak is a shocking breach of security and neither the Pentagon nor the White House are going to take it lying down.

Which raises fears among journalists and anti-war campaigners for Bradley Manning (pictured right), the young US Army intelligence analyst who is believed to be the source of the leak. What price will he now pay for his alleged crime?

There seems little doubt that Manning is the source. He is already in military custody in Kuwait accused of leaking the Wikileaks 'Collateral Murder' video of an Apache helicopter crew gunning down innocent civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

As readers of The First Post will recall, Manning was shopped to his superiors by a former computer hacker, Adrian Lamo, to whom Manning had confessed his role in the course of an extended email conversation in May.

Lamo has argued that he felt bound to tell the US military about Manning precisely because the soldier warned him that he had also leaked tens of thousands of confidential diplomatic cables to Wikileaks - the very material now exposed and promoted by the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel.

"Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world, are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public," Manning is said to have told Lamo.

Lamo said he informed the military because he feared the leak endangered American security.

But have Wikileaks, and its controversial Australian founder Julian Assange (pictured left), now exposed Manning to much harsher treatment than he might have received for the 'Collateral Murder' leak alone?

Lamo thinks so. He told the Daily Beast website: "For WikiLeaks to do this, it's transparently callous in its attitude toward him [Manning]. The information wasn't going to go away. WikiLeaks could have waited until after Manning was sentenced, after he was tried."

Lamo went on: "WikiLeaks is just paying lip service to wanting to protect Manning as a potential source, while letting him get hit by a train over this."

He also questions whether Manning acted alone in leaking the material. "It was not my impression that he had the technological expertise to carry out some of these actions. I believe that somebody would have had to have been of assistance to him."

Of course, Lamo could be accused of trying to pass the blame to Wikileaks - it was he, after all, who shopped Manning. "I feel an attachment to this kid," he told the Daily Beast, "even though he probably hates my guts now."

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