US intel analyst held for Wikileaks video breach

A US Army intelligence analyst has been arrested in Iraq for leaking sensitive files to the open source whistleblower website Wikileaks. Brad Manning is thought to be the person who leaked a video, dubbed 'Collateral Murder', of a fatal helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians, including Reuters journalists, which was posted on the site in April.

Wired reports that the 22-year-old was arrested two weeks ago and is being held in protective custody in Kuwait. He has not been formally charged.

The tech magazine claims that Manning betrayed himself to a former hacker, to whom he poured his heart out during online chats, and whom he thought he could trust.

Wikileaks is renowned for the protection it affords whistleblowers. No personal information is stored when documents are uploaded – a situation that is also convenient for the website from a legal standpoint.

Manning reportedly told the hacker, Adrian Lamo, of three other tranches of classified data he had leaked besides the Collateral Murder video. They are:

• A video of a 2009 US attack on the Afghan village of Garani in which 140 people, most of them children, were killed. The video has not yet been released by Wikileaks.

• A US Army document identifying Wikileaks as a security threat that has already been released by the website.

• An archive of 260,000 classified US embassy cables.

It is this last item that Lamo says persuaded him of the necessity to shop Manning. The whistleblower allegedly told him: "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."

Lamo, who is said to have given financial support to Wikileaks in the past, saw it differently – as a threat to national security. "I wouldn't have done this if lives weren't in danger," he told Wired.

Wikileaks this morning used its Twitter feed to say it cannot confirm whether Manning is the whistleblower who leaked the Garani and Collateral Murder videos, because it does not know. It also said it didn't think it had the 260,000 embassy cables.

However, the statement read, "If Brad Manning is the 'Collateral Murder' & Garani massacre whistleblower then, without doubt, he's a national hero."

And Wikileaks left the world in no doubt as to whose side it was on: "Adrian Lamo & Kevin Poulson [the writer of the Wired article] are notorious felons, informers & manipulators. Journalists should take care."

Meanwhile, Manning isn't being kept totally incommunicado in Kuwait. He called his aunt on Saturday and gave her his Facebook password so that she could post a message on his account: "Some of you may have heard that I have been arrested for disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons. See CollateralMurder.com." ·