In the Daily Beast today, Philip Shenon reports the Pentagon has launched a “manhunt” for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has… just announced he’ll be in Vegas tonight. Huh? The Defense Department is upset at Wikileaks and Assange for publishing a number of secret and sensitive documents, and the “Collateral Murder” video. The big fear now, according to reports, is that Assange has access to up to 260,000 classified State Department cables leaked by 22-year-old Army intelligence specialist Bradley Manning (now jailed in Kuwait after being outed by hacker Adrian Lamo). From The Daily Beast: The cables, which date back over several years, went out over interagency computer networks available to the Army and contained information related to American diplomatic and intelligence efforts in the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, the diplomat said. American officials would not discuss the methods being used to find Assange, nor would they say if they had information to suggest where he is now. “We’d like to know where he is; we’d like his cooperation in this,” one U.S. official said of Assange. Unless this tweet from Wikileaks (presumably Assange himself) is a diversion, if there is a manhunt they won’t have to look far. The whole thing is feeling very Spy Vs. Spy at this point. It should be said that at this time, I have no way of verifying whether there is indeed a “Pentagon manhunt” for Assange, nor can I verify that he’s in Vegas, nor do I know that the whole matter of 260,000 cables existing is real. A “manhunt,” for all I know, could be one guy with a dot-gov email, not a vast, coordinated effort with all laser-guns blazing. But again, we don’t know. Related: Wired News reports more on the contents of the chat sessions between Manning and Lamo, who turned over Manning to the government. There’s some really key stuff in the transcripts—one incident in particular, about being asked to “[evaluate] the arrest of 15 Iraqis rounded up by the Iraqi Federal Police for printing ‘anti Iraq’ literature”—all of which sheds light on why Manning may have been motivated to do what he is alleged to have done (and why he may have been compelled to unload his troubles to a stranger, Lamo, who then outed him). Everything started slipping after that. I saw things differently. I had always questioned the [way] things worked, and investigated to find the truth. But that was a point where I was a part of something. I was actively involved in something that I was completely against. Wired News (and Adrian Lamo) report alleged Wikileaks "Collateral … Wikileaks/Manning: "Are America's foreign policy secrets about to … Iraq: Wikileaks video of US military killing journalists…
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Friday, June 11, 2010 3:36:10 PM – Link
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