Manning’s Emotional State Could Decide WikiLeaks Case

The pre-trial hearing of First Class US Army Private First Class Bradley Manning drew protesters lining the highway outside Fort Meade, Md. Manning was attending a pre-trial hearing inside the base for being the alleged source of a trove of classified documents to Wikileaks. Paul J Richards/AFP/Getty Images

Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was at his wit’s end. He felt he had nobody to turn to, nobody who would listen, and nobody who would accept him. It was in this state that he turned to Julian Assange, founder of information-leaking website WikiLeaks.

Manning is now on trial for allegedly providing Assange with hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents. Yet his mental state at the time could be the deciding factor for his future.

“I don’t believe Bradley Manning was coerced in the traditional sense, but when you have someone who has been lonely much of their lives and all of the sudden they are getting approval from a source they subjectively respect—in this case, Julian Assange—the threat of losing that approval, that attention, is in its own way a form of coercion,” said Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned in Manning, in an earlier interview.

Lamo will testify at the hearing. Last year, in an interview with The Epoch Times, Lamo believed Assange used Manning to meet his own ends, and leveraged Manning’s vulnerable state in doing so. He could not be reached to confirm whether he still holds this perception.

Manning’s preliminary hearing is being held at an Army installation outside Washington. Final arguments in the case are expected Dec. 21, after which a military officer will decide whether Manning should be court-martialed. He would face a life sentence in military prison.

Lamo referenced the series of conversations he had with Manning, noting “In one of the logs, Manning refers to himself as a high-profile source. You have to ask, where did he get that particular impression? It would have been imparted onto him. Someone, probably Assange, would have told him one day the value of his work, and continued to reinforce that.”

When the intelligence community looks at a person’s motives for spying or leaking sensitive data, like Manning allegedly did, they categorize them into four areas: money, ideology, compromise, and ego (MICE).

According to Lamo, what Assange gave Manning was ego, the “e” of MICE—something he was desperate for. No response was received from questions e-mailed to Assange, regarding the accusations.

Just prior to his arrest in June 2010, Manning reached out to Lamo, who he believed “would possibly understand,” as he stated in the online conversation, which was obtained by Wired magazine. That conversation is one of the main pieces of evidence in the case, since it contains Manning admitting he provided files to Assange, including the Iraq war reports and State Department cables.

But Manning also confesses his emotional and mental state at the time.

“im pretty reckless at this point,” Manning wrote. “but im trying not to end up with 5.56mm rounds in my forehead.”

“im honestly, scared … i have no one i trust … i need a lot of help … i dont know if i can rebuild from here,” Manning wrote.

He relayed his life story—one of being bullied since kindergarten, alcoholic parents, and an abusive father. He never felt accepted, he felt unloved and unwanted, and he was an outsider wherever he went. “ive been so isolated so long … i just wanted to be nice, and live a normal life … but events kept forcing me to figure out ways to survive … smart enough to know whats going on, but helpless to do anything … no one took any notice of me,” Manning wrote.

His interactions with Assange seemed to have changed this to a degree. When he messaged Lamo, he began the conversation with his access to military networks. He boasted about his providing information to Assange in a similar conversation in May 2010 with a mathematician named Eric Schmiedl.

For him, his information access, and providing the data to Assange, was a way of being accepted. “It’s hard to tell whether he loved information for information’s sake, or information for what it could buy him in terms of approbation and approval,” Lamo said.

Yet even so, he seemed unsure about his actions. “i have no idea what im doing right now,” Manning told Lamo in their chat logs. He told Lamo he was providing information to Assange, noting “in other words… ive made a huge mess.”

“i’ve totally lost my mind… i make no sense… the CPU is not made for this motherboard,” he said, adding, “im self medicating like crazy when im not toiling in the supply office.”

“i mean, im a high profile source … and i’ve developed a relationship with assange… but i dont know much more than what he tells me, which is very little,” Manning wrote, noting, “assange offered me a position at wl … but im not interested right now … too much excess baggage.”

Lamo’s belief that Assange used Manning to meet his own ends goes beyond just taking data from a person in a highly vulnerable state. Part of Lamo’s beliefs are fueled by what took place after.

When Lamo turned Manning in, the only file attached to him was the “Collateral Murder” video WikiLeaks had released of two Reuters reporters and a group of alleged insurgents being killed from the air. Yet the crucial files associated with Manning were not yet public.

The fallout of the video alone would likely have been much lighter. Yet Assange’s release of the cables caused added charges against Manning for leaking the Afghan and Iraq war logs, and a quarter million State Department cables—the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history.

The documents, among other things, exposed names of informants around the world, and exposed how the government operates—something closely guarded by U.S. intelligence.

Lamo said he didn’t believe Assange would release the documents after Manning was arrested—since Assange and WikiLeaks claim to protect their sources. “I thought, honestly, that he would never release the cables, especially not in this number, because that was the one thing in particular that was associated with Bradley Manning,” he said.

“I figured, OK, this man may be callous, but at the very least, he may maintain plausible deniability until Bradley’s case was over, and that didn’t happen,” he said.

“I think that Julian Assange, as the older, more sophisticated party, bears more responsibility than a 22-year-old, who was at the time a specialist in the Army,” he said.