Plan B Forum

FT. MEADE, Maryland — A day after a government forensic expert testified that he’d found thousands of diplomatic cables on the Army computer of suspected WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, he was forced to admit under cross-examination that none of the cables he compared to the ones WikiLeaks released matched.

Special Agent David Shaver, a forensic investigator with the Army’s Computer Crimes Investigations Unit, testified Sunday that he’d found 10,000 U.S. diplomatic cables in HTML format on the soldier’s classified work computer, as well as a corrupted text file containing more than 100,000 complete cables that had been converted to base-64 encoding.

Six months after Manning was arrested for allegedly leaking documents to WikiLeaks, the site began publishing 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables that ranged in date from December 1966 to the end of February 2010. But Shaver said none of the documents that he found on Manning’s computer, and that he then compared to those that WikiLeaks published, matched the WikiLeaks documents.

Shaver wasn’t asked how many cables he compared to the WikiLeaks cables, or which dates those cables had, he just said he matched “some of them.” In re-direct examination, however, he noted that the CSV file in which the cables were contained was corrupted and suggested this might indicate that it had not been possible to pass those cables to WikiLeaks for this reason. The defense objected to this assumption, however, noting that Shaver could not speculate on why the cables were not among those released by WikiLeaks.

The cross-examination of Shaver focused on establishing that there might have been legitimate reasons for the State Department cables to be on Manning’s computers, since intelligence analysts were given access to them to do their job. One of Manning’s superiors testified earlier in the hearing that he had sent a link to Manning and other analysts directing them to the location where they could find the cables.

"PFC Manning allegedly responded with, 'I sold information to WikiLeaks,' " according to the defense document.

Source

Which appears to be his "defense."

dgs49 wrote:This is one of those cases that will irritatingly demonstrate the silliness of the American criminal justice system.

Everyone knows what he did. There is no question that it was a criminal activity. He actually admitted doing it.

But it will take the Criminal Justice System months, if not years, to come to the obvious conclusion.

But rest assured, he will spend many long and difficult years at Leavenworth, were they will not sympathize with him for the agony of being a closeted queer in the American military.

Which appears to be his "defense."

The US Army said in a statement that the head of the tribunal, Lt Col Paul Almanza, had concluded that "reasonable grounds exist to believe that [Intelligence analyst Bradley Manning] committed the offences[sic] alleged.

"He [Lt Col Almanza] recommended that the charges be referred to a general court martial," the army statement said.




BBC

(CNN) -- Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, who is suspected of leaking hundreds of thousands of secret documents to the WikiLeaks website, will be court-martialed on charges that could lead to a sentence of life in prison, the Army said Friday in a statement.

loCAtek wrote:

The US Army said in a statement that the head of the tribunal, Lt Col Paul Almanza, had concluded that "reasonable grounds exist to believe that [Intelligence analyst Bradley Manning] committed the offences[sic] alleged.

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BBC

sic
   [seek; Eng. sik]
adverb Latin .
so; thus: usually written parenthetically to denote that a word, phrase, passage, etc., that may appear strange or incorrect has been written intentionally or has been quoted

Scooter wrote:One would have though that someone would have actually gone to the effort of actually tracing the Wikileaks cables back to Manning before now. Apparently not.
...
Was this another railroad job, à la USS Iowa, fabricated in order to cover up military incompetence?