Wikileaks & Bradley Manning

In late May, Adrian Lamo -- at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant against Manning -- gave Poulsen what he purported to be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables, documents and video that WikiLeaks released throughout this year.

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From the start, the strangest aspect of this whole story -- as I detailed back in June and won't repeat here -- has been the notion that one day, out of the blue, Manning suddenly contacted a total stranger over the Internet and, using unsecured chat lines, immediately confessed in detail to crimes that would likely send him to prison for decades.

More strangely still, it wasn't just any total stranger whom Manning contacted, but rather a convicted felon who is notorious in the hacking community for his dishonesty and compulsive self-promotion, and who had just been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital three weeks earlier [...] Add to all of that the central involvement of Lamo's long-time confidant, Poulsen, in exclusively reporting on this story and one has a series of events that are wildly improbable (which doesn't mean it didn't happen that way).

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By allowing the world to see only the fraction of the Manning-Lamo chats that he chose to release, [Wired’s Kevin] Poulsen has created a situation in which his long-time "source," Adrian Lamo, is the only source of information for what Manning supposedly said beyond those published exceprts. Journalists thus routinely print Lamo's assertions about Manning's statements even though -- as a result of Poulsen's concealment -- they are unable to verify whether Lamo is telling the truth. Due to Poulsen, Lamo is now the one driving many of the media stories about Manning and WikiLeaks even though Lamo (a) is a convicted felon, (b) was (as Poulsen strangely reported at the time) involuntarily hospitalized for severe psychiatric distress a mere three weeks before his chats with Manning, and (c) cannot keep his story straight about anything from one minute to the next.

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Whether Manning actually said [certain] things to Lamo could be verified in one minute by "journalist" Kevin Poulsen. He could either say: (1) yes, the chats contain such statements by Manning, and here are the portions where he said these things, or (2) no, the chats contain no such statements by Manning, which means Lamo is either lying or suffers from a very impaired recollection about what Manning said. Poulsen could also provide Lamo -- who claims he is no longer in possession of them -- with a copy of the chat logs (which Lamo gave him) so that journalists quoting Lamo about Manning's statements could see the actual evidence rather than relying on Lamo's claims. Any true "journalist" -- or any person minimally interested in revealing the truth -- would do exactly that in response to Lamo's claims as published by The New York Times.

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[B]ack in July, Lamo admitted to the New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller that he has "no direct evidence" that anyone helped Manning obtain the classified information:

Mr. Lamo acknowledged that he had no direct evidence that Private Manning had help. He said he based his belief on information from people who knew Private Manning, not on his contact with the soldier himself. Asked if Private Manning had ever told him of any WikiLeaks assistance, Mr. Lamo replied, "Not explicitly, no."

But now that Savage is reporting that the DOJ needs to prove that WikiLeaks actively helped Manning, Lamo pops up to make the exact opposite claim: namely, that Manning explicitly told him in these chats that he had help from Assange and from WikiLeaks "intermediaries" in Boston.

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There is one person who could immediately confirm whether Lamo's claims are true: Kevin Poulsen of Wired. Yet he steadfastly refuses to do so.

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But now there are new facts making all of this stranger still, and it all centers around a man named Mark Rasch. Who is Rasch? He's several things. He's the former chief of the DOJ's Computer Crimes Unit in the 1990s. He's a "regular contributor" to Wired. He's also the General Counsel of "Project Vigilant," the creepy and secretive vigilante group that claims to gather Internet communications and hand them over to the U.S. government. Rasch is also the person who prosecuted Kevin Poulsen back in the mid-1990s and put him in prison for more than three years. As detailed below, Rasch also has a long and varied history with both Poulsen and, to a lesser extent, Lamo. And -- most significantly of all -- Rasch is the person who put Lamo in touch with federal law authorities in order to inform on Manning.

  Glenn Greenwald

There’s a lot more interesting information raising lots of interesting questions in this Greenwald post. Poulsen is reputedly promising a response tomorrow.