Bradley Manning Admits Providing Files to WikiLeaks – The …

He said he then tried to reach out to The New York Times by calling a phone number for the newspapers public editor an ombudsman who is not part of the newsroom and leaving a voice mail message that was not returned.

In January 2010, around the time when Mr. Manning called the public editors line, voice mail messages were checked by Michael McElroy, the assistant to Clark Hoyt, then the public editor. Both Mr. Hoyt, now the editor at large at Bloomberg News, and Mr. McElroy, now a staff editor at The Times, said on Thursday that they had no recollection of hearing such a message.

We got hundreds of calls a week, and I tried to go through them all, Mr. McElroy said. If Id heard something like that, I certainly hope I would have flagged it immediately.

Private Manning eventually decided to release the information by uploading it to WikiLeaks. To do it, he said, he used a broadband connection at a Barnes & Noble store because his aunts house in a Maryland suburb, where he was staying, had lost its Internet connection in a snowstorm.

In February 2010, after he returned to Iraq, Private Manning sent more files to WikiLeaks, including a helicopter gunship video of a 2007 episode in Iraq in which American forces killed a group of men, including two Reuters journalists, and then fired again on a van that pulled up to help the victims.

Private Manning said the video troubled him, both because of the shooting of the second group of people, who were not a threat but merely good Samaritans, and because of what he described as the seemingly delightful blood lust expressed by the airmen in the recording. He also learned that Reuters had been seeking the video without success.

Private Manning said he copied the files from the secure network onto disks, which he took back to his quarters and transferred to his personal laptop before uploading them to WikiLeaks initially through its Web site, and later using a directory the group designated for him on a cloud drop box server.

Read the rest here:
Bradley Manning Admits Providing Files to WikiLeaks - The ...