AP, 27 July 2010: A Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday that the Army is leading the Pentagon’s inquiry into the source of leaked classified intelligence logs from the Afghanistan war.
Col. Dave Lapan said the criminal probe launched Tuesday is aimed at finding the source of secret documents published Sunday by the online site Wikileaks. The Army’s criminal investigative division led the investigation into Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence specialist charged with leaking other material to Wikileaks. Col. Lapan said it’s not clear whether the latest material came from Mr. Manning or someone else.
The Army will have the power to investigate members of other military branches. . . .
Wired, 6 July 2010: A U.S. Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking videos and documents to Wikileaks was charged Monday with eight violations of federal criminal law, including unauthorized computer access, and a single count of transmitting classified information to an unauthorized third party.
Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, was charged with two counts under the Uniform Code of Military Justice: one encompassing the eight alleged criminal offenses, and a second detailing four non-criminal violations of Army regulations governing the handling of classified information and computers.
According to the charge sheet, Manning downloaded a classified video of a military operation in Iraq and transmitted it to a third-party, in violation of a section of the Espionage Act, 18 U.S.C. 793(e), which involves passing classified information to an uncleared third-party, but not a foreign government.
The remaining criminal charges are for allegedly abusing access to the Secret-level SIPR network to obtain more than 150,000 U.S. State Department cables, some of them classified, as well as an unspecified classified Powerpoint presentation. With regard to the State Department cables, Manning allegedly passed more than 50 classified cables to an unauthorized party but downloaded at least 150,000 non-classified State Department documents. . . .
Alleged Army whistleblower felt angry and alone (AP, 6 July 2010)
With his custom-made “humanist” dog tags and distrust of authority, Bradley Manning was no conventional soldier. Ostracized by peers in Baghdad, busted for assaulting a fellow soldier and disdainful of the military’s inattention to computer security, the 22-year-old intelligence analyst styled himself a “hactivist.” . . .
. . . . Manning is a slight, boyish-looking son of divorced parents from Crescent, Okla., population 1,400. His Facebook page shows him smiling, with stylish, upswept hair and a stated affinity for gay-rights groups including Repeal the Ban, which seeks to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on homosexuals serving in the U.S. military.
Growing up in a house he shared with his parents and older sister, Manning had a sharp intellect and an interest in science, history and computers, said Jordan Davis, a boyhood pal. He said Manning also was determined at a young age to join the Army. “It always seemed to me that Bradley was actually was more patriotic than probably even your average person,” he said. Chera Moore, another childhood friend, described Manning as highly intelligent and helpful. But she said he had “anger issues” and could get furious when people disagreed with him.
When Manning’s parents split up in middle school, he left Oklahoma to live with his mother in Wales, Davis said. After Manning graduated from high school and returned to Oklahoma, he quit or lost jobs in food service and retail in Tulsa, Davis said. Settling briefly in Chicago, Manning moved in with an aunt in Potomac, a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., and took community college courses before joining the Army in 2007.
Davis said Manning trained in Arizona, probably at Fort Huachuca, where he trained in compiling intelligence reports. Such reports help the military determine changes in enemy capabilities, vulnerabilities and probable courses of action. . . .
Wired, 6 June 2010: Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.
SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.
Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.
He said he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing “almost criminal political back dealings.”
“Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning wrote. . . .
. . . . Manning came to the attention of the FBI and Army investigators after he contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail. Lamo had just been the subject of a Wired.com article. Very quickly in his exchange with the ex-hacker, Manning claimed to be the Wikileaks video leaker. “If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?” Manning asked.
From the chat logs provided by Lamo, and examined by Wired.com, it appears Manning sensed a kindred spirit in the ex-hacker. He discussed personal issues that got him into trouble with his superiors and left him socially isolated, and said he had been demoted and was headed for an early discharge from the Army.
When Manning told Lamo that he leaked a quarter-million classified embassy cables, Lamo contacted the Army, and then met with Army CID investigators and the FBI at a Starbucks near his house in Carmichael, California, where he passed the agents a copy of the chat logs. At their second meeting with Lamo on May 27, FBI agents from the Oakland Field Office told the hacker that Manning had been arrested the day before in Iraq by Army CID investigators. . . . (read ALL)
Hacker explains why he reported ‘Wikileaks source’ (BBC, 7 June 2010)
Washington Times/Bill Gertz, 9 Feb 10: Almost two years before the deadly Fort Hood shooting by a radicalized Muslim officer, the U.S. Army was explicitly warned that jihadism — Islamic holy war — was a serious problem and threat to personnel in the U.S., according to participants at a major Army-sponsored conference. The annual Army anti-terrorism conference in Florida in February 2008 included presentations on the threat by counterterrorism specialists Patrick Poole, Army Lt. Col. Joseph Myers and Terri Wonder.
The meeting was organized by the Army’s provost marshal general and included more than 350 force protection and anti-terrorism professionals who came from major Army installations and commands from around the world, according to participants.
Mr. Poole, a counterterrorism specialist and adviser to government and law-enforcement agencies, said his presentation and that of the other two counterterrorism experts “attempted to instruct these anti-terrorism and force protection professionals not just in the indicators of Islamic jihadism, but also the strategic deficiencies in the military comprehension of the overall jihadist threat.”
The shooting at a recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark., in June and the November shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, that killed 13 people have exposed the problem of the Army’s deficiencies in understanding the nature of the domestic Islamic terrorist threat, Mr. Poole said. The incidents have raised questions about whether the Army made any effort to “operationalize” the threat warnings from the 2008 conference and develop policies to counter the threats. “The answer quite clearly is no,” Mr. Poole said.
Col. Myers said in an interview that he was a key speaker at the annual conference and spoke there based on his role as a force protection instructor-trainer. He also had conducted an organizational review of the Pentagon’s Anti-Terrorism Operations Intelligence Cell, a group that provides strategic threat warnings to the Army.
“I noted that because of our lack of understanding of Islamic doctrines, Islamic Jihad and my view that our counterintelligence function is broken, outdated and being usurped in some cases by public affairs and equal opportunity officials, we were going to get soldiers killed in America, on our own bases for that professional ignorance,” he said, adding that his comments were his personal views and not those of the service.
Col. Myers said he told the conference that senior military and defense officials were involved in outreach programs to “organizations affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and snapping pictures with its foundational leaders in our country.” “The Muslim Brotherhood, also known as the Ikhwan al Muslimeen, is a global jihad organization that fundamentally shares the same objectives as the ‘combat jihad’ groups like al Qaeda, but orients on ‘cultural jihad’ — subversion, infiltration and proselytization,” he said. “By its own long-standing strategic documents, … they say they exist in America to destroy our civilization and replace it with an Islamic one.”
Army spokesman Lt. Col. Nathan Banks declined to comment on the specifics of the Army conference. However, “in light of the Fort Hood tragedy, we are currently reviewing potential vulnerabilities and methods of combating external and internal threats,” Col. Banks said. The Pentagon-wide review led by former Army Secretary Togo West and retired Adm. Vern Clark, former chief of naval operations, as well as an Army review “have been focused on identifying those vulnerabilities and developing ways to mitigate those threats,” Col. Banks said.
Mr. Poole said the Pentagon’s outreach program to some Muslim groups, including photographs of senior defense officials associating with questionable domestic Muslim leaders and groups, gave “legitimacy” to some of the organizations promoting the ideology embraced by Maj. Nidal Hasan, the suspect in the shooting rampage at Fort Hood that killed 13 people.
“These embarrassing photo-ops occur because the military is not well-schooled on the jihadist threat in America, and because fundamentally the national security establishment does not have a fully elaborated threat model for the global and domestic jihad,” Mr. Poole said. “In many instances, relationships and events with terror-tied Islamic groups and leaders are organized by public affairs flacks and never vetted by counterintelligence agencies.”
Mr. Poole said an example was a lecture on Islam that was given to U.S. troops at Fort Hood by Louay Safi as the troops were preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. Mr. Poole said Mr. Safi had been captured on FBI communications intercepts talking to a senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader in the U.S. Additionally, Mr. Safi’s office had been raided by the FBI in 2002 as part of a terrorism finance probe. “Amazingly, a Fort Hood spokesman later claimed that Safi had been fully vetted,” Mr. Poole said. “If thats true, who was doing the vetting and what standards were they using?”
Ms. Wonder, a third speaker at the conference, also presented several case studies showing indicators and warnings of mosques in the U.S. that were taken over by Islamic radicals, many linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. The mosques are being used as “hubs” and support systems for active terrorist cells, she told the conference.
Col. Myers said his presentation in 2008 represents a failure to strategically understand the full nature of the threat facing the United States in the war on terrorism. “Unfortunately, such strategic failings at senior leader levels cannot help but result in tactical failings, such as the Fort Hood terrorist attack,” he said. “It demonstrates that we don’t get it.”
Mr. Poole noted the case of Army Sgt. Hasan Karim Akbar, who killed two fellow soldiers in Kuwait in 2003. Akbar was sentenced to death for the killing. “Our conclusion was that ignorance and inaction keeps our troops vulnerable,” Mr. Poole said. “But our warnings were ignored and no policies were changed. And in 2009, 13 soldiers and one civilian employee paid with their lives.”
Col. Myers said the Army’s recent report on the Fort Hood shooting, like much of current military doctrine, focused on capabilities and deficiencies, process and procedures but failed to address the threat. “We continue to act and talk as though we don’t understand it and that there is a level of ‘uncertainty’ — a word overused today in military parlance — as to who our enemy is and at this point, that can no longer be tolerated,” he said.
“All federal and commissioned officers take an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and that mandates a duty to be clear on who the enemies of our Constitution are, and a failure to know is a failure of duty.”
♦ CI CENTRE COURSE: 361–The Global Jihadist Threat Doctrine
