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Pentagon focuses on 'main suspect' in Afghanistan leak - CNN.com
Pentagon focuses on 'main suspect' in Afghanistan leak
By the CNN Wire Staff
July 28, 2010 11:43 a.m. EDT
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is the main suspect in the leak of secret military documents, a Pentagon official says.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Pfc. Bradley Manning, already jailed over an earlier leak, is the main suspect, a top Pentagon official says
- Investigators think he logged onto a military network that gave him access to classified material
- Manning has not entered a plea and is not cooperating with the investigation, the military says
- WikiLeaks.org published about 76,000 secret documents about the Afghanistan war this week
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Washington (CNN) -- The Pentagon is focusing on jailed Army Pfc. Bradley Manning as the main suspect in the leak of tens of thousands of secret U.S. military documents related to the war in Afghanistan, a senior Pentagon official told CNN Wednesday.
Manning, 22, is believed to have accessed a worldwide military classified internet and e-mail system to download tens of thousands of documents, according to the official, who did not want to be identified because of the ongoing criminal investigation of the soldier.
The official said investigators now believe Manning logged into a system called the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, which essentially provides military members who have appropriate security clearances access to classified e-mails and the military's classified internet system.
But the official emphasized passwords and other control measures such as physical access are needed to log onto specific systems that provide information classified at the highest levels.
Pentagon officials have said for the past several days that so far the only material they have seen on the website WikiLeaks.org is classified at the "secret" level, a relatively low-level designation that allows for a large number of military personnel to access the information.
The senior Pentagon official told CNN that for now, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is relying on the Army criminal investigation into Manning and the leaks to determine how it happened and what might need to be done to prevent future cases.
"The secretary is determined to get to the bottom of this," the official said.
The editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has refused to say where his whistle-blower website got about 91,000 United States documents about the war. Some 76,000 of them were posted on the site Sunday in what has been called the biggest leak since the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War.
Pentagon officials have not found anything top-secret among the documents, a Defense Department spokesman said.
"From what we have seen so far, the documents are at the 'secret' level," Col. David Lapan said Tuesday. That's not a very high level of classification.
Lapan emphasized that the Pentagon has not looked at all of the papers published on WikiLeaks.
President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he is "concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information" about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan but asserted that the documents don't shed much new light on the war.
Manning was charged in June with eight violations of the U.S. Criminal Code for allegedly illegally transferring classified data, reportedly including an earlier video that wound up on WikiLeaks.org. The private had top-secret clearance as an intelligence analyst for the Army when he was stationed in Iraq.
The Army is considering whether he should face the military equivalent of a trial over the charges.
He has not yet entered a plea, Army Maj. Bryan Woods told CNN, since there has not yet been a decision about whether he should face trial. Military lawyers for Manning referred CNN questions about him to Woods.
The Army has expanded its criminal investigation into Manning to look at potential accomplices and what military or U.S. government systems the information came from, Lapan said Tuesday.
The military is "determined to find out who is responsible for this and to make sure they pay or are held accountable for it," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Monday.
"Look, there's a slew of people who have access. It will be, as all these investigations are, very difficult," Morrell said in an interview with CNN's John King. "This is a very big breach for which there must be consequences."
The investigation was expanded because investigators believe Manning has a connection to a number, but not all, of the documents released on WikiLeaks.org.
The Army is also working with other U.S. agencies in the investigation, according to Army CID spokesman Christopher Grey.
Manning has been accused of "wrongfully introducing a classified video of a military operation filmed at or near Baghdad, Iraq" around July 12, 2007, "onto his personal computer, a non-secure information system." So far, he also has been charged with illegally adding unauthorized software to a classified computer system in connection to the leaking of the helicopter video.
He was detained in June and sent to the U.S. base in Kuwait for his connection to the release of the classified U.S. military combat video, which showed the shooting deaths of Iraqi civilians and two journalists in 2007 by a helicopter gunship.
The Army is trying to trace who Manning's contacts were. They also want to know what computer servers he allegedly accessed in order to obtain a plethora of information from U.S. military documents to Department of State cables, according to the official.
Manning has not been cooperating with Army investigators, the official said. He has invoked the Fifth Amendment and is refusing to answer questions.
The private is still being held by the U.S. military in Kuwait while his unit begins to rotate back to the United States.
He could face additional charges as the Army's investigation continues, according to the official.
Among the other counts he faces, Manning has been charged with communicating, transmitting and delivering national defense information to an unauthorized source and disclosing classified information concerning the national defense with reason to believe that the information could cause injury to the United States. The latter charge stems from the leak of the helicopter video.
The documents released by WikiLeaks are divided into more than 100 categories and touch on everything from the hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden to Afghan civilian deaths resulting from U.S. military actions.
Tens of thousands of pages of reports document attacks on U.S. troops and their responses, relations between Americans in the field and their Afghan allies, intramural squabbles among Afghan civilians and security forces, and concerns about neighboring Pakistan's ties to the Taliban.
And WikiLeaks has another 15,000 documents that it plans to publish after editing out names to protect people, according to Assange.
He said on CNN's "Larry King Live" that the first-hand accounts represent "the cut and thrust of the entire war over the past six years," through the military's own raw data: numbers of casualties, threat reports and notes from meetings between Afghan leaders and U.S. commanders.
"We see the who, the where, the what, the when and the how of each one of these attacks," Assange said. That includes, he said, possible evidence of war crimes by both U.S. troops and the Taliban, the Islamic militia that has been battling U.S. troops since 2001.
CNN has not independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents, but neither the White House nor the Pentagon has denied that they are what WikiLeaks claims they are.
Assange said his website is not campaigning against the war.
"WikiLeaks does not have an opinion whether the war in Afghanistan should continue or not continue. ... It should continue in a just way if it's to continue at all," he said.
CNN's Barbara Starr, Mike Mount and Richard Allen Greene contributed to this report.
Originally Posted by GEN Dwight D. Eisenhower
