Private (Bradley) Manning said the first set of documents that he decided to release were hundreds of thousands of military incident reports from Afghanistan and Iraq that he had initially downloaded onto a disk because he needed them for his work, and the computer network connection kept going down. The reports, he decided, showed the flaws in the counterinsurgency policy the United States was then pursuing in both war zones.

The military, he said, had become “obsessed with capturing or killing” people on a list while ignoring what the operations were doing to ordinary people in the two nations. The reports, he said, were not sensitive because they recounted events that were long over.

“I believed if the public — in particular the American public — had access to the information” in the reports, “this could spark a debate about foreign policy in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.

Private Manning said he brought the disks home with him on a leave in early 2010 and initially decided to give them to a newspaper.

He said he first called The Washington Post and spoke to a reporter for about five minutes, without going into detail about what he had. He said he decided that the reporter did not seem particularly interested because she said The Post would have to review the material first and a senior editor would make the call.

He said he then tried to reach out to The New York Times by calling a phone number for the public editor, an ombudsman who is not part of the newsroom. An automatic answering service routed him to voicemail, and he left a message that no one returned, he said. He also considered visiting the offices of Politico, but was deterred by a snowstorm.

Eventually, Private Manning said, he decided to release the information by uploading it to WikiLeaks. He later sent several other batches of documents and files to the organization from his computer in Iraq, while striking up an online chat room relationship with someone who he said he assumed was a senior figure in the group like Julian Assange, whose name he mispronounced as “as-SAHN-JAY.”

2 months ago  /  79 notes

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

2 months ago  /  189 notes