The Apache Video And The Adrian Lamo Dialogues(Wikileaks)

The Apache video was a classified record of a scandal according to Julius Assange.The video was recorded in July,2007 in Baghdad by an AH-64 Apache's military camera as it hovered over a suburb firing its 30mm gun while virtually invisible to those on the ground.U.S.army pilots managed to kill two innocent employees of the Reuters news agency,Seed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen.Altogether twelve people died(some trying to evacuate the wounded in a van) and two young children were wounded but survived.Assange didn't say where the raw video came from other than "military sources".He premiered the Apache helicopter video at the National Press Club in Washington on April 5,2010 but didn't get the response he assumed.One of the reasons was Reuters chose not to go on the attack over the leaked information.They had been shown privately a clip of the two men's deaths within days after it happened by the military.Reuters was only shown the journalists being killed with a group of individuals and not the second part where the helicopter fired on a van trying to evacuate the wounded.Another reason was the title of Assange's presentation"Collateral Murder".Reuters thought that the soldiers clearly made a mistake and the pilots were trained to do these murderous things. Clearly there was far more to be debated than could be encompassed in the crude legend"Collateral Murder".Nevertheless,this public display on information will cause American soldiers to be a little less casual about raining down on a target in the future.

Adrain Lamo was a hacker  that was sentenced to two years' probation for having hacked into computers in a range of enterprises including the NY Times.He was the individual Bradley Manning started to reveal his leaking to.Manning was breaking down after his release of information to Assange.He was self- medicating like crazy and he felt very isolated and loosing his mind.Days before unburdening himself to Lamo,he was demoted from the rank of specialist to that of private first class after he punched another soldier in the face.In his exchanges with Lamo,Manning described how he transferred the documents.He would scrap the files out of the system and encrypt it using AES-256 cipher.He would then send the encrypted material via a secureFTP to a server at a particular Internet address.Finally,the encryption code that he devised would be sent seperately via Tor.Manning started to blurt out confessions to Lamo and revealed he thought he was doing a good thing and that he wasn't a venal,mad traitor.He felt for some bizarre reason that the information(videos to cables) might change something.He told Lamo that he was just waiting to be redeployed to the U.S.He also told Lamo that he has developed a relationship with Assange(took four months to confirm).Eventually,Lamo turned Manning in to the U.S. military but continued to talk to him to gather information and record his conversations.Lamo thought it was his patriotic duty because he thought lives were in danger.Lamo stated"he was in a war zone and was just throwing the information up into the air".According to Manning, he wanted people to see the truth and without information you can't make informed decisions(many information hackers believe this position today).Manning stated that a plethora of states are only acting in their self interest and the U.S is one of them.According to Manning,we are just more subtle about our approach.He believed that public data belongs in the public domain and this perspective corresponds to numerous hackers and WikiLeaks founder Jullian Assange.

Bradley Manning now spends twenty-three hours a day alone in a 6'by 12' cell and isn't allowed to sleep from 5am until late at night.The guards are not allowed to talk to him but make him respond to them every five minuets by asking him if he is OK.Manning is required to respond in some affirmative manner.They wake him up during the night if they can't see his face.He eats alone in his cell and can't do any exercise in the cell.He is not allowed a pillow or a sheet(a blanket is provided),personal items and only two visitors.Manning's friends believe his health is deteriorating,physically and mentally.His speech is less fluid and less able to express complex ideas.He also looks weak and his muscles are turning to fat.The U.S army tells us that they prod him every five minuets for his own welfare to avoid a suicide.He is allowed books,and late in 2010 asked to be sent Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason"

More to come from WikiLeaks byLeigh and Harding.