US intel geek ‘Bradass87’ had said he would reveal the truth’

Manning was arrested in Baghdad in May and charged earlier this month with multiple counts of mishandling and leaking classified data,after a computer hacker turned him in,the paper said. Manning is currently awaiting court martial,

During online chats with the hacker,a man thought to be Manning said he had passed material relating to Afghanistan to Julian Assange,the founder of the WikiLeaks which leaked over 92,000 documents to The New York Times,Guardian and Der Spiegel.

Manning is alleged to be a whistle-blower who used the online name ‘Bradass87’ when he contacted a high-profile Californian computer hacker,Adrian Lamo,on May 21,the paper said.

Over the following five days,Bradass87 held a series of online conversations with Lamo,in which he identified himself as “an army intelligence analyst,deployed to eastern Baghdad” with “unprecedented access to classified networks”.

He said his job gave him access to two high-security networks: the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network,SIPRNET,which carries US diplomatic and military intelligence,and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System,which includes “top secret” classification.

Bradass87 said the networks had enabled him to see “incredible things,awful things that belong in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC almost criminal political backdealings the non-PR version of world events and crises”.

He said he had downloaded 260,000 classified or sensitive State Department cables and transmitted them by computer to Wikileaks.

He claimed he copied some of the information on to blank CDs labelled “Lady Gaga” and hummed along to non-existent music while he downloaded secret information.

“I want people to see the truth,” he said. “It’s open diplomacy it’s Climategate with a global scope and breathtaking depth it’s beautiful and horrifying. It’s public data,it belongs in the public domain.”

Unknown to Bradass87,Lamo had contacted the US military two days into the online chat,fearing that the leak of information would endanger lives.

On May 25,he met Pentagon officials at a Starbucks cafe and gave them a print of the chat. Manning was arrested the next day at US Forward Operating Base Hammer near Baghdad,The Telegraph said.

Manning is also suspected of being behind the leak of a video,distributed by Assange in April,of a 2007 US helicopter strike in Baghdad which killed a dozen people. He is suspected to have several accomplices in the leak of the war logs,however.

Yesterday,Lamo said he had no doubt Manning was behind the leaks,though he strongly suspected the young analyst from Maryland could not have acted alone. “It was not my impression that he had the technical expertise to carry out some of these actions,” Lamo was quoted as saying.