It's Not a WikiLeak: Assange-Manning Chat Logs Surface on Army Website

In March of 2010, WikiLeaks was just weeks away from bursting onto the world stage with the first of its major leaks from intelligence analyst Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning: the “Collateral Murder” video showing a 2007 Apache helicopter attack that killed civilians and wounded children. Julian Assange, in Iceland, was in contact with Manning in online chats, getting more leaks and keeping his source updated on WikiLeaks’ progress.

Now we get to see how things worked between Assange and Manning.

Just before Thanksgiving, the Army posted to its FOIA reading room a large tranche of documents from Chelsea Manning’s court martial, including an 88 megabyte zip file containing the prosecution’s unclassified exhibits in the case. Buried in that file is Exhibit 123, a log of a chat that an Army forensics expert recovered from the unallocated space on Manning’s computer. The chat is between Manning (“dawgnetwork”) and a WikiLeaks contact the Army says is Julian Assange.