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Comment by killerdark | Hacker News Reader

I don't think so. Manning leaked cables and somewhat classified documents from/to US embassies. These documents are internal US Department of Defense documents.

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He also (allegedly) leaked the Iraq and Afghanistan war documents, including the Collateral Murder video. So, assuming he is a Wikileaks source, he had access to a wide range of DoD files in addition to State Department files.

The thing is, Manning didn't go into detail about any Gitmo files when chatting with Adrian Lamo, and, according to the Nation's Wikileaks pointsman Greg Mitchell, there were rumors that Wikileaks had secret Gitmo files before the alleged leaking from Manning took place. http://www.thenation.com/blog/160135/wikileaks-blog-guant%C3...

Remember, too, that Wikileaks released Gitmo's "Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures" way back in 2007.

This leak could have come from anybody at any time. My feeling is that this was probably someone other than Manning, though I obviously don't have any real evidence to support that.

Remember that Adrian Lamo was on the FBI radar before producing these chat logs, it could well be that he dealt with the FBI by producing chat logs that implicate someone else. It wouldn't exactly be the first time someone has lied to the FBI to get a reduced sentence, or avoid prosecution.

We also know that the US gov't engages in torture to extract confessions so you should be skeptical of anything anyone who has been in US custody says. It's not just middle easterners, Canadian citizens have been tortured under US auspices.

Yeah, that's true. Although I think it's more likely that Lamo would falsify/misrepresent the chat logs because of his sketchy political views or because he lives off of media attention. His public defense of his actions seems too enthusiastic to be coming from someone who made up a story just to avoid jail time. We don't know what other evidence the government has against Manning, if any. If they only have Lamo's chat logs and testimony, that's pretty flimsy. (Not that the government needs evidence of a crime to keep someone in jail indefinitely. You know, see above.)

And a president that doesn't even need a trial to determine whether or not someone broke the law.

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