Pentagon Manhunt For Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange

[The Consul]

Sometimes threads here feel like going to five different chiropractors in a single afternoon.
The vid, if released, will greatly quicken the distemper in Afghanistan and most likely propel the demise of US presense (notice the "Trillion Dollar" exctractible claim in advance as counterbalance. Perhaps they think Nirvana can replace Metallica in the cockpit with, you guessed it....Lithium!)
The cables, if true, if released, could be like a putting together an art puzzle worthy of Mark Lombardi. Certainly majoroo shocks.
It will all come out and then Henry Kissinger will explain what it means and why it shouldn't happen in Newsweek. Kristol will liken it to the days when red spies ran amok in the state dept. His column will be on pg 4 of the NYT, the story will be on pg 8.

[wintler2]

Google news search on just 'wikileaks' returns 397 articles on 'US seeks WikiLeaks founder‎' theme & 580 on 'Hacker explains why he reported Wikileaks source'‎, far far more articles than under other headlines less immediately congruent with undermining Wikileaks. Just one random measure that supports theory that there is an active propaganda effort underway.

Wired.com coincidentally have a piece questioning Wikileaks ethics on Tor monitoring, Assenge apparentlyresponded by Tweet

"Wired has a beatup on WL&Tor,with no new info,spinning "our" 2006 investigation into Chinese spying, don't be fooled."

Iceland says yes to Wikileaks law - A toast! To Iceland!

[KeenInsight]

Hopefully nothing happens to him. The Pentagon is clearly able to follow through with its criminal threats. Julian needs a rogue Jason Bourne to protect his ass.

[hanshan]

Google news search on just 'wikileaks' returns 397 articles on 'US seeks WikiLeaks founder‎' theme & 580 on 'Hacker explains why he reported Wikileaks source'‎, far far more articles than under other headlines less immediately congruent with undermining Wikileaks. Just one random measure that supports theory that there is an active propaganda effort underway.

Wired.com coincidentally have a piece questioning Wikileaks ethics on Tor monitoring, Assenge apparentlyresponded by Tweet

"Wired has a beatup on WL&Tor,with no new info,spinning "our" 2006 investigation into Chinese spying, don't be fooled."

Iceland says yes to Wikileaks law - A toast! To Iceland!

counter-prop fer' sure

The threat is unfettered, unfiltered info. Always has been, & forever will be.

Iceland - good on ye, Salud

...

It seems clear to me that this latest "news" event is all about turning wikileaks and Julian into treasonous bastards in the public mind, as well as discouraging any whistleblowers from coming forth because, gosh, you might get busted!

And the Pentagon is on a manhunt ....

Just more propaganda. The truth is their enemy, which means it's our friend.

The truth must be stopped.

Yeah, this whole thing smells like a staged event.

Most people in our population would think that anyone who would deliberately release documents that would "harm our troops" is a treasonous prick who didn't deserve to live.

Nordic - concurrence (!)



...

[elfismiles]

WikiLeaks Founder Has Massacre Video
by Philip Shenon

Julian Assange, who the Feds fear may release State Dept. secrets, denies having them—but he’s readying video of a deadly U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan.

After several days underground, the founder of the secretive website WikiLeaks has gone public to disclose that he is preparing to release a classified Pentagon video of a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan last year that left as many as 140 civilians dead, most of them children and teenagers.

In an email obtained by The Daily Beast that was sent to WikiLeaks supporters in the United States Tuesday, Julian Assange, the website’s Australian-born founder, also defends a 22-year-old Army intelligence specialist who is now under arrest in Kuwait on charges that he leaked classified Pentagon combat videos, as well as 260,000 State Department cables, to WikiLeaks.

“Mr. Manning allegedly also sent us 260,000 classified US Department cables, reporting on the actions of US Embassy’s [sic] engaging in abusive actions all over the world,” Assange said in an email. “We have denied the allegation, but the US government is acting as if the allegation is true.”

American officials have said they are eager to determine the whereabouts of Assange, who canceled an appearance last Friday in Las Vegas, to discourage him from releasing any more classified information on his website, which is nominally based in Sweden and promotes itself as a global resource for whistleblowers. As recently as two weeks ago, Assange, who first gained global notoriety as a computer hacker, was in his native Australia.

In April, his website posted a copy of a classified Pentagon video of a 2007 American helicopter attack in Baghdad in which a dozen people were killed; that video is also believed to have been leaked by the Army intelligence analyst, Specialist Bradley Manning of Potomac, Maryland.

Department cables, Assange acknowledges in the email today that he is in custody of the May 2009 video that shows the airstrike on the Afghan village of Garani, believed to be the most lethal combat strike in Afghanistan—in terms of civilian deaths—since the United States invaded the country in 2001. Assange writes that “we are still working on” preparations for release of the video of “the Garani massacre.”

The State Department and Pentagon did not immediately comment on Assange’s email message.

American officials have acknowledged in the past that they are concerned about the release of the Garani video, fearing that it could undermine public support for the American military campaign in Afghanistan both in that country and in the United States. Pentagon officials were outraged by WikiLeaks’ release of the Baghdad video this spring.

State Department officials are especially alarmed by the potential that Assange might post the huge library of classified department memos that Manning is reported to have bragged of providing to WikiLeaks earlier this year. The department has confirmed that it is conducting a forensic examination of Manning’s computer equipment for evidence of what he may have downloaded.

In the email, Assange does not confirm any relationship between the website and Manning, describing him as “one of our alleged sources.”

But he suggests that Manning is being treated unfairly—“detained and shipped to a US military prison in Kuwait, where he is being held” without trial.

“Manning is alleged to have acted according to his conscience and leaked to us the Collateral Murder video and the video of a massacre that took place in Afghanistan last year at Garani,” Assange continues.

“Mr. Manning allegedly also sent us 260,000 classified US Department cables, reporting on the actions of US Embassy’s [sic] engaging in abusive actions all over the world. We have denied the allegation, but the US government is acting as if the allegation is true and we do have a lot of other material that exposes human rights abuses by the United States government.” Assange does not reveal exactly what that other material might be.

American officials are treating Assange’s claim that he does not have the State Department emails with skepticism, suggesting that he is playing word games—that while he may not have exactly 260,000 cables, he has a large number of them.

Assange seems to enjoying taunting the United States government and news organizations with information that is not always accurate. Last Friday, WikiLeaks—which tends to communicate with the outside world through Twitter messages–created a flurry when it disclosed via tweet that Assange was scheduled to appear that afternoon at a journalists’ conference in Las Vegas. The Twitter notice failed to mention that Assange had canceled his appearance several days earlier because of unspecified security concerns.

The arrest of Manning became public last week after Wired magazine disclosed that Manning had been turned in to authorities by another former computer hacker, Adrian Lamo, who had been contacted by Manning for counsel. Much of the evidence against Manning is contained in an Internet chat log that Lamo has already turned over to authorities.

In an interview with The Daily Beast on Monday, Lamo said that he had been interviewed for nearly 12 hours this weekend by investigators from the Defense Department, the State Department, and the FBI, as formal criminal charges are being prepared for Manning. Lamo said he was motivated to turn in Manning out of fear that the classified information he had provided to WikiLeaks could put lives in danger—within the United States government and elsewhere.

Lamo said he is convinced that Manning did have access to highly classified State Department cables, and that Manning’s boast of having stolen 260,000 cables sounds truthful.

In his email, Assange asks supporters for money, citing “an enforced lack of resources” for the website. “Please donate and tell the world you have done so,” he writes. “Encourage all your friends to follow the example you set, after all, courage is contagious.”

Philip Shenon, a former investigative reporter at The New York Times, is the author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and- ... mainpromo1

[slomo]

The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks (Glenn GreenWald)

On June 6, Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zitter of Wired reported that a 22-year-old U.S. Army Private in Iraq, Bradley Manning, had been detained after he "boasted" in an Internet chat -- with convicted computer hacker Adrian Lamo -- of leaking to WikiLeaks the now famous Apache Helicopter attack video, a yet-to-be-published video of a civilian-killing air attack in Afghanistan, and "hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records." Lamo, who holds himself out as a "journalist" and told Manning he was one, acted instead as government informant, notifying federal authorities of what Manning allegedly told him, and then proceeded to question Manning for days as he met with federal agents, leading to Manning's detention.

On June 10, former New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, writing in The Daily Beast, gave voice to anonymous "American officials" to announce that "Pentagon investigators" were trying "to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website Wikileaks [Julian Assange] for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security." Some news outlets used that report to declare that there was a "Pentagon manhunt" underway for Assange -- as though he's some sort of dangerous fugitive.

From the start, this whole story was quite strange for numerous reasons. In an attempt to obtain greater clarity about what really happened here, I've spent the last week reviewing everything I could related to this case and speaking with several of the key participants (including Lamo, with whom I had a one-hour interview last night that can be heard on the recorder below, and Poulsen, with whom I had a lengthy email exchange, which is published in full here). A definitive understanding of what really happened is virtually impossible to acquire, largely because almost everything that is known comes from a single, extremely untrustworthy source: Lamo himself. Compounding that is the fact that most of what came from Lamo has been filtered through a single journalist -- Poulsen -- who has a long and strange history with Lamo, who continues to possess but not disclose key evidence, and who has been only marginally transparent about what actually happened here (I say that as someone who admires Poulsen's work as Editor of Wired's Threat Level blog).

Reviewing everything that is known ultimately raises more questions than it answers. Below is my perspective on what happened here. But there is one fact to keep in mind at the outset. In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a classified report (ironically leaked to and published by WikiLeaks) which -- as the NYT put it -- placed WikiLeaks on "the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States." That Report discussed ways to destroy WikiLeaks' reputation and efficacy, and emphasized creating the impression that leaking to it is unsafe (click image to enlarge):

(image)

In other words, exactly what the U.S. Government wanted to happen in order to destroy WikiLeaks has happened here: news reports that a key WikiLeaks source has been identified and arrested, followed by announcements from anonymous government officials that there is now a worldwide "manhunt" for its Editor-in-Chief. Even though WikiLeaks did absolutely nothing (either in this case or ever) to compromise the identity of its source, isn't it easy to see how these screeching media reports -- WikiLeaks source arrested; worldwide manhunt for WikiLeaks; major national security threat -- would cause a prospective leaker to WikiLeaks to think twice, at least: exactly as the Pentagon Report sought to achieve? And that Pentagon Report was from 2008, before the Apache Video was released; imagine how intensified is the Pentagon's desire to destroy WikiLeaks now. Combine that with what both the NYT and Newsweek recently realized is the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistle-blowers, and one can't overstate the caution that's merited here before assuming one knows what happened.

* * * * *
(More...)

[justdrew]

short addon to slomo's post:

a summary from slashdot:
"Bradley Manning, the US Army private arrested recently by the Pentagon for providing classified documents — including the widely seen Apache helicopter video — may have been duped by wannabe hacker Adrian Lamo, according to Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. Lamo told Manning he could provide protection under both journalist shield laws, and the clergy-lay confidentiality tradition, and instead immediately turned him in to authorities in an act of apparent shameless self-promotion."

and he did this just DAYS after being released from a psych ward, having been held for 9 days after being given a three day hold, because a cop he called to report a stolen backpack to decided he was crazy from listening to him talk. wild huh?

Lamo's in bad shape here, but it seems plausible to me that he wasn't given much choice in the matter, if he ever wanted to get out of the snake pit.

[justdrew]

ok just for the record...

the IM chat between the two occurred May 21st, so it was 14 days after his release from psychiatric hold.

the story of the institutionalization hit Wired May 20th, the day before.

[anothershamus]

Look at that 9/11 pager data dump. I was browsing the reddit comments here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/a7xpt/conspiracy_theories_commence_wikileaks_to_release/

They are pretty interesting, some sad. Nothing really big out yet. I wondered if this was worth a new thread but I will let others post that. I couldn't find a wikileaks specific thread here at RI.


http://911.wikileaks.org/

9/11 tragedy pager intercepts.

From 3AM on Wednesday November 25, 2009, until 3AM the following day (US east coast time), WikiLeaks released half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

The messages were broadcasted "live" to the global community — sychronized to the time of day they were sent. The first message was from 3AM September 11, 2001, five hours before the first attack, and the last, 24 hours later.

Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center

The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war.

Twitter users may use the hashtag #911txts. We will give status updates at twitter.com/wikileaks.

Observations may be posted to reddit. Please vote for important material.

Please remember to protect and support our work.

An index of messages released is available here.

All pager messages released can be downloaded here (torrent) as a single compressed text file, or here (torrent) as a number of files, sorted by time.

via cryptogon.com

[justdrew]

Look at that 9/11 pager data dump. I was browsing the reddit comments here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/a7xpt/conspiracy_theories_commence_wikileaks_to_release/

They are pretty interesting, some sad. Nothing really big out yet. I wondered if this was worth a new thread but I will let others post that. I couldn't find a wikileaks specific thread here at RI.

here's the thread on the pager data leak...
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=26002

[anothershamus]

damn, cryptogon.com got dated just like I did! (although he didn't give a date, he was referencing the leak) Man, the latest ones are 6 months ago. I gotta quit doing the quick replies!

thanks
A.Shamus

[MinM]

With World Watching, Wikileaks Falls Into Disrepair | Threat Level | Wired.com

* By Ryan Singel Email Author
* June 30, 2010 |
* 8:21 pm |
* Categories: Sunshine and Secrecy

Would-be whistle-blowers hoping to leak documents to Wikileaks face a potentially frustrating surprise. Wikileaks’ submission process, which had been degraded for months, completely collapsed more than two weeks ago and remains offline, in a little-noted breakdown at the world’s most prominent secret-spilling website.

Despite a surge in mostly laudatory media portraying Wikileaks as a fearless, unstoppable outlet for documents that embarrass corporations and overbearing governments, the site has published only 12 documents since the beginning of the year, the last one four months ago. And on June 12, Wikileaks’ secure submission page stopped working after the site failed to renew its SSL certificate, a basic web protection that costs less than $30 a year and takes only hours to set up.

Wikileaks still prominently displays a link on its homepage to a secure submission form for whistleblowers to upload documents. But the page doesn’t load. The site’s donation page remains reliably available. Wikileaks’ head Julian Assange declined to comment.

Launched in 2007, Wikileaks was thrust into renewed international prominence this month after the Army confirmed it had arrested an intelligence analyst based in Iraq on suspicion of leaking classified information. Bradley Manning, 22, has been held for five weeks without charges at an Army base in Kuwait, while officials investigate claims he made to an ex-hacker that he’d leaked two videos and several classified documents to Wikileaks, as well as an unfiltered database of 260,000 diplomatic cables.

Among the documents Manning claimed to have leaked was a classified U.S. embassy cable that appeared on Wikileaks on Feb. 18. That, in fact, was the last new document to appear at Wikileaks.org, though on April 5 Wikileaks made headlines when it released a classified video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a number of innocent civilians and injured two children. The video, which Manning took credit for in his online chats, and in discussions with a real-life friend, was published on another domain called CollateralMurder.com.

Wikileaks released the Apache video during a six-month fundraising drive in which Wikileaks’ archive was unavailable. By the time the site relaunched in May, careful observers had noted that its much-hailed cryptographic security had been degraded. Wikileaks’ system to upload documents using the anonymizing service Tor had stopped working by February, though there’s no indication of that status on Wikileaks’ page explaining how to securely submit documents. Wikileaks has also stopped supporting secure downloads from the site over HTTPS, meaning users downloading from the site are vulnerable to eavesdropping.

Wired.com spoke by instant messenger with Ben Laurie, a noted security expert who has served as a de facto security press person for Wikileaks, and who is listed on Wikileaks’s advisory board. When asked if it seemed odd that the most basic security features are missing from Wikileaks’ website, Laurie said, “I agree. I was not aware.”

By policy, Wikileaks does not publish a PGP key that would allow people interested in leaking documents or otherwise helping the site communicate securely by e-mail. The site still offers a “secure” chat room, but that uses a security certificate that isn’t issued by a trusted third party.

A May profile in the New Yorker reported that Wikileaks had been receiving about 30 document submissions a day when it was fully operational. With its Tor Hidden Service down, and now its SSL submission page missing, the average Wikileaks leaker would seem to be blocked. For his part, Manning claimed to have direct contact with Assange that allowed him priority access.

“Long term sources do get preference,” he wrote in a chat with ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, who turned him in.

If Wikileaks’ issues are financial, the site may yet surmount them. The organization recently announced that it has decrypted a U.S. video of the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan — another one of the leaks Manning claimed credit for in his chats with Lamo. Wikileaks has promised to release the video shortly, a move that could give its fundraising an added boost, even if it doesn’t help with Wikileaks’ lack of transparency regarding its security woes.

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/0 ... z0sU5HBSiK

[Sweejak]

The Executive Branch, State Department and American embassies and others are said to be preparing for the massive, unauthorized release of classified diplomatic communications. One report stated these documents contain “harsh evaluations of foreign leaders as well as a fairly detailed description of the inner-workings of how American’s foreign policy decisions and activities take place.
Other comments suggest that sensitive communication with Israel is also included in these documents. If that is indeed true, I am sure the Mossad is hot on the case. This is very serious.

Read more: http://defensetech.org/2010/07/07/those ... z0t9Mvfcsj
Defense.org

[justdrew]

ok just for the record...

the IM chat between the two occurred May 21st, so it was 14 days after his release from psychiatric hold.

the story of the institutionalization hit Wired May 20th, the day before.

Speaking of Manning getting caught:

Lamo’s Two (?!) Laptops
By: emptywheel Friday December 31, 2010 6:31 am

In the original story about Adrian Lamo’s involuntary hospitalization, he loses his medication and calls the cops.

Last month Adrian Lamo, a man once hunted by the FBI, did something contrary to his nature. He picked up a payphone outside a Northern California supermarket and called the cops.

Someone had grabbed Lamo’s backpack containing the prescription anti-depressants he’d been on since 2004, the year he pleaded guilty to hacking The New York Times. He wanted his medication back. But when the police arrived at the Safeway parking lot it was Lamo, not the missing backpack, that interested them. Something about his halting, monotone speech, perhaps slowed by his medication, got the officers’ attention.

But in Ryan Singel’s telling of it, Lamo lost his laptop.

For instance, you make it sound creepy that Poulsen wrote a long profile about Lamo. Huh. Read the story again. Basically, it goes like this. A convicted hacker, now gone legit, calls the police to report a stolen laptop. When the police arrive, instead of focussing on the crime, they 5150 the victim.

I find that rather interesting for several reasons.

First, because the larger story ends with Lamo losing his laptop, too.

Agents from the Army’s criminal and counter-intelligence units and the Diplomatic Security Service met with Lamo on Friday night, Lamo said. The agents asked for files related to the communications between him and Manning, Lamo said, and he gave them a laptop and the hard drive from another laptop, as well as encrypted e-mails that had been stored on a remote server. Lamo said he is scheduled to give a sworn statement to authorities on Sunday.

So is the laptop the authorities took (and the hard drive from another one) a new laptop, purchased to replace the one that got taken? Another one that Lamo had lying about at home?

And then there’s this detail: the PGP key Lamo “no longer had access to” when Bradley Manning first tried to contact Lamo via encrypted email.

GREENWALD: And so the first contact he made with you, was that be email or was that some other way?

LAMO: [Sound of rustling papers] First contact was by email.

GREENWALD: And can you tell me generally what he said?

LAMO: I can’t unfortunately. It’s cryptographically impossible since he encrypted it to an outdated PGP key of mine.

GREENWALD: So were you unable to understand what he said in that first email?

LAMO: Correct. First, second, and third at the very least. I get a lot of random email and the hassle of decrypting it even if I had the key would be enough to push it back about a week or so in my “to read” stack.

GREENWALD: Right. So when you got this email that you were incapable of deciphering did you respond to him in some way, or what did you do?

LAMO: I ignored it for the first couple of hours and then I received a few subsequent emails and then I finally replied, “Hey I can’t read your emails encrypted to a PGP key I no longer have access to. Why don’t we chat via AOL IM instead?”

And finally there are the number of hackers who have had their laptops confiscated (though usually as part of a border crossing) of late.

It’s just a data point. But the story of Lamo being involuntarily hospitalized in response to reporting having his laptop taken is a whole lot different than it is if he has just had his drugs taken away.

Discussed at length in the comments.

so... Manning was e-mailing Lamo some weeks before he actually spilled the beans. Lamo's e-mail was certainly being monitored, especially e-mails from an overseas military base. So then all they had to do was arrange one of their junior operatives to pull a classic bag snatch and co-ordinate with local law enforcement to get the involuntary commitment, which stretched on for nine days, 6 days more than the statutory 3 days. All the while his parents and himself would likely have been wanting out.

[Plutonia]

so... Manning was e-mailing Lamo some weeks before he actually spilled the beans. Lamo's e-mail was certainly being monitored, especially e-mails from an overseas military base. So then all they had to do was arrange one of their junior operatives to pull a classic bag snatch and co-ordinate with local law enforcement to get the involuntary commitment, which stretched on for nine days, 6 days more than the statutory 3 days. All the while his parents and himself would likely have been wanting out.

Well, seeing as how Lamo has been named as a "volunteer" for Project Vigilant, they probably didn't need to do any covert email interception.

And there's a different version of his incarceration floating around out there, one that comes from Lamo's estranged wife Lauren - that it was related to drug abuse. Could be a cover story but if so, it demolishes Lamo's credibility as a witness:

These logs originally appeared on pastebin.ca as "The Truth About Adrian Lamo" and have been confirmed by Nadim as genuine.

The salient facts contained in these logs is that a) Lamo got "Hackers Wanted" leaked despite denying that he had anything to do with it and b) he was taken into psychiatric care for a drug problem rather than for "Aspergers" as he claimed. If you read http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/lamo/ along with these logs the story makes a lot more sense.

Cops don't institutionalize people for acting weird, RE: the homeless.

You can just imagine it:

COP #1: "Worst case of Aspergers I've ever seen!"
COP #2: "Sweet jesus... I'm calling for an ambulance now."

Yeah, I don't think so. They *will* call an ambulance if you're so mashed they think you're at risk of dying from an overdose, however.

NOTE: Adrian Lamo appears to be systematically attempting to remove these logs from the net. Roll of honour: http://pastebin.com/7XsPFFyX, http://pastie.textmate.org/1015569, http://pastebin.com/PDTUGLNZ & http://pastebin.ca/1888965 (entire site nuked?!) all now sadly deceased. A copy is available at Nadim Kobeissi's shell server site here http://kaepora.users.anapnea.net/nadimlogs.txt

Just to make it clear the above is all my own commentary and was not part of the original file as found on pastebin.ca
------ ORIGINAL FILE FOLLOWS -----


# *snip* #

Logs between Nadmin and Lamo's wife Laura, and Nadim and Lamo, as sent to WikiLeaks by Nadim

Following Adrian Lamo's recent exposure of Bradley Manning, I reveal chat logs with Lauren Lamo (Adrian Lamo's wife), incriminating him in many ways.
These chat logs are dated. They are related to the recent Wired exclusive interview with Lamo, which, as you'll soon find out, was complete bullshit:

APRIL 23 2010

Nadim: I now have the capacity to leak Hackers Wanted
Nadim: Letting you down on that front in the past's left a mark in my memory
Nadim: I haven't forgotten =)
Adrian: Why do you put up with me>? I´m often a jerk, arrogant, totally sure of my theories, and willing to crash and burn to make a point.
Adrian: Make no mistake, you;re one of roughly fie people I trust.

APRIL 29 2010

Lauren: he is now at sacramento mental health
Lauren: Nadim. He doesn't want to be talked to.
Nadim: Why mental institutions?? Is it really that bad???
Nadim: I'm shocked and hurt
Lauren: Yes.
Lauren: You couldn't ever tell by the speech slurring, and the lack to follow through with things?
Lauren: So many medications.
Nadim: I haven't spoken vocally with him in a while
Nadim: But yes, I confronted him about his lack of following up only last week
Lauren: my love wasn't enough to get him to change, and i meant the world to him.
Nadim: I thought he wasn't changing at all!
Nadim: I thought he was simply distancing himself from me!
Lauren: i made him want to change his life, nadim. and I don't just say this to boast or make myself seem more important.
Nadim: And I said to myself I'd let him do it since he probably has more important things in his life
Nadim: He never ever mentioned drugs
Nadim: Ever
Nadim: I kept asking him for months wtf was happening
Nadim: Why he was getting so distant and hard to reach
Nadim: He was such a conversationalist when I first met him!
Lauren: he is very very VERY private about his personal lfie.
Lauren: life"
Nadim: I trust him to be
Lauren: he has a persona, "Adrian Lamo" he thinks he must keep up.
Nadim: I know about that.
Nadim: God damn it
Nadim: Such a spirit
Nadim: It's just ugly
Nadim: Such a spirit to have a flaw so tragic and at the same time so meaningless
Nadim: Why prescription drugs???
Nadim: I understand the exact name of the drugs ought to be private info, but could you at least tell me what the drugs did?
Nadim: I mean, were they painkillers? amphetamines? what?
Lauren: It's hard to explain, he is very sensitive and in touch with every part of his body, down to the pulses in his brain and the nerve endings... the meds he takes he regulates it all but its just too much.
Nadim: Ah
Nadim: There were 2600 articles published about "hacking your brain" with certain "boosting" medications
Nadim: Is this related?
Lauren: It has crippled him, into living like this, and without these meds, he can't function, or so he thinks.
Lauren: I suppose.
Lauren: The first and only time he ever stayed at my parents home in phoenix he stole a bunch of my mothers medication (one that he too happened to be taking normally) and gave us quite a scare in the morning.
Nadim: Adrian doesn't trust people, but makes his entire functioning dependent on drugs?
Nadim: I'm angry at him.
Nadim: He could have so easily avoided such a trap
Lauren: so lackadaisical he was spilling his coffee all over himself burning his legs and falling over speaking nonsense.
Nadim: What's his side of the story? He must have constructed many arguments in his defense.
Lauren: It's been a long time coming.
Nadim: !
Lauren: A movie recently made me realize what its like for adrian and for those on the outside. It was a terrible cheesy movie but it was about the start of Alc-anon.
Nadim: Does he think the people around him don't understand?
Nadim: That they're exagerating and picking up wrong signals?
Lauren: Yes, and he thinks we all just want him to be "normal" and not take any drugs.
Lauren: he doesnt realize he seems drunk and slurs and sways.
Lauren: Half the time he doesn't remember it.
Nadim: Fuck
Nadim: What treatment is he receiving?
Nadim: Are his parents alright?
Lauren: I once picked him up, drove him with me to the clinic I needed to go to on a saturday, prior to going to the clinic we went through the drive thru for mcdonalds bfast, i got him a coffee and two breakfast sandwiches and even returned from the hospital and after our nap we took when we arrived back, he woke up and said "oh my god, im so sorry we didnt go to the clinic"
Lauren: He will be receiving "time" really. Supervised, only prescribed medication at prescribed times. I've been through this process so it's a lot easier knowing what he is going through.
Lauren: He will have counselling classes with other abusers whether alcohol, hard drugs, just mentally ill or even folks like him, rx drug abusers.
Nadim: I really wish there was anything I could do. It's painful to sit there watching him suffer
Lauren: He isn't suffering.
Lauren: We are helping him stop the suffering.
Nadim: When you told him that you guys did indeed go to the clinic, how did he react??
Lauren: His family was so worried they called the paramedics/firefighters to where they knew he was hanging out, since he decided to choose the highway when they asked him, adrian please let us help you with your medications. or we will not give them to you to administer on your own.
Lauren: so he filled a final rx he had money for at the rite-aid pharmacy and was found just taking them like candy.
Lauren: he was just like... oh.
Lauren: i found him, when i picked him up that morning, lying on the floor, twisted up as if he had fallen and dropped dead, in his clothes on his wires and tech. just down. drooling. from being so gone.
Lauren: i shook him and shook him, he would wake up and go huh, and then drop his head hard back on the carpet.
Lauren: and fall asleep again.
Lauren: the people at the clinic were mocking him, acting drunk and play swaying, and humiliating me. (and him, but he would never know)
Lauren: I told him via text how it humiliated me and he got mad and said i say the harshest things.
[...]
Lauren: his hacking days, i believe were all because of his drug use. he was able to do it.
Lauren: also part of the reason his mouth is rotten.
Lauren: and he breaks teeth on random things.

MAY 5 2010

Lauren: he's going public with the whole experience next week through wired.
Lauren: but I doubt the part with his true struggle with drugs and his history with them will be disclosed
Lauren: mainly the article is going to be about hackers and such with aspergers
Lauren: he told me that today. but who knows if Kevin poulsen will go through with it.

JUNE 10 2010

Nadim
I am very, very angry.
Nadim
For what you did to Manning.
Adrian
*to* manning?
Encrypted OTR chat initiated. - 7:21
Adrian
He's a traitor at best.
Nadim
You liar.
Adrian
His own words damn him, not mine.
Nadim
His own words, that you gave to the FBI.
Nadim
That he confided in you
Adrian
Army CI, to be exact.
Nadim
Same as you confided in Wired about your "asperger's arrest"
Nadim
Oh, by the way
Nadim
I know the truth about that.
Nadim
And about many other things too
Nadim
And I'm going to make you pay.
Adrian
Do what you feel you need to do.
Nadim
You got it.

END OF CHAT LOGS

I really don't care about anonymity. I care about earning Manning some degree of justice, what with Lamo's blatant betrayal. Contact me if you wish.