NY Times News Alert: U.S. Tries to Build Case Against WikiLeaks Founder

[Mira]

U.S. Tries to Build Case Against WikiLeaks Founder

WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors, seeking to build a case against the WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange for his role in a huge dissemination of classified government documents, are looking for evidence of any collusion in his early contacts with an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information.

Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.
Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

Edited to conform to DU's fair use policy for copyrighted material. Lithos, DU Moderator

Source
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/world/16wiki.html?emc=na

[Angry Dragon]

1. Wikileaks is more news than fox

[girl gone mad]

2. Fuck them.

[Bobbieo]

3. And, Cheney is still free!

[mmonk]

4. If Manning approached him saying he had information

he could provide WikiLeaks, its still going to be hard for the government. It would still mean WikiLeaks is the recipient, not a procurer using him.

[truedelphi]

9. Except that hell's bells, if the government is totally hot about

Charging Assange, they can create IM's retroactively that say anything the government wants them to say.

[Hissyspit]

5. Sam Seder: "Hope irony of NY Times sending alert 'U.S. Tries to Build Case for Conspiracy' is not

lost on you."

[EFerrari]

7. LOL.

[WilliamPitt]

6. You should edit this for copyright reasons.

[NuclearDem]

8. Many Americans are going to die of thirst...

Because of the government grasping at all these straws...

[Odin2005]

10. *Odin starts cursing uncontrollably.