The additional charges leveled at Pfc. Bradley Manning last week provide new information on the timing of Manning’s alleged leaking, including the surprising detail that by the time Manning allegedly leaked a notorious video of a 2007 Army helicopter attack in Iraq, he’d already allegedly passed nearly half-a-million classified documents to WikiLeaks.

The helicopter video, released by WikiLeaks under the title “Collateral Murder” last April, was generally presumed to have been one of Manning’s earliest leaks to the secret-spilling website.

The charge sheet released Tuesday indicates that the Army has pinned down the Collateral Murder leak to a six-week period beginning February 15, 2010, and ending with WikiLeaks’ publication of the video on April 5.

By then, according to the new charges, Manning had already leaked other material, including the mostly classified logs of nearly 500,000 events from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that WikiLeaks later published in part as the “War Logs.”

Manning allegedly downloaded the War Logs between December 31, 2009 and January 8, 2010, and leaked them on or before February 5 — at least 10 days before leaking Collateral Murder.

The time frame leaves open the possibility that Manning hand carried the War Logs to the United States to leak them from a network not subject to the Army’s monitoring. In late January 2010 — between the time Manning allegedly downloaded the logs, and the last day he might have leaked them — he’s known to have traveled to the United States on a two-week leave. He stayed with his aunt in Potomac, Maryland, for part of that trip, then traveled to the Boston area to visit friends.

It was on that trip that he told his friend Tyler Watkins that he’d obtained some unspecified sensitive material, and was weighing leaking it, according to Watkins. “He wanted to do the right thing,” Watkins said in an interview last June. “That was something I think he was struggling with.”

If the Army is right, though, Manning had already leaked at least one thing to WikiLeaks: an encrypted copy of a video named BE22 PAX.wmv, which is likely the classified video of the notorious Gharani massacre in Afghanistan.

In the first hint that it had an important new U.S. source, WikiLeaks tweeted about its possession of that video on January 8, 2010. But the organization has never released it, possibly because its failed to crack the encryption.

Below is an interactive timeline of Manning’s alleged leaking, as variously described by Manning in his chats, and as alleged by the Army in the new charges.

With previous reporting by Kim Zetter.

Photo: Facebook.com



