Plausible Denial
Dossiers

The Manning–WikiLeaks Disclosures, 2010

2010-04-05

The 2010 series of four publication events by WikiLeaks of classified United States military and diplomatic material sourced by US Army Private First Class Chelsea Manning — the *Collateral Murder* video, the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and the Cablegate State Department cables — together constituting the largest single unauthorised disclosure of classified United States Government records on record at the date of the publications.

Background

Chelsea Manning (named at the time of the disclosures Bradley Manning, with the change of name and gender announced in August 2013 following the court-martial verdict) enlisted in the United States Army in October 2007 and was assigned to the 10th Mountain Division as an all-source intelligence analyst with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team. Manning deployed to Iraq in October 2009 and was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, east of Baghdad, with access in that role to two classified networks: the Department of Defense's Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System.1

Across the period from approximately November 2009 through May 2010, Manning downloaded a substantial quantity of classified material from SIPRNet — principally the Combined Information Data Network Exchange (CIDNE) records of US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the State Department's Net-Centric Diplomacy database of cabled diplomatic reporting. Manning transferred the material to WikiLeaks, the international publishing organisation founded in 2006 under the editorship of Australian national Julian Assange. WikiLeaks subsequently developed a coordinated publication arrangement with five international media partners — The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El País — and on the bulk of the cable release with several additional secondary partners.2

The Operation

The disclosures were released by WikiLeaks in four publication events across April–November 2010. The first release, on 5 April 2010, was the Collateral Murder video — gun-camera footage from a 12 July 2007 US Army Apache helicopter engagement in the New Baghdad district that resulted in the deaths of approximately twelve individuals including two Reuters news employees, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. The video was published with editorial framing and a transcript prepared by WikiLeaks. The Reuters journalists' employer had previously sought the video under the Freedom of Information Act and had been refused.3

The second release, on 25 July 2010, was the Afghan War Diary — approximately 91,731 records of US military operational reporting from Afghanistan covering January 2004 through December 2009. WikiLeaks coordinated the release with The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel, which published interpretive accounts on the same date. The third release, on 22 October 2010, was the Iraq War Logs — approximately 391,832 records of US military operational reporting from Iraq covering January 2004 through December 2009 — released in coordination with the same partners and several additional outlets. The fourth and most consequential release, beginning on 28 November 2010, was the Cablegate publication of approximately 251,287 United States Department of State diplomatic cables originating from 274 US diplomatic missions worldwide and dating principally from December 1966 through February 2010, with the bulk in the post-2003 period.4

The Cablegate release was conducted across an extended publication schedule from late November 2010 through 2011. WikiLeaks initially released a small selection of cables in coordination with the five-partner consortium, with subsequent staged releases. The full unredacted cable set was inadvertently released in September 2011 following the publication by Der Freitag of the encryption passphrase that David Leigh of The Guardian had included in his 2011 book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy — a development for which WikiLeaks and The Guardian attributed mutual responsibility in subsequent commentary.5

Disclosure

Manning was arrested at FOB Hammer on 27 May 2010 following an online conversation with former hacker Adrian Lamo in which Manning had described the disclosure activity. Lamo reported the conversation to US Army Counter Intelligence and to the FBI; Manning was transferred to the United States Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Virginia, in July 2010, where Manning was held under conditions that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan E. Méndez, characterised in a March 2012 report as cruel, inhuman, and degrading.6

Manning was charged on 22 charges, including aiding the enemy under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice — a capital offence — and twenty-one further charges including offences under the Espionage Act of 1917 incorporated through the UCMJ. The court-martial proceeded at Fort Meade, Maryland, before Colonel Denise R. Lind. On 30 July 2013 Manning was acquitted of the aiding-the-enemy charge and convicted of twenty further charges; on 21 August 2013 Manning was sentenced to thirty-five years' imprisonment. President Barack Obama commuted Manning's sentence on 17 January 2017 in the final week of his administration; Manning was released from custody on 17 May 2017.7

The Swedish judicial proceedings against Julian Assange — initiated by complaints made in Stockholm in August 2010 and characterised through a series of changing prosecutorial designations across 2010–2017 — produced a European Arrest Warrant in November 2010, Assange's 2012 entry into the Embassy of Ecuador in London, and his subsequent eighty-one-month residency at the embassy. On 11 April 2019, following the withdrawal of asylum by the Government of Ecuador under President Lenín Moreno, the Metropolitan Police entered the embassy and arrested Assange. He was committed to HM Prison Belmarsh and held there during the subsequent extradition proceedings on a United States indictment unsealed the same day, which was superseded in May 2019 to add Espionage Act charges relating to the 2010 disclosures.8

The extradition proceedings ran from 2019 through 2024. The District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled in January 2021 against extradition on health grounds; the High Court reversed in December 2021 on the basis of US assurances; the Supreme Court declined to hear Assange's appeal in March 2022; the United Kingdom Home Secretary, Priti Patel, signed the extradition order in June 2022. On 24 June 2024, following extended pre-trial negotiations, Assange entered a plea agreement at the United States District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands in Saipan, pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national-defence information under the Espionage Act, and was sentenced to time served (approximately sixty-two months in HM Prison Belmarsh). He returned to Australia the same day.9

Legacy

The Manning–WikiLeaks disclosures of 2010 are the canonical reference for the modern, large-scale, intermediated unauthorised disclosure of classified material — the publication model in which a single source provides bulk classified material to a publishing organisation, which curates and releases the material in coordination with established media partners. The model has subsequently been replicated and refined in successive disclosure events including the Snowden disclosures of 2013, the Vault 7 publications of 2017, and a series of further events. The legal and political contestation of the model — particularly its application of the United States Espionage Act of 1917 to publication and to non-citizen publishers — remains substantively unresolved.10

The substantive content of the disclosures has been the subject of extensive subsequent analysis across academic, journalistic, and governmental commentary. The State Department cables in particular produced a sustained reorientation of the public-record account of US foreign policy during the period covered, with consequences across multiple specific cases — including, by the assessment of multiple subsequent commentators, the December 2010 demonstrations in Tunisia that initiated the Arab Spring (specific cables on Tunisia's Ben Ali government having been characterised as a contributing factor by some commentators and disputed by others). The Iraq War Logs documented operational detail on civilian casualties and on detention conditions that materially extended the public-record account; the Afghan War Diary provided comparable detail on Afghan operations.11

The judicial outcomes — Manning's conviction and commutation, Assange's plea agreement, the absence of any successful prosecution against the publishing partners — establish a partial public-record framework around the events. The Manning prosecution under Article 104 set the precedent that aiding-the-enemy charges could in principle be applied to disclosure to a publisher (although Manning was acquitted on that count); the Assange prosecution under the Espionage Act set the precedent that non-citizen publishers could in principle be charged under that statute (although the case was disposed of by plea before any merits ruling). Both precedents remain available to subsequent administrations.12

This dossier is the immediate predecessor to the Snowden disclosures (2013) and to Vault 7 (2017) in the modern post-2010 disclosure series. The agency-level entries most directly engaged are the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, although the principal United States Government victims of the Cablegate publication were the Department of State and the Department of Defense; the country-level context is on the page for the United States.

Sources & Further Reading

  1. United States Army court-martial proceedings, United States v. Manning, Fort Meade, Maryland, 2012–2013, public-trial transcripts; Denver Nicks, Private: Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, and the Biggest Exposure of Official Secrets in American History (Chicago Review Press, 2012).
  2. Heather Brooke, The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches from the Information War (Heinemann, 2011); David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (Guardian Books, 2011).
  3. WikiLeaks, Collateral Murder (5 April 2010); Reuters statements on the New Baghdad incident, July 2007 onward; Department of Defense investigative reports on the 12 July 2007 engagement.
  4. WikiLeaks publication archives: Afghan War Diary, Iraq War Logs, Cablegate; coordinated publications by The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El País, July 2010 onward; Bill Keller, "Dealing with Assange and the WikiLeaks Secrets," The New York Times Magazine, 26 January 2011.
  5. Leigh and Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy; Der Freitag, "Cable Mishap" reporting, August 2011; Glenn Greenwald, "WikiLeaks publishes full unredacted cables," Salon, 2 September 2011.
  6. United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Report of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, A/HRC/19/61/Add.4, 29 February 2012; Adrian Lamo's contemporaneous statements on the Manning conversation.
  7. United States Army court-martial, United States v. Manning, verdict of 30 July 2013, sentence of 21 August 2013; Presidential commutation, 17 January 2017; Chase Madar, The Passion of Bradley Manning (Verso, 2013).
  8. Swedish Prosecution Authority statements on the Förundersökning against Assange, 2010–2017; Embassy of Ecuador asylum statements, 2012–2019; Metropolitan Police arrest record, 11 April 2019; United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, United States v. Assange, indictment unsealed 11 April 2019, superseding indictment May 2019.
  9. UK Westminster Magistrates' Court, judgment of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, 4 January 2021; UK High Court of Justice, judgment of 10 December 2021; UK Supreme Court, refusal of permission to appeal, 14 March 2022; Home Secretary order of 17 June 2022; United States District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, plea agreement and sentencing in United States v. Assange, 24 June 2024.
  10. Yochai Benkler, "A Free Irresponsible Press: WikiLeaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate," Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 46 (2011); David Pozen, "The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures of Information," Harvard Law Review 127 (2013).
  11. Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark, Staatsfeind WikiLeaks (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2011); academic and journalistic analysis of the cable corpus, 2011 onward; Cablegate corpus released editions and academic projects.
  12. United States v. Manning, court-martial record; United States v. Assange, plea agreement of 24 June 2024; American Civil Liberties Union, Knight First Amendment Institute, and Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press public-record submissions on the Espionage Act prosecutions of journalists and publishers, 2019 onward.