The State Department says it is studying the computer hard drives used by an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, trying to assess the potential damage if allegations are true that the analyst leaked tens of thousands of classified diplomatic documents to a whistle-blower Web site.
Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Friday that the Bureau of Diplomatic Security is assisting in the forensic analysis of the data stored on one or more hard drives from computers believed to have been used by Army Spc. Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Md.
Manning, who has not been charged with any crime, is being detained in Kuwait pending an Army criminal investigation of unauthorized leaks of classified information.
“We take this seriously,” Crowley said. “Any release of classified material to those who are not entitled to have it is a serious breach of our security and, you know, can cause potential damage to our national security interests.”
Former computer hacker Adrian Lamo says that Manning claimed in a series of online chats that he downloaded 260,000 classified or sensitive State Department cables and transmitted them by computer to the Web site Wikileaks.org.
Crowley said examination of the hard drives, which arrived in Washington on Thursday from Baghdad, should allow officials to verify what documents Manning may have downloaded and whether he sent them to an unauthorized recipient.
In a post on Twitter, Wikileaks has denied that it was provided with 260,000 classified documents, but it has not further clarified the matter.
Wikileaks’ chief spokesman, Julian Assange, was expected to appear as part of a panel Friday night an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Las Vegas, Nev. But a conference spokesman, Mark Horvit, said Assange told him this weekend he wouldn’t be coming for security reasons.
In April, Wikileaks posted a leaked video that shows Apache helicopters gunning down unarmed men in…