US authorities had not been able to make a connection between Wikileaks' Julian Assange and a jailed army private. Picture: AP Source: AP
INVESTIGATORS say they found contact information for Julian Assange on a computer hard drive belonging to US soldier Bradley Manning, who is accused of spilling secrets to Assange's WikiLeaks organisation.
Testifying today at a hearing to determine if Manning should face a court-martial, the investigators also said they found evidence of online chats between the US Army private and a computer user identified by the handle "Julian Assange".
In addition, the US Army digital forensics experts said they recovered State Department cables, US military field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, and other classified material from Manning's computers and storage devices.
The testimony, which came on the fourth day of the hearing being held at the Fort Meade army base in the US state of Maryland, was the most compelling government evidence yet linking Manning to one of the most serious intelligence breaches in US history.
Manning, who turned 24 on Saturday, could face life in prison if convicted of "aiding the enemy", the most serious of the 22 charges he is facing.
Mark Johnson, a private contractor who works for the US Army's Computer Crime Investigative Unit (CCIU), said a computer hard drive obtained from Manning had contact information for Assange, the Australian-born WikiLeaks founder.
US Army prosecutors showed a screenshot of a message said to be taken from a file on the drive. "You can currently reach our investigations editor directly in Iceland - 354 862 3481 - 24 hour service - Ask for Julian Assange," it said.
The investigators also said they had recovered online chats between Manning and a user by the name Julian Assange during which WikiLeaks was discussed.
Assange, who is in Britain fighting extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges, has consistently denied knowing the source of the material received by his site, but has expressed support for Manning.
The investigators said they had found a file on an SD card recovered from Manning's aunt's house that contained 91,000 US military field reports from Afghanistan and another 400,000 from Iraq.
They did not specifically state that the reports matched those released by WikiLeaks, but the anti-secrecy site published approximately the same number.
Special Agent David Shaver, head of the CCIU's digital forensics and research branch, said investigators had also found 10,000 State Department cables that were apparently not passed on to WikiLeaks because of a corrupted file.
Among the documents Manning is suspected of giving WikiLeaks are about 260,000 State Department cables, which led to a string of embarrassing revelations for the United States and other governments.
Shaver also said an additional 100,000 complete State Department cables, which had been encoded, were found on a computer used by Manning between November 2009, when he was deployed to Iraq, and May 2010, when he was arrested.
Defence lawyers have argued that Manning struggled with gender issues and emotional problems, but his superiors repeatedly failed to provide counseling, take disciplinary action or revoke his top secret security clearance.
His lawyers have also suggested that Manning, who is gay, had difficulty serving in a US military that was operating under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy towards homosexuals, which has since been repealed.
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