#news : #WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning "designed Facebook" as a schoolboy, friends say

telegraph.co.uk

Bradley Manning, the prime suspect in the leaking of top secret documents to the WikiLeaks website, was such a computer expert that he designed a version of Facebook years before modern social networking sites took off, friends have disclosed.

10:30PM GMT 01 Dec 2010

Manning was born in Oklahoma but spent his teenage years living with his mother in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire.

Bradley Manning

Friends remember the teenager as a shy schoolboy who was determined to speak his mind and “had his own sense of right and wrong”.

Tom Dyer, a fellow pupil at Tasker Milward School, said: "Overall, Bradley was renowned for his IT skills.

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"He produced a website with another schoolmate. It was pre-Facebook. It was like a community site. It didn’t really lift off, but it was a good idea.

"It was pretty much a social networking site before its time. You could log in and find out about local news."

Manning, 23, is being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia.

He was arrested in May after WikiLeaks released leaked footage of attacks by US Apache helicopters which killed two Reuters news staff in Iraq in 2007.

He was later charged with "transferring classified data" and "delivering national defense information to an unauthorised source," which could carry a maximum sentence of 52 years in jail.

Following the later release by WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of documents from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Pentagon has described Manning as a "person of interest" in its hunt for the source.

But those who befriended Manning when he arrived in Wales aged 13, after his parents divorced, suggested that he had always possessed some of the character traits which may have prompted the biggest-ever leaks of confidential information from the US government.

Mr Dyer told Channel 4 News that Manning had quickly established a reputation for computer expertise at his West Wales comprehensive.

And he said he was not surprised when he heard that he was suspected of being behind the leaks.

He said: “He's always had this sense that 'I'm going to right a big wrong'. He was like that at school.

"If something went wrong, he would speak up about it if he didn't agree with something. He would even have altercations with teachers if he thought something was not right.”

Mr Dyer insisted that Manning never meant any harm but was simply determined to stand his own ground.

"He has his own sense of what is right or wrong,” he added. “It’s not directed against another person in particular. He's certainly not malicious in any of his actions."

Rowan John, another school friend, said: "He was opinionated but not forward on it. If he truly believed in something, he would give an opinion. That's probably because he was right in his opinion."

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