With Private Bradley Manning sitting in solitary confinement in the United States, Army investigators are now looking at civilian suspects who could have aided him in allegedly leaking tens of thousands of classified military documents from the war in Afghanistan.

The hacker who turned Manning in, Adrian Lamo, told the AP today that he knows firsthand that someone aided Manning in setting up encrypted software to transmit the information to Wikileaks. The New York Times today ran a story saying investigators are looking at some of Manning's friends who are students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University as possible suspects. The investigators told the paper that Manning may have handed disks with the information over to friends while on leave from duty in Iraq.

One of the people interviewed by the Army told the Times, "I was under the impression that they believed that perhaps Bradley had used friends in Cambridge as a mechanism for moving documents." The investigator also offered this person, who spoke in anonymity, "a considerable amount of money" to infiltrate Wikileaks. And so it continues.

[Image via AP]