'No hatred of US' revealed on Manning computer Support: A protester carries signs for Private Manning outside Fort Meade, Maryland. The tension was electric on the arrival of a witness denounced as "the snitch" by Bradley Manning's supporters. Dressed in black and wearing a silver cross around his neck, the thirtysomething Adrian Lamo revealed his own ailments and confessed to his own brush with the law while providing critical links in the chain of evidence in the prosecution case. Within 24 hours of Manning first contacting him, Mr Lamo had informed military intelligence and within a week Private Manning had been arrested at a US army base in Iraq. Former computer hacker Adrian Lamo tipped off authorities about Bradley Manning, leading to the young soldier's arrest. But there was opportunity here, too, for the defence and Private Manning's lawyer David Coombs seized it, segueing from the enormity of Private Manning having dumped 700,000 classified US documents into the public domain, to the fractured and confused young US Army private revealed in several online chats with Mr Lamo. Cross-examining Mr Lamo, Mr Coombs led him in revealing a side of Private Manning much at odds with the prosecution claim that he had deliberately set out to put the top- secret files of the US government in the hands of Osama bin Laden - "helping the enemy," as the most severe charge against Private Manning is paraphrased. Mr Lamo's account squared with evidence earlier in the day by a forensic digital examiner on contract to the US military, Mark Johnson, who said that none of the material found on Private Manning's computer related to terrorism or "indicat[ed] a hatred of America." A convicted hacker turned cyber analyst, Mr Lamo told army prosecutor Major Ashden Fein that Private Manning had first contacted him online on May 20, 2010 - and that within 24 hours he had reported him to military intelligence, briefing agents on his dialogue with the soldier and, in particular, on Private Manning's references to Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks anti-secrecy entity was the conduit by which the files became public. Mr Assange, who is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, on Monday called Private Manning's court martial a "show trial" and referred to him as "the most prominent political prisoner in modern US history." This is not justice; never could this be justice. The verdict was ordained long ago," Mr Assange wrote in a statement on the WikiLeaks site. Mr Lamo was tight-lipped on the witness stand, mostly agreeing with or slightly modifying statements put to him by the prosecution and defence lawyers. Describing himself as a threat analyst and a "grey hat," a hacking term, Mr Lamo confirmed that in 2004 he had pleaded guilty to computer fraud charges after he had breached the networks of The New York Times and Microsoft, among others. On conviction, he had been sentenced to six months' home detention and two years' probation. In response to Mr Coombs, Mr Lamo said there had been no suggestion by Private Manning, whose online identity was Bradass87, that he intended the leaked documents to aid "the enemy." Relying on purportedly tamper-proof, real-time recordings of their several chats that were retrieved from Mr Lamo's computers, Mr Coombs drew out the fragile nature of his client, who had told Mr Lamo he had made a "huge mess" of his life. Suggesting he was suicidal, Private Manning had described himself as a "broken soul ... emotionally fractured." Private Manning chatted about seeing "incredible things, awful things" in classified files, "things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC." He had told Mr Lamo the files revealed how "the first world exploits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective," showing "diplomatic scandals" wherever there was a US mission. "I don't believe in good guys versus bad guys anymore," Private Manning told him. Mr Lamo confirmed having asked why Private Manning was not selling the files to Russia or China - to which the private had replied that the information "belongs in the public domain." Another irony was that the Manning-Lamo dialogue - which led to Private Manning's arrest - might not have happened. Explaining that the soldier's initial approaches were a series of encrypted emails from both his personal and US military addresses, Mr Lamo said he had ignored them because they were just more of the "high volume" of messages he received from strangers.