Presiding over a staff of specialists — Nikon men, Leica men, Hasselblad men, movie-camera men — Mr. Forscher, in his red apron, was a learned generalist.
Asked to specify what he saw as Specialist Manning's motives, Mr. Lamo replied: "Ideology.
In a single intense week in late May, Specialist Manning and the former hacker, Adrian Lamo, traded instant messages about what Mr. Lamo described as Specialist Manning's personal troubles with the military.
Specialist Manning has been under arrest since at least early June and has not uttered a peep publicly.
Mr. Lamo, 29, said he had expressed concern to Specialist Manning during the course of their exchanges.
Representatives of the Army were contacted by e-mail and asked to comment on the arrest of Specialist Manning, but did not reply.
When the Department of Defense announced the arrest, it said that Specialist Manning was in pretrial confinement in Kuwait "for allegedly releasing classified information".
In addition to Mr. Lamo's multipronged online strategy, there is Wikileaks, which used its Twitter feed to comment on reports that Specialist Manning had been arrested.
After all, if Wikileaks cleared Specialist Manning, it would be undercutting its central claim: that those who give it information are ensured that they will remain anonymous.
After reading the thousands of words Mr. Greenwald published on the case, what happened — how Mr. Lamo came to know Specialist Manning, among other things — was still not clear.
Mr. Lamo, reached at his parents' home in Carmichael, Calif., said that he turned over copies of his chat logs with Specialist Manning to Army investigators, and that they included much personal information that could give clues to Specialist Manning's motives, should he indeed turn out to be the leaker.
