Chelsea Manning

Army intelligence officer

• Born: December 17, 1987
• Birthplace: Crescent, Oklahoma

Also known as: Bradley Edward Manning; Elizabeth Chelsea Manning; Chelsea E. Manning

Education: Tasker Milward, Haverfordwest, Wales, UK; US Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, Fort Huachuca, Arizona

Significance: Manning, born a male, was convicted of espionage for leaking classified documents. Manning then announced her transition to a woman. From prison, she became an activist for freedom of information and transgender issues.

Background

Born on December 17, 1987, Elizabeth Chelsea Manning grew up as Bradley Manning near the small town of Crescent, Oklahoma. Manning’s older sister later testified that their parents were both alcoholics, and Manning’s father was abusive, verbally at least, toward his wife. Manning was an excellent student, interested in computers, math, and science. When she was thirteen, her parents divorced. She moved with her mother back to her native Wales, where she attended high school and developed her interest in computers and video games. After graduating, she returned to the United States in 2005, moving in with her father and stepmother. A major family fight erupted the following year, and Manning moved out. After a year of drifting, she joined the army.

Career

Manning had a difficult time in basic training, but her ability with computers led the army to send her to its intelligence school in Arizona. She was posted to Iraq in 2009, with access to a constant stream of documents and other materials that had been classified, including databases of military activity in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Manning quickly became concerned about what she saw in the communications, as detailed in this quotation from a pre-sentencing statement: "I felt that we were risking so much for people that seemed unwilling to cooperate with us, leading to frustration and anger on both sides" (Fuller para. 8).

Manning began to secretly copy the databases as well as classified internal State Department communications. She determined to make the information public, hoping, she said at the trial, to "spark a domestic debate" about the two wars and their cost in dollars and lives.

On a trip back to the United States in 2010 while on leave, Manning contacted the Washington Post and New York Times to explore the possibility of turning the documents over to one of them for publication. When those contacts proved fruitless, Manning uploaded the documents to the WikiLeaks website. WikiLeaks is a website dedicated to publishing classified government and corporate information from around the world. It was founded in 2006 by an Australian named Julian Assange. Another document Manning uploaded was video taken from an army helicopter that showed an attack carried out in 2007. In that attack, several people died, including at least one Iraqi civilian and two Iraqis working for the Reuters news agency. All told, Manning leaked about 700,000 files to the website.

In February 2010, WikiLeaks began publishing online thousands of classified State Department cables, some of which revealed embarrassing details about US officials’ views of the diplomats and leaders with whom they interacted. That April, it posted the video of the helicopter attack. That May, Manning contacted Adrian Lamo, who had once been arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for hacking. In one message, Manning told Lamo that she had leaked more than a quarter-million documents to WikiLeaks. Lamo, concerned about the national security issues raised by the leaks and not wanting to be in any further trouble with the FBI, contacted the bureau and told people there what he knew. On May 29, 2010, the army arrested Manning.

Manning was held for more than three years before her case came to trial. During that time, there were allegations that she was mistreated and even tortured. Her case became something of a cause célèbre, with activists and human rights groups campaigning for her release. She and Assange were even proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize. The US government did not agree, and charged her with more than two-dozen crimes, including theft and espionage. The most serious was aiding the enemy, a capital offense. Army lawyers argued that the release of raw information about troops and their movements endangered the lives of American personnel.

In February 2013, Manning entered a plea of guilty on ten counts, which meant she would have a twenty-year sentence. The government pursued the other charges, considering their seriousness. Manning’s court-martial began on June 3, 2013. That July, Manning was found not guilty of aiding the enemy but guilty on the other counts. They included the theft and espionage charges. Less than a month later, Manning was given a sentence of thirty-five years in prison, less than the maximum ninety years. The judge also ruled that the three-plus years she had already spent in custody would count toward the sentence. The day after her sentencing, Manning announced she was transgender.

In April 2014, an army general denied Manning’s plea for clemency. Her case then was moved automatically to the army’s Court of Criminal Appeals. That same month, Manning petitioned the court and won the right to be legally recognized as Chelsea Elizabeth Manning.

Just days before leaving office in January 2017, President Barack Obama used his executive power and went against the advice of his secretary of defense as well as several intelligence officials to commute Manning's sentence. While the commutation meant that Manning would not have to serve the entirety of her sentence and would be released in May of that year, it did not pardon her from the crimes of which she was convicted. Regardless, Manning, who had reportedly attempted suicide more than once while incarcerated in an all-male army prison, was grateful for her freedom. The move generated a large amount of controversy, especially as some critics considered Obama's decision hypocritical following his administration's hard-line approach to whistleblowers leaking classified government information. Manning was officially released on May 17, 2017, with the several months following Obama's commutation intended to allow her to prepare for reentering society.

In early 2018, Manning attempted to gain political influence through a seat in the US Senate by filing to run against incumbent Maryland senator Benjamin Cardin. Though her campaign was highly covered by the media, she was overwhelmingly defeated by Cardin in the state's Democratic primary in June. While Manning had, in the meantime, appealed to overturn her 2013 conviction, it was ultimately upheld by the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals in 2018. Additionally, because she refused to testify in the ongoing grand jury case against WikiLeaks, she was detained on a charge of contempt early in 2019. Released upon the grand jury's term ending in May, she was soon taken into custody once more and held for several months in a Virginia jail as well as fined over $250,000 for her refusal to testify for a different grand jury. Her release came with a judge's order in March 2020, which cited that her testimony was no longer necessary; her lawyers reported that she had again attempted suicide while incarcerated. She then focused her transparency activism on strengthening private networks to aid whistleblowing efforts without reliance upon funding from the government. Having studied cryptography and how best to apply blockchain technology for this purpose while serving her initial prison sentence, it was reported that by 2021 she had begun working as a security auditor for the newer privacy infrastructure technology company Nym.

Impact

The US government claimed that the impact of Manning’s leaks was substantial, given the volume and the sensitive nature of some of the material. Altogether Manning's leaks were the largest release of classified material in US history. Her actions are widely seen as ushering in a new period of significance for whistleblowing and similar intelligence leaks, and WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in particular gained greater influence and international attention in the years following Manning's disclosures. Manning became a key figure in a growing debate in the United States and around the world about whether leakers should be seen as heroes promoting transparency and accountability or as traitors and dangers to national security.

Manning also had an impact on the army’s treatment of transgender individuals. In 2015, she became the first service member to be granted hormone treatment. Also that year, an army court agreed with her request that all correspondence refer to her with female pronouns, another first. Her highly publicized life drew significant attention to transgender people, and her activism further promoted transgender rights.

Personal Life

While imprisoned, Manning became very active in writing and commenting on issues related to war, gender, and the freedom of information. She communicated through blog posts, tweets, and her regular columns for the Guardian, the London-based newspaper. She continued her activism and communications with the press after being released, and her first full, official interview since being arrested was published in June 2017 in the New York Times Magazine.

Bibliography

"Bradley Manning’s Early Years." Frontline, WGBH Educational Foundation, 29 Mar. 2011, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/wikileaks/bradley-manning/timeline/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2016.

"Chelsea Manning Biography." Bio, A&E Television Networks, 2016, www.biography.com/people/chelsea-manning-21299995#mannings-future-and-the-leak-aftermath. Accessed 2 March 2016.

del Castillo, Michael. "Chelsea Manning Is Back, and Hacking Again, Only This Time for a Bitcoin-Based Privacy Startup." Forbes, 25 Aug. 2021, www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2021/08/25/chelsea-manning-is-back-and-hacking-again-only-this-time-for-a-bitcoin-based-privacy-startup/?sh=3b0580e56e69. Accessed 7 Mar. 2022.

Fishman, Steve. "Bradley Manning’s Army of One." New York Magazine, 3 July 2011, nymag.com/news/features/bradley-manning-2011-7/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2016.

Fuller, Nathan. "In Her Own Words." Chelsea Manning Support Network, 7 Mar. 2013, www.chelseamanning.org/learn-more/in-his-own-words. Accessed 27 Feb. 2016.

Greenhouse, Emily. "What Chelsea Manning Has Won." BloombergPolitics, 10 Mar. 2015, www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-03-10/chelsea-manning-s-next-chapter. Accessed 27 Feb. 2016.

Kaplan, Fred. "Myths About Manning." Slate, 22 Aug. 2013, www.slate.com/articles/news‗and‗politics/war‗stories/2013/08/bradley‗manning‗sentenced‗to‗35‗years‗the‗private‗s‗prosecution‗has‗nothing.html. Accessed 27 Feb. 2016.

McKelvey, Tara. "Bradley Manning’s Disrupted Family Life." BBC News Magazine, BBC, 22 Aug. 2013, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23780581. Accessed 27 Feb. 2016.

Madar, Chase. The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the WikiLeaks Whistleblower. Verso, 2013.

Nicks, Denver. Private: Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, and the Biggest Exposure of Official Secrets in American History. Chicago Review, 2012.

Polantz, Katelyn, et al. "Federal Judge Orders Chelsea Manning's Release from Jail." CNN, 12 Mar. 2020, www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/politics/chelsea-manning-suicide-attempt-virginia-jail/index.html. Accessed 7 Mar. 2022.

Savage, Charlie. "Chelsea Manning to Be Released Early as Obama Commutes Sentence." The New York Times, 17 Jan. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/us/politics/obama-commutes-bulk-of-chelsea-mannings-sentence.html. Accessed 3 Feb. 2017.

Shaer, Matthew. "The Long, Lonely Road of Chelsea Manning." The New York Times Magazine, 12 June 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/magazine/the-long-lonely-road-of-chelsea-manning.html. Accessed 12 June 2017.