TO FREEDOM
Revealing the intriguing life and crimes of Chelsea Manning, America’s most controversial trans person, by Andrew M Potts.
Chelsea Manning leaves Fort Leavenworth prison this May. Her life, to date, has been extraordinary. The Iraq and Afghanistan war logs she passed to WikiLeaks revealed shocking information about the operations of the US military. Additionally, her personal life and gender transition make her one of the most intriguing LGBTI people of the modern era. In this profile,
Andrew M Potts looks at her formative early life, her crimes and how she committed them, the US Army’s baffling responses to her, and what the future may hold for the world’s most famous and most incarcerated whistleblower.
On January 17, in one of his final acts before leaving office, President Barack Obama announced the commutation of Chelsea Manning’s 35-year-prison sentence for her violation of the United States Espionage Act.
“I feel very comfortable that justice has been served,” Obama said at his final White House press conference the following day, “Let’s be clear: Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence.”
Had Manning been made to serve the full length of her sentence she would have left prison in 2045, aged 57. Had federal prosecutors had their way she would not have been released until 2070. Many on the political right in America had called for her execution – something which she qualified for under the Espionage Act. Without Obama’s pardon, with good behaviour and the earliest possible release date, Manning would have still have faced another year in prison and a staggering 45 years on parole under the scrutiny of the military justice system.
Now when Manning gets out on May 17 she can breath a sigh of relief as she begins her life afresh – though she will always remembered as the longest serving prosecuted whistleblower in US history.
“[I don’t think] the average person who is thinking about disclosing vital classified information would think that it goes unpunished,” Obama said in answer to critics of the decision to commute Manning’s sentence. “I don’t think [they] would get that impression from the sentence that Chelsea Manning has served.”
Just days earlier, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had announced he would hand himself over to US authorities if Manning was granted clemency, despite what he said was the
unconstitutionality of the Department Of Justice case against him over his role in publishing Manning’s intelligence leaks. Assange has not honoured that offer and the White House has denied that it played any role in the decision to grant Manning’s commutation.
Having gender transitioned, Manning will begin her new life as a woman. She has undergone the entire process of transitioning while confined to the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas – an all-male military prison.
Her family and supporters are already preparing the way for her and have crowdfunded over $90,000 on GoFundMe to help ease her transition into the free world.
“The majority of Chelsea’s adult life has been spent under the control of powerful institutions,” the Welcome Home Chelsea campaign said in launching their appeal in February. “For the first time in her life, Chelsea will have the opportunity to live freely as her authentic self, to grow her hair, engage with her friends, and build her own networks of love and support. We want her to have the tools to do that and to overcome the years of abuse she has experience in custody.”
Until her release, Manning’s only contact with the outside world is through books and newspapers, through heavily vetted postal correspondence, over the telephone with her lawyers, and through visits from a small list of people she nominated at the start of her sentence. Perhaps, understandably, given the nature of her crimes, Manning has been banned from accessing the internet – though she tweets and blogs via notes that are carried out of Fort Levenworth by intermediaries.
Prior to her arrest Manning expressed her concerns about being misgendered in the media, telling a confidant, “I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me… plastered all over the world press… as boy.”
But the media are barred from visiting Manning and under her terms of incarceration, no one is allowed to photograph her. The only image we have to get an impression of her appearance today is a portrait by the artist Alicia Neal, which Manning has approved.
When Manning is released she will first go to visit her fraternal aunt in Maryland, though she has also been invited to live with her Welsh and Scottish relatives in the UK.
We have no word on how she plans to support herself on the outside, though studying for a political science degree in prison and her blogging for The Guardian suggests she has a future as an author and political commentator ahead of her.
A TROUBLED CHILD
Chelsea Manning was born on December 17, 1987 in Oklamhoma City to a Welsh mother, Susan, and an American father, Brian. They named her Bradley Edward Manning and raised her as a boy.
Manning’s father Brian had joined the United States Navy in 1974 at the age of 19 and became an intelligence officer. Brian met Chelsea’s mother while they were both shopping at a local store when he was stationed in Wales at RAF Brawdy later that decade – the exact year remains disputed. He left the armed services to take a job as an IT manager for a rental car agency.
When Chelsea was born the family were living outside of Crescent, Oklahoma, on a five acre property where they kept pigs and chickens. Both Manning’s parents had drinking problems but Susan was the worse of the two, staying home and day drinking, too drunk to drive to pick up groceries for her kids. Susan drank during the pregnancy and Manning would later be diagnosed as displaying symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome.
Within the family, Manning’s primary care giver was her sister Casey, who was eleven years her senior and who was in control of the money in the household when her father was travelling for work. >>
>> Mostly left to fend for herself, Manning developed a fascination with her father’s computers, building her first website at age ten and learning to use PowerPoint. Chelsea held strong opinions from a young age, refusing to speak the words “under God” during the Pledge Of Allegiance at school.
When she was 11 her parents split up and Chelsea and her mother moved into a rented apartment in town. Her mother remained unstable and, in 1998, she tried to commit suicide. Casey drove her to the hospital with Chelsea on the back seat keeping her alive.
At age 13, Chelsea (then still Bradley and presenting as male) confided in a friend that she thought she was gay and was interested in boys.
When Manning’s father remarried another woman (also named Susan) in 2000, Chelsea didn’t take it well – particularly when her new step-brother took the Manning family name. Chelsea began to act destructively and confided to her mother that her step-brother joining the family made her feel like, “I’m nobody now.”
In November 2001, Manning and her mother left the US and moved to Haverfordwest in Wales to be closer to her mother’s relatives. Manning made friends at the local high school but was bullied by the boys because of her American accent and feminine personality.
An aunt told the The Washington Post that on a school camp the other students quietly packed up their tents in the morning while she was still asleep and left so that she woke up alone. But she continued to excel with computers and in 2003 she and a friend set up an online messaging board, AngelDyne.com, which hosted computer games and free music downloads.
However, Chelsea’s mother’s health was declining and she feared being trapped in the UK if something were to happen to her so, in 2005, aged 17, Manning returned to live with her father in Oklahoma City with his second wife.
Manning, now identifying openly as a gay male, applied for a job as a software developer and was hired on the spot. However, after initially settling into the job well, Chelsea’s performance deteriorated, and she was fired after just four months.
Her relationship with her father’s new family continued to be rocky, and in March 2006 her step-mother called the police after Maning pulled a knife during an argument about getting a job. Brian responded by telling her to leave. She drove to the neighbouring city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, initially sleeping in a pick-up truck her father had given her before moving in with a friend.
Chelsea and her roommate got jobs at a local pizzaria but Manning was soon on the move again, first to Chicago before running out of money, then to Potomac, Maryland to stay with her father’s sister Debra. In Potomac, Manning met her first boyfriend and juggled several low paying jobs while studying English and History at a local college. She left the school after just one semester after failing an exam.
YOU’RE IN THE ARMY NOW
In late 2007 Manning’s father began encouraging her to join the US Army like he had, and train to be an intelligence officer, hoping that the military would give structure to her life. The idea of gaining a free college education under the GI Bill on completion of her service appealed to Manning and she dreamed of one day attaining a PhD in Physics. She later told an Army supervisor that she hoped enlisting in the military would also help her resolve her growing questions about her true gender identity.
Manning began basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri in October, 2007 but it quickly became apparent that she was neither mentally nor physically prepared for what lay ahead and six weeks later she was sent to a discharge unit. Another soldier from that unit later told The Guardian that Manning was being bullied over her perceived sexuality and that he thought she was heading for a mental breakdown.
“The discharge unit at any given time had about 100-plus men. It was basically one big room, it had a group of bunks, bunk-beds and that’s where we all lived,” the soldier, who spoke anonymously, recalled in 2011.
“[Manning] was being picked on… everybody said [she] was crazy or [she] was faking and the biggest part of it all was when rumours were getting around that [Manning] was ‘Chapter 15’ – you know, homosexual. They’d call [Manning] a faggot or call [her] a Chapter 15 – in the military world, being called a ‘Chapter 15’ is like a civilian being called a faggot to their face on the street. There were guys refusing to go in the showers when [Manning] was even in the damn latrine. I mean, it was childish and it was hateful.”
Under the then policy of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ for Defence Department employees, Chapter 15 of the Army’s Active Duty Enlisted Administrative Separations code states that “preservice, prior service, or current service homosexual conduct” is grounds for dishonourable discharge from the military.
For reasons that are still not completely understood, the decision to discharge Manning was revoked in January 2008 and she returned to basic training.
After graduating in April she was transferred to Fort Huachuca in Arizona for advanced training as a Military Occupational Speciality intelligence analyst, earning her a Top Secret/ Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearance, working out of the base’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. Working with computers again, Manning was back in her element, and she was awarded the National Defence Service Medal and an Army Service Ribbon upon graduating.
In August 2008, Manning was transferred to Fort Drum in New York state to join the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division to begin preparations for deployment to Iraq.
Around this time she met Tyler Watkins, a young psychology and neuroscience student at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Watkins would be her most serious relationship to date. He introduced her to the hacker community at his university and at nearby Boston University and she began to mix in those circles.
Some superiors expressed concerns about whether Manning was fit to be deployed, but after four weeks at the Joint Readiness Training Centre at Fort Polk, Louisiana, she arrived at Forward Operating Base Hammer near Baghdad in October 2009.
From her workstation at Hammer base, Manning had access to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS) – two of the Department Of State and Department Of Defence’s most confidential intelligence data networks – with JWICS also
No one suspected a
thing... I listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.
linking into the Department Of Homeland Security and Department Of Justice databases.
Through these networks Manning had access to the vast secrets collected by America’s security apparatus, diplomatic networks and war machine. She began to explore. What she saw shocked her to the core, and Chelsea came to feel that she, too, had blood on her hands.
By November 2009, Manning had also resolved the questions about her gender identity and concluded that she was female. She contacted a gender counsellor in the States and discussed the process of surgically transitioning. “Bradley felt he was female,” the counsellor would later tell a journalist from the New York Times, “He was very solid on that.”
However, Manning also told the counsellor about a targeting mission she had been involved with in Basra in Iraq that had gone wrong. “Two groups of locals were converging in this one area. Manning was trying to figure out why they were meeting,” the counsellor recalled. Based on Manning’s information, a unit was dispatched to hunt the groups down. Manning initially thought the operation had gone well until a superior explained there had been collateral from the mission. “Some guy loosely connected to the group got killed,” the counsellor revealed, adding that Manning had been “very, very distressed” to learn of this.
Despite the US Government’s then policy banning openly LGBT people from serving in the military, Manning, by all accounts, made no effort to hide. She (still presenting as “he” Bradley) kept a fairy wand on her workstation, where she would listen to Lady Gaga. That camp persona would become an important aspect of Manning’s subterfuge when she decided to go rouge. It allowed her to hide what she was doing in plain sight.
MANNING CROSSES THE LINE
In January 2010, taking advantage of her security clearance, Manning downloaded almost half a million documents relating to America’s recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and copied them to a CD labelled “Lady Gaga”.
She then copied the files to her personal computer and transferred them to an SD card and took them to the United States inside a digital camera without attracting attention.
“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like Lady Gaga… erase the music… then write a compressed split file,” Manning later revealed. “No one suspected a thing... [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.” Investigators later discovered the SD card in Manning’s basement bedroom in her aunt Debra’s home in Maryland.
On January 28, Manning f lew from the United States to Germany for rest and recreation. During this trip, she took her first steps outdoors as a woman, wearing a wig and make-up.
Around this time, she also confided to her boyfriend Tyler that she had found some sensitive information that she was considering leaking. Manning initially sought to give her Iraq War and Afghan War material to the New York Times or the Washington Post but the Times did not return her calls and a reporter she spoke to at the Post did not seem interested or did not take her seriously.
Manning then reached out anonymously to WikiLeaks, having become aware of them in November the previous year when they published 570,000 SMS messages sent on the day of the September 11 attacks that had come from a National Security Agency (NSA) database. On February 3, she sent Wikileaks the Iraq and Afghanistan War logs anonymously via the dark web but received no acknowledgement in response, so she returned to her duties in Iraq on February 11.
Then on February 18 she passed WikiLeaks a US diplomatic cable from the United States Embassy to Iceland. The less-than-onemonth-old cable from the American deputy chief of mission in Reykjavik detailed private discussions he had held with Icelandic leaders about a referendum that was being held after the country’s three biggest banks collapsed – including the sensitive assessment that Iceland could default on its debts in 2011. Within hours of receiving it, WikiLeaks published the cable. Now she knew they were taking her seriously.
What Manning had leaked so far had mostly been large, indiscriminate data dumps. What she was to leak next would shock the world.
Three days after passing the first diplomatic cable (Manning would eventually leak a quarter of a million such cables) WikiLeaks received a video file from Manning depicting a series of airstrikes by two Apache helicopters in Bagdad on July 12, 2007. In the footage, recorded by a camera mounted on the gun sights, we see the helicopters fire their 30mm M230 chain guns on a group of ten men who are standing around in an area that militants had previously used to fire on an American Humvee.
The men, some of them armed, had been escorting two Iraqi journalists from the Reuters news agency to the scene of the attack on the Humvee so that they could report on it. The >>
>> helicopter crews misidentified them as insurgents after someone near the group appeared to be holding a rocket propelled grenade. The helicopter crew also mistook a camera one of the journalists was carrying as a weapon.
In the video, the helicopter’s cannons tear through the group, killing seven of them instantly, including journalist Namir NoorEldeen, and badly wounding journalist Saeed Chmagh. Then, when a van pulls over to help the wounded journalist and another two locals step in to help, the helicopter fires again, killing the two men and Chmagh and badly wounding two children that were with them.
In a final airstrike in the video, the helicopters spot a group of people f leeing into an apartment building and target the building with Hellfire missiles. It’s not only the killings on camera that make an impact; the banal, workaday radio chatter between the helicopter crews as they carry them out makes it all the more chilling.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released the footage on April 5, 2010 in theatrical fashion to the world’s media, entitled Collateral Murder. He explained his rational to Al Jazeera: “You can see that they… deliberately target Saaed… despite their earlier belief that… the rules of engagement did not permit them to kill Saeed when he was wounded,” Assange said.
“When he is rescued, suddenly that belief changed. You can see in this particular image he is lying on the ground and the people in the van have been separated, but they still deliberately target him. This is why we called it Collateral Murder. In the first example, maybe it’s collateral exaggeration or incompetence when they strafe the initial gathering… But this particular event – this is clearly murder.”
In March, Manning sent WikiLeaks an encrypted video she’d found which, she believed, was footage of the 2009 Granai massacre – one of the worst atrocities against civilians by coalition forces during the Afghanistan War. On May 4 of that year a US B-1 Bomber launched an airstrike on the village of Granai in Farah Province in western Afghanistan. The US military initially claimed that the airstrike had killed 20 to 30 civilians along with a group of around 60 insurgents, however, they now concede that “no one will ever be able conclusively to determine the number of civilian casualties that occurred”.
The Afghan Government maintains that over 140 people were killed in the attack, with only 22 of them men, and the majority of them being children. Villagers say that Taliban forces had left the area well before the airstrike occurred.
The video had not yet been released when it was, allegedly, deleted by a disgruntled WikiLeaks team member when he quit the organisation. If the video was of the Granai massacre and had the public ever seen it, it would have been extremely damaging for the United States and its allies.
Manning was now regularly chatting with someone online that she believed was Julian Assange himself – though this has never been proven. Investigators later found around 15 pages of encrypted chats between her and this person hidden on her MacBook’s hard drive.
CHELSEA COMES UNDONE
On April 24, Manning outed herself as transgender to her supervisor, Master Sergeant Paul Adkins, in an email titled “My Problem,” writing, “I’ve had signs of it for a very long time… It’s caused problems within my family. I thought a career in the military would get rid of it. It’s not something I seek out for attention, and I’ve been trying very, very hard to get rid of it by placing myself in situations where it would be impossible.
“But, it’s not going away; it’s haunting me more and more as I get older. Now, the consequences of it are dire, at a time when it’s causing me great pain in itself… I don’t know what to do anymore, and the only ‘help’ that seems available is severe punishment and/or getting rid of me.”
Attached with the email was a photograph of Manning, dressed as a woman she called Breanna, most likely taken on her trip to Germany. Manning probably expected this revelation would result in her immediate discharge from the military. But while Adkins talked to Manning’s therapist, he did not share her confession with anyone above him in the Army chain of command.
Manning’s behaviour at work and online in the weeks that followed reveal that she was spinning out of control and, now, probably wanted to get caught. On May 7, Manning was found in a storage closet, curled up in a foetal position, with a knife at her feet. She had carved the words, “I want...” into a chair. Later that day, she got into an altercation with another intelligence analyst and punched her in the face.
Manning was taken to the brigade psychiatrist who recommended her discharge from the Army. Instead, Manning’s supervisor removed the bolt from Manning’s weapon and sent her to work in a supply office, demoting her from the rank of Specialist to Private First Class. Amazingly, she still retained her security clearance at this point.
Two days later, Manning contacted the novelist Jonathan Odell via Facebook and told him that she wanted to talk to him in confidence about some “very high-profile events, albeit as a nameless individual thus far”. On May 19, she contacted Eric Schmiedl, a mathematician she had met while in Boston, and told him she had been the source of the Collateral Murder video. Then two days later, Manning began chatting online to the person who would be her downfall.
Adrian Lamo was an American internet threat analyst and so-called“grey hat” hacker who had made a name for himself breaking into computer networks at The New York Times. While black hat hackers break into networks to cause malicious damage, and white hat hackers identify penetration points in computer systems in order to fix them, grey hat hackers typically break into systems just because t hey can and just to look around.
When Lamo broke into The New York Times intranet in 2002, he not only added his name and details to the paper’s database of expert sources, but also used it to seek information about a number of high-profile individuals. The New York Times lodged a complaint against Lamo with the Department Of Justice and two years later he surrendered himself to the FBI. Lamo was sentenced to six months of home detention with two-year’s probation, and was ordered to pay $65,000 for compromising the newspaper’s computer security as well that of as Microsoft, WorldCom and the Yahoo browser website.
The chat logs between Manning and Lamo on AOL instant messaging, beginning from May 21, show her eagerness to spill the beans. They begin, “Hi. How are you? I’m an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern Baghdad, pending discharge for ‘adjustment disorder’ in lieu of
She began to explore. What she saw shocked her to the core and Chelsea came to feel that she, too, had blood on her hands.
It was her opinion that… it would lead to a greater good… that society would come to the conclusion that the war wasn’t worth it…
‘gender identity disorder’.
“If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?”
Manning also revealed to Lamo that she had questioned her gender for several years and that, “Sexual orientation was easy to figure out, but I started to come to terms with it during the first few months of my deployment.”
Lamo told Chelsea that he was bisexual and had previously dated a transgender woman, so that she would relate to him. When Manning told Lamo that she was “trying to keep a low profile” he said he could be trusted like a “journalist and a minister… Treat this as a confession or an interview (never to be published) and enjoy a modicum of legal protection,” Lamo replied. “Assange level?” Manning asked in response. Lamo went on to describe himself to Manning as “a friend to WikiLeaks” who had encouraged people to donate to the organisation. Manning quickly revealed that she was someone with access to the “DoS, DoD, CIA, NSA – those are what I know.”
Over the next three days, Lamo and Manning chatted frequently and she revealed that the event that had really sent her over the edge was when the Iraqi Federal Police had detained 15 people for printing anti-government propaganda. Her army supervisors asked her to find out who the “bad guys” were but when she looked into it she found that the detainees were people trying to expose corruption within the Iraqi cabinet. When she reported this to her commanding officer he “didn’t want to hear any of it” and instead asked her to try to help the Iraqi police f ind more detainees.
It was at that point that Manning realised that she was “actively involved in something that I was completely against”.
When Lamo began to appreciate the gravity of what Manning had leaked he spoke to a friend who had worked in counterintelligence. That friend advised Lamo to contact the authorities and then reported their conversation to his former bosses. Lamo shared the chat logs of his conversations with Manning with Army Counterintelligence and told them that he believed that Manning was potentially endangering lives through the leaks. Lamo also passed the chat logs and Manning’s birth name to Wired magazine under strict embargo so that they could break the story and reveal her identity when news got out.
Two days after Lamo spoke to Army Counterintelligence, Manning was arrested by the US Army Criminal Investigation Division and then transferred to a holding facility at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait where she was assigned a military defence attorney and placed on suicide watch. On March 11, 2011, after a thorough investigation, Manning was charged with 22 offences including violations of the Uniform Code Of Military Justice and United States Espionage Act. In April of that year, a panel of experts evaluated Manning as mentally fit to stand trial.
At a preliminary hearing, Manning’s lawyers argued that the government had exaggerated the harm that the leak of the documents had caused. They accused prosecutors of overcharging Manning in an effort to >>
coerce her into giving evidence against Julian Assange, who had become a household name after the release of the Collateral Murder video.
By this time, WikiLeaks had begun to release and publish material from the Iraq War and Afghan War logs, and the diplomatic cables Chelsea had leaked in partnership with The Guardian, Der Siegel, Le Monde, El Pais and The New York Times.
Before the start of her trial, Manning pleaded guilty to ten of the charges, reading a 35-page statement about her actions into the public record. She was convicted of seven of the remaining 12 charges on July 30, 2013, but acquitted of the charge that she aided the enemy.
A defence psychiatrist testified that Manning’s motive had been to “really change how the world views the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and future wars”. The psychiatrist said that leaking the documents had been “an attempt to crowdsource an analysis of the war” by making them public.
“It was [her] opinion that if… enough analysis was done on these documents… that it would lead to a greater good… that society, as a whole, would come to the conclusion that the war wasn’t worth it… that really no wars are worth it.”
On August 14 Manning apologised to the court, stating, “I am sorry that my actions hurt people. I’m sorry that they hurt the United States. I am sorry for the unintended consequences of my actions. When I made these decisions, I believed I was going to help people, not hurt people.”
Manning came out publicly as transgender eight days later – the day after her sentencing – with her attorney, David Coombs reading a statement on The Today Show.
“As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me,” the statement read. “I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible.
“I hope that you will support me in this transition. I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun (except in official mail to the confinement facility). I look forward to receiving letters from supporters and having the opportunity to write back.”
Manning has battled with authorities to have them accept her female identity and to transition physically in jail. In April 2014, the Kansas District Court granted Manning a legal name change from Bradley to Chelsea. The Army updated her personnel records to record her new name but refused to correct the gender designation in her file. Manning sought to access hormone therapy in line with her diagnosis of gender dysphoria by the Army’s own doctors, but that was not allowed for inmates in military prisons.
In July 2014, the Federal Bureau Of Prisons rejected a request from the Army to transfer Manning to a civilian prison where she could undergo hormone therapy. The then Secretary Of Defence, Chuck Hagel made an exception that should have allowed Manning to wear female undergarments under her prison uniform and receive hormone therapy. However, the Bureau Of Prisons did not honour that, and in August the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) threatened to sue the Defence Department if that was not granted.
It wasn’t until February of 2015 that the commander of the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth finally relented and issued the following memo: “After carefully considering the recommendation that (hormone treatment) is medically appropriate and necessary, and weighing all associated safety and security risks presented, I approve adding (hormone treatment) to Inmate Manning’s treatment plan.”
With a stroke of a pen, Manning became the first transgender American soldier to be allowed to access hormone therapy in the military justice system. In a public statement later that year Manning confirmed she was receiving treatment. “I finally began my prescribed regime of hormones to continue my overdue gender transition in February,” she wrote. “It’s been such an amazing relief for my body and brain to finally come into alignment with each other. My stress and anxiety levels have tapered off quite considerably. Overall, things are beginning to move along nicely.”
However, Manning was still not allowed to grow her hair longer and getting prison staff to refer to her by the correct pronouns remained a problem.
In September the Army told the ACLU that Manning would become the first transgender inmate in a military prison to be allowed to transition surgically. Yet, three months later, her military doctor was still refusing to change the gender on her official records to female.
CHELSEA’S LEGACY
With President Obama’s commutation, Chelsea’s struggle with the military justice system comes to a close. Her choice to go public as transgender and her subsequent legal battles to obtain treatment would have had to have some inf luence on the Obama Administration’s decision to end the discharge of openly transgender military personnel, which persisted after the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.
Since June of last year, otherwise qualified United States service members can no longer be discharged, denied re-enlistment, involuntarily separated or denied continuation of service for being transgender regardless of their stage of transition. It remains to be seen whether President Trump will seek to reverse this policy. According to Department Of Defence, estimates would affect as many as 7,000 service members.
On the campaign trail, when asked a question about the issue, Trump responded, “We have a politically correct military, and it’s getting more and more politically correct every day… Some of the things that they’re asking you to do and be politically correct about are ridiculous… We’d get our military people to come back and make recommendations to me, and I will follow those recommendations.”
So how will Manning fare in President Trump’s America? Manning encouraged people to take part in the 2016 Presidential Election but did not tell them how to vote, saying only: “One of the most contentious general elections in modern US history is in front of us… if you’re lucky enough to be able to vote, don’t let that privilege go to waste.”
Trump publicly encouraged the hacking and leaking of material that would damage the Clinton campaign during the election and has praised Assange for publishing leaked Democratic National Committee emails. But it appears he has a different standard when it comes to government secrets.
On January 19 of this year Trump spokesman
and soon-to-be White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters, “[The commutation is] disappointing, and it sends a very troubling message when it comes to the handling of classified information and to the consequences of those who leak information that threatens the security of our nation.”
Spicer called Manning, “someone who has given away this country’s secrets,” but did not answer directly when asked whether Trump would attempt to take steps to undo Obama’s decision. President Trump then attacked Chelsea’s commutation in a January 26 tweet in response to Manning criticising Obama in The Guardian newspaper for not being bold enough during his presidency.
“Ungrateful TRAITOR Chelsea Manning, who should never have been released from prison, is now calling President Obama a weak leader. Terrible!” he tweeted.
Legal experts agree that Trump does not have the power to revoke Obama’s commutation.
MANNING AND SNOWDEN
Manning’s Iraq War log release alone is the biggest military leak in US history, dwarfing the material released by fellow whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 that documented the digital mass surveillance of the public by the United States’ National Security Agency.
Manning’s Iraq War logs documented a further 15,000 civilian deaths in Iraq that had not been previously known to the public. Manning’s release of US diplomatic cables provided the information fuel for the Arab Spring that spread across the Middle East in the early 2010s.
Snowden is not eligible for a pardon because, unlike Manning who has faced the military’s criminal justice process, he remains on the run.
While Snowden leaked his material in a much more selective way to avoid harm, he has praised Manning for raising the issue of “overclassification” – in which information that is not related to national security is made classified and kept from the public record.
“In the last year, the White House told us that 95 million records have been created, classified and withheld from the public in the year 2012,” Snowden said in 2014 via video link at an awards ceremony where Manning was being honoured. “Some of this information is unambiguously necessary for public ends. For example, how can we vote without evidence of the true costs of the wars in which we are involved. Instances of public corruption or official corruption in nations that we support and ally ourselves with… and unambiguous war crimes. All of these were represented in the Manning leak.”
Learning of Manning’s commutation in January, Snowden tweeted, “In five more months, you will be free. Thank you for what you did for everyone, Chelsea. Stay strong a while longer… Let it be said here in earnest, with good heart: Thanks, Obama.”
Remarkable as it has already been, the Chelsea Manning story has only just begun.