Manning tells Nantucket conference she’s no traitor
NANTUCKET, Mass. — Chelsea Manning told a crowd at a “creative thinkers” conference in Nantucket on Sunday that she’s not an “American traitor” and she did what she thought was the right thing to do.
Manning attended the annual conference for The Nantucket Project, a venture founded to bring together creative thinkers to uncover the ideas that matter most. Organizers say about 600 people attended.
“I believe I did the best I could in my circumstances to make an ethical decision,” she said when asked if she was a traitor.
Manning, 29, is a transgender woman who was known as Bradley Manning when she was convicted in 2013 of leaking a trove of classified documents. She was released from a military prison in May after serving seven years of a 35-year sentence.
Tom Scott, who co-founded The Nantucket Project with Kate Brosnan, said they invited Manning for “clarity of understanding.”
“My brother and father are Marines. They would respectfully challenge some of her decisions,” he said. “Barack Obama commuted her sentence. My instinct is that he’s a good and trustful man. How do those two things mix? Seeing her in person offers, perhaps, the best way to decipher that.”
Eugene Jarecki moderated the discussion. He asked Manning if it “reflects something about the state of our time” that she’s still the subject of pressure and labeled a traitor.
Manning said she took a risk to contribute to discourse and “change the tone of the conversation,” but it hasn’t changed, and, if anything, “things have gotten worse.”
“I’m walking out of prison and I see, literally, a dystopian novel unfolding before my eyes,” she said. “That’s how I feel when I walk in the American streets today.”