WHISTLE BLOWER SEEKS REPRIEVE
Chelsea Manning hopes Obama will show mercy
Most mornings at 4.30am, half an hour before the “first call” awakens inmates at the Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas, an alarm rings within an 7.5-square-metre cell. Inmate 89289, slightly built with short hair, rises to apply make-up and don female undergarments and a brown uniform before the still-slumbering men in the adjacent cells stir.
That is the routine for Chelsea Manning, America’s most famous convicted leaker and the prison’s most unusual inmate. She is serving the longest sentence ever imposed for disclosing government secrets — 35 years — and her status as a celebrity of sorts and an incarcerated transgender woman presents continuing difficulties for the military.
During the day, Manning, who was an army intelligence analyst known as Bradley Manning when she disclosed archives of secret military and diplomatic files to WikiLeaks in 2010, builds picture frames and furniture in the prison wood shop. In the evenings, before the 10.05pm lockdown, she reads through streams of letters, including from anti-secrecy enthusiasts who view her as a whistleblower.
“I am always busy. I have a backlog of things to do: legal, administrative, press inquiries, and writing — lots of writing,” Manning wrote in response to questions submitted by The Times because the army does not permit her to speak directly to journalists. “Being me is a full-time job.”
But Manning, who is struggling to transition to life as a woman while enduring a bleak existence at a male military prison, has asked President Barack Obama to commute the remainder of her sentence before he leaves office next week. She poses particular challenges as a prisoner, with a volunteer support network that helps bring global attention to her treatment, fragile mental state — she twice tried to commit suicide in 2016 — and need for treatment that the military has no experience providing.
Her request comes as the world is again focused on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, whom her leaks made famous.
The organisation last year published Clinton campaign emails, obtained through hacking, as part of what US intelligence officials claim was a covert Russian operation aimed at tilting the election to president-elect Donald Trump. (Manning declined to discuss WikiLeaks, saying only that her decision to send documents to it “was neither an endorsement nor an affiliation.”) It also comes at a time of flux in the military’s policies on gender identity. Last June, the Obama administration rescinded a ban on transgender people serving in the military and began overhauling its practices, which eventually would include providing gender reassignment surgery. But Mr Trump has derided the lifting of the ban as “politically correct”, raising the possibility that his administration may roll back the changes.
The White House declined to comment on Manning’s commutation request. The army declined to comment about her situation at Fort Leavenworth, citing privacy laws.
A military prosecutor had called Manning a “traitor” at her 2013 court-martial, and officials have said the disclosures disrupted government operations and put people at risk, although prosecutors did not claim anyone was killed because of them.
In a statement accompanying her petition asking Obama to reduce her sentence to the nearly seven years she already has served, Manning, now 29, said she never intended to hurt anyone and pleaded for a chance to start her life over.
“I need help,” she wrote. “I am living through a cycle of anxiety, anger, hopelessness, loss, and depression. I cannot focus. I cannot sleep. I attempted to take my own life.”
On Aug 22, 2013, the day after her sentencing for sending documents to WikiLeaks, Manning’s lawyer read a statement on the Today show announcing that she was female, wanted to be called “Chelsea” rather than “Bradley” and would seek cross-sex hormone therapy.
To observers of her court-martial, this was no surprise. Her motivation for leaking hundreds of thousands of files she had copied from a classified computer network while serving in Iraq, as she wrote at the time, was hope that they would spark “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.” But at her trial, she apologised and noted that she was “dealing with a lot of issues” when she had made that decision.
Testimony showed that she had been in a mental and emotional crisis as she came to grips, in the stress of a war zone, with the fact that she was not merely gay, as she had believed while growing up in Oklahoma, but had gender dysphoria — a disconnect between one’s gender identity and sex assigned at birth. In the months before her leaks and May 2010 arrest, she had been behaving erratically and emailed a picture of herself wearing a woman’s wig to her supervisor.
The military sent Manning to serve out her sentence as a medium-security inmate at the Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks, its main prison for male inmates.
Court documents show that Manning has had counselling sessions with a prison psychologist, Dr. Ellen Galloway, at least once a week, and military authorities have over time allowed her access to some treatments doctors prescribed for her gender dysphoria, in part because of pressure from a lawsuit filed by Chase Strangio, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, in September 2014.
She can now wear female prison undergarments, including a sports bra, and “subdued cosmetics”. In early 2015, she was permitted to get speech therapy to feminise the tone and pitch of her voice and began cross-sex hormone therapy prescribed, Mr Strangio said, by an endocrinologist brought in from the military’s Walter Reed hospital. Since then, Manning wrote, she has developed breasts and curvier hips. “There have been significant changes since I’ve been taking the hormones, and I am happy with them,” she said.
But, citing security risks, the military rejected the recommendation of an outside psychologist who said she should be permitted to further feminise her appearance by growing her hair longer than male military standards. Mr Strangio is helping her challenge that restriction.
“Plaintiff feels like a freak and a weirdo — not because having short hair makes a person less of a woman — but because for her, it undermines specifically recommended treatment and sends the message to everyone that she is not a ‘real’ woman,” he wrote in a court filing.
“She is getting hormones, but it sounds like the inability to socially transition, or to have surgery, could be contributing to suicidality — especially when she is looking at decades in prison and thus a certain hopelessness about whether that might ever be available for her,” said Dan Karasic, a University of California psychiatrist; he cautioned that he had not examined her.
The military turned down a request by reporters to visit the facility. But an army spokesman, Wayne Hall, provided written answers from the Army Corrections Command to questions, from which a sketch of her environment emerged.
Manning’s cell, like others at Fort Leavenworth, contains a bed, toilet, sink, locker, storage bin, chair and desk, according to the army.
She showers in a nearby communal bathroom with individual stalls. She has no access to the internet, but says she receives “at least a couple hundred pieces of mail every week.”
The army does not permit her to see people who did not know her before her incarceration, so she is not allowed to meet with a handful of volunteers who have formed an informal network of supporters, but she calls one of them daily.
A volunteer who relayed questions from The Times to her asked not to be named, citing security concerns.
Manning said she recently finished reading Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, a book about artificial intelligence by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, and 1Q84, a dystopian novel by Haruki Murakami.
She is interested in efforts to develop stronger encryption and has been “going through” the Princeton Companion to Mathematics.
She also said she reads women’s athletic, fashion and lifestyle magazines like Shape, Vogue, Vanity Fair
and Cosmopolitan.
“I am not asking for a pardon of my conviction. I understand that the various collateral consequences of the court-martial conviction will stay on my record forever,” she wrote in her commutation application.
“I am merely asking for a first chance to live my life outside the USDB as the person I was born to be.”