Chelsea Manning

Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning, December 17, 1987) is an American activist and whistleblower. She is a former United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents. She was imprisoned from 2010 until 2017, when President Barack Obama commuted her sentence. A trans woman, Manning said in 2013 that she had had a female gender identity since childhood and wanted to be known as Chelsea Manning.

Assigned in 2009 as an intelligence analyst to an Army unit in Iraq, Manning had access to classified databases. In early 2010, she leaked classified information to WikiLeaks and confided this to Adrian Lamo, an online acquaintance. Lamo indirectly informed the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, and Manning was arrested in May 2010. The material included videos of the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 251,287 US diplomatic cables; and 482,832 Army reports that came to be known as the "Iraq War Logs" and "Afghan War Diary". WikiLeaks and its media partners published the material between April 2010 and April 2011.

Manning was charged with 22 offenses, including aiding the enemy, which was the most serious charge and could have resulted in a death sentence. She was held at the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico, in Virginia, from July 2010 to April 2011, under prevention-of-injury status—which entailed de facto solitary confinement and other restrictions that caused domestic and international concern—before being transferred to the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she could interact with other detainees. In February 2013, she pleaded guilty to 10 of the charges. The trial on the remaining charges began on June 3, 2013, and on July 30, she was convicted of 17 of the original charges and amended versions of four others, but acquitted of aiding the enemy. She was sentenced to 35 years at the maximum-security US Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. On January 17, 2017, Obama commuted Manning's sentence to the nearly seven years of confinement dating from her arrest in 2010. Since her release, Manning has made her living through speaking engagements.

In 2018, Manning challenged incumbent senator Ben Cardin for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate election in her home state of Maryland. She received 6.1% of the vote; Cardin won renomination with 79.2%.

From March 8, 2019, to March 12, 2020, Manning was jailed for contempt and fined $256,000 for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Background

Early life

Born in 1987 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Manning is the second child of Susan Fox, who is Welsh, and Brian Manning, an American. Brian had joined the United States Navy in 1974, at age 19, and served five years as an intelligence analyst. He met Susan while stationed in Wales at RAF Brawdy. Manning has an older sister. The couple returned to the U.S. in 1979, settling first in California. After moving near Crescent, Oklahoma, they bought a house with five acres of land, where they kept pigs and chickens.

Manning's sister told the court-martial that both their parents were alcoholics, and that their mother drank continually while pregnant with Chelsea. Captain David Moulton, a Navy psychiatrist, told the court that Manning's facial features showed signs of fetal alcohol syndrome. The sister became Manning's principal caregiver, waking at night to prepare the baby's bottle. The court heard that Manning was fed only milk and baby food until the age of two. As an adult she reached 5 ft 2 in (1.57 m) and weighed around 105 pounds (48 kg).

Manning's father took a job as an information technology (IT) manager for a rental car agency, The Hertz Corporation, which required travel. The family lived several miles out of town, and Manning's mother was unable to drive. She spent her days drinking, while Manning was left largely to herself playing with Lego toys or on the computer. Brian stocked up on food before his trips and left signed checks that the sister mailed to pay the bills. A neighbor said that whenever Manning's elementary school went on field trips, she would give her own son extra food or money so he could make sure Manning had something to eat. Friends and neighbors considered the Mannings a troubled family.

Parents' divorce, move to Wales

As a child, Manning was opinionated about the intersection of religion and politics. For example, she invariably remained silent during the part of the Pledge of Allegiance that makes reference to God.

In a 2011 interview, Manning's father said, "People need to understand that he's a young man that had a happy life growing up." He also said that Manning excelled at the saxophone, science, and computers, and created a website at the age of 10. Manning learned how to use PowerPoint, won the grand prize three years in a row at the local science fair, and in sixth grade, took top prize at a statewide quiz bowl.

A childhood friend of Manning's, speaking about a conversation they had when Manning was 13, said: "he told me he was gay". The friend also said that Manning's home life was not good and that her father was very controlling. Around this time, Manning's parents divorced. She and her mother, Susan, moved out of the house to a rented apartment in Crescent, Oklahoma. Susan's instability continued, and in 1998 she attempted suicide; Manning's sister drove their mother to the hospital, with the 11-year-old Manning sitting in the back of the car trying to make sure their mother was still breathing.

Manning's father remarried in 2000, the same year as his divorce. His new wife, also named Susan, had a son from a previous relationship. When the son changed his surname to Manning too, Chelsea felt rejected, telling her mother, "I'm nobody now, Mom."

In November 2001, aged 14, Manning and her mother left the U.S., moving to Haverfordwest, Wales, where her mother had family. Manning attended the town's Tasker Milward secondary school. A school friend there told Ed Caesar for The Sunday Times that Manning's personality was "unique, extremely unique. Very quirky, very opinionated, very political, very clever, very articulate." Manning's interest in computers continued, and in 2003, she and a friend, James Kirkpatrick, set up an online message board, angeldyne.com, that offered games and music downloads.

The only American at her school, and viewed as effeminate, Manning was bullied. In Oklahoma, she had come out to a few friends as gay, but was not open about it at school in Wales. The students frequently mocked her accent. Once, they abandoned her during a camping trip. Her aunt told The Washington Post that Manning had awoken to an empty campsite after the other campers had left without her.

Return to the U.S.

After completing high school in 2005 at age 17 and fearing her mother was becoming too ill to cope, Manning returned to the U.S. She moved in with her father, then living in Oklahoma City with his second wife and her child. Manning landed employment as a developer for the software company Zoto. She was apparently happy there, but was let go after four months. Her boss told The Washington Post that on a few occasions Manning had "just locked up" and would simply sit and stare, and in the end, communication became too difficult. The boss told the newspaper that "nobody's been taking care of this kid for a really long time".

By then, Manning was living as an openly gay man. Her relationship with her father was apparently good, but there were problems between Manning and her stepmother. In March 2006, Manning reportedly threatened her stepmother with a knife during an argument about Manning's failure to get another job; her stepmother called the police, and Manning was asked to leave the house. Manning drove to Tulsa in a pickup truck her father had given her. At first she slept in it, before moving in with a friend from school. The two got jobs at Incredible Pizza in April. Manning moved on to Chicago before running out of money and again having nowhere to stay. Her mother arranged for Brian's sister, Debra, a lawyer in Potomac, Maryland, to take Manning in. American journalist and Manning biographer Denver Nicks wrote that the 15 months Manning spent with her aunt were among the stablest of her life. Manning had a boyfriend, took several low-paid jobs, and spent a semester studying history and English at Montgomery College but left after failing an exam.

Military service

Enlisting

Manning's father spent weeks in 2007 asking her to consider joining the Army. Hoping to gain a college education through the G.I. Bill, and perhaps to study for a PhD in physics, she enlisted in September that year. She told her Army supervisor later that she had also hoped joining such a masculine environment would resolve her gender dysphoria.