On April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks published the first of several classified files leaked by Chelsea Manning, an Army intelligence analyst deployed in Iraq. The classified U.S. military video titled “Collateral Murder” shows a helicopter airstrike on Baghdad, with soldiers laughing and cursing as unarmed Iraqi civilians and journalists were gunned down. The video was part of what became known as the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary, nearly 750,000 classified documents released by Manning, in what is one of the largest disclosures of classified documents in U.S. history. Chelsea Manning quickly became the most well-known whistleblower around the world.
Manning said,
Chelsea Manning in 2018. Source: Public domain
These were real people in real places, not just dots on a map. These are people’s lives and emotions. We’re in their home . . . I couldn’t separate my work from my emotions anymore.
As more leaks followed, prominent newspapers and magazines partnered with WikiLeaks to analyze and publicize the files, prompting widespread international criticism of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Convicted of violating the Espionage Act, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in military prison. The day of her sentencing, Manning released a statement that she was trans and identified as a female. While in prison, she advocated for trans rights and sued the government in order to receive gender-affirming care. She spent over seven years in prison before her sentence was commuted by outgoing President Barack Obama in 2017.
For more than a year, in 2019 and 2020, Manning was jailed again, this time as a Grand Jury resistor refusing to testify before a Grand Jury investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Her prison experiences are shared in the book Rattling the Cages.
When asked about Manning’s Grand Jury resistance, famed Vietnam era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers, said of Manning,
Manning knowingly risked her freedom then for truth-telling and actually suffered seven-and-a-half years in prison. I regard her as an American hero, and I admire her for what she is doing, risking, and enduring right now.
Additional Resources
README.txt: A Memoir by Chelsea Manning
Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling by Lida Maxwell
The Chelsea Manning Case: A Timeline, compiled by the ACLU
The Real Life of Chelsea Manning: The Whistleblower’s New Memoir Chronicles Her Journey From Queer Teenager to Enemy of the State by Natasha Lennard (Lux Magazine)
Chelsea Manning: We Got This by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan (Truthdig)
Learn more about Grand Juries at the Grand Jury Resistance Project and listen to the Ex-Worker podcast episode Surviving a Grand Jury.
Watch an interview of journalist and author Baynard Woods and Chelsea Manning on The Real News Network below, followed by an interview of Chelsea with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!.
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