Manning, Chelsea Elizabeth (1987-…), is a former United States Army intelligence analyst who was convicted of espionage. She was accused of leaking (making public) more than 700,000 classified (secret) military documents to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is an organization that publishes secret government and business material on the internet. The Manning incident was one of the biggest security breaches in U.S. history.
Chelsea Manning was born Bradley Edward Manning on Dec. 17, 1987, in Crescent, Oklahoma. Her father was a U.S. Navy intelligence officer. Manning joined the Army in 2007 and served as an intelligence analyst with the rank of private first class. She was trained extensively on safeguarding sensitive military information and was allowed access to classified documents. While deployed in Iraq in 2009 and 2010, Manning stole hundreds of thousands of secret files from government computers and passed them to WikiLeaks. The materials included files on terrorist detainees, combat logs, diplomatic cables, and videos. One of Manning’s leaks was a 2007 video of a U.S. air strike that killed several Iraqi civilians.
A computer hacker to whom Manning had confessed on the internet turned the Army private in to authorities. Manning then was arrested and detained in Iraq in 2010. In July 2013, she was convicted in a court-martial (military court) of six counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, as well as theft and fraud charges. However, she was acquitted of the most serious charge, aiding the enemy. Manning originally had claimed that she leaked the documents to spark a public debate about the role of the U.S. military and U.S. foreign policy. However, at her court-martial, defense lawyers argued that the Army private was experiencing a gender identity crisis when the soldier turned over the classified materials to WikiLeaks. Manning later apologized for committing acts that “hurt the United States.”
In August 2013, a military judge sentenced Manning to 35 years in prison. The day after the sentencing, Manning came out as a transgender woman. Transgender is a term for individuals whose identity or self-expression does not match their assigned gender. A judge approved Manning’s legal name change from Bradley Edward to Chelsea Elizabeth in 2014. In 2015, the Army agreed to provide hormone therapy for Manning as part of her gender transition.
In 2017, U.S. President Barack Obama commuted (reduced) Manning’s 35-year prison sentence to time served, and she was released. Manning had served nearly seven years, mostly in an all-male military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Manning was jailed again in 2019 after refusing to testify before a grand jury regarding WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. She was released in 2020. Manning’s memoir README.txt was published in 2022.
