PVt. Chelsea Manning, formerly named Bradley, was convicted last year of sending classified documents to anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks

For the first time since she was sentenced to 35 years in prison for the leak, Manning writes at length in an opinion column published by The New York Times on Sunday.

Manning, who was formerly known as Bradley, says that as the U.S. considers renewed military action in Iraq, she thinks some of the issues she exposed have yet to be addressed.

Mainly, Manning writes about the lack of information in the United States. Manning says that even back in 2010, she saw a complicated reality on the ground, while the U.S. media painted a rosy picture of successful elections.

Manning writes:

"If you were following the news during the March 2010 elections in Iraq, you might remember that the American press was flooded with stories declaring the elections a success, complete with upbeat anecdotes and photographs of Iraqi women proudly displaying their ink-stained fingers. The subtext was that United States military operations had succeeded in creating a stable and democratic Iraq.

"Those of us stationed there were acutely aware of a more complicated reality.

"Military and diplomatic reports coming across my desk detailed a brutal crackdown against political dissidents by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and federal police, on behalf of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Detainees were often tortured, or even killed.

"Early that year, I received orders to investigate 15 individuals whom the federal police had arrested on suspicion of printing 'anti-Iraqi literature.' I learned that these individuals had absolutely no ties to terrorism; they were publishing a scholarly critique of Mr. Maliki's administration. I forwarded this finding to the officer in command in eastern Baghdad. He responded that he didn't need this information; instead, I should assist the federal police in locating more 'anti-Iraqi' print shops."

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Chelsea Manning Says She Leaked Classified Info Out Of Love For Country

By Faith Karimi, CNN

updated 12:07 PM EDT, Sun June 15, 2014

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(CNN) -- A U.S. soldier imprisoned for leaking documents to WikiLeaks broke her silence in a fiery editorial accusing the United States of lying about Iraq.

Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 for leaking 750,000 pages of classified documents to the anti-secrecy group.

At the time, Manning went by the first name Bradley, but later announced the desire to live as a woman and be known as Chelsea.

Manning has stayed out of the limelight since the conviction, which spared the former intelligence analyst from the most serious charge of aiding the enemy.

But she was back Saturday, with an opinion piece titled 'The Fog Machine of War" in The New York Times. In it, she accuses the U.S. media of looking the other way when chaos and corruption reigned in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan," Manning wrote.

"I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance."

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Chelsea Manning breaks silence, accuses U.S. of lying on ...

Chelsea Manning broke her silence on Sunday for the first time since being sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.

The former military intelligence analyst was convicted in August 2013 after giving the anti-secrecy website hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military and diplomatic videos, accounts and documents. Until now, she has stayed relatively quiet about her situation.

In an opinion piece in the New York Times on Sunday, Manning went after the U.S. military and media for hiding information from the American people. Manning, formerly known as Bradley, accused the military of manipulating media coverage surrounding the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and attacked the limitations placed on journalists' ability to cover wars.

Read Manning's entire opinion piece here.

Manning said she is speaking out because the same "concerns" which led her to leak the documents in 2010 have still "not been resolved."

"I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance," she wrote.

Manning focused on media coverage of the 2010 elections in Iraq, and said that journalists greatly misrepresented the reality of the political situation. She wrote that while working as an analyst in Iraq, she became very aware of the major differences between the American media reports and the military and diplomatic reports she was reading. The information given to the public was "flooded with foggy speculation and simplifications," Manning noted.

"I was shocked by our militarys complicity in the corruption of that election," she wrote. "Yet these deeply troubling details flew under the American medias radar."

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Chelsea Manning Speaks Out, Accuses U.S. Of Manipulating ...

The disgraced former soldier convicted of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks warned, in a lengthy article penned from prison, that the current unrest in Iraq is the result a deeply flawed media strategy undertaken by the U.S. government and accused the White House of continuing to lie about political developments in the war-torn country.

In a New York Times editorial published Sunday, Chelsea Manning, the transgender ex-intelligence analyst who passed on a trove of sensitive state secrets for public dissemination, criticized the way the U.S. has controlled the media coverage of its involvement in Iraq, blaming the White House for willfully distorting the complicated, and now violent, reality on the ground.

I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance, wrote Chelsea Manning, who was known as Bradley before announcing her gender transition and changing her name to Chelsea last August.

Manning alleged that the U.S. government bombarded media outlets during the March 2010 elections in Iraq with success stories complete with upbeat anecdotes and optimistic photographs while, in fact, there was a far more complicated reality on the ground.

Military and diplomatic reports coming across my desk detailed a brutal crackdown against political dissidents by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and federal police, on behalf of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Detainees were often tortured, or even killed, wrote Manning, who went on to detail orders she received while stationed in the country to investigate anti-Iraqi print shops she said he found to have no ties to terrorism.

I was shocked by our militarys complicity in the corruption of that election. Yet these deeply troubling details flew under the American medias radar, Manning, who worked as an intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2009 and 2010, wrote.

Manning, who was sentenced to 35 years in prison last August for six Espionage Act violations and 14 other offenses for leaking more than 700,000 secret military and U.S. State Department documents, blamed the lapse on the militarys selection process for embedding journalists.

In all of Iraq, which contained 31 million people and 117,000 United States troops, no more than a dozen American journalists were covering military operations, Manning wrote, claiming that the discrepancy was not a coincidence.

The process of limiting press access to a conflict begins when a reporter applies for embed status. All reporters are carefully vetted by military public affairs officials. This system is far from unbiased. Unsurprisingly, reporters who have established relationships with the military are more likely to be granted access, she wrote.

Less well known is that journalists whom military contractors rate as likely to produce favorable coverage, based on their past reporting, also get preference, she added. This outsourced favorability rating assigned to each applicant is used to screen out those judged likely to produce critical coverage.

Excerpt from:
Chelsea Manning blames renewed violence in Iraq on U.S ...

TIME U.S. Military

Chelsea Manning, the former military intelligence analyst who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking classified information in 2010, has broken her silence to rail against a lack of military transparency in a New York Times editorial.

In the article, Manning calls for a new government body to oversee embedded journalists press credentials and for a quicker declassification of the militarys Significant Activity Reports, which detail the facts of attacks and casualties and could aid reporters coverage of the conflict.

I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance, Manning writes.

The soldier formerly known as Bradley Manning was arrested in 2010 on several charges, including aiding the enemy, after leaking reams of intelligence to Wikileaks earlier that year. The day after she was sentenced to 35 years in prison, Manning whom many consider a traitor to her country came out as a transgender woman and announced she would live her life as Chelsea Manning.

Manning points to journalists coverage of the March 2010 elections in Iraq, which suggested that United States military operations had succeeded in establishing democracy, though on-the-ground reports she had access to revealed a crackdown against political dissidents in the country during that time.

Manning was also appalled by the disparity between daily media coverage of the war back home and the daily military intelligence reports she read during her time as an analyst.

How could top-level decision makers say that the American public, or even Congress, supported the conflict when they didnt have half the story?

She writes that the system of approving and embedding reporters is deeply flawed and makes it difficult for journalists to report the news accurately. Manning claims the military has a history of granting access to reporters it thinks will write favorable coverage. Policies in place allow for immediate termination of reporters access, which Manning alleges was has been used as punishment for critical coverage, like when Michael Hastings was denied access following his reporting on Gen. Stanley A. McChrystals critical comments on the Obama administration.

Improving media access to this crucial aspect of our national life where America has committed the men and women of its armed services would be a powerful step toward re-establishing trust between voters and officials, she writes.

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Chelsea Manning Writes Op-Ed Criticizing Military Secrecy ...