Bradley Manning Admits Providing Files to WikiLeaks – The …

He said he then tried to reach out to The New York Times by calling a phone number for the newspapers public editor an ombudsman who is not part of the newsroom and leaving a voice mail message that was not returned.

In January 2010, around the time when Mr. Manning called the public editors line, voice mail messages were checked by Michael McElroy, the assistant to Clark Hoyt, then the public editor. Both Mr. Hoyt, now the editor at large at Bloomberg News, and Mr. McElroy, now a staff editor at The Times, said on Thursday that they had no recollection of hearing such a message.

We got hundreds of calls a week, and I tried to go through them all, Mr. McElroy said. If Id heard something like that, I certainly hope I would have flagged it immediately.

Private Manning eventually decided to release the information by uploading it to WikiLeaks. To do it, he said, he used a broadband connection at a Barnes & Noble store because his aunts house in a Maryland suburb, where he was staying, had lost its Internet connection in a snowstorm.

In February 2010, after he returned to Iraq, Private Manning sent more files to WikiLeaks, including a helicopter gunship video of a 2007 episode in Iraq in which American forces killed a group of men, including two Reuters journalists, and then fired again on a van that pulled up to help the victims.

Private Manning said the video troubled him, both because of the shooting of the second group of people, who were not a threat but merely good Samaritans, and because of what he described as the seemingly delightful blood lust expressed by the airmen in the recording. He also learned that Reuters had been seeking the video without success.

Private Manning said he copied the files from the secure network onto disks, which he took back to his quarters and transferred to his personal laptop before uploading them to WikiLeaks initially through its Web site, and later using a directory the group designated for him on a cloud drop box server.

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Bradley Manning: Is There Anyone More Normal? – reason.com

Joanne McNeil (an occasional Reason contributor)reports from the Bradley Manning trial for Jacobin magazine, with some interesting observations, starting with the fact that he seems to have a lot of older fans, with:

a third of the people attending the trial as spectators could remember the bombing of Pearl Harbor as clearly as 9-11. And quite a number more looked like retired boomers. Has AARP thrown its weight behind hacktivist causes? Were they cypherpunks in elaborate disguise?

I started talking with a retired woman who drove down from Pennsylvania. I asked how she felt about the prosecution's depiction of WikiLeaks as a terrorist abettor. "Well, I'm not as concerned with that," she said. "I'm here because they were torturing that kid."

McNeil notes that this trial, of great importance to citizens' and the press' relationship with government and government crimes, isn't getting the attention it deserves:

How many people even know the trial is happening? Manning washeld for three years without a trial.That is plenty of time for the public to mistakenly assume there was already a court decision and sentencing. And why did they try this case at all? Manning already pled guilty to 10 charges and faces up to 20 years. The remaining charges are bizarrely exaggerated. Usingflimsy circumstantial evidence, the government is trying to argue that publishing documents on the internet assists terrorists. And for that they could lock him away for life.

Theprosecutors are in their early 30s nominally "digital natives" and should know better. "Do you know what WGet is?" they interrogate a witness, as if it is malicious spyware and not an everyday command line program. The government is capitalizing on asymmetric tech literacy and the failure of language when old laws are applied to the internet. At the peak of this absurdity: WikiLeaks cables are still formallyclassified, so despite being readily available to anyone with internet, closed sessions are required to discuss them.

Perhaps you heard theaudio of Bradley Manning's court statementlast November. That was leaked. No other recordings or visuals have come out of the trial, with the exception ofcourtroom sketches. Now imagine if there were a livestream. And imagine if everyone had tuned in to watchYochai Benkler's gripping expert witness testimonyon July 10th. He argued on behalf of the decentralization of media in the digital age, the blurred lines between activist and journalist, and that WikiLeaks was "providing a discrete but critical component of what in the past was always integrated in a single organization.".

Why did the prosecution ramp up charges against Manning? "Aiding the enemy" might have resulted in the death penalty. The answer came from Benkler under cross-examination. Summarizing an article he wrote, he explained in court, "it's very hard to suppress information once it's on WikiLeaks and that the core target needs to be on trust as the center of gravity. In other words, to undermine the concept that WikiLeaks is a place where a leaker can go and trust that they won't be revealed. So in order to prevent this distributed leaking, it's necessary to increase the fear, as it were, or the constraint on potential leakers."

That's justice in America: increasing the fear that anyone might help American citizens or journalists might have a chance of learning what's being done in our names, on our dimes.

Part of the public campaign against Manning is based on the notion that he, well, he just ain't right:

Manning was tortured in part because he signed a few letters from the brig as "Breanna Elizabeth." Marine Corps Master Sgt. Craig Blenis defended his cruelty in a December pre-trial hearing. Coombs asked why the marine thought Manning's gender dysphoria should factor into his"prevention of Injury"status. Blenis answered because"that's not normal, sir."

But it is normal. Manning's gender identity is as normal as his computer use. Using WGet, believing WikiLeaks to be a reputable news source in 2010, listening to Lady Gaga, identifying as a gender different from your assigned sex this is all normal. It just might take another generation to see this. What is out of the ordinary about Pfc Bradley Manning is his extraordinary courage.

Reason.TV was live from the Manning trial a few weeks ago:

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Bradley Manning: Is There Anyone More Normal? - reason.com

Bradley Manning Awaits Armys Decision on Whether to Court …

The pretrial hearing for Bradley Manning ended in a packed courtroom at Fort Meade with dramatic closing arguments Thursday morning, including a strong case from the prosecution with shocking, newly public chat logs between Manning and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Confronted with overwhelming evidence, the defense questioned what it called the governments overreaction and called for a reduction of the charges Manning faces.

Mannings lead attorney, David Coombs, opened the morning by directly addressing Lt. Col. Paul Almanza, the officer presiding over the hearing, to determine if Private Manning will be court-martialed and, if so, on what charges. Youre in a unique position here, Coombs said, to give the United States government something the United States government needs: a reality check. Coombs asked the investigating officer presiding to reduce Mannings 22 charges to three and to remove his most serious charge, aiding the enemy.

Coombs asserted that the United States has overreacted. The government has overcharged in this case, he said, to strong-arm a plea from my client. The maximum sentence for all but one of Mannings charges adds up to 150 yearsaiding the enemy carries a maximum penalty of death or life without the possibility of parole.

Coombs described Mannings long struggle with his gender identity, reading from an email Manning sent to a superior officer weeks before his arrest. His gender crisis, Manning wrote, makes my entire life feel like a bad dream that wont end ... Everyones concerned about me, and everyones afraid of me. And Im sorry, he wrote. Coombs denounced Mannings superiors for failing to respond to his clients pleas for help. It is the units lack of response to that which also smacks in the face of justice, he said.

The attorney went on to question the damage done by the documents release. What was the result of these leaks? he asked, adding it would have been nice if the original classifying authorities and the officials who claimed such harm had been done had testified, an allusion to the decision to deny Coombs most of the witnesses he requested. They are reinforcing the Chicken Little response from the U.S. military, he said.

But in the end, Coombs insisted, the leak hurt no one. It hasnt caused harm. If anything it has helped, he said. The sky is not falling. The sky is not falling. And the sky will not fall. Coombs highlighted Mannings youth and idealism. In your early 20s you believe you can change the world, he said. In your early 20s you believe. When the president of the United States says Yes, we can, you believe that.

Coombs closed his oratory with a soaring appeal to conscience. An individual who breaks a law and they do so because the law is unjust, and they risk jail to arouse the public, Coombs said, paraphrasing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, theyre really expressing the very highest respect for the law. Coombs ended by quoting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

In a fast-paced presentation aided by PowerPoint, Capt. Ashden Fein, lead attorney representing the government, methodically laid out its case against Private Manning. Fein described Manning as a trusted and well-trained soldier who betrayed his country. He used that training to defy our trust, to indiscriminately and systematically harm the United States.

The prosecution went through the evidence it had presented throughout the trial, illustrating step by step how, it says, Manning used his working hours in Iraq to download immense amounts of classified information, which he then transferred to his personal computer and uploaded to WikiLeaks. Fein hammered on Mannings betrayal, noting that he signed six nondisclosure agreements. Using a PowerPoint presentation on operational security that Manning himself had created as a student at Army intelligence school, Fein laid out the multiple dangers posed by spilling classified information.

In a dramatic turn, the prosecution showed chat logs of conversations between two people it asserted (with forensic evidence) were Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, allowing the logs to flash briefly on a screen for the benefit of the gallery.

Anyway, Im throwing everything Ive got on JTF Gitmo at you know. Should take a while to get up though, said the user Nobody, presumed to be Manning.

OK, great, said Nathaniel Frank, alleged to be Julian Assange.

Upload is at about 36 PCT.

ETA? asked Assange.

Eleven to twelve hours Im guessing since its been going six already.

The government also presented chats in which Assange appears to offer assistance to Manning in cracking a logon password to allow him to search anonymously on a computer.

Any good at LM hash cracking? asked Manning.

Yes, said Assange. We have rainbow tables for LM.

[Note: Chat logs appeared only briefly on a screen and remain, like other evidence and filings in the military proceeding, unreleased to the public. Logs as they appear in this and other articles are the result of collaborative note taking by journalists in the courtroom and those watching proceedings via live feed.]

Fein closed his statement with a video statement from Adam Gadahn, also known as Azzam al-Amriki, an American-born al Qaeda spokesperson, discussing the Collateral Murder video and the State Department cables Manning stands accused of leaking. Fein also alluded to evidence that an enemy of the United States has, or had, the CIDNE Afghanistan database Manning allegedly leaked, known to most of the world as the raw material of WikiLeakss Afghan War Diary.

This information, Fein said, is accessible to all enemies of the United States with Internet access. Fein insisted that Manning had received the training to know better than to leak classified information. He used that training to betray our trust, he said.

The investigating officer who presided over the hearing was Lt. Col. Paul Almanza, an officer in the Army reserve and a Department of Justice attorney until days before the hearing began. Almanza has a nonbinding deadline of Jan. 16 to issue his report announcing what charges, if any, will be brought against Manning in a court martial.

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Bradley Manning Awaits Armys Decision on Whether to Court ...

Do you think Bradley Manning being stripped naked is a …

He is not being tortured. He made comments about killing himself so the guards took away anything that he could use to do it so he can stand trial for leaking sensitive information that humiliated the United States and put thousands of lives in danger.

Does he deserve it? No, he deserves much worse. He sold out his nation because he was "confused" over being a homosexual in the Army and his transvestite boyfriend told him to do it. Is it ethical? Its just as ethical as illegally copying classified files and then sending them to a site that published them on the internet.

As for the Army, this turd is lucky that he is still alive. It says leaps and bounds about the Army that he is just being put through a little hard time rather than being beaten on an hourly basis for the rest of his life, or being be-headed with a dull knife.

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Do you think Bradley Manning being stripped naked is a ...

Bradley Manning court-martial starts: key points in the …

The court-martial of US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning for the largest leak of classified documents in US history will hinge on whether he aided the enemy and violated the 1917 Espionage Act charges that some legal analysts say the Obama administration could have trouble proving.

Manning, whose trial begins Monday, is accused of passing more than 700,000 government and military documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. The polarizing figure, called a whistle-blowing hero by supporters and traitor by opponents, has been in detention since his arrest in Iraq in May 2010.

Manning faces more than 20 charges, including violating the Espionage Act and a military charge of aiding the enemy. If convicted, he could be sentenced to prison for life without parole.

In February during pretrial hearings, Manning admitted to 10 charges. He told military judge Army Col. Denise Lind he leaked the material to expose the American military's "blood lust" and disregard for human life in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said he did not believe the information would harm the United States and he wanted to start a debate on the role of the military and foreign policy.

The judge accepted his guilty plea to reduced charges for those charges, but prosecutors did not and moved forward with a court-martial.

Manning chose to have his court-martial heard by a judge instead of a jury. It is expected to run all summer. The case is the most high profile in a string of leak prosecutions by the Obama administration, which has come under criticism for its crackdown on leakers. The six prosecutions since Barack Obama took office is more than in all other presidencies combined.

The governments decision to proceed with the two most serious charges even after Manning admitted guilt took some legal analysts by surprise.

Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justices Liberty and National Security Program, told The Washington Post that Mannings leaks were reckless and a data dump. But he is not an enemy of the state and putting him behind bars for life is overreaching, she said.

First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams told The Wall Street Journal, His conduct in my view was neither lawful nor admirable, but the decision to persist in this prosecution seems unduly severe.

On the other side, prosecutors have said Manning must be held accountable: Private First Class Manning was a US analyst who we trained and trusted to use multiple intelligence systems ... and he used that training to defy our trust, said Maj. Ashden Fein, a prosecutor in the case, in one pretrial hearing.

Manning, he said, knowingly engaged in a six-month-long criminal enterprise of harvesting classified information to send to WikiLeaks, while knowing and understanding that enemies would have access to the information.

Some former prosecutors told The Washington Post it could be difficult to prove intent to harm the US.

A lot of times, you think something is damaging, said Baruch Weiss, a former federal prosecutor and an expert on the Espionage Act, and the reality proves to be otherwise.

But Ms. Goitein said that under a ruling by Lind, prosecutors will have to prove only that Manning had reason to believe that the documents disclosed could be used to harm the US or aid a foreign power. They need not prove that he intended to harm the US.

I suspect that the government can meet this burden on at least some of the counts, Goitein told the Post.

The material that WikiLeaks began publishing in 2010 documented complaints of Iraqi detainee abuses, contained a US tally of civilian deaths in Iraq, and described weak US support for the government of Tunisia a disclosure that Manning supporters said encouraged the popular uprising that ousted the Tunisian president in 2011 and helped trigger the Middle Eastern pro-democracy uprisings known as the Arab Spring.

In pretrial hearings, Manning also acknowledged sending WikiLeaks unclassified video of a 2007 US Apache helicopter attack that killed civilians, including a Reuters photographer. An internal military investigation concluded the troops reasonably mistook the camera equipment for weapons, while WikiLeaks dubbed the video "Collateral Murder."

The release of the cables and video embarrassed the US and its allies. The Obama administration has said it threatened valuable military and diplomatic sources and strained America's relations with other governments, but the specific amount of damage hasn't been publicly revealed and probably won't be during the trial.

Much of the evidence is classified, which means large portions of the trial are likely to be closed to reporters and the public. The judge tested alternatives to closing the courtroom, such as using code words and unclassified summaries, but she said it didn't work.

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About 20 Manning supporters demonstrated Monday morning in the rain outside the visitor gate at Fort Meade in Maryland, where the court-martial is taking place. They waved signs reading "free Bradley Manning" and "protect the truth," while chanting, "What do want? Free Bradley. When do we want it? Now."

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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Bradley Manning court-martial starts: key points in the ...

Intent To Harm At Center Of Bradley Manning’s Trial : NPR

Protesters march during a rally in support of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning outside Fort Meade, Md., on Saturday. Manning, who is scheduled to face a court-martial beginning Monday, is accused of sending hundreds of thousands of classified records to WikiLeaks while working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad. Patrick Semansky/AP hide caption

Protesters march during a rally in support of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning outside Fort Meade, Md., on Saturday. Manning, who is scheduled to face a court-martial beginning Monday, is accused of sending hundreds of thousands of classified records to WikiLeaks while working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad.

In the three years since his arrest, Bradley Manning, the slight Army private first class with close-cropped blond hair and thick military glasses, has become less of a character than a cause.

"Bradley Manning is a very polarizing figure. People either think that he is a hero or they think he's a traitor," says Elizabeth Goitein, who co-directs the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "I actually think that he's somewhere in between."

Manning is accused of one of the biggest leaks of classified information in history. Prosecutors say he downloaded thousands of diplomatic cables and war field reports and sent them to the website WikiLeaks.

Goitein will follow Manning's trial, which begins Monday at a military base in Maryland, for what it says about the government's system for handling secret material.

"I think this case really does illustrate one of the harms of overclassification, which is that when people, day in and day out, who are working with classified information see that there are so many documents that are completely innocuous that are classified, they lose respect for the system," she says.

Manning's supporters say he deserves an award for blowing the whistle on war crimes, civilian casualties and torture. Instead, they say, he was abused by the U.S. military, which held him in solitary confinement for months in a brig in Virginia.

Defense lawyer David Coombs made rare public remarks at a rally last year.

"Brad's treatment at Quantico will forever be etched, I believe, in our nation's history as a disgraceful moment in time," he said.

Bradley Manning is a very polarizing figure. People either think that he is a hero or they think he's a traitor. I actually think that he's somewhere in between.

Elizabeth Goitein, Brennan Center for Justice

Manning has already agreed to plead guilty to 10 lesser criminal charges, but not the most serious offenses including violations of the Espionage Act and aiding the enemy, which carries a possible life sentence.

The government will need to prove Manning had reason to believe the leaks would hurt national security. But Manning is expected to argue that he had no intent to harm anyone.

The case is already one of the longest and most complex in military history, says Eugene Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale.

"The unanswered question is why this train has run so badly off the tracks," he says.

Fidell says the military justice system is supposed to prize speed and efficiency, but the drift in the Manning prosecution and other failings undermine public confidence.

"It's unfolding at a time that may be a tipping point for the military justice system generally," he says. "And what I'm talking about specifically is the widespread consternation and dismay about how the military justice system deals with an entirely unrelated type of criminality, which is sexual assault."

The judge in the Manning case has ruled that some witnesses will testify behind closed doors. The case already has a rap for excessive secrecy, since many court filings have been impossible to view for reporters and Manning's vocal supporters.

One of them is Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who spoke about his frustration at that rally last year.

"It's hard to hear sometimes. You get no access to any of the court documents, none of the court orders, none of the motions filed nothing," he said. "And I'm a lawyer, and I sit in that courtroom and it seems like a completely secret proceeding to me."

The trial is expected to last 12 weeks.

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Intent To Harm At Center Of Bradley Manning's Trial : NPR

Manning Is Acquitted of Aiding the Enemy

FORT MEADE, Md. A military judge on Tuesday found Pfc. Bradley Manning not guilty of aiding the enemy for his release of hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks for publication on the Internet, rejecting the governments unprecedented effort to bring such a charge in a leak case.

But the judge in the court-martial, Col. Denise R. Lind, convicted Private Manning of six counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and most of the other crimes he was charged with. He faces a theoretical maximum sentence of 136 years in prison, although legal experts said the actual term was likely to be much shorter.

While advocates of open government celebrated his acquittal on the most serious charge, the case still appears destined to stand as a fierce warning to any government employee who is tempted to make public vast numbers of secret documents. Private Mannings actions lifted a veil on American military and diplomatic activities around the world, and engendered a broad debate over what information should become public, how the government treats leakers, and what happens to those who see themselves as whistle-blowers.

We always hate to see a government employee who was trying to publicize wrongdoing convicted of a crime, but this case was unusual from the start because of the scope of his release, said Gregg Leslie of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, adding, Whistle-blowers always know they are taking risks, and the more they reveal the bigger the threat is against them.

Colonel Lind said she would issue findings later that would explain her ruling on each of the charges. But she appeared to reject the governments theory that an employee who gives information about national security matters to an organization that publishes it online for the world to see is guilty of aiding the enemy.

The premise of that theory is that the world includes not just ordinary people who might engage in socially valuable debate, but also enemies like Al Qaeda. Critics have said that it is not clear how giving information to WikiLeaks is different for legal purposes from giving it to traditional news organizations that publish online.

Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor who testified in Private Mannings defense, praised the judge for making an extremely important decision that he portrayed as denying the prosecutions effort to launch the most dangerous assault on investigative journalism and the free press in the area of national security that we have seenin decades.

But, he said, the decades of imprisonment that Private Manning could face is still too high a price for any democracy to demand of its whistle-blowers.

The sentencing phase will begin on Wednesday, with more than 20 witnesses scheduled to appear for both the prosecution and the defense. It could last for weeks; there are no sentencing guidelines or minimum sentences in the military justice system. Private Mannings appeals could go on for years, legal experts said.

Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale Law School, said Private Manning would not be sentenced to anywhere near the 136-year maximum because Colonel Lind was likely to collapse some charges so he did not get punished twice for the same underlying conduct.

The case has arisen amid a crackdown by the Obama administration on leaks and a debate about government secrecy. Private Manning is one of seven people to be charged in connection with leaking to the news media during the Obama administration; during all previous administrations, there were three.

The Justice Department recently won an appeals court ruling forcing James Risen, a reporter for The New York Times and an author, to testify in the criminal trial of a former intelligence official accused of being his source. And it has used aggressive tactics in secretly subpoenaing communications records of reporters for Fox News and The Associated Press.

Most reporters watched the proceedings from a closed-circuit feed in a filing center. One who was inside the small courtroom said that Private Manning, 25, appeared relaxed when he entered the room. But as the hour drew near he grew more stoic, and he showed no emotion as he stood while Colonel Lind marched through the litany of charges.

The aiding the enemy charge was the first in the list, and she said not guilty. But she quickly moved into a long list of guilty findings for the bulk of the remaining charges, including six counts of violating the Espionage Act, five of stealing government property, and one violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Each carries up to a 10-year sentence.

Colonel Lind accepted Private Mannings guilty pleas on two lesser counts, one of which involved leaking a video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad. She also found him not guilty of leaking in 2009 a video of an airstrike in Afghanistan; he had admitted leaking it, but said he did so later than the time in the charge.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, called Private Mannings many other convictions a weighty verdict that the prosecution would count as a win, but he argued that the larger significance of the case for open government may be limited, since most leakers do not disclose entire databases.

Months before the trial, Private Manning confessed to being WikiLeaks source for videos of airstrikes in which civilians were killed; incident reports from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars; dossiers on detainees at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba; and about 250,000 diplomatic cables.

Private Manning also pleaded guilty to a lesser version of the charges against him, although that was not part of any bargain with prosecutors. The move was unusual, and it appeared aimed at trying to persuade the judge to view Private Manning as having taken responsibility for his actions, while recasting the trial as a test of whether the government had brought excessive charges in the case.

The government elected to press forward with trying to convict Private Manning of the more serious charges. Prosecutors portrayed him as an anarchist and a traitor who recklessly endangered lives out of a desire to make a splash. The defense portrayed him as a young, nave, but good-intentioned humanist who wanted to prompt debate and change.

Hours before the verdict, about two dozen supporters of Private Manning gathered at the main gate to Fort Meade displaying signs with messages like whistle-blowers keep us honest. After the verdict, his supporters announced a protest rally Tuesday in front of the White House.

But Representatives Mike Rogers of Michigan and C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Republican and Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, praised the verdict.

Justice has been served today, they said in a statement. Pfc. Manning harmed our national security, violated the publics trust, and now stands convicted of multiple serious crimes.

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Manning Is Acquitted of Aiding the Enemy

Leaker Chelsea Manning stuck in jail after Assange arrest

Washington (AFP) - Nine years ago, a 23-year-old US army specialist, deeply troubled by the US war in Iraq and by her own gender identity, rocked the US government by leaking disturbing classified military records to WikiLeaks.

Chelsea Manning spent years in prison for her crime before her sentence was commuted -- but on Friday was again sitting in jail for what her supporters say is an ongoing punitive political vendetta.

Last month, she refused to testify in a secret grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was arrested in London on Thursday on a US indictment linked to their cooperation in 2010 on the leak of secret US records of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In fact, her lawyers point out, the grand jury secretly issued its Assange indictment over one year ago, making Manning's testimony superfluous.

But federal prosecutors have jailed her anyway, with little explanation of why.

The Assange indictment "is further evidence that the government's continued imprisonment of Chelsea for her principled stance against grand jury secrecy is punitive, cruel and unnecessary," her lawyers said.

- Deep divide over Manning -

Manning, now 31, had worked since her release from military prison in 2017 to start a new life, as a civilian and as a woman.

But the US is divided over whether what she did was heroic or traitorous.

She was Bradley Manning when, in 2009, she was sent to Iraq as an army intelligence officer with access to a massive database of US war records and classified diplomatic communications.

Manning was already struggling with gender dysphoria in a military officially closed to gay and transgender soldiers.

Meanwhile, she grew despondent about the ongoing wars, leading her to release the hundreds of thousands of files that made Assange and WikiLeaks famous worldwide.

"I began to become depressed with the situation that we found ourselves increasingly mired in year after year," she said in her 2013 trial.

"If the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information... this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general."

Manning was arrested within weeks after a confidant turned her in. She was thrown into a military prison and held for three years until her trial in 2013.

One day after she was sentenced to 35 years in prison, she announced she was a woman and would go by the name Chelsea.

But until her sentence was commuted in 2017 by president Barack Obama, she endured an ongoing crisis over her gender and attempted suicide twice in prison as she fought for gender reassignment surgery.

- Finding her footing -

After her release, Manning struggled to find her footing, lauded as a spokeswoman for whistleblowers and transgender people, but also spurned over her decision to leak US secrets.

Strong criticism from senior intelligence officials forced Harvard University to rescind a fellowship offer, with CIA chief Mike Pompeo branding her an "American traitor."

In 2018, a half-hearted attempt to run for political office in Maryland failed, but she continued to be celebrated as an important whistleblower.

While everything she did with WikiLeaks in 2010 came out in her trial, in March she was nevertheless ordered to testify again in front of a grand jury, now known to have been investigating Assange.

Manning, a strong critic of the secret panels often used by prosecutors in high-profile cases, said she objected "strenuously" to the subpoena.

"We've seen this power abused countless times to target political speech," she said, making clear that she would be willing to testify in public.

On March 8, the judge ordered her locked up in an Alexandria, Virginia detention center until she testifies or the grand jury is wound up.

The indictment of Assange -- issued secretly in March 2008 -- would appear to negate the need for her testimony.

But on Friday, she remained behind bars.

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Leaker Chelsea Manning stuck in jail after Assange arrest

Chelsea Manning Changed the Course of History. Now Shes Focusing on …

One hot, humid early-summer evening in New York, a hired car slows on Bleecker Street, and a young woman inside prepares for her first party out in years. She is wearing a midnight-colored semiformal dress by Altuzarra and Everlane ankle boots with heels. Her hair is trimmed into a pixie cut; her makeup softens, but wont hide, a dust of freckles. I dont know if Ill know anybody, she fretted earlier, but she seems to have quelled what nerves remain. She is accompanied by a couple of men who surround her like guards. For the first time in a long time, thats a welcome thing.

Chelsea Manninggraceful, blue-eyed, transsmiles and prepares herself. Since her release from the Fort Leavenworth prison, on May 17, Manning has been living in New York, with a low profile. Tonight she will make her social debut in her own skin. From February to April 2010, while living as Bradley, an Army intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq, Manning sent three-quarters of a million classified or sensitive documents to WikiLeaks. The breachs breadth was startling, as were its contents, ranging from the so-called Collateral Murder video, showing a U.S. helicopter killing a group of Baghdad pedestrians that included children and press, to hundreds of thousands of Cablegate documents, disclosing 44 years of State Department messaging. When Mannings role became clear, she turned into a polarizing figurecelebrated as a whistle-blower by some, condemned as a traitor by others. In August 2013, after pleading guilty to ten charges and being found guilty of 20, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison. The day after the sentencing, Manning came out publicly as trans.

Tonight, a summer Monday, is a different kind of coming-out. To honor the occasion, she has picked an event with a celebratory turn: the after-party for the Lambda Literary Awards, which each year honor books by members of the LGBTQ community. The evening is glamorous; the guest list is varied. Here Manning will reintroduce herself to a community in which she seeks acceptance for more than her heavy past.

The car stops in front of Le Poisson Rouge, a Washington Square art space. Im not sure how to do this, Chase Strangio, an ACLU lawyer, murmurs in the front seat. A gregarious young man with a trim Clark Gable mustache, Strangio has emerged as one of the nations leading trans-rights lawyers, helping represent Gavin Grimm, the trans student in Virginia who challenged his exclusion from the boys bathroom at his high school, and successfully advocating for Mannings hormone therapy in prison. With Manning now out in the world, however, he faces a new challenge: remaining alert to unwelcome attention.

I think that looks pretty discreet, Tim Travers Hawkins, a filmmaker whos making a documentary on Manning, says, judging the entry. When his project, executive-produced by Laura Poitras, started two years back, he intended to use Mannings prison diaries to shape a documentary with an invisible hero. Then, in the final days of his term, President Obama commuted Mannings sentence. It was kind of unbelievable, Poitras says. All the news had been so, so bad. For Hawkins, Mannings release introduced new imperatives. It was a radical shift in the way the film existed, Hawkins says. Tonight, hes brought a compact camera along.

Manning, Strangio, and Hawkins clamber rapidly inside. ALambda host guides Manning down a flight of steps. The party is just starting. At one end of the space, a platform, slightly raised above the dance floor, is marked off with velvet rope. A plate of crudits awaits; Manning orders a gimlet. Shes extroverted, she says: I love being around people. While living as a man, she often went to clubs and parties, even in stodgy Washington, D.C. People are a lot more open and outgoing in New York, Manning explains. In D.C., you really had to, like, know someone.

Music pounds through the room, which is dim and bathed in blue and fuchsia light. As the space fills, a few brave souls approach Manning, then a few more. Soon the platform is packed with people hoping to take a flash-bleached selfie.

I just wanted to say hello. Youre, like, a perfect hero.

Im going to give you this card. Wed love to throw a party for your return.

Manning seems startled by the attention. Thank you! she keeps saying. She is 29 now, with a confidence that, even in a novel city, hits like sunlight at high altitude. Though shes petitejust a few inches over five feetshe speaks with a clarion directness, as if constantly projecting toward an unseen back row. In prison, she read the fashion press (I missed seven years of fashion, but I went through every season in a magazine!), and while shes embraced her femininity, she eschews what she calls fertility stylebunnies and hearts and stufffor more current, gender-neutral garments. While serving out her sentence, she got her hands on photos from Barneys 2014 trans campaign, shot by Bruce Weber. That was a really important thing for me to see, she says.

From the stage, the DJ mixes sharpen: Uptown Funk, I Feel It Coming. But there isnt time to dance. Shes standing, greeting new faces from all sides, thanking, thanking some more. Her left arm is crossed over her belly, cradling her opposite elbow, which is straight. When Beyoncs Love on Top begins its climbing modulations, she uncrosses her arms and begins fidgetingmindlessly, flirtatiouslywith the charm on her gold necklace, drawing it back and forth between her thumb and forefinger. She sways. She lets herself lean forward, laughing at a joke. When her newest friend wanders away, she turns around and smiles.

Im starting to loosen up! she says.

When Manning was growing up in Crescent, a town of some 1,400 north of Oklahoma City, she struggled to pinpoint a reason she felt so awkward. I knew that I was different, she says. I gravitated more toward playing house, but the teachers were always pushing me toward playing the more competitive games with the boys. She recalls, I spent so much time wondering, Whats wrong with me? Why cant I fit in? Sometimes she felt left behind; at other times, she leaped out in front. Once, she and a group of other kids were allowed to take a field trip to Frontier City, an amusement park known for its loopy, soaring Silver Bullet roller coaster. Other students were petrified. Manning couldnt wait to get on and boarded the ride all alone: Im a bit of an adrenaline junkie, I think its safe to say.

Its a June afternoon, and we are sitting in a park along the Hudson River, a short walk from the sleek Tribeca building where Manning has been living since arriving in New York. Today she is dressed with a mixture of straightforward elegance and function: a casual black sleeveless Marc Jacobs dress with playful paisley lining, a small purse from The Row, Borderline boots by Vetements x Dr. Martens, andthe cinching toucha black utility belt from 5.11 Tactical, a gear company that supplies law enforcement and the military. Ive been a huge fan of Marc Jacobs for many, many years, even going back to when I was wearing mens clothing, she explains. He captures a kind of simplicity and a kind of beauty that I likeprojecting strength through femininity.

In Mannings telling, strength was a necessity before it was a choice. When she was eleven, her father, a computer engineer whod gotten his start in the Navy, announced that he was moving out, effectively ending his marriage. That night, her mother swallowed a bottle of pills, then told Chelseas older sister, Casey, what shed done. On the hurried drive to emergency room, the journalist Denver Nicks reports in Private, his book on Mannings early life, it was Chelseas job to sit with her mother in the backseat and make sure that she did not stop breathing.

Over the months that followed, Casey and Chelsea, then still known as Bradley, struggled to manage their mothers alcoholism while also learning to navigate basic domestic chores. Nicks reports that their mother, whod grown up in Wales and married early, didnt know how to write a check, let alone pay bills or seek alimony. I had to learn how to do all of this stuff with my mother and also deal with the friction between my parents, says Manning. I loved them both, but they were angry at each other. I always felt like I was doing something wrong and I had caused it. (Mannings family members have declined interviews since her release.)

From twelve to thirteen, Manning grew up quickly. She realized that she was attracted to boys, and considered herself gay. Her father had introduced Manning to computers and programming at a young age, and Manning began to see the Internetvast, anonymous, and full of answersas an escape. I learned that I wasnt alone. I learned about all these different life possibilities and options, she explains. She began to find her first natural identity. Because I would actually be anonymous online, I could be more myself.

The Web also held constant through a series of displacements. In November 2001, when Manning was just shy of fourteen, her mother decided to return to Wales and took Manning with her. (Casey had moved away; their father had remarried.) Her responsibilities increased as her mothers health declined. In 2005, after a fluky brush with the July 7 London bombingsManning says she was near Kings Cross station at the moment of the Tube explosionsshe moved in with her father, his wife, and his stepson. That arrangement didnt end well: Mounting tension ended with Manning allegedly brandishing a knife and her stepmother calling 911. Manning lived for a spell with a friend in Tulsa, then drifted to Chicago. In increasingly dire straits, she was taken in by her aunt Debbie, in suburban Maryland. She worked at Starbucks and Abercrombie & Fitch; she explored the LGBTQ scene of greater D.C.; she enrolled, briefly, in community college. At nineteen, she started seeing a psychologist for the first time.

Thats the part of my life I replay the most: whether or not, living in Maryland and seeing a therapist, I could have finally been able to say, This is who I am; this is what I want to do. It was the first time in my life when I really considered transitioning. But I got scared, she tells me. I really regret the fact that I didnt know or realize I already had the love I needed, especially from my aunt and sisterjust to seek support.

Rather, she made a defiantly different choice. It was the moment of the so-called surge in Iraq. The news on TV was grim. I dont know who I am, she recalls in the park. Maybe the military will allow me to figure that out. She looks out toward the river. It was a naive thought, but it was very real to me in 2007.

On the grass behind us, teenage girls are putting together a dance routine: Five, six, seven, eight! Not far away, upriver, are the piers where, for years, LGBTQ teens have congregated at the witching hour to vogue under the stars. If Manning had remained in Maryland and been a little braver, she now believes, her 20s could have been quite different.

Instead, she traveled as a new Army enlistee to Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri; trained as an intelligence analyst at Fort Huachuca, in Arizona; and worked for about a year at Fort Drum, in New York, as an analyst with a top-secret clearance. In October 2009, she was shipped to a base outside Baghdad, where she became Specialist Manning: an anguished 22-year-old in a harsh environment, with access to some of the militarys darkest secrets.

The clock has barely struck midnight at Le Poisson Rouge when Mannings first night at the ball seems to end. The music stops; fluorescent lights flicker on overhead. There will be a small after-after-partya loose, laid-back affairat Julius, a tavern in the Village that is sometimes called the oldest extant gay bar in New York. Strangio has peeled offhe has a family to return tobut Manning decides to continue: The world is new again, and shes not ready to go home.

About a dozen people walk the half-mile to the tavern. It is 12:45 a.m. and quiet on the streets; sprinklers stutter softly over the Minetta Green. Manning has no I.D. yet, for arcane reasonsshe lost her old one with her old lifebut the doorman at Julius is expecting her. For weeks after coming to New York, she wandered all around the city, unrecognized. Its not like Im living in fear or anything, she tells me. Im so glad to be out and about and walking around.

Juliuss interior creaks with landmark artifacts: black-and-white photos checkering the walls, posters commemorating the gay-rights Mattachine Societys 1966 sip-in at the bar. Manning alights on a bench underneath an American flag whose stripes are replaced with the bars of the pride banner. Conversation foams around her while the jukebox plays. They are deep into drinks; people are sitting on laps. Manning falls into conversation with January Hunt, a writer, musician, and artist who is also a young trans woman. Manning is describing her trip into Brooklyn for a tech meet-up in a derelict building; it struck her, she explains, as very New York.

Manning publicly came out in a written statement, sent to and read aloud on the Today show, in which she asked to be called by female pronouns and expressed interest in hormone therapy. She had thought of making an announcement earlier, she saysshe had taken her first outing in womens dress in February 2010 and had told guards at the detention center where she was first imprisoned that she was a womanbut had been advised that it would complicate the trial. The opportunity to do it on the Today show popped up, so it happened a little bit sooner and a little faster than I hoped it would, she told me. Still, she says, she was taken aback by the response. I was honestly a bit surprised by the outpouring of love and support that I got, she says. If there was backlash, too (and there was), she doesnt seem to have registered ita tellingly upbeat response from a woman who now sprinkles her tweets with hearts and rainbows.

Prison bureaucracy was another story. Almost immediately after coming to the ACLU in 2013, Strangioa trans man himselfbegan work on Mannings civil case, fighting for her to begin receiving hormone therapy. Our goal was to get her the health care that she needed, he explained. Even when there are legal principles that are pretty unambiguously on our side, theres so much cultural bias were confronting in the courts and in other systems. Meanwhile, behind bars, Manning sought equilibrium in other ways. The first thing I learned to do was avoid television, she says. She took out subscriptions to 50 or 60 periodicals, she saysnews and global-affairs publications, science magazines, technical journals, and, of course, fashion glossies. She describes it to me as like having a printed version of the Internet. And she read books: literary classics, fantasy series, contemporary histories. She liked biographies: Queen Isabella, Joan of Arc. She read Cheryl Strayeds memoir, Wild, three times. Many of Mannings favorites seemed to emphasize personal strength or bureaucratic disaffection. She read Catch-22, she says, more than once. I was institutionalized to such a point where my expectations were limited to, Im going to eat the next meal. Im going to go to sleep. Im going to be here the next day, Manning says. Before commutation, this outlook had psychological costs; as recently as last October, she tried to kill herself for the second time. Then, in January 2017, the White House phoned the office of one of her lawyers.

In his statement announcing the commutation, President Obama emphasized that it was not a pardon for her crime. Lets be clear: Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence, he said in a press conference. I feel very comfortable that justice has been served.

On the day of Mannings release, things happened quickly. She picked her first outfit for life as a woman: a black-and-white striped blouse, with matching sneakers. She stopped at a roadside pizza joint, got a pepperoni slice, and posted a photo of it to Instagram. (Freest pizza ever! she tells me.) She had the lawyers who picked her up drive her to the countryside. I think I spent, like, five or six hours sitting outside.

A day after leaving Fort Leavenworth, she posted a new photo (OK, so here I am everyone!!) with the coder-inspired hashtag #HelloWorld. She had on a trim black dress by one of her favorite designers, Gabriela Hearst. Her hair was crisply coiffed; she wore a vibrant lip. In a Guardian column, written while in prison, Manning had discussed her nervousness about moving through the world as a woman. Now that shes no longer worried about being found out by the military, she says, the fear is gone. It feels natural. It feels like its how its supposed to be, instead of this anxiety, this uncertainty, this ball of self-consciousness that comes with pretending to be male, she says. It didnt feel right. I didnt know what it was. I couldnt describe it. Now thats gone.

Poitras, who met Manning for the first time after her release, says she was startled by the young womans focus. There are people who have really put their lives on the line for something, and they come out on the other side of it. You can feel that with her, Poitras tells me. Now that shes free, what is she going to do with her freedom? She adds, When I first met Ed Snowden in Hong Kong, he had the same sort of eerie power.

Twice during our conversations, and in slightly different ways, I ask Manning what she regrets from the period when she was living as Specialist Bradley Manning. Her leaking of state secrets doesnt appear on the list, although that decision remains the most publicly controversial of her life, earning her accusations of treason and reckless endangerment. Ive accepted responsibility for my own decisions and my own actions, she says. When we speak, Reality Winner, the 25-year-old intelligence contractor, has recently been arrested on suspicion of leaking information about Russian hacking in the 2016 U.S. election, adding to a list of leakers who, like Snowden, have become household names. Manning tells me that she has nothing to say about Winner (All I know is what I see in the media reports) but speaks about what she refers to as the larger issue. I think its important to remember that when somebody sees government wrongdoingwhether its illegal or immoral or unethicalthere isnt the means available to do something about it, she says. Everyone keeps saying, You should have gone through the proper channels! But the proper channels dont work.

Manning describes trying to release information to the press before WikiLeaks. In 2010, I was literally scrambling around D.C. trying to get The Washington Post to publish this stuff, and then I went to The New York Times. Manning has said that a reporter at the Post with whom she spoke briefly over the phone wouldnt commit to a story, which she took as a sign of uninterest. At the Times, she says, she left a message on the voice mail of the ombudsman, confusingly called the Public Editor. The editor and his assistant later said that they had no memory of such a message, but explained that they received hundreds a week. I did this all on leave, Manning says. I had only twelve days. The approaching Snowmageddon made it harder still. Manning traveled from public phone to public phone, to avoid a traceable line. I ran out of time, she says. Before returning to Iraq, she sent files to WikiLeaks.

Even so, Manning continues to take her struggle to find an outlet as proof of a systemic problem. We need to have more ways to talk about whats going on in government, she says. I ask what those ways might look like. I dont know whats right, she says. I have certain values. I live by those.

When it comes to information freedom, those values remain controversial. Many lawmakers bridled at her abbreviated sentence; at the time of the commutation, Paul Ryan said, Chelsea Mannings treachery put American lives at risk and exposed some of our nations most sensitive secrets. Others argue that her motives, like a public-interest journalists, were honorableor that the actual damage of the leaks was small. Beyond some vocal LGBTQ advocacy (she was a star of the summers Pride March in New York, waving from a drop-top Nissan alongside Gavin Grimm), Manning herself has mostly stayed circumspect on issues of politics. Still, in a Guardian column from January 25, a few days following her commutation, she offered a soft criticism of President Obamas tactical approach: The one simple lesson to draw from President Obamas legacy: Do not start off with a compromise. They wont meet you in the middle. President Trump, newly elected, lambasted Manning over Twitter: Ungrateful TRAITOR Chelsea Manning, who should never have been released from prison, is now calling President Obama a weak leader. Terrible!

Manning has avoided a rejoinder to the presidents tweet. And to the extent that WikiLeaks of 2017 (which seems to have pursued specific electoral outcomes in France and America and is dogged by the troubled reputation of its leader, Julian Assange) has a different public reputation than the 2010 organization (which claimed more categorical anti-secrecy principles), she has avoided opinions there, too. Ive been in prison for seven years! Ive been completely disconnected from all of that, she tells me. Her plan is to live in New York until late summer, then move to suburban Maryland, not far from where she was before.

By then, she hopes to be acclimated to a new life. For the moment, certain habits of this decade strike her as weird. Our phone fixation, for example. Were sitting in the same room as each other but looking at our phones constantly, she says. Before I was in prison, I was one of the only people on social media. I was a novelty. Now everybodys on social media all the time! Its too much. I think thats where a lot of this miscommunication, polarization, friction, and chaos is coming from.

Thus, though she tweets and Instagrams, Manning has tried to focus on more in-the-moment pursuits. She still loves video games, though she has forsworn the violent ones. Soon after leaving prison, she began teaching herself the programming language Rust. (It has a lot of features that werent available seven years ago, she says.) She hopes to begin datingIm not planning to be single!but intends to wait until her life settles, in Maryland.

She is also at work on a memoir. Im trying to tell the story as if it was happening now and youre with me, she explains. Hawkins, the documentarian, says he plans to stop shooting soon, as Mannings personal narrative finds its own way in the world: Shes too young for this film to attempt to be the definitive story of her life.

Manning does not know what her career will be. While living as Bradley Manning, she expressed an interest in running for political office. I ask whether thats still on her mind. Im certainly not going to say no, and Im certainly not going to say yes, she says. My goal is to use these next six months to figure out where I want to go.

I have these values that I can connect with: responsibility, compassion, she goes on. Those are really foundational for me. Do and say and be who you are because, no matter what happens, you are loved unconditionally. Its the lesson, she says, that she wishes she learned earlier. Unconditional love, she says. It is OK to be who I am.

In front of an apartment building in the East Seventies, near Central Park, Manning meets up with Strangio to pay a visit to a hero of New Yorks LGBTQ past. Its 90 degrees, clear, and sticky. Manning arrives late, looking addled and a little faint. She had a subway snafu, she explains, and then a long walk. Strangio takes her shoulders and gives them a shake. Oh, my Godhi! he says with get-ahold-of-yourself astringency. Inside, they board a tiny elevator that seems as old as the building.

Everybody in! Strangio says merrily as it begins groaning upward. Well just get stuck in here a few days.

Ive got a flashlight, Manning deadpans.

At a time when drag queens were widely shunned, Jack Doroshow, better known as Flawless Sabrina, blazed a trail across Philadelphia and New York with her high-profile drag pageants, forcing the cities to acknowledge and accept their androgyne and transgender communities. Bobby Kennedy helped her book a venue. Andy Warhol helped secure funding for a film on the pageants, The Queen (1968), which went to Cannes. Flawless posed for Diane Arbus, acted for John Waters, and dated William S. Burroughs. Along the way, she was arrested several times and came to be known as a mother figure in the queer community. Now in her late 70s, she suffers from various age-related ailments. There are good days and bad days, but today is good.

The long wall of Flawlesss sitting room is mirrored, floor to ceiling. A desk near the window supports pineapple-esque lamps and on the far wall is a framed canvas that looks likeis assumed to bea late-period Picasso. Scattered through the room are heads: mannequin heads, papier-mch heads, other heads, one sporting a costume-ball mask and feather headpiece, another wearing a wig and sunglasses, a third stabbed at the scalp with hypodermic syringes.

Just then, Flawless enters the room. Gorgeous! she says, looking at Manning. Girl, thats what Im talking about.

She is sitting in a wheelchair pushed by Curtis Carman, an artist who is Flawlesss partner. She looks old, alert, and not unlike Picasso herself: bald, with a striped shirt and a big, knitted navy cardigan. Carman helps her climb into a thronelike chair behind the desk. Now, hows your family? she asks Manning.

Theyre all right, she says. Theyre laying low a little bit. She hasnt seen her mother yet, Manning explains. She lives in the care of her family and cannot travel.

But youll do that, Flawless says. Its not a question. Youre young, arent you?

Twenty-nine. I hope thats young.

You bet. Flawless allows herself a smile. I mean, as I look at it, everybodys pretty new.

Flawless brings her palms together. All I see is a very natural, very beautiful little girl, she says. The only jarring thing is that theres so much power. This is somebody who has changed history.

Manning thanks her and keeps talkingabout her move to Maryland, and then about her writing. Flawless starts shaking her head. I cant get over how beautiful you are, she says.

Through the next half-hour, they discuss the military, the Tonys, the past. Before Manning leaves, Flawless is keen to pass on some wisdom. Think about your story, she says.

Im not done yet! Manning protests.

No, Flawless says slowly.

Strangio says they should let Flawless rest.

Its not easy to change the world, Flawless chirps. She draws Strangio close. I am so proud of you, she says, and gives him a tight hug.

Manning comes next. Flawless wraps her aged arms around her small frame. Thank you so much, she whispers, so softly that Manning may not hear. Thank you so much. When Manning stands, she moves briskly toward the door. Flawlesss eyes are wet with tears.

In this story:Fashion Editor: Phyllis Posnick.Hair: Jimmy Paul for Bumble and Bumble; Makeup: Alice Lane.Tailor: Maria Del Greco for Christy Rilling Studio.Set Design: Mary Howard

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Chelsea Manning Changed the Course of History. Now Shes Focusing on ...

Fox News reporter calls Chelsea Manning by her deadname during Julian …

Following the arrest of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange in London, in the coming weeks we are likely to be hearing the name Chelsea Manning a lot.

The former US soldier, activist and whistle-blowerwas convicted by US authorities in 2013for disclosing nearly 750,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks, whom she is believed to have known Assange through.

Assange has also been arrested by US officials who have charged him with a hacking conspiracy linked to Manning, who was jailed last Friday for contempt of court.

When reporting on the arrest, Fox News correspondent, Greg Palkot, rather than refer to Manning as her chosen name,instead repeatedly called her by her deadname 'Bradley'.

Julian Assange, famous or infamous depending on who you are talking to, for the leaks coming from his WikiLeaks organisation.

Classified information about the Iraq and Afghan war. Classified state department cables, coming with the help at that time of Bradley Manning.

Later on, Palkot used the dead name again saying:

Assange, famous for releasing information to is WikiLeaks side on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Pentagon classified state department cables, at the time, back in 2010, with the help of the then Bradley Manning.

Manning has identified as female since her sentencing in 2013,has identified as female since childhood and has requested to be called Chelsea since then.

Calling a trans person by their deadname is considered to be incredibly offensive and insensitiveand Fox News and Palkot have been criticised for referring to Manning by such a name.

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Fox News reporter calls Chelsea Manning by her deadname during Julian ...