Chelsea Manning: We Need to Stop This ‘Death Machine of Power …

Chelsea Manning wants to change America. On Tuesday, the freed whistleblower appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss her plan with hosts Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.

The appearance was Mannings first live television interview since President Barack Obama pardoned her in 2017. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 after leaking more than 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks in 2010 while serving as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq. The leaked materialsthe largest classified data dump in United States historyincluded documents related to the Iraq War, the U.S. war in Afghanistan and diplomatic cables.

During her conversation with Goodman and Gonzalez, Manning discussed Iraq, dismantling the prison system, transgender rights, her run for a Senate seat and other topics.

Manning is running as a Democrat in the November elections, challenging senior Democrat Ben Cardin for his seat in Maryland. She explained her decision to run for political office:

You know, it wasI thought I was done. I thought, OK, like I can go home now. But I dont feel like its thisI mean, in this environment, in this place, this time that were in is what I feared when Ibecause I saw, you know, and I realized its expanded more and more, that its not just the military, its not just the intelligence community. Its notits police. Its the justice system. Its immigration. Like all these systems are overlapping, and theyre suffocating people, deliberately and methodically, over decades. And this has been a continuingyou know, like people have been building this whirling death machine of power for decades now.

And you can focus in on a particular war or a particular moment or a particular controversy, but its the overwhelming awe of the giganticness of this system that has driven me to try to fight back. And we need to startyou know, like we dont need to fix these systems, we need to stop them. We need to push back on them, whether its immigration or whether its the military or whether its the intelligence apparatus, because theyre all a part of the same system. And people are suffering. And we cant wait. We cant wait anymore. We cant wait for change.

Watch the full Democracy Now! interview with Manning in the videos below.

Managing Editor

Eric Ortiz is the managing editor of Truthdig. A journalist and innovator with two decades in digital media, Ortiz founded the mobile app startup Evrybit, a live storytelling and reporting tool, as a 2014 John

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Chelsea Manning: We Need to Stop This 'Death Machine of Power ...