Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence officer who was sentenced to 35 years in prison because of the trove of classified documents she released in 2010, has felt that she hasn't yet been able to tell her side of the story.

Manning, whose sentence was commuted after seven years by former President Barack Obama in 2017, has recently published a memoir called 'README.txt.'

She spoke with ABC News' Linsey Davis about her experience as a whistleblower, her childhood, decision to transition and message to trans kids.

PRIME: A number of people are going to say, you know, I already know who Chelsea Manning is and, you know, she leaked classified documents and they feel some kind of way about that.

MANNING: Right.

PRIME: And so what would you say to those critics? Why should they take the time and money to actually read your story?

MANNING: I think that my voice and my, sort of, experience taken as a whole has been left out of the story. Everybody's been sort of treating me as an enigma, but I'm here, right? And so, I'm just trying to tell my story. I'm a little late to the show, but I wanted to do this. So, I mean, because this book has been, I've been working on this book since I was in prison.

In this Sept. 8, 2017, file photo, Chelsea Manning and Larissa MacFarquhar attend The 2017 New Yorker Festival in New York.

Thos Robinson/Getty Images for The New Yorker, FILE

PRIME: And you're only 34, so you've made it clear this is not a memoir, but really a coming of age story. You describe a really tumultuous childhood... your mom trying to commit suicide, the divorce, you facing homelessness at a really early age. How did that all shape who you have become?

MANNING: It shaped all of me. Any one of those experiences would have been different, it wouldn't be me.

PRIME: Right.

MANNING: So, you know, I did have a difficult upbringing. I mean, there were good times as well. But yeah, I felt and I still feel to this day, like I was, I always felt under-appreciated by my father, and I always wanted to just get my father to say, you know, I appreciate you. I love you. I am proud of you cause it always felt like nothing was good enough for him.

PRIME: You talk about, though, in the book how your dad seemed to be proud of you when you joined the military.

MANNING: Yes.

PRIME: And your sister, conversely, she said, you write, she told me I was a dumb--ss, making a stupid, impulsive move, and that no matter how talented I was, there was no way I'd fit into the culture of the Army. How did you make that decision? Going from just kind of starting to explore gay clubs at the time and then joining the military during the height of the Iraq war during 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.'

MANNING: I wanted to rekindle the relationship with my father. You know, he kicked me out of the house in 2006 and he had remarried. I felt like there was unfinished business. I was genuinely looking for some way of fitting into the world, of having stability. And my father kept pitching stability and structure. But in all of this, I wanted to feel like I could make a mark on the world and not just be struggling to stay afloat.

PRIME: Some people are going to hear you say that and say that's what this is about, you wanted to make your mark on the world. What would you say that this is really what led you that day, to decide to upload more than 700,000 classified documents?

MANNING: Right. By the time I got into Iraq in 2010, or 2009, we deployed and by 2010, that was when I started to make these decisions. I had become very professional, I had this sense of purpose and this sense of I can do something and I can be a part of something bigger. And then have that, you know, having this cognitive dissonance between something that I believe in and really have invested an enormous amount of time and energy into, be contradicted by the realities on the ground.

You know, everything that I had learned about what was going on at that point, you know, turned out to be much more complicated and much bleaker and much more, I would say, from the perspective of the military and the government and the political establishment, much more self-destructive than I ever could have imagined.

In this March 13, 2018, file photo, network security expert Chelsea Manning talks onstage during the SXSW Interactive session "Free Radical: Chelsea Manning with Vogue's Sally Singer" in Austin, Texas.

Jim Bennett/WireImage via Getty Images, FILE

PRIME: What is the truth that you wanted Americans to know?

MANNING: That the sanitized version of the Iraq War up to this point, this discourse had started to be sanitized again and started to be glossed over again. And I was still seeing all of the same problems and all of the same feedback loops that were happening on the ground in terms of, you know, these cycles of retribution of death and destruction, of brutality, and the public not having any full understanding of this. I wanted to make that available. I wanted that discussion to happen.

PRIME: Well, you write, it's not possible to work in Intelligence and not to imagine disclosing the many secrets you bear.

MANNING: I would agree with that.

PRIME: On the flip side, there are thousands of people who've had a similar occupation and they didn't disclose classified information.

MANNING: But they thought about it.

PRIME: You think so?

MANNING: I know so.

PRIME: What kept them from doing that?

MANNING: Well, probably the same reason why I hesitated, which is, you know, an opportunity, a career. Being in the military and being an intelligence in itself, is a lifestyle, it's not just a career. There really is this entire worldview of, I work in this field and this becomes part of your identity and part of who you are. And that's much deeper than just being a job.

In this May 16, 2019, file photo, former military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning speaks to the press ahead of a Grand Jury appearance about WikiLeaks, in Alexandria, Va.

Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images, FILE

PRIME: So in addition to losing your career, you get court-martialed and sentenced to 35 years, actually the harshest sentence for anyone who'd ever leaked classified documents, during all of this time, you're also struggling with your your gender identity, your sexual identity. And so even on that day, in the bookstore, when you're uploading the documents, you take a picture of yourself with a wig and makeup.

MANNING: Right.

PRIME: And you write about gender dysphoria and you say that it was like a toothache that never goes away. You're not always consciously thinking about it, but it's this persistent thing that you can't totally shake that keeps holding you back. When was the first time that you thought about changing your gender?

MANNING: Yeah. I didn't realize it was an option until my twenties, right? I didn't realize that you could seek access to care, that you could get hormone treatment, that you could get therapy, that you know, surgical options were available. I just didn't realize that, even though I knew I was different at a very young age.

It wasn't until I was in the military, and I'd been in the military for a few years. By the time I was deployed to Iraq, I knew for certain that this was the path that I knew that I need to take in order to survive.

PRIME: And I'd like to read the book dedication. It says, this book is dedicated to the brave trans kids who struggle to live as themselves in a hostile world. You make me proud.

MANNING: Yes.

PRIME: What is your message, beyond that, to trans kids right now who are struggling and feeling uncomfortable, perhaps, in their own skin?

MANNING: I went through that experience as a kid, I know what you're going through very deeply. And I'm thankful that kids are able to even know this kind of information because I didnt when I was that age. I just needed someone to tell me that I was loved and appreciated for who I am. And that's all I want to say. You are loved, you are appreciated, and that there is a community.

We had a progressive moment in the last decade where we've been able to make advances, and find ourselves and find our community. We may lose some of that in the next few years, and that's unfortunate but also we're survivors and we can make it through.

I've seen resiliency, and survivability, and solidarity. Many of these laws that have popped up and these quote unquote debates that have popped up are going to roll back some of the progress of the last decade, that's not the end of the story.

Read more here:
Chelsea Manning speaks out and says voice 'has been left out of the ...

— -- Chelsea Manning, the Army private and intelligence analyst whose release of classified information to WikiLeaks sparked worldwide controversy over transparency in the military and whistleblower protections, will be released from prison on Wednesday. The majority of her 35-year prison sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama in January.

The debate over Mannings reasons for leaking the data, and the attention she received as a transgender military servicemember, have made her perhaps the most notable person to have her sentence commuted by the former president during his time in office. Manning, who was assigned male at birth and previously known as Bradley, joined the Army at the age of 19.

Ahead, heres what you need to know about Chelsea Manning.

In October 2007, Manning joined the Army. According to information later provided as part of her court martial, Manning explained that earning benefits under the GI Bill for college opportunities was one of the motivators behind her enlistment.

She performed well on the Armed Services Aptitude Battery but struggled with Basic Combat Training, at one point injuring both her shoulder and foot. At one point, Manning was told she was in danger of being out-processed or dismissed from training, but she returned after recovering from her injuries. Ultimately, Manning needed six months to finish the training that typically takes six weeks.

Drawing on an expertise with and long interest in computers, Manning received training to be an intelligence analyst at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, then joined the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum in New York. A New York Magazine profile of Manning in 2011 claimed that Manning struggled emotionally while at Fort Drum, lashing out at fellow soldiers, and was seeing a mental-health counselor.

Despite hesitation from superiors who were reportedly uncertain she would be able to handle deployment, Manning was sent to Forward Operating Base Hammer, located to the east of Baghdad, in October 2009. She worked there until her arrest in May 2010.

Manning reported that she first learned of WikiLeaks while at Fort Huachuca and that she was regularly visiting the website while stationed in Iraq, utilizing some of the leaked information to inform her work. As part of her role as an analyst, Manning frequently utilized records of notable incidents and events termed Significant Activities (SIGACTs).

While back in the U.S. on leave in January 2010, Manning said she began to become depressed by the U.S. military situation in Iraq and Afghanistan and felt that if the public had access to the information she possessed, that it could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and ... foreign policy.

At first, Manning reached out to The Washington Post and The New York Times in an attempt to release SIGACT tables, but she was rebuffed. From there, she utilized an anonymizing network to submit the information to WikiLeaks, according to court documents. She would later submit additional materials, including diplomatic cables and a video of a July 2007 airstrike in Baghdad in which two Reuters photographers were killed and two children were wounded.

The video, which WikiLeaks renamed Collateral Murder, received widespread attention and Manning noted she was encouraged by the response in the media and the general public.

In May 2010, Manning began an online friendship with a hacker named Adrian Lamo. In their internet exchanges, Manning discussed her troubles with the military and disclosed that she was responsible for providing hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Lamo contacted the Department of Defense about the leak, and Manning was arrested in May 2010 and placed in a detention camp in Kuwait. In July, the military transferred Manning to a Marine Corps prison in Quantico, Virginia, where she stayed in solitary confinement and claimed she was stripped of all clothing with the exception of my underwear and that her eyeglasses were taken away, according to a statement from Manning released by her lawyers.

In 2011, Obama said that Manning broke the law, noting: We are a nation of laws. We dont let individuals make decisions about how the law operates."

In 2013, Manning deferred a plea bargain and was arraigned on 22 charges, including espionage, theft of military records or property, and aiding the enemy -- a capital offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Mannings lawyer, David Coombs, claimed she was emotionally distraught and said her clearance privileges should have been removed by superiors in the military who were aware of her struggles. Coombs said Manning wrote a letter to a supervisor in which she came out as a transgender woman and attached a photo of herself wearing a blonde wig. Manning maintained that her decision to release the government documents was a way to reveal war crimes.

"I understand that my actions violate the law. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people," Manning said in a statement delivered by her lawyers. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty for others."

During her court martial in Fort Meade, Maryland, Manning was acquitted of the charge of aiding the enemy, but was sentenced to 35 years in prison. In the military justice system, prison sentences longer than 30 years are eligible for parole review after 10 years. Manning, however, was credited 1,294 days towards her sentence and told that she was eligible to request a parole review after seven years.

One day after her sentencing, Manning revealed in a statement delivered by defense counsel that she wanted to transition from male to female, and asked to be called Chelsea.

During an appearance on NBCs Today, Mannings lawyer read a statement in which Manning wrote: I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female.

Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible, she said. I hope that you will support me in this transition. I also request that starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun (except in official mail to the confinement facility).

In 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Department of Defense officials for denying Manning access to medically necessary treatment for her gender dysphoria. The ACLU claimed that if left untreated, Manning could become suicidal. In February 2015, the Army allowed Manning to receive hormone treatment for her transition from male to female.

During her time in prison, Manning has struggled with mental health issues. After a reported suicide attempt in July 2016, Manning was placed in solitary confinement, an environment her lawyers said exacerbated her mental stress. In September, Manning went on a hunger strike in protest of the Armys refusal to give her access to hormone therapy. She ended her strike after five days when the Army informed her that they would allow her to move forward with her plans to undergo gender reassignment surgery.

In October 2016, Mannings lawyers reported that she had attempted suicide again.

She has repeatedly been punished for trying to survive and now is being repeatedly punished for trying to die, her attorney, Chase Strangio, said in a statement. I worry about the sustainability of her current conditions and her ability to keep fighting under these relentless abuses.

Concerned about Mannings well-being, her attorneys filed an application for clemency. The application was filed in time to be considered by President Obama before he was set to leave office.

I have no confirmation that Chelsea's request is on a short list, Strangio, Mannings attorney, said at the time of the filing. But I encourage the president to act on Chelsea's request for a commutation of her sentence. Her life depends on it and she has already served almost 7 years of her sentence -- longer than any whistleblower in United States history.

A White House petition asking for President Obama to commute Mannings sentence to time served received 117,000 signatures. Manning, who corresponds with supporters online, tweeted about the potential for her clemency request.

Obama ultimately granted her request on January 17, just three days before President Trump took office.

Manning will be released on May 17.

Originally posted here:
Everything you need to know about Chelsea Manning - ABC News

Chelsea Mannings memoir opens like a Jason Bourne novel with a scene in which the then 22-year-old, on the last day of two weeks military leave, tries to leak an enormous amount of classified data via a sketchy wifi connection in a Barnes & Noble in Maryland. Outside, a snowstorm rages. Inside, Manning, a junior intelligence analyst for the US army, freaks out as the clock ticks down. In 12 hours, her flight leaves for Iraq. Meanwhile she has half a million incident reports on US military activity to upload from a memory stick to an obscure website called WikiLeaks. The military would later argue she didnt have the clearance even to access these files exceeded authorised as Manning puts it, in army parlance but the fact is, she says, It was encouraged. I was told, Go look! The way you do analysis is you collect a shit-ton of data, a huge amount, in order to do the work on it.

Everything about Manning on that afternoon of 8 February 2010 her name, her gender, her anonymity, her freedom is provisional and shortly to change. Three months later, shell be in a cage in Kuwait. Three years after that, shell be starting a 35-year prison sentence at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Meanwhile, the wider consequences of her actions that day will, depending on your view, topple governments; endanger lives; protect lives; uphold democracy; compromise global diplomacy; change the world in no measurable way whatsoever; or Mannings least favourite interpretation boil down to a cry for help from a troubled young transperson seeking the care she required. Today, sitting across the table from me in an office in Brooklyn, Manning is tiny, fierce, dressed all in black with long blond hair, and vibrating with enough nervous energy to power the lights. Are we recording? she says as her eyes skim the room. For the space of our 90-minute encounter, she will seem only partially present, each question yanking her back to some unseen site of contest where she must defend herself against endless and wide-ranging charges.

The memoir is called README.txt, a misleadingly clunky title (it refers to the file name she used for the leaks) for a highly entertaining book that, while telling the story of why and how Manning leaked the data, gives equal space to her origins in Oklahoma, a complex and traumatic family story creating the conditions for all her subsequent decisions. Its a terrific read, full of unexpected turns and details that counter many of the assumptions made about Manning at the time. In the wake of her arrest, she was characterised by the US government as, variously, a nihilist, an anarchist, an idealist and an ideologue. Three days into her trial in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents revealing how the US government spied on its own citizens, something, Manning notes drily in the book, that only damaged her image further. I support Ed generally, but on a personal level, the timing was difficult for me, she writes. Snowden emerged as the grownup, the credible whistleblower to Mannings loose cannon, hero to her bad leaker. Compared with Snowden, Manning was young, inexperienced and, because she was in prison, unable to defend herself in interviews. When, at the end of the trial, a photo surfaced of Manning wearing a blond wig and eye makeup, it delivered to her critics a further made-for-TV narrative: she had a secret she couldnt tell, so she told a nations secrets.

Manning, now 34, snorts mirthlessly at this interpretation. People tried to say, Oh, this all happened because you were trans. Its like, no; its because I was a data scientist who had way too much information and was actually trying to do my job, and realised that continuing on like this is not sustainable. We cant keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.

She is talking about the raw data it was her job to harvest and analyse in Iraq, and that, within weeks of arrival, she came to feel was being dishonestly reported to the American people by the military. Manning speaks quickly, in a way that seems linked both to her talent for processing large amounts of complex information and to a more basic need to scuttle past black spots of memory. She was in prison for seven years before President Obama commuted her sentence in 2017, a chunk of that time spent in Quantico military prison, in solitary confinement. She tried to kill herself twice during that jail term and a third time, in 2019, when she returned to prison, this time for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Julian Assange. That refusal was an incredible piece of self-sacrifice, blowing a final hole in the idea that she was driven by mental turbulence, not principle. Im very frustrated by that even to this day, she says, adding that there are a number of diagnoses on her Wikipedia page that are misidentified PTSD. Gender dysphorias not on the radar any more; its been treated, or some would go so far as to say cured. All the other diagnoses were just untreated, unidentified, complex post traumatic stress syndrome. That is my sole diagnosis.

Manning wrote the book to restore a sense of nuance to a story that, over the years, she feels has been seized on by one pressure group or another seeking to use her to fortify their cause. It has left her with a tendency to find a hidden agenda in even the blandest statement, which gives rise to occasionally comic misunderstandings. When I say the book is very good, she looks concerned and says, Ive spoken a lot about commodification in the digital age, and everythings a product now, and everything has to be sponsored, from people on TikTok and Instagram, to the entirety of society where it feels like every single interaction you have has a monetary transaction or value to it.

Theres a short pause. No, I I just meant that I thought it was a good read. Entertaining. Manning looks fleetingly blank. OK.

The irony of making journalists sign NDAs to read the manuscript (it is watermarked on every page to discourage leaks) isnt lost on her. She gives a whaddya-gonna-do shrug. Ownership of something you can copy still seems absurd to me, especially in the NFT era. My publishers not happy with me for saying that. Which I understand. But I do find it a little silly.

It is hard to imagine what Mannings life consists of these days. Before the pandemic, she was doing speaking events mainly at the invitation of students, but lockdown put paid to that. She has some consulting gigs with tech and security firms, on the AI side nuanced and complex opinions on crypto-applications and post-crypto currency, she says. She lives alone, in Brooklyn, where her social life revolves around the music scene she has always been a big music person; as a teenager, Napster was her gateway to online culture.

Last August, she popped up as a guest DJ at Elsewhere, a huge club in Brooklyn where she wore light-up cat ears and played a set including Britney Spears remixes and the theme from Succession. She has, perhaps, the worst form of celebrity, one that guarantees intrusion and wild gossip earlier this year, she was rumoured to be dating Canadian musician (and Elon Musks ex) Grimes, something she wont dignify with comment but one that doesnt deliver any perks or income. Im not an actor or a movie star, she says. Even YouTubers make more money than me.

Still, two years after her release from Fort Leavenworth, she had won some kind of equilibrium and was starting to rebuild a life. All that ended in 2019, when she was subpoenaed to testify in front of a grand jury about her interactions with Assange. She refused, and was sent back to prison. Given everything shed been through, this was, surely, a very difficult decision to make? Manning looks indignant to the point of outrage. Not hard at all.

Im amazed, I say, not least because in the book, she appears to be no fan of Assanges, characterising his faction within WikiLeaks as the less responsible of the original cohort of hackers. (She wont be drawn on her personal dealings with Assange, nor on the legal fight he currently faces.) No, she says. The grand jury process is a screwed-up process and regardless of whether its activists on the frontline or if its journalists, Im not going to participate in that.

But the cost to you personally

Oh, when youve already spent seven years in prison, 18 months is just ...

She fades out. Surely, I suggest, having already served time makes the prospect of a return to jail even worse, particularly in light of your PTSD? No. I Her voice trembles and her eyes fill with tears. OK, Im going to get real intense here. Mannings voice lowers, loudens and becomes very harsh, as if she is forcing out an unbearable truth. I struggle every day with the world out here, she says. There is a long pause. I have a lot of trouble with this world, this so-called free world, compared with the life that I had in prison.

Why? I struggle with the fact that ... I dont know what tomorrow brings out here. I feel less supported than I did in both the military and in prison. In prison I know that I have housing; I know that I have healthcare; I know that I have food. I dont feel as secure here. And people are so detached. There is no community. People dont talk to each other. People dont say hi to you. People are suspicious of each other. Her voice rises to a peak. Theres more community in a prison than there is out here! And that says a lot about how fucked-up our world is right now. I struggle with it every day.

Manning was released from a detention centre in Virginia in March 2020, a year after she was imprisoned, when the grand jurys investigation expired and her testimony was no longer required. To have that much fight in her, to remain true to her principles in the face of such cost, is admirable to the point of baffling. It stems from optimism, she says, and I believe her. I know that community is possible, because Ive seen it, and Ive seen it in the worst places that you can possibly imagine. Whenever humanity is pushed to the edge, I see the best, so I know its there.

If there is a strand unifying all the contrasts that have governed Chelsea Mannings life, it is her dislike consistent and to the point of perversity of orthodoxies of any kind. She wont be owned by a single group, no matter how sympathetic to her cause. During her trial, the old lefties and free-speech campaigners who turned up to support her pissed her off when they disrupted the courtroom and annoyed the judge. In the book, she calls out elements of the radical transparency crowd at WikiLeaks, including Assange, for being troll-y and nihilist. She breaks rank with elements of the trans community at the time of her arrest, she was still living as a gay man by deadnaming herself in the memoir. There is, she believes, too much emphasis placed on identity at the expense of other considerations. Thats not how I think. I have things that I care about, I have positions that I hold, and I feel like especially in the online era, you find an identity and you fit your beliefs to your identity, which is not how I work at all.

The fact is, she writes, she didnt join the military to advance an ideological agenda, or to help the enemy, or to cause chaos for its own sake. She joined for the reasons so many people do: because she was lost, unemployed, directionless and wanted to impress her father, a US navy veteran who she claims bullied her relentlessly as a child for being a sissy. Essentially: trying to get my father to respect me again. That was the largest part, I think.

She also hoped the rigours of military life would quell her gender dysphoria; thinking its better to try to tamp down on that, which is basically what most trans people did in the early 2000s. And it did die down, under the weight of the crushing physical demands of basic training. Then training ended and I was like, oh, crap. Its still there.

After acing the aptitude tests, Manning was posted to army intelligence and, at 22, found herself deployed in Iraq as part of the graduating class of the 2007 recruitment surge. The shock was immense. Along with other analysts, she was housed in a converted basketball court in the green zone, providing direct support to frontline troops by anticipating enemy movement. She was very good at her job. She was also horrified and depressed, fielding graphic raw images from the battlefield. One night, a clerical error made by a special operations unit they used an old address for a target resulted in the death of a group of Iraqi civilians. I blamed myself in part because I left my desk to go eat. I shouldnt have left. If she hadnt been absent, she says, I couldve solved this. She felt powerless, and angry, and guilty. She wondered if there was anything she could do.

The assumption about whistleblowers is that the bravery it takes and the self-sacrifice it entails require a confidence bordering on narcissism. To call out systems as large as the US military, there has to be, surely, something wrong with you. The fact that Chelsea Manning was so young when she uploaded the incident reports and significant activity logs to WikiLeaks isnt irrelevant; risk assessment at that age isnt what it is a decade later. To Manning, analysing the data, precedent suggested that the consequences might not be too dire. Forty years earlier, when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing the US governments lies about Vietnam, he escaped a jail term. More recently, Thomas Drake, a whistleblower who in 2006 communicated with journalists about inefficiency and fraud at the NSA, had been sanctioned but not imprisoned. Mannings assumption was that shed face dishonourable discharge. She believed it was worth it. As she writes in the book, when she left Barnes & Noble that day after uploading the files, it made her feel like Id done something, that Id relieved my conscience a little. I felt a duty to my fellow humans to do this, to make the world understand more about what I knew was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan every day, to understand what the true casualty numbers were.

Manning wanted to apprise the American public of several things: how badly the Iraq war was going; and that the secrecy around it was designed to save face, not a security measure to protect the national interest. A year later, similar concerns propelled her to leak a huge cache of diplomatic cables from the US Department of State. (That leak would reveal nothing so starkly as how porous and pathetic US government cybersecurity was that a low-ranking 22-year-old analyst could access and disseminate the data.) The question remains less one of whether or not Manning was justified in her actions as why, of the hundreds of intelligence and other officers with access to the same information, she was the one to break rank. There was in her background a kernel of belief in the theory of radical transparency, but it was very specific to music. It was very Napster-era. It was around pirating music, or films. Before joining the military, shed engaged in some internet activism, targeting evangelical churches by trolling their discussion groups, but this was largely recreational at a time when early internet culture was, as she says, a playground, rather than the toxic cesspools of extreme rightwing ideologies it became.

She has vaguely anti-authoritarian roots on both sides of her family. Her mother, Susan, was Welsh, from a large, working-class family in Haverfordwest. Her father, Brian, is from a Catholic family from the midwest, with a strong libertarian streak. Mannings parents met in a pub in Wales in the mid-1970s, where her father was stationed with the US Navy. They married and moved back to the US, winding up in Oklahoma where her father found a job as an electronic data processor for the Hertz Corporation.

It was a comfortable, middle-class home. It was also violent. Both Mannings parents were alcoholics; her father frequently beat the crap out of her, she writes, sometimes for no apparent reason, but often triggered, Manning believes, by what he perceived to be his sons effeminate behaviour. Her mother was gentler, but also zoned out on alcohol and incapable of behaving like an adult. She never learned to drive or to balance a chequebook, and her alcoholism eventually made it even more difficult for her to function in the world. There was at least one suicide attempt, when Manning found her mother passed out half-naked in the hallway. After her parents split up in her early teens, she followed her mother to Wales for a short, unhappy period before returning to the US. If there is a scorched-earth mentality in her thinking, it has been born of necessity. Less apparent is how she built and maintained her considerable confidence. At school, she was an academic high performer who felt cleverer than her classmates. After being introduced to computers aged six, she almost immediately started doing basic-level programming. Still, looking at the whole picture, I suggest, it wasnt exactly a background to foster self-esteem.

Well, it was very advantageous, Manning says. I was a middle-class white boy in Oklahoma.

Right, but your memoir describes you as a child of alcoholics growing up in a violent home. Very typical, though, in that region. But yeah, being trans in particular ... She tapers off. But for being trans, I wouldve been on the path to going to Harvard.

Manning is resistant to narratives that dead-end in victimhood. She spent years in therapy fighting to recover from the guilt of abandoning her mother when she returned to the US from Wales. Ive come to recognise that I was in a co-dependent relationship and had to do something different. Her mother died in 2020. She has no idea where her father is. We tried to track him down for the book, but hes very mercurial. In her late teens, Manning says, her father kicked her out of the house and she lived in her car for a while, selling bootleg Adobe software out of a parking lot. It wasnt long after that she joined the military. When youve been through the things Ive been through, most things dont seem that insurmountable, she says.

Politically, several important things happened in Mannings childhood. In 1993, when she was five, the US government sent troops into a hostage situation in Waco, Texas, bungling the mission and killing 76 people, including 25 children. Mannings father jumped instantly into the governments-going-to-take-your-guns mentality, she says, a position she despises. Its an excuse, a rallying call for something deeper and much more sinister. A significant amount of the libertarian strain of American politics is deeply connected to this air of superiority among upper-middle-class white men. Nonetheless, from a young age Manning learned to maintain a measure of scepticism in relation to the US government, one that she never entirely lost.

The other political influence during her formative years was the gay rights movement. As a 10-year-old, Manning kissed a boy called Sid. Sid kissed back, before calling Manning a faggot. I didnt even know what gay meant at that point, she writes, and I bet the kids calling me that didnt really, either. It was just a bad thing, we all thought, the worst insult you could use. I just wanted the whole thing to go away. Her gender dysphoria was so deeply suppressed at that point that she simply assumed, with a sinking heart, that she was gay in a state where homosexual sex would be a criminal offence until 2003. Five years later, while Manning was learning to be an intelligence analyst at Fort Drum, New York, the voters of California passed Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to outlaw gay marriage.

This was a huge moment for Manning in terms of both her mental health and her belief in systems of government. My whole life, Id been told that things were always going to get better, she writes, that the system was set up with checks and balances, that liberal society meant slow but steady progress toward democratic inclusion. The passing of Proposition 8 blew that vision apart. It wasnt just a repudiation of that promise. It wasnt even just a national tragedy. It was a personal rejection of me, and millions of other queer people, as human beings.

To Mannings detractors, her leaking of the Iraq reports, and later the Afghan war logs and diplomatic cables, was an expression of monstrous arrogance; at best an overreaction to the normal chaos of war by a naive young recruit, at worst a bad-faith action designed to aid the enemy. After uploading the files, nothing happened for a long time, then everything happened at once. WikiLeaks released the reports to the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel and other media partners. The military began an inquiry. As Manning felt the net closing in, she worried about her fellow analysts coming under suspicion she had acted entirely alone and effectively confessed to an anonymous contact online, whom she suspected had links to the FBI and she imagined, correctly, would turn her in. Less than a week later, two agents from the Army Criminal Investigation Division turned up to question Manning, accompanied by civilians from the state department and the FBI. She was immediately arrested and transported from Iraq to Kuwait, where she was imprisoned, under canvas, in a makeshift jail made entirely of metal bars. In other words a cage, where she would spend several months. A tyre cage, we called it. Built in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I remember because that was the only piece of writing on it. It was a brain-melting experience. She was stripped down to the most basic shadow of humanity. Food. Water. Cool. My reptilian needs were the primary driver. Meanwhile the guards goaded her about her next move. Maybe theyll send you to Cuba, or Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, she recalls them saying. We do bad things there.

Instead, Manning was conveyed to Quantico, a military prison in Virginia that at first struck her as an improvement. Its funny because people say, Your time in Quantico was very bad. But the initial thoughts I was having in Quantico were: Im in the United States! Hot and cold running water! Air-conditioning! The relief didnt last long. Manning was held in solitary confinement, harassed constantly with rules she wasnt permitted to lie down during the day and any attempt to do so would result in barked orders to sit up again. She was on suicide watch, and as a result was denied pillows or bedding she might use to harm herself. She was not permitted to exercise in her cell or to meet other prisoners. She was entirely isolated in Quantico for nine months, an experience the UN later ruled was cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture. Meanwhile, military doctors diagnosed her with depression, anxiety and gender dysphoria, all of which were used by her defence team when, three years later, she finally came to military trial.

Of the 22 counts with which Manning was charged, she pleaded guilty to 10 and was found guilty on a further seven, among them six counts of espionage. She was sentenced to 35 years imprisonment, escaping life without parole only because the judge rejected the governments most serious accusation that Manning had given information to the enemy. In the event, she was found not guilty of treason. The single note of relief for Manning was that, with the trial over, she could finally come out as trans without compromising her case. She could also start legal proceedings to compel prison authorities to permit her to have hormone treatment in jail. Pretrial, she had started signing some letters Breanna Manning. Now, in Fort Leavenworth, she decidedChelsea was the right name. It was a neighbourhood in Manhattan full of dance clubs where queer people could feel totally at home and normal and welcome, she writes. She put out a statement via her lawyer. Then she knuckled down to spend what she assumed would be the next 30 years in military prison.

In fact, when President Obama commuted Mannings sentence in 2017 he pointed to the apology shed read out in court as evidence of her contrition with time served she would end up spending another four years inside before release. Her experiences at Fort Leavenworth had been a combination of deep depression and suicidal thoughts exacerbated, according to Manning, by the destabilising effect of the hormones the government allowed her to start taking in 2015 and what she characterises as a surprisingly peaceable existence. An individual as birdlike as Manning taking female hormones in a male prison would, one imagines, have been at risk of attack. In fact, she says, she had almost no problems; a couple of fights, thats it. You have to remember I was pretty sociable in prison. People knew me and I got to know people. She helped other prisoners with their legal problems. She became a popular inmate. People stopped seeing me as a trans person; they saw me. I could hear it sometimes oh, well, youre different. These days, Manning says, the fact of being trans feels like such a minor thing in my life. Like: I went through this transition period and it was very difficult and I needed access to care, and once I got care Ive been able to function as an adult and not really think about this stuff. It very rarely comes up.

And so she tries, again, to rebuild a life for herself. The speaking income hasnt really recovered post-Covid, but she is about to embark on a multi-city book tour and relishes the prospect of meeting and debating with people. She receives hundreds of letters a year, occasionally hateful, mainly admiring. Reading her book put me in mind of Regeneration, Pat Barkers novel of the first world war and the best encapsulation of PTSD Ive read. I ask if she has read it and she looks bemused, eyes skimming the room, before going off on a diatribe about the US militarys psychology of lethality.

I try once more to discover a shred of hesitation, doubt or regret at any of the events of the last 12 years. In your place, I say, given the extremes of your circumstance, a different personality would have gone into retreat. Manning looks taken aback that, analysing the data, anyone could reach this conclusion. Thats not me!

Chelsea Mannings README.txt is published by Vintage at 20. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Chelsea Manning: I struggle with the so-called free world compared ...