Pvt. Chelsea Manning, the Army soldier in prison for handing over a massive trove of classified documents to Wikileaks, has joined Twitter . <\/p>\n
David Coombs, the lawyer for Pvt. Manning, confirmed the account is real in a brief email and said his client is dictating the tweets to people over the phone, who are then posting them to the social-media service. She is tweeting under the handle @xychelsea. <\/p>\n
In 2013, Pfc Manning was acquitted of the most serious charges brought by the government but convicted of lesser charges related to the release of State Department cables and military records from Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Pfc. Manning was reduced in rank to private and sentenced to 35 years in prison, but will be eligible for parole after serving eight years. She is serving her sentence at the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. <\/p>\n
After the conviction, Pvt. Manning, then know as Bradley Manning, asked to be referred to as female and announced she would seek hormone therapy. Last year a Kansas judge granted Pvt. Mannings request for a name change to Chelsea. <\/p>\n
Pvt. Manning released four tweets in the initial postings on Friday, quickly gaining thousands of followers. There was little in the way of controversy in the comments. <\/p>\n
Pvt. Manning said she would try to maintain a conversation with followers, but acknowledged the difficulty of doing that from prison, where there are sharp limits on conversations. <\/p>\n
And she set expectations for the frequency of postings with the hashtag #lessismore. <\/p>\n
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