Chelsea Manning, the Connection between her Personal Struggles and her Leaking of Secret Documents

When Chelsea Manning was arrested in May 2010, the key piece of evidence tying her to large-scale leaks to WikiLeaks was a set of chat logs between Manning and Adrian Lamo—a hacker famous for his infiltration of the New York Times website (for which he was arrested and served time)—in which Manning appears to admit to the leaking. Lamo had given the logs to the FBI as well as to a journalist at Wired magazine. The journalist released the logs in abbreviated form, holding back on what Wired viewed as “personal” parts that did not directly reference Manning’s leaking.

After intense public speculation about what they were hiding, Wired released the full chat logs in July 2011 and revealed that the missing parts of the logs primarily concerned Manning’s questions about her gender identity and her struggles with addressing those questions under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Wired had chosen to redact those because they saw them as merely personal. Yet in the full logs, Manning explicitly and consistently links her leaking of government documents with her own struggles with living under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and, in particular, with her struggles with her gender identity. For Manning, her struggles with state secrecy were connected with her struggles with the mandated secrecy surrounding her sexual and gender identity.

In a 2013 essay in The New Republic, Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler portrays Chelsea Manning as part of the “long-respected tradition” of whistleblowers in the United States. Whistleblowers, on Benkler’s account, serve the vital constitutional role of assuring “oversight” of institutions otherwise shrouded in secrecy— for example (and especially), institutions within the arena of national security.

Whistleblowers “offer a pressure valve, constrained by the personal risk whistleblowers take, and fueled by whatever moral courage they can muster.” Benkler argues that Manning should be classed within this tradition— of which Ellsberg is on his account the most notable example— not because of the effects of her actions, but because of the moral “motives” revealed in her statement on her guilty plea.

Benkler’s emphasis on Manning’s moral motives on behalf of “oversight” of government (or private corporations) resonates with broader US scripts about the figure of the “whistleblower,” a term coined in the 1970s by Ralph Nader. Nader similarly locates the importance of the whistleblower in assuring oversight of governmental and corporate organizations (Nader compares the structure of organizations to feudalism), which otherwise might go unchecked. Whistleblowing, Nader says, is the “last line of defense ordinary citizens have against the denial of their rights and the destruction of their interests by secretive and powerful institutions.” Nader also, like Benkler, emphasizes the importance of individual moral “courage” and care for the public good as the proper motivations of the whistleblower. Whistleblowing, Nader says, depends upon individuals’ “professional and individual responsibility,” which consists in “placing responsibility to society over that to an illegal or negligent or unjust organizational policy or activity.” For Nader— as for Benkler— in other words, the whistleblower serves an important role in society as a safeguard for the public good when it is threatened by private interest pursued under shadow of secrecy.

We can see this whistleblower script echoing throughout the many articles and opinion pieces written not only by Benkler, but by Manning’s other defenders. For example, Glenn Greenwald—a prolific defender of Manning writing for Salon and The Guardian—continually refers to Manning as a “whistleblower” and stresses Manning’s morally pure motives. For Greenwald, the Lamo-Manning chat logs show that “the private decided to leak these documents after [s]he became disillusioned with the Iraq war. [S]he described how reading classified documents made [her], for the first time, aware of the breadth of the corruption and violence committed by [her] country and allies. . . .When asked by the informant why [s]he did not sell the documents to a foreign government for profit, Manning replied that [s]he wanted the information to be publicly known in order to trigger ‘worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.'”

While Manning’s biographer, Denver Nicks, claims that Manning may not be a traditional whistleblower simply due to the vast scope of documents she released—unlike the traditional whistleblower, who releases documents targeted at revealing a specific injustice—he nonetheless stresses that “Manning’s decision to leak state secrets was clearly made with altruistic motivations.”

By portraying Manning as a whistleblower, Manning’s defenders reveal an important part of her story. As Benkler, Greenwald, and Nicks argue, the chat logs between Manning and Lamo and Manning’s guilty plea statement show that Manning was motivated in part by a concern with the public good. Manning tells Lamo, for example, that she would not have sold her data “because its public data”; “it belongs in the public domain. . . .it should be a public good.”

Yet Manning’s chats with Lamo also reveal a narrative of her acts that connects her struggle with state secrecy to her struggle with living under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and with her gender identity. In her introduction of herself to Lamo, Manning identifies herself in terms of these two aspects of her life: “hi. . .how are you? . . .im an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern Baghdad, pending discharge for ‘adjustment disorder’ in lieu of ‘gender identity disorder’. . .im sure you’re pretty busy . . . if you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?” For Manning, the thread that ties these two aspects of her life together is clear: mandated secrecy. As she says after referring Lamo to the WikiLeaks website (without directly identifying herself yet as the leaker), “living such an opaque life, has forced me never to take transparency, openness, and honesty for granted.” Manning’s negative experiences of having to hide parts of herself under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell are not separate from her motives for leaking information; rather, they are part of why she feels the need to ensure transparency of military actions.

When Manning’s supporters efface these connections between her personal struggles and her leaking of documents, they do so in order to justify her actions as in service of the public good (rather than private interest or revenge). Yet in so doing, they also unintentionally repeat rather than remedy the injury done to Manning by the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. Their portrayal of her as a whistleblower, and as what Dean Spade and Craig Willse call the “sympathetic gay soldier,” constructs her struggles with gender identity as “secrets” that must be kept if she is to serve the public good. This seems to do a specific injustice to Manning.

It also, however, blocks from view a story implicit in Manning’s self-representation: a story about how supposedly “private” aspects of Manning’s motivations to leak documents may themselves have been formed by Manning’s public experiences of failing to fit into public norms of gender comportment in the army.

To examine the connections drawn by Manning between her public leaking and her supposedly private struggles challenges the dominance of the whistleblower model through which Manning’s actions are usually seen. This model has productively legitimated forms of truth-telling that aim to expose arbitrariness on behalf of assuring accountability and adherence to rules. However, this model also reifies a distinction between public and private that tends to delegitimate forms of truth-telling that do not fit into dominant norms of publicness.

If the prevalence of the whistleblower model leads us to see Manning’s linkages between public and private as damaging to her credibility, those same linkages mark her as negotiating the dilemmas of an outsider truth-teller: someone whose refusal to comply with norms of publicity and privacy render her illegible to her society as a truth-teller, while also putting her in a position to tell us important and unsettling truths about the public and private realms.

Manning’s insistence on connecting her “private” struggles and public leaking should not be seen as corruptive of the attempt to speak truth, but instead as an attempt to change the world by creating spaces and connections where marginalized individuals can say what the world is like for them and begin to imagine how to make it otherwise.

While the whistleblower reveals facts hidden by the state or corporation on behalf of returning each organization to its proper concern with the public good, transformative truth-tellers like Manning reveal the public/private distinction as an oppressive dyad. Manning’s actions showed the changeability and transformability of those realms in her example and practice of truth-telling, and her actions demanded a public response distinct from the accountability demanded by the whistleblower: namely, a public affirmation of the leaked facts and documents as significant and, hence, of a world where outsider truth-tellers would be seen as meaningful speakers of truth.

We should read Manning’s leaking as an attempt not only to reveal facts, but also to help build a world where she, as a gender-nonconforming person, could be seen as a significant speaker of truth. Read as an act of transformative truth-telling, Manning’s leaking appears less as a failed attempt to assure governmental accountability and more as a risky (and still active) contribution to a world where outsiders, who are silenced and oppressed in both public and private realms, would find connections and freedom, a world still under construction.

For Chelsea Manning, Coming Out and Whistleblowing Were Deeply Linked. By Lida Maxwell. LitHub, September 23, 2019.

Oxford University Press

Almost a month ago Chelsea Manning was released from jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Julian Assange. She explained her refusal: “I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.”

For this she was held in civil contempt and incarcerated for two months, including in solitary confinement.

Her release came with the dissolution of the grand jury, but she was issued another subpoena for another grand jury investigating Assange and has been imprisoned again. This time, the judge is also imposing a fine of $500 per day after thirty days, and $1,000 per day after sixty days.

Her actions are being treated as an individual act of resistance. But if we put them in context — of her previous actions and the history of the grand jury — her resistance opens up opportunities for collective action and solidarity, especially in regard to unchecked prosecutorial power.

This is, of course, not the first time that Manning has refused to comply with the law because of her commitment to public transparency. In 2010, Manning, then a soldier in the US Army, leaked huge amounts of classified government documents to Wikileaks that detailed US abuses in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: unreported killing of civilians; the failure to adequately investigate accusations of torture; increased use of drones; and the use of special units to track down and kill individuals without trial, among other things.

While no mainstream public intellectuals spoke up on her behalf then, we might expect more to do so now, especially since so many journalists have been lauding the goods of governmental “transparency” and “facts” in the wake of the Trump candidacy and presidency. Yet only a few journalists in publications like Teen Vogue and the Intercept have spoken up recently on behalf of Manning. Perhaps this is because Manning’s commitment to transparency goes beyond empty platitudes.

For Manning, transparency is important not as a vague good in itself. Rather, transparency is important because it enables democratic political action and solidarity — especially among those vulnerable to state violence — and because secrecy has so often been used as a tool of oppression and control.

While Manning’s earlier leaking of classified documents about American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are often portrayed by her supporters as “whistleblowing,” the significance of Manning’s actions in 2010 and now comes more clearly into view if we see them as “outsider truth-telling,” a practice of telling the truth that (1) is not aimed (as with the whistleblower) only at remedying a particular wrong, but also at showing problems with institutionalized forms of secrecy; and (2) aims not only at holding wrongdoers accountable, but also works to change the world so that those on the margins (on the “outside”) — like Manning — might be seen as significant public speakers of truth. Manning’s recent refusal to testify should be seen as an act of outsider truth-telling that shows the violence of legal procedures that are supposedly neutral and purely fact-centered and changes the world so that we might value and listen to voices that are often excluded and devalued.

While grand juries now appear as a routinized part of the criminal justice system, they were originally a site of popular voice and empowerment. Imported from the common law system in England, grand juries along with petit juries (or trial juries) were meant to act as a check on the abuse of power by the state. Before a criminal charge could be brought by the king, a grand jury had to determine whether the evidence warranted it.

During the colonial period, a grand jury was convened in 1733 to determine whether publisher John Zenger should be charged with libel for insulting the royal governor. They voted against it, functioning as a check not only on the abuse of power by the crown but also against the implications of the charge for the freedom of the press. Grand juries are used to investigate circumstances where a crime may have occurred but further evidence is needed, including organized crime.

But they have also been used to gather information about constitutionally protected activity (such as the freedom of assembly) by those involved with social movements, including the environmental movement and the LGBTQ movement — for example, by secretly calling members of the community who were protesting the pipeline at Standing Rock to testify, law enforcement created conditions of distrust and fear of imminent arrest. Leaders in the Puerto Rican independence movement have organized campaigns informing community members about their rights before federal grand juries because they have long been the focus of such inquiries.

Manning’s refusal to speak to the grand jury draws attention to the ways grand juries now function in a way opposite to their original function: their broad mandate to secretly investigate and coerce individuals to share information makes them a tool of intimidation by the state.

The secrecy of grand jury hearings, while meant to protect the confidentiality of witnesses, ends up making them even more prone to prosecutorial abuse. All topics are permissible during grand jury questioning, and no judge is present. Furthermore, subpoenas for witnesses are not difficult for prosecutors to obtain, and there are no opposing lawyers to question why witnesses are being asked to give details about actions protected by the Constitution.

Those who serve as jurors, while expected to represent peers of those who may be charged, find it difficult to go against a prosecutor motivated to convict. Grand juries indict in 98 percent of cases.

What might be done to restore juries, both grand and petit, to better serve their distinct function as a barrier against unchecked prosecutorial power?

The first is to follow the lead of Chelsea Manning’s distinctive commitment to transparency. Making public the fact of her subpoena and her refusal to be further involved with the investigation, Manning resisted secrecy as a tool of control and sought to enable and expand forms of democratic solidarity, showing us how to assess grand jury proceedings: not narrowly, in terms of whether the law is followed, but more expansively, in terms of how well they further goals of democratic empowerment.

Here, context matters. Given that the charge against Assange proceeded without her testimony, it seems clear that the call for Manning’s testimony has more to do with targeting activists — and punishing Manning in particular. In contrast, when subpoenas are issued (as in the case of President Trump’s financial documents and of Donald Trump Jr. being asked to provide information to the Senate Intelligence Committee) for the purpose of congressional oversight and a check on unitary executive power, they are on the side of democratic empowerment. Looked at in context, Trump’s and his son’s resistance to the subpoenas runs contrary to the democratic spirit of the grand jury.

Second, voters should select prosecutors who share their views about the potential for the abuse of grand jury powers. As Emily Bazelon has written in her new book Charged, the discretion attributed to prosecutors in determining charges is dramatically out of balance with the judge and the jury, two other discretionary nodes. Voters have the power to change the ideology of criminal prosecution at its most influential point.

Third, greater education about jury service is sorely needed. Currently what jurors understand about their responsibilities comes mainly from the video they are shown at the beginning of jury duty (and what they have gleaned from true crime television shows and podcasts). Community workshops and teach-ins are needed to teach jurors about their range of responsibilities and common examples of bias during jury deliberation.

They do not know, for example, that they have the power to nullify — that is, to not indict during a grand jury or to find a defendant not guilty during a trial regardless of the evidence in the case. This right of nullification is the linchpin that holds together the jury’s responsibility to stop unjust punishment by the state, beginning with the process of indictment. Resisting a subpoena to appear before a grand jury and serving as a juror for one are two types of what Chakravarti calls “radical enfranchisement,” understanding that citizenship calls for a differentiation between law and justice at critical moments.

Finally, the commonsense view that refusing to participate in the grand jury process is automatically contrary to the aim of justice is wrong. What Chelsea Manning’s actions show is that outsider truth-telling (not just compelled testimony on the stand) and resistance to prosecutorial intimidation (not just compliance with a prosecutor) reflect the democratic spirit of jury service, and especially the possibility of furthering and expanding democracy, rather than contracting it, through the law.

Chelsea Manning Against the Grand Jury. By Lida Maxwell and Sonali Chakravarti. Jacobin Mag, June 2019. 

In Laura Poitras’s documentary, Citizenfour, Edward Snowden worries to Poitras and Glenn Greenwald that “they” (the press and government) will use his “personality” as a distraction when Greenwald starts publishing stories about the documents that Snowden has leaked. Snowden’s concern was meaningful considering the media coverage of Chelsea Manning, who was on trial at the time Poitras was filming the documentary for charges arising from the Espionage Act, including the charge of aiding the enemy.

Manning’s queerness, gender nonconformity (she now identifies as trans*), and experiences of being bullied in the Army made her an easy target for claims that her leaking of documents was not true whistleblowing, but amounted simply to a private vendetta against the Army and government. In one of the first articles on Manning in the New York Times, for example, Ginger Thompson suggested that Manning might have leaked documents as a way of seeking revenge for being bullied in the military, or for her struggles under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, or out of “delusions of grandeur.”

While Manning is never mentioned by name in Citizenfour, Snowden’s comment suggests that her unacknowledged presence may hover in the background — a specter against which Snowden and his advocates may be trying to distinguish him. Snowden’s comment implies his desire to be a model of rectitude and constraint, one whose actions cannot be questioned on the basis of any supposedly personal motives.

Snowden has been mostly successful on this score. While he certainly has a number of detractors among establishment politicians and some journalists (notably, Jeffrey Toobin), many on the Left clearly find his actions inspirational and motivational. In addition to Poitras’s documentary, Snowden has been the subject of two books (by Glenn Greenwald and Luke Harding) published by major American presses, and the ACLU has recently mounted a high-profile campaign to “Pardon Snowden,” complete with celebrity signatures. Perhaps most strikingly, Snowden has become the subject of a major Hollywood motion picure, Oliver Stone’s just-released biopic, Snowden.

Yet as Snowden has become a symbol in the mainstream left of resistance to state power and secrecy, Manning has receded from view. While many individuals have protested, signed petitions, written alternative press books, and penned letters on Manning’s behalf, dominant voices on the Left have placed Snowden at the center of our attention.

The mainstream left’s focus on Snowden, rather than Manning, as a model truth-teller may have something to do with the kinds of truths they each revealed; Snowden leaked a more coherent set of documents, that arguably revealed a greater wrong: government deception about mass surveillance. Yet if many on the Left (rightly) see Snowden’s act as important not just because of what he disclosed, but because of his political example, then we should ask what the stakes are of taking that example as our model of truth-telling, rather than — or in addition to — Manning’s.

For many on the Left, what Snowden offers us is a stirring example of what David Bromwich calls, in an insightful review of Citizenfour, “integrity — the insistence by an individual that his life and the principles he lives by should be all of a piece.” In Stone’s Snowden, for example, we see Snowden’s integrity through the progression of a fairly conventional story of the refusal of the “self-taught” man of conscience to be complicit in unjust deception.

Stone depicts Snowden as self-possessed, a man who refuses to let his thinking and principles be influenced by others (except perhaps by his liberal photographer girlfriend, whose interest in photographing and examining herself in her images serves as a complement to Snowden’s moral self-examination). Snowden’s self-possession is what allows him to accurately see, diagnose, and ultimately resist complicity in wrongdoing.

Poitras’s film gives us a more taut and complex picture of Snowden, and of the riskiness of his act, but still shows Snowden as a self-possessed, moral man: he says, for example, “I don’t want to hide on this, I don’t want to skulk around. I don’t think I should have to, and I’m not afraid.” Greenwald’s and Harding’s books offer similar depictions of Snowden.

Both films suggest indirectly that Snowden’s integrity might be a model for the rest of us. Stone’s Snowden does so by hinting at the pleasures that a life of principle can afford, in contrast to the discomfort and anxiety of a life of complicity in injustice.

At the end of the movie, Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) says that his “greatest freedom is that I don’t have to worry about what happens tomorrow, because I’m happy with what I’ve done today.” Despite leaving a comfortable job and life in “paradise” (Hawaii), Snowden (first played by Gordon-Levitt, and then the man himself) appears happier living a life in exile devoted to the fight against government secrecy and surveillance. At the very end, while an inspirational score plays, we see Snowden giving lectures via Skype and receiving a standing ovation. These, the film tells us, are the rewards and pleasures of the just — rewards we, or at least many of us, might also seek.

In a less celebratory vein, Bromwich similarly argues that Citizenfour offers a broad invocation to all of us: “[i]t is up to other Americans now, the uncertain end of Citizenfour says, to rouse ourselves and find the value of Snowden’s action as a resource.” For Bromwich, even if we cannot reveal classified documents, we can be people of integrity — committed to living according to principle, to not being complicit in deception, surveillance, and other wrongs.

In contrast to their valorization of Snowden’s integrity, these same filmmakers and journalists have tended to either remain silent about Chelsea Manning, or to suggest that Manning’s act was of a different order than Snowden’s. Manning is not mentioned by name in either film — an omission that bespeaks a conscious or unconscious desire to distance Snowden from Manning.

Harding and Greenwald, in contrast, distance Snowden from Manning explicitly. For example, in The Snowden Files Luke Harding says that Snowden’s leak “eclips[ed] the 2010 release of US diplomatic cables and warlogs by a disaffected US army private, Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.” Implicit in Harding’s statement is the claim that Manning’s act was tainted by personal motives or troubles; “disaffected” connotes malaise, not principle.

In a different register, Glenn Greenwald — who was and continues to be an ardent supporter of Chelsea Manning — portrayed Snowden as someone who appears more like a real whistleblower than Manning.

In his book about Snowden, No Place to Hide, Greenwald notes that Manning “was criticized (unfairly and inaccurately, I believe) for supposedly leaking documents that she had not reviewed” — an argument that “was frequently used to undermine the notion that Manning’s actions were heroic. It was clear that nothing of the sort could be said about our NSA source. There was no question that he had carefully reviewed every document he had given us, that he had understood their meaning, then meticulously placed each one in an elegantly organized structure.”

Greenwald’s comment suggests that even if Manning is a true whistleblower, Snowden is easier to defend, that his actions make him appear like the whistleblower we want and expect.

The desire to distance Snowden from Manning is understandable. Leaders of social movements have long tried to select morally and politically un-impeachable (or at least, less impeachable) individuals as their symbols and exemplars. As Danielle McGuire recounts in At the Dark End of the Street, Rosa Parks was not the first person to refuse to sit at the back of the bus, but she was the person chosen by the NAACP and other early civil-rights leaders as the symbol around which they and other groups could and would rally.

Two other young women, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, also challenged bus segregation in court. But E. D. Nixon, a leading civil rights organizer in Montgomery, deemed both women too compromised to serve as symbols: Colvin’s pregnancy outside of marriage and working-class status made her a “liability,” while Smith’s father drank and her family lived in a “low type of home.” In contrast, Parks, as Nixon said years later, was “honest, she was clean, she had integrity. The press couldn’t go out and dig up something she did last year, or last month, or five years ago.”

The logic is simple: If the person who resists unjust state power appears morally “pure,” the struggle by extension appears pure as well, pursued solely out of a concern with justice. Yet when we overlook or downplay Manning’s actions and render Snowden’s heroic, we perpetuate a hierarchy of public speakers — in this case, holding up an ideal of the self-possessed, white, straight man of principle — while treating Manning as someone better kept private, quiet, out of view.

In turn, we reify and treat as natural an unjust oppression that Manning was trying to fight. In the chat logs with Adrian Lamo, Manning claims that she leaked documents out of a broad discontent with government secrecy — not only the secrecy of their actions in Iraq, but also the secrecy demanded of her by Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. When we allow Manning to be pushed to the sideline, and treat her sexuality and gender nonconformity as matters of “personality” that can “distract” us, we reenact the injustice and silencing that she experienced in the Army.

But what if we see Manning differently — not as someone whose truth-telling is perverted by her “private” motives, but as someone who is a stronger and more potent exemplar of truth-telling because she refuses to privatize her queerness and gender nonconformity?

Manning’s refusal to see these as separate issues — to bracket her sexuality and gender while pursuing transparency — could and should be seen as a form of courage and integrity, to be emulated by others.

If Snowden offers us a model of the integrity of the self-possessed, we could say that Manning offers us a model of the integrity of the dispossessed.

This integrity is revealed in her refusal to separate her queerness and gender nonconformity from her public actions. It is revealed in her description (in the chat logs) of herself downloading documents while listening to Lady Gaga; resisting conformity to the model of the morally serious truth-teller, Manning shows that truth-telling can be a risky pleasure in and of itself. Her integrity is revealed in her wariness about revealing her identity. As she says in the chats with Lamo, she would not mind revealing her identity, if it weren’t for the fact that her picture would be plastered all over the media “as a boy.”

Her refusal to identify herself initially, in other words, was a refusal to be read and interpolated into a gender that did not do justice to who she was and is.

Finally, her integrity can be seen in her broad resistance to secrecy: not just to the government keeping secrets from the people, but to the mandated privatization (or secret-ization) of queerness and gender nonconformity. Manning’s leaking of documents insisted not only that the people know the truth about the government’s actions in Iraq, but also that she, too, is a proper member of the people as she is, a proper public speaker of truth.

We should hold Snowden up as a model of democratic action, as Stone, Poitras, and others do. Yet when we mobilize Snowden’s example and keep Manning in the background, we lose an important example and model of truth-telling as political resistance — one that may be especially relevant and inspirational for those who are not white, cisgender, heterosexual men.

From Manning’s integrity, we learn that even if the dominant culture sees you as untrustworthy, suspect, or queer, you may find and reveal integrity in telling the truth as who you are, and how you see it — and you may solicit a public who would vindicate you as a proper public speaker.

Elevating Manning’s example of integrity, we may also encourage and politically demand greater public receptivity to truth-telling that comes from the dispossessed: from people of color telling the public that the police are murdering black men and women; from women telling the truth about sexual assault and rape; from trans people revealing ongoing harassment and violence.

We could start such a project, today, by linking Snowden and Manning insistently, on principle, as a matter of conscience. There should be no pardon of Snowden that does not include a pardon of Manning. While Snowden lives in Moscow and gives talks via Skype, Chelsea Manning languishes in a jail cell, where she has been recently sentenced to serve fourteen days in solitary confinement for a suicide attempt.

As part of demanding a pardon for Manning, we could declaim this treatment, today, as unfair and cruel. Rather, though, than claiming that Manning deserves a pardon in spite of her private motives, we should demand the pardon in part because of her courage in connecting the dangers of government secrecy about war with the dangers of government secrecy about her sexuality and gender.

If Snowden’s integrity reminds us of the importance of following the principles each of us hold, Manning’s integrity reminds us of the importance of fighting for the voices of the dispossessed to be heard, and allowing those voices to challenge and transform our principles.

Chelsea Manning’s Integrity.    By Lida Maxwell. Jacobin Mag, October 2016

Ever since she was publicly identified as the source who had disclosed a huge trove of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks in 2011, Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst, has been a polarising cultural figure – called a traitor by prosecutors, but celebrated as an icon by transparency and anti-war activists. Her life story, and her role in one of the most extraordinary leaks in American history, has been told in news articles, an off-Broadway play and even an opera. But while she spoke at her court-martial and has participated in interviews, Manning herself has not told her own story. Until now. Manning is writing a memoir, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in winter 2020, the publisher announced earlier this month.

Manning was convicted in 2013 and sentenced to 35 years in prison, the longest sentence ever handed down in an American leak case. After her conviction, Manning announced that she was a transgender woman and changed her name [from Bradley] to Chelsea, although the military housed her in a Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, prison for male inmates. She had a difficult time there, attempting suicide twice in 2016, before President Barack Obama commuted most of the remainder of her sentence shortly before he left office in January 2017. In the meantime, WikiLeaks published Democratic emails stolen by Russian hackers during the 2016 presidential campaign, transforming its image from what it had been back when Manning decided to send archives of secret files to it.

Manning reappeared in the news this year, refusing to testify before a grand jury as federal prosecutors continue to build a case against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder. Assange, in custody in Britain, is fighting extradition to the US for a charge that he conspired with Manning to try to crack an encoded password that would have permitted her to log onto a classified computer network under a different person’s account rather than her own, which would have helped her mask her tracks better. She was jailed for two months for contempt over her refusal to answer questions about her interactions with Assange, then freed because the grand jury expired. But on Thursday she was once again found in contempt by a federal judge for refusing to testify before a grand jury and will return to custody, just seven days after being released from the same Virginia jail.

Tell me about your book?

“It’s basically my life story up until I got the commutation, from my birth to my time in school and going to the army and going to prison and the court-martial process. It’s a personal narrative of what was going on in my life surrounding that time and what led to the leaks, what led to prison, and how this whole ordeal has really shaped me and changed me. I view this book as a coming-of-age story. For instance, how my colleagues in the intelligence field really were the driving force behind my questioning of assumptions that I had come into the military with – how jaded they were, some of them having done two, three, four deployments previously. And then also there is a lot of stuff about how prisons are awful, and how prisoners survive and get through being in confinement.”

Do you have a title yet?

“There is no title yet. I am trying very hard to have some control over that, but none has been decided yet. Noreen Malone from New York magazine worked on it with me. She did a lot of the groundwork in terms of the research, and I did the storytelling, so it was a collaborative effort. I’m still going through and editing where she has taken independent sources to help refine my story, fact-check, verify things and provide a third-person perspective in shaping things.”

Is it written in first-person or third-person?

“It is written in first-person, but there are parts of the book that reference material that are independent of me. I’m still under obligation under the court rules and the Classified Information Procedures Act of 1980 to not disclose closed court-martial testimony or verify evidence that was put in the record. Things like that. So I can’t talk about that stuff and I’m not going to, and so I’m trying to keep this and maintain this as more of a personal story. There are parts of it that might reference reports or whatnot but I’m just going to say, “the media reported this, but I’m not confirming or denying it”.

Are you going to submit the manuscript to the government for a classified information review?

“We’re trying our best to avoid the review process. There is a lot of stuff that is not going to be in the book that people would expect to be in there, but rules are rules and we can’t get around it. It’s more about personal experiences I had rather than anything specific. I’m not trying to relitigate the case, just tell my personal story.”

So if it ends with you getting out of military prison, you’re not going to address your current situation with the grand jury investigating WikiLeaks?

“No, we’re not planning on including that in this current stage. If there is a book that gets into the more juicy details about that stuff, then we’ll probably get around to that after going through a review process, several years down the road from now, whenever the dust settles. But I think this is more about trying to contextualise my story from my perspective rather than get into the weeds of what is in the record of the trial, what is in the documents, what the investigation focused on, because we’re just not able to get into that area.”

It sounds like you are a lot freer to talk about your gender identity than the WikiLeaks issue?

“Yeah. This is less a book about the case and more a book about trials, tribunals, struggles, difficulties, and overcoming them and surviving. If people are expecting to learn a lot more about the court-martial and a lot more about the case, then they probably shouldn’t be interested in this book. But if they want to know more about what it’s like to be me and survive, then there are reams of information in here. It’s much more autobiographical than it is a narrative thriller or crime story or anything like that. I have always pitched this as being very similar to Wild by Cheryl Strayed. I’m really opening myself up to some really intimate things in this book, some really very personal moments and much more intimate points of my life that I’ve never disclosed before. You’re probably going to learn more about my love life than about the disclosures.”

Chelsea Manning interview: ‘I’m opening myself up to some really intimate things in this book’ By Charlie Savage.  The Independent, May 17, 2019.