Chelsea Manning
Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, was an intelligence analyst in the United States Army, who was deployed to Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, rather against his will. Manning held a “Top Secret” security clearance, and signed a classified information non-disclosure agreement, acknowledging that the unauthorized disclosure or retentionor negligent handling of classified information could cause irreparable injury to the United States or be used to the advantage of a foreign nation.
Executive Order No. 13526 and its predecessor orders define the classification levels assigned to classified information. Under the Executive Order, information may be classified as "Secret" if its unauthorized disclosure reasonably could be expected to cause serious damage to the national security. Further, under the Executive Order, classified information cangenerally only be disclosed to those persons who have been granted an appropriate level of United1States government security clearance and possess a need to know the classified information inconnection to their official duties.
Between in or around January 2010 and May 2010, Manning downloaded four nearly complete databases from departments and agencies of the United States. These databases contained approximately 90,000 Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports, 400,000 Iraq war-related significant activities reports, 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, and 250,000 U.S. Department of State cables. Many of these records were classified pursuant to Executive Order No. 13526 or its predecessor orders. Manning provided the records to agents of WikiLeaks so that WikiLeaks could publicly disclose them on its website. WikiLeaks publicly released the vast majority of the classified records on its website in 2010 and 2011.
Among those files was video footage of an Apache helicopter killing 12 civilians in Baghdad in 2007, along with sensitive US diplomatic cables, intelligence assessments of Guantanamo detainees being held without trial and files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
She was jailed for 35 years in 2013 – the longest ever sentence for a US whistle-blower. In jail, she described suffering in solitary confinement and being forced to keep short hair in line with the rules of an all-male lockup. Last year, she twice attempted suicide and also went on a hunger strike, which she ended after the military agreed to provide her with transition treatment to assist her with gender-related stresses. Manning served seven years in a military prison for leaking a trove of documents to WikiLeaks before President Barack Obama commuted the remainder of her 35-year sentence. Obama granted Manning clemency in January 2017, saying she had taken responsibility for her crime and her sentence was disproportionate to those received by other leakers.
Manning was jailed for civil contempt on 16 May 2019. She could remain in jail for up to 18 months — the length of the grand-jury term. Judge Anthony Trenga also ordered fines of $500 a day to kick in after 30 days of confinement and $1,000 a day after 60 days. This follows a two-month jail term earlier this year for refusing to testify to a previous grand jury. Under federal law, a recalcitrant witness can only be jailed for civil contempt if there is a reasonable belief that incarceration will coerce the witness into testifying. If the jail time has no coercive effect and is purely punitive, the recalcitrant witness is supposed to be released.
Lawyers for Manning renewed efforts to get her released from a northern Virginia jail. Manning's lawyers filed court papers asking a federal judge to reconsider his decision to send Manning to the Alexandria jail for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. The motion argues that a new indictment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on espionage charges makes Manning's testimony irrelevant. Manning was released from a northern Virginia jail Thursday after a two-month stay for refusing to testify to a grand jury. Manning spent 62 days at the Alexandria Detention Center on civil contempt charges after she refused to answer questions to a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.
In January 2021, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan nominated Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. Corrigan received the 1976 Nobel Prize for her work in resolving the conflict in Northern Ireland.
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