Chelsea Manning

Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (b. 1987) is an American activist, whistleblower, and former United States Army intelligence analyst who came to prominence in 2010 after disclosing hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents to the website WikiLeaks. ^[1]

Early life and military service

Manning was born in Oklahoma City on 17 December 1987 to an American father and a Welsh mother. She spent part of her adolescence in Haverfordwest, Wales, attending Tasker-Milward V.C. School, before returning to the United States and briefly studying at Montgomery College in Maryland. She enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2007, trained as an intelligence analyst, and deployed to Iraq in 2009.

Disclosures to WikiLeaks

While stationed near Baghdad, Manning accessed classified databases and transmitted a large volume of material to WikiLeaks in early 2010. The releases included a video of a 2007 Baghdad airstrike (published as "Collateral Murder"), the Afghan and Iraq War logs, and roughly 250,000 U.S. State Department diplomatic cables. The disclosures fueled international debate over government secrecy, the conduct of the wars, and the limits of whistleblowing.

Court-martial and imprisonment

Manning was arrested in May 2010. In 2013 a military court convicted her of multiple offences, including violations of the Espionage Act, and sentenced her to 35 years in prison ^[2] — among the longest terms imposed in the United States for such a leak. The day after sentencing she publicly announced that she is a transgender woman and asked to be known as Chelsea Manning. During her incarceration she campaigned, at times through hunger strikes and litigation, for access to gender-related medical care.

Commutation and later activism

In January 2017, President Barack Obama commuted most of Manning's remaining sentence, and she was released that May ^[3]. She subsequently became a prominent advocate for government transparency, privacy, and transgender rights, and sought the Democratic nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in Maryland in 2018. In 2019 she was again jailed for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Her work has been recognised with honours including the Seán MacBride Peace Prize, the Sam Adams Award, and an Electronic Frontier Foundation award ^[4].