Chelsea Manning

Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning, December 17, 1987) is an American activist and whistleblower. She is a former United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents on US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. She was imprisoned from 2010 until 2017, when President Barack Obama commuted her sentence. Manning, a trans woman, said in 2013 that she had had a female gender identity since childhood and wanted to be known as Chelsea Manning.

Assigned in 2009 as an intelligence analyst to an Army unit in Iraq, Manning had access to classified databases. In early 2010, she leaked classified information to WikiLeaks and confided this to Adrian Lamo, an online acquaintance. Lamo indirectly informed the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, and Manning was arrested in May 2010. The material included videos of the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 251,287 US diplomatic cables; and 482,832 Army reports that came to be known as the "Iraq War Logs" and "Afghan War Diary". WikiLeaks and its media partners published the material between April 2010 and April 2011.

Manning was charged with 22 offenses, including aiding the enemy, which was the most serious charge and could have resulted in a death sentence. She was held at the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico, in Virginia, from July 2010 to April 2011, under prevention-of-injury status—which entailed de facto solitary confinement and other restrictions that caused domestic and international concern—before being transferred to the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she could interact with other detainees. In February 2013, she pleaded guilty to 10 of the charges. The trial on the remaining charges began on June 3, 2013, and on July 30, she was convicted of 17 of the original charges and amended versions of four others, but acquitted of aiding the enemy. She was sentenced to 35 years at the maximum-security US Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. On January 17, 2017, Obama commuted Manning's sentence to the nearly seven years of confinement dating from her arrest in 2010. Since her release, Manning has made her living through speaking engagements.