Nihilists, anarchists, idealists, troubled transgender youth asking for help: When a 22-year-old U. S. Army analyst leaked thousands of classified documents, everyone knew why. They were wrong, she says. That’s what happened.
Chelsea Manning’s memoir opens like a Jason Bourne novel with a scene in which the 22-year-old, on the last day of a two-week military leave, tries to leak a massive amount of classified information through a crude Wi-Fi connection in a Barnes.
Everything about Manning this afternoon on February 8, 2010 – his name, his gender, his anonymity, his freedom – is tentative and will soon be replaced. Three months later, she will be in a cage in Kuwait. Three years later, he will begin a 35-year criminal sentence at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Meanwhile, the broader consequences of his moves that day, depending on his perspective, will topple governments; endanger lives; protect lives; preserve democracy; compromising global diplomacy; replace the global in immeasurable ways; or, Manning’s least favorite interpretation, it boils down to a cry for help from a troubled transgender youth seeking the attention she needs. Sitting across from me today at a job site in Brooklyn, Manning is diminutive, fierce, dressed all in black with long blonde hair, and vibrating with enough nervous force to force the lights. “Are we recording?” he says as his eyes scan the room. For our 90-minute meeting slot, he will only partially appear, each query taking her back to an unseen competition site where he will have to stand against endless and deep accusations.
The memoir is called README. txt, a deceptively awkward name (it refers to the filename he used for the leaks) for a highly entertaining e-book that, while telling the story of why and how Manning released the data, gives you the same area of its origins. Oklahoma, a complex and traumatic circle of hitale relatives creating the situations for all of her future decisions. It’s an excellent read, full of twists and turns and main points that contradict many of the assumptions made about Manning at the time. After her arrest, the United States government branded her a nihilist, anarchist, idealist, and ideologue. Three days after his trial began in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents revealing how the US government was spying on its own citizens, which, Manning dryly points out in the e-book, it didn’t. that most damaged her image. “I ed in general, but at a non-public point it was a difficult time for me,” she wrote. Snowden emerged as the adult and plausible whistleblower of Manning’s loose bullets, the “hero” of her “evil patron. ” Compared to Snowden, Manning was young, green, and because she was in prison, she couldn’t protect herself in interviews. When, at the end of the trial, a photo of Manning wearing a blonde wig and eye makeup surfaced, she told her detractors another made-for-TV tale: She had a secret she couldn’t tell, then she told it to a country. mysteries.
Manning, now 34, thankfully sniffs this interpretation. “People tried to say, ‘Oh, this all happened because you were trans. ‘”It’s like, no; That’s because I was a knowledge scientist who had too much data and sought to do my job, and I learned that doing this is not sustainable. We cannot continue to do the same thing and expect other results.
She talks about the raw information that was her duty to collect and analyze in Iraq, and that within weeks of her arrival she came to feel that it was being dishonestly reported to other Americans through the military. Manning speaks fast, in a way that seems to relate to her ability to process gigantic amounts of complex data and a more fundamental intellectual desire to erase the black spots in memory. She was in prison for seven years before President Obama commuted her sentence in 2017, spending some of that time in solitary confinement at the Quantico Army Penitentiary. She attempted suicide twice this criminal sentence and a third time, in 2019, when she re-criminalized, this time for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Julian Assange. This refusal was an incredible act of self-sacrifice, driving a hole in the notion that she was driven by intellectual confusion, not principle. “I’m very frustrated with it even to this day,” she says, adding that there are a number of diagnoses on her Wikipedia page that are misidentified. “Gender dysphoria is no longer on the radar; it has been treated, or some would say ‘cured’. All other diagnoses were unidentified, untreated complex PTSD only. It is my only diagnosis.
Manning wrote the e-book to give a sense of nuance to a story that, over the years, she believes has been tapped into by one lobbying organization or another that seeks to use it to strengthen their cause. This has left him with a tendency to place a hidden calendar in even the most bland statement, leading to comic misunderstandings. When I say that the ebook is very good, she looks worried and says, “I’ve talked a lot about commodification in the virtual age, and each and every one Everything is a product now, and everything has to be sponsored, from other people on TikTok and Instagram, to society at large where you feel that every interaction you have has a transaction or a financial value.
There is a short pause. No, I, I just wanted to say that I think it’s a smart read. Manning is fleetingly empty. ” Okay. “
He doesn’t escape the irony of having NDA news hounds instruct him to read the manuscript (he has a watermark on each and every page to discourage leaks). absurd to me, especially in the NFT era. My editor is not satisfied that he says that. I perceive it. But I think it’s a bit silly. “
It’s hard to believe what Manning’s life is like in those days. Before the pandemic, I used to give lectures at the invitation of students, but the shutdown paid for that. He has some consulting contracts with technology and security firms, “on the AI aspect: complex and nuanced reviews about crypto programs and post-crypto currency,” he says. She lives alone, in Brooklyn, where her social life revolves around the music scene: it has been wonderful music; As a teenager, Napster was his gateway to online culture.
Last August, she gave the impression of being a guest DJ at Elsewhere, a huge Brooklyn club where she sported shiny cat ears and played a set that included Britney Spears remixes and the song Succession. promises intrusion and wild gossip: Earlier this year, she was said to be dating Canadian musician (and Elon Musk’s ex) Grimes, anything she couldn’t possibly dignify with a comment, but doesn’t generate profits or revenue. actor or movie star,” he says. Even YouTubers make more money than I do. “
However, two years after his liberation from Fort Leavenworth, he had regained some sort of balance and begun to rebuild a life. It all ended in 2019, when she was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury about her interactions with Assange. She refused and sent back to prison. Given everything that had happened, is it actually a very difficult resolution to make?Manning seems outraged to the point of outrage. ” It’s not difficult at all. “
I’m surprised, I say, mostly because in the e-book she doesn’t seem to be a fan of Assange, calling her faction within WikiLeaks less “responsible” for the original cohort of hackers. (She won’t be drawn to her non-public appointments with Assange, or the legal fight she’s faced lately. )”No,” he said.
But the charge for you –
“Oh, when I’ve already spent seven years in prison, 18 months is just. . . “
She faints. I surely recommend that having already served a sentence makes the prospect of going back to criminal life even worse, especially in light of your PTSD?”Non. Je – ” Her voice trembles and her eyes fill with tears. “OK, I’m going to be very intense here. ” Manning’s voice falls, intensifies and becomes very harsh, as if forcing an unbearable truth. “I fight the global here every day,” he says. There is a long pause. ” I have a lot of problems with this global, this loose global call, compared to the life I had in criminal. “
Why?” I struggle with the fact that Array. . I don’t know what it will bring. I feel less supported than in the army and in prison. In prison, I know I have a position to live in; I know I’m physically careful; I know I have food. I don’t feel so safe here. And other people are so distant. There is no network. People don’t communicate with each other. People don’t greet you. People are suspicious of both. one more. ” His voice is a peak. ” There is more network in a criminal than here!And that says a lot about how fucked up our world is right now. I struggle with that one and both days.
Manning was released from a detention center in Virginia in March 2020, a year after her incarceration, when the grand jury investigation expired and her testimony was no longer required. of such a cost, it is admirable to the point of bewilderment. It comes from optimism,” he says, “and I from her. ” I know the network is possible, because I’ve noticed it, and I’ve noticed it in the worst it puts you can imagine. Every time humanity is pushed to the limit, I see the best, so I know it’s there.
If there is a thread that unifies all the contrasts that have governed Chelsea Manning’s life, it is her consistent and even perverse aversion to orthodoxies of all kinds. Possibly he would not belong to a single group, sympathetic to his cause. During her trial, former leftists and free speech activists who came forward to help her angered her when they disrupted the courtroom and upset the judge. In the book, she calls elements of the WikiLeaks transparency mob, and adds Assange, for being a “troll-and” and “nihilist. “She breaks with elements of the trans network – at the time of her arrest she was still living as a gay boy – by naming herself in the memoirs. According to her, too much emphasis is placed on identity to the detriment of other considerations. “That’s not how I think. I have things that matter to me, I have positions that I hold and I feel like, especially in the online age, you find an identity and adapt your ideals to your identity, which is not my way of running at all.
The fact is, he writes, that he did not sign up for the military to promote an ideological agenda, nor to help the enemy, nor to sow chaos. , unemployed, directionless, and wanted to impress her father, a U. S. Navy veteran. A U. S. woman who she says relentlessly bullied her during her formative years into being a “dick. “Part, I think.
She also hoped that the rigors of military life would calm her gender dysphoria; “To think it’s better to try to reduce that, which is basically what most trans people did in the early 2000s. “And it passed, under the weight of the overwhelming physical demands of basic education. I like it, oh, it’s still there.
After passing the style tests, Manning was assigned to Army Intelligence and, at age 22, found herself deployed to Iraq as part of the promotion of the 2007 recruiting wave. The surprise was immense. Along with other analysts, he stayed on a changed basketball court in the Green Zone, offering direct frontline troops waiting for enemy movements. He was very intelligent in his work. She was also horrified and depressed, showing unedited graphic photographs of the battlefield. One night, a clerical error through a special operations unit (they used an old cloak as a target) resulted in the death of an organization of Iraqi civilians. In part, I blamed myself because I left my workplace to eat. He wondered if there was anything she could do.
The assumption about whistleblowers is that bravery and self-sacrifice demand trust that borders on narcissism. To call such vital systems as the U. S. military. young man when he uploaded incident reports and vital activity logs to WikiLeaks is no small thing vital; Risk assessment at this age is not what it is a decade later. For Manning, when analyzing the data, the precedent advised that the consequences might not be too severe. Forty years earlier, when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing the lies of the U. S. government, he was not a member of the Pentagon. A U. S. military official on Vietnam, he escaped from prison. More recently, Thomas Drake, a whistleblower who in 2006 communicated with reporters about inefficiency and fraud at the NSA, was sanctioned but not jailed. Manning’s speculation was that he would face a dishonorable discharge. It was worth it. As he writes in the book, when he left Barnes
Manning sought to tell the American public several things: how badly the war in Iraq was going; and that the secrecy surrounding it was designed to save face, not as a security measure to protect the national interest. A year later, similar considerations led her to release a slew of US State Department diplomatic cables (this leak would reveal nothing as brutal as the porosity and mercilessness of US government cybersecurity). for a low-ranking 22-year-old analyst to access and publish the data). her movements as why, of the load of intelligence officers and other agents with access to the same information, she was the one who broke ranks. There was a ‘core’ of confidence in the radical theory of transparency among them, ‘however, that was very expressive for music. It was very Napster. It was about pirating music or movies. Before joining the military, he had engaged in web activism, targeting evangelical churches through trolling their chat groups, however it was largely recreational at a time when early web culture was, as she says, “a playground,” which has become the “toxic cesspool of far-right ideologies. “
It has vaguely anti-authoritarian roots on both sides of its circle of relatives. His mother, Susan, is Welsh, from a giant circle of working-class relatives in Haverfordwest. His father, Brian, came from a circle of Midwestern Catholic relatives, with a strong libertarian bent. Manning’s parents met at a pub in Wales in the mid-1970s, where her father was stationed in the U. S. Navy. UU. Se married and returned to the United States, ending up in Oklahoma, where his father discovered a task as an electronic knowledge processor for Hertz Corporation.
It was a comfortable middle-class house. He was also violent. Both of Manning’s parents were alcoholics; her father “frequently beat her,” she writes, infrequently for no obvious reason, but prompted, according to Manning, by what he perceived as her son’s effeminate behavior. His mother was softer, but she was also in the alcohol zone and “unable to behave like an adult. He never learned to drive or keep a checkbook, and his alcoholism ended up making it even more difficult for him to serve as in the world. There was at least one suicide attempt, when Manning discovered his mother passed out half-naked in the hallway. After his parents separated in their teens, he followed his mother to Wales for a short, unfulfilled era before returning to the United States. If there is a scorched earth mentality in his thinking, he was born out of necessity. What is less obvious is how he built and maintained his abundant confidence. At school, he was a high achiever who felt smarter than his classmates. After being introduced to computers at the age of six, she almost without delay started doing basic programming. Even so, she hunted for the image in the whole of her, I recommend that it was not exactly a background to give life to self-esteem.
“Well, it’s very advantageous,” Manning says. I’m a middle-class white kid in Oklahoma. “
Granted, your memoir describes you as a child of alcoholics growing up in an abusive home. “However, it is very typical in this area. But yes, being trans in particular. . . “It would have been fine in my going to Harvard. “
Manning resists narratives that lead to victimization. He spent years in treatment suffering the guilt of “abandoning” his mother when he returned from Wales to the US. I needed to do something different. ” His mother passed away in 2020. No has no idea where his father is. “We tried to locate him for the book, but it’s very fickle. ” In her late teens, Manning says, her father kicked her out and she lived in his car for a while, promoting counterfeit Adobe software in a parking lot. Soon after, he joined the army. things don’t seem so insurmountable,” he says.
Politically, several vital things happened in Manning’s childhood. In 1993, when I was five years old, the U. S. government was in charge of the country. The U. S. sent troops to a hostage scene in Waco, Texas, ruining the project and killing 76 people, adding 25 children. Manning’s father immediately jumped into the “government mentality that’s going to take up arms,” he says, a position he despises. “It’s an excuse, a call to something deeper and much more sinister. Much of the libertarian tension in American politics is deeply connected to this air of superiority among upper-middle-class white men. However, from an early age, Manning learned to have a certain skepticism of the U. S. government. In the U. S. , a skepticism he never completely lost.
The other political influence in his formative years was the gay rights movement. At the age of 10, Manning kissed a boy named Sid. Sid kissed her back before calling Manning a faggot. “I didn’t even know what homosexual meant at the time. “She writes, “And I bet the kids who called me didn’t know either. It was a bad thing, we all think, the worst insult you can use. I just wanted everything to pass away. His gender dysphoria was so deeply suppressed at the time that he simply assumed, with great regret, that he was homosexual in a state where “homosexual sex” would be a criminal offense until 2003. Five years later, when Manning was learning to be an intelligence analyst in Fort Drum, New York, California’s electorate passed Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage.
It was a great moment for Manning in terms of her sanity and her confidence in governing formulas. “All my life I had been told that things were going to get better,” he writes, “that the formula was set with checks and balances, that liberal society meant slow but steady ‘progress’ toward democratic inclusion. “The adoption of Proposition 8 exploded that vision. “It wasn’t just a repudiation of that promise, it was a non-public rejection of me, and millions of other queer people, as human beings.
To Manning’s critics, his release of the Iraq reports, and later Afghan war diaries and diplomatic cables, was an expression of monstrous arrogance; at most productive an overreaction to the general chaos of war through a naive young recruit, at worst an act of bad religion meant to aid the enemy. After downloading the files, nothing happened for a long time, then everything happened at once. WikiLeaks published the reports in The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel and other associated outlets. The army has opened an investigation. When Manning felt the net closing, she feared her fellow analysts might be suspects (she had acted entirely alone) and confided in an anonymous online contact that she suspected ties to the FBI and that she correctly imagined it would make her Minus. A week later, two agents from the Army Criminal Investigation Division showed up to interview Manning, accompanied by civilians from the State Department and the FBI. She was promptly arrested and transported from Iraq to Kuwait, where she was framed, in a tent, in a makeshift criminal made entirely of steel bars. In other words, a cage, where she would spend several months. “A tire cage, we call it. Built in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I don’t forget it because it was the only one written on it. It was a brain melting experience. It has been reduced to the highest fundamental shadow of humanity. “Food. Water. Fresh. My reptilian desires were the main driver for her. Meanwhile, the guards goaded her into taking her next step. Bad things there. “
Instead, Manning was transported to Quantico, an army criminal in Virginia who, in the first place, seemed like an improvement. “It’s funny because other people say, ‘Your time at Quantico was really bad. ‘But the first thing I thought of Quantico was, ‘I’m in the United States!Hot running water without bloodshed!Air conditioning!'”The relief didn’t last long. Manning was held in solitary confinement, constantly harassed by the rules: she was not allowed to lie down during the day and any attempt to do so would result in barking orders for her to sit down. He was on suicide watch and was denied pillows or bedding as a result. that she could use to harm herself. He was not allowed to exercise on his mobile phone or meet with other criminals. She was completely isolated in Quantico for nine months. 16 of the Convention Against Torture. “During this time, army doctors diagnosed her with depression, anxiety, and gender dysphoria, not all of which were used by her defense team when, 3 years later, she was put on trial by the military.
Of the 22 charges Manning was charged with, he pleaded guilty to 10 and was found guilty of seven others, adding six counts of espionage. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, escaping life without parole only because the finding went above the government’s maximum serious charge: that Manning had given information to the enemy. In the event, it was discovered that she was not guilty of treason. The only note of relief for Manning was that once she finished the trial, she could still come out as trans for her without jeopardizing her case. She can also take legal action to force the criminal government to allow her to use hormone treatment in crime. Before the trial, she had begun signing letters from “Breanna Manning. ” Now, at Fort Leavenworth, she has made the decision that “Chelsea” is the right name. “It was a Manhattan community full of dance clubs where other queer people could feel at home, normal and welcome,” she wrote. She made one of her through her lawyer. She then bent down to spend what she assumed would be the next 30 years in a criminal army.
In fact, when President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence in 2017—he pointed to the apology she read in court as proof of his remorse—with time served, he would end up serving another four years in prison. before her release. The reports of her at Fort Leavenworth had been a mix of deep depression and suicidal thoughts, exacerbated, according to Manning, through the destabilizing effect of hormones the government allowed her to start taking in 2015, and what she calls a strangely non violent. A birdlike individual like Manning who takes female hormones in a male criminal would run, one imagines, the threat of being attacked. In fact, she says, she had almost no problems; some fights, that’s all. “Do not forget that I was quite sociable in criminal. People knew me and I got to know people. She helped other criminals with their legal problems. She has become a popular recluse. “People stopped seeing me as a trans person; they saw me. I can just hear it – oh well, you’re different. These days, Manning says, being trans “seems like such a small thing in my life. Like: I went through this transition era and it was very complicated and I needed access to care, and once I was given care, I was able to serve as an adult. ” and not really thinking about those things. He very rarely comes back. “
And then, he tries, once again, to rebuild a life. The benefit of speech hasn’t actually recovered after Covid, but you’re about to embark on an ebook tour of several cities and enjoy the prospect of meeting and debating with people. He gets a lot of letters a year, hate, basically admiration. Reading his eBook reminded me of Regeneration, Pat Barker’s novel about World War I and the most productive description of PTSD I’ve ever read. I ask her if she has read it and she looks at me puzzled. eyes scanning the room, before launching into ranting about the U. S. military’s “lethality psychology. “
I look back to notice an iota of hesitation, doubt, or remorse at one of the events of the last 12 years. Instead, I say, given the extremes of your situation, some other character would have backed down. Manning is surprised that, through analysis of the data, he can come to this conclusion. “It’s not me!”
Chelsea Manning’s README. txt record is published via Vintage for £20. For The Guardian and The Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop. com. Shipping rates may apply.