Chelsea Manning on new book, decision to leak classified information and the "fight" to transition while in military jail
Chelsea Manning's rise to prominence was through her disclosure of secret and classified documents. The decision would shape her life for years to come. In her new book, "README.txt: A Memoir," Manning tells her side of what happened through her own voice.
"I haven't been able to tell my version of events, I haven't really been able to tell my story. And so, this is the first, sort of my first draft, or if you will, of history from my perspective. While there is... I did testify a little bit during the court-martial, my voice has been kind of lost throughout this whole process," she said.
In README.txt, Manning recounts her views after she downloaded nearly 750,000 classified and sensitive military and diplomatic documents during her service as an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army.
She then sent them to WikiLeaks in 2010. It was one of the largest unauthorized disclosures of government documents in American history.
She was convicted of 20 charges, including espionage and theft, and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. In 2017, former President Obama commuted her sentence, and she was released after serving nearly seven years.
Manning said she felt a cognitive dissidence when she was in Iraq and that played a role in her decision to send the documents to WikiLeaks.
"One of the primary goals that I had was to try to -- I always had this sense that especially whenever I was in whenever I was on the ground in Iraq, that there was the story that was happening on the ground and I always considered myself a very, you know, informed citizen prior to this and very well trained at my job. And there was this cognitive dissidence between what was being told to the public and what was being shared with the public and what I was actually seeing on the ground," Manning said.
Many in the country considered her a traitor and a criminal for her role in the leaks, but she says that attitude is changing more than 10 years later.
"I think there was more of that a few years ago, but I just I'm not encountering the same criticisms as I would have in say 2010 or 2013," she said.
There are some details of the leak that Manning had to redact from the book due to a government review process.
"README.txt" also goes into Manning's process to transition while she was serving time in a military jail, seeking hormone treatment through the federal court system. She said that she wanted to highlight the fight she had to go through to secure treatment.
"I'm just trying to tell what my experience was. You know, obviously, I needed access to care, and I think that I got that. You know, it took a little bit of fighting. Eventually, I got that access to care in the end," Manning said. "It hasn't really been, being trans can sort of be, I think, turned into something that is more than it is because just once you go through the transition process, you sort of finish, like you sort of integrate into society. And so, you know, like, I'm very excited about that part."