Through the next half-hour, they discuss the military, the Tonys, the past. Before Manning leaves, Flawless is keen to pass on some wisdom. “Think about your story,” she says. On February 1, The Washington Post raised questions about Manning's eligibility to run. "While her case is on appeal," reported The Post, "she is on a technical form of unpaid active duty, putting her political campaign at odds with Department of Defense regulations that prohibit military personnel from seeking public office." Military law expert Eugene R. Fidell of Yale Law School considered it unlikely the Army would take action against her, saying, "Services don't like to create martyrs." [356] On February 2, Manning commented: "This is an issue that's cropped up mostly from the conservative blogosphere, and the campaign and we don't believe this is an issue at all. ... I've been issued a dishonorable discharge, and I'm not sure where the issue lies in this case." She also confirmed that she was still appealing her court-martial sentence. [357] This is one of the most significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare. For the number of documents involved, and the penalty if convicted, see "WikiLeaks: Bradley Manning faces 22 n

Chelsea Manning - Penguin Books Australia README.txt by Chelsea Manning - Penguin Books Australia

It is not possible to work in intelligence and not to imagine disclosing the many secrets you bear. I can’t pinpoint exactly the first time the idea crossed my mind. Maybe it was when I was exposed to actual classified information, right after basic training in 2008, when I was first learning to be an intel analyst. It’s as if there’s a line you’ve crossed, a partition you’ve opened, this knowledge that you can’t un-know, and it gives you power over the government—but it also gives the government power over you. You’re trained and tested and vigorously inculcated with the notion that you can’t tell anyone anything about what you do, ever. This begins to control how you think about everything, how you act in the world. But the power of prohibition is fragile, especially once the lines seem arbitrary. a b Myers, Steven Lee (July 6, 2010). "Charges for Soldier Accused of Leak". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 9, 2010.

My father made the military sound glamorous. The U.S. Navy stationed him in the United Kingdom as an analyst at a Royal Air Force base a few minutes’ drive east of St. Davids, in Pembrokeshire, Wales. He rose to petty officer third class and worked with classified intercepts, monitoring a network of undersea microphones between Iceland and the UK, on the lookout for Soviet (and sometimes NATO) nuclear submarines. He told me that he’d worked with classified documents and worn a Royal Navy uniform to blend in and confuse spies—it sounded like a spy movie or Tom Clancy novel to me, growing up in the quiet, empty plains of Oklahoma. A Washington Post editorial asked why an apparently unstable Army private had been able to access and transfer sensitive material in the first place. [258] According to her biographer, the American far right saw Manning's sexuality as evidence that gay people were unfit for military service, while the American mainstream thought of Manning as a gay soldier driven mad by bullying. [259] Her early Oklahoma years helps explain why she joined up at least. “My childhood,” she writes, “now feels like it was lived under rigid cis gender sensibilities.” Almost comically so. Dad banned his son from watching his favourite movie, The Little Mermaid, and filled his room with military toys. Little Bradley put sister Casey’s hand-me-down Barbies in GI Joe uniforms and sent them on missions. The trial began on June 3, 2013. Manning was convicted on July 30, on 17 of the 22 charges in their entirety, including five counts of espionage and theft, and an amended version of four other charges; she was acquitted of aiding the enemy. The sentencing phase began the next day. [1]

Chelsea Manning Chelsea Manning

She also hoped the rigours of military life would quell her gender dysphoria; “thinking it’s better to try to tamp down on that, which is basically what most trans people did in the early 2000s.” And it did die down, under the weight of the crushing physical demands of basic training. Then training ended and “I was like, oh, crap. It’s still there.”But I didn’t just want to unburden myself of the restrictions of a judgmental world. There was something else even more urgent on my mind, and it’s why I sat down with my computer at the Barnes & Noble. There were critical revelations about the government, and the complex nature of war, in those files. You might need to sit on this information for 90 to 180 days to best send and distribute such a large amount of data to a large audience and protect the source. Kirkland, Michael (March 13, 2011). "Under the U.S. Supreme Court: Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks martyr?". United Press International.