She was sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment, escaping life without parole only because the judge rejected the government’s most serious accusation – that Manning had given information to the enemy. Manning said she had started to help WikiLeaks around Thanksgiving in November 2009—which fell on November 26 that year—after WikiLeaks had released the 9/11 pager messages; the messages were released on November 25. Because of the military's " Don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) policy (in effect until September 20, 2011), Manning was unable to live as an openly gay man without risk of being discharged. In January 2017, a Justice Department source said that Manning was on President Obama's short list for a possible commutation.

README.txt: A memoir from one of the world’s most famous

They married and moved back to the US, winding up in Oklahoma where her father found a job as an electronic data processor for the Hertz Corporation.

Manning's sister Casey told the court-martial that both their parents were alcoholics, and that their mother drank continually while pregnant with Chelsea. Of the 22 counts with which Manning was charged, she pleaded guilty to 10 and was found guilty on a further seven, among them six counts of espionage. The grand jury process is a screwed-up process and regardless of whether it’s activists on the frontline or if it’s journalists, I’m not going to participate in that. Part of the reason no one noticed, she said, was that staff were working 14 hours a day, seven days a week, and "people stopped caring after 3 weeks. The petition contended that Manning's disclosures did not cause any "real damage", and that the documents in question did not merit protection as they were not sensitive.

Book Review: ‘README.txt,’ by Chelsea Manning - The New York

Although she said she dealt with Assange directly, Manning also said Assange had adopted a deliberate policy of knowing very little about her, telling Manning: "lie to me. In July 2007, two American Apache helicopters launched 30mm cannon fire at a group of Iraqi men in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, New Baghdad. Manning’s voice lowers, loudens and becomes very harsh, as if she is forcing out an unbearable truth. I ask if she has read it and she looks bemused, eyes skimming the room, before going off on a diatribe about the US military’s “psychology of lethality”.In the wake of her arrest, she was characterised by the US government as, variously, a nihilist, an anarchist, an idealist and an ideologue. The most serious charge was "aiding the enemy", a capital offense, although prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty. The court also rejected Manning's assertion that her actions in disclosing classified information related to national security are protected by the First Amendment.

Chelsea Manning Changed the Course of History. Now She’s Chelsea Manning Changed the Course of History. Now She’s

In a 2011 interview, Manning's father said, "People need to understand that he's a young man that had a happy life growing up. Well, Pfc Manning was under the impression that his leaked information was going to really change how the world views the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and future wars, actually. One time, they abandoned her during a camping trip—of which incident, her aunt told The Washington Post that Manning had awoken to an empty campsite after the other campers had left without her. 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.

There is, she believes, too much emphasis placed on identity at the expense of other considerations. In late 2008 while stationed there, she met Tyler Watkins, who was studying neuroscience and psychology at Brandeis University, near Boston. This was a huge moment for Manning in terms of both her mental health and her belief in systems of government. If there is a strand unifying all the contrasts that have governed Chelsea Manning’s life, it is her dislike – consistent and to the point of perversity – of orthodoxies of any kind. The investigators testified they had also recovered an exchange from May 2010 between Manning and Eric Schmiedl, a Boston mathematician, in which Manning said she was the source of the Baghdad helicopter attack ("Collateral Murder") video.