Chelsea Manning says she’s not a traitor, feels as if she lives in a ‘dystopian novel’
She also feels a ‘responsibility to the public’
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Avi Selk.
Is she a traitor?
It’s a question that has dogged Chelsea Manning ever since she walked out of prison four months ago — nearly three decades short of a 35-year sentence, courtesy of a commutation from President Barack Obama in the last days of his administration.
Had the Army private betrayed her country in 2010 when she passed hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks?
Or had Manning, as many believe, demonstrated loyalty to the American public by exposing its government institutions?
‘An ethical decision’
Manning was asked the question again Sunday, this time point-blank on a stage on the island of Nantucket, Mass.
This time, she answered with finality.
“Are you an American traitor?” asked the moderator, in the final interview of the four-day Nantucket Project conference.
“No, I’m not,” Manning said. “And I believe I did the best I could in my circumstances to make an ethical decision.”
And when she said “ethical,” she hammered her fist in her lap.
The story of Chelsea Manning
Manning tried to kill herself twice during her seven years in a cell in Fort Leavenworth. She was reportedly forced to sleep naked.
Not everyone was sympathetic.
As an Army intelligence analyst in 2010, then named Bradley Manning, she perpetrated what The Washington Post once described as “one of the most notorious leaks of classified documents in U.S. history.”
A quarter-million State Department cables.
Classified documents about military prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Recordings of U.S. soldiers firing from a helicopter at suspected insurgents in Baghdad (“I think they just drove over a body. Ha ha!”), leaving two journalists dead and revolting much of the American public.
“Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence,” President Obama said seven years after her arrest as he wiped out the remainder of her sentence. “She took responsibility for her crime.”
Manning for the public
In Manning’s first interview after going free, she told ABC News she felt a “responsibility to the public.”
“You’re getting all this information, and it’s just death, destruction, mayhem,” she said in June. “And eventually, you just stop. I stopped seeing just statistics and information, and I started seeing people.”
“So many people call you a traitor. Many call you a hero,” said the interviewer. “Who is Chelsea Manning?”
“I’m just me,” she said. For a while, that answer stood.
Manning and Harvard
Harvard University has invited her to make a speech there in the future, although the school’s relationship with the private was clouded this month when it rescinded a fellowship offer to Manning, bowing to pressure from upset staff and graduates.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo, for instance, canceled his own speech at the school, calling Manning an “American traitor.”
Pompeo’s comments might be why the moderator used exactly that term in Nantucket on Sunday, when he and some of about 600 people in the audience questioned Manning, according to the Associated Press.
No, Manning said. She was not an American traitor.
Nor did she mind being snubbed by Harvard: “I view that just as much of an honored distinction as the fellowship itself.”
With a microphone tucked into her shirt collar, sometimes sitting and sometimes rising to face the audience, Manning painted a dark picture of the country where she walks free.
“I’m walking out of prison, and I see literally a dystopian novel unfolding before my eyes,” she said. “That’s how I feel when I walk in American streets today.”
But at one point, she also hinted at her version of brighter future.
“There are things we as people can always do,” Manning said. “Whenever society and the institutions are failing, we can always take our own individual actions against the institutions of power.”
