PERSON: Bradley (Chelsea) Manning

Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning, December 17, 1987) is a former United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013, of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents.
Assigned in 2009 to an Army unit in Iraq as an intelligence analyst, Manning had access to classified databases. In early 2010, she leaked classified information to WikiLeaks and confided this to Adrian Lamo, an online acquaintance. Lamo indirectly informed the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, and Manning was arrested in May that same year. The material included videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike, and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables; and 482,832 Army reports that came to be known as the “Iraq War Logs” and “Afghan War Diary”. The material was published by WikiLeaks and its media partners between April 2010 and April 2011.

Manning was ultimately charged with 22 offenses, including aiding the enemy, which was the most serious charge and could have resulted in a death sentence. She was held at the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico in Virginia, from July 2010 to April 2011, under Prevention of Injury status—which entailed de facto solitary confinement and other restrictions that caused domestic and international concern—before being transferred to the Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she could interact with other detainees. She pleaded guilty in February 2013 to 10 of the charges. The trial on the remaining charges began on June 3, 2013, and on July 30 she was convicted of 17 of the original charges and amended versions of four others, but was acquitted of aiding the enemy. She was sentenced to serve a 35-year sentence at the maximum-security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. On January 17, 2017, President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence to nearly seven years of confinement dating from her arrest on May 27, 2010 by military authorities.

Manning is a trans woman who, in a statement the day after sentencing, said she had a female gender identity since childhood, wanted to be known as Chelsea, and desired to begin hormone replacement therapy. Reaction to Manning’s disclosures, arrest, and sentence was mixed. Her biographer, Denver Nicks, writes that the leaked diplomatic cables were seen by some (but disputed by others) as a catalyst for the Arab Spring that began in December 2010, and that she was viewed by some as a 21st-century Tiananmen Square Tank Man and by others as an embittered traitor.

— Wikipedia