Chelsea E Manning Biography
Chelsea Manning (Chelsea Elizabeth Manning) birth name Bradley Edward Manning is an American activist and whistleblower. Chelsea is a former United States Army soldier who was convicted by a court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after she sends information to WikiLeaks of nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents, she was imprisoned between 2010 and 2017.
Chelsea Manning Transgender
She later became a trans woman, Manning released a statement in 2013 explaining she had a female gender identity since childhood and wanted to be known as Chelsea Manning. She also expressed her desire to begin hormone replacement therapy.
Chelsea Manning Age
Chelsea was born on December 17, 1987, in Crescent, Oklahoma, U.S. She is 31 years old as of 2018.
Chelsea Manning Senate | Chelsea Manning Election Results
Chelsea was defeated in the Democratic primary for the Maryland Senate seat.
Chelsea Manning Twitter
Tweets by SaveManning
Chelsea Manning Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/p/Btywb-Wnqgn/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Chelsea Manning Documentary | Chelsea Manning Movie
On the day of Chelsea was released from prison, Pulse Films announced at the Cannes Film Festival that a documentary about the whistleblower and her adjustment into post-incarceration life is in the works.
Chelsea Manning Interview
Chelsea Manning: ‘I’m a very different person than I was 10 years ago’ (theguardian.com)
A few weeks after Chelsea Manning was released from military prison, having served seven years of a 35-year sentence for leaking official secrets, she came to a terrible realization. “I was out, but I saw that while I had been away, the prison had moved out here as well. That’s how I feel. I feel like I haven’t left, we’ve just exchanged prisons.”
That grim assessment, that even in the freedom she was trapped within a prison, dawned on her as she walking one day through the streets of Brooklyn. The New York borough has a reputation for hipster cool, but she was shocked to see so many heavily armed police.
“There was this immense police presence and they were militarized. I’ve been part of an occupying force in a foreign country, and I know what that looks like. That’s what I saw in Brooklyn – an occupying force.”
Her powerful fear about what America has become in the seven years of her incarceration, combined with an equally powerful determination to do something about it lies behind Chelsea Manning’s announcement this week that she is running for a US Senate seat. Fear and determination – you could say that has been her dual hallmark since she made the fateful decision in 2010 to leak a vast trove of 700,000 secret documents when she was working as an intelligence analyst at a US military base in Iraq.
In the first interview Manning, 30, has given since she posted details of her Senate bid on Twitter, the Guardian asked her whether she drew a straight line between becoming one of the most famous – and most severely punished – official leakers in US history and her political ambitions today. “It’s certainly not a direct line,” she said. “It’s windy, a lot has happened. I’m a very different person than I was 10 years ago.”
But there are certainly parallels between the two events. It was an act of extreme courage – some would, and did, say folly – to download and transmit war logs, embassy cables, videos and Guantánamo files to WikiLeaks. It is an act of extreme courage – some might, and are, saying folly – to run for the US Senate.
There’s also a profound dichotomy to be found somewhere along that winding road between her May 2010 arrest and her new campaign: she wouldn’t have the global platform she enjoys today were it not for the at times brutal treatment she received at the hands of the US military. How does she make sense of such opposites?
“I haven’t made sense of it,” she said. “And I don’t think there has to be an explanation. I learned very quickly that my experience in prison has shaped my understanding of the world.”
We meet, appropriately on the first anniversary of President Obama’s commutation of Manning’s sentence, in her apartment outside Washington DC. It has a large living room that is full of light, but strangely empty and devoid of human touch, as though she had replicated, albeit more comfortably, the spartan aesthetic of a prison cell. The walls are almost bare besides prints of Oscar Wilde and anarchist Emma Goldman above the fireplace, and a copy of Manning’s commutation letter.
She is dressed in black, as she was in the video launching the Senate campaign in which she carried a red rose as symbol of political resistance. In the bright light of the room, her eyes are piercingly blue-grey, topped by a slash of pink eye shadow. She wears a silver necklace with a hashtag pendant; asked why she replies without hesitation: “Twitter … got me out of prison.”
To say that Manning has taken on a tough job running for office in her home state of Maryland is an understatement. The incumbent in the 26 June Democratic primary, Ben Cardin, is a seasoned veteran going for a third term, the leading Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, with a large and loyal following of centrist voters.
Cardin is reported to have at least $2m in his war chest, and the last time he faced a primary challenge in 2012 he beat his opponent by 74% to 16%. Manning has raised a little under $50,000 so far, drawn from small online donations, with a staff currently of two that she wants to keep lean throughout the campaign at under 10.
How can she possibly compete?
“We know it’s a real fight ahead of us,” she said, insisting that she is in the race to win. Whatever happens, though, she will not compromise her convictions to garner votes. “We do want to win, but if we lose our principles then winning wouldn’t matter.”
Manning says she is putting her faith in victory in the local activist and student groups with whom she has been building connections since her release. “We are not doing a centralized ground game, we are waiting for local communities to come to us. I will come, and I will listen.”
Does she fear that she could crash and burn, as the Black Lives Matter celebrity DeRay Mckesson did when he contested the Democratic primary for Baltimore mayor in 2016, coming in sixth with just 2% of the vote?
“Baltimore is a deep-rooted city with a very active activist community, and I don’t think DeRay utilized that,” she replied. “I’m not going to criticize a friend of mine, but at the same time we are talking to local people in Maryland, and we are taking the time.”
‘This is my moment’
Manning’s political style is already fully on view through her Twitter feed. It is vibrant and provocative, fusing upbeat jingles like “#WeGotThis” – a mantra that she developed in prison to buoy up her spirits at times of despair – with blunt language that compares the federal immigration agency Ice to the Gestapo and says “fuck the police” without elucidation.
That approach clearly works for her 323,000 Twitter followers. But how it will play on the doorsteps of Maryland, a state with a large federal employee contingent (the NSA spy center is based here), remains to be seen.
Manning calls her politics “radical anti-authoritarianism”. Asked to explain, she grew animated, her voice crescendoing: “The United States has the largest and most expensive military in the world, but we always want more. We have the largest prison system in the world, yet we want more. We have the largest and most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in the world by far, and still we want more. How much is enough? That is my moment – we need this to stop.”
Though she says she has no animus towards Cardin – “I voted for him twice” – she sees him as part of the problem. She points to the Israeli Anti-Boycott Act that he championed that has been widely criticized for attempting to stifle protests against Israeli settlements.
In her first campaign statement, Manning mentions three core policy areas: criminal justice, healthcare and immigration. In each, she pitches herself strikingly to the left of Bernie Sanders. Prisons should be closed and inmates released; all hospitals should be free at the point of use, no questions asked; US borders should be open.
And she really means open. “We shouldn’t be denying the absolute right to come into the United States. You have a right, everybody does.”
What would she say to a Maryland voter worried about terrorists entering the country? “We have domestic terrorists and they can travel wherever they want. Closing of the borders doesn’t solve the problem.”
That initial position statement is as interesting for what it omits as for what it addresses. Manning is silent on transgender politics, despite being at the forefront herself of the trans movement. And she does not mention Donald Trump.
Why no reference to the man who for many progressives has become the embodiment of evil?
“All our problems are personalized into one individual, but it’s a systemic problem. Our broken immigration system didn’t pop up overnight, it was a machine built over decades by centrists from both sides.”
Manning said that she will soon begin appearing in public meetings at the invitation of local groups. Given that her Twitter feed regularly attracts vile hate-filled comments and threats of violence towards her from transphobic and rightwing detractors, is she not anxious about her safety?
“It doesn’t bother me. These people want to shut dissent down, and we have to push back. I’m not going to be deterred by somebody saying horrible things to me.”
Attack lines that she is certain to face on the campaign trail have already begun to be aired. She is a traitor to her country, is the most predictable iteration, followed by conspiracy theories that she is in the pay of the Russians attempting to destabilize a sitting Democratic senator.
Again she appears unfazed. “Everybody is a traitor these days. James Comey, Hillary Clinton, Trump, Obama … the word has no meaning any more. Any form of ‘I don’t agree with you’ becomes ‘treason’, and in that kind of society we can’t have debates.”
WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, to whom she leaked the documents in 2010, are also certain to be invoked against her. What does she say now of WikiLeaks?
“I made a decision in 2010 to release the documents. I reached out to the New York Times and the Washington Post, I ran out of time, and that was the decision I made. I can’t change that.”
Has she had any contact with Assange since the data transfer?
“No. Zero.”
Perhaps the most serious charge so far has come from the right. The Conservative Review wrote that the Manning v Cardin battle “benefits the Republican party tremendously. It will pit the Democrat party’s establishment wing against the radical identity politics of its more progressive members.”
How does she answer that theory that by injecting “radical anti-authoritarianism” into the race, she could have a reverse impact by presenting a gift to radical reactionaries?
Manning’s answer is that in this fevered age all political bets are off. “Pundits say all kinds of things, and they are always wrong. Remember election night 2016? Times are different. People are upset. The political system we have isn’t representing people anymore. So yeah, we need a fight.”
To that fight Chelsea Manning, one-time homeless person, US soldier, official leaker, military prisoner, now Twitter celebrity and trans woman, is joined. Let the wild rumpus begin.
Chelsea Manning Website
https://www.luminairity.com/
Chelsea Manning Net Worth
Details about her net worth will be updated soon.
Chelsea Manning 2018
Chelsea Manning Australia
Chelsea canceled her appearance in Australia and instead conducted her scheduled speaking tour via a satellite from New Zealand.
Chelsea Manning Book
♦ The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower
♦ The United States Vs. Pvt. Chelsea Manning
♦ Private: Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, and the Biggest Exposure of Official Secrets in American History
♦ The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U. S. History
♦ WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy
♦ Chelsea Manning: The Scandalous True Story of an All-American Whistleblower
♦ Whistleblower: Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden – 2 Books In 1
♦ Chelsea Manning: Intelligence Analyst
♦ Truth and Consequences: The U.S. Vs. Bradley Manning
♦ The Art of Revolt: Snowden, Assange, Manning
♦ A Becoming Resemblance
♦ The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning
Chelsea Manning Harvard
Chelsea declined an offer to speak at Harvard after a dean at the university revoked his invitation for her to be a visiting fellow there. Douglas W. Elmendorf, the dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, told Ms. Manning in a phone call at about 12:30 a.m. that the school was no longer offering her the fellowship, according to a source familiar with the conversation. The decision was made public shortly afterward.
Chelsea Manning Leak
Manning said in January 2010, when she began interacting with them on IRC and Jabber, her first contact with WikiLeaks took place. At the end of November 2009, when they posted 570,000 pager messages from the attacks of September 11
Manning downloaded the 400,000 documents known as the Iraq War logs on January 5, 2010. She downloaded 91,000 documents from the Afghan database on January 8, later known as part of the Afghan War logs. She saved the material on CD-RW and smuggled it by labeling CD-RW media “Lady Gaga” through security. She then copied it to her computer. The next day, she wrote a message in a readme.txt file (see right), which she told the court was initially intended for The Washington Post.
Manning copied the files from her laptop to her camera’s SD card so that she could take them to the United States while she was leaving for R&R. Army researchers later found the SD card in the basement room of Manning in the home of her aunt in Potomac, Maryland. Manning flew via Germany to the United States on January 23 for two weeks of leave. During this visit, she went out dressed as a woman, a wearing a wig and makeup. Her former partner, Tyler Watkins, told Wired after her arrest that Manning said during the visit that she had found some sensitive information and was considering leaking it.
Manning contacted The Washington Post and The New York Times to ask whether they were interested in the material; the Post reporter was not interested, and the Times did not return the call. Instead, Manning decided to pass it on to WikiLeaks and sent them the logs of the Iraq and Afghan War via Tor on February 3. On February 11, she returned to Iraq without WikiLeaks acknowledging that they had received the files.
She passed WikiLeaks a diplomatic cable from the United States on or around February 18, 2010, dated January 13, 2010. Iceland’s embassy in Reykjavík. They published it in hours, suggesting to Manning that the other material had also been received. She found a video of the Baghdad helicopter attack (“Collateral Murder”) in the directory of a Judge Advocate and passed it on to WikiLeaks on February 21 or around. She sent them a video of the May 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan in late March, which Daniel Domscheit-Berg later removed and apparently destroyed when he left the organization. She downloaded 250,000 diplomatic cables from March 28 to April 9 and uploaded them to a dropbox for WikiLeaks on April 10.
Manning told the court that she developed a friendship with someone there during her interaction with WikiLeaks on IRC and Jabber, believed to be Julian Assange (though she didn’t know the name of the other), which she said made her feel that she could be herself. Army investigators found 14 to 15 pages of encrypted chats between Manning and someone believed to be Assange in an unallocated space on the hard drive of their MacBook. She wrote in a statement that the more she tried to fit in at work, the more she became alienated from all around her. WikiLeaks ‘ relationship gave her a short break from isolation and anxiety.
Chelsea Manning Photos