by Daniel Kavanagh
Today, Chelsea Manning turns 28 years old. Chelsea is an MTF trans woman who was born Bradley Manning in Oklahoma 28 years ago today, in 1987. On the 21st of August 2013, Chelsea was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
She was charged under 22 different charges, 10 of which she pleaded guilty to. The most serious of these charges was “aiding the enemy”, which is a capital offence, although the prosecutors did not wish to inflict the death penalty on her.
Throughout Chelsea’s early life, she was bullied in school because of her ‘effeminate’ nature. She moved from Oklahoma to Wales, and then back to Oklahoma again when she was 17. She was always intelligent and showed a particular interest in computers. She worked for a software company in Oklahoma, but was let go soon after. After continuous career and study failures, including spending 15 months with her aunt in Maryland studying, she took her father’s advice to join the army. She told her army supervisor that she believed being in such a masculine environment would resolve her gender identity disorder. The US military, up until 2011, enforced a disgustingly discriminatory policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, under which lesbian, gay and bisexual personnel could not openly serve in the military, or else they would be discharged. There have been at least 13,650 discharges during the time-span of this policy.
She was trained in New York and Louisiana before being deployed just outside Baghdad. Two of her superiors discussed not taking her to Iraq, believing that she may be a potential risk to the operation. In November 2009, she was promoted from Private First Class to Specialist after receiving the Global War on Terrorism Services medal.
Chelsea pictured in makeup and a wig, courtesy of the US Government
In January 2010, she downloaded 400,000 and 91,000 documents from the Iraq and Afghanistan databases respectively. These became known as the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs. She saved the material on CD-RW, and smuggled it through security by labelling it “Lady Gaga”. She copied it onto her personal computer, and then to an SD card for her camera so that she could take it with her to the United States while on R&R leave. Chelsea contacted the Washington Post and the New York Times, neither of which replied to her. She then decided to send the information to WikiLeaks, which she had discovered the previous year. In Mid-February, she passed WikiLeaks a diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavík. This was published by WikiLeaks and informed Chelsea that they had seen the information that she sent earlier that year. In late March she sent them a video of the May 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan (in which between 86 and 147 people were known to have died, mostly women and children). She also sent information on another airstrike as well as files on occurrences at Guantánamo Bay.
Devastation left in Granai, Afghanistan, where 147 civilians were reportedly killed in US Airstrikes
Manning was arrested in May 2010 and sent to Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. She was subsequently transferred to Virginia where she had to spend 23 hours a day in a 6 x 12 ft. windowless cell in which she could not see any of her fellow prisoners. After around 3 ½ years in Virginia, she received trial and was given a 35 year sentence. She will be eligible for parole after approximately 7 years. She is now in a Kansas prison.
We salute Chelsea’s integrity in her courageous strive to unravel the web of American imperialism in order to bring justice to this war-tangled planet. We sincerely hope for international pressure on the American authorities for her immediate release and the prosecution of the real criminals at stake here….
To write a letter to Chelsea, post must be addressed exactly as follows:
CHELSEA E. MANNING 89289
1300 NORTH WAREHOUSE ROAD
FORT LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS 66027-2304
Notes regarding this address:
- Do not include a hash (“#”) in front of Manning’s inmate number.
- Do not include any title in front of Manning’s name, such as “Ms.,” “Mr.,” “PVT,” “PFC,” etc.
- Do not include any additional information in the address, such as “US Army” or “US Disciplinary Barracks.”
- Do not modify the address to conform to USPS standards, such as abbreviating “North,” “Road,” “Fort,” or “Kansas.”
- For international mail, either “USA” or “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” are acceptable on a separate line.
How Chelsea Manning sees herself by Alicia Neal, with Chelsea herself