Chelsea Manning is in the hospital recovering from an attempted suicide only days before she was scheduled to testify in court.
When Chelsea Manning was Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, he released classified information to WikiLeaks. His release of classified information ignited a firestorm, including the controversy over transparency in the military.
In 2015, while Bradley Manning transitioned to Chelsea Manning after the U.S. Army allowed her to received hormone treatments.
CBS – While back in the U.S. on leave in January 2010, Manning said she “began to become depressed” by the U.S. military situation in Iraq and Afghanistan and felt that if the public had access to the information she possessed, that it “could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and … foreign policy.”
At first, Manning reached out to The Washington Post and The New York Times in an attempt to release SIGACT tables, but she was rebuffed. From there, she utilized an anonymizing network to submit the information to WikiLeaks, according to court documents. She would later submit additional materials, including diplomatic cables and a video of a July 2007 airstrike in Baghdad in which two Reuters photographers were killed and two children were wounded.
In 2011, Obama said that Manning “broke the law,” noting: “We are a nation of laws. We don’t let individuals make decisions about how the law operates.”
In 2013, Manning deferred a plea bargain and was arraigned on 22 charges, including espionage, theft of military records or property, and aiding the enemy — a capital offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
In 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Department of Defense officials for denying Manning “access to medically necessary treatment for her gender dysphoria.” The ACLU claimed that if left untreated, Manning could become suicidal. In February 2015, the Army allowed Manning to receive hormone treatment for her transition from male to female.
President Barack Obama commuted Chelsea Manning’s 35-year sentence on January 17, 2017, only days before President Trump took office.
Ian Miles Cheong of the Post Millennial is reporting that Chelsea Manning, the former military intelligence officer who leaked a series of diplomatic wires to WikiLeaks, attempted suicide in prison on Wednesday, her lawyers reveal. Manning’s legal team, led by Moira Meltzer-Cohen, told The Daily Beast that Manning was taken to hospital and is currently recovering from the attempt.
The WikiLeaks leaker was previously convicted by court-martial to 35 years in prison in July 2013 for espionage and other offenses for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified and other sensitive documents to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks organization, which published the materials on the Internet, including highly classified embassy cables that threw American diplomacy into disarray. President Obama later commuted her sentence, releasing her in 2017.
Manning has been repeatedly classed as a suicide risk during her previous stays in prison, making two previous attempts in 2016, and once more in 2018, when she tweeted a picture of herself standing on the ledge of a building.
From RT -Judge Trenga was scheduled to hear Manning’s motion to end the sanctions on Friday.
It would be the third time the former US Army intelligence analyst has tried to take her own life while in prison. The previous two attempts happened in 2016, as Manning served a 35-year federal sentence for handing WikiLeaks a trove of Pentagon and State Department documents related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
That sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama at the end of his term, and the free speech activist was released in May 2017, only to be jailed for refusing the court summons in the WikiLeaks case.
Further complications notwithstanding, Manning is still set to appear in court for a Friday hearing, where a federal judge is expected to rule on a motion filed by her legal team to end civil contempt sanctions against her.
