None of this exists without one person. A 22-year-old analyst sat at a terminal on a base east of Baghdad, watched a recording of men being shot from the air, and decided that people at home should be able to watch it too. Whatever you think of that decision, everything else in this archive follows from it.
Who she was in 2009
Chelsea Manning, who was then known as Bradley Manning, was an intelligence analyst with a US Army brigade deployed to Forward Operating Base Hammer, east of Baghdad. Her job was to read reports and help build a picture of what was happening in the area of operations, which meant daily access to classified networks holding an enormous quantity of material.
She was young, technically able, and by her own later account increasingly unwell and isolated in a unit where she did not fit. All of that is part of the story and none of it settles what she did.
- Deployed east of Baghdad as an intelligence analyst, aged 22.
- Finds the recording and sends it, with much else, to WikiLeaks.
- Arrested in Iraq after confiding in a stranger online.
- Sentenced to 35 years, the longest US leak sentence ever imposed.
What she found
The gun camera recording from 12 July 2007 sat on a military network as routine material. She watched it. She also read the reports around it, which described the engagement in the flat institutional language such reports use.
The gap that moved her
She has said that the gap between the two was what moved her: between a file in which people are killed while men on a radio sound pleased, and a report in which the same event is a set of categories. She has also pointed to the killing of the men in the van, and to the fact that two Reuters staff had died while their employer was being told it could not see the footage. That refusal was already three years old.
Two versions of the same event
A file in which people are killed while men on a radio sound pleased. And a report in which the same event is a set of categories. The distance between those two documents is what she said moved her.
What she actually sent
Far more than the video. The disclosure included several hundred thousand military field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and a very large body of State Department cables.
| Material | Roughly | Published as |
|---|---|---|
| Baghdad airstrike video | One file | Collateral Murder, April 2010 |
| Afghan field reports | ~75,000 | Afghan War Diary, July 2010 |
| Iraq field reports | ~390,000 | Iraq War Logs, October 2010 |
| Diplomatic cables | ~250,000 | Cablegate, from November 2010 |
The scale matters, because it is the heart of the argument against her. A single video of a disputed engagement is one kind of act. Hundreds of thousands of documents is another, and prosecutors leaned on that distinction hard.
What she says her reason was
She has been consistent: she believed the public had a right to see how the wars were actually being conducted, and that the material she released would start a debate rather than endanger anyone. She has also accepted, at various points, that she broke the law and that some of her judgement at the time was affected by her state of mind.
Why WikiLeaks and not a newspaper
She tried, by her account, to interest mainstream news organisations first. When that went nowhere she went to WikiLeaks, which had a submission system and no obvious reason to say no. What they did with the file is a separate story.
How she was caught
Not by network monitoring. By talking. In May 2010 she began confiding in Adrian Lamo, a former hacker, over instant messenger. Lamo passed the conversations to the US Army and the FBI, and she was arrested in Iraq on 26 May 2010, seven weeks after the video appeared.
What happened to her
She spent her first year in conditions that a United Nations special rapporteur later described as cruel and inhuman. She was tried by court-martial in 2013, convicted under the Espionage Act and other charges, and acquitted of the gravest count, aiding the enemy. She was sentenced to 35 years, the longest ever imposed in the United States for a leak to the press. The trial is covered here.
After the sentence
President Obama commuted almost all of the remaining sentence in January 2017 and she was released that May, after seven years. The difference between a commutation and a pardon matters, and she has lived since as a public figure with a conviction that still stands.
One decision behind the leak, and who paid for it
Strip the argument back and it comes to this. She saw something, she believed people should see it too, and she was right that they would care. Millions did. The recording changed what a generation expected to be able to know about a war.
She also broke the law she had sworn to follow, at a scale that made any narrow defence impossible, and she served seven years for it. Nobody in the footage served a day. Whether that is justice or its opposite is the question this archive cannot answer for you, but it is the question every argument about whistleblowing keeps coming back to.
Questions people ask about this
What did Manning actually leak?
Was she convicted of treason?
Was she pardoned?
Where this comes from
- Federal and military court records — CourtListener
- July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike — Wikipedia
- Amnesty International case reporting — Amnesty International
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