by Alexandra Zavis
Pvt Chelsea Manning is expected to walk free Wednesday from the military prison at Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas after serving seven years of a 35-year sentence for disclosing a trove of classified government documents to WikiLeaks.
Military officials and Manning’s legal team provided few details about the soldier’s plans ahead of her release. The Army said only that she would remain on active duty, although in an unpaid status known as “excess leave,” while her court-martial conviction is under appellate review
Under this status, she will be eligible for care at military medical facilities and other military privileges.
Manning, a transgender woman formerly known as Pfc. Bradley Manning, began her transition while in prison. She is being released after President Obama in January decided to commute her sentence for one of the largest breaches of U.S. classified documents.
At the time, Republican lawmakers condemned the decision, one of Obama’s final acts as president, saying it would encourage others to leak sensitive information. But administration officials said Obama believed the sentence — the longest ever imposed in the United States for a leak conviction — was excessive.
The administration officials contrasted her case to that of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who sought refuge in Russia after leaking what were regarded as far more sensitive documents about U.S. surveillance programs to news outlets in 2013. Manning, the officials noted, did not try to avoid facing justice for her crimes.
Manning was a 22-year-old junior intelligence analyst at a base outside Baghdad in early 2010 when she began to illegally copy U.S. military field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, battlefield videos and diplomatic cables from classified computer accounts.
She later acknowledged leaking more than 700,000 documents and other materials to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, saying that she wanted to expose what she considered to be untruthful claims about the way the U.S. was conducting the wars.
They included a now-infamous 2007 video of an Apache combat helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq and killing 12 people, including two employees of the Reuters news agency. The military said the helicopter crew mistook a camera lens for a weapon.
Manning said she shared information that she believed wouldn’t harm the U.S. But critics said documents posted on the Internet by WikiLeaks identified informants who had helped the military, potentially putting their lives at risk. The leaks also revealed disparaging comments by U.S. diplomats about America's foreign allies, causing embarrassment to the Obama administration.
Manning was convicted in 2013 of 20 charges, including six Espionage Act violations. But a military court acquitted her of the most serious charge, aiding the enemy, which could have sent her to prison for life. Her sentence included a demotion.
In a statement released by her legal team last week, Manning thanked Obama for granting her clemency and the many supporters whose letters she said had lifted her spirits in “dark times.”
“For the first time, I can see a future for myself as Chelsea,” Manning said in the statement. “I can imagine surviving and living as the person who I am and can finally be in the outside world. Freedom used to be something that I dreamed of but never allowed myself to fully imagine.”
Manning twice tried to commit suicide last year, said her lawyers, who accused the military of mistreating their client by confining her to an all-male prison where she was subject to violence.
“Chelsea has already served the longest sentence of any whistle-blower in the history of this country,” Nancy Hollander and Vincent Ward, Manning's clemency and appellate lawyers, said in the statement. “President Obama's act of commutation was the first time the military took care of this soldier who risked so much to disclose information that served the public interest. We are delighted that Chelsea can finally begin to enjoy the freedom she deserves.”
SOURCE: latimes.com
