Chelsea Manning announces 'intimate' memoir
Source: The Guardian
Chelsea Manning announces 'intimate' memoir
Her role in exposing US Iraq war secrets saw her jailed for seven years, and she promises a book about trials, tribunals, struggles, difficulties and her love life
Alison Flood
Tue 14 May 2019 12.16 BST Last modified on Tue 14 May 2019 16.20 BST
Chelsea Manning will reveal the details of how and why she decided to send hundreds of thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks, in a memoir due early next year.
The as-yet unnamed book will see Manning write about what publisher The Bodley Head described as her challenging childhood and her struggles as an adolescent. It will also delve into why she decided to join the army, as well as how, when she was working as an intelligence analyst for US forces in Iraq in 2010, she smuggled out 720,000 classified military documents on the memory card of her digital camera and sent them to WikiLeaks.
Manning was subsequently sentenced to 35 years in military prison in 2011. The day after her conviction, she declared her gender identity as a woman and began to transition. Her memoir will set out how her plea for increased institutional transparency and government accountability take place alongside a fight to defend her rights as a trans woman, according to her publisher.
Manning spent seven years behind bars, some of it in solitary confinement as punishment for trying to take her own life, before President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017. She was recently released from a Virginia jail after spending 62 days there for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks, saying that grand juries are simply outdated tools used by the federal government to harass and disrupt political opponents and activists in fishing expeditions.
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Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/14/chelsea-manning-announces-intimate-memoir