Chelsea Manning marks fifth anniversary of imprisonment with revealing account of her life behind bars
Jailed whistle-blower considered castrating or killing herself in early days of 35-year sentence
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 28 May, 2015, 10:36pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 28 May, 2015, 10:36pm
The Guardian in New York
Bradley Manning (left) became Chelsea Manning.Photo: AFP
The American soldier Chelsea Manning has accused US military guards of threatening her with exile to Guantánamo Bay without trial or acknowledgment of her gender transition after she was apprehended as the source of one of the largest leaks of state secrets in history.
Writing in The Guardian from prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where she is serving a 35-year sentence, Manning marked the fifth anniversary of her military custody on Wednesday with the most personal first-hand account she has yet given of the "physical and emotional rollercoaster" of a whistle-blower behind bars.
She described her initial arrest in 2010, her harsh treatment at a US marine brig in Virginia and her ongoing legal battle to be allowed treatment for gender dysphoria, which has reached the highest levels of government.
"I began to fear that I was forever going to be living in a hot, desert cage, living as and being treated as a male, disappearing from the world into a secret prison and never facing a public trial," she wrote.
Manning, now 27 and a contributing opinion writer for The Guardian, disclosed in her op-ed that she was threatened from detention in Kuwait by some of her navy captors with interrogation "on a US cruiser off the coast of the horn of Africa, or being sent to the prison camps of Guantánamo Bay".
The army private, then known under her birth name Bradley Manning, was arrested five years ago at the Forward Operating Base Hammer outside Baghdad, where she was working as an intelligence analyst.
She was later prosecuted as the source of a vast mountain of confidential files, including logs kept by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan that gave a level of detail about modern warfare never before made public.
Details of Manning's ordeal have gradually emerged in the years since, through her prolonged military trial, her writings from prison, and her recently opened Twitter account. But she has never before offered such a detailed portrait of her journey from Baghdad to Kansas.
Her latest article recounts her "very lowest point" over the past five years - the moment in Kuwait, stuck in the desert tent, where she saw little hope for the future and contemplated castrating or killing herself.
She also traced her motivation for leaking back to the astonishment she felt reading war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq.
"Once you come to realise that the coordinates in these records represent real places, that the dates are our recent history and that the numbers represent actual human lives… then you cannot help but be reminded just how important it is for us to understand and, hopefully, prevent such tragedies in the future," Manning wrote.
