Whistleblower Chelsea Manning Is Released After Seven Years in Prison
Posters at the 2014 San Francisco Pride Parade urging Manning’s release. (Flickr / CC 2.0)
Chelsea Manning, the courageous WikiLeaks whistleblower was granted clemency by President Obama, and, after serving a fifth of her prison sentence, she was finally released from a Kansas military detention center on Wednesday. Manning was arrested in May of 2010 for leaking hundreds of thousands of disclosures, including a video called “Collateral Murder” which showed how a U.S. military attack on Baghdad, Iraq, took the lives of several civilians and journalists. It is considered to be the largest classified leak in U.S. history.
In prison, the whistleblower suffered many injustices during her detention, including being punished with solitary confinement after she attempted to commit suicide.
Manning walked out to freedom after 2,545 days in military captivity. ... Speaking from her prison cell as she prepared for release last week, Manning said: “I’m looking forward to breathing the warm spring air again.
“I want that indescribable feeling of connection with people and nature again, without razor wire or a visitation booth. I want to be able to hug my family and friends again. And swimming – I want to go swimming!”
Obama’s decision to release the soldier early leaves her with legal challenges still hanging over her. Foremost of those is the fact that her sentence from 2013 under the Espionage Act remains in full force – a fact that her lawyers regard as ominous given the current incumbent of the White House.
As a result, even in freedom Manning will continue to press vigorously for her sentence to be overturned. Her appeal, filed almost exactly a year ago in the US Army court of criminal appeals, argued that her 35 year sentence was “perhaps the most unjust sentence in the history of the military justice system”.
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— Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata