Jim Suhr / Associated Press & BBC World News – 2016-11-05 00:59:33
http://bigstory.ap.org/26b779e366bd4c829a3d04899c8a62bf
Attorney: Chelsea Manning Again Attempts Suicide in Prison
Jim Suhr / Associated Press
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (November 4, 2016) — Chelsea Manning attempted suicide for the second time in recent months while the transgender soldier remains imprisoned in Kansas for leaking classified information, two of her attorneys said Friday.
Attorneys Vincent Ward and Chase Strangio declined to divulge details of Manning’s suicide attempt last month at a military prison at Kansas’ Fort Leavenworth. Wayne Hall, an Army spokesman, said medical privacy laws barred him from discussing the matter.
But Manning’s attorneys cited her prison conditions — including the solitary confinement that her legal team says she received as punishment for her July suicide attempt — as contributing to their client’s fragile mental state.
Strangio, in an email to The Associated Press, called her treatment since her 2010 arrest and subsequent time serving a 35-year sentence “demoralizing and destabilizing assaults on her health and humanity.”
“After her July suicide attempt, I watched her begin to piece her life and spirit back together only to have that shattered by the disciplinary proceedings brought against her and then the unannounced initiation of her term of punishment last month,” Strangio wrote. “She has repeatedly been punished for trying to survive and now is being repeatedly punished for trying to die.”
Strangio added he worries about Manning’s “ability to keep fighting under these relentless abuses.”
Manning, arrested in 2010 as Bradley Manning, was convicted in 2013 in military court of leaking more than 700,000 secret military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks. Manning was an intelligence analyst in Iraq at the time.
In 2014, the ACLU sued the US Department of Defense over its refusal to treat Manning’s gender dysphoria.
Manning staged a several-day hunger strike in September until the Army agreed to get her treatment for her gender dysphoria, including surgery recommended in April by her psychologist, the ACLU said.
Chelsea Manning Attempted
Suicide a Second Time, Lawyers Say
BBC World News
LONDON (November 4, 2016) — US whistleblower Chelsea Manning attempted suicide for a second time last month, her lawyers say. Her legal team declined to give details but said prison conditions contributed to her fragile mental state.
Manning was sentenced to 14 days in solitary confinement in September for charges relating to her attempt to kill herself in July. The transgender army private, born Bradley Manning, is serving a 35-year sentence for espionage.
She was found guilty in September by prison officials in Leavenworth, Kansas, of “conduct which threatens” after her initial suicide attempt. She was also convicted of having “prohibited property” — the book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy by Gabriella Coleman.
In July, the former intelligence analyst attempted to take her own life after what lawyers said was the Army’s refusal to provide appropriate health care. She later went on hunger strike, which ended after the military agreed to provide her with gender dysphoria treatment.
Her lawyer, Chase Strangio, described her treatment in a letter, quoted by the AP news agency, as “demoralising”, adding that it was an “assault on her health and humanity”.
“She has repeatedly been punished for trying to survive and now is being repeatedly punished for trying to die,” wrote Mr. Strangio. When she was removed from solitary confinement in October she tweeted that she was “OK” and “trying to get back in the groove of things”.
Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013, after being found guilty of espionage for her role in leaking diplomatic cables and battlefield reports to Wikileaks, the anti-secrecy group.
The leak of more than 700,000 documents and videos was one of the largest breaches of classified material in American history.
Profile: Private First Class Manning
BBC World News
LONDON (September 23, 2016) — The US soldier then known as Pte First Class Bradley Manning lip-synced to Lady Gaga while downloading thousands of classified documents from military servers, according to a computer hacker she befriended.
Now, the soldier is spending 35 years in prison, after being convicted of 20 charges in connection with the leaks, including espionage. She was acquitted of the most serious charge, aiding the enemy.
After her sentencing, Pte Manning, who was born a man, said she wanted to live as a woman and had taken the name Chelsea.
Her time in prison has seen her engage in a fight with the Army over receiving gender reassignment surgery, a fight that also saw her attempt to take her own life.
As an intelligence analyst in the US Army, Pte Manning was given access to a large amount of highly sensitive information. But as a private first class, she was very low-ranking with a relatively meagre wage.
‘Funny Little Character’
According to her friends, she had become frustrated with a military career that appeared to be stagnating.
And her personal life appears to have hit a downward spiral after she was posted to Iraq in 2009. Pte Manning joined the army in 2007 after drifting through low-paid jobs.
Born in December 1987, she was brought up in Crescent, a small town in Oklahoma. Her father, Brian, reportedly spent five years in the military. But her parents divorced when she was a teenager, and she moved with her mother to Haverfordwest in south-west Wales. As a teenager, she was said to have been a hothead who was often teased for being a geek.
“He would get upset, slam books on the desk if people wouldn’t listen to him or understand his point of view,” a classmate from Oklahoma, Chera Moore, told the New York Times.
A friend from Wales, James Kirkpatrick, told the BBC she was a “funny little character, really on the ball” who was obsessed with computers.
Turned In
After finishing school, she returned to the US and joined the Army. Friends say she enlisted to help pay for college, and she later said she had joined up in the hope the Army would rid her of her desire to be a woman.
She was deployed to Iraq in October 2009. But messages she posted on Facebook suggest she was far from happy.
She wrote in early May 2010 on the site that she was “beyond frustrated with people and society at large”. Other status updates followed, among them: “Bradley Manning is not a piece of equipment.”
A week earlier, she had written: “Bradley Manning is now left with the sinking feeling that he doesn’t have anything left.” Some of the postings appear to refer to a recent breakdown of a relationship. But weeks later, her words appeared prophetic when she was arrested by military investigators on suspicion of stealing secret information.
Self-confessed computer hacker Adrian Lamo told the world’s media how Pte Manning had admitted the data theft during conversations they had on the internet.
“Listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” Pte Manning wrote, according to a transcript of their messages published on Wired’s website.
“Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis . . . a perfect storm.” Mr. Lamo went to the authorities with the messages.
During a sentencing hearing at her court martial in August 2013, a military psychiatrist testified that Pte Manning had struggled with her gender identity and wanted to become a woman.
She also said Pte Manning had felt abandoned by friends and family after her 2009 deployment to Iraq and that a relationship with a boyfriend had hit a rough patch.
An Apt Location
In March 2011, the US Army charged Pte Manning with 22 counts relating to the unauthorised possession and distribution of more than 720,000 secret diplomatic and military documents.
Among the files she passed to Wikileaks was video footage of an Apache helicopter killing 12 civilians in Baghdad in 2007. Wikileaks released tens of thousands of documents relating to the Afghan war.
The website later disclosed thousands of sensitive messages written by US diplomats and military records from the Iraq war, causing growing embarrassment to the US government.
Pte Manning told the court she had leaked the documents to spark a public debate in the US about the role of the military and about US foreign policy.
At a later sentencing hearing, she apologised for “hurting the US” and said she had mistakenly believed she could “change the world for the better”. And she said that in retrospect, she should have worked “inside the system”.
Officials say the location of the trial, Fort Meade, was chosen because its military court is one of the largest in the Washington area.
‘I Am Chelsea Manning’
A day after she was sentenced to 35 years in prison, Pte Manning said she wanted to live as a woman. “I am Chelsea Manning,” she said in statement to NBC’s Today programme. “I am a female.”
She said she had felt female since childhood, wanted at once to begin hormone therapy, and wished to be addressed as Chelsea.
When asked why Pte Manning was making this announcement after her sentencing, her lawyer, David Coombs said: “Chelsea didn’t want to have this be something that overshadowed the case.”
In April 2014, a military judge granted Manning’s official name change from “Bradley Edward Manning” to “Chelsea Elizabeth Manning”.
In July 2016, her lawyers confirmed she had tried to take her own life at Leavenworth prison in Kansas. It was later reported this was because of her ongoing fight for gender reassignment surgery, or a sex change.
Months later, she went on hunger strike, before bringing it to an end after the Army agreed to provide her with the surgery.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
