Chelsea Manning spoke about her motivation and the effects of her actions. Photo / Doug Sherring
Chelsea Manning spoke about her motivation and the effects of her actions. Photo / Doug Sherring
She's tiny, even in her Doc Martens with the platform soles, and wired, like a muscled-up sparrow, and she lopes when she walks, strides as big and long as she can make them.
She loped into the photographer's studio and straight past the few of us there, avoiding eye contact, heading for the far corner.
Chelsea Manning was exhausted, straight off the plane from LA, and anxious, because the last media interview she did went very badly. But it seemed like this was her now. Always on planes, always waiting to be attacked, soldiering on.
In 2010, when she was an intelligence analyst in the US Army stationed in Iraq, Manning gave Wikileaks 750,000 files of classified military and diplomatic information.
They covered the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan and included video of US helicopter gunships killing unarmed civilians in a Baghdad street.
Arrest followed promptly and a court martial three years after that. She faced 22 charges of espionage, including one, "aiding the enemy", that could have meant a death sentence.
The prosecution said the only reason she'd leaked the files was because she wanted to be famous.
She was perched on the couch, replying to some of my questions by talking as if she didn't know how to stop, to others with a panicky silence, not knowing how to start. But did she want to be famous?
She laughed bitterly. "No. I do not want to be famous."
So what does she want? What has she ever wanted?
Growing up gay, a small boy who might be a girl, always bullied, why did she even take the step that got her into this whole catastrophic mess – why did she join the army?
She gave me the straight-up reason every recruit is supposed to give: the war in Iraq was all over the news and joining the cause looked like a better thing to do than working at Starbucks.
Then she said there was her father, a former military man who thought the world he knew and trusted would be good for her. Dad had been so unimpressed with how she lived her life, he'd kicked her out of home. "I'd spent a year homeless," she said.
Why? "I was living as a very gay queer at the time. Going through a very feminine phase. Experimenting with makeup, that sort of thing."
Wait. She was saying she joined the army because she thought she might be too feminine? Who does that?
"I thought maybe I will be able to man up. I thought I couldn't possibly be transgender."
Also, she said, she didn't want to be dependent. The army would give her an income, training, life skills.
It didn't go well. She was bullied in training and some of her superiors thought she was so unfit for military service they wanted her discharged.
But the army thought different, started her training all over, set her up as an intelligence specialist and posted her to Iraq. Every step of the way, there were officers who said no, this is a mistake. But the army was short of intel personnel and they kept her on.
Besides, "intelligence" wasn't what it is now. "When I started my training we had grease pens [what we call marker pens] and maps." That was 2007. Computers were just starting to be a thing, and Manning knew computers. She was a valuable asset.
By the time she got to Iraq in 2009, computers were such a big thing, and so poorly understood, she discovered she had access to millions of files. "Everyone did."
By then she had also discovered she was not going to man up. She probably was going to be trangender.
Iraq was a shock. "I'd been working with statistics, doing predictive analysis. It was abstract. But when I saw Baghdad, you know, saw all the neighbourhoods, I knew all about them from my work, but I didn't know anything. These were real people, they had their hopes, their dreams, their flaws."
She talked at length about this. It really had been a revelation.
"And I thought it was time to do something different. Fighting that war the way we'd fought the Vietnam war, it wasn't going to work."
She was there just three-and-a-half months before she started putting files on CDs with false labels and hustling them through security. One of them she called Lady Gaga.
What did she think would happen when she leaked the files? She said she didn't think.
She says now that she's campaigning against "21st century asymmetric warfare".
Defence witnesses in the court martial said much the same thing, that she was motivated by a desire to stop the horror of war. And it's true: Chelsea Manning is doing her best to make the world rethink the way it behaves.
United States whistle blower Chelsea Manning in Auckland. Photo / Doug Sherring
I asked her about prison and she said it was very hard for her to think back to that time too.
She was convicted of nearly all charges, although not of "aiding the enemy", and served seven of the 35 years she was sentenced for.
Barack Obama commuted her sentence when he left office, saying it was "disproportionate". But he did not pardon her.
The day after her conviction she had announced she was applying for gender reassignment surgery. She'd already spent three years in prison by then, coming to the decision, trying not to be terrified, doing her best to be the way she felt she had to be.
But if army training was tough on Chelsea Manning, prison was more like straight sadism.
There were long periods of solitary confinement, a lot of enforced nakedness, so much humiliation and abuse. Did she think she had unusual amounts of inner resilience?
"I don't know." She stopped talking and just sat there. She wore pink lipstick, pink eyelids, red nails, elegant wireless glasses and a pink keffiyeh, the Palestinian neckscarf.
Her arms were thin but they were muscular, a soldier's arms. She said, "It hurts so much."
The most violent people she had ever met were prison guards. "Again and again and again, and they do it with impunity."
We started talking about the politics of it all and she had a speech that just spilled out from somewhere deep within her and covered her in anguish.
It was about "the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex" and how they're all part of the same thing, and how Donald Trump isn't the problem, "it's much deeper and more systemic than him, he's just the symptom but he's not an aberration, he's the inevitability of the system".
About how "everything that made me concerned in Iraq is happening now in the US, the police have been turned into a military force, there are large parts of America now where they drive around, the lights flashing, and their message is, 'We're watching you, we're here to oppress you.' It's about power and it's about race. It's a domestic military occupation. It's about who is allowed to exist in society."
I said I imagined the battles inside feminism over gender identity must be upsetting to her.
"Yes," she said. "Trans exclusionary radical feminists, they're called TERFs, and they're telling us we're not who we say we are. It's a real threat to our existence."
At this time, when that larger battle over power had become so critical, did she have a view about why the gender identity fight had erupted?
She said it was people wanting to define the struggle the way it was for them. "It's reactionary. Every time you get progress, you get a reactionary kickback."
It was the same with marriage equality, which was a good thing but that issue left behind a whole lot of other people, transgender and so many more, who faced hardships that had nothing to do with whether they could get married.
"It's heartbreaking," she said. "I've been there, I know." She was crying now.
I asked her if she had any regrets and she shot back that she gets asked that a lot.
"I don't think like that. I am the person I am because of what I've done and if I'd done different things I'd be a different person. I made those decisions because I'm me."
It wasn't quite an answer, I thought. But it was her answer.
What was she doing here? She doesn't want to be famous but she doesn't want to stop?
She shrugged. She's facing up to herself, honouring the hardship she has seen and been through. Talking about war and violence and how there's got to be a better way. Trying to make sense of the pain.
