CHELSEA MANNING’S MEMOIR OPENS LIKE A JASON BOURNE novel with a scene in which the then 22-year-old, on t he last day of two weeks’ military leave, tries to leak an enormous amount of classified data via a sketchy wifi connection in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Maryland. Outside, a snowstorm rages. Inside, Manning, a junior intelligence analyst for the US army, freaks out as the clock ticks down. In 12 hours, her flight leaves for Iraq. Meanwhile she has half a million incident reports on US military activity to upload from a memory stick to an obscure website called WikiLeaks. The military would later argue she didn’t have the clearance even to access these files – “exceeded authorised” as Manning puts it, in army parlance – but the fact is, she says, “It was encouraged. I was told, ‘Go look!’ The way you do analysis is you collect a shit-ton of data, a huge amount, in order to do the work on it.”
Everything about Manning on that afternoon of 8 February 2010 – her name, her gender, her anonymity, her freedom – is provisional and shortly to change. Three months later, she’ll be in a cage in Kuwait. Three years after that, she’ll be starting a 35-year prison sentence at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Meanwhile, the wider consequences of her actions that day will, depending on your view, topple governments; endanger lives; protect lives; uphold democracy; compromise diplomacy; change the world in no measurable way whatsoever; or – Manning’s least favourite interpretation – boil down to a cry for help from a troubled young trans person. Today, sitting across the table from me in an office in Brooklyn, Manning is tiny, fierce, dressed all in black with long blond hair, and vibrating with nervous energy. For the space of our 90-minute encounter, she will seem only partially present, each question yanking her back to some unseen site of contest where she must defend herself against endless and wide-ranging charges.
The memoir is called README.txt, a misleadingly clunky title (it refers to the file name she used for the leaks) for a highly entertaining book that, while telling the story of why and how Manning leaked the data, gives space to her origins in Oklahoma, a complex and traumatic family story. It’s a terrific
