AS A blizzard blew on a February afternoon in 2010, a 22-year-old US army intelligence officer on leave from Iraq sat down in a bookshop café in Rockville, Maryland, and opened her laptop. Over the following hours, Bradley Manning wrestled with the shop’s stuttering WiFi to upload stashes of military files to WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing site set up by Julian Assange.
By the time she was done, half an hour before the bookshop closed at 10pm, she had released nearly half a million reports of enemy engagements, explosions and body counts – effectively every single incident report the army had ever filed about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The data had been smuggled out of Baghdad on a memory card in her camera. On her return, she made WikiLeaks other offerings, including videos of apparently gratuitous killings during a US helicopter attack on Baghdad and of a strike on an Afghan village that killed perhaps 147 civilians.
Her hope was that by airing these disasters, the consoling, half-accepted narratives of America’s wars of liberation would skew towards her perception of things, which was that they were a chaotic, self-inflaming and unwinnable attempt to establish American regional hegemony by fear.
Instead, most verifiably, her torrential leak changed Manning’s life. The Pentagon and President Obama saw in their young, unhappy, perhaps misguided, but undoubtedly brave recruit another enemy.
Arrested that May, she was confined for 49 days to a cage she believed better suited to a large animal. There followed incarceration in a marine base in Quantico, Virginia, where, a United Nations investigation later ruled, her treatment violated her human right not to be tortured.
In 2011 she was transferred to Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas, her home for the next six years. At her court martial
