The following is a transcript of the statement made by United States Private Chelsea (formerly "Bradley") Manning as read by David Coombs at a press conference on August 21 after Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks that exposed serioous war crimes.
(Born -- and tried -- as "Bradley", Manning has announced she wishes to be known as Chelsea and plans to undergo hormone therapy. "I am Chelsea Manning, I am a female," Manning said in a statement released by her lawyer David Coombs.
"As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. Given the way I feel and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. I also request that starting today you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun.")
A list of some of the key revelations exposed by Manning's leads have been compiled by the Bradley Manning Support Network. These include systematic torture by the US military and deliberate covering up of war crimes. Despite this, Australian attorney-general Mark Dreyfus said that Manning and Snowden should not be regarded as whistleblowers as the information they made public supposedly did not expose government wrongdoing.
The transcript is reprinted from Democracy Now.
* * *
The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.
I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing.
It was at this time I realised in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.
In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.
Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based intentions, it is usually an American soldier that is ordered to carry out some ill-conceived mission.
Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy — the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps—to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.
As the late Howard Zinn once said: "There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."
I understand that my actions violated the law, and I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people.
When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.
If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.
