Chelsea Manning
American activist and whistleblower (born 1987)
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning, December 17, 1987) is an American activist and whistleblower. She is a former United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents on US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. She was imprisoned from 2010 until 2017, when President Barack Obama commuted her sentence. Manning, a trans woman, said in 2013 that she had had a female gender identity since childhood and wanted to be known as Chelsea Manning.
Assigned in 2009 as an intelligence analyst to an Army unit in Iraq, Manning had access to classified databases. In early 2010, she leaked classified information to WikiLeaks and confided this to Adrian Lamo, an online acquaintance. Lamo indirectly informed the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, and Manning was arrested in May 2010. The material included videos of the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 251,287 US diplomatic cables; and 482,832 Army reports that came to be known as the "Iraq War Logs" and "Afghan War Diary". WikiLeaks and its media partners published the material between April 2010 and April 2011.
Manning was charged with 22 offenses, including aiding the enemy, which was the most serious charge and could have resulted in a death sentence.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Chelsea Manning” as american activist and whistleblower (born 1987). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q298423. VIAF identifies the subject as 170370248. The Library of Congress control number is n2011023206. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987, 2013, 2010 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chelsea Manning” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.