butchflirt: Happy birthday, Chelsea Manning! (December 17, 1987)As a member of the US Army, Chelsea
butchflirt: Happy birthday, Chelsea Manning! (December 17, 1987)As a member of the US Army, Chelsea Manning struggled with her gender identity and the moral weight of the innumerable crimes which she was privy and party to in America’s Middle Eastern wars. Each day, she encountered more and more evidence of war crimes and misconduct by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. Downloading nearly 500,000 documents and smuggling them past security, Manning set out to expose them to the world. Rebuffed by mainstream news outlets, Manning instead gave the documents to WikiLeaks, who published them. She continued passing information on to WikiLeaks until she was caught and arrested. Her sentence of 35 years in prison caused outrage, and it was eventually commuted by Barack Obama in the final days of his Presidency. Since her release, Manning has continued her activism, including being jailed again for over a year after she refused to testify in a government case against WikiLeaks.“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.” -- source link