NY TIMES NONFICTION REVIEW
Why Chelsea Manning Went to WikiLeaks, and What It Cost Her
In a new memoir, “README.txt,” the former military intelligence analyst tells her life story and explains her decision to blow the whistle on U.S. actions in the Middle East.
Why Chelsea Manning Went to WikiLeaks, and What It Cost Her
In a new memoir, “README.txt,” the former military intelligence analyst tells her life story and explains her decision to blow the whistle on U.S. actions in the Middle East.
In a new memoir, Chelsea Manning discusses her 2013 court-martial for revealing military secrets, as well as her gender transition and other details of her life.
Credit...Bert Van Den Broucke / Photonews via Getty Images
By Margaret Sullivan
Oct. 18, 2022
README.txt: A Memoir, by Chelsea Manning
On a Georgetown University stage in early 2017, the most famous government leaker of the previous century expressed his fervent and longstanding wish.
“Something like the Pentagon Papers should be coming out several times a year,” Daniel Ellsberg, then 85, told the audience at a free-speech symposium. There is far too much government secrecy keeping important information from the American public, a reality that makes courageous whistle-blowers a necessity, asserted the former military analyst who in 1971 had given The New York Times thousands of pages of classified documents — the secret history of America’s role in the Vietnam War. Ellsberg, though he was charged under the Espionage Act, escaped being locked up for life because of legal technicalities. In that onstage appearance 46 years after the Pentagon Papers were published, he offered warm praise for Chelsea Manning, another military insider turned whistle-blower, whose prison sentence had been commuted by President Obama shortly before he left office.
But any potential leaker who reads Manning’s new memoir would be extremely unlikely to step forward in fulfillment of Ellsberg’s wish. “README.txt” describes in painful, affecting detail what happened as a result of the U.S. Army intelligence analyst’s decision in 2010, while still in her early 20s, to alert the world — largely through illegally transferring huge amounts of classified or sensitive military data to WikiLeaks — to some portion of what really was happening in America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I didn’t have an overarching ideological agenda,” she writes, “but I had a clear objective: I wanted to complicate the retrofitted, sanitized version of the war that was spreading like wildfire back home, where any questioning of a clear narrative was perceived as disloyal.” That she surely did, especially with the release of a grainy video from 2007 that showed an Apache helicopter airstrike that killed several Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists in New Baghdad. “The most shocking thing about this video, in which innocent people are killed simply for being in the wrong place,” she writes, “is that everything about it was perfectly legal under the Geneva Conventions and our own rules of engagement.”
Arrested and removed from her post in Iraq in May 2010, after the leaks were traced to her, the analyst then known publicly as Pfc. Bradley Manning was put in solitary confinement in a Kuwaiti jail.
“It was like no prison cell I’d ever imagined,” she writes. “Inside the tent was an iron cage, sized for a large animal.” Within weeks, she was so disoriented and unable to function that she had come to believe she would be in that cage forever: “My world had shrunk to an 8-by-8-foot metal jaw clenching around me.” It took a brutal toll on her mental and emotional well-being, already weakened by all she had seen and experienced in Iraq. “One day, I started to babble, to scream, to bang my head against the wall.”
In the outside world, far from the steel cage, the huge leak of classified documents hit hard. Every major media organization, led by The Guardian, The New York Times and Germany’s Der Spiegel, was covering the disclosures. The embarrassment caused to world leaders by the meant-to-be-secret details of diplomatic cables (including diplomats’ commentary on their host nations and their leadership) caused Alan Rusbridger, then editor of The Guardian, to say that, with the exception of a war or a terrorist attack, “I’ve never known a story that created such mayhem.”
Manning intends this memoir to explain and to instruct — that much is clear from its title. To the cyber-savvy, “README” is an old-school internet term for an explanatory file, a kind of road map accompanying a package of software, so dubbed to make it easy to find. This particular “README” has hard lessons to impart; it is less instruction manual than frightening cautionary tale.
By Margaret Sullivan
Oct. 18, 2022
README.txt: A Memoir, by Chelsea Manning
On a Georgetown University stage in early 2017, the most famous government leaker of the previous century expressed his fervent and longstanding wish.
“Something like the Pentagon Papers should be coming out several times a year,” Daniel Ellsberg, then 85, told the audience at a free-speech symposium. There is far too much government secrecy keeping important information from the American public, a reality that makes courageous whistle-blowers a necessity, asserted the former military analyst who in 1971 had given The New York Times thousands of pages of classified documents — the secret history of America’s role in the Vietnam War. Ellsberg, though he was charged under the Espionage Act, escaped being locked up for life because of legal technicalities. In that onstage appearance 46 years after the Pentagon Papers were published, he offered warm praise for Chelsea Manning, another military insider turned whistle-blower, whose prison sentence had been commuted by President Obama shortly before he left office.
But any potential leaker who reads Manning’s new memoir would be extremely unlikely to step forward in fulfillment of Ellsberg’s wish. “README.txt” describes in painful, affecting detail what happened as a result of the U.S. Army intelligence analyst’s decision in 2010, while still in her early 20s, to alert the world — largely through illegally transferring huge amounts of classified or sensitive military data to WikiLeaks — to some portion of what really was happening in America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I didn’t have an overarching ideological agenda,” she writes, “but I had a clear objective: I wanted to complicate the retrofitted, sanitized version of the war that was spreading like wildfire back home, where any questioning of a clear narrative was perceived as disloyal.” That she surely did, especially with the release of a grainy video from 2007 that showed an Apache helicopter airstrike that killed several Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists in New Baghdad. “The most shocking thing about this video, in which innocent people are killed simply for being in the wrong place,” she writes, “is that everything about it was perfectly legal under the Geneva Conventions and our own rules of engagement.”
Arrested and removed from her post in Iraq in May 2010, after the leaks were traced to her, the analyst then known publicly as Pfc. Bradley Manning was put in solitary confinement in a Kuwaiti jail.
“It was like no prison cell I’d ever imagined,” she writes. “Inside the tent was an iron cage, sized for a large animal.” Within weeks, she was so disoriented and unable to function that she had come to believe she would be in that cage forever: “My world had shrunk to an 8-by-8-foot metal jaw clenching around me.” It took a brutal toll on her mental and emotional well-being, already weakened by all she had seen and experienced in Iraq. “One day, I started to babble, to scream, to bang my head against the wall.”
In the outside world, far from the steel cage, the huge leak of classified documents hit hard. Every major media organization, led by The Guardian, The New York Times and Germany’s Der Spiegel, was covering the disclosures. The embarrassment caused to world leaders by the meant-to-be-secret details of diplomatic cables (including diplomats’ commentary on their host nations and their leadership) caused Alan Rusbridger, then editor of The Guardian, to say that, with the exception of a war or a terrorist attack, “I’ve never known a story that created such mayhem.”
Manning intends this memoir to explain and to instruct — that much is clear from its title. To the cyber-savvy, “README” is an old-school internet term for an explanatory file, a kind of road map accompanying a package of software, so dubbed to make it easy to find. This particular “README” has hard lessons to impart; it is less instruction manual than frightening cautionary tale.
Manning in 2013, en route to the hearing where her name was legally changed.
Credit...Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
Manning weaves together her role as a whistle-blower — utterly disillusioned by what she saw and experienced in the military — with her sad personal story. Her childhood was marred by a violent father’s physical and emotional abuse, as well as her mother’s tragic alcoholism. The narrator’s gender dysphoria, which began to play out in childhood and culminated in her triumphant coming out as a woman while still in prison, brought about soul-deadening nastiness and physical attacks by schoolmates and military colleagues alike. Especially appalling was the treatment from some Army higher-ups, who — while supposedly adhering to the often cruel “don’t ask, don’t tell” rules of the time — took every opportunity to bully and mock the talented young analyst.
Though many of the facts here were previously known through extensive news reporting over more than a decade, Manning’s memoir fills in some blanks and, most important, adds a searing personal element. The writing in “README.txt” is vivid, as its narrative moves from an Oklahoma childhood to community college in Maryland to an unpredictable decision to enlist — brought about partly by dire financial need — which eventually brought her to the Middle East. She describes the Army base east of Baghdad where she was first stationed in late 2009, with its constant acrid smell, as “bleak and beige and above all boring.”
Manning conjures, too, a different kind of torture: her court-martial, during much of which she was convinced she would be locked up for life. Lawyers might have reached a plea deal if Manning had been willing to admit to malicious intent but she resisted the pressure to make what she called a “moral compromise.” She disputed, all along, that aiding the enemy was either the intention or the result of her actions, and she refers to the former defense secretary Robert Gates’s view, stated at a news conference, that the leaked information did no significant harm to U.S. foreign policy.
Although Manning’s tale is troubling to read, it manages to be uplifting as well. In addition to describing the abuse she was so often subjected to, she writes of small but touching acts of kindness, as when one prison barber — knowing how much she detested the ritual buzz-cutting of her hair because it meant she was being treated as a man — asked if he could shape her eyebrows. From then on, “he’d thread my brows into a feminine shape, a small thing that made me feel more like the person I knew I was.” That she and her advocates managed to get the U.S. military to agree to her gender-transitioning in prison, including providing hormone therapy, is remarkable; her sense of accomplishment in becoming her true self gives the memoir something of a redemptive ending.
Was she right to blow the whistle? That’s a debate that rages around the leaks of classified material by Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, Thomas Drake and others. Accusations of treason will never cease, nor will the claims, however dubious, that there’s a better way to follow one’s conscience — either by advocating for change, legally and conscientiously, from the inside, or by leaving an organization to become an activist. No one who has followed those cases, however, can argue that the punishments have not been harsh. Reality Winner, who leaked a single classified report, was sent away for years as President Trump (himself no scrupulous handler of classified information, we now know) found the scapegoat for leaking to the press that he wanted. It seemed a fulfillment of what the F.B.I. director James B. Comey had earlier promised him: “a head on a pike” to make the point that leaking is unacceptable.
Was it all worthwhile? On that Georgetown stage, Daniel Ellsberg reflected, “Manning and Snowden and I all thought the same words, which I heard them say: ‘No one else was going to do it, someone had to do it — so I did it.’”
Manning describes what she did as “an act of rebellion, of resistance, and of civil disobedience,” and as an important American tradition. It is one that often, and certainly in her case, comes at a high price.
Margaret Sullivan, the public editor at The Times from 2012 to 2016, is a former media columnist for The Washington Post and the author, most recently, of “Newsroom Confidential.”
Manning weaves together her role as a whistle-blower — utterly disillusioned by what she saw and experienced in the military — with her sad personal story. Her childhood was marred by a violent father’s physical and emotional abuse, as well as her mother’s tragic alcoholism. The narrator’s gender dysphoria, which began to play out in childhood and culminated in her triumphant coming out as a woman while still in prison, brought about soul-deadening nastiness and physical attacks by schoolmates and military colleagues alike. Especially appalling was the treatment from some Army higher-ups, who — while supposedly adhering to the often cruel “don’t ask, don’t tell” rules of the time — took every opportunity to bully and mock the talented young analyst.
Though many of the facts here were previously known through extensive news reporting over more than a decade, Manning’s memoir fills in some blanks and, most important, adds a searing personal element. The writing in “README.txt” is vivid, as its narrative moves from an Oklahoma childhood to community college in Maryland to an unpredictable decision to enlist — brought about partly by dire financial need — which eventually brought her to the Middle East. She describes the Army base east of Baghdad where she was first stationed in late 2009, with its constant acrid smell, as “bleak and beige and above all boring.”
Manning conjures, too, a different kind of torture: her court-martial, during much of which she was convinced she would be locked up for life. Lawyers might have reached a plea deal if Manning had been willing to admit to malicious intent but she resisted the pressure to make what she called a “moral compromise.” She disputed, all along, that aiding the enemy was either the intention or the result of her actions, and she refers to the former defense secretary Robert Gates’s view, stated at a news conference, that the leaked information did no significant harm to U.S. foreign policy.
Although Manning’s tale is troubling to read, it manages to be uplifting as well. In addition to describing the abuse she was so often subjected to, she writes of small but touching acts of kindness, as when one prison barber — knowing how much she detested the ritual buzz-cutting of her hair because it meant she was being treated as a man — asked if he could shape her eyebrows. From then on, “he’d thread my brows into a feminine shape, a small thing that made me feel more like the person I knew I was.” That she and her advocates managed to get the U.S. military to agree to her gender-transitioning in prison, including providing hormone therapy, is remarkable; her sense of accomplishment in becoming her true self gives the memoir something of a redemptive ending.
Was she right to blow the whistle? That’s a debate that rages around the leaks of classified material by Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, Thomas Drake and others. Accusations of treason will never cease, nor will the claims, however dubious, that there’s a better way to follow one’s conscience — either by advocating for change, legally and conscientiously, from the inside, or by leaving an organization to become an activist. No one who has followed those cases, however, can argue that the punishments have not been harsh. Reality Winner, who leaked a single classified report, was sent away for years as President Trump (himself no scrupulous handler of classified information, we now know) found the scapegoat for leaking to the press that he wanted. It seemed a fulfillment of what the F.B.I. director James B. Comey had earlier promised him: “a head on a pike” to make the point that leaking is unacceptable.
Was it all worthwhile? On that Georgetown stage, Daniel Ellsberg reflected, “Manning and Snowden and I all thought the same words, which I heard them say: ‘No one else was going to do it, someone had to do it — so I did it.’”
Manning describes what she did as “an act of rebellion, of resistance, and of civil disobedience,” and as an important American tradition. It is one that often, and certainly in her case, comes at a high price.
Margaret Sullivan, the public editor at The Times from 2012 to 2016, is a former media columnist for The Washington Post and the author, most recently, of “Newsroom Confidential.”
Hear why Chelsea Manning leaked classified documents to WikiLeaks
In an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, former US Army soldier and whistleblower Chelsea Manning described her new tell-all memoir and why she chose to leak 750 classified documents to WikiLeaks.
#cnntonight #jaketapper #CNN Oct 19, 2022
A memoir in which everything is classified and nothing is secret
Chelsea Manning’s “README.txt: A Memoir” refuses the confessional mode — and offers something more radical in its place
Review by Jordy Rosenberg
October 18, 2022
Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, was convicted in 2013 for leaking military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. Her sentence was commuted in 2017. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
When we meet Chelsea Manning in the electrifying opening of her new memoir, “README.txt,” she is 22 years old, on leave from a deployment in Iraq and attempting to upload classified documents to WikiLeaks from a Barnes & Noble computer with a guttering internet connection. Downing a triple grande mocha in a Maryland mall while wrestling with a cumbersome upload to a website she’d only recently learned about had not been Manning’s first choice for releasing this information. She’d initially tried to speak with various news outlets. No one bit. She then planned to go directly to the Politico offices in Northern Virginia, only to be derailed by a historic blizzard.
Chelsea Manning’s “README.txt: A Memoir” refuses the confessional mode — and offers something more radical in its place
Review by Jordy Rosenberg
October 18, 2022
Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, was convicted in 2013 for leaking military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. Her sentence was commuted in 2017. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
When we meet Chelsea Manning in the electrifying opening of her new memoir, “README.txt,” she is 22 years old, on leave from a deployment in Iraq and attempting to upload classified documents to WikiLeaks from a Barnes & Noble computer with a guttering internet connection. Downing a triple grande mocha in a Maryland mall while wrestling with a cumbersome upload to a website she’d only recently learned about had not been Manning’s first choice for releasing this information. She’d initially tried to speak with various news outlets. No one bit. She then planned to go directly to the Politico offices in Northern Virginia, only to be derailed by a historic blizzard.
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
So, due to redeploy in less than 24 hours, Manning white-knuckled it through unplowed streets in search of a non-traceable computer from which to release the trove of documents she had emancipated from a military computer on DVDs “labeled with titles like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Manning’s Mix.” We may know some facts of this story, but what we cannot know as an abstract fact — what we can only feel through Manning’s unfurling of narrative detail — is the texture of her choices: not only the anomie of an aughts chain bookstore, but the material conditions of a young millennial finding the cracks in the smooth, implacable face of mall culture and the doldrums of a major recession.
The arc of “README.txt” reaches back from here, then forward again, spanning Manning’s early years in Oklahoma City, enlistment in the military, deployment to Iraq, trials and incarceration, public announcement of herself as transgender, and finally her commutation. In May 2010, Manning was arrested for disclosing military and diplomatic documents that included, as the American Civil Liberties Union puts it, “evidence of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. attempts to cover up the CIA torture program, and other matters of public interest.” Manning was incarcerated at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and sentenced to 35 years. Her imprisonment included long periods in solitary confinement and other forms of severe and inhumane punishment, including the denial of gender-affirming hormones. In 2015, after more than a year of litigation, and other forms of resistance by Manning herself, including a hunger strike, Manning received hormone treatment. Responding to massive public pressure, President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence, and she was released on May 17, 2017.
In revisiting these events, “README.txt” serves as an insider confessional turned inside out for the 21st century. The perverse secret of our era, one that Manning details in multiple surreal encounters with military bureaucracy, is that everything is already known. Manning is canny in her refusal to simply embrace the confessional mode often demanded of trans writers and whistleblowers alike. Other insider memoirs may open with men in power suits stalking through the halls of the Pentagon while poring over “For the President’s Eyes Only” documents. But Manning’s opens onto the hellscape of the post-2008 financial crash. The hushed sublimity of the halls of the Rand Corp. circa 1970 has given way. In 2010 the distinction between the crucibles of power and the strip mall has dissolved in a monochromatic late-capitalist soup, or something like what critic Anna Kornbluh terms “Fifty Billion Shades of Gray.”
This world is Manning’s milieu, and her evocation of it is agile and granular. It matters that “README.txt” begins in a Barnes & Noble. Manning’s scene of whistleblowing isn’t the scowling apple-pie-faced consternation of a James Spader, Matt Damon or Adam Driver. It’s Manning, exhausted and precarious, darting between parking lots and coffee shops with a thumb drive and a set of headphones, hijacking and rerouting power from deep within the heart not of the Rand Corp. but a chain store. Treading water in a sea of mass-market books and muffins, Manning conducts a pitched battle against the mass-marketization of death.
In the world to which Manning has access, everything is classified and nothing is secret. Not Manning’s gayness, which she reveals to her father only to be met with an “Okay?” as he throws up his hands. Not the contents of military computers in Iraq: “In our supposedly high-security office, people kept the passwords to laptops containing government secrets stuck to those same laptops, written on Post-its.” And not the “classified courier box” continuing a report on “significant actions” in Iraq that Manning is asked to create “for internal purposes only.” When Manning turned over the report, the public affairs office “removed the classified stamps” and sent it directly to the Iraqi press. The “classification system doesn’t exist to keep secrets safe,” Manning writes. “It exists to control the media.
Non-confession is an apt approach to this American feint, whereby imperial aggression is alternately cloistered and flaunted at will. And anyway, what other kind of memoir could be written by someone whose life has been made so extensively, excruciatingly public? Manning’s tremendous bravery, much of the information she released, and the ways in which she was punished and tortured in the wake of her disclosures are all a matter of extremely public record. As Manning puts it, “Everyone now knows — because of what happened to me — that the government will attempt to destroy you fully … for bringing to light the truth about its own actions.”
So disclosure isn’t the road she travels in this memoir. Instead, she highlights the extent to which she’s chosen not to address some aspects of her story that “the media has made public”: “I have already faced serious consequences for sharing information that I believe to be in the public interest,” she says. “I am uninterested in facing them again.” Manning’s memoir may thus give us less, not more, of what we may think we know about her. But this is an artful refusal, and an important one.
Journalists are failing our fragile democracy, a media insider says
As a non-confession, “README.txt” functions in part to correct the ways Manning was compelled to frame her identity in the context of her legal travails. She articulates regret about how her gender was made to serve a particular narrative function for her legal case: “My legal team used everything it could, including arguing that gender identity had pushed me to a breaking point. This strategy continues to weigh on me,” she writes. “I worried that the argument we were forced to make gave ammunition to those who want to pathologize trans people.” Manning’s memoir decompresses the false equivalences that have been required of her and reconstructs the epiphanies that cemented her political convictions. One key moment comes in 2008, when Proposition 8, which aimed to ban same-sex marriage in California, passes while Manning is training as an analyst at Fort Drum in New York. “This was my worldview shattering,” she writes. “My whole life, I’d been told that things were always going to get better … that liberal society meant slow but steady ‘progress’ toward democratic inclusion.” This moment is transformative: “My intellectual and political life can be divided into pre- and post-Proposition 8. It made me think long and hard about my blind faith in nationalism.”
While the military still paints leakers as perverts (“nuts and sluts,” as Manning tells us), queerness and transness do not necessarily put anyone at odds with the state, as we well know from the proliferation of rainbow-garnished police cars and fighter jets during Pride Month. Manning’s memoir reckons with this complex relationship of sex and gender to political radicalism, a legacy fraught with Cold War demonization and red-baiting, by showing us the process of her political bildung — that is, the way she came to be herself, especially as Proposition 8 opened a fissure around nationalism for her. But she also shows us how her experiences with homelessness, familial estrangement, sub-minimum-wage jobs and other forms of precarity opened the fissure wider. She is right to be concerned about the ways in which transness has been made to carry the whole weight of her actions. And because it is a memoir and not a legal brief, “README.txt” can refract the vexations of this tangled history while allowing the reader to experience Manning’s layered feelings about these issues.
Late in the book, Manning charts her organization of and involvement in a prison strike at Leavenworth. Her absorbing account begins with her years-long struggle to receive hormones. While awaiting the outcome of this legal battle, Manning builds friendships within the prison, notably with the barbers. Though she is required to receive biweekly haircuts, the barbers treat her kindly, soothing her through the violent, dysphoria-inducing procedure, even improvising to provide the feel of a salon experience: “Sometimes they’d wash my hair to make it feel more like a beauty appointment than a ritual shearing.” Are all these barbers queer and trans? Do they treat her gently because they are bolstering their own ranks? No. “The other inmates were supportive of my pursuit of gender reassignment, not necessarily because they believed deeply in trans rights, but because compelling the government to allow me to take hormones was fighting back against the prison. A victory for me would be a victory for prisoners.”
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Just as the prison barbers support Manning through the torment of a forced haircut, she stakes her own welfare with the welfare of the rest of the incarcerated population, organizing a general strike against the guards’ arbitrary disruption of mealtime. The narrative progression that unfolds over these pages forms a sublime arc within the memoir. These sections give us a peek into Manning’s political passions and allow us to experience the feelings that have informed her decisions to stand in solidarity with others. For serious legal reasons, Manning simply cannot say certain things about her actions around the WikiLeaks releases (indeed, sections are still classified and blacked out). But this Leavenworth section carries the broad, revolutionary affect that the rest of the memoir must be more cautious around.
Chelsea Manning, author of "README.txt: A Memoir" (Matt Barnes)
Together with the Barnes & Noble disclosure sequence and the events that follow, Manning’s description of the prison strike makes up the heart of her memoir. The two narratives can be read as binary stars, poles of a single, embedded fable in which we don’t have to adjudicate between our passions or parse them for a legal argument. Instead, we can just, as Angela Davis reminded us in a speech that celebrated Manning’s then-impending release, aspire to freedom for all political prisoners.
Jordy Rosenberg is a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the author of the novel “Confessions of the Fox” and the forthcoming hybrid work “The Day Unravels What the Night Has Wove"
So, due to redeploy in less than 24 hours, Manning white-knuckled it through unplowed streets in search of a non-traceable computer from which to release the trove of documents she had emancipated from a military computer on DVDs “labeled with titles like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Manning’s Mix.” We may know some facts of this story, but what we cannot know as an abstract fact — what we can only feel through Manning’s unfurling of narrative detail — is the texture of her choices: not only the anomie of an aughts chain bookstore, but the material conditions of a young millennial finding the cracks in the smooth, implacable face of mall culture and the doldrums of a major recession.
The arc of “README.txt” reaches back from here, then forward again, spanning Manning’s early years in Oklahoma City, enlistment in the military, deployment to Iraq, trials and incarceration, public announcement of herself as transgender, and finally her commutation. In May 2010, Manning was arrested for disclosing military and diplomatic documents that included, as the American Civil Liberties Union puts it, “evidence of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. attempts to cover up the CIA torture program, and other matters of public interest.” Manning was incarcerated at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and sentenced to 35 years. Her imprisonment included long periods in solitary confinement and other forms of severe and inhumane punishment, including the denial of gender-affirming hormones. In 2015, after more than a year of litigation, and other forms of resistance by Manning herself, including a hunger strike, Manning received hormone treatment. Responding to massive public pressure, President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence, and she was released on May 17, 2017.
In revisiting these events, “README.txt” serves as an insider confessional turned inside out for the 21st century. The perverse secret of our era, one that Manning details in multiple surreal encounters with military bureaucracy, is that everything is already known. Manning is canny in her refusal to simply embrace the confessional mode often demanded of trans writers and whistleblowers alike. Other insider memoirs may open with men in power suits stalking through the halls of the Pentagon while poring over “For the President’s Eyes Only” documents. But Manning’s opens onto the hellscape of the post-2008 financial crash. The hushed sublimity of the halls of the Rand Corp. circa 1970 has given way. In 2010 the distinction between the crucibles of power and the strip mall has dissolved in a monochromatic late-capitalist soup, or something like what critic Anna Kornbluh terms “Fifty Billion Shades of Gray.”
This world is Manning’s milieu, and her evocation of it is agile and granular. It matters that “README.txt” begins in a Barnes & Noble. Manning’s scene of whistleblowing isn’t the scowling apple-pie-faced consternation of a James Spader, Matt Damon or Adam Driver. It’s Manning, exhausted and precarious, darting between parking lots and coffee shops with a thumb drive and a set of headphones, hijacking and rerouting power from deep within the heart not of the Rand Corp. but a chain store. Treading water in a sea of mass-market books and muffins, Manning conducts a pitched battle against the mass-marketization of death.
In the world to which Manning has access, everything is classified and nothing is secret. Not Manning’s gayness, which she reveals to her father only to be met with an “Okay?” as he throws up his hands. Not the contents of military computers in Iraq: “In our supposedly high-security office, people kept the passwords to laptops containing government secrets stuck to those same laptops, written on Post-its.” And not the “classified courier box” continuing a report on “significant actions” in Iraq that Manning is asked to create “for internal purposes only.” When Manning turned over the report, the public affairs office “removed the classified stamps” and sent it directly to the Iraqi press. The “classification system doesn’t exist to keep secrets safe,” Manning writes. “It exists to control the media.
Non-confession is an apt approach to this American feint, whereby imperial aggression is alternately cloistered and flaunted at will. And anyway, what other kind of memoir could be written by someone whose life has been made so extensively, excruciatingly public? Manning’s tremendous bravery, much of the information she released, and the ways in which she was punished and tortured in the wake of her disclosures are all a matter of extremely public record. As Manning puts it, “Everyone now knows — because of what happened to me — that the government will attempt to destroy you fully … for bringing to light the truth about its own actions.”
So disclosure isn’t the road she travels in this memoir. Instead, she highlights the extent to which she’s chosen not to address some aspects of her story that “the media has made public”: “I have already faced serious consequences for sharing information that I believe to be in the public interest,” she says. “I am uninterested in facing them again.” Manning’s memoir may thus give us less, not more, of what we may think we know about her. But this is an artful refusal, and an important one.
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As a non-confession, “README.txt” functions in part to correct the ways Manning was compelled to frame her identity in the context of her legal travails. She articulates regret about how her gender was made to serve a particular narrative function for her legal case: “My legal team used everything it could, including arguing that gender identity had pushed me to a breaking point. This strategy continues to weigh on me,” she writes. “I worried that the argument we were forced to make gave ammunition to those who want to pathologize trans people.” Manning’s memoir decompresses the false equivalences that have been required of her and reconstructs the epiphanies that cemented her political convictions. One key moment comes in 2008, when Proposition 8, which aimed to ban same-sex marriage in California, passes while Manning is training as an analyst at Fort Drum in New York. “This was my worldview shattering,” she writes. “My whole life, I’d been told that things were always going to get better … that liberal society meant slow but steady ‘progress’ toward democratic inclusion.” This moment is transformative: “My intellectual and political life can be divided into pre- and post-Proposition 8. It made me think long and hard about my blind faith in nationalism.”
While the military still paints leakers as perverts (“nuts and sluts,” as Manning tells us), queerness and transness do not necessarily put anyone at odds with the state, as we well know from the proliferation of rainbow-garnished police cars and fighter jets during Pride Month. Manning’s memoir reckons with this complex relationship of sex and gender to political radicalism, a legacy fraught with Cold War demonization and red-baiting, by showing us the process of her political bildung — that is, the way she came to be herself, especially as Proposition 8 opened a fissure around nationalism for her. But she also shows us how her experiences with homelessness, familial estrangement, sub-minimum-wage jobs and other forms of precarity opened the fissure wider. She is right to be concerned about the ways in which transness has been made to carry the whole weight of her actions. And because it is a memoir and not a legal brief, “README.txt” can refract the vexations of this tangled history while allowing the reader to experience Manning’s layered feelings about these issues.
Late in the book, Manning charts her organization of and involvement in a prison strike at Leavenworth. Her absorbing account begins with her years-long struggle to receive hormones. While awaiting the outcome of this legal battle, Manning builds friendships within the prison, notably with the barbers. Though she is required to receive biweekly haircuts, the barbers treat her kindly, soothing her through the violent, dysphoria-inducing procedure, even improvising to provide the feel of a salon experience: “Sometimes they’d wash my hair to make it feel more like a beauty appointment than a ritual shearing.” Are all these barbers queer and trans? Do they treat her gently because they are bolstering their own ranks? No. “The other inmates were supportive of my pursuit of gender reassignment, not necessarily because they believed deeply in trans rights, but because compelling the government to allow me to take hormones was fighting back against the prison. A victory for me would be a victory for prisoners.”
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Just as the prison barbers support Manning through the torment of a forced haircut, she stakes her own welfare with the welfare of the rest of the incarcerated population, organizing a general strike against the guards’ arbitrary disruption of mealtime. The narrative progression that unfolds over these pages forms a sublime arc within the memoir. These sections give us a peek into Manning’s political passions and allow us to experience the feelings that have informed her decisions to stand in solidarity with others. For serious legal reasons, Manning simply cannot say certain things about her actions around the WikiLeaks releases (indeed, sections are still classified and blacked out). But this Leavenworth section carries the broad, revolutionary affect that the rest of the memoir must be more cautious around.
Chelsea Manning, author of "README.txt: A Memoir" (Matt Barnes)
Together with the Barnes & Noble disclosure sequence and the events that follow, Manning’s description of the prison strike makes up the heart of her memoir. The two narratives can be read as binary stars, poles of a single, embedded fable in which we don’t have to adjudicate between our passions or parse them for a legal argument. Instead, we can just, as Angela Davis reminded us in a speech that celebrated Manning’s then-impending release, aspire to freedom for all political prisoners.
Jordy Rosenberg is a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the author of the novel “Confessions of the Fox” and the forthcoming hybrid work “The Day Unravels What the Night Has Wove"
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