The army whistleblower, who is set for release 17 May after seven years, thanked supporters in statement and looked forward to living as a transgender woman

Chelsea Manning, the army private who released a vast trove of US state secrets to WikiLeaks, has issued an emotive statement eight days before her release from military prison thanking her supporters and rejoicing that she can at last see a future for herself as a transgender woman.

Chelsea Manning: to those who kept me alive all these years, thank you | Chelsea E Manning Read more

“For the first time, I can see a future for myself as Chelsea,” she said. “I can imagine surviving and living as the person who I am and can finally be in the outside world.”

Manning will be set free from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas on 17 May, bringing to an end a seven-year ordeal in which she has been held captive in Iraq, Kuwait and the US, always in male-only detention facilities. In that time, she has waged a relentless legal battle to be respected as a transgender woman, winning the right to receive hormone treatment but still being subjected to male-standard hair length and dress codes.

She was granted freedom by Barack Obama as one of his final acts in office. The outgoing commander-in-chief said in commuting to time served Manning’s 35-year sentence, the longest ever penalty dished out in the US to an official leaker, “justice had been served”.

In her statement, Manning thanked the former president, as well as her legal team and supporters “who kept me alive”. She also alluded to the “dark times” she had had in military prison that were at times so extreme that she attempted to take her own life.

“Freedom used to be something that I dreamed of but never allowed myself to fully imagine. Now, freedom is something that I will again experience with friends and loved ones after nearly seven years of bars and cement, of periods of solitary confinement, and of my healthcare and autonomy restricted, including through routinely forced haircuts.”

Manning was arrested outside a US army base on the outskirts of Baghdad in 2010, having leaked hundreds of thousands of documents and videos downloaded from intelligence databases to WikiLeaks. The disclosures included “Collateral Murder”, the footage of a US Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad in which two Reuters journalists and other civilians were killed.

The lawyers who handled Manning’s appeal against her sentence, Nancy Hollander and Vincent Ward, praised Obama for his act of commutation, which they said marked the first time the military had taken care of the soldier “who risked so much to disclose information that served the public interest. Chelsea has already served the longest sentence of any whistleblower in the history of this country – it has been far too long, too severe, too draconian”.