In 1st interview since release, Chelsea Manning thanks Obama for 2nd chance

Aamer Madhani | USA TODAY

Chelsea Manning, the transgender U.S. Army soldier who spent seven years in prison for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents, said that given the chance she would say “thank you” to former President Obama for commuting her sentence.

"I've been given a chance," said a tearful Manning in excerpts of an interview with ABC News that aired Friday. "That's all I asked for was a chance. That's it, and now this is my chance," she added in the first interview since her release from military prison last month.

Manning was convicted of leaking more than 700,000 classified documents, including battlefield reports on Iraq and Afghanistan and State Department cables, while working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq. She said the leaks were intended to expose wrongdoing.

She was arrested outside a U.S. Army base in Iraq in May 2010. Her 35-year sentence, the longest punishment ever imposed by the U.S. government for a leaking conviction, was commuted in the final days of the Obama administration, a move that infuriated some in the military as well as President Trump. Manning would have been eligible for parole in six years.

At the time of her arrest, she was known as Pvt. Bradley Manning, but came out as transgender during her incarceration. She remains an active-duty, unpaid soldier, eligible for health care and other benefits while her court-martial conviction remains under appeal.

In the ABC News interview, Manning said she accepts responsibility for her actions and said she felt compelled to leak the information because of a “responsibility to the public.”

"Anything I've done, it's me. There's no one else," she said. "No one told me to do this. Nobody directed me to do this. This is me. It's on me."

The low-level enlisted soldier twice tried to kill herself in 2016 while incarcerated at the men’s military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Manning came out days after her sentencing. The military initially would not provide her with treatment for gender dysphoria, but the ACLU filed suit on her behalf and she eventually began receiving hormone treatment.

Manning said treatment was crucial to her survival.

"(It) keeps me from feeling like I'm in the wrong body," she added. "I used to get these horrible feeling like I just wanted to rip my body apart and I don't want to have to go through that experience again. It's really, really awful."