Chelsea Manning had “a responsibility to the public” to leak thousands of classified documents, the former soldier said in her first interview following her release from a federal prison last month.
In an interview broadcast on Friday morning on ABC’s Good Morning America, Manning said she had “accepted responsibility” for her actions.
“Anything I’ve done, it’s me,” she said. “There’s no one else. No one told me to do this. Nobody directed me to do this. This is me. It’s on me.”
Manning, who leaked the documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, served seven years of a 35-year federal sentence that was commuted by former president Barack Obama in his final days in office. Even after being truncated, it was the longest sentence ever served by a US intelligence leaker.
Manning said she had not spoken to Obama but thanked him in the ABC interview, her voice breaking, for giving her “another chance”.
Asked what motivated her to leak the material that was published by the Guardian, New York Times and other international outlets, she said: “We’re getting all this information from all these different sources and it’s just death, destruction, mayhem.
“We’re filtering it all through facts, statistics, reports, dates, times, locations, and eventually, you just stop. I stopped seeing just statistics and information, and I started seeing people.”
The 29-year-old also discussed her struggles in dealing with her gender transition while in prison. She tried to kill herself twice, she said, and fought for the hormone treatments that she says keep her alive.
“[It] keeps me from feeling like I’m in the wrong body,” she said. “I used to get these horrible feelings 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.”
Manning was released from prison on 17 May and has been sharing moments from daily life on Instagram and Twitter, from taking her first steps out of prison to lighter faire like “restarting [her] daily caffeine addiction at Starbucks”.
After all she has been through, including a daily deluge of negative social media comments from people calling her a traitor and worse, Manning still expressed “nothing but respect” for the US military.
“The military is diverse, and large, and it’s public, it serves a public function, it serves a public duty,” she told ABC. “And the people who are in the military work very hard, often for not much money, to make their country better and to protect their country. I have nothing but respect for that. And that’s why I signed up.”