Front Burner - Chelsea Manning, in her own words

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

In 2010, during the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic records were released, revealing civilian death and disaster on the ground for both conflicts. It was one of the largest and most explosive leaks in U.S. history and included every incident report the United States Army had ever filed about Iraq or Afghanistan. The mass leak pulled back the curtain on both wars, igniting an intense debate over the role of the U.S. military and about what information the public deserves to know. And at the centre of it all was Chelsea Manning. Manning was a young American military intelligence analyst on her first tour in Iraq who was secretly struggling with her gender identity. She became so disillusioned by the horrors of war that she decided to risk everything to publicize highly-sensitive military information. Now, more than a decade later, Manning is speaking out about her experience as a whistleblower in a new memoir called README.Txt. She joins Front Burner from New York.

Happy Holidays! I'm Frank Cappadocia, Dean of Continuous Professional Learning at Humber Polytechnic, and I'd like you to set a goal for 2025 to sharpen your skills and get promoted. Register for a professional designation, micro-credential, or certificate with Humber's Continuous Professional Learning and ignite your career journey this new year. Our experts deliver accelerated learning from resilience-based leadership to electric vehicle fundamentals in learning options that work with your ambitious lifestyle. Adapt, evolve, and excel. Go to humber.ca slash cpl to get started. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey everybody, Jamie here. So we have an interview today that I hope you'll enjoy

as much as I did. I spoke last week with Chelsea Manning. She's got this new book out, a memoir called Read Me.Text. You might remember back in 2010, Chelsea Manning was the young American military intelligence analyst who leaked hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic records to WikiLeaks. And these documents revealed a lot of innocent civilian death and disaster on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was one of the largest and most explosive leaks we've ever seen and really ushered in this era of leaks. It changed the public perception of both wars. And what happened is that Chelsea Manning became this controversial flashpoint for a larger conversation about what information the public deserves to know. To get you caught up here, in 2013, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison. That's also around the time that Chelsea came out as trans, which is an important part of her story, too.

an important part of her story too. After seven years in custody and a lot of lobbying by supporters, President Obama commuted her sentence in one of his final acts in office. But Chelsea actually ended up going back to prison for a little while in 2019 for refusing to testify at the grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks. For me, Chelsea has been one of these recent historical figures who has loomed so large and who has also been the subject of other people's narratives. Is she a traitor? A hero? An unstable young person who didn't fully appreciate the consequences of her actions? So it was really interesting to hear her story from her own perspective. All right, enough from me. Here's our convo with Chelsea. Take a listen. Chelsea, hi. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Hi, how's it going? Good, thank you. And thank you for being here. So look, over the years, you've been called a lot of things, right? A radical, an anarchist, a whistleblower, a traitor. But this book paints, you know, I thought, such a more complex and human picture of who you were when you decided to leak hundreds of thousands of classified documents. And if you could talk with that Chelsea now, what would you say to her? documents. And if you could talk with that Chelsea now, what would you say to her? That you are loved, that you, you know, you are loved unconditionally,

that there are other people out there like you, that you are not alone. That's nice. You begin your memoir by recounting all these roadblocks that almost stopped you from sharing this classified data that you had secretly stolen. It was February 2010. You were back in the U.S. on leave and everything just seems to go wrong. It's incredible reading it. Why was this information so hard to release? I mean, just the practical and technical limitations of the time, right? You know, I was a junior enlisted military analyst. So essentially, you know, I, my time was very limited. You know, I was working 14 hours a day, every single day, no breaks, no weekends. And I had a very limited time for being on leave. The internet obviously was a bit slower for us out there, and it was slower than it was today.

And also, you know, I sort of had this vision of a Woodward and Bernstein-style handoff to a Washington Post reporter in my mind, and particularly my first initial attempts was to try to get the Washington Post because I'm a DC. I'm from the DC area and I really had this like kind of 1970s vision

of being in a parking garage or whatever. So I reached out to the Washington Post and try to do a handoff or something like that. But I really encountered sort of communication misunderstandings as well. I was very hesitant based on my understanding of things going on to use email, to use the telephone. So whenever I was communicating with reporters, they were like, can you talk to me about it?

And I'm like, no, like, I need to see you. And, you know, it just, there was a misunderstanding. And, you know, obviously there was a blizzard and it limited the amount of time that I had, even on the limited amount of time that I had for leave already. Yeah. So yeah.

You talk about this blizzard, like you were trying to actually get the data to Politico, but basically you're caught in this crazy snowstorm. Yeah. So I abandoned that and ended up like the power was out of my aunt's house. So we had no internet at home. And yeah, so I dug on my last day off before I had to fly out early the next morning to Atlanta to get on the military flight back to Kuwait and then to Iraq. I flew or I drove out or I walked. I walked like a half a mile in the snow to pick up this car. It was a car share service.

And I grabbed it and it was completely encased in snow. So I just shoveled with my hands, this car out of the snow took me several hours to do. And by the time I was done with this process, and I was already late afternoon, the sun was setting, and I was looking for internet. So I, I went to this little bookstore out near where my my aunt lives and where i previously lived in maryland and i found uh that there was the starbucks did in fact that was attached to it did in fact have internet and made my attempt there so i spent several hours trying to using this you know sketchy you know slow Wi-Fi connection.

This is early 2010, so this is not the Wi-Fi of today. This is not 5G by any standard. And upload and try to do this upload because I couldn't find any quote-unquote reputable outlets in time. And it was done in this way where it had to be complete. It was corrupted if it wasn't sent fully. So it had to be done completely. And I reached a point where the store was about to close.

And it was about 45 minutes till closure. And I made the decision then then and there that if i couldn't get this done uh before it closed that i was going to throw away the sd card delete everything and just say hey this wasn't meant to be this isn't going to happen and just abandon the entire thing from there and never return. It's crazy to think that it was almost completely abandoned. You write about what it was like trying to upload those 750,000 records to WikiLeaks. How were you feeling in that moment?

What was that like? So, I mean, it was frustrating because it often seems to get portrayed as like I have some kind of grand plan or something. But I mean, it was just like one. It was just one complete disaster after another that I was sort of encountering. And again, you know, I'm like I'm like a young person. So I have like I also have a life.

You know, I'm also like, you know know trying to eat and trying to find places to you know trying to find time and place to sleep and this is such a narrow snapshot in comparison to the rest of my life uh and I feel like you know I mean one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book even was to explain you know that you know my feelings in any given moment were very hard to capture because of just sort of the absurdity of all of the different you know obstacles that i was facing on every day you know because yeah i was very hesitant to write a thriller style novel or a tell-all book because it just doesn't capture the sort of absurdity and the banality of it all, you know, because like this was this was a haphazard affair.

When you sent those files through, did you did you know what the risk was? Uh, no, I, you know, really didn't have a full understanding of what the risk was because, you know, the, what happened afterwards is hindsight is 2020 for everyone else. Um, but there was no, there was no previous cases of this happening where somebody who released information to the public was criminally charged and held in pretrial confinement under extreme circumstances. Like, none of this had ever happened before. So this was really, I was the test case for a lot of this stuff. I mean, I certainly expected some, I mean, what I viewed as being a big deal, which was, you know, I was hoping for a career in intelligence, I was hoping for a career, you know, past the military and government.

And I knew that all that was at risk, right? I thought I'm going to lose my security clearance, I'm probably going to face some kind of administrative charges or something like that, some kind of administrative charges or something like that, potentially. But prison had never happened before, and it wasn't on my radar. I mean, it just wasn't a realistic outcome from where I was sitting. And the consequences, I knew that there would be the potential consequences, but the the one of the consequences that I was thinking about the most was I do this and nobody cares. Right. Nobody thought nobody would care. Yeah. I, you know, where that is possible that no one would care. one of my bigger concerns was, you know, hey, like, I, you know, I do this thing. And, you know, and this is really important. And, you know, just given the difficulty I was having with reporters and given, given the difficulty that I was having with sort of explaining this to anyone. And,

you know, one of the, I mean, my explanation is really in this, this file that the book is titled off of, which is readme.txt, or readme.txt. And I just explain, like, this is the true face and scope of 21st century asymmetric warfare, essentially meaning being an occupied power, you know, facing an insurgency, and how brutal and ugly this is. ugly this is and my biggest concern was especially given how sort of you know chill americans were with the war at that point you know this is the second year of the obama administration it had fallen off of the radar for most people and all of this was still going on i was seeing it every day and you know uh and it became a distancing thing for me to talk to civilians even because their understanding was like oh you're still we're still

there we're still doing stuff there and you know it was just whenever I enlisted it was a very different affair it was the top news story every night and that was one of the main drivers behind this was this I what was this was this notion of like there being two different understandings of things, like the things that we were seeing and that deployed soldiers were seeing and dealing with and then things that the general public was being exposed to or not being exposed to at all in some instances. What was it that you wanted the general public to see that you you that they weren't seeing? What really pushed you to share these these files? I just wanted people to know, you know, like this is this is what it was. This is what happened here. You know, I mean, it's essentially a repository of historical events.

Right. a repository of historical events, right? And working as an analyst, I wanted to look at previous historical events of this nature. Just look at Vietnam, for instance. Many of the snapshot, like obviously the strategic stuff, the Pentagon Papers talks about the strategic sort of planning, the White House and the Pentagon level stuff. But the snapshots of what was the White House and the Pentagon level stuff. But the snapshots

of what was happening on the ground in Vietnam were lost to history because, weirdly enough, all of the records, you know, were stored in a building and that building caught fire. So putting this in the digital world and, you know, sharing it in the digital age, I thought would at least capture. So that way, we would not go into another decision like this in the future without an understanding of the operational, the lower level sort of reality of how ugly being an occupying power truly is and how brutal it is and how exhausting it is. And I think that, you know, while these are just records, they're not just records. These are human lives. They're they're they are real events.

They're things that actually transpired. And, you know, the bigger picture kind of view of some of these historical events doesn't capture the on the ground. Right. It doesn't capture the sort of some of these historical events um doesn't capture the on the ground right it doesn't capture the sort of grit of these things and i feel like that that's what happened with previous um with sort of previous wars so that was my my main goal was to just sort of inform the public of the true reality as opposed to the sort of glossed over or, you know, to borrow a phrase used by Robert Gates himself, the soda straw picture of history and provide some granularity to it. If you could define that true reality,

what was that true reality to you? I know that a lot of people like to use the video in particular as a good example. The collateral murder video? Yeah, I didn't name it that. From my perspective, it's the air weapons team incident of of July 12th, 20, 20 or seven. This video, probably the best known of the leaked material, shows a helicopter gun crew misidentifying journalists and civilians as combatants and then gunning them down. Come on, fire! I think that that is a very narrow snapshot

in which you can see visually of what this represents, which is the complexities of warfare and how messy it is and how ugly it is because previously, especially given the way things were portrayed with embedded reporters,

you had this very certain... all this was being viewed through this like very surgical lens right but the truth but the truth is that being an occupying power and being a essentially a a police force with military powers is ugly it's brutal it's It's not clean. It's extremely messy. There's a lot of ethical dilemmas. And you have a lot of young people being put in these really uncomfortable situations every single day. And they're getting paid barely more than minimum wage to do it. And, you know, it's just this I think encapsulates that. It captures that. I want to just come right back to the diplomatic cables in one second. But just for our listeners, you know, this video that we're talking about, we talk about how it shows the like everyday horrors of war.

I just wonder if you could just explain for me briefly, you know, what that video actually showed. Right. So a lot of people focus very much on the there's a there is a helicopter pilot and a gunner, and they're communicating with with on the ground via radio, which is being captured by the by the video. And they are communicating with each other and basically sort of, they have mistook a photographer for somebody firing an RPG at a convoy. They were a war reporter for Reuters and their helper.

That's a weapon, yeah. And they get clearance to engage, and a lot of people notice the sort of ugly banter, the sort of very dark and gruesome language that the pilot and the gunner use. Fight them all up. Two traffic, two six. Fight them all up. 202 traffic, 260. Come on, fire.

Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards. 202, free chain. Nice. Which is, you know, which is actually very common in warfare, unfortunately. It's, you know, just sort of the dehumanization of people, which didn't strike me initially as being that. I mean, when civilians view it, they're sort of struck by it.

But I kind of overlook that. But, you know, they engage this group of civilians who are just standing there and it's a number of people around them. a number of people around them. And it's a very ugly and very, you know, gruesome sort of attack in which basically the bodies are ripped apart by an anti-tank gun, a 30 mic mic, that's a 30 millimeter high velocity round fired from an Apache gunship. And there's all but you know, it's 30 minutes, it's 34 minutes long. So you get the entirety of the aftermath as well, which is, you know, there, there is a minivan that comes up to try to assist some of the survivors. Where's that van at? Right down there by the body.

Okay. Yeah. Bushmaster, Crazy Horse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly picking up bodies and weapons. Who are limping along and they try to pick up the wounded, and then they get clearance to engage the wounded person and the people who are helping them. Which just happened to be this good Samaritan

who just noticed this happening and saw this person laying on the ground. So they grabbed them and put them in their car, and they are engaged also by these... I mean, these rounds are designed for tanks, so it just rips the vehicle. Yeah, it's brutal. Bushmaster 7, roger. Bushmaster 7, roger.

Bushmaster 7, roger, engage. 1-8, clear. Come on. Clear. And also then you have the mechanized infantry unit that comes in, does a battle damage assessment and pulls security and checks in on the, on the damage.

And they discover that there are children in the car, you know, there is no weapons in the vehicle that, you know, the, and, uh, and,

you know, they, and, you know, they, they try to pick up these kids and, and try to take them to the hospital as quickly as they can. So,

you know, it's like, it's both the best, you know, it's like, it's both the best, you know, it's like the worst of humanity mixed in with the best of humanity all at once. I think it captures that. It clearly affects you so much all these years later. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, and yeah, it's just, you know, I feel like, and I often give university lectures

and sort of like the information age that we live in and the desensitization that we experience and, you know, and the sort of dehumanization of people in general that we've been going through, particularly here in the United States, you know, sort of with social media and things like that. But, yeah, it's just always struck me that what often gets lost in all these discussions about war or peace or, you know, politics is, you know, you've got real people just trying to just trying to survive um and of course that was just one example of civilian deaths that we learned about because because of your leak you also mentioned before as part of the leak there were of course these tens of thousands of diplomatic cables that were released that they gave a really honest view of how diplomats communicate with each other,

including how they talk about the countries that they're based in. Right. And the leaders of those countries. And specifically in the context of the the quote unquote war on terror of the war on terror. Right. You know, these are these are limited in scope. These are not all diplomatic discussions. These are diplomatic discussions specific to, you know, the ongoing, quote unquote, war on terror that was raging during the Bush administration and the Obama administration, and that's captured. Happy holidays.

I'm Frank Cappadocia, Dean of Continuous Professional Learning at Humber Polytechnic. And I'd like you to set a goal for 2025 to sharpen your skills and get promoted. Register for a professional designation, micro-credential, or certificate with Humber's continuous professional learning and ignite your career journey this new year. Our experts deliver accelerated learning from resilience-based leadership to electric vehicle fundamentals and learning options that work with your ambitious lifestyle. Adapt, evolve, and excel. Go to humber.ca slash cpl to get started. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people

and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples.

How would you respond to people who think this information, it was dangerous and reckless to put it out there, that it put lives at risk on Americans and foreign citizens who had supplied those diplomats with information, for example. Well, I mean, you know, we had a court-martial and we went through this process. You know, the government never really raised anything that was tangible. You know, it was all about what ifs and coulds and would have. And so it didn't really pan out, I feel like. And even by the Department of Defense's own assessment, it didn't really.

You know, the Secretary of Defense said, you know, that, you know, it was embarrassing, but not necessarily a big deal in terms of their strategic, you know, sort of objectives and, you know, the big picture and, you know, sort of the dangers that were sort of hyped up in 2010 didn't really pan out by 2013. So I don't think that that I think that the assumption that something that is classified or that the government is keeping secret is dangerous as I think is I think one that that lead that at that in that era, you know, was leading leading people to not having full the full picture or enough information, you know, and the assumption that something is classified means that it's dangerous as I think is I think a one that I'm not comfortable with, right? Now, of course, we're in an era where this information flows extremely freely. And it's kind of everywhere now. So it's a very different era where there's less government secrecy, there's a lot more transparency, but there's also a lot more disinformation, which I think is actually, you know, obscuring the picture that we're starting

to emerge in the early 2010s of sort of the realities of the stuff. Because now they don't even, now governments across the world, they do less of the hiding and more of the sort of just spreading an alternative message. Yeah. Just to go back to what you're saying about the classified document, it was interesting, to what you're saying about the classified document it was interesting you talk about in your book just how arbitrary this this label is right like it is yeah i mean anyone who works in this stuff really knows kind of the arbitrariness um of it uh i think that's a lot of people who are because you know like i worked with i worked mean, even in my job, I was working with, you know, thousands, if not tens of thousands of records per day, right? You know, 72 hour time scale, you know, it's not useful or, you know,

sensitive after that time period. So, you know, from our perspective, so, you know, but you stamp this thing off, you put a secret stamp on it and, you know, there's the expectation that it won't get reviewed for 25 years. And by then, you know, it's probably been destroyed. I wonder, and I don't want to keep you too long, but I wonder if we could spend a little bit of time talking about some of the more personal things you shared in this book because it is also a really intimate portrait of your life um how would you describe your family growing up and what life was like for you

so my my parents were heavy drinkers um my father my father was a was a well-to-do um businessman um you know he was a He worked at Hertz Corporation for many years and had managed to get himself, I think, into a directorial position by this point and was looking at, and eventually became a junior executive. And so I grew up in an upper middle class, central Oklahoma home.

And I had access to a computer at a very young age, for instance. But the instability of my father going out on business trips and then coming back and being raging drunk and being very abusive to me and my mother and to my sister was a difficult one. And I didn't realize that this was difficult, obviously, as a kid, because, you know, it was the world that I knew. It was the world that I understood. But, yeah, it was very uncomfortable.

And, you know, I really leaned on and depended on my sister, who I just adored and admired enormously. You know, I love my sister so much. I would not be the person that I am today without her helping me in these trying times. And it just got worse. And by the time my parents divorced, because my mother's British,

so she didn't get naturalized. So after she gained custody of me, she took me to the UK. And I lived in the UK for a period of time. But my mother just descended even further to the point where, you know, my mother was, I would find my mother passed out on the stairs you know from drinking at you know when i came home from school you know this is like three four o'clock in the afternoon oh i can't imagine how difficult that must have been and at the same time right you're grappling with uh your own sexuality and your own sort of gender dysphoria, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I didn't know, I didn't have words for these things. Obviously I got in trouble in school for kissing a boy on the sort of queer side of things and then being trans, you know, I was very effeminate and I didn't really, you know,

sort of understand, you know, what may be so different. And then I explored this later in my in my in my sort of later years as an adult, or as a young adult. But yeah, like, growing up this way, you know, growing up, just not really knowing my history, not really knowing my identity, not really being told anything. But always being treated differently, or like I was different, was, you know, was very confusing. And I, you know, I really wish that I had some guidance at a younger age. I really wish that I had some somebody to sort of educate me and tell me, like, hey, you know, you're loved, you're fine, there's nothing wrong with you, you know, instead of giving, you know, giving my younger self all this constant negative

reinforcement. And this old, this theme that is really a theme throughout the memoir of having no one really taking care of you and this lack of stability in your life, it comes to a head after high school when you get kicked out of your dad's house you end up broken homeless in Chicago and it gets really it gets really bad yeah well uh I mean from my perspective though I mean at the time I thought being houseless in Chicago was the time of my life. I was free. I was alive. But I was also hungry. I was also... And the funny thing is I actually even had a job. I was just in Chicago. I just drove by the guitar center where I used to work, but it wasn't enough to pay rent. So the sort of precarious life existence that I had out there and the unsustainability of

it and really only my aunt, you know, calling me on the phone out of the blue. I don't know how she got my number, but my aunt really pulled through and, you know, she said she wired me some money to to drive back to her her home in Maryland, which now I've been mostly based out of Maryland. Even though I live in New York, I've been mostly based out of Maryland because of her, because she helped me in a very precarious time in my life. The real heroes of the story are in many ways my aunt and my sister. Yeah, that's really interesting to hear. I mean, you can tell through the pages just how much you admire both of them. I mean, and your sister, I know we haven't talked about this, that at some point your mom has a suicide attempt,

and you talk about just how strong she was in that moment for you and for your whole family. in that moment for you and for your whole family. I thought that was a really powerful part in the book as well. One question that kept coming to my mind when I was reading this book is like reading your story, it struck me how you do seem like maybe the last person who might join the military, right? Like at the time you were hacking, you were growing, you know, ideologically, like more of a commitment to freedom of information. On top of that, this was during the don't ask, don't tell era in the military, you were dating men. And, and as we've talked about privately dealing with gender dysphoria and like, why did you enlist in the military? What ultimately drove you to do that?

My father had a very big role in that. Also, the troop surge in Iraq, you know, was an ongoing discussion. It was on the news every night. And I was really looking for a place of belonging, a sense of identity, a sense of self, because I didn't know who I was or what I was doing or what the purpose of anything I was doing was. And, you know, I was essentially, you know, hitting a lot of birds with one stone there. And I was my father was encouraging me to enlist in the military, I was dealing with identity issues with in general, not just with gender, but, you know, just who am I in general. with in general, not just with gender, but, you know, just who am I in general? And, and then the I wanted to feel like I was a part of the world, and do doing my part in some way. And, you know, and here's this big thing. And they're, oh, by the way, they're offering bonuses. And, you know,

they're really looking for people, they're really recruiting hard. And I was like, well, they, you know, like, this is a place where I might be needed. And, you know, it's, but one of the funny things is that my father encouraged me to enlist in the Navy. And me being hardhead or the Air Force and me being hardheaded, I was like, well, I'm going to join the Marines. of you know strange set of events is that whenever whenever i showed up on that day um the marine recruit the marine corps recruiters weren't there so i just happened to walk a little further down the hall and see that there was the army recruiting center was right there as well and i and i and i poked my head in and out and wanted to ask if they if they had any brochures it's it's incredible to think how at so many moments, this all could have gone so much differently. Yeah, absolutely.

Like that you would never have ended up in that Barnes & Noble trying to upload all those files, you know, at 10 p.m. at night. I almost ended up staying stateside in a more cushy role in the D. the DC area, which would have put me closer to home. And I decided that I wanted a deployment on the right belt. But I was offered a position at a different place.

So yeah, there's so many little, it's the little, these little tiny decisions and things really chart the course of my life. It's not like this big decision. It's a lot of little, small happenstances. We talked earlier about how you didn't really think through the consequences, or you didn't think that the consequences would obviously be as grave as they were. And of course, after the leak, I mean, people cared a lot. Like this story hit really, really hard.

I remember living through it. But you did not see any of that because you spent 59 days alone in a sweltering cage in kuwait and then after that you were transferred back to the u.s where you spent nine months in solitary confinement and and i know that this is probably difficult for you to talk about but like what what do you remember from that period what was that like for you yeah so it's you know it's funny um it was actually one of the harder parts of the book to write because as awful as Being a Solitary Confidant is, I mean, the awfulness is really in how boring and empty and unfortunately, there's not a lot to write about because it was just the same day again and again and again.

And there's not really a lot going on. I know there's people are very fascinated by this, but, you know, my day really consisted of, you know, living from wake up to chow to chow to chow to sleep, right? And maybe getting a shower in between and being in the cell and being watched by, you know, two Quantico Virginia Marines, right? in between and being in the cell and being watched by two Quantico

Virginia Marines at all times and being alone in there and me just trying to entertain myself by some way, just anything to break the monotony.

It's just, it's just, it was very difficult to write because, and one thing I will say about it is that one of the things that happens because there's so little going on is that you become hyper aware and hypersensitive to tiny things, right? The drips of water and pipes through the wall, right? The footfall of people somewhere else in the building. You can tell who a person is and what their mood is based on their footfall. You just become super hyper acutely aware

of all these kinds of little tiny details, right? So that's what I try to capture in there because I just became, you know, obviously, I'm still in therapy, you know, from that time period, and being in Iraq, and being houseless, like I've been in therapy for that. And, you know, one of the things is that, you know, like just surviving, I've just become very numb to all these kinds of sets of circumstances, right? You know, people often ask me, like, what, you know, what's it like being outside of prison? And I'm like, well, I'm still trying to figure that out. I'm still trying to, or, you know,

what's it like being in prison? And I'm, like, still trying to figure it out from here, because my whole, my whole life experience is, you know, is really being incarcerated, being in the military, being houseless, being, you you know in school um i'm only just starting to figure stuff out so like i'm i'm really at the age of 23 in terms of my life experience right um like my my day-to-day life experience of dealing with taxes and bills and things like that but you will you you you've said that life behind bars was in i think in a way easier for you and like could you just elaborate on what you mean by that a little bit yeah obviously there's obviously it's less fulfilling

but i mean you know there you don't you don't have to worry about where you're going to live you don't have to worry about your access to health care you don't have to worry about food you don't have to worry about you know um a lot of a lot of things that become question marks out here in the quote unquote free world. try to get a job or, you know, try to find the next gig to do or, you know, try to shift, you know, your brand to meet whatever potential revenue streams are out there if you're an online influencer or whatever. You know, it's difficult out here. And then you've got taxes, you've got bills, you've got, you know, you've got basic housework and things.

And, you know, these are not things that we, I mean, like, obviously we cleaned in there in prison, but, you know, we didn't, we didn't do the cooking. We didn't do, you know, it was somebody else who did the laundry and things. Life tasks are actually surprisingly hard for someone who didn't have to do it for seven or eight years, right? Yeah. That's so interesting to hear. Yeah.

Thank you so much for sharing all of this. Just before we go, though, in Iraq before the leak, you wonder if releasing the truth about the wards would help prevent the next war from happening. And do you still think that's true? Well, I mean, I'm not sure whether that was my goal or my intent, but, I mean, the information landscape has completely changed

and the geopolitical landscape is so different now that trying to compare what the world was like 12 years ago to today, you know, where Russia is infrating Ukraine, where the U.S. is receding as a as a as a world power and i i this is a very uncertain world this is a world where you know the the the previous world powers are weaker um where the internet and the information age and disinformation and misinformation are are reigning supreme We're going through an identity crisis as almost an entire society, right?

Where we're just trying to figure out where we fit in a world that is full of uncertainty, full of chaos, and where we're sort of being deluged with, you know, we're drinking from a fire hose of information. I feel like everybody's just sort of getting the same stream of information that i was getting back then right now we're now we're all exposed to it constantly and and well there's probably a lot of but a lot more disinformation yeah exactly and you know trying to be able to verify that information and figure

out what's true and what's not and people are just giving up on that and you know it's a it's a it's a more bleak time um i am more hopeful though that we'll be able to figure this out um i know the things you know because like things can't keep getting things can't keep falling apart right you know eventually eventually we have to find our footing and i think that individually um i'm finding my footing. And I think that collectively, the people around me are finding their footing in this sort of,

this quote unquote, brave new world. But I'm generally optimistic about the future, but we have some tough times ahead. And I have no idea what that looks like in the interim.

You dedicate this book to trans kids. And what is it? What does it mean to you to be able to to do that? When I wrote this book, I envisioned this book being written to a younger version of myself. So I dedicate this book to the younger folks who were in the same position that I was in when I was 13 years old, right? Not knowing who you are, you know, and facing a world that just seems so hostile to your very existence. And I survived. I got through that. And I know that, you know, the younger generation, as they figure things out, they'll make it too. Chelsea, I want to thank you so much. You've been so, so generous with your time today. We're really appreciative. Thank you. Thank you. All right.

That was our conversation with whistleblower Chelsea Manning. What you didn't hear is when we said goodbye, Chelsea told us she was off to prep for a DJ set. She was performing later that evening. So I'll leave you with a little snippet of Chelsea recently spinning. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to Front Burner. We'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.