Front Burner - ENCORE: Chelsea Manning, in her own words

Episode Date: December 28, 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. This episode orginally aired on November 14th, 2022.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem, brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. 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. classified military and diplomatic records to WikiLeaks. And these documents revealed a lot of innocent civilian death in 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. 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? 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 share 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 like why was this information so hard to release uh 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, 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, 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 to because I'm, you know, 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, you know, 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 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 reporters they were like can you talk to me about it and i'm like no like i need to see you uh 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 you're trying to actually get the data to politico but basically Yeah. So yeah. 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 walked 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 aunt lives and where I previously lived in Maryland. And I found 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 sketchy, 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, you know, 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 and there that if I couldn't get this done 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 it from 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 are you feeling in that moment what was that like so uh I mean it's 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 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 and i feel like you know i mean one of the reasons why i wanted to write this book even was to 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 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? where it's as hindsight as 2020 for everyone else.

But 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 I was hoping for a career in intelligence. I was hoping for a career 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, 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 of consequences but honestly 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 uh where that is possible that no one would care yeah and i was actually that was actually 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 giving 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 explained like, this is the true, 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. 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, 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. 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 yeah 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 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? 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, you know, the Pentagon Papers talks about the strategic sort of planning, 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 all of the records, you know, were stored in, were stored in a building and that building caught fire. So putting this in the digital world, I 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 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 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 like what what was that true reality to you um i know that a lot of people like to use the the the video in particular as as a good the collateral murder video it's yeah I didn't name it that. I mean, from my perspective, it's the air weapons team incident of July 12th,

2007. 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. 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, cities of warfare and how messy it is and how ugly it is because you know previously especially given the way things were portrayed with embedded reporters you you have this like very certain you know 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 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. situations every single day. And, you know, they're, and they're getting paid, you know, barely more than minimum wage to do it. And, you know, it's just this, this, 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 that like everyday horrors of war. I

just wonder if you could just explain for me briefly, you know, what, what that video actually showed. Right. So a lot of people focus very much on the, um, there's a, there, there is a helicopter pilot, uh, and a gunner, and they're communicating with, uh, with on the ground via radio, which is being captured 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.

And they get clearance to engage. And a lot of people noticed the sort of ugly banter, the sort of dark, the very dark and gruesome language that the pilots uh the pilot and the gunner use which is you know um which is actually very common in warfare unfortunately um it's you know just sort of the dehumanization of people um which didn't strike me initially as being um that i mean it's when when civilians view it they're they're sort of struck by it but i i kind of overlooked that but you know they they engage this group of civilians who are just standing there. And it's a number of people around them. And it's a very ugly and very 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.

But it's 34 minutes long. So you get the entirety of the aftermath as well, which is, you know, 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.

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. Request permission to engage. Picking up the wounded. We're trying to get permission to engage. Come on, let us shoot. 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, you know, I mean, these rounds are designed for tanks, so it just rips the vehicle. It's brutal. Bushmaster 7, roger. Bushmaster 7, roger, engaged.

1-8, okay, clear. Come on. Clear. And also then you have the mechanized infantry unit that comes in, does a battle damage assessment and you know pulls security and checks in on the damage and they discover

that there are children in the car you know there's no weapons in the vehicle that you know and you know they try to pick up these kids 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 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're 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 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. And of course, that was just one example of civilian deaths that we learned about as part of the leak, there were, of course, these tens of thousands of diplomatic cables that were released that 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 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 the the the ongoing quote unquote war on terror. That was that was raging during the Bush administration and the Obama administration, and that's captured.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. 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. vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cops. 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 and 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, 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 as dangerous is, 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 is, I think, 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. do less of the hiding and more of the sort of just spreading an alternative message yeah um just to go back to 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 of it. I think that a lot of people who are, because, you know, like I worked with, I worked with, I mean, even in my job, I was working with, you know, thousands, if not tens of thousands of records per day, right? You know, my email inbox was, I had 80 or 90 classified emails per day. My email inbox was, I had 80 or 90 classified emails per day. And the value of this stuff operationally is maybe on a 24, 48, 72 hour time scale. It's not useful or sensitive after that time period.

So from our perspective, 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. How would you describe your family growing up and what life was like for you? So 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 in a into a directorial position by this point, and was looking at, and eventually became a junior executive. And I, so I grew up in a, you know, upper middle class, you know, central Oklahoma home. And, you know, I had access to a computer at a very young age, for instance. But, you know, the instability of my father going out on business trips, and coming back and being you know raging drunk uh and being very abusive to me and my mother and to my sister um you know was was was a wasn't you know a difficult one and i didn't realize that this was that this was difficult obviously as a kid because i you know it was the world that i knew it was the world that I understood but yeah it was it was uh it was very uncomfortable and you know um by and I you know I um I really leaned on and depended on my sister who I just

adored and admired enormously you know I love my sister so much um I would not be the person that I am today without her helping me in the 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. Wow. I can't imagine how difficult that must have been. And at the same time,

right, you're grappling with 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 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 and not really knowing my identity, not really being told anything, but always being treated differently or like I was different was, you know, it was very confusing. And I, you know, I really wish that I had some guidance at a younger age. And 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. 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, 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, you know, 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 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 she wired me some money to drive back to 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, dear. I mean, you can tell through the pages just how much you admire both of them. 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. 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.

This was during the don't ask, don't tell era in the military. You were dating men. 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, uh, you know, I, I, I was essentially, you know, hitting a lot of birds with one stone there. Um, and that I was, my, 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. 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, 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, you know, one of the funny things

is that my father encouraged me to enlist in the Navy and me being a hard, or the Air Force and me being hard-headed. I was like, well, I'm going to join the Marines.

And another another sort of, you know, strange set of events is that whenever whenever I showed up on that day, 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 and it's it's incredible to think how it's so many uh moments this all could have gone so much differently uh yeah yeah absolutely like that you that you would never have ended up in that barnes and Noble trying to upload all those files, you know, at 10 p.m. at night. Yeah, I almost ended up staying stateside in a more cushy role in the D.C. 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 it's the little these little tiny decisions that and and things really chart the course of my life it's not like this big decision it's 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 I know that this is probably difficult for you to talk about, but like what what do you remember from that period that this is probably difficult for you to talk about, but like, what do you remember from that period? What was that like for you? Yeah, so it's, you know, it's funny. It was actually one of the harder parts of the book to

write because as awful as Being a Solitary Kid Feynman 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, you know, there's not really a lot going on. I know 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 and being in the cell and being watched by you know two two uh two

quantico virginia marines right you know at all times um 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 was very difficult to write because 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 hype hyper acutely aware of all these kinds of little tiny details right so um that's what i try to capture in there um because i i just became and you know obviously i'm still in therapy you know from that time period and being 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 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 still trying to or you know what what's it like being in prison and I'm I'm like still trying to figure it out from here because my whole my experience is really being incarcerated, being in the military, being houseless, being in school. I'm only just starting to figure stuff out. So I'm really at the age of 23 in terms of my life experience, right? Like my day-to-day life experience of dealing with taxes and bills and things like that but you well 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 because you know you don't really feel free because you're constantly out trying to make you know make a wage or try to get a job or you know try to find the next gig to do or you know try to try to shift you know your your brand to to meet whatever potential revenue streams are out there if you're if you're an online influencer or whatever um you know it's it's It's difficult out here.

You've got taxes. You've got bills. You've got basic housework. These are not things that we... Obviously, we cleaned in there in prison, but we didn't do the cooking. We didn't do... 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? 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, where Russia is infrating Ukraine, where the U.S. is receding

as a world power. This is a very uncertain world. This is a world where the previous world powers are weaker, where the internet and the information age and disinformation and misinformation 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 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 all exposed to it constantly. And well, there's probably a lot of 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 bleak 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, 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 um but you know i'm generally optimistic about the about the future but we have some we have some tough times ahead and i have no idea what that what

that looks like in in the interim you dedicate this book to trans kids and what what is it what does it mean to you to be able 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 FrontBurner. We'll talk to you tomorrow.