Bradley ‘I mean CHELSEA MANNING’ Sentenced to 35 Years for Leaking Secrets

FT. MEADE, Md. – Bradley Manning, the Army private convicted of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the website WikiLeaks, was sentenced to 35 years in a military prison today.

Pfc. Manning will also be reduced in rank to private, forfeit all pay and allowances and receive a dishonorable discharge. He will serve his prison sentence at the military’s detention facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Manning, 25, expressed no emotion as a military judge announced the sentence. His defense attorney, David Coombs, later called Manning a “resilient young man” who comforted the weeping members of his defense team after the sentencing.

“You get this guy and he looks to me and he says, “It’s OK. It’s all right. Don’t worry about it. I know you did your best. It’s going to be OK. I’m going to be OK. I’m going to get through this,’” he said.

Bradley Manning Guilty on Most Charges, but Not Aiding Enemy

As is customary in the military justice system for prison sentences longer than 30 years, Manning will be eligible for his first parole review after serving 10 years of his sentence. But Coombs believes he could be eligible for parole after seven years because of the 1,294 days credited by the judge toward his sentence.

Manning has served 1,182 days during pre-trial confinement and was also credited with 112 days for the treatment he received at the Marine brig in Quantico, Va

ACCEPTING CHELSEA MANNING

POSTED BY EMILY GREENHOUSE

In 2010, the WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning confided to Adrian Lamo, a former hacker who eventually turned Manning in to the government, that “I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me plastered all over the world press as a boy.”

On Thursday, a day after he was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison, Manning released a statement in which he said, “I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible.” He continued, “I hope that you will support me in this transition.”

Today, the United States is friendlier to lesbians, gays, and bisexuals than at any point in its history. But there is often still a discomfort toward and about the population represented by the final letter in the acronym L.G.B.T. Western society long ago decided that gender is immutable, that men are men and women women in perpetuity—that, somehow, nature or God or whomever is responsible for determining the formation of genitalia and chromosomes in utero is incapable of error. We may know today that this is not true, but we have not figured out how to deal with that fact.

There is already discussion and debate about how we should refer to Manning now: do we stick to the name we know him by, or accede to her wish and acknowledge the identity she knows to be the correct one? Is it about the choice, or is there a line that must be crossed before we begin using the female pronoun: when Manning begins hormone therapy, say, or undergoes an operation—or maybe just schedules one? What about the moment the discharged soldier starts to cross-dress, or pad bras, and looks, by some mysterious objective standard of gender-bearing, like a lady? Then what? Would it make any difference to the court or to the country, or to us, if we just did as she asked and started calling her Chelsea?  >>more<<

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