In February 2010, Chelsea Manning sent WikiLeaks a short video. The clip, entitled “Collateral Murder”, showed two American Apache helicopters opening fire on a group of Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists. When the website published the footage two months later, it became a defining moment in America’s War on Terror: revealing the horror inflicted on innocent people in the name of western democracy.Manning, now 35, went on to leak an enormous trove of military reports, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to WikiLeaks while she was an intelligence analyst in Iraq. She was convicted of espionage and other offences in 2013 and received a 35-year jail sentence, the longest ever imposed for a leak. Manning, who was born a man, announced that she identified as a woman the day after her conviction and began to transition. She remained behind bars until May 2017, when former president Barack Obama commuted her sentence.
The whistleblower is the focus of the fifth instalment of BBC Two’s Louis Theroux Interviews…, which has seen the nation’s favourite bespectacled maverick probe the darkest secrets of Anthony Joshua, Pete Doherty, Joan Collins and RAYE. This is by far the strongest interview of the series so far: a portrait of an inspiring, complex person struggling with the impact of a life-changing decision.
