In February 2010 Chelsea Manning, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst in the US Army, sat down with a large mocha and accessed the free internet at a Barnes & Noble bookshop in Rockville, Maryland. She began to upload every incident report filed by the US military during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – close to three-quarters of a million documents in total. Manning had downloaded the files several weeks earlier, while serving in Iraq, and burned them on to a series of rewritable DVDs disguised to look like albums by Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. Then she transferred the files to the memory card in her digital camera. When she left the country, military customs did not blink.
Manning had spent months sifting vast quantities of classified information, email updates and video feeds of live conflict in Baghdad. She likens the intelligence operations centre where she worked to a trauma ward. “The United States’ formal promise to the Iraqi government about how our troops would treat the country and its citizens didn’t mean a thing,” she writes. Among the files was video evidence that appeared to show the deaths of civilians during US airstrikes, as well as attempts to cover up a CIA torture programme.
