JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Fifteen years ago this month, the U.S. invasion of Iraq began. Today we spend the hour with the war’s most famous whistleblower, Chelsea Manning, in her first live television interview. Manning served as an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, based in Iraq. In 2010, while on leave in the United States, Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley, made a decision that would change her life and the public’s understanding of the U.S. War in Iraq.

After first approaching The New York Times and The Washington Post, Manning decided to leak a trove of documents about the Iraq War to WikiLeaks. She also leaked diplomatic cables, as well as information on Guantánamo and the U.S. War in Afghanistan. It would become the largest leak of classified data in U.S. history. Over the next year, WikiLeaks would team up with major news organizations to break countless stories based on Manning’s leaks. The documents exposed how U.S.-backed forces were involved in torture, summary executions and war crimes in Iraq.

But Manning was soon caught. On May 27, 2010, Manning was arrested at Forward Operating Base Hammer, outside Baghdad. She was initially held in a cage in Kuwait. Then she was moved to the Marine Corps base at Quantico in Virginia, where she was held in a tiny cell in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. The United Nations said her prison conditions violated the U.N. Convention Against Torture. On August 21st, 2013, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison—the longest sentence ever given to a whistleblower in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: The next day, Manning issued a statement through her lawyer announcing she was transgender. She said, quote, “As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female.”

Manning would battle with military officials for years in an attempt to receive the proper healthcare, including hormone therapy. She would stage hunger strikes and twice attempted suicide.

Then, in 2017, a shocking development occurred. President Obama granted her clemency, in one of his final acts in office. She had written to the president requesting what she described as a, quote, “first chance at life.” Chelsea Manning was finally released from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas on May 17th last year.

Since then, she’s emerged as a leading activist for trans rights and greater transparency. She has been featured in the pages of Vogue magazine, where she was photographed by Annie Leibovitz, and was named 2017 Newsmaker of the Year by Out magazine. In January, she announced her bid for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, challenging Democratic Senator Ben Cardin, who’s seeking a third term. And today she joins us here on Democracy Now! for her first live television interview.

Chelsea Manning, welcome to Democracy Now!

CHELSEA MANNING: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: So, it has been 10 months, but how does it feel to be free?

CHELSEA MANNING: It’s overwhelming. I wake up some days, and I’m not sure that this is actually happening. You know, sometimes I wake up in the morning, and I have to figure out where I am, because now I’m traveling all the time, and I’m not staying in one spot. And it’s both—you know, initially, it was very inspiring and wonderful. But now, as I’m seeing more and more of the world and how it’s become the world I feared a decade ago, now it’s just—it’s overwhelming.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And can you go back to when you heard the news that President Obama had granted you clemency? Had you had any expectations of the possibility of that?

CHELSEA MANNING: It was very hard for me to acknowledge that this was happening. I’m writing a book, so it’s like—a lot more of the details are going to be in the book. But I couldn’t process it. It was very difficult for me to process that this was actually happening. I mean, when you’re in prison, you know, with a 35-year sentence, and you’re only seven years into it, you don’t think that miracles are going to happen. You know, it takes a couple years, but you just—you expect that tomorrow is going to bring the same thing. So, you know, like having a sudden change and a sudden shift in my entire life outlook was very difficult for me to process.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, let’s go to President Obama speaking at his final press conference as president in 2017.

CHELSEA MANNING: Right.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, first of all, let’s be clear: Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence, so the notion that the average person who was thinking about disclosing vital classified information would think that it goes unpunished, I don’t think would get that impression from the sentence that Chelsea Manning has served. It has been my view that given she went to trial, that due process was carried out, that she took responsibility for her crime, that the sentence that she received was very disproportional—disproportionate relative to what other leakers had received, and that she had served a significant amount of time, that it made sense to commute, and not pardon, her sentence.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, there was the letter that you had sent to the president, a very long, thoughtful, detailed letter about your life and your career and what you suffered while you were in solitary confinement, as well. That must have had a big impact on his decision, as well. I’m wondering your thoughts about that?

CHELSEA MANNING: I’m not going to speculate on the reasons. I did write that letter. I wrote that letter in summer of 2017 [ 2016 ], not long after some bad things happened to me. And I was just in a very emotional state, so I just poured out this letter. And I gave it to my lawyers, and I said, “I’m going to ask for a commutation.”

And I asked for a commutation because the goal was not, at this point, to try to—you know, I had a court-martial appeal, and it dealt with a lot of legal issues, but, just as a human being, to like just live my life again, especially because I hadn’t lived my life before. I mean, I had, you know, been homeless before. I enlisted in the—you know, I had been homeless for a period of time before I enlisted in the military. And I spent about a year working two jobs and trying to go to college, before going into the military. And then I was in the military for three—I was in the military doing intelligence work for three years. And then I’m just in prison for the next seven years. So, I haven’t really lived, you know, what I thought life would consist of.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Chelsea, we’re going to talk about your life before you were in prison, during imprisonment—

CHELSEA MANNING: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —and then this big decision that you have made to run for senator from Maryland, the very place where you were court-martialed and where you were held in jail during that court-martial—

CHELSEA MANNING: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: —and what that all means, in a moment. Chelsea Manning is our guest for the hour, Army whistleblower, transgender activist, spent seven years in military prison after leaking a trove of documents about Iraq and Afghanistan and the State Department to WikiLeaks in 2010, now running for U.S. Senate in Maryland. Back with her in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “That’s Not My Name” by The Ting Tings, here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guest for the hour is the—well, the most famous whistleblower to come out of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Her name is Chelsea Manning. She spent seven years in prison. But before we talk about her time in prison and her attempt to become senator from Maryland today, let’s go back in time. Where were you born, Chelsea? Tell us where you grew up, and then, ultimately, why you decided to join the military.

CHELSEA MANNING: Right. So, I was born in central Oklahoma. My parents lived sort of between the South, the Southwest, and we spent a period of time in Arizona. But I mostly spent, up until my teenage years, my time in just, you know, rural Oklahoma. And when my parents had several disputes, and they finally divorced in whenever I was 12 or—I was about 12 or 13 when my parents divorced. And I left to go to the United Kingdom with my mother. My mother is British. And I went to school there for four years. And after my mother had some health problems come up, I decided to move back to the U.S. and live with my father.

But not long after I moved in with my father and got a job as a programmer at a software development company, my father kicked me out of the house. There was a dispute with his new wife, and I had to like leave. And so I moved to Chicago, where I spent the next six months living homeless. It was summer 2006, and I lived homeless in Chicago, mostly spending time in central and western parts of Chicago.

And then I moved—then my aunt tracked me down. My aunt lived in Maryland, on my father’s side of the family, tracked me down, found me and invited me to live with her. And I did. I took up that offer and spent a year in—you know, I spent the next several years of my life in Maryland. But I tried working two jobs, service jobs, barely making minimum wage, trying to go to college, all at the same time. You know, I was busy 100 hours a week. And I just kind of burned out.

And I was also dealing with who I am, because I knew—I always knew I was trans, and dealing with like who I was in terms of like my gender, because I had all these gender feels that I couldn’t really explain. But as I got older, it was becoming clear that this was more of something that was coming up. So then I—

AMY GOODMAN: When you say you always knew you were trans—

CHELSEA MANNING: Well—

AMY GOODMAN: —going back to what age? And what did that mean?

CHELSEA MANNING: I knew I was different. I didn’t know—I didn’t have a language to describe that. I didn’t know—I didn’t know what was going on with me. I just always knew that I was different. Everybody treated me differently. I was always very feminine. I was always very effeminate. I couldn’t meet expectations for people. So, it was very overwhelming for me to try to live life not knowing what—you know, I thought something was wrong with me. I thought something was like very wrong with me. But it’s just—I was trying to live a life that wasn’t me. It wasn’t my life. It wasn’t who I am. But I—

AMY GOODMAN: Did you tell your parents about this from an early age?

CHELSEA MANNING: I did. And, you know, it was just—I was always told like that’s not how—like “You can’t be a girl, you’re not a girl.” And it was just very—it was very difficult for me to grasp this, but I just knew that in order to make my parents—you know, in order to make my dad happy, I just sort of went along with it. And school also, you know, socialized me to like be in this—to do boy things, to like do sports. And it was just a—it was a very self-conscious life, you know, always measuring how much I’m passing as a boy throughout my life.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, and was joining the military part of that? Was it pressure from your father to get some structure and organization in your life?

CHELSEA MANNING: Yeah, those are the words he used. Those are the exact words. And he said—he said to me, “You know, you should join—you should enlist in the Navy or the Air Force.” And the Iraq War was going on, and it was on television every night. And I didn’t really have strong opinions about it until the surge started happening. I just felt, you know, my life is kind of in a dead-end. I was just homeless. I’m living, you know, with my aunt. I’m living with a family member. I’m 20 years old—I was 19 years old at the time. And then, you know, it was very—it became this like notion of like I can do something, I can do something to help people, I can do something about this. And so I jumped into enlisting very quickly. It was about a five-day period.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, you’ve also talked about that, from an early childhood, you had a fascination with computers, and you started programming at the age of 10.

CHELSEA MANNING: Yes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Talk about the attachment to computers. And also, would you—did you consider yourself a hacker back then?

CHELSEA MANNING: I mean, you know, the term “hacker” is kind of loaded. I use it like—I mean, I’m a programmer, I’m a developer. I work on—I also do network security work. You know, it’s not the big scary H-word, you know, “hacker,” like this nefarious actors sitting behind a screen trying to get your credit card information. Just more curiosity, driven by the—you know, just the freedom that the information networks give you as a human being.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you went to Arizona to train?

CHELSEA MANNING: I did. That was three or—I barely remember that period. It was very fast-paced.

AMY GOODMAN: Fort Huachuca?

CHELSEA MANNING: Yes. It was very fast-paced. I went—you know, I went through basic training, went to Fort Huachuca for intel school. And then, next thing I know, I’m doing this work.

AMY GOODMAN: In Iraq?

CHELSEA MANNING: I was stateside for a year, before Iraq. And a lot of that was pre-deployment preparation.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about your experience in Iraq then.

CHELSEA MANNING: Just a very—you know, I came into this with a very—you know, I’m a problem solver. I’m a—as an analyst, I solve math problems. You know, I took a statistical approach to my work. I did statistical predictive analysis, basically what people would now call AI, the sort of AI sector, you know, grew up working with big data. And I did this regularly.

But whenever I got to Iraq, I just like—I was just this like data—it was just this constant, you know, drinking-from-a-firehose sense of like all these things happening around me. And they were happening here, right in front of me, and so it was no longer a math problem. You know, these were real people in real places. You know, they weren’t just dots on a map. They were lives. These are people’s lives and emotions and all of the things that are attached with that. And we’re in their home. You know, they live here. And we’re doing all of this stuff, and we’re just like viewing it as like an academic problem, as a math problem. And I couldn’t—you know, I couldn’t separate my work from my emotions anymore. I became emotionally invested.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’ve always been fascinated by, given the enormous complexity of the American military machine and the data and the secrecy of the American military, that you, as a private, would have access to quite an enormous amount of documentation and records of the military. Could you talk about the level of security clearance that you went through, and also the unit that you were working with, in terms of how many other privates had access to this kind of information?

CHELSEA MANNING: I mean, there’s this notion of like, you know, rank in the military is very important. But in the intelligence field, it’s more about your ability. You know, they even, at times, discourage you from wearing rank, so that the command structure can take you more seriously, they’re not blinded by rank. So, as an enlisted person, you’re afforded more privileges as an analyst than—you’re kind of seen almost a peer to officers, but you’re still—you know, like you’re in support of them.

And, you know, like I—and I really took my job seriously. I tried to do the best work that I could. So I was afforded even more, you know, leeway and access than the average person, just based on what I’m doing. And there was always this phrase, like mission critical, mission critical. Everything you’re doing is mission critical. So, it bumps you up to the top of the priority list. So I got training. I got access to databases. And I performed. You know, there’s a focus on delivery and on results, 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, etc.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about your decision to try to make the information you were seeing in Iraq public, something that we were not seeing here.

CHELSEA MANNING: That was the problem. It was this—I went at home at night, and I’m over—or not home, but to my housing unit at night, or daytime, because I worked the night shift. And I would—I couldn’t sleep. And I would look at the news. And, you know, it was almost like a glossing over of what had happened in Iraq. In 2010, it was less about what had happened and more about—and more about this like—it was almost like, “Oh, let’s forget about all the bad things that have happened, because it’s working out in the end.” But like what I was seeing on the ground was not that. And I was very—I was very worried about that and that disconnect.

AMY GOODMAN: So, in April 2010, WikiLeaks makes international headlines when it publishes a video that you had leaked. The chilling video footage is taken from a U.S. military helicopter. It shows U.S. forces indiscriminately firing on Iraqis in the New Baghdad neighborhood of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. The dead included two employees of the Reuters news agency, photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver Saeed Chmagh. It became known as the “Collateral Murder” video. This is a clip.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: There, one o’clock. Haven’t seen anything since then.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Just [expletive]. Once you get on, just open up.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: I am.

U.S. SOLDIER 4: I see your element, got about four Humvees, out along this—

U.S. SOLDIER 2: You’re clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: All right, firing.

U.S. SOLDIER 4: Let me know when you’ve got them.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Let’s shoot. Light ’em all up.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: Come on, fire!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’.

U.S. SOLDIER 5: Hotel, Bushmaster two-six, Bushmaster two-six, we need to move, time now!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: All right, we just engaged all eight individuals.

AMY GOODMAN: Minutes later, the video shows U.S. forces watching as a van pulls up to evacuate the wounded. They again open fire from the helicopter, killing several more people and wounding two children inside the van.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: Where’s that van at?

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Right down there by the bodies.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: OK, yeah.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly picking up bodies and weapons.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: Let me engage. Can I shoot?

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Roger. Break. Crazy Horse one-eight, request permission to engage.

U.S. SOLDIER 6: Picking up the wounded?

U.S. SOLDIER 3: Yeah, we’re trying to get permission to engage. Come on, let us shoot!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: They’re taking him.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.

U.S. SOLDIER 7: This is Bushmaster seven, go ahead.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Roger. We have a black SUV—or Bongo truck picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.

U.S. SOLDIER 7: Bushmaster seven, roger. This is Bushmaster seven, roger. Engage.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: One-eight, engage. Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: Come on!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Clear. Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: We’re engaging.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Coming around. Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: Roger. Trying to—

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: I hear ’em—I lost ’em in the dust.

U.S. SOLDIER 6: I got ’em.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Should have a van in the middle of the road with about 12 to 15 bodies.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: Oh, yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield! Ha ha!

AMY GOODMAN: Just a small excerpt from the “Collateral Murder” video, as it was so called, released by WikiLeaks in 2010, that showed this group of people killed—I believe it was 12 in all—two of them from Reuters. Namir Noor-Eldeen was an up-and-coming videographer, 22 years old. His driver, Saeed Chmagh, was a father of four. Reuters attempted to get this video for several years. It was only, Chelsea, when you had this released that they were able to see what happened to their staff.

CHELSEA MANNING: Yeah. The video stands on its own. It explains an enormous amount of not just this moment, but of what the reality of warfare looks like. And, I mean, I’m going to talk about this more, in much greater detail, in my book. But it’s clear in this video. It doesn’t need an explanation. You just have to watch it.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was it like for you the day—do you remember the day you first saw this video? Where were you sitting?

CHELSEA MANNING: I mean, it was among hundreds of other similar ones. It’s just that there’s more—there was more information about the aftermath of this incident because there was an investigation following it. But—

AMY GOODMAN: Because the Reuters journalists were killed?

CHELSEA MANNING: I mean—yeah. So, apart from that, it’s just routine—it’s just a routine incident. Just another day.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And was part of your decision to try to get this out that there were so many of these—I mean, this is a publicized incident, but there were so many others that never got any kind of publicity outside of Iraq at all, if even in Iraq. Part of that, your sense that this needed to get out to the world?

CHELSEA MANNING: Right. And I’m going to talk more about that in my book, but yeah. I would say that the video stands on its own. And, you know, I can try and explain it, but—and, yeah, this is not—this is not unusual. This is not a freak incident. This is what war is, in a nutshell.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, WikiLeaks releases the video. From that point, when was it that you got arrested in Iraq?

CHELSEA MANNING: Oh, it was a few months later. I was busy. I was working a lot.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what happened to you when you were arrested, where you were taken.

CHELSEA MANNING: I’m going to explain a lot more of this in my book. So, I’m in the process of writing a book right at the moment. And a lot of—you know, there’s a lot of information that I was exposed to, and a very overwhelming time for me. And I’m also dealing with my—you know, who I am. So, there’s a lot going on, which I’ll be able to get into far more detail in my book.

AMY GOODMAN: When you were taken to Kuwait, describe the place you were kept.

CHELSEA MANNING: So I got taken to Kuwait after CID detained me in 2010.

AMY GOODMAN: CID stands for?

CHELSEA MANNING: Criminal Investigation Division. So, it’s the U.S.’s FBI, internal investigations division—or the military’s or the Army’s, in particular, U.S. Army intelligence, Criminal Investigation Division. I’m sorry. It’s just a big cage, a big metal cage. And I was staying there. And it was—you know, I lost the sense of who I was. I lost a sense of time. I lost a sense of location. I lost a—you know, I had been in this cage for about, I believe, 60 days, but I didn’t really know. Like I didn’t have access to a calendar. After about 20 or 30 days, I mean, like I just became so depressed and so overwhelmed that I just gave up. And—

AMY GOODMAN: A cage in solitary. No one else was there?

CHELSEA MANNING: Well, yeah, that’s the thing, is I was alone in a tent. So this was a cage inside of a tent. And I just—the only people I’m interacting with are staff, and they’re not talking to me. It was Navy personnel.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the CID folks, when they first arrested you, they say, “We know—we know what you’ve done,” or we—did they ask you to talk to them, explain whether you were doing it by yourself, or what? Or did they not talk to you at all?

CHELSEA MANNING: No, they didn’t talk to me at all. I mean, they gave me a form to sign, and then I’m detained. That’s all that consisted of. And, you know, I’m going to get a lot more into the details of what happened in my book.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re held there for how long in this cage, under a tent, by yourself, in Kuwait?

CHELSEA MANNING: I was held in there—I don’t know. It feels—it feels like forever. But, you know, it was about—I believe it was 59 days, was the total.

AMY GOODMAN: And then you were moved to Quantico.

CHELSEA MANNING: Yeah, I was moved to Quantico. And that was like the first time that I had a grounded sense of where I am, access to the outside world. I visited my lawyer—I mean, my lawyers came to visit me. I hired a civilian attorney. And I saw my family for the first time.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re held in a cell in solitary confinement 23 hours a day?

CHELSEA MANNING: Yeah. And, you know, by this point, being in solitary confinement had become normal. So, it was over 11 months altogether, if you include both Quantico and Kuwait, that I was held.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I want to read from the letter you sent to President Obama about that period of time. You said, “The Army kept me in solitary confinement for nearly a year before formal charges were brought against me. It was a humiliating and degrading experience—one that altered my mind, body and spirit.” And you went on to say, “These experiences have broken me and made me feel less than human. I have been fighting for years to be treated respectfully and with dignity; a battle I fear is lost. I do not understand why.”

CHELSEA MANNING: Is there much more to say than that?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s go to Atul Gawande. First, I want to turn to—in March 2012, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, Juan Méndez, criticized the condition of your detention, telling The Guardian_, “I conclude [that] the 11 months under conditions of solitary confinement (regardless of the name given to his regime by the prison authorities) constitutes at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture. If the effects in regards to pain and suffering inflicted on Manning were more severe, they could constitute torture.” And then, Atul Gawandehealth, practicing surgeon in Boston, staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, studied the effects of solitary confinement on prisoners.

DR. ATUL GAWANDE: The science of what happens to people deprived of social contact is they have to fight for their sanity. And many lose their sanity. That reality, that we are social beings in our physiology, led me to ask the question: Is solitary confinement, the way we’re practicing it now, torture? And you can’t read the cases—and I describe the cases of both hostages and people who are in prisons—and conclude that, number one, those experiences are different. They’re the same. Number two, you can’t conclude that it’s not torture.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Dr. Atul Gawande. “You cannot conclude it’s not torture.” Did you feel like you were tortured, Chelsea?

CHELSEA MANNING: I didn’t know what was happening to me. I don’t know what it—I still struggle with what it feels like to be in that situation. You know, I’m in a lot—I’m still in a lot of therapy. And I got out of this. I mean, I’m functional. I’m able to go out into the world again, and I’m thankful for that. And that, in alone, is, I’ve been told, an accomplishment.

And, you know, this is a practice that needs to stop. It’s a practice that needs to be ended everywhere, you know, regardless of what you think the circumstances—what justifies the circumstances. Nothing justifies doing this to any human being.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you—on the one hand, here was the U.S. government putting you on trial, and at the same time you were getting thousands and thousands of letters of support from people who felt that what you had done was courageous and heroic. Could you talk about all the letters that you got and the support from the outside?

CHELSEA MANNING: I’m still trying to get an exact number from the government. And it’s somewhere—it’s probably—I mean, I’ve heard estimates between 200,000 and 300,000 letters, of pieces of mail, people sending to me over a 7-year period. So, yeah, it was very overwhelming. And once I started to get it—I didn’t get mail while I was at Quantico, but once I got into general population at Fort Leavenworth, I was able to read the mail. And it was—prison support, for anyone, is valuable. You know, I keep telling people, you want to write prisoners, because we get them, we read them, and it means a lot to us. You know, you can’t forget about people that are in prison, because we feel forgotten.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, then come back to this discussion. Our guest for the hour is Chelsea Manning, Army whistleblower, transgender activist and candidate for the U.S. Senate for Maryland. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Born This Way” by Lady Gaga. In fact, Lady Gaga, Chelsea Manning, was what you wrote on the CD that you used to take the information in Iraq that you felt the public should know about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

CHELSEA MANNING: Yeah. Well, I talk more about that in my book.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you comment on why Lady Gaga was important?

CHELSEA MANNING: Yeah, there’s a very—there’s a very lengthy explanation. But I can’t give it to you in three minutes.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Chelsea, you’re running for Senate right now—

CHELSEA MANNING: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —from the state of Maryland.

CHELSEA MANNING: Yes. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: The state of Maryland, that is the place where you were court-martialed, at Fort Meade, National Security Agency, where you were jailed during that court-martial. You were jailed—where was it, the local jail?

CHELSEA MANNING: I was held at the Howard County jail. So, this was a county jail, a standard, good old-fashioned jail in Howard County, Maryland. There’s a federal contract to hold some federal detainees there. And actually, the majority of the population there often are ICE detainees.

AMY GOODMAN: So you met ICE detainees?

CHELSEA MANNING: I did not. I saw them. I was separated. But ICE—you know, it was clear that there were far more, and I was—you know, it was a world that I just wasn’t paying attention to, that I didn’t notice. And I just realized, “Oh, I am here with people who haven’t been charged with anything at all.”

AMY GOODMAN: You know, when we were covering your trial, it was very difficult. We hadn’t heard your voice in three years.

CHELSEA MANNING: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Very difficult, when we were able to surreptitiously get audio of you giving your statement in the courtroom.

CHELSEA MANNING: Right. You know, and all that is in the record. It’s all—all that is available. I mean, I’m really more—I’m really here to discuss, you know, like my policies and positions, because, you know, like I was held in prison. I was held in prison in Maryland, but I lived in Maryland prior to going into confinement. And seeing—and, like, is it a surprise that a national security apparatus and a criminal justice system would try to block access to a record of trial or access to a trial or access to somebody like me, who stands up and says, “I need to do something”? You know, I think that—and I’m still driven to stand up and do something. And that’s one of the reasons why I’ve decided to run in Maryland, you know. And I can—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, can you talk about that, about your decision to run for political office?

CHELSEA MANNING: Right. You know, it was—I thought I was done. I thought, “OK, like I can go home now.” But I don’t feel like it’s this—I mean, in this environment, in this place, this time that we’re in is what I feared when I—because I saw, you know, and I realized it’s expanded more and more, that it’s not just the military, it’s not just the intelligence community. It’s not—it’s police. It’s the justice system. It’s immigration. Like all these systems are overlapping, and they’re suffocating people, deliberately and methodically, over decades. And this has been a continuing—you know, like people have been building this whirling death machine of power for decades now.

And you can focus in on a particular war or a particular moment or a particular controversy, but it’s the overwhelming awe of the giganticness of this system that has driven me to try to fight back. And we need to start—you know, like we don’t need to fix these systems, we need to stop them. We need to push back on them, whether it’s immigration or whether it’s the military or whether it’s the intelligence apparatus, because they’re all a part of the same system. And people are suffering. And we can’t wait. We can’t wait anymore. We can’t wait for change.

AMY GOODMAN: So talk about what that would mean if you became senator for Maryland. Would you pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, for example?

CHELSEA MANNING: That’s not a power that I would have. But that’s a position—

AMY GOODMAN: Would you vote to call for that?

CHELSEA MANNING: That’s a position—that’s a position that I already hold. You know, I already hold that we should be—we should be—you know, we have the largest and most powerful military in the world. We have the largest prison population per capita, if I’m not mistaken, per capita. But, I mean, we have 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. And it’s always—and we have the largest and most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in the world. And yet, these systems, they always want more, more, more. They’re continually expanding, continually being built. And instead of slowing it down, you know, instead, like it’s tweaks about like how big it should be or how much power we should give them, between one administration or one political agency or political party to the next.

And we can’t—we need to roll these systems back. And, you know, whether it’s U.S. troops or ICE agents, or whether it’s police, we’re in a military—we’re in a domestic military occupation in many, you know, of the most vulnerable communities in America. I’ve seen what an occupation looks like. And I walk down some streets in Brooklyn, in Oakland and in Baltimore, in particular, and we’re living under the thumb of this enormous machine. And we need to stop it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And some might say, though, that this is your first run for office. You’re running for U.S. Senate. Why not pick a lower post where you might get experience in governing? Why the decision to run against Ben Cardin for the U.S. Senate?

CHELSEA MANNING: This isn’t about experience in government. The fact that the establishment has become this thing where you have to have so many years, and it’s this process, and—you know, like I’m standing on the merit of my own positions and my own—you know, I already have a record. I already have experience. I’ve seen. I’ve been homeless. I’ve been to war. I’ve been to prison. I’ve seen the way—the other side of government. And I’ve been a part of government before, you know, from being in the military.

And I’m standing on the merit of my own positions, being that we should stop these systems, that we should roll them back. We need to start defunding, dismantling and, you know, pushing back against this gigantic, whirling death machine that we call the government and we call the state. And it’s at all levels—you know, local, state, federal and, beyond that, the supernational agencies.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about Trump’s trans policies. President Trump signed this memorandum banning most transgender people from serving in the U.S. military. The new policy, signed just last Friday, comes after Trump announced unexpectedly on Twitter last July he was banning all transgender people from U.S. military service. The White House spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, issued a statement on the measure, saying, “the accession or retention of individuals with a history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria—those who may require substantial medical treatment, including through medical drugs or surgery—presents considerable risk to military effectiveness and lethality. This new policy will enable the military to apply well-established mental and physical health standards … equally to all individuals,” she said. So, Chelsea Manning, you’ve been through this in the military in prison. You were demanding healthcare change for trans prisoners. And now this latest statement from the president?

CHELSEA MANNING: Well, this isn’t about trans—this is about trans people in the military. And the reason why we keep having these orders is, and why they keep coming, you know, whether it’s the Muslim ban or anything else, is they’re trying to make it OK to be hateful to minority groups. They’re picking—you know, and they’re picking policy positions to do it, and they’re picking orders to do it, because it sends a signal, you know, from the highest office in government, that it’s OK to hate trans people, it’s OK to hate Muslim people, it’s OK to hate immigrants, it’s OK to hate people. You know, that’s the signal. That’s the underlying undertones of these kinds of things. It’s not about the policy positions. This has nothing to do with trans people in the military, and everything to do with sending a signal.

And it’s the same with the bathroom bills. You know, like, we didn’t—trans people, we’ve been using bathrooms for decades. We didn’t just come out of nowhere and start using bathrooms. You know, like these so-called debates are a distraction to the underlying message, which is that it’s OK to hate people, when it’s not.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been using the hashtag #WeGotThis. Who’s the “we,” and what do you got?

CHELSEA MANNING: We is us. It’s whoever we are. It’s solidarity. We is solidarity, in a word. I used this word, and I used this phrase, in prison, whenever I was overwhelmed, when I was in—you know, I was facing insurmountable odds, and I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. But I just kept going. I kept fighting. I kept fighting, even though it looked like it was futile.

And that’s how I feel now. You know, we keep fighting, and we can’t see the end of it, but we can continue to push forward, even if we don’t have—you know, even if we can’t see it, we actually do have this. We do got this. And, you know, it was a mantra that I used to repeat to myself while I was in prison, but it’s still something that I keep saying and keep saying. And, yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’m wondering—we talked earlier about all the support you got from the general public when you were imprisoned. What about the soldiers, both once you’ve been—when you were in custody and also since you’ve come out, veterans of the war? Have any of them approached you or talked to you about—saw your actions as courageous actions?

CHELSEA MANNING: I mean, I’ve had thousands of veterans come up to me, you know, over the years, write to me. You know, I think—you know, it’s very difficult to talk about a sort of particular one group of people, because it just fills—I mean, there’s a diaspora of people. And again, you know, like I’m—it’s just—it’s overwhelming to have all these people come up to me and say “thank you.” And I can’t even tell for what anymore. Sometimes they have to tell me what. But I just—I’m more focused on fighting the battles that are in front of us. You know, the past is in the past, and I really want to move forward.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for spending this hour with us.

CHELSEA MANNING: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to ask you to stay for a few minutes after for a post-show interview, a web exclusive. And I want to particularly ask about your time in prison and the healthcare issues you think, the policies around trans prisoners, that have to be changed. One of the issues you deal with, if you were senator from Maryland, are those kinds of issues. Chelsea Manning, Army whistleblower, transgender activist, who spent seven years in military prison after leaking a trove of documents about Iraq and Afghan wars to WikiLeaks in 2010, now running for the U.S. Senate in Maryland. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Thanks for joining us.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Amy Goodman, with Juan González, with Part 2 of our exclusive conversation with Chelsea Manning, Army whistleblower, transgender activist, spent seven years in military prison after leaking a trove of documents about Iraq and the Afghan wars and the State Department to WikiLeaks in 2010, now running for the U.S. Senate in Maryland. The primary is in June.

I want to turn to some of the establishment today and what they had to say about you. This is in the midst of you being held in solitary confinement. I want to turn to John Bolton, who the president has named to be his next national security adviser. He was interviewed about your case in the 2012 BBC film WikiLeaks: The Secret Life of a Superpower.

RICHARD BILTON: What do you think of Bradley Manning?

JOHN BOLTON: I think he committed treason. I think he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

RICHARD BILTON: What does that mean?

JOHN BOLTON: Well, treason is the only crime defined by our Constitution, and it says treason shall consist only of levying war against the United States or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. And he gave our enemies a lot of aid and comfort.

RICHARD BILTON: So what should happen to him?

JOHN BOLTON: Well he should be prosecuted. And if he’s found guilty, he should be punished to the fullest extent possible.

RICHARD BILTON: And what is that?

JOHN BOLTON: Death.

RICHARD BILTON: You think he should be killed.

JOHN BOLTON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think that Manning should be killed? “Yes,” Bolton says. He is going to be the next national security adviser for President Trump. April 9th, he apparently takes the position.

CHELSEA MANNING: I mean, is there a question with that?

AMY GOODMAN: How do you feel about that? Do you feel threatened?

CHELSEA MANNING: No. I mean, well, yes, I feel threatened, but as any other person should feel threatened. You know, are these positions surprising? No. You know, anybody who challenges these people, anybody who challenges their power, is a threat to them. And so, yeah, they’re going to go after people, and they’re going to say that everybody deserves the death penalty. I mean, it’s going to be this expanding, broadening net, you know. John Bolton, as U.N. ambassador, bolstered the neoconservative movement in building, you know, the—this was during the time of the CIA and expanding into torture. Like, they’re trying to cover themselves up, and they’re trying to protect themselves, and they’re trying to—of course they’re going to—they’re going to claim that anybody who challenges them is a traitor. Everybody who goes against them is against, you know, the state. And anybody who’s against them is worthy of, you know, going away.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s go to Vice President Pence, just last year, describing you as a traitor on Fox News.

VICE PRESIDENT–ELECT MIKE PENCE: Private Manning is a traitor and should not have been turned into a martyr, as Senator Cotton said. Private Manning’s actions compromised our national security, endangered American personnel down range, compromised—compromised individuals in Afghanistan who were cooperating with our forces, by leaking 750,000 documents to WikiLeaks.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response to Vice President Pence?

CHELSEA MANNING: I mean, this is surprising? I mean, these are—again, I’m challenging these people. These people need to be challenged. And these are—they just say these words. At the end of the day, they just keep saying these things, about all kinds of people. You know, words like—words like “hero,” words like “traitor” have lost their meaning. You know, everybody is a traitor in this world—you know, James Comey, Hillary Clinton, you know, Donald Trump, like everybody. It gets to the point where, you know, it’s almost—it’s almost like it’s not about—like anybody who I disagree with becomes this label. And that’s the problem with the establishment, is that anybody who’s not the establishment is a threat and has violated this or violated that, you know, whether it’s immigrants, whether it’s the impoverished, whether it’s—you know, whether it’s—just so many of the most vulnerable people are getting called all kinds of different words—”criminals,” “illegals.” You know, like this is the language of power. So, is it surprising that the language of power would be used against somebody who actually challenges it?

AMY GOODMAN: Chelsea, one of the issues that we’ve covered for years, when you were in prison, was your battle against the prison authorities around their treatment of you as a trans woman. Talk about what happened, how they treated you and the whole issue of healthcare for trans prisoners around the country.

CHELSEA MANNING: Right. So, systems, like prison and the military and police, treat trans people—I mean, governments do this as a whole. They treat us as an administrative problem, to be solved somehow. And it’s at the whim of some—you know, usually some authority or some legal position that we have our entire lives be policed. You know, there’s what uniforms you wear, what type of clothing you have access to, how much healthcare you get. And these are all determinations that are being made arbitrarily, whether it’s, you know, giving us healthcare and telling us which types of healthcare are available or, you know, what that is. So, the problem is, is that these are systemic problems.

And one of the more deeper systemic problems is the fact that trans people are disproportionately imprisoned. You know, we’re one of the most targeted groups, usually for petty offenses, like sex worker-related offenses and just the—we’re policed based on gender and how we look and how we act—you know, the walking while trans, if you will. And we need to stop—like that needs to be more of a focus, is: Why do we have so many trans people in our prison system? Why do we have so many people who are trans in jail? And, you know, why don’t we focus on dismantling the prison system, that is—in which we’re placed in these situations?

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain your own experience, what you were fighting for? You were held in an all-male prison. Is that right? At Fort Leavenworth.

CHELSEA MANNING: Right. And most trans people are held in one of—that differs from their true gender.

AMY GOODMAN: You were fighting for hormone therapy. Talk about that battle and ultimately winning it.

CHELSEA MANNING: I mean, well, I barely won it. You know, I got access to hormones. But, I mean, it was arbitrary. It was based on some signature, you know, and only after a major lawsuit. You know, it wasn’t really a victory, in the sense of, you know, I get access to something, but I had to fight for it. I had to fight tooth and nail for it. And so many people still have to fight to get just basic access, basic access to healthcare, especially in prison.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the clothes you were forced to wear in prison, and also the length of your hair, and why this mattered so much to you?

CHELSEA MANNING: Well, because, I mean, I couldn’t grow my hair. So, I’ve always wanted to grow out my—I’ve always wanted to grow out my hair. It’s always been shortly cropped, but I was kept at a military standard. But it was also the notion of like an institution telling me, “Hey”—you know, because it was like this notion of like, “Yeah, we know you’re pretending to be a woman. So we’re giving you some things, because we’re legally required to do so. But we’re going to make it—we’re going to do everything that we can, in other regards, to make sure that you’re not treated as who you actually are.” So, it’s this notion of value. Like I value who I am, and I value my identity, and as all of us should. And we should be able to defend ourselves and fight back. And that was what drove me, day to day, while I was in these circumstances, and, you know, the clothing and whatever.

But yeah, like, you know, and a lot of this is stuff in the past for me. You know, a lot of this is things that—where I’ve come from. But, you know, I’m more focused on what—I’m more focused on what’s facing us today—

AMY GOODMAN: Right.

CHELSEA MANNING: —what we’re facing right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, certainly, that would be something that trans prisoners are faced with and that you—

CHELSEA MANNING: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —would, hopefully, make a difference in, if you became senator of the United States.

CHELSEA MANNING: I mean, I’m hoping to get trans people out of prison. That’s the objective. It’s not about making conditions better. It’s not about making more or better prisons. It’s about making—closing them down and releasing people. So, we should be releasing trans prisoners.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You’ve talked about you looking to get criminal justice reform, anti-military—

CHELSEA MANNING: Not reform, dismantling the criminal—we need to restructure and dismantle the criminal justice system.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dismantling the criminal justice system and ending the military involvements around the world, and also immigration. Could you talk about some of the other issues that you would consider—you’d want the voters to consider when they vote for you?

CHELSEA MANNING: Healthcare. We need to have basic access to healthcare for everyone. And we shouldn’t have our healthcare policed by the state, either. You know, we’ve seen this in—we’ve seen people like go, who are free to go to hospitals, because of who they are or what their background is or what their legal status is. So, we need to remove—we need to provide healthcare for everybody. It should be free. It should be accessible. It should be—and there should be a doctor-patient relationship that is unaffected by—you know, the state should not be intervening into the—you know, into who you are and why. You know, you should just be getting access.

AMY GOODMAN: Healthcare for all.

CHELSEA MANNING: Healthcare for all, but unconditionally. It’s not—you don’t have to fill out forms or get—or have the state police you based on—you know, like you should feel safe to go to a hospital or to get healthcare.

AMY GOODMAN: Your comments on the current #MeToo movement in this country, what it has meant. Does it give you strength, just the organizing of people?

CHELSEA MANNING: Well, you know, it’s a large movement that has a diaspora of people that have different positions. I’m more focused on getting solidarity among people that’s not necessarily based on a particular issue. I believe that the way in which we can fight back against these institutions of power is to focus on the institutions of power, not focusing on the symptoms, if you will. We need to deal with the systemic problems that underlie why—you know, like it’s—why are people that do these things being placed in these positions in the first place? Why do we have a system and a structure that placed them there and allowed them to fester for years? And it’s—and why are they continuing to be able to defend themselves, you know, whenever there’s overwhelming evidence that these things are happening. And so, you know, the systems of accountability are not working. And certainly, you know, we can’t depend on government to do that and the court system to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you abolish the NSA? Your state, Maryland, the state you’d represent as senator, represents the largest intelligence agency in the world—

CHELSEA MANNING: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —far, far larger, for example, than the CIA—the National Security Agency, where you were actually court-martialed.

CHELSEA MANNING: Right. You know, and the National Security Agency collects an enormous amount of data and information. But it’s more of these policing agencies that I’m focused on. You know, ICE is—ICE has more law enforcement power than any other federal law enforcement agency. And it’s only a matter of time. And we’ve already seen people who are assisting, you know, people crossing the border and assisting people that, you know, be arrested and charged with federal offenses. They’re going to expand the net of their federal law enforcement powers over the next few years. They’ve already said that they’re going to do this. ICE didn’t exist 15—or ICE didn’t exist 18 years ago. It’s a brand-new institution. It didn’t exist whenever I was a teenager. It should go away. We don’t need ICE. We don’t need a lot of these gigantic, you know, police agencies that are singularly focused on deporting people.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you—it’s been a year and three months now since President Trump was inaugurated. You were arrested, tortured, and then, eventually, had your sentence commuted under President Obama. And now we have President Trump. I’m wondering how you see how the country has changed since Trump came into office, and what your candidacy would represent in terms of a resistance to that.

CHELSEA MANNING: Right. You know, we often personalize—you know, administrations allow us to personalize these systemic problems. Oh, it’s Bush, it’s Obama, it’s Trump. These are systemic problems that both political parties that are in power have bolstered and maintained—you know, the whirling death machine, if you will, of power. And, you know, it’s always about tweaking. It’s always about like either being aggressive with it or having a more law-and-process approach. Whenever the real—the real problem is that none of these systemic problems ever get addressed, because of the entrenchment of the establishment.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But yet, you’re running in the Democratic primary, right?

CHELSEA MANNING: Right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Against Ben Cardin.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We should primary. You know, Ben Cardin is an establishment Dem. He’s an establishment Democrat. He’s been doing that—you know, he’s been in Maryland politics for 40 years. All these problems have been built over more than—even more than 40 years. So, we need to start pushing back against these people. We need to start pushing back against the establishment. The establishment and the systemic problems need to be addressed.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about your activism around anti-fascism, and also how you’re going to conduct your campaign? The primary is coming up soon. It’s in June. What are you going to do to run throughout Maryland to get your name out there and your positions out there, throughout the state? Not that your name isn’t known, but as a senator from Maryland.

CHELSEA MANNING: So, yeah, so I’ve been—I’ve been, you know, meeting with activists and organizers locally. I’ve been more on a listening tour, because I want to hear their—what they have to say, what their positions are, what the concerns are, and—before I started to publicly, you know, like roll out there. Obviously, you have to file pretty early in the Maryland primary. So, a lot of the work is going to come over the next few months. And being on this program is a part of that. So, I would say that my activism and who—and like how I’m running are hand in hand. I mean, I’m running as an activist. Like this is—like, I’m not running to have a career as a senator. I’m here as a continuation of my career as an activist who pushes against these systemic problems and these systemic structures. You know, I’m not willing to get entrenched into the circle of lobbying and the network of, you know, revolving-door politics.

I mean, I’ve already been excluded. You know, the language that they use excludes me, by default. You know, the I’m not—you know, I’m inexperienced, or I’m—you know, think about that for a second, inexperienced. Like what—like Ben Cardin has been in politics, Maryland politics, for 40 years. He’s been behind a desk that whole time. What experience can he bring to the table? I mean, I have life experience. I’ve been out there. I’ve been homeless. I’ve been to prison. I’ve been to war. These are what I consider experience. So, we need to start pushing back. And the way we do that is by focusing on the systemic problems, like the criminal justice system, immigration and healthcare.

AMY GOODMAN: What would you do with the prisons of the United States?

CHELSEA MANNING: We need to start closing them. We need to start closing prisoners—we need to start releasing prisoners and then closing prisons down. No more of—we should put a moratorium on construction, first off, and then start closing prisons.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of immigration, what would you do?

CHELSEA MANNING: Abolish ICE. Abolish the CBP.

AMY GOODMAN: And our borders?

CHELSEA MANNING: I mean, borders are imaginary lines. They’re something that we draw, you know, through the middle of a desert. We invented the border. It wasn’t there previously. People should be able to move freely about the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you specifically, as, you know, an intelligence expert, when you heard about Cambridge Analytica—now, the FTC, for example, the Federal Trade Commission, is investigating Facebook—when you heard about Cambridge Analytica, what, gathering information on millions of Americans without their knowledge, like 50 million Americans, your thoughts?

CHELSEA MANNING: It’s unsurprising. The corporate world has become an extension of the surveillance state. But it’s become this private interest surveillance state, where if you have enough money, you can learn as much about these people as possible. And their mission, of course, has been to—I mean, brazenly—manipulate people. I mean, now, how well they do that is, I guess, going to be the focus on the investigation. But that’s their stated goal. Is it surprising that they’re under investigated—that they’re under investigation for doing what they claim to do?

AMY GOODMAN: What was your response to Pence saying you endangered people, you know, presumably referring to the redacting of names in the documents that came out in WikiLeaks?

CHELSEA MANNING: I mean, the government’s been using all of this rhetoric for seven years. And for three-and-a-half years, they said it, and then they went—they had to deal with a courtroom, and they couldn’t bring—they couldn’t bring a shred of evidence to the courtroom. Instead, they merely said, “Oh, could have.” It was all hypotheticals. So, these are just talking points. They’re just hot air. It’s been continuing.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read from BuzzFeed. “In the seven years since WikiLeaks published the largest leak of classified documents in history, the federal government has said they caused enormous damage to national security. But a secret, 107-page report, prepared by a Department of Defense task force and newly obtained by BuzzFeed News, tells a starkly different story: It says the disclosures were largely insignificant and did not cause any real harm to US interests.” Chelsea Manning?

CHELSEA MANNING: I mean, that’s what we’ve been saying this whole time. You know, they agreed with us. But instead, during the trial, they said “could have.” It was all about maybe. You know, what crime is it where you could have? You know, if I threw this rock, I could have broken a window. You know, and, of course it wasn’t going to cause any damage.

And the whole notion of national security, it’s a word that gets—it’s a phrase that gets used a lot in politics. But do you know what the definition of “national security” is? The definition of “national security” is that—anything of and relating to the national defense, meaning the military, or foreign relations, meaning the State Department. Anything can be construed as being national security. Those are—that’s an incredibly broad definition. And “interests” is—what is “interests”? Interests is whatever they want. So, if it’s whatever these institutions want, and it’s against their interests, which is against our interests, as people, then it’s a threat to national security. So, in a sense, everyone who goes against them is a threat to national security.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’m wondering—subsequent to your revelations, there was the revelations of Edward Snowden, the enormous impact it had on the American public in terms of understanding the surveillance state. Your advice to other people who are in network securities in other parts of the world in terms of potentially being whistleblowers, and the importance of being a whistleblower—

CHELSEA MANNING: Yes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —when you believe that something is unjust or is wrong, that an institution that they’re associated with is committing? What would be your advice to potential whistleblowers?

CHELSEA MANNING: You know, you’re in a better position to understand what the issue is and what you have to do. I can’t give people specific advice. What I can say is that there’s a lot of—and a lot of people in government and a lot of people in these positions already know that there are no safe channels to go through. Like we’ve had—you know, like I have a friend of mine, you know, Jesselyn Radack, who’s been on this show a lot, who has defended people, who have gone through the proper channels, from prosecution and from being targeted. The Insider Threat Program, whenever you—whenever you raise a concern, you are automatically listed under the Insider Threat Program as a potential threat, and placed under surveillance, under electronic surveillance or surveillance by your supervisors. That said, there are no safe channels. You have to make a decision as to what to do. And that’s my advice.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you concerned you’re being surveilled, monitored today?

CHELSEA MANNING: We all are.

AMY GOODMAN: You any more than anyone else?

CHELSEA MANNING: I mean, it depends on the focus or the day. But, I mean, that goes for all of us.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to Michael Ratner, the late Michael Ratner, one of the founders of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who appeared on Democracy Now! in 2013, shortly after attending part of your court-martial, when you accepted responsibility for leaking information when leaking documents to WikiLeaks.

MICHAEL RATNER: It was one of the more moving days I’ve ever spent in a courtroom. You’ve heard from Bradley Manning once before, which was when he testified about the torture that happened to him. I was crying through that. This was amazing. I mean, he actually didn’t stand; he sat at the defense table. And he read his 35-page statement, which, sadly, we do not have a copy of, even though there’s nothing classified about that statement. And hopefully we’ll get it, because that is something that should be taught in every school in America.

He went through each of the releases that he took responsibility for, that you mentioned on the air, and he told us why he did it. And in each case, you saw a 22-year-old, a 23-year-old, a person of incredible conscience, saying, “What I’m seeing the United States do is utterly wrong. It’s immoral. The way they’re killing people in Iraq, targeting people for death, rather than working with the population, this is wrong.” And in each of these—each of these statements tells you about how he was doing it politically.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the late Michael Ratner, one of the founding attorneys of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in 2013, coming from your trial and coming on Democracy Now! the next day. Your thoughts on what Michael said? And would you do this again, if you had the chance?

CHELSEA MANNING: Look, I can’t go back and change history. I can’t reflect on every single moment that I’ve gone through my entire life. And I reflect a lot on all kinds of decisions throughout my life, mostly to do with relationships that I’ve had and jobs that I’ve held in the past and decisions that I’ve made, especially in regards to college. Should I have stayed in college? Should I have stayed at Starbuck’s?

That said, this couldn’t have happened any other way. It happened because of who I am and the values that I have and the time that I had and the means, the technology, that was available. And also, it almost didn’t happen. You know, I tried to—I tried to reach out through conventional journalists, if you will. And, you know, the technical complexities, they just couldn’t work around.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, wait for one second. Could you explain exactly what you did, for people who aren’t familiar with your course? When you were in Iraq, you got a hold of these documents. You saw what you described as the horror documented in the government’s own pages, and wanting to get it out, coming back to the United States. It wasn’t WikiLeaks you went to first.

CHELSEA MANNING: Right. Of course not. I mean, you know, they weren’t a thing yet. There weren’t a name. And, I mean, like I ran out of time. I didn’t have a whole lot of time. I had about 12 days, and three of those days were taken out by a snowstorm.

AMY GOODMAN: Before you were going back to Iraq.

CHELSEA MANNING: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: So you turned to The New York Times. You tried to reach out to them.

CHELSEA MANNING: Well, I reached out to The Washington Post first.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did you—

CHELSEA MANNING: But, I mean, this is—a lot of information, I’m saving for my book. So…

AMY GOODMAN: So, The Washington Post, you called them?

CHELSEA MANNING: I’m saving a lot of these details for the book. But, yes, I did reach out to The Washington Post.

AMY GOODMAN: And they didn’t want the documents, or they did?

CHELSEA MANNING: I mean, it’s technology. Technology is the problem. You know, SecureDrop is something that came out of all of this. It’s now possible to reach out to The Washington Post and use these tools. They weren’t—they had—there’s a lot of detail, and I’m saving a lot of this for the book.

AMY GOODMAN: But they couldn’t do it. They—

CHELSEA MANNING: Yeah. It’s a mostly technical problem, you know, technical problems and sort of an understanding. Like journalists didn’t really have an understanding as to the technical problems of the time.

AMY GOODMAN: Why you couldn’t just send it to them—

CHELSEA MANNING: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —by regular email.

CHELSEA MANNING: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: Why Washington Post, did you go to?

CHELSEA MANNING: All the President’s Men.

AMY GOODMAN: Exposing Watergate.

CHELSEA MANNING: Well, that was my reference, was a movie. So…

AMY GOODMAN: And why The New York Times? And what did they say?

CHELSEA MANNING: New York Times because it’s a big name. Same thing, technical problems. I mean, I’m not going to—I’m saving a lot of that for the book.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, WikiLeaks, which wasn’t very well known at the time, what, had released Sarah Palin’s email or something.

CHELSEA MANNING: Right, but they knew the—I mean, the key here—I mean, it wasn’t just—you know, there was a number of people associated with the organization then. And it was very small. But, I mean, they had the technical means. They had all of the technology, and they understood it. So, it was just—and I ran out of time. You know, I ran out of time. I had to go back. And I—

AMY GOODMAN: And, ultimately, they would, The New York Times, is that right? And The Washington Post would publish some of the documents that you had procured in Iraq.

CHELSEA MANNING: Right. I mean, is this surprising?

AMY GOODMAN: If you were a senator of the United States, and even as not as senator of the United States, as an activist, what are you pushing for when it comes to the military?

CHELSEA MANNING: We spend 600—we spend almost $600 billion a year on our defense budget. And there’s various other portions that go into the paramilitary portions of our government. We need to spend this money somewhere else. It needs to be—you know, we have other issues. We don’t need to have 800 bases all across the world. We don’t need to have the—we already have the largest system in the world. We don’t need more. And they’re always asking for more. Isn’t that funny? Like, it’s already the largest. We’re already spending $600 billion a year. And yet, you know, it’s on boondoggle projects, like the F-35, you know? We’re going to stop that. I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that defense funding bills for more stuff don’t happen.

AMY GOODMAN: What gives you hope, as we wrap up this interview?

CHELSEA MANNING: What gives me hope is the people I have to my left and right, the people that I’m in solidarity with, when I’m—especially when I’m doing activism, and especially whenever I’m in these meetings, the people who have been with me this whole time, the people who are fighting with me and the people that I know will be by my side, whatever happens.

AMY GOODMAN: Chelsea Manning, thanks so much—

CHELSEA MANNING: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: —for joining us. Chelsea Manning, Army whistleblower, transgender activist, spent seven years in the military, after—in a military prison, after leaking documents about the Iraq and Afghan wars and the State Department to WikiLeaks in 2010, now running for the U.S. Senate in Maryland. The primary is in June. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.