The phrase “Snitches get stitches” has been heard countless times from a surprising range of people. The basic meaning of this phrase is, those who expose unsavory behavior may find themselves in unsavory situations from the person or people they expose. This shows unsettlingly true for one brave
Chelsea Manning was born in 1987 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Growing up with excellent grades, she was quite adept with computers and taught herself how to code. Despite this academic blessing, Chelsea had quite a difficult home life with both of her parents struggling with alcoholism. She recalled a night when her sister found their mother unconscious next to an empty Valium bottle. The girls called 911 but dispatch said the nearest ambulance was a half hour away, leaving Chelsea’s older sister no other choice but to drive to the hospital as best as she could. Chelsea’s father was unable to operate a vehicle due to his drunken state. While her sister drove, it was Chelsea who stayed in the back seat to monitor her mother’s breathing. Being only twelve years old, this will heavily impact Chelsea moving forward. Family issues like this remained common in her life until at age seventeen when she is kicked out of the house and forced to live on her own.
This led Chelsea to enlist in the united states military in 2007. Her main position was as an intelligence analyst. At this time, the US was at war with the Middle East, and in 2009, Chelsea is deployed to Iraq where she monitored data on different targets, troop locations, and enemy plans. She had a front-row seat to the horrors taking place on the front lines. What gave Chelsea a sense of guilt was the fact that the horrors taking place were almost being buried by the military. Manning stated, “At a certain point I stopped seeing records and started seeing people.”
Chelsea saw the costs of war firsthand in the form of wounded soldiers returning to the base as well as dead civilians laying in the street. She was seeing things in person that she knew would never make it to the eyes of the American public. Chelsea knew that she had a responsibility to get the real story out there. This is where she began to sort and organize her files in a way that best suited her ideas. She also noticed that the maps she developed for troop plans would only cause a chain reaction of war violence. This disturbed her seeing as these were direct orders from the American government that were made in secret. This led to Chelsea doing what most people her age did; she burned a CD.
Manning transferred her reports onto multiple disguised CDs, one of which was reportedly labeled “Lady Gaga” and left her service from Iraq. She uploaded her files onto her personal computer, planning on breaking every oath she took when she enlisted. Armed with information, Chelsea began contacting major news outlets, but due to the outlandish claims she was making, no one seemed to believe her, causing her to turn to a new, controversial source.
WikiLeaks was a scarcely known site that wished to expose the world’s secrets, and once Chelsea had shared all of her data with the site, it became a household name. Julian Assange, the site’s founder became a global celebrity due to this. The website broadcasted all of Chelsea’s files for the entire world to see. Countless documents of the US not investigating Iraqi abuse and torture, secret missions about hunting down terrorists that the Pentagon wanted under wraps and many more classified and disturbing documents made headlines because of this. One of the biggest topics in these documents was the concept of “Collateral Murder”. On February 3rd, 2010, WikiLeaks published receipts consisting of videos of an American military helicopter. The operators request permission to begin firing at targets, human targets. The guns on said helicopter began spraying bullets across its path, killing anyone in sight. The pilots in the video are shown laughing as if this was just a fun game to them, rather than the taking of countless lives. This instance led to several civilians and two journalists being killed.
Of the over 750,000 documents Manning shared, the US was not the only country mentioned. Alliances between nations, spy identities, and other highly sensitive information on countless countries were shared. While many people applauded Chelsea for her transparency, she was now considered a threat to national security. She was on the top of many hit lists internationally. She was later given over two dozen charges by the military and ended up spending several years in prison with an entire year in solitary confinement. Manning faced horrible treatment including forced stripping and sleep deprivation. Her treatment was so bad that even some government officials referred to it as cruel, inhumane, and degrading but no one did anything to free her. Meanwhile, the media attempted to mock her personal life as a way of distracting from what she had exposed.
Eventually, Chelsea was pardoned and was able to live freely. Today, she is a celebrated political activist, published author, and security consultant in the tech industry. Because of how Chelsea was treated, there are now protections for those who wish to come forward about corruption without fearing for their safety. Major publishers have ways of anonymously sharing information. If it weren’t for this brave woman, we would not have known the horrors of what our military endured and participated in during one of our nation’s darkest times and people who wish to expose wrongdoings are now able to do so without fear of persecution.