Chelsea Manning: I'm a Transparency Activist, Not a Peace Activist

Chelsea Manning (formerly Pfc. Bradley Manning) was recently awarded the Sean MacBride Peace Prize by the International Peace Bureau for doing "outstanding work for peace, disarmament and/or human rights." There's a bit of a problem, though. Now that the famous military leaker is not so isolated and has settled into serving her sentence at Ft. Leavenworth, she's discovering how she is being presented by her own supporters, and she is concerned even they don't quite grasp why she did what she did. The Guardian explains:

Chelsea Manning, the WikiLeaks source formerly known as Bradley Manning, has expressed intense unhappiness at the public profile that is being presented about her, warning that a false impression is being given to the outside world that she is an anti-war pacifist and conscientious objector.

In a statement issued to the Guardian, Manning insists that she did not leak hundreds of thousands of US classified documents to WikiLeaks because she was explicitly motivated by pacifism. Rather, she sees herself as a "transparency advocate" who is convinced that the American people needs to be better informed.

"It's not terribly clear to me that my actions were explicitly done for 'peace'… I feel that the public cannot decide what actions and policies are or are not justified if they don't even know the most rudimentary details about them and their effects."

Manning said she didn't even realize she had won an award, but her lawyer talked to her and said she had gotten confused about it during the process of her indoctrination into prison.

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