Chelsea Manning: Leak Motivation Was Transparency, Not Peace Activism

Does not consider herself to be a pacifist -- rather she wanted public to be better-informed

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."

In her first public comments since she was sentenced in August to 35 years in military custody for leaking the largest quantity of US state secrets in history, Manning writes that she is increasingly concerned about what she calls a "substantial disconnect" between her experiences at the US military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she is being held, and the messages that are being put out to the rest of the world without her knowledge or approval. "I was shocked and frustrated about what's occurred here," she writes.