Chelsea Manning is a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst and a crucial source for WikiLeaks’ 2010 releases, providing significant information about U.S. military activities.[1] John Kiriakou says Manning meets the legal definition of a whistleblower — what she revealed, in his view, was evidence of war crimes — though he says he personally would not have leaked every diplomatic cable the way she did.[2] After Manning’s document release, Kiriakou personally searched the leaked documents for his own social security number, a direct consequence of the scale of Manning’s disclosure.[3]
Sentence, torture, and clemency
Manning was originally sentenced to 35 years in prison for the leaks.[4] Kiriakou says he is “thrilled” by her eventual release and considers her a torture victim: she spent long stretches of her sentence in solitary confinement — a practice the United Nations has declared a form of torture — compounded by forced nudity intended purely to humiliate and control her.[5] He is emphatic that Obama did not pardon Manning, as is sometimes assumed: he commuted her sentence, meaning she remains a convicted felon.[6]
Refusing to testify against Assange
Kiriakou describes Manning’s later refusal to testify before a grand jury against Julian Assange, even after prosecutors offered her immunity. Rather than take the Fifth Amendment, she asserted the First, Fourth, and Sixth Amendments and refused to “rat out” Assange.[7] The prosecutors, he says, were seeking to have her repeat testimony she had given in her own 2012 court-martial at Fort Meade — a demand that risked false-statement or perjury charges if her memory of the earlier testimony differed even slightly.[8] Kiriakou describes Manning as roughly 5’4” and 120 pounds but “tougher than 99% of the men that I know,” someone who never blinked at a 35-year sentence and, facing renewed imprisonment, chose to say nothing rather than cooperate.[9] He notes it was hacker Adrian Lamo who originally turned Manning over to the FBI, and who tried to entrap her by suggesting she instead sell the leaked documents to Russia or China; Manning refused, telling him the leaks were not about money — she wanted the American people to know the truth.[10] She was eventually released, Kiriakou says, once the judge concluded she genuinely would not testify, and once prosecutors decided they no longer needed her testimony to bring further charges against Assange.[11]
Emergence as a whistleblower
Manning’s emergence as a whistleblower was a significant topic of discussion within secret spaces, and her actions were part of an ongoing campaign to smear Julian Assange — the same period John Kiriakou describes as his own introduction to WikiLeaks. [12]
Motivation is irrelevant
Kiriakou credits attorney Jesselyn Radack with teaching him that a whistleblower’s motivation does not affect their legal status — citing Manning’s anger at her commanding officer at the time of the leak as an example of a personal motive that doesn’t change the public value of what was disclosed.[13]
Declining to take it to the Supreme Court (Scott Horton, 2021)
John Kiriakou says Chelsea Manning was one of only two people with standing — the other being Jeffrey Sterling — to appeal an Espionage Act conviction to the Supreme Court and try to have the statute ruled unconstitutional. Manning, he says, “just couldn’t do it… she just didn’t have it in her to go all the way to the Supreme Court.”[14]
Why the commutation happened
Kiriakou gives a specific account of the decision, drawn from what was relayed to him by a businessman who was in the room. Joe Biden had gone to the president to argue for clemency for Kiriakou; ten minutes in, Obama ended the discussion with “guys, I’m just not going to do this. It’s either him or it’s Manning.” Manning’s sentence was the longer of the two — “and Manning got 35 years, and that’s why Obama did it. Obama was not upset that Chelsea was convicted; Obama just believed that 35 was too much.”[15][16]
Kiriakou draws no sentimental conclusion from it: “he didn’t really commute Chelsea’s sentence out of the goodness of his heart, or because of some pursuit of justice. We all know now that Barack Obama was the enemy of transparency — he waged a war on whistleblowers. Chelsea just got lucky in the end.” See “It’s either him or it’s Manning”.[17]
The harm that was not found
Kiriakou uses the aftermath of Manning”s case as his standing rebuttal to the blood-on-your-hands rhetoric used against whistleblowers. “After the Chelsea Manning case was completed, the head of NSA at the time came out and said that there was no discernible harm to the national security. None. Zero. It was embarrassing to see what people say behind closed doors — but there was no harm.” He extends the finding to the other cases in the same class: “just like with this IRS guy Littlejohn, there”s no harm … and just like with Julian Assange, there”s no harm.”[18][19]
He also notes what the military did instead of alleging harm — the charge that she had aided the enemy — and treats it as the template for what he expects to be argued against Assange in an American courtroom.[20]
The three exits she refused
Kiriakou’s admiration for Manning is framed as a list of the escapes available to her. “These coercive detentions are meant solely to break people, and to tell the truth Chelsea could have gotten out of this early on by playing a little game with the prosecutors.”[21]
First: “she could have gone before that grand jury and answered every question with the response ‘I don’t recall.’ Plain and simple. And they would have had to let her go.”[21]
Second: “she was offered immunity and refused the immunity,” on the ground that it was unnecessary — everything they wanted to ask her “she had already testified to in her own trial in a military court,” and she urged them to enter the transcript of that testimony into the record instead.[21][22]
Third, she could simply have testified against Julian Assange. “But she stood up and she refused. So this is an unusual toughness — a toughness and fortitude that we don’t normally see on a day-to-day basis. I have mad respect for Chelsea Manning.”[22][23]
Kiriakou also flags what he takes to be a legal defect in holding her at all: because Assange had already been charged, and “a grand jury cannot continue to be impaneled once the charges have been levied,” either the Justice Department was breaking the law or it intended to add charges.[24]
The mechanics of the contempt
Kiriakou has explained why Manning’s imprisonment ended when it did, and why it began again. Contempt of court, he says, means remaining in jail until you change your mind or until the term of the grand jury runs out. That term ran out after what he puts at something like sixty-two days, and they had to release her.[25]
Prosecutors then empanelled a new grand jury — in his reading, looking for additional charges they could bring against Julian Assange. He also states plainly what the first one had been for: “we now know that that was Julian Assange’s grand jury.”[26][25]
On the escalating fines subsequently imposed on her — 500 dollars a day after thirty days, then 1,000 a day after sixty — his contribution is a legal opinion rather than an objection of principle: he thinks it may actually be unconstitutional, and that it is something her attorney should take up.[27]