Chelsea Manning is speaking out for the first time and accepting responsibility for releasing secret military documents to WikiLeaks, ABC News reported.
Manning, a transgender U.S. Army soldier, served time at the U.S Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
She had been sentenced to 35 years before former President Barack Obama commuted all but four months of the remaining prison sentence for the Army intelligence analyst, who was convicted of a 2010 leak, The New York Times reported.
She was released from prison on May 17.
"Anything I've done, it's me," she said in an interview with ABC News, which will air in an upcoming broadcast of "Nightline."
"There's no one else," she said. "No one told me to do this. Nobody directed me to do this. This is me. It's on me."
Manning, who maintained she did not think leaking the documents would threaten national security, said she had wanted to spark public debate, according to ABC News.
Manning at that time was a 22-year-old Army private named Bradley Manning. The leaked information included battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, evidence of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantanamo prison camp detainee profiles and U.S. diplomatic correspondence, ABC News reported.
"We're getting all this information from all these different sources and it's just death, destruction, mayhem," she told the network news.
"We're filtering it all through facts, statistics, reports, dates, times, locations, and eventually, you just stop. I stopped seeing just statistics and information, and I started seeing people."
Manning pleaded guilty to some charges and was acquitted of the most serious charge: aiding the enemy, ABC News reported. And just days after Manning was sentenced, she came out as transgender on Aug. 22, 2013.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.