Washington - Former US military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who is serving 35 years in prison for passing classified files to WikiLeaks, has asked the Obama administration to commute her sentence to time already served, her legal team said on Monday.
Manning made the request in a November 10 petition to President Barack Obama, a copy of which was published online by her defence team. She attempted suicide on October 4 at the start of her stay in solitary confinement, where she was placed after an earlier suicide attempt in July.
The petition said Manning accepted responsibility for leaking classified materials, noting her actions were wrong and that she pleaded guilty without negotiating a plea agreement with prosecutors.
“After accepting full responsibility for her choices, Ms Manning was sentenced to the most severe punishment received by any other whistle-blower in American history, so excessive that it even exceeds international legal norms,” Manning's attorney Vince Ward said in a statement.
In her clemency application, Manning said she was confronting gender dysphoria at the time of the leaks while deployed in Iraq. She said she released the files in the interests of transparency and accountability.
Gender dysphoria is a condition of distress or anxiety that some transgender people experience.
“The sole relief I am asking for is to be released from military prison after serving six years of confinement as a person who did not intend to harm the interests of the United States or harm any service members,” Manning said.
The petition was accompanied by letters of support from Daniel Ellsberg, best known for releasing the classified Vietnam War history known as the Pentagon Papers, Morris Davis, a former military commissions chief prosecutor, and Glenn Greenwald, a legal commentator and journalist who has been a prominent supporter.
Manning, formerly known as US Army Private First Class Bradley Manning, was born male but revealed after being convicted of espionage that she identifies as a woman. She is being held at the Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas.
She has been a focus of a worldwide debate over government secrecy since she provided more than 700 000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
Manning was working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad in 2010 when she gave WikiLeaks a trove of diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts that included a 2007 gunsight video of a US Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people including two Reuters news staff.
The New York Times first reported on Manning's petition on Sunday.
REUTERS