Chelsea Manning Arrested for Leaking Classified Documents to WikiLeaks

U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning (later Chelsea Manning) was arrested at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq for allegedly leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, including evidence of war crimes and civilian casualties. The arrest initiated what would become one of the most significant whistleblower prosecutions in American history.

The Leaks

Between late 2009 and early 2010, Manning, working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, downloaded and transmitted to WikiLeaks an extraordinary cache of classified material: approximately 700,000 military and diplomatic documents. The releases included the “Collateral Murder” video showing a 2007 U.S. Apache helicopter attack that killed Iraqi civilians and journalists, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs documenting thousands of unreported civilian casualties, and 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables.

The leaked documents revealed systematic undercounting of civilian deaths, evidence of torture by Iraqi forces under U.S. command, and diplomatic cables exposing widespread government corruption and duplicity. The “Collateral Murder” video, showing U.S. forces killing Reuters journalists and civilians—including two children—while crew members made callous remarks, became one of the most widely viewed pieces of evidence of potential war crimes.

The Arrest

Manning was arrested on May 27, 2010, at her base in Iraq after Adrian Lamo, a hacker whom Manning had confided in online, reported their conversations to federal authorities. Lamo turned over chat logs in which Manning described the leaks and explained her motivation: “If you had free reign over classified networks… and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do?”

Immediate Aftermath

Following her arrest, Manning was transferred to a military prison in Kuwait, where she was held in a cage-like cell in extreme heat. She was then moved to the Marine Corps Base Quantico brig in Virginia, where she would face conditions that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture would later condemn as “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”

Significance

Manning’s arrest marked the beginning of the Obama administration’s most high-profile whistleblower prosecution. The scale of the leaks—the largest in U.S. military history—sparked a global debate about government secrecy, accountability for war crimes, and the role of whistleblowers in democratic societies. While Manning faced severe prosecution, none of the potential war crimes documented in the leaked materials resulted in criminal charges against military personnel or officials.

The arrest signaled the government’s determination to make an example of Manning to deter future leakers, beginning a process that would subject her to brutal pre-trial detention, a military trial with severe restrictions on her defense, and ultimately the longest sentence ever imposed on a whistleblower under the Espionage Act.