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News > World

Chelsea Manning's Legal Team Confirms Suicide Attempt

  • Activists display a photo of Barack Obama, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning during a protest in Berlin in 2013.

    Activists display a photo of Barack Obama, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning during a protest in Berlin in 2013. | Photo: AFP

Published 11 July 2016
Opinion

The whistleblower spoke to her lawyers for the first time since last week and asked them to issue a public statement about her health situation.

Chelsea Manning has survived her attempt to take her own life and spoke with her lawyers for the first time in over a week, Manning’s attorneys Chase Strangio, Vincent Ward and Nancy Hollander said in a joint statement Monday.

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“After not connecting with Chelsea for over a week, we were relieved to speak with her this morning,” the statement, which was posted on chelseamanning.org website, read.

“Though she would have preferred to keep her private medical information private, and instead focus on her recovery, the government’s gross breach of confidentiality in disclosing her personal health information to the media has created the very real concern that they may continue their unauthorized release of information about her publicly without warning,” the statement continued.

The lawyers said their statement to the media came at the request of Manning herself in an effort to communicate her health status.

“She knows that people have questions about how she is doing and she wants everyone to know that she remains under close observation by the prison and expects to remain on this status for the next several weeks,” they stated.

The lawyers further stressed how emotional it was for them to finally hear from Manning after her suicide attempt and concluded by praising the renowned whistleblower as “someone who has fought so hard for so many issues we care about and we are honored to fight for her freedom and medical care.”

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Manning, a former intelligence analyst in Iraq, is serving a 35-year sentence after a 2013 military court conviction for providing more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to WikiLeaks.

It was the biggest breach of classified materials in U.S. history. Among the files that Manning turned over to WikiLeaks in 2010 was a gunsight video of a U.S. Apache helicopter firing at suspected Iraqi insurgents in 2007. A dozen people were killed, including two Reuters news staff.

The U.N. special rapporteur on torture said in 2012 after a two-year investigation that Manning was subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment by the U.S. military.

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