US Army Private Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, has sought a presidential pardon after being sentenced last month to 35 years in prison for turning over hundreds of thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks.
The 25-year-old Manning, who announced a day after the sentencing that he would henceforth live as a woman and should be called Chelsea, asserted that he leaked the documents “out of a concern for my country and the world we live in”, adding: “It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people.”
“When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability,” Manning said in the pardon request sent to the White House on Tuesday.
The request from Manning, who is lodged in a military prison at Fort leavenworth in Kansas, will be considered like any other pardon request made to the president, the White House has said. Officials, however, have been quoted as saying that pardon requests often takes years to be dealt with. Some media reports, citing Pentagon and administration officials, discounted the possibility of President Obama ever granting pardon in this case.
After a military trial, Manning was convicted of espionage, computer fraud and federal theft for releasing the material collected in 2009 and 2010 while posted as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq. The judge awarded 35 years after prosecutors had sought a 60-year sentence. Manning will be eligible for parole in eight years.