welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. signing up for military service is a big deal. soldiers put their lives on the line for their country. no questions asked. but what if the soldier has questions, doubts, doesn't believe in the mission? should personal morality ever trump the military code? well, my guest today thought so. former us army intelligence

analyst chelsea manning was responsible for one of the biggest leaks of classified information in history and spent seven years in prison as a result. is transparency a justification for spilling state secrets? chelsea manning, welcome to hardtalk. good evening, thanks for having me. it's a great pleasure to have you. if i may, i want to begin with the decision that really changed, transformed your life. that is the decision to sign up to the us military. right. why did you do it?

so in 2007, my father and i had a falling out and i was living in maryland and i had just been houseless for about a year. and i decided that working in various jobs and trying to go to school was wasn't enough for me. and also, as a trans person, i was trying to figure out who i was so i had a lot of identity issues, all sort of happening at the same time, and wanting to rebuild my relationship with my father, who was in the navy and also this war being discussed continuously and ongoing. it was a dinner table conversation, the iraq war at the time, as well as afghanistan to a lesser extent. being an ongoing thing, i decided, you know, based on my father sort of suggesting that i enlisted in the navy, i decided i wanted to be a little different and try to enlist the marine corps, but the recruiters weren't there on that day, so i ended up enlisting in the us army. even within that story,

there are all sorts of red flags to me that suggest that you are actually perhaps one of the most unsuitable people i could possibly think of to actually go and serve in the us army in iraq. i mean, you talk about the wrestle with your identity, which we'll talk more about later, but also you clearly, you'd been homeless for a while, you were very lost mentally, your mental health was fragile, you had a poor relationship with your parents. on all of those bases, as well as being quite a rebellious person. the idea of going into uniform, accepting the authority of the us army seems like the last thing you needed at that particular time. well, i mean, other people would make the suggestion that that's exactly what you need at that time. so then that was what my father was suggesting, and that's what the military itself was even suggesting. but were you just really trying to escape from the reality of your life as it was then? sure. i think that's why a lot of people at that age

enlist in the military. in your memoir, it's a very candid memoir and you describe how you really struggled with basic training, with lots of different aspects of being in the military. and in fact, the military nearly threw you out long before you got to iraq, but you just about scraped through. and they recognised in you some skills, particularly computing skills, data analysis skills. right. which they desperately needed at that particular time. right. do you think that they, in a sense, swallowed their major suspicions and reservations about you just because of the skills you brought to the table? sure. the us military at that timeframe was very short staffed. it was you know, they were obviously trying one of the one of the things that to try to encourage people to enlist in the military at the time was they were offering these gigantic bonuses. i mean, i think i was offered $20,000 and some of my other peers were offered $40,000 at the time in order to to enlist. there were people who were leaving the military and being called back up and as a stop loss, to continue to have people in the office.

many people in my position as well, you know, we're basically having issues looked at, you know, ignored or or given a second chance or put into a slightly different role to sort of shake things up. right. because you were obviously destined to go to iraq to do data analysis, to work in intel in one form or another. right. you were warned, weren't you, about the dangers of leaking, of exposing information to the outside? you're also warned, i believe, about wikileaks, in particular? so, yeah, it was brought up in my...in my... it was brought up by a contractor, civilian contractor who was training us. they mentioned it and it was just sort of the thing in passing. i do recall that happening. i didn't really dig into it at that point. it was like 2008, so. right. you didn't dig into it. and yet within weeks of arriving in iraq, you'd reached out to wikileaks and you'd clearly made a decision to cross the most fundamental line of all to actually reveal this confidential secret information.

i don't think that comports with the timeline necessarily. i think that i, i spent quite a bit of time in myjob and in my role. and obviously i was in various... well, i think by the end of november, you'd only arrive there a month or so earlier. by the end of november, you made the initial contact with wikileaks. that doesn't comport with my understanding of the events now. well, it's the timeline that was put into the court and that appears to be established by the computer records. that's not the timeline that i'm familiar with. so i recall the upload coming up injanuary. but the first time that i ever uploaded anything or released anything was injanuary. right. well, yes, that's when you actually release things. i'm talking about the initial contact, but i don't know, quibble about a few weeks because it doesn't really actually matter that much. the point, the timeline. i think it matters because like i had some time to settle into my role. i had time to to to

really learn things and experience things. so what was it that motivated you to cross that most fundamental line, in essence, to steal secrets and send them notjust to anybody but to wikileaks, where you knew they would be exposed to the whole world? well, i mean, i tried to reach out to the new york times in the washington post as well. one of the things that i envisioned was a sort of a physical handoff to like a journalist and like a kind of a woodward and bernstein style handoff in parking garage or something along those lines. so that's why i came. that's why i went to the us during my leave and tried to contact more conventionaljournalists. right. in the end, you use the computer in a book shop, i believe. yes. dispatch this information and we should say vast, vast amounts of information.

well, the so called iraq war logs and the afghan war diaries amounted to hundreds of thousands of separate pieces of information. right. but i mean, like i worked with tens of millions of records every single day. so this is a this is still even a fraction of the kinds of information that we were collecting and using. i don't doubt that. but what i'm getting to is the point that as these were hundreds of thousands of files, there is no way in the world that you had sifted them, filtered them, you just dumped them. no, i wouldn't characterize it as that. i the way that i view this is these are categorical types of information. so you have information... and this is this is obviously types of information that i'm very familiar with, that i have worked... ..that i was essentially one of the most familiar with because we were the ones that really had to categorize this information, put it into subcategories, you know, direct where it flows, train an artificial intelligence algorithm to be able to make predictive analysis based on. so i think that my...i was very familiar and i certainly knew tens of thousands of types of information. and this was information

going back five years to the engagements in afghanistan and iraq of the us military. you knew the types, the categories. but what i'm getting to is you didn't go through these files to look at the individual stories they told. you couldn't possibly. there were far too many. we know you didn't. and that gets to the heart of the ethics of this case. you just put this information out there, gave it to wikileaks, not having examined it yourself and not knowing that actually it did include some information which named individuals, which compromised individuals. that was that, you know, the us government wasn't able to show, they didn't show that in court. so they made this allegation in 2010 but it appears that in 2011, whenever the information review task force reviewed this information, that it was a different type of information that i had access to that they included, because they assumed that everything that i had access

to was potentially leaked. and i did have access to source identifying information, and i did have access to human intelligence reports, but those were not included in the records. right. but see, once it was out there and wikileaks in the end dumped this information into the public domain because, of course, you had no control over what wikileaks, julian assange and the rest of them were going to do with it. they chose in the end to dump this information. if they hadn't, then i would have done the same thing. would you? i would have posted it. and you say that now knowing what we know? the media, for example, went through this information, this is back injuly of 2010 when you did the first big dump was put into the public domain. the times newspaper found the names of dozens of afghans credited with providing detailed intelligence to us forces. the taliban then went on the record saying, "we are analyzing all of this data and we will take retribution against those individuals that we find in this reporting from wikileaks." amnesty international and the open society institute then said, "we have seen

the negative, sometimes deadly ramifications for those afghans who have been identified." that was all your work. right. and again, we went through a court martial process and those allegations didn't show up. you know, they made the allegation that obviously the taliban said that they were going to retribute against people and then the government couldn't identify anybody who was held accountable or... so as far as you and your conscience are concerned, the fact that you don't know of specific individuals who were killed... we weren't given a list of individuals who were placed at risk. this just didn't happen. well, they clearly were placed at risk. whether or not retribution was eventually delivered to those people is another matter. but it wasn't. .. there's no list of names to for us to to go through. we asked for it during our court martial. but the media found these names. i mean, it was quite plain...

it wasn't presented before the court. but even if it wasn't presented before the court, and i'm not answerable for what the prosecution did or didn't do, is it on your conscience that these names, you didn't sift the information? it turns out you did put names into the public domain. and i wonder now, having had many years to reflect on it, whether you regret that? well, no, i... i chose certain categories of information under the under the understanding of what is and shouldn't should be in this kind of categories. categories. categories, yes. in a sense, you put an awful lot of trust into wikileaks and julian assange. do you regret that? i would... if they were not available, i would have uploaded this information separately. i was in a position where if i didn't have a publisher of last resort because i was struggling with the new york times, i was struggling with the washington post — the washington post was the one that i really wanted to get to and the one that i had the most sort of interaction with — then i was going to use some other tool like bittorrent or something like that,

to post this information, which would have been... that would have been my even more of a last resort. that would have been my more desperate. right. you did the war logs and the war diaries dump and then you then released all of these diplomatic cables, which had different kinds of information, secret confidential information involving the us government's contacts with individuals on the ground and a whole host of countries. just to take one small example, but not small to the individual involved, an ethiopian journalist, reporter argaw ashine, was forced to flee the country because he was named in a us cable and he believed it put his life in immediate danger. he had to flee, leave his homeland and again wouldn't have happened had you not taken your decision to leak. again, you know, you're talking about situations that i'm not familiar with, that weren't brought before a court... but that's the point. you weren't familiar with them because there's no way you could have gone through the information, and you just, to use the word again, dumped it. and after all these years, i'm fascinated to know

whether there's a part of you that thinks you got it wrong. i mean, i don't think i got it wrong. i think that this information needed to be made public. i think that any method that was made available, i would have taken. there was nothing that was going to stop me. if i didn't have anyone to go to and i was running out of places, i would have done this completely on my own. in essence, are you saying you don't believe in the legitimacy of intelligence gathering of secret government activity in the name of national security? because michael rubin, a former pentagon official, after all of this, particularly the diplomatic cables which upset him so much, he said, "manning not only burned the sources of hundreds of diplomats around the world, she effectively dissuaded foreigners from ever trusting a future american official." well, on the other hand, you have robert gates who basically says that this is nothing. this has no impact on the diplomatic relationship of the united states. this is the secretary

of defense. it's not quite what he said. he said, in the end, we will get over this, that outsiders, foreigners look at the us, they realize these things happen, but they're not going to stop talking to us. but fundamentally, i'm just asking you whether you believe or whether you care that you might have compromised important aspects of us national security and intelligence gathering, not least because, for example, one cable... well, for intelligence gathering, i don't think so. because the us intelligence apparatus is a large apparatus, is one in which there are many sources and methods that haven't been made public, that aren't, that weren't even available to me. just a final one on the cables, there was one list of the most important national security sites around the world listed by us diplomats. and you, of course, you didn't necessarily know you were doing it, but you inadvertently released that to the world, too. pj crowley, the state department spokesman at the time, said you were effectively giving a targeting list to al-qaeda. did that give you

pause for thought? i mean, look, we live in the age of radical transparency already at this point. but what does that mean? what is the transparency? it doesn't mean you don't have a personal responsibility. and i'm asking you whether you feel it? i went through a court martial process. martial process where evidence was presented before the court. we were given evidence. we were given discovery. we went through this process. i've taken responsibility. i've taken full responsibility for all of my actions. i've gone through this process. you did at the time of the court martial, let's get to that, you did say that you recognize the damage you had done. so to this day, do you recognise damage done? look, myjob was essentially to make decisions in which i damaged people every single day. so, you know, among all of the decisions that i've ever made in my entire life, yes, i have caused some harm. i've killed civilians. i've been involved in the death of civilians because i've made mistakes. this was and this was just a just me doing myjob. i was never held accountable.

well, the leaking clearly wasn't you doing yourjob because the military then decided... i'm talking about the job that i was doing, which i know in iraq. that was an intelligence. i did this every day. i understand that that was the job. there are dozens of people not alive today because of the job that i did. and do i regret that? i mean, ifeel that down in my bones. yes. let's let's talk about the way you were treated once you were apprehended, because to be honest, you didn't really cover your tracks very well. i'm not even sure you intended to. i had a concern that my colleagues might get caught up in this and their careers might be affected. so you felt that wouldn't be fair. so your tracks were not well covered. you spent three years pretty much in prison before you actually got convicted. it seems to me, and again, the memoir is very frank, they tried to break you.

how close did they come to breaking you, particularly with the amount of time you spent in solitary confinement? break me how? mentally, to the point where you frankly were no longer capable of mounting any sort of defense of yourself. well, i was surprised. i was shocked. i didn't expect this this experience or this treatment. i certainly felt because i certainly thought that the risk to me was that i could lose my job, that i could be discharged, that i could lose my security clearance, which at that age and infact... you were kept in a steel cage for a while in kuwait. and when you got to the united states again, you spent many months in solitary confinement. in fact, you talked about breaking free and very, almost no. i mean, i've had no contact with my lawyers. i had no contact with the outside world. i didn't even know who won the world cup. a couple of points before your eventual release in 2017, you were so desperate you tried

to take your own life. yes. that sounds like you were broken. well, i don't know, because that time period is just it's blended together so much. i don't remember a whole lot about my time period in kuwait because ijust remember being in this hot steel enclosure with two or three navy personnel watching me at all times, telling me different bits of information if they did talk to me at all, feeding me and it being very hot and i have no i don't know. i don't know that i'm facing charges. i have a lawyer or that i'm facing any that there's any end to this. and so and it all started to blend together because i don't even know what time it is, because it's the same it's the same lights every all day. like i can't see the sun. i have no idea what's going on. well, i'll tell you what's so striking about this is you say you didn't know when, how the end would come, but you had the strength. despite all of this and despite, obviously,

the mental trauma you were going through to fight notjust the case, which we've gone into in some detail, but you also made a stand for your own identity. you demanded that the military this is after conviction, but you were facing a long prison sentence. you demanded that the military system and the government recognise you as transgender, give you hormone treatment. yes. and if they would not, you said i'm going on hunger strike. yes. to death. yes. and in fact, they bent and you became the first ever prisoner in military custody to get hormone therapy. us military custody. is that more important to you in a way than this sort of advocacy for transparency that you're involved in? i mean, it's i mean, they're different, obviously. i think it's more important for me personally that i be who i am and that i have some because after my court martial and after i faced responsibility or after i faced accountability and took responsibility for everything, and i had a sentence

and i was given a numbers is sort of the phrase. let's face it, you were given 35 years. yeah, but it's numbers. it's it's a number that you can count down from. it's not life without parole, you know. so now it was a matter of improving the quality of life and ensuring that i can make it through and survive this. and i don't think it would be realistic of me for me to have survived and the 32 years not having access to the care that i needed at the time. the troubled mind you had as a young person seems to me you still have in a way, because, again, very candidly, you told the guardian newspaper recently that you fell in some weird ways that the army and prison as well were places where you felt you fitted in a way that you don't even feel you fit. now that you're free and living that varied life in the united states

of america, you know, it feels very unstable in the us is what i'm trying to get at. the lack of knowing that you're going to have housing, knowing that you're going to have health care, knowing that you're going to have food, knowing that you're going to have knowing what tomorrow brings. i don't know what's what tomorrow. you feel a deep sense of insecurity? i do. you, chelsea manning feel the insecurity every day, even now. well, i mean, ifeel it less because i'm obviously establishing myself and having more of a more of an assertive role in my life. and now i'm sort of learning how credit systems work and how how to pay rent and do pay bills and things like that. so like, ifeel a bit more secure, but there's always, there's always a sense of like i had more of this sense of belonging and security when i was with the inmate population in prison than than i do outside in this very alienating world where we're just constantly communicating with each other over phones or like interacting with it where everything feels

like it's everything feels like it's every interaction feels like it's commodified and somehow like it's a product. and let's say and just with a thought about america, right? you signed up to serve america. as i said at the very beginning, you now live a civilian life in america. and you say that you wanted to show the world the conscience of individuals can make urgent change through bravery and determination. do you believe you've played a little part in changing america? you know, i think that america is changing and it's changing rapidly. whether or not i have been a part of that or not, i'm not sure about. i want to believe that people as individuals can do that. and i encourage people to not it doesn't have to necessarily be something as big or as ambitious as, you know, like the events of 2010 or anything like that. but i do believe that people in their own way, because like every every moment

of your life is a decision like whether or not and when you're not doing something and whenever you are deciding not to participate in something, you are actively making a decision. not doing something is a decision. it is a political action. and i and i believe that we have some responsibility in order to act in these kinds of situations. and sometimes it's messy. chelsea manning, we have to end there, but thank you so much forjoining me on hardtalk. thank you.

for the this week, slowly but surely, it is going to turn milder, and there will be spells of wind and rain at times but not all the time. on the satellite picture, you can see this swirl of cloud, that brought wet and when the weather for many on monday. behind me, more cloud waiting in the atlantic, more weather systems will be directed towards the uk by the jet stream, the winds high up in the atmosphere, but watch the pattern of the jet stream closely, by the end of the week, it starts to shift northwards, it will focus most of the wind and rain to the north and west of the uk but it will also allow us to bring in milder airfrom the will also allow us to bring in milder air from the south, will also allow us to bring in milder airfrom the south, and that will peak as we head

through the coming weekend. more on that in a moment. we start on tuesday with a band of rain working its way into eastern scotland, some heavy downpours in the north of scotland and some windy showery weather for a time in southern england and the channel islands. generally speaking, early cloud will break up, we will see sunshine, temperatures north to south six to 12 degrees. as you move out of tuesday into wednesday, here comes another area of low pressure, another atlantic weather system, that will bring rain northwards and eastwards, some of the rain will be heavy, behind it a some of the rain will be heavy, behind ita mix some of the rain will be heavy, behind it a mix of sunny spells and hefty showers and it will turn windy again across parts of wales and the south—west of england. temperature isjust england. temperature is just beginning england. temperature isjust beginning to creep upwards by a degree or so, we are looking at values of between nine and 13 degrees. into thursday, after what may well be a fine start, we see another band of rain, again some of the wet weather will be heavy, accompanied by some quite brisk winds but again we add a degree to the

temperature so ten to 13, may 14 temperature so ten to 13, may 1a degrees. now, for friday, we're watching this area of high pressure, long way to the south of us but notice ridge and the isobars, it is going to have some influence on our weather for friday so while there will still be some showers we will start to see drier weather, spells of sunshine and top temperatures again between nine and 13 degrees. as we get into the weekend, the madness really starts to show its hand. 0n starts to show its hand. on saturday, this weather system bringing heavy rain across the western side of the uk, we expect southerly wind were left temperatures to ten, 13, maybe 14 temperatures to ten, 13, maybe 1a degrees, but as that southerly wind continues to blow through saturday night, temperatures are not going to drop, in fact we will keep a feed of really mild and so overnight lows on saturday night likely to be between eight and 13 degrees, pretty extraordinary for a night in late november. now, this

forecast takes us through the remainder of november through to the end of the month. you can see more rain at times, it will often be windy, and it's dale's national it stays mild. as we head into the start of december, there are tentative signs that we might start to say something a little bit colder, we will keep a close eye on that and we will keep you up—to—date.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore. i'm karishma vaswani. the headlines: the desperate search for suvivors in indonesia, as a devastating earthquake kills more than 160 people and reduces many buildings to rubble. hospitals in west java province are now overwhelmed with at least 700 people being treated, many with serious injuries. hundreds of people are spending the night being treated here intense _ the night being treated here intense outside the hospital building. there is a fear also of after—shocks. we'll bring you the very latest on those ongoing rescue

efforts as soon as we get them. also on the programme: iran's footballers show their support for protesters