From graphic videos of US military assaults in Iraq and Afghanistan, to candid comments by heads of state, secrets leaked by transgender army private Chelsea Manning caused Washington major embarrassment and upset relations with its allies.
In July 2010, Manning — then a male soldier known as Bradley — was arrested over the release of a huge trove of more than 700,000 classified military and diplomatic documents via WikiLeaks.
On Wednesday, Manning was released from the prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas owing to a commutation of her sentence by president Barack Obama before he left office.
Now 29, Manning said at the time she hoped to encourage debate about America’s wars, but the leaked files stretched far beyond the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, with diplomatic cables embarrassing senior officials on nearly every continent.
Here is a chronological summary of the material disclosed by Manning:
— The first document published by WikiLeaks that Manning admitted to having leaked was a diplomatic cable from the US Embassy in Iceland released on February 18, 2010.
— Starting in November 2010, five major global news organizations — The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais — collaborated with WikiLeaks to partially publish more than a quarter of a million State Department cables from US embassies and consulates dated 1966 to 2010.
— Manning admitted to the “willful transmission” of a video that showed a US attack helicopter mowing down Iraqi civilians in July 2007. Dubbed “collateral murder” by WikiLeaks, the video was made public by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during a news conference in Washington in April 2010.
— Manning also acknowledged transmitting a confidential video of a US air strike on the Afghan village of Granai, where more than a hundred civilians lost their lives in May 2009.
— More than 90,000 documents linked to the war in Afghanistan were published in July 2010, followed in October of that year by more than 400,000 others connected to the conflict in Iraq. The reports showed US troops ignoring torture by local allies and killing civilians on a number of occasions.
— Confidential files related to 779 detainees who passed through the military prison at Guantanamo Bay — leaked by Manning and published in April 2011 — revealed new details about their treatment at the “war on terror” prison.
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