Why Chelsea Manning Went to WikiLeaks, and What It Cost Her
nytimes.comREADME.txt: A Memoir, by Chelsea Manning On a Georgetown University stage in early 2017, the most famous government leaker of the previous century expressed his fervent and longstanding wish. “Something like the Pentagon Papers should be coming out several times a year,” Daniel Ellsberg, then 85, told the audience at a free-speech symposium.
There is far too much government secrecy keeping important information from the American public, a reality that makes courageous whistle-blowers a necessity, asserted the former military analyst who in 1971 had given The New York Times thousands of pages of classified documents — the secret history of America’s role in the Vietnam War.
Ellsberg, though he was charged under the Espionage Act, escaped being locked up for life because of legal technicalities. In that onstage appearance 46 years after the Pentagon Papers were published, he offered warm praise for Chelsea Manning, another military insider turned whistle-blower, whose prison sentence had been commuted by President Obama shortly before he left office.
But any potential leaker who reads Manning’s new memoir would be extremely unlikely to step forward in fulfillment of Ellsberg’s wish. “README.txt” describes in painful, affecting detail what happened as a result of the U.S.
