By Juliana McLeod, editorial editor

A former military intelligence analyst, who is currently serving a 35-year sentence in jail, opened up to the public about the reasons for her arrest and the problems she sees in the country. In the New York Times Op-ed article, “The Fog Machine of War,” Chelsea Manning explains how constitutional freedoms are becoming limited, which sparked her decision to notify the public of what the government wanted to keep disclosed.

“I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance,” she wrote.

In 2010, Manning, then Bradley Manning, was arrested for releasing top secret government documents to the public. The Edward Snowden-esque action resulted in Manning’s jail sentence, followed by the former analyst’s statement that he was going to live the rest of his life as a transgender female.

Throughout the article, Manning delves into the injustices she witnessed while working in Iraq, such as the U.S. government’s failure to step in on torture and killings it had intelligence on. Further, she continues on to explain that the process of bringing journalists to Iraq to cover the news is “far from unbiased.”

Journalists are chosen based on the likelihood that they will report what the U.S. wants them to report, rather than critical issues that raise eyebrows. In order to receive the chance to report internationally, journalists write news articles in a favorable fashion instead of reporting the truth of what they see, Manning claimed.

“Journalists have an important role to play in calling for reforms to the embedding system. The favorability of a journalist’s previous reporting should not be a factor,” Manning wrote.

This is the first the country has heard from Manning since her sentence in 2013, after she publicized 750,000 pages of private documents.

Photo courtesy Creative Commons.