https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/18/chelsea-manning-readme-memoir-review/
"[...] We may know some facts of this story, but what we cannot know as an abstract fact — what we can only feel through Manning’s unfurling of narrative detail — is the texture of her choices: not only the anomie of an aughts chain bookstore, but the material conditions of a young millennial finding the cracks in the smooth, implacable face of mall culture and the doldrums of a major recession. [...]
Manning was incarcerated at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and sentenced to 35 years. Her imprisonment included long periods in solitary confinement and other forms of severe and inhumane punishment, including the denial of gender-affirming hormones. In 2015, after more than a year of litigation, and other forms of resistance by Manning herself, including a hunger strike, Manning received hormone treatment. Responding to massive public pressure, President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence, and she was released on May 17, 2017. [...]
The perverse secret of our era, one that Manning details in multiple surreal encounters with military bureaucracy, is that everything is already known. Manning is canny in her refusal to simply embrace the confessional mode often demanded of trans writers and whistleblowers alike. Other insider memoirs may open with men in power suits stalking through the halls of the Pentagon while poring over “For the President’s Eyes Only” documents. But Manning’s opens onto the hellscape of the post-2008 financial crash. The hushed sublimity of the halls of the Rand Corp. circa 1970 has given way. In 2010 the distinction between the crucibles of power and the strip mall has dissolved in a monochromatic late-capitalist soup, or something like what critic Anna Kornbluh terms “Fifty Billion Shades of Gray.” [...]
In the world to which Manning has access, everything is classified and nothing is secret. Not Manning’s gayness, which she revealed to her father only to be met with an “Okay?” as he threw up his hands. Not the contents of military computers in Iraq: “In our supposedly high-security office, people kept the passwords to laptops containing government secrets stuck to those same laptops, written on Post-its.” And not the “classified courier box” containing a report on “significant actions” in Iraq that Manning was asked to create “for internal purposes only.”
When Manning turned over the report, the public affairs office “removed the classified stamps” and sent it directly to the Iraqi press. The “classification system doesn’t exist to keep secrets safe,” Manning writes. “It exists to control the media.” [...]
Late in the book, Manning charts her organization of and involvement in a prison strike at Leavenworth. Her absorbing account begins with her years-long struggle to receive hormones. While awaiting the outcome of this legal battle, Manning built friendships within the prison, notably with the barbers. Though she was required to receive biweekly haircuts, the barbers treated her kindly, soothing her through the violent, dysphoria-inducing procedure, even improvising to provide the feel of a salon experience: “Sometimes they’d wash my hair to make it feel more like a beauty appointment than a ritual shearing.” Were all these barbers queer and trans? Did they treat her gently because they were bolstering their own ranks? No. “The other inmates were supportive of my pursuit of gender reassignment, not necessarily because they believed deeply in trans rights, but because compelling the government to allow me to take hormones was fighting back against the prison. A victory for me would be a victory for prisoners.”
Just as the prison barbers supported Manning through the torment of a forced haircut, she staked her own welfare with the welfare of the rest of the incarcerated population, organizing a general strike against the guards’ arbitrary disruption of mealtime. The narrative that unfolds over these pages forms a sublime arc within the memoir. These sections give us a peek into Manning’s political passions and allow us to experience the feelings that have informed her decisions to stand in solidarity with others. For serious legal reasons, Manning simply cannot say certain things about her actions around the WikiLeaks releases (indeed, sections are still classified and blacked out). But this Leavenworth section carries the broad, revolutionary affect that the rest of the memoir must be more cautious around.
Together with the Barnes & Noble disclosure sequence and the events that follow, Manning’s description of the prison strike makes up the heart of her memoir. The two narratives can be read as binary stars, poles of a single, embedded fable in which we don’t have to adjudicate between our passions or parse them for a legal argument. [...]"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/27/readmetxt-by-chelsea-manning-review-secrets-and-spies
"[...] README.txt also covers Manning’s early life – and how the army appeared to offer an escape from a traumatising upbringing. But once there she was targeted by drill sergeants for her “slight, childish” appearance and subjected to homophobic insults. In this turbo-charged masculine environment, her struggles with gender identity (she would later come out as trans) became more pronounced: “[It was] less about being a woman trapped in a man’s body than about the innate incoherence between the person I felt myself to be and the one the world wanted me to be,” she writes.
In Iraq the bullying continued. After she witnessed the death of a colleague, Manning felt how “with enough grief, adrenaline and fear”, war can turn anyone “amoral, even malevolent”. She began to wrestle with two life-changing secrets: who she was, and what she saw.
At times, README.txt is vague; some sections have been blacked out, presumably on legal advice. Manning claims to have seen more than she ever disclosed, things she “will never reveal”. “I know this is annoying,” she writes. “But I have already faced serious consequences for sharing information I believe to be in the public interest; I am uninterested in facing them again.” Even so, what remains is a compelling, taut account of what she has experienced, and a persuasive justification of how she behaved.
At her trial, lawyers convinced Manning to issue a mea culpa: “I look back at my decisions and wonder how on earth could I … believe I could change the world for better over the decisions of those with the proper authority?” Today, her view has changed. “What I did,” she concludes, “was an act … of forcing progress.” In an age of digital communication, it is likely that today’s politicians and military leaders “lose” far more information than is ever logged in our national archives for future study. Manning’s efforts preserved a trove of evidence that one hopes will prompt corrective measures. Five years after President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence, history continues to vindicate her actions. [...]"
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