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“Last week,
Chelsea made a decision to end her life,” attorneys Chase
Strangio, Vincent Ward and Nancy Hollander said in a joint
statement. “Her attempt to take her own life was unsuccessful.
The statement confirms earlier media reports that said Manning's
hospitalization last week near the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, resulted from a suicide attempt.
The lawyers said Manning, 28, is under close supervision and
expects to remain on that status for several weeks.
They said the U.S. military committed a “gross breach of
confidentiality” for revealing her “personal health information”
and hospitalization to the press.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for
comment. The U.S. Army had not officially confirmed the
hospitalization was due to a suicide attempt.
Manning, a former intelligence analyst in Iraq, is serving a
35-year sentence after a 2013 military court conviction of
providing more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables
and battlefield accounts to WikiLeaks. It was the biggest breach
of classified materials in U.S. history.
Among the files that Manning turned over to WikiLeaks in 2010
was a gunsight video of a U.S. Apache helicopter firing at
suspected Iraqi insurgents in 2007. A dozen people were killed,
including two Reuters news staff.
Manning, who was born male but identifies as a woman, in May
appealed to a military court to overturn her court-martial
conviction.
Her lawyers have said she was held in unlawful pretrial
detention for nearly a year and that her punishment is
excessive, a claim civil liberties and government transparency
advocates have echoed.
(Editing by Jeffrey Hodgson)
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