Breach, Compliance Management, Data Security, Privacy, Threat Management

WikiLeaks whistleblower Manning hospitalized briefly after reported suicide attempt

Chelsea Manning, who is serving out a 35-year prison sentence for transmitting more than 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks, was briefly hospitalized Tuesday after an apparent suicide attempt.

The former U.S. Army intelligence officer, who was known as Bradley Manning at the time the documents were transmitted and who was convicted in 2013, was taken from Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks to a hospital and then released the same day, according to a report in The Daily Beast.

Manning began making her transition to female shortly after she began to serve her sentence. WikiLeaks founder and Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange, who remains in Ecuador's embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden in the WikiLeaks case, earlier this week tweeted a link to more than 1,200 emails regarding the Iraq War culled from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server.

Nancy Hollander, lead attorney on the former private first class's defense team, fumed over a Leavenworth official releasing "private confidential medical information" to the press without giving "a shred of information to her legal team."

“I had a privileged call scheduled with Chelsea at 2pm Leavenworth time yesterday, after the Army has now said she was hospitalized, but the Army gave the excuse—which I now believe to be an outright lie—that the call could not be connected although my team was waiting by the phone," Hollander said in a statement emailed to SCMagazine.com by Fight for the Future, explaining that the Army has said the earliest her legal team can speak to Manning is Friday morning. “We call on the Army to immediately connect Chelsea Manning to her lawyers and friends who care deeply about her well-being and are profoundly distressed by the complete lack of official communication about Chelsea's current situation.”


UPDATE: This story has been updated to include a statement from Nancy Hollander, lead attorney on Chelsea Manning's defense team.

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