Chelsea Manning's leaks did not damage US national security, says government report

In 2010 Wikileaks published classified documents provided by US solider Chelsea Manning that were said to be damaging to national security, but a newly-public report claims otherwise despite assessments about danger to civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ms Manning was sentenced to 35 years in a military prison for leaking the nearly 750,000 pages, but her sentence was commuted in May 2016 by President Obama.

The secret June 2011 Defence Department report, obtained by Buzzfeed through a Freedom of Information Act request, determined "with high confidence that disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former US leadership in Iraq".

It was prepared by 20 federal agencies who reviewed the leaked classified documents line-by-line.

The report also discussed that there would be no "significant impact" on US war operations in Afghanistan.

But, that does not mean that the Wikileaks action caused "no harm" at all as many news outlets have been reporting. In fact, the report stated that the leak could have done some "serious damage" to people who were non-US soldiers.

The statement seems to contradict with Defence's overall assessment of the impact on the war in Afghanistan given the day to day priorities of US soldiers on the ground. They are not just concerned with protecting their own troops, but worried about protecting intelligence assets, local interpreters and translators, and civilians as part of their duties.

"Cooperative Afghans, Iraqis, and other foreign interlocutors" would likely see the biggest impact of the leak, according to the report.

The documents also made public civilian casualty numbers, which the federal agencies determined could be used by opposition forces or the media to lessen support for US missions. This also puts US troops in more harm as a result, according to some experts.

Many in the defence community have called for a dishonourable discharge for Ms Manning.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said that one of the main priorities for the US now is to arrest Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. He is currently seeking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London because he has been dodging various countries' arrest warrants on him, primarily one from Sweden on rape and molestation charges which were dropped in May 2017.