Chelsea Manning’s military leaks had no significant impact on U.S. interests: Pentagon report

Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning’s unauthorized release of hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military documents to WikiLeaks in 2010 failed to significantly affect American interests, according to a newly released government assessment.

A federal multi-agency review undertaken in 2011 after the soldier shared the documents with WikiLeaks concluded that their release had little impact on the country’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the report suggests, contrary to previous claims raised by Manning’s critics.

The government concluded with “high confidence” that Manning’s disclosure of over 400,000 records related to the Iraq War would “have no direct personal impact on current and former U.S. leadership in Iraq,” according a highly-redacted copy of the assessment obtained by BuzzFeed News through a Freedom of Information Act request and published online Tuesday.

Manning’s separate disclosure of over 90,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan was not expected to have any “significant ’strategic impact’” on U.S. operations, the same report concluded, but its authors nevertheless cautioned that the leak of those documents had the potential to cause “serious damage” to “intelligence sources, informants and the Afghan population.”

Opponents of WikiLeaks and Manning have long argued that the soldier’s disclosures had a detrimental affect on U.S. national security — a determination that doesn’t appear anywhere in the copy of the report obtained by BuzzFeed.

“It should not be a surprise to anyone that WikiLeaks is right and that its opponents are inaccurate and unprofessional,” WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange told The Washington Times Wednesday.

Manning was arrested in 2010 and charged with supplying WikiLeaks with a trove of classified State and Defense Department documents accessed during her deployment in the Iraq War as an Army intelligence analyst. She was convicted of related counts including espionage and theft in 2013 and sentenced to 35 years in prison, but former President Obama commuted the bulk of her remaining stint behind bars before leaving office in January.

Military prosecutors selectively cited the previously unpublished assessment during the soldier’s court-martial, BuzzFeed News reported. The report was commissioned by the Defense Department and finalized in June 2011 after representative from over 20 federal agencies including the FBI, NSA and CIA reviewed more than 740,000 pages of documents “known or believed compromised” by WikiLeaks.

Manning did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but previously defended her conduct during a recent interview with ABC News.

“I was always willing to accept responsibility for those decisions … my intentions were pure and clean,” the soldier said.