Twitter followers of Chelsea Manning were probably left open-mouthed this week after they saw the whistleblower accusing her former ally and Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald of being “greedy and unprincipled” in an unanticipated attack.
Manning said on Twitter that she was “embarrassed” for ever seeing Greenwald as a friend and wanted to return him the $10,000 in donation money he had previously handed her – but just didn’t have the sum at the moment.
“Last night during the floods i decided that im no longer going to be afraid of saying what’s on my mind anymore or taking a stand from the people that i once considered allies but who have chosen to bash, harass, humiliate, intimidate, and lie to get ahead,” the whistleblower added in a follow-up tweet.
Manning, who spent seven years in jail for leaking secret military info to WikiLeaks, has given no clear indication of any specific grievances against the former ally that could have caused such an outrage.
Greenwald, who resigned from the Intercept last year, accusing the outlet’s editors of censoring his reporting on Joe Biden’s deals in China and Ukraine, didn’t hesitate to respond to Manning’s “vague” accusations:
“Friendships that depend on political agreement were never "friendships," just cynical transactions,” he shortly tweeted in response. “When she was in prison trying repeatedly to kill herself, I was one of the only one who visited, spent hours on the phone, raising money for her. No good deed goes unpunished.”
The journalist later accused people “on the left” of mistaking “friendships for political agreements” and turning “on each other”.
In a series of tweets, Greenwald has also given a hint at what could have possibly provoked Manning’s long-in-the-making attack.
He shared screenshots of Manning’s apparent messages back from 2018, where she criticised the journalist for taking part in Tucker Carlson’s shows on Fox News:
“You’re losing a lot of friends here,” Manning wrote.
Many on Twitter have suggested that it is exactly Greenwald’s shift to the right that disappointed the whistleblower, who made her name by leaking thousands of hundreds of classified and sensitive military data, including a famous ‘Collateral Murder’ video from Iraq. The controversial clip, that was published on WikiLeaks, showed American helicopter crew killing off and then laughing at civilians during a 2007 Baghdad airstrike. Manning was commuted by Barack Obama in 2017 over the whistleblower charges but was again imprisoned in 2018 for “contempt” after refusing to testify against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange.