Bradley Manning received his sentence yesterday. But there was even more interesting news coming out of the courthouse where he was sentenced…

Bradley Manning plans to live as a woman named Chelsea and wants to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible, the soldier said Thursday, a day after being sentenced to 35 years in prison for sending classified material to WikiLeaks.

Manning announced the decision in a written statement provided to NBC’s “Today” show, asking supporters to refer to him by his new name and the feminine pronoun. The statement was signed “Chelsea E. Manning.”

“As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible,” the statement read.

Manning’s defense attorney David Coombs told “Today” in an interview that he is hoping officials at the military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., will accommodate Manning’s request for hormone therapy.

“If Fort Leavenworth does not, then I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure they are forced to do so,” Coombs said.

In a statement, the Army said it “does not provide hormone therapy or sex-reassignment surgery for gender identity disorder.”

Coombs did not respond to phone and email messages from The Associated Press on Thursday.

That we gave this perverted creature access to classified information in massive quantities is a scandal of major proportions.

A guy with a bad credit rating because he went through a messy divorce would have been disqualified, but somehow this deviant passes the psych evaluation?

The system is broken and getting worse. We should not be surprised that Manning released massive amounts of secret information blindly for the world to see.

And if you are one of the cretins who think this demented twerp is a “patriot,” please recognize that he released 750,000 pages of secret documents. He had no idea what was in them. He was just mad at fellow soldiers for being “hyper-masculine.”

The worst is there are people in responsible positions in the U.S. Army who somehow didn’t see a problem in putting someone of Manning’s quality in such a pivotal position. To call this a poor use of human resources is hardly sufficient.