Before we get to the news about President Obama commuting the sentence of Chelsea Manning, but first some background on the story. From Wikipedia:
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning, December 17, 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly three-quarters of a million classified or unclassified but sensitive military and diplomatic documents. Manning was sentenced in August 2013 to 35 years imprisonment, with the possibility of parole in the eighth year, and to be dishonorably discharged from the Army. Manning is a trans woman who, in a statement the day after sentencing, said she had felt female since childhood, wanted to be known as Chelsea, and desired to begin hormone replacement therapy. From early life and through much of her Army life, Manning was known as Bradley; she was diagnosed with gender identity disorder while in the Army.Regarding the Baghdad airstrike mentioned above:
Assigned in 2009 to an Army unit in Iraq as an intelligence analyst, Manning had access to classified databases. In early 2010, she leaked classified information to WikiLeaks and confided this to Adrian Lamo, an online acquaintance. Lamo informed Army Counterintelligence and Manning was arrested in May that same year. The material included videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike, and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables; and 482,832 Army reports that came to be known as the Iraq War Logs and Afghan War Diary. Much of the material was published by WikiLeaks or its media partners between April and November 2010.
The July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrikes were a series of air-to-ground attacks conducted by a team of two US AH-64 Apache helicopters in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, New Baghdad during the Iraqi insurgency which followed the Iraq War. The attacks received worldwide coverage following the leaking of 39 minutes of classified gunsight footage in 2010, provoking ongoing global discussion on the legality and morality of the attacks.
In the first strike, the crews of two Apaches directed 30mm cannon fire at a group of ten Iraqi men standing at a position (intersection) insurgents had previously used to shoot an American Humvee with small arms fire. Among the group were two Iraqi war correspondents working for Reuters, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. Namir accomplished his objective with three photos of the Humvee which included the large dirt pile used as cover by insurgents to attack the Humvee earlier that morning. Seven men (including Noor-Eldeen) were killed during this first strike, and Saeed Chmagh was injured.
...Reuters had unsuccessfully requested the footage of the airstrikes under the Freedom of Information Act in 2007. The footage was acquired from an undisclosed source in 2009 by the leaks website WikiLeaks, which released the footage on April 5, 2010 under the name Collateral Murder. Recorded from the gunsight Target Acquisition and Designation System of one of the attacking helicopters, the video shows the incident and the radio chatter between the aircrews and ground units involved.Frankly, the footage should have been released when Reuters requested it. There is nothing in it that should be "classified", other than the fact it is embarrassing to the United States because our forces killed an innocent reporter.
However, the Granai airstrike mentioned was a truly significant incident, which really doesn't get enough coverage:
The Granai airstrike, sometimes called the Granai massacre, refers to the killing of approximately 86 to 147 Afghan civilians by an airstrike by a US Air Force B-1 Bomber on May 4, 2009, in the village of Granai (sometimes spelled Garani or Gerani) in Farah Province, south of Herat, Afghanistan.Although Wikileaks lost the video in their own screw-up, this is still something American should admit. Note the government still has this footage nicely classified. But since Obama was resident when it happened, don't expect the mainstream media to be outraged over it.
The United States admitted significant errors were made in carrying out the airstrike, stating "the inability to discern the presence of civilians and avoid and/or minimize accompanying collateral damage resulted in the unintended consequence of civilian casualties".
The Afghan government has said that around 140 civilians were killed, of whom 22 were adult males and 93 were children. Afghanistan's top rights body has said 97 civilians were killed, most of them children. Other estimates range from 86 to 147 civilians killed. An earlier probe by the US military had said that 20–30 civilians were killed along with 60–65 insurgents. A partially released American inquiry stated "no one will ever be able conclusively to determine the number of civilian casualties that occurred". The Australian has said that the airstrike resulted in "one of the highest civilian death tolls from Western military action since foreign forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001".
As for the Iraq War Logs released by Manning via Wikileaks:
The Iraq War documents leak is the disclosure to WikiLeaks of 391,832 United States Army field reports, also called the Iraq War Logs, of the Iraq War from 2004 to 2009 and published on the Internet on 22 October 2010. The files record 66,081 civilian deaths out of 109,000 recorded deaths. The leak resulted in the Iraq Body Count project adding 15,000 civilian deaths to their count, bringing their total to over 150,000, with roughly 80% of those civilians.I added the bold part, because that cannot be emphasized enough. If you need to understand how ISIS came into being, just consider how many innocent civilians were killed by U.S. forces in Iraq. What would be your response if you saw innocent Americans being killed in large numbers like that?
Regarding the Afghan War Diary, that was a mess of epic proportions, showing Pakistan's involvement with Afghan rebels, civilian casualties, friendly fire casualties, and just a complete mess by the U.S. military.
Needless to say, shining a light on the U.S. military's massive incompetence (when they weren't just being bloodthirsty) does not go unpunished, and Chelsea Manning paid the full price with a 35 year conviction.
And now for the good news:
CNN:
It must have stuck in President Barack Obama's craw to deliver a win for WikiLeaks.
But that is effectively what he had to do to commute the 35 year sentence of Pvt. Chelsea Manning, who was convicted of committing one of the biggest and most embarrassing leaks of classified information in US history.
...Senior officials told CNN that Obama decided to act because Manning had expressed remorse and responsibility for her actions, and she had already served six years of a long sentence.Actually, the real reason may have come out about 5 days ago:
Obama may also have been motivated by humanitarian considerations, given that Manning is a transgender woman facing decades in an all-male prison and has attempted suicide several times.
Fox News:
WikiLeaks said Thursday that its founder Julian Assange will agree to be extradited to the U.S. if President Barack Obama grants clemency to Chelsea Manning.In Barack Obama's political game of chess, this was checkmate. If Assange is extradited, the U.S. can prosecute him, and the Democrats get their revenge for what he did to Hillary Clinton's campaign (although reality shows she did it to herself, but nobody ever accused Democrats of being realistic). If Assange goes back on his word, then the Democrats can call him a liar (although nothing he ever published was a lie). In politics, the Democrats, in their own warped minds, would consider themselves winners.
WikiLeaks made the announcement on Twitter and remained adamant that the Department of Justice case against Assange was unconstitutional.
Assange has been hiding out at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations. According to AFP, Assange fears Stockholm would extradite him to the U.S. after WikiLeaks published thousands of secret cables from the U.S. military, which were leaked by Manning during his time as a U.S. soldier.
So Obama commuted Manning's sentence, losing the leaker, but getting the publisher of the damaging leaks. That is the bigger victory for the forces of global elitism, because it takes out a source of press freedom, allowing the elitists to control the news cycle.
In other analysis of this story:
Bloomberg:
What makes Chelsea Manning -- whose sentence for leaking classified military and diplomatic files was commuted Tuesday by President Barack Obama -- different from Edward Snowden, who will not be pardoned for his disclosures of classified National Security Agency information? Whatever the White House may have said, it isn’t just the degree of secrecy of the leaked documents, Manning’s guilty plea or her gender transition.Sorry Noah Feldman, but one commutation does not prove the other would have happened, unless Assange would have offered to turn himself over to U.S. authorities for a Snowden pardon. Without Assange's offer, Manning might not have gotten the commutation.
The most important difference is simply this: Snowden’s freedom poses a foundational threat to the U.S. systems of national security and criminal justice. Snowden won’t be pardoned because he’s demonstrated serious gaps in both realms. If he were in prison today, however, by his choice or otherwise, there’s a good chance he would have had his sentence commuted.
The U.S. government has far too much leeway in what they call "classified information". Of the information leaked, from Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers all the way up to what Manning and Snowden revealed, more often than not, the leaks seem to be embarrassing information, and not information vital to the security of the United States.
Our government needs to be far more transparent than it is. Many of these whistleblowers should be honored, not prosecuted.
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