Playing Devil's Advocate: if this is the case, why did it take until the last week of his tenure as President for him to do this?
No, this smells of "legacy". Obama could have done this years ago.
Because the petition on which action was taken was filed by Manning in November, and the review that goes into making the determination takes nonzero staff and Presidential time, and wasn't the sole thing the White House was doing.
However, if the supposed motivation is because somebody is suffering...why wait another day, another week, another month, another year?
If this took place before the election, you could call it a principled decision.
If this took place immediately after the election, you could call it a cautious-but-nevertheless-sound decision that might have otherwise been passed on to a (presumably friendly) successor.
Instead, this has taken place three days before he leaves office.
Manning hasn't gone anywhere in seven years. This was not based on a long bout of soul-searching or a sudden new development.
This was a move to either bolster Obama's legacy, or grease the wheels for a post-Presidential opportunity.
facepalm
Obama led the Democrats to political disaster; I wonder if any party since WWII has been in as bad a political position. Why would they want his continued leadership after he leaves office?
I won't wade into the debate about Obama's future, and will point out that I think the USA's effective two-party system is pretty busted, but yeah -- the USA has a pretty polar political past.
In 2008 they did not have a 'supermajority', usually interpreted to mean a veto-proof or filibuster-proof majority, in any house of Congress.
Also, today Republicans control both houses and the Governer's seat in approx. 33% of states.
Finally, the Dems can't win in some states due to gerrymandering and voting laws that prevent even a majority of Democratic votes from winning the election.
I'm not saying the Democrats weren't roundly drubbed in the last election, just refuting the belief that this might be the worst position a political party has been in since WW2. I hadn't thought of the state legislature, however! That's a good point.
The President is the head of the party; the DNC traditionally is run by his people AFAIK.
If you look at previous opinion polls on Manning (see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/24/manning-sentence-po...), the opinion seems less to fall on traditional "left / right" lines. If anything, there is some bias towards younger people being more approving of Chelsea Manning compared to older people.
The demographics in the Manning polls actually are very similar to other tangentially related topics in United States polls, eg how people feel about Snowden and how people feel about (edit for clarity) massive government cyber surveillance.
I personally think the decision is more than just pandering, but if Obama is pandering to someone, he is pandering to the youth.
"[She] didn’t like that people were being killed, particularly the citizens, innocent people," Campbell said. "I remember us specifically talking about how we were having a hard time getting information on how many people were being killed."
"On one of [her] last visits to Boston, Manning told Keith Rose, a friend [she] had met at Brandeis, of [her] misgivings about Iraq because of what [she] was learning as an intelligence analyst. "[She] expressed a feeling to me like how messed up the situation is," Rose said. "[She] said things like, 'If more people knew what was going on over there, they would not support the war.'"
Manning: “The thing that got me most was discovering that 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police for printing ‘anti-Iraqi’ literature” had in truth printed a “benign political critique” against the corruption in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s cabinet.
Her conscience could not bear to keep these human rights abuses secret, and she revealed them to a world that needed to know about them. I am getting very tired of a narrative in which Manning's actions are mischaracterized as a "vendetta against the US Army" and a "cowardly act." It's an insidious and despicable way to shift attention away from civilian deaths in war and the mistreatment of detainees, the latter of which Manning continues to experience even today.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/who-is-wik...
Manning had no idea what was in any of the information being leaked. This is not the actions of a conscientious objector. The amount of re-writing history going on here is absurd.
After watching journalists get annihilated by an Apache missile strike, there is not a lot of room for confusion.
You sound ridiculous. Let's get to the real question.
> So because there happened to be something bad among the 250k documents, the act itself is completely absolved?
In short, yes. Her 7-year sentence has already been quite enough.
I will concede that the outlet through which the leaks were published didn't meet the standards to which we usually hold investigative reporting. Manning chose to disclose all cables in confidence to a team she felt could sift through them for evidence of wrongdoing. That team then proved themselves irresponsible by publishing everything. They should have been far more selective about what they disclosed to the public.
I don't blame the source here. I absolutely do blame the coverage.
It's not ridiculous, its a reductio ad absurdum of the principle you seem to be employing, that a chance positive result of an action justifies the original action. Or are you just making things up as you go along to reach the conclusion you prefer?
>In short, yes.
OK, here's a more down to earth scenario. Say I'm a high level administration official and I have access to all classified information. Should I release literally all of it because surely somewhere in the dump will be some wrongdoing by somebody? Surely your answer to this must be no?
Here's a quote from Snowden on just that:
"I never published a single document on my own because I believe that the model, the ideal of American government is actually quite a shrewd one,” he said. “I tried to emulate the model of checks and balance. Instead of making a unilateral decision, that ‘The world must know,’ I worked with the free press, institutions that we trust, American journalists.”
Could Chelsea Manning have chosen a better way to release the documents than WikiLeaks? Absolutely. Do I still consider her a whistleblower? Yes - though I would never claim she was as responsible about it as someone like Snowden.
This can't be reconciled with saying Manning's actions were justified without post-hoc rationalizing.
>Do I still consider her a whistleblower? Yes
Then clearly the meaning of words mean nothing to you. Which is fair, a lot of that going around lately.
> Then clearly the meaning of words mean nothing to you.
I'm not sure you understand the meaning of the post-hoc fallacy.
If you want to get strict about definitions, look up "whistleblower." You'll find it covers anyone who acts as an informant to reveal something illicit within an organization. For someone like yourself who seems to be eager to find a reason to dislike Chelsea Manning: yes, there's such a thing as an irresponsible whistleblower.
You're just misquoting me.
>If you want to get strict about definitions, look up "whistleblower."
If you rely on dictionaries written at a third grade reading level as your source of meaning, you're doing it wrong.
Again with the mischaracterizations! You should stop that.
I feel someone who had no knowledge or suspicion of wrongdoing and no intention to just reveal wrongdoing does not count as a whistleblower. Pretty simple.
From "Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of the 12 July 2007 aerial weapons team or AW team video", a statement by Manning to the US Army:
The video depicted several individuals being engaged by an aerial weapons team. At first I did not consider the video very special, as I have viewed countless other war porn type videos depicting combat. However, the recording of audio comments by the aerial weapons team crew and the second engagement in the video of an unarmed bongo truck troubled me.
As Showman and a few other analysts and officers in the T-SCIF commented on the video and debated whether the crew violated the rules of engagement or ROE in the second engagement, I shied away from this debate, instead conducting some research on the event. I wanted to learn what happened and whether there was any background to the events of the day that the event occurred, 12 July 2007.
Using Google I searched for the event by its date by its general location. I found several new accounts involving two Reuters employees who were killed during the aerial weapon team engagement. Another story explained that Reuters had requested for a copy of the video under the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA. Reuters wanted to view the video in order to understand what had happened and to improve their safety practices in combat zones. A spokesperson for Reuters was quoted saying that the video might help avoid the reoccurrence of the tragedy and believed there was a compelling need for the immediate release of the video.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/01/bradley-mannin...
I can accept that the whistleblower label isn't completely incorrect, but the problem is that people use it in place of leaker in an effort to establish moral justification for all his leaks. He wasn't kept in prison for 7 years because he was a whistleblower, it was because he was a leaker. But he was also a whistleblower.
Whistleblowers in the US government can and do go to prison, regardless of whether they're responsible about it or not. I think clemency in this case (shortening the sentence for disclosure of the cables to 7 years) is the least the President could have done.
Please use "she," by the way. Chelsea's gender and correct pronoun are some of the most well-known in the world by now. Nobody can claim ignorance anymore.
And yeah I generally just avoid using the pronoun or use she when forced to. But the article you linked had pictures of "him" at the bottom and so using he was unconscious.
Intelligence analyst, no knowledge or suspicion... uhhhh what?
Political pandering is intended to help you buy favor. The President of the United States does not need to pander to the people who elected him. It would be more like pandering if he did this some time before the final days of his term. And typically, pandering happens to gain the favor of the other side, which this will certainly not do.
Therefore it's much less likely to be pandering than, say, commuting the sentence of a mentally unstable person who's been in jail for 7 years, attempted suicide twice, and needs medical assistance they can't get in jail.
Just as an example, Manning's leaks have been cited as a major contributor to the Arab Spring that has left thousands of people dead, thrown Europe into turmoil, and is in the process of potentially ending the EU due to backlash against migration.
In honesty, the punishment should be death, but given that Manning was a deeply troubled young man, 35 years with the possibility of parole in 10 years is fine with me.
Right, and nobody is contending that. Rather, the act of commuting her sentence is contending that 8 years is a sufficient punishment for a leak which hasn't caused any concrete harm to US citizens or interests. 35 years is more than most rapists and many murderers serve, do you really think it was a just sentence?
>Why are assault and murder treated differently then?
Well, assault covers a wide range of violent actions, some of which are very unlikely to cause death and others that are highly likely to cause death. Thus it makes sense to treat the actions differently because the likely outcome is different.