[NYTIMES] President B.O. on Tuesday largely commuted the remaining prison sentence of Chelsea Manning...formerly Bradley Manning before he decided to become a girl. He, or she or whatever it was, was a misfit Army intel analyst who decided to leak all the secrets he could lay hands on. Currently doing 35 years in Leavenworth and writing editorials for the New York Times....
, the army intelligence analyst convicted of an enormous 2010 leak that revealed American military and diplomatic activities across the world, disrupted the administration and made WikiLeaks, the recipient of those disclosures, famous.
First president we've ever had who was demonstrably on the other side.
The decision by Mr. Obama rescued Ms. Manning, who twice tried to kill herself last year, from an uncertain future as a transgender woman incarcerated at the men’s military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. She has been tossed in the slammer
Keep yer hands where we can see 'em, if yez please!
for nearly seven years, and her 35-year sentence was by far the longest punishment ever imposed in the United States for a leak conviction.
The act of clemency could be seen as a reversal, at least in part, of the B.O. regime’s unprecedented criminal crackdown on leaking: The administration has brought charges in about nine cases, about twice as many as under all previous presidents combined.
At the same time that Mr. Obama commuted the sentence of Ms. Manning, a low-ranking enlisted soldier at the time of her leaks, he also granted a pardon to Gen. James E. Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and one of the highest-ranking officials ensnared in the leak crackdown.