Breaking: Obama Commutes Chelsea Manning

President Barack Obama on 17 January, Tuesday afternoon commuted Chelsea Manning’s sentence for leaking documents to Wikileaks in 2010. Manning was sentenced to 35 years, tortured and left without hope for being a whistle-blower of United States war crimes. She was viewed by most of the public as a hero.

The 29-year-old transgender US Army private, born Bradley Manning, is slated to be freed on 17 May instead of her scheduled 2045 release.

Manning was sentenced in 2013 for her role in leaking diplomatic cables that were evidence of war crimes by the United States. The cables were leaked to the transparency group, WikiLeaks.

The leak was one of the largest breaches of classified material in US history.

The Obama administration has been under intensive public pressure to release Manning. The private was tortured — held in solitary confinement — and attempted suicide twice last year at the male military prison where held in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Manning went on a hunger strike last year, that ended after the military agreed to provide her with gender dysphoria treatment.

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee, among the first and strongest to pressure toward Manning’s freedom,  issued a statement moments after the victory, part of which is below:

Today is a happy day for us. We helped to organize some of the first protests in support Manning, and have long championed her release.

As a whistleblower, Manning enriched our democracy by making public information about misconduct, including war crimes, carried out by our government. She did so, because she wanted the public to have a more informed, more robust discussion about US foreign policy.

And we did, as evidenced by the number of journalists, academics, and activists who relied on the information she helped make public.

Manning paid a terrible price though, one which she should never have had to. She was sentenced to the outrageous sentence of 35 years in prison, the longest anyone ever faced for leaking information. On top of that, we know that the conditions of her pretrial confinement were torture and we know she continued to face and cruel and unusual conditions throughout her incarceration at the hands of the US government.

Manning is going free thanks thanks to the enormous public outcry in her favor. Her prosecution came in the context of an unprecedented war on whistleblowers waged by the Obama Administration. Without a movement organized from the grassroots up putting the government on notice that people had Chelsea Manning’s back it is unlikely that we would be celebrating today.

Only days ago, Wikileaks’ Julian Assange agreed to extradition if the Obama Administration granted Chelsea Manning pardon.