Chelsea Manning sentence commuted after seven years of brutal imprisonment
By
Patrick Martin
18 January 2017
President Obama commuted the 35-year prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the military intelligence analyst who made public evidence of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, allowing Manning to go free on May 17, after completing over seven years in prison.
Army Pfc Bradley Manning was arrested by the Army in 2010 after he turned over military and State Department files to WikiLeaks. Manning had copied hundreds of thousands of internal Army “incident logs” describing US soldiers’ experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, which proved that civilian deaths were far higher than reported. This material included the video of an American helicopter attack on civilians in Baghdad in which 16 people were gunned down, including two Reuters journalists. WikiLeaks published the video on the Internet with the title “Collateral Murder.”
Manning also provided WikiLeaks with some 250,000 diplomatic cables from American embassies around the world, which exposed official US lying, efforts to subvert governments, and dossiers on the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, showing most of them had no significant role in terrorist operations.
Manning always maintained that her goal was to inform the American public about the criminal actions being carried out by US military forces in their name. She pleaded guilty to 20 of 22 charges in August 2013 and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. After the trial, Manning announced that she was transgendered and took the name Chelsea Manning. She said she was seeking hormone therapy and requesting gender reassignment surgery, which the Army has repeatedly denied.
The prosecution and horrific treatment of Manning is itself a crime, for which the…