If Obama only pardons one person (hopefully unlikely) Chelsea is by far the correct choice imo. She did a great service to the world and has been horribly mistreated by the prison system for it.
The one sided, anti-us nature of WikiLeaks, including perhaps incomplete content, hint at editorial digression with a clear motivation.
I can't come up with a single way this helped America, but it certainly hurt our prestige around the world.
Its rich people.
America's prestige was destroyed by none other than George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremmer, Rupert Murdoch, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice and several others, for a number of reasons, but most of all the 2003 invasion of Iraq, from which you can draw a straight line to ISIS.
How you "connect the dots" and manage to wander your way from Manning and land on Trump is beyond me. How you digress from WikiLeaks to Trump is curious.
Political influence may have elected Trump, but cones of silence, echo chambers and hacker mudslinging isn't really what got Trump elected.
Republican incompetence permitted his candidacy in the first place. Republican spite invoking a broad mistrust among suburbanites and rural America put him in office. If the people who voted Trump, are so easily deceived by falsified evidence and dubious non-journalism, then they were stupid enough to be deceived by anything, but wanted to be spiteful and hate something, and would have found something dubious to latch onto and excuse their shitty vote anyway.
>>How you digress from WikiLeaks to Trump is curious.
I think Wikileaks has become the avenue for unilateral anti-US sentiment. For example,. Recent leaks like the DNC emails reinforced a sense of political disenfranchisement that leading to shockingly poor voter turnout. Perhaps most misleading was that the DNC emails were selective, possibly edited for maximum impact. For a similar opinion see Edward Snowden's(!) comments:
http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2016/07/edward...
There is an information/spin war going on, with the military agencies of countries such as Russia directly participating. Wikileaks was the first shot at the USA, and Manning was a traitor who gave the ammo.
And mistreated? Perhaps, but not any more, and certainly quite less given the media scrutiny, than any generic prisoner.
There are plenty of more deserving souls out there, people like this -
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mom-of-young-man-jail...
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/5lc9z3/justice_dept_l...
Or intervene on behalf of people who take a deal for the sake of not being able to defend themselves.
Source: http://www.legalflip.com/Article.aspx?id=61&pageid=321
https://www.chelseamanning.org/learn-more/collateral-murder-...