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Comment by notpc | Hacker News Reader

Manning indiscriminately leaked tons of diplomatic cables, as part of a personal vendetta against the US Army. It is without contention that the vast majority of the leaked cables revealed nothing that anyone considers wrongdoing. This wasn't the act of a whistle blower. It was the cowardly act of someone who put their own petty fantasies ahead of their solemn duty to protect the information they were entrusted with by the people of this country.

This is nothing but Obama pandering to the left.

EDIT: How telling that this comment has been flagged. Downvoting opinions you don't like is bad enough, trying to kill them altogether by flagging betrays a serious contempt for open discourse.

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Or it's Obama recognizing that someone with mental health issues the military is ill-equipped to address who has been in custody for seven years has been punished enough. Lawfare is not a bastion of liberalism, but has suggested enough is enough. Let's save the life sentences for the Walkers.

"Or it's Obama recognizing that someone with mental health issues the military is ill-equipped to address who has been in custody for seven years has been punished enough."

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.

> 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?

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.

It's not atypical for a president to wait until the end of their term to issue pardons and commutations, for legacy, or any other consideration.

That's true.

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.

I'm not privy to the internal motivations of the President (or anyone else for that matter), though I can think of at least one reason besides the two that you've listed: doing so earlier would have made the issue that much more of a political football, principles aside (which is one reason why pardons and commutations are left for the end). I fight against being cynical as a rule. I'm not going to go out of my way to argue that this decision was made purely on principle. That said, it doesn't need to be purely craven posturing either.

What need does Obama have to pander to anyone right now?

Legacy

It's been reported in the news for the last month that Obama has no intention of retiring from public life. He's going to be a major spokesman and "spiritual leader" of sorts for the Democrats going forward. The reason is that the Democrats don't have a good "bench." Most of the Democrats remaining in positions of power are creatures of big-city machine politics, not exactly likable populists who can counter Trump.

> The reason is that the Democrats don't have a good "bench."

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?

They have; most notably the Republicans when LBJ crushed them in a landslide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...). Or even -- again, the Republicans -- as recently as 2008 when Obama won (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...), and the Democrats has a supermajority across all three houses and beat McCain by a larger margin than Trump beat Clinton.

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.

> the Democrats has a supermajority across all three houses

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.

Sorry -- I'm not an American, I misunderstood what "supermajority" meant (I took it to mean a majority in each of the houses). My bad :).

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.

No, the DNC led the Democrats to political disaster by discouraging anyone other than HRC from running, and running an atrociously hubris-filled campaign

> No, the DNC led the Democrats ...

The President is the head of the party; the DNC traditionally is run by his people AFAIK.

That is incorrect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_National_Committee

Because the elections are a show that are only designed to keep the plebs angry at each other. 2016 was a great season of American Next Great President .. except Americas forgot it's just a TV show and not real. This intensifies that effect and makes the left forget about all the war, drones, spying and everything that will not change under this or any other administration.

The "pandering to the left" comment is in my opinion a bad political assumption.

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.

HN is one of the few places left for open political discourse with little partisanship or blundering hostility. Your comment/account suggests that you have no intention of continuing that trend. Down-votes represent a reaction to that, not your particular pov.

This hasn't been true of HN for years.

You have it backwards. I have this account because HN is not very open to political discourse unless you toe a very specific line. The Overton Window around here is very small.

I am talking about tone, not substance.

It's troubling that calling for witch hunts and firings over political opinions is okay, but a direct tone is a problem. Maybe our society would be better if that was flipped around.

Society already is that "flipped around" scenario, there are thousands of places on the web where you can yell and call people idiots/fascists/libtards/whatever. Have you ever seen it be productive ? Change people's minds on important issues ? No. To effect change you have to have respect and compassion for the person who's mind you are trying to change.

I didn't call anyone an idiot, a fascist, a libtard, or a 'whatever'. Good try at a straw man though.

it doesn't seem like they said you did.

Chelsea Manning brought us video footage of Baghdad airstrikes with civilian and press casualties. The motive was clear-cut: she wanted to expose hidden truths about the war in Iraq that might convince the American people it was no longer worth the cost. That's the definition of a whistleblower.

"[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...

>Her conscience could not bear to keep these human rights abuses secret

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.

> no idea what was in any of the information being leaked

After watching journalists get annihilated by an Apache missile strike, there is not a lot of room for confusion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

So because there happened to be something bad among the 250k documents, the act itself is completely absolved? If I were to murder 100 people randomly should I be absolved because it turned out one of them was a child molester?

> If I were to murder 100 people randomly should I be absolved because it turned out one of them was a child molester?

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.

>You sound ridiculous. Let's get to the real question.

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?

That's more like it! Naturally, the answer's no - there's plenty of material the public doesn't need to know about, and which could compromise ongoing operations if it were completely transparent. Sources who want to ethically be whistleblowers need to work with reputable press outlets, releasing only what is necessary to people they know will further trim the leak - until the final product does only good for the public.

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.

>Naturally, the answer's no - there's plenty of material the public doesn't need to know about

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.

> This can't be reconciled with saying Manning's actions were justified without post-hoc rationalizing.

> 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.

> post-hoc fallacy.

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.

When it comes to prescriptive definitions for words in the English language, I trust the concurrence of Merriam-Webster and Collins a bit more than I'm willing to trust your word. You won't convince me otherwise. If you feel a whistleblower who also causes unrelated data to be leaked "doesn't count," you are welcome to take that point of view up with the publishers. Have a great day!

>If you feel a whistleblower who also causes unrelated data to be leaked "doesn't count,"

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.

That is a fair way of looking at it (and consistent with prevailing definitions). However, Manning strongly suspected wrongdoing, made herself aware of it, and leaked a video in which it was blindingly obvious. She doesn't fall under your exclusion at all.

None of that is true as far as I'm aware. Do you have a source that Manning knew of the video ahead of time?

You betcha.

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...

Well I read his statement and its definitely interesting. It doesn't really help his case though. Some of his actions he was acting as a whistleblower (releasing videos of civilian deaths), other actions he was acting as someone who simply felt information should be leaked (diplomatic cables and such). The problem is that these were separate acts and so while he may have been a whistleblower for some of the releases, the others were plain leaking classified info. One doesn't absolve the other.

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.

I would argue Snowden's approach - working with the most reputable news outlets in the US to release only what was necessary - serves as a good example of ethical whistleblowing. Nonetheless, the intelligence community wanted him arrested after the NSA slides went public, and he will still be arrested if he sets foot back in the United States.

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.

I think 7 years is plenty although I don't think anyone should have to suffer solitary for any reason.

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.

>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.

Intelligence analyst, no knowledge or suspicion... uhhhh what?

Well "wrongdoing" is a little bit too generic. What I meant was breaking the law (or some severely immoral acts). His opinion regarding the diplomatic cable doesn't justify releasing it and claiming he's a whistleblower.

Oh, is it time to talk about cowardly people and the Iraq/Afghanistan war?

although this does heavily resemble a troll account so perhaps the downvotes are because this account is trying to stir up trouble instead of engage in civil discourse as opposed to downvoting to disagree with you.

Anyone else notice how "pandering to X" is the last argument of someone who refuses to think critically?

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.

What do you think is the appropriate sentence for this crime?

35 years with the possibility of parole in 10 years seemed pretty reasonable to me.

Why? Do you think 35 years is a greater deterrent than 15 years? Or are you concerned about rehabilitation? What is the logic?

Indiscriminately leaking thousands of diplomatic cables is the kind of thing that can change the world forever. It can cause major treaties to fall through, wars to start, etc.

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.

So what is the logic of 35 years? The way you describe it, it should be a life sentence. What is the purpose of prison in this case? And why not 15 years, or 50?

The purpose of prison is to strike fear deep into the hearts of those who would follow in Private Manning's footsteps. And actually, the sentence was 35 years with eligibility for parole in 8 years. There is always a certain arbitrariness to choosing sentences.

> It is without contention that the vast majority of the leaked cables revealed nothing that anyone considers wrongdoing.

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?

It is unjust to measure a sentence by the chance outcome (this would mean one person ends up with a light sentence and the other ends up with the book thrown at them for the same action due solely to chance). The evaluation must be in the action, not whether luck was or wasn't on your side. The fact that releasing so much classified information indiscriminately could have been very damaging to real people is the problem. Furthermore, simply saying no one was directly harmed is an incredibly low bar. The ability for diplomats to do their job has been significantly harmed by such a release. This does have real consequences for real people.

According to what theory of jurisprudence? Why are assault and murder treated differently then?

I'm not referencing any fleshed out theory that I'm aware of.

>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.

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