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Obama is seriously considering a pardon for Chelsea Manning
- Rotten194 10y agoIf 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.
- frozenport 10y agoI disagree, I think you can draw a straight line from him to the election of Donald Trump. 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.
- totalZero 10y agoThe US wasn't founded to serve as a beacon of prestige. The point of the government has more to do with its obligations to, and relationship with, its people.
- frozenport 10y agoBut I don't see anything in the documents that showed a government working against its own people. The content of the documents is mostly matter-of-fact (or even sarcastic) analysis of other countries. In a few cases it reveled intelligence sources, for example Lebanese politicians politicians working against the destructive foreign influence in their country - more controversially, I think, there was a US "spy" in the German government. I'm not German, so I have no problem with this. In other cases, for example in South Sudan, it shows the US government working, perhaps clandestinely, to uphold justice and help the people avoid ethnic cleansing.
- ionised 10y ago> The US wasn't founded to serve as a beacon of prestige. The point of the government has more to do with its obligations to, and relationship with, its people. Its rich people.
- totalZero 10y agoSome comments go "zing!" without going "aha!"
- rasz_pl 10y agoDid you maybe mean anti-us nature of US foreign policy?
- interNeds 10y agoThere's a bit of cognitive dissonance in your claims. 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.
- frozenport 10y agoI agree with most of your post, certainly the ideological bankruptcy of the GOP left trump the best candidate, and no doubt America's "good guy" image was harmed by Bush. Although as satire of the time ("Team America: World Police"), the USA was certainly not seen as impotent. Just dumb, maybe evil. >>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-snowden-wikileaks-dnc-226386 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rpedela 10y agoFor the sake of argument, let's say that WikiLeaks is anti-US. How does that matter? The US itself is ruining it's reputation by conducting mass surveillance, torture (at least during Bush years), drone assainations, etc. WikiLeaks just happens to be the vehicle for releasing classified information about that. In other words, if the US wasn't doing that then there wouldn't be much "embarrassing" material for WikiLeaks to release.
- dvdhnt 10y agoWhat great service did he do? 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-jailed-for-three-years-without-charges-died-of-a-broken-heart https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mom-of-young-man-jail... https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/5lc9z3/justice_dept_louisiana_parish_jailed_hundreds/ 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. http://www.innocenceproject.org http://www.innocenceproject.org
- vinay427 10y agoThe first two links you posted don't seem to apply, as far as I know, because the President can only pardon people convicted of federal crimes against the US. Source: http://www.legalflip.com/Article.aspx?id=61&pageid=321 http://www.legalflip.com/Article.aspx?id=61&pageid=321
- ionised 10y agoExposed American war crimes? https://www.chelseamanning.org/learn-more/collateral-murder-video https://www.chelseamanning.org/learn-more/collateral-murder-...
- interNeds 10y agoI predict suicide within 5 years of pardon. Manning has such an odd personality, it's hard to discern how much is the person and how much is the influence of the extraordinary circumstances swirling around the individual. The really strange part in all this is whether preventing suicide through incarceration is at all ethical. What kind of acceptance and support awaits Manning upon being granted freedom? Can a post-pardon suicide be prevented?
- erikpukinskis 10y agoUm, predicting someone's suicide is gross. Just give them a chance at a healthy life. If you are concerned send help.
- rasz_pl 10y agoYes, just after he closes Gitmo, like he promised _before_ getting elected.
- lobster_johnson 10y agoYou do realize that Obama has tried to find several ways to do this, and has been shut down by the Republicans every time? Congress ultimately decided to keep Guantanamo, and left zero room to find a single solution; Obama had no choice but to negotiate transfers with other countries (a long and problematic process) while at the same time let the court system handle the remaining cases. Obama could perhaps have tried harder, but he has had a lot of resistance on many fronts from the GOP. He has almost succeeded at this point, anyway; there are only about 40 prisoners left. [1] [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/with-final-detainee-transfer-obamas-guantanamo-policy-takes-its-last-breath/2016/12/28/dfdf8cb2-cd0f-11e6-a747-d03044780a02_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/with-...
- harry8 10y agoPresidential pardons are corrupt by definition. They transgress the rule of law and equality before it. If you think someone needs a presidential pardon, just back up and think "which law is horrible and unjust and must be reformed." If not the law maybe the courts. Pardon at best is a fig leaf over a gaping wound. At worst, well pick them out yourself - the best you can say about it is that it looks really, really bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controvers...
- sparky_z 10y agoPardons can certainly be corrupt, but I don't think they're corrupt by definition. I think of them as a last line of defense-in-depth against unjust convictions. After all, no organization made up of humans can be perfect, and the court system (of any nation) is no exception. Of course, pardons are misusable. I would support, for example, disallowing presidential pardons in the last year of a presidential term, so that Presidents can't cut and run from the political consequences of their last minute pardons. That could cut down on egregious abuses like Clinton's.
- harry8 10y agoIf the conviction is unjust either the law is unjust and should be reformed or the system is unjust in not providing a reasonable, equitable and useful avenue of appeal to overturn the injustice. Corrupt by definition because it is always a corruption of "equality before the law"
- sparky_z 10y agoSuppose we abolished presidential pardons. Now, couldn't the exact same argument be used in favor of abolishing the final layer of appeals courts? And then the layer below that? Keep in mind that many (most?) people consider interrelated checks and balances between the different branches of government to be a good thing. And the system was designed to be biased in favor of false negatives in order to reduce as much as possible the incidents of false positives (wrongful convictions). I consider that a feature, not a bug.
- oshoham 10y agoChelsea Manning is a trans woman, please don't misgender her.
- sctb 10y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13379559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13379559 and marked it off-topic.
- oshoham 10y agoI'm a little disappointed, honestly, because now the original comment that I responded to is still on the parent thread, without any response that suggests that it's not okay to misgender a trans person.
- xyzzy4 10y agoChelsea Manning isn't reading the HN thread, so why does it matter what gender you use? It's like telling someone to use Kolkata instead of Calcutta.
- sctb 10y ago> It's like telling someone to use Kolkata instead of Calcutta. No, it's not like that for everyone. Part of having a civil discussion within a community is understanding and accepting our differences—especially ideological ones. That means recognizing when what you say has the effect of moving us away from our shared goal of gratifying our intellectual curiosity and adjusting accordingly. It might not be possible to succeed in this all of the time, but we have to try, and this is a case with an obvious path forward.
- sophspot 10y agoChelsea Manning may not be reading HN, but other trans people are. Misgendering one of them is misgendering all of them by proxy.
- toor2 10y agoRude. A trans person other than Chelsea could be reading this right now. If you do not respect her identity then it could be (and should be imo) interpreted as disregard for trans people in general
- PhilWright 10y agoThe best use of pardons would be to release thousands of people that have been convicted under the three strikes and your out schemes. Not all will deserve to be released, but someone that used up there last strike with shop lifting or stealing a car does not deserve to be put away for the rest of their life.