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Obama to Commute Chelsea Manning's Sentence

wait, so we let a tranny in the army then are surprised they leaked shit due to mental instability?
 
EatLeadCommie said:
Do you think we should be stuck footing the bill for this clown's surgery or are you just shaking your head at my insensitivity to his gender confusion?
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Just commenting on the predictability of the view and rhetoric.
 
I'm a bit bothered by this 1. While I agree the original sentence went overboard, I have no sympathy for Manning. She is no Ellsberg or even Snowden. I'm cool with a legitimate corporate or government whistle blower exposing illegal or unethical activity. But my recollection is that is not what Manning did. She just gave Assange a ton of classified information because she was generally unhappy or something. I don't mind an overly stiff sentence in a case like this as a deterrent to potential future offenders.

To me, Snowden is the tougher case. I would think for Obama too. He is obviously sincere and high minded, though I probably don't want him to have done what he did. The easy resolution for him, though is just to stay in Russia.
 
cville deac said:
I'm a bit bothered by this 1. While I agree the original sentence went overboard, I have no sympathy for Manning. She is no Ellsberg or even Snowden. I'm cool with a legitimate corporate or government whistle blower exposing illegal or unethical activity. But my recollection is that is not what Manning did. She just gave Assange a ton of classified information because she was generally unhappy or something. I don't mind an overly stiff sentence in a case like this as a deterrent to potential future offenders.

To me, Snowden is the tougher case. I would think for Obama too. He is obviously sincere and high minded, though I probably don't want him to have done what he did. The easy resolution for him, though is just to stay in Russia.
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And, of course, Putin is letting him stay there out of the goodness of his heart. No way Snowden has given Putin or the FSB any info or help.

By the way, the check is in the mail.
 
RJKarl said:
And, of course, Putin is letting him stay there out of the goodness of his heart. No way Snowden has given Putin or the FSB any info or help.

By the way, the check is in the mail.
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It's the Czech is in the male (old joke)
 
No mention of Willie McCovey? He got his tax evasion charge dropped too.
 
TownieDeac said:
Since I posted the thread, I guess I should weigh in. I hate this. I've been all for commuting sentences of nonviolent drug offenders, but this is a bad precedent. I cynically think the details change if gender identity played no part in her story. Assange, Snowden, et al. shouldn't be treated this well, no matter how draconian Manning's sentence was. People shouldn't endanger or potentially endanger American lives.
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Private citizen Obama's friends will likely bring up Assange's promise to turn himself in over and over and over. This will make Assange look like the pawn of Putin he is and keep the Trump/Putin thing in the public eye.
 
cville deac said:
He's gotta be close to 80. And he was a HOFer. That's fine.
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He's 79 and apologized for doing it. But if we pardon a HoFer for not paying taxes on baseball card signings, it could lead to chaos in the streets.

I used to love to watch McCovey hit balls over the scoreboard at Connie Mack Stadium and into the night.
 
TownieDeac said:
Since I posted the thread, I guess I should weigh in. I hate this. I've been all for commuting sentences of nonviolent drug offenders, but this is a bad precedent. I cynically think the details change if gender identity played no part in her story. Assange, Snowden, et al. shouldn't be treated this well, no matter how draconian Manning's sentence was. People shouldn't endanger or potentially endanger American lives.
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I don't understand the "bad precedent" argument. First of all, commutations aren't precedent. Trump isn't bound to (and probably won't) follow the same commutation guidelines as Obama. And no sane person is factoring the infinitesimal possibility of a presidential commutation in ex ante when deciding whether to leak documents.

Second, had the judge in the case sentenced Chelsea Manning to 7 years originally (already orders of magnitude longer than most leakers), would anyone be saying that it was bad precedent? I doubt it.

If you're going to make the bad precedent argument, you need to have answers to both of those points.
 
so we we just let traitors go free? someone should retroactively commute Benedict Arnold because he's was a goddamned snubbed hero
 
TownieDeac said:
Since I posted the thread, I guess I should weigh in. I hate this. I've been all for commuting sentences of nonviolent drug offenders, but this is a bad precedent. I cynically think the details change if gender identity played no part in her story. Assange, Snowden, et al. shouldn't be treated this well, no matter how draconian Manning's sentence was. People shouldn't endanger or potentially endanger American lives.
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Great post Townie. I agree with it, but I would not put Snowden in the same category as Manning or Assange. I think both Manning and Assange have put the lives of innocent Americans at risk. I don't think the same can be said about Snowden, he just showed we shouldn't trust everything the intelligence committee is telling congress in regards to sweeping data mining. IMO Snowden is whistle blower, where as Manning is a traitor.
 
TownieDeac said:
I don't mean legal precedent. Hope this clears up both questions.
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No, I don't think it does.

1. Trump isn't going to care what Obama did in making his own commutation decisions.

2. The legal issue doesn't even begin to answer the second point. Had the judge originally sentenced her to seven years, would you have called it bad precedent at the time? Keep in mind the other precedent out there. People like Petreus, who leaked information for personal gain rather than out of a sense of despair, got zero time in prison.
 
ImTheCaptain said:
so we we just let traitors go free? someone should retroactively commute Benedict Arnold because he's was a goddamned snubbed hero
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Huh? You're missing the point. This isn't a question of Chelsea Manning "going free." She was going to go free at the end of 35 years anyway (and I believe she would have been eligible for parole much earlier). It's a question of when she goes free.

Maybe your post is confusing the difference between pardon and commutation. I'm not sure.
 
TownieDeac said:
I'm not talking about legal precedent, so I don't even know how to answer your second question. Trump is going to do whatever he wants regardless of what past presidents did; I acknowledge that, and it's not what I'm talking about when I said precedent.

I mean if you want to deter giving up state secrets, don't pardon people who expose state secrets. That's all I mean.
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It's not a pardon, it's a commutation. It doesn't affect the conviction, which still stands. It only affects the sentence imposed.

It is no different than if the judge had imposed a seven year sentence originally. So it matters whether you think seven year sentences are enough to deter leaking information, which is why I think you have to grapple with the question of whether you would have thought a seven year sentence was "bad precedent" at the time if that's what the judge had originally imposed.

I'm very skeptical that if the judge had imposed a seven-year sentence in the first instance that people would be reacting like they are now. But maybe I'm wrong. You can tell me what you would have said.
 
Manning took an oath to defend the country from all enemies and used her position as a result of that oath to transmit classified information. This isn't just "a leak". She should be held to a higher responsibility than a government contractor.
 
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