Chelsea Manning’s Commutation Can Not Gloss Over Obama’s Brutal Crackdown On Whistleblowers

Just a couple of days before moving out of the White House, US President Barack Obama has done what many, especially those who still repose faith in his leadership, have long been urging him to do.

In a move not many saw coming, the President commuted all but four months of the inordinately long remaining prison sentence of Chelsea Manning.

In 2010, Manning, a former intelligence officer passed a treasure trove of information on to WikiLeaks including the Afghan and Iraq War Logs and an infamous video called “Collateral Murder”, which shows Americans shooting and killing 11 civilians including two Reuters’ reporters in 2007.

The information she provided and which WikiLeaks published decisively changed how the American public saw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Subsequently, Manning was sentenced to 35 years of incarceration – the longest conviction ever imposed on a whistleblower in US history. She has served seven years of that sentence. During this period she was tortured and had her rights violated at the hands of the US government. She had tried to commit suicide on two occasions.

According to a report in The Guardian, in 2012, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture accused the US military of “cruel and inhumane treatment”. Over an 11-month stretch, Manning was kept in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day.

This Tuesday, she unexpectedly got a new lease of life when Obama commuted the rest of her sentence, taking the defence and intelligence community somewhat by surprise.

In the final countdown to a change of guard in the Oval office, Obama, has at the very end, done the right thing. His actions will not only prevent the further unwarranted and inexcusable persecution of whistleblowers but will also allow Private Chelsea Manning to get the medical assistance she needs as a transgender woman. Even after undergoing a sex change surgery, Manning has been held at the men’s military prison at Fort Leavenworth. But thanks to the commutation order, she will now walk free on May 17 of this year instead of 2045.

The commutation, coming as it does at the eleventh hour of the Obama Presidency, does indeed raise eyebrows. If we keep in mind the draconian policies Obama has pursued during his eight-year presidency, especially when it comes to dealing with whistleblowers. It’s beyond dispute that the Obama-led administration, despite its liberal credentials, has executed unprecedented crackdowns on whistleblowers and dissidents.

The high-profile case of Edward Snowden constitutes just one example of many. “Depending on how they are counted, the Obama administration has prosecuted either nine or 10 such cases, more than were charged under all previous presidencies combined,” says a New York Times report.

In fact, Obama’s heavy-handed treatment of whistleblowers, and the expansion of intensive surveillance on his watch, are considered among some of his administration’s most damaging legacies. These policies, which even his supporters and sympathisers believe have cast a shadow on Obama’s tenure as president, will now pass into the hands of Donald Trump on Friday.

However, at a deeper level, Obama’s last-minute effort to make amends draws attention to a fundamentally critical question; one that assumes invaluable significance in the contemporary, shadowy world of cyber snoops and routine military excesses during wars: How does or should the state deal with whistleblowers? By stigmatising whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden as ‘traitors,’ does the state hide its own criminal actions by turning messengers into targets? In doing so, it normalises the violation of peoples’ privacy and civil rights.

As she explained at that time, Manning had made the files public in the hope that the material would catalyse “worldwide discussion, debates and reforms.”

Let’s then take the case of Edward Snowden, who, The Guardian said, “will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley [Chelsea] Manning.” Risking his life and career, Snowden, 29 years old at the time, made public explosive material from NSA, one of world’s most secretive organisations. He revealed the alarming depth and extent of the clandestine mass surveillance that was carried out by the NSA, and sanctioned first by the Bush, and then Obama administrations.

Even as Obama commuted Manning’s sentence, he didn’t extend any such reprieve to Edward Snowden, who is currently living in exile in Russia. In fact, when asked about Snowden’s clemency petition pending before Obama, White House spokesman, Josh Earnest – underlining the “pretty stark difference” between the cases of Manning and Snowden – said that Snowden’s case was too severe.

A New York Times report quotes Earnest as saying: “Chelsea Manning is somebody who went through the military criminal justice process, was exposed to due process, was found guilty, was sentenced for her crimes, and she acknowledged wrongdoing.” “Mr. Snowden fled into the arms of an adversary and has sought refuge in a country that most recently made a concerted effort to undermine confidence in our democracy,” he added.

However, as Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept said on the programme Democracy Now, this argument papers over the fact that the Obama administration forced Snowden to flee to Russia by cancelling his passport while he was on a flight, possibly heading towards Latin America.

The cloud of misinformation surrounding actions by whistleblowers doesn’t help matters one bit. After the news about Manning became public yesterday, former New York Times journalist Judith Miller tweeted: “Obama commutes sentence of Chelsea Manning. How many people died because of Manning’s leak?” The answer to this question is zero.

More importantly, Judith Miller’s own reputation is cause for concern. As a journalist with The New York Times, Miller wrote a series of stories leading up to the war where she cited unnamed sources to claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

As Scahill said in the same interview: “Judith Miller was a witting participant in a sophisticated propaganda campaign orchestrated by Dick Cheney and the top levels of power in the United States government to falsify a case to invade and destroy Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people died in that war.”

In his final press conference as president, Obama yesterday said :“I feel very comfortable that justice has been served.” But the question remains: does he feel “comfortable” leaving behind a legacy of persecution of whistleblowers, and a massive state apparatus of surveillance that will now be in the custody of his successor Donald Trump?