For the first question of his final news conference as president Wednesday, President Obama was asked to defend his decision to commute Chelsea Manning's prison sentence.
Manning, then an Army private named Bradley Manning, was convicted of leaking secret military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks and sentenced to 35 years. Obama was asked whether commuting her sentence would “send a message” to potential future Mannings that leaking classified materials won't be punished harshly.
Obama demurred:
Let's be clear: Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence, so the notion that the average person who was thinking about disclosing vital classified information would think that it goes unpunished, I don't think, would get that impression from the sentence that Chelsea Manning has served.
It has been my view that given she went to trial; that due process was carried out; that she took responsibility for her crime; that the sentence that she received was very disproportional — disproportionate relative to what other leakers had received; and that she had served a significant amount of time, that it made sense to commute and not pardon her sentence.
And that, right there, may go to the heart of why conservatives and foreign policy hawks could never stand Obama.
Through a series of decisions — most notably the Manning clemency, the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap and the Syria “red line" — Obama made controversial calls that critics worried would set bad precedents for U.S. national security and foreign policy. The president, though, approached these situations from more of a pragmatic and in-the-moment standpoint, looking at the specifics of each case and making a call — wanting to do what he felt was right in the specific case.
Source:-Washingtonpost
Manning, then an Army private named Bradley Manning, was convicted of leaking secret military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks and sentenced to 35 years. Obama was asked whether commuting her sentence would “send a message” to potential future Mannings that leaking classified materials won't be punished harshly.
Obama demurred:
Let's be clear: Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence, so the notion that the average person who was thinking about disclosing vital classified information would think that it goes unpunished, I don't think, would get that impression from the sentence that Chelsea Manning has served.
It has been my view that given she went to trial; that due process was carried out; that she took responsibility for her crime; that the sentence that she received was very disproportional — disproportionate relative to what other leakers had received; and that she had served a significant amount of time, that it made sense to commute and not pardon her sentence.
And that, right there, may go to the heart of why conservatives and foreign policy hawks could never stand Obama.
Through a series of decisions — most notably the Manning clemency, the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap and the Syria “red line" — Obama made controversial calls that critics worried would set bad precedents for U.S. national security and foreign policy. The president, though, approached these situations from more of a pragmatic and in-the-moment standpoint, looking at the specifics of each case and making a call — wanting to do what he felt was right in the specific case.
Source:-Washingtonpost
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