In his last week as President of the United States Obama has commuted Chelsea Manning's 35 year sentence. She is now due for release in May 2017.
But no joy for Edward Snowden or Julian Assange.
Snowden because he fled to Russia; and Assange because he provided Manning with the means (wikileaks) to release a video showing collateral murder by U.S. helicopter crews in a suburb of Baghdad.
Wikileaks obtained and decrypted video footage from a US Apache helicopter in 2007. It shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad. This was part of an operation known as the The New Way Forward ordered by George Bush in January 2007. The US President deployed more than 20,000 soldiers into Iraq (five additional brigades), sending the majority of them into Baghdad.
After the initial shooting, an unarmed group of adults and children in a minivan arrives on the scene and attempts to transport the wounded. They are fired upon as well.
The official statement on this incident initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the US military did not know how the deaths occurred.
Wikileaks released a video with transcripts and a package of supporting documents on April 5th 2010.
Blaming Obama for Trump???
Greg Sheridan writing in 'The Australian' (19 Jan 2017) has this to say:
"The simple equation is that innocent people’s lives were put at risk, and perhaps sacrificed, because of Manning’s treachery and then Obama rewarded Manning. It is just this kind of demented leftism which has infected the last months of the Obama administration and which did so much to kill Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. Obama has reverted to a pure version of the celebrity, leftist politics of Zeitgeist orthodoxy he preached with such undergraduate certainty before he became president."
Where is the logic in this commentary by 'The Australian'?
Obama waited till after Clinton's presidential bid had failed before he commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence from 35 to 7 years; Chelsea Manning, a woman trapped, not only in a man's body, but in an all male military prison.
Ian Curr
Paradigm Shift 4zzz fm 102.1
18 Jan 2017
Sound is from 'Collateral Murder of Iraqi civilians in 2007. These are edited excerpts. The video that goes with this soundtrack was first published by Wikileaks.
Music by Ferouz أعطني الناي وغنّي Give me the flute and sing
