Obama must pardon Manning and Snowden before Trump takes office
Obama must pardon Manning and Snowden before Trump takes office
R. Kyle Alagood
CNN
Manning has served more than six years of an excessive thirty-year sentence. Throughout her incarceration, the federal government has proven itself unequipped to humanely incarcerate a transgender woman -- even as the Obama administration has reformed military policies to be more inclusive of transgender people and attempted to advance LGBT rights abroad.
Manning has suffered immensely, as has the nation's reputation. As a result of the way she has been treated, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture accused the United States of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.
Unlike Manning's indiscriminate dump of unredacted information onto the web, Snowden turned over his information to journalists. In doing so, he allowed the process and ethics of journalism to filter the leaked documents, publish only those that were in the public interest, and give the government an opportunity to push for redactions or withholding of truly harmful documents.
Without the data Snowden released, newspapers and the American people would have gone years without learning of the intelligence community's abuses and excesses. After all, the congressional intelligence committees knew about many of the programs Snowden exposed. They did not act.
The Obama administration has exiled Snowden to Russia, thereby fueling his celebrity and tarnishing the US image of political tolerance. Manning and Snowden are blemishes on President Obama's record, but they need not remain bruises on the nation's international reputation.
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