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In one of his last moves in office, President Obama has commuted the 35-year prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the Army private who leaked a massive trove of military secrets to WikiLeaks.
The former intelligence analyst's prison sentence has been shortened to expire on May 17, 2017, according to a statement from the White House.
Her lawyers at the ACLU expressed relief after the decision, saying that Manning has already served more time behind bars than any other whistleblower in U.S. history, and under difficult conditions.
Also at the BBC and the New York Times.
Previously: Chelsea Manning Reportedly on Obama's Short List for Commutation; Assange Offers Himself in Trade
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @12:54PM
What I do find interesting is that Assange offered himself up in some kind of exchange for Manning, so is he going to step outside the comfort of the embassy?
Probably not. He said he would let himself be extradited to the US. But there is no outstanding extradition request from the US, only the phony one from Sweden.
To get Assange, the US would have to make an extradition request, thus admitting to both voters and US and Swedish courts that Assange has been right all along, and I don't think they want to admit that. In addition, an official extradition would take him to a US court, where he would be pretty hard to convict (he wasn't the one taking the leaked data, he's a spokesperson, not the one running the servers, and even if they can find someway around the whole freedom of speech thing, he did those things outside the US. The people previously "extraordinarily renditioned" from Sweden has been flown directly to black sites, without ever setting foot on ground covered by the US constitution, thus avoiding the whole "court of law" problem.