Chelsea Manning’s prison sentence has been reduced from 35 years to 7 years by President Obama. The Army soldier was convicted back in 2013 after leaking hundreds of thousands classified documents about US national security activities to WikiLeaks. Its estimated that Manning leaked approximately 750,000 classified documents.
The content of the leaked documents includes military intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan, diplomatic cables and video files that show US strikes against terrorists. Unfortunately, one of the instance shows strikes that claimed the lives of two Reuters journalists.
Obama has granted Manning clemency and as a result he admits that the massive leak of classified intelligence information was damaging but not so damaging to call for a 35 year prison sentence. However, Manning’s leak is arguably the most damning US intelligence leak ever.
In comparison to the John Podesta's email, Manning’s intelligence leak is worse in relation to the US national security. Surprisingly, the establishment is up in arms calling for a heavy retaliation for Podesta’s email leaks.
Its important to note that Chelsea Manning has pleaded guilty and admitted to the intelligence breach. As for the DNC leak, no evidence has been provided to the public that proves the Russian state was behind the hack. This begs the question as to whether the Democrats and their outgoing President Barack Obama, are gravely concerned about Russian election hacking to the extent that they are willing to impose sanctions on Russia and expel Russian diplomats and even call for war with Russia, without any evidence or are they simply unleashing a political ploy to ruin President-elect Donald Trump and excuse Hillary Clinton from running the most pathetic election in history.
For any reasonable individual, its hard to believe that John Podesta’s email were worthy enough for conflict with Russia, but Manning’s classified document release that exposed the highest level of US military intelligence information is now considered forgivable.
