Obama commutes prison sentence for whistleblower Chelsea Manning

China 24

Photo by Stephen Melkisethian on Flickr. Protestors in Washington D.C. on May 11, 2014.

Chelsea Manning, known to the world over as the whistleblower who gave a treasure trove of American state secrets to the website, Wikileaks, will be released from prison in May instead of 2048.

Manning’s sentence was one of a long list of pardons and commutations released by the White House on Tuesday afternoon.

Manning was convicted of “wrongful and wanton publication to the internet intelligence belonging to the United States” and sentenced to 35 years in prison in August of 2013, a White House press release said.

She will now be released on May 17, 2017.

Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan objected to the commutation on Twitter:

Manning was known as Bradley Manning at the time of her 2010 arrest. She attempted suicide twice last year and is a transgender woman who has suffered problems with mental health while in confinement.

She is accused of downloading more than 700,000 classified or confidential files from the military’s Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet, while serving in the Army’s 10th Mountain Division in Iraq.

Those files are thought to be the source of documents that appeared on WikiLeaks, which promotes the leaking of government and corporate information.

Other charges against Manning include wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the internet and theft of public property.

In a statement on its twitter page, Wikileaks, called the release, a “victory.”

Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange had pledged to agree to his extradition to the United States for separate charges in a tweet earlier this month.

Story by CCTV America with information from the Associated Press and Reuters.