WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is commuting the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who leaked classified documents.
The White House says Manning is one of 209 inmates whose sentences Obama is shortening.
Manning is more than six years into a 35-year sentence for leaking classified government and military documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. Her sentence is now set to expire May 17.
She was known as Bradley Manning at the time of her 2010 arrest and attempted suicide twice last year.
Obama is also pardoning 64 people, including retired Gen. James Cartwright, who was charged with making false statements during a probe into disclosure of classified information.
Most of the other people receiving commutations were serving sentences for nonviolent drug offenses.
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Obama granted clemency to Puerto Rican independence activist Oscar López Rivera, who has been imprisoned for about 35 years, much of the time in solitary confinement. In 1981, López Rivera was convicted on federal charges, including seditious conspiracy—conspiring to oppose U.S. authority over Puerto Rico by force. FALN placed more than 130 bombs in U.S. cities in the 1970s and 80s. In 1999, President Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of 16 members of the FALN, but López Rivera refused to accept the deal because it did not include two fellow activists, who have since been released.
**** General Petraeus did not get a pardon…..and did Obama put ink to paper to give Hillary legal immunity?
Going back to General Cartwright…
In part from Daily Beast: Retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright, once considered one of President Obama’s favorite generals, pleaded guilty Monday to lying to federal investigators about revealing classified information to two journalists, including a New York Times reporter who wrote about a highly-classified U.S. cyberattack against Iran’s nuclear program.
The charges weren’t exactly a surprise. Cartwright has known for more than three years that he was the target of an investigation into who leaked details about the so-called Stuxnet computer virus, which the United States used to destroy centrifuges inside an Iranian nuclear enrichment facility in 2008 and 2009.
But notably, Cartwright who previously served as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is the only person to have been charged in the leak investigation about the highly classified program, even though it’s clear from various books and articles that he wasn’t the only source of information about it. Times reporter David Sanger revealed the operation and wrote about it extensively in his book, Confront and Conceal.
In a statement, Cartwright acknowledged that he had talked to the journalists but said he was not the source of the leak about Stuxnet. Rather, he portrayed himself as trying to mitigate the fallout from the revelation of a secret program.
“It was wrong for me to mislead the FBI on November 2, 2012, [during an interview] and I accept full responsibility for this,” Cartwright said. “I knew I was not the source of the story and I didn’t want to be blamed for the leak. My only goal in talking to the reporters was to protect American interests and lives; I love my country and continue to this day to do everything I can to defend it.”
Gregory Craig, Cartwright’s attorney, said his client had “engaged in a well-known and understood practice of attempting to save national secrets, not disclosing classified information.” Craig said that by the time Cartwright talked to the journalists, they had already written their stories.
“His effort to prevent publication of information that might harm American lives or national security does not constitute a violation of any law,” Craig added. Neither he nor Cartwright specified what information, if any, the retired general may have prevented the journalists from publishing.
The charges state that investigators showed Cartwright “a list of quotes and statements” from Sanger’s book, “a number of which contained classified information.” More here.
