WikiLeaks Founder Clarifies Pledge To Accept US Extradition

The pledge was confirmed by Assange after US President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s 35-year sentence. Period. He was arrested, confessed, and subsequently sentenced to 35 years in a military prison.

At Manning’s court-martial, during the sentencing phase, Army Brig.

“Mr. Assange had called for Chelsea Manning to receive clemency and be released immediately”, Mr. Pollack added.

Manning copied and released more than 700,000 classified files – not through reporters who would have vetted the material – but through an irresponsible organization, WikiLeaks. She has already served longer, and as a transgender woman she has endured far worse punishment than anyone else convicted of a similar crime – worse than any human being should have to endure.

But hey, at least Chelsea Manning’s happy. I am a female. I want to hear a defense of what Barack Obama did today. “I hope that you will support me in this transition”.

When trans women are housed with men, they are typically denied access to hormones, women’s clothing, cosmetics, gender-appropriate haircuts, and other gender confirmation needs. His legacy will not be regarded highly, especially given the clemency he granted to a traitor, being the president to issue more commutations than any of his predecessors and all of the bad decisions he has made over the last eight years. Chelsea Manning’s prison sentence for leaking classified documents is drawing backlash from Oneida County’s congresswoman. WikiLeaks said on Twitter today that “Assange is still happy to come to the USA provided all his rights are guaranteed despite White House now saying Manning was not quid-quo-pro”.

But not our outgoing president.

Obama’s decision was however met with sharp criticism from some Republicans and the Intelligence community. In short, there wasn’t any explanation about a decision that everyone saw as impossible just a week ago, the accusations that WikiLeaks received from the USA intelligence agencies, revealing that the organization worked along with Russian hackers aligned to Russia´s government, in order to get president Donald Trump elected.

At Obama’s news conference Wednesday, he explained that Manning “has served a tough prison sentence”, and that no one considering such a crime would think “it goes unpunished”. But he’s made his decision.

This commutation was highly politically sensitive, and in no small part because other cases could yet be brought against other hackers, leakers and whistleblowers, among them Edward Snowden. The United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where Chelsea has been serving her sentence. As columnist Charles Lane wrote for The Washington Post, “During the 1970s, Lopez Rivera headed a Chicago-based cell of the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), which waged a futile but violent struggle to win Puerto Rican independence”. She was convicted of handing a large amount of classified documents to the whistleblower site, WikiLeaks, and she was charged with espionage. He was court martialed in 2013, “three years after Manning was first detained in Iraq for suspicion of having leaked the video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack that killed several Iraqi civilians”.