It has taken a period of not inconsiderable pain and torment, but Chelsea Manning, who will forever be a bright symbol of the international whistleblower movement, has had the bulk of her sentence commuted from a brutal 35 years. Barring any upsets or reversals, she should be free 17 May.
Manning, to much gruesome fanfare, became the victim of an institutional drive to punitively target whistleblowers, with the centrepiece of the prosecution focusing on computer crimes and the Espionage Act. Manning had made her name supplying military incident logs to WikiLeaks on US operations in Iraq, thereby earning notoriety both for herself and Julian Assange.
The flawed prosecution always sensed that a conviction was already in the bag. What mattered in such cases was not actual harm in disclosing secrets (in that case, revelations included abuses by Iraqi military officers and civilian deaths), but the mere act of disclosing them.
Not even Manning's insistence the disclosures had been made in the interest of exposing war crimes, notably the attack by a US helicopter that led to the deaths of two Reuters journalists, mattered. 'When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of love for my country and a sense of duty to others.'
The rumours had been building that President Barack Obama would make use of his executive privilege to commute the sentence as a parting gift. Such hope might well have been premature: the Obama administration has been unswervingly brutal in its efforts to gag low level whistleblowers.
The contradictory contrast lay in another figure Obama granted a pardon to: General James E. Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Cartwright found himself in the lurch after disclosing details of a top secret cyber attack on Iran's nuclear program to reporters. The gravity of the offence was compounded by his mendacity to the CIA.
Under Obama's watch, nine cases have seen the prosecuting light of day, doubling the numbers of all previous presidents combined. This fact alone suggests a disturbing fixation with the 1917 Espionage Act and the cult of official secrecy.
It also suggests inconsistency and unevenness. During the Obama years, the fixation on punishing low-level figures stood in contrast to the kid gloves approach to high-ranking, often bumbling officials. In Obama's America, a General Petraeus or Cartwright could be assured of being treated more mildly than a Manning.
"Punitive approaches, once formed, are hard to break. The desire to