Do You Agree With President Obama’s Decision To Commute Chelsea Manning’s Sentence? [POLL]

It was announced on Tuesday that President Obama would commute the remaining prison sentence for Chelsea Manning. Manning, a transgendered former army intelligence officer who was known as Bradley Manning when convicted in 2010 for leaking classified documents to the website WikiLeaks. According to the NY Times, Manning copied a massive amount of information for WikiLeaks.

Ms. Manning was still known as Bradley Manning when she deployed with her unit to Iraq in late 2009. There, she worked as a low-level intelligence analyst helping her unit assess insurgent activity in the area it was patrolling, a role that gave her access to a classified computer network.

She copied hundreds of thousands of military incident logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which, among other things, exposed abuses of detainees by Iraqi military officers working with American forces and showed that civilian deaths in the Iraq war were probably much higher than official estimates.

The files she copied also included about 250,000 diplomatic cables from American embassies around the world showing sensitive deals and conversations, dossiers detailing intelligence assessments of Guantánamo detainees held without trial, and a video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad in which two Reuters journalists were killed, among others.

She decided to make all these files public, as she wrote at the time, in the hope that they would incite “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.” WikiLeaks disclosed them — working with traditional news organizations including The New York Times — bringing notoriety to the group and its founder, Julian Assange.

Manning will now be set free on May 17 of this year instead of 2045. Do you agree with Obama's decision?