Mick Hartley

Kyle Orton on Chelsea Manning:

Manning was arrested in late May 2010, having already handed over 91,000 classified documents from Afghanistan and nearly 400,000 from Iraq, which were released by WikiLeaks in July and October, respectively. Again, whistle-blowers try to limit the scope of what they leak to make the point they feel they need to; Manning dumped years' worth of data without ever having read it.

"I could've sold to Russia or China, and made [a lot of money]," Manning said in a webchat with Adrian Lamo, the hacker who would turn him in. But, said Manning, he believed it was "public data" that "belongs in the public domain" and did not want to transfer the data to "some slimy intelligence collector". Perhaps Manning didn't know Russian and Chinese intelligence have the internet as well.

China made ample use of the WikiLeaks cables to incite a witch-hunt against every academic and human rights activist named in the cables – and of course many who were not – for passing information to Washington. This applied especially to Tibetans and Muslim Uyghurs. Many other authoritarian governments found the cables useful.

Two Zimbabwean generals who had met with US diplomats and criticised senior officials in Robert Mugabe's police state were court-martialled, and an investigation was started into the "treasonous collusion" of Zimbabwe's lead oppositionist, Morgan Tsvangirai, with an "aggressive international world, particularly the United States". A journalist in Ethiopia, Argaw Ashine, was forced to flee his country after Manning revealed he had been discussing with the U.S. ways to avert a planned crackdown on the Ethiopian press. Syria's beleaguered human rights activists could have done without one more excuse to dismiss them as hirelings of the Americans. Beyond states, Osama bin Laden had "asked for and received" copies of the so-called Afghan War Logs.

When asked about the danger his revelations had put these people and more in, Assange replied, "Well, they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." Assange had never been shy about his anti-Americanism, and already by this stage it was quite evident that – whatever WikiLeaks had been when it first started in 2006 – by 2010-11 it was not the transparency organisation it billed itself as.

The Moscow handler for WikiLeaks was Israel Shamir, an antisemite and all-round crank with half-a-dozen different aliases. (Assange might have found some common ground with Shamir, given his belief that all of his enemies are "sort of Jewish".) Shamir has strong links to Russian intelligence and personally handed stolen cables to Belarus's dictator to help him root out dissidents….

Commuting Manning's sentence sends an appalling signal to intelligence operatives who take their secrecy oaths seriously – some of them so seriously that they will lay down their lives rather than give up what they know. Politically, this does nothing but harm to the Democrats; already crippled after the election, their credibility on national security – which had been rising, if only because of the debacles of the Bush years – has diminished in Obama's time and now takes one final hit. If there is one positive to this, though, it is that Assange said he would agree to face prison in the U.S. if Obama granted clemency to Manning. Over to you, Julian.