A case for Executive mercy for Chelsea Manning
Manning was born and grew up in an age of information. Her leaks are proportional to it, even if they understandably shocked the institutions and society with their advent. Her guilelessness evokes the kind of earnest protagonist in a classic fictional war story. Like in Thin Red Line or Catch 22 Manning was a humanist soldier trapped by cynical realities of warfare and her own incapacity to deaden her senses and willful and disobedient conscience clinging onto the exigent hope that sanity and common sense would triumph if buttressed by knowledge and deliberation. Whether or not the reality of such an ideal is real or a fairy tale we tell ourselves remains to be seen. An act of mercy by the Executive, might evidence its virtuous display in our great and fallible experiment in self government.