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.
Alexa O'Brien researches and writes about national security and law enforcement. Her work has been published in The New York Times, VICE News, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Guardian (UK), The Daily Beast, NY Daily News, and featured on the BBC, PBS, NPR, Democracy Now!, and Public Radio International. She was shortlisted for the 2013 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in the United Kingdom and listed in The Verge 50. In 2016, she worked at The Constitution Project in Washington, D.C. as a staff researcher and writer on an independent commission studying Oklahoma's death penalty. She also provided research support to scholars of the first cost study conducted on that state's capital punishment system. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, majoring in Political Science. She is currently a candidate in Georgetown University's Master of Professional Studies in Applied Intelligence.