Obama's Pardons and Commutations

According to the Iraq Body Count project, a sample of the deaths found in about 800 logs, extrapolated to the full set of records, shows an estimated 15,000 civilian deaths that had not been previously admitted by the US government. 66,000 civilians were reported dead in the logs, out of 109,000 deaths in total. The IBC has so far added a total of 3,334 of these previously unrecorded civilian deaths to its database from their ongoing analysis of the war logs. A list of these incidents, added as of 2 January 2013, has been published on the IBC website.
The Guardian stated that the logs show "US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers"; the coalition, according to The Guardian, has "a formal policy of ignoring such allegations", unless the allegations involve coalition forces.

Sometimes US troops classified civilian deaths as enemy casualties. For example, the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike by US helicopter gunships which killed two Reuters journalists along with several men thought to be armed suspected to be insurgents. They, including the journalists, were all listed as "enemy killed in action".
Wired Magazine said that even after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse incident came to light in 2004, abuse of prisoners or detainees by Iraqi security forces continued; in one recorded case, US troops confiscated a "hand cranked generator with wire clamps" from a Baghdad police station, after a detainee claimed to have been brutalized there.
One report analyzed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism seems to show that "the US military cleared an Apache helicopter gunship to open fire on Iraqi insurgents who were trying to surrender".

But such an approach would be breaking new legal ground, experts said.

Unlike Manning, charged with handing over a massive cache of secret State Department cables and military intelligence logs to WikiLeaks, Assange is not a US government employee obliged to withhold classified documents.

The United States has "never really successfully prosecuted a non-government official for taking documents that were classified," Ratner said.

His defense attorneys portray him as a publisher, who merely came into possession of sensitive information. But US investigators would likely try to paint Assange as a plotter who helped Manning spill secrets, with the aim of tarnishing Washington.

Assange's supporters can take comfort from a recent case against two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of passing on classified information to Israel, the first time civilians were charged under the Espionage Act.

After a long legal battle, prosecutors eventually dropped the charges in 2009.

The seminal case that proved the limits of government authority over publishing secrets came in 1971 over the Pentagon Papers, when President Richard Nixon tried to stop The New York Times from publishing classified documents on the Vietnam War.

The bid failed, with the courts citing the free speech rights enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

Renowned First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, who worked on the Pentagon Papers case, said Assange's website raises questions about the limits of freedom of expression, including the publishing of names of Afghans cooperating with the US government.

Some of Assange's public comments have seemed to suggest a desire to undermine US foreign policy, comments that could backfire on him in court, Abrams said.

"WikiLeaks has a First Amendment argument, and it is a serious First Amendment argument, if it is ever charged," Abrams said on C-Span television in 2010.

"At the same time, the government has a genuine and serious national security argument to be made with respect to the behavior, often the misbehavior, of WikiLeaks."

After pressure from Bernie Sanders, Puerto Rican independence activist wins commutation
Washington Post - ‎12 hours ago‎
Oscar Lopez Rivera, a Puerto Rican independence activist convicted 35 years ago of a conspiracy against the U.S. government, will be freed from prison after President Obama commuted his sentence.

I'm thrilled for Manning, and want Snowden and Assange freed.

The brave whistleblowers who reveal crimes against the people should be rewarded, and the criminals prosecuted. What a fucked up judicial system we have.

edgarblythe wrote:

After pressure from Bernie Sanders, Puerto Rican independence activist wins commutation
Washington Post - ‎12 hours ago‎
Oscar Lopez Rivera, a Puerto Rican independence activist convicted 35 years ago of a conspiracy against the U.S. government, will be freed from prison after President Obama commuted his sentence.

Disgraceful and dangerous.

They could have arranged to talk to journalists like Seymour Hersh or other independent reporters and presented a compelling case.

A lot of Americans seem to gloss over the fact that Assange, Manning and Snowden have exposed war crimes.

If America had acted within the law these leaks would not have happened.

What "war crimes" were exposed?

hightor wrote:

My point would be that the smart, quasi-ethical thing to do would have been to only release the data that directly exposed a particular crime instead of just handing over access to hundreds of thousands of pages exposing diplomatic back chatter and domestic security concerns.

It would be the smart thing to do. It wouldn't be remotely ethical though because they would have hushed it up.

This is what a quick google search brings up. They are war crimes,

According to the Iraq Body Count project, a sample of the deaths found in about 800 logs, extrapolated to the full set of records, shows an estimated 15,000 civilian deaths that had not been previously admitted by the US government. 66,000 civilians were reported dead in the logs, out of 109,000 deaths in total. The IBC has so far added a total of 3,334 of these previously unrecorded civilian deaths to its database from their ongoing analysis of the war logs. A list of these incidents, added as of 2 January 2013, has been published on the IBC website.
The Guardian stated that the logs show "US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers"; the coalition, according to The Guardian, has "a formal policy of ignoring such allegations", unless the allegations involve coalition forces.

Sometimes US troops classified civilian deaths as enemy casualties. For example, the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike by US helicopter gunships which killed two Reuters journalists along with several men thought to be armed suspected to be insurgents. They, including the journalists, were all listed as "enemy killed in action".

Wired Magazine said that even after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse incident came to light in 2004, abuse of prisoners or detainees by Iraqi security forces continued; in one recorded case, US troops confiscated a "hand cranked generator with wire clamps" from a Baghdad police station, after a detainee claimed to have been brutalized there.

One report analyzed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism seems to show that "the US military cleared an Apache helicopter gunship to open fire on Iraqi insurgents who were trying to surrender".