The Scrapbook was dismayed but not surprised when, in the waning days of his presidency, Barack Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning. We have been equally dismayed and unsurprised at the desire of left-leaning institutions to treat Manning as some sort of folk hero. It is cold comfort that these attempts to rehabilitate Manning keep turning into embarrassments for champions of the one-time soldier, who was convicted of giving classified Defense Department documents to WikiLeaks.
Most recently, Manning made an appearance at the New Yorker Festival, where the venerable magazine hosts various discussions on current events for a paying audience. It did not go well. The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar asked how Manning felt about WikiLeaks’s decision not to redact, in the documents Manning gave them, the real names of 900 Afghans who were helping the American military. “I’m not going to have this debate right now,” Manning angrily retorted. According to a Business Insider reporter at the event:
You know who else was fighting for their lives the last seven years? The hundreds of Afghans whose identities Manning outed to the Taliban. It would be interesting to have a few of them on a New Yorker Festival panel.
