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Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden:
A Plea for Pardon By |
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WikiLeaks
whistleblower, U.S. Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, an American prisoner of
conscience convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 after leaking
hundreds of thousands of secret military and government documents to the
American public. His disclosures
included the collateral murder video of unarmed civilians by a |
Edward Snowden, former
National Security Agency contractor, who unleashed 200,000 classified
government documents to the media, disclosing a massive, secret domestic and
global government surveillance program by the NSA targeting telephones, cell
phones, emails and the internet. The revelations have fueled outrage
worldwide with calls for the NSA to terminate its surveillance program. |
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By
Almost ninety-two years ago, Warren G. Harding, an
unlikely and undistinguished American president who had just succeeded
Woodrow Wilson, a highly unpopular president, commuted the prison sentence of
Eugene V. Debs, an antiwar, anti-draft socialist who had spent three years of
his ten year sentence for opposing America’s entry into World War I in
Atlanta Penitentiary. In June 1918, Debs delivered the speech that
landed him in prison and became the Government’s biggest catch. The
three-time Socialist Party candidate for the presidency—he would run again in
1920 while still a prisoner, his campaign button featuring his portrait along
with the words, “For President: Convict No. 9653”—openly defied U.S. foreign
policy and the draft, telling his audience: “The master class has all to gain
and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all
to lose—especially their lives. They have always taught and trained you to
believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves
slaughtered at their command.….They alone declare war and they alone make
peace….” For this “crime” he was indicted by a federal
grand jury and arrested in Pardoning so prominent a dissident as notorious in
his era as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning are to ours, was hardly easy.
Yet it was also a highly political move, wisely reflecting Harding’s campaign
promise of a presidency dedicated to “normalcy.” But at the same time it was
also a remarkably humane act. After issuing his order to release the prisoner,
Harding had the courage to invite Debs
to visit him in the White House, where the two men, so different in so many
ways, shook hands, and spent an hour talking, much to the mortification of
many in Congress, the bellicose American Legion, his wife Florence, as well as Republicans
who had voted for him and considered Debs a traitor. But Harding – always falsely rumored to be
part-black, was very different from the bigoted Wilson, who once told his
secretary Joe Tumulty that Debs “was a traitor to his country and he will
never be pardoned during my administration.” Forever tainted by his corrupt
appointees, Harding has since been portrayed by most historians as one of our
worst presidents. Still, unlike most presidents since Lincoln, he tried to
broach the question of racial inequality and supported anti-lynching
legislation and once dared tell a gathering of whites in Birmingham, Alabama,
“We cannot go on, as we have for more than a half century, with one section
of our population…set off from real contribution to solving our national
issues, because of a division on race lines,” an extraordinary presidential
statement in the 1920s. He also
supported the Washington Naval Conference, a genuine if ultimately futile
effort to limit the navies of By contrast, it was Snowden and Manning have something of Eugene Debs’
understanding that dissent never equals disloyalty. By drawing on the courage
of—yes—Warren Harding, and offering clemency would certainly not be
politically easy but it would in time burnish Barack Obama’s legacy. ___________________________________________ Editor’s Note: A version of the Manning/Snowden article previously
appeared in the NYTimeseXaminer.com |
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