This is Bill Press and Friends on the District Productive Network.

Yep, we start with a big move by President Obama yesterday.

We had called on the president, as you know, last week here on the show. I asked the question

at the briefing at the White House and President Obama yesterday announcing one of his final

measures. He announced that commuted 209 sentences, issued 64 pardons. The biggest one and the one

that made the most news, of course, is the pardon of the commuting the sentence.

In effect, it was a pardon, but commuting the sentence, technically he commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning,

formerly Bradley Manning, when he was then accused of leaking documents, secret documents, to WikiLeaks back in 2010, sentenced to 35 years.

She has now served almost seven of those years.

And according to President Obama's order, she will be released and freed on May the 17.

Chelsea Manning, of course, former Army Intelligent Analyst, private in the Army,

who leaked 750,000 pages of documents, actually, to WikiLeaks.

Documents that were, by the way, never, not as high, highly rated as the documents that Edward Snowden later released.

Her documents never got above the kind of simply secret, if you will, the lowest level of secret documents.

They were mainly military documents

and talking about military activities and diplomatic activities, which caused a lot of embarrassment

to the United States because, among other things, they documented that there were prisoners

in Iraq that were being tortured with American,

pardon me, with American knowledge by Iraqi military and by the involvement with some American

officers, which of course we all learned about later through Abu Ghraib.

There were also reports in those papers that the number of civilian deaths in Iraq was far,

far greater than the U.S. military than the Pentagon was admitting.

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