just pardoned

Saw that on FoxBusiness.

One of many!

Obama is saving the BIG ones till last, imagine how long that list will be.

OOPS, commuted. But the same smell remains

35 year sentence down to released in May..

The bassturd did it! and the asswholes bitch about emails being leaked yet commute the sentence of a traitor.

The hypocrisy is astounding.

Bergdahl next?

Clinton?

I'm becoming more convinced all the time that a Presidents power should be limited after the election. Basic functions only, no last minute pardons and last ditch efforts to circumvent the will of the people knowing there are no consequences.

If these types of things had to occur before the election in November the voters could retaliate at the ballot box. No doubt precisely why it isn't set up that way.

You can count on it.

Wonder how long Manning and Bergdahl will last once released into the company of their peers?

I agree

Such a shame.

Treason is no big deal to the Traitor in Cheif.

Really, why the annoyance at Putin when a traitor has his/her sentence commuted?

Obama would give Manson blood if he had any

Expect Bergdahl to be pardoned next, just as a final "FU" to the military.

Hillary violated the Espionage act also. Mannings violations ended up on Wikileaks. I wonder if the Mocha Messiah is trying to somehow lay a pathway out for old rotten crotch Hillary.

Bergdahl and/or Clinton would indeed be a FU to America.

Out of prison on May 17, 2017 - instead of 2045.

There's still time...

That's what he will do Friday at 1130, to take the news off of Trump.

wait for movies , books , etc..

may be you should do a gender change.


P.

Rush comes on early Friday with commentary, if there's a pardon for Bergdahl/Clinton I'd love to hear his take.

.....if you ever wondered about Obama's contempt for the US or it's military.

Just enough time left to get a couple more taxpayer funded surgeries.

US Army LT sentenced to 20 years; charged with murder for protecting his men from Taliban

Clint Lorance is a loving, caring, hardworking, determined, friendly, positive person who has dedicated his life to the Army. He was an enlisted soldier who was the first in his family to graduate college, which he did while serving in the Army before becoming an officer. Clint is from Oklahoma and spent time in Texas, where his family lives now. First Lieutenant Clint Lorance has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for murder because of an unfortunate incident while Clint was deployed to a volatile area of Afghanistan in July 2012, Panzai, in Kandahar province. Only 96 hours after he took charge of his platoon, who had already been in the area for 7 months, Clint gave a difficult order under pressure in order to stay true to the only promise he made to his men - that he would not lose one of them. This was a bold promise since the platoon had suffered four casualties already, including the previous platoon leader who Clint was brought in to replace. Three Afghans came speeding toward Clint's platoon and their Afghan National Army counterparts on a known enemy route where they had been attacked just days before. Clint gave the order, responding to his soldier's verbal warning, to his men to engage the threat, and two of the men on the motorcycle were killed and the third escaped.

Allen West details on his Facebook page:

"In July 2012, 1LT Lorance ordered the engagement of two Taliban scouts who were tracking his platoon’s movements while on a patrol in Kandahar province, a platoon that had recently experienced losses, including the previous Platoon Leader.

"According to our ridiculous Rules of Engagement, soldiers in a combat zone are told to hold their fire unless there is evidence of hostile action or direct hostile intent.

"I spent two and a half years in southern Afghanistan, and we all knew the Taliban utilized fighters on motorcycles and cell phones as scout/trackers. If there are enemy combatants reporting your patrol movements in order to facilitate an attack, how is that not hostile intent?

"CPT William Miller, the government prosecutor, said 1LT Lorance “used his rank and position to harass, intimidate, threaten, and murder Afghans.”

"What an incredible dilemma for our men and women in combat: fight and kill the enemy and be sent to prison. Or be killed by the enemy and be denied your death gratuity benefits.

"This is utter BS and I implore true Americans, and veterans, to melt down the White House, DoD, and Department of the Army phone lines and email."

To further explain the ludicrous parameter of our military’s ROE (Rules of Engagement), consider the words of Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, from his epic narrative, Lone Survivor:

"Our rules of engagement in Afghanistan specified that we could not shoot, kill, or injure unarmed civilians. But what about the unarmed civilian who was a skilled spy for the illegal forces we were tying to remove? What about an entire secret army, diverse, fragmented, and lethal, creeping through the mountains in Afghanistan pretending to be civilians?

"But we were also told that we could not shoot that camel drover before he blew up all of us, because he might be an unarmed civilian just taking his dynamite for a walk."

And a couple pages further:

"The truth is, in this kind of terrorist/insurgent warfare, no one can tell who’s a civilian and who’s not. So what’s the point of framing rules that cannot be comprehensively carried out by anyone?

Rules that are unworkable, because half the time no one knows who the [bleep] enemy is, and by the time you find out, it might be too late to save your own life. Making sense of the ROEs in real-time situations is impossible."

Luttrell sums up the problem of ROE written up by political heads in the safe and sterile environment of DC:

"Thus we have an extra element of fear and danger when we go into combat against the Taliban or al Qaeda — the fear of our own, the fear of what our own navy judge advocate general might rule against us, the fear of the American media and their unfortunate effect on American politicians."

This is what our soldiers are up against. Marcus Luttrell’s worst case scenario was played out in real life for 1LT Clint Lorance.

As far as I am concerned, The Zero has committed high treason on numerous occasions and should face a firing squad.

Faqs gotta lookout for fellow faqs.

Come Friday around noon it will be:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb_g4jkPqUw&feature=youtu.be

How about Snowden?

The spy shoulda be shot.

Obama did this one for the media coverage.

He wanted it singled out and publicized.

There will be another longer list of pardons coming before Friday. But he wanted this one known.

That fuggers name is Bradley and should be addressed as such.

Bradly Manning is a traitor who exposed US Intel to our enemies. OTOH...

https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/01/...agent-faces-extradition-prison-in-italy/

US Refusing to Intervene as Ex-CIA Agent Faces Extradition, Prison in Italy



Time continues to tick away for former CIA agent Sabrina de Sousa, who faces extradition from Portugal to Italy on Tuesday to face a four-year jail sentence for her involvement in the highly classified Bush-era rendition of a radical Muslim cleric known as Abu Omar.

An Italian court convicted de Sousa in absentia in 2009 for allegedly planning the operation. None of the defendants were informed of the charges against them by their Italian court-appointed lawyers.

------------------------------------

De Sousa maintains that she had nothing to with planning, authorizing or executing Abu Omar’s 2003 kidnapping and rendition, saying that she was on a family ski trip at an Italian resort. During her 1998-2004 tenure in Italy, she posed as a State Department official, first in the US Embassy in Rome, and then in the Consulate in Milan.

Despite this, the State Department declined to grant her the same diplomatic immunity that it gave to others implicated in the case, such as former CIA Rome station chief Jeff Castelli, who played a central role in planning the rendition.

De Sousa sued the State Department after she resigned from the government in 2009, demanding that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton grant her diplomatic immunity from prosecution.

“The US government turned its back on Sabrina and not only failed to assist her but literally obstructed our efforts. We had to sue to compel the Justice Dept to provide her with Italian legal counsel to defend against her in absentia prosecution, but by the time we secured that help, the case was along too far and she was convicted,” former De Sousa attorney Mark Zaid told the IPT in an email.

“Typically the State Department would ensure even diplomats facing DUI prosecution would be protected and brought back home. Instead, they left Sabrina to hang in the wind back at the time, and most certainly now.”

The charges against the former CIA operative are based on circumstantial evidence, de Sousa said.

Her defense was further handicapped when the Italian government agreed with the prosecutors about what evidence could be excluded based on state secrets.

“It’s not possible to have a fair trial when the evidence is covered by State secrets in both the US and Italy,” de Sousa said.

Nonetheless, Italy’s highest appellate court, the Supreme Court of Cassation, upheld the convictions of all the American and Italian defendants in 2012.

Since 2006, de Sousa has had a Europol arrest warrant hanging over her. This made her subject to arrest in the event she traveled in Europe.

“The Portuguese prosecutor analyzed her case and said she would only be extradited if the Italians would guarantee her a second trial,” Ana Gomes, a Portuguese member of the European Parliament who supports de Sousa, told the IPT. “Otherwise, Portugal would not be able to extradite her, because there was overwhelming evidence that this process was conducted in a very unfair way.”

Italy reneged. Italy’s Justice Ministry sent a letter to de Sousa’s Portuguese public attorney saying that the verdict against her was final. The letter noted that she would not get a new trial and that she would go straight to prison upon arrival in Italy. She would only be allowed to challenge the verdict from prison.

Appeals to higher courts in Portugal failed.

But her family is scattered in Europe, India and Canada. Most of her close relatives live in Portugal, and she was unwilling to be separated from them.

De Sousa went to Portugal in 2015 to visit relatives, after she felt she had exhausted all avenues to resolve her case.

Portuguese authorities detained de Sousa six months later.

Italy issued a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) for her extradition, which noted that de Sousa had been tried in absentia and could apply for an appeal or retrial after being notified of her sentence.

-----------------------

“If you look at all of the charges against me, they are hypothetical at the end of the day,” de Sousa said. “Although the prosecutor does acknowledge that I wasn’t part of the snatch and grab team, he does say that I was involved in planning the whole thing …”

No Help From Washington

US government officials did everything they could to hamper de Sousa’s ability to defend herself.

The government “practically eviscerated” her ability to respond to the charges against her, according to a 2008 letter from her attorney to then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

The government even denied her lawyer the use of a secure computer to draft their filings, and threatened the lawyer’s security clearance.

“The message that this scenario sends to civilian government employees serving this country on tours of duty abroad is a potentially demoralizing one,” wrote US District Judge Beryl A. Howell.

In addition, the State Department improperly classified all correspondence with Clinton and failed to answer his letters, Zaid said.

“It’s sort of a retaliation for her speaking out in the process of trying to clear her name,” Gomes said. “That’s really outrageous.”

Government officials did go to bat for another official implicated in the case. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates personally asked then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for help protecting Air Force Col. Joseph Romano, convicted in 2010 for a direct role in the Abu Omar case.

-------------------------

Abu Omar, whose full name is Osama Mustapha Hassan Nasr, has called de Sousa a minor player and suggested that Italy drop the case against her.

Back in 2012, the Italian newspaper Il Giornale reported that the prosecutor general in Rome’s Supreme Court of Cassation had recommended annulling the sentence against de Sousa, but nothing came of it.

Abu Omar and the Anatomy of a Cover-up

How Abu Omar’s rendition materialized, and who was responsible remains contentious. De Sousa alleges that her case has been used to cover up for those responsible.

The cleric’s activities in 2002 at an Islamic center in Milan caught the attention of Diogos, Italy’s special police responsible for terror investigations, along with the CIA and FBI. Abu Omar belonged to the terrorist group Gamaa Islamiya, whose spiritual leader Omar Abdel Rahman masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Two witnesses also connected Abu Omar with Al Qaeda, according to Italian government documents.

With help from Italian police informant Luciano Pironi, CIA operatives nabbed Abu Omar on a Milan street in February 2003. The agents brought him to the NATO air base in Aviano, Italy, and transferred him to Ramstein Air Base in Germany for questioning. He was then sent to Egypt, where he underwent torture. Egyptian authorities released Abu Omar in April 2004 for the lack of prosecutable evidence against him and later rearrested him again in May 2004 and imprisoned him in Cairo. They released him in 2007 on the condition that he remain quiet.

Former CIA official Michael Scheuer exposed the Abu Omar case in a 2005 interview with Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper. Scheuer alleged that Gen. Nicolo Pollari, who then led Italy’s now-defunct military intelligence agency SISMI, authorized the operation in conjunction with the CIA. He also claimed that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley signed off on the rendition.

Scheuer’s interview with La Repubblica gave Italian prosecutors ammunition to move forward with prosecuting de Sousa and her fellow defendants, she said.

But kidnapping Abu Omar was Castelli’s brainchild, de Sousa said.

Castelli obtained support for the operation from CIA Director George Tenet and Rice, who recommended that President George W. Bush sign off on the operation.

Pollari and other SISMI officials disputed Scheuer’s claims, saying that the SISMI had nothing to do with the rendition. Berlusconi’s office likewise disavowed involvement in the rendition after Scheuer’s interview appeared.

“If the kidnapping of the person in question had not been carried out, Nasr [Abu Omar] … would now be detained and subject to Italian justice,” Milan prosecutor Armando Spataro told CNN in 2005.

Italian court documents, however, show that Diogos did not see Abu Omar as an immediate threat, de Sousa said, which is why it dropped its surveillance of him in early 2003.

“The trouble here is that it’s a lot of ‘he said, she said’ between Pollari and Castelli, and Castelli says Pollari approved it. Pollari said, ‘I didn’t,'” de Sousa said.

The Italian agents’ ability to explain their role in the rendition has been hampered by the same state secrets rules that inhibited de Sousa’s defense.

Pollari and other top SISMI officials were also prosecuted for their roles, but Italy’s Supreme Court overturned their convictions in 2014 due to the secrecy laws.

Spataro uncovered the CIA’s involvement in Abu Omar’s disappearance by analyzing cell phone records from the day of the rendition. These records connected the cell phones with the credit cards, hotels and car rentals used by the CIA agents involved in the kidnapping. Many of the names Spataro found were aliases used by the agents, not their true identities.

In 2005, Spataro obtained arrest warrants for 22 CIA operatives in connection with the rendition, together with a Air Force officer and two SISMI operatives. Italian Judge Oscar Magi indicted de Sousa and 26 US government officials for their alleged roles in Abu Omar’s kidnapping.

“The problem as I can see it is behind the prosecutor,” Gomes said. “The prosecutor did his job and went after people he could connect with the CIA at that time, and that obviously was the case of Sabrina.

“Had she been at the trial, she would have been able to say, ‘No, I didn’t do it and the people who did it were these guys,’ but she never had this chance because they never allowed her to go to the trial.”

American and Italian authorities did not let de Sousa appear at the trial because they did not want her fingering the real culprits, according to Gomes.

“This is a betrayal beyond belief and the message it sends to the community of officers serving overseas is troublesome,” Zaid said

If it's wrong for America, Obama will do it.

I wonder where all the Snowden/Manning ball washers are to defend them? Both should have been shot with lead shot.

Don't forget Bergdahl. I'll donate the rounds.

It's Bradley Manning, not Chelsea. Calling this traitorous scum "Chelsea" is just feeding into and legitimizing this freakshow BS.

the whole gd thing has become a freakshow. hell, it was that way 40 years ago, but the patriots claimed it was protecting america.

it's all a lie, but just keep working & payin' taxes. that's your purpose.

Really

He should have his balls cut off. Oh, wait...

He seems to know no bounds at all.

What is right is wrong and what is wrong is right.

What will he do in the next few days?

Winder how safe Manning will feel knowing his release date and location are public knowledge now?

Would anyone be willing to write a large life insurance policy on him?

Notice how the Obama administration is waiting until May to release Manning?

I wonder, can a sitting president revoke a pardon granted by a ass hole like obammy?

If anything happens to him, it'll make instant news as a "hate crime." Can't miss a chance to further the agenda.

Tried to commit suicide twice.
3rd time's the charm.

Bet it goes bye bye.......maybe be own hand, maybe not.

Don't think so. Once it's chit out, it can't be stuffed back in.

They have elevated mental illness the the level of a status symbol.

Why does even Fox News refer to him as a woman? If Manning was convinced he was a donkey, would they all refer to him as Eeyore?

He is not a woman, just a deviant. We do these types no favor by playing along with their mental issues. Libs are always up for making an "anything is all right" stance. Give them 2 more decades and child molestation will be considered by them to be fine. Sad.

A disgrace of a President, releasing a disgrace of a human being......

I find it to be an appropriate metaphor for who Obama really is and hope that he has a few more of these over the next 2 days.

And I hope we can hang these metaphors on the Democratic Party and finally wake up the silent majority in this nation.

And yet I'll bet half of America doesn't give a sheit and half of them are happy.

It's a victory for LBUIJLKJIQQISUCKDICKCUMFUKFAG community.

PS: Looks like Snyper will be having date night this coming May.

Manning and Clinton.

What is it with dudes named Chelsea?