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Available for over a year

By any reckoning, Chelsea Manning is extremely fortunate to be at liberty today. The US soldier got a 35-year sentence for espionage and other crimes after leaking hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and military files. Thanks to a clemency decree from President Obama, she left a military prison in Kansas this week after serving just seven years. So easily she might, like thousands of others convicted on much lesser charges, have spent the rest of her life in the dustbin of the American penal system, largely forgotten and with little realistic prospect of successful appeal. ‘I am looking forward so much,’ she said. ‘Whatever is ahead of me is far more important than the past.’ Except, of course, that that past will continue to shape the way she’s seen for a very long time to come. Is she still what some regard as the reckless and insecure person who put at risk the lives of many people working for her own country - misguided maybe, but still a traitor? Or does she deserve hero status for exposing significant war crimes, uncovering murky diplomatic manoeuvring, and in the process revealing an embarrassing fragility in national security? And there’s also, of course, her stand on transgender rights, since she entered the military as Bradley Manning, which is who she’d been as a teenager in Pembrokeshire. Admirers and detractors will go on disagreeing, and neither, it seems to me, can claim a monopoly of the high ground. Like many others, I retain reservations about what she did, but my instinct is to be glad that she’s been shown leniency. A merciful society is always much healthier than one which seeks to squeeze out every last drop of vengeance available. For various faiths, that reflects a God who is merciful - and Christian teaching insists that God is always infinitely more generous than we deserve, treats us with sheer grace, whoever we are, whatever we’ve done. And one dangerous but arguably necessary thing Chelsea Manning did was to bring into the light words and deeds which many would have preferred hidden. Whether she realised it or not, she was engaged in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets of speaking truth to power, the power in particular of those whose decisions taken in great secrecy determine whether people live or die. That took guts. At one point she was reported as apologising ‘for hurting the United States’ and suggested she had been mistaken in believing she could ‘change the world for the better.’ I rather hope she’s changed her mind on that, because making a difference is within the grasp of any of us, at however humble a level. As she sets out on the new beginning, seeking to change the world for the better still seems a pretty good goal.