Chelsea Manning Disinvited as Harvard Fellow After Protest from CIA Officials By Bridget Johnson
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/2017/09/14/chelsea-manning-disinvited-harvard-fellow-protest-cia-officials/
The dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School announced in a late-night statement that Chelsea Manning was disinvited as a visiting fellow after former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell quit in protest.
“Senior leaders have stated publicly that the leaks by Ms. Manning put the lives of U.S. soldiers at risk,” Morrell wrote in a letter to dean Douglas Elmendorf. “The Kennedy School’s decision will assist Ms. Manning in her long-standing effort to legitimize the criminal path that she took to prominence, an attempt that may encourage others to leak classified information as well.”
Morell said he had “an obligation to my conscience — and I believe to the country — to stand up against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national security information.”
While serving in the Army, Manning passed nearly 750,000 classified or sensitive documents to WikiLeaks, and in August 2013 was sentenced to 35 years in prison for violations of the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as other charges. President Obama commuted her sentence and she was released on May 17.
On Wednesday, the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School announced Manning would be one of several visiting fellows. Morell announced his resignation as a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center the next day. The former CIA chief stressed in his letter that he supported Manning’s rights as a transgender American and her right to “publicly discuss the circumstances that surrounded her crimes,” but said it was his right and duty “to argue that the school’s decision is wholly inappropriate and to protest it by resigning from the Kennedy School — in order to make the fundamental point that leaking classified information is disgraceful and damaging to our nation.”
In a midnight statement, Elmendorf said Manning was invited “because the Kennedy School’s longstanding approach to visiting speakers is to invite some people who have significantly influenced events in the world even if they do not share our values and even if their actions or words are abhorrent to some members of our community.”
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