Another Political Pardon

Slight of hand produced a couple of pardons besides Chelsea Manning.  This is to avoid press coverage by announcing one before the other two, and doing it at the end of the day.  One of them was General James Cartwright and one of them was a terrorist, sparking an editorial in the Wall Street Journal today.  Perhaps that would have been another way to close Guantanamo - pardon all the people there and call it a day.

General Cartwright [see my earlier post on this ] for all the delays in getting his prosecution done while he continued to serve the President, is a story that deserves to be told one day by an enterprising reporter with enough time to investigate the case.  Cartwright may, as his lawyers have said, been covering for someone else who gave the information to the New York Times.  There are not very many people who he would have to cover for, so the list is short.  His sentence is now vacated and he is a free man, never having served a day of his sentence.  He is not going to talk about it, though a lot of people surely will one day.  Only David E. Sanger knows for sure and he is not going to give up a source that highly placed. We know the White House favored the New York Times for a long time, but that time is coming to an end, creating an opening for discovery.  

This is another case where highly sensitive national security information was disclosed for political purposes i.e to make the President look good at a time when he didn't, covered up, and then pardoned to avoid the embarrassments of having to deal with any of those things.  Valarie Jarrett was right about the scandals of the White House - there were none.

I don't blame the General for any of this.  If his former White House counsel is correct, he did his job, and although he may have taken a dive for somebody else, he got his reward for it by keeping quiet and not drawing attention to all the things that were disclosed to the New York Times.  That is how you avoid scandal, and protect the office.  But, somebody needs to tell that story and tell it all.