Freedom is suddenly in sight for Chelsea Manning. There is a real chance the Iraq War veteran and Wikileaks whistleblower could be home by Groundhog’s Day.

Even a year ago it was unthinkable; now, it could be a partial redemption of the Obama administration’s shoddy record of persecuting leaks and whistleblowers.

Chelsea Manning served Army intelligence, the position from which she leaked thousands of field reports from the Afghan and Iraq Wars, as well as thousands of State Department documents, to Wikileaks. Thanks to Manning, we have a mosaic portrait of the flailing Afghan counterinsurgency war: night raids gone wrong, checkpoint shootings of civilians, outposts built and abandoned. We know that it was official US policy, in spite of the highest official denials, for occupying US troops to not intervene in the torture by Iraqi authorities of local suspects. We know that the State Department pushed hard to keep the minimum wage down in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Americas, and worked to extend Big Pharma’s intellectual property regime to Western Europe, where prescription drugs costs a small fraction of what they do here.