The Inhumane Conditions of Bradley Manning’s Detention

[Peter Lemkin]

Al Jazeera - English [great if you haven't yet discovered it!!!] had the only interview to my knowledge given by snitch Adrian Lamo, now living in fear of his life. It is worth looking at, can't find a transcript.....his 'explanation' is pathetic and I think he was working for the Govt. Not surprised he is now in fear of his pathetic life. angryfire

[Carsten Wiethoff]

The following is an open letter signed by more than 250 researchers and law professionals. ( http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/apr/28/private-mannings-humiliation/)

Private Manning's Humiliation

Bruce Ackerman and Yochai Benkler



Bradley Manning is the soldier charged with leaking US government documents to Wikileaks. He is currently detained under degrading and inhumane conditions that are illegal and immoral.
For nine months, Manning has been confined to his cell for twenty-three hours a day. During his one remaining hour, he can walk in circles in another room, with no other prisoners present. He is not allowed to doze off or relax during the day, but must answer the question "Are you OK?" verbally and in the affirmative every five minutes. At night, he is awakened to be asked again "Are you OK?" every time he turns his back to the cell door or covers his head with a blanket so that the guards cannot see his face. During the past week he was forced to sleep naked and stand naked for inspection in front of his cell, and for the indefinite future must remove his clothes and wear a "smock" under claims of risk to himself that he disputes.
The sum of the treatment that has been widely reported is a violation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the Fifth Amendment's guarantee against punishment without trial. If continued, it may well amount to a violation of the criminal statute against torture, defined as, among other things, "the administration or application…of… procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality."
Private Manning has been designated as an appropriate subject for both Maximum Security and Prevention of Injury (POI) detention. But he asserts that his administrative reports consistently describe him as a well-behaved prisoner who does not fit the requirements for Maximum Security detention. The brig psychiatrist began recommending his removal from Prevention of Injury months ago. These claims have not been publicly contested. In an Orwellian twist, the spokesman for the brig commander refused to explain the forced nudity "because to discuss the details would be a violation of Manning's privacy."
The administration has provided no evidence that Manning's treatment reflects a concern for his own safety or that of other inmates. Unless and until it does so, there is only one reasonable inference: this pattern of degrading treatment aims either to deter future whistleblowers, or to force Manning to implicate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a conspiracy, or both.
If Manning is guilty of a crime, let him be tried, convicted, and punished according to law. But his treatment must be consistent with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. There is no excuse for his degrading and inhumane pretrial punishment. As the State Department's P.J. Crowley put it recently, they are "counterproductive and stupid." And yet Crowley has now been forced to resign for speaking the plain truth.
The Wikileaks disclosures have touched every corner of the world. Now the whole world watches America and observes what it does, not what it says.
President Obama was once a professor of constitutional law, and entered the national stage as an eloquent moral leader. The question now, however, is whether his conduct as commander in chief meets fundamental standards of decency. He should not merely assert that Manning's confinement is "appropriate and meet[s] our basic standards," as he did recently. He should require the Pentagon publicly to document the grounds for its extraordinary actionsand immediately end those that cannot withstand the light of day.
Bruce Ackerman
Yale Law School
New Haven, Connecticut
Yochai Benkler
Harvard Law School
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Additional Signers: Jack Balkin, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Alexander M. Capron, Norman Dorsen, Michael W. Doyle, Randall Kennedy, Mitchell Lasser, Sanford Levinson, David Luban, Frank I. Michelman, Robert B. Reich, Kermit Roosevelt, Kim Scheppele, Alec Stone Sweet, Laurence H. Tribe, and more than 250 others. A complete list of signers has been posted on the blog balkinization.

[Peter Lemkin]

The isolation of Bradley Manning just took a turn for the worse.
Now Quantico Marine Base and the government are breaking their own rules to deny visits to Bradley Manning.
Government officials and Quantico Marine Base have just declared that Congressman Dennis Kucinich and the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture - who have tried to visit Manning for months - would not be considered to be on "official government business." That means brig authorities could monitor their conversations and possibly use them against Manning in court.
We need to appeal this decision to the leadership at Quantico and the Pentagon, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Quantico Base Commander Colonel Daniel J. Choike, and Brig Commander CWO Denise Barnes. If enough of us call out this wrongheaded decision, we can generate pressure in the media to allow official visits with Bradley Manning.
Sign our letter to Quantico and Pentagon leaders: follow your own rules and allow official visits to PFC. Bradley Manning. Click here to add your name.
What do Quantico and the Pentagon have to hide? Are they afraid of what Bradley Manning might say about his treatment when the brig cameras are turned off?
For 9 months and counting, Bradley Manning has faced almost complete solitary confinement. He is still forced to strip nude nightly. He is still in maximum custody with an unnecessary "Prevention of Injury" order - far beyond that of any other detainee. He is still cut off from appropriate exercise and other rights afforded prisoners at the brig.
When confronted about Manning's harsh treatment, President Obama said the Pentagon had reassured him that Manning's confinement met "basic standards." If Manning's conditions meets our "basic standards," then why is the government going to such great lengths to keep him from meeting with official visitors?
Call out the hypocrisy of denying Bradley Manning official visitors. Sign our letter protesting the decision to block unmonitored visits to Bradley Manning.
The decision to block official visits to Bradley Manning isn't just ludicrous. It's against the rules. Marine rules clearly state that people "conducting official government business, either on behalf of the prisoner or in the interest of justice," can be allowed "official visits" not subject to monitoring by the brig. That explicitly includes Members of Congress like Rep. Kucinich.
Rep. Kucinich, a member of the House Oversight Committee, has been trying to visit Manning in prison for more than two months. The Congressman repeatedly wrote to Secretary Gates and other military officials requesting a visit to investigate the allegations of torture-like conditions to which Manning has been subjected. And the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has opened an official investigation into PFC. Manning's conditions.
If it seems like a stretch to say that a member of the US Congressional Oversight Committee and the United Nations visiting a military prisoner alleging abuse does not constitute 'official government business,' that's because it is. This is one big game of semantics, with the ultimate goal being to keep the public from hearing the truth about Manning's confinement.
The secrecy has to stop. Sign our petition to Secretary Gates and Commanders Choike and Barnes to stop obstructing and allow official visits to Manning.
With your help, we will make sure there is nothing secret about the way the US Government is treating Bradley Manning.
Thanks for all you do.
Michael Whitney,
Firedoglake.com

[Magda Hassan]

Bradley Manning: top US legal scholars voice outrage at 'torture'

Obama professor among 250 experts who have signed letter condemning humiliation of alleged WikiLeaks source

• Ed Pilkington in New York
  
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 April 2011 20.01 BST A man protests about the detention of Bradley Manning. More than 250 legal scholars have signed a letter expressing outrage. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
  
  More than 250 of America's most eminent legal scholars have signed a letter protesting against the treatment in military prison of the alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, contesting that his "degrading and inhumane conditions" are illegal, unconstitutional and could even amount to torture.
  The list of signatories includes Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America's foremost liberal authority on constitutional law. He taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign.
  Tribe joined the Obama administration last year as a legal adviser in the justice department, a post he held until three months ago.
  He told the Guardian he signed the letter because Manning appeared to have been treated in a way that "is not only shameful but unconstitutional" as he awaits court martial in Quantico marine base in Virginia.
  The US soldier has been held in the military brig since last July, charged with multiple counts relating to the leaking of thousands of embassy cables and other secret documents to the WikiLeaks website.
  Under the terms of his detention, he is kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, checked every five minutes under a so-called "prevention of injury order" and stripped naked at night apart from a smock.
  Tribe said the treatment was objectionable "in the way it violates his person and his liberty without due process of law and in the way it administers cruel and unusual punishment of a sort that cannot be constitutionally inflicted even upon someone convicted of terrible offences, not to mention someone merely accused of such offences".
  The harsh restrictions have been denounced by a raft of human rights groups, including Amnesty International, and are being investigated by the United Nations' rapporteur on torture.
  Tribe is the second senior figure with links to the Obama administration to break ranks over Manning. Last month, PJ Crowley resigned as state department spokesman after deriding the Pentagon's handling of Manning as "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid".
  The intervention of Tribe and hundreds of other legal scholars is a huge embarrassment to Obama, who was a professor of constitutional law in Chicago. Obama made respect for the rule of law a cornerstone of his administration, promising when he first entered the White House in 2009 to end the excesses of the Bush administration's war on terrorism.
  As commander in chief, Obama is ultimately responsible for Manning's treatment at the hands of his military jailers. In his only comments on the matter so far, Obama has insisted that the way the soldier was being detained was "appropriate and meets our basic standards".
  The protest letter, published in the New York Review of Books, was written by two distinguished law professors, Bruce Ackerman of Yale and Yochai Benkler of Harvard. They claim Manning's reported treatment is a violation of the US constitution, specifically the eighth amendment forbidding cruel and unusual punishment and the fifth amendment that prevents punishment without trial.
  In a stinging rebuke to Obama, they say "he was once a professor of constitutional law, and entered the national stage as an eloquent moral leader. The question now, however, is whether his conduct as commander in chief meets fundamental standards of decency".
  Benkler told the Guardian: "It is incumbent on us as citizens and professors of law to say that enough is enough. We cannot allow ourselves to behave in this way if we want America to remain a society dedicated to human dignity and process of law."
  He said Manning's conditions were being used "as a warning to future whistleblowers" and added: "
  I find it tragic that it is Obama's administration that is pursuing whistleblowers and imposing this kind of treatment."
  Ackerman pointed out that under the Pentagon's own rule book, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Manning's jailers could be liable to prosecution for abusing him. Article 93 of the code says "any person who is guilty of cruelty toward any person subject to his orders shall be punished".
  The list of professors who have signed the protest letter includes leading figures from all the top US law schools, as well as prominent names from other academic fields. Among them are Bill Clinton's former labour secretary Robert Reich, President Theodore Roosevelt's great-great-grandson Kermit Roosevelt, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union Norman Dorsen and the writer Kwame Anthony Appiah.
  This article was amended on 11 April 2011. The original referred to Kwame Anthony Appiah as a novellist. This has been corrected.
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr...ars-letter
  
  
  
  

[Carsten Wiethoff]

From http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2011/04...hat-trial/

OBAMA: So people can have philosophical views [about Bradley Manning] but I can't conduct diplomacy on an open source [basis]… That's not how the world works.
And if you're in the military… And I have to abide by certain rules of classified information. If I were to release material I weren't allowed to, I'd be breaking the law.
We're a nation of laws! We don't let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law.
[Q: Didn't he release evidence of war crimes?]
OBAMA: What he did was he dumped…
[Q: Isn't that just the same thing as what Daniel Ellsberg did?]
OBAMA: No it wasn't the same thing. Ellsberg's material wasn't classified in the same way.

Constitutional Scholars aren't any more what they used to be... :mad:
Reminds me to similar pre-convictions in the Khalid Sheikh Mohamed case. Maybe Obama intends to make it impossible to hold a civil trial and go for a military tribunal instead. Just guessing...

[Magda Hassan]

And why wasn't Obama talking this talk with Bush and company's crimes? Instead we got this "Move on, look forward not backwards" crap. No one has died from any of the Wikileaks cables and maybe many saved. Millions have died from Bush and companies murderous wars and cover ups.

[Peter Lemkin]

We convict them first and try them never.....torture and imprison 'em in between...how nice :darthvader: As cartoon character Pogo famously said, "We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us!"

[Keith Millea]

And why wasn't Obama talking this talk with Bush and company's crimes? Instead we got this "Move on, look forward not backwards" crap.

Well,the "Move On,look forward" crap,means the Bush company's crimes are also Obama's crimes now.Obama ain't sayin' nothing!

No one has died from any of the Wikileaks cables and maybe many saved. Millions have died from Bush and companies murderous wars and cover ups.

Which reminds me,what ever happened to the threat to release the video of the massacre of over 90 Afghan civillians?Remember,that was just after the chopper video was released.And,that video would have been 10 times more explosive than the Apache video.Did WikiLeaks think people couldn't handle it,or was there something more persuasive that Wikileaks just had to cave? :mexican:

[Magda Hassan]

I'm sure it will come in good time. And I'm certainly interested to learn more as it was horrific enough when it was even first mentioned. I just think the Wikileaks people have had their hands full with releasing the cables and the fall out from that plus the rape trials plus internal sabotage and infiltration and the Twitter case. I'm sure it is still on the to do list and not forgotten. There is quite a bit of work to do before the releases. Checking veracity of material and safety of sources etc.

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: We turn right now to Dan Ellsberg. I want to turn to President Obama, who was questioned by supporters of accused U.S. Army whistleblower Bradley Manning last week at a fundraiser in San Francisco. The President's comments were recorded on a cell phone. He said that what Bradley Manning had done was different from what Dan Ellsberg had revealed a generation ago. Listen very carefully. This is a cell phone recording.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We're a nation of laws. We don't individually make our own decisions about how the laws operate. No, he's doing fine, he's doing fine; I mean, he's being courteous, and he's asking a question. He broke the law.

LOGAN PRICE: You can make it harder to break the law, even to tell the truth.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, what he did was he dumped

LOGAN PRICE: Isn't that just the same thing as what Daniel Ellsberg did?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: No, it wasn't the same thing. What it was, Ellsberg's material wasn't classified in the same way.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama openly declaring that Bradley Manningwho has yet to stand trialhas broken the law. According to Obama, the cases are not similar because, quote, "Ellsberg's material was not classified the same way." Dan Ellsberg is on the phone with us right now, the world-renowned whistleblower who exposed the Pentagon Papers some 40 years ago.

Dan, he says don't compare Bradley Manning with you.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, nearly everything the President has said represents a confusion about the state of the law and his own responsibilities. Everyone is focused, I think, on the fact that his commander-in-chief has virtually given a directed verdict to his subsequent jurors, who will all be his subordinates in deciding the guilt in the trial of Bradley Manning. He's told them already that their commander, on who their whole career depends, regards him as guilty and that they can disagree with that only at their peril. In career terms, it's clearly enough grounds for a dismissal of the charges, just as my trial was dismissed eventually for governmental misconduct.

But what people haven't really focused on, I think, is another problematic aspect of what he said. He not only was identifying Bradley Manning as the source of the crime, but he was assuming, without any question

AMY GOODMAN: Dan, we have four seconds.

DANIEL ELLSBERG:that a crime has been committed.