In the US military or government justice system torture has become commonplace and the the public and mainstream media appear oblivious to it or actively support the use of torture.
Bradley manning and Julian Assange
Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com argues that the Whisleblower Bradley Manning is in effect being tortured by being held in inhumane conditions. The question arises that the US government is hoping to break Bradley Manning so he will testify against Julian Assange and Wikileaks giving evidence that Wikileaks was actively encouraging Bradley Manning to leak the documents.
Bradley Manning 2 Imprisoned under Inhumane Conditions [DemocracyNow!]
The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention By Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, Dec. 14, 2010
Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months -- and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait -- under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning's detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.
and further Greenwald in his update :
The need to have Manning make incriminating statements against Assange -- to get him to claim that Assange actively, in advance, helped Manning access and leak these documents -- would be one obvious reason for subjecting Manning to such inhumane conditions: if you want to have better treatment, you must incriminate Assange. In The Huffington Post yesterday, Marcus Baram quoted Jeff Paterson, who runs Manning's legal defense fund, as saying that Manning has been extremely upset by the conditions of his detention but had not gone public about them in deference to his attorney's efforts to negotiate better treatment.
Whatever else is true, the DOJ seems intent on pressuring Manning to incriminate Assange. It would be bizarre indeed to make a deal with the leaking government employee in order to incriminate the non-government-employee who merely published the classified information. But that may very well at least partially explain (though obviously not remotely justify) why the Government is holding Manning under such repressive conditions: in order to "induce" him to say what they need him to say in order to indict WikiLeaks and Assange
US prosecutors are trying to prove that Assange and Manning were co-conspirators and that Wikileaks and Julian Assange were actively encouraging Manning to leak the Classified documents .
But the issue is that any investigative journalist is not a mere passive bystander.
As Glenn Greenwald points out:
"In sum, investigative journalists routinely -- really, by definition -- do exactly that which the DOJ's new theory would seek to prove WikiLeaks did. To indict someone as a criminal "conspirator" in a leak on the ground that they took steps to encourage the disclosures would be to criminalize investigative journalism every bit as much as charging Assange with "espionage" for publishing classified information."
Keith Olbermann talked with FBI whistle-blower Colleen Rowley about the details of Bradley Mannings incarceration, which were reported by Glenn Greenwald earlier this week:
Keith olbermann
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The US government is trying to prove that Wikileaks and Assange actively encouraged Bradley Manning to leak classified material to them . If they can prove this they believe Assange can be prosecuted for sedition and or treason or whatever they can come up with. But as Charlie Savage of the New York Times argues investigative journalist are rarely passive in their role as uncovering government wrong doing. Therefore going after Assange will inevitably lead down a slippery slope in which all investigative journalist could be characterized as taking part in seditious and treasonous actions.
To prevent this the prosecutors need Manning to testify against Wikileaks and Assange.
Since the conditions under-which Manning is being held that is 23 hours out of 24 in solitary confinement which is tantamount to torture are they hoping Manning will break and be coerced into making a false confession which would be used against Wikileaks and Assange.
What disturbs many Obama supporters is that Obama was supposed to be a champion for whistleblowers instead he has sold out to the right wing and is more anti-Whisleblowers than was the Bush/Cheney Regime.
U.S. Tries to Build Case for Conspiracy by WikiLeaks By CHARLIE SAVAGE Published: December 15, 2010
WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors, seeking to build a case against the WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange for his role in a huge dissemination of classified government documents, are looking for evidence of any collusion in his early contacts with an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information.
Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.
Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.
...Since WikiLeaks began making public large caches of classified United States government documents this year, Justice Department officials have been struggling to come up with a way to charge Mr. Assange with a crime. Among other things, they have studied several statutes that criminalize the dissemination of restricted information under certain circumstances, including the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.
But while prosecutors have used such laws to go after leakers and hackers, they have never successfully prosecuted recipients of leaked information for passing it on to others — an activity that can fall under the First Amendment’s strong protections of speech and press freedoms.
Last week, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said he had just authorized investigators to take “significant” steps, declining to specify them. This week, one of Mr. Assange’s lawyers in Britain said they had “heard from Swedish authorities there has been a secretly impaneled grand jury” in northern Virginia.
US prosecutors are hoping to "...persuade Private Manning to testify against Mr. Assange. But two members of a support network set up to raise money for his legal defense, Jeff Paterson and David House, said Private Manning had declined to cooperate with investigators since his arrest in May."
The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention By Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, dec. 14, 2010
Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months -- and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait -- under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning's detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.
Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a "Maximum Custody Detainee," the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.
From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not "like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole," but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out
Just by itself, the type of prolonged solitary confinement to which Manning has been subjected for many months is widely viewed around the world as highly injurious, inhumane, punitive, and arguably even a form of torture. In his widely praised March, 2009 New Yorker article -- entitled "Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?" -- the surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande assembled expert opinion and personal anecdotes to demonstrate that, as he put it, "all human beings experience isolation as torture." By itself, prolonged solitary confinement routinely destroys a person’s mind and drives them into insanity. A March, 2010 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law explains that "solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture."
For that reason, many Western nations -- and even some non-Western nations notorious for human rights abuses -- refuse to employ prolonged solitary confinement except in the most extreme cases of prisoner violence. "It’s an awful thing, solitary," John McCain wrote of his experience in isolated confinement in Vietnam. “It crushes your spirit." As Gawande documented: "A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam . . . reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered." Gawande explained that America’s application of this form of torture to its own citizens is what spawned the torture regime which President Obama vowed to end:
This past year, both the Republican and the Democratic Presidential candidates came out firmly for banning torture and closing the facility in Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of prisoners have been held in years-long isolation. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, however, addressed the question of whether prolonged solitary confinement is torture. . . .
This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. . . . Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America’s moral stature in the world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement . . .
...This is why the conditions under which Manning is being detained were once recognized in the U.S. -- and are still recognized in many Western nations -- as not only cruel and inhumane, but torture. More than a century ago, U.S. courts understood that solitary confinement was a barbaric punishment that severely harmed the mental and physical health of those subjected to it. The Supreme Court's 1890 decision in In re Medley noted that as a result of solitary confinement as practiced in the early days of the United States, many "prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition . . . and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better . . . [often] did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community." And in its 1940 decision in Chambers v. Florida, the Court characterized prolonged solitary confinement as "torture" and compared it to "[t]he rack, the thumbscrew, [and] the wheel."
The inhumane treatment of Manning may have international implications as well. There are multiple proceedings now pending in the European Union Human Rights Court, brought by "War on Terror" detainees contesting their extradition to the U.S. on the ground that the conditions under which they likely will be held -- particularly prolonged solitary confinement -- violate the European Convention on Human Rights, which (along with the Convention Against Torture) bars EU states from extraditing anyone to any nation where there is a real risk of inhumane and degrading treatment. The European Court of Human Rights has in the past found detention conditions violative of those rights (in Bulgaria) where "the [detainee] spent 23 hours a day alone in his cell; had limited interaction with other prisoners; and was only allowed two visits per month."
and so it goes,
GORD.
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