“If a fellow soldier is punished for taking their oath to defend the Constitution seriously, what does that mean for our military and for our democracy?”
For 60 years the most celebrated and revered African in history was listed as a terrorist threat to the people of the United States. Who decided this? Why did Americans allow this, and what does it say about what we are?
In 2008, former South African President Nelson Mandela was finallyremoved from the U.S. terrorism watch list. Mandela and other members of the African National Congress had been placed on the list because of their fight against South Africa’s apartheid regime — a system of legalized racial segregation enforced by the country’s National Party between 1948 and 1994.
Yet it was just days ago that former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt — a man once lauded by President Ronald Reagan — was convicted of genocide after a Guatemalan court found him guilty for his role in the slaughter of 1,771 Mayan Ixils in the 1980s. In fact, a total of 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or “disappeared” during the conflict, making it one of Latin America’s most violent wars in modern history.
This marks the first time in modern history that a former head of state has been found guilty of genocide in his own country. After Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison, Guatemala erupted in cathartic relief.
During a meeting with Ríos Montt in December 1982, Reagan famously declared: “President Ríos Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment …. I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.” In reality, Ríos Montt was brutal, learning his “counter-insurgency” tactics at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga. Former Panamanian President, Jorge Illueca, stated that the School of the Americas was the “biggest base for destabilization in Latin America.”
Against accusations of murder, Ríos Montt responded: “It’s not that we have a policy of scorched earth, just a policy of scorched communists.”
So, Reagan supported this man who scorched Ixil Mayans from the face of the earth because they were “communists” (they were not) and proclaimed that Ríos Montt was a man of integrity, a friend of the United States. Shame!
Our government has over the last century supported a score of corrupt, murderous tyrants throughout Latin America, including Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujullo and Nicaragua’s Anastastio Somoza. The list for the Middle East is even longer and more sinister.
More disturbing is the vilification, torture or humiliation which our government has wreaked upon great heroes like Mandela, and courageous whistleblowers like Thomas Drake, Peter van Buren, Sibel Edmonds, Lt Col Daniel Davis, CIA veteran John Kiriakou and, most egregiously of all, Pvt. Bradley Manning. Never has a U.S. soldier been so unjustly and cruelly treated by his government.
After more than three years in prison, including nine months of torture in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Bradley Manning’s trial is finally scheduled to begin June 3, 2013, in Maryland. The nation will break out in protests.
The outcome of this trial will determine whether a conscience-driven 25-year-old WikiLeaks whistle-blower spends the rest of his life in prison. Manning believed that the American people have a right to know the truth about what our government does around the world in our name.
We do not know how history will judge Manning, but nations around the world already embrace him as the catalyst for activating vibrant democratic developments in the Middle East. Democracy thrives on truth and transparency in government dealings, which these leaked documents are supplying.
No one has named one single U.S. soldier who has been harmed by the leaked documents. On the contrary, release of the highly embarrassing documents expedited U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, rescuing thousands of troops from bodily injury, PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
The Commander-in-Chief, however, improperly decreed Manning guilty on April 23, 2011, even as Manning languished under abusive treatment in prison. This was evidenced when protesters interrupted President Obama’s speech at his $5,000-per-ticket fundraiser in San Francisco, and were met with the blanket statement from Obama that Manning “broke the law.”The impropriety of Obama’s public pre-trial decree of Manning’s guilt is both gross and manifest.
“How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers,” asked Glenn Greenwald, “when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?”
Numerous commentators have noted how egregiously wrong Obama was in his preconceived condemnation.
Michael Whitney wrote: “[T]he President of the United States of America and a self-described Constitutional scholar does not care that Manning has yet to be tried or convicted for any crime.”
No American soldier has been treated the way our government has treated Pvt. Bradley Manning.
Over three years in prison without trial, nine months of which were in solitary confinement accompanied only by highly abusive treatment. The U.N. official overseeing the investigationpronounced that “Bradley Manning was subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in the excessive and prolonged isolation he was put in ….”
His miscreant jailers and interrogators tormented Manning with perfidious methods designed to humiliate him as a gay man. But he would not break. He stood strong and true for his country and his personal integrity.
But years from now Manning will be exonerated, much like Nelson Mandela. Let’s hope his exoneration rises above a Nobel Peace Prize, as that would only put him on a par with Obama’s questionable status.
We who love a healthy and vibrant democracy demand a full and unconditional pardon from Obama, an apology from the secretaries of State and Defense, and restitution for the injustice and humiliation already inflicted upon Pvt.Manning. If the court does not release Manning, and if Obama refuses to issue a pardon, a very severe political cost will be extracted. Justice will prevail.
We demand full respect and honor for patriotic whistleblowers, without whom our democracy will descend into despotism. Governments which operate in secrecy cannot be trusted and descend into oppression — even tyranny.
We see clearly that American government has an atrocious record in choosing its friends, and an equally dismal record of abusing its heroes. We must not allow the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, the Pentagon or even the president to make these choices. We, the free and informed people of America, must select our heroes, and name our villains.
Joseph Howard Crews is the editor of Progressivepost.com, a North County liberal website and bi-monthly newsletter.
******************
June 1 is the International Day of Action to Support Bradley Manning as his trial begins. Rallies in support Manning are scheduled across the nation. San Diego’s rally will be held at 1 p.m. at the corner of 6th and University avenues.
We the People will send a strong message to the military prosecutors, the Congress and President Obama, that Bradley Manning is a courageous patriot for democracy, a hero and intrepid truth-teller.
No getting around it: the Obama administration is badly abusing its power in its handling of the “Wikileaks” case against Army Pfc. Bradley Manning. Forget about Manning for the moment. The issues involved in his case are of great interest to the general public. We have a stake in whether he receives a fair, public trial. If his case were in a civilian court instead of a military court martial, none of the shenanigans outlined in David Carr’s column today in the New York Times would be tolerated — or, at least, they would be corrected on appeal.
The military’s handling of this case is embarrassing our country in the eyes of the world, and it insulting to the citizens of the United States. I don’t know if he is guilty or not; I don’t know if the military is railroading him or not. But I know for sure that it appears as though the military is railroading the guy, and that is bad enough.
Just a sample from today’s Carr column:
Finally, at the end of last month, in response to numerous Freedom of Information requests from news media organizations, the court agreed to release 84 of the roughly 400 documents filed in the case, suggesting it was finally unbuttoning the uniform a bit to make room for some public scrutiny.
Then again, the released documents contained redactions that are mystifying at best and at times almost comic. One of the redacted details was the name of the judge, who sat in open court for months.
A disgrace.
Update: the AEJMC, the country’s biggest group of journalism scholars and educators, just issued this statement on prosecuting leaks.
As American combat troops left Iraq in December 2011, at that point, the war was largely forgotten by the American public. What remains in public memory are retrospectives of the war, especially on its ten-year anniversary. The dominant narrative is that the Iraq war was a mistake because of the lies or “faulty intelligence” that were used to justify it, costs to the United States, and the strategic folly of invading the country in the first place. However, the war was more than a mistake — it was a crime. Portraying the war as a mistake does three pernicious things: downplay the gravity of the crime, does not question the premises of militarism and permanent war, and perpetuates the myth of American benevolence. Cumulatively, these retrospectives amount to a gross revision of history.
Before the war
Many commentators argue that the Iraq war was based on “faulty intelligence” and attribute it to an honest lapse in judgment. Joseph S. Nye, a prominent liberal intellectual and former U.S. assistant Secretary of Defense, did so in a piece for Project Syndicate. In it, he said Bush was “not alone” in believing Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. He said that other countries believed Saddam had them. However, this is misleading and whitewashes the historical record.
Manning testimony recording could be a direct leak from the government
“…What is now the focus is his motivation and he obviously was not motivated to aid the enemy, or to harm the US – he made that very clear. He chose cables and videos that had no national security concerns and he released them so we could have this conversation. And I think it is a disgrace every day that he is in jail. It is a disgrace to our military. It is a disgrace to the promises that Obama made in 2008….”
Published time: March 14, 2013 00:34
RT
The quality of the audio recording of Bradley Manning’s plea speech suggests that the tape could have been leaked by the government itself rather than some rogue journalist, WikiLeaks activist Clark Stoeckley told RT.
RT:The media reported what Manning said during the hearing, why is it so significant to actually hear him say it in his own voice?
Clark Stoeckley: I think it is very important for people to hear Manning’s own voice. So far everything has been processed through journalists and finally we get to hear his tone and the conviction in his voice. We can hear that he is a very brave, intelligent young man. And I think this is a very great thing that this has been released to the world.
RT:Is it going to effect the trial in any way, because it was not supposed to be leaked, is it?
CS: Correct. The court rules say, and every time I go as a journalist, I have to sign a peace of paper that says that I won’t to any recording. I will clarify: I definitely did not record this. I did not leak it. I’m sure that they are going to be clamping down on us.
But I am suspicious as to whether they leaked this audio or not. The audio to me sounds like it came from the courtroom rather than press room. There is a lot more chatter in the pressroom and I do not hear that in the audio. And it is also a lot crisper and clearer than what I heard in the pressroom. It sounds like it could be a direct recording from the government.
joelmarkharris journalist, novelist, screenwriter and producer – Posted on 03/15/2013
There has been a very alarming threat to journalism and our freedoms recently.
Earlier this year ex-CIA operative John Kiriakou pleaded guilty to violating the Orwellian-sounding Intelligence Identities Protection Act, passed in 1982 to weed out spies. The guilty plea has given Kiriakou the dubious distinction of being the first CIA agent to be imprisoned for leaking information to a reporter.
A more famous example is Private Bradley Manning who is facing a minimum of twenty years in prison and up to a maximum of a life sentence and this is all for releasing secret documents to Wikileaks. Not even the Cold War spies were treated as harshly as Manning.
Both men are what are called whistleblowers, people who tell the public about illegal or dishonest activity. Democratic countries needs to protect whistleblowers not vilify them. They are an important part of our societies and are, in part, what makes journalism function. Without whistleblowers, governments and corporations will feel more comfortably disregarding the rules when it suits them.
It’s ten years after G.W. Bush and his allies (UK, Australia and a “coalition of the willing”) attacked Iraq and quickly toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. The war was illegal, weapons of mass destruction have never been found, at least 130,000 Iraqis have been killed, millions displaced. Torture in detention centers, abuse in Abu Ghuraib and elsewhere. The Iraq War Logs, leaked by Bradley Manning and published by WikiLeaks and major main stream media in 2010, must be regarded one of the most significant documents of our time, and its full analysis will take more years if not decades. Responsible figures such as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair and others are now retired, never indicted for any war crimes at least in their own countries, but elsewhere, sure.
Throughout America’s history, brave individuals have opted to defy the American government in order to speak up against slavery, segregation, discrimination, and war. One such “enemy of the state” is Bradley Manning—an intelligence analyst who is being prosecuted for leaking classified government documents which expose systemic corruption within America’s military and diplomatic apparatus. Sadly, as John Whitehead argues in this week’s vodcast, the government’s war against Bradley Manning is a war against all who speak out against injustice.
US secrecy policy run as though formed by Orwell and Kafka
Engineering Evil – Intel Portal for Weighted Data and Information
Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 March 2013 13.26 EDT
– Posted on March 15, 2013
William Leonard, who oversaw state secrecy under George W Bush, says successive US presidents have abused system
Leonard said new executive powers had been created without congressional oversight or judicial review. Photograph: Rick Wilking/Reuters
Successive US presidents, including Barack Obama, have abused the system for handling classified information to expand their executive powers, the former senior official who oversaw state secrecy under George W Bush has claimed.
William Leonard, who was entrusted with ensuring proper treatment of state secrets by government agencies in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, said that over the past decade both the Obama and the previous Bush administrations had manipulated their classification authority to create new executive powers without congressional oversight or judicial review.
He said: “Governments have decided under the cloak of secrecy to unleash the brutality of violence in our name and that of our fellow citizens. So extra judicial kidnapping becomes ‘rendition’, torture becomes ‘enhanced interrogation’, detainees are held on information that barely qualifies as hearsay, and assassination becomes ‘targeted killing’.”
Whistleblowers perform a vital public service exposing government complicity in torture, terrorism, corruption, war and other human rights abuses.
Recently a group of whistleblowers gave a talk at the Oxford Union. These genuine public servants, realising their bosses were betraying the public and engaging in wrong-doing, sacrificed their careers for the public interest.
For many of them, despite the persecution they faced, this has been a liberating experience.
In her speech, Annie Machon explains how she revealed some of the crimes and utter incompetence of the unaccountable British spy community.
Tom Drake explains how narrow ‘intelligence’ is being hidden behind a veil of secrecy instead of shared, leading to its use by the powerful in the interest of militarism and against the public interest. He contrasts this with genuine intelligence which insists on telling truth to power.
Ann Wright resigned in opposition to the illegal war on Iraq after years in the government and now puts her experience to use as an active citizen protesting against the US government including the drone assassination campaign.
John Brady Kiesling also resigned in opposition to the illegal war on Iraq and advises the students in the audience to go into public service inside the system for 20 years and then raise the cost for poiticians of going against the public interest by resigning at the opportune moment.
Craig Murray blasts the Oxford students for not demonstrating against war criminal John Bolton but protesting against whistleblower Julian Assange. He explains how he resigned/was sacked as a result of his opposition to torture and extraordinary rendition. Whistleblowers are needed as governments can’t be trusted and governments regularly use smear tactics against whistleblowers to undermine their message. Whistleblowers, and Wikileaks in particular, is also needed as the mainstream media is dominated by militaristic interests.
Unlike other human rights groups, which dilly dally around these issues, Human Rights Investigations fully supports whistleblowers and recognises them as performing an essential role in defending human rights. In particular, we support the work of Wikileaks and recognise Bradley Manning as a prisoner of conscience.
Instructions for the #PardonMANNING daily twitterbomb
* Do this EVERY DAY for 1 hour starting at 6-8 PM YOUR TIME from NOW UNTIL MARCH 25th or until there are 100,000 signatures.
* Continuously tweet using the hashtag #PardonManning and the petition link and/or this page.
* In order to trend, everyone must tweet using the hashtag. YOU CANNOT JUST RETWEET OTHER PEOPLE. YOU HAVE TO TWEET YOURSELF! The best thing to do is click on #PardonManning and copy and paste other user’s tweets regarding Bradley Manning and tweet them out yourself. Do this as fast as you can, as long as you can.
* IT’S OKAY TO STEAL OTHER PEOPLE’S TWEETS DURING THE TWITTER RIOT.
* Remember! It’s important you use the #PardonMANNING hashtag and link to the petition with every tweet.
* Aim tweets at people who you think will help spread it, or at US elected representatives or #celebs.
Michael Moore @MMFlint – Roseanne Barr @TheRealRoseanne – Kim Dot Com @KimDotCom – most epic journo Greg Palast @Greg_Palast – and to our great joy – @LadyGaga have helped, as have large Occupy, Anonymous and other activist accounts, so remind them that this will be going on until March 26!
While trending itself is important to help raise awareness, the content of the tweets should include some information regarding Pvt. Bradley Manning so that we can educate people about his situation. One thing you can do is copy the individual news articles that are listed on this page http://www.bradleymanning.org/category/news and tweet them out so that people will know why it’s important to sign the petition.
Bradley’s full statement to the court last week, thanks to the amazing transcription by Alexa O’Brien @carwinb
Nobody has any illusions that the Obama administration will change it’s campaign of overzealous prosecution of whistleblowers, but forcing them to acknowledge public opinion is another black eye for an administration that has a worse human rights record than his arguably psychopathic predecessor George “Dubya” Bush.
So let’s shove 100,000 signatures in their faces and show our elected officials that we don’t mind taking pointless actions to make a point.
Because he carried out actions consistent with his oath
and his legal and moral obligations.
A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic reveals how retired US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq. Another special forces veteran, Colonel James Coffman, worked with Steele and reported directly to General David Petraeus, who had been sent into Iraq to organise the Iraqi security services.
This film includes references to torture and killing of Iraqi citizens by Iraqi “police” under the direct supervision of the hand-picked death squad trainer James Steele. Many such incidents are described in the diplomatic cables to the White House, provided by Bradley Manning to Wikileaks. In his statement Bradley Manning describes how disturbed he was to witness these rampant human rights violations, which he unsuccessfully attempted to report through proper channels, and which went uninvestigated by order, Frago 234.
Goal: To trend the hashtag #ThankManning worldwide for at least 1 hour
Write him 1 million THANK YOUS!
via @digitalfolklore <3
Instructions
* Continuously tweet using the hashtag #ThankManning and his mailing address and instructions. * In order to trend, everyone must tweet using the hashtag. * YOU CANNOT JUST RETWEET OTHER PEOPLE. YOU HAVE TO TWEET YOURSELF!
*Aim a few tweets at people who you think will help spread it, or at US elected representatives or #celebs.
The best thing to do is click on #ThankManning and copy and paste other user’s tweets regarding Bradley Manning and tweet them out yourself. Do this as fast as you can, as long as you can. IT’S OKAY TO STEAL OTHER PEOPLE’S TWEETS DURING THE TWITTER RIOT. While trending itself is important to help raise awareness, the content of the tweets should include some information regarding Pvt. Bradley Manning so that we can educate people about his situation. One thing you can do is copy the individual news articles that are listed on this page (http://www.bradleymanning.org/category/news) and tweet them out. * Remember! It’s important you use the #ThankManning hashtag and link to /WRITE TO PFC MANNING with every tweet. * Encourage people to go to /SupportNet to find a group near you and get active!
Bradley’s full statement to the court last week, thanks to the amazing transcription by Alexa O’Brien @carwinb
We suggest that this be not only US national actions at state capitols, but international as well, at US Embassies and Consulates or other relevant locales. Some of Bradley’s best supporters are in Berlin, Melbourne and around the world <<< Yes, WE LOVE YOU!!!
Twitter accountslist for all US Senators, Representatives and Committees. You may need to download the free, open-source OpenOffice to use the spreadsheet after downloading the file.
posters
There are a lot of Bradley Manning support posters on the net. Some can be found hereand on the /SupportNet member links.
I’m already getting assailed for including in my title Bradley Manning, who so many have already branded a traitor — even some vets who are themselves in the book draw the line at what he’s done. But as mesmerized as I am by the case, I’m even more mesmerized by the way it’s galvanized so many people — some soldiers/vets, some civilians like me who’ve internalized that old VVAW slogan “Love the warrior, hate the war.” It’s why I got my butt onto that Occupy bus and went down to Fort Meade for Manning’s first pretrial hearing more than a year ago.
Here’s what it was like— something I hadn’t put up here because I thought would be the prologue to this book. As I pull my manuscript apart to reshape it, some leaves fall off that might still be worth sharing — and I thought this might explain some things. I’ve posted photos of that weekend on this blog before, and they’re not hard to find — so the image above is simply that of old Camp Meade, back when it was an army camp instead of the intelligence-HQ Fort Meade. I’m betting that the scene outside the fort last month wasn’t that different from what I described then.
====================
Fort Meade, MD, December 16, 2011
The morning had already begun to chill as the bus pulled onto Reece Road long past the highway signs that said FORT GENERAL GEORGE MEADE.
With more pretrial hearings scheduled for this month and next we examine the similarities between the Bradley Manning case (and Wikileaks) and that of Daniel Ellsberg, the celebrated whistleblower who, together with Anthony Russo, was charged and tried for leaking the Pentagon Papers. At the trial all charges against Ellsberg and Russo were dropped and Bradley Manning’s supporters argue that the charges against him should be dropped too. Below is a summary of what happened to Ellsberg and Russo, their trial and the irregularities identified that led to the outcome..
1. Introduction
“I was the Bradley Manning of my day. In 1971 I too faced life in prison for exposing classified government lies and crimes. President Obama says “the Ellsberg material was classified on a different basis.” True. The Pentagon Papers were not Secret like the Wikileaks revelations, they were all marked Top Secret—Sensitive. Ultimately all charges in my case were dropped because of criminal governmental misconduct toward me during my proceedings. Exactly the same outcome should occur now, in light of the criminal conditions of Manning’s confinement for the last six months.” Daniel Ellsberg.
Daniel Ellsberg was described by Henry Kissinger as “the most dangerous man in America.” His actions directly contributed to the end of the Nixon presidency and the Vietnam War.
2. The Pentagon Papers
To see the Pentagon Papers in full (all 7000 pages were only made available in May 2011), click here .
The papers were officially known as United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense. The Papers showed that the US had deliberately expanded its war with the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks. Four administrations, from Truman to Johnson, had misled the public regarding their intentions.
Ellsberg provided material from the Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post (both went ahead and published).
3. The charges
On June 28, 1971, Ellsberg (who had gone into hiding after distributing copies of the Pentagon Papers to newspapers) surrendered in Boston to face criminal charges. Under the Espionage Act, Ellsberg was charged with theft and unauthorized possession of classified documents. Anthony Russo, a former RAND colleague of Ellsberg’s who had helped photocopy the documents and urged Ellsberg to distribute them, was subpoenaed in August 1971 and imprisoned for six weeks after refusing to testify against Ellsberg before a grand jury. In December 1971, a second indictment was issued against the two men, listing them as co-conspirators in the matter. Ellsberg faced five counts of theft and six of violations of the Espionage Act, for a maximum total of 115 years; Russo faced one count of theft and two of violating the Espionage Act, for a maximum total of 35 years.
4. The trial
Their trial began on January 3, 1973. Five days later, the Watergate burglary trial commenced in Washington, D.C. The Ellsberg/Russo trial continued for more than four months. In late April, Watergate prosecutor Earl Silbert submitted a memo that revealed that two members of a special investigations unit known as “the plumbers” that had been created by President Nixon — G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt (who had just been convicted in the Watergate burglary trial) — had illegally entered the offices of Lewis Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst, in search of files that could be used to discredit Ellsberg. A few days later the judge revealed that John Ehrlichman — one of Nixon’s top aides — had offered him the job of director of the FBI. It was also revealed that the FBI had secretly and illegally recorded conversations between Ellsberg and Morton Halperin, who had supervised the Pentagon Papers study. Meanwhile the Government admitted that telephone conversations of Ellsberg were picked up by wiretapping in late 1969 and early 1970, but that all records and logs of those conversations had disappeared from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Given the irregularities that had occurred the judge declared a mis-trial and the charges against both Ellsberg and Russo were dropped. The Government’s action in this case, Byrne said, “offended a sense of justice,” and so “I have decided to declare a mis-trial and grant the motion for dismissal.” The judge also made it clear that Ellsberg and Russo would not be tried again on charges of stealing and copying the Pentagon papers. He said, “The conduct of the Government has placed the case in such a posture that it precludes the fair, dispassionate resolution of these issues by a jury”.
Note: it was the revelation of the Fielding break-in that Nixon feared the most. When the House Judiciary Committee, in 1974, adopted three articles of impeachment against Nixon, two of them directly concerned the Fielding break-in. After that, Nixon had no choice but to resign.
5. Similarities/differences to Manning case
A. The (apparent) differences:
1. Manning is being court-martialled and is not facing charges via the criminal courts system. The rules and procedures are therefore different from those that applied to Ellsberg/Russo.
2. At the time of the Ellsberg/Russo trial the public mood was not in favour of President Nixon, whereas today President Obama still, arguably, enjoys popularity.
3. While Ellsberg provided extracts from the Pentagon Papers directly to the media, Manning is alleged to have used Wikileaks as a conduit.
4. More..?
B. The (apparent) similarities:
1. Both cases involve irregularities. With Ellsberg/Russo it was about break-ins, unauthorised surveillance, corruption, etc. With Manning it is more to do with the way he has been treated – or mistreated – since his arrest.
2. With both the Manning and Ellsberg/Russo cases the raison d’etre is/was all about revealing uncomfortable truths and acting according to conscience.
3. The files Manning is alleged to have leaked were published in part by several well known newspapers, including the New York Times; NYT and the Washington Post similarly published extracts from the Pentagon Papers.
4. More..?
Bradley Manning spent his third Christmas in solitary confinement on Tuesday. His imprisonment should trouble every citizen: if the government can detain any one of us indefinitely without bringing charges, it can do the same thing to anyone else.
A constitutional scholar familiar with the Fifth Amendment will say that the military may do what it likes with service members during time of war or public danger. Say what you like, military law does not permit violation of these rights:
Prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Solitary confinement is cruel and unusual.
Right to a speedy and public trial.
Right to due process.
Rights of the accused “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation,” “to be confronted with the witnesses against him,” and “to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor.”
Summary: It’s the time of year to look back on our deeds of the past year, and contemplate what we’ll do in the next. In the past American could think of bold exploration ventures (from Lewis & Clark to Apollo), great projects of domestic infrastructure (from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highways), and expansions of civil rights (from Emancipation to the 1960s). What have we to look back upon with pride? Or forward to with expectation?
… the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. — From C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, chapter VII
Americans watch Zero Dark Thirty’s depiction of torture, exulting in their moral decay:
The deterioration in the Republic proceeds at a speed beyond my worst fears (underestimating this was my worst mistake on these pages in 2010). Not just the government, although its institutions rot at an alarming rate. Torture, surveillance, assassination, foreign wars based on lies — the by now usual long list. It’s the failure of our private institutions that astonishes me. The ones that the Founders hoped would contain the government and defend our liberties.
Now attorneys write briefs justifying torture, wars without legal authorization, surveillance and detention without warrant, and indeed limitless Executive power under the authoritarian justification of the President as Commander in Chief. It’s not just lone actors, as the State legal associations have de facto ratified these actions though their inaction (e.g, the Pennsylvania Bars inaction on John Yoo, and the Alaska Bar inviting him to be their keynote speaker). And judges openly applauding the President’s violation of the laws.
Perhaps worse (as we expect little good from attorneys) even doctors participate in torture. Long rumored, now documented in “Neglect of Medical Evidence of Torture in Guantánamo Bay: A Case Series“, Vincent Iacopino (Adjunct Prof of Medicine, U of Minnesota) and Stephen N. Xenakis (Brigadier General, US Army, retired), PLOS Medicine, April 2011. Will the State Medical Associations act on this clear violation of medical ethics? {No, they didn’t. But the Brits did, see BBC, 21 December 2012.}
The impending release of the Hollywood film Zero Dark Thirty has sparked a vigorous debate about torture. A consensus among informed observers has emerged that torture was never actually helpful in securing useful intelligence information to support our nation’s wars abroad.
But the question of efficacy has obscured more important issues. Largely absent from the debate have been apparently forgotten concerns about human rights, accountability, and the rule of law.
Just to reiterate the consensus: torture did not help national security. The chairs of the Senate intelligence and armed services committees, in addition to a recent Republican presidential nominee and torture survivor, and the acting head of the CIA, have all publicly announced that the film’s depiction of torture exaggerates its usefulness.
In fact, as they have all confirmed, the information that led to the death of Osama bin Laden was gained through traditional intelligence methods, not the unconstitutional “enhanced interrogation” human rights abuses illegally concocted by former Vice President Dick Cheney, Ninth Circuit Judge Jay Bybee, and others.
Not only was torture unhelpful as an interrogation method, it was actively counterproductive: it fueled the recruitment of new terrorists by our nation’s enemies, and undermined our nation’s moral standing in the world, degrading the “smart power” that was responsible for our triumph over the Soviet bloc and the relative peace in the decades following WWII.
Yet in the wake of torture, our government has turned a blind eye to enforcing the law, ensuring that it will recur by endorsing a regime of unaccountability in direct violation of the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution, the precedent from the Nuremberg trials, the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT), and our federal statute enforcing the CAT.
The Obama administration commits violations of human rights every day it fails to pursue accountability for the architects of the Bush administration’s torture program. The first term decision to “look forward, not backward” reflected acapitulation to political headwinds, but it also heralded a great deal more.
First, it reflected the naïveté of the new administration dreaming that it could transcend partisan division. With the sober realities of the first term behind it, and the fresh political mandate conferred by a resounding re-election victory, the Obama administration should not hesitate to pursue long overdue investigations of senior Bush administration officials. Indeed, those investigations are required under international legal principles—principles so cherished that we once fought a world war to establish them.
After more than 900 days of detainment in United States military jails for allegedly disclosing state secrets, the haunting imprisonment of accused WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning was discussed in court for the first time at the latest round of pretrial motion hearings that began on Nov. 27 in Fort Meade, MD. Below is an account of those court proceedings. The case will continue intermittently into 2013.
If there’s a bad time to discuss holiday shopping, it’s while waiting for someone to describe being tortured.
I was soaking wet and still half asleep when our driver turned to the back seat of the press shuttle and said something so totally irrelevant and ill-timed that I knew right then and there that she was either innocently naïve or politely retarded.
“Can you believe it,” she said, “Christmas is already less than a month away.”
Festive fucking cheer is not particularly on the mind, at least not on this Tuesday morning at Fort Meade, Maryland. The sprawling 6.6-square mile United States Army base just outside of Washington, DC is the venue for the pretrial motion hearings in the case against Private First Class Bradley Manning. By the time the trial is over, a soldier considered a hero by some could be sentenced to life in prison. I was likely not the only one uninterested in having a holly jolly ol’ time, but that didn’t do anything to change the fact that our driver had just adjusted the FM dial to pick up “Santa Baby.”
When only 22 years old, Pfc. Manning was arrested at his barrack in Baghdad and dragged off to Kuwait, then to perhaps the worst locale yet— Quantico, Virginia—for the longest stretch of the two-and-a-half years of imprisonment that’s been condemned by the United Nations and Nobel laureates as tantamount to torture. Pfc. Manning won’t be court-martialed by a military judge until next March, and at that point he’ll likely have spent over 1,000 days—ten percent of his life—in solitary confinement.
This, of course, is because the US says Manning took 250,000 diplomatic embassy cables and a trove of sensitive military documents and sent them to the website WikiLeaks. Among the documents Pfc. Manning allegedly leaked are the Afghan War Diaries, the Iraq War Logs, secret diplomatic communications, and a video of US soldiers firing at Iraqi civilians and journalists from the air in a clip that was dubbed “Collateral Murder.”
“This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time, removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare,” Pfc. Manning is alleged to have written of the footage. Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder currently sought for extradition from the UK to Sweden, credits those documents and particularly the video with ending a war that left over 4,400 Americans dead and countless Iraqis murdered.
“It was WikiLeaks’ revelations—not the actions of President Obama—that forced the US administration out of the Iraq War,” Assange wrote last month. “By exposing the killing of Iraqi children, WikiLeaks directly motivated the Iraqi government to strip the US military of legal immunity, which in turn forced the US withdrawal.”
But the Obama administration doesn’t consider Manning’s alleged actions heroic—they deem them treasonous. The indictment against Pfc. Manning has made him one of just a handful of Americans charged under the World War I-era Espionage Act, and this week the court had to declassify a CD-ROM belonging to Osama bin Laden, presumably to prove that the al-Qaeda leader accessed the WikiLeaks files attributed to Manning thus justifying another charge he faces: aiding the enemy. That crime is punishable by death, but prosecutors have already acknowledged they won’t seek anything beyond a life sentence.
It was overcast and gloomy as we made our way through the morning’s relentless rain toward the court early Tuesday, the first day of the hearings. A throng of political protesters demonstrated their own country’s treatment of Manning. Just like with every motion hearing so far, they brandished protest signs saying “Free Bradley,” and wore matching T-shirts adorned with only the word “Truth.”
Soon we’d be shuffled into the tiny, 50-person-capacity courtroom, but for now we were in our cars, part of a caravan of two-dozen autos with hazards flashing as we meandered across Ft. Meade. Our trek through the base and toward the judge’s quarters seemed too eerily like a slow march from mortuary to cemetery for me to handle. The Christmas tunes didn’t help either: “Feliz Navidad.”
It wasn’t the drizzle or the drive that got me thinking about death. We were preparing for at least a week of hearing about the torture of a man not-yet-convicted of any crime.
At this point it was likely too late to break Manning. Since the summer of 2010 Pfc. Manning has been held in military custody, and sadly that was the reason a handful of us had assembled this week. The latest round of hearings would involve soul-crushing first-hand accounts of the nine months at Qauntico that had nearly killed the soldier. Defense attorney David Coombs is asking the court to dismiss all charges with prejudice due to alleged illegal pretrial punishment that he says his client was subjected to in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Fifth and Eighth Amendments to the US Constitution. At a rare public appearance in Washington on December 3rd, Coombs said Pfc. Manning’s time at Quantico will forever be etched in history as “a disgraceful moment in time.”
Inside the courtroom Manning, now 24, looks as if he’s still in high school. He’s just five-two and weighs less than my last four girlfriends. His dashing blue military garb, particularly his fitted jacket donned with decorative accolades, dwarfs him, sleeves extending almost past the tips of his fingers. To say Pfc Manning looks like he’s playing dress-up with items from his dad’s closet wouldn’t be inaccurate; the only difference is no one, not at any age, can manage to look so goddamn confident in the court as Pfc Manning. Despite being detained for over 900 days and subjected to conditions considered cruel and inhuman by the UN, Pfc. Manning is not the ghost I imagined he’d resemble. As we found out, though, that’s all anyone would have expected.
Immediately upon his arrest on May 26, 2010, Manning was transferred to an 8’ x 8’ x 8’ wire mesh cage in Kuwait with just a toilet and a shelf to keep him company. He had confessed online to a supposed confidant earlier in the week that he had submitted compromised intelligence to WikiLeaks, only for that correspondence to be handed to the FBI.
“Hypothetical question: If you had free reign [sic] over classified networks for long periods of time … say, eight to nine … and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do?” Manning is alleged to have asked in an AOL chat with Adrian Lamo, a hacker whom the private had never met.
“I was the source of the 12 July 07 video from the Apache Weapons Team which killed the two journalists and injured two kids.”
Within hours, the soldier was shackled and succumbing to what he described in court as a complete and total breakdown.
“I just thought I was going to die in that cage. And that’s how I saw it—an animal cage,” he told the judge as he testified for the first time.
Pfc. Manning was held captive in Kuwait for nearly two months, but it wasn’t until he landed on American soil that the fury of Uncle Sam came completely crashing down on him. Weeks after being rushed out of Iraq, Manning found himself in full restraints onboard an airline en route to Baltimore, Maryland. It was only when the pilot announced the flight plan that the soldier was ever sure he knew where he was going: Military prisons in Germany and Guantanamo Bay all could have been possibilities, he thought. Ironically, a stay at Gitmo may have actually given the soldier a more fighting chance at justice than what he and his legal team have had to endure during the last two years: The US has been sued by the Center for Constitutional Rights for the government’s failure to release court motion papers and transcripts—items the CCR say are easier to obtain in the cases involving al-Qaeda insurgents detained at the Cuban military jail.
Once in Baltimore, Pfc. Manning was loaded into a car and transferred to the military base in Quantico, Virginia. There he was held for nine months in maximum custody in a cell smaller than the one he saw overseas—just 6′ x 8′. For only 20 minutes a day, Pfc. Manning was left to see the sunlight while shackled in chains. Other times, he found that if he arched his neck and angled himself just right he could catch the reflection of the sun from a window that was mirrored into his unimaginable concrete hellhole. Once inside his isolation chamber for the customary 23-and-a-half hours or so, he was deprived of just about everything, including contact with other inmates and often his clothes. He was forced to sleep from 1 PM to 11 PM, naked, and was allowed to do so only when facing his lamp.
“I started to feel like I was mentally going back to Kuwait mode, in that lonely, dark, black hole place, mentally,” he said.
“The most entertaining thing in my cell was the mirror. You can interact with yourself. I spent a lot of time with it,” he told the court on Thursday.
For those nine months, Manning had to. His commanders at Quantico were put on the stand this week and testified that the soldier was regularly stripped of his underwear and flip-flops because he was classified consistently as prevention-of-injury, or POI, a status that made his imprisonment essentially on par with the strictest of solitary confinement sentences on the basis that he was a suicide risk.
Pfc. Manning was”as normal as a max prisoner would be,” Lance Corporal Joshua Tankersley told the court. Normal doesn’t necessarily have the same definition with military detention personnel as others.
“You would look in the mirror at yourself or stare at the wall.” That, said Tankersley, was normal behavior.
In the brig, Pfc. Manning was only allowed to make contact with the detainees directly on either side of his cell; for the duration of his extended stay, both rooms on the left and right remained vacant.
Sometimes, said Tankersley, POI status inmates were found snoozing. “And we catch them and wake them back up,” he said. “There’s basically nothing to do.” Any time Pfc. Manning had to be moved from his cage, the entire facility was put in lockdown.
To pass the time, Pfc. Manning would dance. He’d dance alone and make funny faces, both habits his psychiatrist attested on the stand as being normal given his condition. Because he wasn’t allowed weights, he lifted imaginary ones to stay agile.
“I would pace around, walk around, shuffling, any type of movement. I was trying to move around as much as I could,” he said. “I would practice various dance moves. Dancing wasn’t unauthorized as exercise.”
When asked to explain in court this week why nine months of maximum custody was necessary, his jailers gave varying answers akin to what would be expected for such strict handling: He could have harmed himself; he could have been harmed by others; he wasn’t mentally sound. Upon cross-examination, though, other information was unearthed revealing that the egregious conditions could easily be viewed as imputative, not imperative.
In multiple instances, the Quantico guards admitted that they subjected Manning to harsh treatment because the very antics he used to amuse himself in his cage were giving them cause for concern.
“His erratic behavior” was reason for putting him in protected watch, said Col. Dan Choike, the brig commander at the base
“His acting out, playing pee-a-boo, licking the bars on the cell itself. Different dancing. Erratic dancing.”
“Erratic dancing?” asked Coombs.
In another example, Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. William Fuller cited Manning’s “little interest in discussion” as a reason to him as POI. Col. Choike, the brig chief, had similar rationale.
He was “withdrawn, depressed,” Col. Choike said of Pfc. Manning.
“He wasn’t the kind of guy that was going to sit there and talk to you, his jailers, ad nausea?” Coombs asked Choike, deadpan.
“Would you agree with me that if you’re talking with your jailers and you make causal conversation and then they use that casual conversation to take away your underwear from you, then you might stop talking to your jailer?” he asked.
Upon further questioning, Quantico staffers acknowledged that the severity of the aiding the enemy charge—although not formally introduced yet by the government—also warranted harsher imprisonment. While innocent until proven guilty is the norm for civilians, Manning hasn’t been awarded that luxury of democratic society.
“The United States government with all of its resources, all of its personnel, I see them standing against me and Brad, and I have to admit to you—that could be rather intimidating,” Coombs told the crowd in DC during his first and likely only public appearance before his client’s court-martial. “And I was intimidated. Especially when the president of the United States says your client broke the law. Especially when Congress members say your client deserves the death penalty.”
Supporters of the soldier have argued that Pres. Obama’s extrajudicial declaration that Pfc. Manning’s guilt during a candid moment caught on camera last year may influence the military’s eventual court decision. During his turn cross-examining the Army’s witnesses, Coombs made it clear that his client was not accommodated like any other inmate at Quantico. Sgt. Fuller told that court that in his 17 years in military corrections, most inmates were listed POI for “a few days. No more than a week.” Manning was held in maximum confinement for nine months.
When a forensic psychiatrist was eventually commissioned to assess Manning at the brig, repeated recommendations were made to remove him from protected watch, which left him forced to cover himself with only a suicide smock and bedding that resembled something between a cardboard box and a liquidation sale rug. Those professional suggestions were all ignored in favor of the guards’ own instincts. Many of those staffers testified that they were trained in corrections for one month at an Air Force base in Texas and rightfully admitted that the guidelines for dealing and assessing with a suicide case they were taught there were thrown out the window when Private Manning arrived.
On Saturday afternoon, five days into the latest round of hearings, Quantico Staff Sgt. Fuller acknowledged that he routinely signed off on keeping Pfc. Manning a max custody detainee, and cited his reasons specifically for the court.
“Those times that I actually did have interaction or communication with Manning, it seemed he was distant, withdrawn, or isolated. That gave me cause for concern,” he told the court. When asked him to explain why he was worried, Fuller said, “I’m not sure why. You really couldn’t get him to talk.”
Quantico guards also testified that for initial health evaluations, a dentist was the qualified physician tasked with assessing Manning’s mental wellbeing.
“Why were you getting weekly updates from a dentist as opposed getting them directly from a forensic psychiatrist?” Coombs asked Col. Choike.
“She was the commanding officer,” he said.
At Quantico, Pfc. Manning treatment wasn’t by the book: the sleep depravation and stripping of clothes; the humiliation; the taunts and mockery; the nine months of putting Pfc. Manning in protected custody citing concerns over suicide—concerns that were rebuffed relentlessly by both Pfc. Manning himself and qualified psychiatrists. That’s why Coombs is looking to have the case against his client thrown out, and Manning’s own testimony this week only accentuated the living nightmare he was made to endure for nearly a year while only a half-hour drive from the capital of the nation. As testimonies from Quantico staff, health professionals, and the private himself continued late into the night all week, often for hours without intermissions, more unraveled about not just the torturous conditions imposed on Pfc. Manning but the blatant mismanagement in the same institution he is accused of blowing the whistle on.
On Wednesday, the night of Manning’s first day of testimony, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange embarrassed CNN during a 20-minute interview that seemed all too perfectly orchestrated to accentuate the mainstream media’s mistake of first underestimating WikiLeaks, then thinking it’s the site’s founder who needs to be forced into the spotlight.
“The case is not about whether Bradley Manning allegedly stole cables or not. The case is about the abuse of Bradley Manning,” said Assange.
Days earlier, Assange had again appealed the actions that his accused source is credited with contributing to the annals of history.
“The material that Bradley Manning is alleged to have leaked has highlighted astonishing examples of U.S. subversion of the democratic process around the world, systematic evasion of accountability for atrocities and killings, and many other abuses,” he wrote.
Video: David Coomb’s first public presentation on 3 Dec, 2012 in Washington, DC – Q&A follows
audio echo but includes Q & A (video of the full event follows this article)
During his address in DC, Coombs didn’t come close to buying Assange’s hyperbole. He did, however, acknowledge that the circumstances in the case against Manning—and to a lesser degree, other whistleblowers charged under Obama—have very real implications for everyone in the country.
“When you look at the offense of aiding the enemy and take it out of this case and simply say, ‘If you can possibly aid the enemy by giving information to the press with no intent that that information land in the hands of the enemy, and by that mere action alone you could be found to have aided the enemy,’ that’s a scary proposition,” said Coombs. “Right there that would silence a lot of critics of our government, and that’s what makes our government great, in that we foster that criticism and often times when its deserved, we make changes. “
“Last Tuesday, the president of the United States signed into law the Whistleblower Enhanced Protection Act,” he continued. “As President Obama was signing this bill into law, Brad and I were in the courtroom for the start of his unlawful pretrial punishment motion.”
Coombs paused, dumbfounded.
“How can you reconcile the two?”
Another pause.
“I don’t know the answer to that question.”
Before wrapping up his remarks, Coombs acknowledged Daniels Ellsberg, the former Pentagon staffer who spent countless hours inside the Department of Defense photocopying classified logs of the Vietnam War to release what became known as the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg, perhaps the country’s most recognized whistleblower, has saluted Pfc. Manning as his own personal hero.
“One of our nations most famous whistleblowers, Daniel Ellsberg, has on multiple occasions spoken out for Brad,” said Coombs. “History has been the ultimate judge of his courage and sacrifice. History has judged him well. I hope that history will judge Private first class Manning.”
Meanwhile, though, history will be taking it’s sweet fucking time. During the latest round of motion hearings, Pfc Manning’s court-martial was yet again postponed, this time from February to March. When the trial is convened next spring, Manning will have spent over 1,000 days in prison.
Someday, says Coombs, Brad Manning wants to walk out of his cell, earn a degree, enter public service, and perhaps even run for office.
“I want to make a difference in this world,” the soldier said to Coombs.
If one outcome occurs, Pfc. Manning may enter the history books as a traitor and sentenced to rot behind bars for acts of espionage and aiding the enemy. In another, he’s renowned as a patriot and a hero. Either way, his life has already been ravaged by a flawed system.
No matter the verdict, at Ft. Meade this weekend, Pfc. Manning looked determined to fight. He did not look dead, like his treatment the last two and a half years might suggest. He even acknowledged dozen supporters who had just sat through 12 hours of arguments in a cramped military courthouse.
“I’m confident that by the time this case comes to a conclusion, the record of trial will be the longest record of trial in our military’s history,” says Coombs. “And that record will reflect one thing: that we fought at every turn, at every opportunity, and we fought to assure that Brad received a fair trial.”
When I last saw Pfc. Manning, he was brought out of the court, hands shackled, flanked by two deputies equipped with semi-automatic assault rifles as they ushered him into a SUV and sent him back to whatever cage he now occupies. It was cold, and the radio in the nearest car belonging to the Ft. Meade media convoy was predictably tuned to the hits of the holiday.
“Can you believe it?” the press liaison said as I tried to defog my camera lens. “Less than three shopping weeks left.”
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange emerged for a rare public address Thursday, praising jailed U.S. soldier Bradley Manning in an address delivered from the balcony of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.
“While this immoral investigation continues, and while the Australian government will not defend the journalism and publishing of WikiLeaks, I must remain here,” he said.
Assange’s address name-checked a series of jailed figures, including Bahraini human rights activist Nabeel Rajab and alleged Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond. But the biggest cheers came when he praised Bradley Manning, the alleged source of WikiLeaks’ most earth-shaking revelations.
He said the 25-year-old “has maintained his dignity after spending more than 10 percent of his life in jail, some of that time in a cage, naked and without his glasses.”
Manning, who was arrested in 2010, currently faces trial on 22 charges, including aiding the enemy. Testimony in pre-trial hearings has recently focused on the conditions under which he was detained — including times at which he was forced to strip naked and at least one incident in which he says he was made to stand at attention while nude.
REPORT/RESOURCE ON UNLAWFUL PRETRIAL PUNISHMENT MOTION TO DISMISS CHARGES AGAINST BRAD BASED ON TREATMENT AT QUANTICO
Courtroom illustration by Clark Stoeckley
This is a work in progress compiled from first hand reports from the courtroom (and other), and will be added to as time permits! It links back to pages of contemporaneous notes from sources, so that even where this report is incomplete, you can access those notes.
#Op Manning 