Bradley Manning, Washington, And The Blood Of Civilians

By Chase Madar, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

From animated piece by Michael Daly

Who in their right mind wants to talk about, think about, or read a short essay about... civilian war casualties?  What a bummer, this topic, especially since our Afghan, Iraq, and other ongoing wars were advertised as uplifting acts of philanthropy: wars to spread security, freedom, democracy, human rights, gender equality, the rule of law, etc.

A couple hundred thousand dead civilians have a way of making such noble ideals seem like dollar-store tinsel.  And so, throughout our decade-long foreign policy debacle in the Greater Middle East, we in the U.S. have generally agreed that no one shall commit the gaucherie of dwelling on (and “dwelling on” = fleetingly mentioned) civilian casualties. Washington elites may squabble over some things, but as for foreigners killed by our numerous wars, our Beltway crew adheres to a sullen code of omertà.

Club rules do, however, permit one loophole: Washington officials may bemoan the nightmare of civilian casualties -- but only if they can be pinned on a 24-year-old Army private first class named Bradley Manning.

Pfc. Manning, you will remember, is the young soldier who is soon to be court-martialed for passing some 750,000 military and diplomatic documents, a large chunk of them classified, to the website WikiLeaks.  Among those leaks, there was indeed some serious stuff about how Americans dealt with civilians in invaded countries.  For instance, the documents revealed that the U.S. military, then the occupying force in Iraq, did little or nothing to prevent Iraqi authorities from torturing prisoners in a variety of gruesome ways, sometimes to death.

Then there was that gun-sight video -- unclassified but buried in classified material -- of an American Apache helicopter opening fire on a crowd on a Baghdad street, gunning down a dozen men, including two Reuters employees, and injuring more, including children.  There were also those field reports about how jumpy American soldiers repeatedly shot down civilians at roadside checkpoints; about night raids gone wrong both in Iraq and Afghanistan; and a count of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, a tally whose existence the U.S. military had previously denied possessing.

Together, these leaks and many others offered a composite portrait of military and political debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan whose grinding theme has been civilian casualties, a fact not much noted here in the U.S.  A tiny number of low-ranking American soldiers have been held to account for rare instances of premeditated murder of civilians, but most of the troops who kill civilians in the midst of the chaos of war are not tried, much less convicted.  We don’t talk about these cases a lot either.  On the other hand, officials of all types make free with lusty condemnations of Bradley Manning, whose leaks are luridly credited with potential (though not actual) deaths.

The Trial Of Bradley Manning: Intimidation, Retaliation, Retribution

By Ann Wright, cross-posted from WarIsACrime.org (formerly AfterDowningStreet)

Yesterday, December 16, 2011, 40 supporters of Bradley Manning saw him in person in the military courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland and another 60 saw him on a video feed from the court, the first time Manning has been seen by the public in 19 months.  Over 100 other supporters, including 50 from Occupy Wall Street who had bused down from New York City, were at the front gates of Fort Meade in solidarity with Manning.

Hundreds of supporters will gather today, Saturday, December 17, for a large rally and march.
For his first court appearance, Bradley was in what looked to be a new military uniform and typically military, he had a fresh haircut.  He was not in shackles in the courtroom, but it appeared in a photo that he was shackled in the van that brought him to the court. Manning talked freely with his civilian defense counsel and his two military legal counsels.

He did not turn around and look at the people in the court, but as he was brought in and taken out during the various recesses of the court, he no doubt noticed supporters in Bradley Manning t-shirts.
Bradley Manning has been imprisoned for 19 months, since May, 2010, without a trial.  Yesterday, December 16, 2011, an Article 32 hearing began at Fort Meade, Maryland, in which an investigating officer will determine whether there is sufficient evidence of the crimes with which the military has charged him for the case to be referred to a General court-martial.

In July, 2010, Manning was charged with transferring classified information onto his personal computer and communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source.  22 more crimes were charged in March 2011, including "aiding the enemy," a capital offense.  Defense Department prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty. In April, 2011, Manning was found fit to face a court martial.

If It's Good Enough For Cheney and Rumsfeld . . .

Pfc. Bradley Manning was arrested in Iraq in May 2010, for allegedly leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, including the U.S. diplomatic cables that were subsequently published by WikiLeaks and in newspapers around the country.  As widely reported, Manning has been subject to inhumane conditions during his confinement, raising serious concerns of human rights groups as well as the spokesperson for the State Department, who resigned after publicly condemning Manning's treatment as "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid."

Chase Madar, an attorney who is writing a book about Manning, contends in a piece originally published at TomDispatch, that not only should Manning not be punished so harshly, he deserves a medal. 

Bradley Manning, American Hero
Four Reasons Why Pfc. Bradley Manning Deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Not a Prison Cell

By Chase Madar, originally published on TomDispatch on July 7, 2011.

We still don’t know if he did it or not, but if Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old Army private from Oklahoma, actually supplied WikiLeaks with its choicest material -- the Iraq War logs, the Afghan War logs, and the State Department cables -- which startled and riveted the world, then he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom instead of a jail cell at Fort Leavenworth.

President Obama recently gave one of those medals to retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who managed the two bloody, disastrous wars about which the WikiLeaks-released documents revealed so much.  Is he really more deserving than the young private who, after almost ten years of mayhem and catastrophe, gave Americans -- and the world -- a far fuller sense of what our government is actually doing abroad?

Bradley Manning, awaiting a court martial in December, faces the prospect of long years in prison.  He is charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917.  He has put his sanity and his freedom on the line so that Americans might know what our government has done -- and is still doing -- globally.  He has blown the whistle on criminal violations of American military law.  He has exposed our secretive government’s pathological over-classification of important public documents

Welcome To Post-Legal America

Everyone knows that in the United States if you’re a robber caught breaking into someone’s house, you’ll be brought to trial, but if you’re caught breaking into someone else’s country, you’ll be free to take to the lecture circuit, write your memoirs, or become a university professor. -- Tom Engelhardt

I have written before about the Obama Adminstration's refusal to hold accountable those in the Bush Administration who authorized torture and how damaging it is to not have a true reckoning that confirms once and for all not just the immorality, but the illegality of torture.  (See, e.g., Pitfalls of Only Looking Forward, Tortured Logic.)  As I previously stated, "if we are to remain a nation of laws then when high government officials break the law or cynically bend the law to justify human rights violations there needs to be consequences."  (No Spain, No Gain.)  As Tom Engelhardt explains, in a great new piece on TomDispatch, which he kindly allows me to re-post here, by failing to bring wrongdoers to justice while instead prosecuting whistle blowers, we are indeed becoming a country that is no longer governed by the rule of law.

Dumb Question of the Twenty-first Century: Is It Legal? 

Post-Legal America and the National Security Complex

By Tom Engelhardt, originally posted at TomDispatch, on May 30, 2011.

Is the Libyan war legal?  Was Bin Laden’s killing legal?  Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination?  Were those “enhanced interrogation techniques” legal? These are all questions raised in recent weeks.  Each seems to call out for debate, for answers.  Or does it?
Now, you couldn’t call me a legal scholar.  I’ve never set foot inside a law school, and in 66 years only made it onto a single jury (dismissed before trial when the civil suit was settled out of court).  Still, I feel at least as capable as any constitutional law professor of answering such questions.

My answer is this: they are irrelevant.  Think of them as twentieth-century questions that don't begin to come to grips with twenty-first century American realities.  In fact, think of them, and the very idea of a nation based on the rule of law, as a reflection of nostalgia for, or sentimentality about, a long-lost republic.  At least in terms of what used to be called “foreign policy,” and more recently “national security,” the United States is now a post-legal society.  (And you could certainly include in this mix the too-big-to-jail financial and corporate elite.)

It’s easy enough to explain what I mean. If, in a country theoretically organized under the rule of law, wrongdoers are never brought to justice and nobody is held accountable for possibly serious crimes, then you don’t have to be a constitutional law professor to know that its citizens actually exist in a post-legal state.  If so, “Is it legal?” is the wrong question to be asking, even if we have yet to discover the right one.

Quite Simply A Mess

"Viewed as a whole, the secret intelligence summaries help explain why in May 2009 President Barack Obama, after ordering his own review of wartime intelligence, called America's experiment at Guantanamo 'quite simply a mess.'"   Rosenberg & Lasseter, McClatchy Newspapers, 4/24/11

Various media outlets have just published classified military documents on Guantanamo detainees originally obtained by WikiLeaks.  Here is the story from McClatchy's Carol Rosenberg and Tom Lasseter.  They report that:

[T]he U.S. military set up a human intelligence laboratory at Guantanamo that used interrogation and detention practices that they largely made up as they went along . . . The documents, more than 750 individual assessments of former and current Guantanamo detainees, show an intelligence operation that was tremendously dependant on informants — both prison camp snitches repeating what they'd heard from fellow captives and self-described, at times self-aggrandizing, alleged al Qaida insiders turned government witnesses who Pentagon records show have since been released.

The New Yorker's Amy Davidson details how some of the evidence was gathered and goes on to say that "the greatest insight the files may give is into what our government thought it was doing, and why, when it decided to imprison certain people indefinitely and out of the reach of the rule of law—the logic, or illogic, of Guantánamo."

As Rosenberg and Lasseter conclude after reviewing the records of the interrogations, "there’s not a whiff in the documents that any of the work is leading the U.S. closer to capturing bin Laden. In fact, they suggest a sort of mission creep beyond the post-9/11 goal of using interrogations to hunt down the al Qaeda inner circle and sleeper cells."  Which leads Davidson to remark:  "And so we sacrificed our values and our moral standing for goals that were increasingly—vanishingly—distant from the ones we had been told were so urgent; or for no real reason at all."

In the wake of President Obama's executive order to continue to hold some of the detainees at Guantanamo indefinitely without any charges, Glenn Greenwald stresses that "these documents conclusively underscore the evils of the Obama administration’s indefinite detention regime." 

The idea of trusting the government to imprison people for life based on secret, untested evidence never reviewed by a court should repel any decent or minimally rational person, but these newly released files demonstrate how warped is this indefinite detention policy specifically.

Sub-Standard

I have previously written about the inhumane conditions of confinement of  Bradley Manning, the Army private who has been accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.  Locke Bowman, Legal Director of  the MacArthur Justice Center, has written an article, originally published in Huffington Post, in which he makes the essential point that while Manning's case received a blast of publicity after a State Department official was fired over remarks criticizing Manning's treatment, "the indignities and abuses he is enduring are merely commonplace" in our maximum security prisons and jails. 

Prisoner Abuse In WikiLeaks Case Puts Our Standards On Trial

By Locke Bowman, April 19, 2011

For a couple of news cycles last month, there was a public debate of sorts about the treatment of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of embarrassing the government by leaking State Department files to Wikileaks.

Manning, it will be remembered, is being held in a maximum security brig in Quantico, Virginia where he has been on "prevention of injury watch." According to news reports, his clothes have been removed every night and he has been forced to sleep in a smock. He is shackled when he is removed from his cell. His only exercise consists of the opportunity, one hour per day, to walk in circles in a room. He is forced to periodically assure his keepers that he is "okay," a procedure that makes it impossible for Manning ever to sleep for more than a few minutes at a stretch.

Manning's lawyer complained in a blog post that his client was being unjustifiably humiliated. Philip Crowley, a State Department spokesperson, famously let slip that Manning's treatment was "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid" -- an indiscretion that cost Crowley his job.

At a news conference on March 11, the president himself faced a question about Manning. Mr. Obama said he'd looked into the matter and received assurances from the Pentagon that Manning's treatment was "appropriate" and "meeting our basic standards," an answer that left some wondering what "basic standards" the president had in mind. Notably, though, Obama declined to answer whether he agreed or disagreed with Crowley's assessment.

The next week, the New York Times blasted the president for his indifference to the violations of Manning's rights. A group of academic luminaries drafted an open letter deploring the detention of Manning "under degrading and inhumane conditions that are illegal and immoral."

Then the flames of controversy died down.

Private Manning's abuse continues -- we must presume. The injustice of it is unabated. It's no less immoral and illegal this month than it was in March to deprive Manning of the opportunity to sleep and to strip him, literally and figuratively, of his human dignity. Due process and the rule of law bar still punishment without trial. And, in our system, even after trial, when punishment is justified, the punishment may not be "cruel and unusual," as Manning's ongoing mistreatment obviously is.

In truth, though, this was never a story about Private Manning. His case only caught the public's attention for a few days because Crowley, the former State Department employee, had the bad judgment to speak the truth about one instance of pointless cruelty. It got more interesting when the president had to respond to an inconvenient, discomforting question and demonstrated, as he has before, the unwillingness of his administration to take a principled stand against abuses of human rights.

The mistreatment of Private Manning is reprehensible. But what matters more is that the indignities and abuses he is enduring are merely commonplace.

My colleague Joe Margulies (a leading voice in opposition to the post-9/11 detention without trial of persons suspected of terrorist involvement) points out that Manning's treatment eerily mirrors the regimen that 9/11 detainees Jose Padilla, Yaser Hamdi and Ali al Marri were subjected to before any of them had been convicted of any offense. Few voices were raised in opposition.

In maximum security prisons and jails all over the United States detainees routinely endure mistreatment worse than the published accounts of what Manning is undergoing. For over a decade, seriously mentally ill prisoners at the Tamms Correctional Center in southern Illinois have been stripped naked for periods of "suicide watch," during which they cower and whimper as security personnel make periodic observations of their "wellbeing." Prisoners at Tamms spend 23 hours per day in barren cells with concrete slabs for beds. They exercise alone in a concrete room. Their view of the outside world is a sliver of sky visible through a tiny window when they stand on their bunks. For year after year, their only human touch is from a guard who shackles their legs and arms whenever they leave their cells. Some lose their minds. No one cares.

The president's brush off of the complaints about Private Manning -- his treatment "meets our basic standards" -- is more an indictment of ourselves than of Mr. Obama. The president was right, of course. "Our standards" are being met in Manning's case. And that's the real problem.

[Related posts:  Ridiculous and Counterproductive and Stupid]

Ridiculous and Counterproductive and Stupid

Pfc. Bradley Manning was arrested in Iraq in May 2010, for allegedly leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, including the U.S. diplomatic cables that were subsequently published by WikiLeaks and in newspapers around the country.  Originally charged last July with transferring classified data onto his computer and communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source, 22 new charges, including the capital offense of "aiding the enemy" were added this month.  As Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake observed, the Pentagon is "ratcheting up the pressure on  Manning" with these charges now that the case against WikiLeaks' Julian Assange is falling apart.

Since the beginning of this year, serious concerns have been raised about the conditions of Manning's confinement at the Marine Corps Brig at Quantico, Virginia. Manning had been held in solitary confinement under a "prevention of injury" assignment, which is one step below suicide watch.  Twenty-three hours a day he must remain in in a 6 x 12 ft cell, which consists of a bed, toilet and sink, but no window.  He is checked by guards every five minutes and is not permitted to sleep during the day.  He was required to sleep in his boxers, with no sheets or pillow, only a rough, heavy blanket.  Recently he has been given a smock to sleep in but he has also been subjected to prolonged forced nudity, and is required to present himself naked outside his cell for morning inspection.

In January, Amnesty International wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Gates complaining that Manning's detention was "unnecessarily harsh and punitive" and in "breach the USA’s obligations under international standards and treaties."  Amnesty has renewed its objections and contends that the current treatment, which requires Manning to remove his clothes violates his human rights.  Glenn Greenwald reports that Manning's formal request for less harsh treatment -- including an end to forced nudity and solitary confinement --  was rejected last week by the Quantico base commander.

P.J. Crowley, the State Department's spokesman was speaking to a small group at M.I.T. on Friday, when he was asked about Manning's treatment.  His response was that while Manning deserves to be in prison, what is being done to him is “is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”

OK, substantial allegations of inhumane treatment of a military prisoner have been raised not only by the human rights community and progressive-minded journalists, but by the State Department's chief spokesperson.  What is this Administration going to do about it?  That's easy.  Deny there is any problem and then fire the spokesperson.

When President Obama was asked on Friday about Crowley's statement and whether he agreed with it.  Obama's response was disturbing, to say the least:  "With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are. I can't go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning's safety as well."

So, the President has been assured by the Pentagon that everything is fine.  As Daniel Ellsberg put it, "If Obama believes that, he'll believe anything. I would hope he would know better than to ask the perpetrators whether they've been behaving appropriately."

Then, on Sunday, P.J. Crowley was made to resign in the wake of his criticism of Manning's treatment.

I suppose President Obama can be decisive after all.  Shameful, but decisive.

No Spain, No Gain

"I didn't expect a Spanish Inquisition"

In the Spring of 2009, after it became clear that the Obama Administration was not going to pursue any meaningful investigation, much less prosecution, of the Bush Administration's use of torture in its war on terror, I was heartened when Spanish Magistrate Baltasar Garzon ordered an inquiry into whether six senior Bush administration officials, the Bush Six, were responsible for "an authorized and systematic plan for torture."  Judge Garzon is a heroic figure who previously ordered the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.  The torture investigation stemmed from allegations from five Spanish citizens imprisoned at Guantánamo.  (Spain was also investigating other Bush Administration misdeeds:  the death of a Spanish cameraman when Baghdad's Palestine Hotel was shelled and the use of Spanish bases and airfields for CIA extraordinary renditions flight).

We now know, thanks to WikiLeaks, that U.S. officials in the Obama Administration tried to influence Spanish prosecutors and government officials to stop these investigations.  As summarized by Scott Horton, the cables "reveal a large-scale, closely coordinated effort by the State Department to obstruct these criminal investigations."

High-ranking U.S. visitors such as former Republican Party Chair Mel Martinez, Senator Greg Judd, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were corralled into this effort, warning Spanish political leaders that the criminal investigations would “be misunderstood” and would harm bilateral relations. The U.S. diplomats also sought out and communicated directly with judges and prosecutors, attempting to steer the cases into the hands of judges of their choosing. The cables also reflect an absolutely extraordinary rapport between the Madrid embassy and Spanish prosecutors, who repeatedly appear to be doing the embassy’s bidding.

According to the cables, the embassy discussed with Spanish authorities specific judges handling these cases and obtained a promise from prosecutors to have the torture case assigned to a judge they considered friendlier to the United States.  And, lo and behold, the torture investigation has languished.  Garzon has since been suspended after being charged with abusing his powers to investigate Spanish Civil War atrocities, and, as David Corn reports, another judge is now overseeing the case, which has gone nowhere.

President Bush, in touting his new book, proudly admitted that he authorized waterboarding and considered it legal "because the lawyer said it was legal."  These lawyers -- the Bush Six -- provided the legal justification for torture based on what well-respected legal experts have characterized as "embarrassingly weak," "blatantly wrong" and "erroneous legal analysis."  There is little doubt that they conformed their legal opinions to reach the results Bush wanted.  As Georgetown law professor David Cole put it:

They concluded that keeping suspects awake for eleven days straight, stripping them naked, exposing them to cold temperatures, dousing them with water, slamming them into walls, forcing them into cramped boxes and stress positions for hours at a time, and waterboarding them hundreds of times were not torture, not cruel, not inhuman, not even degrading, and therefore perfectly legal. The memos make clear that true accountability . . . must extend up the chain of authority, to the lawyers and Cabinet officers who approved the “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the first place. 

President Obama has stated that since his Administration won't condone torture we can simply move forward.  This is remarkably short-sighted. If we are to remain a nation of laws then when high government officials break the law or cynically bend the law to justify human rights violations there need to be consequences.  As Professor Cole eloquently states:  "Absent a reckoning for those responsible for making torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment official US policy, the United States’ commitment to the rule of law will remain a hollow shell -- a commitment to be honored only when it is not inconvenient or impolitic to do so."

We have known for some time that this reckoning would not come from the U.S. government, but it did appear that other countries might fill the breach.  What the leaked cables tell us is that the Obama Administration was not only passively refusing to examine the Bush Administration's wrongdoing but actively pressuring other governments to cease their inquiries.  It appears that Obama can be tough when he wants to be.   [Related posts:  Pitfalls of Only Looking Forward, Tortured Logic]