Bradley Manning's abuse by US military
Whatever the outcome of his trial, whatever the ethics of his actions, the treatment of Bradley Manning in custody has been "cruel, inhuman and degrading", according to the UN special rapporteur on torture. A new report argues that, by keeping Private Manning in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day over an 11 month period, the US military may have breached the UN convention against torture: "imposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of his presumption of innocence".
This follows a letter signed by 250 US law professors that called his treatment illegal, unconstitutional and possibly torture.
I have written in the past about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, though Manning is also a fascinating figure in his own right. His alleged actions, whatever else we may wish to say about them, helped precipitate the Arab Spring, the US withdrawal from Iraq and the ending of that war - amongst many other things. Yet despite the hysteria at the time of their release, the US government admits it still can not point to a single informant who has been harmed by the leaks. Furthermore, various subesequent leaks of information likely subject to higher levels of classification have not been punished.
Posts
21 comments:
I'm not sure which is more depressing - that the US continues to perpetrate this kind of stuff (have they invented a vaccine for cognitive dissonance?!), or that this is the first I've heard of this. Heaven help us.
Heaven help us indeed.
My impression is that the US and Oz mainstream media have done a particularly poor job on this issue. Actually, on at least least two issues: the treatment of Private Manning and on drawing the links between the leaks and their effects.
The link to the end of US occupation of Iraq is fairly straightforward. US abuses were revealed in the cables that lead to a public outcry in Iraq that lead to the refusal of the Iraqui government to continue to grant criminal immunity to US troops, which was a condition for continued US presence. Similar links can be drawn for the cables precipitating many of the events that sparked the Arab Spring.
CD: The liberal betrayal of Bradley Manning. If Bush were still president, this would be a cause célèbre.
Guardian: Obama's record on whistleblowing. He's been worse than Bush. These are only some of the examples.
Guardian: Bradley Manning lawyer in struggle to have government documents released.
Guardian: Manning's lawyers accuse prosecution of lying. These are serious allegations against the responsibilities of prosecutors to share relevant evidence. As one of the commenters points out, were Manning a Chinese dissident who had revealed Chinese military abuses and corruption within the regime, he would be hailed by the US press as a hero and lauded by Clinton and quite probably offered asylum if he managed to make it to the US.
Guardian: Manning treated more harshly than suspected terrorists, argues his defence lawyer.
Guardian: Bradley Manning's lawyers seek to show torturous holding conditions.
"Bradley Manning, the suspected WikiLeaks source, is seeking to call several military psychiatrists to testify that he was held in custodial conditions likened to torture against their professional advice."
I suspect that this line of defence has zero chance, but I'm glad the arguments are being put on record. If, against my expectations, it succeeds, the political fall out will be very interesting... :-)
Guardian: Bradley Manning treatment in 'flagrant violation' of military code - lawyer.
Comment in the Guardian that seems relevant:
The US Military Whistleblower Protection Act of 1988 falls far short of the Nuremberg Principles, in that it limits disclosure to
(1) A member of Congress, an Inspector General, or a member of a Department of Defense audit, inspection, investigation, or law enforcement organization
All these people and bodies were already well aware of the various unprosecuted massacres exposed by the leaks, as they had access to the same network at a higher security level than the leaker, and yet none of them did anything about it. The Nuremberg Principles trump national law and so the leaker is the one person who had access to these files that acted legally and morally under international law. If any member of Congress or ranking military had acted legally and morally by raising these unprosecuted massacres in government then there would have been no need for the leak. It is their mass culpability and illegal lack of concern that should be the focus of concern. The fact that still no prosecutions have been brought or even considered against the actual war criminals exposed in the leaks shows a national disregard for the rule of domestic, military and international law and the role of justice.
The leaker took a great risk in taking the data and expose these crimes. To expect them to sort through the data for potentially threatening identifiable information, when it took teams of journalists months to do just that, seems unreasonable when they had every expectation that would be done, as indeed it was done for a long time."
Guardian: US military recruiting more neo-Nazis, criminals, physically unfit and mentally ill people to fill numbers. Interestingly, Bradley Manning would never have been deployed in active service if there had not been a critical shortage of soldiers with IT skills at the time.
Guardian: Manning offers partial guilty plea.
Guardian: BM voted person of the year 2012, after WikiLeaks freeped the poll.
TYT: Why is Bradley Manning pleading guilty?
Greenwald: Manning in his own words.
TYT: Manning in his own words.
Daniel Ellsberg: A Salute to Bradley Manning, Whistleblower:
"In fact, the Iraq war logs show hundreds of instances of cases of torture, and in every case, the soldiers were given the illegal order not to investigate. [...] Bradley Manning, by releasing this information, is the only solider who actually obeyed this law, the international treaty, and by extension, the Constitution."
Here is a FB discussion on the ethics of the leak in which I participated.
YT: We are all Bradley Manning.
AJ: Why Manning's trial matters for US journalism.
Guardian: Bradley Manning verdict.
Guardian: Government prosecution asks for 60 years (!).
Statement from Bradley Manning on receiving a 35 year sentence for whistleblowing:
The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of the concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We have been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on a traditional battlefield. Due to this fact, we’ve had to alter our methods of combatting the risk posed to us and our way of life.
I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend our country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time that I realized that our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we had forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.
In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated teh definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.
Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism any logically-based dissension, it is usually an American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission.
Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism and the Japanese-American internment camps—to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.
As the late Howard Zinn once said, there is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
I understand that my actions violated the law. I regret that my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and my sense of duty to others.
If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my request knowing that some time you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.
Bradley Manning, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, had his trial prejudiced by his commander-in-chief (Nobel Peace Prize winner).
"I want to thank Bradley Manning for the service he has done for humanity with his courage and compassionate action to inform us, so that we have the means to transform and change our societies for the better. I want to thank him for shining light into the shadows. It is up to each and everyone of us to use the information he provided for the greater good. I want to thank him for making our world a little better. This is why I nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, for there are very few individuals who have ever brought about the kind of social change Manning has put in motion."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/21/bradley-manning-sentence-birgitta-jonsdottir
Post a Comment