In Washington, the New York Times reports federal prosecutors are looking for evidence of any collusion between Assange and Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who is suspected of leaking the massive trove of classified government documents. Justice Department officials are reportedly trying to find out whether Assange encouraged or even helped Manning to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did, they believe they could charge Assange as a co-conspirator in the leak. The Times reports the Justice Department is under intense pressure to make an example of Assange as a deterrent to further mass leaking of documents.
While all eyes are on Julian Assange, little is being said about the plight of Bradley Manning. He’s the 22-year-old U.S. Army private who was arrested in May and has been in detention ever since. For the past five months he’s been held at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia. Before that, he was held for two months in a military jail in Kuwait.
In a new report, Glenn Greenwald, the political and legal blogger at Salon.com, writes that Manning is being held under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment, and even torture.
Glenn Greenwald talking:
Bradley Manning is the 22-year-old Army private who is alleged, though not at all proven or convicted, to have been a source for not only the diplomatic cables that were just released but also the trove of documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as the video that showed an Apache helicopter attacking unarmed civilians and killing two journalists in Baghdad, as well as other undisclosed—yet undisclosed information that WikiLeak appears to possess.
He’s been held for seven months without being convicted of any crime. And the conditions that he’s being held in are really quite disturbing. And this has been true for the entire seven-month duration of his detention. He is in solitary confinement, and he’s not only in solitary confinement, which means that he’s in a cell alone, but he’s there for 23 out of 24 hours every day. He is released for one hour a day only. So, 23 out of the 24 hours a day he sits alone. He is barred from even doing things like exercising inside of his cell. He’s constantly supervised and monitored, and if he does that, he’s told immediately to stop. There are very strict rules about what he’s even allowed to do inside the cell. Beyond that, he’s being denied just the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, such as a pillow and sheets, and has been denied that without explanation for the entire duration of his visit, as well. And there is a lot of literature and a lot of psychological studies, and even studies done by the U.S. military, that show that prolonged solitary confinement, which is something that the United States does almost more than any other country in the Western world, of the type to which Manning is subjected, can have a very long-term psychological damage, including driving people to insanity and the like. It clearly is cruel and unusual; it’s arguably a form of torture. And given that Manning has never been convicted of anything, unlike the convicts at supermaxes to whom this treatment is normally applied, it’s particularly egregious.
DR. ATUL GAWANDE: The science of what happens to people deprived of social contact, is they have to fight for their sanity. And many lose their sanity.
There are different levels of solitary confinement. There’s the full-on sensory deprivation that they do at Florence. What’s being done to Bradley Manning is not quite to that level. He does get a certain amount of TV time, 15 minutes, 20 minutes a day, where they stick a TV in front of his cell, for example. They claim that he’s able to try and communicate with the detainees through the walls on either side of him, which is obviously not real social interaction. But he is alone in his cell 23 out of 24 hours a day.
And there are European courts, including the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces treaties to which E.U. states are bound, including the Convention Against Torture and just the general human rights treaties, that bar the extradition of any citizens to any country where they’re likely to be subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment. And there are currently war on terror detainees, whom the United States considers highly important detainees, who are contesting their extradition in these European courts on the ground that if they are extradited to the United States, they will be subjected to the kinds of inhumane and cruel treatment which E.U. courts ban, primarily solitary confinement. And there are case laws—cases in E.U. jurisprudence where they have refused to extradite prisoners to some countries, such as Bulgaria, on the grounds that solitary confinement is a form of torture, and therefore countries are bound not to transfer their citizens there without at least a guarantee that they won’t be subjected to those sorts of tactics. Other countries around the world, in response to pressure from Amnesty and others, such as Tunisia, have all recently renounced the practice of solitary confinement for any more than a few days at a time, except in the most extreme cases of extremely violent prisoners. So what the United States is doing is really a departure from Western norms in terms of how people are imprisoned, especially pretrial detention, where the person has been found guilty of nothing.
Bradley Manning has been charged basically with transmitting classified information without authorization, not treason or anything along those lines. And those charges, given the magnitude of what he’s alleged to have transferred, carries a very significant prison term. It’s up to 72 or 80 years. And there’s certainly an expectation that the government could add much more serious charges still, as serious as those are, to Manning’s—to the panoply of accusations that Manning faces. A New York Times article this morning that suggests that the government is trying to pressure Manning into cooperating and giving incriminating testimony in order to enable them to have a case against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. And what it appears is that the government is using both the repressive conditions and the threat of more serious charges still as a means of coercing him into doing that.
The government may actually be trying to turn Manning, who they say is the guy who actually gathered all of the documents, against Assange as a way of going after Assange. This whole issue of looking at Assange as a co-conspirator, as someone who colluded with Manning in grabbing all of these documents, raises questions. Journalists always ask for documents for allegations people makes. To now say that that is colluding with the whistleblower, to get this information illegally from the government, would really create a major problem for journalists in this country and around the world.
The dilemma that the government is facing is the following. They are, on the one hand, facing significant political pressure to take serious action against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, meaning prosecution or worse. On the other hand, though, there’s really no way to prosecute Julian Assange and WikiLeaks without criminalizing the very essence of investigative journalism. WikiLeaks has done nothing that every good investigative journalist doesn’t do all the time. There are multiple journalists in the United States who have Pulitzer Prizes sitting on their shelf for having obtained and then published very serious classified information that the government insisted posed grave national security harm. And so, in order to get around this, they’re trying to distinguish WikiLeaks from other journalists.
And what they first tried to do was to say, well, WikiLeaks just recklessly publishes, indiscriminately publishes, everything. And, of course, that’s totally false, because WikiLeaks has published only a tiny sliver of the cables that it has received and has worked closely with these newspapers around the world to decide what ought to be published. And what they’re trying to do now is to say that WikiLeaks, unlike journalists, isn’t merely a passive recipient of classified information but is actively trying to induce the leak of classified information the way that a spy would.
Whenever journalists are aware or become aware of classified information that they want to publish, they take all kinds of affirmative steps to encourage more documents to be given to them, to encourage the source to allow their publication, to contact other people in government to try and get even more classified information to confirm what they’ve learned or to elaborate on it. Journalists are very rarely mere passive recipients of classified information—one day you just sit there, and it shows up in your email box. Journalists, good journalists, always take affirmative and active role in trying to get more classified information and secure the right to publish classified documents. And if this is the theory that they’re going to use to try and criminalize WikiLeaks, that’s at least as much of a threat, if not more so, to investigative journalism as simply charging them under the Espionage Act for publishing classified information standing alone.
– from democracynow.org