The Passion of Bradley Manning (12 page)

Were American air strikes on Iran in the waning days of Bush-Cheney averted by a timely leak? The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program swiftly made its way public; its findings—that Iran was very far from acquiring nuclear weapons—were a shocking reversal of previous reports. Admiral William Fallon, head of CENTCOM, took the unusual step of immediately declassifying this NIE on Iran in December, 2007; a decision to which the White House, fearing an inevitable leak, assented. This quasi-leak, whose content was given emphatic backing by top military, diplomatic and intelligence officials, further stated that “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” This was Fallon making good on his candid earlier utterance that “we won't be doing Iran on my watch”—candor that cost him his job.

In his memoirs, George W. Bush writes that this unexpected assessment “tied my hands on the military side.” It's impossible to prove that this quasi-leak was decisive in preventing American and/or Israeli air strikes (or worse) on Iran. But it certainly did set back the neoconservative efforts to make war on Tehran, with much disappointment manifested in the National Review and editorial section of the Wall Street Journal.

It was Ray McGovern, a retired CIA senior analyst, who brought the above two leaks to my attention. McGovern knows something about secrets, intelligence and public service: he served in Army intelligence in Vietnam, then went on to give daily intelligence briefings to President Reagan and the first Bush.

McGovern has written that he wished he had had the courage to leak some of the Pentagon's honest internal evaluations of the Vietnam War's countless failings and evils—back then, he tells me, the Fourth Estate actually picked up stories like that, and it couldhave given the antiwar movement a boost. (Today McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing ministry of the ecumenical Church of the Savior in inner-city Washington; he's also a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.) On February 15, 2011, McGovern attended a speech given by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Eager to disassociate himself from what he called “the obsequious adulation of a person responsible for so much death, suffering and destruction,” McGovern stood up in the midst of her opening remarks, and turned his back to her, his Veterans for Peace t-shirt combining with his silence to make a powerful statement. It did not go unnoticed. Madame Secretary's security retinue grabbed McGovern, dragged him out of the auditorium, beating him black and blue. “So this is America! So this is America!” he yelled. Clinton resumed her speech, a lofty defense of internet freedom—abroad, of course, not at home.

Ray is an unpretentious guy from the Bronx; a self-professed “Vatican II Catholic;” a polyglot intellectual proficient in five languages. We talked about Brad Manning's alleged act—which McGovern admires greatly—its likely impact on US foreign policy, and Thomas Aquinas.“In section 158 of the
Summa Theologica
, Aquinas complains that Latin has no word for the virtue of anger. There's anger as a vice,
iracundia
. So Aquinas went back to Chrysostom to revive the concept of righteous anger at injustice and evil. Because he who isn't angry has an ‘unreasoned patience', sows the seeds of vice. I'm trying to be virtuously angry. Being Irish gives you a leg up!

“Bradley Manning had the strength to be angry. Are all of the cables he released covered by whistleblower protection laws? Of course not, but what was he going to do, go over each and every one in his bed with a flashlight? Moral philosophy teaches that there are supervening values that dwarf the other stuff, that it's transcendently important to stop war and torture. That's what I think Manning understood, these basic principles.

“But in America today we have far too much passive acceptance of injustice. We need more righteous anger.”

McGovern's gloomy diagnosis is, alas, born out by hard data. We Americans can pride ourselves all we want on our anti-authority posturing, but a 2006 poll from the International Social Survey Programme of national attitudes towards individualism and authority tells a very different story.

Perhaps the most distressing part of the whole saga of these leaks is that, given how easy it was to bring these public records to light, and how many soldiers and diplomats had access to them, not a single person had the courage to do the deed—until, allegedly, a certain private from Crescent, Oklahoma. This paucity of public-spirited citizens speaks poorly of American rebelliousness. After all, what country can remain free if its citizens no longer have any “issues with authority”?

If any lesson can be drawn from the Manning affair, it's that leaks can make a great difference if there is organized political muscle to put them to good use. Information on its own is futile; as useless as those other false hopes of the global center-left, international law and its sidekick, the human rights industry, all of which have their uses, but are insufficient to stop wars and end torture. This is not to denigrate the achievement of the person who gave us this magnificent gift of knowledge about world affairs. If the disclosures have not changed US statecraft—yet—the fault lies not in the cables, but in the pathetic lack of political organization among those individuals who don't “have a position” in Halliburton stock—the 99%, if you will.

Michael Moore has named Bradley Manning a patron saint of the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, an icon and martyr for the cause of justice and freedom. The “Free Bradley” signs at Occupy events all over the country are often sneered at as proof of the incipient movement's indiscipline and lack of realism. They are, in fact, a sign of the group's robust ideals and healthy distance from the neoliberal/neoconservative mainstream of American news media.

For now, the disclosures and their great potential hangs unresolved. Will the leaks kindle more uprisings in authoritarian nations? Will the Haitian diaspora be able to use the diplomatic cables to rally opposition to imperial meddling? Will Americans unlearn some of their deference and docility and stand up to the foreign policy elite that has brought carnage and destruction to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, that has supported dictators in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and bankrolled ethnic cleansing in Palestine? Will American stand against a foreign policy that has served their own needs and interests so disastrously? The growing number of young returned veterans at Occupy Wall Street events is a sign that their fellow soldier and patriot's earnest hopes for debate, discussion and reform may yet be validated.

But even if these leaks lead to nothing, the Promethean act of bringing knowledge to mere civilians without a security clearance is still taboo enough to provoke the severest punishment.

(2:01:14
PM
) bradass87:
but im pretty desperate for some non-isolation

No feature of the Manning affair has been more controversial than the young soldier's nine months under strict solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Corps Base. As we have seen, even the State Department's top spokesperson, a mouthpiece of perfect blandness, lost his job after a spontaneous eruption damning Manning's treatment, and foreign governments have brought pressure to bear, sending pointed letters of concern to Washington.

Adrian Lamo, shortly after informing on Manning, assured an audience of hackers and digital activists in New York that his dupe would be treated decently; after all, “We don't torture our own citizens.” Lamo was apparently trying to distinguish Manning's likely treatment from that endured by hundreds of captured foreigners in the course of our Global War on Terror, or GWOT, as it was known in-house during the Bush-Cheney Administration.

Lamo's reassurance, based perhaps in guilt-ridden wishfulness, has proven grotesquely wrong. Twenty-three hours of solitary a day; a ban even on push-ups and sit-ups in the cell; the confiscation even of reading glasses; enforced nudity at night; the unrelenting repetitive mental stress of having to respond every five waking minutes to the guards' query, “Are you OK?” If this were done to a US soldier held captive in North Korea or Iran, no American pundit would hesitate to call this torture. How could this treatment not drive anyone mad?

Being alone in a small cell for years or even months does a body great harm. Not surprisingly, medical research into the effects of solitary confinement finds that the treatment inflicts lasting severe damage. “Solitary confinement can have serious psychological, psychiatric and sometimes physiological effects on many prison inmates,” writes Dr. Peter Scharff Smith, head of research at the Danish Institute for Human Rights. “A long list of possible symptoms from insomnia and confusion to hallucinations and outright insanity has been documented.” The suicide rate for isolated inmates, according to another psychiatric expert on mental health in prisons, is substantially higher than among those living communally in prison.

In the footsteps of medical science, international law is ever less hesitant to classify solitary confinement as torture. The European Court of Human Rights has allowed the practice in the case of Kurdish terrorist Abdullah Öcalan, but after finding a marked mental deterioration in that prisoner recommended that the Turkish government integrate him into a communal setting. The United States has ratified the international Convention Against Torture, whose acting body, the Committee Against Torture, has recommended that long-term solitary be wholly abolished. The German Bundestag's human rights committee was not breaking new ground when it condemned Manning's treatment as torture.

But what could possibly inspire the American government to torture one of its own citizens? Most of those who have answered this question have approached the problem from the context of America's post-9/11 GWOT. Andy Worthington, the most dogged and incisive journalistic tracker of the Guantánamo prison, has asked if Bradley Manning is being treated like an enemy combatant. Lisa Hajjar, a trenchant academic analyst of Washington's weaponization of international law, has described the treatment of Manning as a slide down the “slippery slope,” from torturing enemy combatants to inflicting the same punishment on Americans, just as torture opponents predicted would happen.

It is certainly tempting to see the isolation torture of Bradley Manning as toxic spillover from the Global War on Terror. What else could explain an advanced industrial democracy thus abusing one of its own citizens?

There is undoubtedly some truth to this story—that after a decade, the “excesses” of the War on Terror have seeped into our domestic justice systems. Yet this account is, by itself, incomplete. In fact this narrative is perhaps undeservedly reassuring. For this story assumes that our domestic criminal justice system was already uncontaminated, and had hitherto run smoothly and fairly, at least more or less. This narrative of corruption assumes that Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantánamo are flagrant offenses against “American values,” vivid exceptions to our legal and penal norms. It assumes that nine months pretrial detention in solitary confinement is simply unheard-of in the United States. In short, this story assumes the legalized torture of Bradley Manning to be exceptional, an atrocity. We must reject these assumptions: they are wrong both in their particulars and in their overall image of America's justice system.

The roots of Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantánamo and the isolation torture of Bradley Manning are so close to home that we have trouble seeing them. Many of us would like to think that all of this is a colossal and shameful exception to our laws and customs. But the sensational GWOT atrocities that have scandalized the world for the past decade are at base a simple extension of our everyday “normal” way of doing criminal justice. To be sure, the GWOT's use of torture has been more programmatic, and the locales more exotic, but on the whole these headline-making scandals have been far less aberrant than we would like to think. From Guantánamo to the treatment of Bradley Manning, most of our supposedly out-of-character response to 9/11 has in fact been less exception than the rule. On the whole, the GWOT has been all-American.

This is a strong statement, demanding evidence beyond the scope of the Bradley Manning case. The argument is best bolstered by a brief and unpleasant visit to Guantánamo, the iconic “legal black hole” whose essential
normality
within the American legal-penal galaxy is more disturbing still.

I visited Guantánamo in April-May of 2010, where a member of our international press gaggle let it slip that she didn't much care for the place. “
This
,” she confided to the group, “is the
worst
place I have
ever
visited in my
entire career
.” Many of us made similar judgments over the course of our visit.

It's not hard to see why so many of us felt this way: we were covering pretrial hearings for the trial of Omar Khadr, a Canadian captured at age 15 after a firefight with US forces outside Kabul in 2002, tortured and interrogated for a few months at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, then transported to Guantánamo to await trial before a military commission, charged with five “war crimes.” (The scare-quotes are necessary as four of the charges were freshly invented for the occasion, and are not recognized as war crimes in any other court.) In October later that year, Khadr would take a deal pleading guilty to all charges, leaving him with one more year at Gitmo–to be spent in solitary–and then a likely transfer to Canada for a remaining seven years of either prison or supervised release.

Aside from Khadr and about 130 other prisoners who may one day see a trial, Guantánamo still holds some 45 more War on Terror prisoners who will be “detained” indefinitely without being tried at all. This is one of the radical policies of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that is now cheerfully defended by the human rights grandees in Barack Obama's State Department.

Gitmo and all other places without
habeas corpus
rights are indeed dismal places—and there is certainly something striking about the first conviction of a child soldier since World War II. All the same, I couldn't help but draw a comparison from the most notorious prison in the world to homegrown US federal prisons, like the one in Terre Haute, Indiana (whose maximum security wing was copied down to the smallest detail at Gitmo's Camp 5), or even a run-of-the-mill overcrowded state penitentiary, the kind you pass on the highway without even noticing, or one of the crumbling youth detention facilities in New York State which are thoroughly hellish.

Such prisons may lack the exotic setting of Gitmo's Camp Delta, but they are not incomparable. A great many of America's domestic prisons also routinely abuse inmates; are unable or unwilling to prevent inmate rape; inflict long-term solitary confinement, which does at least as much physiological damage as waterboarding; and in actual practice operate beyond most notions of the rule of law. Confessions, true or false, obtained through violence and threats, aren't restricted to Guantánamo either. They are not all that hard to find in our fifty states. And for the rest of our prison system, where is the outraged international press gaggle? Why are no British “law lords” calling the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado, a “legal black hole” as Lord Johan Steyn termed Guantánamo?

Alas, in so many ways Guantánamo is not the exception but far closer to the rule of our criminal justice system. To be sure, taking a child soldier you've captured in a foreign land, whose interrogation entailed stringing him up half-naked in a five-foot-square cell with wrists chained to the bars at eye level and a hood clamped tightly over his face, then prosecuting him for “murder” because he allegedly tossed a grenade on a foreign battlefield, does present some legal issues that don't ordinarily come up in Spokane or Chillicothe.

But are Gitmo, the torture of Bradley Manning and the whole Global War on Terror a “betrayal of American values”? Would that they were. For nearly every grisly tabloid feature of the Khadr case, you can find an easy analog in our everyday criminal justice system. In a sense, much of our War on Terror has proven a slightly spicier version of our “normal” way of doing criminal justice. Using the case of young Omar Khadr, let's take this step by step.

Child Soldiers and Juvenile Offenders

Hasn't there been a surge of concern for child soldiers in book clubs and church groups across the land? It turns out that this long-distance compassion goes up in smoke at closer range. When a child soldier points his gun at an American, not another African, he becomes a hardened terrorist in American eyes.

The hypocrisy in all this is perhaps only apparent. After all, clemency for youth offenders, be they child soldiers or just local kids, runs against the American grain today. If we routinely prosecute children even younger than 15 as adults—and we do—why should a foreign child soldier be any different?

In fact the US even has a few dozen inmates doing life without parole for acts committed when they were thirteen or fourteen, and most of these sentences were mandatory rather than the prerogative of a particularly vindictive judge. (Some progress has been made: in May 2010, the United States Supreme Court decided in
Graham v. Florida
that juveniles can get life without parole
only
if there's homicide involved.) Overall, the US has in recent years had precious little mercy for its children, or anyone else's.

During my visit to Gitmo, the press corps gasped when Khadr's “Interrogator Number One,” Joshua Claus, described the veiled threats of rape he wielded at Bagram Prison to try to break the young prisoner. If Khadr should fail to cooperate, Claus told him, he would meet the same fate as another young (and imaginary) Afghan detainee who was supposedly sent to a US penitentiary and raped to death in a shower room by “neo-Nazis, and four big black guys.” Claus, a court-martialed detainee abuser, had been the leader of the final interrogation of a mistakenly imprisoned Afghan taxi driver who was beaten to death by American guards at Bagram in 2002. Before receiving a light sentence in the case, Claus pledged his full cooperation with the Khadr prosecution, and he kept his part of the bargain with visible enthusiasm.

As it happens, Claus's veiled threats of rape and violence to a minor would not have been so uncommon in domestic interrogation rooms. “From the stories I'm familiar with, threats like that are a pretty garden-variety police interrogation tactic,” says Locke Bowman, legal director of the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University. With youths, it's not that much of a challenge to get a false confession, even without the threat of or actual physical violence being brought to bear, as the case of Marty Tankleff in Long Island shows, not to mention the seven and eight year-old boys from the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago who, in the summer of 1998, “confessed” to murdering a girl for her bicycle. Even after DNA evidence from semen found on the corpse was matched to an adult serial sex offender, the Chicago Police Superintendent at first refused to exonerate them. The State's Attorney might well have prosecuted the boys, too, if the entire South Side of Chicago hadn't threatened to explode.