| Breaking Private Manning!

Breaking Private Manning ~ Michael Ratner, President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for Constitutional Rights.

Bradley Manning is being punished – and tortured – for a crime that amounts to believing one’s highest duty is to the American people and not the American government.

Bradley Manning

By the time the 23-year-old soldier’s court martial starts on February 4, 2013, Bradley Manning will have spent 983 days in prison, including nine months in solitary confinement, without having been convicted of a single crime. This week, in pre-trail hearings, a military court is reviewing evidence that the conditions under which he has been held constitute torture. These conditions include the nine-month period spent 23 hours a day in a six-by-eight-foot cell where he was forbidden to lie down or even lean against a wall when he was not sleeping – and when he was allowed to sleep at night, officers woke him every five minutes – and where he was subjected to daily strip searches and forced nudity. The UN Special Rapporteur for Torture has already found this amounted to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and possibly torture.

For almost three years Manning has endured intense physical and mental pressure, all designed to force him to implicate WikiLeaks and its publisher Julian Assange in an alleged conspiracy to commit espionage. It is also a message to would-be whistleblowers: the U.S. government will not be gentle.

“[If] 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, D.C.… what would you do? … It’s important that it gets out…it might actually change something… hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms…”

These are purportedly Manning’s words*, and that is change many of us would like to believe in: that if you give people the truth about their government’s unlawful activities, and the freedom to discuss it, they will hold their elected officials accountable.

But it is one thing to talk about transparency, the lifeblood of democracy, and even to campaign on it – in 2008, candidate Obama said, “Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal” – and another thing to act on it. On a fundamental level, Manning is being punished, without being convicted, for a crime that amounts to having the courage to act on the belief that without an informed public our republic is seriously compromised. Or, as he is quoted saying, for wanting  “people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

The U.S. government is intent on creating a portrait of Manning as a traitor who aided and abetted Al Qaeda by releasing classified information into the public domain. But what actually occurred was that documents were sent anonymously to WikiLeaks, which published them in collaboration with The New York Times, The Guardian and other news media for the benefit of the general public, much like the Pentagon Papers were published a generation ago.

The emails the prosecution is using to try to prove Manning was the source of the leaks also depict the side of the story they want to hide, that of a young soldier grappling with the dilemma of a would-be whistleblower who knows he is taking great risks by exposing the state-sponsored crimes and abuses he witnessed, the “almost criminal political back-dealings… the non-PR-versions of world events and crises,” as he is quoted describing them to the confidant who ultimately betrayed him.

“I will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens.”  One can’t help wondering what Manning must think now, after so long under such brutal conditions of confinement. Did he expect the government to punish him in such a disproportionate and unlawful manner?

Manning’s abusive pre-trial treatment is a clear violation of the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and even U.S. military law. In fact, Manning’s defense attorney David Coombs is arguing in the pre-trail hearings this week that in view of this blatant disregard for his client’s most fundamental rights, all charges should be dismissed.

The government claims this was all done to prevent Manning from committing suicide, though any rational observer might point out that these conditions are more likely to drive someone to suicide than keep him from it. The more likely explanation is the obvious one: the government wants to break Manning enough to force him to implicate WikiLeaks and Assange, and make enough of a show of it to deter other whistleblowers. At stake is the foundation of our democracy, a robust free press, and the fate of a true American hero.

*Disclaimer: Bradley Manning has not been convicted of any charges, nor has he admitted to any of the allegations against him. Likewise, he has not acknowledged the chat logs that purport to be his words.

 

Michael Ratner is President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents WikiLeaks and Julian Assange as well as other journalists and major news organizations seeking to make the documents from the Manning trial public.

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| Land of the Free? Kids in solitary confinement: America’s official child abuse!

Kids in solitary confinement: America’s official child abuse ~ Jean Casella and James Ridgeway, guardian.co.uk.

Thousands of teenagers, some as young as 14 or 15, are routinely subjected by US prisons to this psychological torture.

One teen who participated in the Human Rights watch report wrote that being in isolation felt like ‘a slow death from the inside out’. Photograph: Vincent O’Byrne/Alamy

Molly J said of her time in solitary confinement:

“[I felt] doomed, like I was being banished … Like you have the plague or that you are the worst thing on earth. Like you are set apart [from] everything else. I guess [I wanted to] feel like I was part of the human race – not like some animal.”

Molly was just 16 years old when she was placed in isolation in an adult jail in Michigan. She described her cell as being “a box”:

“There was a bed – the slab. It was concrete … There was a stainless steel toilet/sink combo … The door was solid, without a food slot or window … There was no window at all.”

Molly remained in solitary for several months, locked down alone in her cell for at least 22 hours a day.

No other nation in the developed world routinely tortures its children in this manner. And torture is indeed the word brought to mind by a shocking report released today by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. Growing Up Locked Down documents, for the first time, the widespread use of solitary confinement on youth under the age of 18 in prisons and jails across the country, and the deep and permanent harm it causes to kids caught up in the adult criminal justice system.

Ian Kysel, author of the 141-page report, interviewed or corresponded with more than 125 young people who had spent time in solitary as children in 19 states. To cope with endless hours of extreme isolation, sensory deprivation and crippling loneliness, Kysel learned that some children made up imaginary friends or played games in their heads. Some hid under the covers and tried to sleep as much as possible, while others found they could not sleep at all.

“Being in isolation to me felt like I was on an island all alone dying a slow death from the inside out,” a California teen wrote in a letter to Human Rights Watch.

One young woman, who spent three months in solitary in Florida when she was 15, described becoming a “cutter” while in isolation:

“I like to take staples and carve letters and stuff in my arm … Each letter means something to me. It is something I had lost.”

She started by carving into her arm the first letter of her mother’s name. Another girl who cut herself in solitary said, “because it was the only release of my pain.”

In fact, solitary confinement has been shown to cause severe pain and psychological damage to the tens of thousands of adults who endure it every day in American prisons. On children, the report states, the practice has a “distinct and particularly profound impact.” Because of “the special vulnerability and needs of adolescents, solitary confinement can be a particularly cruel and harmful practice when applied to them.” This is all the more true because for many of these kids, “developmental immaturity is compounded by mental disabilities and histories of trauma, abuse, and neglect.”

Yet, prisons and jails commonly use isolation as punishment for violating prison rules, including both violent and nonviolent infractions. One boy who entered a Colorado jail at age 15 said the guards doled out stints in solitary for crimes that would, in any other setting, be deemed normal adolescent behavior:

“15 days for not making the bed; 15 days for not keeping the cell door open; 20 or 25 days for being in someone else’s cell.”

On Rikers Island in New York City, more than 14% of adolescents between 16 and 18 spent some period in “disciplinary segregation”. This despite the fact that nearly half of all adolescents on Rikers have been found to have a “diagnosed mental disorder“.

Other kids are isolated as a form of “protective custody”, because they are vulnerable to physical or sexual abuse. Even though they are being locked down “for their own good”, many receive no educational or rehabilitative programming while in solitary, and some are barred from seeing their families.

Still, other children are placed in solitary confinement for “treatment” purposes, especially after threatening or attempting suicide – even though isolation has been shown to sharply increase the risk that prisoners will take their own lives.

“There is nothing to do so you start talking to yourself and getting lost in your own little world. It is crushing,” said Paul K, who spent 60 days in solitary when he was 14.

“You get depressed and wonder if it is even worth living. Your thoughts turn over to the more death-oriented side of life.”

No one knows precisely how many children live in these conditions, since many state and local correctional systems do not keep such data. But the overall rate of solitary confinement in American prisons is thought to be between 3% and 5%, and anecdotal evidence suggests that, in some systems, children may be isolated at even higher rates than adults. Given that nearly 100,000 youth under the age of 18 pass through adult prisons and jails annually, there exists the staggering possibility that thousands of children are spending time in solitary confinement each year.

Liz Ryan, who directs the Campaign for Youth Justice, points out that 20 states have laws requiring that juveniles be kept apart from adult prisoners. Yet most of the nation’s 3,000 jails lack dedicated facilities for children – leaving them with no alternative but to place kids in solitary. A majority of people in jail are there awaiting trial, which means many children in solitary have not even been convicted of a crime.

In addition, Ryan said, “A kid could be held in jail not because there is a risk to public safety, but because they don’t have the resources to make bail.” So the racial and class disparities endemic to the criminal justice system are likely reflected in the population of children languishing in isolation. Ian Kysel said in an interview:

“I think one of the greatest impediments to change is trying to unravel the policy issue that is at the root of this problem: a criminal justice system that treats kids as if adults without providing resources or guidelines for their care,”

For this reason, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union recommend that state and the federal governments “prohibit the housing of adolescents with adults, or in jails and prisons designed to house adults”. However, “regardless of how they are charged and held,” Kysel says unequivocally:

“We need to ban the solitary confinement of young people across the board. There is simply no reason that a child or adolescent ever needs to be held in a cell, alone, for 22 let alone 24 hours at a stretch.”

For this to happen, though, the American public will need to accept what numerous international bodies have already concluded – that solitary confinement is cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and clearly rises to the level of torture when levied against vulnerable populations, including children.

“If my story can stop another kid from coming” to solitary confinement, one Florida teen wrote, then, “Hopefully my pain serve[s] some purpose.”

• Editor’s note: this article originally referred to the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth; this was amended to the Campaign for Youth Justice at 10am (ET) on 12 October 2012

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Related articles

• Kids in Solitary Confinement: America’s Official Child Abuse (childreninprison.wordpress.com)
• Kids in Solitary Confinement: America’s Official Child Abuse (alternet.org)
• Kids in solitary confinement: America’s official child abuse | Jean Casella and James Ridgeway (guardian.co.uk)
• Juvenile Justice: US – Youths Suffer Serious Harm From Weeks, Months in ‘Lock-Down’ (ionglobaltrends.com)
• ACLU highlights Michigan prisoners in report calling on ban of solitary confinement for youth (mlive.com)

| Bradley Manning’s Quest for Justice!

Whatever the outcome of the WikiLeaks suspect’s trial, many of us believe he holds to a higher standard of truth than this court’s

~ Logan Price

In a small military court room at Fort Meade, two weeks after he was nominated for a Nobel Peace prize, I watched Bradley Manning appear before a judge – for the second time in his 635-day stint of pre-trial detainment. He sat silently while the prosecution read his 22 charges.

We won’t hear his plea until the hearing is continued in March. Manning will likely be tried in early August. If all goes to plan for the prosecution, he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Bradley Manning escorted from a military vehicle to the court facility at Fort Meade, Maryland. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/APBefore the charges were read, Manning’s attorney asked the judge about her prior knowledge of the case, the issues surrounding it, and any previous opinions she may have had about it. She stated that she had known nothing of the case besides Manning’s name “and that it involved classified material”. When asked if she had spoken to friends or colleagues about the case, she said she hadn’t. She held no prior opinion, we were told.

For what must be the biggest controversy of the decade, I found this hard to believe. It reaffirmed my skepticism and brought to mind what many have already said: this trial is a sham.

President Obama, ultimately the judge’s commander, does have an opinion about the matter – as he told me when I asked for his view at a fundraiser in San Francisco last April, at the end of Manning’s extended solitary confinement at Quantico Marine Base.

In his mind, Bradley Manning was already guilty. The conversation was caught on tape, and legal experts have argued that the president’s statement should be grounds for dismissal.

“We’re a nation of laws,” Obama told me. “He broke the law.”

Some people are held to the law and others are not. Recalling the killing of journalists working for Reuters in the “Collateral Murder” video allegedly released by Manning, this is exactly this kind of selective enforcement that motivated WikiLeaks’ revelations – and which brought me and my peers to Zuccotti Park last fall to use the only means we have to hold accountable those whose criminal acts brought us to economic crisis.

A generation before Bradley Manning, Daniel Ellsberg understood that some laws were worth breaking to expose and bring accountability to far greater crimes. Ellsberg tried to voice his grievances within his chain of command, as Manning did, before being ignored.

I have heard many people justify the government’s treatment of Manning simply because of the risks he allegedly took. “He should have known better,” they say, missing the point. Asked in 1971 if he was prepared to go to prison for releasing the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg’s reply was simple: “Wouldn’t you go to jail to end this war?”

Ellsberg’s stand came back to me, sitting at Manning’s arraignment. “I want people to see the truth,” Bradley is alleged to have typed to the hacker who turned him in.

As the judge announced the recess and prepared to leave the room, someone stood up and shouted: “Your honor! Isn’t it a soldier’s responsibility to report war crimes?”

The judge silently looked away. It’s an argument that the court will have to contend with, before the trial ends. When that happens, I hope the world is watching.

© 2012 Logan Price

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| BRADLEY MANNING NOBEL PEACE PRIZE NOMINATION 2012!

February 1^st 2012 the entire parliamentary group of The Movement of the Icelandic Parliament nominated Private Bradley Manning for the Nobel Peace Prize. Following is the reasoning we sent to the committee explaining why we felt compelled to nominate Private Bradley Manning for this important recognition of an individual effort to have an impact for peace in our world.

Our letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee:

We have the great honor of nominating Private First Class Bradley Manning for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Manning is a soldier in the United States army who stands accused of releasing hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. The leaked documents pointed to a long history of corruption, war crimes, and imperialism by the United States government in international dealings. These revelations have fueled democratic uprising around the world, including a democratic revolution in Tunisia. According to journalists, his alleged actions helped motivate the democratic Arab Spring movements, shed light on secret corporate influence on our foreign policies, and most recently contributed to the Obama Administration agreeing to withdraw all U.S.troops from the occupation in Iraq.

Bradley Manning has been incarcerated for well over a year by the U.S. government without a trial. He spent over ten months of that time period in solitary confinement, conditions which experts worldwide have criticized as torturous. Juan Mendez, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, has repeatedly requested and been denied a private meeting with Manning to assess his conditions.

The documents made public by WikiLeaks should never have been kept from public scrutiny. The revelations – including video documentation of an incident in which American soldiers gunned down Reuters journalists in Iraq – have helped to fuel a worldwide discussion about America’s overseas engagements, civilian casualties of war, imperialistic manipulations, and rules of engagement. Citizens worldwide owe a great debt to the WikiLeaks whistleblower for shedding light on these issues, and so I urge the Committee to award this prestigious prize to accused whistleblower Bradley Manning.

Sincerely,

Birgitta Jónsdóttir

Margrét Tryggvadóttir

Þór Saari

Members of the Icelandic Parliament for The Movement