You're About To See The Light, If You Want To Bang Heads With Me

03/13/2011

You're About To See The Light, If You Want To Bang Heads With Me

The abusive treatment of Bradley Manning in pre-trial detention is an outrage. Forcing out a spokesman who recognizes that outrage is an implicit concession that Manning's treatment is an outrage. This is the decadent phase of executive arrogance: the enforcement of euphemism to avoid responsibility for the injustices the executive commits.

Notice that no one besides Manning from within the Obama administration or the military has been held accountable for the actual leak itself. But P.J. Crowley gets fired for the secondary issue of exercising common sense, candor and consistency about Manning. My old FDL colleague Michael Whitney is completely correct: Obama owns Manning's torture. He owned it before, but Crowley's firing underscores it.

Stripping a man presumed to be innocent in front of other people has nothing to do with protecting him from himself or others. Neither does prolongued isolation. It has everything to do with breaking Manning, assuredly to get him to implicate Julian Assange. This is an American citizen who has been convicted of no crime. You don't have to have any sympathy for WikiLeaks or for Manning to recognize that he's being tortured. It's as if the Obama administration is doing whatever it can to generate international sympathy for WikiLeaks. Of course, P.J. Crowley just proved that if you say that inside the administration, you'll soon find yourself outside of it.

Last summer, I had a one-star general named Mark Martins walk me through what used to be called the Bagram detention facility (now the "Detention Facility at Parwan") and explain how prolonged isolation -- familiar from Appendix M, you'll recall -- required special (if unspecified) safeguards for use on an Afghan detainee. But it can be employed for the pre-trial detention of an American citizen. If only Bradley Manning was a suspected terrorist. Then Obama's January 2009 executive order banning torture would forbid what the Obama administration is doing to him.

Posted at 03:58 PM in loooooooooong war | Permalink

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But .. but ... but .. it's not really torture .. and Bradley Manning's dad said he was doing just fine.

Posted by: Phil Perspective | 03/13/2011 at 06:20 PM

Forcing out a spokesman who recognizes that outrage is an implicit concession that Manning's treatment is an outrage.

I can almost see this, but I'm not quite there.

On presumption of innocence - on charges as a civilian, yes, but Manning is still an enlisted soldier in the U.S. Army. Do military personnel have presumption of innocence against charges of breaking regulations of their conduct as military personnel? By no means, even if not, does that justify abuse per se. BUt that, like the very word Torture, from the beginning of the debate in 2002, just begs the question. What is 'abuse' in this context? What, even, is the legal incidence of this particular context?

When you sign up to go into the military, are you not signing up for being willingly (in a non-conscriptive environment) forced to undertake and accept crushing physical abuse that in any civilian correctional setting would be clearly unlawful, and also signing up to accept humiliating and demeaning displays of the absolute authority of your superiors? This may not include being forced to sleep naked, but on the other hand, once you have breached very serious regulations of conduct, might the kind of treatment you may be subject to change? Or if your conduct rises to the level of that which can potentially be charged in a civilian context, does all that authority that the military would otherwise have over you dissolve, and all civilian legal protections apply? Or, are any differences in treatment between American service member prisoners of the U.S. military and other prisoners in the U.S. correctional system depend on the setting being an actual warzone - i.e. anyone being held at Quantico is afforded all the same rights as any other prisoner in the U.S.? I don't know these answers.

Just as my gut told me that GTMO detainees being deprived of sleep were being tortured before I had done the research to know whether and why that treatment fit the definitions (legal, moral) of torture, my gut also tells me Bradley Manning is being or has been abused. But I cannot claim to have a precise situational understanding of the exact wherefore of that belief.

Posted by: Mike D. | 03/16/2011 at 12:19 AM