Bradley Manning Update

Via CBS News World Watch, “Marines Replace Commander in Charge of Detention of Bradley Manning, Accused WikiLeaker“:

One week ago, David Coombs, the main lawyer for accused WikiLeaks document leaker Bradley Manning, filed a complaint with military officials against Quantico Base Commander James Averhart. Coombs accused Averhart of abusing his “discretion” by arbitrarily choosing harsh – some have said tortuous – confinement conditions for Manning, who is housed in the Quantico brig.

On Wednesday, the Marines replaced Averhart as Quantico’s commander with Chief Warrant Officer Denise Barnes, CNN reports.

A base spokesman claims the complaint and Averhart’s removal are not related, and that the decision to replace Averhart was made back in October, CNN reports.
[...]

Coombs has been struggling with Manning’s confinement and trial status for months now. Because Manning is being held under such harsh conditions without having been charged, Coombs has tried all manner of legal recourse, including filing a motion for Manning’s release, a motion to dismiss the trial because of its slow start, and even a request for a speedy trial last week.

The office of Manfred Nowak, special rapporteur on torture in Geneva for the United Nations, received a complaint at the end of December from one of Manning’s supporters alleging conditions in the brig amount to torture, said a UN spokesperson. At the time of the complaint, Manning was under POI [Prevention of injury] watch, which is only slightly less harsh than suicide watch. Manning remains on POI watch to this day.

The U.N. has begun investigating and could ask the United States to stop any violations it finds.

After another BJ post concerning Manning, a certain BJ commentor wrote:

Speaking of blegging and fund raising, any comments from the rest here on my suggestion that those actually interested in helping Bradley Manning do a fund raiser here like BJ has done for so many politicians and causes, and donate the money to Manning’s defense, instead of sitting around and bitching… ?

From what I can google, Courage to Resist is hosting the Bradley Manning Defense Fund:

2,706 individuals have donated a total $169,181! Another 596 supporters (including WikiLeaks) have given $58,799 directly to Bradley’s legal trust account. (Updated: 1pm PST Jan. 25, 2011)

Bradley Manning’s total legal defense will cost about $115,000. We have transferred about $108,800 towards that expense so far (including direct contributions to the legal trust account), and we are committed to funding the total expense. The defense fund also supports international public outreach and activities.

The Bradley Manning defense fund is hosted by Courage to Resist in collaboration with the Bradley Manning Support Network. At this point donations are primarily being routed for public education and support activities. The defense fund will contribute to the remaining legal fees as needed. For more information, check out the defense fund FAQ and the defense fund fiscal report (PDF), January 25, 2011.

Does anyone here have any further information about Courage to Resist? Any suggestions about other organizations that could use funds, or publicity, in regards to Manning’s defense?

For the Shithouse Lawyers

I still can’t believe that after the last decade, knowing everything we know, that there are still some idiots who will take the military and government’s description of Manning’s custody and believe it.

Fools.

Talk About Epistemic Closure

For every single one of you shithouse lawyers who questioned the treatment of Bradley Manning because “you don’t like Glenn Greenwald” or his “posts are too long,” suck on this:

PFC Manning is currently being held in maximum custody. Since arriving at the Quantico Confinement Facility in July of 2010, he has been held under Prevention of Injury (POI) watch.

His cell is approximately six feet wide and twelve feet in length.

The cell has a bed, a drinking fountain, and a toilet.

The guards at the confinement facility are professional. At no time have they tried to bully, harass, or embarrass PFC Manning. Given the nature of their job, however, they do not engage in conversation with PFC Manning.

At 5:00 a.m. he is woken up (on weekends, he is allowed to sleep until 7:00 a.m.). Under the rules for the confinement facility, he is not allowed to sleep at anytime between 5:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. If he attempts to sleep during those hours, he will be made to sit up or stand by the guards.

He is allowed to watch television during the day. The television stations are limited to the basic local stations. His access to the television ranges from 1 to 3 hours on weekdays and 3 to 6 hours on weekends.

He cannot see other inmates from his cell. He can occasionally hear other inmates talk. Due to being a pretrial confinement facility, inmates rarely stay at the facility for any length of time. Currently, there are no other inmates near his cell.

He’s being treated unlike any other accused in the country and kept in his cell for 23 hours a day. It’s absurd and outrageous. And he is being treated this way for one reason, and one reason only- to break him, so the government can then proceed with an outrageous suit against a journalist- Julian Assange. He isn’t a security risk. He isn’t a physical threat. He’s made no attempt to hurt himself or anyone else. He is being tortured with mentally debilitating confinement simply to break him. It’s obscene, and Obama should be embarrassed. Just what the hell was he teaching in his con law classes?

And yet I’m sure there will be some internet tough guys excusing this behavior. Shame on you.

And to end the “but I don’t trust his lawyer” bullshit (despite the fact that he is a Major in the Army and a veteran of the Iraq War) that will inevitably come from some of you clowns, there are tons of links out there verifying how he is being treated and why.

Thug Nation

We’re really a disgusting nation:

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day—for seven straight months and counting—he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not “like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole,” but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

In sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America’s Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been convicted of anything. And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig’s medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.

Just by itself, the type of prolonged solitary confinement to which Manning has been subjected for many months is widely viewed around the world as highly injurious, inhumane, punitive, and arguably even a form of torture. In his widely praised March, 2009 New Yorker article—entitled “Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?”—the surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande assembled expert opinion and personal anecdotes to demonstrate that, as he put it, “all human beings experience isolation as torture.” By itself, prolonged solitary confinement routinely destroys a person’s mind and drives them into insanity. A March, 2010 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law explains that “solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture.”

There is absolutely no reason for this whatsoever, other than the fact that the United States has morphed into a brutal and repressive regime that is terrified of dissent. The only difference between this treatment and what we imagine third world nations do is that we have cleaner and more modern facilities. Hell, at this point Manning would probably welcome physical torture- it would be a welcome diversion.

And yet, this goes on every day in the greatest nation in the world, the home of the free and the land of the brave. Brought to our collective knees in terror of a rosy-cheeked private who had the balls to allow our lies to be published. And for that, we must emulate those great men who have gone before us- Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and other great human rights leader, and publicly make a show of our ability to crush one man. Because that is what this is- a message to every one else. There is no other reason to be subjecting Manning to this behavior, as he could be safely secured at any county jailhouse in this nation. Hell, he could be returned to his unit and confined to quarters, and nothing would happen.

We’re basically scum these days. It’s really sad. And I do not know how Lt. Villard and those like them live with themselves or sleep at night. I really don’t. Spare me the “they’re just following orders” crap. But we’ll go on spouting bullshit about Human Rights in every international forum we can find. American exceptionalism!

*** Update ***

For Christ’s sake, people. I simply am astounded at the lengths some of you will go to excuse this. “But I don’t like or trust Glenn Greenwald!” Who gives a shit if you don’t like him or trust him, try looking at the damned links he provides? What the hell is wrong with your cognitive skills? At the bottom of the page, there is an update which states a minor correction from THE OFFICIAL IN CHARGE OF MANNING’S DETENTION. That means they have read what Glenn said, and found one error, and corrected it. That would suggest to most people with at least one functioning synapse that, horror of horrors, Glenn’s piece is ACCURATE.

And yes manic progressives in the comments, this is on Obama. If we know about his, so does he, and he could stop it. It’s a goddamned disgrace. I didn’t realize I need to point this out explicitly, because Obama is, after all, the President and Commander-in-Chief. I sort of assumed you dullards knew this.

The System Worked

Whaddya know? We tried a terrorist in court, and he was found guilty on the charges that could be proven, the others were dismissed, and now he is facing 20 to life in jail:

The first former Guantánamo detainee to be tried in a civilian court was acquitted on Wednesday of all but one of more than 280 charges of conspiracy and murder in the 1998 terrorist bombings of the United States Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

The case has been seen as a test of President Obama’s goal of trying detainees in federal court whenever feasible, and the result may again fuel debate over whether civilian courts are appropriate for trying terrorists.

The defendant, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, 36, was convicted of one count of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property. He was acquitted of four counts of conspiracy, including conspiring to kill Americans and to use weapons of mass destruction.

I see a wingnut voltron is being formed to claim “justice” was not served, but from where I sit, it worked perfectly. Note to CIA and Republicans- stop torturing people and maybe we can send them to jail for longer!

No Looking Back Now, Y’all

You know the Rules! We’ve got to move forward! Mistakes were made! Moving right along:

No charges will be filed against the CIA’s former top clandestine officer or anyone else in the destruction of CIA videotapes of harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.

Another part of the nearly three-year-old criminal investigation is continuing into whether CIA interrogators went beyond the legal guidance given them on the rough treatment of suspects during questioning, a Justice Department official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because that part of the probe is still under way.

The CIA destroyed its cache of 92 videos of two al-Qaida operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri, being waterboarded in 2005.

Jose Rodriguez, formerly the agency’s top clandestine officer, worried the tapes would be devastating to the CIA if they ever surfaced. He approved the destruction of the tapes. Rodriguez’s order was at odds with years of directives from CIA lawyers and the White House.

So the CIA breaks the law and tortures people, films it, and then destroys the evidence, and the Justice Department just shrugs and says “Meh.”

Keep this in mind the next time some jackass from either party or this administration starts finger-wagging at another nation regarding torture.

Wikileaks

In case you were out drinking last night and missed it, the Wikileaks Iraq document dump was released last night. Here’s the Times coverage, and here’s the Guardian’s. One thing that jumps out is the Guardian’s story of how the US ignored torture, or what the Times calls “detainee abuse”.

Depressing

When even sarcasm won’t make a difference.

It Never Stops

In a sign of how much awful shit is going on in the world, I just now have learned that there are accusations we experimented on detainees as we tortured them.

I’ll just avoid anything that will Godwin this discussion, but seriously, WTF? Does this shit ever stop?

American Mengele

This is nowhere near as bad as what Paul McCartney did, obviously:

In the course of trying to prove that its “enhanced” interrogation program was legal, the Bush administration may have broken the law, according to a new report (PDF) by Physicians for Human Rights. The watchdog group claims that in an attempt to establish that brutal interrogation tactics did not constitute torture, the administration ended up effectively experimenting on terrorism detainees. This research, PHR alleges, violated an array of regulations and treaties, including international guidelines on human testing put in place after the Holocaust.

According to the report, which draws on numerous declassified government documents, “medical professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA” frequently monitored detainee interrogations, gathering data on the effectiveness of various interrogation techniques and the pain threshholds of detainees. This information was then used to “enhance” future interrogations, PHR contends.

Reminder

Julius Caesar did not break ancient Rome’s taboo against marching troops into the city of Rome. Lucius Cornelius Sulla did that in 82 B.C., thirty years earlier. Sulla even set what you might call a good example: he restored the Republic’s traditional balance of powers and then, setting himself apart from self-appointed dictators then and now, he retired.

Similarly, the first Weimar leader who more or less ignored his Republic’s balance of powers was Friedrich Ebert. Ebert, the first President of Weimar after WWI, felt that nobody could rebuild German society with the existing burden of checks and balances. Maybe he was right! Historians disagree. Regardless, by Hitler’s time a leader had plenty of precedent to declare an emergency and use the Constitution as a dinner napkin.

We shoudln’t punish the Addington regime because they acted like assholes or because they made America look bad. We should punish them, and we must punish them, because we cannot afford not to.

A judge will investigate claims that British intelligence agencies were complicit in the torture of terror suspects, William Hague, the foreign secretary, said tonight. The move was welcomed by civil liberties campaigners and may put pressure on the Labour leadership candidate and former foreign secretary David Miliband, who was accused by Hague, while in opposition, of having something to hide. Miliband has repeatedly rejected the accusation and broadly indicated that he or his officials may have been misled by foreign intelligence agencies about the degree of British complicity…

Hague will come under pressure to ensure the inquiry is public and comprehensive. He first called last year for an independent judicial inquiry into claims that British officials had colluded in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, the former Guantánamo detainee and a UK resident. Mohamed claimed that he was tortured by US forces in Pakistan and Morocco, and that MI5 fed the CIA questions that were used by US forces.

Isn’t it odd to see Labour utterly fail to rise to the challenge of Bush-era abuses and have the Tories stand up instead. By US wingnut standards I guess that makes the mainstream British right a bunch of terrorist-loving communazis.

For lack fo a better word, news from our side of the pond sucks ass.

[L]ast April, John Bates, the Bush-43-appointed, right-wing judge overseeing the case, rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that Boumediene applies to detainees picked up outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram. I reviewed that ruling here, in which Judge Bates explained that the Bagram detainees are “virtually identical to the detainees in Boumediene,” and that the Constitutional issue was exactly the same: namely, “the concern that the President could move detainees physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely.”

But the Obama administration was undeterred by this loss. They quickly appealed Judge Bates’ ruling. As the NYT put it about that appeal: “The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight.” Today, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals adopted the Bush/Obama position, holding that even detainees abducted outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram have no right to contest the legitimacy of their detention in a U.S. federal court, because Boumediene does not apply to prisons located within war zones (such as Afghanistan).

Maybe the British could indict ours as well.

Down With Torture, Up With Assassination!

Could someone inform the WH this is simply not progress:

The Obama administration’s decision to authorize the killing by the Central Intelligence Agency of a terrorism suspect who is an American citizen has set off a debate over the legal and political limits of drone missile strikes, a mainstay of the campaign against terrorism.

The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy.

To eavesdrop on the terrorism suspect who was added to the target list, the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is hiding in Yemen, intelligence agencies would have to get a court warrant. But designating him for death, as C.I.A. officials did early this year with the approval of the National Security Council, required no judicial review.

Love the strong words from the Times- “uneasy.” Assassinating citizens makes “some people uneasy.” You know what makes me uneasy- taking a sip from the milk container a day after the expiration and it tastes a little sour. Or cleaning up dog vomit.

The fact that we are ordering the assassination of own citizens makes me furious, even if it is someone who has done the things al-Awlaki is alleged to have done.

Oh. Hey! Look Who Discovered the “T-Word”

The NY Times:

The torture of Iraqi detainees at a secret prison in Baghdad was far more systematic and brutal than initially reported, Human Rights Watch reported on Tuesday.

The Washington Post:

Adding to the political tension, Human Rights Watch released a report late Tuesday saying that members of a military unit under the command of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, systemically tortured and sexually abused hundreds of Sunni Arab prisoners.

NPR:

Iraqi men held for months at a secret prison outside Baghdad were systematically tortured and forced to sign confession statements that in at least some cases they were forbidden to read, according to a new report by a human rights group released Wednesday.

When OTHER people do it, HRW is a legitimate, credible source, and it is not “allegations of torture” or “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Funny, that. In a really sad way.

*** Update ***

We’ll see how much the Iraqi government has been paying attention they call this the work of a few bad apples doing some frat boy pranks and then publish the menu at the prison.

Funny Tweets

Greenwald:

Those who doubt the existence or power of Satan should read the first paragraph here: http://is.gd/bHedg

The first paragraph:

Reply to Jim Manzi [Andy McCarthy]

I was happily out of pocket yesterday, traveling to beautiful Santa Barbara for a weekend retreat organized by David Horowitz’s Freedom Center — and a panel this morning with John Yoo and my fellow Cornerite Marc Thiessen.

I LOL’d.

What He Said

Greenwald nails this one:

Let’s spend just a moment thinking about what this means. We’ve known since December, 2005, that Bush officials, including at the NSA, committed felonies by eavesdropping on Americans without the warrants required by law—crimes punishable by a five-year prison term and$10,000 fine for each offense. All three federal judges to rule on the question have found those actions to be in violation of the law. Yet there have been no criminal investigations, let alone indictments, for those crimes, and there won’t be any, due to Barack Obama’s dictate that we “Look Forward, Not Backward.” Thus, the high-level political officials who committed crimes while running the NSA will be completely immunized for their serious crimes.

By stark contrast, an NSA official who brought to the public’s attention towering failures and waste at the NSA —revelations that led to exposés that, as Shane put it, were “honored with a top prize from the Society for Professional Journalists”—is now being prosecuted for crimes that could lead to a lengthy prison term. Why doesn’t Obama’s dictate that we “Look Forward, Not Backward,” protect this NSA whistle-blower from prosecution at least as much as the high-level Bush officials who criminally spied on American citizens? Isn’t the DOJ’s prosecution of Drake the classic case of “Looking Backward,” by digging into Bush-era crimes, controversies and disclosures?

Meanwhile, who wants to bet we won’t “look backward” when it comes to this:

Porter J. Goss, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in 2005 approved of the decision by one of his top aides to destroy dozens of videotapes documenting the brutal interrogation of two detainees, according to an internal C.I.A. document released Thursday.

Shortly after the tapes were destroyed at the order of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, Mr. Goss told Mr. Rodriguez that he “agreed” with the decision, according to the document. He even joked after Mr. Rodriguez offered to “take the heat” for destroying the tapes.

“PG laughed and said that actually, it would be he, PG, who would take the heat,” according to one document, an internal C.I.A. e-mail message.

The message is clear- you torture people and then destroy the evidence, and you get off without so much as a sternly worded letter.

If you are a whistle blower outlining criminal behavior by the government, you get prosecuted.

I expected better from Obama and Holder.