This Shameful Abuse of Bradley Manning by Daniel Ellsberg

[Better Believe It]

This Shameful Abuse of Bradley Manning
The WikiLeaks suspect's mistreatment amounts to torture. Either President Obama knows this or he should make it his business.
by Daniel Ellsberg
March 12, 2011

.... if President Obama really doesn't yet know the actual conditions of Manning's detention – if he really believes, as he's said, that "some of this has to do with Private Manning's" well-being, despite the contrary judgments of the prison psychologist – then he's being lied to, and he needs to get a grip on his administration.

The president refused to comment on PJ Crowley's statement that the treatment of Manning is "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid". Those words are true enough as far as they go – which is probably about as far as a state department spokesperson can allow himself to go in condemning actions of the defence department. But at least two other words are called for: abusive and illegal.

Crowley was responding to a question about the "torturing" of an American citizen, and, creditably, he didn't rebut that description. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity – that's right out of the manual of the CIA for "enhanced interrogation". We've seen it applied in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. It's what the CIA calls "no-touch torture", and its purpose there, as in this case, is very clear: to demoralize someone to the point of offering a desired confession. That's what they are after, I suspect, with Manning. They don't care if the confession is true or false, so long as it implicates WikiLeaks in a way that will help them prosecute Julian Assange.

That's just my guess, as to their motives. But it does not affect the illegality of the behavior. If I'm right, it's likely that such harsh treatment wasn't ordered at the level of a warrant officer or the brig commander. The fact that they have continued to inflict such suffering on the prisoner despite weeks of complaint from his defence counsel, harsh publicity and condemnation from organizations such as Amnesty International, suggests to me that it might have come from high levels of the defence department or the justice department, if not from the White House itself.

Read the full article at:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/12