The United Nations has harshly criticized the U.S. state and defense departments for
resisting the UN's efforts to investigate the government's treatment of Bradley Manning.
A senior United Nations representative on torture, Juan Mendez, issued a rare reprimand to the US government on Monday for failing to allow him to meet in private Bradley Manning, the American soldier held in a military prison accused of being the WikiLeaks source. It is the kind of censure that the UN normally reserves for authoritarian regimes around the world.
Mendez, the UN special rapporteur on torture, said: "I am deeply disappointed and frustrated by the prevarication of the US government with regard to my attempts to visit Mr Manning."....
Mendez, who has been investigating complaints about his treatment since before Christmas, said the US department of defence would not allow him to make an "official" visit, only a "private" one. An "official" visit would mean he meets Manning without a guard present. A "private" visit means with a guard and anything the prisoner says could be used in the planned court-martial.
Mendez pointed out that his mandate was to conduct unmonitored visits, and that had been the practice in at least 18 countries over the last six years.
"Since December 2010, I have been engaging the US government on visiting Mr Manning, at the invitation of his counsel, to determine his condition," Mendez said. "Unfortunately, the US government has not been receptive to a confidential meeting with Mr Manning."
That, along with the treatment of Manning, puts the U.S. in poor international company, and is a serious departure from the nation's constitutional traditions. More than 250 legal scholars and constitutional experts—including Obama's mentor, Lawrence Tribe—pointed that out in a letter published in The New York Review of Books:
Bradley Manning is the soldier charged with leaking US government documents to Wikileaks. He is currently detained under degrading and inhumane conditions that are illegal and immoral....
The sum of the treatment that has been widely reported is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against punishment without trial. If continued, it may well amount to a violation of the criminal statute against torture, defined as, among other things, "the administration or application…of… procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality...."
If Manning is guilty of a crime, let him be tried, convicted, and punished according to law. But his treatment must be consistent with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights....
President Obama was once a professor of constitutional law, and entered the national stage as an eloquent moral leader. The question now, however, is whether his conduct as commander in chief meets fundamental standards of decency. He should not merely assert that Manning’s confinement is “appropriate and meet[s] our basic standards,” as he did recently. He should require the Pentagon publicly to document the grounds for its extraordinary actions—and immediately end those that cannot withstand the light of day.
In an interview with The Guardian, Tribe said that the treatment of Manning "is not only shameful but unconstitutional," and that's what prompted him to join the other legal scholars in signing this letter. The administration is clearly on the wrong side of the law and the wrong side of decency in this case. The question for President Obama is what's going to trump: the rule of law or squelching further leaks by using Manning as an example to would-be whistleblowers.