Around 8pmest every night
Seems like many journalists are starting to pay attention to the treatment Bradley Manning is recieving while in prison awaiting trial.
Here is David House being interviewed by Jonathan Capehart on the Dylan Ratigan Show:
David House diary at Firedoglake where he says "I am one of the few people allowed to visit Bradley Manning while he is detained in the Quantico brig.":
In my visit to see Bradley at the Quantico brig, it became clear that the Pentagon’s public spin from last week sharply contradicts the reality of Bradley Manning’s detainment. In his five months of detention, it has become obvious to me that Manning’s physical and mental well-being are deteriorating. What Manning needs, and what his attorney has already urged, is to have the unnecessary "Prevention of Injury" order lifted that severely restricts his ability to exercise, communicate, and sleep.
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Manning has been living under the solitary restrictions of POI for five months despite being cleared by a military psychologist earlier this year, and despite repeated calls from his attorney David Coombs to lift the severely restrictive and isolating order. POI orders are short-term restrictions that are typically implemented when a detainee changes confinement facilities and these orders are lifted after the detainee passes psychological evaluation.
Our conversations, which take place in the presence of marines and electronic monitoring equipment, typically revolve around topics in physics, computer science, and philosophy; he recently mentioned that he hopes to one day make use of the GI Bill towards earning a graduate degree in Physics and a bachelors in Political Science. He rarely if ever talks about his conditions in the brig, and it is not unusual for him to shy away from questions about his well-being by changing the subject entirely.
When I arrived at the brig on December 18th I found him to be much more open to lines of inquiry regarding his circumstances, and in a two and a half hour conversation I learned new details about his life in confinement.
Just read the entire thing. Amazing.
In the Wikileaks Informationthread 11 I decided to put out some information about Bradley Manning and why he is in jail at the moment. I asked each of you to listen to Glenn Greenwald's audio interview with Lamo and to watch a few videos of him being interviewed. Now, thanks to Greenwald, it seems that many people are finally coming out to call into question not only the conditions he is being kept in but, how he ended up there. I called it a COINTELPRO-type of operation that Lamo/Poulsen were involved with. Others are now as well.
FDL has a great timeline that you NEED to read AND bookmark. Also, Marcy Wheeler wrote on July 7th qustioning Adrian Lamo:
As I noted in my earlier post on Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning’s charging document, there’s an apparent discrepancy between the timing Wired gives for Manning’s arrest and what the charging document shows. Wired said that the FBI told Adrian Lamo on May 27 that Manning had been arrested the previous day–that is, May 26.
At their second meeting with Lamo on May 27, FBI agents from the Oakland Field Office told the hacker that Manning had been arrested the day before in Iraq by Army CID investigators.
But the charging documents actually says Manning’s alleged activities continued until "on or about 27 May 2010," and it says his pretrial detention started on May 29 (though see scribe’s comments on a possible explanation).
And as I pointed out in comments, there’s also a problem with the story Lamo gave Wired as to why he turned in Manning. He claimed he turned in Manning because he had told him he had already leaked 260,000 cables to Wikileaks.
Lamo decided to turn in Manning after the soldier told him that he leaked a quarter-million classified embassy cables. Lamo contacted the Army, and then met with Army CID investigators and the FBI to pass the agents a copy of the chat logs from his conversations with Manning.
But the charging document only accuses Manning of leaking [more than] 50 cables; it alleges he got information from [more than] 150,000 cables, but did not even load the cables onto his own computer. Now, Wired has repeatedly published a quote from Manning telling Lamo that he had leaked the quarter-million cables.
But the most startling revelation was a claim that he gave Wikileaks a database of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables, which Manning said exposed "almost-criminal political back dealings."
"Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public," Manning told Lamo in an online chat session.
But they didn’t include that quote in their publication of what they claimed to be all the chat logs, save those that revealed personal information about Manning or classified information. Note, WaPo published a longer version of the same quote after Wired first published it.
From the FDL Bradley Manning/Wikileaks Timeline:
April 28 •Adrian Lamo involuntarily committed to mental facility by the police
May 7 •Adrian Lamo discharged from mental hospital
May 20 •Wired Magazine reports on Adrian Lamo’s involuntary psychiatric hold
May 26 •Bradley Manning is taken into custody, per Wired Magazine
May 27 •Adrian Lamo turns over his entire chat log with Manning to Wired
May 29 •Bradley Manning actually taken into custody, per his official charge document
June 6 •Wired Magazine reports the arrest of Manning
June 9 •John Cook of Yahoo News asks Lamo to provide a portion of their chats; Lamo says he will have to check with his lawyer
June 10 •Wired posts the heavily redacted version of the chats
•Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima reports Lamo also turned over entire chat log to them, and also publishes excerpts
June 11 •Wired reports that Wikileaks is hiring a lawyer for Manning, and that Julian Assange has asked Lamo for a copy of the chats to assist in his defense. Lamo responds that "Private Manning’s attorney can get them by discovery like everyone else."
June 13 •Comment appears in Xeni Jardin Boing Boing article, alleging that Wired Magazine reporter and Lamo "worked their target, Bradley Manning, for days — in co-operation with the FBI and US Army CID," classic "COINTELPRO tactics."
•Wired tells CJR they did not even find out Manning’s name until May 27, after he had already been arrested on May 26, therefore there could have been no collusion.
June 18 •Wired tells Glenn Greenwald that they published all of the chats that Lamo turned over to them, with the exception of "Manning discussing personal matters that aren’t clearly related to his arrest, or apparently sensitive government information."
•Greenwald compares Wired’s published chats with the Washington Post’s, and finds there are things that are neither "personal matters" nor "sensitive government information," which Wired nonetheless withheld.
June 19 •Boing-Boing receives an allegedly more complete version of the alleged Lamo/Manning chats, which were allegedly given from Lamo to Assange when he had a change of heart.
July 6 •Wired reports that Lamo says he turned Manning in because he was concerned over the 260,000 cables. But as Marcy Wheeler points out, the passage they quote–and its context–doesn’t appear in the IM logs Wired originally reproduced.
•The quote conveniently appears in the subsequent Boing Boing chat log
•Bradley Manning charged. Documents say he was taken into custody on May 29 and not May 26 as Wired reported
Dec 15 •Lamo tells Charlie Savage of references to Julian Assange in his chats with Manning, which don’t appear in the Wired excerpts, either. Lamo says he no longer has access to chats because the FBI seized his hard drive.
•Instead of asking Lamo to go back to Wired or the Washington Post and get copies, Savage prints the allegations without question.
As I posted in a previous Wikileaks Informationthread the surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande made the definitive undeniable case last year that solitary confinement is torture in The New Yorker :
After a few months without regular social contact, however, his experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises—the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him. He put the television under his bed, and rarely took it out again.
One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.
Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners "begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose," he writes. "Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving," becoming essentially catatonic.
Second, almost ninety per cent of these prisoners had difficulties with "irrational anger," compared with just three per cent of the general population.* Haney attributed this to the extreme restriction, the totality of control, and the extended absence of any opportunity for happiness or joy. Many prisoners in solitary become consumed with revenge fanasies.
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It wasn’t always like this. The wide-scale use of isolation is, almost exclusively, a phenomenon of the past twenty years. In 1890, the United States Supreme Court came close to declaring the punishment to be unconstitutional. Writing for the majority in the case of a Colorado murderer who had been held in isolation for a month, Justice Samuel Miller noted that experience had revealed "serious objections" to solitary confinement:
A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover suffcient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.
Glenn Greenwald on BBC Newshour debating former Reagan Pentagon official Jed Babbin, who was also one of the key members of the Bush Pentagon's domestic propaganda program. It is audio.
Daphne Eviatar writes at the Huffingtonpost(also posted a diary here at Kos) that "Bradley Manning's Confinement Conditions are 'Not Customary'":
As Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice who teaches at Yale Law School told me, if these extreme conditions and deprivations are being imposed because the military believes Manning is a danger to himself, then "he should be in a hospital rather than a brig." In any event, Fidell says he believes that Private Manning's treatment is "not customary."
And just to be clear, there is no proof that Bradley Manning is responsible, other than Adrian Lamo’s statement. The problem with his statement is that he was talking to someone alleged to be manning via IM. There is no proof that the account actually belonged to Manning, or that if it did belong to Manning, that Manning was actually using it.
As I mentioned in Informationthread 14 along with the creepy U.S. response, Glenn Greenwald states that the UN is set to investigate Manning's treatment. The whole Greenwald post is well worth the read. No really. READ it.
Sorry if you wanted Wikileaks information today. I think I am proud of everyone today and in the past that have stood up and did some REAL reporting to make sure we have some sense of what is happening with Bradley Manning.
Sign the letter to the Commanding Officer of Bradley Manning’s brig urging for Bradley’s unnecessary POI order to be lifted
Have at it in the comments.
shenderson gives the daily breakdown of Wikileaks related diaries