Around 8pmest "every" night
In Informationhread 45 I did a simple poll where I asked "Amnesty International is"... and 4% answered either "part of the Assange fanboy club" or "bad." On Dailykos. 4%! Yup. Not a joke. I think I have had a conversation on this site with those 4%.......
Democracy Now! Dr. Atul Gawande: Solitary Confinement is Torture
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: I want to switch gears for a moment. You wrote a remarkable piece about the effects of solitary confinement on prisoners, on people who have been held in isolation for a long time. On this issue, I just want to turn to the case of the four prisoners in a supermax prison, the Ohio State Penitentiary. This week they launched a hunger strike to protest what they call their harsh mistreatment under solitary confinement. The prisoners—Bomani Shakur, Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Jason Robb and Namir Abdul Mateen—were sentenced to death for their involvement in the 1993 prison uprising in Lucasville, Ohio. For over 17 years, they’ve been held in 23-hours-a-day solitary lockdown. On Monday, the four began refusing to eat meals until they are moved out of solitary confinement and onto death row, where they say they’ll get better treatment. Yesterday I spoke—Amy spoke with the longtime peace activist, historian and lawyer, Staughton Lynd. He wrote the definitive history of the 1993 Ohio prison uprising at Lucasville. He described the prisoners’ conditions. Let’s take a listen.
STAUGHTON LYND: They are held in more restrictive confinement than the more than 100 other death sentence prisoners in the same prison. Now, why is this? It’s precisely because the system thinks of them as leaders. So, it will let them watch television. They even let Bomani Shakur use a typewriter. But what they don’t let any of the four men do is to be in the same space as another human being other than a guard at the same time. And this means that while other death sentence prisoners can wander about the pod, can have collective meals outside their cells, and especially can have semi-contact visits with their friends and families, the four are always obliged to encounter the world either through a solid cell door or, when they go out on a visit, through a solid pane of glass. So that, again, Bomani has a niece and nephew aged eight and three that he loves and would wish to touch. If he were on death row, he could do that. But he’s been told by the prison authorities he will never be on death row, because they’re going to keep him in social isolation until they kill him.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Staughton Lynd, the longtime peace activist, lawyer, talking about these four men who have now gone on a hunger strike at the Ohio State Penitentiary, demanding to be put on death row, where they say that they will be treated better.
And then we’ve got the case of the alleged WikiLeaks Army whistleblower Bradley Manning, who’s being held in solitary confinement. Twenty-two years old, U.S. Army private, arrested in May, has been in detention ever since. For the past five months, he’s been held at the U.S. Marine brig at Quantico, Virginia, before that, held for two months in a military jail in Kuwait. Last month, we spoke to Glenn Greenwald, the political and legal blogger at Salon.com. Glenn reported that Manning is being held under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment, and even torture. This is what Glenn Greenwald said.
GLENN GREENWALD: He’s been held for seven months without being convicted of any crime. And the conditions that I recently discovered he’s being held in are really quite disturbing. And this has been true for the entire seven-month duration of his detention. He is in solitary confinement, and he’s not only in solitary confinement, which means that he’s in a cell alone, but he’s there for 23 out of 24 hours every day. He is released for one hour a day only. So, 23 out of the 24 hours a day he sits alone. He is barred from even doing things like exercising inside of his cell. He’s constantly supervised and monitored, and if he does that, he’s told immediately to stop. There are very strict rules about what he’s even allowed to do inside the cell. Beyond that, he’s being denied just the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, such as a pillow and sheets, and has been denied that without explanation for the entire duration of his visit, as well. And there is a lot of literature and a lot of psychological studies, and even studies done by the U.S. military, that show that prolonged solitary confinement, which is something that the United States does almost more than any other country in the Western world, of the type to which Manning is subjected, can have a very long-term psychological damage, including driving people to insanity and the like. It clearly is cruel and unusual; it’s arguably a form of torture. And given that Manning has never been convicted of anything, unlike the convicts at supermaxes to whom this treatment is normally applied, it’s particularly egregious.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: That’s Glenn Greenwald, the political and legal blogger at Salon.com. In his piece that he wrote about Manning, he actually cited your article "Hellhole," which you document what happens to people held in isolation. Explain why this is thought of as a form of torture in many places.
DR. ATUL GAWANDE: Well, I was interested in whether it really was torture, and I was interested because this has become, I think, a generationally defining question for us. In the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, solitary confinement was very unusual. Today, we have over 50,000 people in long-term solitary confinement in our American prisons now. You know, in states like New York— it’s across every—red and blue states. We have—New York has over eight percent of its prison population in long-term solitary confinement. A large proportion—some think a majority—are not there for violent offenses, either. It’s a method of control that we regard as increasingly routine. And so, what my puzzle was, is it torture, or is it not?
And what I looked back to was the experience and the literature, which is much richer, around what hostages and prisoners of war—our Vietnam veterans, for example—experienced when they went through solitary confinement. And what’s found is that people experience solitary confinement as even more damaging than physical torture. Vietnam veterans who received physical torture—John McCain had two-and-a-half years in solitary confinement, had his legs and arm broken during his imprisonment, but described the two-and-a-half years that he spent in solitary as being the most cruel component and the most terrifying aspect of what he went under. You also look at studies that show that people held in isolation from other human beings—we actually need social, friendly interaction with other people to be sane, to be absolutely—
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Right. You document how people actually reach a level of psychosis.
DR. ATUL GAWANDE: That’s right. Not everybody.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: They begin to lose their minds, right?
DR. ATUL GAWANDE: Not everybody. The people who become psychotic in solitary confinement are people who often have attention deficit disorder or low IQ or issues of prior mental illness. Well, guess who is in our prisons? And there’s a very high rate of psychosis and people flat-out going crazy under the confinement conditions. And so, then what I puzzle over is, does it actually reduce our violence in our prisons? The evidence from multiple studies now is that not only that it has not reduced violence, it’s increased the costs of being in prison. And my finding was that we have decided that when it is political—when it is a prisoner of war or a hostage, that it is absolutely torture when other countries do this to people, and that there is no discernible difference in the experience of what people go through in our prisons, when they’re in solitary confinement for 14 years, in the case of one person who I documented, that this is torture.
Many of you remember that in Informationthread 15 and Informationthread 13 I linked to this March 30, 2009 article by Atul Gawande. Here is a bit:
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.
...
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.
Sady Doyle at Tiger Beatdown (Please read the whole thing at the link):
It’s hard to write about Bradley Manning. I’ve composed more than one lengthy, impassioned post about Manning, and deleted it; we’ve heard things about or from Manning that we weren’t supposed to hear, and we’ve heard lots of things about Manning that may or may not be the truth, and addressing those things publicly — in any of the various ways that they are actually being construed — may actually put Manning in danger.
But let’s start with the most important thing, something simple: Bradley Manning is accused of trying really, really hard to do the right thing.
Bradley Manning is nobody special. He was an ordinary, unexceptional person, enlisted in the US Military, as many people are, and he allegedly found out that the military was doing something which — though we all might have suspected or feared or heard about it — betrayed its most basic promise. The promise that this was war, not murder. I mean, this is what you have to believe, if you’re going to hand a bunch of people guns and train them to kill, if you’re going to give people all of these incredibly powerful weapons in the first place: If you are going to have a military, you have to believe that the weapons and killing-people skills of that military are not going to be used to just gratuitously murder people. And it’s been proven wrong before, and we all have every reason to know that it’s often wrong, this belief, but we have to believe it if we are to justify the existence of a military. Because the other option is realizing that we’ve just sent Death out there, that we’ve just unleashed a ton of highly armed people onto a country where they can now do anything they want to anyone they want. We’ve sent murder. And rape: Rape happens a whole, whole, whole lot, in war. I want to believe that my country, at least, would not support that.
But here’s what they think happened: Manning found out that US soldiers had shot and killed civilians who did not return fire. There was a video: Not just words, but a chance for people to see it happen. He decided that people ought to know that it was really happening. And whatever you think of what he did next, in this version of the story, it can’t really be denied: He tried to do the right thing.
There are supposed to be protections in place, when you do the right thing. When you find out that something has gone wrong, and you tell people about it. If there weren’t protections for whistleblowers, there would be no way for corruption or injustice to be exposed. People would be too scared to tell anyone what they saw, whatever it was. It’s kind of a basic principle of society — it’s what they fucking tell us to do in those Bush-era subway ads, the ones everybody makes fun of. "IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING." Don’t be quiet if you have reason to believe people could get hurt. But there are no protections in place for Bradley Manning.
Teh "EVIL" says something
(1) Last month, The New York Times' Charlie Savage reported that the DOJ -- in order to distinguish Julian Assange and WikiLeaks from investigative journalists -- was seeking to prove that they actively conspired beforehand with Bradley Manning to "steal" classified information, as opposed to merely receiving and then publishing it after the fact. That prosecution tactic has apparently run into a major roadblock. According to NBC News' Jim Miklaszewski, "investigators have been unable to make any direct connection between" Manning and Assange, as "there is apparently no evidence [Manning] passed the files directly to Assange, or had any direct contact with the controversial WikiLeaks figure."
If true, that would leave the Obama DOJ with two options: (1) prosecute WikiLeaks and Assange for doing nothing more than receiving and publishing classified information: an act that is simply not a crime in the U.S. and could not be prosecuted as one without criminalizing much of investigative journalism (indeed, it's no different than what The New York Times did in this case and countless other cases), or (2) defy political pressure, honor the First Amendment, and accept that Wikileaks did nothing criminal.
(2) The DOJ's apparent failure to find the evidence it needs to prosecute WikiLeaks underscores the reasons for the increasingly inhumane treatment to which Bradley Manning is being subjected. It's long been clear -- and reported -- that the Obama DOJ desperately needs Manning to incriminate Assange in order to be able to prosecute him (by, for instance, providing the Manning-Assange link that the DOJ is unable to prove). The harsh, punitive conditions under which Manning are being held is designed -- like most detainee abuse -- to force him to say what his captors want him to say (yesterday, Amnesty USA followed Amnesty International in denouncing Manning's detention conditions as "inhumane").
Not only did Quantico officials this weekend contrive reasons to deny Manning his only real reprieve from isolation -- periodic Saturday visits from his friend David House -- but they also last week made his conditions even harsher by placing him on suicide watch even though three separate brig psychiatrists said it was unwarranted. That decision resulted in this:
The suicide risk assignment meant that PFC Manning was required to remain in his cell for 24 hours a day. He was stripped of all clothing with the exception of his underwear. His prescription eyeglasses were taken away from him. He was forced to sit in essential blindness with the exception of the times that he was reading or given limited television privileges. During those times, his glasses were returned to him.
But because of all the light that has been shined on the issue of Manning's detention, the Government has now been forced to publicly admit that the imposition of these conditions was not only improper, but punitive. From Miklaszewski:
The officials told NBC News [] that a U.S. Marine commander did violate procedure when he placed Manning on "suicide watch" last week.
Military officials said Brig Commander James Averhart did not have the authority to place Manning on suicide watch for two days last week, and that only medical personnel are allowed to make that call.
The official said that after Manning had allegedly failed to follow orders from his Marine guards, Averhart declared Manning a "suicide risk." Manning was then placed on suicide watch, which meant he was confined to his cell, stripped of most of his clothing and deprived of his reading glasses.
The order was lifted once Manning's lawyer filed a formal complaint, but clearly, the mentality of brig officials is to punish Manning -- who has been convicted of nothing -- and make life as inhumane and unbearable for him as possible, even if it means violating their own rules and abusing the oppression of "suicide watch" to torment him further. None of this will deter the blind authoritarians among us -- the long-time marchers on the Right and their newfound Obama-apologist comrades -- from citing pronouncements from brig and other military and government officials as though they're unchallengeable Gospel (that's what authoritarians, by definition, do), but for anyone minimally rational, this episode will underscore the need for serious skepticism with such claims.
Greg Mitchell
6:00 Charlie Savage at NYT with new update on Manning case and comparisons to the Bush-era, scandalous Yee episode years ago. But as Glenn Greenwald tweets: "difference: no Dems defended" the Yee "travesty."
Red State: Give Manning his pillow and blanie back yup. And former Obama press aide Joy Reid says the same fucking thing as our country falls further into asshatville. Well, I am not having it. I dare you to come into my comments and try...