The Passion of Bradley Manning

by Chase Madar

  And Manning too became a figure of instant infamy. Rep. Mike Rogers, ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, called the private a traitor who deserved execution. In September, Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, Baptist pastor and one-time Republican presidential candidate, took a break from signing copies of his new Christmas-themed children’s book to recommend execution for Manning.

  An ad-hoc nonprofit group, the Bradley Manning Support Network, quickly sprang up. They raised money for Manning and hired an experienced JAG lawyer, David E. Coombs, to defend him. But the detention itself soon came to the fore. Manning’s harsh and gratuitous months of punitive solitary confinement at the Quantico brig joined Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as an emblem of Washington’s post-9/11 sadism.

  Pretrial confinement in the military justice system is customary only if the accused presents a flight risk or or a risk of harm to self or others. But Pfc. Manning, military authorities decided, was a risk to himself, and this became the pretext for a punishment of extraordinary harshness. Despite the repeated findings of a brig psychiatrist that Manning was not a suicide risk, authorities imposed a regimen of punitive solitary confinement, chillingly described by the accused leaker’s attorney:

  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 to 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.

  From 7:00 p.m. to 9:20 p.m., he is given correspondence time. He is given access to a pen and paper. He is allowed to write letters to family, friends, and his attorneys.

  Each night, during his correspondence time, he is allowed to take a 15 to 20 minute shower.

  On weekends and holidays, he is allowed to have approved visitors see him from 12:00 to 3:00 p.m.

  He is allowed to receive letters from those on his approved list and from his legal counsel. If he receives a letter from someone not on his approved list, he must sign a rejection form. The letter is then either returned to the sender or destroyed.

  He is allowed to have any combination of up to 15 books or magazines. He must request the book or magazine by name. Once the book or magazine has been reviewed by the literary board at the confinement facility, and approved, he is allowed to have someone on his approved list send it to him. The person sending the book or magazine to him must do so through a publisher or an approved distributor such as Amazon. They are not allowed to mail the book or magazine directly to PFC Manning.

  Due to being held on Prevention of Injury (POI) watch:

  PFC Manning is held in his cell for approximately 23 hours a day.

  The guards are required to check on PFC Manning every five minutes by asking him if he is okay. PFC Manning is required to respond in some affirmative manner. At night, if the guards cannot see PFC Manning clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or is curled up towards the wall, they will wake him in order to ensure he is okay.

  He receives each of his meals in his cell.

  He is not allowed to have a pillow or sheets. However, he is given access to two blankets and has recently been given a new mattress that has a built-in pillow.

  He is not allowed to have any personal items in his cell.

  He is only allowed to have one book or one magazine at any given time to read in his cell. The book or magazine is taken away from him at the end of the day before he goes to sleep.

  He is prevented from exercising in his cell. If he attempts to do push-ups, sit-ups, or any other form of exercise he will be forced to stop.

  He does receive one hour of “exercise” outside of his cell daily. He is taken to an empty room and only allowed to walk. PFC Manning normally just walks figure eights in the room for the entire hour. If he indicates that he no long feels like walking, he is immediately returned to his cell.

  When PFC Manning goes to sleep, he is required to strip down to his boxer shorts and surrender his clothing to the guards. His clothing is returned to him the next morning.

  Why was Manning treated like the inmate of a Soviet psychiatric prison? Had an American soldier been treated like an enemy combatant? His torture may be a warning to other prospective whistleblowers, and used as a way to break him, crush his spirit and force him to implicate Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in espionage charges. (The Department of Justice has had a difficult time finding a legal rationale against WikiLeaks, whose act of receiving confidential disclosures is no different from that of the New York Times or Washington Post in any given week—but if they could get Manning to say that Assange was actively involved in the leaks somehow, they might have a case.)

  Manning was kept on POI watch despite month after month of both brig and independent psychiatrists affirming that the prisoner was not a suicide risk. Opposition to his punitive pretrial solitary confinement in the United States and abroad was growing during this time, but Quantico only clamped down harder. In March of 2011, they began stripping Manning naked, depriving him of his glasses as well. The torture and humiliation of the leaker became an even bigger story than the leaks, which at that point included the Iraq War Logs and “Cablegate,” the 251,000 State Department cables.

  Manning’s pretrial torture became an international scandal. British Members of Parliament started protesting the treatment of a Welsh subject’s son. The Bundestag’s human rights committee sent a letter to Obama expressing concern. Two hundred law professors, including Obama’s former mentor Laurence Tribe, wrote an open letter to the president condemning Manning’s treatment, if not defending his alleged deeds. (Few are the American intellectuals who unequivocally defend the leaks: Michael Moore, Jesse Ventura and CodePink’s core of leftwing peace activists—and that’s about it.) Even the hyper-conservative National Review blasted the pretrial solitary confinement of Manning as a draconian affront to the rule of law.

  On March 10th, State Department spokesperson P. J. Crowley condemned Manning’s treatment as “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid” at an MIT speaking engagement. He resigned two days later.

  And where did President Obama stand on this? On the campaign trail, Obama had praised whistleblowers for their patriotism, pledging to protect and promote them. But upon installation in the White House, the Obama Department of Justice launched more Espionage Act prosecutions against leakers than all previous administrations combined. Asked about the issue the day after Crowley’s outburst, Obama reassured the reporter that he personally looked into the matter and that the months of pretrial solitary confinement were all for the soldier’s own good. Confronted by a group of Manning solidarity activists, who thanks to a benefactor had infiltrated a $5,000-a-plate fundraiser for the President at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco, Barack Obama informed them with exasperation that Bradley Manning “broke the law. I can’t do open source diplomacy!”

  If Manning were so abused by the Bush-Cheney gang, it would have been one more proof of the Republicans’ noisome barb
arity. But with Obama in office, Democrats have been remarkably mellow about the matter—save, of course, those Obama loyalists who have aggressively condemned Manning’s alleged deeds, mocked his defenders and praised his incarceration as essential to national security.

  It’s tempting to figure that Manning’s sexual preference and gender identity played a large role in his alleged deeds. A young sensitive gay man, alienated and brutalized by the Army’s macho culture—it makes some intuitive sense. It is a temptation worth resisting, as it is not supported by any of the available evidence. The informant who turned Manning in is gay, as is the former Army counterintelligence special agent, Tim Webster, whom Lamo first turned to after receiving the alleged confession from FOB Hammer, and who then connected Lamo with the military authorities. Webster told The Guardian he had no time whatsoever for the fixation on Manning’s sexuality. “The notion that the Manning case has anything to do with his sexuality is categorically absurd. Many thousands of homosexual and bisexual men and women are serving honorably and to suggest that their sexuality renders them any less effective in the defense of our nation is bigoted nonsense.” There are thousands of gays and lesbians in the military, many with security clearance, and they have been largely happy to obey all their orders, both legal and illegal, and would never dream of doing what Manning is alleged to have done.

  Manning himself never linked his sexual preference or gender identity to his alleged deeds. In fact, the way he described the military, it seems a virtual magnet for gays and lesbians. There was the colonel that Manning had a fling with back when he was a Starbucks barista in Maryland; the interrogator at FOB Hammer who has a civil union back in New Jersey; the claim that “half the S-2 shop [military intelligence unit] is at least bi.”

  (It should also be pointed out that some of the most bellicose politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are rumored to be gay. The South Carolina chapter of the Tea Party has delightedly outed again and again their über-hawkish but otherwise insufficiently conservative senator, Lindsey Graham, as a homosexual. Liam Fox, the recently resigned minister of defense in the Tory-Liberal Democrat government in the United Kingdom, is a neocon ultra who carried out his official duties abroad very frequently in the company of his “best friend,” a man seventeen years his junior without any governmental position but bankrolled as a “consultant” by various wealthy individuals close to Fox.)

  In the United States, mainstream LGBT activists have been more than happy to shun Manning; with the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy of prohibiting “out” gays and lesbians from the military finally and triumphantly repealed, why defend an accused traitor who just happens to be gay? In the United Kingdom, where the LGBT rights movement is less beholden to the military, the mood is different and leading gay rights and human rights activist Peter Tatchell has promoted solidarity with Manning (he of the Welsh mother) at every opportunity.

  Whistleblowers are always pathologized; their governments refuse on principle to comprehend their political motive, no matter how overt and obvious. In the United States, we are barely able to even comprehend a political motive, given that the whole category of the political has eroded so severely, fatally associated with the ghastly talking heads who appear on Sunday morning talk shows. Despite the clarity of Manning’s stated mens rea in the chatlogs, a political motive simply won’t do. His motive must be sexual, as we have seen. Or it must be emotional. (As if Bradley Manning, who was dumped by his boyfriend in January of 2010, is somehow different from the thousands of other soldiers and sailors similarly jilted every year.) It must be psychiatric. (That mental illness is rampant throughout the armed forces is rarely mentioned, nor the fact that the leading cause of death among active duty troops in 2009 and 2010 and likely 2011 is not enemy fire or IEDs but suicide.) It must be pharmacological. (According to the Washington Post, Dr. David Charney, a psychiatrist who has consulted on espionage cases, pointed out that Manning’s reported tendencies to zone out might be related to “petit mal epilepsy.”) So much concern, such eagerness to diagnose.

  The irony is that Manning himself in his IM chats with Lamo already dismissed the pathologization of every last personality trait.

  (01:51:59 AM) bradass87: im probably suffering from depression

  (01:51:59 AM) bradass87: ={

  (01:52:03 AM) bradass87: ={

  (01:52:06 AM) bradass87: =P

  (01:52:15 AM) info@adrianlamo.com: Who isn’t :(

  (01:52:20 AM) bradass87: goddamn, i missed the “P” key twice

  (01:52:27 AM) info@adrianlamo.com: I’m supposedly bipolar.

  (01:52:38 AM) bradass87: oh well, still not medicated

  (01:53:00 AM) bradass87: i dont believe a third of the DSM-IV-TR

  (01:53:58 AM) bradass87: so many Disorders that so many people fall into… it just seems like a method to categorize a person, medicate them, and make money from prescription medications

  […]

  (01:54:31 AM) bradass87: i’d like to meet a single person that wouldn’t fall into a Disorder in the DSM-IV-TR

  And yet, most media accounts of Manning and his alleged deeds have made a meal of the private’s personal life and do not even go near his plainly stated motive. Commentator Joy Reid, a Harvard-educated blogger, commentator and Obama loyalist is typical in this regard, seeing Manning as “a guy seeking anarchy as a salve for his own personal, psychological torment.” Reid also says Manning’s “gender identity disorder” “kind of puts his subsequent terms of incarceration in context.” Meaning that it’s okay to lock transgender people in solitary for as long as you want? The comment is certainly open to interpretation.

  Is the political angle too obvious for clever journalists? One man with no patience for the media’s lurid fixation on Manning’s personal life is Ethan McCord—the US infantryman who retrieved the two wounded children from the shot-up van on July 12, 2007, all filmed between the cross-hairs in the “Collateral Murder” video. He responded to a New York Magazine article on Manning that dwelled at length on the soldier’s gender identity counseling, but barely mentioned his crisis of conscience after helping to round up Iraqi civilian activists for likely torture. McCord’s cogent letter to New York is worth quoting in full, even if the magazine printed only a snippet.

  Serving with my unit 2nd battalion 16th infantry in New Baghdad Iraq, I vividly remember the moment in 2007, when our Battalion Commander walked into the room and announced our new rules of engagement:

  “Listen up, new battalion SOP (standing operating procedure) from now on: Anytime your convoy gets hit by an IED, I want 360 degree rotational fire. You kill every [expletive] in the street!”

  We weren’t trained extensively to recognize an unlawful order, or how to report one. But many of us could not believe what we had just been told to do. Those of us who knew it was morally wrong struggled to figure out a way to avoid shooting innocent civilians, while also dodging repercussions from the non-commissioned officers who enforced the policy. In such situations, we determined to fire our weapons, but into rooftops or abandoned vehicles, giving the impression that we were following procedure.

  On April 5, 2010 American citizens and people around the world got a taste of the fruits of this standing operating procedure when WikiLeaks [1] released the now-famous Collateral Murder [2] video. This video showed the horrific and wholly unnecessary killing of unarmed Iraqi civilians and Reuters journalists.

  I was part of the unit that was responsible for this atrocity. In the video, I can be seen attempting to carry wounded children to safety in the aftermath.

  The video released by WikiLeaks belongs in the public record. Covering up this incident is a matter deserving of criminal inquiry. Whoever revealed it is an American hero in my book.

  Private First Class Bradley Manning has been confined for over a year on the government’s accusation that he released this video and volumes of other classified documents to WikiLeaks—an organization that has been selectively publishing portions of this informatio
n in collaboration with other news outlets.

  If PFC Bradley Manning did what he is accused of doing, then it is clear—from chat logs [3] that have been attributed to him—that his decision was motivated by conscience and political agency. These chat logs allegedly describe how PFC Manning hopes these revelations will result in “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.”

  Unfortunately, Steve Fishman’s article Bradley Manning’s Army of One [4] in New York Magazine (July 3, 2011) erases Manning’s political agency. By focusing so heavily on Manning’s personal life, Fishman removes politics from a story that has everything to do with politics. The important public issues wrapped up with PFC Manning’s case include: transparency in government; the Obama Administration’s unprecedented pursuit of whistle-blowers; accountability of government and military in shaping and carrying out foreign policy; war crimes revealed in the WikiLeaks documents; the catalyzing role these revelations played in democratic movements across the Middle East; and more.

  The contents of the WikiLeaks revelations have pulled back the curtain on the degradation of our democratic system. It has become completely normal for decision-makers to promulgate foreign policies, diplomatic strategies, and military operating procedures that are hostile to the democratic ideals our country was founded upon. The incident I was part of—shown in the Collateral Murder video—becomes even more horrific when we grasp that it was not exceptional. PFC Manning himself is alleged to describe (in the chat logs) an incident where he was ordered to turn over innocent Iraqi academics to notorious police interrogators, for the offense of publishing a political critique of government corruption titled, “Where did the money go? [5]” These issues deserve “discussion, debates, and reforms”—and attention from journalists.