Please think about Bradley Manning during the comfort of this family holiday
25th December 2010.
martin.
Bradley Manning Suffering Extreme Isolation
Courageous Whistleblower 'Physically Deteriorating'
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on December 23, 2010,
Printed on December 24, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/149317/
Last week, Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of
giving classified materials to Wikileaks, spent his
23rd birthday in the brig of the Marine Corps Base in
Quantico, Virginia. He has been convicted of no crime,
but endures the kind of highly restrictive detention
that's usually reserved for the most dangerous
criminals in America's supermax prisons. He is kept
isolated in his cell 23 hours a day, where he is cut
off from most human contact, denied reading materials
and personal items, prevented by the guards from
exercising and regularly awakened from his sleep. He
has been at Quantico for five months, following two
months of detention in Kuwait.
The circumstances of Manning's detention gained
prominence last week after Salon's Glenn Greenwald
wrote a scathing exposé of what he called "conditions
that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by
the standards of many nations, even torture." As
AlterNet's Sarah Seltzer noted, the U.N. Special
Rapporteur on Torture has started a probe to determine
whether Manning's solitary confinement constitutes
torture under international law.
The Pentagon reacted to the story by claiming that
Manning is "a maximum custody detainee" who can
"receive the same privileges that a detainee classified
as general population may receive . [including] daily
television, hygiene call, reading and outside physical
activity without restraint." But David House, one of
the few people able to visit Manning, said that Manning
told him he'd only been allowed outdoors sporadically,
and his exercise consisted of being placed in a room
where he can only walk around in circles.
Manning also has a "Prevention of Injury" (POI) order
that requires him to be constantly monitored by guards,
and prevents him from having normal bedding. He has to
strip down to his underwear and surrender his clothes
to the guards each night before sleeping under a
"suicide blanket" - he told House it's "similar in
weight and heft to lead aprons used in X-ray
laboratories, and similar in texture to coarse and
stiff carpet." Manning "expressed concern that he had
to lie very still at night to avoid receiving carpet
burns." According to Greenwald, prison medical
officials are administering him antidepressants.
POI orders are usually issued for brief periods of time
for inmates who are judged to be suicidal or have not
yet undergone a psychological evaluation. Manning has
been evaluated, and there is no indication he is a
threat to himself or others. He has been, by all
accounts, a model prisoner.
Psychiatrist Jeff Kaye spoke to House after his visit
with Manning, and while he stressed that a complete
evaluation of Manning's well-being is impossible
without personal contact, he predicted that "Solitary
confinement will slowly wear down the mental and
physical condition of Bradley Manning."
Solitary confinement is an assault on the body and
psyche of an individual. It deprives him of species-
specific forms of physical, sensory and social
interaction with the environment and other human
beings. Manning reported last weekend he had not seen
sunlight in four weeks, nor does he interact with other
people but a few hours on the weekend. The human
nervous system needs a certain amount of sensory and
social stimulation to retain normal brain functioning.
The effects of this deprivation on individuals varies,
and some people are affected more severely or quickly,
while others hold out longer against the boredom and
daily grind of dullness that never seems to end.
Over time, isolation produces a particular well-known
syndrome which is akin to that of an organic brain
disorder, or delirium. The list of possible effects
upon a person is quite long, and can include an
inability to tolerate ordinary stimuli, sleep and
appetite disturbances, primitive forms of thinking and
aggressive ruminations, perceptual distortions and
hallucinations, agitation, panic attacks,
claustrophobia, feelings of loss of control, rage,
paranoia, memory loss, lack of concentration,
generalized body pain, EEG abnormalities, depression,
suicidal ideation and random, self-destructive
behavior.
According to Kaye, the detention is already having
effects on Manning - he appears to have difficulty
concentrating and his physical condition is
deteriorating.
As Glenn Greenwald notes, prolonged solitary
confinement is, "widely viewed around the world as
highly injurious, inhumane, punitive, and arguably even
a form of torture."
In his widely praised March, 2009 New Yorker article--
entitled "Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?"
-- the surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande assembled
expert opinion and personal anecdotes to demonstrate
that, as he put it, "all human beings experience
isolation as torture." By itself, prolonged solitary
confinement routinely destroys a person's mind and
drives them into insanity. A March, 2010 article in The
Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the
Law explains that "solitary confinement is recognized
as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological
stressors such as isolation can be as clinically
distressing as physical torture."
It's important to recognize that Manning is a true
whistleblower - according to chat logs obtained by
Wired magazine, Manning saw what he viewed as serious
crimes committed by U.S. forces in Iraq, and felt
compelled to release the information in the hope that
it would spark "worldwide discussion, debates, and
reforms." "I want people to see the truth," he wrote,
"regardless of who they are. because without
information, you cannot make informed decisions as a
public." He succeeded in that - the release of video
showing an American helicopter attack on a group of
unarmed civilians, and subsequent attack on rescuers
rushing to evacuate the survivors, was an eye-opening
look at the horrors of war that's never seen in the
sanitized footage released by the military.
Given that Manning has not been shown to be suicidal or
a threat to others, it's hard to disagree with
Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange's claim that "Manning
is being held as a political prisoner in the United
States."
Greenwald wrote that what Manning's solitary
confinement "achieves is clear."
Having it known that the U.S. could and would disappear
people at will to "black sites," assassinate them with
unseen drones, imprison them for years without a shred
of due process even while knowing they were innocent,
torture them mercilessly, and in general acts as a
lawless and rogue imperial power created a climate of
severe intimidation and fear. Who would want to
challenge the U.S. government in any way -- even in
legitimate ways -- knowing that it could and would
engage in such lawless, violent conduct without any
restraints or repercussions?
Bradley Manning's detention is not comparable with the
horrific measures imposed on Jose Padilla, an American
citizen who was accused of plotting to detonate a
"dirty bomb" and held as an "enemy combatant" for six
years before being convicted on a lesser charge.
Padilla's attorneys alleged that he was subjected to
sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and tortured
with psychotropic drugs until he lost his mind. But
Manning is also a 23-year-old who, whether he is right
or wrong, thought he was doing the right thing, and has
now run into the maw of a vindictive American security
state.
Fyodor Dostoevsky famously said that "The degree of
civilization in a society can be judged by entering its
prisons." The Web site FireDogLake has asked people to
sign a letter urging the military to stop its
"inhumane" treatment of Bradley Manning. You can add
your name here.
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at
AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About
the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want
You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America).
Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.
c 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights
reserved.
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