In a recent speech, Glenn Greenwald discussed how the government and media treatment of WikiLeaks is symptomatic of a total lack of respect for the law and government transparency by the secret consortium of government and corporate power that runs the United States.
[Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from the transcript of a speech delivered by Constitutional lawyer and Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald at the Lannan Foundation on March 8. The speech was transcribed by the blog Contumacious. Please visit AlterNet to read the entire speech.]
by Glenn Greenwald
...[P]olitical controversies and political issues never take place in isolation. They're always part of some broader framework, that drives political outcomes, and that determines how political power is exercised. And so it doesn't really matter which specific topic, or which specific controversy of the day you want to discuss, the reality is, you can't really meaningfully discuss any of them without examining all the forces that shape political culture, and that shape how political outcomes are determined. So, in order to talk about any issue, you end up speaking about these same, broad themes, that are shaping, and I think plaguing, the political discourse in the United States.
This is something that I first realized when I started writing about politics in late 2005. One of the very first topics on which I focused was the scandal about the Bush administration eavesdropping on American citizens without the warrants required by law. This was first exposed by the NYT in December of 2005, so it happened around six weeks after I began writing about politics. I had this very naïve idea that this was going to be very straightforward and simple political controversy. The reason I thought that in my naiveté, was because what the Bush administration got caught doing [eavesdropping on Americans without warrants from the FISA court] is as clear as could possibly be a felony under American law. You can actually look at the criminal law that existed since 1978, when FISA was enacted. It says that doing exactly what the Bush administration got caught doing, is a felony in the U.S., just like robbing a bank, or extortion or murder, and that it's punishable by a prison term of five years or a $10,000 fine for each offense.
The report that the NYT published was that there were at least hundreds and probably thousands of instances where American citizens were eavesdropped on illegally and in violation of the law. So, I thought that this was going to be a fairly straightforward controversy, because I had this idea that if you get caught committing a felony, and the NYT writes and reports on that and everybody's talking about that, that that's actually going to be a really bad thing for the person who got caught doing that. I know it was really naïve. I'm actually embarrassed to admit that I thought that, but that really is was I thought at the time. I also thought that basically everybody would be in agreement that that was a really bad thing to do....that thing that the law said for 30 years was a felony and punishable by a prison term and a large fine. And, as it turned out (and I realized this fairly quickly) none of that actually happened. It wasn't a really bad thing for the people who got caught committing that felony.
And, not only did everyone not agree that that was a bad thing, very few people actually agreed that that was a very bad thing. So, what I thought I was going to be able to do was to take this issue and write very legalistically about it, and demonstrate that what the Bush administration had done was a crime, that it was a felony under the statute and that the legal defenses for it that they had raised were frivolous and baseless and that would be the end of the story. Crime committed, investigation commenced, punishment ensues. So what immediately happened, when I realized that none of that was really going on, of course then the question became why. Why was my expectation about what would happen so radically different than what in fact happened?
So, then I needed to delve into that dynamic, that I began by referencing that determines political outcomes. I had to examine the fact that we have a political faction inside the U.S. [the American Right] that is drowning in concepts of nationalism, and exceptionalism, in tribalism that leads them to believe that whatever they and their leaders do is justifiable inherently because they do it, and in a complete lack of principle...this is the same faction that impeached a democratically elected president not more than 10 years earlier on the grounds that the rule of law is paramount and we can't allow our presidents to break the law. And, yet, here they were defending it.
Please read the entire address at How the US Government Strikes Fear in Its Own Citizens and People Around the World by Glenn Greenwald (AlterNet 2011-03-21).
Glenn Greenwald is a constitutional law attorney and chief blogger at Unclaimed Territory. His forthcoming book, How Would a Patriot Act: Defending American Values from a President Run Amok will be released by Working Assets Publishing next month.
Showing posts with label WikiLeaks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WikiLeaks. Show all posts
Justice: Bradley Manning and the Case Against Solitary Confinement
[If there is anything positive resulting from the torture of Bradley Manning by USMC carabinieri at Quantico, it is that it has raised public awareness about the shockingly routine use in United States state and federal prisons of the cruel but not unusual punishment of solitary confinement. Yesterday, for example, Robert Gibbs was asked about Manning by ABC's Jake Tapper and MSNBC featured an excellent interview about his treatment with FireDogLake's Jane Hamsher. Like the tragic shooting in Tucson and the issue of gun control, the government's brutal handling of Bradley Manning has encouraged the media to begin to shine a light on a dark corner of American justice.]
by Lynn Parramore (new deal 2.0; 2011-01-23)
In the earliest days of our Republic, a group of well-meaning Philadelphia Quakers set out to reform the prison system. The idea was to remove convicts from the mayhem and corruption of overcrowded jails to solitary cells where sinners would return to mental and spiritual health through reflection. In the Walnut Street Jail, no windows would distract the prisoners with street life; no conversation would disturb their penitence. Alone with God, they would be rehabilitated.
There was a small problem. Many of the prisoners went insane. The Walnut Street Jail was shut down in 1835.
But the word penitentiary became part of the language, and the idea of placing prisoners in solitary confinement did not die. It seemed so reasonable - so much better than chain gangs or public stocks. New prisons opened to test the theory that solitude might bring salvation to criminals.
Charles Dickens had a keen interest in prison conditions, having witnessed his father’s detention in a Victorian debtor’s prison. When he heard about the latest American innovation in housing convicts, he came to see for himself. At Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, the wretches he found in solitary confinement were barely human spectres who picked their flesh raw and stared blankly at walls. His on-the-spot conclusion: Solitary confinement is torture. Dickens wrote:
That was 1842. Since then, piles of scientific studies, along with the vivid accounts of victims, have confirmed what was obvious to Dickens. Solitary confinement is worse than smashed bones and torn flesh. When human beings are deprived of social contact for even a few weeks, concentration breaks down, memory fades and disorientation sets in. Eventually, many prisoners experience explosive rages, hallucinations, catatonia, and self-mutilation. Some become irretrievably insane. Far from promoting safety, the most commonly cited justification, solitary confinement often amplifies violent impulses, turning prisoners into ticking time bombs who are far more dangerous to human society upon release than they ever were to begin with (see National Geographic’s documentary on the subject, available on Netflix).
Human beings need social contact for normal brain function. Solitary confinement is thus a method of inflicting traumatic injury upon the human mind. “It’s an awful thing, solitary,” wrote former Vietnam prisoner John McCain in Faith of My Fathers. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” Among its legion perversities, solitary confinement turns medical doctors into torturers; renders violent criminals more aggressive, and makes prisoners cut off from human society incapable of functioning in it.
In 1890, the United States Supreme Court nearly declared the punishment unconstitutional. It is banned by the Geneva Convention, condemned by the United Nations, and either prohibited or restricted in most civilized countries. And yet today, as Atul Gawande showed in his revealing 2009 New Yorker article, tens of thousands of Americans are tortured in this fashion every day, out of sight, in the “Supermax” prisons that have popped up like poisoned mushrooms on the American landscape since the 1980s. Some prisoners are consigned to these Houses of Unholiness for violations - both major and minor — of prison rules. Some for gang activity. Others for trying to escape. Or for violent behavior. Some are placed there because they are mentally ill and there is nowhere else to put them - the equivalent of casting a sufferer of pneumonia onto an Arctic tundra.
Save for the death penalty, solitary confinement is the most extreme sanction allowed by law. Like slavery and every other form of institutionalized inhumanity, it should be banished to the dark annals of American history as an example of what happens when our humanity slumbers.
Instead, it is being used as a method of terror and coercion by the United States government upon a citizen who has not even been convicted of a crime.
As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and several other courageous journalists have documented, Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has been detained in solitary confinement for the last seven months, despite not having been convicted of any crime, having been a model detainee, and having evidenced no signs of violence or even disciplinary misdemeanors. Manning has been kept alone in a cell for 23 hours a day, barred from exercising in that cell, deprived of sleep, and denied even a pillow or sheets for his bed. As Greenwald reports, “the brig’s medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.” A court hearing has not been set.
The message of the U.S. government to its citizens in this activity is clear: blow the whistle and your brain will be mutilated before you even have a trial.
But it may be that much to the shame of the U.S. government, our slumbering humanity is awakening. The solitary confinement - the torture, for we must call it that - of Bradley Manning is ironically shining a light on this brutality and tipping us off to the danger of authoritarianism. A United Nations probe is now investigating the Bradley case, and the drumbeat of outrage in the blogosphere grows louder every day. Protesters are organizing. Whatever one thinks of Manning and his involvement in the WikiLeaks release of classified information, there can never be any justification for torture. As Greenwald argues, such practices weaken the position of the United States government, both abroad and at home. Other countries will think twice before accepting extradition requests to a place where inhumane treatment of prisoners is sanctioned. Our moral standing in the world suffers, while the American citizenry, already suspicious of post-9/11 governmental abuses of power, grows even more alarmed. What kind of legitimacy adheres to a judicial hearing when the accused has been subject to sanity-threatening conditions? Even exposing the accused to duress is a violation of justice and of the U.S. Constitution — which applies to both civilians and soldiers. Trust and faith in American justice will deteriorate as long as such damaging practices continue.
As we spend time and rejoice with our friends and family in the new year — enjoying the social interaction that human beings require - let us pause for a moment to remember the thousands of people being tortured in American prisons, including Bradley Manning, and let us send our own message back to our government: We are Americans. We will not accept the intimidation and coercion of our fellow citizens, even from the Pentagon. Most assuredly, we will not accept torture in our name. Not of the accused. Not of the mentally ill. Not even of convicted criminals. When our civilized society is attacked, no matter what the justification, we will rise up to defend it.
The placement of human beings in solitary confinement is not a measure of their depravity. It is a measure of our own.
Lynn Parramore is Editor of New Deal 2.0, Media Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and Co-founder of Recessionwire. This article originally appeared here.
See, also: U.S. can't link accused Army private [Bradley Manning] to Assange (NBC News 2011-01-25);
Salon's Glenn Greenwald on "disgustingly harsh conditions inside prisons" and related matters (Salon 2011-01-25);
US accused of inhumane treatment over Wikileaks soldier case (Amnesty International 2011-01-24).
by Lynn Parramore (new deal 2.0; 2011-01-23)
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged
by entering its prisons. ~Fyodor Dostoevsky
by entering its prisons. ~Fyodor Dostoevsky
In the earliest days of our Republic, a group of well-meaning Philadelphia Quakers set out to reform the prison system. The idea was to remove convicts from the mayhem and corruption of overcrowded jails to solitary cells where sinners would return to mental and spiritual health through reflection. In the Walnut Street Jail, no windows would distract the prisoners with street life; no conversation would disturb their penitence. Alone with God, they would be rehabilitated.
There was a small problem. Many of the prisoners went insane. The Walnut Street Jail was shut down in 1835.
But the word penitentiary became part of the language, and the idea of placing prisoners in solitary confinement did not die. It seemed so reasonable - so much better than chain gangs or public stocks. New prisons opened to test the theory that solitude might bring salvation to criminals.
Charles Dickens had a keen interest in prison conditions, having witnessed his father’s detention in a Victorian debtor’s prison. When he heard about the latest American innovation in housing convicts, he came to see for himself. At Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, the wretches he found in solitary confinement were barely human spectres who picked their flesh raw and stared blankly at walls. His on-the-spot conclusion: Solitary confinement is torture. Dickens wrote:
I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers…I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.A man who had seen his share of inhumanities, Dickens pronounced solitary confinement to be “rigid, strict, and hopeless…cruel and wrong.”
That was 1842. Since then, piles of scientific studies, along with the vivid accounts of victims, have confirmed what was obvious to Dickens. Solitary confinement is worse than smashed bones and torn flesh. When human beings are deprived of social contact for even a few weeks, concentration breaks down, memory fades and disorientation sets in. Eventually, many prisoners experience explosive rages, hallucinations, catatonia, and self-mutilation. Some become irretrievably insane. Far from promoting safety, the most commonly cited justification, solitary confinement often amplifies violent impulses, turning prisoners into ticking time bombs who are far more dangerous to human society upon release than they ever were to begin with (see National Geographic’s documentary on the subject, available on Netflix).
Human beings need social contact for normal brain function. Solitary confinement is thus a method of inflicting traumatic injury upon the human mind. “It’s an awful thing, solitary,” wrote former Vietnam prisoner John McCain in Faith of My Fathers. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” Among its legion perversities, solitary confinement turns medical doctors into torturers; renders violent criminals more aggressive, and makes prisoners cut off from human society incapable of functioning in it.
In 1890, the United States Supreme Court nearly declared the punishment unconstitutional. It is banned by the Geneva Convention, condemned by the United Nations, and either prohibited or restricted in most civilized countries. And yet today, as Atul Gawande showed in his revealing 2009 New Yorker article, tens of thousands of Americans are tortured in this fashion every day, out of sight, in the “Supermax” prisons that have popped up like poisoned mushrooms on the American landscape since the 1980s. Some prisoners are consigned to these Houses of Unholiness for violations - both major and minor — of prison rules. Some for gang activity. Others for trying to escape. Or for violent behavior. Some are placed there because they are mentally ill and there is nowhere else to put them - the equivalent of casting a sufferer of pneumonia onto an Arctic tundra.
Save for the death penalty, solitary confinement is the most extreme sanction allowed by law. Like slavery and every other form of institutionalized inhumanity, it should be banished to the dark annals of American history as an example of what happens when our humanity slumbers.
Instead, it is being used as a method of terror and coercion by the United States government upon a citizen who has not even been convicted of a crime.
As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and several other courageous journalists have documented, Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has been detained in solitary confinement for the last seven months, despite not having been convicted of any crime, having been a model detainee, and having evidenced no signs of violence or even disciplinary misdemeanors. Manning has been kept alone in a cell for 23 hours a day, barred from exercising in that cell, deprived of sleep, and denied even a pillow or sheets for his bed. As Greenwald reports, “the brig’s medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.” A court hearing has not been set.
The message of the U.S. government to its citizens in this activity is clear: blow the whistle and your brain will be mutilated before you even have a trial.
But it may be that much to the shame of the U.S. government, our slumbering humanity is awakening. The solitary confinement - the torture, for we must call it that - of Bradley Manning is ironically shining a light on this brutality and tipping us off to the danger of authoritarianism. A United Nations probe is now investigating the Bradley case, and the drumbeat of outrage in the blogosphere grows louder every day. Protesters are organizing. Whatever one thinks of Manning and his involvement in the WikiLeaks release of classified information, there can never be any justification for torture. As Greenwald argues, such practices weaken the position of the United States government, both abroad and at home. Other countries will think twice before accepting extradition requests to a place where inhumane treatment of prisoners is sanctioned. Our moral standing in the world suffers, while the American citizenry, already suspicious of post-9/11 governmental abuses of power, grows even more alarmed. What kind of legitimacy adheres to a judicial hearing when the accused has been subject to sanity-threatening conditions? Even exposing the accused to duress is a violation of justice and of the U.S. Constitution — which applies to both civilians and soldiers. Trust and faith in American justice will deteriorate as long as such damaging practices continue.
As we spend time and rejoice with our friends and family in the new year — enjoying the social interaction that human beings require - let us pause for a moment to remember the thousands of people being tortured in American prisons, including Bradley Manning, and let us send our own message back to our government: We are Americans. We will not accept the intimidation and coercion of our fellow citizens, even from the Pentagon. Most assuredly, we will not accept torture in our name. Not of the accused. Not of the mentally ill. Not even of convicted criminals. When our civilized society is attacked, no matter what the justification, we will rise up to defend it.
The placement of human beings in solitary confinement is not a measure of their depravity. It is a measure of our own.
Lynn Parramore is Editor of New Deal 2.0, Media Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and Co-founder of Recessionwire. This article originally appeared here.
See, also: U.S. can't link accused Army private [Bradley Manning] to Assange (NBC News 2011-01-25);
Salon's Glenn Greenwald on "disgustingly harsh conditions inside prisons" and related matters (Salon 2011-01-25);
US accused of inhumane treatment over Wikileaks soldier case (Amnesty International 2011-01-24).
Balance of Payments?: Exporting Terrorism
A no-longer-secret memo, prepared by the so-called "CIA Red Cell," an entity "charged by the Director of Intelligence with taking a pronounced 'out-of-the-box' approach that will provoke thought and offer an alternative viewpoint on the full range of analytic issues," suggests that "Al-Qa’ida" (after 9 years, you'd think at least we could settle on a spelling) may be increasingly looking for American citizens to operate overseas, undoubtedly recognizing that Americans can be great assets in terrorist operations in other countries because "they carry US passports, don’t fit the typical Arab-Muslim profile, and can easily communicate with radical leaders through their unfettered access to the internet and other modes of communication" (although on that latter point, who can't?). The Red Cell seems genuinely worried that our reputation could be damaged if the U.S. were "to be seen increasingly as an incubator and 'exporter of terrorism.'" Sounds soft-headed, soft-hearted and positively un-American. Can it be there are actual Reds in the CIA Red Cell? -- CIA Red Cell special memorandum on ”What If Foreigners See the United States as an ’Exporter of Terrorism’” (Wikileaks pdf 2010-08-25).
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