We can't forget Bradley Manning

Image via Flickr user “DEVOLVE”

On February 28 of 2013, Bradley Manning, the Private First Class who pled guilty to ten of twenty-two violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and other regulations for releasing a large amount of digital military documents to WikiLeaks.org, including the “Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs,”  gave a statement to a military court detailing the motivations for his actions (audio version). The statement is largely the rote particulars of the life of a military intelligence analyst, but when Manning describes his tortured decision to show the world the reality of war as he saw it, one can’t help but shudder to think that such an honest person has received such monstrous treatment at the hands of what is supposedly the beacon of freedom and democracy.

            Before we look at Manning’s statement, let’s take a brief look at the story so far:

• May 26, 2010: Manning arrested and held at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait.
• July 29, 2010: Manning moved to the Marine Brig in Quantico, VA.
• Thur, Feb. 23, 2012; Manning arraigned for “aiding the enemy, wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the Internet, transmitting national defense information and theft of public property or records.”
• Feb 28, 2013; Manning pleads guilty to 10/22 charges, facing up to 20 years for those 10. Prosecutors seek 12 more charges, including “Aiding the Enemy,” which could result in a life sentence.

(Full timeline of events available here)

            If you do a little math, you can see that Manning has been in prison for almost three years without a trial. This alone is a travesty, but his treatment over those three years has been far from kind. It is well known, but bears repeating, that Manning was required to sleep naked for 112 days, ostensibly because he threatened to strangle himself with the waistband of his underwear (this was actually a joke), and suffered a number of other mistreatments, including solitary confinement and forced wakefulness from 5am to 10pm. In addition to these well-known offenses, Manning’s Defense Counsel, David Coombs, also lists on his blog a long catalogue of abuses, including an episode wherein two guards repeatedly berate and verbally abuse Manning because of his inability to switch from “yes, sir,” as the Army says, to “aye, sir,” as the Marines say.

            Coombs also alleges that the orders for this treatment were handed down by a three-star general, which is pretty terrifying when you consider that President Obama himself said that he was assured that Manning’s treatment was “appropriate and meeting our basic standards,” despite disagreement from Amnesty International. Obama also said, on April 21, 2011, long before Manning had even been arraigned, that Manning “broke the law.” It’s clear that that was an off-the-cuff remark, but it speaks to the idea that even though President Obama extolls the virtues of transparency, his administration is extremely dismissive of the role of whistleblowers. In what Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian has called “a case of extraordinary prosecutorial overkill,” Manning’s prosecutors still seek the charge of “Aiding the Enemy,” even though, as journalist Alexa O’Brien points out, almost everything that he leaked was already available and there has yet to be any demonstration of any harm to national security wrought from Manning’s actions. All of this amounts to government persecution of a man whose sole offense was sharing information with the public, which ought to be of concern not just to those who dislike big government, but to anyone who wishes America to be a role model for other nations. After all, we can judge societies by how they treat their criminals, right? Well, what about those criminals whose crime is pointing out the misconduct of others? Should they even be criminals to begin with?