Taki's Mag

Bradley Manning

Dear Dr. Gates,

Your cautious appraisal of a proposed American military intervention in Libya is an important warning from a public servant unafraid to speak unpopular truths. While all liberty-loving people abhor the Libyan regime’s cruelty and repression, I agree with your observation to a House subcommittee: “A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy the air defenses.” As you warn, such an attack constitutes an act of war. UN Security Council Resolution 1973 prohibiting flights over Libya may be insufficient to upset the balance between lightly armed rebels and Colonel Gaddafi’s military machine of tanks, heavy artillery, and rapid-fire machine guns. You rightly fear that eliminating the Gaddafi regime may require American Marines on “the shores of Tripoli” whose victory may end up as hollow and self-defeating as that in Baghdad in 2003. While some in the State Department rattle the swords of war, you have counseled caution.

The United States has experience in raising people’s hopes, only to dash them later. In Hungary in 1956, it promised—but failed to deliver—help to the uprising. In Iraq in 1991, it called on the people to overthrow the dictator and then gave the dictator permission to use his air power to crush the revolt.

Having heard your views on American military action in Libya, I ask you to reconsider another matter of concern to the Department of Defense: the treatment of a 23-year-old soldier at the Marine Brig in Quantico, Virginia. You are a cabinet officer bound by oath to defend the US Constitution, whose Eighth Amendment states, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” As far as I am aware, America was the first nation to deny the state the right to practice torture. The Eighth Amendment became the basis for similar laws throughout the world. American diplomats helped to draft Article Five of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” After World War II, American jurists sat on the courts that sentenced enemy officers and soldiers to death or long prison terms for their “cruel and unusual” treatment of subject peoples, political dissidents, racial outcasts, and war prisoners. The ban on such treatment is a cornerstone of American jurisprudence and one of a free republic’s proudest achievements.

The young soldier in the Marine Brig, Private Bradley Manning, stands accused of releasing classified documents and a videotape to the public. Many, including myself, believe that releasing information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as about American global power diplomacy, is healthy for American democracy. Whether one believes what Private Manning is accused of having done is right or wrong, no institution should be granted the right to confine a prisoner to his cell for twenty-three hours a day. Quantico’s prison regime requires him to strip naked every night, stay in his cell naked until morning, and report for roll call undressed. This treatment is cruel. It constitutes punishment before trial, something that no law permits. “Forced nudity is a classic humiliation technique,” wrote The New York Times about Manning in a March 14 editorial. So repugnant and degrading is this practice that the American Psychological Association decided in August 2007 not only prohibit its members from taking part in forcing any detainee to remain naked, but to require them to report it or intervene to prevent it.

Under American law, anyone accused of a crime is innocent until found guilty by a jury of his or her peers. This applies to Private Manning as much as it does to you and me. Since Manning is by law presumed innocent, the Defense Department must stop punishing him as if he were already guilty and somehow exempt from the Eighth Amendment. That he has been confined in isolation since last May is also a denial of the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of “a speedy and public trial.” If the government needs a year or more to prepare its case against him, it has all the more reason to treat him decently and lawfully while he is forced to wait.

I know something about confinement. In 1987, the Lebanese Shiite Muslim Hezbollah militia kidnapped me and held me in solitary confinement for sixty-two days. Food was so inadequate that my weight dropped more than twenty-five pounds. Water became so scarce that I suffered from dehydration. Anyone seeing the succession of sealed rooms in which I was held would have concluded I was being treated cruelly. But no one tortured me. No one made me stand naked in front of other people. No one degraded my humanity in the way Bradley Manning’s has been. When the Marine Corps treat an American Army detainee worse than kidnappers in Beirut treated their captives, something is wrong.

If I can empathize with Manning, Dr. Gates, I suspect you can as well. In 1987, you were not far from being arrested yourself for your role in the Iran-Contra Affair. As you recall, chief prosecutor Lawrence Walsh considered bringing charges against you. CIA officers Richard Kerr and Charles E. Allen testified that they had informed you the Nicaraguan Contras were receiving funds diverted from the Reagan Administration’s illegal weapons sales to Iran well before you said you remembered learning of it. In the absence of third-party witnesses to your discussions with Kerr and Allen, Lawrence Walsh elected not to indict you. Having been that close to an indictment and possible incarceration, you would have strenuously objected to being treated like Bradley Manning while awaiting your own trial. The officials involved in illegal arms sales to Iraq and Iran were committing a far more serious crime against constitutional government than a mere Army private who gave information to a website for public dissemination.

The United States must demonstrate its commitment to justice—perhaps even to justice tempered with mercy. If it cannot intervene everywhere on Earth to guarantee the right not to be tortured for others such as the Libyans or Bahrainis, it can at least set an example by not tormenting those in its own custody. It can avoid behaving like the regimes it sponsors in the Middle East, including the Saudi, Bahraini, and Yemeni governments whose populations suffer torture, detention without trial, and other infamies. We may not give the people of the Middle East practical support against the police forces we have armed and trained, but we can at least provide the moral example of adhering to the values that they seek and we claim to uphold.

Yours sincerely,
Charles Glass