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First of all, welcome to the show, Glenn.
How are you?
Doing great, Kyle.
Thanks.
And then secondly here, what's the name of the new book?
Have you already decided?
The name of the new book is going to be released in May, and it's with liberty and justice for some.
And it's about how the rule of law is used to subvert equality and protect the powerful.
Excellent.
A topic that you and I have discussed many times over the years.
Many times, exactly.
That's what prepared me to write the book.
There's no law whatsoever for them, and there's more laws than we could possibly figure out for the rest of us.
In essence, that's exactly right.
Right on.
Well, I can't wait to read it.
And listen, I've got to tell you, I'm sure you're well aware that I read your blog every day and every essay you write here, but especially the last few weeks, it's been really great to have you to turn to, and the wisdom and the context that you provide in this entire battle over WikiLeaks.
I know I'm not the only one who feels that way, so thanks for that.
Thanks.
I appreciate that.
Well, a big part of that is this piece that's really original reporting by you, not a blog entry.
It's called The Inhumane Conditions of Bradley Manning's Detention.
It's from Wednesday, December the 15th.
And it's your reporting on the conditions of Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old, maybe 23 now-year-old, U.S. Army private accused of leaking the Afghan and Iraq war logs and the State Department cables to WikiLeaks.
Can you please explain what happened here, what you found out?
Sure.
I had been hearing for a little bit of time from people who are friends with Bradley Manning and who had been visiting him regularly in the brig at Quantico, where he's been held for five months, that the conditions are extremely repressive and that he's been actually deteriorating in terms of his physical appearance and even his mental health and his behavior rather steadily.
And it was difficult for many people to get confirmation about that because the visits are completely surveilled and monitored.
But they had indicated that he had most certainly at all been kept alone in his cell, in a cell by himself, for virtually the entire day, 23 or 23 1⁄2 hours a day is what they had said, and that he was barred from even doing things inside the cell like exercising.
He was monitored constantly in order to make sure that he doesn't even move or do any physical activity in the cell and that there are even punitive measures being imposed, denials of the most minimal attributes of civilized imprisonment, such as a refusal to even give him things like a pillow or a sheet.
He has no pillows, no sheets on his bed.
And at the same time that he's being kept 23 hours a day in his cell, he is also being given a regimen of antidepressants, essentially, to prevent him from succumbing to the oppressiveness of those conditions.
So I didn't want to write about it based just on the statements of the people who had been visiting him.
I called the Marine Brig and spoke with a First Lieutenant there in the Public Affairs Office who confirmed virtually everything that I had heard, that he was kept in solitary confinement.
He insisted not 23 1⁄2 hours a day but 23 hours a day.
He confirmed that he had no pillows and sheets.
He confirmed that he was prevented, prohibited from exercising in his cell.
He claimed that it wasn't the kind of solitary confinement that you see in movies where people get thrown into a hole.
He insisted that the antidepressants are given to him by medical personnel.
But the facts, the core facts of how this person who has never been convicted of any crime whatsoever is being detained are all confirmed by the Marine Lieutenant and that's what then led me to go write about it.
All right, it's Antiwar Radio here on Pacifica KPFK in L.A.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Glenn Greenwald and the article we're talking about right now is The Inhumane Conditions of Bradley Manning's Detention.
He's the accused in the Iraq and Afghan war logs and accused is hardly the right word because it's such a heroic act obviously but I guess we'll get to that.
The Iraq and Afghan war logs and the State Department cables and he's locked up by the military now I guess awaiting a court-martial but that makes me wonder, Glenn, about the got to be strict military rules about how they treat their own soldiers, right?
We're not talking about Gitmo-izing the process here.
Can they just treat the average arrested soldier like this?
Well, what's interesting is that...
Again, he hasn't been convicted of anything.
Not only hasn't he been convicted of anything but he's not in any way a physical threat.
I mean, he hasn't been accused of killing somebody.
There's no allegation that.
He is a threat to anyone around him.
There's been no incidents, disciplinary incidents of any kind during the seven months that he's detained.
He's been at Quantico for five months and before that he was in a military jail in Kuwait for two months.
So he's been a model detainee and yet at the same time they've classified him as what's called a maximum custody detainee which allows the most oppressive and restrictive conditions to be imposed on him and keeping somebody in solitary confinement for 23 out of 24 hours a day is something that the United States pretty much alone in the Western world does routinely to maximum security prisoners.
We've seen it in supermax facilities in Florence, Colorado and other places where people literally go and just basically get disappeared.
I mean, it destroys the brain.
It drives people into insanity.
It erases their personality and basically drains their soul.
And there are all kinds of psychological studies including some from the military that document how destructive to the brain a prolonged solitary confinement is.
And John McCain, for example, after he came back from Vietnam talked about the isolation that he suffered for two years and said that that was at least as bad if not worse as torture than the physical suffering he endured.
And in fact many countries around the world and many human rights organizations consider prolonged solitary confinement to be a form of torture and refuse to extradite their citizens to countries which will subject them to these kind of tactics.
But the difference is that the people at Florence, Colorado and other supermax facilities around the United States are people who not only have been convicted of crimes after due process in a court but have been convicted of some of the most heinous crimes imaginable and who are, at least according to the government, actually quite dangerous because they have a history of violence or they have followers.
If they're allowed to communicate, they can instruct to go and carry out violence.
They're generally people who are terrorists or who are masterminds of mass murder or other dangerous groups.
I don't condone that at all.
I think it's horrendous and inhumane but at least those people have been convicted of extremely heinous crimes.
Bradley Manning not only hasn't been convicted of anything but even if you believe the allegations against him, he hasn't harmed a single person.
Even the Pentagon admits that none of these WikiLeaks disclosures have resulted in the death or physical harm to even a single person.
So to take him and essentially stick him into a cage by himself for that long a period of time, every day, all day except for one hour a day, and you add on the other deprivations as well, it's not just likely but really inevitable that he will start to suffer, if he's not already suffering, long-term irreversible psychological damage and very arguably being subjected to a form of psychological torture.
Well, and to be clear here again, that's not just your opinion.
You quote in your article from the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law which explains that, quote, solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand.
Indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture.
And, you know, this is something that the great journalist Alfred McCoy has written about in his book, A Question of Torture, was kind of the tradition in the CIA of no-touch torture, like how they treated Jose Padilla, where, look, there's no bruises on him.
We didn't tie him to the wall and beat him up like, you know, in the dungeon in Thailand.
But, you know, like Jose Padilla was reported that he went, first of all, he was given drugs and all kinds of things, but that he went years without being touched at all.
Even in the pictures where they're taking him to the dentist, they don't even have so much as a hand on his shoulder.
They're leading him by his chains.
And this sensory deprivation, the social deprivation, I think anyone can imagine in that same situation how they would go crazy.
Right.
Now, you know, I do want to say there are different levels of solitary confinement.
And, you know, this was the insistent claim that the lieutenant, who is the public affairs official for the BRIC, kept insisting upon, which is, yes, he's in solitary confinement, but, as he said, and I quoted him in my piece, it's not like it's in the jail movies where somebody gets thrown into a hole.
So there is full-scale sensory deprivation, solitary confinement, where somebody is put into just a white room and they're incapable of hearing anything, seeing anything, and they literally just sit there.
And sometimes you can even deprive them of any radios, televisions, books, papers, anything.
That's the most extreme kind.
And that was what was done to Jose Padilla.
And they would even, you know, put goggles on him and earphones so that he couldn't hear or see anything, even when he was being transported from one cell to another or to a court or anything else or to see his lawyer.
That's not really what's being done to Manning.
They claim, for example, that they stick a TV for somewhere between 15 to 30 minutes in front of him a day, depending on how many, you know, detainees are there.
They also claim that he's allowed to try and talk through the wall to someone in the next cell.
But that's obviously not any meaningful form of human interaction, and he is by himself in his cell for 23 out of the 24 hours a day, and that's been true for seven months.
So, you know, there are varying degrees of it, and I wouldn't say that he's being subjected to the worst, most egregious kind, but it's certainly way disproportionate to the level of threat that he's ever suggested he could pose to anybody.
And even with those caveats that I just included and that I include in my piece, it's still very psychologically degrading and inhumane.
All right.
Now, Glenn Greenwald, tell us, why are they doing this?
Just revenge?
No, I think it's a couple of reasons.
One is that they're extremely concerned about copycat leaks, because even if they end up destroying leaky leaks, the template for how these leaks can be accomplished is already well known, and there are going to be other groups that sprout up.
And, you know, it's interesting when, if you talk to Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, one of the things that he describes is, you know, what he leaked was basically 3,500 pages, a 42-volume history of the Vietnam War and America's involvement in Vietnam that the Pentagon had authored.
And one of the real difficulties he had was how could he Xerox that volume of information without being discovered, given how top secret the Pentagon Papers were.
And he had to go through all kinds of, you know, jump through all kinds of hoops and had to face all kinds of impediments in order to do that.
And just the physical challenge of transmitting that amount of information was really quite daunting.
Well, obviously, the Internet now basically allows that amount of information and far more to be, you know, transmitted around the world with very little effort.
I mean, Bradley Manning is said to have, if you believe the accusations, downloaded all of this stuff onto a small little memory chip and then emailed it all essentially within about an hour to WikiLeaks.
And WikiLeaks has now emailed it to all kinds of people around the world and has taken that and sent an encrypted file to at least 100,000 people and threatened to release the password to enable its full-scale dissemination if they are, if Julian Assange is killed or the organization is shut down through extra-legal means.
They're very concerned that there's going to be further episodes like this.
And so they want to make an example out of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange by having people think twice about they're going to, if you have government secrets that you're aware of that show high levels of deceit or criminality or corruption, you're going to think twice and three times and more about whether or not you're going to expose what the government is doing because that can happen to you as well.
It can basically be disappeared into this sort of black hole without very much recourse.
And so much of what the United States has done over the last decade is about creating this climate of fear and intimidation from sticking people into cages with no charges to sending drones to kill people without any recourse or due process whatsoever.
And, of course, when we invaded Iraq, we flamboyantly labeled it the Attack Deck in the first week, shock and awe, where we wanted to terrorize people into concluding that resistance was futile.
And that's so much of what the United States government does is it tries to create a climate of intimidation and fear to prevent people from legitimately challenging its assertions of power even when that power is being exercised correctly.
And then there's a second aspect to it, which is that the government's real objective is to bring down WikiLeaks and to have Julian Assange be in prison.
The problem, though, is that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks haven't actually broken any laws.
And nothing that they've done is distinguishable from what investigative journalists do all the time, which is cajole people to give them classified information and then publish that classified information.
The New York Times does that on a regular basis.
Reporters have Pulitzer Prizes sitting on their shelves for having convinced people to turn over classified information and then published it.
And so what the government is now trying to do is to claim that WikiLeaks is different because they didn't merely receive the information passively.
They actively conspired with Manning and actually gave him assistance in order to steal this information.
They gave him technical assistance and advice about how to access it, how to hack into it, how to encrypt it, how to send it.
And that, they're claiming, makes them a conspirator in the leak.
And so in order to be able to prove that, they need Bradley Manning to point the finger at Julian Assange and to give incriminating statements.
And so putting him in these horrific, inhumane conditions as a negotiating technique to say, if you want better conditions, if you want to see sunlight more than an hour a day, if you want to be able to have human contact and interaction, you need to say the things we need you to say to be able to prosecute WikiLeaks and Assange.
Well, so now when they talked about they wanted to indict Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, that was a different course.
And this is what you're describing now, is the DOJ figuring that maybe they can charge him with conspiracy under the same leak charge, basically, that they're going after Manning for.
Is that right?
They've abandoned the idea of using the Espionage Act.
Exactly right.
I mean, the idea originally clearly was that they wanted to charge him under the Espionage Act.
The problem is that there was one other time, only one other time in American history, when the Espionage Act was used to prosecute a non-government employee for receiving and disseminating classified information, and that was the Bush administration's effort to prosecute two officials of AIPAC who had received classified information from a Pentagon official.
The Pentagon official ended up pleading guilty and is in prison.
But the AIPAC officials who received the information were not government employees, and they took that information and they passed it on to the government of Israel.
Now, that act was actually much more like espionage than anything WikiLeaks did, because that was actually stealing government secrets and passing them on to a foreign government.
But even there, the Bush Justice Department had a very hard time in prosecuting them, and they ultimately were forced to drop the case because of adverse court rulings that said that simply receiving classified information and then publishing it, even to a limited number of people, is insufficient to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act because that's what journalists do all the time.
And journalists started realizing, slowly, at first there was an immediate consensus that Estan should be prosecuted under the Espionage Act, but they started realizing that if someone like Julian Assange can be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for receiving and publishing classified information, that poses a direct threat to press freedom.
And you see more and more journalists slowly starting to raise their voices in opposition to prosecution, not because they think WikiLeaks shouldn't be shut down and Assange should be in prison, they think they should, but because they're only concerned about their own self-interest, which is, well, if they do that to them, you're basically criminalizing investigative journalism.
So there's pressure now on the government to find a different way to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks while assuring journalists that they won't be prosecuted, and this conspiracy theory of, well, they're actually a conspirator in Bradley Manning Glee because they actively helped him in advance, something to which there's no evidence, by the way, but that's the theory, is the way that they can, they think, prosecute Assange without running into this problem of, well, then how do you refrain from prosecuting, say, the New York Times that's also published so many of these documents?
Well, they're trying to say the litmus test seems to be that, well, it's not objective reporting.
They have an agenda, which, you know, I guess if your agenda, then, Glenn, is sticking up for civil rights and for the little guy over at your blog on Salon.com, that means what you say isn't protected either.
Or what if, I mean, here you have, do you have at least one anonymous source in this article?
I mean, or that's the same thing we're talking about, right?
Their distinction there is preposterous, right?
Well, I mean, the reason the distinction is preposterous is because it isn't so much that WikiLeaks has an opinion, although they are, in order to prosecute the espionage act, you actually have to prove that the objective was to harm the United States.
And, you know, Julian Assange has some statements in interviews and the like where he says that he thinks what the United States is doing in the world is wrong and evil, and that these kind of leaks will impede their ability to continue to do that by bringing transparency and by causing overreactions.
So, you know, but you're allowed to work against the United States government to believe that they have, that what they're doing is wrong.
What they're really trying to do is to say the line is between simply passively receiving classified information and actively trying to encourage the source to take it and give it to you.
But even that distinction is completely illusory.
I mean, if you look at, for example, what James Risen and Eric Licklout did for The New York Times when they uncovered the Bush-NSA wiretapping program, they went and they encouraged all kinds of people to give them classified information so that they could publish it.
Dana Priest did the same thing in The Washington Post when she uncovered the CIA black sites.
And, you know, I mean, Bob Woodward, the well-loved reporter for The Washington Post, well-loved in Washington, that is, basically does nothing with his life now except try to manipulate and pressure government employees to turn over classified information to him that he can then go publish in his books and make money from.
So there is no way to distinguish what WikiLeaks does and what investigative journalists do on the grounds of, well, the differences between passive receipt of information and actively encouraging people to give it to you because good investigative journalists always actively encourage classified information to be disseminated.
There is no way to prosecute WikiLeaks without posing a direct threat to press freedom.
Well, Glenn, as you've written on your blog there at Salon.com, this issue, the existence of WikiLeaks and these documents and the First Amendment at stake and who's on whose side on this, it's really served as a litmus test.
And, of course, you always end up pretty much good on everything, as far as I can tell over there, defending what ought to be, I thought, the unanimous principles of America, such as the Bill of Rights, for crying out loud, our First Amendment, if not the rest of them, even our freedom of speech.
You see the No More Mosques initiative around the country and whatever going on where they want to now threaten the free exercise of religion clause in the First Amendment.
Time's getting tough, and it's nice to know that there are some people who consistently come down on the right side of these issues.
And I really appreciate your work and your time on the show today, Glenn.
Thanks, Scott.
I appreciate that.
And I think the same about the work that you do as well, and I appreciate you having me on.
All right, everybody, that was the great Glenn Greenwald, former constitutional litigator and blogger at salon.com/opinion/Greenwald, author of How Would a Patriot Act, A Tragic Legacy, and Great American Hypocrite.
