08/14/12 – Chase Madar – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Scott Horton.org is the website and our first guest today is Chase Madar.
He's the author of the passion of Bradley Manning and a regular contributor to Tom dispatch.
And I think if I remember right, a lawyer.
Yeah, that's what it says.
Did I just say that a lawyer in New York?
It's right in front of me.
Anyway, I don't know.
Uh, welcome back.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Great to be back on your show, Scott.
Uh, well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And there's important news this week about the treatment of Bradley Manning in his pretrial detention.
Um, some new claims by his attorney, David Coombs, and I was hoping you could teach us all about it.
I'd be glad to.
So the big news is that David Coombs is going to file a motion to dismiss all the charges against private first-class Bradley Manning on account of the unlawful confinement and flagrant violation of Manning's constitutional rights that were imposed on Bradley Manning when he was held in very strict isolation for nearly 11 months.
And the strict solitary confinement he was subjected to first at a military base in Kuwait for two months.
And then for nearly nine months at the Quantico brig in Virginia, uh, was, was one of the more famous parts of Bradley Manning's case, because it was so harsh, this is pretrial confinement, uh, which is unusual, uh, although not unheard of, and it was very draconian, uh, for nine months in Quantico prison, Bradley Manning was in his cell alone.
He had to respond every five of his waking minutes to the query of, are you okay?
Uh, he was not allowed to do any exercise in his jail cell.
He was only allowed to correspond to, to write to people for one hour a day.
Uh, in the one hour of exercise time he was allowed, they gave him no crappy athletic shoes that were too big and without shoelaces that kept falling off.
And, uh, this was all against the psych, the advice of the psychiatric experts at the Quantico brig and outside psychiatric experts, but it was done as so many of the most horrible things that we do to our fellow man are done for Bradley Manning's own good.
Now, I don't know much about it.
I don't know if you do, I don't know if anybody ever really wrote about it, but it sounds like there could be the makings of a whole heroic story there about the military psychologists who refused to go along with this and recommended against it.
They must have known about all this pressure from the top to go along.
They did.
And it's clear now due to emails that were finally released after many requests to the Bradley managed defense council, that pressure did come all the way from the top, from a three star general who was running Quantico break for a time.
And, uh, the psychiatric experts at the brig, I find it quite admirable what they were doing according to the emails and documents that we have in meetings, they were demanding that the brig make it clear that, uh, psychiatric, uh, reasons and, and prevention of injury watch had absolutely nothing to do with why Bradley Manning was being confined and solitary.
It was against their medical advice.
And for pretty much the whole nine months, they were advising that POI that's prevention of injury watch be dropped because there was absolutely no medical reason for it.
And it was just done out of bloody minded, punitive, uh, vengeance to make a big example of Bradley Manning, maybe to break him and get him to implicate Julian Assange and a testament to Bradley Manning strength and fortitude as a, as a human being that he did not go along with this.
He did not break.
All right.
Now, did they have any other excuse?
Because this sounds to me pretty damning.
You have prevention of injury as its own special initials and everything, right?
POI.
Um, this is if they suspect if the psychologists say you have to prevent this person from hurting or killing themselves, then these are the things you have to do.
And under the rubric of that, under the color of these, uh, prevention of injury restrictions, that was, and then they took that and then just extrapolated it from there.
Uh, but is, did they have any other excuse for doing so?
Is there any other excuse that they could use for doing so other than the official psychologists on the job on this brig told us to do it?
You know, the only excuse that has come to light so far, and it's, it's not much of an excuses.
Well, the, the, the brig commanders ordered the continuation of solitary because, well, they're in charge and that they said, well, the, the psychiatrists, they may be medical experts, but their opinion is only advisory and, and they only see Bradley Manning occasionally.
But, uh, we, the commander see him all the time.
We know what's best for him.
So we're going to keep him stuck in the strictest, harshest.
Are they saying that though?
The local commander saying, well, we were very concerned about him and we disagreed with the psychologist.
They're pretty much saying they're not even, you know, I think wasting their breath by saying that we're concerned about them.
They're just saying that, well, we're in charge here is basically their defense.
It's a, they're just, it's a, you know, one of these circular defenses of, well, we're in charge.
It's our decision, not yours.
And that's of course not a defense or the decision.
That's just the statement that we're in charge.
And, uh, and now how much different is what they did to him compared to what they would do to any other soldier convicted or, or being held, I shouldn't say convicted, being held on the accusation of a heinous felony at Quantico, for example.
Well, it's a lot harsher.
I mean, for, for one thing, according to the uniform code of military justice, brig authorities are only allowed to, uh, keep a soldier in pretrial isolation or any kind of pretrial confinement to the minimum degree necessary.
If that alleged perpetrator, uh, is a risk to others or risk to himself.
So in this case where you have the professional psychiatric opinion saying that he's at no risk to himself and not the others either, Oh, you know, that, that just doesn't stand.
The, the, the cells in Quantico are single occupancy and max, uh, max solitary confinement is imposed from time to time, uh, on, on other soldiers and it's harsh and it's awful.
So I, I don't want to say that, uh, there's a good reason because there isn't for Bradley Manning's solitary confinement, but it's not quite as exceptional either in the military justice system or in the civilian justice system, as we would like to think.
Oh yeah.
Well, regularity certainly wouldn't justify, they tortured tens of thousands of Iraqis, that's just tens of thousands of counts of things wrong.
Absolutely.
And, uh, you know, many advocates and defenders of Bradley Manning, we, we would like to see this as a cruel aberration of our normal functioning of the justice system, both military and civilian, but I'm not sure how much of a, an aberration it is.
I mean, we have 20,000 American prisoners in federal super max prisons, not for exotic national security crimes, but for run of the mill crimes, we have a further 50 to 80,000 people in solid, some kind of solitary confinement in other federal and local prisons.
We don't do a good job of counting.
We don't seem to care that much as a nation.
And, uh, it's, it's this perspective that led the advocates, Jean Casella, James Ridgeway, the excellent advocacy group, solitary watch to call Bradley Manning's treatment cruel and usual because we use solitary confinement as a way to punish people all the time in America.
It's unfortunately a normal, although kind of invisible part of our penal landscape, it's most of the time, not very controversial.
I would love to tell you that holding Bradley Manning in solitary pretrial is some kind of horrible aberration, but even there it isn't because there are hundreds, if not thousands of people.
Again, we don't do a good job of counting as a nation of, uh, the prisoners held in pretrial isolation, just like Bradley Manning was.
Yeah.
Well, Anthony Gregory has pointed out, and he's one of very few who's ever pointed out that even though we all accept it, we all know it.
It's the butt of jokes from coast to coast.
And of all ages, that part of your prison sentence in America, if you go to prison, is to be raped.
Ha ha.
Isn't that hilarious?
That that's part of our prison sentences in America, rape.
And there's no group of people trying to stop that anywhere.
Nobody even cares.
Uh, this country is just barbarians from coast to coast, if you ask me.
So yeah, that's the whole thing.
They could beat the living crap out of Bradley Manning and that would just be another day at another prison in America.
Big deal.
Absolutely.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Chase Medard.
He's a lawyer from New York.
He writes for Tom dispatch from time to time.
And we're talking about, oh, and he wrote the book on Bradley Manning, the passion of Bradley Manning.
And we're talking about, uh, his abuse in custody and his lawyers pushed to have him released.
He's done his time and then some because of the way they treated him in his pre-trial detention.
Nevermind the charges against him are bogus and nevermind that the commander in chief and the secretary of defense have already pronounced him guilty publicly.
Um, and to, uh, even put him on trial at this point would be a laughing stock of a star chamber farce.
Um, they abused him terribly at the very least.
And now is that already chase?
Uh, is that already a legal doctrine that no, you just can't do that.
And this is the exclusionary rule is the accused is excluded from trial.
If you abuse him like this before he gets a chance at one.
Well, the judge has discretion to rule on this.
It's not hard and fast at the, the Lord Bradley Manning lawyer has asked for at the very least, if you're not going to dismiss all these charges due to the inhumane cruel and unusual treatment, then at least give him credit for each day that he suffered in, in solitary confinement.
Give him credit for 10 days that will count against the sentence that he's likely to get.
Uh, but this whole question about whether Bradley Manning's treatment has been an aberration or, or been normal opens up a larger question.
And that's where, where does the war on terror and all its abuses come from?
Uh, it's, it, it isn't coming back home and infecting our domestic justice system with the treatment of Bradley Manning and, and with a few others.
It's tempting to look at it that way.
And we, we've looked at it, Bradley Manning's credibly harsh, over the top punitive treatment for no real legal or lawful purpose.
Uh, and people have said, oh, that's KGB tactics that we're treating in the way we treat unprivileged combatants at Guantanamo.
And there's some truth to that.
Uh, but I think it's also true that Bradley Manning is getting treated the way other American prisoners get treated, which is really the most damning statement you can make at all.
In other words, the terror war is the exporting of America's police state.
And hey, this goes, we're free.
We never were.
And after a few decades of a war on crime and a war on drugs, the war on terror is just a natural outgrowth of that.
You know, we kept hearing after September 11th and after Guantanamo that, well, the gloves are coming off now.
A great many Americans who have a family member or a loved one in the prison system were very surprised to learn that the gloves were ever on in the first place.
And that's, that's how harshly we treat people.
Not surprisingly, a great many of the intellectual and jurists who are pushing this argument that, that we've exported harshness, uh, are black Americans, members of a minority group that has just born such a heavy brunt of our war on drugs and our war on crime that has just caused so much destruction in the lives of so many people without solving any problems.
All right.
Now you mentioned his, uh, Bradley Manning's abuse.
Sorry to, I want to focus back on the Manning case itself for a minute here.
I certainly appreciate the larger picture stuff.
In fact, Alfred McCoy's coming up next to talk about all that too.
But, uh, Manning was held in Kuwait for how long before they even brought him to Quantico?
Nearly two months.
Nearly two months.
And then, so how much do we know about what happened to him there?
Well, we're finding out more and more as the prosecution very grudgingly releases emails and records to, to Bradley Manning's defense lawyers.
And the prosecution has been playing all kinds of games in releasing these documents that they have a legal obligation to produce for a fair trial.
Uh, so more and more is coming to light.
Uh, we're getting some documentation of conversations even between Bradley Manning and the prison guards.
And he's asking them, why are you keeping me in solitary?
You know that there's no, there's no medical rationale for it.
And they're saying, Hey, well, we're in charge, you know, we're in charge.
That's the answer.
Again, just the circular defensive authority.
We're in charge because we're in charge.
We're going to do what we'd like to you because we're in charge.
Yeah.
The big question is they're committing the same war crime against him that was, that drove him over the edge and made him a whistleblower in the first place was committing an innocent person for simply free speech issues.
And the one big question is, well, what kind of impact is the defense lawyer suit to dismiss all the charges going to have?
Will the judge, Denise Lynn dismiss all the charges?
I doubt it.
You know, judges are intensely political beings.
Law itself is a form of politics that depends on appearing neutral and objective and apolitical for its legitimacy.
But judges in courtrooms are very political spaces and she's under intense political pressure, uh, to, to deliver a verdict, a guilty verdict.
I I'd be shocked if she dismissed all the charges despite the very well documented over the top harsh treatment that violates much of the uniform code of military justice that was meted out to Bradley Manning.
Well, now if you go back to the atmosphere of the time when Manning was first arrested and all the fanfare and all of the two minutes hate about Assange and Wikileaks and blood on his hands, blood on his hands, everyone chants and everyone take part, uh, like your favorite nighttime drama that everybody watches together separately and all that kind of thing.
I can understand that they would get away with this kind of thing in the midst of that to me quite manufactured, but still that fever pitch of that time and yet didn't that wear off pretty quickly?
And isn't it pretty obvious that this guy, Bradley Manning, isn't he a pretty, um, the kind of guy that you see on the news and he's, um, you like him instead of hating his guts like they want you to, you know what I mean?
Yeah, no, I find him very sympathetic.
Sympathetic is exactly the word I was not able to come up with.
Thank you.
And I think releasing these documents, if that's what he indeed did, it's very praiseworthy.
But I mean they're treating him as though we're still all, uh, you know, chanting at the witch trial to go ahead and hang him.
Well, it's, it's just shameful how Bradley Manning and Assange too, have been scapegoated for the bloody astrophy of American foreign policy over the past 10 years.
I mean, what's really been killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan and killing foreigners as well as Americans.
It's not leaks.
It's US foreign policy and our foreign policy has been distorted and driven to a large degree by government lies, secrecy and distortion.
And we feel leaks is a solution to that.
Not a, not a, not a problem.
Uh, but I, uh, I, I don't think it's worn off completely.
Unfortunately.
So many people just say, well, he broke the law.
The law is law.
You've got to have law.
So yeah, he's got to go.
Yeah.
Even even if it's good for us, it, uh, it's, it's really disappointed to me how major newspapers and media outlets who have gotten tons of scoops and tons of stories from the weekly leaks have not risen to the fence of their ultimate source.
Bradley Manning, they've been content to paint him as a weirdo and hang him out to dry.
Yeah.
Well, and if the law is the law, that's fine.
How about all the law breaking exposed in the WikiLeaks gets prosecuted first and Manning last.
That would be fair.
All right.
Thanks.
Chase Medar, everybody.
Tom dispatch.com.
Appreciate it.