Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, and by the hairs of my chinny-chin-chin, I've got Jane Hampshire on the line from Fire Dog Lake, where they do all of the best journalism on the case, well, on a lot of different things, but especially, particularly at issue today, is the treatment of the heroic Bradley Manning in his military prison.
So, welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Jane?
Thanks for having me, Scott.
I really appreciate it.
I'm doing good today.
How about yourself?
I'm doing great, and I'm really happy to have you here.
So, there's so much going on, I'm not sure exactly where to begin, but I guess start with the thumbnail of, you know, who this guy is, how he ended up in the military's custody, then we can talk a little bit about, because, you know, there are new people every day, right?
Absolutely.
And then we can talk about exactly what's going on here and why I got such a problem with it.
Well, to back up just a second, I sort of got involved in the situation by chance.
Glenn Greenwald, who I know your listeners probably know, was doing a lot of work on the WikiLeaks case, and he did a story on a guy named David House, who is a friend of Bradley Manning, helped form the Bradley Manning Support Network, raising money for his legal defense, and his computer was seized at the airport, I believe back, I'm going to say, in November or October of last year.
He contacted Glenn and told him what had happened to him, and for no better reason than we know of than the fact that he was, you know, supporting Bradley Manning.
So, he told Glenn that he was going down to Quantico on a regular basis to visit him, where he was being detained on the Marine base, and he's, you know, 23 years old, just graduated from college, and Glenn said, oh, well, you can stay with Jane Hampshire when you're down there.
So, I came to the activism sort of by accident.
Good old Glenn Greenwald.
You can always count on him to get it done, right?
Exactly, exactly.
So, David House began coming down here, and they were, you know, making it difficult for him to get on the base.
So, I started driving him down about 45 minutes to Quantico, and, you know, started getting interested in what was happening, and as I started looking at what the evidence was, I started putting together a timeline and what was known about what Manning had done, and really, very little publicly is known about what he did, as a long way of answering your question.
We know what the military has charged him with, which is actually nothing related to WikiLeaks.
We, the only person whose allegations regarding him in the press are known is a guy named Adrian Lameau, who is unreliable and has said many different conflicting things.
So, to say, you know, what's he in there for, I know why the military thinks he's there.
I know why Adrian Lameau says he's there, to the defense has actually admitted nothing, and so we're not, we're not actually, there's no way to actually really know.
Right, yeah, the way I've been saying it on the show is, well, as far as the military's concerned and what he's accused of and all that, he's just alleged, he's just a suspect, he's innocent until he's proven guilty.
As far as I'm concerned, he's convicted American hero, thank goodness for him, and you guys over at FireDogLake, you took not just the chat logs between Bradley Manning and Adrian Lameau the rat, but you took partial transcripts from the Washington Post and from BoingBoing.com, I think it is, and combined all this stuff together, and so let me ask you, I mean, do you basically think that that's legitimate copy, or I guess your point might be that it's still just excerpts, we don't have all the chat logs, we don't know really, but he does seem to be saying in there that, hell yeah, I gave this stuff to Julian Assange, right?
Well, what, as Glenn Greenwald was fighting for Wired to release all of the chat logs, it's only a sort of a snapshot, it's at most 25% of what the chat logs were.
Really, that little of it?
And the reason that Wired said they didn't release any more of the chat logs is because the rest of it was either of a personal nature or involved national security, but pieces have come out since then that are related to neither of those.
So basically what we see is what Wired thinks it's appropriate for us to see.
And that allowed Adrian Lameau to run around saying that in the chat logs there were definitely connections of a personal nature between Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, which was what the government was very much hoping to prove, so that it could get Julian Assange on an espionage charge.
And so we went through and did this very elaborate timeline, we transcribed everything Adrian Lameau said, it was used by Glenn as ammunition in his battle to try and get Wired to release the chat transcripts.
And Wired did eventually come out and say that there was absolutely nothing left in the transcripts that had to do with Julian Assange.
So what that means is that everything that's out there about Julian Assange and Bradley Manning is known in the chat transcripts, and there really isn't anything.
Manning makes allegations, allegations that he thinks he may have been in contact with Julian Assange, but he, in the chat transcripts, if they are his, he doesn't ever offer anything that's proof.
He says that he was talking with someone at WikiLeaks, he thinks it was Assange, and he was satisfied to his curiosity that it was, but nothing beyond that.
So if that's all the government's got, their case against Assange is very thin.
Well, and you know, as soon as you talk about what the government says about him, I don't know if you even use the word alleged, but I mean, there's only been sort of some kind of complaint file, I'm no expert in military law, I don't know if you got your head around how all this works, but he hasn't even officially been charged yet, much less charged with hitting the upload button at WikiLeaks.org.
Well, he has been charged, they filed five charges against him, but they were for mostly downloading information, I believe, the 2007 Apache helicopter video.
Okay, so that complaint thing that they issued, that was the charges?
Yes, that was the charge sheet, yeah.
I believe there were some number of cables, I think 150,000 cables, something like that, whatever it was, the number doesn't match up with what they say WikiLeaks got from him.
Most of it was just information that they charged him with downloading to his computer.
I think there's only 50 cables he's actually charged with transmitting to somebody else.
So that falls far short of the 250,000 cables that they say were transmitted to WikiLeaks by someone.
And then, I guess at last count, he was facing, was it 57 or 52 years in prison?
Something like that, yes.
Okay, so let me check the clock here, all right, we've got time to get into this.
So you brought up that they're trying to figure out a way to charge Julian Assange with espionage, and I believe Greenwald wrote, it was, I guess, apparent to him, or I don't know if he had a better way of putting it together than that, that this is why Bradley Manning is being treated so much differently than, say, the rest of anybody awaiting charges in that Quantico brig is because they're trying to pressure him into saying something true or not about Julian Assange that would allow them to get at him, their real target.
Well, one has to, you know, that question certainly comes to mind at the same time that the Justice Department is telling the New York Times that they're hoping to build against their case against Julian Assange by getting Manning to flip on him.
He is being held in pretrial detention, not having been convicted of anything, in ways that are reminiscent of how they held prisoners in, you know, the Soviet gulags, questioning their mental health as an excuse for holding them in very restrictive, you know, solitary confinement-like ways, quote-unquote, for their own good, and that is what's happening to him.
Well, let's see, we still do have a couple of minutes.
Maybe we can get into specifics, and I guess I didn't realize the correlation directly with the New York Times saying they were trying to flip him.
I knew they were trying to build a case against Assange for espionage, but I didn't realize that they made it that obvious why they were doing what they're doing to Bradley Manning, but so what are they doing to him?
They didn't connect the treatment of him to that, certainly, but they did say that their case against Julian Assange, they told Charlie Savage of the New York Times on December 15th that the way that they were trying to build their case against Assange was to cut a deal with Manning to get him to flip on Assange, which, you know, I have no special knowledge other than what's out there, but apparently he has not done at this point.
Yeah, well, 21st century plea deal like in the Lackawanna Six, look, either plead guilty and accept life in prison, or we'll just turn you over to Don Rumsfeld to be tortured, how do you like that?
And they said, okay, we'll plead guilty and accept the maximum, so I guess that's kind of the precedent they're working with here, is we might let you live if you do what we say.
Well, and you know, the fact that they've really tried to keep anybody from being able to have any communication with Manning, that three big psychiatrists have said that there's nothing that should cause him to be in this confinement state, and the fact that he is slowing down, it's not a good thing.
Well, we'll get back to more about that and how we know about that, David House and the lawyer Coombs and the rest of this, with Jane Hampshire from Firedog Lake, right after this, y'all, Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio.
We're talking with Jane Hampshire from FiredogLake.com.
She's a film producer, an author, and a blogger, writes at the Huffington Post, and has written for Alternet and the American Prospect as well, over at Firedog Lake, they're all on the story of the treatment of Bradley Manning in custody in Quantico, Virginia.
And now, I guess, let's start with what you mentioned there, Jane, about how the KGB used to always make their political prisoners psychiatric patients, and how that's the...
We're slouching toward the USSR here, and the treatment of Bradley Manning, can you explain that?
Well, that is probably one of the most terrifying things about what's happening to Manning, is that, as Jenny Jarden of Boing Boing said, we're seeing the offshoring of tactics that's used at Guantanamo Bay, onto, you know, into the U.S., that Manning is being held under POI watch, that Prevention of Injury watch, which allow him to be placed in solitary confinement, essentially, without the government having to justify their use of solitary confinement conditions on someone who is, you know, has not been convicted, he's being held in pretrial confinement.
And that was something that they used to do in Soviet gulags, was, you know, confine people, you know, classify them as mental health, having mental health issues, mental health risks, in order to, you know, to do these things to them.
So, that is very much what we're seeing in Manning's case, there have been three psychiatrists, three big psychiatrists have said that he is not in danger of, you know, harming himself, and have been recommending, ever since August, that he be taken off of POI watch max custody.
However, the brig commander has not only overridden that, based on his own judgment, but in December, put him on suicide watch, as we are told, as punishment for having disobeyed an order.
And using people's medical classification is, for the purpose of punishing them, is not only against the military's rules, but it pretty much qualifies as torture, under just about any objective measure you want to be able to name.
Okay, so, in the sense that he's being treated differently from the average accused in the military system, there's two different levels of it.
One is, I forgot what you called it, and then, POI watch, prevention of injury.
Prevention of injury.
Okay, and then, but that's different than suicide watch.
Suicide watch is a whole extra level of clamp down, basically, and now, you said that when they escalated him from one to the other, that they admitted that that was as punishment for what?
And who admitted that?
According to Jim Miglischewski of NBC News, they admitted that the brig commander had operated, that had acted inappropriately, and had broken the rules, and had put him on suicide watch as punishment for disobeying an order.
What order?
We don't know, but that was what Miglischewski reported.
Now, the Defense Department freaked out after that, and held an emergency press conference that they hadn't held in three months, their first press conference, to basically push back on that, and Jeff Morrill, who is the Department of Defense spokesperson, specifically called out Miglischewski, and slapped him down for inaccurate reporting.
Nonetheless, the brig commander was replaced that week, so how inaccurate, you know, circumstantially, it sort of conspired to back up Miglischewski.
Right.
Well, that's funny, I can't think of that guy without thinking of him after the Camp Lejeune speech, saying, well, I don't know what Obama's talking about, but here at the Pentagon, they say we're going to be in Iraq for at least 15 or 20 years.
He's been the Pentagon correspondent there for decades, you know, for NBC News, he really knows those guys well, and knows what they think, so it's interesting.
Anyway, I'm sorry for going off on a tangent.
I think you're absolutely right, you know, it wasn't like he wasn't in there all day long every day.
Miglischewski's office is there at the Pentagon, he might well be one of them.
And Miglischewski also said that they had been unable, the Justice Department had been unable to make a connection between Assange and Manning, so that sort of blows their whole propaganda spiel.
Right, and their motive for doing this to him, out of the water, and you know, this is something that Greenwald has talked a lot about, and I'm sure you guys have covered as well, is, you know, the inhumane treatment, which, you know, if this wasn't war on terror time or whatever, might be one of our biggest issues, would be prison reform in America, and not holding people in solitary confinement, even if they are convicted terrorists.
But he's being held in conditions that right now Americans basically accept, which are the conditions that Ramzi Yousef and the Unabomber are being held under in Colorado, in the Super Macs.
Absolutely.
And there's no question about it.
And Jeff Kaye, I don't know if you've ever talked to him before, but he is a psychologist who works with torture victims, who also writes for us, and has done a lot of work on the SEER program, and the development of torture programs for Guantanamo Bay and, you know, black sites.
And he has written extensively about how, you know, what's being done to Manning very much undermines people's mental stability, and can cause the very things that you say you're trying to prevent.
Right.
Which may very well be the point anyway, right?
I mean, they seemingly were deliberately driving Jose Padilla out of his mind, because they knew at some point they would have to cry uncle and put him in the civilian system.
And then they argued like mad that he's not fit for trial, let's just lock him up in an insane asylum.
Well, that does seem to be a pattern anyway.
I mean, and again, in this case, despite all the right-wing rhetoric in the Congress and whatever, this guy has not been declared an enemy combatant like they did to Jose Padilla, and yet they're giving him almost the same Jose Padilla treatment here.
Absolutely.
I mean, I don't know how they justify that it's non-punitive.
And when Jeff Morrill gave his press conference, he didn't seem to understand what military regulations were regarding the confinement of prisoners, let alone give a plausible justification for it.
Now, I saw here on your site, too, that David House is reporting, well, a great many things, but one of them is that Manning has learned of events in Egypt and Tunisia.
I guess they do let him watch a little bit of TV, and that he's very excited about this happening.
And I guess if we assume his, I don't know what's the word for guilt when you approve of it or whatever, but if we assume that he's the one who did it and uploaded these State Department documents, he gets to take a little bit of credit for the overthrow of some dictatorships.
At least one and a half so far.
I drove David down again last weekend to Quantico, and when he got back, number one, he can't discuss, there are two guards there all the time, so they were absolutely not discussing anything that Bradley Manning did or didn't do.
That was not the context, it was just more, you know, how do you turn on the television without seeing Egypt and Tunisia these days, right?
Right.
So David got in the car and he goes, no, Bradley was watching Meet the Press, and he actually agreed with something that some guy named Ford said, and I went, Harold Ford?
And he goes, yeah, that's it, and I go, well, I'll have to look and see what that was.
These are strange days.
As Jess Raimondo pointed out over on the blog at Antiwar.com, Daniel Pletka is saying, cut off all aid to Mubarak, and hey, that's our line at Antiwar.com, too.
It's a strange week to be in business, you know?
It is.
So I got home and Harold Ford had said, what he'd said was that he, you know, he was looking at the board, the Twitter board of all these Egyptian, you know, students and bloggers, and saying that these people might know more about the situation than those people who were sitting around the table, and he got very aggressive pushback from all the people who were there on Meet the Press, but he actually had a point, that the people who were there connecting through social media, you know, that had some authority about what was going on there.
I'm glad to know that he's found a little bit of a silver lining.
I hope people will take time to be outraged about what's being done to this young man.
Thank you, Jane, very much.
Thank you, Scott.
I really appreciate it.
Everybody, that's Jane Hampshire, FireDogLake.com, The Huffington Post, too.
