All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show is Jason Leopold from Truthout.org.
He's a lead investigative reporter of Truthout and author of the L.A.
Times bestseller, News Junkie, a memoir.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Great to be back with you.
Good, good.
Happy to have you here.
Very important story.
Thanks for covering it.
U.S. subjected Manning to cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment.
U.N. torture chief concludes.
Wow, what a headline.
Yeah, yeah.
The Juan Mendez, who is the special rapporteur for torture with the United Nations, he spent over a year investigating, you know, Bradley Manning's treatment after he was arrested in Iraq in May 2010.
And, you know, as you know, he was immediately, Bradley Manning was immediately, you know, placed into solitary confinement.
Well, they even kept him in Kuwait for months before they brought him to the United States, right?
That's for about three months, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, about two and a half, three months.
That's where they kept him before they brought him, you know, to the U.S. and, you know, transferred him to the to the brig over at Marine Corps based Quantico.
Right.
And we know we know a bit about that and I'll let you get to it.
But do we know very much at all about what happened to him in Kuwait?
You know, we don't.
In fact, you know, the report that Juan Mendez had filed, this was to the U.N. General Assembly, the Human Rights Council.
Basically, this is an addendum to a report in which he's outlining or highlighting all the various human rights abuses, the alleged abuses that are taking place all around the world.
So in this section of the United States, in this report, Bradley Manning is the main focus.
So we don't know what his exact treatment was.
And part of the reason we don't know that is because the U.S. government would not allow Juan Mendez to have any one on one treatment with meetings with him.
So they refused to allow him to meet with him unmonitored and which which he said was, you know, sort of, you know, violates or goes against his own mandate of what he's supposed to do, which is investigating human rights abuses.
So it's unclear.
I mean, obviously, we've heard the stories about, you know, Bradley Manning being, you know, forced to strip naked, you know, put into humiliating, you know, positions, much like we did to detainees in Iraq, in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo.
And, you know, it's important to note that in this addendum to this report, you know, Juan Mendez is talking about all the various communications that went back and forth.
But it's important to note that back in December of 2010, when he reached out to the Defense Department, you know, he said that he he believed that Bradley Manning was, you know, being held in solitary confinement in the conditions that he was being held in, simply as a as a as a way to coerce him into giving up information on other people.
Also important to note that, you know, Juan Mendez has is in a unique position himself.
He was a victim of torture, a survivor of torture during the Dirty War in Argentina.
Brutally tortured.
You know, he talks about that in one of his in his book, his most recent book called Taking a Stand.
So he has a real keen understanding of, you know, what it is to, you know, be tortured, what psychological torture is, because, as you know, Scott, many people simply dismiss what happened to, you know, Bradley Manning in regards to his treatment.
And they say, well, you know, look, this is what we do to prisoners all around, you know, the country in our maximum security prison, which is, you know, not I mean, that's that's a whole other issue, which is which is troubling in and of itself, right?
So, right.
But he's in the equivalent of county jail awaiting trial here.
He's not even a convicted, you know, unabomber.
Exactly what he was saying in this report is that, look, you know, he's not even convicted.
But, you know, I'll tell you something that's very interesting.
I spent the past 24 hours really sort of analyzing.
I'm not sure, you know, what sort of possessed me to do this, but analyzing the response of the general public to to this story.
And, you know, Juan Mendez, you know, the U.N. torture chief, he made it clear that, like, look, he's being held in these conditions.
He hasn't been convicted of anything.
The response by the public is that, you know, Bradley Manning is already guilty.
So there's no presumption of innocence.
The public is, you know, more or less saying, you know, he deserves it.
He's a traitor.
Let's hang him.
He's lucky that this is all he's getting.
There's not even in the minds of people any sort of like, well, you know, does he deserve his day in court?
He's, you know, we presume under our constitution that people who, you know, that that the accused are innocent first and until proven guilty later.
And that doesn't even enter the, you know, the thought process for people.
So he's already been convicted in the eyes of the public.
Yeah, which is funny because that just means he's a hero.
If he did what they say he did, then, you know, he's, you know, there were other, you know, interesting comments in terms of the fact that, you know, look, you know, we we basically let people who bring, you know, these these sorts of we punish people who who are whistleblowers in a sense.
You know, people want Bradley Manning to be identified as a classic whistleblower and, you know, basically hold up others who, you know, are or quit others, such as the, you know, the the massacre that took place in Iraq in which a recent trial.
I think that what you know, one of the soldiers, you know, was acquitted on that.
So, you know, people are basically trying to say they're like, look, he's you know, he he revealed some disturbing details about, you know, murder and suspect intelligence and the death of civilians.
So, you know, the thing is, too, and maybe this is just me, but I really resent the UN coming here and telling us our business like this.
But the problem is we don't have that heroic senator who's intervening here and putting a stop to it.
There is nobody.
There is no crusading prosecutor who's indicting the people who are doing these things to him.
Our system isn't working like it's supposed to work, at least like we're supposed to believe it's meant to work anyway.
And so here we are exposed to having some UN busybody come and tell us how to operate our own rule of law, like we're some little satellite state in somebody else's empire over here.
Right, right.
I get what you're saying in terms of the UN.
You know, look, I mean, this is it.
I don't think that he's basically saying this is what you you know, how you guys in the United States need to operate.
I mean, it's really interesting when you read and I link to this actual, you know, to this report when you read, you know, what's taking place.
I mean, his job is to basically investigate claims of torture around the world and, you know, write to various officials and get more information.
And that's more or less what he did.
And we rebuffed him.
We basically said you can't have any more information.
You know, so there is something to be said when we as a country, you know, then look at other countries and shake our, you know, our fist at them or or wag our fingers saying, you know, you guys engage in torture and abuse and we're doing the exact same thing.
So well, I'm pretty sure the irony is not lost on the rest of the world that we're the ones enforcing all this world law on them.
We exempt ourselves from it completely and break it all the spirit and intent in every way that we can get away with exactly while we use as an excuse to bomb them.
All right.
Well, hold it right there.
We got more like this with Jason Leopold from truthout.org after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Talking with Jason Leopold of truthout.org.
U.S. subjected Manning to cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment.
UN torture chief concludes, and that language really does sound to me like what it means is what they did and just wrong.
It's in violation of the law, the very same international law that like we were saying before the break, the U.S. has insisted that the rest of the world obey and join up all our treaties and whatever.
That's been our policy since the end of World War II.
Is everybody subscribed to our version of world law, right?
That's exactly what the assertion is, is that this is a violation of long-standing international treaties.
We are more or less guilty of violating that, certainly with regards to the way we treated Bradley Manning.
He also does make a point of noting that solitary confinement in general.
And that's an issue, a much bigger issue, and obviously for a different conversation.
But yes, I mean, Scott, over the years, particularly over the past three years since the Arab Spring, and there's no question that what has happened in the Middle East has been horrific in terms of the way people have just been, you know, average citizens have been taken out, executed, picked off.
But when it comes time to condemn the treatment of people by these governments, it's just amazing when you read the press releases that the State Department puts out, okay?
Or tune into the press conferences that are led by State Department spokespeople or Hillary Clinton, and what they say is, you know, here's an example.
You know, the indefinite detention.
They actually say indefinite detention of citizens is a crime.
It goes against our values and treaties.
I mean, they're basically stating that, you know, what we have enshrined into law in this country, certainly with the National Defense Authorization Act, whatever you want to call it, is an exception.
But anyone else who does this, you know, you're going to get called out and sanctions will, you know, be implemented.
Right, and we might bomb your cities.
Right, yeah, it's...
Well, and you know, the hypocrisy is stunning.
Right, well, and you know, they somehow convinced, and this is the part that's almost the most amazing to me, really, Jason, is that they convinced the American people that Bradley Manning was Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanson or something, or Jonathan Pollard, that he had, you know, really sold out all of our CIA spies, got rolled up by the enemy like some James Bond fantasy or some kind of thing.
But none of that happened.
All that happened was, in fact, no accountability whatsoever.
All that happened was embarrassment.
Now, there still is a hell of a lot of good journalism coming out of what Bradley Manning liberated.
He's obviously guilty of being a hero here and liberating the State Department logs and the Afghan and Iraq war logs.
And it's important truth in there about what the State Department has been up to over the last years.
And there's not one bit of blood on his hands.
There's not one bit of this has anything to do with high treason.
And yet they've successfully made him guilty of high treason in the mind of the American people.
Right.
Yeah.
And it's certainly, you know, that's why I say that, you know, you read these comments or I've read the comments, but, you know, and these comments are plentiful.
So it's amazing how people react.
And, you know, there are a lot of people out there that, you know, that support what, you know, what he did.
And I think that there's a conversation that we can certainly have about, hey, look, you know, he dumped a 700,000 or hundreds of thousands of documents.
It's just a huge volume.
So we can have that conversation.
But in general, you know, yes, the, you know, the machine that's been in place already convicted him and spun it in such a way that, you know, because of who he gave it to, Wikileaks, allegedly, allegedly, you know, have to make sure that people understand that.
Because he allegedly gave it to Wikileaks.
He's worse because that organization is obviously looked at as, you know, as the enemy of the state, you know.
Well, and as you said, this U.N. torture reporter has said that, I guess it's obvious to him, I don't know if he had specific statements to back this up, but it was pretty obvious to us all, wasn't it, that the reason that they were treating Bradley Manning this way is because they were trying to get him to flip State's witness to testify against Julian Assange.
That Assange put him up to it in the first place, could jump their little legal hurdle so they can get him.
Yes, in fact, I mean, this is, you know, an important note in his, you know, in the addendum to his report on Bradley Manning is that what he said or what the response that he received, you know, from government officials, you know, high-ranking government officials, U.S. government officials, was that Bradley Manning, what he was subjected to, was not, quote, solitary confinement.
It was rather prevention of harm watch.
No details were offered about what that harm was that was being prevented.
And then in addition to that...
Well, they claimed then, didn't they, that it was suicide prevention.
That's what they were basically saying, yes.
Again, there was nothing, you know, offered up to back it up.
But in addition to that, okay, when Juan Mendez, the special rapporteur for torture at the U.N., when he requested information on the authority, whose authority, you know, to impose this, you know, this punishment, the U.S. government responded that the prison rules authorized the brig commander to impose it on account of the seriousness of the offense for which Bradley Manning would eventually, eventually be charged.
He hadn't been charged at that point, yeah.
Right, so basically, you know, this was justified on what he would eventually be charged with a year and a half later.
And we know that the mental health professionals there at the prison had said, oh, no, he's not a suicide risk.
Exactly.
They had already cleared him for that, so it was clearly just the excuse.
Yeah, so this was, you know, a clear-cut, you know, case of, you know, trying to break down at least, look, I'm just offering opinion here.
I don't have anything to back it up, but it was, it appears that it was a, you know, a case of trying to break down a prisoner, you know, to get him to cooperate.
And look, you and I talked about this about, you know, about a year or so ago when we were talking about those torture notes by Bruce Jessen.
It's the exact same, the exact same ideal.
Yeah, I call it two-thirds of the Padilla treatment, right?
It's not the full MKUltra, but it's pretty bad.
Right, right.
So that is more or less what they, you know, what they were trying to do.
But look, you know, I mean, this is, this should be an embarrassment.
Unfortunately, Scott, you know, most people at this point, they really don't care.
You know, they don't care that, you know, that this is the conclusion, that this is the finding.
Perhaps it's because it's, you know, it's the UN, but I think in a way it sort of backs up what many people have been thinking for, you know, for a while in terms of, you know, that his, that his treatment was, you know, problematic.
Well, and Obama himself, the President of the United States himself has implicated himself in his own office in all of this treatment.
I guess he could have pretended to rise above it all and maintain deniability, but he chose not to.
And when asked about it, he said, well, you know, Robert Gates assured me that whatever's going on there is fine, and so I'm going along with that.
Well, we all know where the buck supposedly stops.
It's his responsibility.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
He could be, you know, impeached and removed and brought up on charges on that right now if there was such a thing as the law in America.
Yeah, well, that's, you know, we've seen the erosion of the law, you know, over the years and more so over the past three years, certainly, with regard to these issues and certainly, you know, international issues as well.
Some of this sounded like anti-Iraq propaganda from 2002 when I'm reading your article, and it's about how, yeah, he couldn't even interview him without an official government minder standing there looking over his shoulder, but you're talking about the USA.
It's unbelievable, but you know what's amazing, Scott, is, you know, you talk about 2002, and probably back in 2002, all of us would have been, you know, truly outraged.
We've come to accept it because this is what we're, this is the new normal.
I don't even think it's the new normal, but this is what we, we're used to this now.
We expect this.
We expect that to be the response.
So, you know, in a way, we sort of shrug our shoulders like, of course, you know, that's the way things are in this country now.
Yeah, there you go.
Jason Leigh pulled everybody's truth out.
U.S. subject to manning to cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment, U.N. torture chief concludes.
Thank you very much, sir, for your time.
Thanks, Scott.
Take care.
