03/07/11 – Robert Parry – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and joining me now on the line is Robert Perry from ConsortiumNews.com and author of Neck Deep, The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, for one example.
Welcome back to the show Bob, how are you doing?
Good Scott, how are you?
I'm doing great, except I'm really mad about this.
The treatment of Bradley Manning, the suspect, alleged Wikileaker, the then-Sergeant, I think, now Private, who is accused and charged with downloading documents and now with aiding the enemy, apparently for uploading to Wikileaks is what they're saying, but his treatment in Quantico, Virginia at the hands of, I think, the Marines holding him in custody there has been pretty outrageous and so I guess I was hoping maybe we could start with you kind of giving the audience a little refresher course on what we've learned over, say, the past month or two about the treatment of Bradley Manning, who's been held, after all, without trial so far since, what, last May?
Yeah, around that, yes, it's been getting close to a year now, yeah.
And so, you know, you have this article here, Bush's Interrogators Stress Nudity, which is obviously very relevant today, but maybe first could you explain to people kind of what's going on with Bradley Manning there, as you understand it?
Sure, Manning's been placed in maximum security, even though there's no one really suggesting that he's particularly a dangerous threat to anybody physically.
He has been confined to his small cell for pretty much 23 hours a day, he then is given an hour to walk around a room by himself in shackles as an exercise period, and then he's put back into his cell.
So that in itself is very rough, he has minimal interaction with other people, he is, obviously there's an effort to get him to cooperate with the government in terms of perhaps implicating someone else in the WikiLeaks disclosure of these hundreds of thousands of documents.
But then in the last week or so, he's also been subjected to some new abusive treatment, and that includes, middle of last week, being stripped of his clothing and forced to sit naked in his cell for seven hours, and that included having to report, I guess, where they have them to be counted, he has to stand at attention naked while the other people in that area of the cell block are also counted.
He complained to his attorney about this humiliation that he's been subjected to, the people in charge of the brig at Quantico wouldn't give specifics because they said they wanted to protect Manning's privacy, but they did say, they indicated that this was sort of apparently being done to prevent him from possibly strangling himself with his clothes.
He's now being forced to sleep naked, and also having to stand at attention naked every morning after he gets up before he's given clothes.
And so, you know, I wonder, a lot of this obviously is reminiscent of what we learned about the treatment of people at Guantanamo Bay, as well as at prisons throughout Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush years, particularly in the earlier parts of the wars there.
You have this article kind of, I guess, reminding us about the CIA document kind of instructing the Justice Department on, you know, I guess this would be our strategy for how we do it.
Is that right?
Right.
And then I wonder if you can kind of make the connection for us, is it, do you think that this is really being applied in the same manner to Bradley Manning, or, I mean, they're not quite giving him the Jose Padilla treatment, right?
With the MKUltra complete deprivation.
I don't think we have evidence of that.
I think the point is that he is being treated very harshly, and he's being humiliated.
Now whether they, their contention is they're not doing this to extract information from him, but they're doing this for his, probably his protection from himself.
That's the implication they're leaving.
But clearly the fact that they are not only putting him in this long-term solitary arrangement and requiring him to go naked a large part of the time, but they're also now, they've now charged him in connection with the WikiLeaks leaks, the more recent ones, of a variety of crimes, including one that supposedly aiding the enemy, which carries with it life imprisonment or possibly even execution.
The military has indicated they don't intend to seek the death penalty against Manning.
But when you have someone who's 23, 24 years old, and who's being threatened with life imprisonment, that's obviously a very severe penalty.
Whatever their goal is and how they're holding him in this solitary and stripping him of his clothes.
The other part, though, of what you asked is relating to a story that I originally did actually a year or so ago and reposted it with some updates relating to Manning at ConsortiumNews.com.
But that one was, that related to some documents that were released in 2009.
And they dealt with this essentially a report that the CIA was providing to the Justice Department back in around 2004, explaining how these interrogations were done as a way to break down witnesses or captives in the war on terror when they were being taken to the black sites, the CIA black sites.
And that document is quite extraordinary in terms of how these various abusive techniques were used in concert.
But one of the points they kept making over and over and over again is the necessity to have people nude.
And they'd even like underline nudity whenever they'd sort of come to it in this report as if it was all, it took on a kind of a lurid, sadistic quality.
And sometimes besides having these detainees be held nude, they'd sometimes put them in diapers.
And then they would slam them against walls, the so-called walling technique they had.
They'd force them into painful stress positions and make them stay there facing a threat that if they moved out of the stress position, they'd be slammed against the wall again.
And sometimes the walling would be once and sometimes it would be a repetitive series of wallings.
But the key point of keeping people nude was to enhance their sense of vulnerability.
And the claim in this report was that this is how you teach helplessness and establish American control to the detainees.
Now here's the thing though, aren't there laws, even military ones, that say that you can't just arbitrarily apply all these so-called psychiatric reasons for clamping down on a prisoner before he's been tried with anything?
Even then, after he's been tried with something and something else.
This seems like the kind of thing we wouldn't allow down at our local sheriff's jail, would we?
Well I don't know what goes on in your local sheriff's jail.
Actually, Williamson County, you know where I'm from.
But I do think, the point here is that what they're saying, and obviously you can say anything you'd like, but what they're saying is that they're doing this for his personal safety.
So as they're describing it, they're saying, well we want to make sure he stands trial, that justice is served by him going to trial and being punished.
And they don't want that trial to be prevented by him killing himself.
That seems to be their suggestion.
And so what they're asserting is it's being done for his own protection, as well as for the interest of justice.
They're not saying this is being done as punishment.
But if you're in the position of Bradley Manning, it may well feel like punishment.
Yeah.
Well, I read, I think it was Jason Ditz's treatment at Antiwar.com had a so-called quote of his saying, oh well, you better take away my underwear and flip-flops, I guess I could beat myself in the head with my flip-flops and hang myself with my underwear.
And that was the excuse that they seized on, to, oh well, we have to protect you, he threatened to hang himself with his underwear.
Alright, Robert Perry on the show, we're talking about learned helplessness and the torture of Bradley Manning.
I call it anyway.
Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Bob Perry.
Robert Perry?
Bob Perry.
Consortiumnews.com.
Great investigative journalism going back for a long, long ways there.
And of course you can find Ray McGovern there as well.
And now, so, Bob, it seems like on the issue of Bradley Manning's treatment here, we've had in the past, what, month or so, kind of a back and forth about whether he was on suicide watch or whatever.
Basically, even Jim Michaloszewski on NBC is reporting that, yeah, he joked about hanging himself with his underwear.
They're seizing on these excuses to persecute him.
And I wonder, you know, I guess the reason you reposted this article today about the CIA's use of nudity in helping to break someone is you're not necessarily saying, you know, that's why they're doing this so much as at least this is what the effect of this is.
This is the extent of the kind of humiliation that he's being forced to deal with, regardless of what their excuse is.
Am I right?
Well, I posted it actually last week because this does certainly recall the kind of treatment that was being afforded people at the black sites.
Again, they, you know, even then, there were reasons that they claimed that these people were being subjected to these things.
The CIA said this was being done to protect American lives.
There were always reasons for harshly treating someone.
In this case, maybe you can even say they were doing it to protect them.
And maybe that's the truth.
I mean, we don't, no one really knows.
But the point is, is that this, that the treatment that Manning has received, it has been extremely tough for someone who is not a physical danger to other people.
He's put in, he's being put in maximum security.
He's being denied access to many, many outsiders, except for a very few, select few, his attorney and possibly family.
He's not being, he's not being, he's not able to really speak out very much in his own defense or, or to reach the public.
The claim is that he, he could threaten national security by providing some other information, apparently.
But again, that's, that's, that's very much of a stretch.
So, so while there, so while the government is holding him and making him face these very draconian charges, he's also being denied access to many people.
He's being, he's being locked in a cell for 23 hours a day, given minimal time for exercise.
And even that is by himself.
So this is extremely harsh treatment and compounding it now there, there, and maybe, I guess, if you've been held in solitary for, for almost a year, you might actually start feeling a little suicidal.
And that's become the excuse now to, to strip him naked and make him stand in front of people that way.
So it's, it's certainly not, well, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not alleging, I don't know that the government, the U.S. government is, is applying a sort of black side techniques on, on Bradley Manning.
But the use of nudity is certainly something that has been used in this way.
Even the application of these other harsh pre-trial punishments is quite extraordinary.
Well, you think they're just trying to get him to plead guilty and then make up whatever lie they want him to tell about Julian Assange so they can prosecute him under the Espionage Act somehow?
Again, I don't know.
They're, they're saying that they are not using these techniques to coerce him.
But I'm not sure I believe the U.S. government in this context.
I mean, I may, but I don't want to sound overly suspicious.
Well, yeah, I mean, you wear him down to a nub and he doesn't have to be coerced anymore.
Right.
And that was the idea with the people that were being subjected to these interrogation techniques at the black site.
You wear them down, you teach them helplessness, you, you show who's in, who's in total command, and then you get them to tell you what you want to hear from them.
Whether it's having them provide evidence against someone else, name names, or whether it's even to make things up, as we also saw happen back the last decade, when some people facing torture and other tough techniques began making up lies that they, they thought the U.S. government wanted to hear about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for instance, or ties to, between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
So these things are not imaginary, they happened.
Now with Bradley Manning, it certainly would seem that if you were considering all the good that he has done, assuming the allegations are true, he has probably done more to spread freedom around the world in terms of getting people to stand up against dictatorships, and especially in places like Egypt and Tunisia, and now in Libya and elsewhere, that than any U.S. president in our memory could claim.
I know, I've got this real cognitive dissonance going on, and it's obvious, Bob, that I'm usually not on the side of whatever the 60% is in the opinion poll, you know?
But I'm, I sort of feel like I'm missing this feeling of, yeah, let's get him, that, have they done a good enough job with their PR to make Americans hate Bradley Manning, and to somehow justify, is he serving as a very good scapegoat here, because he's just plainly and obviously a hero to me.
I just don't get it.
Well, it's a very good point.
Clearly he has offended some very powerful people who believe that their communications should not be violated.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for instance, has been furious because, because Manning allegedly provided these diplomatic cables that were supposed to be private communications between ambassadors and back to the State Department and so forth.
But the point one would have to make is that because that information got out the way it got out, and then resonated throughout the entire region, especially in the Middle East, some historic events have occurred that actually would fit with what U.S. policy purportedly is, that is, spreading democracy and freedom around the world.
And an open Internet, even.
Exactly.
An Internet that the U.S. created and supposedly believed in.
Hillary Clinton was giving a speech on how important it is to have an open Internet.
That was during the time that, if you remember, a couple weeks ago, when Ray McGovern stood up in protest and was dragged away and bloodied.
So there is this sort of, there is this cognitive dissonance, this double standard, if you will, between what the United States would seem to say, wow, we haven't been able to achieve these things we say we're for, i.e. spreading democracy in the Middle East.
And if you listen to what they said during the Bush administration, there were invasions of other countries, very bloody ones, to achieve supposedly spreading democracy in the Middle East.
And they didn't work out very well.
And here you have someone who, without doing any violence, has achieved something that the U.S. presidents were unable to achieve, yet he's ending up not only in prison facing possible life sentence, but is also humiliated in these very personal ways.
So it does seem that there's a bit of a skewed set of standards going on here.
Yeah, I mean, I can see the consensus in Washington, D.C.
That makes sense to me.
But it seems like the American people probably, if you asked them, would be against hanging this guy, you know?
What would he do?
He leaks some secret, not even top-secret things that got none of our loyal people killed, like in the way that they accused, and only helped lead to all these great revolutions and all of this stuff, which is very incongruent.
I hope they don't get away with it.
I guess they will.
All right.
Well, listen, we'll keep our eyes on Consortium News.
Everybody, that's the great Robert Perry, author of Neck Deep and a bunch of other great books, too.
Thanks.