It Gets Worse: The Ongoing Torture of Bradley Manning

David House is one of the few people allowed to visit Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence officer accused of leaking evidence of war crimes to WikiLeaks who's being held in solitary confinement 23 hours a day – an hour for each year he has been on this earth. Or rather, House was one of the few people allowed to visit Manning, a right that's now been denied because he did something the military didn't like: he spoke out.

In a December piece for the blog Firedoglake, House confirmed what Manning's military lawyer, Lt. Col. David Coombs, had long been saying: that the young man who in a free country would be considered a hero is instead being tortured, mentally destroyed by military officials who critics speculate are trying to coerce testimony from him against the founder of WikiLeaks, Public Enemy #1 and “high-tech terrorist” Julian Assange. Denied so much as a pillow and bed sheets, Manning is permitted just one hour of exercise – he's taken to a room where he walks figure eights – and is required, every five minutes, to respond in the affirmative to guards who ask him if he's “okay.”

The prolonged use of solitary confinement can break a man, as a group of psychologists noted in a recent letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, one of the reasons even the just-deposed authoritarian regime in Tunisia pledged not to employ it for more than 10 days, acknowledging that any period longer than that would constitute torture. Manning has been held in solitary confinement for more than six months.

Those torturous conditions – and remember, whatever your thoughts on what Manning allegedly did, he has yet to even have a trial – spurred his military lawyer last week to file an Article 148 complaint under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), charging that he is being criminally wronged by his commanding officers. Rather than improve his conditions, however, those commanding officers have responded by cutting of Manning's access to the outside world, denying his lone remaining visitor, David House, the right to speak with the imprisoned whistleblower.

More than 42,000 people have also signed a petition at Firedoglake demanding Manning be treated humanely by a government that continually – and with no apparent sense of self-awareness, or shame – regularly condemns human rights abuses in other countries. Antiwar activist group Code Pink also has a petition calling on the Obama administration and Quantico military brass to treat Manning like a human being with rights, rather than as a caged dog at a puppy mill.

But on Sunday, commanders at the Quantico military cut off Manning's access to visitors altogether.

When David House and Firedoglake founder Jane Hamsher attempted to deliver their petition to military officials and see Manning during his regularly scheduled visiting hours, they responded by detaining them without cause for two hours – coincidentally equal in length to Manning's visiting hours – and impounding their vehicle. They left without seeing Manning. And Manning went another week without human contact, outside of the every-five-minute pestering from guards.

“There is no doubt in my mind that the primary objective of everything that happened today was to keep Bradley Manning from having the company of his only remaining visitor,” Hamsher writes on her blog. “The MPs told us they were ordered to do this, the brass showed up to make sure that they did, and they held us until 2:50” – 10 minutes before the end of visiting hours -- “by repeatedly asking for information they already had whenever we asked to leave.”

Liberals have rightly criticized President Obama for not prosecuting those who tortured – and as documents obtained by the ACLU show, murdered – detainees during the Bush administration. But the current administration is guilty of more than just complicity in torture during the Bush years; as the Manning case illustrates, Democrats are just as willing as Republicans to employ torture in the name of the war on terror, even against U.S. citizens.

Demand humane treatment for Bradley Manning by contacting the following officials:

Quantico Base Commander
Colonel Daniel Choike
3250 Catlin Avenue, Quantico VA 22134
(703) 784-2707

Quantico Brig Commanding Officer
CWO4 James Averhart
3247 Elrod Avenue, Quantico VA 22134
(703) 784-4242 (fax)

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Photo Credit: Bradley Manning Support Network