Bradley Manning: A Tale Of Liberty Lost In America - Glenn Greenwald/TheNation

[JDPriestly]

27. Whether Manning is unfit for trial is not the issue.

It is about what the treatment of Manning in prison says about the moral state of the leadership of our country and whether Manning's trial could be more than just a kangaroo court.

The real issue is not Manning's mental incompetency but the Obama administration's moral incompetency and whether that incompetency is so extreme that it makes a fair trial impossible.

It is immoral to place a small, relatively weak young man like Manning in a tiny cell, 8 by 8, force him to strip naked, require him to ask for toilet paper and demean him in numerous other ways, allow him to see only 20 minutes of sunlight a day and then in chains -- when he poses no physical threat to anyone. It is cruel and unusual punishment and for a man who has not yet been convicted of anything. I have read that lack of sunlight and vitamin D in and of itself can cause serious illness and physical problems.

If you have ever read the book The Shock Doctrine or any literature on brainwashing techniques or the shock torture used in experiments by people commissioned by our military in the 1960s (according to news reports about the torture of prisoners under the Bush administration), then you will recognize that the kind of sensory deprivation that Manning has been subjected to can lead to memory loss and confusion.

Sensory deprivation may even be a means to try to reconstruct a person's memories -- to change testimony perhaps?

To rely on the testimony of a prisoner who has been subjected to the torture of sensory deprivation about any memory that could have been "reconstructed" in his mind should not be permitted in any kind of court.

The military has made such a mess of the Manning case. There is probably no way that he can ever get a fair trial or that we will be able to find out what really happened in the case. There appears to be a major cover-up that has created a suspicion or possibility of subornation of perjury. We will never know for sure, and if you can't know for sure, there should be no trial. Any trial that would be held at this time, after so much pre-trial sensory deprivation and humiliation would appear to the world to be a sham and an injustice.

It isn't a matter of Manning's sanity but rather of tampering with the evidence, meaning his memory, and therefore with his testimony.

A kangaroo court.