Soros Leaks: The Most Important Story You're Not Hearing

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Hannibal Bateman ·

August 18, 2016
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One of the biggest stories is unfolding right now, and most people probably haven’t heard it. It’s the leaks of thousands of emails and documents from George Soros’ “Open Society Foundation”, that detail strategy, tactics, grants, and more from Soros’ global network.
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From the U.S. to Europe Soros’ largesse has been exposed as a major prop behind much of our society’s hegemonic liberal discourse. Light is also shed on the plans and tactics being used, particularly against Russia, to undermine traditional family structures and European identity worldwide.
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As Black Lives Matter burn the streets of Milwaukee, Breitbart News is reporting that Soros has given the organization close to $650,000. Leaving no crisis to waste, the documents make explicit the strategies all of us on the Alt-Right have known Soros and co. have been pursuing for decades. From the documents (emphasis Breitbart):

In particular, recent events offer a unique opportunity to accelerate the dismantling of structural inequality generated and maintained by local law enforcement and to engage residents who have historically been disenfranchised in Baltimore City in shaping and monitoring reform. Building on our existing networks and programs, OSI-Baltimore will focus investments on: 
 

1) creating a culture of accountability for policing in Baltimore, recognizing the pervasive racism, disrespect, and lawlessness that gave rise to recent events; and  
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2) building the capacity of activists in Baltimore to demand and achieve immediate and long-term reforms. 

“Dismantling structural inequality” is just another way of saying dispossession. 
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Further documents reveal the Foundation’s role in funding many of the groups that would later become “Black Lives Matter”. Also striking are the documents stark discussion of demographic realities, however, they do so in a way that’s menacing for members of the Historic American Nation.
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In addition to funding local NAACP and Mexican American groups throughout states such as North Carolina and Texas. Such demographic real talk is spoken of in plain language in a way that it never is in Conservatism Inc. For instance, look at the following (emphasis mine):

For much of the past decade, North Carolina has been among the nation’s fastest growing states for three primary reasons: 

1) It has a pleasant quality of life, with decent weather and a lower cost of living than the Boston to Washington, DC urban corridor; 

2) The employment situation is strong and diversified, with its higher education institutions creating a high tech Mecca, principally in the Research-Triangle area of Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, that draws many well educated northerners to the state, and the Charlotte area’s rise to be the nation’s second largest banking center after NYC; and 

3) The free trade accelerated decline of its historic industries: textiles, furniture, and tobacco has led to new low-wage economies of service, construction, and agribusiness industries that have made the state a magnet for immigrants from Mexico and Central America

Because of these factors, North Carolina now has roughly nine million residents, slightly larger than the population of New York City, making it the third most populous southern state (after Texas and Florida). The state is now the nation’s tenth most populous and continues to grow.

It is changing rapidly, with one third of the population now people of color and a tri-racial population dynamic ~ African-American, Latino, and white ~ replacing the Black/white dominance of old. North Carolina through the 1990s had the fastest growing immigrant population and in the 2000s had the fastest growing Latino population. This is no Mayberry (and taking TV fiction for what it is, the state likely never was Mayberry).

Soros and the left understand that demographics are destiny and the sooner the right understands this, the sooner that it can actually fight back.

Of course, it’s not just in the United States that Soros and his foundations are making plays. Throughout Europe, they have been fundamental in shaping establishment and leftist discussion of the “refugee” crisis and various “human rights” issues.
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The Daily Caller reports that Soros funded organizations view the crisis as the “new normal” and having “opportunities” to influence public opinion through it. In particular The Daily Caller notes the role of the International Migrant Initiative’s role in shaping EU refugee policy:

IMI played a central role in establishing and influencing the goals of two new [European Programme for Integration and Migration] sub-funds on the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) and immigration detention.

Moreover, it has been revealed that Soros was a major funder of the Ukrainian “revolution”. This is part of Soros’ general strategy against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. A big part of which seems, is because Putin’s Russia won’t buy into the “open society” total vision of Soros and co.
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In the wake of these revelations, Russia has already taken steps to curb the influence of Soros non-profits and is wise to do so. If only our “right-wing” would be as brave. 
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One amusing thing to come from these revelations is the work the Open Society Foundation is doing to promote “human rights” and generally big (L)iberalism in Israel. Which would only lead to the sort of self-doubt and weakness that would lead to the fall of an ethnically homogenous Jewish state. Ha!
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One assumes that if this issue is picked up at all, it will be the above that “conservatives” will endlessly kvetch about. Meanwhile, they do their best to support Soros foundations war on Russia over such “human rights” issues as transgenderism, and whatever else is the latest in the multi-kulti death cult that rules us today, all as the same values are being promoted in the United States.
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The issue remains the same globally, survival.

European peoples the world over are being dispossessed and hollowed out. These revelations are just the sort of thing we’ve all known for a long time, but it’s nice to see them so plainly stated. But don’t expect to hear about it on the nightly news!

BRADLEY MANNING, AMERICAN HERO

FOUR REASONS WHY PFC. BRADLEY MANNING 

DESERVES THE PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM,

NOT A PRISON CELL

By Chase Madar
July 07, 2011

"TomGram"

We still don’t know if he did it or not, but if Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old Army private from Oklahoma, actually supplied WikiLeaks with its choicest material ~ the Iraq War logs, the Afghan War logs, and the State Department cables ~ which startled and riveted the world, then he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom instead of a jail cell at Fort Leavenworth.

President Obama recently gave one of those medals to retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who managed the two bloody, disastrous wars about which the WikiLeaks-released documents revealed so much.  Is he really more deserving than the young private who, after almost ten years of mayhem and catastrophe, gave Americans ~ and the world ~ a far fuller sense of what our government is actually doing abroad?

Bradley Manning, awaiting a court martial in December, faces the prospect of long years in prison.  He is charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917.  He has put his sanity and his freedom on the line so that Americans might know what our government has done ~ and is still doing ~ globally.  He has blown the whistle on criminal violations of American military law.  He has exposed our secretive government’s pathological over-classification of important public documents.

Here are four compelling reasons why, if he did what the government accuses him of doing, he deserves that medal, not jail time.

1: At great personal cost, Bradley Manning has given our foreign policy elite the public supervision it so badly needs.
 

In the past 10 years, American statecraft has moved from calamity to catastrophe, laying waste to other nations while never failing to damage our own national interests.  Do we even need to be reminded that our self-defeating response to 9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia) has killed roughly 225,000 civilians and 6,000 American soldiers, while costing our country more than $3.2 trillion?  We are hemorrhaging blood and money.  Few outside Washington would argue that any of this is making America safer.

An employee who screwed up this badly would either be fired on the spot or put under heavy supervision.  Downsizing our entire foreign policy establishment is not an option.  However, the website WikiLeaks has at least tried to make public scrutiny of our self-destructive statesmen and -women a reality by exposing their work to ordinary citizens.

Consider our invasion of Iraq, a war based on distortions, government secrecy, and the complaisant failure of our major media to ask the important questions.  But what if someone like Bradley Manning had provided the press with the necessary government documents, which would have made so much self-evident in the months before the war began?  Might this not have prevented disaster?  We’ll never know, of course, but could additional public scrutiny have been salutary under the circumstances?

Thanks to Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosures, we do have a sense of what did happen afterwards in Iraq and Afghanistan, and just how the U.S. operates in the world.  Thanks to those disclosures, we now know just how Washington leaned on the Vatican to quell opposition to the Iraq War and just how it pressured the Germans to prevent them from prosecuting CIA agents who kidnapped an innocent man and shipped him off to be tortured abroad.

As our foreign policy threatens to careen into yet more disasters in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya, we can only hope that more whistleblowers will follow the alleged example of Bradley Manning and release vital public documents before it’s too late.  A foreign policy based on secrets and spin has manifestly failed us.  In a democracy, the workings of our government should not be shrouded in an opaque cloud of secrecy.  For bringing us the truth, for breaking the seal on that self-protective policy of secrecy, Bradley Manning deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

2: Knowledge is powerful.  The WikiLeaks disclosures have helped spark democratic revolutions and reforms across the Middle East, accomplishing what Operation Iraqi Freedom never could.
 

Wasn’t it American policy to spread democracy in the Middle East, to extend our freedom to others, as both recent American presidents have insisted?

No single American has done more to help further this goal than Pfc. Bradley Manning.  The chain reaction of democratic protests and uprisings that has swept Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and even in a modest way Iraq, all began in Tunisia, where leaked U.S. State Department cables about the staggering corruption of the ruling Ben Ali dynasty helped trigger the rebellion. 

In all cases, these societies were smoldering with longstanding grievances against oppressive, incompetent governments and economies stifled by cronyism.  The revelations from the WikiLeaks State Department documents played a widely acknowledged role in sparking these pro-democracy uprisings.

In Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Yemen, the people’s revolts under way have occurred despite U.S. support for their autocratic rulers.  In each of these nations, in fact, we bankrolled the dictators, while helping to arm and train their militaries. The alliance with Mubarak’s autocratic state cost the U.S. more than $60 billion and did nothing for American security ~ other than inspire terrorist blow-back from radicalized Egyptians like Mohammad Atta and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Even if U.S. policy was firmly on the wrong side of things, we should be proud that at least one American ~ Bradley Manning ~ was on the right side.  If indeed he gave those documents to WikiLeaks, then he played a catalytic role in bringing about the Arab Spring, something neither Barack Obama nor former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (that recent surprise recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom) could claim.  Perhaps once the Egyptians consolidate their democracy, they, too, will award Manning their equivalent of such a medal.

3: Bradley Manning has exposed the pathological over-classification of America’s public documents.

“Secrecy is for losers,” as the late Senator and United Nations Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say.  If this is indeed the case, it would be hard to find a bigger loser than the U.S. government.

How pathological is our government’s addiction to secrecy?  In June, the National Security Agency declassified documents from 1809, while the Department of Defense only last month declassified the Pentagon Papers, publicly available in book form these last four decades.  Our government is only just now finishing its declassification of documents relating to World War I.

This would be ridiculous if it weren’t tragic.  Ask the historians.  Barton J. Bernstein, professor emeritus of history at Stanford University and a founder of its international relations program, describes the government’s classification of foreign-policy documents as “bizarre, arbitrary, and nonsensical.” 

George Herring, professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky and author of the encyclopedic From Colony to Superpower: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy, has chronicled how his delight at being appointed to a CIA advisory panel on declassification turned to disgust once he realized that he was being used as window dressing by an agency with no intention of opening its records, no matter how important or how old, to public scrutiny.

Any historian worth his salt would warn us that such over-classification is a leading cause of national amnesia and repetitive war disorder.  If a society like ours doesn’t know its own history, it becomes the great power equivalent of a itinerant amnesiac, not knowing what it did yesterday or where it will end up tomorrow.  Right now, classification is the disease of Washington, secrecy its mania, and dementia its end point.  As an ostensibly democratic nation, we, its citizens, risk such ignorance at our national peril.

President Obama came into office promising a “sunshine” policy for his administration while singing the praises of whistle-blowers.  He has since launched the fiercest campaign against whistle-blowers the republic has ever seen, and further plunged our foreign policy into the shadows.  Challenging the classification of each tightly guarded document is, however, impossible.  No organization has the resources to fight this fight, nor would they be likely to win right now.  Absent a radical change in our government’s diplomatic and military bureaucracies, massive over-classification will only continue.

If we hope to know what our government is actually doing in our name globally, we need massive leaks from insider whistle-blowers to journalists who can then sort out what we need to know, given that the government won’t.  This, in fact, has been the modus operandi of WikiLeaks. 

Our whistle-blower protection laws urgently need to catch up to this state of affairs, and though we are hardly there yet, Bradley Manning helped take us part of the way. 

He did what Barack Obama swore he would do on coming into office.  For striking a blow against our government’s fanatical insistence on covering its mistakes and errors with blanket secrecy, Bradley Manning deserves not punishment, but the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

4. At immense personal cost, Bradley Manning has upheld a great American tradition of transparency in statecraft and for that he should be an American hero, not an American felon.

Bradley Manning is only the latest in a long line of whistle-blowers in and out of uniform who have risked everything to put our country back on the right path.

Take Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, a Pentagon-commissioned secret history of the Vietnam War and the official lies and distortions that the government used to sell it.  Many of the documents it included were classed at a much higher security clearance than anything Bradley Manning is accused of releasing ~ and yet Ellsberg was not convicted of a single crime and became a national hero.

Given the era when all this went down, it’s forgivable to assume that Ellsberg must have been a hippie who somehow sneaked into the Pentagon archives, beads and patchouli trailing behind him.  What many no longer realize is that Ellsberg had been a model U.S. Marine.  First in his class at officer training school at Quantico, he deferred graduate school at Harvard to remain on active duty in the Marine Corps.  Ellsberg saw his high-risk exposure of the disastrous and deceitful nature of the Vietnam War as fully consonant with his long career of patriotic service in and out of uniform.

And Ellsberg is hardly alone.  Ask Lt. Colonel (ret.) Darrel Vandeveld.  Or Tom Drake, formerly of the National Security Agency.

Transparency in statecraft was not invented last week by WikiLeaks creator Julian Assange.  It is a longstanding American tradition.  James Madison put the matter succinctly: “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.”

A 1960 Congressional Committee on Government Operations report caught the same spirit:

“Secrecy ~ the first refuge of incompetents ~ must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society…Those elected or appointed to positions of executive authority must recognize that government, in a democracy, cannot be wiser than the people.” 

John F. Kennedy made the same point in 1961:

“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society.” 

 Hugo Black, great Alabaman justice of the twentieth-century Supreme Court had this to say:

“The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.” 

And the first of World-War-I-era president Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points couldn’t have been more explicit:

“Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”

We need to know what our government’s commitments are, as our foreign policy elites have clearly demonstrated they cannot be left to their own devices.  Based on the last decade of carnage and folly, without public debate ~ and aggressive media investigations ~ we have every reason to expect more of the same.

If there’s anything to learn from that decade, it’s that government secrecy and lies come at a very high price in blood and money. 

Thanks to the whistle blowing revelations attributed to Bradley Manning, we at least have a far clearer picture of the problems we face in trying to supervise our own government.  If he was the one responsible for the WikiLeaks revelations, then for his gift to the republic, purchased at great price, he deserves not prison, but a Presidential Medal of Freedom and the heartfelt gratitude of his country.

Chase Madar is a lawyer in New York and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, the American Conservative magazine, CounterPunch.org, and Le Monde Diplomatique.  His next book, The Passion of Bradley Manning, will be published by O/R Books this fall.  He is covering the Bradley Manning case and trial for TomDispatch.com.  To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Madar discusses the Manning case, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Copyright 2011 Chase Madar

KINGDOM OF EVIL

 

BRADLEY MANNING SPEAKS ABOUT HIS CONDITIONS

A VISITOR WATCHES BRADLEY MANNING’S MENTAL HEALTH DETERIORATE
By: Ryan Gallagher March 7, 2011

For over seven months, Manning has been detained in solitary confinement at a maximum security military brig in Virginia.  He has been forced to endure widely condemned conditions and could face the death sentence as a result of charges recently leveled against him. He has yet to receive so much as a preliminary hearing.

House, who was born in Alabama, was brought up in a conservative household and was an Eagle Scout as a boy. He admits that growing up he “never really had any big doubts about the US govt or about the fact that people’s due process may be infringed upon.”

Consequently, the detainment and subsequent treatment of his friend, Manning, came as something of a shock and an awakening.  He helped start the Bradley Manning Advocacy Fund and has appeared on television and radio talking about the treatment of the soldier.  It has been a “very jarring” experience, he says.

Last week, as part of a media conference call with Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and former Judge Advocate General Jon Shelburne, House spoke at length about his experiences visiting Manning.  What he described was deeply troubling.

He spoke about how the severe emotional and physical deprivation forced upon Manning is taking its toll, and suggested US authorities are ~ by treating him harshly ~ trying to extract a confession that implicates WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief, Julian Assange.

It is important that the full story, as told by House, is in the public domain. In this case, a single quote as chosen by a journalist is simply not enough.

Below is a transcript of House’s story, taken from a phonecall on Thursday 3 March 2011.  A recording of the call can be heard here.

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I’ve been visiting Bradley in the brig [at Quantaco, Virginia] since last September.  He and I met very briefly in Boston early last year, and I went to visit him in September because there were not many people, not many friends, who were willing to do so.

When I first visited him he was a very bright eyed intelligent young man, very full of life. We had many good conversations in September / October. But getting in to November something started to change, almost like a light switch had switched off or something.  I thought that maybe he had just been sleeping right before our meetings or something, or maybe he was just tired because of medication he was on.  

But around late November his inability to really hold conversations the way he used to ~ the bags under his eyes under his eyes that were constant from meeting to meeting and his utter exhaustion ~ was really indicative to me that something was going on.

David Coombs [Bradley’s lawyer] and I talked a little bit in early December, and later that month I went to see Bradley ~ in late December ~ and asked him about his confinement after news had came out via Glenn Greenwald and Salon.com that he was indeed being held in solitary. And I hadn’t really pressed Bradley before that point on his conditions ~ again, I guess my naiveté assuming that the US government wouldn’t stoop to these ends in order to collectively pressure an individual, a young man like Bradley.

But in December I asked him: “What’s it like in here? Are you able to go outdoors? Pentagon spokesperson David Lapan has said you have access to newspapers, you can exercise, you can do calisthenics and running … is any of this true?”

And Bradley kind of didn’t believe that this would be the statement that the Pentagon was releasing ~ that they were either not telling the truth or they’d had a grave misunderstanding of the situation here.

Going in to January. I published that post on Firedoglake where I talked a little bit about my experience with Bradley … his conditions kept getting worse.  There was some physical trembling when I visited him in late January.  As I said in an MSNBC interview, there was a point at which he appeared to be almost catatonic and had very high difficulty carrying on day to day conversation. Tired all the time.  He seemed to be undergoing a very obvious and very extreme decay from his former self.

So for me this has been like watching a really good friend succumb to an illness or something; like watching someone get very sick. And I do not think that this is normal for people being held in confinement.  I think that the conditions he is under, the POI [Prevention of Injury] order which applies a selective pressure to him ~ locked up for 23 hours a day, denied access to regular exercise and denied access to social interaction ~ I feel that this has really weighed on him to a high degree.

I’ve done a little bit of learning on solitary based on this, and as you can imagine it has been a pretty emotional process.  I’ve been trying to find what exactly is going on.  In doing so I found closing arguments from a Guantanamo bay trial by an attorney named David Frakt, who was defending a young man from Afghanistan who was alleged to have killed two US soldiers.

David Frakt, in the closing argument of his client’s trial, said that he did not believe his client had had a fair trial, or could not have been given a fair trial, because he was kept in solitary confinement.

As David Frakt said in his closing argument: the purpose of the solitary confinement was to cause severe emotional devastation in his client ahead of the trial … to make him softer for the trial; to make him sign a confession or a false confession before the trial.  In my opinion, I believe this is exactly what is happening to Bradley Manning.

I believe that the delays in Bradley’s trial taking place, I believe the government’s selective and punitive measures on him in keeping him in solitary which is different from any other detainee in the Quantaco Brig … this is all because the US govt wants to get a confession ~ or a false confession – from Bradley Manning.  

And as we have learned recently, the US government has been unable to link Manning with Julian Assange … and so this pressure, I fear, may continue, as they try to extract a false confession for him.

One last thing about the research I did on solitary is a quote from [US Senator] John McCain about the effects of solitary.  John McCain said: “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.”

And for those on the call who are interested, I also found the case of a man named Bobby Dellelo, who was held in supermax [at Walpole prison] under similar conditions.  Bobby Dellelo was also kept for 23 hours a day, allowed exercise for one hour, allowed access to visitors and television for an hour.  Bobby Dellelo developed a form of psychosis after six months in these conditions.

This is consistent with EEG studies going back to the 1960s which found abnormalities consistent with brain trauma on people held in solitary confinement for six months or longer.  I do not think that these are facts the US government is unaware of. And I think that Bradley Manning is being punished in this way because the US government wants him to crack ahead of his trial. For that reason I believe that his due process, his right to a fair trial, and certainly his right to a speedy trial, is being infringed upon.

David House can be followed on Twitter here. You can support Bradley Manning by donating to the Bradley Manning Advocacy Fund (US) or the Bradley Manning Defense Fund (International).

Cross-posted at openDemocracy

KINGDOM OF EVIL

KINGDOM OF EVIL 

By Arthur Silber
March 5, 2011

A human being can be destroyed in a seemingly infinite number of ways, as history repeatedly demonstrates. Our capacity for cruelty is limitless. It would appear to defy gratification. We are all too familiar with the horrifying varieties of physical violence inflicted on the human body, but there is another method of seeking to destroy those whom we have designated as enemies to our own survival.

In one critical respect, this method is worse than injuries that might be visited on our fragile corporeal form, for while the body may survive intact, the person ~ that is, his mind and soul ~ will never be made whole again.

This method of destruction throws the victim into a nightmare world, one which mocks every effort to comprehend it. Cruelty is presented as compassion and solicitude for the victim's well-being; the words of justification seek to convince those who suffer that their unbearable pain should be accepted for their own good. The victim knows that every utterance of his tormentors is a lie, and the more he attempts to understand why they act so monstrously, the greater his suffering grows.

The victim can never escape these lacerating questions:

How is it possible that human beings could treat another person in this manner?

How can I survive in a world in which such cruelties not only occur with soul-destroying regularity, but in which these cruelties are considered necessary and moral?

If the victim should conclude that he cannot survive in such a world ~ and how can we be surprised that this should be his judgment? ~ his soul will be lost. Even if his body continues to function, he will survive in a world rendered eternally bleak, with terror lurking in every moment. The possibility of joy is extinguished.

This is evil; those who seek to impose this fate on a human being are engaged in evil of an especially monstrous kind.

Read this New York Times story about the latest cruelties inflicted on Bradley Manning, and you will see the operation of these mechanisms. We must remember that Manning is, as the Times story states in its first sentence, the "accused."

As of this date, Manning has been tried for nothing.

As of this date, Manning has been convicted of nothing.

The story informs us that Manning

"will be stripped of his clothing every night as a 'precautionary measure' to prevent him from injuring himself," and that he "will also be required to stand outside his cell naked during a morning inspection." A Marine spokesman says that "the underwear was taken away from him as a precaution to ensure that he did not injure himself."

But as the story goes on to tell us, Manning "has not been elevated to the more restrictive 'suicide watch' conditions." The same Marine spokesman also says that "the new rule on clothing ... would continue indefinitely," and that "he was not allowed to explain what prompted it 'because to discuss the details would be a violation of Manning’s privacy.'”

Thus, according to this spokesman, Manning is subjected to repeated humiliation and degradation ~ for his own good. Moreover, the reason for the repeated humiliation and degradation cannot be provided because of the military's boundless concern for Manning's "privacy" ~ that is, the military also refuses to explain the reason for its cruelty for Manning's own good.

Does the nightmare begin to assume more definite shape before you? 

If you feel assaulted in the depths of your being by this mere recitation of the facts ~ and you should ~ you are experiencing but the faintest shadow of what Manning experiences in captivity.

Manning is, I remind you, only the "accused."

Manning's lawyer, David E. Coombs, tries to cut through this enveloping fog of evil:

“There can be no conceivable justification for requiring a soldier to surrender all his clothing, remain naked in his cell for seven hours, and then stand at attention the subsequent morning,” he wrote. “This treatment is even more degrading considering that Pfc. Manning is being monitored ~ both by direct observation and by video ~ at all times.”

Mr. Coombs contended that stripping his client was medically unjustified.

“If a person is at risk of self-harm, then you get them treatment, you get them to a mental health professional and address the issue ~ you don’t strip them,” he said, adding in a separate telephone interview, “There is no excuse, no justification to having a soldier stand at attention naked. There can be no mental health reason for that.”

Coombs characterized these latest punitive measures "as an unjustified 'humiliation' of his client."  

I would add two comments to that description.

First, forcing a prisoner to remain naked for extended periods of time is not only a barbaric means of humiliating and degrading him: it necessarily includes a very significant element of specifically sexual humiliation and degradation. Add to this unforgivable atrocity the well-known fact that Manning is gay. Especially in the hyper-masculinized world of the military, such sexual humiliation and degradation represents an intentional, additional cruelty. I can only say that the U.S. government and the military of which it is so proud put Torquemada to shame.

Second, these cruelties and the purported "justifications" offered by the military, all in a notably high profile case, definitively put the lie to the propaganda spewed by the U.S. government in response to the torture, including sexual humiliation, revealed at Abu Ghraib: that such incidents were an "aberration" perpetrated by a few "bad apples." (I emphasize that similar torture and humiliation occurred in other locations as well; Abu Ghraib is probably the best-known instance.) They also definitively put the lie to Obama's patently false claim that he has "ended torture," a point I have made repeatedly.

Now we have the U.S. military, with the full support of the U.S. government, openly engaging in repeated acts of cruelty, atrocity, humiliation and degradation ~ acts which the military proclaims will "continue indefinitely" ~ and offering nauseatingly ludicrous justifications which would not convince a minimally healthy ten-year-old child.

No honest observer can regard these actions of the U.S. government and its military as "aberrations": these actions are brazenly offered as U.S. government policy.

These actions also constitute torture. I first offered this description of torture in December 2005, and I stand by it today:

Torture is the deliberate infliction of unbearable agony on a human being ~ a human being who is intentionally kept alive precisely so that he will suffer still more and for a longer period of time ~ for no justifiable reason.

(Descriptions of the articles in my series, "On Torture," will be found here.)

I therefore repeat what I said above:

This is evil; those who seek to impose this fate on a human being are engaged in evil of an especially monstrous kind.

This is also the U.S. government and its military.

Mark it well.

Several additional issues require further commentary. In particular: we must beware falling into the trap of selective outrage.

The horrifying case of Bradley Manning is an especially high profile one, but he is hardly the only victim of even this particular form of the U.S. government's monstrousness.

And the cruelties visited upon Manning ~ a man who, I emphasize again, has not yet been tried and convicted of even a single crime ~ necessarily raise this question: What is the source of the rage which the U.S. government directs at this man?

The answer will not be found in most of the commentary on this awful case.