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Bradley Manning's Military Doctors Accused Over Treatment
WikiLeaks suspect treated cruelly, says rights group, which accuses psychiatrists of 'violating ethical duties'
A leading group of doctors in the US concerned with the ethical treatment of patients has questioned the role of military psychiatrists in Quantico, Virginia, where the suspected WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning is being subjected to harsh treatment that some call torture.
A Bradley Manning supporter takes part in a protest outside the US state department this week. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) The advocacy body Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has sounded the alarm over the role of psychiatrists at the brig in the marine base where Manning has been in custody since last July.
The group sees the psychiatrists as trapped in a classic case of "dual loyalty", where their obligations to the military chain of command may conflict with their medical duty to protect their patient.
Christy Fujio, author of a forthcoming report on the issue, said the main concern was that psychiatrists were allowing Manning's continuing solitary confinement.
"Even if they do not officially approve it, by continuing to examine him and report back to the government on his condition, they are effectively taking part in security operations. Their failure to call it what it is – cruel and inhumane treatment – constitutes a violation of their ethical duties as doctors."
Manning, who has been charged with passing a mountain of digital US state secrets to WikiLeaks, is under a prevention of injury order (PoI) that requires him to be kept alone in a cell for 23 hours a day and checked every five minutes. Since earlier this month, he has also been stripped naked each night and made to parade in front of officers.
Manning himself says the conditions amount to pre-trial punishment provoked by a sarcastic remark he made to guards.
Official records kept at the brig, released recently by Manning's lawyer, reveal that between last August and January military psychiatrists made no fewer than 16 recommendations to their military commanders that Manning should be taken off the PoI restrictions because he was no threat to himself.
Typical of the entries was that of 29 October 2010, which stated that Manning "was evaluated by the brig psychiatrist and found fit to be removed from prevention of injury classification from a psychiatric standpoint".
Only once in that five-month period did the psychiatrists conclude that the prisoner should be subjected to the restrictions. Despite the clear medical opinion given, brig commanders have repeatedly ignored the advice and retained the harsh regime. That is in itself, PHR says, an indication that the US government is breaking its own clearly stated rules. The group's Susan McNamara, a doctor who works with victims of torture from other countries, said Manning's treatment appeared to be an extension of the interrogation tactics used against terror suspects in Guantánamo.
"That is a huge problem, as it is designed to break a person down psychologically. Solitary confinement is a form of sensory deprivation, and if you are depriving a person of the human contact they need that can amount to torture."
She added: "In the US, if a patient was treated in a psychiatric hospital in the same way the military is treating Manning, the federal government would stamp all over it … [it] is disobeying its own rules."
The controversy over Manning's treatment has reached to the heart of the Obama administration. This week, state department spokesman PJ Crowley resigned, having called the confinement "ridiculous and stupid" and warned it could damage the global standing of the US. Obama himself was forced to defend the regime, saying he had been "assured" by the Pentagon it was in Manning's own interests.
While the Quantico psychiatrists are given credit for having consistently argued that Manning should be removed from the current extreme regime, there are serious questions about whether they are doing enough to force change.
Doctors have been under tight ethical guidelines to protect their patients since the framing of the Nuremberg ethic at the end of the second world war.
More recently, the American Medical Association ruled that physicians "must oppose and must not participate in torture for any reason ... Physicians should strive to change situations in which torture is practised or the potential for torture is great".
PHR has called on all doctors to avoid performing evaluations of patients in a manner that facilitates violations of human rights and condemns doctors who remain silent in the face of human rights abuses. The group believes the psychiatrists should act on their duty to report Manning's cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and ensure, in line with their ethical duties, that he is kept in the least restrictive environment needed.
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84 Comments so far
Show AllNeurologist.
Ha-ha, great comeback - at least with a sense of humor. I like. Sugar on my porridge.
Manning has not been proven to have done anything wrong yet. If he were treated like a man and not a leper, he would have been charged by now and been brought before a board to make the military prove a case against him. Obama has sold out to everyone he said he would not during the campaign. Obama reminds me of Howdy Doody whose puppet strings are not being pulled by Buffalo Bob but by Gen. Petraeus, the Pentagon, Wall Street, and the Big Bank Mafia. He is letting all the evil empire folks in DC and NYC run him. He has become a coward because all he wants is to be reelected and stay in the trough of power and attention. He campaigned with the statement he would walk with union workers. Where was he in Madison? When does he ever help anyone but the rich and corporations. We do not want anymore Quislings in the White House. Clinton, Bush and Reagan all sold out the people. They all lied to us. We need someone who stands up for America and today Obama is still touting nuclear power in spite of the meltdown in Japan. What gives Obama?
mental health professionals should not collude in unethical behavior.
This is just sick.. What's next, Josef Mengele for “Surgeon General”.
Obama said that he had been assured that the torture is in Manning's best interest. One can conclude only that (a) Obama is disingenuous and he knows that the torture is not in Manning's best interest, thus revealing Obama to be morally incompetent, or (b) Obama truly accepts that it is in Manning's best interest, and thus is cognitively incompetent to be President. Is he a total idiot, or is he a willing torturer? Neither is acceptable.
Smarter, you are a fool. NOT one comment agrees with you. You are a lemming swimming out to the outhouse. Reevaluate your obtuseness.
Amnesty International achieves better treatment of prisoners by wide-spread and persistent writing to prisoners and to the authorities who abuse prisoners. Everyone inside and outside the USA who opposes torture, who wants war criminals prosecuted, who favors freedom, democracy and accountable government, everyone should routinely, frequently, relentlessly express yourself to President Obama and VP Biden:
Post: White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20500
Email form: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact
Phone message: 202-456-1111
FAX: 202-456-2461
Also, send postcards of care (without presuming him guilty) to
Bradley Manning
c/o Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave., #41
Oakland, CA 94610
Code Pink has a petition to President Obama concerning Bradley Manning:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/424/t/10579/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=2294
There's nothing new in these stories. The Hippocratic Oath has been violated time and again by the USA. During the Bush admin it was common place to bring in medical doctors to advise on suitable torture techniques. So what's happening now is just more of the same
I don't think people appreciate how serious and debilitating this is. Spain is still reeling from its inquisition past hundreds of years later. It's like a national and cultural black mark that can't be erased. When people now say USA, in their minds this now includes the most horrific torture.
Obama is a WIMP and a "PUPET" for the "Military" AND the "INDUSTERAL COMPLEX" that SUPORTS and DEFENDS it.
"I said that"
I would like the names of the clinicians, referred to in the article, to be published. As a mental health professional I believe that it is important for those who violate their professional (and human!) ethics be publicly named so they can never work in the field again. They should all be stripped of their credentials.
They're not violating their "ethics." They're doing what psychiatrists DO.
Exactly. They should be struck off and their credentials revoked, because they obviously didn't learn a damned thing about the ethics of the profession.
But at the same time, any commissioned or GS-equivalent medical caregiver should have the power to override pathological decisions by line commanders regardless of rank differences. Right now the only major thing they can do is resign their commissions rather than be involved --which is only symbolically helpful to the victims of the psychopaths.
I wonder how many of Manning's captors have spent time in Iraq, or served as guards at places like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. I'm convinced that the torture that they were encouraged to commit on Muslims abroad was at least partially intended as a conditioning process for their role here at home. They have been desensitized to the torture process and now they are monsters that the fascist government can unleash against the American people. There is huge subset of the American population that would eagerly torture and even execute people like Manning, not to mention you and me.
The US Armed Forces are a disgrace, a moral stain on our nation. And we are told to celebrate and revere these sadists. No thank you -- they do not defend our nation and they certainly do not uphold the Constitution. Also, they are cowards and bullies, not heroes.
Oh, and the Pentagon is also 'assuring' us that what they are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is for the good of those people as well. We can only hope that the Pentagon won't decide to some 'good' for the rest of us as well.
So who are these psychiatrists? Are they anonymous? I'd like to find out their names and go to their homes and have a word or two with them. And why is there not more outrage about this story? Is the US military exempt from our laws? our Constitution? Have people been so conditioned by 9 years of the "war on terror" and torture at Guantanimo that they just shrug this off as par for the course? This is sickening and outrageous. It is time for revolution in this country. General strikes, tax resistance, non-violent protest, non-cooperation at every level with the Beast of the Military Industrial Complex.
I will write to every shrink I know, insisting that they object to torture and their profession's complicity in it.
I don't pray, but I pray for Bradley Manning. And I want him to be a live, sane, free hero, not a dead one.
Bert Hornback
It seems pretty obvious to me that our military jailers get their rocks off by playing games with naked young men. What a bunch of perverts.
According to this article in the Guardian today, they force Manning to take his antidepressants an hour before his visitors arrive so he will be doped up and unable to converse well. They also time this "treatment" just before his daily correspondence time, which Manning reports makes it very difficult to focus on writing. This is deliberate misuse of psychiatric drugs!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/16/hear-bradley-manning-because-chains
Sickening. On par with Soviet "reeducative psychiatry". - Who does that make the enemy now, then?
Tnx for the link, very sobering article:
Excerpt: "Manning is allowed visits* only on Saturday and Sunday. The rest of the week he is kept in his cell 23 hours a day, fed a daily diet of antidepressant pills, forbidden to exercise in his cell, and forcibly woken if he attempts to sleep in the daytime. He is continually subject to what is called "maximum custody", and also to a so-called "prevention of injury" order, which among other things, deprives him of his clothes at night and also of normal sheets and bedding in favour of a blanket he describes as being like the lead apron used when operating x-ray machines. He is allowed no personal possessions."
* "visits": "[The visitor] too feels the displeasure of the US military when he pulls up at the Quantico guardhouse: "Recently it's become really hard. The brig seems to have done playing nice. I have to pull over. They ask for ID, and radio ahead. They pop the trunk, these guys with shotguns. Then I have to wait sometimes 20 minutes for an escort. Two black SUVs arrive and they take you into the base, for two or three miles, very slowly with police lights going. It nowadays takes about 30 minutes.""
...
""You can hear Bradley coming from a long way away because of the chains – his feet have chains on them, they go to a leather belt around his waist. His hands go into them and he has no free movement of his hands." The room is split by a screen of bullet-proof glass, with a small hole cut in it for conversation. The slight figure of Manning shuffles in to sit on a metal stool bolted to the floor. Three burly Marine guards stand a few feet behind him throughout, while a ceiling microphone records everything he says, and a fourth guard patrols behind the door through which House has entered."
If this isn't "cruel and unusual punishment", I don't want to know what is. But it is - breaching the US Constitution. The danger is, if it's allowed to stand, it'll cease being "unusual", becoming half legal.
I wonder what happened to all those candidates last year, most of whom were elected, who so faithfully believed in upholding the Constitution and wasted our tax dollars by insisting on reading it.....incorrectly? The better question is why do people believe anything "their" politicians and idiot pundits on tv say. The level of complete belief by the majority of Americans in all the lies and propaganda fed to them by the government and our media is so insane. Not to mention that it has reached disturbing levels in the whole red vs. blue smoke screen.
IB
Twisted, twisted sick f*cks.These truly remind me of Nazi practices. The US military is a force for evil, nothing more.
Please go to http://www. osixs/home.aspx and sign the petition for
Declaration of Dissoulution and Termination, Our Constitution demands that it is our Duty to do so. Our Government is Broken. Patching the pieces is not going to work. Both parties are complicit in this destruction of our Constitution. High treason can be charged. If you are not part of the solution then you are part of the problem. I am Seventy years old. I fear for this country. MaGoogle
So... Brian Manning, Bradley's Navy Intelligence "lifer" father now sez he forced "B" into the army because " He needed structure in his life...he was aimless".
The "Psychiatrists" who are "serving your country, in your name" are the
spawn of the descendants of the "Inquisition".
The "military" paid for their "education", as well as that your "Lifer" class,
be they enlisted, officer, or command.
The US situation is as bad as WAS Mubarak's Egypt.
Forced into the army...OK, that goes toward explaining his actions as a form of retaliation. So, enough with all the talk about hero and exposing war crimes. He wanted to address a personal grievance against his father's ability to control him and his own inability or unwillingness to control himself. Seriously? "The US situation is as bad as WAS Mubarak's Egypt." Not at all, if Quantico or any military institution was in anyway comparable to a similar middle eastern entity, Manning would be literally, dead and buried by now.
Hey! - There's no contradiction, between "personal grievance" and Doing The Right Thing (the alleged leaking being very right).
In fact, if it wasn't for "personal grievances" much of humanitarian progress in the world would never've happened.
Go back to The Nation, Katrina dear.
"Christy Fujio, author of a forthcoming report on the issue, said the main concern was that psychiatrists were allowing Manning's continuing solitary confinement."
Don't worry, after his trial he can and will then be released into an environment, in a military prison, with others who committed similar crimes. Then, he won't be alone anymore, physically. Why are you people so sympathetic to him? Is it the picture you keep seeing of his forced smiling face? He didn't want to be there, he should have taken it upon himself to leave, legally and peacefully, the opportunity was there up until he decided to do harm. And, that is his crime, punishment will soon follow.
Manning's alleged crime of Wikileaking wasn't "harm", it was healing - to a whole world.
Sod off, war-monger.
If convicted to serve 5 years or more, Manning will go to the military prison at Leavenworth where he will probably be kept permanently in maximum custody due to being designated a "security risk." The conditions there are similar to what he is being subjected to now, go read up on this military prison in Wikipedia and other websites. It is all just horrifying.
Obama and Bush = Fascists.