Obama professor among 250 experts who have signed letter condemning
humiliation of alleged WikiLeaks source
Ed Pilkington in New York
Monday April 11 2011
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/10/bradley-manning-legal-scholars-letter
More than 250 of America's most eminent legal scholars have signed a
letter protesting against the treatment in military prison of the
alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, contesting that his
"degrading and inhumane conditions" are illegal, unconstitutional and
could even amount to torture.
The list of signatories includes Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor
who is considered to be America's foremost liberal authority on
constitutional law. He taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and
was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign.
Tribe joined the Obama administration last year as a legal adviser in
the justice department, a post he held until three months ago.
He told the Guardian he signed the letter because Manning appeared to
have been treated in a way that "is not only shameful but
unconstitutional" as he awaits court martial in Quantico marine base
in Virginia.
The US soldier has been held in the military brig since last July,
charged with multiple counts relating to the leaking of thousands of
embassy cables and other secret documents to the WikiLeaks website.
Under the terms of his detention, he is kept in solitary confinement
for 23 hours a day, checked every five minutes under a so-called
"prevention of injury order" and stripped naked at night apart from a
smock.
Tribe said the treatment was objectionable "in the way it violates his
person and his liberty without due process of law and in the way it
administers cruel and unusual punishment of a sort that cannot be
constitutionally inflicted even upon someone convicted of terrible
offences, not to mention someone merely accused of such offences".
The harsh restrictions have been denounced by a raft of human rights
groups, including Amnesty International, and are being investigated by
the United Nations' rapporteur on torture.
Tribe is the second senior figure with links to the Obama
administration to break ranks over Manning. Last month, PJ Crowley
resigned as state department spokesman after deriding the Pentagon's
handling of Manning as "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid".
The intervention of Tribe and hundreds of other legal scholars is a
huge embarrassment to Obama, who was a professor of constitutional law
in Chicago. Obama made respect for the rule of law a cornerstone of
his administration, promising when he first entered the White House in
2009 to end the excesses of the Bush administration's war on
terrorism.
As commander in chief, Obama is ultimately responsible for Manning's
treatment at the hands of his military jailers. In his only comments
on the matter so far, Obama has insisted that the way the soldier was
being detained was "appropriate and meets our basic standards".
The protest letter [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/apr/
28/private-mannings-humiliation/" title="The protest letter],
published in the New York Review of Books, was written by two
distinguished law professors, Bruce Ackerman of Yale and Yochai
Benkler of Harvard. They claim Manning's reported treatment is a
violation of the US constitution, specifically the eighth amendment
forbidding cruel and unusual punishment and the fifth amendment that
prevents punishment without trial.
In a stinging rebuke to Obama, they say "he was once a professor of
constitutional law, and entered the national stage as an eloquent
moral leader. The question now, however, is whether his conduct as
commander in chief meets fundamental standards of decency".
Benkler told the Guardian: "It is incumbent on us as citizens and
professors of law to say that enough is enough. We cannot allow
ourselves to behave in this way if we want America to remain a society
dedicated to human dignity and process of law."
He said Manning's conditions were being used "as a warning to future
whistleblowers" and added: "
I find it tragic that it is Obama's administration that is pursuing
whistleblowers and imposing this kind of treatment."
Ackerman pointed out that under the Pentagon's own rule book, the
Uniform Code of Military Justice, Manning's jailers could be liable to
prosecution for abusing him. Article 93 of the code says "any person
who is guilty of cruelty toward any person subject to his orders shall
be punished".
The list of professors [http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/03/statement-
on-private-mannings-detention.html" title="The list of almost 300
professors] who have signed the protest letter includes leading
figures from all the top US law schools, as well as prominent names
from other academic fields. Among them are Bill Clinton's former
labour secretary Robert Reich, President Theodore Roosevelt's great-
great-grandson Kermit Roosevelt, the former president of the American
Civil Liberties Union Norman Dorsen and the novelist Kwame Anthony
Appiah.
guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2011
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