Score: Donald Trump 1, President Barack Obama 0.

Long-form Birth Certificate PDF on White House website.

Chinese Credit Ratng Agency Downgrades USA

Read report here.

Document of the Week: Wikileaks Guantanamo Files

Read them here. From the introduction:

Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 063), a Saudi regarded as the planned 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, was subjected to a specific torture program at Guantánamo, approved by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. This consisted of 20-hour interrogations every day, over a period of several months, and various other "enhanced interrogation techniques," which severely endangered his health. Variations of these techniques then migrated to other prisoners in Guantánamo (and to Abu Ghraib), and in January 2009, just before George W. Bush left office, Susan Crawford, a retired judge and a close friend of Dick Cheney and David Addington, who was appointed to oversee the military commissions at Guantánamo as the convening authority, told Bob Woodward that she had refused to press charges against al-Qahtani, because, as she said, "We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture." As a result, his numerous statements about other prisoners must be regarded as worthless.

Abd al-Hakim Bukhari (ISN 493), a Saudi imprisoned by al-Qaeda as a spy, who was liberated by US forces from a Taliban jail before being sent, inexplicably, to Guantánamo (along with four other men liberated from the jail) is regarded in the files as a member of al-Qaeda, and a trustworthy witness.

Abd al-Rahim Janko (ISN 489), a Syrian Kurd, tortured by al-Qaeda as a spy and then imprisoned by the Taliban along with Abd al-Hakim Bukhari, above, is also used as a witness, even though he was mentally unstable. As his assessment in June 2008 stated, "Detainee is on a list of high-risk detainees from a health perspective ... He has several chronic medical problems. He has a psychiatric history of substance abuse, depression, borderline personality disorder, and prior suicide attempt for which he is followed by behavioral health for treatment."

These are just some of the most obvious cases, but alert readers will notice that they are cited repeatedly in what purports to be the government's evidence, and it should, as a result, be difficult not to conclude that the entire edifice constructed by the government is fundamentally unsound, and that what the Guantánamo Files reveal, primarily, is that only a few dozen prisoners are genuinely accused of involvement in terrorism.

The rest, these documents reveal on close inspection, were either innocent men and boys, seized by mistake, or Taliban foot soldiers, unconnected to terrorism. Moreover, many of these prisoners were actually sold to US forces, who were offering bounty payments for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects, by their Afghan and Pakistani allies -- a policy that led ex-President Musharraf to state, in his 2006 memoir, In the Line of Fire, that, in return for handing over 369 terror suspects to the US, the Pakistani government “earned bounty payments totalling millions of dollars.”

Uncomfortable facts like these are not revealed in the deliberations of the Joint Task Force, but they are crucial to understanding why what can appear to be a collection of documents confirming the government's scaremongering rhetoric about Guantánamo -- the same rhetoric that has paralyzed President Obama, and revived the politics of fear in Congress -- is actually the opposite: the anatomy of a colossal crime perpetrated by the US government on 779 prisoners who, for the most part, are not and never have been the terrorists the government would like us to believe they are.

Happy Easter!

"Let Bradley Manning Go!" Singers Disrupt Obama Event

They sang this song:

Dear Mr. President we honor you today sir

Each of us brought you $5,000

It takes a lot of Benjamins to run a campaign

I paid my dues, where's our change?

We'll vote for you in 2012, yes that's true

Look at the Republicans -- what else can we do?

Even though we don't know if we'll retain our liberties

In what you seem content to call a free society

Yes it's true that Terry Jones is legally free

To burn a people's holy book in shameful effigy

But at another location in this country

Alone in a 6x12 cell sits Bradley

23 hours a day (and) night

The 5th and 8th Amendments say this kind of thing ain't right

We paid our dues, where's our change?

Michael Maren on Greg Mortenson's Unworthy Cause

From Michael Maren's blog:

A lot of the hand wringing over the Greg Mortenson scandal has been a lament over the damage he has done to the “worthy” cause of building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  But the cause is crap, and the faster Greg and his foundation disappear the better.

What the 60 Minutes piece made clear is that what The Central Asia Institute does primarily is build buildings.  Call them schools. Call them warehouses. Call them what you want, but a building is NOT a school. A building is a monument. A building gives you something made of stones to show your donors.  But you don’t need a building to have a school. 

You need teachers. You need books. You need a community’s dedication to educating its children. If a community does not have the resources to build a school in the first place, it will not have to resources to maintain it. As the empty school buildings attest, CAI was not paying for teachers and administrators to run the schools.  They were paying for bricks and mortar — They were investing in their own fund raising.

For a school or any development project to be successful, it must evolve from the strong desires of a community. The community must be able to dedicate the resources necessary to carry out the project. Of course, these communities can’t build school buildings, but they hire a teacher and buy a few books. The evolution process is slow. It requires a huge shift in attitudes and priorities. Placing a building in a community doesn’t accomplish any of this.

Plopping a building into a community doesn’t change anything except the landscape. It makes donors feel good. It gives the charities something to photograph for their brochures.  But in the end it’s all just a pile of rocks. Good riddance Greg Mortenson and your self-serving, self rightous crusade.

Bill Black: Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum (Let Justice be Done, Though the Heavens Fall)

Bill Black: Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum (Let Justice be Done, Though the Heavens Fall)

William Black on the Financial Crisis

From Marketplace:

RYSSDAL: Well then to the question I think a lot of people have, and especially after reading the piece in The Times today: Why hasn't anybody gone to jail?

BLACK: Well little people have gone to jail. And of course the answer is they haven't looked.

RYSSDAL: They, regulators?

BLACK: Well, good point. They, the regulators and they, the FBI, have not investigated, which is why this trifecta was necessary. If you go back to the savings and loan crisis, when we had the inevitable national commission to look at the causes, they had available to them in the public records, a thousand successful felony prosecutions, several thousand successful enforcement actions, and about 800 successful civil suits. And that provided all kinds of facts. Nothing like that exists

RYSSDAL: What about the argument, though, that the financial system is so fragile still, and these cases so complicated, that we can't really tear things apart with substantive investigations and prosecutions because it will all fall apart again?

BLACK: Yeah, that's an excellent point. We should leave felons in charge of our largest financial institutions as a means of achieving financial stability.

RYSSDAL: See, that's funny because I was expecting you to come back with -- I don't know, JPMorgan earned $5 billion last quarter. How shaky can they be?

BLACK: Well, they didn't earn $5 billion. What we did was change the accounting rules to hide the losses and then we did an amazing amount of off-budget sheet stuff through the Fed. But if you note, you'll see that most of the recent earnings were because they reduced their loss reserves, which is exactly how they created fictional income during the run up to the crisis.

RYSSDAL: What do you think, though, of the Dodd-Frank financial reform regulations out there?

BLACK: Well it wasn't designed to deal with the causes of the crisis. It doesn't deal with causes of the crisis. It won't prevent future crises.

RYSSDAL: So have we wasted this crisis?

BLACK: Yes, in the sense that you're supposed to learn from them. We're not learning the right lessons. In fact, we're learning the wrong lessons. And that kind of failure to learn is almost always due to ideology getting in the way of facts. We've got to get back to American pragmatism, use what works. And boy, this current system does not work.

RYSSDAL: William Black teaches law and economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Thanks a lot.

Jon Krakauer's Three Cups of Deceit, about Greg Mortenson

A new e-book, available for download from Byliner.com.

Happy Passover!

Michael Maren: Is 3 Cups of Tea a Fraud?

Michael Maren writes:

The feel-good foreign aid story of the decade may be an elaborate hoax. The man whose best selling book has been required reading in grade schools around the country appears to be a liar, liar, pants on fire con artist. (Two years ago my son’s entire school read the book.)

“Significantly, Mortenson’s origin story — of being saved by a remote village in Afghanistan and promising to build a school for them — appears to be a fabrication.”

The man who Mortenson identified as one of his Taliban captors is in fact a research director of a respected think tank in Islamabad.

“And according to “60 Minutes,” Mortenson’s charity, the Central Asia Institute, has spent more money in the the U.S. talking about education in Pakistan and Afghanistan than actually building and supporting schools there.”

If even some of these allegations are true, Mortenson’s transgression makes James Frey’s fabrications look like piddling inaccuracies. In the end, who cares if Frey made up his story? Oprah had her feelings hurt and a lot of inspiration-seeking readers of memoir were tricked into reading a novel. I expect that Mortenson will argue, eventually, that he’s done a lot of good for the people of Afghanistan, that his ends justify his means. But now, even his ends need to be called into question.

And in any case, the ends don’t justify the means. And it does matter if his we-are-the-world take on the helping impoverished people is a fiction. Because there are real people out there with real needs and the world has a moral obligation to do something about it, not just get the warm and fuzzies over a self-created hero of charity like Greg Mortenson.

LATE BREAKING: From Mortenson “I stand by the information conveyed in my book,” … “and by the value of CAI’s work in empowering local communities to build and operate schools that have educated more than 60,000 students.”

Dear Greg, and what’s your message to the millions of American students who read your book? It’s okay to lie and make up stories to turn yourself into a hero?

In addition: Mortenson was slated to win the $100,000.00 Grawemeyer Education prize from the University of Louisville in September.

Time Mag: “Looks like Mortenson’s writing has the potential to be shattered into a million little pieces.”

BTW, I wrote about Greg Mortenson and his relationship with the US military in Afghanistan, personified by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, in July 2009. I said at the time:

Admiral Michael G. Mullen gives serious cause to worry about our military strategy in Central Asia, if he really has fallen for the self-serving promotional pablum Greg Mortensen has peddled to gullible customers with such success in his best-sellers...

For some reason, 60 Minutes failed to mention Mortenson's funding by the US Department of Defense.

Latino Veterans React to Proposed Ken Burns PBS Vietnam Show

Defend the Honor
April 16, 2011
Defend The Honor Advisory on Ken Burns/PBS

Attention Latino and Latina Vietnam War veterans, families and extended community

Yes, we know - our loyal Defenders of the Honor have been sending us messages about Ken Burns and PBS reaching out to Latino and Latina Vietnam War veterans. Unlike the 2007 Ken Burns/PBS WWII documentary debacle that left out the Latino and Latina experience, this time they might have a different interest in filming a documentary on the Vietnam War. Many of our Defenders of the Honor are rightfully outraged that Burns, who had a track record of excluding Latinos in his work long before the 2007 WWII documentary, is still being allowed to document an important event in American history. Many feel that he has failed repeatedly and that he should never again be trusted. (He still thinks the protests of 2007 were a "misunderstanding" on our part. And one high-placed public broadcasting official called it a "dust-up" - an indication that she still does not get it.) They also question the sincerity of PBS' commitment to diversity, after the disastrous handling of The War.

Defend the Honor welcomes attempts to include stories of Latinos and Latinas in our nation's historical narrative. However, DTH also believes that those who choose to collaborate with Florentine Films, Burns' production company-- or with any others-- should proceed with caution.  

Here is the back story: On March 28, 2011, the Associated Press reported "PBS said the 10-12 hour film by Burns and longtime partner Lynn Novick will be broadcast in 2016. Burns said his film will tell the human stories of Americans and Vietnamese affected by the war, along with those of Americans who protested against it.  He said that four decades after the war's end, most people have opinions about it but few truly know its history."

It remains to be seen if the "human stories of Americans" will follow the same path as THE WAR film.  In his funding request proposals for the 2007 WWII film, Burns is specific on what the film would focus on.  His proposal stated: "The series will celebrate American diversity, telling the stories of ordinary Americans (from our four chosen towns) of many different ethnic and racial backgrounds, individuals who are both representative and singular. In doing so, the film will demonstrate the war's indisputable impact on the transformation of America into a more perfect union, while at the same time acknowledging the difficult challenges faced by ethnic minorities in a segregated society."  Until Defend the Honor and others protested the exclusion of Latinos, Ken Burns did not find Latino and Latina WWII veterans to be "ordinary Americans" who fought in the war, much less helped in the "transformation of America into a more perfect union."  In the end, in response to the protests, other than several minutes of pasted on images of Hispanics, Burns left our community out of his final public/corporate funded film.  The accompanying book had no mention of Latinos. 

Knowing of Burn's history of omitting our rightful place in history relative to  our military service record in wars and military conflicts around the world, will our "American" Latino and Latina Vietnam War veterans and their families,  respond to Ken Burns/PBS?  Maybe yes, maybe no. 

The questions, concerns and reservations surrounding Ken Burns venture into the Vietnam War are many, especially when it comes to the "human stories" of Latino and Latina veterans who served during the Vietnam War era, as well as those involved in the Chicano movement who protested the war.

We must never forget that over 170,000 Latinos and Latinas served or fought in Vietnam, of which, more than 3,070 made the ultimate sacrifice. Thousands more were wounded, exposed to Agent Orange and/or suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

The toll taken on our Vietnam veterans and their families continue to be felt to this day.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas where veterans have been demanding the building of a veteran hospital.  The absence of a veteran hospital forces veterans to travel 250 miles to San Antonio for medical treatment.

We have thousands of Vietnam War stories that need to be told by filmmakers, writers, playwrights and ordinary Latinos and Latinas who are interested in remembering our warriors.

We encourage everyone concerned with any and all facets of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Latinos and Latina community to voice their opinions, personal stories and documentation on family members who were directly or indirectly impacted by this war.

We issue the following cautions:

·         All material written by individuals about the Vietnam War should be copyrighted before it is released to Ken Burns, PBS, businesses or corporations seeking to represent our Latino and Latina veterans and families in books, film or other media.
·         Do not enter into a relationship with the above mentioned entities without a formal contract that specifies ownership of intellectual property associated with any and all material related to the Latino and Latina Vietnam War experience. 
·         Do not allow your material or personal story to be placed in a secondary role in any Vietnam War film production as was done with Latinos by Ken Burns The WAR. His excuse was that he had "artistic license" to do whatever he pleased.
·         Review your material and interest in sharing your stories with existing Latino and Latina veteran's organizations, filmmakers and book authors so that they may assist and guide you with information and resources related to your Vietnam War experience.
·         Communicate openly with your state or national legislative representatives if you feel your material on the history, courage and sacrifice of our Latino and Latina Vietnam War veteran is not being treated with respect and dignity by a public funded entity.

Defend The Honor encourages all Latinos and Latinas to write and document as many Vietnam War stories as possible so that no one can deny our existence or service to our country. 

Furthermore, we express our profound thanks to those few who have written books, archived stories, produced films and theater productions on the experiences of our Latino and Latina Vietnam War veterans.

 

Gus Chavez and Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, co-founders and co-chairs, Defend theHonor 

Why I Don't Believe Thomas Friedman

On February 26, 1999, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman published an anti-Amazon.com article hyping Lyle Bowlin of Cedar Falls, Iowa as an alternative bookseller. Friedman declared:

Well, if you really want to be ''concerned'' about the levels of some of these profitless Internet stocks, such as Amazon.com, you should pay less attention to Mr. Greenspan and more attention to what's going on in a small house in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

There, a single Iowa family, headed by Lyle Bowlin, is re-creating Amazon.com in a spare bedroom. I tell you this not because they're an immediate threat to Amazon.com, but to underscore just how easy it is to compete against Amazon.com, and why therefore I'm dubious that Amazon and many other Internet retailers will ever generate the huge profits that their stock prices suggest.

Luckily, in 1999. I was a satisfied Amazon author, and a satisfied Amazon customer. So I bought some Amazon.com stock. This was contrary to Friedman's advice:

Because his profit margins are razor-thin, Mr. Bowlin, like Amazon, needs repeat buyers. Amazon gets them by offering useful information about books. Mr. Bowlin does it by offering any government-certified nonprofit organization a donation of 10 percent of the purchase price of any book that any nonprofit or its members buy through him.

So the next time your broker tells you that this or that Internet retailing stock is actually worth some crazy multiples, just think for a moment about how many Lyle Bowlins there already are out there, and how many more there will be, to eat away at the profit margins of whatever Internet retailer you can imagine. It only costs them $150 a month and they can do it as a hobby!

Or think about it like this: For about the cost of one share of Amazon.com, you can be Amazon.com.

I was among those who posted comments on the NY Times website taking issue with Friedman's analysis. He had so many complaints that the Times published a follow-up on March 9, 1999:

I recently wrote a column about Lyle Bowlin, who, for about $150 a month, had managed to put together a Web site that could compete with Amazon.com for selling books. Mr. Bowlin was underselling Ama zon.com (and making a profit!) while running the whole operation out of a spare bedroom in his home in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Well, the column elicited the usual range of skeptical responses from experts, who argued that Mr. Bowlin's operation was just a fluke, or that he wasn't calculating his costs properly, or that Amazon.com would soon crush him and all other would-be little-guy competitors.

Well, to all of you I say: YOU'RE WRONG.

Lyle Bowlin's internet bookshop, hyped by Friedman (reportedly a family relation of some kind) went out of business. But Amazon didn't. It's trading today at $179 per share. Amazon not only dominates the book business, it is a major player in the rapidly growing cloud computing field. Amazon is currently valued at approximately $80 billion.

One title you won't see on a Thomas Friedman book, I imagine: Money Talks, B.S. Walks.

outside the box: michelle rhee: a glossarhee, 2nd edition

outside the box: michelle rhee: a glossarhee, 2nd edition: "Rheewrite:  to write something again in order to embellish or falsify an existing document. Rheelay:  to receive and pass on misinfo..."

Agustin Blazquez at Emory University

Here's my friend, the leading Cuban-American documentary filmmaker you've never heard of, presenting CHE: The Other Side of an Icon to Dr. Mary Grabar's class on March 16th.

His film is now on sale on DVD at Amazon.com:
Here's my review:

*****
When working as an actor in the Cuban film industry as a young man, filmmaker Agustin Blazquez met Che Guevara personally. The revolutionary legend had come to shake hands with the cast and crew of his film, and Blazquez was among those granted an audience. Not too long afterwards, Guevara was dead in the jungles of Latin America...and Blazquez subequently fled as a political exile--a story I hope he will one day tell on film, as it is as gripping as any novel. So he knows about Che, both as a Cuban culture worker for the revolution, and later as a refugee from Communism.

For his seventh documentary on Cuba, his beloved homeland, Blazquez compares the legend of Che with the reality of his legacy. Although Cuban-American audiences have been exposed to this side of Che before, much of it was new and surprising to me, a non-Cuban viewer.

Blazquez traces Che's route from Argentine leftism, to Cuban guerilla warfare, to execution of prisoners, to international terrorism. Underlying the film is a convincing case that Che Guevara is a spiritual father to Osama bin Laden. As evidence, Blazquez documents a foiled Guevara plot to bomb New York City in the 1960s, that had it succeeded, would have been America's first 9/11.

The film is powerful, compelling, and should be seen by anyone interested in Cuba, international terrorism--or the terrible power of an iconic image.

Cisco Stock Chart After Flip Death Sentence

From Yahoo! Finance, this snapshot of market reaction to Cisco CEO John Chambers' decision to kill the Flip camera:

Mobile Opportunity: The Real Lesson of Cisco's Billion-Dollar Flip Debacle

Mobile Opportunity: The Real Lesson of Cisco's Billion-Dollar Flip Debacle:

Cisco is an outstanding company, and an excellent place to work. But it screams respectable enterprise hardware supplier. To someone from a funky consumer company, going there would feel like having your heart ripped out and replaced with a brick.

Then there were the business practices to contend with. As an enterprise company, Cisco is used to long product development cycles, direct sales, and high margins to support all of its infrastructure. A consumer business thrives on fast product cycles, sales through retailers, and low margins used to drive volume. Almost nothing in Cisco's existing business practices maps well to a consumer company. But it's not clear that Cisco understood any of that.

The transition to Cisco management happened at a terrible time for Flip. Just when the company's best people should have been focused obsessively on their next generation of camera goodness, their management was given new responsibilities, and Cisco started "helping out" with ideas like using Flip cameras for videoconferencing -- something that had nothing to do with Flip's original customers and mission.

If Pure Digital had remained independent, would it have innovated quickly enough? Maybe not; it's very hard for a young company to think beyond the product that made it successful. But merging with Cisco, and going through all of the associated disruptions, probably made the task almost impossible.

I'm sure that as the Flip team members get their layoff notices, we'll start to hear a lot more inside scoop. But in the meantime, this announcement by Cisco looks like a classic case of an enterprise company that thought it knew how to make consumer products, and turned out to be utterly wrong.

That's not an unusual story. It's almost impossible for any enterprise company to be successful in consumer, just as successful consumer companies usually fail in enterprise. The habits and business practices that make them a winner in one market doom them in the other.

The lesson in all of this: If you're at an enterprise company that wants to enter the consumer market, or vice-versa, you need to wall off the new business completely from your existing company. Different management, different financial model, different HR and legal.

You might ask, if the businesses need to be separated so thoroughly, why even try to mix them? Which is the real point.

The other lesson of the Flip failure is that we should all be very skeptical when a big enterprise company says it's going consumer. Hey Intel, do you really think you can design phones? (link) Have you already forgotten Intel Play? (link)

I'll give the final word to Harry McCracken (link): "You can be one of the most successful maker of enterprise technology products the world has ever known, but that doesn’t mean your instincts will carry over to the consumer market. They’re really different, and few companies have ever been successful in both."

Flip Video Camera Founder on Cisco's Death Sentence

Jon Kaplan, former Flip CEO, interviewed by Kara Swisher, of Boomtown.com from a link on the Wall Street Journal Venture Capital Blog. Kaplan says a high point for Flip was when President Obama's daughters used his camera at the inauguration in 2009:

Congressional Budget Deal Fully Funds NPR

From Current Blog:

As expected, CPB lost digital funding, recession aid to stations and radio interconnection money in the budget agreement for the remainder of the fiscal year, finally hammered out last week on Capitol Hill. The bill, H.R. 1473, zeros out $25 million in station "fiscal stabilization" grants and $25 million for replacement and upgrade of the radio infrastructure, and reduces digital spending from $36 million to $6 million. There's also a small — .2 percent — across-the-board trim for all non-defense discretionary spending. Main appropriation for FY11, $445 million. One reported sticking point in the contentious negotiations was a provision to prohibit federal funding for NPR; the Democrats managed to kill that.

Aaaaaaargh...

Although I predicted this would happen on KCRW's "To the Point" radio program hosted by Warren Olney on February 15, 2011, I'm disappointed to have been proven right.

DOCUMENT OF THE WEEK: Glenn Greenwald on Bradley Manning & Barack Obama

From Salon.com:

For that reason, as The Guardian reports this morning, a letter signed by "more than 250 of America's most eminent legal scholars" that "includes leading figures from all the top US law schools, as well as prominent names from other academic fields" -- featuring "Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America's foremost liberal authority on constitutional law"; who "taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign"; and "joined the Obama administration last year as a legal adviser in the justice department, a post he held until three months ago" -- not only denounces Manning's detention but also the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner's personal responsibility for it:

[Tribe] 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. . . . 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. . . .

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. . . .

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."

Professor Benkler, echoing the point that I've repeatedly emphasized as I believe it to be the most important one, said "Manning's conditions were being used 'as a warning to future whistleblowers'." Indeed, Manning's treatment lacks even a pretense of justification; it -- just like the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistle-blowers -- is clearly meant to threaten and intimidate future individuals of conscience who, like Manning, might consider exposing government deceit, corruption and illegality: one of the few remaining avenues for learning what the Government does.

Aside from what conduct like this reveals about Obama, it also severely undermines the ability of the U.S. to exercise any shred of moral leadership in the world.

Text of the letter, as published in the New York Review of Books, below:

Private Manning’s Humiliation
APRIL 28, 2011
Bruce Ackerman and Yochai Benkler

Bradley Manning is the soldier charged with leaking US government documents to Wikileaks. He is currently detained under degrading and inhumane conditions that are illegal and immoral.

For nine months, Manning has been confined to his cell for twenty-three hours a day. During his one remaining hour, he can walk in circles in another room, with no other prisoners present. He is not allowed to doze off or relax during the day, but must answer the question “Are you OK?” verbally and in the affirmative every five minutes. At night, he is awakened to be asked again “Are you OK?” every time he turns his back to the cell door or covers his head with a blanket so that the guards cannot see his face. During the past week he was forced to sleep naked and stand naked for inspection in front of his cell, and for the indefinite future must remove his clothes and wear a “smock” under claims of risk to himself that he disputes.

The sum of the treatment that has been widely reported is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against punishment without trial. If continued, it may well amount to a violation of the criminal statute against torture, defined as, among other things, “the administration or application…of… procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.”

Private Manning has been designated as an appropriate subject for both Maximum Security and Prevention of Injury (POI) detention. But he asserts that his administrative reports consistently describe him as a well-behaved prisoner who does not fit the requirements for Maximum Security detention. The brig psychiatrist began recommending his removal from Prevention of Injury months ago. These claims have not been publicly contested. In an Orwellian twist, the spokesman for the brig commander refused to explain the forced nudity “because to discuss the details would be a violation of Manning’s privacy.”

The administration has provided no evidence that Manning’s treatment reflects a concern for his own safety or that of other inmates. Unless and until it does so, there is only one reasonable inference: this pattern of degrading treatment aims either to deter future whistleblowers, or to force Manning to implicate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a conspiracy, or both.

If Manning is guilty of a crime, let him be tried, convicted, and punished according to law. But his treatment must be consistent with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. There is no excuse for his degrading and inhumane pretrial punishment. As the State Department’s P.J. Crowley put it recently, they are “counterproductive and stupid.” And yet Crowley has now been forced to resign for speaking the plain truth.

The Wikileaks disclosures have touched every corner of the world. Now the whole world watches America and observes what it does, not what it says.

President Obama 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. He should not merely assert that Manning’s confinement is “appropriate and meet[s] our basic standards,” as he did recently. He should require the Pentagon publicly to document the grounds for its extraordinary actions—and immediately end those that cannot withstand the light of day.

Bruce Ackerman
Yale Law School
New Haven, Connecticut

Yochai Benkler
Harvard Law School
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Additional Signers: Jack Balkin, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Alexander M. Capron, Norman Dorsen, Michael W. Doyle, Randall Kennedy, Mitchell Lasser, Sanford Levinson, David Luban, Frank I. Michelman, Robert B. Reich, Kermit Roosevelt, Kim Scheppele, Alec Stone Sweet, Laurence H. Tribe, and more than 250 others. A complete list of signers has been posted on the blog balkinization.

UPDATE: While Human Rights Watch has condemned other countries and leaders for similar types of torture and confinement, it has not to date condemned the Obama administration for Manning's treatment; instead, HRW has merely and meekly issued this press release asking for an explanation:

The US government should publicly explain the precise reasons behind extremely restrictive and possibly punitive and degrading treatment that Army Private First Class Bradley Manning alleges he has received while detained at the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, said Human Rights Watch.

Better call it "Human Rights Don't Watch."