State Department Spokesperson PJ Crowley resigned from the State Department last month after calling the detention conditions of alleged WikiLeaks leaker Pvt. Bradley Manning, which critics have called abusive, "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid."
Yesterday, the Pentagon announced they were moving Manning from the brig in the Marine base at Quantico to pretrial confinement in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The move will mean that Manning will be held in medium-security conditions, will be able to interact with other pre-trial confinees, and will have three hours of recreation time a day. Those conditions are considerably less austere than the ones described by Manning's defense attorney David Coombs, who said Manning's imprisonment in maximum-security conditions under Prevention of Injury watch was equivalent to 23-hour isolation. That doesn't mean Manning supporters are happy with the move -- yesterday the Bradley Manning Support Network shot out a press release accusing the Pentagon of trying to limit access to him by moving him across the country, while Coombs suggested the move was designed to avoid him filing a habeas petition.
Speaking to reporters yesterday, Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson said the move was not "a criticism of the pre-trial facility at Quantico," and emphasized that he believed the conditions at Quantico were "in compliance with legal and regulatory standards in all respects." Johnson said that Manning was being moved because an evaluation of his mental fitness to stand trial had been completed, and therefore his presence in the D.C. area was no longer necessary.
Officials at the briefing yesterday also said that the decision to move Manning to Fort Leavenworth was at least in part based on mental-health reasons -- Johnson said that "without commenting on Private Manning's particular situation, mental health support, mental health infrastructure was a consideration in looking at Leavenworth and other facilities."
Nonetheless, it's difficult to imagine that the criticism from human-rights and civil-liberties groups like the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, as well as withering editorials from newspapers like the New York Times -- didn't factor into the move. Undersecretary of the Army Joseph Westphal had a telling answer when asked why DoD officials felt the move was in Manning's best interest:
I would say -- I would say -- and I'll shift it back to Colonel [Dawn] Hilton, but I would say the openness in the facility. If you -- when you look at the [fact sheet] and you look at the differences in the place where he will reside, it's more open. He's got more space, more ability to interact with other prisoners. He will eat with them. It will depend a lot on the evaluation that they will do at the very beginning. But it is a place where if you're going to be confined for a longer period of time, you have the ability to interact. You have the ability to exercise, to move around. And that is just a -- the nature of the facility itself.
Now if you go back and look at Crowley's remarks, he's not really alleging wrongdoing on the part of the leadership at Quantico. When he spoke to Ben Smith, Crowley suggested he was concerned that Manning's treatment was undermining U.S. ability to act as a credible voice on issues like the humane treatment of prisoners.
The move to Fort Leavenworth seems designed to alleviate criticism of what Glenn Greenwald described as the "inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation," he's been held in thus far. In that sense, DoD seems to have come around to Crowley's point of view.
