In any event, I've been in the hospital since Wednesday and will likely be here at least a few more days, so there won't be any postings for a little while longer.  Things aren't getting substantially worse, which is good, but they're not really getting better either, and until that happens, this lovely little hospital room will continue to be my home.  The wi-fi access provided by the hospital is both a blessing and a curse; I'd likely go even crazier than I am if I were confined here without it, but I'm neither permitted nor able to work at all, and there have been all sorts of things over the last week that I've had to fight not to write about -- like this (the video) and this and this and this and this and this.  Ultimately, though, a miserable medical condition combined with a frustrating uncertainty over its resolution makes resisting that temptation, and following the advice of one's doctors, rather easy.

Feel free to use the comment section here for all reasonable discussions.  And thanks to those who have emailed well wishes.  I haven't been able to answer any of those -- or virtually any of my other email over the last week -- but it is appreciated.

Yesterday, MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan hosted a segment on the extreme, prolonged isolation in which Bradley Manning has been kept for eight months now, despite having been convicted of nothing.   He had on his panel a "Democratic strategist," a "Republican strategist," and "a Washington insider."  Ratigan tried without any success to get them to understand why putting someone in a cage alone for 23 hours a day under extremely repressive conditions was unjust and intolerable.  Begin at the 1:20 mark -- right after Ratigan introduces his panel -- and see if you can identify who the Republican is, who the Democrat is, and who the "Washington insider" is; I'd submit it's impossible.  Once your guesses are in, go back and watch the beginning of the segment and grade yourself -- on the honor system.  It's the Joys of Bipartisanship: 

One other aspect of this bipartisanship quiz -- an extra credit essay, if you will (and the flu I referenced yesterday turned out to be anything but "mild," so posting may be quite sparse over the next few days): yesterday, Atrios referenced the snide, Red-State-mimicking derision of prolonged isolation and solitary confinement by former Obama campaign aide Joy Reid (which I noted in the update to yesterday's post), and then asked this extremely relevant question:

As I wallow in my flu-induced misery, I'd be genuinely interested in hearing answers to that question.

 

UPDATE:  Here's a very strange, and hopefully positive, set of events: two days ago, NBC News reported that government officials acknowledged that the Marine commander of the Quantico brig had violated regulations by imposing "suicide watch" conditions on Manning both punitively and without the recommendations of psychiatric experts.  Yesterday, CNN reported -- then retracted -- a story that a formal investigation had commenced into the commander's actions.  Today, CBS News reports that the Quantico commander is now being replaced; CBS certainly appears to believe that it's related to the treatment of Manning, though the Pentagon is denying this.  Whatever else is true, far more attention has been generated for the conditions of Manning's detention than I expected when I first wrote about them.

 

UPDATE II:  On his Fox News show today, Andrew Napolitano -- who often exhibited strong civil libertarian leanings during the Bush years -- today denounced the Government's harassment of David House for visiting Manning, as well as the treatment of Manning itself; it begins at the 1:00 mark:

If true, that would leave the Obama DOJ with two options:  (1) prosecute WikiLeaks and Assange for doing nothing more than receiving and publishing classified information:  an act that is simply not a crime in the U.S. and could not be prosecuted as one without criminalizing much of investigative journalism (indeed, it's no different than what The New York Times did in this case and countless other cases), or (2) defy political pressure, honor the First Amendment, and accept that Wikileaks did nothing criminal.

 

(2) The DOJ's apparent failure to find the evidence it needs to prosecute WikiLeaks underscores the reasons for the increasingly inhumane treatment to which Bradley Manning is being subjected.  It's long been clear -- and reported -- that the Obama DOJ desperately needs Manning to incriminate Assange in order to be able to prosecute him (by, for instance, providing the Manning-Assange link that the DOJ is unable to prove).  The harsh, punitive conditions under which Manning are being held is designed -- like most detainee abuse -- to force him to say what his captors want him to say (yesterday, Amnesty USA followed Amnesty International in denouncing Manning's detention conditions as "inhumane").

Not only did Quantico officials this weekend contrive reasons to deny Manning his only real reprieve from isolation -- periodic Saturday visits from his friend David House -- but they also last week made his conditions even harsher by placing him on suicide watch even though three separate brig psychiatrists said it was unwarranted.  That decision resulted in this:

The suicide risk assignment meant that PFC Manning was required to remain in his cell for 24 hours a day. He was stripped of all clothing with the exception of his underwear. His prescription eyeglasses were taken away from him. He was forced to sit in essential blindness with the exception of the times that he was reading or given limited television privileges. During those times, his glasses were returned to him.

But because of all the light that has been shined on the issue of Manning's detention, the Government has now been forced to publicly admit that the imposition of these conditions was not only improper, but punitive.  From Miklaszewski:

The officials told NBC News [] that a U.S. Marine commander did violate procedure when he placed Manning on "suicide watch" last week.

Military officials said Brig Commander James Averhart did not have the authority to place Manning on suicide watch for two days last week, and that only medical personnel are allowed to make that call.

The official said that after Manning had allegedly failed to follow orders from his Marine guards, Averhart declared Manning a "suicide risk." Manning was then placed on suicide watch, which meant he was confined to his cell, stripped of most of his clothing and deprived of his reading glasses. . . 

The order was lifted once Manning's lawyer filed a formal complaint, but clearly, the mentality of brig officials is to punish Manning -- who has been convicted of nothing -- and make life as inhumane and unbearable for him as possible, even if it means violating their own rules and abusing the oppression of "suicide watch" to torment him further.   None of this will deter the blind authoritarians among us -- the long-time marchers on the Right and their newfound Obama-apologist comrades -- from citing pronouncements from brig and other military and government officials as though they're unchallengeable Gospel (that's what authoritarians, by definition, do), but for anyone minimally rational, this episode will underscore the need for serious skepticism with such claims.

The one silver lining from all of this has been the surprisingly substantial attention now being paid to the inhumane conditions of Manning's detention.  Yesterday, ABC's Jake Tapper asked Robert Gibbs about it; MSNBC yesterday featured an excellent interview with Jane Hamsher about what is being done to Manning; the Amnesty and U.N. actions have brought even more attention; and as part of Miklaszewski's featured report last night, he noted that "U.S. military officials also strongly denied allegations that Manning . . . . has been 'tortured' and held in 'solitary confinement' without due process."  This has become a real issue, as it should be.

 

(3) There's an emerging theme circulating in some precincts that those protesting the conditions of Manning's detention are somehow acting improperly because they ignore -- and even implicitly endorse -- all the other cases of prisoners in the U.S. being held in prolonged isolation.  This claim was first concocted by James Ridgeway and Jean Casella in a recent Op-Ed in The Guardian, in which they glaringly fail to identify a single person guilty of these accusations, opting instead for the consummately cowardly and slimy reliance on the "some say" strawmen tactic favored by mendacious politicians.  Thus we find accusations hurled at the following, all without names, citations or even links:  "many have argued . . . .  progressive commentators . . . these writers – and their readers, if comments are any measure . . . they depict . . . writers and readers make the point . . . . We have also seen articles suggesting. . . . " 

It's hard to overstate the intellectual dishonesty and cowardice of those who use this tactic (as always, if you defend yourself from these nameless accusations, the accusers will simply claim they didn't mean you; if you don't, the insinuation hangs over you).  As a general rule:  if you want to take issue with what someone has said, name them specifically and link to them (or at least cite and quote from the offending article) so that there's accountability and a way for readers to check the veracity of your claims.

This accusation is necessary to address because it's now become a popular means among Obama apologists for discrediting objections to Manning's detention (and, in the hands of some of the Internet's most bottom-scraping, Obama-revering commenters, has even morphed into a claim that the focus on Manning is racially motivated: i.e., he's white, hence the unique concern over his treatment).  It's also necessary to address because this Guardian Op-Ed does link to my original article reporting on Manning's conditions -- not to necessarily suggest that I stand accused of these crimes of selective concern, but as an example of Manning's detention being "discussed, lamented and protested throughout the left-leaning blogosphere."  I just want to comprehensively address this little smear one time before it proliferates further:

First, those voicing these accusations have apparently never heard of someone named "Jose Padilla," who was mercilessly tortured during the Bush years -- and psychologically destroyed -- from years of solitary confinement without being charged with a crime; back in October, 2006, I detailed the prolonged solitary confinement -- the "torture" -- to which Padilla was subjected ("The base ingredient in Mr. Padilla’s torture was stark isolation for a substantial portion of his captivity," quoting his lawyer's brief), and -- along with countless others now protesting Manning's conditions -- I denounced this treatment as "one of the most despicable and outright un-American travesties the U.S. Government has perpetrated for a long time."  Indeed, I wrote endlessly about Padilla's plight, and that was roughly four years before anyone heard the name "Bradley Manning." 

Second, in March, 2009, Sen. Jim Webb introduced legislation to fundamentally reform America's Prison State and prison conditions in the U.S.; I publicized that bill and hailed Webb's focus on what I called "disgustingly harsh conditions inside prisons" as "genuinely courageous and principled."  Third, both before I ever heard of Manning and every time I've written about him, I've denounced prolonged isolation in general as not only inhumane, but torture.  In June, 2009 -- roughly a year before I ever heard the name "Bradley Manning" -- here's what I wrote:

Prolonged solitary confinement is absolutely a form of torture, and while it's unknown whether Shalit was subjected to that, extreme isolation and prolonged solitary confinement are prominents features of America's prisoner system -- not only as part of the "War on Terror," but our domestic prison system as well.

The first time I wrote about Manning, I described the "inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation . . . at America's Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado" and reviewed the full body of literature on how solitary confinement destroys the brain.  When I wrote about Manning last month, I noted that "the U.S. is one of the world's most prolific practitioners of prolonged solitary confinement" and at least 25,000 prisoners in America were subjected to it, and then wrote: "Prolonged solitary confinement is inhumane, horrendous and gratuitous even when applied to those convicted of heinous crimes."  Fourth, I just finished writing a soon-to-be-released book on America's two-tiered justice system that devotes substantial attention -- including an entire long chapter -- on the way in which America's Prison State is profoundly oppressive based on race and class lines, with a focus on the inhumane conditions of imprisonment.

The notion that objections to Manning's conditions are the by-product of newly discovered concerns or are due to his privileged or celebrated status is offensive in the extreme and, worse, demonstrably false (as the above citations prove).  Moreover, those of us whose work focuses on America's civil liberties abuses spend most of our time writing about the plight of ignored, forgotten, marginalized, powerless, invisible, demonized minorities (Gulet Mohamed, Maher Arar, Binyam Mohamed, Ali al-Marri, Chinese Uighurs, etc. etc.) and/or holding the world's most powerful factions accountable for systematic abuses of their authority. 

It's true that high-profile cases like Manning's can bring otherwise elusive attention to general problems (Gabrielle Giffords was hardly rare in being shot by an apparently deranged person, but that episode was highly publicized and thus seized on by gun policy and mental health advocates across the board to bring attention to their positions).  It's also true that the treatment of Manning raises disturbing issues not triggered by other prisoner abuse cases:  namely, it's designed to enable a radical attack on press freedoms (by coercing anti-WikiLeaks testimony) and is being carried out by high-level officials in the administration of a President who ran on a platform of ending detainee abuse.  And just like the death penalty in general is unjust when applied to convicted felons but worse when imposed on those convicted of no crime, subjecting someone to prolonged isolation who has been convicted of nothing and poses no danger raises additional issues not raised by doing that to a convicted felon who has proven himself a threat to others (even though they're both wrong). 

But whatever else is true, the very idea that this is some sort of new, boutique concern for those objecting to the conditions of Manning's detention is a pure fabrication.  What's being done to Manning is an absolute manifestation of the abuses of the National Security State, the Prison State and America's authoritarian culture that have been long protested by most of those now writing about Manning.

(4) For those in California, I'll be appearing at several events next week:  on Wednesday, February 2, I'll be at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, near Los Angeles, speaking about Obama's civil liberties record; on Thursday, February 3, I'll be speaking at Berkeley during the day on "Human Rights, Civil Liberties, and the War on Terror," and that night I'll be speaking at Stanford University on "the War on WikiLeaks and why it matters"; and on Friday, February 4, I'll be speaking in Palo Alto at an event of the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center on "Civil Liberties in a Time of Endless War."  I believe all events are open to the public and will post more details in a few days.

 

(5) I was on Lawrence O'Donnell's Last Word program last night -- its debut in the 8:00 p.m. time slot formerly occupied by Keith Olbermann -- discussing Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas' brazen politicization of their office.  The segment can be seen here:

 

UPDATE:  This is a perfect sign of the times.  Here's former Obama campaign press aide Joy Reid this morning on the controversy over Manning's detention:

And here's Red State on the same subject:

Leaving aside the extraordinary levels of dishonesty and/or denseness required to claim that the Manning controversy is about whether or not he has a pillow, the fact that an ex-Obama campaign aide and Red State diarists now sound exactly alike in mocking issues of detainee abuse and prolonged isolation says all one really needs to know about what has happened in these areas over the last two years.

On a separate note, The New York Times is now actively considering creating a system pioneered by WikiLeaks -- and recently adopted by Al Jazeera -- to allow whistleblowers to leak classified documents with full anonymity by uploading them to their site.  Media executives like Bill Keller can claim all they want that they're not like WikiLeaks, but the more they copy their methods and benefit from their work, the more their actions negate those protestations.

[Finally:  please note that it is Salon's excellent Art Department, and not me, who chooses and inserts the photographs that appear at the beginning of my columns; put another way, I'm not the one who decided to place a large photograph of myself at the top of this page.]

The harsh conditions imposed on PFC Manning also undermine the principle of the presumption of innocence, which should be taken into account in the treatment of any person under arrest or awaiting trial. We are concerned that the effects of isolation and prolonged cellular confinement . . . may, further, undermine his ability to assist in his defence and thus his right to a fair trial.

The letter follows a report from Manning's lawyer, former Lt. Col. David Coombs, that the conditions of his detention temporarily worsened in the past week, prompting a formal complaint under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  Amnesty's letter also follows a report that the U.N.'s leading official on torture is formally investigating the conditions of Manning's detention, a fact confirmed two weeks ago by The New York Times  ("the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, Juan E. Mendez, [] said he had submitted a formal inquiry about the soldier’s treatment to the State Department").  

Of course, caring what Amnesty International or the U.N. have to say about the conditions of America's detainees is so very 2004.  Now, such a concern is -- to borrow a phrase from Alberto Gonzales -- a quaint and obsolete relic of the past.

Relatedly, the ACLU has obtained new documents which shed more harsh light on the 190 War on Terror detainees who died in American custody.  Specifically, many of these documents -- autopsy reports and military investigations - - show that at least 25 to 30 of those cases were "unjustified homicides," i.e., murder.  It's long been known that many detainees were killed by their treatment during interrogation.  I wrote about many of these cases here over a year ago, and Gen. Barry McCaffrey has said:  "We tortured people unmercifully.  We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A."  But these new documents show that these deaths at the hands of U.S. captors were even more deliberate, brutal and widespread than previously known:

In one such case, a detainee was killed by an unnamed sergeant who walked into a room where the detainee was lying wounded "and assaulted him ... then shot him twice thus killing him," one of the investigating documents says. The sergeant than instructed the other soldiers present to lie about the incident. Later, the document says an unnamed corporal then shot the deceased detainee in the head after finding his corpse.

Appropriately, The Weekly Standard today has an interview with former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey in which he slams Eric Holder for the mere possibility that some of these detainee deaths will be criminally investigated, calling it a "witch hunt."  That view is not an aberration, of course.  The Brookings Institutions' Benjamin Wittes last week criticized the Obama DOJ for merely leaving open the possibility of prosecution for some of these CIA interrogators who were so sadistic and lawless that they even exceeded the boundaries of the torture permission slips given to them by the Bush DOJ.  Both Mukasey and Wittes are speaking for the consensus of America's political class.  They -- and it -- literally believe that anyone acting as part of the American government should be able to get away with murder -- which they'll argue in between sermons on the evils of other nations' human rights abuses and the need for the U.S. to "do more" to stop such abuses.

 

UPDATE:  As they have done several times before, Jane Hamsher today drove David House to visit Bradley Manning at the Quantico brig -- this time, as they announced ahead of time, House intended to deliver to brig officials a petition relating to Manning's detention conditions which has been signed by 42,000 people (only House is on the approved visitors list, so Hamsher typically drops him off, waits at a base McDonald's nearby [as she's been instructed to do], and then picks House up once his visit is done).  Today, they went to the brig and House attempted to enter, the same way as always, but, as of 1:45 2:15 pm EST, both of them have been detained for 45 minutes 1 hour and 20 minutes, and told that they are not permitted to leave or else they will be arrested.  They have now been told -- without explanation -- that they are not permitted to enter, and Hamsher's car is being towed off the brig's property and impounded.  Here is House's live Twitter feed sent during this episode (start at the bottom and read up):

And from Hamsher (read from bottom, up):

 

UPDATE II:  More from Hamsher:

The claim is that Hamsher has only electronic rather than printed proof of car insurance -- the same proof she's had every other time she brought House there, though without a petition -- and they have thus impounded her car.  They also, though, are refusing -- without any explanation -- to let House visit Manning despite his being on the approved visitor list.  So much for Manning's once-a-week reprieve from solitary confinement.

 

UPDATE III:  The real purpose of this Quantico episode seems clearly to be to deny Manning his only real visitor, thus making his already hellish solitary confinement that much more unbearable, in turn increasing the likelihood that it will crack him and thus induce the anti-WikiLeaks testimony from him that they need.  But it's also critical to note that the last time House went to visit Manning was in December, and afterward, he went on MSNBC to describe the deterioration of Manning's physical and mental condition; now he's been banned, at least for today, from seeing Manning again:

 

UPDATE IV:  Juan Cole insightfully compares the treatment of Bradley Manning to the uprising in Tunisia:  recommended.

Conspicuously missing from any of these paeans is the issue most responsible for the contempt in which many liberals (and anti-war conservatives) hold Lieberman:  his vigorous, ongoing support for the attack on Iraq.  Why allow the small matter of a decade-long, brutal occupation that eradicated the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings to negatively affect the reputation of a Washington official?  To bring any of that up is so very uncivil and past-obsessed.  Like torture, illegal eavesdropping, CIA black sites, the systematic denial of due process in a worldwide prison regime, and the ongoing Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning acts of war entailing things like this (all of which Lieberman also supported), the Iraq War is written off -- flushed down the memory hole -- as nothing more than one of those garden-variety "policy differences" about which reasonable, decent people disagree.  

Support for all those violent and illegal acts just isn't something we hold against someone, and it's certainly not going to preclude someone from being a "Democratic hero."  Indeed, even Lieberman's false claim -- repeated just yesterday -- that we found evidence that Saddam was developing WMDs (while patronizingly calling Arianna Huffington "sweetheart" after she disagreed) won't interfere at all in these admiration rituals, even (especially) in Beltway Democratic circles.

In one sense, this is unsurprising, since every one of the Lieberman-praising individuals in the first paragraph -- like most Washington opinion-makers -- also publicly supported the Iraq War, and thus are eager to uphold a framework in which public war advocacy -- even unrepentant advocacy -- is not even slightly reputation-damaging.  It's perfectly fine in D.C. circles to talk about the Iraq War as a "mistake," but assigning responsibility for the human suffering and devastation it unleashed is simply not done.  And, of course, the number one rule of Washington is that high-level political officials should not be held accountable, even reputationally, for anything they do (Look Forward, Good Citizens, Not Backwards).

But the blood on Joe Lieberman's hands is accounted for by far more than support for the Iraq War.  He's long been one of Washington's most indiscriminate, toxic and deceitful supporters of aggressive war generally.  Even as the two wars he cheered on were spiraling out of control, he was repeatedly urging new American attacks against Iran, Syria and, most recently, Yemen.  Lieberman -- who, needless to say, never served in the military nor have any of his children -- devoted his entire career to attempting to send other Americans' children to fight war after war after war.  In sum, as The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch put it when examining the muddled history of Lieberman's opposition to the war in Vietnam:  "the only war he ever opposed was the only war he might actually have had to fight in."  But, of course, being a relentless warmonger while cowardly hiding yourself and your family far away from the wars you cheer on is not remotely inconsistent with being a Man of Decency and Conscience, as David Brooks and his many Beltway admirers will be the first to tell you.

Then there's Lieberman's vaunted "civility."  He was not only one of the most vocal war supporters, but was responsible for some of the most toxic and McCarthyite efforts to stigmatize war opposition as illegitimate and even treasonous.  In 2005, he infamously lectured Democratic war critics that "in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril," and in 2007 used the language of treason to pose leading questions to Gen. David Petraeus to induce the General's agreement that war opposition "would give the enemy some comfort."  Worse, Lieberman often bolstered these smears with outright lies, such as when he claimed on Meet the Press that we were "attacked on 9/11 by the same enemy we're fighting in Iraq today."  Behold his grand civility.

And then there's the leading role Lieberman played in lending Democratic support to the whole litany of Bush/Cheney assaults on basic liberties.  He defended the "Bush interrogation program" and even waterboarding, and was one of only two Democrats to vote against banning it.  He led the way -- along with his close friends John McCain and Lindsey Graham -- in enacting the Military Commissions Act, which explicitly denied all detainees the right to contest their detention in a court of law:  a measure so repressive that the Supreme Court in Boumediene struck it down as unconstitutional, citing Alexander Hamilton's warning that "the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, in all ages, is the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny."  Once the Court re-established the habeas right which Lieberman and his comrades snuffed out, it turned out, as federal courts found, that there was no credible evidence to justify the detention of a huge percentage of remaining detainees at Guantanamo:  innocent people who would have been imprisoned indefinitely to this day -- without a shred of due process --  if Lieberman had his way.

This "Democratic hero" has spent decades posing serious threats to basic liberties, including free speech.   It was Lieberman who, just a few weeks ago, publicly threatened and bullied all companies to terminate their relationship with WikiLeaks despite its not even being charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime.  That was just a repeat of his censoring behavior, two years earlier, when he successfully demanded that YouTube remove videos he disliked, causing The New York Times to editorialize: "it is profoundly disturbing that an influential senator would even consider telling a media company to shut down constitutionally protected speech."  And it was Lieberman who joined with Bill Bennett, Sam Brownback, Lynne Cheney, Tipper Gore and others in trying to regulate music they disliked.

Then there's the bill introduced last year by Lieberman and McCain -- the so-called "Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act" -- which is probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the U.S. Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act. It would literally empower the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect -- including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil.  The bill requires that all such individuals be placed in military custody, and explicitly says that they "may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners," which everyone expects to last decades, at least.  It's basically a bill designed to formally authorize what the Bush administration did to American citizen Jose Padilla or what was done to Japanese-Americans during World War II -- arrest them on U.S. soil and imprison them for years in military custody with no charges.

As for Lieberman's Principled Integrity, just consider this article from The Hill yesterday, which describes how the Connecticut Senator has been so loyal to defense contractors that they are lamenting that he'll be "hard to replace."  And then there's the matter of his virulent servitude to the health insurance industry placed next to his wife's "professional lifetime devoted to the corporate health sector."  And, needless to say, he was the receipient of millions of dollars from the industries he so loyally served.

This is all just the small illustrative tip of the iceberg that is Joe Lieberman's hideous, destructive political career.  It leaves out his alliance with the worst religious extremists in the country, such as Rev. John Hagee, his steadfast refusal as Homeland Security Chairman to investigate some of the Bush administration's worst failures and abuses, and -- of course -- his overarching, unyielding, blind support for anything and everything Israel does, even trying to construct similar absolute allegiance to Israel as a litmus test for American politicians.  In a 2008 report, Think Progress compiled all the ways that this Democratic Hero has not only failed to support progressive values, but led the way in waging war on them, and this amusing Gail Collins column from yesterday perfectly captured Lieberman's rotted "character."

That this same person, in light of this record, can be so widely hailed in Washington circles is significant indeed.  Granted:  some of the praise is just the pro forma self-regard in which Washington elites and especially Senators hold themselves; he's one of Them, in good standing in the royal court culture, and is thus entitled to obligatory praise upon retiring.  But the reality of Joe Lieberman is that he always fit perfectly into the Democratic Party.  Virtually the entire Party establishment stood behind him in his 2006 re-election bid:  not just during his primary fight, but even once Connecticut Democrats chose someone else (Ned Lamont) as their nominee, the support offered by establishment Democrats for Lamont ranged from stingy to non-existent. 

That's why it's utterly unsurprising to watch Democrats -- and even progressive pundits such as Klein -- heap praise on Lieberman.  It's more than obligatory; they mean it.  Very few of the views Lieberman holds are inconsistent with Democratic Party dogma.  How, for instance, could Democrats possibly hold his Iraq War support against him when the vast majority of top Obama officials (Biden, Clinton, Gates, Emanuel, etc. etc.) supported the same war?  Or how could they possibly suggest that his enabling of Bush's torture, illegal eavesdropping and detention regimes are reputationally damaging when party leaders and the Party itself enabled the same policies? And, obviously, corrupt obeisance to industry and lobbyists, a war on civil liberties, and blind support for Israel are so pervasive in both parties that very few people could possibly hold any of that against him.  The reason Lieberman's long record of heinous acts isn't invoked as criticism is because they're little more than bipartisan Washington pieties, perhaps just a bit more flamboyantly expressed in his case.

Even more significant is how this Democratic praise for Lieberman reveals just how bipartisan the Washington consensus on most issues truly is.  When Lieberman ran for re-election in 2006, his most vocal support came from places like The Weekly Standard, National Review, and Commentary Magazine; Sean Hannity, Bill Kristol and right-wing radio hosts cheered for his victory.  But a mere four years later, he's branded in The Washington Post as a "Democratic hero" and leading Democrats rush forward to praise him.  As happens so often, the two sides who -- in our political theater -- are endlessly presented as being polar opposites, intractably hostile to one another, in fact find common ground with amazing frequency.  The extremely bipartisan and quite genuine love for Joe Lieberman in Washington circles (notwithstanding the contempt of his own constituents) illustrates that as well as anything else.

It's understandable if Democrats are happy that Lieberman voted for much of Obama's domestic agenda over the last two years.  Even that praise is highly questionable; after all, he voted for Obama's health care bill only after stripping out the truly progressive parts, while his recent role in crusading for gay rights was explained perfectly by Salon's Alex Pareene:  "Of course he wants gay people in the military -- he wants everyone in the military" (except himself and his own family).  But at least appreciation for those positions is cogent for those who view the world through the prism of how much value someone is to Barack Obama.

But to whitewash this long, bloody, repressive, disgraceful record of Joe Lieberman from his legacy and suggest he may be a "Democratic hero" -- all because he cast some pro-Obama votes over the last two years -- is just intolerable.  But it's par for the Washington course.  Blood-stained hands are far too common to be bothersome (it's part of the D.C. uniform); servitude to lobbyists and corporations is the central Article of Faith, not a ground for embarrassment or disgrace; assaults on core liberties is how Strength and Seriousness are demonstrated; and "centrism" and "principled independence" are the glorifying names given to status quo perpetuation and loyalty to the factions who run Washington.  Lieberman isn't widely admired across the Washington spectrum and in both parties despite his aberrational acts; he's admired precisely because he's the perfect face of what that culture is and what it values.

* * * * *

Three updates relating to issues I've recently written about:  (1) in a bit of good news:  it appears that, in response to CAIR's lawsuit brought on behalf of Gulet Mohamed, the Obama administration has capitulated and allowed the American teenager to return to his own country (as of this moment, he has deplaned at Dulles and is in customs, where he is being interrogated, yet again, by the FBI without counsel); (2) Salon's Justin Elliott describes how the Obama DOJ -- the Most Transparent Administration Ever™ -- has secretly adopted new guidelines on Miranda warnings but refuses to disclose them; and (3) a former Marine commander of the Quantico brig writes a letter to the current commander to object to the conditions of Bradley Manning's detention; Manning's lawyer details here how these conditions worsened this week and a complaint has been filed (a petition will be delivered to Quantico tomorrow which I encourage everyone to sign).

Lastly:  my sincere thanks and appreciation to everyone who contributed to my blog fund-raiser last week.  I am in the process of sending out thank you emails to each person who donated, but that may take me a bit of time, so in the meantime, please accept my genuine thanks; reader support is both very gratifying and helpful.

When WikiLeaks in mid-2010 published documents detailing the brutality and corruption at the heart of the war in Afghanistan, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, held a Press Conference and said of WikiLeaks (and then re-affirmed it on his Twitter account) that they "might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family."  This denunciation predictably caused the phrase "blood on their hands" to be attached to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, in thousands of media accounts around the world.  But two weeks later, the Pentagon's spokesman, when pressed, was forced to admit that there was no evidence whatsoever for that accusation:  "we have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the WikiLeaks documents," he admitted.  Several months later, after more flamboyant government condemnations of WikiLeaks' release of thousands of Iraq War documents, McClatchy's Nancy Youssef -- in an article headlined:  "Officials may be overstating the danger from WikiLeaks" -- reported that "U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date" that the disclosures resulted in the deaths of anyone, and she detailed the great care WikiLeaks took in that Iraq War release to protect innocent people.

The disclosure of American diplomatic cables triggered still more melodramatic claims from government officials (ones faithfully recited by its servants and followers across the spectrum in Washington), accusing WikiLeaks of everything from "attacking" the U.S. (Hillary Clinton) and "plac[ing] at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals" and "ongoing military operations" (Harold Koh) to being comparable to Terrorists (Joe Biden).  But even Robert Gates was unwilling to lend his name to such absurdities, and when asked, mocked these accusations as "significantly overwrought" and said the WikiLeaks disclosures would be "embarrassing" and "awkward" but would have only "modest consequences."  

Since then, it has become clear how scrupulously careful WikiLeaks has been in releasing these cables in order to avoid unnecessary harm to innocent people, as the Associated Press reported how closely WikiLeaks was collaborating with its newspaper partners in deciding which cables to release and what redactions were necessary.  Indeed, one of the very few documents which anyone has been able to claim has produced any harm -- one revealing that the leader of Zimbabwe's opposition privately urged U.S. officials to continue imposing sanctions on his country -- was actually released by The Guardian, not by WikiLeaks.

To say that the Obama administration's campaign against WikiLeaks has been based on wildly exaggerated and even false claims is to understate the case.  But now, there is evidence that Obama officials have been knowingly lying in public about these matters.  The long-time Newsweek reporter Mark Hosenball -- now at Reuters -- reports that what Obama officials are saying in private about WikiLeaks directly contradicts their public claims:

Internal U.S. government reviews have determined that a mass leak of diplomatic cables caused only limited damage to U.S. interests abroad, despite the Obama administration's public statements to the contrary.

A congressional official briefed on the reviews said the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers. . . .

"We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging," said the official, who attended a briefing given in late 2010 by State Department officials. . .

But current and former intelligence officials note that while WikiLeaks has released a handful of inconsequential CIA analytical reports, the website has made public few if any real intelligence secrets, including reports from undercover agents or ultra-sensitive technical intelligence reports, such as spy satellite pictures or communications intercepts. . . .

National security officials familiar with the damage assessments being conducted by defense and intelligence agencies told Reuters the reviews so far have shown "pockets" of short-term damage, some of it potentially harmful. Long-term damage to U.S. intelligence and defense operations, however, is unlikely to be serious, they said. . . .

Shortly before WikiLeaks began its gradual release of State Department cables last year, department officials sent emails to contacts on Capitol Hill predicting dire consequences, said one of the two congressional aides briefed on the internal government reviews.

However, shortly after stories about the cables first began to appear in the media, State Department officials were already privately playing down the damage, the two congressional officials said.

In response to Hosenball's story, Obama officials naturally tried to salvage the integrity of their statements, insisting that "there has been substantial damage" and that there were unspecified "specific cases where damage caused by WikiLeaks' revelations have been assessed as serious to grave."  But the only specific cases anyone could identify were ones where the U.S. was caught by these documents lying to its own citizens or, at best, concealing vital truths -- such as the far greater military role the U.S. is playing in Yemen and Pakistan than Obama officials have publicly acknowledged.   

And this, of course, has been the point all along:  the WikiLeaks disclosures are significant precisely because they expose government deceit, wrongdoing and brutality, but the damage to innocent people has been deliberately and wildly exaggerated -- fabricated -- by the very people whose misconduct has been revealed.  There is harm from the WikiLeaks documents, but it's to wrongdoers in power, which is why they are so desperate to malign and then destroy the group.

Just as was true in 2003 -- when the joint, falsehood-based government/media demonization campaign led 69% of Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein participated in the planning of the 9/11 attacks (the Bush era's most revealing fact about American politics) -- this orgy of anti-WikiLeaks propaganda has succeeded, with polls reliably showing the American public largely against the group and even favoring its prosecution (citizens in countries not subjected to this propaganda barrage view the group far more favorably).  As has been demonstrated over and over, when the U.S. Government and its media collaborate to propagandize, its efficacy is not in doubt.  And as Marcy Wheeler notes, these lies were told not only to distort public opinion and justify prosecuting WikiLeaks for doing nothing more than engaging in journalism, but also to coerce private corporations (MasterCard, Amazon, Visa, Paypal) to cut all services to the group.

The case against WikiLeaks is absolutely this decade's version of the Saddam/WMD campaign.  It's complete with frivolous invocations of Terrorism, grave public warnings about National Security negated by concealed information, endlessly repeated falsehoods, a competition among political and media elites to advocate the harshest measures possible, a cowardly Congress that (with a few noble exceptions) acquiesces to it all on a bipartisan basis and is eager to enable it, and a media that not only fails to subject these fictions to critical scrutiny, but does the opposite:  it takes the lead in propagating them.  One might express bewilderment that most American journalists never learn their lesson about placing their blind faith in government claims, but that assumes -- falsely -- that their objective is to report truthfully.

 

UPDATE:  Kevin Drum, Dan Drezner and Daniel Larison all cite this report as evidence that the WikiLeaks disclosures have been insignificant.  They seem to equate a finding of "no harm to national security" with "nothing of significance," but not only are those two concepts not the same, they're hardly related.  Many revelations are very significant even though they do not harm national security.

When The New York Times revealed that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on Americans' communications without the warrants required by law, that revelation was extremely important even though it entailed no national security harm.  The same is true of The Washington Post's exposure of the CIA "black site" program, or David Barstow's exposé on the Pentagon's propaganda program, and countless other investigative reports.  The WikiLeaks disclosures -- like most good investigative journalism -- harm those in power who do bad things (by exposing their previously secret conduct), but do not harm the national security of the United States.  I'd be interested in hearing anyone who wants to argue that the WikiLeaks disclosures contain "nothing new" dismiss the actual revelations (here and here).

As for the comparison of this deceit to Saddam/WMD:  obviously, the magnitude of the consequences are not similar, but the misleading tactics themselves -- for the reasons I enumerated -- are.  Moreover, prosecution of WikiLeaks would hardly be inconsequential; it would likely be the first time in history that a non-government employee is convicted of "espionage" for publishing government secrets and, as such, would constitute one of the greatest threats to press freedom in the United States in a long time.