Glenn Greenwald: Obama’s Comments on Bradley Manning Mark "Amazing Amount of Improper Influence" in WikiLeaks Case

Military officials announced Thursday that accused WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning has been cleared to be held as a medium-security prisoner at Fort Leavenworth, where he was just transferred. Up until last week, the Army private was being held in solitary confinement at a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia. His treatment at Quantico was condemned by Amnesty International and led to a probe by a torture expert at the United Nations.

He was held at Quantico for eight months. The entire time, he was held in solitary confinement, 23 hours a day, inside his cell, forbidden from exercising while inside his cell—a completely punitive and irrational restriction. The one hour a day that he had was to walk around by himself in a room shackled. And so, this is the kind of isolation and psychological torment that has broken large numbers of people in permanent ways. And that’s what led to all the controversy that you just described.

In response to that controversy, it just got too big of a scandal for the Obama administration, and they just yanked him out of Quantico, in essence, without warning and have now transferred him to Fort Leavenworth, where that’s a much larger and more regularized military prison. And the claim is, although we don’t know it’s true, that his treatment will be less oppressive. He’ll have more time out of his cell and more interaction with other people.

The issue for him really is, he’s being held in the manner he’s being held because of the sever-–the seriousness of the charges he’s facing, the potential length of sentence, the national security implications, and also the potential harm to him that he could do to himself or from others, frankly, you know, who are being imprisoned there, if he were allowed to mix with the general population. So this is as much for his own good as it is because of the charges.

Recent information about the continuing criminal investigation that’s going on into the leaks, new subpoenas that seem to suggest some of the documents that the government is trying to ascertain to prove that Manning and Assange conspired even before he downloaded the material, to download the material—in other words, that Assange wasn’t just a passive recipient of the WikiLeaks documents, that he was actually conspiring to get them.

The problem the DOJ faces in trying to prosecute WikiLeaks is how do you prosecute them, but then say that other newspapers like the New York Times and the Post that have published this information shouldn’t be prosecuted, as well. And their answer, according to the New York Times about six months ago, was that they were going to try and prove, as you just said, that they actually actively conspired with Manning to help him steal the documents and didn’t just get them passively afterwards. Meanwhile, there’s been no evidence that that’s the case. The Justice Department admits there’s no evidence. And what was disturbing about the subpoena, that was served on a Cambridge, Massachusetts, resident with connections to WikiLeaks, was that it’s clearly the grand jury is considering indictments under the Espionage Act, which would be the first time a non-government employee would be convicted under that for disclosing classified information and this conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence. They’re just desperate to prosecute.