North Korea Would Approve

When we talk about Liberal Democracy, when we refer to American Democracy, when we think about how America is different, what we mean is a nation, a society, that does not permit atrocities like this:

DOES AMERICA REALLY OPPOSE CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT?

Glenn Greenwald's recent post on the appalling conditions prison conditions being endured by suspected WikiLeaks leaker Private Bradley Manning was a public service -- but I don't expect it to make much difference, for reasons to which Greenwald refers:

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. [Brian] Villiard [an official at the Quantico brig] protested that the conditions are not "like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole," but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

In sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America's Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been convicted of anything. And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig's medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.

This is the problem: not very much of the country is going to be upset at this torture because we've been torturing common criminals this way for years, and hardly anyone thinks it's a problem.

SNIP

As a nation, we don't care about this stuff. If we ever do, it will be because we've had a perfect benign storm: simultaneously, an extremely low crime rate, a thriving middle class that feels secure, and a high-profile Supermax torture victim who’s (a) incontrovertibly innocent and (b) mediagenic and appealing (and -- somehow -- able to become a figure profiled by the media).

Then again, we've had a number of Death Row inmates exonerated by DNA evidence and we still don't have anything resembling a national groundswell on, say, allowing inmates to appeal whenever physical evidence might reasonably prove them innocent. So I'm not getting my hopes up, for Manning or any other prisoner treated this way by American jailers.

Read the whole thing from Steve M.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?