As the Treatment of Bradley Manning Grows More Obscene, Reality Becomes Harder to Ignore

Imagine that you’ve arrived at the local multiplex for a weekend flick. Popcorn in hand, you settle in to watch Matt Damon star in a new thriller as a young American soldier imprisoned by the government for blowing the whistle on crimes witnessed while serving in a foreign country.

INT. MILITARY PRISON CELL - DAY

(Calendar pages flip by indicating the passage of months. July. August. September. October. Etc.)

The Damon character stands naked in front of his cell. His head is bent over, and he stares blankly at the floor.

GUARD (roughly): “Are you all right? I need a verbal response.”

DAMON CHARACTER (voice shaking): “Yes, I am all right.”

The Damon character is handed his neatly folded underwear.

GUARD: “You give it back at night. Every night. Got it?”

DAMON CHARACTER: “Yes.”

GUARD (turning the lock on the cell door). “Are you all right?”

DAMON CHARACTER (weakly): “Yes, I am all right.”

CUT TO: INT. SMALL EMPTY ROOM IN MILITARY BRIG - DAY

The Damon character shuffles slowly in a figure eight pattern. He stops to scratch his foot. The guard interrupts.

GUARD: “Exercise is over! You know the rules. No stopping. Are you all right?”

DAMON CHARACTER (robotically): “Yes, I am all right.”

As our movie unfolds, we see the Damon character growing more detached from reality. Every five minutes, he is interrupted with the same question, “Are you all right?” Day in, day out. Each night, he must surrender his clothing, left naked in his cell without a pillow or blanket. Should he roll to a side of the bed where the guards can’t see him, he is immediately awakened. He is kept alone in his cell for 23 hours a day, and his only exercise is an hour of walking in a bare room. If he pauses, he forfeits the rest of his time. The Damon character grows pale; his speech becomes broken, almost indecipherable.

Gradually he becomes catatonic, awaiting a trial that has never been set.

In this Kafkaesque film, the military personnel overseeing the treatment insist to the press that they can’t explain why they strip the soldier because to do so would violate his privacy. They claim that they are isolating him and imposing bizarre restrictions out of concern for his safety. Members of the press corps don’t believe the lies. But they nod in tacit agreement. “Traitor!” they whisper. They deadpan the story, as if it were just another routine case.

If we were watching all this transpire on the screen, we would know how to interpret the story. We would intuit that the soldier is up against some version of Big Brother, the Authoritarian State. We would squirm in our seats, waiting for justice to intervene. If this were a high-quality, complex film, we might not completely sympathize with the motives of Damon’s character or totally agree with his interpretation of the crimes he witnessed. But we would root for him anyway, because as Americans we instinctively reject authoritarian control. We know that the Constitution protects citizens from the trampling of basic rights. And we sense that the violation of one is the violation of all.

Except when it happens in reality. Then we stick our heads in the sand. We make excuses. We say, “but this case is different.”

Even when we do talk, we are careful. Cautious not to sound too soft. Many journalists have covered the detention of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the suspect accused of leaking cables to Wikileaks (Manning, as yet, has been convicted of nothing). But though he has been subjected to exactly the treatment as our fictional example, most — with some brave exceptions — have been reluctant to challenge the military or the U.S. government.