Bradley Manning's incarceration

Daring Fireball is less and less one of my refuges from the troubles of the world because John Gruber keeps noticing pieces like Glenn Greenwald's describing the conditions of Bradley Manning's confinement. Manning, in case all the hullaballoo over Julian Assange has driven it from your mind, is the man alleged to have provided Assange a good deal of the confidential information published on WikiLeaks that has embarrassed the U.S. government this year. He has not been convicted of a crime.

I can't and won't summarize the piece: it needs to be read in its entirety.

I want to touch on one point Greenwald made, though, and that is Manning's apparent motivation for leaking information in the first place. Using the edited chat logs between Manning and Adrian Lamo released by Wired, Greenwald paints a sympathetic portrait of Manning as a patriotic young man who became deeply disturbed not merely by what he saw happening, but by the fact that so much of it was being determinedly hidden from the U.S. public.

With due respect to both Greenwald and Manning, my cursory reading of those chat logs doesn't convince me of Manning's guilelessness. I'm not saying he was deceitful in his chats; I'm saying that I can't read his motivations well enough. Small parts of his chats make him sound resentful for being overlooked, which might offer a less noble reason for his alleged actions. I'd like to believe he was and is an idealist with his country's best interests at heart, but I'm not ready to assume that was the case.

Speaking of those logs, I think it likely Manning was played by Lamo. As "redseeker" noted in the comments following the article:

What this transcript shows is Lamo, for reasons unknown, leading Manning on and on until he had enough info to hang Manning, then he did.

Lamo *could* have said, “look, I’m not your friend and I don’t agree with you, so stop talking to me.” Instead, Lamo went all mirroring, saying as little as he could himself (almost nothing) while keeping Manning talking.

Getting back to the main point: whatever Manning's motivations, whether Lamo led him on or not, indeed, whatever the true damage attributable to the leaks turns out to be, can we not all agree that the terms of his incarceration are unconscionable?

If not -- if even a sizable minority of the U.S. public believes these conditions do not constitute cruel and unusual punishment of a nonviolent prisoner -- can I ask that the U.S. government and the hardest-blowing of our punditry class cease to tout the U.S. as a moral leader in the world?

Condoning such treatment would make us bad enough: I'd rather we weren't hypocrites and liars as well.