WE ALL owe a debt of gratitude to P.J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman who resigned yesterday, but I owe him more than most, because he allowed me to say something I believe to be true but would not otherwise have been able to say. Like Mr Crowley, I believe that the treatment of Corporal Bradley Manning, who has been held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day since last summer and subjected to episodes of forced public nudity and other deliberate crass humiliations on suspicion of having leaked documents to WikiLeaks, is ridiculous and counterproductive. And I can say so in this blog. But house style rules would normally prevent me from calling it "stupid", had not Mr Crowley had the courage or just plain good sense to tell a graduate seminar at MIT that Mr Manning's treatment was "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid." So thanks, Mr Crowley.

Obviously, his own organisation's house rules didn't allow Mr Crowley to call that treatment "stupid" either, or even "ridiculous and counterproductive", as it turns out. Mr Crowley didn't make the comments publicly; as Dave Weigel writes, he made them to a small seminar of 20 people and thought he was speaking in confidence. As a letter from those present at the MIT seminar says, his resignation over frank personal comments that didn't represent administration policy and weren't meant to be made public is bad news: "If public officials are made to fear expressing their truthful opinions, we have laid the groundwork for ineffective, dishonest, and unresponsive governance."

There are good reasons for the house rules that prevent me from calling things "stupid"; blogs aren't so far removed from kindergarten, and we need some rules to preserve some semblance of basic civility. And there are good reasons for the rules that prevent government spokespeople from harshly critiquing the policies of other departments of the government they work for. That said, it strikes me that this dynamic, in which the speech of one highly placed official frees everyone else to say things that would otherwise be taboo, is not confined to bloggers at major publications. The close attention we pay to the speech of those in positions of power, whether in government, business or the media, often seems absurd. But it is an inescapable feature of society that those who hold the podium determine, through their speech, the boundaries of what can be said, and to some degree what can be thought, or at least what counts as a "legitimate" point in the public sphere. We imagine that this dynamic is limited to authoritarian societies with departments full of censors blacking out impermissible words, but it's not. Even in a free society such as ours, organisations and powerful organisational officers walk the discursive third-base lines of the polity, ruling on what is a serious point, and what's just crazy talk. P.J. Crowley provided us with one of those infrequent moments when something many of us knew to be true but not up for serious consideration, an illegitimate truth, suddenly became somewhat more legitimate.

This probably won't get Bradley Manning out of solitary confinement. But it helps to know that apparently some highly placed people in government, not just regular folks like us, think keeping him there is stupid.

(Photo credit: AFP)