Prior to Crowley's comments, vocal opposition to Manning's treatment was, for the part, confined to lefty freaks like us, but in the last few days, both the New York Times and Washington Post have weighed in. Here's an excerpt from the Times's editorial.

Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been imprisoned for nine months on charges of handing government files to WikiLeaks, has not even been tried let alone convicted. Yet the military has been treating him abusively, in a way that conjures creepy memories of how the Bush administration used to treat terror suspects. Inexplicably, it appears to have President Obama’s support to do so.

And from the hawkish Washington Post.

The episodes of forced nudity are particularly disturbing. In both instances, nudity was imposed after, according to Mr. Manning, he had run-ins with brig personnel, leading to questions about whether it was payback for mouthing off. And Mr. Manning’s treatment comes uncomfortably close to the kind of intimidating and humiliating tactics disavowed after the abuses at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons that eroded the country’s standing in the world.

Also, Obama-friendly bloggers Matt Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, and Ezra Klein have all recently blasted him for abusing Manning.

Some progressives don't understand the intensity of opposition to the abuse of Manning. After all, solitary confinement is widespread in American prisons (my wife, who makes films in prisons, points out that forced nudity is too.) They conclude that the attention on Manning has to be attributable to his race. (As if there weren't plenty of other white people in solitary.) Surely, his fame is a factor, as are his alleged actions, which many see as heroic.

But the biggest factor, I'm confident, is the context, the context being the long national nightmare known at the Great War on Terror. Not for nothing do both the Times and the Post reference the abuse of prisoners under Bush. The people who committed war crimes are free, not just Bush and Cheney but ordinary soldiers like Manning.

Consider what happened to the U.S. soldiers who, over a period of hours – not minutes – went house to house in the Iraqi town of Haditha and executed 24 men, women and children in retaliation for a roadside bombing. “I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head,” said one of the two surviving eyewitnesses to the massacre, nine-year-old Eman Waleed. “Then they killed my granny." Almost five years later, not one of the men involved in the incident is behind bars. And despite an Army investigation revealing that statements made by the chain of command “suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives,” with the murder of brown-skinned innocents considered “just the cost of doing business,” none of their superiors are behind bars either.

You need not see Manning as a hero to see in his treatment the ghosts of Abu Ghraib. Or to note the discrepancy between his abuse and the inpunity for war criminals. The lack of accountability and justice has left a wound on the country. Manning's treatment aggravates it.

UDPATE: I brought up Abu Ghraib, because Manning's treatment is reminiscent of what happened there, but that was, we should remember, but a small part of it. The ACLU recently obtained documents showing that at least 190 people have died in the custody of the United States military. Many were tortured to death.

That's the shadow hanging over this case.