In January 2011, the Los Angeles Times editorial board ran a piece calling attention to the detention conditions of the WikiLeaks source held at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. FishbowlLA’s pickup praised the editorial as belated but consequential.
Then
The editorial — which the original FishbowlLA post pointed readers toward — laid out the specific conditions of confinement after five months at Quantico without the military equivalent of a preliminary hearing: maximum custody, a “Protection of Injury” order confining the detainee to a cell 23 hours a day even though a Marine psychologist had reportedly determined no self-harm risk, denial of sheets, no in-cell exercise, no sleep between 5 a.m. and 8 p.m. with guards intervening to force sitting or standing.
The editorial framed the broader debate openly — some saw the leaker as a whistleblower deserving leniency, others saw a civil-disobedience case in which punishment was appropriate if guilt was established — but argued that whichever view applied, the conditions of confinement were not.
The original FBLA framing was that the LA Times had been late to the story relative to other outlets but that the editorial was significant precisely because it brought the city’s flagship paper’s institutional weight onto the question.
Now
The detainee at Quantico is now Chelsea Manning, who came out as transgender shortly after her court-martial. Manning was convicted in 2013 on charges related to the disclosures and sentenced to 35 years. President Obama commuted the sentence in January 2017, and Manning was released that May after roughly seven years in confinement.
The Quantico-conditions question that the 2011 editorial focused on was eventually validated by a United Nations special rapporteur’s finding that the treatment had amounted to cruel and inhumane treatment, and by the military’s own subsequent transfer of Manning to a less restrictive facility at Fort Leavenworth in April 2011 — three months after the editorial ran. Manning has continued in advocacy, public-speaking, and writing work in the years since release, including additional brief periods of confinement related to grand-jury testimony refusals in 2019-2020.
The LA Times editorial board itself has gone through multiple reorganizations under the Soon-Shiong ownership era, including substantial staff reductions in the 2024 round of newsroom cuts. The 2011 piece reads now as one of the cleaner examples of the paper’s editorial voice intervening on a national-security story — and as a reminder of what an active institutional editorial board can do when it weighs in early on a developing case.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: January 2011 snapshot