Assange and solitary confinement describes the argument John Kiriakou made in July 2018 about the conditions in which Julian Assange was then living inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
The classification
When it was put to him that Assange was in a solitary-confinement-style situation, Kiriakou agreed without qualification: “that’s exactly what this is.” He noted that the United Nations has declared solitary confinement to be a form of torture, and added that the fact Assange happened to have a television did not make it any less confining. [1]
The prognosis
Kiriakou’s position on what isolation does is categorical. He has said solitary confinement is in part meant to break a person mentally, and that he does not care how tough or how strong someone is — everybody is going to break eventually. [2]
He attached to this the CIA’s own vocabulary. Asked about the medical and biological effects of isolation, he said that at the agency they called it learned helplessness, and defined it as accepting that one is helpless and that nothing one does will help — at which point, he said, a person simply falls apart. His view is that this is what those responsible are counting on. [3]
Health
Kiriakou raised Assange’s physical condition as a human rights issue in its own right, saying that a man closed up in an embassy twenty-four hours a day needs sunlight, exercise and nutritious food, and that there was no way to know whether he was getting any of it. [4]
The remedy he proposed
His practical answer was letters. He argued that people should not worry about finding something profound to say — that they should simply say hello and describe their day. He drew this directly from his own experience of imprisonment, recalling correspondents who wrote about visiting a daughter, about a new car game, and one woman who photographed the birds landing in her garden and sent him the pictures. For a few minutes at a time, he said, it let him forget that he was in a cage under armed guard behind barbed wire. [5] [6]