If anybody doubts the brutality of the US “justice system” and the ways in which anybody deeply associated with Wikileaks is deemed an enemy of the state, the treatment of Bradley Manning is nothing less than torture. The reality of a tattered super-power. The Guardian reports:
Shortly before… Bradley Manning… was arrested in Iraq under suspicion of being the source of the vast transfer of US state secrets to… WikiLeaks, he is alleged to have entered into a web chat with the hacker Adrian Lamo using the handle bradass87. “I’m honestly scared,” the anonymous individual wrote. “I have no one I trust, I need a lot of help.”
That cry for assistance was a gross under-estimation of the trouble that was about to befall Manning, judging from his testimony on Thursday. In his first publicly spoken words since his arrest in May 2010, delivered at a pre-trial hearing at Fort Meade in Maryland, the soldier painted a picture of a Kafkaesque world into which he was sucked and in which he would languish for almost one excruciating year.
Over more than six hours of intense questioning by his defence lawyer, David Coombs, Manning, 24, set out for the court what he described as the darkness and absurdity of his first year in captivity. The more he protested the harsh conditions under which he was being held, the more that was taken as evidence that he was a suicide risk, leading to yet more tightening of the restrictions imposed upon him.
He related how he turned for help to one particular member of staff at the brig at Quantico marine base in Virginia where he was taken in July 2010. He assumed that Staff Sergeant Pataki was on his side, so opened up to him.
“I wanted to convey the fact that I’d been on the [restrictive regime] for a long time. I’m not doing anything to harm myself. I’m not throwing myself against walls, or jumping up or down, or putting my head in the toilet.”
Manning told Pataki that “if I was a danger to myself I would act out more”. He used his underwear and flip-flops as an example, insisting that “if I really wanted to hurt myself I could use things now: underwear, flip-flops, they could potentially be used as something to harm oneself”.
The conversation took place in March 2011, some eight months into his stay at Quantico where he had been held in the most extreme conditions. He was under constant observation, made to go to the toilet in full view of the guards, had all possessions removed from his cell, spent at times only 20 minutes outside his cell and even then was always chained in hand and leg irons.
Manning felt good about his interaction with Pataki. “I felt like he was listening and understanding, and he smiled a little. I thought I’d actually started to get through to him.”
That night guards arrived at his cell and ordered him to strip naked. He was left without any clothes overnight, and the following morning made to stand outside his cell and stand to attention at the brig count, still nude, as officers inspected him.
The humiliating ritual continued for several days, and right until the day he was transferred from Quantico on 20 April 2011 he had his underwear removed every night. The brig authorities later stated that in their view the exceptional depriving of an inmate’s underpants was a necessary precaution, in the light of his ominous comments about using his underwear and flip-flops to harm himself.
If the marine commanders were guided in their treatment of Manning, as they said they were, by fears that he was suicidal, that assessment would certainly have been merited at the beginning of his captivity. Manning began his epic testimony by describing how he had a virtual mental breakdown soon after he was taken to Camp Arifjan in Kuwait following his initial arrest.
He was clearly terrified by the uncertainty in which he suddenly found himself. He had, by his own admission, recently committed a massive dump of government information from secure military computers to the website WikiLeaks, and now he was in the hands of army jailers with no knowledge about what was going to happen to him.
“I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t have formal charges or anything, my interactions were very limited with anybody else, so it was very draining.”
He was put on a schedule whereby he would be woken up at 10 o’clock at night and given lights out at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. “My nights blended into my days and my days into nights,” he told the court.