General

Solitary confinement for Wikileaks source

A report on the inhumane conditions of U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning’s detainment

For 23 out of 24 hours a day, U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning sits imprisoned in isolation, barred from contact with the outside world. Manning is the soldier accused of leaking classified military documents to WikiLeaks—a crime for which he has yet to be convicted. After a series of interviews with people directly familiar with Manning’s imprisonment in U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, Salon.com deems the conditions of his imprisonment cruel and inhumane, and likely to cause long-term psychological injuries. By some nations’ standards, writes author Glenn Greenwald, those conditions may even be seen as torture. For five months in Quantico, and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait, Manning has been kept in solitary confinement, and deprived of basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, such as a pillow and sheets. Barred even from exercising to pass the time, he is under constant surveillance to enforce the restrictions imposed on him. Solitary confinement, Greenwald writes, has been widely argued to be as psychologically distressing as physical torture, and for that reason many Western nations refuse to employ it except in the most extreme cases of prisoner instability or violence.

Salon.com

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