Breaking Private Manning | The UN Ruled it Torture

“[If] you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, D.C.… what would you do? … It’s important that it gets out…it might actually change something… hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms…”

via Breaking Private Manning | MyFDL.

The quote above is Attributed to Private Bradley Manning a 23 year old army soldier and whistle-blower.  So what exactly has the UN Special Rapporteur found to be cruel and inhumane treatment?

“Bradley Manning is being punished – and tortured – for a crime that amounts to believing one’s highest duty is to the American people and not the American government

 

By the time the 23-year-old soldier’s court martial starts on February 4, 2013, Bradley Manning will have spent 983 days in prison, including nine months in solitary confinement, without having been convicted of a single crime. These conditions include the nine-month period spent 23 hours a day in a six-by-eight-foot cell where he was forbidden to lie down or even lean against a wall when he was not sleeping – and when he was allowed to sleep at night, officers woke him every five minutes – and where he was subjected to daily strip searches and forced nudity. ”

And why was this done? To break Manning and force him to implicate Wikileaks and Julian Assange all to no avail.  The real story here involved not only Wikileaks and Assange but also the New York Times and UK Guardian which published parts of the classified documents released to them by Wikileaks who received them from an anonymous source.

The real story here is whether we can continue as a Democracy when our government constantly hides its business behind Secrecy Acts and prevents public knowledge of wrong doing with intimidation and torture of a US citizen who I and many others would call a true patriot.