Manning Testifies About His Torture; Was it Aimed at Turning Him on Assange?
Manning Testifies About His Torture; Was it Aimed at Turning Him on Assange?.
This report of the testimony at the trial comes from Michael Ratner President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York and Chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin. He is currently a legal adviser to Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
The main burden of the psychiatrists’ testimony—this was by the defense—was that they did not recommend that Bradley Manning should be put on suicide risk or on preventive injury risk, that he should be treated like the regular population. But, in fact, for this year, he was treated as if he was a suicide risk. And because of that, he was treated very badly, and probably even worse than people put on that are treated. Normally, those treatments are for four to seven days. The psychiatrists uniformly recommended that Bradley Manning should be treated as normal in the regular population. That was disregarded both—that was disregarded at Quantico in Virginia, where he was ultimately sent for about nine months.
The Bradley Takes the stand:
What you expected about Bradley Manning, particularly after all the negative press about all his problems, all his issues, about his sexuality and the military, etc., what you got was somebody very different. He opens his mouth, and you had this confident, bright, intelligent, articulate person who could really describe what happened to him, not nervous, straightforward.
And what happened to him was really outrageous. It was an essential effort to break him down as a human being. And I’ll just summarize it quickly. The first two months, roughly, he was held at a military camp in Kuwait. And here’s how he was held. He said he went into a tent, and there were two cages like they keep animals, each about 8-foot cubes. He was put into one of the cages. The other cage was empty. And he was essentially kept there almost the entire two months. Most of the time had to eat in those cages.
Ratner’s take on the Ideal Outcome:
the ideal case would be that Manning should be acquitted in this case and the government should be tried
So True! This is well worth watching in its entirety (16 plus minutes) Watch the rest on the video above.