Manning acknowledges he contemplated suicide
BY DAVID DISHNEAU & BEN NUCKOLS Associated Press
Saturday, December 01, 2012
FORT MEADE, Md. — As
a military prosecutor held up
a knotted bedsheet in court,
Pfc. Bradley Manning acknowledged
on Friday that
he fashioned a noose and
contemplated suicide shortly
after his arrest on charges
of engineering the biggest
leak of classified material in
U.S. history.
The pretrial testimony appeared
to support the military’s
argument that it was
trying to protect the former
Army intelligence analyst
from harming himself by
taking away all his clothes,
keeping him in strict isolation
and shackling him when
he was outside his cell.
Manning’s lawyers argue
that the conditions he experienced
for nine months at
the Marine brig in Quantico,
Va., amounted to illegal punishment,
lasting well past
the time he was having suicidal
thoughts, and that the
charges against him should
be dropped as a result. Manning
spent most of his early
life in the central Oklahoma
town of Crescent.
On Friday, prosecutor
Maj. Ashden Fein produced
a knotted, peach-colored
sheet from an evidence box
on the prosecution table and
held it up, displaying a loop
in the fabric.
“You made a noose out of
this?” he asked Manning.
“Yes,” the soldier replied.
Manning, 24, said he fashioned
the noose while being
held in Kuwait soon after he
was accused in May 2010 of
leaking reams of military and
diplomatic documents to the
website WikiLeaks. He said
his time in Kuwait was the
lowest he felt during his entire
confinement.
When he was transferred
to the brig at Quantico in
July 2010, he said, he wrote
on his intake form that he
was “always planning and
never acting” on suicidal
thoughts. He was classified
a suicide risk for eight days,
then upgraded to the lessrestrictive
“prevention of injury”
status.
Manning maintains that
neither designation was appropriate
because he didn’t
feel like hurting himself after
leaving Kuwait.
Quantico commanders
kept the restrictions in place
despite repeated recommendations
by brig psychiatrists
that they be eased. Among
other things, Manning was
given scratchy, suicide-prevention
bedding, and sometimes
all his possessions, including
his underwear and
eyeglasses, were removed
from his cell.
Manning testified that
he stood naked at attention
during a morning head
count one day after a guard
appeared to object to his use
of a blanket to cover himself.
He said he had been put on
“suicide risk” the previous
day, and stripped of all his
clothes at night, after he
told a guard that if he really
wanted to kill himself, he
could do it with his underwear.
The testimony came on
the fourth day of the hearing
and marked the first time
Manning came face-to-face
with prosecutors in court.
Fein, the prosecutor, said
that during eight visits Manning
received when he was
in brig, the soldier either
said he was doing fine or
didn’t complain about his
conditions.
Manning, who was an intelligence
analyst in Baghdad
in 2009 and 2010, is
charged with 22 offenses,
including aiding the enemy
and violating espionage and
computer security laws. He
could get life in prison.
Associated Images:
This artist rendering shows Army Pfc. Bradley Manning (right)
being shown a bedsheet as he testified in his pretrial hearing
in Fort Meade, Md., on Friday. Manning is charged with leaking
classified material to WikiLeaks. WILLIAM HENNESSY/Associated Press
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