December 19, 2010, Nothing personal, just business
Attorney David Coombs, counsel to one [ex-?]-PFC Bradley Manning justs wants to give you "a day in the life" of Private Manning. I won't go into much more detail (Mr. Coombs does that himself... read the link if you want it), but Private Manning is required to sit in his rather small cell (and sit it is... he will be stopped from any form of exercise) for 23 hours a day or so, then allowed for a figure-8 walk in a concrete room for up to an hour a day, with limited opportunity to read, watch television, write to approved persons, and I suppose once in a while, confer with his counsel. Other than some more privileges (watching local television, reading material on an approved list), it's not terribly different from the "full-GTMO" (although still "nicer" than "what Padilla got").
No, the military is not physically abusing Private Manning in any way... many if not most torture experts would tell you that's irrelevant-- the prolonged solitary conditions forcing Manning to be totally alone is one of the most effective forms of torture there is. Ah, Barack "the One" Obama's Totally Corporate America. What can you say?
Manning's "crime" of course is leaking purportedly secret (though mostly simply "embarrasssing") information to Wikileaks by the diskful, a crime which could carry up to 52 years in the stockade if he is convicted... which, at the moment at least, he has not been. (Of course... one might wonder whatever happened to the Eighth Amendment? Boss... it's Chinatown Wikileaks.) Manning, of course, is being "persuaded" in the not-so-subtle-ways of the Spanish Inquisition the People's Liberation Army the United States Government to rat on Julian Assange so that a made-up-conspiracy charge against him (who not only embarrassed the Imperium, but used it to get laid) might be viable... "or else." Or else, presumably being, more of the same-- the prolonged isolation conditions, until Manning goes mad, and will, of course, say anything at all to make it stop, or just mindlessly repeat what the Government wants him to say ("good enough!")
This, boys and girls, is how we treat members of our own military who stray from the most important principle there is: don't fuck with the powerful.. Sorry Brad... it's "Nothing personal, just business." America. Fuck YEAH!
[Oh yeah: don't ask don't tell got repealed. Go Barack.]