Bradley Manning testifying today...

Defense lawyer David Coombs asked Col. Hoctor if he thought Quantico was running the risk of of endangering Bradley Manning, and Col. Hoctor said yes, it was, as these conditions might have “unintended consequences.” Coombs asked how Col. Hoctor would describe officials who didn’t consider these effects, and he said, “callous.”

Bradley’s treatment would continue indefinitely

When Cpt. Hoctor expressed his concerns, and the fact that Bradley’s restrictive conditions should not be justified with mental health language, to Col. Robert Oltman, Security Battalion Commander in charge of Quantico, Col. Oltman told him that Cpt. Hoctor should continue to report weekly but that “we’ll do what we want to do,” and that Bradley would be on POI watch for the foreseeable future.

This made Cpt. Hoctor the “angriest [he’d] been in a long time,” as the treatment was “senseless,” had no psychiatric justification, and a Battalion Commander had never before said outright that such a confinement statues would continue indefinitely regardless of his recommendations. He also said that this treatment could harm Bradley, as “everyone has limits,” though “he’d been strong.”

Col. Oltman’s testimony

Col. Oltman himself testified for most of this morning, explaining why Bradley remained on POI watch and why he didn’t fully trust Cpt. Hoctor’s opinion. Col. Oltman didn’t make the decision to put Bradley on POI watch, but decisions in Bradley’s confinement were passed along to Col. Oltman who then passed them up the command chain. He had the authority to change Bradley’s status, but never reduced his status. He said that because a soldier, Captain Webb, had killed himself at Quantico earlier that year, and since Cpt. Hoctor hadn’t recommended Cpt. Webb be put on Suicide Risk, Col. Oltman didn’t weigh his advice for other detainees as heavily.

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Bradley is treated much better at Ft. Leavenworth, yet he’s still deprived of his due process rights. Though promised a “speedy trial,” he’s spent more than 800 days in prison without court martial. President Obama has illegally declared him guilty before a trial even began. The prosecution has prevented the defense from showing the lack of harm from WikiLeaks’ releases. More to the point, Bradley is a heroic whistle-blower who believed the American public deserved to know what their government does at war and in secret. He shouldn’t be on trial in the first place.

Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Bradley Manning Support Network call on you to stand up for Bradley again. Sign our petition and share it widely. Bradley put his future on the line for a transparent government and a better democracy. Now he needs you to call on U.S. officials to do the right thing.

What came out—what it began with was really his arrest in late May of 2010. He was almost immediately taken to Kuwait. And that’s where—really where they got him in a way that really, for a period of time, almost destroyed him. They put him into cages that he described as eight-by-eight-by-eight. There were two cages. He said they were like animal cages. They were all—they were in a tent alone, just these two cages, side by side. One of them had whatever possessions he may have had; one of them, he was in, with a little bed for a rack and a toilet, dark, in this cage for almost two months. He was taken out for a short while and then, without explanation, put back in the cage, meals in the cage, etc., all of that.

And then—wait until you hear this. They would wake him at night at 11:00 p.m., 10:00 or 11:00, and his day—or night—was all night, and he was allowed to go back to sleep at 12:00 or 1:00, noon, the next day. So when we think about what happened to people at Guantánamo or sensory deprivation or what McCoy says in his books on torture, what are they trying to do except destroy this human being?

And he said, "For me, I stopped keeping track. I didn’t know whether night was day or day was night. And my world became very, very small. It became these cages. And I’m person," he said—this was really, I thought—all of us really were interested in it. He said, "I’m someone who likes current events. I take a broader view of the world." And he gave an example of the oil spill in the Gulf. And he said, you know, "When that ended," and he said, "my world all of a sudden was totally confined to these cages." And that was almost two months in Kuwait, something that none of us really knew about for this period. And he went on to talk about then what happens when he went to Quantico.

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What’s remarkable is that he still has this incredible dignity after going through this. But I think all these prison conditions were—sure, they were angry at Bradley Manning, but in the face of that psychiatric statement, that this guy shouldn’t be kept on suicide risk or POI, they’re still keeping him in inhuman conditions, you can only ask yourself—they’re trying to break him for some reason. The lawyer, David Coombs, has said it’s so that he can give evidence against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

The oppressive, borderline-torturous measures to which he was subjected, including prolonged solitary confinement and forced nudity, have been known for some time. A formal UN investigation denounced those conditions as "cruel and inhuman". President Obama's state department spokesman, retired air force colonel PJ Crowley, resigned after publicly condemning Manning's treatment. A prison psychologist testified this week that Manning's conditions were more damaging than those found on death row, or at Guantánamo Bay.