Bradley Manning: pre-trial hearing ends as case goes to military judge [View all]

[unhappycamper]

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=159924



Manning has been accused of 'aiding the enemy' by passing hundreds of thousands of confidential US documents to WikiLeaks.

Bradley Manning: pre-trial hearing ends as case goes to military judge
Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 December 2012 13.21 EST

The epic courtroom battle between the WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning and the US government over his alleged pre-trial punishment has drawn to a close, with the soldier's lawyer accusing the military of treating him like a zoo animal and the prosecution countering that in its view he was entitled to have just seven days removed from any eventual sentence.

The two-week hearing at Fort Meade, Maryland, lasted far longer than intended and turned into a dramatic spectacle in which Manning effectively turned his court-martial on its head and put the US military on trial. In his closing argument, the soldier's main civilian lawyer, David Coombs, said that the most amazing element of his nine-month solitary confinement under suicide-prevention restrictions at the marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, was that his spirit had remained unbroken.

"Being watched or viewed almost as a zoo animal for that period of time has to weigh on somebody's psyche," Coombs told the court.

Over 10 days of intense legal proceedings, lasting for up to eight hours every day, a clear picture emerged within the courtroom of how Manning, 24, had been trapped in a Kafkaesque paradox. Whatever he did – or didn't do – was taken by his military captors as proof of his suicidal tendencies.