By Norman Solomon
The U.S. government is trying to destroy Chelsea Manning.
Five years after the arrest of Manning, an Army private, for providing classified information to WikiLeaks, the government’s cruelty is taking another turn — part George Orwell, part Lewis Carroll. But Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning did not fall down the rabbit hole. She’s locked up at Fort Leavenworth, five years into a 35-year sentence — and the fact that she is not scheduled for release until 2045 isn’t enough of a punishment. Prison authorities are now brandishing petty and bizarre charges to threaten her with indefinite solitary confinement.
Why? The alleged transgressions include the possession of toothpaste past its expiration date and an issue of Vanity Fair with Caitlyn Jenner on the cover. Even if all the charges of minor violations of prison rules are found to be true at her closed hearing today, the threatened punishment is cruelly disproportionate.
As the conservative pundit George Will wrote more than two years ago, “Tens of thousands of American prison inmates are kept in prolonged solitary confinement that arguably constitutes torture.” In effect, the government is now threatening to torture Manning.
The ironies of the situation are boundless. Five years ago, Manning opted to send secret information to WikiLeaks after realizing that the U.S. military in Iraq was turning prisoners over to the Baghdad government with the full knowledge they would very likely be tortured.
After arrest, Manning remained in solitary confinement at a military brig in Virginia for nearly a year under conditions that a special United Nations rapporteur found constituted “at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture.” Among the publications just confiscated from Manning’s cell, ostensibly as contraband material, was the official Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture.
Last weekend, Manning said that she was denied access to the prison’s law library just days before a closed-door hearing set for Tuesday afternoon that could result in ongoing solitary confinement. The timing of this move was particularly egregious: She was preparing to represent herself at the hearing, which none of her lawyers would be allowed to attend.
“During the five years she has been incarcerated, Chelsea has had to endure horrific and at times plainly unconstitutional conditions of confinement,” ACLU attorney Chase Strangio said Monday. “She now faces the threat of further dehumanization because she allegedly disrespected an officer when requesting an attorney and had in her possession various books and magazines that she used to educate herself and inform her public and political voice.”
[To read the entire article, which was originally published by Al Jazeera America, click here.]