UN: WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning treatment “degrading”

PanARMENIAN.Net - U.S. authorities' treatment of WikiLeaks suspect Private Bradley Manning was "cruel and degrading," the UN special rapporteur on torture Juan Ernesto Mendez said Monday, March 5, AFP reported.

"I believe Bradley Manning was subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in the excessive and prolonged isolation he was put in during the eight months he was in Quantico," he said, referring to the U.S. military prison near Washington.

Mendez said that "fortunately" the alleged mistreatment ended when Manning was transferred from Quantico to another prison in Kansas.

"But the explanation I was given for those eight months was not convincing for me," he said, speaking on the sidelines of a UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva.

Jailed for more than a year and a half before his arraignment last month, Manning, 24, has complained of being placed in solitary confinement, of bullying by guards, and of being subjected to an ultra restrictive regime in Quantico.

He has been charged with 22 counts in connection with turning over a massive cache of classified U.S. documents to the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks in one of the biggest intelligence breaches in U.S. history, including "aiding the enemy."

Manning faces court martial later this year, accused of passing hundreds of thousands of military field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks between November 2009 and May 2010, when he served as an intelligence analyst in Iraq.