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Brutality and 'Armchair-Diagnoses' Revealed in Manning Pretrial Hearing
Judge
delays upcoming trial another month, due to length of pretrial
-
Common Dreams staff
The
military judge overseeing the pretrial hearing for Pfc. Bradley Manning announced
Sunday that the trial will be delayed another month til mid-March, due to
lengthy pretrial proceedings.
The
pretrial hearings are meant to determine whether Manning's nine months in
pretrial confinement at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va., were so
punishing that the judge should dismiss all charges.
On Sunday, the sixth day of pretrial
hearings, testimonies were given by two former Quantico counselors, Army Staff
Sgt. Ryan Jordan and Marine Master Sgt. Craig Blenis, "who sat on a board
that recommended to the brig commander that Manning remain in maximum custody
and on either injury-prevention or suicide-risk status—conditions that kept him
confined to his cell 23 hours a day, sometimes with no clothing," AP said. Their
report continues:
He
said he supported the brig commander's decision in March 2011 to strip Manning
of all clothing at night and place him on suicide watch after Manning told another
staffer that if he really wanted to kill himself, he could use the elastic
waistband on his underwear.
"If
someone tells me they're going to shoot themselves in the face, I'm not going
to give them a gun," Blenis said.
Afterwards, the defense showed a
12-minute video clip of Blenis talking with Manning through the bars of his
cell, regarding why he was on a Prevention of Injury (POI) watch. Kevin
Gosztola, reporting on the trial for Firedoglake,
described as a scene "out of Robert Greenwald’s lesser-known film, 'In the
Custody of Strangers,' starring Emilio Estevez and Martin Sheen, about a young
man who winds up in solitary confinement after committing a minor crime."
In response to the day's testimony,
Jesselyn Radack, National Security & Human Rights Director for the
Government Accountability Project, writes:
From
testimony over the weekend, we learned that the military leadership and guards
at Quantico – who had no medical training or degrees – substituted their
judgment for that of multiple trained psychologists so that they could keep
Manning on an unnecessary, punitive "suicide watch" or
"prevention of injury" (POI) status. [Note how in Orwellian fashion,
the names for this type of confinement suggest that it was being done for
Manning's own good.]
Their
amateur judgments were based on things like rumors about Manning's sexual
orientation or "observations" that Manning was not talkative enough,
despite a rule that Manning could only talk at a "conversation volume
level" to other detainees, who were too far away to hear anything Manning
said at a "conversational volume level." Yet the leadership at
Quantico relied on the guards' and amateur "counselors"
armchair-diagnoses rather than the well-informed opinions of multiple
well-credentialed psychiatrists, all of whom agreed that Manning did not need
to be on POI status.
Last week, Manning spoke publicly for the
first time since his May 2010 arrest. His testimony focused
on the extreme mental distress he endured, including occasional suicidal thoughts.
After
concluding the day's hearings Sunday evening, military judge Col. Denise Lind
recessed the hearing until Wednesday, December 5. It's scheduled to run through
Dec. 12.
Donations
can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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