Supporters say Manning in ‘solitary confinement’

WASHINGTON: Chelsea Manning, the anti- secrecy campaigner who was jailed for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks, has been held in solitary confinement for over two weeks, supporters said Saturday.

Since being sent to a detention center in Alexandria, Virginia earlier this month, “Chelsea has been placed in administrative segregation ... a term designed to sound less cruel than ‘solitary confinement,’” the Chelsea Resists group said.

“However, Chelsea has been kept in her cell for 22 hours a day.

“Chelsea can’t be out of her cell while any other prisoners are out, so she cannot talk to other people, or visit the law library, and has no access to books or reading material. She has not been outside for 16 days,” they added.

“Keeping her under these conditions for over 15 days amounts to torture, possibly in an attempt to coerce her into compliance with the Grand Jury.” Manning, who was convicted in 2013 of leaking more than 700,000 classified US documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks, was ruled in contempt of court on March 8 after rejecting a court demand that she testify in the WikiLeaks probe.

The transgender woman, 31, cited ‘ethical’ objections to the grand jury system.

“I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech,” she said at the time. — AFP