Wikileaks soldier believed to be suicidal, hearing told
FORT MEADE, MD. — A U.S. army private charged with sending reams of classified documents to the antisecrecy website WikiLeaks could have had his tight pretrial confinement conditions reduced by clearly explaining why he wasn’t a suicide risk, the former commander of a Marine Corps brig testified Friday.
Chief Warrant Officer 2 Denise Barnes testified on the ninth day of a hearing to determine whether Pfc. Bradley Manning’s nine months in maximum custody at the marine base in Quantico, Va., amounted to illegal pretrial punishment. He was always on either suicide watch or injury-prevention status, and Manning claims the conditions were so harsh that the charges, including aiding the enemy, should be dropped.
When the frustrated soldier did speak up, his crack about hanging himself with his underwear only heightened the concern for his safety, Barnes said, so she ordered him to be stripped naked each night.
“There was never an intent to punish Pfc. Manning,” she testified for the prosecution at a pretrial hearing.
Barnes said she didn’t consider Manning’s comment in early March 2011 serious enough to warrant placing him on suicide watch, but “I felt that I needed not to take that comment lightly, and I didn’t.”
Manning, 24, was an intelligence analyst in Iraq. He is charged with 22 offences, including aiding the enemy, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison. He is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and more than 250,000 diplomatic cables while working in Baghdad in 2009 and 2010.
He is also charged with leaking a 2007 video clip of a U.S. helicopter crew gunning down 11 men later found to have included a Reuters photographer and his driver. The Pentagon concluded the troops acted appropriately, having mistaken the camera equipment for weapons.
Barnes was the 11th government witness to testify at the hearing. The government must prove by a preponderance of evidence that brig officials justifiably believed strict conditions were needed to keep Manning from hurting or killing himself.