Chelsea Manning confirms she was hospitalized over suicide attempt

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Chelsea Manning has made her first public statement since she required hospital treatment last week, confirming that she tried to take her own life.

The US army private, who is serving 35 years in military custody for leaking US state secrets to WikiLeaks, has let it be known through her lawyers that she attempted suicide.

“She knows that people have questions about how she is doing and she wants everyone to know that she remains under close observation by the prison and expects to remain on this status for the next several weeks,” the attorneys said in a statement.

The comments bring to an end several days of uncertainty in which the US military kept silent about Manning’s condition while she was under medical observation and her lawyers were also unable to clarify what had happened for privacy reasons.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/11/chelsea-manning-confirms-suicide-attempt-hospitalized

---

Ed Pilkington in New York
Monday 11 July 2016 23.29 BST

[NWCorona]

1. She's been pretty much tortured when you look at how Manning has been treated.

I'd crack too

[hack89]

2. That is not true

once they moved her from the brig several years ago, she has been treated like every other prisoner.

[NWCorona]

5. Please see post #4

[hack89]

6. That is what I said

the brig was in Quantico. She has not been in those conditions for several years now.

[NWCorona]

8. I understand that but are you saying that it's all good now?

Being locked up for 23.5 hrs out of the day can't be easy on your brain. Can you really bounce back from that?

[hack89]

10. Her emotional fragility is what got her into this mess to begin with

that is how Assange was able to manipulate and take advantage of her. Toss in her issues with her sexuality and I can understand how her treatment had lasting impact.

[NWCorona]

11. Agreed!

And that wasn't lost on her handlers either.

[Crash2Parties]

36. gender identity, not sexuality. :-)

[MohRokTah]

3. False.

She has NEVER been "tortured". That is bullshit hyperbolic crap.

[NWCorona]

4. Never?

"Once in Baltimore, Pfc. Manning was loaded into a car and transferred to the military base in Quantico, Virginia. There he was held for nine months in maximum custody in a cell smaller than the one he saw overseas—just 6' x 8'. For only 20 minutes a day, Pfc. Manning was left to see the sunlight while shackled in chains. Other times, he found that if he arched his neck and angled himself just right he could catch the reflection of the sun from a window that was mirrored into his unimaginable concrete hellhole. Once inside his isolation chamber for the customary 23-and-a-half hours or so, he was deprived of just about everything, including contact with other inmates and often his clothes. He was forced to sleep from 1 PM to 11 PM, naked, and was allowed to do so only when facing his lamp."

http://www.vice.com/read/the-torture-of-bradley-manning

I thought you said you were a progressive? Do you believe in the death penalty?

[MohRokTah]

7. Never!

That is not torture.

[NWCorona]

9. Then we will disagree once again.

I think being stripped every day and being forced to sleep facing a light is torture. Let alone a cell you can't even stretch out in.

Are you saying that it has to be physical to be called torture?

[MohRokTah]

13. I am saying that nothing done to Ms. Manning was torture.

End of discussion.

[LiberalLovinLug]

16. End of discussion!!!!!

or what?

I 'd like to see what you say about that if you had to endure even a couple of days like that.

[NWCorona]

19. Agreed! And Manning spent months like that.

[MohRokTah]

25. End of discussion because there is nothing more to discuss.

There was precisely zero torture of Ms. Manning.

Nothing more needs to be said.

[Crash2Parties]

37. Define "Torture" then, if you are so sure of your stance.

[womanofthehills]

41. UN Torture Chief - Manning's treatment cruel

Bradley Manning's treatment was cruel and inhuman, UN torture chief rules

The UN special rapporteur on torture has formally accused the US government of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment towards Bradley Manning, the US soldier who was held in solitary confinement for almost a year on suspicion of being the WikiLeaks source.

Juan Mendez has completed a 14-month investigation into the treatment of Manning since the soldier's arrest at a US military base in May 2010. He concludes that the US military was at least culpable of cruel and inhumane treatment in keeping Manning locked up alone for 23 hours a day over an 11-month period in conditions that he also found might have constituted torture.

"The special rapporteur concludes that imposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of his presumption of innocence," Mendez writes.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/12/bradley-manning-cruel-inhuman-treatment-un

[Hekate]

27. Have to disagree, Moh. That's a species of torture, and it's pitiful.

[struggle4progress]

17. The so-called "torture" was that Manning was put on suicide-watch after

threatening self-harm. The judge shaved some days off the final sentence, on the theory that the suicide-watch precautions had been unnecessarily prolonged. That Manning has had, and does have, serious psychological problems, including suicidal tendencies, seems rather well-established no

[NWCorona]

20. There are other means to handle that.

Can you find me a suicide watch SOP that dictates the treatment Manning received? I'll take federal or state level.

[struggle4progress]

26. Since Manning had credibly threatened suicide while detained in Kuwait, fashioning

a noose from a bed-sheet, there may have legitimate reason to watch him carefully in custody as a protection against potential self-harm, and the non-tearable "suicide smock" he was issued after his January 2011 "joke" about suicide while at Quantico is not an uncommon precaution. His restricted access to toilet tissue in that period may not have been unreasonable in context, either, given the fact that another Quantico prisoner had recently committed suicide by choking himself with such tissue. Restrictions on eyeglasses as a prevention-of-injury may also sometimes be appropriate, since prisoners have been known to use eyeglasses to cut themselves deliberately and sometimes fatally

[Crash2Parties]

38. But the treatment proscribed would only make it worse, no?

[jberryhill]

39. You can't lock up someone who is suicidal...

...and allow them to have bedsheets or clothes with which they can hang themself.

People hang themselves with their shoelaces by tying them to the bars and leaning.

[struggle4progress]

40. Depriving suicide-prone persons of the means by which

they might hang, choke, or cut themselves is a plausible method for reducing the risk that they will actually hang, choke, or cut themselves

[Ash_F]

12. Chelsea Manning exposed the child sex slave trade by US contractors

And the State Department's subsequent attempt to tamp down on the news coverage.

http://www.houstonpress.com/news/wikileaks-texas-company-helped-pimp-little-boys-to-stoned-afghan-cops-6718414

[struggle4progress]

21. Such problems with DynCorp were well-known long before Manning joined the Army in 2007

US: DynCorp Disgrace

by Kelly Patricia O'Meara, Insight Magazine
January 14th, 2002

Middle-aged men having sex with 12- to 15-year-olds was too much for Ben Johnston, a hulking 6-foot-5-inch Texan, and more than a year ago he blew the whistle on his employer, DynCorp, a U.S. contracting company doing business in Bosnia.

According to the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) lawsuit filed in Texas on behalf of the former DynCorp aircraft mechanic, "in the latter part of 1999 Johnston learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorpwere engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in other immoral acts. Johnston witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased."

Rather than acknowledge and reward Johnston's effort to get this behavior stopped, DynCorp fired him, forcing him into protective custody by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) until the investigators could get him safely out of Kosovo and returned to the United States. That departure from the war-torn country was a far cry from what Johnston imagined a year earlier when he arrived in Bosnia to begin a three-year U.S. Air Force contract with DynCorp as an aircraft-maintenance technician for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters ...

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11119

[NWCorona]

24. You must not have read the supplied link. A direct quote

"As we mentioned, this isn't DynCorp's first brush with the sex-slavery game. Back in Bosnia in 1999, US policewoman Kathryn Bolkovac was fired from DynCorp after blowing the whistle on a sex-slave ring operating on one of our bases there. DynCorp's employees were accused of raping and peddling girls as young as 12 from countries like Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. The company was forced to settle lawsuits against Bolkovac (whose story was recently told in the feature film The Whistleblower) and another man who informed authorities about DynCorp's sex ring"

[struggle4progress]

28. so "Manning exposed child sex slave trade by US contractors" is inaccurate --

and, in fact, we have no reason to think Manning had any idea what was in most (or even in any) of the 750K or so documents he dumped

In fact, the diplomatic cable that you believe "exposed child sex slave trade by US contractors," actually only reported that the Afghan government had begged US diplomats to quash a forthcoming story on dancing boys hired for a DynCorp party in Kunduz. The topic did reach the US press months before Manning downloaded abd dumped his documents:

Amid Reviews, DynCorp Bolsters Ethics Practices
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 27, 2009
... One effort to train Afghan civilian police has drawn attention from the State Department's inspector general following incidents of questionable management oversight, including one instance in which expatriate DynCorp employees in Afghanistan hired a teenage boy to perform a tribal dance at a company farewell party and videotaped the event ... At least two videos were shot of the dancing at the farewell party in April at a DynCorp base in Kunduz, in northeastern Afghanistan, according to DynCorp employees who have seen copies. One version, according to several who have seen it, showed some 15 DynCorp personnel egging on the dancer, who came from a nearby village and was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with a long scarf tied around his waist, as he moved around a DynCorp employee sitting on a single chair in a courtyard ... "The whole event, hiring an Afghan dancer to perform for a non-Afghan audience, we felt could be seen as culturally insensitive and an example of poor judgment," Ebner said ...

[NWCorona]

15. You really didn't need to go any further than the "she" and "he"

But why don't you tell us how you really feel?

[LiberalLovinLug]

18. blind right wing authortarianism

So is any whistleblowing ok? If war crimes is not good enough reason for you, I guess someone like Jeffrey Wigand is way off base and should also be locked up.

My gawd

[FairWinds]

22. What evil I read above . .

Not a smidgen of attention to Scooter Libby, Armitage,
Petraeus, who released TOP SECRET INFO.

Manning released only CONFIDENTIAL INFO.

Stand strong Chelsea - millions of us are on your side.

What can we send you? Books?

Please tell us . .

(Vet For Peace who formerly had a top secret clearance)

[NaturalHigh]

43. I'm also a veteran who had a top secret clearance...

and I wouldn't give Manning the time of day.

[FairWinds]

45. But you think Libby & Armitage, etc.

are great patriots.

[NaturalHigh]

48. Hardly. It's not necessarily an either/or thing.

[TipTok]

49. Same...

There are legitimate things that may need to have the whistle blown on them.

Doing a massive cut and paste of a sensitive server and blasting it to the world without even a review is several orders of magnitutde beyond that.

Manning deserves every day of that 35 year term.

[FairWinds]

23. Just to be clear . .

the people of the world have every right to access
to the information that Chelsea released.

We are glad she did it, and applaud her for it.

FUCK THE REST OF YOU AND YOUR NATIONAL IN-SECURITY STATE.

[1StrongBlackMan]

30. Well fuck me ... neither you, I or the rest of the world have ...

a " right to access" to classified information ... in the real world. But in the pretend world, where people can pontificate about what you are entitled to, from the comfort of you couch ... a comfort you are afforded because other people live in the real world ... yrd, you have that tight.

[FairWinds]

33. I learned to my sorrow as a trooper in Vietnam . .

that the national security state will lie its ass off,
and kill millions, and cover it all up with . .

a security classification.

Iraq 2003 was another classic example.

I'm astonished that you trust them in the slightest.

[1StrongBlackMan]

34. Thank you for your service ...But real life remains real life ...

despite the government mistakes.

[Hekate]

29. I wonder if the man who led her down this garden path ever feels the slightest responsibility....

...for this outcome? Or does he look on from afar in smug self-satisfaction that he stuck it to The Man?

[1StrongBlackMan]

31. Fuck no ... she's paying the price, we should be honored to pay to play out his fantasy.

[Hekate]

32. Kind of my take on it, too

[FairWinds]

35. We need leakers because the . .

national security state lies about pretty much everything.

I salute Chelsea for her brave service, as does Veterans For Peace.

She is a hero.

[Blue_Tires]

44. Why the depression? I thought Manning had it pretty good in prison?

Paid columnist, she gets a twitter account, celebrity treatment, etc...

I realize there's probably a lot of remorse for trusting Assange (since he's been laughing all the way to the bank), but she couldn't have known at the time he'd turn out to be such an egotistical, lying, deceitful piece of shit in bed with the Kremlin...

[FairWinds]

46. And all you folks are just fine with . .

Petraeus, Clapper, Libby, Armitage, etc.

You're just a tad inconsistent, doncha think?

[FairWinds]

47. And furthermore . .

it was the LACK OF LEAKS that led to over
3 million innocent deaths in Vietnam, as well as
55,000 Americans - and also huge numbers of
Laotian and Cambodian deaths.

(Ellsberg's leaks came too late to stop most of the
suffering . .)

And you folks want me to oppose leaks?

Nope.