Marine official: Manning held improperly in brig

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http://www.ctpost.com/news/crime/article/Marine-official-Manning-held-improperly-in-brig-4092659.php




Marine official: Manning held improperly in brig
By DAVID DISHNEAU, Associated Press
Updated 10:03 p.m., Wednesday, December 5, 2012

FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) — An Army private charged with sending reams of classified documents to the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks was wrongly kept on suicide watch for at least seven days of his nine months' confinement at a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va., the Marines' chief of corrections testified Wednesday.

Chief Warrant Officer 5 Abel Galaviz also said Pfc. Bradley Manning shouldn't have been stripped of all clothing during a period when he wasn't on suicide watch. And he said a board that made confinement recommendations to the brig commander used improper procedures that called into question the panel's objectivity.

Galaviz's testimony on the seventh day of a pretrial hearing was the strongest evidence the defense has produced to counter the government's claim that brig officials justifiably believed the strict conditions were needed to keep Manning from hurting or killing himself. The hearing is to determine whether those conditions, including confinement in an 8-by-6-foot cell at least 23 hours a day, amounted to illegal pretrial punishment, possibly warranting dismissal of the case.

Manning was held at Quantico in maximum custody from July 2010 to April 2011, when he was moved to medium-security confinement at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. While at Quantico, Manning was on either "suicide risk" or the less-restrictive "prevention of injury" status, both involving additional security measures. Brig commanders, advised by a three-member Classification and Assignment Board, rejected psychiatrists' nearly weekly recommendations to ease Manning's restrictions, according to testimony and brig records.