By New Worker
correspondent
Demonstrators gathered outside the US
embassy in London last Friday for a
protest picket in support of Bradley Manning, the Iraqi war veteran accused of
leaking secrets to WikiLeaks. The vigil was organised by Veterans for Peace UK
and London Catholic Worker to call for all charges to be dropped against the
former US intelligence analyst accused of leaking a video of the killing of
civilians, including two Reuters journalists, by a US helicopter gunship in
Iraq and passing other sensitive material exposing US war-crimes and those of
their mercenaries in occupied Iraq to WikiLeaks.
The demonstration was held to coincide
with the second day of a pre-trial hearing at a military tribunal held at Fort
Meade in Maryland where Manning faces a total of 23 charges in relation to
documents he allegedly handled that were later published by WikiLeaks and other
major news outlets including the Guardian
and the New York Times. One charge
carries the death penalty, others could mean life imprisonment.
Manning was kept in solitary in Iraq,
Kuwait and Quantico,
Virginia following his arrest in Iraq
in 2010. After widespread condemnation of Manning’s conditions of confinement,
he was moved to more humane conditions at Fort Leavenworth,
Kansas in April 2011. Manning says he was
tortured when he was held the Quantico US Marine Base. And Juan Mendez, the
United Nations Rapporteur on Torture, who has slammed the American authorities
for abusing Manning during his pre-trial confinement has repeatedly sought to
conduct an unsupervised meeting with Manning in order to investigate these
abuses.
“I believe Bradley Manning was
subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in the excessive and
prolonged isolation he was put in during the eight months he was in Quantico,”
Mendez told the UN Human Rights Council
in Geneva last week.
“It’s astonishing that US
officials are blocking an investigation into the humiliating and degrading
treatment of Bradley Manning, while the Kingdom of Bahrain has just invited Mr.
Mendez to conduct a fact-finding mission into their recent abuses of political
prisoners,” said Jeff Paterson from the Bradley Manning Support Network.
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