With the news that the Justice Department has failed to produce evidence to support a conspiracy between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and alleged leaker Private Bradley Manning, the question of Manning's treatment while in custody becomes even more urgent. As Glenn Greenwald writes, it begs the question of whether Manning's solitary confinement is being used as a mere coercive tool of interrogation rather than a justified security measure:
It's long been clear -- and reported -- that the Obama DOJ desperately needs Manning to incriminate Assange in order to be able to prosecute him (by, for instance, providing the Manning-Assange link that the DOJ is unable to prove). The harsh, punitive conditions under which Manning are being held is designed -- like most detainee abuse -- to force him to say what his captors want him to say (yesterday, Amnesty USA followed Amnesty International in denouncing Manning's detention conditions as "inhumane").
The case for Manning's isolation for security reasons has never been made clear, and as Greenwald noted in his original post on Manning, "solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture." Is Manning's isolation being used as a form of "enhanced interrogation" to get Manning to implicate Assange?
