WikiLeaks: Bradley Manning treatment may be 'illegal and unconstitutional'
The degrading and inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of leaking classified cables to WikiLeaks, has been denounced as "illegal, unconstitutional and could even amount to torture".
Pte Manning, who has been charged on 34 counts, including illegally obtaining 250,000 US government cables and 380,000 records related to the Iraq war, is being held in solitary confinement in a maximum security military prison. He is shackled at all times.
In a letter signed by more than 250 of America's leading legal scholars, published in the New York Review of Books, the signatories claim his alleged treatment is a violation of the US constitution, specifically the eighth amendment which forbids cruel and unusual punishment and the fifth amendment which prevents punishment without trial.
"The administration has provided no evidence that Manning's treatment reflects a concern for his own safety or that of other inmates," the letter states. "Unless and until it does so, there is only one reasonable inference: this pattern of degrading treatment aims either to deter future whistleblowers, or to force Manning to implicate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a conspiracy, or both."
The list of signatories includes Laurence Tribe, who worked as a legal adviser in the US justice department until three months ago, and was writer by Bruce Ackerman from Yale University and Yochai Benkler of Harvard.