Bradley Manning's Saga Keeps Getting Sadder

After nearly 1,000 nights in prison, sometimes spending days without seeing sunlight, Bradley Manning took the stand at his pretrial hearing in Fort Meade, Maryland on Friday. The 24-year-old's lawyers are trying to talk the judge into dropping all of the charges on the grounds that Manning was punished enough during his detention. And when you hear Manning talk about what it was like where he was held in the Kuwait and later in Quantico, Virginia, it certainly doesn't sound like Manning's jailtime was very fun.

“I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to die,’” Manning said at one point. “I’m stuck inside this cage. I just thought I was going to die in that cage. And that’s how I saw it: an animal cage.” Manning wasn't very far off with his analogy, either. He was living in an eight-foot by eight-foot cell for 24 hours a day during his stay at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. He feared that the military would move him to Guantanamo or Djibouti. Instead, they moved him to Quantico and put him in another tiny cell. Guards forced him to sleep naked on a number of nights, and we only recently found out what their justification for the inhumane treatment was: They were afraid that Manning would kill himself.

Manning admitted as much when he was on the stand, but that doesn't make the treatment okay. Whereas the guards said that it was "erratic behaviour, poor judgment in the past and poor family relationships" that put Manning on suicide watch, the prisoner himself sounded a bit more dejected when talking about that dark time. "I was getting more and more tired. I started to feel I was mentally moving back into Kuwait mode — that lonely, black hole of a place," said Manning.

So, Manning made a noose out of bed sheets that he planned to hang himself with. When guards found out about the noose, they took away all of his things. That didn't make things any better for Manning. "I had no socks, no underwear. … I had no articles of clothing." He added, "I really wanted to get off of this status. I wanted to sleep on sheets and blankets and have soap. … That was a high priority."

Manning's luxuries in custody were basically non-existent. The guards gave him 20 minutes a day of "sunshine call," when they'd let him out in full restraints. He'd otherwise have to crane his neck through the bars to see daylight reflecting off the walls. Manning told the judge that he would sit on his rack, crosslegged to relax, but guards wouldn't even let him do that sometimes.

Inevitably, Manning did plead guilty to eight charges for sending classified documents to WikiLeaks. It was part of a plea bargain he made with the judge, and while nothing is final yet, it really doesn't look like the judge will be willing to let him off the hood due to his treatment in prison. In fact, it looks like he'll sentence Manning to 16 more years of it.