Credit
United States Army
WASHINGTON
— Chelsea Manning tried to commit suicide last month as she was
starting a week of solitary confinement at the prison barracks at Fort
Leavenworth, Kan., her punishment for a previous attempt to end her life in July.
Ms. Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking archives of secret documents to WikiLeaks, disclosed the attempted suicide, which took place Oct. 4, in a statement she dictated over the phone to a member of her volunteer support network.
She asked that it be sent this week to The New York Times, according to
members of the network who want to keep their identities private.
Chase
Strangio, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer representing Ms.
Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, confirmed the attempt, which
raised new questions about the military’s handling of the troubled
soldier, dating to when she was permitted to deploy to Iraq and kept at
her post in a secure facility despite signs of erratic behavior.
During Ms. Manning’s trial in 2013, testimony showed that she had been deteriorating, mentally and emotionally,
during the period when she downloaded the documents and sent them to
WikiLeaks. Then known as Pfc. Bradley Manning, she was struggling with
gender dysphoria under conditions of extraordinary stress and isolation while deployed to the Iraq war zone. At that time, military rules made being openly gay a ground for discharge without the college tuition benefits that were her prime motive for enlistment.
Mr.
Strangio said his client has endured a long series of “demoralizing and
destabilizing assaults on her health and her humanity,” adding: “I
worry about the sustainability of her current conditions and her ability
to keep fighting under these relentless abuses.” Mr. Strangio, who is
representing Ms. Manning in a lawsuit accusing the military of refusing
to adequately treat her gender dysphoria, had predicted that putting Ms.
Manning in solitary confinement could exacerbate her problems.
A
support network member said Thursday that Ms. Manning had been informed
by the Army that it would hold another disciplinary hearing on the
second attempted suicide and that she possibly faced new punishment. An
Army spokesman said he was unable to comment or answer any questions
about matters covered by medical information privacy rules.
In
her four-page statement, Ms. Manning said she tried to kill herself on
the first night of her week in solitary detention, which she was given
no warning was about to begin. She was then placed on suicide watch and
transferred to a special observation unit, called Alpha Tier, where she
continued to be held in solitary confinement, it said.
Most of her statement was devoted to a detailed account of a bizarre sequence of events she said took place several days later.
On
the night of Oct. 10, according to her statement, four people
impersonating guards conducted an hourslong attack on the prison, during
which she said she heard sounds indicating that the attackers were
shooting and torturing her cellblock’s actual guards.
These
attackers tried to induce Ms. Manning to escape, she said in her
statement. Instead, as the night unfolded, she hid in the corner of her
cell, telling the impostors she knew they were not actual guards, it
said.
At
6 a.m. on Oct. 11, a regular shift of guards familiar to Ms. Manning
arrived, and “everything returned to normal, except that several
correctional specialists were deep cleaning the entirety of Alpha tier
with Pine Sol and bleach,” the statement concluded.
The
Army spokesman denied those events had taken place. Mr. Strangio said
that Ms. Manning had described them to him in phone calls and that he
“couldn’t comment on any of these experiences because I don’t understand
them.”
He
added, “I am going to visit her later this month due to continuous
concerns that she is not getting the health care she needs.”
Ms.
Manning has also filed a complaint with the Office of the Intelligence
Community Inspector General asking for an investigation into the
incident, on Oct. 17. She said she believes it was an intelligence
operation intended to torment her psychologically and induce her to
commit a crime.
A
spokeswoman for the office of the inspector general said it was policy
not to comment on the existence or nonexistence of any whistle-blower
complaints or investigations.
Since
her suicide attempt in October, Ms. Manning, 28, has been released from
the special observation unit and returned to the general inmate
population, and can again receive mail and make phone calls. Still, two
members of the support network said Ms. Manning had told them that she
continued to see the attackers who posed as guards around the prison
until Oct. 27.
Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist who is a specialist in the psychiatric effects of solitary confinement,
said it was a mistake to subject people who have exhibited irrational
behavior to the stresses of isolation the way the military does in
punishing suicidal inmates by placing them in solitary confinement.
Dr.
Grassian cautioned that he did not know Ms. Manning and had not
examined her, but said that a classic symptom experienced by inmates
held in solitary confinement, especially if they were fragile to begin
with, is a form of delirium whose characteristics include
hallucinations, paranoia, intense agitation and confusion.
While
in Iraq, Ms. Manning was cited for responding with disproportionately
angry outbursts when she was chastised over minor misconduct; went
“catatonic” at times while talking; and was found in the fetal position
with a knife, witnesses said. Yet her supervisor never pulled her from
the secure facility where she had access to classified information or
recommended filing a report that could have revoked her security
clearance.
That
supervisor, then a master sergeant, was demoted for failing to alert
commanders of the warning signs. At Ms. Manning’s trial, he testified
that he was reluctant to do more than refer her for mental health
counseling because she was performing valuable analysis of intelligence
about Shiite insurgents that was helping to save soldiers’ lives.
After
her arrest, Ms. Manning was flagged as a suicide risk and held in the
Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va. She was placed under austere
conditions that the military said were necessary to prevent her from
harming herself even after military psychologists said it was no longer
necessary. A military court-martial judge later ruled the move had been
unlawful, and after a high-level Pentagon intervention, she was
transferred to Fort Leavenworth.
After her conviction, she announced that she wanted to be known as Chelsea Manning and referred to by female pronouns. In 2014, she legally changed her name
from Bradley to Chelsea. In response to a federal lawsuit, the military
began letting her receive hormone therapy, but houses her with male
inmates and does not let her grow her hair.
Ms.
Manning’s 35-year sentence is the longest ever imposed for providing
government secrets to the public. The documents she disclosed, which
made her a hero to open-government activists, included diplomatic cables
from American embassies around the world, incident logs from the Iraq
and Afghanistan wars, intelligence dossiers about Guantánamo Bay
detainees and a video of a helicopter airstrike in Baghdad in which two
Reuters journalists were killed. WikiLeaks made them public, working
with various news organizations, including The Times.
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