Chelsea Manning has emerged from seven days of solitary confinement as punishment for having tried to take her own life during a spell of despair related to her treatment as a transgender woman at the hands of her military jailers.
The army private, who is serving 35 years in the harshest sentence meted out to any source of an official government leak in modern history, announced her return to the general population of the military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in a tweet.
I'm back. I'm OK. I'm resting and trying to get back in the groove of things. #solitaryconfinement
— Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) October 12, 2016
Manning’s re-emergence puts to an end several days of jitters among her supporters who were alarmed by the sudden lack of communication with the prisoner. That prompted one of her most prominent supporters, Michael Stipe of REM, to put out a video statement on Facebook asking “Where is Chelsea Manning?”
Manning said that she was put into solitary last Tuesday, less than 15 minutes after she was served with a written notice of her punishment for the July suicide attempt. “I received written notification of the findings on Tuesday afternoon and was then placed in solitary less than 15 minutes later,” she said.
She was taken down to a so-called “segregation” cell where she was held in isolation, despite the fact that she had already indicated that she intended to appeal against the punishment. She is now likely to go ahead with the appeal, which has to be filed within the next seven days, in the hope of erasing the infraction from her prison record.
Military authorities at Fort Leavenworth and the Pentagon failed to respond to numerous requests from the Guardian for information about Manning’s apparent disappearance and solitary confinement.
Holding human beings in isolated confined spaces is well known to exacerbate depression and other mental health conditions. It has been found to induce serious psychological side-effects such as paranoia and suicidal thoughts within a matter of a few days.
Mental health experts reacted with shock and anger at the decision of the US army to put someone who had survived a suicide attempt into solitary confinement – a response that risked reinforcing the behavior that it purported to punish.
The soldier’s support group @SaveManning expressed relief and said it was “nice to hear her voice”.
Chelsea is back in touch with friends and her lawyers. Nice to hear her voice. We are amazed, as always, at her resiliency :-) https://t.co/P1FTr3XOkP
— Chelsea Manning (@SaveManning) October 12, 2016
Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the US army in Iraq, leaked hundreds of thousands of warlogs and diplomatic cables, revealing the impact of modern warfare.
