Chelsea Manning’s Petition Achieves 100,000 Signatures
via RootsAction.org
From the article:
On October 4, 2016, Chelsea was again placed in solitary confinement. This time as punishment for her July 2016 suicide attempt. Chelsea had been working on her appeal for more than a week straight, and was waiting to receive the written notification of her sentence, so she could file it. But when she finally received the written notification, she taken away to solitary almost immediately. As Chelsea explains: “I received written notification of the findings on Tuesday afternoon and was then placed in solitary less than 15 minutes later.”
Serving a solitary confinement sentence was especially hard on Chelsea, as it brought back memories of the unlawful pre-trial solitary confinement that she previously endured. (Two months Kuwait, where she was completely in the dark, in a cage, in a tent, in 105 degree temperatures, for two months straight. Nine months in Quantico, Virginia, where she had to sit upright and stare at the wall all day.)
The UN special rapporteur on torture formally accused the US government of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment towards Chelsea in 2012. Chelsea has also written first hand about her experiences in solitary confinement, where she refers to as ‘”no touch” torture.’
Being placed in solitary confinement again, and especially without warning, caused her a great deal of emotional distress. This caused her to again attempt to take her own life. It is now likely that she will soon be given more solitary confinement as punishment for the second suicide attempt, and that this cycle of solitary/suicide attempts will continue, if President Obama does not step in to stop it.
