WASHINGTON (AP) – The defense of ex-soldier Chelsea Manning, source of the government’s massive leakage of confidential documents to WikiLeaks, on Tuesday called for her release pending her appeal after she was arrested for refusing to appeal to her. testify before a judge.
Defense attorneys revealed in a statement that they filed an appeal on March 29 with the Fourth District Court of Appeals and have requested that the defendant be released from jail on bail pending the response to her appeal.
Manning was sent to prison on March 8 and will remain in detention until she testifies or until the grand jury handling the case has completed its WikiLeaks investigations, according to federal judge Claude Hilton of Alexandria, Virginia.
In her note, the ex-soldier’s defense recalled that she refused to testify because the District Court did not consider evidence that would have prevented her from testifying before a grand jury.
A support group for the ex-soldier, self-styled “Chelsea Resist!”, Today condemned in a statement the “solitary confinement” to which she has been subjected during her incarceration at the William G. Truesdale adult detention center in Alexandria.
“Since arriving in Truesdale on March 8, Chelsea has remained in administrative segregation or ‘adseg’ (in English), a term designed to appear less cruel than ‘solitary confinement,” they said.
“However,” they warned, “Chelsea has been in her cell for 22 hours a day, and this treatment qualifies as ‘solitary confinement.’
The movement claims that Chelsea can not leave her cell while other prisoners are, so she can not talk to other people or visit the library, and does not have access to books or reading material.
On March 8, the ex-soldier was sent by a judge to jail after she refused to answer questions about the publication of military secrets nine years ago.
Manning was sentenced in 2013, when she was still known as soldier Bradley Manning, to 35 years in prison as responsible for the largest leak of confidential documents in the country’s history.
On May 17, 2017, she was released after seven years in prison, one fifth of the sentence that had been imposed, thanks to the pardon granted in January of that year by the then president, Barack Obama (2009-2017). , three days before leaving the White House.
While he was a military intelligence analyst, in 2010, Manning leaked more than 700,000 classified documents to the WikiLeaks portal as secrets about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and cables from the State Department, which was a setback for US diplomacy and fueled a debate about the Washington’s role in the world. (EFEUSA)
