By Charlie Savage
WASHINGTON: Chelsea Manning tried to kill herself at the start of a week of solitary confinement at the prison barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, last month, a punishment imposed for a previous attempt to end her life in July.
Manning, the former US 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 on October 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, said members of the network who want to keep their identities private.
Chelsea Manning.Credit: US Army
Chase Strangio, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer representing Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, said, "I can confirm there was a second suicide attempt."
"She asked me to confirm that," he added.
Mr Strangio had publicly criticised the army for saying it was going to put his client in solitary confinement because of her attempted suicide in July, predicting that it could exacerbate her problems.
A support network member said on Thursday that Manning had been informed by the army that it would hold a disciplinary hearing for 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.
Manning's four-page statement said she tried to kill herself on the first night of her week in solitary detention.
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 is devoted to a detailed account of a bizarre sequence of events she said took place several days later.
Her statement says that, on the night of October 10, four people impersonating guards conducted an hours-long attack on the prison, during which she heard sounds indicating that the attackers were shooting and torturing her cell block's actual guards.
These attackers tried to induce Manning to escape but she did not co-operate. 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 6am on October 11, a regular shift of guards familiar to 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.
Manning's support network also sent the Times a copy of a complaint from her addressed to the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General on October 17. The complaint asked the inspector general to investigate Manning's claims, saying that the incident had been 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 whistleblower complaints or investigations.
Manning, 28, has since 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 Manning had told them that she continued to see the attackers who posed as guards around the prison until October. 27.
Mr Strangio said that Manning described the same supposed events 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."
Manning's 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 US embassies around the world, incident logs from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, intelligence dossiers about Guantanamo 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 organisations, including the Times.
During 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 Private First Class Bradley Manning, she was struggling with gender dysphoria under conditions of extraordinary stress and isolation while deployed to the Iraq War zone at a time when military rules made being openly gay a ground for discharge without the college tuition benefits that were her prime motive for enlistment.
After her arrest, she was flagged as a suicide risk and held in the jail operated by the Marines in Quantico, Virginia, under austere conditions the military said were necessary to prevent her from harming herself even after military psychologists said it was no longer necessary, a step her supporters denounced as abuse.
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, and she has since been pursuing gender reassignment surgery.
The New York Times
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