The UN Says Chelsea Manning Is Being Tortured by the United States, Demands Answers

The United Nations has decided to stick it’s corrupt, dictator fluffing nose into U.S. domestic affairs again. This time it’s about Chelsea Manning, formerly named Bradley Manning (he did legally change his name). Manning was serving a long prison sentence for stealing and trafficking in highly classified information about American military and intelligence. He passed it on to Wikileaks, who widely distributed the information.

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Unlike the DNC emails Wikileaks published, which were purely political in nature and not government documents, what Manning stole put lives in danger. His original sentence was 35 years in federal confinement. Inexplicably, former President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence after just three years behind bars. Obama claimed the sentence was not “in proportion” with other leakers. That ignored that what Manning did was at a far greater scale, dealing with far more dangerous information than other leakers.

Recently, Manning has found himself back behind bars for refusing to testify to a grand jury about his contacts with Wikileaks. This is part of the government’s plan to prosecute Julian Assange, who is currently being held in the UK pending extradition.

Now, the United Nations is accusing the United States of torturing Manning by keeping him detained for being in contempt of court.

This per NPR.

A top United Nations official is accusing U.S. authorities of imposing a penalty that amounts to torture against former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who is currently jailed in a federal facility after refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Earlier this year, a federal judge detained Manning and imposed on her daily fines after finding that she was in contempt of the court’s order to testify.

Nils Melzer, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, said in a letter that he made public this week that detaining Manning and fining her with the aim of coercing her to testify constitutes a kind of torture that runs afoul of U.S. international human rights obligations.

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Melzer continued with these descriptions in his letter.

Calling Manning’s treatment a “deprivation of liberty,” Melzer wrote that jailing and fining Manning fulfills “all the constitutive elements of torture, or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In my view, such measures do not fall under the ‘lawful sanctions’ exception” of the U.N.’s Convention Against Torture.

Perhaps Melzer hasn’t heard of what jail is, but when you break the law, you typically go there and can’t leave of your own volition (unless you live in New York or California). Of course it’s a “deprivation of liberty,” as that’s clearly what being held in legal confinement is. It is not torture for someone to be jailed under the stipulations of the law.

Melzer, who sent the letter to American officials on Nov. 1 but made the document public only on Monday, is asking authorities in the U.S. to explain how Manning’s punishment does not violate international human rights standards.

“Please provide information on how such coercive measures, which do not constitute circumscribed criminal sanctions, but which appear to intentionally inflict progressively severe suffering and financial pressure for the purpose of coercing individuals to testify against their conscience,” he wrote.

I’m guessing the U.S. response is going to be to tell this guy to go jump in a lake. These clowns at the UN sit idly by while vast human rights abuses take place, even committing some themselves, while instead focusing their attention on Israel and the United States for political reasons. Meanwhile, they elect dumpster fires like Venezuela and Iran to their human rights council, because of course they do.

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Chelsea Manning is not being tortured. In fact, he should still be in prison right now. It was a travesty to commute the sentence of a person who probably got American soldiers killed. The only reason it happened was to throw the transgender community a bone. That’s not how these things should be handled. The fact that Obama faced almost no criticism aside from right-leaning outlets is a testament to how garbage our mainstream media outlets are.

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