Bradley Manning: How Keeping Himself Sane Was Taken as Proof of Madness

He was clearly terrified by the uncertainty in which he suddenly found himself. He had, by his own admission, recently committed a massive dump of government information from secure military computers to the website WikiLeaks, and now he was in the hands of army jailers with no knowledge about what was going to happen to him.

"I didn't know what was going on, I didn't have formal charges or anything, my interactions were very limited with anybody else, so it was very draining."

He was put on a schedule whereby he would be woken up at 10 o'clock at night and given lights out at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. "My nights blended into my days and my days into nights," he told the court.

The isolation also got to him. "I'm generally a pretty socially extrovert person, but being for long periods of time by myself I was in a pretty stressed situation. I began to really deteriorate. I was anxious all the time, everything became more insular."

The guards stopped taking him out of his cell so that he became entirely cut off from human company. "Someone tried to explain to me why, but I was a mess, I was starting to fall apart."

Military police began coming into his cell in a tent in the Kuwaiti desert two or three times a day doing what they called a "shakedown": searching the cell and tearing it apart in the process.

Then the breakdown happened. He was found to have made a noose out of bedsheets, though he told the court he doesn't recall that now. He was found one day screaming, babbling and banging his head against his tent cell.

"My world just shrank to Camp Arifjan and then my cage. I remember thinking: I'm going to die. I'm stuck here and I'm going to die in animal cage."

He remembers telling the camp psychiatrist in Kuwait that he had contemplated suicide. "I didn't want to die but I wanted to get out of the cage. I conveyed to him that if I could be successful in committing suicide, I would."

When he was asked to fill out a form by the camp guards, he answered a question on whether he had any suicidal thoughts with the comment: "Forever planning, never acting."

Amid such alarming signals of potential self-harm, he was put on anti-depression and anti-anxiety drugs and put on suicide watch. By the time he was moved from Kuwait to Quantico on 29 July, he told the court, he was already feeling substantially better and well on the way to recovery.

It is one of the great ironies of his story that when he arrived at Quantico he was at first delighted. "It wasn't the ideal environment in Quantico," Manning said to chuckles around the court. "But it had air conditioning, solid floors, hot and cold running water. It was great to be on continental  United States  soil again."

His buoyant spirits soon received a knock, he went on. He was submitted to what he called a "shark attack" by the reception officers at Quantico. Though he was an army soldier, he had been transferred to a marine base, part of the navy, and he didn't understand any of their routines or vocabulary.

"They were trying to show you they were in charge. 'Face the bulkhead!' they ordered, but I didn't know what a bulkhead was. Everything I did was wrong because I didn't know."

Given his behaviour in Kuwait, Manning was put on suicide watch when he arrived at Quantico. He was under permanent observation from guards who sat in a booth right outside his cell, most of his possessions were removed, he was made to sleep on a pillowless suicide mattress with only a suicide blanket – one that could not be used to cause self-harm – to lie under at night.