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

"The most entertaining thing in there was the mirror. You can interact with yourself. I spent a lot of time with that mirror," he told the court, provoking laughter.

Why did he do all those things, Coombs asked him.

"Boredom. Just sheer out-of-my-mind boredom."

But that is where the problems for Manning started. He was trying to keep himself sane in unthinkably isolated and segregated conditions. But his military captors chose to interpret such behaviour as quite the opposite, a sign that he was still suicidal.

The truth was very much otherwise. Three Quantico forensic psychiatrists who gave evidence to the court this week agreed that within days of arriving at the marine base Manning had recovered his mental health and was no longer a risk to himself. They consistently recommended that the soldier be put on a much looser regime.

But the authorities would not listen. All they would do was to lower his status from "suicide risk" to "prevention of injury order" or PoI, a theoretically more relaxed set of rules that in practice was in almost all regards just as restrictive as its predecessor.

Other military expert witnesses this week compared the PoI regime unfavourably with Guantánamo and death row, saying that it was more stressful on the inmate than either. Yet the Quantico authorities cited precisely those activities that Manning had used to keep his hopes alive to argue for him remaining on the PoI order. They referred to the fact that he danced in his cell, did fantasy weightlifting and made strange faces in the mirror. They even referred to the fact that he played peek-a-boo with the guards as a sign that he was at serious risk of suicide.

They also continuously referred back to that comment he'd made in Kuwait – "Always planning, never acting" – even though that had been almost a year earlier.

Before he left Quantico Manning made one final attempt to persuade the brig commander, Chief Warrant Officer Barnes, that he was perfectly well and was no danger to himself. "I told her that the conditions I was under struck me as absurd. I tried to tell her that's how I saw it – the absurdity of it."

Once more his attempt to act reasonably and rationally was interpreted as the opposite. Barnes grew angry, Manning testified, and said he was being disrespectful of a superior rank.

She warned Manning to be careful in future about what he said, as it might hurt him. "I took that as a threat," he told the court. "I realised at that point that to say any more would be a dangerous mistake."