The American soldier at the centre of the WikiLeaks revelations was so mentally fragile before his deployment to Iraq that he wet himself, threw chairs around, shouted at his commanding officers and was regularly brought in for psychiatric evaluations, according to an investigative film produced by the Guardian.
Guardian
And not only that ...
Two months after his arrival, the bolt was removed from his rifle because he was thought to be a danger, his lawyer, David Coombs, has confirmed.
A few random thoughts below the DK Squiggle.
- The Army is still unclear on the concept of mental illness. How many other people went to combat who had no business doing so?
- Closing down the Iraq was is overdue
- It is at least possible that one reason we have not left Iraq is that useful intelligence is being collected
- It appears likely that Bradley Manning was, and is, a suicide risk. A risk being different than 100% likely to kill himself if circumstances permit. If he was wetting himself before deployment, arrest, and imprisonment, it is doubtful that he was mentally stable the day he arrived at Quantico
- Given this instability, the treatment he received at Quantico may have rendered him less able, or unable, to assist in his own defense
- The ethics of Wikileaks accepting the material received from Manning is now in question, at least to my mind. The papers you sign when you are granted access to classified material make it quite clear that a shitstorm is coming your way if you permit the uncleared access to said materials. Manning's actions always seemed rather stupid to me; I now consider it plausible that he was not of sound mind at the time, and therefore Wikileaks is approximately in the position of someone allowing a mentally ill person to give you all their money
So I feel more sympathetic to Bradley Manning than I once did; less sympathetic to Wikileaks; and profoundly disappointed in the US Military not realizing that mental illness is illness. And Manning seems to have been ill long before Wikileaks.
A last quote from an officer who knew Manning prior to deployment.
"I escorted Manning a couple of times to his 'psych' evaluations after his outbursts. They never should have trapped him in and recycled him in [to Iraq]. Never. Not that mess of a child I saw with my own two eyes. No one has mentioned the army's failure here – and the discharge unit who agreed to send him out there," said the officer, who asked not to be identified because of the hostility towards Manning in the military.