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Chelsea Manning Moved Out of Solitary Confinement After Nearly a Month

Whistleblower and former US Army analyst Chelsea Manning has been moved out of de facto solitary confinement and joined the general population at the Virginia jail where she has been detained since March 6. She refused to testify before a grand jury for its investigation into document leaking website WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.
Sputnik

The support crew that operates Manning's Twitter account while she remains in jail tweeted Thursday that "After 28 days in so-called 'administrative segregation,'(solitary confinement)' Chelsea has finally been moved into general population at Truesdale Detention Center," the Alexandria, Virginia, jail where she's been held since March 6.

The development comes on the heels of a Tuesday motion filed by Manning to be released, arguing Judge Claude M. Hilton hadn't followed proper procedure by refusing to weigh in on her arguments against detention and that her continued jailing had become punitive.

Manning's Twitter acknowledged her continuing legal battle and asked supporters to donate to her legal fund.

The whistleblower spent nearly a year in solitary confinement from 2010 to 2011 while awaiting trial for stealing classified documents from the US Army and publishing them on WikiLeaks. Those documents, collectively termed "Collateral Murder," exposed US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but US President Barack Obama commuted her sentence to seven years of confinment as he left office in 2017; Manning was released that May.

UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez has described solitary confinement for more than 15 days as tantamount to "torture."

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