Chelsea Manning Out Of Solitary Confinement After 28 Days, Her Supporters Say

The whistleblower is serving an indefinite prison sentence in Virginia for refusing to testify before a grand jury.
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Government whistleblower and transgender activist Chelsea Manning reportedly has been released from solitary confinement after 28 days. Supporters who manage her Twitter account said Manning, imprisoned for refusing to answer questions before a grand jury, had “finally been moved into general population” at the William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center in Alexandria, Virginia.

But, the supporters added, “while this is a big win, there’s still a road ahead to get her out of jail.”

Manning had been held in isolation for 22 hours each day, according to Chelsea Resists!, a support committee for the whistleblower. The group criticized the conditions of Manning’s confinement as being tantamount to “torture” and “possibly … an attempt to coerce her into compliance with the grand jury.”

Demanding her release from the confinement, the committee said in a statement last month that the punishment had been injurious to Manning’s health.

A spokeswoman for the detention center told HuffPost that the group’s allegations were neither “accurate” nor “fair.”

Last week, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) also called for Manning’s release from solitary confinement, saying the former Army intelligence analyst was “being tortured for whistleblowing.”

″[Manning] should be released on bail, and we should ban extended solitary in the U.S.,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

Manning, who earlier served seven years of a 35-year jail term for sending classified documents to WikiLeaks, was sentenced to an indefinite time behind bars on March 8 for refusing to testify about the document leak before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.

Assange has been hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for nearly seven years to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning as part of a sexual assault investigation.

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