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Alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning, a 23-year-old U.S. Army intelligence analyst, is confined in a 6-by-12-foot cell with a bed, a drinking fountain, and a toilet for about 23 hours a day. On a "typical day," he is awakened at 5 a.m. and is not allowed to sleep between 5 a.m. and 8 p.m.; if he tries to sleep during those hours, guards will make him sit up or stand. He eats all his meals in his cell. He is allowed one hour of "exercise" daily outside his cell, consisting of walking in figure eights in an empty room. When he goes to sleep, he is required to strip down to his boxer shorts and give his clothing to the guards. He is not allowed to have any personal items in his cell.

Late in the evening on 9 June 2006, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen.

According to the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service's report, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell's eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat.

According to the report, each prisoner, even as they were choking on the rags, would have climbed up on their washbasin, slipped their head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until they asphyxiated. The report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in US immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

Behind the scenes, the deaths generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos showing officials stymieing outside inquiry.

The documents concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.

The documents show how officials covered up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10detain.html

The permanent danger of torture through human history is that it can be used by the torturers to manufacture or "create" evidence through confession. In fact, this has always been the prime function of torture: not to discover something that the torturers did not know beforehand, but to force a victim to tell the torturers what they were already convinced was true.

When neoconservatives, at the peak of their hubris, bragged that they could create reality, they weren't kidding. Torture is the most effective means of creating reality because of this dynamic. What better evidence is there that someone was an al Qaeda member than that he confessed to it? And torture can get victims to confess to anything if they are tormented enough.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/posts-of-the-year-they-tortured-a-man-they-knew-to-be-innocent-october-1-2009.html

The US interrogator told Fouad al-Rabiah: "There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent."

This was not a statement from the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials, nor archival evidence from one of Stalin's gulags. This was a statement made by an agent of this government less than seven years ago to a detainee. The enormity of that is nearly incomprehensible. But even worse -- far worse -- is the fact that the Obama administration would nevertheless still seek to convict based on the resulting confession.

To those of us who read that passage and who vowed and make it our vocation to serve and protect the Constitution of the United States, that fact is a gut-punch. For me and my colleagues, it literally took our breath away. It makes one wonder how far down into the abyss we have allowed ourselves to drop. And whether there is the political will to find our way out.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/email-of-the-year-october-2-2009.html