WASHINGTON: Chelsea Manning, who spent more than three years in prison for leaking US military secrets to WikiLeaks, was jailed again on Friday for refusing to testify in a grand jury investigation targeting the anti-secrecy group.
US District Judge Claude Hilton ordered Manning to be held not as punishment but to force her testimony in the secret case, according to a spokesman for the US attorney in the Alexandria, Virginia federal court.
“Chelsea Manning has been remanded into federal custody for her refusal to provide testimony” to a grand jury, said a statement from the Sparrow Project, a support group for Manning.
They cited Hilton as saying Manning would be held indefinitely “until she purges or the end of the life of the grand jury.” Manning, 31, was ruled in contempt of court after refusing earlier this week to testify for an investigation into actions by WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange in 2010, according to her own description, inadvertent court revelations and media reports.
Manning, a transgender woman then known as Bradley Manning, was a military intelligence analyst at the time who delivered more than 700,000 classified documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into WikiLeaks’s hands.
Published in Dawn, March 9th, 2019
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