WASHINGTON — The Army private suspected of illegally passing U.S. government secrets to the WikiLeaks website was transferred Wednesday to an Army prison in Kansas from the Marine brig in Virginia where he has spent the past nine months.
Pfc. Bradley Manning, suspected of having obtained the classified documents while serving as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, is awaiting a determination by the Army on whether he is mentally competent to stand trial.
An Army spokesman at the Pentagon, Col. Tom Collins, said Manning arrived at the Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., on Wednesday afternoon. In the coming five to seven days, he will undergo an in-depth physical and behavioral assessment by Leavenworth staff, Collins said.
Shortly after the Pentagon announced its decision to transfer Manning, the soldier’s attorney, David Coombs, wrote on his blog that his client’s treatment at Quantico was substandard.
“While the defense hopes that the move to Fort Leavenworth will result in the improvement of Pfc. Manning’s conditions of confinement, it nonetheless intends to pursue redress at the appropriate time for the flagrant violations of his constitutional rights by the Quantico confinement facility,” Coombs wrote.
The Pentagon said Manning would be returned to the Washington, D.C., area as needed for legal proceedings, since his case is under the jurisdiction of the Army’s Military District of Washington. No trial date has been set.
Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon’s top attorney, said the transfer to Fort Leavenworth does not suggest that Manning’s treatment at the Marine base at Quantico, Va., was inappropriate. But he acknowledged that the case received high-level Pentagon attention because of persistent criticism by human rights groups, some members of Congress and others of the conditions in which Manning had been held.
Army Undersecretary Joseph Westphal, at a news conference Tuesday, acknowledged that the brig at Quantico was not designed to hold pretrial detainees for more than a few months.
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