WikiLeaks suspect turned bed sheet into a noose

The American soldier accused of the biggest leak of official secrets in US history admitted he had turned a prison bed sheet into a makeshift noose he could have used to kill himself.

Army private Bradley Manning, 24, has been in military custody since his arrest in Iraq more than two years ago on accusations that he leaked hundreds of thousands of confidential documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.

He faces life imprisonment if convicted of the most serious charge that he "aided the enemy," but his defense team argues that the case should be thrown out because of his unduly harsh treatment in jail.

The soldier broke his silence in the case on Thursday by testifying at a pre-trial hearing near the US capital, and is now being cross-examined. "Yes, sir," Manning said yesterday, after lead government counsel Major Ashden Fein asked him if the sheet, which was rolled into a ligature and had several knots tied along it, was his. Both men referred to the bed sheet as a noose.

The soldier was considered a suicide risk when the bedding was taken from the cell where he was initially held at a garrison in Kuwait. In a medical note, however, regarding the possibility that Manning might take his own life, Manning wrote: "Always planning, never acting."

Manning's disputed mental state may prove pivotal in the case because if the court ultimately finds that he was abused in custody the charges could fall, or any eventual sentence be reduced.

After Kuwait, he was moved to the Marine Corps Brig at Quantico in Virginia, where he was kept isolated in excess of 23 hours a day and formally classed as a suicide risk.

Manning's defense team maintains the military's stringent POI (prevention of injury) status that he was given amounted to degrading treatment. On Thursday, Manning recounted a detention regime under which he "started to fall apart," where he was forced to stand to attention naked in his cell and encountered angry responses when he questioned his guards' orders.

But Major Fein sought to undermine those claims, citing tape recordings taken in prison over a period of eight months where Manning did not raise his alleged mistreatment with anyone who visited him.

"Better than a significant part of the population," was how Manning described his condition to one Quantico visitor, according to Fein, in November 2010.