Snowden hasn't been tortured, and will certainly not be tortured when he gets back to the US.
Snowden would prefer not to find out if that trend is going to continue.
Hint: nobody has ever said they thought Manning was a suicide risk except for his torturers. All qualified medical personnel that have ever examined him (including the prison psychologist) have insisted that he wasn't. Hint 2: doing sleep deprivation and humiliation is not the way to reduce someone's chance of suicide, if you honestly believed they were a risk. Which no one did.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/01/1166253/-The-Tortur...
Additionally, Obama himself declared him (Manning) guilty in public before his trial even began. (I wish I was making this up.)
It's not speculation. We've watched it happen, and recently. They are condemned before the trial even begins, and denied basic human rights from the outset - rights we shouldn't even deny convicted mass murderers.
It's an incredible shame for everyone who used to be proud to be from the USA.
His treatment was bad enough that you don't have to be counter-factual about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning#Detention
Last time I checked May -> April was still 11 months, and definitely not "several years".
> Additionally, Obama himself declared him (Manning) guilty in public before his trial even began. (I wish I was making this up.)
As far as I can tell from Googling, he said in a conversation, in the context of the rule of law, the "he broke the law". And that was it.
Am I missing something?
The rest of the context from the sites Google finds seems to indicate that Manning can't possibly get a fair trial, because the officers who would have to decide his guilt would treat that as some kind of order. Which is simply untrue, as evidenced by Manning's own reaction by asking for a bench trial.
If he had asked for a jury trial he would have had many more people to possibly conceive of his innocence. And the jury pool would have contained enlisted members as well, not just officers.
By asking for a bench trial he's one, and only one, commissioned officer away from being found guilty. That would be an insane choice, if this officer were really that susceptible to finding Manning guilty simply because Obama failed to use the word "allegedly" in a conversation.
Luckily, as Manning realizes since he's actually in the freaking military, that isn't the case at all.