Yet more cheap opinion from the ABC

Insanity at the ABC, which today publishes utter nonsense concerning the fate of alleged Wikileaks leaker PFC Bradley Manning. The Unleashed article is jointly written by "retired diplomat" Bruce Haigh and "lawyer and human rights activist" Kellie Tranter, who claim:

Reports confirm that [Manning] is being held in solitary confinement; that he only has one hour outside his cell a day; is on suicide watch and has no access to news.

Manning is not in solitary confinement rather being held in a single-person cell and has daily access to television. After this poor start the article doesn't improve:

The fear is that the US will apply a range of methods, including coercive pressure, such as water boarding and/or blandishments such as a promise of sentence reduction or waiver, in order to extract a confession from Manning that Assange set him up as his agent of supply. The United States has applied this type of pressure in the not too distant past in order to extract ‘confessions’. Will we see a repeat with Manning?

Manning isn't remotely likely to be water boarded and has not been subjected to any abuses other than the "harsh" confinement regime typically found at military confinement facilities. But, the evil American empire has a history that must be considered:

The problem with any US “investigation” like this - for which “witch hunt” may be a more accurate description - is the patterns of behaviour to be found in recent American history.

There is a record of secret support for less than salubrious regimes with undeclared involvement for example in the overthrow of Chilean president Allende, secret support for drug running Panamanian president General Noriega, the corrupt Marcos family in the Phillipines, Ngo Dinh Diem, General Thieu and Air Vice Marshall Ky in South Vietnam and more recently Karzai in Afghanistan: a further quick sampling would highlight the McCarthy witch hunt of “communists” in the 1950s, the Gulf of Tonkin incident staged to justify the war in Vietnam, the invasion of Afghanistan that hinged on blaming the government for 9/11, and assertions about non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” to justify the invasion of Iraq.

There's also a geographical problem for Manning:

Virginia is the headquarters of the Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Homeland Security. Assange’s lawyer, Mark Stephens, has warned that the US has convened a secret federal grand jury. Will a grand jury include people employed by or with family connections to the US national security apparatus? The death penalty is a feature of Virginian law. The stage is set.

The Department of Homeland Security is headquartered in Washington, D.C.. And since Manning is being held in relation to possible federal charges, he is unlikely to be subject to Virginia law.

None of this relevant, of course, which explains why Haigh and Tranter's Leftist screed contains nary a link. Why does Australia's national broadcaster publish such crap?