GENEVA - The UN investigator on torture accused the US government of blocking a one-on-one meeting he was seeking with detained soldier Bradley Manning.

Argentine lawyer Juan Mendez said he had been trying to organize a visit to check on Manning's condition since December.

Manning, 23, is being held during the investigation of charges that while serving in Iraq he leaked secret documents, including hundreds of State Department cables.

Manning has been held at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia since last May.

His lawyers have complained he is being mistreated by being kept in his cell for 23 hours a day while the Pentagon says he has to sleep naked and is woken repeatedly during the night to check that he is safe.

"Unfortunately, the US government has not been receptive to a confidential meeting with Mr Manning," Mendez said in a statement issued from his Geneva office.

Manning's lawyer now understood that the request for a meeting had been refused, added Mendez, a former political prisoner who experienced torture under his country's military dictatorship in the 1970s.

Mendez said he was "deeply disappointed and frustrated by the prevarication" he had met from both State and Defense Department officials who made clear they would only allow him to talk to the soldier with a prison official present.

A Pentagon spokesman said that like in the federal prison system, only lawyers were allowed one-on-one unmonitored meetings with anyone confined at the Quantico base.

"The UN Special Rapporteur, like any other visitor, is free to request a visit with Manning through Manning's attorney and Manning is free to agree to it," Colonel Dave Lapan said in a statement.

Lapan also said there was "considerable misinformation" about Manning's confinement. Lapan said that except for a brief period about a month ago, Manning had not been sleeping naked and was not awakened repeatedly.

Mendez, an independent expert who reports to the UN Human Rights Council, said a monitored conversation would violate his job's requirement for private, confidential and unsupervised interviews with detainees alleging torture and ill-treatment.

The Guardian newspaper said on Monday that more than 250 US legal scholars, including one who taught President Barack Obama constitutional law and served in the administration, had signed a protest over Manning's "degrading and inhumane" treatment.

Obama has said he has been assured by the Pentagon the handling of the soldier, an intelligence analyst, was appropriate and met basic US standards.

Last month, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, a former Air Force colonel, resigned amid a furor over reports that he said Manning was being held in "ridiculous" conditions.

Reuters

(China Daily 04/13/2011 page11)