Bradley Manning's lawyers seek to show torturous holding conditions

Manning's lawyers move to have the 22 charges against him dismissed due to treatment during his detention likened to torture

After his arrest in May 2010 at a military base near Baghdad, the young soldier was held at the Quantico marine base in Virginia.

For a period of about eight months at Quantico, Manning was subjected to extraordinarily harsh conditions. This was done, the military claimed, for his own protection under a so-called "prevention of injury" order or POI.

The unidentified witnesses that Coombs wants to call include a military psychiatrist who consistently recommended to Manning's captors at the brig at Quantico that the prisoner should be removed from restrictive conditions. But his advice was ignored and Manning continued to be subjected to solitary confinement, being stripped naked, held in a bare cell and made to wear a rough smock at night.

Witnesses will testify, the defence motion states, that when the psychiatrists objected to the conditions, they were told by the military chiefs in the brig: "We will do whatever we want to do."