Bradley Manning was submitted to sleep deprivation & extreme isolation, both of which are widely regarded as torture by civilized people. Given that it seems reasonable for Snowden to believe he will be tortured on his return to the US and unreasonable for someone to say that he certainly won't be tortured.
Not everyone who is convicted of a crime by the government is tortured and not every trial is a mocking pretense. Maybe, just maybe, Edward Snowden is speaking through the filter of his own prejudices and biases, which may not necessarily 100% reflect reality.
Maybe we should put it this way: the last person that the U.S.A. got its hands on that caused a similar amount of embarrassment to the U.S. government was brutally tortured.
Snowden would prefer not to find out if that trend is going to continue.
What you call brutal torture is certainly nothing anybody wants to experience, but the implication that it is legally unprecedented or obviously illegal is not correct, particularly for someone who is both subject to UCMJ and is reasonably deemed a suicide risk.
Nice torture justification, bro. You should be proud of yourself: you've stood up for humans beings torturing other human beings. Probably the highlight of your life to date.
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.
