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BY TRACY PFEIFFER

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As WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is released on bail after a week’s incarceration, Private First Class Bradley Manning, believed to be the source of thousands of WikiLeaks’ documents, is going on seven months of solitary confinement -- and some are asking, is it torture?

MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann describes Manning’s current imprisonment.

OLBERMANN: “Manning, nonetheless, spends 23 out of every 24 hours alone in his cell.  This has been true for seven months.  He has been prohibited exercising in that cell, strictly monitored and enforced.  He is denied prison basics like a pillow and sheets.  Medical personnel administer anti-depressants regularly to prevent Manning from mentally deteriorating due to the effects of such isolation.”

Those effects, according to The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, can be quote- “as clinically distressing as physical torture.” Psychological effects noted in the article are, “anxiety, depression, anger, cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, obsessive thoughts, paranoia, and psychosis.”

In a lengthy discussion on Manning’s imprisonment, Democracy Now! revisited a January 2010 interview with surgeon and New Yorker writer Atul Gawande, who wrote an extensive piece on the effects of solitary confinement.

GAWANDE: “The science of what happens to people deprived of social contact is they have to fight for their sanity and many lose their sanity.  … And you can’t read the cases, and I describe the cases of both hostages and people who are in prisons, and conclude that, number one, those experiences are different.  They’re the same.  Number two: You can’t conclude that it's not torture."

But a writer for the website RedState takes a simpler route on the issue: If you do the crime, you have to be willing to do the time.

“I suppose I really wouldn’t want to be put in solitary confinement and have my pillow and blankie taken away. In order to avoid this result, I have made a conscious decision to not access and steal highly classified information from the United States and sell it to a sex offender from Sweden. Thus far, my strategy seems to be working."

But Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story, says this goes beyond crime and punishment -- it’s about fear and intimidation.

“If you became aware of secret information revealing serious wrongdoing, deceit and/or criminality on the part of the U.S. Government, would you -- knowing that you could and likely would be imprisoned under these kinds of repressive, torturous conditions for months on end without so much as a trial... be willing to expose it?"

Finally, a writer for Business Insider -- who makes it clear he believes Manning should be rightly punished if guilty of treason -- wonders -- hasn’t the United States learned anything from its past embarrassments?

“As was demonstrated in spades at Abu Ghraib, how we treat our prisoners matters. It matters to other soldiers. It matters to the country. It matters to humanity.  And subjecting prisoners to petty tortures and humiliations just lowers us to the level that we're fighting to try to rise above.”

Bradley Manning has not been formally charged with any crime, though he faces charges of securing and transmitting classified information without authorization.

Transcript by Newsy