“I remember thinking I’m going to die. I’m stuck inside this cage,” Private Bradley Manning said in court today, according to press reports. “I just thought I was going to die in that cage. And that’s how I saw it—an animal cage.” Manning was describing his time in detention in Kuwait, when, his lawyer told the court, he broke down—“screaming, babbling, banging his head against the cell.” Manning said that he hardly remembered: “I knew I had just fallen apart, everything is foggy and hazy at that point.” And then he was taken back to America, and locked in solitary confinement in a cell at Quantico for nine months, in conditions that neither his alleged crimes or his state of mind explain.

Manning, until now, has been the silent center of the WikiLeaks case, in which Julian Assange, to whom he is accused of giving classified materials, and who has his own legal issues (not all of which have to do with the leaks), has been a far more visible and certainly a louder presence. Manning has been shut away: this was his first time speaking, and observers seemed struck by how young he appeared; he is now twenty-four. His appearance came on the day that the judge approved potential language for a potential plea deal in which he would, according to the AP, admit “to willfully sending the following material: a battlefield video file, some classified memos, more than 20 Iraq war logs, more than 20 Afghanistan war logs and other classified materials …[and] to wrongfully storing classified information.” (He has not entered that plea yet.) And it came after troubling testimony about his detention.

On the floor in front of the judge, Manning’s lawyer David Coombs drew an outline of the cell that Manning had been kept in for twenty one to twenty-three hours a day: it was eight feet by six feet. Manning testified that he made faces at himself in a mirror to keep sane. In addition to the isolation, Manning was stripped of his clothes at night and made to stand naked at attention in the morning, for no practical reason. This was supposedly because he was a on suicide watch or in “prevention of injury” risk, except that, as the Washington Post’s Julie Tate noted in her account of the hearing, the garrison commander at the time acknowledged “that psychiatrists who treated and observed Manning had written multiple reports asserting that he was not a threat to himself.” (“I’ve just never experienced anything like this,” Captain William Hocter, a Navy psychiatrist testified. “It was clear to me that they had made up their mind on a certain course of actions and my recommendations didn’t really matter.”) Other testimony reflected concern within the military itself that Quantico was not the right place for Manning, at least not for so long.

The seven charges Manning appears to be ready to plead to are not the most serious, although they carry a potential maximum sentence of sixteen years. The remaining ones—fifteen of them, including violating the Espionage Act and aiding “the enemy”—could result in life in prison but may also be harder to prove. As Tate notes, “Both require evidence of intent—and in the case of the Espionage Act, an intent to injure the United States.” There are other strange notes to be played out, including a Dr. Seuss parody that prison personnel wrote about Manning’s underwear and indications that some information from bin Laden’s hard drives might be introduced. And there should be more to hear, at last, from Manning himself. He’ll be cross-examined by the prosecution on Friday.

But what the pre-trial hearings have really shown so far is how addled our country is on questions of detention and national-security secrets—separately and, even more so, when they come together. We seem to forget ourselves, at home and abroad. A report this week from the General Accounting Office about the prisons available in America for the prisoners at Guantánamo, if it should ever be closed, counted a hundred and four that already hold terrorists, and are doing so without problems. It also mentioned. almost in passing, that “as of August 2012, system-wide Bureau of Prisons facilities were about 38 percent overcrowded”—a distinctive American dilemma, if not pathology. (Adam Gopnik has written about that; also see Atul Gawande on what solitary confinement really means.) One problem is that federal prisons are only supposed to hold people who are charged with or have been convicted of a federal crime—a good exercise in discipline, to say the least. But out of a hundred and sixty-six prisoners at Guantánamo, only three have been convicted of anything; only seven more have been charged. Bradley Manning’s lawyer said that in offering a plea he was taking some responsibility for the secrets he had let go. Will the government take responsibility, too, for the prisoners it still keeps?

Photograph by Mark Wilson/Getty.