FORT MEADE, Md. — An Army private accused of sending reams of classified U.S. documents to the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks was kept in tight pretrial confinement partly because another prisoner had recently committed suicide, the former security chief at the Quantico, Va., Marine Corps base testified Wednesday.

Marine Col. Robert Oltman appeared as a witness on the second day of a pretrial hearing for Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is seeking dismissal of all charges, claiming his confinement in the Quantico brig amounted to illegal punishment.

Oltman and others have testified that psychiatrists who examined Manning at Quantico repeatedly recommended that his conditions be eased. But Oltman, whose command included the brig, said he was skeptical about at least one of those recommendations because another detainee had killed himself in December 2009 after his custody status was reduced because of the advice of the same doctor, Navy Capt. William Hocter, the psychiatrist assigned to the brig.

“He didn’t have the strongest credibility with me with regards to his recommendations,” Oltman said under questioning by civilian defense attorney David Coombs.

Manning was held at Quantico for nine months, from July 2010 to April 2011, when he was moved to Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Throughout his time at Quantico, he was designated a “maximum custody” detainee and considered at risk of either suicide or harming himself or others. He was locked up alone for at least 23 hours a day, forced to sleep naked forseveral nights and required to stand naked at attention one morning, his lawyers assert.

At Fort Leavenworth, Manning was re-evaluated and given a medium-security classification.

Oltman said that he told Hocter in January 2011 that Manning would remain on “prevention of injury” status unless senior officers decided otherwise.

Manning faces possible life imprisonment if convicted of aiding the enemy, the most serious of the 22 charges that he faces. He is accused of sending hundreds of thousands of classified Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and more than 250,000 diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks while he was working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad in 2009 and 2010.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 11/29/2012