Protests are expected in dozens of cities today as part of an effort to call attention to the harsh conditions faced by accused U.S. Army whistleblower Bradley Manning. Manning is expected to testify about conditions during his imprisonment at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia, as part of a pretrial hearing today at Fort Meade, Maryland. The testimony will mark Manning’s first public comments since his arrest more than two years ago. Manning’s lawyers have argued all charges against him should be dismissed because of his “unlawful pretrial punishment,” which included being held in a six-by-eight-foot cell for at least 23 hours a day and being banned from lying down or even leaning against the wall unless he was sleeping. Manning is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks and has offered to plead guilty to a subset of the government’s charges against him. In a recent statement published by The Nation magazine, three Nobel Peace Prize laureates condemned Manning’s treatment, which has been called cruel, inhuman and degrading by a United Nations investigator. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel wrote: “If Bradley Manning released the documents, as the prosecution contends, we should express to him our gratitude for his efforts toward accountability in government, informed democracy and peace.”