09/23/10 – Jeff Paterson – The Scott Horton Show

All right, boys and girls, welcome back to the radio show.
I'm Scott Wharton.
Our first guest on the show today is Jeff Patterson from CourageToResist.org.
Welcome to the show, Jeff.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
Thanks for having me on.
I appreciate you joining us today.
And obviously, the subject matter is the American hero, Bradley Manning.
But before we talk about Bradley Manning, I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about CourageToResist.
Maybe if you could mention Aaron Matata and some of the other stories, some of the other soldiers you guys have helped out.
And maybe even give a word out to any active duty soldiers who might be listening to the show today, what they can do to resist.
Well, absolutely.
CourageToResist started in about 2004 when the first U.S. Marine and service person refused to fight in Iraq.
His name was Lance Corporal Stephen Funk, out here in the San Francisco Bay Area.
We rallied to support Stephen, refusing to fight in Iraq, and paid for his legal expenses.
And then in 2006, CourageToResist sort of began in earnest as a full-time project when Lieutenant Aaron Matata, out of Fort Lewis, south of Seattle, took a stand that he would refuse to deploy to Iraq, specifically because he believed that the war in Iraq was illegal, and the orders as such were illegal orders.
And that's...
We organized thousands of people to rally around the country.
We raised tens of thousands of dollars to pay for his legal...all of his legal expenses.
And at the end of the day, Aaron Matata never did a single day in jail because of our efforts nationwide and internationally to basically make the military realize that it wasn't in their best interest to make an example out of Aaron Matata, because he was becoming a different kind of example, an example of resistance and telling the truth about what was going on in Iraq, and the legality of that situation.
Yeah, it just goes to show it's all about PR, not about law, but...
Well, let me ask you this about Aaron, because I really don't know too much about the rest of these cases, honestly.
But I know about Aaron Matata that his argument was, you know, he was an officer, and his argument...
I talked to his father on the show a couple of times a couple of years back, and his argument was not just, look, I don't want to go because I don't want to commit war crimes, and I don't want to participate in an illegal war.
In fact, I don't even think he said that.
What he said was, I will not lead men into battle in an illegal war.
I will not be responsible for having enlisted men under me commit war crimes.
No deal.
They're my men, and I will not use them to commit illegal acts in an illegal war.
So send me to prison if that's what you've got to do.
Well, I think that was his core message.
At the core, it was that the war in Iraq was illegal.
So as a leader, he wasn't going to do that.
And since then, you know, many enlisted people have said the same thing, that they refused to deploy to Iraq because the war was illegitimate.
Now when you talk about, you know, we've worked with at least a couple hundred public objectors to the Iraq and Afghanistan war since then.
Many of these individuals have gone to Canada.
Next week, in Canadian Parliament, we'll be debating a binding resolution on whether to allow those war resistors to stay up in Canada.
There's a couple hundred of them, and we deal with conscientious objectors of all kinds.
Right now, we're dealing with a conscientious objector who became a Buddhist as a direct result of the death and literally having blood on his hands in Afghanistan.
And then we're also dealing with a Muslim conscientious objector who, for the first time, is trying to articulate how he's no longer going to work as an organized member of the military as a Muslim, trying to redefine what people understand about that religion.
So we don't really take a position on, you know, some people have better reasons than others.
We support the people who refuse to fight, and people have many different personal and political reasons for that stance.
All right, now tell me a little bit about that resolution in Canada that Parliament is talking about.
Does it have much support?
Well, I think it's going to be a very close resolution.
The Canadian Parliament has already twice passed non-binding advisory resolutions to try to convince the Harper government to allow the U.S.
-Iraq war resisters to stay in Canada.
And twice we've won that vote, and twice the conservative Harper government has basically ignored them.
So at this point, now there is a Bill C-440 that's coming up for debate and a vote next week, and if passed, that will be a binding resolution on the government for the first time.
It's going to be very close, though.
It could go down in flames by one or two votes, or it could pass with one or two votes, because the Harper government is now putting pressure on some of the middle-of-the-road supporters that there could be consequences if they vote yes, in opposition to the ruling party's wishes.
So we'll see what happens.
Hi everybody, it's Jeff Patterson from Courage to Resist.
They're organized to help people, I guess, if a soldier comes to you and says, hey man, I'm in the Army, but I want out, can you help me through the process to obtain conscientious objector status?
You guys are helpful for that, right?
Well, it's true, but most of the people we deal with aren't conscientious objectors.
They're basically broken soldiers that have deployed one, two, three, four times to spend the years in Iraq or Afghanistan, have mounting hardship problems, are physically injured or mentally injured, and the military is so desperate that they're not going to let those guys go.
They're going to force them for one more deployment, and that's usually when they get into the breaking point.
And that's who we're talking about.
We're talking about post-traumatic stress disorder, we're talking about hardship, we're talking about physical medical injuries that would have been a quick discharge a couple years ago, but now people are being told to suck it up and put your whiney and strap on your pack and go back one more time.
So it's conscientious objection, and it's a lot more.
And is there a phone number that people can call, or just CourageToResist.org?
People should definitely check out CourageToResist.org, and we have profiles of over 100, 200 folks that we've worked with.
And people can call 510-488-3559 and talk to us directly.
That's 510-388-4559 for CourageToResist, 510-388-4559.
And now we've still got a couple of minutes before the first break here to get into the story of Bradley Manning.
So I don't know, maybe someone just got back from vacation to Aruba or something, and they have no idea who Bradley Manning is.
Why don't you give us the lowdown on this kid's story here real quick, and then when we come back from the break, we'll talk about what you're doing about it.
Bradley Manning is 22 years old, he's an Army Intelligence Analyst.
He deployed to Iraq as an Intelligence Analyst.
And while stationed in Iraq and looking over intelligence reports from the battlefield, he came across a video that depicts a helicopter, a U.S. helicopter gunship, killing 11 Iraqis and significantly wounding two children.
And it appeared to be outside of the normal rules of engagement, meaning these individuals that were being shot down on the street were no threat to any U.S. forces.
They didn't look like any kind of organized militia.
They weren't in the process of attacking anybody or anything like that.
But they were gunned down from a mile in the sky by an Apache helicopter.
Allegedly, Bradley released this video to the WikiLeaks website, who then reposted it and called it the Collateral Murder video.
And millions of people have seen this video and have basically been very outraged, not only by the killings it depicts, but by the callousness of how these lives are being dispatched.
It's literally video game-esque.
Bradley is now facing over 50 years in prison, simply mainly for this video.
The U.S. government believes that Bradley is also responsible for releasing 90,000 battlefield reports from Afghanistan.
So we've got a court-martial coming up, and we're doing everything we can to support him.
All right, everybody, it's Jeff Patterson from CourageToResist.org.
We're now on the case of young Bradley Manning, the American hero, and we'll be back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is dang old ChaosRadioAustin.org, LRN.
FM, AntiWar.com slash Radio, AnomalyRadio.com, and hell, as far as I know, more places than that.
I don't know.
I think there was another one that redoes this show live, and now I don't know what it is anymore.
Anyway, I'm talking with Jeff Patterson from CourageToResist about the young Army specialist, I guess he's now been demoted to private, who's facing court-martial, Bradley Manning.
He is credited or accused, depending on your point of view, with leaking the collateral murder video and apparently also the tens and tens and tens of thousands of Afghan war logs to Wikileaks.org, which, by the way, just as a little parentheses, go and dig through Wikileaks for an afternoon.
You'll learn some things.
Jeff, so tell me about Bradley.
Where is he now?
You say he's facing 52 years in prison on charges of breaking his secrecy oaths, or they're not charging him with espionage or anything like that, are they?
Well, Bradley's facing charges basically of releasing classified information, and mainly that's it.
And they charged him multiple times for the same acts, meaning that accessing the computer was one violation.
Looking at the information was another violation.
Sharing that information was a third violation, and that way it adds up to 50 years very quickly.
He was arrested in late June in Iraq.
He was put in solitary confinement in Kuwait for two months, up until very recently, before he was transferred to Quantico, Virginia.
And we worked very hard to try to figure out who was representing him, if anybody, and who was fighting for his legal rights, if anybody.
And the answer turned out to be really nobody.
And it really became incumbent upon U.S.
-based supporters to gather together to create a defense network.
And that's what we've done through the Bradley Manning Support Network.
And people can check out bradleymanning.org for daily reports from around the country of rallies to support Bradley.
Last week we hosted a forum with Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers, who helped end the Vietnam War.
And Daniel was talking about the very close similarities between his case and Bradley Manning's.
So stuff's going on every day.
We're building an international movement to defend somebody who is basically, we believe, is being persecuted because he's a whistleblower.
Let me ask you this, Jeff, because the other Scott Hortons, the one with the legal mind, mine's just angry.
But I'm trying to understand.
It seems like we have all these whistleblower protection laws, not that they're ever really enforced well, but it's at least officially supposed to be the case that if you're a government employee and you rat on your boss, that you're protected, that that's okay as long as you're actually trying to do the right thing.
You try to go through the official process first or something.
And, of course, 99 times out of 100, the whistleblowers are persecuted anyway.
But I wonder whether there even is a legal argument inside the military for saying to the military judge, for his lawyers to say to the military judge, but judge, it was a war crime and it was covered up for years.
And he had a moral obligation as high as his oath to the Constitution, perhaps as part of his oath to the Constitution, to get that information to the American people the best way he could.
Is there a legal case that can be made that, yeah, he did it, but that's what makes him a hero, judge, not a criminal?
Well, the laws on protecting whistleblowers are better than nothing.
But there is a specific exemption in the federal laws, I believe, that exempts particular positions in the intelligence community.
So that would be one.
And second, the military law is not affected by the civilian whistleblower protections.
So that doesn't offer him any protection either.
But what you're saying about him and his relationship to the same possible war crimes that were being covered up is, I think, a very valid and could be a very important argument that will come up in the military trial.
Because if he indeed is the person who released these documents, the question is why.
And if we believe the prosecution, he did it because he believed that these were possibly war crimes, that they were being covered up, and that the people, the U.S. population, needed to know what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan with their tax dollars, that really this is an issue about transparency, and that people are going to fund trillions of dollars with our money, that we should know what exactly is happening over there without the spin of the Pentagon or the State Department.
All right.
It's Jeff Patterson from CourageToResist.org.
And, you know, we talked with Michael Goski quite a few times on the show now from BradleyManning.org.
He's the one who set up that site.
And then you and he really got together to create this Bradley Manning Support Network, right?
It's true.
You know, CourageToResist, what we brought to it is a track record of doing military court-martials.
We hosted defense funds of two different, some high-profile, some lower-profile military objectors who have gone to trial.
Some of them have been acquitted, more or less, and have left the military.
Some have gone to prison for a year or so.
So we have that experience.
And we were able to host and set up a defense fund to cover Bradley's legal expenses.
Those expenses will be about $100,000 for legal and for expert witnesses on forensic computer systems and psychiatrists and criminal investigators and that kind of thing.
But we've already raised nearing or a little bit more than $60,000 to those fees.
So we've done a lot in the last six, seven, eight weeks.
Can you tell me a little bit about the lawyers that you found for him?
Our position from the beginning to Bradley was that there are a number of civilian lawyers around the country that he should look at hiring.
We tried to select the best lawyers around the country that were available and willing and excited to take this case.
And we gave Bradley those options, and he selected David Coombs out of the Rhode Island-Boston area to be his civilian defense counsel.
So David is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve.
He's a professor at the U.S. Military Judge Advocate General Academy.
He's been doing defense, and now he's gone into business for himself in the civilian legal defense world.
I think David is looking to establish his civilian career with a confident and strong defense of Bradley Manning.
We've had a good working relationship with him, building in parallel both the legal and the political defense effort.
Yeah, I'm so glad to hear that.
When I first talked to Mike, I said, look, man, people might not know who you are.
I didn't know who you were before, and anybody can just Google up, do a Who Is, and get BradleyManning.org.
How do we know you're legit?
How do we know this money's going where it's going?
He said, because I'm working with CourageToResist.org.
That's how you know you can trust me.
Well, I appreciate that.
We've spent a few years now doing this full-time.
There's plenty of people, individuals that you can look up on CourageToResist.org, their stories, what they went through, the outcomes, how much money that was spent on their fees and supporting their family members and travel fees and stuff like that.
I think we have a pretty good track record.
It's just too bad that Bradley couldn't keep his fingers, mouth shut and typed all these admissions to the rat, Adrian Lamo.
If he had just stayed quiet, he might have been okay and gotten away with it and done the right thing and known that, hey, the truth got out.
So why brag to this rat?
It's sad.
Well, yeah, I think people get a little too preoccupied with Adrian Lamo and that situation.
People look at what Bradley was going through.
He was in Iraq.
He's 22 years old.
Viewing, looking at all this crazy stuff like the collateral murder video, raising concerns to his commanding officers like, hey, this stuff's not okay.
Are you guys aware of what's going on over here?
And they're telling him just to keep his trap shut and to do his job and not ask questions.
And in the process, becoming more and more isolated from people who are being good soldiers and who aren't asking questions.
Well, I'm sorry we've got to go here, but it is a good thing that he was able to kind of break away from the boot camp mentality and start thinking for himself again.
It's heroic work that he did and it's heroic work that you're doing.
Thank you very much, Jeff Patterson.
CourageToResist.org, BradleyManning.org.
Peace, man.
Take care.