Alright everybody, welcome back to the show.
Third hour of anti-war radio, I'm switching from coffee to Dr. Pepper now.
Stretching my eyeballs out.
Alright, on the phone is Mike Golgoski from BradleyManning.org.
Welcome back to the show.
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Dr. Pepper sounds great, by the way.
Yeah, it's my favorite.
The serum of life.
They ought to pay me money.
I'd pay them instead, anyway.
So first of all, tell everybody about BradleyManning.org.
Yeah, we're the website of the Bradley Manning Support Network, which was set up to provide a legal defense fund and other forms of support to Bradley Manning, who is in prison currently at Quantico, Virginia, accused of releasing the collateral murder video to WikiLeaks, which showed an Apache attack helicopter in Baghdad gunning down 11 people, including two Reuters employees, back in 2007.
And then also he's accused of leaking the Iraq and Afghan war logs or not?
He's just credited with that.
Well, he's, you know, there's media speculation that he's connected with the release of that material as well, but to date he hasn't been charged with anything connected with that.
Well, that's good, at least.
But already he's facing how many years in prison?
The maximum that's been reported is 52 years, if he were to be convicted on all the charges.
All right, so now break the news for us here.
I guess it's not, it won't be breaking, but it'll be breaking as far as anti-war radio is concerned.
Something happened to a guy named David House, who works with you.
Is that right?
And what happened?
Yeah, David House is a friend of Bradley's, and he was in touch with us very early on when we were first putting the network together as an organization.
He was on our founding conference calls and also provided us with some technical assistance on the website.
Knowing that he's a friend of Brad's also, he's visited Bradley at Quantico two or three times since Bradley was moved from the field confinement facility in Kuwait to the USMC brig at Quantico, Virginia.
So David last week was returning from a vacation to Mexico, and in the process of making a connection at Chicago O'Hare Airport, was detained by Customs initially, later DHS and FBI questioned extensively about his involvement with Bradley Manning, you know, why he was visiting Manning in prison, what his connection was to us, and additionally his electronic devices were seized and retained, including a laptop computer.
Now he was requested to provide the encryption keys to decrypt the contents of his computer, which he refused to do.
And he also, he requested of the DHS and FBI that he be able to get the 20 hours worth of programming work that he accomplished at some point during his vacation off of the computer so that he wouldn't lose, you know, that product of his labor, and he wasn't allowed to do that.
So he was given a receipt for the equipment, which listed the laptop as worth 30 bucks and the camera and the cell phone as worth, sorry, rather the camera and the memory stick as worth nothing, and apparently the cell phone was returned to him after its contents were copied.
All right, now, I think Glenn Greenwald has something here that corrects what I said.
Did I get it wrong that this guy is a student at MIT?
He's an employee of MIT.
Oh, I see.
Okay, and now Greenwald is saying, look, what's going on here is the guy left the country, so then now Customs has basically no standard of probable cause or reasonable suspicion or any kind of thing, or any requirement that they have to go to a court to prove anything.
They can basically do whatever they want.
So they just took advantage of the situation.
Well, I think it's worse than that.
I mean, it's not Customs, per se.
I mean, the fact is that because David is visiting Brad in prison, or because of his involvement with our network, he's listed in the database somewhere now as a person of extreme interest and is going to be subject to essentially warrantless search and seizure as part of a governmental phishing expedition to obtain evidence that they wouldn't otherwise be able to obtain, even if that evidence doesn't exist.
It's really a matter of intimidation, right, to get anybody who's working with you at bradleymanning.org to be afraid that maybe something bad might happen to them, and maybe they ought to pull back a little bit.
Well, I'm not convinced that the U.S. government is all that afraid of the bradleymanning support network, but I think the threat here is definitely WikiLeaks.
Well, that's true, but then again, a sound legal defense could really put the government on trial.
The young man is obligated by the law to do the right thing, regardless of his particular orders.
He's duty-bound to the Constitution and to honor and truth, and all that, like in the TV commercial.
Oh, sure, but let's remember, truth is falsehood, and up is down, and the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
So I mean, yeah, it is intimidation, certainly, and I don't know yet if anyone else connected to our network has tested the borders and run into this.
Daniel Ellsberg is a member of our advisory board, and that's public knowledge.
He was able to travel to London and back as part of the release of the Iraq material just a little while back, so apparently he's not on the list yet.
All right, now hold it right there, Mike.
When we get back, everybody, we'll finish up talking with Mike Golgoski about Bradley Manning, the support network, and any more details on this persecution that we need to know about here.
Bradleymanning.org is the site.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Sandtown War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, talking with Mike Golgoski from Bradleymanning.org.
Save Bradley Manning, it's the movement.
And listen, you know, let's not mince words.
Our very lives depend upon truth, said Bill Hicks, and I think he was right.
What Bradley Manning did was provide evidence of war crimes to the American people, to the American media, by way of a foreign web server.
He's nothing but a hero.
He didn't do anything wrong to anybody.
The Afghan war logs did not get a bunch of people killed, like in the propaganda about Wikileaks has blood on their hands.
It never happened.
There was a senator who asked Robert Gates about it, and Robert Gates wrote him back and said, nah, that never happened.
Admitted it.
Just propaganda against people who give you the truth about the brutality of the American empire, simple as that.
They're persecuting this kid, Bradley Manning, when he's, I keep calling him a kid just because I feel so old now, but he's not, he's a young man who took a lot of responsibility and did a heroic thing, and one thing I like about Mike is that he can tell how important this is and how heroic what Bradley Manning did is, apparently did, allegedly did, and he deserves our support, and so now I'd like to give you a chance, Mike, to tell us about your activism, about the website, about how people can help, the successes you've had so far.
I know you had rallies all over the place.
Go ahead and get them on board for BradleyManning.org, Mike.
Say whatever you want about Bradley himself, about WikiLeaks.
It's your floor.
Well, we're still in the process of raising money for Bradley's legal defense.
To date, we've, there's now two different donation channels.
One is through our organization, through our partnership with Courage to Resist, which is tax deductible.
We've raised about $80,000 by that channel, and then individuals have made direct contributions, to Bradley's attorney's defense fund for his benefit in the amount of about $8,000 or $9,000.
So we're closing in on just short of $90,000, and after expenses, we'll probably need to raise about $20,000 or $25,000 more to cover anticipated costs for the first stage of this, which is through the end of a court-martial, which should happen sometime next year.
At the same time, we had rallies in, I believe, 18 different cities around the country, and a couple in far-off places like New South Wales, Australia.
So we're continuing to work.
We've been a bit quieter lately because there hasn't been terribly much news, but this certainly leaps up into the forefront as something alarming that just a guy who's a supporter of the cause and a personal friend of the accused is being harassed and detained and having his property stolen.
Effectively, there's very little confidence that he's ever going to get this equipment back, and he's certainly not going to get back the value of the work that he didn't have a copy of on that laptop.
So I find it very alarming.
Well, you know, as Glenn Greenwald points out, they did the same thing to this gentleman, Applebaum, from WikiLeaks, back just a few months ago.
Seized all his stuff, and I guess apparently promised him that every time you ever come to America, we're going to do the same thing to you.
Yeah, he hasn't gotten his stuff back either.
Well, I guess we won't have to wait too long for the House of Representatives under Republican control to go ahead and draw us up and official secrets act like the Brits have to criminalize what WikiLeaks does on American soil, although if they're servers in Sweden or Iceland, I don't know how that works, but I guess Congress can do whatever they want.
Well, there's another aspect to this case, too, that's interesting, and that is that in the UK now, people have been jailed by court order for failing to provide the encryption keys to decrypt their laptops when their laptops are seized by border search or otherwise claimed as evidence in investigations.
So is there going to be some push in the U.S. to make it a crime to refuse to decrypt your notebook when demanded by officials?
Who knows?
Right.
And why even pass a law that way?
It's a very disturbing trend.
Let me just give you the Padilla treatment.
I noticed one of these, I forget which one it was, it was at O'Hare Airport, right?
Or was that the Apple bomb when it was at O'Hare Airport?
That's where they grabbed those at Padilla, called them an enemy combatant and locked them in a torture prison.
Why not just go for it?
You know, why even show them to a judge at all?
Why even bother with any process at all?
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, as you mentioned, the empire before, I mean, the mask is certainly slipping.
Yeah, yeah, certainly.
And you know, again, people ought to know in case maybe they don't.
It could be, you know, people have other priorities in life and things pass them by.
I'd say the Guardian.co.uk probably has the best treatment and access to the Afghan and the Iraq war logs.
The collateral murder video can be pulled up quite easily just by Googling or searching for collateral murder or going to WikiLeaks.org.
All this is available.
And you know, WikiLeaks has all kinds of things other than these that have gotten the biggest headlines, the Bradley Manning leaks and so forth.
They've got dirt on every government on the planet and a bunch of corporations too.
And it's a really great place to spend an afternoon.
Yeah, well, if you if you enjoy digging in the dirt and the filth, sure it is, but they've said lately that there's going to be some material on Russia coming out, which should be quite interesting.
And somebody was inquiring at the press conference that Julian Assange gave in London as to whether or not they'd be releasing any more material on a on a kind of crooked incident in Lebanon.
And the way he replied indicated, yeah, they had something more to release on that.
So it's an interesting time for, you know, kind of whistleblower journalism.
I think we're in a in a new era here.
Yeah.
Well, people should not let themselves be fooled by the demonization of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.
I mean, it's just, you know, any anything about how terrible these people are is just the beginning from the get go, 180 degrees from the truth.
Those who favor empire would like to make it seem as though somehow this is betraying the soldiers, betraying America, betraying what's good and true and whatever.
But it's completely the other way around.
You know, these, you know, our very lives depend upon truth.
Like Bill Hicks said, without access to what's happening, how are we the people supposed to use our democracy or whatever to make the politicians do what we want?
Otherwise, we're just turning everything over to them if it's all in secret.
And then look, when the secrets are exposed, look how horrible it is.
Men, women and children being blown to smithereens.
It's crazy.
I mean, you're you know, you you try to engage folks on the other side of this thing.
And a lot of the time, unfortunately, you find that, hey, both of you might be speaking English, but man, you're not speaking the same language.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's the right wing media in America has really done a great job of separating what it is they're telling their audience from the rest of the debate.
I mean, really, there are people who think that there's Sharia law is trying to put gays in the Marine Corps this week or something, that that's what's important this week.torture, not the persecution of those who would support Bradley Manning, the hero.
And it is incredible.
But then again, the truth is really obvious.
So sometimes we'll wake them up.
They can have some access.
Thanks, Mike.
To a better tomorrow.
Always a pleasure.
Scott.
