For Pacifica Radio, March 15th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You'll find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
All right.
Introducing today's guest, it's Joe Lauria, the editor of consortiumnews.com.
Welcome back to the show, Joe.
How are you, sir?
I'm okay, Scott.
Hope you're doing fine, too.
I'm doing all right.
Appreciate you joining us here.
So, listen, you have been doing such a great job.
You and others, I should clarify, over at consortiumnews.com have been doing such a great job covering the story of the prosecution of Julian Assange, the recent extradition hearings in the UK, and all of that.
And we're going to talk about that.
But if you don't mind, I'd like to start with the recent breaking developments, as of yesterday, in the story of Chelsea Manning, who has been held in contempt of court for the last year, in this case, and has recently been released.
But please fill us in the details there, if you could, sir.
Yeah, it was somewhat of a surprise that she was released the day after she attempted to commit suicide.
She'd been 10 months in coercive detention in Alexandria, Virginia, because she refused to testify to a grand jury, which she, in general, as a principal, does not believe in, and specifically because she thought she was being used and railroaded to try to somehow incriminate Julian Assange with even more charges.
Of course, Assange has been charged under the Espionage Act for supposed espionage, but I think it's really sedition.
Myself, a law that doesn't exist anymore in the US, of course.
Assange simply possessed and disseminated classified information.
He wasn't authorized to do that, but anybody who's done that could be charged, but no one has, as a journalist anyway, until Assange.
Of course, Chelsea Manning was the source of those leaks to Assange back in 2010.
The most important WikiLeaks disclosures, collateral murder, death squads in Afghanistan, mostly alleged and prima facie evidence of US war crimes and other corruption.
Chelsea was in jail again.
Of course, she served several years of a 35-year sentence after she was convicted and court-martialed for the leak.
She did not have authorization to give it to Assange.
President Obama commuted that sentence.
Now, suddenly, she found herself back in prison.
Why?
Because she wouldn't testify against Assange.
What's interesting is there's one theory out there.
I don't give a lot of credence to this woman.
Maybe you do, Scott, and I'm talking about Marcy Wheeler.
Empty wheel.
Yeah, I used to until she became the world's worst Russiagate truther hack.
Anyway, go ahead.
Yeah.
That's basic.
Also, very much against Assange because of his alleged involvement and all that.
Just shameless.
In Russiagate.
Yeah.
It was a very weird and hard-to-understand piece, but she wrote it in December.
She has connections to the Department of Justice, I believe, and the FBI, sources anyway.
She was writing the reason they had Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond, of course, who was accused of leaking the Stratford files to Assange.
They were both in coercive detention, the government wanting both to testify against Assange after he'd already been charged in the Espionage Act, after he was already been imprisoned in Belmarsh.
Why did they still need more material on Assange?
What other charges could they add to him?
Her theory is that they were trying, the government, to build a conspiracy, a wider conspiracy, to suck many people in around WikiLeaks, and that testimony from both Assange and Hammond were crucial, but also the case of Schulte, Jonathan Schulte, who was accused of being the leaker of the Vault 7 CIA files to Assange.
Now, what happened on Wednesday of this week is that Chelsea Manning tried to commit suicide, and on the same date, the Schulte trial ended in a mistrial in New York.
If that's true, that there was some kind of conspiracy they were trying to build, Marcy Wheeler wrote that that was a key part of it.
They lost.
The government lost that when it became a mistrial.
So I'm just surmising I don't know.
I even said on another interview that I thought that might help Chelsea Manning, and lo and behold, the next day I see that she's been released, because it was after her testimony, sorry, her attempt at suicide, after the mistrial, and also after the first week of the extradition hearing in London in the Woolwich Crown Court that I attended that day when I heard Assange's lawyers demolish this idea that Assange was charged with computer intrusion by trying to help Chelsea Manning break into government computers.
Of course, what it seemed like in the indictment was he was simply trying to hide her identity.
She already had legal access to all the files that she took and gave to Wikileaks.
The indictment makes that clear.
She had top secret clearance.
But it turns out that, according to the Assange lawyers, that Chelsea Manning was simply trying to crack a password to download music videos and video games, which are prohibited to American soldiers.
So, I mean, that may have something to do with it.
Chelsea is free, and we have a reason to celebrate that.
If I understand you right, you're saying, well, maybe all three of these things together led to the judge releasing Manning.
It sort of sounds like the latter two are just a coincidence in timing.
Even the attempted suicide being a coincidence.
They were already giving it up because of the hung jury.
Yeah, I mean, the greatest story, not only Chelsea Manning being free, is that the Wikileaks jury has been dissolved.
No new charges.
That leaves them with a very, very weak case, which I think came out very clearly in that court.
Okay, so now let's break this down a little bit.
Well, no, wait a minute.
Let's go back while we're still on Chelsea Manning here.
All partisanship aside, it's just, you know, I had this conversation on the show earlier with Kelly Vlahos about the just terrible partisan incentives working against Manning here, that from the right, well, here's this trans activist, so that's, you know, Mark One, but also mostly the Afghan war logs, Iraq war logs, State Department cables, the collateral murder video, almost all of that was implicating the Bush government.
And so the right wing reacted very hard against that back then.
And although there was some about Obama and there's some really bad stuff about Clinton and Obama in there, but then, you know, liberals and leftists tended to like Manning and Assange for that because mostly they overlooked the Obama stuff, but they liked seeing Bush implicated.
But then Assange became caught up in this whole ridiculous false conspiracy theory about Russia in the 2016 election.
And so took all the blame for that, even though that doesn't have a thing to do with Manning.
Now Manning is even assuming the truth of that, which is unnecessary, but assuming the truth of that for the argument's sake, Assange working with the Russians in 2016 doesn't have anything to do with Manning.
And yet it's helped to, you know, by association taint Manning from support on the left.
So now there's just, you know, very few, very interested people like yourself and a few others who are sticking up for Manning.
Whereas, you know, there should be massive constituencies in both Republican and Democratic circles for Manning.
Instead, they're just against.
Isn't it pitiful that partisan analysis that they have, it doesn't rise through any kind of sophisticated analysis, in my opinion.
If it's only about whether it helps your party get power or not, you're not looking at the whole scene.
You can't stand above it and look at this and see what's going on here.
And that is a bipartisan consensus on aggressive military foreign policy of the U.S. and crimes that America has committed since the Second World War, how many governments they've overthrown, how many millions of people have been killed by U.S. military interventions, how many governments overthrown.
That is just papered up, covered over, never discussed by either of these parties.
And this is what Chelsea Manning and Assange is all about.
It's not a partisan motive.
They're talking about the U.S. policy that's bipartisan, that it needs to be exposed.
And she did that as an active conscience.
She saw evidence of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and she took an enormous leap and risk to leak that to WikiLeaks, who published it, and did an enormous service.
Basically, all the news that's omitted on a daily basis from the corporate media.
You know, Winston Smith in 1984, his job was to go back into the archives of The Times of London and change things.
Whereas today, it's on a daily basis they are changing the news by omitting mostly what happens, things that are not complementary to U.S. interests around the world, which I believe corporate media is promoting rather than reporting on.
And here comes Assange and Manning, and they blew the whole thing open.
And that's why they had to be punished.
That's why I think it's sedition that they're angry with them about, because they are not loyal to the U.S. and they have exposed the U.S. crimes.
And that's not espionage.
Assange didn't take money or, for ideological reasons, get these classified materials and gave them to a foreign government, to an enemy, unless the government thinks that the public is the enemy, because he gave it to the public.
Yep, that sure is the implication, isn't it?
And about that, too, is that going back to 2010 and the Iraq and Afghan war logs, the collateral murder video, which you mentioned there, the State Department cables and the Guantanamo files, all of which were leaked by Manning, convicted, guilty of, that this is a heroic leak, that we had the right to know every bit of what was in there, and virtually all of which was scandalous, and even went back and made sure we got the Glaspie memo from 1990 and leaked some stuff on Kissinger from the 70s for good measure, and all of this stuff that we should have known all along, that a thousand whistleblowers should have turned over to the Post and the Times and the Dallas Morning News, if they had to, to get it published years and years and years ago.
All this time, we had the right to know that stuff.
And there's one sort of slight exception.
We'll talk about the redactions and that part of the Assange case in a second here.
But that's the basic thing.
You would have to actually be a CIA contractor to think that, oh no, this is terrible.
The American people shouldn't know this.
That's just, I mean, you'd have to be one of them.
For every other decent human being, Manning didn't steal these secrets.
Manning liberated them, turned them over to the American people, these secrets' rightful owners.
Just like the widely renowned hero, I mean, pardon me, Daniel Ellsberg from the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s, who helped end the Vietnam War and who, of course, is Manning and Assange's biggest fan and supporter.
I mean, it's just crazy to think that people get that backwards, that these guys are anything but heroes here.
Right.
I totally agree with everything you said.
I also want to point out and raise this question.
What does it say about the kind of society and the kind of government that we have, that the people who reveal that information, that the American people absolutely have a right to know?
In prison, Manning, and by the way, she has the right to, she takes an oath to the Constitution, not to a government.
She has the right under Nuremberg principles to disobey orders and reveal classified information if it reveals a crime.
And the publisher who published them, that both of them were imprisoned.
She's now free, finally.
He's still in jail.
He's very likely to be extradited to the U.S. and put away for 175 years, etc., at the end of his life.
What does that tell you?
Are we really a democracy anymore?
Or are we really more like, these tactics are like an aggressive totalitarian state.
You reveal my crimes, I'm going to punish you.
And meanwhile, the public is distracted by a whole number of things and don't really understand the significance of this because too few in the media are pointing this out.
And they've turned against Assange, and they turned against Manning.
This tells you that we have a real serious issue here about what kind of country we are now.
When they're doing that to these two people, it's really that simple, I think, and it's really scary.
And people should look at the files, too, and see from when this story broke back 10 years ago, or nine and a half years ago, or whatever, about the chat logs, where the reason that Manning got busted was Manning had been befriended by this programmer, hacker guy named Adrian Lamo, and Lamo turned him over to the FBI.
And Lamo, then the FBI said, hey, you know, see if you can get him to really make a mistake here and trick him into something horrible.
So Lamo says to Manning, hey, why don't you leak these secrets to Russia or China and make some money?
And Manning goes on, you can read it with your own eyeballs.
Manning goes on and on explaining how, no, man, see, what's going on here is that things are wrong and bad.
And if the American people and the people of the world knew the truth, then they could use democracy to make reforms with the law so that things are better.
This is straight out of exactly what he's supposed to do and exactly what his fifth grade homeroom teacher would have told him to believe as his values as an American, liberty and justice for all and red, white and blue and the Constitution and all of these things.
That's what he was protecting.
Sell the secrets to China?
What are you, an FBI agent trying to entrap me or something?
That's not what this is about.
It never was.
Of course it wasn't.
Yeah, that's a horrible story you just told, that they tried to entrap her by doing real espionage.
He or she was just being a source to a publisher and news, as you pointed out, is vital for the American people to have known.
But the people who committed these acts had tried to cover them up, punished the leaker and the publisher.
And if that's not as plain as, you know, the nose on your face, what we've come to here, then we have a real problem.
And it isn't plain, because the media has obfuscated this or ignored it or twisted it, and it's gotten all mixed up in the partisan, ridiculous.
I have contempt for partisan politics.
I really do.
I'm not interested in hearing either side's stupid arguments about what their talking points are and the party in terms of corruption during the 2016.
I want a leader who's going to be clean.
And no, they turned on Assange, because he's the one who published it.
It's amazing.
It's amazing that we're talking about this like this, but this is where we're at.
And by the way, from the Manning leaks and from the DNC emails, whoever originally liberated them, as published by WikiLeaks, we've got thousands and thousands and thousands of legitimate, important news stories out of these documents.
I mean, if you try to search the phrase, as revealed by the WikiLeaks or as confirmed by the State Department cables, or anything along those lines, as revealed in the Iraq war logs, you will find thousands of stories from around the world, all of which are great journalism stuff we deserve to know.
To look at the fact that in March of 2008, that's two years before collateral murder and all that, when WikiLeaks had just started two years before, there was the Pentagon counterintelligence project to destroy the reputation of Assange and WikiLeaks.
That's the trust is their core.
This is a document from the Pentagon that ironically was leaked to WikiLeaks.
They published it.
So you knew that this was a formal disinformation campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks.
And 12 years later, what do people believe about Assange?
Russian agent, abused his cat, smeared feces on the wall, was dirty, and he's an agent of the Russians, etc., etc.
He was a rapist.
I can't forget that one.
There was never any evidence of that.
There was never even any formal charge against him of rape by the women, and certainly by the Swedish state.
He was never charged with any crime there, only not paying his bail because he went to the embassy so he wouldn't be extradited by Sweden to the U.S. They called him a coward, faced the music.
I mean, the thing that guy's gone through, this is a formal disinformation campaign, which corporate big media, you know, they launder that disinformation.
They give it credibility.
Yeah, they said you were crazy this whole time, and he was crazy for saying that there was a grand jury, that he was facing American charges.
No, he's just trying to get away with abusing these women or something.
And then we find out that, oh yeah, no, the Democrats under Obama, they had a grand jury, and they ended up giving it up.
And then, of course, we know now that Assange has been indicted for espionage.
As you say, they're debating his extradition now.
And once the Brits started negotiating his extradition to the United States, the Swedes gave up their bogus case.
And by the way, I'm sorry, here's our great segue into the recent developments in that extradition of Assange from Britain now.
And that is this important interview, I guess.
I don't know if there's an official report yet.
I'm sure you know better than I do.
But I read a fascinating interview and explanation by Nils Melzer, who is the UN special reporter, how they say that, whatever he is, on torture.
Okay.
And then he did a real investigation of the charges against Assange and how, and on this particular point, how the government of Sweden had essentially a standing order from the United States, all the Western democracies did.
Anything you can get on this guy, you get them for us.
And that was the origin of their bust of him in the first place.
No other real pretension about it.
No question about it.
That interview by Melzer is fascinating.
It was published in a publication called Republik.
It's a Swiss-German publication, but there's an English version online.
And Melzer says that he knows, reads, and speaks Swedish fluently.
So he was able to get his hands on the police documents.
And among many things that he reveals there, the most important is that neither of the women ever brought up rape, that the police brought that up, and that one of the women refused to sign her statement.
And later, Melzer reveals that a police officer changed one of the women's statements, the woman who had refused to sign the statement, the police officer changed it to reflect a charge of rape, and then signed it, that woman's name, the police officer signed the woman's name to them.
That is absolute, total misconduct by the police.
It's probably a criminal offense to do that.
That's what they did to Julian Assange.
And he found that out because he could read Swedish.
That's an extraordinary interview.
And it really goes to the heart of this disinformation campaign against him.
Right.
That it's a lie.
Lies everywhere.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Anti-war radio.
I'm talking with Joe Lauria from Consortium News.
Now it was around a year ago or so, correct me, I know I'm wrong, that they went ahead and abducted Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy.
The new government of Ecuador kicked him out or let the Brits go ahead and grab him.
They gave him a year on charges of skipping bail, and then they put him in solitary confinement.
And then now it comes, of course, to the reality that they're working on figuring out how to get around the law in Britain so that they can send Assange to America to face charges of publishing these things.
So, man, I'm sorry, there's so much here.
I guess the first thing I really need to get you to address here is parse the differences and sames between what Assange did and what the New York Times does.
If there is any real distinction or difference that we need to understand there, address these charges against him, the Espionage Act charges against him, and then fill us all in on the process of what's been happening in these extradition hearings.
There's absolutely nothing different the way the New York Times gets information when it comes to getting a source to give them classified information.
And what Assange did, there was nothing different between Bob Perry, the founder of Consortium News, of course, was an AP investigative reporter who uncovered major Iran-contra stories, including the role of Oliver North.
He wrote a piece, Bob did in 2010, saying that what Assange did is exactly what he did.
He would even encourage his sources to commit a small crime if it would prevent a larger one.
The small crime being stealing a classified document that reveals some government wrongdoing.
So there's no difference.
The only difference is in the presentation.
Of course, WikiLeaks gives out the raw documents that they have vetted, that they make sure are accurate before they put them out, where the New York Times would also put documents online.
And they used to, even in the old days, print three or four pages, depending on papers, in the paper before the internet.
Of course, newspapers write articles about these things and give their own spin about that.
But the actual process, the newsgathering process is identical.
So to charge Assange as the first journalist under that act, simply because he had unauthorized possession and he had unauthorized dissemination of that material, which journalists have been doing for decades, was an extraordinary move, simply because of the type of information that he revealed about the United States.
This is what is so disturbing about what's going on here, because they are criminalizing journalism without question.
There's also an interesting fact that people say, well, how could an Australian who was working in Iceland and Britain and elsewhere around Europe be arrested and charged under U.S. law?
Because of a 1961 amendment that was put into the Espionage Act, up from 1917 to 1961, a crime under the Espionage Act had to be committed on high seas or on U.S. territory.
But in 1961, there was a case where a diplomat in the American Embassy in Warsaw was found in bed with another woman.
The Polish security agencies burst in, took a picture of them, showed him the picture, said, give us these documents or your life is ruined.
So the guy took documents, classified documents, out of the embassy and gave it to the Polish Secret Service.
He was found out, but then they described it, they couldn't charge him on the Espionage Act because it wasn't on U.S. territory, it was outside the embassy.
So this congressman, I forget his name, went crazy and he had four votes and he finally put that amendment in there.
So anybody, it applies to any person, it doesn't matter what their nationality is or where they are, if they have unauthorized possession dissemination.
And meanwhile, once they do take hold of him, Joe, then he is a U.S. person and the Bill of Rights applies to him.
And so how are they going to get around the First Amendment here?
No, they don't.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, has said the First Amendment doesn't apply to him.
So the Espionage Act applies to him universally, but the First Amendment doesn't apply to him universally.
The reason he mentions the First Amendment is because this section in the Espionage Act that I was saying, unauthorized possession dissemination of classified materials, it clearly runs up against the First Amendment.
It needs to be challenged.
And I hope that Assange lawyers will do that.
And Ron Wyden and Ro Khanna just put forward a bill last week in Congress to change that, to reform the reform of the Espionage Act.
That's what they want to do, to change that to protect journalists, that it should apply only to government employees who sign non-disclosure agreements.
But journalists receiving even stolen goods have never been prosecuted before, even though they could have on this little technicality, and now Assange has.
So they've done a great job.
I don't know how far it's going to go.
I don't have a lot of hope.
But they got it.
They got it, those two Congress people, because they are going to try to change the law to exempt journalists from that.
Now, I've got to point out one more thing that really came up in the hearing the first week, and that is the fact that Julian Assange, when he was in the embassy of Ecuador, was spied on by a Spanish company, UC Global, hired by the Ecuadorian government.
And we then learned that everything that they had taped, which was 24-7, including discussions of Assange, privileged discussions with his attorneys, was sold to the CIA.
So you've got the prosecuting government having eavesdropped on the defense preparations of the trial of the hearing that's going on in London right now.
That would be thrown out of any court immediately.
Think back to Ellsberg.
You mentioned Ellsberg.
The plumbers, Nixon's plumbers, broke into the psychiatrist's office to get dirt on Ellsberg.
They tried to bribe the judge by giving him, promising the FBI directorship.
When that became known, Ellsberg walked.
He was free, because that's complete prosecutorial misconduct.
Here we have prosecutorial misconduct, and Assange is still going ahead.
That shows you how far we've come since Ellsberg's day.
Okay.
And now, and I'm sorry, we're so short on time, but can you talk about what was going on in the courtroom there, where they have him locked up in a plastic cage away from his lawyers and all this nonsense?
Yep.
I saw him there.
I saw him looking very old and haggard, but he had his wits about him, because at one point he said to the judge that he's participating as much in his hearing as he would be at Wimbledon, you know, watching a tennis match.
So there's still that wit there and that sarcasm of Assange, which was a good sign.
But they won't let him leave that glass case to sit with his lawyers.
Now, you, Scott, have seen how many, how many common criminals out there accused of murder, they wear a suit for the first time in their life, and they're sitting at the table with their lawyers, like, passing notes and discussing.
And Assange, who's accused of a nonviolent crime, is behind this glass, bulletproof glass case, and cannot sit with his lawyers to confer with them.
This shows that they can treat him any way they want to, and they are.
And the judge berates it, just said, that's not my jurisdiction.
I mean, it was a travesty.
And that's how the thing ended.
A big argument about that, and they cut off the last day, and it starts again on May 18th.
But the really crucial question, again, is whether this was a political offense or not that he's being charged with, because under the extradition treaty between the U.S. and Britain, that's exempt.
You cannot extradite anyone on a political offense.
However, Britain has an extradition act, which says, which doesn't say anything about that.
So of course, the U.S. and the British government want to use the act that doesn't, that's silent on political offenses.
And Assange's side wants to use the treaty to apply, which says you cannot, then you have to establish whether it was a political crime or not.
So that's what was starting to happen in this preliminary hearing.
The first weekday's opening arguments, essentially, is what we heard.
On May 18th, we're going to start getting witnesses, documents.
Noam Chomsky has been called as a witness for the defense.
So we're going to see a lot of people testifying and a lot of documents.
But the first week did not look good, even though they demolished, the Assange lawyers demolished much of the U.S. government case on harming informants.
That's another thing we could talk about for another hour.
Well, you know, Assange actually redacted the informant's names, and The Guardian and The New York Times did not.
That's what his lawyers put forward.
That's key to the case.
Right.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, I mentioned that earlier.
I wanted you to bring that up, that it was not Assange.
If a single informant got compromised, it was The Guardian that compromised him and not Assange.
Right.
Exactly.
And nobody's ever been harmed.
That is known.
Even Robert Gates, the defense secretary at the time, said it was an embarrassment.
It was awkward, but it did not harm any informants in any way.
By the way, if you look at the indictment, the second superseding indictment, the list of the statutes that he broke are all espionage act.
There's nothing in the indictment on the list of statutes that they allege he broke about revealing the name of informants.
That's not a crime.
A crime would be to unveil the name of a CIA agent like Valerie Plamp, but not an informant.
So this is a whole bogus charge as well.
That's what they're focusing on.
Right.
Just public relations to try to get you on the other side.
That's all.
Exactly.
Listen, I'm so sorry that we are out of time here, but everybody, that is the great Joe Lauria.
He is the editor-in-chief of consortiumnews.com, where they do great coverage of all things Manning and Assange.
Thank you, Joe.
You're quite welcome, Scott.
All right, you guys, and that is anti-war radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
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