12/09/10 – Mike Gogulski – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I got a sneak one headline in here before we go to our first cast.
I can't believe this friends in the chat room.
Send this on from State Radio NPR.org officials worry about some Latino converts to Islam.
So now we can combine our war against the Mexicans with our war against the Islam's.
I am so frightened a lot of times.
I wonder what would we ever do without government?
To keep us safe from the Mexican illegal immigrant Muslims.
You know, I'm frightened.
I tells you frightened.
All right.
Anyway, so now on to serious things.
Bradley Manning.org is the home of the Bradley Manning support network.
One of its primary proponents co-founders leaders is Michael Goski, although I probably got his vowels in the wrong order again.
I always do that.
I'm very sorry, but welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
My just fine.
Thanks.
Just on your on your previous point, you know, you say what would we ever do without government?
I say gosh, I don't know, but we certainly wouldn't have enough things to be afraid of.
Yeah.
Well, it's funny because I know the terrorists wouldn't hate us and there would be no such thing as an illegal immigrant just invited guests or uninvited ones.
Simple enough.
Yeah, human beings illegal.
It's really something.
Yeah, it really is.
Isn't it?
Call them people illegals like their very existences.
Somehow they're like they're the outlaws.
No protection of due process for them.
And you can ask any immigrant who's ever had to deal with the immigration authorities.
No due process by a long shot.
I'm not sure which Supreme Court decision.
It was that ruled that the Fifth Amendment's reference to people somehow didn't include immigrants.
Well, and here you here in Slovakia as a as a self-employed adult not on a not on a retirement pension earning the absolute minimum salary, according to the law, you're obligated to pay about a hundred and fifty euros per month to health insurance and and social insurance, which is basically a tax on being alive.
Sounds about right.
So there you go.
We got those same things here.
I think they're just saw a thing with Ron Paul talking with the judge about they're going to raise the estate tax.
So only if you're already a billionaire, do you get to pass on your inheritance?
But if you're anybody else coming up, forget you, the state will take every last bit of it.
So yes, America more and more like Slovakia every day.
That's nice to hear.
And speaking of which, you know, I bet you that they got a rule of law superior to the one that's holding Bradley Manning right now.
Well, I I don't know how to how to compare those two things, but you know for the for the sake of your audience, I mean, we've obviously we've gotten a lot of a lot of attention lately as the State Department cables have been coming out to WikiLeaks.
The traffic to our website is up tremendously.
We've got more people volunteering contributions are still coming in, although at a slower pace than previously.
Well, you know, I saw some billionaire heiress showed up with bail money for Julian Assange.
How about a little love this way for Bradley Manning?
This poor kid is being held in solitary confinement, right?
Like they discovered he's a KGB agent or something.
Yeah.
Well, he's he's being held in isolation.
I mean, he's not in he's not in the hole like like punitive detention, but you know, he's in a cell to himself.
I don't I don't know the details of the you know, the layout of the place, but you know, that's about it.
He's got minimal access to reading material and you know, a few times a week gets to go out and exercise.
All right now, so there was some story I don't even know the origin of it or what but said that he killed himself or that he was going to can you explain where this came from and what it means?
Yeah, I caught sight a couple of days ago at the of a blog post.
Well, actually I got I got emailed by somebody from from Fox News in New York saying that they had found the blog post saying that there was a rumor that Bradley had hung himself in his in his jail cell.
So I immediately went on to the website with the with the blog and I said, what's your source for this?
And I talked to the guy from Fox News is now I don't have any any information about that.
And my you know, one of our other organizers called the called the break at Quantico and spoke to the staff sergeant there.
He said, he's alive.
So somebody was was trying to float a rumor.
Yeah, and now you traced it back to this one blog as the original source, you know, who these people are what they were claiming or how they well they knew he claims he got it from somebody who's he's who he's friends with on Facebook who later on deleted the message with the with the claim.
Yeah, that's amazing how something like that could get picked up and spread around that fast.
I'm surprised it didn't make the top of the hour news on Fox.
But anyway, you wonder in responding to a thing like that, you know, does the denial make more of a story out of it than, you know, just ignoring it would have made, you know, right?
So listen, here's the thing.
They really don't have anything on Bradley Manning.
They keep trying to smear his character basically by saying he was a sissy one that he was gay, but mostly that, you know, he was just this real weak kind of person who couldn't take it or whatever.
That's basically the only smear that they can come up with about him and that about right.
We are often from from the negative press that he's gotten.
That's the you know, that's the that's the tone of things kind of sweeping aside in many cases the things that he's alleged to have written to Adrian Lamo saying that he had a crisis of conscience which led to him giving materials to WikiLeaks right now.
Please elaborate about that because that's exactly what I was trying to get to here was why he did this.
People are saying that he's guilty of treason, which I would remind people, you know, there's I guess the dumb definition and the dictionary the real definition.
The real definition is it's the only crime defined in the Constitution and it says it's got to be an overt act on behalf of a foreign enemy.
So if he had stolen all these documents and then just turn them over to the Iranians or I guess to the Taliban or something then that would have been treason, but he did this for us, didn't he?
As far as I know, yeah, I mean what what he said in the in the chat logs was that he became very disillusioned on one occasion when he was tasked with investigating the claims of some Iraqis who were coming into I forget what the what the detail was exactly but his his higher-ups basically just you know, whatever the issue was they wanted it, you know, kind of silently disposed of so here are these folks that the the military was supposed to help Manning was somehow involved in this and he was just told, you know, just just close the cases just, you know, push it aside, you know, kind of ignoring the human cost of you know, institutional neglect and I get and that according to his narrative led to, you know, a lot more disillusionment.
Yeah, I mean he says that when he talks about the State Department cables, he I think he says some kind of adverb.
I forget but brutal or some other sort of exploitation of the Third World by the West unconscionable behavior almost criminal.
He said a scandal at every post and we've seen this in the just less than a thousand of the State Department cables that have been leaked so far we see I mean you name it.
Yeah, I've I've I've read a couple dozen of them and read a lot more in terms of synopsis from the media and bloggers, but you know, the one thing is clear is that what you're when you're looking at that material what you're what you're really reading is, you know, it's the language of Empire.
It's the the arrogance of you know, if the Imperial Viceroy is sending back to the sending their communicators back to the Emperor.
It's it's it's quite it's quite something.
Yeah.
Well, and you know in the very first week and very first day Larissa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane at raw story wrote up this piece about a State Department cable from August of 2007, which had many interesting things in it.
Everybody can go read about it.
But one of them was covert action and support for dissent in Iran.
And then they name the Kurds and the Balooks and those are obvious references as stated by Robert Behr the former CIA agent in the article to support for the PKK and Jandala terrorists inside Iran.
That's the kind of things in these WikiLeaks.
All right.
Hold on right there.
We'll be right back with Michael Goski after this.
Y'all Bradley Manning org.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
We're on Chaos Radio, Austin anti-war.com/radio LRN dot FM and God knows where else.
All right talking with Mike.
Wait, I got an email here from Angela how to say it right go Golski.
Sorry man for not being able to say your name, right?
I'm kind of an idiot when it comes to things like that a lot of times.
So, okay.
Tell me the status of Bradley Manning's legal case as it is you got him a good lawyer already.
Somebody did well Bradley Bradley selected a lawyer based on based on his own research.
He's on the case.
His name is David Coombs.
He's a guy that we respect that looks like a very competent attorney and we're in touch with him on an occasional basis.
We've so far sent $50,000 to his trust account for Manning's benefit and another about 8,000 has been deposited directly into that account by individuals making direct contributions.
Wow.
That's right.
We've still got a fundraising gap in the sense that we put out a press release yesterday in response to you know, kind of incessant queries from people media and donors as to whether WikiLeaks had put in what they had at one point claimed to be a $50,000 contribution to the defense that so far hasn't materialized.
Although I understand now that at least 20,000 is supposed to be coming in fairly short order.
Okay.
Well, although how's that going to happen if their bank accounts been shut down?
Well, they have they have funds from you know, they have funds in all different sorts of places.
I imagine the accounts that were shut down were their PayPal account.
And then there was the Julian Assange defense fund which was based at a retail bank in Switzerland.
It was a defense fund that they shut down.
Well, they didn't they didn't seize it.
I mean they they closed the account on a pretext of a law that was just passed on November 30th.
That's something to do with Julian's address of record as given on his application for the account wasn't actually really where he lived.
Wow.
And so now I'd heard that but I didn't hear the part about they just passed that law so that they could get him on this technicality.
It sounds like well people people draw that conclusion.
I have I have no idea what goes on in Swiss politics.
So I couldn't tell you but the bank is for people who think that Assange is a CIA agent.
This is what happens man.
They've made this guy into an unperson on the face of the Earth, you know, there's a lesson here somewhere about empowering the state over any of our lives to this degree that they can just shut off all our accounts, you know, stop people from hosting our sites Etc.
Yeah, that money for the defense fund the bank is stated would be would be returned to Assange, you know forthwith and PayPal cave to pressure either yesterday or today and announced that the money that they had frozen about 61,000 euros would be returned immediately.
Whereas normally when they freeze an account, they freeze it for like 180 days before you have a chance of getting your hands on the funds.
But beside that WikiLeaks has other you know, other other vehicles for for holding funding.
Certainly they're in a bad spot.
Well, what's your opinion on the war by the hackers?
Well, it's it's quite interesting actually the last two nights.
I've I've sat for a couple hours each on on the IRC server where they talk about where they coordinate and and actually, you know, launch the attacks and just watching, you know, what was going on and apparently they were quite effective with respect to the Swiss Bank.
They took its home internet banking service offline for more than a day and then they attacked MasterCard and apparently MasterCard actually had some transaction processing interruptions according to some reports.
I don't know if the same was true of Visa or not, but I don't know.
I mean, it's it's kind of like, you know, opening shots in a cyber war.
There's a lot of people have described it.
Yeah, sure seems like it and you know, I can see why some people would, you know, be concerned that these are, you know, private companies who have all this pressure on them and everything and they're not the state.
I think was it PayPal or MasterCard or PayPal came out and said, well, but they told us that the State Department told us that these guys are in violation of the law and that, you know, so then we're helping them break the law and that's why they were in violation of their term of service.
But it seems to me like yeah, right like PayPal doesn't have a lawyer's ever heard of the First Amendment before.
There's no state secrets act like Great Britain in America.
This is America and if you if you're Bradley Manning and you apparently violate the oath that you take your your secrecy oath and you're risking prosecution for that.
But if you're a journalist who receives that information and then passes it on to the public that is not a crime.
There's no law in America that says that that's a crime and everybody every lawyer certainly knows that no and so I say screw them and they want to hide behind that if there's if PayPal and MasterCard and Amazon are not big and strong enough to try to stand up to the state then I guess that proves that nobody is first of all, but still it seems to me like they're strong enough that they ought to take the risk of saying no, you know what you show us where these people are convicted of something and we'll stop doing business with them.
You know, this is supposed to be the United States of America for Christ's sake man.
Absolutely.
And it was exceptional the statement that came out of one of the companies either either Amazon or PayPal in the last couple of days, which was basically somebody from the State Department called us up and told us it was illegal.
So we shut it down.
I mean, that's just you know, what it's ridiculous, you know, forget about even the journalistic aspects of it.
You've got, you know, MasterCard and Visa and PayPal hell they'll collect funds.
If you're running a you know, racial supremacist organization they'll help you out.
If you're peddling kiddie porn online, it doesn't matter, but you know one call from Joe Lieberman or Hillary Clinton's everything changes.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Well, and it is a problem with big business.
You know, there's they make so much money that they're just not responsive or very responsive to an outcry from a small minority of their customers or something.
But in that sense, Barack Obama's the only trillionaire in the whole world.
He's the only you know, he's he runs the biggest corporation of all and you see how they react and the impunity with which they operate when it comes down to them being frightened about what's coming out.
And of course, there's only been a thousand of hundreds of thousands of documents still to come.
But Scott, I know you're not so foolish as to believe that Barack Obama's really in charge, right?
Well, he's sitting in a chair.
He can fire anybody he wants.
I mean the counterfactuals right in front of us.
Ron Paul could have been elected and if Ron Paul was elected this would not be happening and he would be telling the Congress forget you guys, you know, and everybody says, oh, well, but he'd be afraid he'd get shot.
You think that that would stop him from doing the right thing?
No thing is Barack Obama was never that good of a man in the first place.
He was always a bloodthirsty killer and always a betrayer of all that is good, true and beautiful.
So now he's just continuing to act to act that way.
It's like blaming Dick Cheney for everything George Bush did George Bush said.
Okay.
He was the one in the chair with the responsibility.
He's the one who deserves the blame more than anyone else.
That's the way I see it.
I mean if we could all hate George Bush, but somehow Barack Obama is just helpless before all this.
I don't buy it, you know.
No argument, but anyway, I'm Bradley Bradley Manning.org is still out there and we're still looking for folks to to contribute.
We've got a campaign going now to you can through our site.
You can send a letter to some top army officials directly either for a donation to help cover postage and administration or or free of charge.
We've also got a campaign asking folks to send holiday cards to their Congress members and to Bradley himself for the holiday season.
That's a good idea.
And you know folks just try to keep in mind as you're reading the WikiLeaks and as you read and that goes for the Afghan and Iraq war logs, which there are still tons of those to go through as well as the State Department cables.
Just take a second when you're and when you're reading the journalism about them to remember where these came from and the fact that this guy Bradley Manning has literally put the rest of his life on the line here.
I mean if he's convicted, you know fully of all the charges in the indictment so far, he's facing 52 or 57 years in prison, right?
That's nearly a life sentence.
Just on what's on the on the first charging sheet and assuming that you know, the suspicions that have been aired are going to become concretized in charges.
There's going to be a whole raft of other things loaded onto that.
Are his lawyers saying how much they think it'll cost to defend him fully?
We're looking at a first-year budget of around a hundred K plus some miscellaneous expenses.
So we're about halfway there for just his first year.
No, we're a little bit more than halfway there.
All right.
Listen, thanks so much for all your efforts and your time on the show today.
Mike.
Appreciate it.
Thanks Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Bradley Manning.org to support Bradley Manning American Hero.
That's Michael Goski.
I'll put the thing together.