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All right, this is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And I'd like to go ahead and bring up our next guest.
It's David Swanson.
He's hanging on the line.
His website is warisacrime.org.
You might remember it as afterdowningstreet.org.
A very important website, a very important resource there, warisacrime.org.
Again, he's the author of Daybreak, Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.
And the new book, which is now also out in paperback, is called War is a Lie.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Great to be here.
Great work you're doing.
I've been listening and reading along.
Well, thank you very much.
I appreciate you joining us today.
And I really like the website.
I've been reading through it consistently.
One thing about that Dennis Kucinich interview is he really was limited on time.
And I didn't really get a chance to discuss the circumstances of the Bradley Manning case with him very much.
And I see that on your website is something you've written about a little bit.
So I was wondering if we could start the interview now with you maybe kind of catching the audience up, if you could, about Bradley Manning's situation.
Maybe even remind them who he is and how he got where he is.
And explain what it is that they're doing to him that is so objectionable.
Well, he is a young man who has been charged with crimes but has not been given a trial, not been given a court date.
Has simply been lawlessly imprisoned for the better part of a year.
And not just imprisoned but kept in a very small cell for 23 hours of the day.
Allowed to pace around with shackles on in another small room for one hour a day with that being called exercise.
He's being treated in a manner that has been known for centuries to lead in many cases to severe mental damage.
Which from some of the comments of one of his friends, David House, who's been visiting him, may be happening to Bradley Manning.
And piling on, in addition, they've recently decided that he should be completely naked when he sleeps and when he stands at attention in the morning.
As a form of humiliation that has been used to break people by our government for a long time.
But is now being used on American soil against an American, against a member of the U.S. military.
Who is locked up, accused of a crime, tried and convicted in the media but not actually put on trial.
And so there are many, many activist groups that have been raising funds, holding rallies and protests, appealing to all possible authorities.
It's extremely offensive to me to watch Mr. Rattigan on MSNBC today asking, where's the left?
Where's Code Pink?
Where nobody says anything about them, they're all hypocrites.
You know, Code Pink's been at every protest.
MSNBC has yet to be at one of them.
But Congressman Kucinich, in fact, alone in Congress, has been taking this on.
Senator Kerry was cornered by our friend Sam Husseini over the weekend and asked about this.
And John McCain as well, and it was just fine with them.
Kucinich has been appealing to the Department of so-called Defense to go and visit Bradley Manning.
And it's true that he could try to get Bradley Manning to put him on a list of approved visitors, but the Army would still have to approve it.
And they appear unlikely to do so.
My understanding is that Dennis is looking for ways to hold Secretary of Defense, as they call it, Robert Gates, accountable.
Sadly, we are not a member of the International Criminal Court.
There are not higher authorities to appeal to in such a case, outside of perhaps the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and so forth and other toothless organizations.
But at this point today, Gates isn't even the guy anymore.
President Obama has taken ownership of this.
President Obama, because of the spokesman from the State Department letting slip an honest opinion that this was counterproductive and ridiculous and stupid, Jake Tapper from ABC asked President Obama, do you agree with that assessment?
And Obama said, well, I'm just relying on the Department of Defense.
They say this is standard appropriate procedures, and that's good enough for me.
So Obama owns this now, not that he didn't before, and that's who we're going to have to go after.
And it's perfect timing, Congressman Kucinich forcing this debate on Thursday on the war in the House, because all of the actions start Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
And Sunday is going to be another big protest at Quantico.
Well, let's hope that the extra attention being brought to this case will amount to something.
I know that Colleen Rowley and others, as you say, co-pink, have held these rallies.
Of course, there's BradleyManning.org, the Bradley Manning Defense Fund, set up through Courage to Resist.
And there are a lot of people who are trying to chip in on this, but it seems like he may need somebody a bit more powerful than Dennis Kucinich to take up his cause in Washington, D.C.
Well, you know, you start with who you've got, and you add more.
Congressman Kucinich is among the most powerful people sticking up for the majority view in this country on many issues.
And we need everything he's doing, but we do need more allies.
It was kind of amazing, wasn't it, to listen to him say that, oh, the State Department tells me to talk to the Secretary of the Army, and he tells me to talk to the Secretary of Defense, and they tell me to go talk to the Department of Justice, and around and around.
Well, it was actually all within the Department of Defense.
It's the Secretary of Defense referring him to the Secretary of the Army, referring him to the Secretary of the Navy, and all around the departments of the U.S. military.
Oh, I thought he threw State in there too, but maybe not.
It wouldn't surprise me, although I very much appreciate the comments of their spokesperson that came out today, but the fact is that in either case, either of those departments, the guy in charge is the President.
I mean, it's just universally understood now that the President tells everybody, including the so-called Department of Justice, what to do.
And in the military, he is in fact the Commander-in-Chief.
And today, he's taken ownership of this issue.
And we are going to be protesting not just the ongoing wars, but specifically the abuse and torture of Bradley Manning at the White House on the 19th, with as many big-name and powerful people as possible.
This is being led by Veterans for Peace going to jail, locked to the White House fence on the 19th.
And on the 20th, those who are free to move, going down and protesting in Quantico.
And people can go to warsatcrime.org and click on Events at the top and find ways to participate all over the country.
That's great.
And make sure at the end of the interview, if I forget, to bring that up again, where people can look up that information on how to take part in those protests, because that's very important, especially people who are listening online or in podcast form later who live on the East Coast.
And it's not so difficult for them to go and take part in something like that.
It sure would be nice to see.
And back to what Manning is accused of.
I guess if I was a general and you were a lieutenant, we would be in agreement that what he did was just terrible, releasing these secrets that he signs an oath and swears to never release.
And yet, look at all the good that has come of what he's done.
Yeah, so Hillary Clinton had to be embarrassed a little bit and whatever, but a dictatorship or two have already been overthrown.
And there are revolutions, massive protest movements in, what, a dozen countries in the North Africa, in the Middle East right now, all across the region.
And it's basically all got started because Bradley Manning and these State Department cables that he's alleged to have uploaded to WikiLeaks had included within them some frank discussion of the corruption in Tunisia.
That's how it all got started.
And then, of course, the WikiLeaks about the torture regime in Egypt kept fueling that revolution.
And this is the most beautiful thing that anybody's ever seen since the fall of the Soviet Union 20 years ago.
And here we're going to nail this guy, Manning, to a wall over it when he ought to be up on all of our shoulders.
We ought to be all singing songs to Bradley Manning, the guy who liberated all of this truth from those government databases.
Well, I couldn't agree more.
But I honestly do not know what he did, if he did anything.
I'm not just saying that to be technically correct because I think he ought to have a trial, for God's sake, but because I honestly do not know if he did it.
But if he did it, if he released that collateral murder video which documented clear war crimes, he was obeying his legal duty to expose crimes that he was aware of.
He's being punished for what he was obliged to do.
He's a whistleblower, not a traitor.
And if he released these cables, they have had enormous beneficial impact and will for decades to come all over the world, including in this country and would have even more in this country if people would read them and would see what their government spends its time doing.
And he did so assuming that he did it and assuming that anything in those chat logs that are supposed evidence is accurate, precisely so that the public would know what its government was doing, which is the only way you have the sort of representative government in the name of which we're engaging in all of these wars around the world.
Well, you're certainly right to build in those caveats and disclaimers about what we actually know.
But if we accept the partial transcripts of Bradley Manning's supposed chat logs with the rat Adrian Lamo, then he says in there quite explicitly that he had only the most whistleblower motives at all.
Lamo even asked him, why didn't you sell the information to the Russians or something?
He says, I'm not interested in that whatsoever.
All I want to do is provide this information to the American people so that they can decide, because how can they possibly decide what the government ought to be doing if they don't have access to the truth?
Simple as that.
You know, here I sit next to Thomas Jefferson's house in Virginia and he would have agreed emphatically, at least in principle, not that you can't find hypocrisy in all of these people.
But it is a fact that if you are going to have a representative republic, you have to have certain things in place in your society, including an informed public and an open communication system and a transparent government.
You also can't have all the money in the hands of a few hundred people and you can't have various forms of corruption that we've got right now.
But if you can't know what your government is doing and if you've been trained and indoctrinated to think that you shouldn't know what your government is doing, oh, he's a traitor for telling us, we don't want to know, keep us in the dark, please.
I mean, that is possibly majority opinion on issues like this one right now.
Then we're done for.
We have to get to the point where we understand why we should be grateful to this young man if he did this.
And then we have to go out there and force the government to turn around on this issue.
And I'm glad we have at least one congressman pushing this forward.
Maybe we'll get some more this week.
I sure hope so.
Now tell us again how people can find out more information about how to take part in your upcoming protest of the wars at the White House and of the torture Bradley Manning at Quantico.
Go to warisacrime.org and click on events up at the top.
And it's biased toward Washington, D.C., but there are a lot of events linked there that are all over the country.
And you follow the links and find the local place to join in or to create something.
And if you're listening to this outside of California and you're anywhere near Wisconsin, for God's sake, go there right now.
All right, everybody, that is the great David Swanson.
The website is warisacrime.org, and he's the author of two excellent books, Daybreak, Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, and War is a Lie.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
