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He is the co-founder and the director of Voters for Peace, and also is one of the founders of ComeHomeAmerica.us.
He's an advisor to the Bradley Manning Defense Fund at BradleyManning.org.
Welcome to the show, Kevin.
How are you doing?
Good.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
We have very important news this week about Bradley Manning, the accused in the leaking of the Iraq and Afghan war logs and the State Department cables to WikiLeaks.
He was moved from Quantico to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.
And then there's also breaking news in the Bradley Manning case today.
I think I'll just let you take it away from there.
Yeah, we made a lot of progress this week with Leavenworth replacing Quantico, where Manning was essentially being tortured, being held in solitary confinement for nine months.
And then the other day after Manning was transferred, there was a fundraiser for President Obama.
And in the fundraiser, some people stood up and sang a song about freeing Bradley Manning and held up signs saying, Free Bradley Manning.
And after that happened, one of the people who was involved in that spoke to President Obama.
And in the conversation, President Obama said that he broke the law.
And that's essentially the commander-in-chief of the armed forces saying that Manning is guilty.
He broke the law.
And he referred to the actual facts of the case, right, and said something about he did a document dump.
That's right, a document dump.
He was sworn to secrecy, blah, blah, blah.
And he broke the law.
And what's important about that is Bradley Manning is going through a court-martial process.
He's not been tried yet.
The trial probably won't happen until the fall.
But what that means is that his judges will be a jury made up of military officers.
And so when the commander-in-chief is already saying he broke the law, what are the military officers then supposed to do?
Is he supposed to disrespect the commander-in-chief and ignore what he says?
Can you imagine a career of somebody who's a military officer who wants to continue to rise in the ranks going against the words of the commander-in-chief?
So it really raises questions about how Manning can receive a fair trial in the military court system.
And, plus, on top of that, with Manning being held in solitary confinement for almost a year now since he was arrested, and nine months in brutal confinement in Quantico, where he had his clothes taken away from him at night and was forced to stand naked to get his clothes back, he's already been punished.
And so for a group of officers to find him not guilty would really put a difficult situation for the Marines who punished him so aggressively already.
So it really is looking like there's almost no way for Brabant Manning to get a fair trial.
It's almost like his conviction is preordained by the situation with the president and the commander of these officers saying he's guilty, he broke the law.
And so it's a troubling situation.
When you look at the case, the other thing that Obama said in the conversation was he was asked, isn't this exactly the same thing Daniel Ellsberg did?
And Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, and the charges were dropped against him because of the abuse that Nixon was doing, searching his psychiatrist's office and such.
And Obama says, no, it wasn't the same thing.
Ellsberg's material wasn't classified in the same way.
Well, that's true, it wasn't classified in the same way.
It was a much higher classification.
It was the highest top-secret classification, while Manning's documents were the lowest classification.
Manning released essentially raw data, coming from diplomatic cables and from military activities during the day.
Ellsberg released documents that were analysis and top-secret, thousands of pages of top-secret information.
In fact, the reality is that Ellsberg broke a more serious law, a much higher classification than Manning did.
So that cuts in on Manning's favor.
I think the way this has gone so far, with the treatment of Manning the way it's been, the abuse of treatment pre-trial, now with the Commander-in-Chief essentially saying he's guilty, it's become impossible to have a fair trial.
He's already been punished.
Let's get this out of the way and free Radley Manning.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
Let me go back, because there's a lot to go over here.
First of all, I think it's kind of funny about the Dan Ellsberg reference there.
Obama must have to know that that was a top-secret history of the Vietnam War, not that anybody in government ever read it.
But maybe what he meant was, it was about the previous President's time in office at the time it came out.
So it wasn't that bad, because these WikiLeaks implicate him as well as George Bush.
And Hillary Clinton.
I mean, Hillary Clinton is really embarrassing these diplomatic cables, where she turns the State Department into a nest of spies and orders diplomats to spy on other diplomats and break the law by spying on diplomats when they come to the UN in New York City.
So it is embarrassing to the administration.
Well now, as far as tainting the jury pool, it seems to me if we take this case out of the Bradley Manning military tribunal, or military court martial context for a moment, and we're talking about just, I don't know, a murder case in an American town.
If the DA comes out, or say the mayor comes out, and says, oh yeah, well we all know he's guilty, and this, that, the other thing.
Often times you'll have the judge, if not set the person free, they'll at least move the trial to a different town, have a change of venue, that kind of thing.
But it seems very relevant, as you were emphasizing there, that this is a military court martial, that the prosecutor, the judge, and every one of the jurors are all military officers, and Barack Obama is the commander-in-chief of them all.
And so I wonder whether you think there's the slightest bit of hope that somewhere a civilian judge or somebody would say that no, you cannot hold a military court martial under these circumstances, where the commander-in-chief has already pronounced the defendant's guilt like this.
I think this has got, this is really a very big opening for the defense, whether or not we can, whether or not the lawyer, David Coombs, is successful in using this pretrial to get Manning released now, or whether, if Manning is convicted, this is useful for appeal.
I think it provides a real tool for the defense now to undermine this prosecution.
And the reality is, what Manning did, this is a private, he's a low-level private, so he didn't have access to very secret documents.
Documents that hundreds of thousands of people had access to.
And what he's accused of doing is not selling it to Iran, not giving it to our enemies, not trying to sell it for a lot of money, but what he's accused of doing is giving it to the media through WikiLeaks.
And what that means is there are some unverified chat logs that show his intent was to create this, to inform the American people, so that we know what's really happening in our foreign policy, and there can be a debate on foreign policy, and hopefully a change in direction away from this militarist empire approach that acts as, because of the sole superpower in the world, acts as a bully.
Well, and listen, this point can't be emphasized enough.
If those chat logs, which are supposed chat logs, we don't know for sure.
We do know that, at the very least, even for what they're claimed to be, they're not complete, but the so-called chat logs of Bradley Manning published at Wired, as far as what they reveal, show exactly as you say, not any attempt to gain personally from this, not an attempt to empower our enemies by sending secret information to them.
He explains, I mean if you were writing a script of the screenplay of the movie of this, you couldn't come up with lines that are more explicit about the purity of his whistleblower motivations.
He was being forced, he says in those chat logs, to participate in the arrest and detention of innocent people in Iraq, people accused of doing nothing more than write op-ed articles criticizing Nouri al-Maliki's corruption, the prime minister over there.
And then further looking through these logs from the collateral murder video onto the Iraq and Afghan war logs, he saw war crimes and the covering up of war crimes.
And correct me if I'm wrong, Kevin Zese, but isn't he bound by the law to uncover such acts being committed inside his military setting?
Well, that's exactly what the Nuremberg trials were about.
In Nuremberg, the Nuremberg principles came out of that, and they talked about following an unlawful order does not relieve you of guilt.
And so when you see illegal activity in the military, by remaining silent you become complicit in those crimes.
And so if Manning is guilty, what happened it seems like, is he saw crimes being committed, and then he had a choice.
Do we expose the crimes, or do we become complicit in the crimes?
If Manning is guilty, I think he did the right thing.
I mean, he exposed the crimes.
And we would want soldiers in Nazi Germany to expose the crimes.
We would want soldiers in Khmer Rouge, where men were killed, to expose the crimes.
Milosevic soldiers should expose the crimes.
All of these realities, and I was just on a panel last night with one of the vets who came to the collateral murder scene.
Collateral murder was the video that came out very early by WikiLeaks that Bradley Mays accused of leaking, and it showed the killing of two Reuters reporters, a reporter and a photographer, and many civilians in a kind of wanton way.
Including a good Samaritan that came to help the wounded.
And his children.
If people have not seen that video, they should Google collateral murder video and see it, because it really shows a brutal side of American foreign policy.
It's important to see it so you know reality.
Anyway, this vet said that the reality is that kind of thing happened regularly.
We saw these things in Iraq regularly, and that the soldiers were trained to kill civilians.
If a gun went off, they were trained to just shoot anything around.
Well, actually, to clarify, you're talking about Ethan McCord and Josh Steber, right?
That's right.
Well, I want to be a little bit more specific about that, because I interviewed both of those guys on my other radio show, and it's all kind of bound up, the story of the collateral murder video, and what they have to say is all bound up as well with the book The Good Soldiers by David Finkel, the Washington Post reporter, who quite apparently had access to that collateral murder video and sat on it for a while.
And the thing is about the 360-degree fire, just a point of clarification, that was an order from Lieutenant Colonel Kozlarec, and it was Ethan McCord who told me on my show that this was not hearsay.
This was direct.
He heard it with his own ears, saw the order given with his own eyes.
Lieutenant Colonel Kozlarec said, If an IED goes off, you are all to simply fire 360-degree rotational fire at anyone who happens to be around.
And how many of these guys actually refused to cooperate with that and would just fire in the air or fire at the ground?
But Lieutenant Colonel Kozlarec was specifically ordering them to commit war crimes.
Both of those soldiers testified to that on my show, not that anybody picked it up, but these are exactly the illegal acts, not just cruel and immoral acts, but the illegal acts that Bradley Manning was exposing.
That's exactly right.
And that's just one example of many of how soldiers are ordered or trained even to think of their enemy, the civilians in the countries that we're attacking and occupying, considered almost as non-human.
And so it's not like you have one bad apple in the collateral murder video.
You have a barrel of bad apples.
The whole thing is rotten.
The whole thing needs to be changed.
And so while some people criticize the fact that Manning's accused of leaking all the documents, I actually see that as a positive, because whoever leaked these documents is giving the American people and the media the full picture.
We can see everything that's going on.
We can see almost a daily diary of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and see what really was going on.
And what you see is essentially what Ethan and Josh are testifying to, which is widespread violations of law that are ongoing on a daily basis.
And so we really think it's important that this gets out, that people talk about it, that people understand it so we know what our military is doing, and it can be changed.
Whether Bradley Manning is the leaker or not, we now have the information, and we need to, as Americans, to do something about it.
And so that's why it's important to watch that collateral murder video.
It's important to look at these diaries.
I hope academics will study them and come out with reports about them, that human rights lawyers will report on these diaries and say, were war crimes committed?
We need to look at ourselves in the mirror and see what we really are.
We are not the good policemen of the world.
We are the largest empire in world history.
The Roman Empire and the British Empire had under 40 bases each.
At their peak, we have 1,100 bases, actually even more than that, worldwide.
We are the biggest and largest empire in world history, and we are a brutal empire.
We literally kill hundreds of thousands of people a year.
Obama just approved the use of drones in Libya.
He's been droning Pakistan since his first days in office.
We are seeing a real slaughter of civilians, and it's not something that we should be willing to accept quietly.
It's something we need to change.
Yeah, well, and that's why I say Bradley Manning is guilty as hell of being my hero and of doing this heroic thing.
He's simply alleged to have done this as far as his criminal culpability is concerned.
But I think this is just about the greatest thing any American ever did was leak these documents to WikiLeaks.
The preamble of the Constitution says that we seek to form a more perfect union.
How do you become a more perfect union if you're lied to, if you're not told the truth?
By getting the truth, whether it came from Bradley Manning or not, by getting the truth, we now know the truth, and we can work toward creating a more perfect union.
By being ignorant and not knowing the truth, we can believe the lies they tell us that we're the good cops in the world, that we're saving lives, we're spreading democracy, we're protecting women.
All that nonsense they tell us to justify stuff is humanitarian war, to protect people in Bengali by bombing the people in Tripoli.
And so we need to see reality.
And we're very pleased that Bradley Manning got moved.
I think this is a big victory for the Bradley Manning Support Network.
I hope people will get involved because this victory would not have happened had it not been for constant pressure by people who care about these kinds of issues.
So you can go to BradleyManning.org, you can sign up, you can donate to his legal defense fund.
But the Bradley Manning Support Committee has been really organizing events around the country.
We now have people getting organized in Kansas and Missouri to keep the pressure on when Manning is in Fort Leavenworth to make sure he gets put in good conditions there.
We have people organized in Washington, D.C., to be ready when the trial and preliminary hearing starts.
The Article 32 hearing should happen in June.
That's the preliminary hearing.
It should be three weeks or so long.
And we'll be there to protest while that's going on.
And we'll continue all the way through, and we keep on trying to broaden the reach to get the faith community, the legal community, academic community, human rights people involved in this effort.
So we're working hard to defend Bradley Manning.
And he needs it, because it's Bradley Manning versus the largest empire in world history.
Yeah, no doubt about it.
And, you know, I don't know, dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds of lawyers and law professors and shining lights, powerful Ivy League types and powerful law firm types have signed on to this thing.
I believe it even included one of Barack Obama's law professors from Harvard condemning his treatment.
The key thing to getting Bradley Manning transferred was that we began to focus the pressure on President Obama, because President Obama, we knew with one telephone call he could end the torture of Bradley Manning.
And when he came out and the press conference was asked about Bradley Manning and said that he'd been told by the military that this was for his own, Bradley Manning's own good, it really turned our stomachs that our president would say something like that.
So we really focused on the president, and we thought that the U.N. rapporteur coming to investigate torture at Quantico and being denied access was a critical step.
Amnesty International trying to go see Manning and being denied was also critical, and Dennis Kucinich as well.
But the letter you mentioned of 250 academics from all the best law schools in the United States, including Lawrence Traub, who was Barack Obama's constitutional law professor.
And in that letter they said you came with great promise as a constitutional law scholar, as a clear spokesperson with hope for humanity, and now you meet the minimum standards of decency for how you treat somebody.
And so that was very pointed on President Obama, and having lawyers like these top lawyers in the country, legal academics in the country, making this point was key.
You know, P.J. Crowley, the Assistant Secretary of State, who quit over this, was also key.
So a lot of people joined this effort, but there's no question that it was not for the grassroots.
At the Bradley Manning Support Network, working on this for almost a year now, we would not have gotten Bradley Manning out of this torturous situation.
And so please join us at BradleyManning.org, get involved, and help to bring justice to the situation to this young kid who's accused of essentially exposing war crimes.
We see war criminals going free.
We see the situation of this one guy who was accused of killing Iraqi civilians, and he gets nine months of duty at his base, cleaning up the base, not even in prison, at his base.
We see these kinds of stories over and over again.
War criminals going free.
Obama let all the torture lawyers off, all the torturers off.
They were all allowed to go free.
But Bradley Manning, who was accused of exposing war crimes, he's sitting there in solitary confinement before going to trial.
And with President Obama now pronouncing him guilty before even the first day of trial is held.
It's Kevin Zeese from Voters for Peace and BradleyManning.org, as well as ComeHomeAmerica.us.
And, you know, I know that at least there was an attempt.
Maybe it's moot now that he's been moved.
I'm not sure.
But there was an attempt by Bradley Manning's lawyer, David Coombs, to have a writ of habeas corpus and have, you know, ask a judge basically to release Manning simply, as you said, because he's been tortured, because he's already done his time for being abused in Quantico all this time.
And I was wondering if you could take an extra couple of minutes here, Kevin, to explain to the audience exactly what Bradley Manning has been going through.
Because, you know, they're Americans and, hey, I'm an American too.
I've had torture defined way down over the past ten years or so.
So what do you mean when you say that Barack Obama and his employees in the Department of Defense have been torturing Bradley Manning?
Well, Bradley Manning has not been convicted of anything.
He's actually not even been fully charged yet.
The actual formal charging will occur after his preliminary hearing, which will probably be in June.
So he's not even formally charged yet.
He's been held for almost a year now, nine months in Quantico in Virginia.
It's a Marine base, and Bradley Manning comes from the Army, so the fact they put him in a Marine base was already strange.
And Quantico has a reputation for breaking people down.
It looks like it was an intentional decision on the administration's part to take this approach.
Bradley Manning was kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day in a 6-by-12 cell.
Well, that was to protect him, though, right?
That's what they said, and that's what Barack Obama told the American people at a press conference.
And you dispute that?
Just about a month ago, he told us that at a press conference.
But, Kevin, you dispute that, that this was about protecting Bradley Manning?
In fact, the psychiatrists at the brig all disputed it.
They told him he did not need this kind of treatment.
There was no risk to himself or other prisoners that he did not need to be kept in solitary confinement.
And that solitary confinement, by the way, 23 hours a day in a 6-by-12 cell, he was allowed one hour a day to exercise.
And he was put in chains, ankle and arm chains, and walked down the hall.
In fact, one visitor of his, David Howes, said he knew Bradley Manning was coming because he could hear the chains.
So he walked through these halls and these chains to go exercise to another tiny room where he was allowed to walk in figure eights.
He was not allowed to exercise in his own cell.
He was in it for 23 hours a day.
He was not allowed to do push-ups because that was too dangerous, they said.
So, again, for his own protection, he's not allowed to do push-ups.
Every five minutes while he's in that cell during daytime, he's asked by the guard at the door, are you okay in there?
I need a verbal response.
Every five minutes, are you okay in there?
I need a verbal response.
Are you okay in there?
I need a verbal response.
And that's the kind of treatment he was going through.
Then at one point, against the advice of the psychiatrist, he was put on suicide watch.
And that occurred after one of our protests outside of the Quantico Marine Base.
You know Bradley Manning and his lawyer had nothing to do with this protest.
We did this protest to bring attention to Bradley Manning's plight.
And we're glad we did it.
But the day after that, the Marines abused him, and they took all his clothes away, took his glasses away, took his books away.
He was left in his cell naked for days at a time, 24 hours a day, no exercise, no nothing, naked in the cell.
Luckily there was public attention brought to that, and the Marines were forced to change that.
The Marine commander was removed.
A new Marine commander came in for the brig, a female officer.
And a very short time after that, she took away Bradley Manning's clothes at night because he made some joke about hanging himself with his underwear, just being sarcastic about the treatment he was getting.
So they took away his clothes at night.
He was forced to sleep naked, and in the morning he'd have to stand at attention with his hands behind his back, totally vulnerable to everyone who came by to search his cell, visually inspect his cell.
He had to wait there as all the cells were inspected, standing there naked, waiting for his clothes to return.
After complaints about that were received, him sleeping naked, they gave him instead a scratchy smock to wear at night, which he didn't want to wear because it was so uncomfortable.
So all night he was in a scratchy smock that made it hard to sleep, and again in the morning forced to stand naked.
And that stayed that way until the end.
At the end of the time period recently, the attorney was given information that somebody who overheard a conversation that they would continue this treatment until nothing would be done to stop them from treating Bradley Manning this way.
So that's when he was getting ready to file the writ of habeas corpus.
He was going through the process of the administrative appeals.
The brig commander had already denied his appeal.
The commander of the base had denied his appeal.
The next step was the Secretary of Navy, who had not yet ruled on this.
But then the attorney heard this story about, we're going to keep him that way forever, and he was getting ready to file the writ of habeas corpus.
That was the same time as the legal academics came out, and the U.S. investigator in torture came out, and Dennis Kucinich came out.
We held another gigantic demonstration.
Well, and Kevin, look, the point here is, we all recognize this from the CIA torturing people in the Bush years.
All this nakedness and all this humiliation is about breaking his spirit.
They're trying to make him either one, so vulnerable they can get him to just flip and make up lies about Julian Assange, who they're really after.
They're setting an example for other whistleblowers.
I think it's quite possible they're trying to actually drive him crazy enough that he won't be able to participate in his own defense, so they can just lock him in insanity prison instead of admitting what lousy security procedures they have.
I think all that you said is true.
The other possibility is they could also try to get him to plead guilty, make him so weak that he'll plead guilty to anything.
I think all that was done to break him and get what they can out of him, and to punish him, because some people in the military see what he did, exposing the truth about how our military operates is a crime to these people.
Exposing war crimes is a crime to these people.
That's what he's accused of doing, and I think that the war criminals are in charge in our military, people who become generals in Afghanistan.
McChrystal, for example, led an assassination squad.
He was involved in all sorts of torture-related activities in Afghanistan, and he gets to be the top general in Afghanistan.
And on it goes like that, on and on.
All right, well, listen, we're all out of time, but I want to thank you very much for your time again on the show, Kevin.
Thanks very much.
Please go to BradleyManning.org and get involved and help defend the United States and make it the country it should be.
Thanks very much.
Everybody, that's the great Kevin Zeese from BradleyManning.org.
Go there, sign up, support.
It's as legit as it could be.
The money goes straight to Bradley Manning's lawyers, and of course there's all kinds of activism you can take part in as well, so please go ahead and check that out, BradleyManning.org.
That's it for me.
I'm Scott Horton.
This has been Antiwar Radio.
We're here every Friday from 630 to 7 on 90.7 KPFK in L.A.
I've got another radio show.
I do about 15, 17, 20 interviews a week.
You can find all the archives at Antiwar.com/radio.
Thanks very much for listening.
See you all next Friday.
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