07/07/11 – Chase Madar – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio and our next guest is Chase Medar.
Chase Medar is an attorney in New York and a member of the National Lawyers Guild.
He writes for Tom Dispatch, the American conservative magazine, Le Monde Diplomatique, and the London Review of Books.
His next book, The Passion of Bradley Manning, will be published by O.R. Books this fall.
Excellent.
This article is already up on Common Dreams.
It'll be up on antiwar.com tomorrow.
I'm certain under Tom Englehart's name, it's at TomDispatch.com as well.
It's called Bradley Manning, American Hero.
Oh, yeah.
Well, welcome to the show, Chase.
Make your case.
Always a pleasure to be back.
So yeah, Bradley Manning, American Hero.
This is someone who does not deserve a prison cell at Fort Leavenworth.
He deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Here's why.
First of all, our foreign policy establishment is in dire need of public supervision.
I don't think I'm going out on a limb if I tell you that the past 10 years have seen us go from disaster to calamity to catastrophe in our statecraft and in our foreign policy.
Now, if any employee screwed up this badly, he or she would get fired on the spot.
Unfortunately, we really don't have that option.
Our foreign policy establishment is here to stay.
It's not going anywhere, but we can't put them under serious public supervision.
And with what Bradley Manning has allegedly done by providing WikiLeaks with the Iraq war logs, with the Afghanistan war logs, and with all those State Department cables, it's given us the possibility of knowing what our foreign policy elites are doing.
We very badly need to know what our country is doing abroad.
I'm talking about the incredible costs of the failed statecraft of the past 10 years.
Most recent tabulation by Brown University has figures that are just horrifying, that we've killed roughly 225,000 civilians, 6,000 American soldiers, while costing our country somewhere between 3.2 and 4 trillion dollars.
Now, if this is success, I don't want any part of it.
I'd prefer failure.
Well, now, Bradley Manning was this kid who, according to PBS and The New York Times, was, I don't know, just a very weak person.
I guess that's really the best smear about him that they can make is that, well, he was just a sissy and he wasn't man enough to be in the army.
That's the most discrediting they can do, because right in the chat logs, as published by Wired Magazine and Boing Boing and The Washington Post, there he is explaining that, I want a worldwide discussion and reforms, and the people need to know the truth, and how can we be a democracy and do the right thing if the people don't have access to real information?
And there's his most pure whistleblower motives in the plainest of English, right there.
And certainly he's gotten what he wanted from it.
But to hear these other people tell it in the mass media, what he's done is, I mean, I don't know how they can characterize this as anything but whistleblowing, but they say that he did it out of weakness or something.
So still, we should resent him for it, something like that.
You buying it?
Not in the least, and I'm glad you bring it up, I think it's just ridiculous when Bradley Manning does state exactly why he was blowing the whistle and making publicly available these classified documents.
And there's always an attempt to pathologize whistleblowers and deny their usually very clear political motive and say it has, they did what they did because of some character flaw or some sickness they have.
And God knows what people would have been saying about Daniel Ellsberg if when Nixon goons broke into his psychiatrist's office, they had found his file.
This is always the case, and whistleblowers are always accused of being crazy.
There's a long and very tragic tradition, both in the Soviet Union and in Latin America's right-wing dictatorships of the 20th century, to force psychiatric care on whistleblowers and dissenters and political dissidents.
And we saw something like this with Manning's treatment at Quantico, where he was locked up in very punitive solitary confinement for about nine months, deprived of his clothes, of his glasses, and always, of course, for his own good.
Honestly, if you believe that, there's a Brooklyn Bridge I'd be happy to sell you.
Well, now, how is it that the war parties got anyone convinced that what Bradley Manning did was wrong?
You know, I just don't get it.
Their argument is that Bradley Manning is somehow ruining a good thing.
But if you look at the past 10 years of foreign policy disaster, where's the good thing?
We plainly need a pretty radical course correction.
Our government really can't afford it, and the world can't afford the violence and destruction either.
And I have to say I'm especially surprised that a lot of Republicans, many of whom have a healthy distrust of government, are so eager to entrust all these secrets to the government, and are insisting that the government keep us in the dark.
We absolutely need to know what our government is doing, and our government has plainly shown that it is unable to declassify documents in a timely manner.
I mean, it's just ridiculous.
It's just last month that the National Security Agency finally declassified some documents from 1809, over 200 years old.
The Department of Defense only last month declassified the Pentagon Papers, which have been publicly available in book form these last four decades.
So we simply cannot leave this up to the government.
And I think WikiLeaks is the solution, not the problem here, to pandemic overclassification and a government that has a very sick obsession with keeping everything secret.
Mm hmm.
Well, and you know, it's interesting that despite the fact that I don't know which PR firm they hired for this or what, but they did a focus group or something, and they figured out that the slogan blood on his hands would work real well, that the implication that anything, and of course, they don't have to really even assert this part out loud, right?
It's just sort of the subtext.
The assumed false premise is that anything that's classified is classified in order to keep good people from being killed by bad people.
And so, you know, this giant dump of information can only result in the mass slaughter of all of America's quislings across the planet.
And yet that hasn't happened at all.
And and yet what has happened is the American people have had at least the opportunity, I don't know if they really took it up, to find out from all kinds of journalism, brand new secrets that were secret, not because they were protecting the lives of good, innocent people, but because they were protecting the crimes of the American military, State Department, intelligence agencies, etc, etc.
Absolutely.
I think it's high time that we Americans learn to differentiate the institutional self-interest of Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon with the national interest, with the interests of the American people.
Because Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates can be embarrassed.
You know, that doesn't necessarily cause us problems.
That's something we have to live with, with their job.
And frankly, I'm not so surprised that politicians have pounced on this and tried to make such a huge panic out of it, because a lot of our political leaders really have nothing to offer us except for fear mongering.
And it's pathetic, but that's the state we're in.
All right.
So it's Chase Medar, and he's a lawyer for the National Lawyers Guild and a writer for TomDispatch.com, among other places.
This one right now is already up at TomDispatch and Common Dreams.
It'll be on Antiwar.com, I'm sure, tomorrow.
It's called Bradley Manning, American Hero.
And now we're assuming that he's the American hero that they claim he is.
He's, you know, alleged to have committed a crime.
And of course, he's 100% guilty until proven innocent, as far as that goes.
But I say he's 100% guilty as far as being a hero is concerned.
Seems pretty obvious he's the one they're looking for and all that.
And I think when we get back, Chase, I'd like to try to go through some of what we've learned from what he did.
You know, WikiLeaks cables say this and say that.
Well, what do they say?
We'll be right back with Chase Medar after this on Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Wrapping up Antiwar Radio for the day, talking with Chase Medar from the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Conservative Magazine, TomDispatch.com.
His piece, Bradley Manning, American Hero, will certainly be running.
Well, I'm betting 90%, I'm not the editor, will be running under Tom's name tomorrow at Antiwar.com.
And we're talking about Bradley Manning, who, according to the government, is the man who downloaded the Iraq war logs, the Afghan war logs, the collateral murder video that had been suppressed by the Washington Post and their reporter, David Finkel, even though they had access to it, and the State Department cables, as they're called.
And he's, of course, in prison, and he's awaiting trial, and he's facing what amounts to, if he's convicted to everything they've charged him with so far and sentenced to consecutive terms, I think would mean the rest of his life in prison, 50-something, 60-something more years he's facing.
Is that correct, Mr. Medar, there?
Yes, it is.
He faces the potential of several decades behind bars for this.
And now, you know, it's funny, I was just watching Dan Ellsberg, the most dangerous man in America, the other night, and I remember, you know, they kind of skipped this part in the story where the judge declared a mistrial, but I believe the way Dan describes it in his book, Secrets, and I think on this show, was that the prosecution learned and fessed up to the defense and the judge that we've learned that the president hired Cuban hit men to murder the defendant judge, and so the judge said, okay, well, that's it, I've had it.
Well, now, so, and what happened was they couldn't get a clean shot, or they were going to.
They showed up where he was giving a speech, but there were too many people in the way or whatever, something like that.
Anyway, so, short of that, something like that, Bradley Manning is in serious jeopardy unless what happens?
I mean, you're going to have Johnny Cochran's dead.
What are we going to do?
I don't know, and, you know, unfortunately for Bradley Manning, it's not the Nixon administration going against him.
They were a bunch of ham-fisted goons who couldn't really get anything right, and, you know, Obama's people are smoother, slicker, and all the more dangerous in the prosecution, but we have a lot to be grateful for this young man.
I think it's a great thing that Americans and other people saw the collateral murder video.
We very badly need to know what's going on in Iraq and what we've been doing there, and I think much of the world has already been exposed to such images through Al Jazeera, and it's mainly Americans who are deprived of the reality check because we can't get Al Jazeera except for in a few counties in northern Michigan, and it's just not available.
The Iraq war logs contain all kinds of U.S. Army reports on torture still being committed by the Iraqi authorities.
This is one of the things that inspired Bradley Manning to allegedly leak all these documents.
One of his tasks early on in his deployment in Iraq was to help round up Iraqis who had been distributing a pamphlet about financial corruption in the Iraqi government, of which there is plenty, and he wasn't very comfortable about rounding up people in a non-violent, very civilized protest that I think any American would find worthwhile, and handing them over to authorities who had a good chance of torturing them.
I think another very interesting revelation that comes from the State Department cables is about our country's lobbying the Vatican.
You know, we've heard a lot about what a just war is.
A just war, that's something that comes out of Catholic theological doctrine that makes a war righteous and good and justified.
Well, how can we make our wars just, or at least not to criticize them?
Well, we lobby hard at the Vatican to get just war status, or at least silence, and that's very revelatory.
So this is a very positive thing, what Bradley Manning has allegedly done.
And I think it's also important that we realize that this idea that publics in a democratic society need to know what their government is doing, this is something that was invented by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks last week.
This is a very old American tradition with roots deep in classical Republican theory.
If you listen to what James Madison said about it a couple centuries ago, it couldn't be plainer.
Right, it's the free market of ideas.
That's what they called it then.
The classical liberals of the founding era called it.
But you have to know the truth in order that they can decide right.
That's right.
A popular government without popular information is a tragedy for perhaps both.
Well, wherever you were standing before or however you were holding the phone before was working, but we got problems now.
I guess we can give it one more try here.
Going once, going twice.
Okay, well, that's okay though.
I have things to say about Bradley Manning still.
So here's some of what we learned from the WikiLeaks.
As he said about the torture police created by the Americans, the Bata Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council became the core of the Iraqi army.
And their so-called Wolf Brigade is featured highly in the WikiLeaks.
You can read the Guardian coverage, not just about how the headline in the Times, if they talked about it all, it was buried, probably not even in the headline, was that, well, the Americans knew that the Iraqi government was torturing people.
Aha.
Well, the Guardian says, no, we have here where they were handing people over to the Iraqis to be tortured.
So this is separate from the torture that the American troops were inflicting and, you know, intelligence contractors and whoever were torturing the people across Iraq.
Now, this is turning them over to the Wolf Brigade to be tortured.
It's in the war logs.
Also, the fact that they knew they were lying about the numbers of civilian casualties all along.
And I'm sorry, I forget the name escapes me now, but it was someone that, oh, you know, it was the guy that had done the original study of the half a million dead Iraqi kids back in the 90s, I think, who went back and did the study and did the comparison and the contrast between the deaths at iraqbodycount.org, who only counted the very specifically double verified civilian casualties from media reports and compared those with the civilian deaths already reported by the Pentagon.
The civilian deaths that came out were had been hidden by the Pentagon that was proven in the Iraq war log WikiLeaks things and what they had at Iraq body count.
And he's decided, hey, wow, the discrepancy between the Pentagon's original numbers and Iraq body count is one thing.
But now look at the fact that all of these were finding in the WikiLeaks that had gone unreported before.
Why they're not in Iraq body count either.
This is a whole new set of tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians.
That our government had lied about.
And, you know, that's people dying in battle.
This isn't just counting the excess deaths of people who died because they couldn't get to the hospital for all the checkpoints and battles and all the people who died of easily treatable diseases because there was no economy to distribute medicine to them, etc., etc., bad food, bad water, everything else.
Burn pits in their neighborhoods.
Depleted uranium.
We also learned that just in the interactive maps, you can see how the more troops they put in Afghanistan, the worse and worse and worse it gets.
Even they know it.
And maybe that's why they're there.
To make it worse and worse and worse and worse.
According to Obama's best presence, when he's done withdrawing the troop surge, there will still be approximately double the number of soldiers there were in Afghanistan when he took office.
And things will just continue to get worse.
And then from the State Department logs, boy, we've learned all about South America, North Africa, we've had a Tunisian start of the Arab Spring was all from the WikiLeaks and the information about the corruption in their government that was dominating discussion in their society leading up to the beginning of all of that.
And too late for me to catalog it, but let's go Google around.
Go look at WikiLeaks.ch.