All right, welcome back to the show, it's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and there's been big new developments in the case of Bradley Manning, the accused in the massive WikiLeaks dump of the collateral murder video, the Iraq and Afghan war logs, and the State Department cables.
A Wired magazine, which had previously published some of the transcripts between Bradley Manning and the man who turned him into the government, Adrian Lamo, had been published.
Now, finally, they have published the rest.
And Glenn Greenwald has been writing about it at Salon.com.
I'm happy to welcome him back to the show.
Hey, Glenn, how are you doing?
Doing great, Scott, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you joining us here today.
So you've been writing about this particular aspect of the Bradley Manning case for quite some time, the selected portions of the chat logs that had been released.
And you had specific questions about, you know, regarding your suspicions about what might still be hidden from view.
So what have you learned now that the full chat logs have been released?
Well, one thing I've learned is that Wired and its editor-in-chief Evan Hansen and its senior editor Kevin Paulson have made a whole series of factually false statements about what it is that they did once the controversy really blew up in their face.
When I first wrote about the publication of the 25% of the chat logs by Wired, you know, I pointed out that the government informant in this case, Adrian Lamo, and Wired's editor, Kevin Paulson, have a very elaborate and lengthy personal history together.
And that it was very odd that Kevin Paulson of all people would be in the position of deciding what the public could see and what it wouldn't see about these chat logs.
And before I wrote about that, I interviewed him by email and I asked him whether or not he was in receipt of the entire chat log and if he planned at some point to publish them all rather than just the parts that he had picked.
And what he told me was that he didn't think they would publish them anytime soon because, in his words, the only material that they have suppressed is either personal information that has nothing to do with the case or deeply sensitive government secrets that he wasn't willing to put up without vetting.
And what was so odd to me about that, the claim that there's only two categories of stuff that they hadn't released, namely personal information or government secrets, is that Adrian Lamo, the government informant, has spent a year making all kinds of claims about things that Manning told him in these chats that are nowhere to be found in the portions of the logs that Wired released and have nothing to do with personal information or government secrets.
And so it was obvious that either Adrian Lamo was lying about what he was claiming was in these chat logs or Kevin Paulson and Wired were lying about what it is that they had with health.
And once the chat logs were finally released in full, which is what myself and lots of other people were demanding Wired do, since that's the role of what journalism is supposed to be about, is to disclose information, not conceal it, it turned out that they did lie, that there were all kinds of things that were relevant and significant that had nothing to do with personal information and nothing to do with government secrets that they did withhold, including things like Adrian Lamo promising Bradley Manning that he was acting as a journalist or as a minister and that therefore nothing they talked about would ever see the light of day, that it was not for publication or for print.
A very manipulative statement, possibly bearing on the admissibility of these claims, that Wired concealed in order to protect their source, Adrian Lamo.
There's also discussions on the part of Bradley Manning about the fact that Julian Assange has no idea who he is, that Julian Assange purposely stays ignorant of the identity of the sources of information for WikiLeaks, and that he even said, if you tell me anything about you, I won't work with you any longer.
An extremely significant and newsworthy development that Wired withheld, and I don't know why they did, but I know that they have lots of vindictive sentiments toward WikiLeaks, and that makes WikiLeaks and Julian Assange look good, it undercuts the case to prosecute them, and Wired withheld that as well, and there's a whole bunch of other things as well.
And then there's stuff that Adrian Lamo has been claiming about what was in the chats that aren't in the chats, that Wired knew were lies, as Adrian Lamo was going around for the last year claiming, and they never said anything, even though they were the only ones who had the evidence to prove that they were lies.
So what really is this event about is people and a magazine, Wired, which is owned by the huge publishing conglomerate, Condé Nast, pretending to be journalists, but engaging in the exact opposite function of journalism, and instead, rather than disclosing the truth about one of the most significant political events of the last decade, concealing the truth and distorting it and enabling lies to be propagated.
And now, okay, so there's a lot of things to go back over there.
First of all, I wanted to talk about what you mentioned there about the promise by Adrian Lamo, the informant, that he's a journalist and also has training as a minister, and that both ways, he would use both of those things to protect Manning's secrets.
And you said that that might raise questions as to the admissibility of anything that Manning told Lamo.
And I know that you're not just a great blogger, you're a former civil liberties litigator arguing Bill of Rights cases in court, and I wonder if you could be more specific about whether that's really possible.
Well, a lot of it would depend on facts we don't know.
For example, according to Adrian Lamo, there was a time, as part of this discussion, when he began consulting with the FBI and other investigators inside the U.S. government, military investigators and the like.
And so if he's doing these things at the behest of federal agents, telling Brodney Manning that the things he's saying will be protected by the journalist's source privilege or the priest's patent privilege, or that things that he's saying will never be seen the light of day and aren't for publication, it's possible that that's a form of misconduct or manipulation or even entrapment that could lead to a judge ruling that that level of government impropriety means that it's inadmissible.
It's also possible that Wired is implicated in terms of journalism.
I mean, they've worked with Adrian Lamo in a number of instances, and it could be that the breach, because Kevin Paulson of Wired was talking to Adrian Lamo during the course of these events, if this is something that Wired helped engineer, promising Adrian Lamo source protection and that it was not for publication, and then breached its word, that reflects on Wired as well.
And then there's just the issue of the authentication of these chat logs as well.
You know, they used a program designed to foster anonymity on the internet and to prevent detection of the people who are participating in these chat logs, so proving that this was actually Rodney Manning might be a very difficult endeavor which could jeopardize the admissibility of this evidence as well.
So a lot of it depends on some facts that we don't know about.
Certainly it's relevant in terms of the context of why Rodney Manning talked to Adrian Lamo, what the propriety of this conduct was, but it could have a legal effect as well.
Well, and what more did you learn about why Manning talked to Lamo at all?
Anything?
Well, it's pretty evident that Rodney Manning was, you know, undergoing some pretty severe psychological stress.
He felt very alienated from his environment in Iraq, in part because he came to believe that the war itself was immoral.
He talked a lot about how there were instances where, for example, you know, part of what he was doing was intelligence work and helping to track various insurgent groups that the U.S. wanted to arrest.
And he worked on the detection and location of one particular group that the U.S. ended up arresting for handing out what was deemed to be subversive or even, you know, inciting literature.
And once he, Bradley Manning, went and got the literature translated, he realized that it wasn't, you know, it wasn't insurgent material at all.
It was simply political speech.
It was accusing the Maliki government of corruption and saying that they were basically stealing money.
And when he brought to his supervisors this realization and said the people we just arrested weren't inciting violence at all, they were simply asking for investigations into where this money went, he was told that that was none of his business to, you know, not to tell anybody else.
And then they kept them in detention.
And so slowly he began, you know, feeling like this war effort of which he was a part, you know, was immoral and was wrong.
On top of that, he was going through, you know, struggles with gender identity issues.
He had decided that he identified more as a woman and wanted to transition into being female.
And so being part of this war, very far away from everything familiar to him, made him lonely and isolated and alienated and depressed.
And he was seeking out somebody who he thought would be sympathetic to his predicament.
And Adrian Lamo has, you know, had his own problems with the government before.
He was a convicted hacker.
He pretended to be a Wikileaks supporter.
He has identified as being bisexual before and done work on gay issues.
And so this led Bradley Manning to believe that Adrian Lamo was somebody into whom he could confide without any detection.
Unfortunately, he happened to pick somebody who is notorious for being, you know, a narcissistic liar, well known in the hacker world and despised in the hacker world for being desperate for publicity.
He basically couldn't have picked a worse person in him to confide in.
And basically, Adrian Lamo ended up, you know, turning into a government informant in order to generate some cheap publicity for himself and destroyed the life of this 22 year old who did what he did because he detected huge amounts of wrongdoing and corruption and illegality on the part of the most powerful factions in the world and believed that exposing it would lead to worldwide reform.
Well, now, you know, quite contrary to that, the New York Times has it that, well, he had some personal problems and basically he was a big sissy.
And that was why he just couldn't hack it and ended up somehow breaking down and turning over all these logs to Wikileaks, something like that.
They tend to leave out the part about the wrongdoing by Iraqi forces with the cooperation of American forces that he was working with during the thing.
I wonder if there's any more about his motive in leaking to Wikileaks that he explained to Lamo in the newly released complete logs.
Well, I mean, he talked, you know, he talked at length in the release part of the logs about that.
And then in the unreleased part of the log, there is some additional material in which he talks about his desire to trigger movements that would stand up to these factions that were doing these things and talks about how people don't know what's going on.
They can't do any meaningful activism to put a stop to it.
There are several points where Lamo asked him whether or not he would commit suicide or engage in violence if MP showed up at his door.
He asked him whether he's afraid of going to prison.
And Manning basically said, I'm not.
I feel like what I'm doing is so necessary that I'm willing to pay the price.
And I was wondering if you could tell us some more about some of the things about Adrian Lamo, things that Adrian Lamo had claimed to the media over the last year as he, as Manning has been tried in the media.
Some of the things that Lamo has said are in those logs that turn out not to be true.
Well, one of the most significant things is that the effort on the part of the Obama Justice Department to prosecute WikiLeaks and Julian Assange depends upon proving that there was active cooperation between WikiLeaks and Bobby Manning so that WikiLeaks wasn't merely a passive recipient of classified information but was an active conspirator helping Manning steal the information in advance.
And one of the claims that Adrian Lamo has been running around making to lots of different reporters and that made it onto the front page of the New York Times was that Manning used contacts in the Boston hacking world as physical intermediaries and that he did physical drop-offs of secrets, government secrets, and documents and the like, to these people in Boston who then gave them to WikiLeaks and that they served as intermediaries between Manning and WikiLeaks.
None of that is even hinted at, let alone set forth in these chats.
Manning also claims, Lamo also claims that he offered Manning the opportunity to serve as source, to have source confidentiality or minister confidentiality.
He claims that Manning refused.
That is nowhere in the chats.
In fact, you know, Manning was worried about what their relationship was and Lamo had to reassure him.
I already told you this is not for publication.
Manning said, okay, you know, and so you see this and, you know, there's other small discrepancies about how they met.
You know, Lamo has said on several occasions that Manning told him that he found out about Lamo and contacted him because he read an article on Wired about Lamo's psychiatric difficulties.
None of that is in the chat.
And so what you really see is, you know, this person Adrian Lamo who has been driving much of the reporting on this story, willing to be basically a serial liar.
And the chat logs were always the evidence that would prove one way or the other, whether he was telling the truth and yet Wired held on to them for a full year in order to let their source mislead the public and not be as critically scrutinized.
Well, now it seems like, as you mentioned there too, about one of those details, the charge against Julian Assange, which according to the New York Times, the attorney general and his fellows in the Justice Department were trying to come up with a story where Manning, perhaps they're trying to get Manning to flip and testify that Assange basically directed his liberating of these secrets and uploading it to WikiLeaks.
And it sure sounds like, that didn't sound right in the first place, but now we see, assuming this stuff is true, direct evidence to the contrary, correct?
Right.
Well, you know, I think the key thing to remember about Bradley Manning is that the government didn't really care about Bradley Manning because, you know, Manning was never going to have another opportunity to be in a position of having access to classified information to hurt the government again.
They're interested in Bradley Manning only because he is the key to their real role, which is to be able to criminalize what WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have done.
And all of the stuff about keeping Manning in solitary confinement and, you know, tormenting him with these extremely inhumane and oppressive conditions that would leave the border on if not crossed into torture and the like, is all about trying to break him psychologically so he will say the things they need him to say to incriminate WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
And one of the things that Manning has been doing is to keep this theory in the public spotlight by claiming over and over that there is this connection between Assange and Manning.
And what's interesting is WIRED, when the last time this controversy erupted, when I wrote about it in December, you know, the editor-in-chief of WIRED, Evan Hansen, said explicitly that there's nothing in the chat logs, that the unreleased portion of the chat log got barren in any way of the relationship between Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.
And yet, now that they've released the chat logs, that turned out to be a complete lie.
There's a significant passage that, as I mentioned earlier, where Manning describes how Julian Assange knows virtually nothing about him, doesn't know who he is, and purposely keeps it that way, and is, as Manning put it, uber fanatical about safeguarding the identity of sources, something that makes WikiLeaks look very good and that undercuts the theory that the Justice Department is pushing about why they can be prosecuted.
Very significant material, exculpatory for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, that WIRED inexcusably concealed for a full year.
And now, this article is from tgdaily.com.
Navy violated own policy over WikiLeaks suspect.
A special investigation has determined that the Navy violated its own policy by keeping WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning on extended suicide watch.
This was part of your accusation, your actual original report, and you really broke the story there at salon.com/opinion/greenwall about the mistreatment of Bradley Manning.
This was really at the heart of it, right?
Pretending he was a threat to himself so that they could extend all these measures of isolation under the color of the law, the rules of the prison.
Yeah, think about how significant this is.
This is not an investigation by the ACLU or the Amnesty International or the International La Crosse that's concluding that the detention conditions were improper and that the Quantico Brig officials acted in violation of their own rules.
This is an internal investigation by the Marine Corps.
And what they found was that the rules had been violated, that psychiatrists, who are the only ones qualified to assess this issue, had specifically concluded that Manning was not a suicide threat and that suicide watch was inappropriate for him.
And yet they put him on suicide watch in order to take his clothing, make him stand nude for inspection each morning, and to impose a whole variety of other oppressive conditions on him in contravention of the conclusions of their own medical staff.
What it shows is that they clearly were willing to even violate the rules to break the rules to treat him differently in order to subject him to psychological torment.
And the fact that Marine investigators themselves concluded this to be true proves just how egregious this conduct was.
And how's he doing now that he's been moved to Fort Leavenworth from Quantico, Virginia?
Well, nobody's entirely clear because part of what moving him accomplished was to take him away from the sort of center of where the media is and where his friends were and his support network was.
By moving him to Kansas, it's kind of isolated him in some sense.
It seems like at least the conditions that they were originally described by his lawyer were an improvement for sure.
I mean, he's no longer in solitary confinement.
He interacts with the prisoners.
He's no longer deemed a high-profile or high-risk prisoner, but rather just a middle-level security threat who has that level of precaution.
So presumably things are better, although not a lot of people have spoken with him about it.
His lawyers being strangely silent about it as well, I think because they want to make sure not to alienate military officials by going public about any complaint.
But it's probably better, and it's certainly a testament to the ability of citizens to protest government actions.
I mean, the only reason why they moved him is because enough people wrote about it, complained about it, and talked about it.
And that caused the UN to commence a formal investigation into whether this constituted torture, and it caused Amnesty International to formally condemn the Obama administration for inhumane detention abuse.
And then, of course, the State Department spokesman, P.J. Crowley, was forced to resign after he denounced this treatment as well.
So it turned into a huge scandal purely as a result of independent media and bloggers and their viewers and readers and listeners, you know, raising enough of a ruckus to force the government to move him.
So I think it is good that he's been moved.
But the UN top torture official who is trying to formally investigate whether he was subjected to illegal torture while at Quantico has been stymied by the Obama administration in his attempt to interview Manning alone in private.
Something the UN rules require that is routinely granted to the UN officials.
And in fact, even the highest-level Guantanamo detainees, the people whom the Bush administration accused of being top-level al-Qaeda operatives who were imprisoned in CIA black sites, were permitted, once they were moved out of the black sites, to be interviewed in private by investigators from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
But here we have an American service member who has been convicted of nothing, whom the Obama administration is denying access to on that same basis.
And the UN torture official has now publicly denounced the Obama administration and said that it's impeding his investigation to determine whether or not he was subjected to illegal torture.
And now to wrap up here, last couple of minutes, I wonder if, well, if you were helping with this case, you think that his lawyers could actually get him off and say that the Espionage Act does not apply here.
I mean, he may be in violation of some secrecy agreements, but he does have a legal obligation to expose crimes, right?
And he has.
And I wonder whether you think that there's a snowball's chance that some real lawyers with some real constitutional law and, you know, armed with it, could actually guarantee Bradley Manning's freedom.
You know, it's hard to say.
You know, of course, one of the things that happened, you know, when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers was that the government's misconduct and what it was doing to him basically saved him from life in prison.
I mean, he was going, he was on his way to jail, Daniel Ellsberg was.
And only because the Nixon administration had broken into a psychiatrist's office and done a variety of other things to him that the judge ruled him was so improper was that indictment dismissed.
So in general, the claim that, well, I've released classified information because I discovered wrongdoing is not one that courts will use to protect the leaker, in part because they'll say that they have to use proper channels for whistleblowing and not just give it to leaking leaks.
And in part here, my guess is that, you know, they'll say that he didn't just discriminately select specific documents that he thought revealed wrongdoing.
He turned over huge amounts, you know, hundreds of thousands of pages.
So it's hard for me, to be honest, to see a court saying that the fact that he revealed wrongdoing means that he should be exonerated.
It is possible that they could say that the, you know, inhumane treatment to which he was subjected rendered him unfit for trial or even compelled a dismissal of the charges.
I mean, that's what P.J. Crawley was complaining about, the State Department official.
He wasn't saying that he thought this was immoral.
He was saying he was stupid and counterproductive because it could undermine the prosecution.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Glenn Greenwald, salon.com/opinion/Greenwald.
Thanks very much for your time, Glenn.
Thank you, Scott.
Bye-bye.
