All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And I'm happy to welcome Kevin Zeese back to the show.
He's at the center of a project called ComeHomeAmerica.us.
Tell us briefly about it right now, and then we'll talk about it more in the second segment, Kevin, if that's all right.
That's fine.
Come Home America is an effort to bring people who oppose war together, no matter what their other political views are.
You can be a conservative, or a liberal, or a progressive, or a libertarian, or a Republican, or a Democrat, or green, or, you know, populist.
And you can join our group if you oppose war and militarism.
And we're seeking to bring the United Front together to end the American empire and our militaristic foreign policy.
And now, briefly, it's correct, is it not, that this is kind of a trans-partisan, non-partisan type of thing?
It's not like this is just MoveOn.org with another name or something like that?
No, we are staying out of the two parties.
We think both political parties are heavily deserving of criticism.
They're both guilty of militarism.
Neither party's cutting the military budget.
It's just bloated and wasteful, and it's time for us to make some major cuts.
You can read about us at ComeHomeAmerica.us.
It's a pretty regularly updated website with lots of news on war issues and lots of different analysis from different perspectives.
So, please visit ComeHomeAmerica.us and get involved and get informed.
Right on.
Okay, and then we're going to talk about that some more, because I think it's, I don't know, the most important thing in the world, other than America's relationship with Russia, since we've got all these H-bombs pointed at each other.
Other than that, ComeHomeAmerica.us is itself the second most important issue in the whole world.
Alright, so, but we're going to put that off, because one of the most important issues, runner-up, right up there anyway, is the story of young Bradley Manning, who is innocent as far as the criminal charges against him are concerned, but 100% guilty of being an American hero who liberated the Iraq-Afghan war logs and the collateral murder video, as well as the State Department cables, which have shaken the entire world.
And as Glenn Greenwald points out, it was WikiLeaks about Iraq that helped to solidify the anger in, not just the Iraqi population, but inside the Iraqi government against, and solidify their position against Obama's attempts to bribe and cajole them to allow him to leave American forces in that country.
Another heroic blow for somebody's, at least, independence, if not liberty, on the part of Bradley Manning there.
And yet, I'm reading this headline that is just disgusting to me, UN Torture Investigator Says Access to Manning Denied, Condemns Solitary Confinement.
But I thought that once Bradley Manning was released from Quantico and was put in Fort Leavenworth, that he was then dumped into the general population and was being treated fairly.
And so anyway, go ahead.
Well, I think he is being treated fairly.
What the UN investigator is talking about is not being allowed to ask Manning about what was going on at Quantico.
Oh, I see.
Okay.
He hasn't been able to visit them, so he can't comment on what happened in Quantico or what's happening at Leavenworth.
What we hear from Manning's lawyer at Leavenworth is pretty good news.
So we're hopeful that that's an accurate description, that he's in his own cell, but it's part of a quad of four cells.
In the center, there's a shared area for the four prisoners, and that he gets to go out and exercise for three hours a day.
And he also goes out to have meals with the general population.
If that's what's happening, he's finally being treated properly, but for more than a year, he wasn't.
And it is shameful that the U.S. government will not allow the UN torture investigator to meet with Manning in an official visit.
What that means is meet with him without being monitored by the U.S. government.
And so the fact that they're not allowing that to happen is a pretty strong indication they have something to hide, and they don't want a report coming out about Bradley Manning being held in solitary confinement and mistreated for more than a year in that process.
And the Bradley Manning Support Network, which I'm on the board of, the advisory committee of, you can read it, see it at bradleymanning.org, really led the campaign to end his solitary confinement.
And we're continuing to keep the pressure on to push for a more rapid trial, which seems delayed and delayed and delayed, and to give this kid some justice.
I'm right now at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.
That's the site of one of the occupations that are going on around the country, and I can tell you Bradley Manning's picture is in our media tent.
So we're very supportive of Manning and supportive of making sure he has a fair trial and sees some real justice.
Well, can you comment on the fairness of trials in the military system?
I mean, they don't have him at Guantanamo, thank goodness.
He's going to get a regular courts martial, right?
Yeah, you know, the military system is not perfect.
But they do try to, you know, they have to answer to courts of appeals, and they have to be somewhat cautious.
And what makes this case challenging, though, is that President Obama has already pronounced Manning guilty.
You know, the fact that he has come out and on videotapes said he's guilty makes it very hard to have a fair trial in the military.
It's a command situation, and President Obama is the commander-in-chief.
So everybody on the jury and the judge are all under his command.
They're all military officers.
And so it's hard to imagine a fair trial when the commander-in-chief has said that he's guilty.
I mean, for President Obama, who, you know, is a lawyer and claims to be a constitutional lawyer, to make that mistake and pronounce him guilty before a trial, that's really quite pitiful.
And what's known in the military is undue command influence.
And that's enough reason to dismiss the charges.
And I hope that Manning's lawyer will make that argument and seek to have the charges dismissed for undue command influence.
Well, don't you like it when there's old law left over from back before the Rubicon days or whatever, where if right is right and the law is the law, then the judge has to go along?
And then when that comes right up against politics and a giant media story like this?
Yeah, no, no question.
And it is a big media story.
I think President Obama really, in this same videotape, seems to really not understand what Brandon Manning is accused of.
He's not accused of what Daniel Ellsberg is accused of, which was releasing top-secret documents.
These are at the highest level.
I mean, that's what Ellsberg did.
Manning is accused of leaking documents that were at very low-level secrets, that hundreds of thousands of people had access to, that there's very little security of in the military.
In fact, Frontline showed pictures of computers with the passwords just taped on them so anyone could look at the information.
So this was not something that was a giant secret.
And really what the documents did more than anything else was confirm what many of us already suspected or confirm news reports that were denied by the military and show that we are, in fact, violating law and mistreating prisoners and so on.
So it's not like he was giving away information about where the troops are hiding in a battle.
This is not putting troops at risk.
In fact, no troop has been harmed by this.
So I think the President has some misunderstandings about that, and the public does as well, because if they understood what Manning did, I mean, he didn't sell these documents to our enemies.
He didn't give these documents to our enemies.
All he's accused of doing is giving the documents to the media through WikiLeaks.
To me, that should be protective speech, and if he's guilty of doing that, I praise him for it, because he showed us what our military and foreign policy really is about, and that's really important.
Yeah, I mean, if we believe, and I think this part is credible in my best judgment, which is the best I have right now, but if we believe the chat logs published by Wired magazine, the portions of them published by Wired, Bradley Manning says in very explicit language exactly why he did what he did.
The rat, Lamo, tries to get him, tries to even encourage him.
Why not sell it to a foreign power and make a bunch of money in all this?
And he says, no, I want worldwide reforms.
I think that what our State Department does is at least almost criminal, the way the First World exploits the Third as revealed in these documents, and I just think that the people need to know the truth about these wars, and they need to know the truth about this imperial exploitation so they can do the right thing.
He's talking like straight out of Thomas Jefferson and the free market of ideas, and error is tolerable as long as reason is left free to combat it, and all of those things.
This is as red, white, and blue as can be.
They ought to erase all those war pigs and put him on Mount Rushmore, if you ask me.
But all right.
A lot of truth in what he's saying.
A lot of truth in what he's saying.
All right.
It's Kevin Zeese.
He's the legal advisor to the Bradley Manning Support Network at BradleyManning.org, and we're going to be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Kevin Zeese from Come Home America and BradleyManning.org, the Bradley Manning Support Network.
He's still awaiting trial.
He was arrested, what, a year and a half ago or something?
He's still awaiting trial on the charges of being the greatest whistleblower of our era anyway.
One of the things I wanted to mention here, just I guess for my own politics' sake or whatever, is that I really don't like the idea of the United Nations or any other global organization coming in and checking on our criminal justice system here in the United States.
Our Bill of Rights is superior to theirs by a thousand times.
The problem is we don't abide by ours.
The problem is where we're supposed to be spotless and above reproach, and that would never happen no matter what laws we signed up to to allow that kind of thing, international agreements or whatever.
They would never be invoked.
They would never be used against us because we're the shining city on the hill.
We're the people who mean what we say about justice and liberty, and so it shouldn't be a problem.
And now here this is a problem.
They are torturing our independence as bad as they're torturing everybody else.
I guess I don't have as positive a feeling as you do about that.
I actually think the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is superior to our Bill of Rights.
I think our Bill of Rights is a good start, but it's more than 200 years old, and it's kind of an old house that needs refurbishing.
And I think the real problem, of course, is what you did pinpoint, which is the problems in our government.
We have a very deep corruption of government, mainly because of concentrated wealth ruling more than the people ruling.
I really believe that the people can rule better than the elites on issue after issue, including the issues of the wars.
The public is very clear in polls that they want to see the military budget cut.
They want to see these wars ended.
And so I think that one thing we're in is kind of a battle right now, I think, between participatory democracy versus concentrated corporate rule, and that's what these occupations are about.
As I said, I'm in the occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.
You can read about it at occupywashingtondc.org.
So I think it's good to have an outside agency that can look over government.
There have been a lot of governments around the world that are corrupted by either militarism or by corporatism, and having an international agency that is separate from that to look over it and to check on their behavior whether they're abiding by the rule of law is important.
I think right now the United States is pretty lawless.
Lawless not only in how we treat Bradley Manning, but the way we treat civilians around the world, the widespread torture and holding people without trial, the killing of people with drones.
I think we have a lot to answer for, and I don't see it happening in our own government.
I think it's going to take an outside government, outside force, to really check us and make sure we're abiding by the rule of law.
I think we're not, and we won't until we're forced to.
Well, it's supposed to be us, right?
It should never have to come to this.
It should be you're the independent organization after all.
You're the lawyer.
But the problem is they've made it impossible for you to play that role in a way that actually gets it done.
All the ACLU's and CCR's in the world can't sue them enough to make them stop.
That's right.
We have greatly reduced the power of citizens to sue for violations of law.
I did file complaints against the Bush and also Obama torture lawyers.
There were a couple that Obama kept on staff.
So we filed complaints against those lawyers for their obvious violation of international and domestic law.
They're torturing illegally under U.S. law as well.
And, you know, we've filed actions to have their bar licenses revoked and the bar associates are sitting on them not taking any action.
And, in fact, the Department of Justice overruled its own Office of Professional Responsibility.
That came out urging some kind of action against some of these lawyers, but they overruled them.
So I think we're in a predicament here.
We have a government that's really out of control, that's dominated by corporate power and militarism.
And the people need to figure out a way to take some action.
I mean, personally, right now I'm sleeping at Freedom Plaza, which is not a fun place to sleep.
I've got to tell you, I don't like camping to begin with.
And camping on a park on Pennsylvania Avenue that's cemented is no fun.
But I'm doing it because I see that's the only way we can get space in the political dialogue.
I mean, by occupying the public space, we're essentially trying to occupy space in political dialogue.
And we're having an Iraq night tonight at 7 o'clock at 13 at Pennsylvania Avenue to talk about what's happening in Iraq, are we really getting out, what the impact of the war has been.
Last week we had an Iran night talking about the Iranian issue as the drumbeat for war is increasing.
Yesterday we had the Egyptian revolutionaries here to talk about that revolution.
So I think we're one of the few occupations that focuses on war and militarism as much as we do.
Most are economic focused only.
And we recognize the connection between spending 55% of our discretionary spending on militarism on the rest of the budget.
And so we're trying to bring all those issues together.
Yeah, right on.
Well, I sure am glad you're there.
I want to ask you real quick, but we still have a little bit of time to talk about Come Home America and Occupy Wall Street in D.C. and the rest of it here in a minute.
But I want to ask you one more thing about the Bradley Manning thing, because we did talk about how he's not a Guantanamo Bay.
He is under the system of military law that's been developed over 200 years, not 10.
And I wonder, I really don't know, and I don't know if you're an expert in the military law enough that you know the answer to this.
It's OK if you don't.
But it would seem to me a quintessential American principle that if you got tortured in custody, then you've done your time and we don't put you in prison if you've already been tortured.
I think that's one of the few key arguments that he's already been punished enough, in fact, punished severely.
And that's probably why they want the U.N. in there, because the U.N. comes out and says he was tortured.
That could really be something that just makes it another argument for the defense.
I mentioned also the undue influence of President Obama's commander-in-chief for asking him guilty.
The third big issue I'm worried about with the Manning case is making sure it's open to the public and the media.
A lot of the information I'll be using in the case is information that has some kind of requirement of security clearance.
And generally, all military trials and pretrial activities are required to be open to the public.
One exception, of course, is national security.
And the fact that we have evidence in this case that's going to be secret, requires some kind of security clearance, is an excuse to make this a secret trial.
And that's the last thing you need.
This guy is tortured for more than a year, then we have a secret trial, and he's found guilty of the present or he pronounced him guilty before the trial even started.
And that will just ring with such a stink of unfairness that it will just do great damage to the military justice system.
Well, it's a hell of a thing, and you know, I like Julian Assange.
I think he's heroic, all the work he's done.
But he gets all the spotlight because I guess he's got the hair and the whatever.
But Bradley Manning is the one who deserves the attention and the credit here, and he's the one who, obviously more than Assange is so far anyway, facing the consequences for doing the right thing in this case.
And I really should pay more attention to his plight here on this show.
I'm happy we're able to talk about it.
Well, thank you for doing that.
You know, it's very easy in this time period that we're waiting for the pretrial hearing to occur, to even be scheduled, that people lose track of Manning.
I think it's very important for us to keep it in the front of our mind that he's facing a death penalty offense.
And that what he's accused of doing is actually heroic rather than criminal.
And so I appreciate you putting the light on this, Scott.
All right, now quickly here about the Occupy D.C., where you're participating, and Come Home America, the great project, which I think has the very best hope.
If it's not quite already, it could be the anti-imperialist league of our era, the America First Committee of our era, and I sure would like to see it that way.
And it seems to me like, you know, there's a lot of propaganda.
We're like, oh, the Tea Party people believe now that the Muslim Brotherhood is behind Occupy, you know, New York or Wall Street or whatever.
That kind of thing where they're throwing this bait to distract people.
But it seems to me like Ron Paul was saying on Meet the Press yesterday morning, that look, the Tea Party and Occupy D.C. are the same thing.
Cultural divide notwithstanding, they're all against the unfair tipping of the playing field in favor of the people who were already the richest and most powerful.
And it seems to me that on the issue of corporate welfare, foreign empire, and our Bill of Rights, that with this ground, we can build an entirely new political dynamic in this country where it really is us versus them, the Democratic Republicans versus the War Party.
That's why we call ourselves the 99%, because the reality is that we're all suffering the same economic insecurity for the same reasons.
And that reason is the power of concentrated wealth.
I mean, we live in a society right now where 400 people have the wealth equal to 154 million people.
And they own the Congress, which writes the laws.
They own the Congress and the media, and those foreign people pay an average tax rate of 17.4 percent, while someone who makes $50,000 a year is paying 25 to 30 percent on federal taxes.
And so it's obviously unfair, and it's disproportionate.
They don't get rich because they're smarter or work harder.
In fact, some of the hardest-working people in this country are some of the poorest.
But they get rich because of the corruption of government.
We have to leave it there, but I've got to tell them again, BradleyManning.org for the Bradley Manning Support Network, and ComeHomeAmerica.us.
And go and join Kevin at Occupy DC.
Thanks so much, Kevin.
