All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest is Jeff Patterson from the Bradley Manning Support Network at bradleymanning.org.
Welcome back to the show.
Jeff, how are you doing?
We're doing good.
Thanks for having me on again.
Yeah, very happy to have you here.
And of course, everybody knows Bradley Manning is accused of being the American hero who liberated the Iraq and Afghan war logs and the State Department cables from the government's computer systems and uploaded them to wikileaks.ch.
For one example, there's a million mirrors, too.
People want to go look at those.
Of course, the collateral murder video as well is attributed to Bradley Manning's actions.
And now he's been imprisoned, I think is the right terminology, by the military for I don't know how many days here.
What, a year and a half, two years almost?
Well, a year and a half, right?
About 555 days.
So for 555 days, he's been in pretrial confinement without ever seeing a judge, without ever being in a courtroom, without ever formally being arraigned on the charges against him.
Now, do you know specifically whether that is in violation of military law as far as court marshals go?
I mean, I know it's a very different system of law than the way we have it in the regular court system.
It's, you know, what is a violation of the law is very vague.
Bradley still has the right to a speedy trial.
But you, your or mine interpretation of what speedy means is completely different than what the U.S. government considers speedy.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've read Catch-22.
Yeah, you know, again, for 250 of those 555 days, he was held in illegal conditions, brutal, brutally treated, kept in isolation, forced to remain ritualistically nude at times.
So it really took like a million people from around the world to actually speak up and finally, you know, fix those conditions of pretrial confinement.
And you probably have me on today because we're moving forward on his first court hearing on December 16th, coming up in a couple of weeks at board meet right outside of Washington, D.C., between D.C. and Baltimore.
And his lawyer apparently has been complaining in some court filings that the government has not been forthcoming with the Brady material, the material that they have that may be useful to the defense.
Well, and that goes to why it's taken a year and a half.
This process can't move forward until the prosecution gives the defense, you know, the evidence, what they plan on using against them, the process of discovery.
And the government, the State Department, the military have basically dragged their feet at every turn, thus, you know, making this sort of a snail's pace.
And as some reporters have picked up on it, really, the military still refuses to turn over some of the some of the key evidence.
For example, the government videotapes of Bradley and his legal team speaking to each other.
So even that they've refused to turn over.
Wow, really?
Yeah.
You know, I kind of had the idea when this thing started, I guess, because there was so much hype about it that sort of they were going to go with the old rules don't apply in a way.
It's not like they call them an unprivileged enemy belligerent and haul them off to Guantanamo or anything.
But you could tell there was a bit of a difference in the process and the way he was being treated right off the bat there that ultimately might blow back on these guys in that they still have to face the military law when he gets his military trial.
He's not a Guantanamo.
He's going to be able to use quite a bit of this against them doing things like spying on his conversations with his lawyers, right?
Well, there's that.
And there's also the issue of the illegal pretrial punishment, clearly a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Describe that in a bit more detail for the audience, would you please?
Well, within within the military justice system, you're presumed innocent until proven guilty.
And pretrial detainment exists only to make sure that the defendant shows up at trial.
And clearly this treatment in this pretrial situation at Quantico in Virginia was was so extraordinary.
We have the U.N. has taken notice and has been fighting for an unmonitored interview with Bradley that the military and the Obama administration refuses to relent to.
We have the president of the United States, the commander in chief, the supreme authority in the court martial proceedings in this case has already declared Bradley Manning guilty of the charges.
And now we're asking the subordinates of the commander in chief to have an impartial hearing into his guilt or innocence.
That's the legal command influence.
That's something else that his defense team will be fighting to overcome in this process.
And I'm sorry, because I was interrupting you, but could you please describe a little bit better the treatment that you received before being transferred to Fort Leavenworth?
Well, when he was first transferred from Iraq through Kuwait to the United States, he was taken to the Marine brig at Quantico, Virginia.
He was placed in isolation.
He was placed on mental hold, mental evaluation every five minutes for weeks at a time.
He had to respond in a positive way to a guard grunting at him, basically, basically inquiring whether he had committed suicide in the last four minutes and 59 seconds.
Everybody, anybody with common sense, you know, if you're not crazy, that's going to drive you crazy.
If you have to, you know, shout yes or yeah, you know, I'm OK, whatever.
When he was sleeping, if he had rolled over in his sleep and his face was not pointing towards the hallway, the guards were required to wake him up to, quote, unquote, ensure that he was still safe from hurting himself.
And and this is after the psychiatrist had said that none of this was necessary and that he was not a suicide risk.
And that's what I was just going to say.
All this was all just existed simply to punish him.
The psychiatrist on staff with the Marine Corps were asked, we're telling the Marines, what were you guys doing to this guy?
There's no basis for this.
The Marine Corps launched an investigation, found that they had no basis in this treatment, and they tried to hide the outcome of the investigation.
All these will eventually, you know, all these eventually be litigated.
But, you know, again, the punishment was done.
And I think that's what the military was trying to do.
They're trying to make a public example of Bradley to other potential whistleblowers within the military that even if technically you're following the law, even if technically a court martial will eventually acquit you.
And that's a big if we're going to punish you when we get our hands on you, regardless of the law.
Even as well, his lawyers are trying to prove the Defense Intelligence Agency was writing that, ah, come on, this is all confidential and secret level stuff.
None of it compromises our sources and methods.
None of it compromises national security in any narrow sense anyway.
Well, that was that's what his attorney, the civilian legal attorney, David Coombs, was finally able to get out of the military is is that there has been no significant impact to U.S. national security based on these leaks.
Now, plenty of people have been embarrassed.
U.S. corporations, U.S. government, you know, U.S. government embassies around the world have been embarrassed by our foreign policies because the U.S. people and people in these countries have a better idea of what's going on there.
But that's different than actually impacting security of U.S. persons.
And nobody's been physically hurt by this, by this information.
But the fact is, Bradley Manning faces the rest of his life in jail.
And that's what the prosecutor is going to be arguing for at Fort Meade during this pretrial hearing coming up on December 16th and then later in the summer during the actual court martial.
Well, now, it seems like, you know, it would be obvious that part of the reason they're mistreating him so badly is because they're trying to get him to go along with their story so that they can prosecute Julian Assange for espionage on this.
Although I don't know if there's any real evidence to support that suspicion, but I'm going to ask you if there is when we get back from this break.
It's Jeff Patterson from Bradley Manning dot org.
Go there.
Help out.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with Jeff Patterson from Courage to Resist and Bradley Manning dot org.
All donations to Bradley Manning dot org go straight to his legal defense, is that correct?
We handle, I'm with Courage to Resist, we're the fiscal sponsor for the Bradley Manning Defense Network because the Bradley Manning Support Network is sort of this amorphous thing internationally, is not a fiscal entity of itself.
But, you know, to answer your question, we spend we've taken on responsibility for paying every dime of his legal defense to that effect.
We've raised one hundred twenty five thousand and his legal team has the resources they need at the moment.
The court martial could drag on for another six, seven, eight months.
We'll have to raise some more funds for that.
But we're also doing things like taking out billboards.
We have a billboard in the Washington, D.C. area coming out in a couple of weeks to coincide with his pretrial there.
We had a billboard in the Kansas City area because he's been incarcerated at Leavenworth.
We've done over 200 events around the world.
We do press calls to challenge the mainstream press to actually give Bradley a fair shot at what's going on.
So we do a lot of different things.
And if people really want to get into our fiscal situation, we have our expense and budget reports posted freely for people to look at.
OK, great.
That's good.
Thanks for all that clarification.
I think that's a good idea.
Billboards myself.
Sure.
You know, yeah.
This whole thing is like the world's upside down or something that this guy is being persecuted like this when even according to, you know, to hear NBC News tell it or whatever, he did it with the best of motives.
No one is saying that he was trying to get rich, selling our secrets to a foreign power like Aldrich Ames or, you know, had some Robert Hansen narcissism going on that, you know, I'm going to get away with being a James Bond supervillain and give all my country secrets to the Russians.
He was a whistleblower.
And even according to the corrupted transcripts, as posted by Kevin, what's his name?
Paulson over there at at Wired magazine.
It says right in there, yeah, I did this because I want worldwide reform and people need to know the truth so they can do the right thing through their democratic systems and all this stuff like you couldn't have possibly written better script for.
Here's my pure whistleblower do-gooder motives for what I'm doing here.
And that's exactly right.
The government has no evidence whatsoever that Bradley was doing anything other than exposing information that he thought articulated wrongdoings by people in authority.
And no, no person's been harmed from this information.
Again, plenty of people have been embarrassed, military politicians, and he's made them mad and they're coming after him.
So, you know, people are stepping forward to, you know, rally to his defense, the thousands of people that paid for his legal expenses, the thousands of people that rallied and, you know, hopefully hundreds of people that will come out with us to Fort Meade, just north of D.C. on on December 16th.
And then on this on the following day is Bradley's 24th birthday.
On December 17th, we're going to be outside Fort Meade and dozens of places around the world trying to, you know, get people remember, you know, the the the young man who really launched, you know, the WikiLeaks truth revolution.
Well, and for people who haven't taken the time to look through the Afghan and Iraq war logs and the State Department cables, I mean, you could just spend months and months digging through that stuff.
And and there's been so many incredible stories.
Again, the national security hasn't been compromised on any particular level.
Sources and methods and revenge attacks and blood on their hands and all that kind of propaganda.
But on the other hand, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out so many times on his blog at Salon.com, the headline stories, the humongous stories that have come out of these documents, that is exactly as Bradley Manning asserted in those chats.
Transcripts, if they're to be believed, are exactly the kind of, you know, scandalous, embarrassing.
You know, that's like the worst thing that could ever happen to a politician rise to be embarrassed.
But they're worse than embarrassing.
I mean, this is stuff that shows, you know, horribly suppressed truths about terrible things that our government has been up to around the world for a long time.
Well, as much as we want to criticize the mainstream media, they've they've they have produced hundreds of original stories based on the WikiLeaks documents.
So to some extent, you know, they've sort of done their job.
They've taken some of this information, they've made it publicly accessible and and packaged it for people who care.
But at the same time, they really have left Bradley Manning out to dry.
They simply they sort of want to take the fruits of these releases, make new stories.
But yet they're really making no particular effort to actually stand up for the most important whistleblower of a generation since probably Daniel Ellsworth released the Pentagon Papers to help in the Vietnam War.
They're simply walking the other way regarding Bradley Manning.
And it's really up to people like us to step forward and and sort of drive home the point that we're we're not going to forget about this guy, we're going to stand up and and make sure that, you know, fellow Americans know that this is a heroic thing and it cannot go for not.
And this young man simply cannot be allowed to be put in an American prison for the rest of his life for doing the right thing.
Right.
Well, and I think it's important, too, that there really is hope here.
There's no reason for us to just shrug and think, oh, well, too bad for him.
They got him now or whatever, because, in fact, they did a lot of things wrong here that could very well get him off.
Never mind the fact that the charges are pretty trumped up compared to what he really did in the first place.
I think we have a fighting chance.
I think the odds are against us.
I think we're certainly the underdog going into this situation.
We do have a very good legal team.
We've been working to educate the American people for a year and a half on who Bradley Manning is.
We've made great strides to the point of him being one of the front runners for the Nobel Peace Prize a couple of months ago.
But, you know, with the pretrial hearing coming up, the court martial coming up in the summer, we obviously have a lot more work to do.
And you know what?
I'm sorry, because I forgot to get back to where I left it before we went out to that break.
I was going to ask you whether there is any real evidence that they were trying to flip Bradley Manning and have him testify as the state's witness against Julian Assange.
And perhaps that's why they were abusing him so badly while he was there at Quantico.
There is no evidence, but I honestly believe that was part of the situation at the same time.
For the record, for people just tuning in, it was my assertion, not our guest, Jeff Patterson's.
It was just I was speculating because that's what it looked like to me is all.
You know, I'm I work on this case every day and I do a point of speculation myself.
At the same time that they were treating Bradley in torturous kinds of conditions at Quantico, just down the road in Virginia, they were launching a grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, dealing with the same witnesses that the government will probably be looking to call against Bradley.
There's plenty of connections.
They would love to have Bradley crack and, you know, basically say whatever they wanted to improve his day to day, minute to minute conditions.
But that didn't happen.
Well, and they admitted that their legal theory and I forget if this was the Post or the Times now, but one of those very official ones that said that, well, basically we want to make a case that Julian Assange had Bradley Manning get these documents for him.
And then that way it's an espionage case instead of a whistleblower and a journalist.
And yet there's nothing that indicates that that is true at all.
They would have had to get him to go up there and perjure himself, apparently to try to make that story stick against Assange.
Well, I've seen a lot of like soap opera-esque stories of Bradley and Julian and WikiLeaks.
I've seen no indication any of that's based in reality whatsoever.
You know, whistleblowers always...
Of that theory that Assange had him take the documents, you mean?
Exactly.
That there was any kind of relationship, personal, professional, otherwise, between the two of them.
Everything I've seen is whoever gave these documents, the WikiLeaks gave them through the anonymous WikiLeaks website.
Every whistleblower in history has given journalists more information than possibly that they needed so that the journalist could sort of sort through the information and be accountable and publish that information appropriately.
And that, by all indications, if Bradley is accused of what he did, that's the only thing he did, just like every other whistleblower.
All right, everybody.
That's Jeff Patterson, BradleyManning.org.
And tell us very fast about these upcoming actions again.
Well, Fort Meade, right between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, will be out there on Friday, December 16th, and a larger rally on Saturday, December 17th, BradleyManning.org to learn more.
All right.
Thanks very much, Jeff.
Appreciate it.
Cheers, Scott.
Good luck.
All right.
See y'all tomorrow.
