07/20/12 – Jeff Paterson – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
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Our next guest on the show today is Jeff Patterson from couragetoresist.org, and they're part of the Bradley Manning Support Network, also at bradleymanning.org, or I guess I could say they're behind that effort, I think.
Welcome back to the show.
Jeff, how are you?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, you're welcome.
Very happy that you're here.
Very important news this week in the preliminary hearings, the pretrial hearings in the case of Bradley Manning.
I was wondering if, I guess, first of all, you could just catch us up on what the prosecution is pushing, what the judge is letting them get away with.
Well, of course, Bradley Manning is the Army private accused of giving WikiLeaks all the documents that WikiLeaks became famous for, the Iraq war logs, the video of civilians being killed in Iraq by an Apache helicopter, and so forth.
And he's been going through a series of pretrial hearings since December now, leading up to a court-martial that may happen at the end of this year, or possibly even next year now.
And the last hearing of Fort Meade that just concluded yesterday basically had Bradley's attorney arguing for the dismissal of the aiding the enemy.
Basically Bradley faces life in prison for this one charge alone, and he's got a bunch of other charges that add up to another 150 years in military prison.
So we were arguing aiding the enemy, just simply, what is aid, and who is the enemy?
And Bradley's attorney basically making the point, if you take WikiLeaks and you put the name New York Times or any other newspaper in there, there's no way we would be facing this criminal charge, and yet WikiLeaks serves as a media type of operation.
Back in the old days, the media was sort of a guarantor of free speech and truth, and today that's not actually the case, often.
And that's why organizations like WikiLeaks have stepped into that role of providing the public with access to the raw data from which they can make informed decisions as a democracy upon.
So, you know, we didn't get a good ruling on that.
We also had...
We were trying to fight to make sure that Bradley was able to use the fact that actually no significant harm came to U.S. national security based on the release of the document.
No person anywhere on earth has been shown to have been physically harmed by the release of all these documents, and the government basically won the ability to say all that's irrelevant, to say that Bradley Manning can't take the stand and later say, well, I had a reasonable belief that if I released these documents I would only help democracy and nobody would be hurt, and the fact that nobody was hurt reinforces the reasonableness of my belief in the first place.
And the government basically was able to get the military judges to say, well, that's kind of irrelevant.
We don't actually care about what actually happened with that.
So, you know, it wasn't a great week for us, but a lot of times people don't understand these pre-trial hearings in military courts are literally 10-minute affairs where the defense doesn't even try because they know the odds are stacked so high against them, but all these hearings basically are an example of our legal defense team funded entirely by tens of thousands of people around the world and tens of thousands of Americans fighting for every possible inch, for every possible advantage Bradley might get to extract justice out of the military system, you know, sort of blood from a turnip type of situation.
What is interesting, as we're going into the next hearing on August 27th, where the government will be held accountable, we hope, for its torture of Bradley Manning at the Quantico facility in Virginia for the first year of his incarceration, under military law no pre-trial punishment is allowed whatsoever that's any more rigorous, unquote, than what's absolutely necessary to ensure that the defendant appears at court, and yet Bradley Manning was stripped naked, he was yelled at every five minutes, he was jabbed in the ribs if he turned his head away from the guard while he was sleeping, he wasn't able to see the sun for weeks at a time, he wasn't able to even exercise for weeks at a time while he was locked in a little box, all this, no doubt about it, was a violation of his human rights and a violation of military law, and David Coombs, Bradley's attorney, will be arguing that all charges should be dismissed based on that blatant violation of military law.
You're saying that's happening when, next week?
Well, that's happening August 27th, or 31st, so that'll be the next hearing back at Fort Meade.
We'll be out there, and we'll be doing events the weekend before in Washington, D.C. with the local community out there that cares about Bradley as well.
So that's coming up on August 27th, and we think it's probably going to be the most important hearing before the actual court-martial begins.
And now, as far as you know, has the prosecution ever tried to explain what they think is the difference between WikiLeaks and the New York Times at nytimes.com?
Well, their position is simply, WikiLeaks is not a media organization.
For example, it doesn't sell classified ads, it doesn't have teams of reporters, it doesn't have editors to fact-check the reporters.
That is what they say?
That he doesn't sell classified ads?
Well, that's part of their argument, that WikiLeaks is simply not a traditional media outlet, and it doesn't have the same kind of checks and balances that a traditional outlet would have.
Awesome, I didn't realize that tradition was the law.
I thought that's why it was tradition, but anyway.
That's great.
Okay, no, I'm just pleased by the hollowness of their position.
That's awesome.
Well, this is simply a precedent-setting case.
No other person in the history of the United States military has ever been charged with aiding the enemy by way of a media outlet.
Every single case of aiding the enemy has been, an individual hands a packet of information to a courier that's going to give it to the Soviet Union, or the Chinese, or the British during the Revolutionary War, you know, 1775 or whatever.
This is the first case ever that an individual is being charged with this, for providing information to a media outlet that then shared that truth with the public.
Well, you know what, too often times, regardless of the subject, on this show we talk as though everybody kind of has already been reading about this or something, but that's really a bad assumption.
People may very well be in the audience who have been subjected to just the propaganda, you know, war party propaganda about this case, and maybe they don't know that it says right there in the chat logs, when Bradley Manning is talking to Adrian Lamo, the guy that ended up turning him in, he's saying, in fact, the guy that turned him in is even asking him, hey, why not sell this to a foreign government, and he's saying, no, no, no, that's not the point at all.
I'm trying to get this information out to the world so that there can be reforms, because a lot of this is some, you know, borderline criminal stuff here, and I think that if the people have the truth, then they can use their democracy, I mean, he sounds like seventh grade civics class.
He's got the purest, you know, like, driven snow, whistleblower motives here.
Simple as that.
Anyone who reads the chat logs, there's no argument.
Well, that's a good point, Adrian Lamo, you mentioned, when he said that was, by that time, based on what he says, working on behalf of the government.
Ah, there you go, trying to bait him, trying to make him more guilty, and it didn't work.
That's right.
Well, because he wasn't really guilty at all.
Alright, I'm sorry, we've got to hold it right there and take this hard break, but we'll be right back with Jeff Patterson from Courage to Resist and BradleyManning.org, the Bradley Manning Support Network.
Help them, please.
Alright, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, talking with Jeff Patterson about the persecution of the American hero, Bradley Manning, by the U.S. government, and there's so many different facets to this persecution that we've got to, you know, kind of follow up on that you mentioned here already, Jeff.
You talked about, I want to make sure I understand you exactly right, make sure people have a chance to get this real clear here.
I believe what you told me is that Bradley Manning's defense counsel tried to make the case that the government can't prove that any harm was done from these leaks, and the judge agreed with the prosecution that that doesn't matter at all.
Is that right?
Really?
Well, that's absolutely right.
That was probably one of the most disappointing arguments that occurred.
Because it's sort of like, you know, and David Coombs cited case law, law after case law, that depicts on, you know, if you assault somebody, if that person dies or if that person gets a scratch on his cheek, that makes a big difference on whether you're guilty of murder, assault, what have you.
So to say that, you know, your action is totally separate from the outcome, you know, is challenging, it's ridiculous.
But it seems like that leaves the prosecution even less to work with, because all they have now is his motive, right?
And then his motive was, as we know, you know, he was ordered to participate in a war crime, that was the last straw, and so he turned over evidence of war crimes that the people have a right to know.
Because this is America, not Russia.
Well, that's absolutely right, but what the government's going to argue is what he turned over, the content of what he turned over was also irrelevant, in that simply, there is a document, we'll call that document A, it was classified, they want to have experts saying, well, it was properly classified, and to say that defense has no basis to say it wasn't classified appropriately, did Bradley transmit that document of unknown content to a party that did not have authorization to receive it?
In the story, he did so five years for that.
We then times that by 20, Bradley goes to jail for 100 years, in the story.
Really a strict computer crimes violation of the Espionage Act, transmitting classified information to people unauthorized to receive it.
They don't want to talk about the content, the war crimes, they don't want to talk about the outcome, that there was no harm, they don't want to talk about the outcome of great benefits was given to the people of many countries on Earth, as the insight as to what their governments are doing in their name on their behalf, they don't want to talk about any of that.
They just simply want to put Bradley in a hole for the rest of his life.
The size of the legal case is built to fit the size of the integrity of those in charge of persecuting him, not any way made to fit the charges.
What he really did, which was of course, change the history of the world.
That's exactly what the defense has been and will be continuing to fight to air.
Seems like they could at least do him the honor of trumping up some decent charges, you know?
They have trumped up significant charges, the aiding the enemy charge, there's no basis.
The enemy wasn't aided, the people's knowledge of what was really happening was aided.
The Iraqis, the Afghanis, they knew what was happening.
The bombs were falling on their head, their people are, you know, dead in the streets.
It's the American people that didn't know what was going on.
We're the ones that were aided.
But the government charged aiding the enemy, you know, even if they don't think they're going to get a conviction, it serves their purposes, in that it paints Bradley Manning as not a whistleblower, not as a hero, but as somebody who they want to help terrorists.
It's a political charge that, you know, simply makes it harder for people to understand what this case is all about.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, really, that's all they have, right?
They had to just smear him and try to make it, especially in a lot of initial news coverage, just try to make it all about somehow Bradley Manning was just some weak sister who cracked under the pressure or something.
That was all they could come up with to smear him.
I mean, other than he was gay, but I think most people just shrugged and said, well, what does that have to do with it?
And then they said, well, he was just, you know, he was a very fragile person or something.
Oh, well, geez, that makes us kind of like him even more, guys.
They didn't have anything to smear him with.
They didn't have anything on him at all.
So then they tried to go with just blood on his hands, blood on his hands, blood on his hands.
And then after that didn't work, they just started ignoring him and pay only attention to Julian Assange, who, after all, has the made for TV haircut and all that crap.
Yeah, you know, this isn't Bradley versus Mr. Assange, you know, I didn't mean to put it that way.
I just meant that was the way the media decided to do it because they they couldn't come up with anything to say bad about Bradley Manning that could stick.
So then they just decided to ignore him is really what I was trying to say.
Well, plenty of people in our government, high ranking government officials said plenty of bad things about Bradley Manning, you know, congressmen, senators, a few calls for his execution even prior to the court martial.
We had President Barack Obama, commander in chief of the United States Armed Forces, the ultimate member of Bradley's chain of command, declared Bradley guilty last year and said Bradley broke the law.
And that's illegal under military law.
It's called the Unlawful Command Influence, UCI.
And that's important because the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, General Dempsey, then repeated Obama's assertion.
And right under that person is the convening authority of this court martial who is going to pick the jury pool that's supposed to be fair and impartial and to sit there in judgment on Bradley.
So we see the entire ability for Bradley to get a fair trial has already been tainted and we're not even at the point of having a jury pool.
So it has real impact, all these things that people are saying that are overseeing this court martial, they're guiding to make sure that the military justice system doesn't screw up and give Bradley justice.
And that's what we're fighting up against.
Whether we'll be able to overcome those obstacles, we're going to have to wait and see.
But we're going to do everything we can.
Well, yeah, it's certainly true that, assuming the law could be made to apply here, that other than just the fact that he's a hero and not really a criminal, the government has given his lawyers a couple of really great outs here where he ought to be able to just be released right now.
As you cited, for one, the torture, and I'll let you actually go ahead and if you would please elaborate about that, because I guess that's very strong language, I'm not sure if you're using it or not, but you describe in detail and let people decide whether they think that's torture or not.
And then secondly, as you say here, all the commanders of the military, including the president, pronouncing him guilty before the pretrial hearings are even over.
And both of those ought to just be, well, sorry, now we can't prosecute him, he has to be free to go kind of things.
It seems like in any regular case in any regular time, that's how it would be, right?
Well, people have had their charges thrown out at military court for misconduct by the government far less than this.
But this case is special, this case is one that every level of our government seems very intent on pushing through to the end.
So Bradley faces uphill battle, but like you say, the military has clearly violated Article 13 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that bars any type of punishment that's any more rigorous, and that's their word, than what's absolutely the minimum required for him to be at the court hearings.
Now was Bradley tortured at Quantico?
That doesn't really matter.
We're just looking at anything more rigorous than what's required him to appear at trial.
So whether his torturous conditions amount to torture and under whose definition, you know, he wasn't put on a rack, he didn't have his teeth pulled out with pliers, but he was subjected to extreme isolation, no exercise, he was ritualistically stripped nude while they videotaped him to mock him and ridicule him.
He was, you know, every five minutes they yelled at him, say, are you okay, are you alright, and said that they were only doing that for safety, to make sure he was okay.
So of course they yell at him every five minutes to ensure that he's okay.
And the doctors had said that, you know, they had refused to mandate any of these things, these so-called suicide precautions, right?
But this was like in defiance of the doctor's orders of how he was to be treated.
Two mental health professionals are expected to testify, two people on staff at Quantico are expected to testify at the upcoming August 27th hearing, that they protested, they objected to having, basically the military was trying to use them as an excuse for why they were subjecting Bradley to illegal punishment, and they said they don't want anything to do with this, that they were absolutely shocked by what was happening and they were against it, and they were told that if they wanted to keep their jobs they would shut up and go along with the program.
And they're willing to testify under oath.
So there's no doubt that the military has violated his rights, his human rights, and his rights under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
You know, one thing that's overlooked, Bradley, under Article 10 of the UCMJ, has a right to a speedy trial, and that's been interpreted as 180 days by the courts.
We're looking at nearing two and a half years before the military wants to take this to court-martial.
Two and a half years of pretrial confinement, even before a court-martial begins.
That's obviously not a speedy trial under anybody's definition of what speedy should be.
And then, again, what harm came out of this?
None.
And that really does impeach the credibility that these documents were properly classified in the first place.
The documents released should not have been classified.
There was no basis for their classification other than they were embarrassing to our government.
And embarrassing is a far different standard than harm occurring to individuals.
And that's what's really at stake.
And whether the defense will even be allowed to make that argument is what's at issue at these pretrial hearings.
Now, of course, the defense is fighting tooth and nail to sort of work in this language in almost every back-and-forth with the prosecution and the judge at this time, before it gets shut down.
But, you know, we're trying to make our points at any little opening.
And we expect that maybe you possibly have to do the same before a military, a queer military officer's sitting in judgment of Bradley later on.
All right, well, I'm sorry we're over time, but that's a lot of great reasons why you got to go free.
If you ask me, and I urge people to help support the effort at CourageToResist and BradleyManning.org.
Thanks very much again for your time, Jeff.
Absolutely, Scott.
Next time.
That's Jeff Patterson, everybody.
CourageToResist.org and BradleyManning.org as well.
And we'll see you on Monday.