09/26/12 – Nathan Fuller – The Scott Horton Show

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Our first guest on the show today is Nathan Fuller from BradleyManning.org, the Bradley Manning Support Network.
Welcome to the show, Nathan.
How are you?
I'm great, thanks.
I appreciate you having me on.
Well, I'm very happy that you're here.
Now, you guys have events, and I want to hear all about them.
Sure.
Our next big event is this Sunday, September 30th, in Washington, D.C. at the Georgetown University Law Center.
We have authors, activists, whistleblowers getting together to speak out for Bradley Manning.
Most prominently, we have Chris Hedges, who just sued the Obama administration for the unlawful NDAA.
NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake.
DOJ whistleblower Jessalyn Raddick, who also oversees the Government Accountability Project.
Former Colonel Anne Wright, who's retired in protest of the Iraq War.
And then we have a friend of Bradley Manning, David House, who will talk about our financial situation and the imperatives of supporting Bradley's defense fund now.
Well, I'm sorry to be such a bummer, but is it okay if I say how disappointed I am that you're not saying, yeah, and the chair of the New York Bar Association Committee on this, that, and the other freaking thing are there, too?
I mean, where the hell are all the lawyers in this society?
Well, it's actually being co-hosted by the National Lawyers Guild, so we do have some legal support in that regard.
Oh, good.
Yeah, the Lawyers Guild, they do good work a lot of the time.
They do.
This is the fundraiser, or the fundraiser is a separate thing?
Yeah, we'll be asking for small donations at the door, and then David House will make a pitch for bigger donations at the end of the event.
We'll also be hosting some other fundraising events, especially over the next six weeks, because we have a so-far anonymous donor who has agreed to match one-to-one any donations over the next six weeks.
Really?
Yeah, so that's some big news.
Man, you need a giant banner at BradleyManning.org that says, Matching Funds, because that's really a great incentive for people to help out.
Yeah, it's a really huge deal, especially in a really big time of need.
We need to pay David Coombs to continue defending Bradley Manning throughout this really long and protracted trial.
All right, now, I really don't know enough about it, but from what I know, it seems like that guy's doing a pretty good job.
Is that basically the consensus of BradleyManning.org?
Y'all are happy that he's the lawyer here?
We're definitely happy with his various legal arguments so far.
He's been really strong, I think, in a way.
Give them my impression.
Actually, Bradley is pretty confident, too.
The most recent comment he gave was that he's in high spirits and really confident in his legal defense, so that's really all I need to hear.
Yeah, that's great.
All right, now, so here's the thing.
We could talk about some of his likely defenses, because a lot of that is really interesting, right, especially where the president, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, has already announced that he's guilty to a military tribunal that's all made up of his subordinates, so the judge and the entire jury, too.
I mean, that's really problematic right there.
Yeah, let's go ahead and talk about that stuff.
I kind of wanted to go back and sort of talk about the story of Bradley Manning in the first place for people who aren't that familiar, but we can put that off for a minute.
I mean, I think they know in the broad strokes who he is anyway.
So let's talk about that, about how, hey, any other circumstance, the president announces you're guilty before your trial, that could really be problematic for your prosecution.
Yeah, I mean, it's really been under-discussed, I think, and I think it is going to come up a little more prominently when Coombs brings it up in court again, that it's totally unlawful for the president, and actually also General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also said that Bradley violated the law, and so now we have superior officers already ruling on a trial.
I mean, how can we expect Colonel and Judge Denise Lynn to fairly adjudicate now?
It's really precluding a fair trial.
And also, you know, what I'm trying to think, I think I asked the other Scott Horton, who's the legal expert on everything in the world about this, but I can't remember what he said, whether there's like an official legal standard that says if the cops torture you, you've done your time and they can't really prosecute you much after that or they shouldn't anyway, that kind of thing.
Well, there is.
It's unlawful to punitively treat someone in prison while they're awaiting court-martial.
And so our argument, and lots of scholars are arguing, that Bradley Manning's treatment at Quantico was psychologically torturous and therefore punitive, not actually in the interest of preventing an injury, which is what the military said it was about, clearly about punishing Bradley Manning for stepping out of line, for maybe punishing Bradley Manning in an attempt to get him to flip or something on Julian Assange.
Yeah, that really appeared to be it, right?
They're trying to make the case that Assange had talked him into liberating the documents in the first place.
Now he's not a heroic whistleblower.
Now he's a partner in a conspiracy to commit espionage.
Right, and there's no evidence of that from anything we've seen, that they even talked directly.
Julian Assange said he hadn't heard of Bradley Manning until he was in jail.
Yeah, I mean, and that's plausible, too.
That's how WikiLeaks works, right?
I don't want to know your name, but thanks for the documents.
That's the whole point.
That's the idea behind it.
That's the way it's designed.
Yeah.
Well, now can you give us any other insights into the – well, I'm not trying to help the prosecutors here, but I'm very interested in other great points that ought to result in the releasing of this guy.
Is the judge, for example, even going to allow the argument that he did it for good reasons, not bad ones, and that that is a defense, that whistleblower, not traitor, is an important distinction here?
Or are they just going to stick the charges so narrowly to, well, he put the thing on an unauthorized CD, and so that's the charge only, but we're giving him life for the unauthorized CD?
Unfortunately, it's much closer to the latter thus far.
The judge has accepted the prosecution's argument that Bradley's good intentions to expose war crimes is not relevant to whether or not he violated his oath to keep these documents secret.
But now they are charging with espionage and not just putting a file on a CD, right?
Well, the way – that's why it's narrowly worded.
They say he indirectly aided the enemy by putting this information online.
It means that he knew that al-Qaeda could look at wikileaks.org.
He's not saying that he would, or that they would.
Not that he knew that, you know, trying to directly communicate with al-Qaeda or anything, but that indirectly.
And that's enough, they've argued thus far, to put him in jail for life.
Well, what about the argument that he was pressured to participate in war crimes in Iraq, and that's apparently what broke him in the first place?
Right, and I think that is going to come up.
We've seen from the chat logs that Bradley was not interested in following orders to keep these crimes secret.
An intelligence analyst who had a look at all these documents that are concealing crimes, and he's the one brave soldier, apparently, willing to go against that.
But to go back to your other question, before there are some other, I think, strong arguments to come, in late October, David Coombs will bring the motion to dismiss for lack of a speedy trial.
Bradley's been in jail for nearly 900 days now.
Case law suggests that a speedy trial would have started nearly two years ago, after 120 days.
So I think that's going to be a big deal coming up.
Then there's also the motion to dismiss for punitive pretrial treatment is abuse at Quantico.
That's going to come up near the end of November.
So I think these are pretty strong and varied legal arguments that Coombs is going to bring in the months to come.
Yeah, well, it really is the kind of thing where it sounds, to me anyway, like if the law's the law, then this kid's going to be free.
I keep calling him a kid.
He's not a kid.
This young man will be free to go because, for example, the prejudice of having the Secretary of Defense in the present pronounce him guilty beforehand, that kind of thing, all of these things, as you mentioned.
But I wonder, you bring up the speedy trial there, another great argument as to why he ought to be set free.
But it makes me wonder whether you have any insight into why they've delayed so long.
Well, it's pretty complicated the way the prosecution has withheld documents throughout this year.
They've kept e-mails secret for months that revealed more information about Bradley's pretrial confinement.
They withheld documents about the State Department's reaction to WikiLeaks.
So they sat on these for months and months, and then finally the judge forces prosecution to hand over documents.
And Coombs is then, therefore, forced to request delays so we can process all these new documents and bring new litigation from them and potentially new witnesses.
And so the prosecution forces the defense to ask for delays, looking like the defense is prolonging the trial when, in fact, to get all these documents we need more time.
So it's really a tough situation.
Right, yeah.
I mean, well, at least he shouldn't have any trouble making the case that the only reason for the delay is because they wouldn't come forward with the documents that they said they didn't have and then later admitted they did.
And obviously, right, it's not like it's a defense order.
It's the judge's order to turn over everything.
Right, and the judge has done that thus far.
So it'll be interesting to see if she follows through with that and actually holds the prosecution to account for unjustly delaying this trial for no good reason.
Now, you know, I don't know if people know about this, so I like to mention it because I think it illustrates the, you know, at least in the old law, the precedent.
When Charles Manson was on trial, Richard Nixon said, well, you know, something to the effect that everybody knows he did it or something like that, and then he took it back and it almost caused a mistrial.
But he was, like, so sorry because, oh, man, I know better not to do that.
I should have never said that.
And, you know, he deserves the fairest trial he can possibly get and blah, blah, blah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, in this case, well, first of all, in that case, Nixon had no authority whatsoever.
It was a state court in a state trial, a state murder trial.
He wasn't in the chain of command anywhere.
He had nothing to do with it.
He was just the head of state in that, you know, kingly sense or whatever, the Queen Elizabeth sense or whatever.
Whereas in this case, Barack Obama and Leon Panetta, they are the top two guys in the military chain of command.
I mean, they're basically saying he's guilty and that's an order.
How is any officer on that jury supposed to interpret that or even the judge?
How are they supposed to interpret that any other way?
Now we're supposed to rely on their willingness to defy an order from the president to do the right thing in order for the kid to even have the young man to even have the chance at a fair trial.
That's not right.
Exactly.
It's totally ludicrous.
It can't be right.
No, I mean, we were expecting a colonel to go against these two commanding officers.
It's just it would be unheard of.
And she probably feels like her job is on the line, which is a really terrible situation for these commanding officers to put her in.
It's really not anything close to what we can consider a fair trial.
It's really just making a mockery of their own uniform code of military justice.
It says right there, not allowed to unlawfully prejudice the trial, and yet they've done it and not felt bad about it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, and that's the thing, too, for everybody who's, you know, really mad at Bradley Manning and want to see him persecuted.
Well, tough.
The president shouldn't open his big fat mouth then.
You know, that's kind of the deal.
It's just like if they find drugs in a house, but they didn't have a warrant.
They've got to exclude the evidence.
And it's not a lot of trial.
Exactly.
I mean, people say so, you know, so solemnly that Bradley Manning broke the law.
He broke his oath.
And yet they do not hold the same principle to our highest officers or even the criminals that Bradley is said to have exposed.
You know, these people have committed summary executions or hidden torture or covered up civilian casualties.
These people aren't on trial.
You know, where are the people who asked for the rule of law to be applied evenly?
You know, why aren't they?
Are they talking about these people?
Yeah, it's the same kind of thing.
It reminds me of which at the time I didn't participate in the old caring about this at all.
But now it still makes an interesting case study or whatever.
The O.J. Simpson thing back in the 1990s where people acted like the only question was whether he did it or not, rather than the question being whether Marsha Clark proved to the jury that he did it or not.
And that was the question.
And so, you know what?
It's I'm not even in favor of the system, but that's the system is you get the best assistant D.A. that the D.A. that you elected can hire and they do as good as they can.
And if they can't do good enough, then tough.
Sometimes murderers walk free.
Then hire a better assistant D.A. next time.
That doesn't mean you just go ahead and convict people even though they weren't actually proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
And that goes for hiring the LAPD who are all dumb enough to traipse up and down all over the crime scene for four days, you know, in their muddy boots.
Right.
People are so eager to hold the persecuted, you know, to say he broke the law, you know, regardless of presumed innocence.
And are totally afraid to hold the same standard to those in power.
It's really asymmetrical, an understatement by far.
Yeah.
It's really sad.
I'm sorry.
But we really do live in an age where you have to repeat these basic things like, you know, you know, the reason we give somebody a trial isn't because we're soft on murderers.
It's because we want to make sure we got the right guy.
And these kind of very basic things you have to really repeat out loud and explain to adults in American society right now because they don't get it.
You know, they seem not to.
Why not?
Why shouldn't every criminal get a military tribunal if we know we're all guilty once the cops lay their hands on them?
Yeah, it's pretty disturbing.
But that's just the way it is.
So and then now tell me this because I'm not very good at understanding what everybody else more or less kind of thing in this society thinks.
But it seems to me like the best that the state could do as far as destroying Bradley Manning's reputation in the public sphere was to attack his sexuality and basically to say he was a sissy.
And so he couldn't hack it.
And so he broke like a little coward or something and uploaded these files like that's basically the the worst kind of slander that they could come up again, come up with to use against him.
And it seemed to me like, what are you kidding me?
I don't care about that at all.
That's so pathetic.
It just makes me like him even more that that's all they can come up with to attack him for is who he is when what he did is so plainly heroic.
And I just wonder whether you get the feeling that that's pretty much the way most people took that.
Or did that really work?
Did they succeed in smearing Bradley Manning and making him the bad guy to the American people to any large segment?
Well, I think the sexuality element is especially cruel given the way the poor treatment that he received while in the army from his fellow officers.
You know, they're going to treat him so poorly for his alleged gender identity issues and his sexuality.
They're going to treat him so cruelly for that and then blame him for that later on is really a cruel distortion of events.
But no, I don't think that's the most effective argument that they've made.
I don't think that has really sunk in that they've smeared him for sexuality.
I think they have instead smeared him as a traitor.
They're trying to associate whistleblowing with terrorism, you know, putting documents online for the American public to see.
You know, they don't care about that.
They care about whether the fact that Al-Qaeda could look at these documents.
And that's where it's really disturbing to see how effective they have been in some regard in showing that people consider him a traitor when he actually is really acting in the interest of an informed democracy, accountable government, transparency.
You know what I was doing there is I was just kind of personifying the New York Times as the man and what they want to do because that's what they did.
That's what the New York Times did was smear his sexuality.
But that's not all of the media, you're right, and that's not all of the state.
Right.
It's a pretty varied persecution, I guess.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's talk some more.
Nathan Fuller from Bradley Manning or the Bradley Manning Support Network about how people can help this young man, how they can donate to David Coombs legal efforts to defend his life, because that's really what we're talking about here.
His life is on the line because they're trying to charge him with what amounts to a life term.
Correct.
Yeah.
A life without parole is what they're seeking.
So, I mean, really, everybody, you know, are you going to let the greatest American hero go to prison for life when you could actually help do something about it?
You can't.
It's terrible, but people can help.
And as I said, over the next six weeks, we're going to have match donations.
So any dollar you give is actually two dollars to us.
And it's a huge help.
So, yeah, Bradley Manning dot org.
You can find out.
You can easily see how to donate there.
You can host a party near you and spread the word about Bradley Manning.
You can attend or organize events anywhere near you.
We have events that Bradley Manning dot org shows those events.
If you want to find something near you and there are a lot of different ways you can help.
If you're near D.C., you can come to the hearings at Fort Meade.
If not, you can can hold a rally near you.
Yeah, that's great.
And you know what?
Here's the thing, too.
I'm terrible at the call to action.
I never you know, I complain a lot about what's wrong in the world.
I never tell people here's what you ought to do about it.
And people ask me a lot.
Yeah.
But what can we do about it?
Well, here's something extremely important that you really can help do something about when it's not too late yet.
Come on.
Right.
There's there's time yet to save this person from who cared about us, who sacrificed his future for for our democracy.
And you can do something about it in the next few months before his trial starts February 4th.
Yeah.
Help him save his safe defense.
You can you can.
Oh, yeah.
All right.
Thank you so much, Nathan.
I really appreciate it.
No problem.
Thanks for having me.
That's Nathan Fuller from the Bradley Manning Support Network at Bradley Manning dot org.
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