11/30/12 – Jeff Paterson – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest is Jeff Patterson from the Bradley Manning Support Network at bradleymanning.org.
Welcome back, Jeff.
How are you?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me, man.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
All week long, it's been important news, especially the last couple of days.
Bradley Manning himself has been testifying in a hearing on a motion to dismiss by his attorney, describing his captivity in Kuwait and at Quantico, which is where he was held when he was first brought to the United States.
Please tell us everything in order of importance.
Well, Bradley Manning facing life in prison for giving WikiLeaks documents around the Iraq-Afghan war and some embarrassing State Department cables.
He took the stand yesterday for the first time.
He's been in jail for two and a half years and counting.
His trial is not even scheduled to come up until next year.
But for five hours yesterday, he answered questions from his defense attorney.
And basically, he told the story of what happened from the day he was arrested on May 27, 2010, to being detained in isolation in Kuwait, being transferred to the Marine Brigade at Quantico, where he was illegally abused for nine months before a pretty big movement, grassroots effort, got him transferred out of those conditions that amounted to torture, complete isolation, lack of exercise, lack of being able to see the sun, lack of almost any human contact except for guards that were ordered to harass him for every five minutes of every waking day.
So for those of us who have been following this case, all we've heard from Bradley so far up until yesterday was a yes and no in response to direct questions by military Colonel Judge Allend.
So it was very interesting.
Yesterday and this morning, he's been on the stand answering questions from the prosecution and cross-direct.
Mm hmm.
Now, it seemed like a pretty ridiculous catch-22 here that even the military guys had to have noticed that the only thing or their excuse, you know, that they're using to do this is that it's suicide precautions is the reason they have to treat him the way that they're treating him.
And yet, according to the journalism out of the hearing yesterday, the only thing that made him even consider trying to kill himself was the way he was being treated under these suicide precautions.
Well, that's what came out that when he was in Kuwait, he was kept in such conditions there that he volunteered that he's saying, yeah, you know, I'm I'm having some suicidal thoughts, you know, is my life over?
Are they going to execute me?
Will I be tortured now?
What's going to happen?
So that was it wasn't really a secret.
He was transferred to Quantico.
Then he's like, well, OK, you know, I can deal with this.
I you know, in my opinion, he saw that the people cared about him.
Our support network had formed by then.
We were going to make sure he had an attorney.
And he said to himself, you know, I'm going to I'm going to fight this.
I'm going to, you know, invoke my right to remain silent and see what happens.
And so it's ironic is the moment he sort of, you know, was able to express that kind of fortitude.
That's when the suicide watch began.
That's when the psychologist on staff there like, well, you know, you should be transferred off the suicide watch.
And yet the commanders there continue to use that excuse for another nine months to keep them basically on in this complete isolation.
But since they didn't have sort of this supermax isolation protocol, they had to jury rig a bunch of mental health concerns in order to justify what they were doing.
But we we also know that there's absolute proof through hundreds of emails that this wasn't something that was thought of at the break.
Quantico is ordered from a three star general over in the Pentagon.
His name is Lieutenant General George Flynn.
And he's the one who actually orchestrated all this from afar and and gave you the illegal orders that these local commanders then had to implement that sort of make up justifications as they go without giving up their boss.
Wow.
And this much has already just come out in the preliminary hearings.
Now, has it all come out in such a way that you could safely say there's no way in hell the judge can ignore the fact that what came first was we want an excuse for beating up on this kid.
You know, no touch torture, of course.
And so come up with one.
And so they did.
I mean, are you sure that I know we're talking about a military judge, a career officer.
So we don't we don't know whether she has the afford to do the right thing.
But I'm just saying this wasn't really kind of between the lines.
This is a blatant set of facts testified to for all in the audience, no matter how dull to comprehend.
Right.
Well, I'm going to say that I fully believe that Bradley Manning is going to win the argument that he was illegally tortured.
I think that even the military judges come to that conclusion.
But the big question is, then what are then the repercussions for the government, for the prosecution?
What what is his remedy now?
If she does not dismiss the charges, then she should.
But there's a very large likelihood that she's not just because of the immense pressure she's under.
Then the other remedy is giving Bradley Manning credit, like, say, the defense position is backup position is that he should receive 10 days credit for every day he was mistreated.
Quantico.
Well, that amounts to seven and a half years of prison credit.
Add to that two years of prison pretrial detainment credit that he is array will have done by the time it's court martial.
So Bradley Manning should have almost a decade of prison credit by the time he ever goes before the actual court martial.
Then the issue is at the end of that court martial, what sentence is is Judge Lane going to proclaim if she proclaims 10 years?
Well, Bradley Manning's already done 10 years and he gets to come home in a few months if it's not weeks.
But if the judge comes back with a prison sentence, like what the prosecution can argue for 150 years or so, then the credit that he received that decade of credit is meaningless because obviously he'll be dead long before then.
So the issue is, will the will the military actually face any actual repercussions for torturing this person?
And if they don't actually face repercussions, meaning Bradley Manning getting a reasonable prison sentence, unquote, and getting out of jail relatively soon, then the military will get a clear message that just like they've done it at Cuba and Guantanamo, they could take any U.S. military service person in pretrial detainment, literally torture him without question, and then just say, well, we'll knock off 20 years of prison time if he's ever sentenced to whatever bad thing we say he did.
So literally, if they're getting 100, 200 year sentences, then there is no reason why they wouldn't continue torturing people.
And that's sort of a blurry line.
You know, we have military tribunals that really are sort of ad hoc efforts by the military these days to go after enemy combatants.
The rules change on these things every month by declarations by the president, or they're simply military judges deciding they'd rather see things go a different way.
So we have all this sort of made up kind of law to deal with bad guys.
But we also have the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which has protected military service people against arbitrary detention, arbitrary court-martials, and there's these rules.
Now, of course, they're not as good as the civilian courts, but they are what they are, and we have decades, almost 60 years of experience in what those are.
This could basically throw those rules out if Bradley Manning's torture is not held accountable, you know, and the military is not held accountable for torturing Bradley.
Yeah, and of course, doesn't that just show where we're at here?
We need this kid to leak these things to us so bad, and accountability doesn't mean we would never even consider the possibility that the people who mistreated him would get in trouble for what they've done, but just that maybe this could count for some time off, you know?
We're really already at the bottom of the slippery slope having this conversation here, Jeff, I'm afraid.
Well, what's interesting is the military jailers at Quantico were actually complaining that they had to take the stand earlier in the week, and they were complaining that their high-ranking supervisors, when they were ordered to mistreat Bradley, promised them that they wouldn't be, quote, holding the bag on the outcome, and here they are saying, well, they lied to us.
We actually are holding the bag because I'm testifying.
This is not fair to us.
So, it is kind of ironic, but yes, nobody's going to be...realistically, nobody's going to be punished for mistreating Bradley, and yeah, it's all about credit at this point.
Now, that's not our first argument, though.
The motion is to dismiss all charges with fredges based on these severe violations of Article 13 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but you know, case law in the last 20 years has not been really strong on that, so we'll see.
At the same time, if not this case, then can't really imagine what case would clear that legal hurdle.
Again, I'm talking with Jeff Patterson from bradleymanning.org about the young man's testimony at this motion to dismiss hearing this week, and now, do you have indications?
Do you know for sure if this one is to fail?
We've spoken repeatedly in the past on this show with just Kevin Zese the day before yesterday, and others.
He's one of the lawyers there.
Is it the plan?
I don't think I ever asked him this.
Is it the plan that if this doesn't work, that there will be more motions to dismiss based on, for example, Obama's statements about Manning's guilt or the speedy trial and that kind of thing?
The judge has basically indicated that she's not going to entertain a motion to dismiss based on the command influence issue, and that's when President Obama declared Bradley guilty on video during a fundraiser in San Francisco a year and a half ago, and because she is going to be the sole arbitrator of this proceeding, all she has to declare is she just has to promise that she's not going to be influenced by that, and she basically has done that.
However, it's still an issue.
The defense team will still be arguing for that at every step of the way.
The next and probably the last major motion to come before the court-martial begins will be the motion to dismiss based on Bradley Manning's not receiving a speedy trial under rules for court-martial rule 707, and that basically articulates that the government had 120 days to bring Bradley Manning to trial from the day he was arrested.
Now, the government had 120 days, but yet we're now currently at day 900 or so, 900 days, so they've bent the rules by a factor of eight, so it's not like they've missed that deadline by a few days, but they've literally missed it by almost a couple of years now, so the issue is a real one, and David Coombs has posted on his blog that folks could read 134 pages outlining every delay tactic the military has used and how the government rubber-stamped each one of those delays over his objections, and often not even asking him for his own opinion.
So, this is a motion to dismiss all charges based on Bradley not receiving a speedy trial under the rules for court-martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and it's also going to be an interesting one because the government doesn't contest that 110 odd days were days that count towards this 120-day clock, so the defense literally has to prove that there's 17 days of those other 800 odd days that shouldn't have been disqualified, so it could be a very extensive hearing fighting over how to extract 17 obviously unqualified days from what they refer to as the 120-day clock.
Yeah, all right.
Now, can you clarify for me a couple of different stories and whether they fit together or how they do?
The first one was that Manning was considering or maybe had explicitly offered a plea to the judge that he would plead guilty to the actual act of moving the files from here to there in violation of the rules, that kind of thing, if they would drop all the nonsense about aiding the enemy, and then the second thing was I saw a headline, but I don't even have a chance to read it, but it was just that the judge had granted Manning permission to plead guilty, and I was wondering whether that was progress on the plea deal thing or that's entirely separate, and what's she talking about?
Well, those two stories are interconnected.
The fact is that Bradley Manning offered to plead guilty to none of the charges that he's currently facing but to three specifications of two minor charges, and those are basically misuse of a government computer and the mistransmission of documents from one computer system to the other.
So what Bradley Manning, in my opinion, is doing is basically saying, yes, I am the person who accessed these documents and transferred them to WikiLeaks, but I am not guilty of aiding the enemy, I'm not guilty of violations of the Espionage Act, and I'm not guilty of actually any of the charges against me, but I'm willing to take responsibility for accessing the docs, sending them to WikiLeaks, and let me tell you why during the court-martial that I did that and why I felt that that was the right thing to do.
So there's no...what's confusing is there's no deal.
Bradley Manning didn't receive anything in return for it.
He simply is basically trying to take responsibility for the actions and then fighting at court-martial to explain to the judge why he was compelled to do so.
The judge came back and said, I accept...and it's sort of a technical issue because she didn't have to accept his offer of responsibility, but she said, you know, I accept partially what you're saying and we'll have to deal with the rest at court-martial.
That in no way minimizes Bradley's potential sentencing.
The prosecution is free to continue charging him with all the charges he currently faces, and he'll continue facing the same 150-odd years of life in prison.
But without accepting responsibility in some way here, you could think it would be very hard for him to explain to the judge why he believes it was in the public's best interest to make this information.
And we would have to sit through a month of forensic evidence of, you know, all this stuff about computer routers and logins and caches and hard drive mirror software and all this kind of stuff that I believe Bradley is not interested in trying to sit through all that stuff.
He'd rather get straight to the point of what this case is all about.
So he was not offering, I had it wrong, he was not offering any kind of like, you do this for me, you drop this and I'll plead to that kind of a deal.
He was just, in a sense, trying to get one of those by preempting the prosecution and pleading guilty to the things that he's actually, you know, actually did do.
Not that he's guilty of, since it ain't guilt to liberate information that demands to be free, but you know what I mean.
Well, but, you know, but that might be in violation of military regulations to do something like that.
And that's what Bradley Manning is saying.
Yeah, you know, I did that.
But the big comma there is every other member of Bradley Manning's unit was also guilty of violating those same regulations.
And they did so by installing video games on the supernet computers, the secure internet protocol data computers of the Army.
You know, you're not supposed to play Half-Life.
You're not supposed to play Call of Duty on those intelligence computers.
You're not supposed to have like this huge bootleg cache of Hollywood cam recording of movies and stuff.
You're not supposed to like have this huge music library you ripped.
So anyways, all these other soldiers, every one of these people in his unit violated the same regulations.
So that sort of brings up the issue of why only Bradley Manning is being prosecuted.
Why were not any of the other people and the supervisors held accountable for the misuse of these computers?
Well, that's because of what he did with those files.
And thank goodness he did too.
And you know, we're already over time and I know you got to go, but, and I do too, but I did want to point out there are a couple of different articles out today.
One of them is by Julian Assange at the Huffington Post.
And I think there's one other that's taking the opportunity of Manning being in the news to remind the people and go down a list of some of the absolutely earth-shaking, incredible stories that have come out of those WikiLeaks of some of the most important things in the whole wide world from, you know, body counts in Iraq to Columbia to collusion and corruption and lies and secret deals and all over the world.
The entire planet is a different place and in many, many ways, a better one for the release of the State Department cables and the Iraq and Afghan war logs, along with the collateral murder video.
And it's a shame that that kind of sort of goes unsaid some of the time, like, man, people really ought to look through those Afghan war logs.
It'll blow your mind.
Well, thanks for your time, Scott.
And people can follow this case day-to-day, BradleyManning.org.
Right.
Thanks very much for yours.
I appreciate it.
Everybody, that's Jeff Patterson, BradleyManning.org, the Bradley Manning Support Network.
And you know what?
Please do go and look through those WikiLeaks.
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