02/20/13 – Nathan Fuller – The Scott Horton Show

Hey everybody, Scott Horton here, inviting you to check out the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
They've got a brand new website with new and improved access to more than 20 years worth of essays promoting the cause of liberty.
And FFF's writers, including Jacob Hornberger, Jim Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, and more, aren't just good, they're the best at opposing and discrediting our corrupt overlords in Washington and their warfare-welfare regulatory police state.
That's the Future Freedom Foundation's new and improved site at FFF.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is ScottHorton.org.
You can find all my interview archives there, well, and my whole show archives, too.
A few years worth, anyway.
More than 2,700 interviews going back 10 years there at ScottHorton.org.
You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slashScottHortonShow, if you're into that kind of thing.
All right, next guest today is Nathan Fuller from BradleyManning.org, the Bradley Manning Support Network.
Welcome back to the show, Nathan.
How are you?
Great, thanks.
Appreciate you having me on.
Well, I appreciate you joining us today.
Big deal.
This weekend, 40 cities to mark Bradley Manning's 1,000th day jailed without trial.
My God, 1,000 days.
How many years is that?
Almost three?
Almost three years, and by the time the trial itself starts, it'll be well over three years.
Wow.
Well, let's get back to the speedy trial thing in just a second here.
I may get a note.
So tell us about the activism this weekend.
This is going to be a real big deal, huh?
Sure.
We actually have a little over 40 events now, and it looks like it's approaching 50.
Yeah, people in dozens of cities across the U.S., major cities but also a bunch of minor ones, and then across Europe and even in Australia, people are planning all kinds of different actions.
They're the standard kind of marches, rallies, vigils, but then there are also concerts, teach-ins, art installations, a lot of different, a big variety of activities to commemorate Bradley's 1,000th day and to just raise awareness about his case.
People are starting to forget about it.
It's gone on so long.
Right, and now that's this Saturday.
This Saturday are most of the actions, although some are Friday and Sunday as well.
There's going to be a teach-in on Sunday in D.C.
Okay, and people can, of course, find out all the details and whether their city's included and all of that kind of thing at BradleyManning.org, right?
Do you have a big list of cities?
Yep.
The first article there is a long list of all the cities with links to more information about them.
Okay, great.
Yeah, I see it here now.
Oh, good.
Yeah, you've got flags with the little red Google map markers on them and everything.
That's great.
You know, there's not a thing going on in Texas.
What?
Is that right?
Not one.
It doesn't look like it.
Well, I'm all the way zoomed out, but Texas is pretty big, and it looks pretty empty.
Maybe you could start one.
I don't know.
Well, maybe I could.
I don't know if I could get anybody out.
Yeah, I bet you could find a few people.
Yeah.
So, I don't know, man.
There's probably a lot of people awaiting military trial for this, that, or the other thing.
Why does anybody care about this guy?
Well, this one's been longer than almost any military trial in history.
A pre-trial hearing has been confined for almost three years now.
One year of that was in solitary confinement, and it's all to punish Bradley for opposing war, essentially.
He saw things in Iraq that he did not agree with.
He was an intelligence analyst.
He brought those to his superiors, who told him to basically just keep quiet and keep doing what you're doing, and that wasn't good enough for him.
He is said to have leaked these documents to WikiLeaks, because the American public deserves to know about the fact that their government is ignoring torture in Iraq as a general rule and things like that, collateral murder, where the U.S. shot down Reuters journalists and children and rescuers.
He thought that we deserved to know about that, and so supporters believe that he deserves some support as he goes to trial facing life in jail.
And now, well, we always say this whenever you're on the show, but it's the most important point of all, I think, that in the transcripts of Bradley Manning's conversations with Adrian Lamo, the rat that turned him into the state, he's basically tempted, or, well, that's not the right way to say it.
The rat attempts to tempt him with personal gain.
Hey, why don't you sell all these documents to the Chinese or the Russians and make some money?
And Bradley Manning responds, no, what are you kidding me?
No, no, no, this has nothing to do with that.
I just am trying to enlighten the people of the world so that they can use their democracy to make reforms to help the weak.
And, you know, like, it's pure whistleblower motives.
If you did a movie or, you know, a TV movie of the week about a whistleblower, these are the words you would put in the script for a pure whistleblower motive explained.
Hey, I just think that if the truth is out, then people will be better able to do the right thing.
You know?
Exactly.
It's classic whistleblower reasoning.
And yet the government not only charges Bradley with indirectly aiding the enemy and the Espionage Act, meaning spying as if he was giving these to other countries, they've also precluded the defense from talking about Bradley's motive at all in the merits portion of the trial.
The defense is not allowed to show, with quotes like that, that Bradley clearly did not want to give these documents to al-Qaeda or get any personal gain.
He wanted the American people to see these.
And the government has successfully blocked that motive from this portion of the trial, with Judge Lynn's confirmation of that.
Well, that must be why it's taking three years.
They have to exclude his entire defense before they get started.
Exactly.
They've cut it at every aspect of the whistleblower defense.
The defense is also not allowed to show that WikiLeaks releases did not cause harm to the U.S., didn't get anybody killed.
The government is not saying that they caused harm, but they're just saying that you can't even talk about whether or not it caused harm, just that it's illegal to release classified documents.
The judge has accepted those motions.
I mean, it's just crazy to think.
I mean, even if you don't like Bradley Manning, and even if you think that, boy, when you sign a secrecy agreement with the U.S. government, then that's more important than anything or whatever, still, the idea that they would ban him from defending himself by saying why he did it, at the same time that they're accusing him of aiding the enemy.
I mean, the slippery slope that they're putting us all on there, right, is anything that anybody says to The New York Times that in any way could be information that an American prosecutor deems could be useful to Ayman al-Zawahiri in his mom's basement in Pakistan somewhere makes anyone guilty.
I mean, this is the kind of thing that's never been allowed in America with our First Amendment, and it hasn't been part of the prosecution of other whistleblowers either, that this information could end up in the hands of someone when they clearly were not the intended recipients.
Exactly.
This is a totally unprecedented interpretation of aiding the enemy, and actually Judge Denise Lind asked that question about would the government still charge Bradley Manning the same way if they thought he had leaked to The New York Times instead of Wikileaks, and the government said yes without hesitating.
So this is clearly going to set a precedent for basically the way journalism functions in America, that government sources leaked information to The New York Times and The Washington Post basically every day, and if those are equated with treason, what kind of democracy, what kind of journalism do we have anymore?
Right.
I already think anybody who knows a journalist can tell you, well, a journalist that does important work, can tell you that their sources already start drying up.
There have been so many whistleblower prosecutions in Obama years that the calculation used to be they weren't taking that much risk maybe in leaking something important to a reporter.
But now when people are really faced with the threat of real time in prison and the destruction of their family and who's going to take care of my wife and kids and these kinds of things, they just stop talking.
And so now, yeah, we get some classified information in The New York Times, but it all comes from Obama and Brennan, right?
There's very few real James Risen scoops anymore.
Yeah, now all we get is information that bolsters the administration's image or makes it look tough on terror or releases new information that it wants out there.
And you can't really blame government sources for not wanting to leak anything else.
If you look at what's happened to John Kiriakou or Bradley Manning, they've had their lives ruined for making information public.
And so, yeah, I certainly can't blame sources, unfortunately, for fearing their lives.
All right, now before we get back to the activism here in just a second, I wanted to ask you about whether the judge has ruled or I guess he already has ruled on the pretrial punishment, which, as you said, the fact that he's still being held without trial is pretrial punishment itself.
But then, of course, there was the whole, I don't know if you call it torture, abuse or whatever at Guantanamo.
It reminds me of Guantanamo, but that's different.
You mentioned that Guantanamo where he was originally held.
What happened with that?
She gave him time served for it or not or seven days off his final sentence?
Manning was held for over nine months in solitary confinement, which was clearly punitive, clearly designed to break him down and to punish him even though he had not even gone to trial yet.
While Judge Lind did acknowledge that that was excessive in some elements, she only awarded him 112 days, which is about four months worth of credit.
So whatever sentence he gets, they can take four months off of that.
So that's pretty tiny compared to what Bradley's facing, but also to what the defense was requesting, that either you dismiss charges, which is the proper remedy, but alternatively she could have given, say, 10 to 1 credit.
So those 112 days are 10 times credit for sentencing.
So he would get 10 days off for every day he was in solitary.
That would have been a much more reasonable compromise.
But instead she just took almost all the government's lines in her ruling and just gave the 112 days, which obviously if Bradley gets a life sentence would be totally meaningless.
Well, and has she ruled on the command influence thing?
Of course, Obama, the president, Panetta, the secretary of defense, and what's his name, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have all three announced that Manning is guilty.
I know that she has not ruled on that, and that hasn't come up actually since the first pretrial in December of 2011.
I expect it might come up in the trial, but it has not come up in these pretrial proceedings.
I wonder what's up with that if maybe, like you say, maybe they're just saving it.
Right, it could certainly come up at length in the trial.
But we do have the speedy trial ruling coming up, ironically, just after the 1,000th day in prison.
A judgment is set to rule on whether the government has given Manning a speedy trial.
And, of course, the government says that they've been totally diligent and gone as speedily as possible while taking longer than ever before to prosecute a pretrial detainee.
All right, well, okay, so now back to the activism again.
There you go.
There's why.
There's, first of all, the greatest American hero, second of all, what he's up against.
And so now you know why to show up this weekend, if you can, Friday, especially Saturday or Sunday, and wherever it is in your town.
So tell us a little bit more, Nathan, about how they can participate.
Yes, so you can see the first article at BradleyManning.org currently, or if you just go to events.
BradleyManning.org, you can see a list of currently scheduled events, or you can register an event of your own, and we can send you all kinds of materials that you might need for a demonstration.
And you can find a rally close to you, unless maybe you're in Austin, Texas, but you can likely find an action or an event very close to you.
And basically just get out there and try to raise a little awareness, and try to make this case known.
A lot of people either don't know about Bradley Manning at all, or don't really know the essential facts of the case.
So we want people to raise awareness and raise a little ruckus.
You can't just abide by the government sending Bradley to jail for life.
If we can't get a legal remedy, we have to at least make it politically unpopular to keep him in a cage forever for doing something that we see as heroic.
Right, and you're right to point out that a lot of people don't know the first thing about it.
Maybe they really care a lot about politics starting six months ago, and they just haven't had a chance to catch up on this one at all.
Maybe they could really benefit some people from driving by and seeing something like this.
Maybe stop and go ask some questions, get involved for the very first time.
Send people flyers and information and ways to learn more.
Yeah, just wanted to get the word out there.
All right, well, listen, man, I appreciate how hard you work on this all the time, Nathan.
It's great stuff, and thanks very much for your time on the show today as well.
Thank you, happy to.
All right, everybody, that is Nathan Fuller from BradleyManning.org.
That's the Bradley Manning Support Network, BradleyManning.org.
And this Saturday especially, but there's going to be some on Friday and Sunday too, there's more than 40 pro-Manning protests, actions, et cetera, et cetera, across the country.
I really hope that you guys will show up if you can.
Again, go to BradleyManning.org, and then right there on the front page is this thing.
On February 23rd, international protest of Bradley Manning's thousandth day in jail without trial.
If you click that link, you can find the full list of cities, and you can link there to their Facebook event pages and whatever other information for the protests going on in your town this Saturday.
I sure hope you'll show up if you can.
Man, you need some Liberty stickers for the back of your truck.
At LibertyStickers.com, they've got great state hate, like Pearl Harbor was an inside job.
The Democrats want your guns.
U.S. Army, die for Israel.
Police brutality, not just for black people anymore.
At government school, why you and your kids are so stupid.
Check out these and a thousand other great ones at LibertyStickers.com.
And, of course, they'll take care of all your custom printing for your band or your business at TheBumperSticker.com.
That's LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, ladies, Scott Horton here.
If you would like truly youthful, healthy, and healthy-looking skin, there is one very special company you need to visit.
Dagenian Lane at DagenianLane.com.
Dagenian Lane has revolutionized the industry with a full line of products made from organic and all-natural ingredients that penetrate deeply with nutrient-rich ionic minerals and antioxidants for healthy and beautiful skin.
That's DagenianLane at DagenianLane.com.
And for a limited time, add promo code Scott15 at checkout for a 15% discount.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here, inviting you to check out WallStreetWindow.com.
It's a financial blog written by former hedge fund manager Mike Swanson who's investing in commodities, mining stocks, and European markets.
WallStreetWindow is unique in that Mike shows people what he's really investing in and updates you when he buys or sells in his main account.
Mike thinks his positions are going to go up because of all the money the Federal Reserve is printing to finance the deficit.
See what happens at WallStreetWindow.com.
And Mike's got a great new book coming out, so also keep your eye on writermichaelswanson.com for more details.
The Emergency Committee for Israel, Brookings, Heritage, APAC, WINEP, GINSA, PNAC, CNAS, the AEI, FPI, CFR, and CSP.
It sure does seem sometimes like the War Party's got the foreign policy debate in D.C. all locked up.
But not quite.
Check out the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
They put America first, opposing our government's world empire and especially their Middle Eastern madness.
That's the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
So you're a libertarian and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
Well, learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
And if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at scotthorton.org, we'll make a donation to support the Scott Horton Show.
Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.