03/01/13 – Kevin Zeese – The Scott Horton Show

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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, more than 2,700 of them, now going back to 2003.
And you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at scotthortonshow.
All right, next up is Kevin Zeese from Voters for Peace and comehomeamerica.us and bradleymanning.org.
Oh, and he's a lawyer, so he can tell us expert stuff about legal things.
Welcome back to the show, Kevin.
How the hell are you?
Great, Scott.
2,700 shows?
Well, just interviews.
There's a lot more shows than that.
Oh, great.
Congratulations.
Oh, well, thank you.
Yep, they're all there in one big list at scotthorton.org if you want to check it out.
I've been right about everything this whole time, and I can prove it.
And I've been interviewing people like you who, you know, help me to be right, you know, teach me stuff.
So here's the deal.
We've got about 11 minutes for you to tell me everything I need to know about Bradley Manning's day in court, military court, yesterday.
Go ahead.
Great.
Well, it was quite a day.
It was, I think, a really turning point day, and people can read the full transcript of what Manning said in his 35-page document at alexaobrian.com.
She transcribed it because the court has not made it public and the government is keeping it secret.
So we want the public to know what Manning said.
He explained everything he did, why he went through the process of leaking documents on the Guantanamo Bay prison, on Afghanistan, on Iraq, on the diplomatic cables, on various U.S. military slaughters and videos around the world.
He explained every step of the way why he did it, and basically it was all for the right reasons.
It's all what we suspected.
Manning was a guy who saw illegality.
He saw war crimes.
He saw unethical behavior and thought the American public should see it so there would be a debate.
He was correct to say that these were some of the most important documents ever released to the public and gives us a real opportunity to understand our foreign policy better.
As he said, it clears the fog of war so we cannot make these mistakes in the future.
He did it for patriotic reasons.
He wants a better foreign policy, and he wants the American public to be part of that development.
So I think it was a really impressive display.
And what it also was was a display of someone taking responsibility for his actions.
He didn't plead to what the government accused him of.
He went to the government's accusations and changed them, amended them, and pled to what he thinks he's guilty of, and that was ten offenses, each carrying up to a two-year sentence, a potential 20 years in jail.
He refused to plead to the accusation that the government makes that he's aiding the enemy or that he's committing espionage.
He didn't see himself doing that, and not much evidence that he did.
In fact, he did explain how he was sharing documents that he thought were not going to harm U.S. national security except to embarrass U.S. officials for policy mistakes as he saw them.
So it's a taking responsibility moment for Manning.
It was very impressive, and now it really comes down to working our best we can to make sure he gets a fair sentence, and I think a fair sentence would be time served.
We'll see what he can end up with there.
All right, now, this was not a plea deal, right?
He did not have any kind of bargain.
I should mention that.
Yeah, it's very important.
There was no plea negotiation, no plea bargain.
Manning did this on his own with the advice of his lawyer, David Coombs.
He just did what he admitted to what he says he did.
He took responsibility, and there's no plea bargain.
So what can happen now is the government can continue to prosecute him for the offenses they want to accuse him of, and so this is not over.
The court-martial that could happen in June is likely to still happen.
I don't expect the government to back down.
They've always wanted to make an example of Manning, to discourage anyone else from telling the truth and exposing war crimes and criminal behavior of our diplomatic corps, and so I expect that we'll see a court-martial still in this case.
That's going to be something we're going to have to work on, continue to work on.
All right, well, so the fact is that all this aiding the enemy stuff is a bunch of hooey, and so is it possible that this strategy, may I call it a strategy?
You're saying he's being open and honest, but obviously his lawyer has decided that this is the right thing to do too.
Is it possible that the judge will see this and say, yeah, you've pled guilty to everything that you are guilty of, and dismiss the rest?
That's very possible.
One other decision he made yesterday, or announced yesterday, was that rather than going with a jury trial, where you have two-thirds of the jurors need to agree in a military court to guilt and three-quarters need to agree to a sentence that's over ten years.
So it's not an anonymous jury pool like in the civilian court, where the members of the so-called jury, they call it a panel, the members of the panel would be selected by the convening authority, which is the general in the area.
So Manning decided yesterday in an announcement in court to his lawyer that they would have a trial.
The trial would be conducted by the judge.
The judge would decide guilt or innocence, and the judge would decide the sentence.
And so I think throughout this whole process, David Coombs has told himself to be upfront and honest and direct with the judge, developed a very strong relationship.
Bradley Manning, when he testified for nine hours, and when he read his statement yesterday and answered questions from the judge throughout the afternoon, it was a full-day, eight-hour event for Manning yesterday.
He showed himself to be forthright, taking responsibility, explaining why he did what he did.
So I think all that should be in his favor.
Now, of course, we're in a military system, and in a military system, people who go outside the chain of command and disclose information are not looked on very well.
So I'm sure the judge, who is a careerist and has been in that system her whole life, she has a different view of what is the right thing to do than Manning does.
So it will be interesting to see how she handles this.
Well, now, a couple of things there.
First of all, by taking full responsibility, the way you say, he really kind of poured cold water on any possible future that the prosecutors probably had in mind, that he would take any kind of deal in exchange for pointing the finger at Julian Assange and saying that WikiLeaks convinced him to do it.
That way, instead of WikiLeaks just being protected journalists under the First Amendment, he closed that gate for the military.
He was very clear in his opinion in his statement.
He spent a lot of time talking about the dealings of WikiLeaks, and he spent a lot of time about how he uploaded the documents, how he didn't know who he was communicating with in WikiLeaks.
He had suspicions of several possibilities, including Assange, but he didn't know who it was.
And he made it very clear, emphatically clear, that nobody pressured him to release these documents, that he takes full responsibility for making that decision, and it was a decision of his by himself.
And so he really closed that possibility.
There's no way the military is going to be using him to implicate Assange.
He made it clear Assange is not implicated, that whoever he was talking to at WikiLeaks didn't pressure him.
He made these decisions on his own and takes full responsibility for them.
So he closed out that.
He made it very hard now, I think, for the government to make an espionage conspiracy case between Assange and Manning.
Now, Kevin, I know there's some kind of whistleblower protections for the military, but, well, there supposedly are in the civilian part of the government as well, but they don't really ever seem to apply.
But it sounds like you're saying that he certainly made the case that he didn't mean harm, that he thought it was his duty to expose harm.
In this case, simple as that.
Can the judge technically cite that and say, oh, well, in that case, this is a protected thing?
Like if, say, for example, Calley ordered you to murder a grandmother and you refused and turned him in?
No.
Most of the whistleblower statutes require you to go through the chain of command, so Manning is not going to be protected by the whistleblower statutes.
But I do think you're right.
He did make it very clear that his intention was not to harm the government, that the initial documents from Afghanistan and Iraq were years old.
They were low-level intelligence secrecy documents that hundreds of thousands had access to, and so they were not a threat to national security.
And he looked at diplomatic cables, which were more recent, but also equally low-level, and he reviewed them very closely and decided that they were not a threat to national security.
So he actually looked at that and evaluated it before he sent the documents in.
He did not want to harm any diplomats.
He did not want to harm any soldiers.
He was very clear that the only thing he was doing here was putting out information.
And he thought, and I think he's correct, where some of the most important documents released in history.
I think we'll see that in our future history.
People will review these documents thoroughly and create a tremendous day-to-day picture of a faltering U.S. empire.
But I think he was also very careful not to do anything that would harm.
I mean, that's such an important point.
Yes, it is.
Some people even accuse WikiLeaks of all just being a big CIA modified limited hangout, as Richard Nixon would say, because they are just secret and confidential-level documents.
But that's what's so great about them, is that they expose such horrible things, but in such a barely classifiable kind of a way.
And so now we're seeing that's because Manning very deliberately chose the ones that he chose.
I don't know if he was excluding individual cables from batches or whether he was excluding batches based on what might be involved, in terms of details, that kind of thing.
But you're saying he explained how very careful he was that he wasn't putting any Americans in jeopardy.
These things were very scandalous, but not top secret, not the kind of thing.
You know, they're the kind of thing that can only undermine things that the American government is not supposed to be doing, right?
Exactly.
Not our important protection of our vital national interests, et cetera, et cetera.
Exactly right.
You know, if we had a sensible society that could focus on what our foreign policy really does, and this has been a problem for a long time.
We have an article, Margaret Flowers and I have an article on Truthout right now about Korea.
And the history there will blow you away.
I mean, it's history that no one in the United States cares about.
You know, our first invasion of Korea was in the 1880s.
It's amazing how long we've been abusing that country that we forced to divide after World War II.
And the slaughter that occurred in the U.S. occupation of South Korea is an amazing history that we don't hear about.
So we have a real long-term problem with the empire history.
And these documents should be an opportunity for a real discussion, a discussion that's long overdue.
And we really could change the direction of our foreign policy in a much more positive way if we would learn from what we've actually done.
So I hope that, you know, manning, taking responsibility, exposing these documents makes a difference.
I really thank Alexa O'Brien.
As I said, you can go to Alexa O'Brien's website or Twitter feed, and you can get a link to the full statement he made.
It's alexaobrien.com.
And read this statement because it's a real historic and important document and really puts the Manning case in context.
And keep on top of bradleymanning.org to your listeners.
That's where the action really is on this case.
So I hope you get involved and go to that and help to protect this guy who's now taking responsibility and is very clearly a whistleblower.
All right.
Thank you so much for your time, Kevin.
I really appreciate it.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Everybody, that is Kevin Zeese from Voters for Peace and from comehomeamerica.us.
And check out bradleymanning.org.
As he said, that's where you can find all the news and how to support Bradley Manning.
And also you can find the link right there to this website, alexaobrien.com, and Bradley Manning's entire statement to the court.
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