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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton, live here from 11 to 1 Texas time, noon to 2 Eastern, Monday through Friday, well, less Thursday, at noagendastream.com.
Full show archives and interview archives, more than 2,700 interviews now going back to 2003, are available at scotthorton.org.
And you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slashscotthortonshow.
All right, our next guest is Nathan Fuller from bradleymanning.org.
And then you've got to say the name of the website because it's different than the title of the thing, but the Free Press Foundation thingamajig that you created there, too.
Nathan, welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
I'm sorry, I don't have it in front of me.
What's the Free Press Foundation, what's it called?
It's not actually a support network affiliated, but I believe it's freedomofthepressfoundation.org.
Yeah, there you go.
We can look that up.
It's freedomofthepressfoundation.org for the Press Freedom Foundation or something like that.
It always throws me off.
Anyway, so and you guys, in a way, maybe you started out, is that correct?
A place where people can donate to WikiLeaks by donating it to you and you'll go ahead and donate to WikiLeaks for them kind of a thing?
Well, I'm not actually affiliated with the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
That's Rainey Reitman and Trevor Kim and Glenn Greenwald.
But the support network itself is not officially affiliated.
I'm sorry, Nathan.
It was Trevor that I was thinking of, and I screwed up.
I was thinking that you were both things there.
Don't worry.
He wears a couple of hats, and that's where I got it.
Yeah, he wears several hats for sure.
Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry.
I screwed up there.
My bad.
What an idiot.
Live radio.
Hey, these things happen, me looking like an idiot on live radio all the time.
Anyway, so let's talk about Bradley Manning because there's something I actually know a little bit about.
Could you tell me, say, what if I was a brand-new listener to the show and I didn't really know the first thing about Bradley Manning other than TV, told me I wasn't supposed to like him very much?
Why don't you tell the story real quick?
I should like him because he is an Army private who cares about the American people and cares about exposing war crimes.
He was an intelligence analyst in Baghdad in 2010, and he saw horrific abuses.
He saw exploitation by the U.S. via corrupt influence and corporate influence, and he exposed documents via WikiLeaks.
He released hundreds of thousands of cables, diplomatic cables, and documents from Iraq and Afghanistan documenting how the U.S. conducts itself in secret.
And for that, he has been painted as a traitor by the U.S. military, and the military is prosecuting him with 22 counts, including aiding the enemy, which is an unprecedentedly broad interpretation that I think threatens to turn whistleblowing into treason, and with the Espionage Act, and they are seeking to send him to life in jail without parole, even though he recently pled guilty to a number of lesser offenses that would take responsibility for the documents but also only put him in jail up to 20 years, but the government rejected that.
They didn't want to make a deal with the defense, apparently, and are seeking life without parole.
So he's going to go to trial June 3rd, which will have been over three years since his arrest in May of 2010.
So there have been scores of problems with his trial, not least the fact that it's gone on so long without beginning in earnest.
Well, now, as far as that goes, on that particular point, am I right?
I'm trying to remember now if the judge has already heard a motion on, hey, you've got to set him free because he hasn't gotten a speedy trial already.
What happened to that guarantee?
Right.
The defense made that case that the Sixth Amendment, the Code of Military Justice, and the rules for court martial all have individual rules for bringing a defendant to a speedy trial.
The defense said that the military has broken all of those regulations, and yet the judge did not really listen to the case at all and said that it's been plenty speedy because it's a big, complex case and the government did what it could to be as quick as it could.
But this is incredibly long.
This is, if not the longest and among the longest pretrial detentions for any soldier facing military trial, and it's really heinous when you consider how much of that he was in really torturous treatment, at least nine months in Quantico and then an extra month in Kuwait.
He was held in solitary confinement.
Some of that, he was forced to stand naked in the mornings.
He was woken at night, and he was deprived of sleep.
And he's been treated really terribly, and he hasn't even faced trial yet, has not even been convicted.
But that's what he's dealing with right now.
And the judges ruled on that abuse, too, and said rather than, oh, gee, they tortured you, you're free to go, she said you get, what, some number of days off your ultimate sentence?
Right.
She even agreed that the military had been excessive in their treatment of President Manning.
Their treatment did amount to pretrial punishment and yet only gave 114 days off of a potential sentence, which is about four months and pales in comparison to the life sentence that he faces.
If he gets life without parole, it's totally meaningless.
If he gets just a few years, it might be worth something, but he's facing a lot of jail time, and four months is essentially sanctioning the government's behavior, saying, you know, yes, you treated him terribly, and that's okay.
You're not going to get punished for that.
You know, no one who helped out in solitary confinement illegally is really facing any consequences for that.
Well, now, I'm sure you saw this thing in The New Republic about how this capital offense charge, this aiding the enemy charge against him is sure to do so much to chill other whistleblowers and how the prosecutor admitted to the judge that if he had given the documents to The New York Times, as he recently said he tried to do, or The Washington Post, as he said he tried to do before going to WikiLeaks, that the prosecutor said, yeah, this would be the same thing, that in that sense, they don't consider, it's funny, right?
They consider, WikiLeaks is separate and different from The New York Times.
It's not journalism.
It's this weird kind of James Bond villain-to-enemy organization, go-between, somehow between Manning and Bin Laden's group or whatever to get them this information or whatever, but then at the same time, they consider The New York Times just like that, right?
So WikiLeaks doesn't get the benefit of being The New York Times, or The New York Times could find themselves getting the danger of being like WikiLeaks.
It theoretically could, and that's a huge affront to just basic journalism.
I mean, The New York Times and The Washington Post publish secret information via anonymous sources all the time, practically every day, and we could not have that with this kind of interpretation of aiding the enemy.
It's unprecedented.
The government tries to go around that by saying, well, in a civil war, there was one person who gave a military roster, but that guy got three months of labor, and that's their only precedent in this ridiculous interpretation of aiding the enemy by giving documents to a journalistic outlet.
And so, yeah, it's a real threat and should be confronted as one.
All right, now, I'm sorry for jumping around so much, but has the judge ruled on the issue of command influence?
Because, of course, the president, the former secretary of defense, and I think current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have all already pronounced him guilty.
They have, but the judge hasn't ruled on that.
The defense hasn't brought that motion, as far as we know, that could come out in trial, but it has not been brought up yet.
It might be that there's a technicality or it doesn't have the strongest legal case, but it seems pretty clear that the judge has already gotten her orders.
Her superiors have declared him guilty.
I don't see how he could get a fair trial.
How could she make a fair ruling with that kind of pressure from above?
It's untenable.
Yeah, I always like to bring up the example of the prosecution of Charles Manson in California, where President Nixon said that he was guilty and then immediately apologized and took it back and said, oh, no, no, no, no, let him have a fair trial, I'm sorry, I hope I didn't screw it up, and et cetera, et cetera, and, of course, he wasn't in the chain of command anywhere there.
That was a state trial that his federal government had nothing to do with, but for him to pronounce Manson guilty put the trial in jeopardy, and luckily, I guess, they went ahead and proceeded anyway, but that was a real issue back in the 70s, and to Nixon, who was the devil, right?
Nixon, yeah.
Well, and the former New York Times counsel who worked on the Pentagon Papers has recently said Obama's worse than Nixon on prosecution of whistleblowers and the persecution of free information, and that's incredibly clear.
Obama has prosecuted more than double all previous presidents combined with the Espionage Act.
He's used that now seven times, and it looks like there could be an eighth, and so it's a serious chilling effect, and that chilling effect has already had its influence.
It doesn't take a conviction of Manning, and I'm sure that will make it worse, but it's already happened with the BBC, and the Guardian teamed up to investigate Iraqi torture centers and their connections to James Steele and General David Petraeus, and they spent six months trying to talk to U.S. soldiers, and they cited Bradley Manning treatment as the reason that U.S. soldiers were really afraid to speak out.
Even if it wasn't classified information, they were afraid to talk to the press because they know how dangerous that can be for someone in the military.
And so I can only expect that chilling effect to grow as these prosecutions add up.
Yeah, well, no, listen, it's an established fact.
I'm married to an investigative reporter, and I know a lot of them, and I know I've heard at least hearsay, I don't know if I could testify myself, but I've heard plenty of hearsay that sources are drying up and have been drying up, and really the Manning thing is the watershed event where people are just saying, forget it, I can't take this risk.
And the prosecution of Rice and Source, too, was one of the problems.
Right, and sadly that makes sense.
I mean, if I was in the military, I would be afraid, too.
It's really terrible treatment that Manning has suffered, and no one would want to go through that.
But it's also what makes Manning's act so brave.
He said that he knew that he was going to face serious charges.
He said he knew he was willing to go to jail for life to make this information public, and yet he did it anyway.
But even then, he was still only counting, you know, hundreds of thousands of charges of moving a file to an unauthorized computer or whatever.
He couldn't have ever imagined that they would try to claim that he was a traitor to his country.
But, yeah, even without that aiding-the-enemy charge, the remaining charges add up to over 150 years in prison.
So even if we do cut out that aiding-the-enemy charge, which a lot of journalists have now come out against that charge and said it's totally egregious, but even without that, he has a serious hill of dozens of decades in prison.
Man, well, at least I'm kind of glad that he's pled guilty to the facts of those charges in a couple of ways, because, first of all, we don't have to call him the alleged hero anymore.
We already knew that he was the one who'd done it, and so now he's just plain old American hero Bradley Manning without having to put a prefix on that.
Right.
He made it very clear.
He said, you know, no one from WikiLeaks pressured me.
I did this on my own, and, yeah, took full responsibility.
So that part is good.
It really leaves the government kind of hanging out there without—they don't have— I mean, because even I can concede—I think that he should be let go, obviously, but I can also concede that, yeah, there are rules against leaking, and he put himself in jeopardy in that way and whatever.
But now he's really—his lawyer, it seems to me, has succeeded in separating out anything that you could reasonably concede he's guilty of from these ridiculous, bogus charges.
And so the prosecutors no longer have benefit of charging him with a mess of things, some of them legit and some not, you know what I mean?
Right, exactly.
And this is—it's a naked plea, not making any deal with the government, just making a plea to the judge, and that's really shown government as what it is, is rejecting that totally reasonable and compromising plea and rejecting that in favor of something that would send him to jail for life.
And to set an example, it's become increasingly and irrefutably clear that the government wants to set a major example with Freddie Manning, and they're doing that so far.
Yeah, well, you know, one day I guess the future S.A. is going to raid the New York Times offices or something, and they're going to regret that they didn't stick up for this kid when they had the chance.
And they've just been horrible.
I mean, they published all the work that he did for them, and they just trash him all the time when they should be the absolute forefront of fighting for the First Amendment on this issue.
I mean, damn.
For the first year of his trial, of his pretrial hearings, they did not show up.
It took their own public editor, Margaret Sullivan, to publicly shame them in a column saying that we should have journalists there.
And since then they have picked up the coverage a little bit, but it has not nearly been what's required for the biggest leak case in history.
It should be having a press room full every time.
But there have been some hearings where it was me and three other people, and that's our U.S. press today.
That is just absolutely incredible.
Can you imagine that?
You must just be, I guess, shocked but not surprised, but still shocked when you show up and you're by yourself there.
I mean, how could this be in America?
It's practically empty.
On a couple of the smaller hearings, people only want the dramatic news, but it was just Alexa O'Brien, Kevin Gastola, and Adam Classfield of Courthouse News and I were the only ones in the courtroom when it was first announced that he had offered this plea to the judge.
But not even a wire service heard that because it was just a one-day hearing and no one was interested.
So, you know, they want what's going to get clicked, not what is going to make what's really important to the future of U.S. journals.
By the way, this new thing that WikiLeaks has put out today with all these documents from the 70s, do you know whether or not this has any connection?
It seems like there are higher levels of classification than the stuff that Manning had done.
Is that correct?
They used to be secret documents.
Actually, I was at the press conference in D.C. this morning, and they announced that these have been declassified, but at the time, 1973 to 1976 at least, a lot of them were secret and some top secret, and they include a major section of them dealing with Henry Kissinger's private conversations in which he is scarily honest about his disregard for the law and human life, really.
But, yeah, so these are a compilation of formally declassified documents, and some of them have been leaked.
Some of them are already available via FOIA, but what WikiLeaks has done is basically give the journalists, making a hugely searchable and very usable set of these documents that people have not really gone through before.
So WikiLeaks is showing its value to journalism in a way that a lot of other press outlets aren't doing.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's just amazing the way, just with pretty simple and not very convincing to me anyway semantics, they try to separate out what WikiLeaks is doing from what FireDogLake or the NewYorkTimes.com is doing.
I mean, it just doesn't make any sense to try to pretend that WikiLeaks is something other than a journalistic source.
I mean, people resort to arguments about, well, yeah, but if someone just leaked all this to New York Times, they would go over it more carefully than WikiLeaks does, or something like that.
I mean, come on.
You're just saying that you don't like their standards or something, but that doesn't make them an entirely separate category of thing.
And, by the way, of course, they did go through and redact all kinds of stuff anyway.
They did.
If anything, WikiLeaks should be more respected, because the New York Times, when given the documents from WikiLeaks, still asked the government for permission, still said that they needed the Department of State to sign off on their publishing of some of these documents.
And then bragged about it, admitted it like it was a score in their favor, that, hey, don't criticize us.
We asked Obama for permission to print the stuff we printed.
Right, which is totally absurd for a journalistic outlet to do.
If you have the documents, you should make them public.
You should not be waiting for the government to say so.
That's just propaganda, pretty much.
But, yeah, WikiLeaks should be, I think, really respected for making the original source documents public.
The New York Times, I don't think, would not have done that either.
They would have written stories about them, so you go to the New York Times, but they wouldn't let you see the original documents themselves, and that's what the journalists need.
Yeah.
What's funny is, the New York Times, it would be to their credit if they were actually intimidated by the government.
But the problem is, they just identify with it so much, they don't need to be intimidated by it.
They're happy to serve its will the best they can perceive, at least anyway.
And it's probably a lot about access.
They want to maintain good relations so that they can keep getting sources.
But WikiLeaks, as a stateless news organization, doesn't have to worry about that.
And that's what makes them pretty valuable.
Yeah.
All right, and now, I know you're not the legal expertise on this issue necessarily, but maybe you can answer this.
Does any of the recent developments in Manny's case seem to really undercut the pursuit of Assange?
Because, of course, I think it's been reported a few places a few different times that they do have a grand jury, and they're trying to figure out how to charge Assange, if they can ever get their hands on him, and make him some kind of traitor rather than a reporter.
But weren't they kind of relying on Manning, quote-unquote, admitting or confessing that Assange put him up to it, rather than he came to Assange with the documents?
Yeah, a lot of people have been speculating that they were trying to get Manning to slip, as it were, on Assange.
But, yeah, his most recent statement makes it clear that WikiLeaks, no one from WikiLeaks had pressured him to do anything.
He did this all on his own.
But even still, Alexa O'Brien confirmed via Freedom of Information Act request that even today the Department of Justice investigation into WikiLeaks is still ongoing.
They have convened a grand jury, and they're still investigating it.
No, they have not convened a grand jury.
They have, yes.
Oh, they have.
I'm sorry.
They have, and they're still investigating how to prosecute.
And that, as far as we know, has been the biggest investigation and potentially among the biggest investigations in U.S. history, incorporating every branch of the government, every agency.
It's monumental.
All right, now, so you said the trial starts when?
The court-martial trial starts June 3rd.
We have two pretrial hearing sessions left, this week, Wednesday to Friday, and May 21st to 24th, if the calendar changes at all.
We'll learn about that this week.
Okay, great.
Well, the American people will be hanging on to you and your two colleagues every word during your coverage of this momentous, historical trial, and not just Bradley Manning, the American hero, but the First Amendment on trial as well.
You can find our daily reports from the courtroom at bradleymanning.org.
Great, and that's also where people can help support in a lot of ways, get all the updates, find out about actions and protests and different things they can participate in, maybe talking points for talking to your congressman, sign petitions, get updates.
It's all at bradleymanning.org.
Thanks very much for your time, Nathan.
I really appreciate it.
Of course.
Thanks for having me.
All right, everybody, that is Nathan Fuller from bradleymanning.org.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
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