07/26/13 – Nathan Fuller – The Scott Horton Show

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For KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, July 26, 2013.
I'm Scott Horton.
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Tonight, our guest is the great Nathan L. Fuller from bradleymanning.org.
He's been covering the entire trial, which has wrapped up today.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm good, thanks.
Appreciate you having me.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us, and especially last minute like this.
So I guess, first of all, can we start with your summary of the prosecution's closing statement in their case against Bradley Manning?
Yep.
So the government took all day yesterday with their closing argument to paint Manning as a traitor.
They talked about him as a hacker, an anti-American, no regard for soldiers, the flag, classified information.
And they tried to talk about, you know, walk through all of their evidence to support that claim.
And they really hammered the point home over and over that anti-American, he was a hacker, that he was associated with anarchists, that WikiLeaks were anti-government activists.
And so then we heard the countering claims from the defense today.
Well, that's, in a way, it's kind of hilarious because from what we've talked about with you and with the other journalists who've been covering this story, you know, since they finally did deem to even give him one of these, you know, so-called trials here, this court martial, they haven't been able to prove that Bradley Manning was an anti-American, that he was a hacker, that he was a radical, really of any kind.
All of their witnesses have blown up on cross-examination.
So what facts were they able to refer to in order to try to paint Bradley Manning as some kind of traitor to America, Nathan?
Well, the only way they could do it is what they did, and they took Bradley's quotes out of context.
They picked and cherry-picked pieces of his chat logs with Adrian Lamo, with Lauren McNamara, with Press Association, which is a screen name they say is Julian Assange.
And they took bits of those and extrapolated rather, you know, drew pretty big conclusions that weren't really based in fact, and that was the only way that they could associate Manning with any kind of anti-Americanism, to suggest that he has no regard.
They also said that he was incredibly narcissistic and egotistical, that he was just seeking fame and notoriety.
Yet at the same time, they were arguing that he sought anonymity, that he wanted to keep himself hidden, he wanted to cover his tracks.
So they were having a bit of a tough time with the internal consistencies, but then they had an even tougher time backing it up, because as the defense showed today, showing some full quotes, the evidence didn't really support what they were saying.
Yes, a very sneaky publicity hound, that Bradley Manning, I see how he is.
Very sly, yeah.
All right, now, so I'm sorry, you know, we should have started this thing off for people who are just tuning in and maybe haven't caught up.
I actually got an email today from a fan of the show who was talking to her nephew, who was in his 30s, who had never heard of Bradley Manning, had no idea who Bradley Manning even was.
So I guess we should stipulate this young man has pleaded guilty to being the American hero who liberated the Iraq and Afghan war logs, the State Department cables, and I take it some papers on Guantanamo Bay, I'm a little bit less clear on what all about Guantanamo he leaked, but he doesn't deny he is taking full responsibility for all of the actual acts that he's done.
The trial, this military court-martial, is to determine whether he's guilty of the charges that he's pleaded not guilty to and the ones that I also believe that he is not guilty of.
So just to try to catch people up a little bit, what exactly is in dispute here, since he does not dispute uploading the Iraq and Afghan war logs and the State Department cables to Wikileaks.org?
Sure, so what's mainly in dispute is not those basic facts, but what they mean, and the government says that they mean Manning aided the enemy indirectly, attempting to give documents to Al-Qaeda by passing them to Wikileaks.
They're also charging him with the Eskenaz Act, saying that he revealed intelligence information that could have harmed the U.S., he violated the Computer Fraud Act by exceeding his authorized access, and then saying that he stole government property.
And the defense has countered each one of those.
With the aiding the enemy charge, the government has utterly failed to show that Manning had any interest or idea that Al-Qaeda would be getting these documents.
All of his comments prior to these releases, even in private, say that he wanted information to be free, reach the public domain, and expose abuses.
As far as whether these documents could have harmed the U.S., Manning chose documents that memorialized past events and didn't give sources away.
They kept the record of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, so that those were the documents that would better inform the American public.
He didn't take top-secret information, he didn't take what are called human reports, human intelligence reports, which give a lot more identifying information about sources.
So it's clear if Manning wanted to harm the U.S., he certainly could have done so.
What he did was expose abuses, expose crimes, and inform us about these wars.
Right.
Okay, now, well, a lot of things about that.
I guess, first of all, to backtrack just a bit to the closing statement here and the headlines that came out of the closing statement, I mean, it's tragic because something terrible is going to happen to young Manning.
They're going to put him in prison for some amount of time.
But it was kind of hilarious seeing the reports of the government's closing statement and how they're trying to basically just trash Manning and smear him due to the fact that they don't have any facts.
They have to resort to, like, you know, the Fox News morning show kind of version of, well, you know what I think might be going on here or something, and just to try to make him look bad or something, because every single one of their witnesses fell apart on them.
And so all they have is the smear, and I think that's really, you know, a measure of the weakness of their charges, that they were completely unable to prove any nefarious motives here whatsoever.
And you referred to the rat Adrian Lamo, the government informant who sold him out and turned him in to the government in the first place, who had to admit on the stand that, yeah, he's a good kid.
He meant well.
He stipulated to me repeatedly that he only, as you were just saying, he only wanted the people, the American people especially, to know the truth so that we could use our democracy to do reforms.
And, I mean, you really couldn't paraphrase Thomas Jefferson and the free market of ideas and the reason for freedom of speech in our society any better than taking his quotes directly out of those war logs.
Right, and you're right.
Chat logs, chat logs, pardon me.
War logs is something else.
The government started to sound pretty desperate yesterday when they were talking about trying to paint Manning as some kind of narcissist.
The only thing they really had was a photograph.
Manning took a photograph of himself in a mirror when he was home from leave from Iraq.
He was in his aunt's house in Maryland.
He took a photo of himself and he was smiling.
He was smiling for the first time in a little while.
The government says that this is someone who is so proud of his actions.
He's someone so eager for notoriety, craving fame.
But the defense pointed out that maybe this is just someone who didn't really fit in in the Army.
He was going through gender identity issues and maybe the first time he really felt himself in a long time.
This obviously has no bearing on whether he was proud of his actions or whether he was craving notoriety.
The government really started to sound pretty desperate in that part.
Right.
Again, Adrian Lamo, the rat that turned him in, had promised him that he was a minister and a journalist.
So you can extra special double trust me that I will never have to reveal anything that you tell me.
Right.
That, of course, turned out to be false.
But Lamo's chats were useful.
And when we saw that, he offered, he said, you know, why not sell them to Russia or China?
Why not try to make banks?
And Manning clearly said these belong in the public domain.
This should be public information.
He didn't want his name in the public domain.
He just wanted the documents in the public domain.
That's simple as that.
Exactly.
And the government's working pretty hard to undermine that.
But I think they're failing pretty well.
Right.
Now, again, he has stipulated that he did upload the Iraq and Afghan war logs to State Department cables.
I guess I would ask you, sort of in parentheses here, if you could clarify exactly what it was on Guantanamo that he released there.
But then if you could explain also the discrepancy or the difference in the charges against him under the Espionage Act and the aiding the enemy charge.
Those are two separate things that they're going after him for that he's pleaded not guilty to both.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
So first I'll go with the Guantanamo information.
These are detainee assessment briefs.
These were basically what Gitmo prosecutors called baseball cards, essentially, just had biographical information, where this detainee came from, how they were captured.
And so the government says, oh, this gives away a lot of information, and even if the enemy knew about this already, it tells them how much we know about them.
But Gitmo prosecutor, the chief prosecutor, Colonel Morris Ibbits, took the stand and said these were mostly inaccurate information.
A lot of it could be found on open source information.
And while they didn't say who in court, I mean, these documents are still classified, so they wouldn't say who the detainee's reference were, but we were able to crowdsource a lot of them.
Alex O'Brien was able to just figure it out based on openly available information, a lot of the detainees they were talking about.
So it's not like we gave the enemy any new information by making those public.
Instead, we learned a lot more about what our government has been doing in that Cuban detention center.
And so then I'll go to the Aiding the Enemy and Espionage Act.
Aiding the Enemy is a military offense, but it applies to any person.
It's an any-person offense, and it carries a life sentence without parole.
It could be a capital offense, but the government is seeking a life without parole.
And for that, the government has to prove that Manning has actual knowledge that by giving documents to Wikileaks, he was giving them to al-Qaeda, our current enemy.
Whereas the Espionage Act, each offense there is a 10-year offense, but Manning has several against him.
And for that, that's to prove that Manning had reason to believe the information he released could be used to harm the U.S. or aid a foreign nation.
And as the defense has shown, a lot of this information was already known to the enemy, has not harmed the U.S. in the three years since its release.
And so Manning, while it's a lot of documents he released, he was actually highly selective.
He could have released millions of documents, could have released top-secret information, even intelligence reports, but instead he selected documents that would just better inform the public.
Okay, I'm talking with Nathan Fuller from BradleyManning.org, and he has been covering the entire so-called trial here, the court-martial of Bradley Manning, which wrapped up today.
And so what you're telling me is that aiding the enemy charge is, or I guess the way for me to think of it, is the Espionage Act charges are sort of along the same lines as the aiding the enemy, but much broader.
They wouldn't have to prove that he aided an enemy.
Not that we've had our Congress declare war since 1941, but I guess they'd consider, you know, Ayman al-Zawahiri and his group in Pakistan, okay, they're an official enemy of the United States.
That would be the aiding the enemy charge if they could somehow twist this to mean that what Manning did benefited Zawahiri.
But then the Espionage Act charges, it sounds like you're saying, are much broader, that this could harm the United States or its interests as the government defines them as broadly as I want, I guess.
And you're saying that the defense even did a pretty good job of shutting that down.
It doesn't even look like they really had a case on the Espionage Act charges, much less the aiding the enemy charges.
Am I hearing you right?
Yeah, that sounds right.
It's a much lower standard for what the government has to prove.
And I think they've still struggled along the way to prove that.
Because a lot of what they've done is just bring rhetoric.
They bring large rhetoric to make it sound pretty scary.
Manning's a traitor.
Manning released all these documents that he could.
He was working for WikiLeaks.
One of their favorite phrases is that he systematically harvested information.
And yet the evidence shows that he was highly discriminant, cared about his fellow soldiers, and perhaps, unlike some of his fellow soldiers, cared a whole lot about the lives of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The defense played collateral murder, sections of collateral murder.
The video of Apache Gunner in Iraq in 2007, in which U.S. forces killed civilians, journalists, and said, look at this through Manning's eyes.
There are just nine lives extinguished there.
Extinguished, sorry, because they need to die.
And that's the way Manning looks at them.
He's a humanist.
And so that's what separated him from his fellow soldiers.
Right.
All right.
Now, one of the other things you mentioned there is that under the aiding the enemy charge, that is possibly a capital offense.
You said that the prosecution has announced, I'm not exactly sure your exact words, but they've said one way or the other that they're not seeking that.
They're seeking only decades in prison.
But what I'm trying to get clarity on here is whether that's an official position that they put on paper, that we're only seeking this, and then I guess the colliery to that would be, does that matter?
Could the judge go ahead and send some to death anyway?
Or is the judge limited by only being as bad as the prosecution wants the judge to be?
And then the first part, basically how official is that statement that they're not seeking the death penalty?
Could they take that back at this point?
Not that I'm encouraging them to.
No, it is official.
The death penalty is off the table.
So the most Manning could receive would be life in prison without parole.
There are no minimums, so the judge would have wide discretion now to rule on that.
But just as importantly, I mean, that's what's most important for Manning, is that he's not going to receive the death penalty no matter what happens here.
Now, I knew that they had said that.
Yeah, I knew that they had said that.
I just didn't know if it was carved in stone yet or, you know.
It is, but it still sets a highly dangerous precedent.
If we're going to convict someone of aiding the enemy, who's to say that, you know, if he was extradited, they don't slap an aiding the enemy charge, since it's an any-person offense, on Edward Snowden and then seek the death penalty there or the next Bradley Manning.
They're going to set a precedent here if they get the conviction they want, and that will be a capital offense, and that's yet another reason why it's so dangerous.
You know, it's interesting that if you look at very official Washington journalism, the Bob Woodwards and the Bill Gertzes and the David Sangers and the people who publish in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Washington Times, based on classified sources all the time, from time to time they print something that was classified and leaked to them contrary to the interests of what the state would have had them do.
Not usually, right?
These are the kept reporters.
But we're getting to the point where really even Bill Gertz's sources, for writing his pro-war stuff in the Washington Times all the time, they could really be getting in trouble.
And a couple of more steps down this slope, and Bill Gertz himself, Bob Woodward or David Sanger, these reporters could be charged under the same legal theory.
I mean, if it's aiding the enemy for Manning to tell the Post something, because the Post might repeat it, then it's a crime for the Post to repeat it, right?
Exactly.
Yeah, Bob Woodward could certainly be prosecuted, and we've heard statements from Osama bin Laden saying, telling fellow members of Al Qaeda to go read Bob Woodward's book, because it contains information that we wouldn't get otherwise.
And yet, Bob Woodward, of course, is not going to be prosecuted, because he's not a whistleblower.
He's printing what the government tells him to, essentially.
Sometimes that includes top-secret information, whereas Brad P. Manning, on the other hand, is releasing documents that don't exactly cast the government in the best light.
Right.
Yeah, and I guess, see, I shouldn't have used Woodward as an example, because he would never publish something that he's not supposed to publish.
But I guess I was thinking, some of these reporters sometimes, you know, they might...
Not from the Watergate, anyway.
Yeah, the kind of people who normally are in good favor, could fall out of it for doing good journalism, and that's a real worry.
It's not a worry.
And as you've reported, the defense, or I guess the judge, asked the prosecution here, if he had leaked, if Bradley Manning had leaked to the New York Times or the Washington Post, like he tried to do before he went to WikiLeaks, would you guys still prosecute him as aiding the enemy?
And the government said yes, correct?
They said yes, and that's yet another reason.
There are so many reasons why this is such a dangerous precedent, but the fact that, yeah, I mean, the New York Times and Washington Post are essentially on their way to becoming co-conspirators in this case, and perhaps they would be if they were tried, if Manning had leaked directly to them.
But, yeah, if he had leaked to the New York Times, he could be still convicted of aiding the enemy, and that says a lot about where the state of American investigative journalism is today.
All right, now, I put out a tweet kind of joking around saying that I think maybe there's a general somewhere that loves Bradley Manning and deliberately designed the most ridiculous team of JAG prosecutors to go after him here since they have done nothing but fail so spectacularly with, I guess, each and every witness they've attempted to call and their cross-examination of the defense witnesses, too.
And somebody answered me who I think has been a journalist who's been attending the trial at least a little bit or something, who pointed out that, yes, in fact, they're very young, the prosecutors, and that, after all, he's been, I guess I'm extrapolating this part out of the argument, he's been held for three years without a trial.
So new groups of prosecutors have been rotated in and out on this, and really it's amateur hour up there on the government side.
Is that about right, you think?
They are pretty young.
The main few prosecutors have stayed the same, but they have had to rotate some of the others, some of the other people working.
Public affairs officers have come and gone.
And, yes, it's been an extremely long case, and that's perhaps part of the reason for this massive incompetence.
Well, you know, I'm no lawyer.
That's the other Scott Horton that's the lawyer.
So maybe trials are like this all the time if you ever really have a competent defense attorney.
But it's really seemed, as you've reported this story and others have reported this story since the trial began here, like they really never even took a Saturday afternoon to go over their own case and make sure that they thought they were right before they put it before the court.
I mean, you have described some very serious allegations of theirs that they thought, oh, yeah, watch me, I'm about to prove this, and then completely blew up in their face in the courtroom.
Could you share a couple of those with us?
Sure.
Well, I mean, part of the problem is that they charged first and figured out the evidence later, they charged Manning with aiding the enemy in March 2011 and then found some evidence for it a few months later.
But, yeah, I mean, their case for the Skirani airstrike transmission is absolutely collapsed.
They've been arguing all along that Manning released this video of an Afghanistan massacre, and they say he leaked it in November of 2009, defense said he leaked it in April 2010, and the difference is that they're trying to paint him as someone who leaked throughout his entire time in Iraq, and yet their own government witness came on the stand and said, no, the only evidence there is is for April 2010 transmission.
And so that case has largely fallen apart, and we'll see if the judge takes their evidence for that or if she realizes that there's only really evidence for the April one, and she'll rule on that soon, but that's pretty embarrassing in a courtroom.
And then last Friday, during what I thought was rebuttal period, I'm not sure how this works in a military trial at all, but they called a brand-new witness and started making a whole brand-new angle on the case.
Now, this is the prosecution went first, and then the defense got to do their case, and then the prosecution got to rebut, but it didn't seem like they were really rebutting the defense case.
They were going off on a whole new angle, but how did that work out for them, Nathan?
Yeah, they tried to frame it as somebody who was talking about state of mind very narrowly, but actually they were using this witness, Supervisor Manning, to absolutely malign his motive and perform character assassination.
Former Supervisor Julia Shulman said that Manning had no respect for the flag, that he made disloyal to America comments, and that she thought at one point that he was a spy, and yet the entire cross-examination, it was revealed that she never even wrote that statement down.
She wrote less important statements like Manning had a lot of caffeine and he smoked cigarettes sometimes, but apparently forgot to write down that he had made statements disloyal to America and might be a spy.
So I don't really see that evidence holding up very well.
Well, then I guess the question really does come back to whether this is even really a trial, Nathan.
I know it might really seem like one from sitting in the audience, but from here it seems like a show trial, and maybe to you too.
It's all political, as you said, to come up with the charges first and the evidence later, and it seems to me like they've already come up with their verdict too, and they've thrown everything they can at him, and they're going to lock him up for as long as they can for this, just to try to scare the hell out of everybody else, not because there's anything right about it at all, but just to try to keep somebody's cousin out there from deciding to do like Manning and tell the truth about what his boss is up to at the expense of the liberty of the American people.
It certainly seems that that's what they're afraid of.
They want to set a precedent and, more importantly, maybe instill a bit of a chilling effect, and they don't want any future Bradley Mannings.
They don't want anyone inspired by him, and they want it known that if anyone tries to do what he did, that they're going to get the full book and then some.
They're going to get tortured before trial and maybe wait three years before they even see a courtroom, so they certainly do want to chill the scent before it even happens.
Well, you know, it seems like perhaps some of the smearing of Bradley Manning could backfire on the government in this case.
They keep attacking his sexuality and all of this stuff, but doesn't that sort of make it seem like, well, geez, if Bradley Manning is brave enough to do some prison time in order to reveal the most important truths to the American people so they can do the right thing with their democracy to reform their government and such like that, as Manning put it in the chat logs, well, then maybe they can too.
After all, we're talking about people who are literally risking life and limb for Hamid Karzai and what's-his-name Hekmatyar that skins people alive and helped Osama escape.
The least they could do is fight for the American people by leaking some documents.
Absolutely, and I think that is true.
The government has made a lot of statements or elicited statements that I think are really going to backfire.
Their witness that came in at the end to totally malign Manning's motive, it turns out she had said a lot of homophobic slurs to him in the Army, and then the government came on the stand in its closing argument and said, you know, Manning's a traitor, and that's not something they've proven.
They haven't charged him with treason as it's normally known, and yet they say these big statements, and it's really a lot of bluster, and so I think you're right that we're going to have people realize that these are people not to be taken seriously and could be inspired by them by Bradley Manning.
Right, because after all, what's he fighting for, right?
The system is not working.
It needs some correcting, so he blows the whistle.
Well, if we live in a society where they can give him a fake trial and go ahead and pretend he's a traitor when we all know he's not and get away with that, well, then they're exactly the society, they're exactly the government worth fighting against to protect the society from.
So we're in terrible constructional language, but you know what I mean.
I know what you mean.
Yeah, so get out there and be like Bradley Manning.
Like Edward Snowden said, he said he was inspired by what Bradley Manning did.
He was willing to take the risk to do the right thing, and Snowden said, I'm going to be like Bradley Manning.
He did, and he said, yeah, people like Tom Drake, people like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are models for not being complicit in what you're doing and realizing that it's not really good enough to wait for somebody else to do it.
You have to step up and do something about it.
All right, well, listen, this is such an important story.
It's obviously the most important trial of the decade.
Never heard of any other trials going on, have you?
Anyway, it's the Bradley Manning trial.
It's covered in depth.
It's over now.
We'll find out very soon what Sunday, the verdict, maybe Monday.
Bradleymanning.org is the website.
You can find all the great journalism of Nathan L. Fuller, and you can follow him on Twitter at Nathan L. Fuller as well.
Thank you so much for your time on the show tonight.
I really appreciate it.
I'm glad to be there.
Talk to you soon.
All right, everybody, and that's it for the show tonight.
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