07/30/13 – Kevin Zeese – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, first up today, oh, our only guest today is the great Kevin Zeese.
He's an attorney who serves on the steering committee of the Bradley Manning Support Network at bradleymanning.org.
He's the co-founder of Come Home America.
That's comehomeamerica.us, and there's a book like that, too, a collection of great essays.
It's a really great movement to build a left-right consensus against the American empire.
Please check them out at comehomeamerica.us.
Sign the petition against war with Syria and all of that kind of thing.
And he's also, Kevin, is the organizer of popularresistance.org.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Kevin?
Good.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Well, it's very good to talk to you again.
So tell me about this kid, Bradley Manning.
What do you think of him?
I think he's a hero, but today is a very big and, I'm sure, stressful day for him.
Judge Denise Lind, who is the judge in the case, will be deciding whether he's guilty or not on lots of different charges that could wind him up in prison for life plus 154 years.
There's 22 total charges.
He's already pled guilty to 10 lesser charges that expose him to the possibility of 20 years, 10 charges of two years each.
He could get also no time for that.
None of these charges have a mandatory sentence, so the judge has complete discretion.
No matter what she finds as far as guilt or innocence, she has complete discretion as far as sentencing goes.
It's a very big day, and it's a big day not just for Bradley but really for the future of journalism in this country.
One critical charge that will affect journalists is aiding the enemy, and that has got to have journalists around the country nervous if they're paying attention at all because under the aid of the enemy, all you have to do is have, the way Denise Lind defines it, at least, all you need to do is have knowledge that what you publish could aid the enemy.
Let's say the military, the U.S. military, is not able to handle IED attacks in Iraq, and you write about that shortcoming, isn't that aiding the enemy, telling them a weakness of the U.S. military?
It makes reporting on national security and military issues very difficult and really puts all reporters at risk if they offend the United States, and that's a big challenge if that decision on aiding the enemy goes the way against Bradley Manning.
And now it's a de facto official secrets act like they have in England, right, where it has been the case where you're a journalist, somebody leaks to you, you can write about it all you want.
They might get in trouble for breaking their agreement that they signed with the government, but you're protected, but this could mean no longer.
Well, that's right, and that's not just from the Manning case, but the case involving James Risen in the New York Times.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Risen has to testify against the person who provided him information, and if he doesn't testify, then he faces charges.
So the freedom of press in this country is under serious attack.
This attack on whistleblowers was always seen by many of us as really just a first step toward attacking journalists, and with this aiding the enemy potential charge, it really puts journalists at great risk, great risk.
And, you know, by the way, the prosecutors in this case, in Manning's case, have been very clear to say that if it had been the New York Times and not WikiLeaks, they'd have the same result.
So people should be nervous.
Well, you know, I've got to tell you, I like Charlie Savage, and I like James Risen and Eric Lickblau.
They do some good work, but the rest of the New York Times, I'd be happy to see them all locked in prison.
All they do is lie us into war, and all they do is throw Manning and Assange under the bus and pretend like, oh, yeah, no, I totally agree with you, government, says the New York Times editorial page.
No, WikiLeaks isn't journalism.
You should crucify them, but leave us alone.
So I say burn the New York Times to the ground.
Who cares about them?
Well, I agree.
The New York Times is really a national security publication for the most part.
They pretty much put out the national security state's view of the world.
They publish their press releases as if they are news stories, and they will lie to us to protect the security state.
We've seen that over and over again.
So the New York Times has lots of problems.
But this is not just a threat to the New York Times.
This is a threat to all journalists.
It's a threat to all bloggers.
It's a threat to citizen media, independent media, anyone.
I mean, the basic, the bottom line is the Internet connects us all.
And so you write something on AntiWar.com, that could aid the enemy too.
And so it's a risk not just to the New York Times.
It's a risk to anyone writing about national security issues, and that's a big net.
Well, you know, it seems like, and I don't understand.
You're the lawyer, not me.
So let me ask you, but it seems like it doesn't even matter whether we're talking about an article with classified information in it.
Like, for example, what if I wrote an article that said that the reason September 11th happened was because of American support for Israel in occupying the Saudi desert in order to accomplish Bill Clinton's genocide against a million Iraqis in the 1990s, and that if only we would knock it off, we wouldn't have a terrorism problem at all.
When our government has already decided that, as far as they're concerned, September 11th was the first day in history, and the only solution to our problem is to keep creating more enemies and killing more people from now on.
If I make a really compelling argument and public opinion starts really shifting my way on this, and the American people start to oppose the American government's chosen solution to this problem, then does that mean that I'm aiding the enemy, according to the U.S. government, even though I'm the one who's right and they're the ones who are wrong?
Yeah, you know, it doesn't require classified documents.
You're totally right about that.
And so, yes, I think this is going to be a real damper.
It's going to be really a very problematic area.
And I expect if the judge rules wrong on this and finds me guilty of any enemy, this will be something that goes to the U.S. Supreme Court.
It will go to the Court of Military Appeals first.
Before that, it will go to the court that Judge Lind just got nominated, is going to be put on after this, which is the U.S. Court of Army Appeals, so she got a promotion already.
And then it goes up to changing the command to the Supreme Court will decide that, because this is a critical case, I mean, a critical definition.
What's really unusual about the way that Judge Lind has defined it is that she does not require any intent to aid the enemy.
You know, normally in a crime, you have to intend to commit a crime, intend to have the effect.
In this case, it's just knowledge that what you publish might aid the enemy or could aid the enemy.
That's all it requires, and so it's a very weak standard.
Now, the prosecutors want even a weaker standard, and Judge Lind rejected their standard.
The prosecutors just want the fact that you leak documents, that aid the enemy is all that's needed.
Your intent, your knowledge doesn't even matter.
She at least required knowledge.
That's not enough, though.
You need to have an intent to aid the enemy, and there's no question Manning did not have that intent, despite what the nonsense that the prosecutors' comments were during the closing argument, all sorts of name-calling, Manning's a traitor and an anarchist and unpatriotic, hates the United States, all this nonsense that just is the opposite of the truth about Bradley Manning.
Right, and none of which was in evidence in any of the case that they made when they had witnesses to call.
Exactly.
I mean, it's a very strange case.
The prosecutor's closing was long, rambling, repetitive, and I think that Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights is right.
The reason they went on for seven hours rather than the three they planned to was because they didn't want the media reporting David Kuhm's rebuttal.
They just wanted to report on the prosecutor's version of events without a rebuttal, which tore apart the prosecutor's perspective.
So they kind of manipulated the media by giving us a very long, rambling, boring, repetitive closing argument.
But, yeah, none of that was in evidence.
A couple of things have happened since the case nears completion.
Judge Lynn made a couple of really strange rulings that I think both could be reversible error.
One was she allowed the prosecutors to reopen their case because they had done such a lousy job of making their case.
She allowed them to call additional witnesses in order to make the case that Bradley was aiding the enemy and knew he was doing so.
Well, now, wait a minute.
Let me stop you for a second and make sure I understand that.
You're talking about the way they have it in the military system for some reason.
After the prosecution goes, then the defense goes.
Then the prosecution has a chance to rebut.
That's what you're talking about when the judge, she didn't allow them to rebut.
She allowed them to keep going a brand-new case.
Some more.
She allowed them, yeah, after the obvious holes in their case, after they had closed their case, finished their evidence, she allowed them to reopen the evidence to submit additional evidence, which was very strange.
And that's not a normal thing in the military or in the civilian courts.
The second thing that she did that was, I think, even stranger was she allowed the prosecutors to change the charges.
After the defense rested and when the defense could no longer put on evidence, she allowed them to change the charges so that rather than being charged with stealing all these documents, just guilty of stealing some of these documents.
And the defense obviously had no chance to rebut that because that wasn't the charge they were faced with when they were putting their case on.
So that was a very bizarre decision on her part that I think could end up being.
So there's a number of interesting issues.
There will be appeals in this case because Manning is already pleading guilty, so there will be all sorts of issues to talk about.
So I expect this case will go on for a while.
And the Bradley Manning Support Network has committed to raising the money for any appeals that are necessary, and people can get involved in that at BradleyManning.org.
The organization has done a great job, I think, in not only raising money, raising awareness, but to break through the mainstream corporate media barrier to this case and develop support for Manning.
It's been a real challenge, but I think the organization has done an incredible job.
Let me return to what you're talking about there, about altering the charges.
Again, this is the military system, not the regular civilian court system, but I've never heard of this happening in America in my entire life, that after the defense rests— I think it's very strange, and I think it's reversible error, but we'll see.
This is such a rigged justice system, whether it's military or civilian in this country.
We have such a rigged system that's in favor of the executive powers and the security state and the prosecutors and the police and really stacked against anyone who's accused of something.
So it's a very tough system to get a fair hearing in.
I guess in that Zimmerman thing, they did try to add on murder to and manslaughter and that kind of thing at the end, but I'm not sure if that was after they were done resting their case.
That seemed pretty corrupt to me.
That was before resting their case, and that was a really—I mean, I thought the prosecutors— I mean, when I look at what happened in that—I don't want to get off on that tangent, but when I look at what happened in that case, it looks like the prosecutors threw it to me.
Well, you know, a lot of people thought that.
So, yeah, this is just amazing.
People can read this article at bradleymanning.org, which, again, is very much worthy of your support.
We have an article on popularresistance.org.
We've been covering this case a lot, a really excellent article by Alexa O'Brien on popularresistance.org that goes through all the charges that Manning is facing, the potential punishments for each.
And so when the verdict today comes down, you can go to that and figure out, you know, what Manning's facing and what the possibilities are when it comes to sentencing.
The sentencing will begin—the sentencing process will begin right after the finding of guilt or not guilty, and that will be probably another month.
It will probably go through August, another month or so of testimony.
The government has announced something like 15 witnesses who are very high-level people who will testify in secret.
We won't get to hear them in this strange case.
They'll be testifying about the impact that Manning's documents that he released had on national security.
And so that will be a mostly secret sentencing process that we won't get to hear.
Oh, really?
I didn't realize that.
I thought that that was where we're going to get to find out even more, and their testimony is going to be broad.
Well, we'll get to hear other stuff.
I mean, I'm just saying these witnesses of the government will be, unfortunately, mostly in secret, so that's going to be a big gap in the public's knowledge of what this case is really about.
And I'm sure that the defense will put on testimony to show the opposite and talk about, you know, the impact from the defense's perspective.
But, unfortunately, we're not going to get to hear much of the government's case.
Alexa O'Brien, she has a website that goes through these 15 witnesses as well and describes who each of them are.
It's a pretty high-powered group of people who are coming in to try to get Manning the longest sentence possible.
Right, and all that is at AlexaOBrien.com, and it's B-R-I-E-N, Alexa O'Brien.
She's done great work.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
She's really risen to the occasion.
Yeah, for real.
All right, now, so let's talk about, well, there's so many different things to cover here.
I always like harping on my three main reasons why the case should have just been completely thrown out before the trial started.
And first was the three years he was held without a trial.
Second was his abuse at Quantico, which Barack Obama has stated.
He asked Robert Gates about it, and Robert Gates said, yep, that's what we're doing, all right.
And Obama said, great, carry on.
He accepted personal responsibility for the, at least, abuse, if not torture, of Bradley Manning at Quantico.
And then third would be the corrupt command influence, where High Commander Obama, the Secretary of Defense Panetta at the time, Panetta and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, all have already pronounced Bradley Manning guilty.
And they are all three, the top three men in the military chain of command, and those all amount to direct orders to Denise Lynn.
The only way for there to be justice at all would be for her to dismiss all charges.
That's it.
If you wanted him to go to prison, Obama, you should have shut your mouth.
Yeah, I'm with you on all that.
And, in fact, I think that at least two out of three of those will be very important issues on appeal.
The speedy trial question, it was really, I thought, butchered and sliced and diced by Denise Lynn, creating all sorts of exceptions for and excuses for the government's delay that allowed it to get under a speedy trial, which was just almost amusing, but wasn't so serious.
And then the second, of course, is the treatment he had in solitary confinement for almost a year.
He combined Kuwait and Quantico, where he was really mistreated.
It's so embarrassing in the United States that the United States won't even let the U.S. torture investigator meet with Manning in an official capacity to document it.
So it's obviously a big embarrassment.
The command influence is an issue I've raised over and over again from early on.
The question really comes down to was Denise Lynn affected by it, and I think that's a lot tougher case to make on appeal.
It would have been, I think, if they had gone with a jury trial, then he could have made that argument.
But I think one reason they didn't go with a jury trial is because the command was so biased against him and he couldn't have really gotten a fair jury trial.
So maybe it will come up in the appeal.
I'm not sure that one will.
The other two, I think, are very strong arguments that will make very strong issues on appeal.
There's a lot to cover on appeal in this case, obviously.
So I think this case is not coming over, but it's going to take many years for that appeal to work its way through the system.
Right.
That's just amazing to me that he didn't even get away with that in the first place with so little controversy.
I agree.
I really think that if the public had gotten to hear and see Bradley Manning testify for about 15 hours, he did testify on both his solitary confinement abuse and on his pleading guilty to the lesser charges when he explained why he did what he did.
I think you'd have a whole different discussion in this country, and some of the defense witnesses were just excellent that it's just a shame the public didn't get to hear them because it would have been a great education for the country to learn about what the military is doing, how media is developing, what citizens' media is, what WikiLeaks' role is, and how important it is to a vibrant media in this country.
I mean, so much good stuff came out in this trial that just got suppressed because the corporate media did a terrible job covering it, and the military did an excellent job manipulating the media and making it very hard for them to cover it.
Yeah, you know, the consensus in the mainstream media against Manning, when they even deem to talk about him at all, is just ridiculous.
I remember, you know, like it's always the unproven premise that they're running with, right?
It's like, well, you know, how do you compare this guy Snowden to Manning?
Because, of course, the consensus about Manning is that what he did was terrible and wrong and helped our enemies and all that.
It's like, well, wait a minute, man.
These are facts that are not in evidence, Jake Tapper.
Yeah, no, the corporate media is absolutely terrible in their coverage.
And, you know, it's a couple of things.
One is they are very much in bed with the national security state, and people like, you know, they rely on information from the Defense Department in order to, you know, put their stories on.
They want that access to battlefield scenes and all that stuff.
And second, they are, I think, also consciously or unconsciously afraid of the security state.
They have seen other journalists and individuals taken apart by that powerful force, and they know they've told a lie or they're going to get in trouble themselves.
And, of course, they're paid big money by corporations that are very much in bed with the security state.
So it's a very dysfunctional and corrupted media that we live with at the corporate media.
The good news is that less and less people watch it or read it.
More and more people don't give it any credibility, and more and more people are getting the news from other sources.
And there is more information out there.
So people can get the truth.
They just have to avoid watching MSNBC and CNN and Fox, ABC and CBS.
Ignore those stations, and you'll get better information from other sources, and I think more people are realizing that.
So it's an interesting time.
We're at a very tipping point moment, I think, in the battle between citizens' media and corporate media.
And we'll see how it goes.
But I think if the people who are involved in citizens' media work like we are, you have your show and I have a show, too, and do a lot of writing, if people involved in citizens' media start to realize how close we are to the tipping point and start to work together, knowing that we have a task to overcome the corporate media, I think we can do it.
We're very close to having that kind of ability to get our message out.
Right.
Yeah, I'm a big believer in the realignment.
Realignment, as you know, the best of the left and the right with the libertarians is the real moderate center.
We're against all the horrible things our government wants to do to everyone all day, and exactly opposite of the conservative Democrat Obama and the liberal Republican McCain and their extremist so-called moderate center on the other side.
And these battle lines are just more and more clear all the time.
Yeah, I think that recent vote on the NSA helped to clarify those battle lines as well.
You saw an interesting right-left coalition challenging the NSA, but you also saw the progressive caucus give just enough votes to make sure that the corporate Democrats, leadership of the party, got what they wanted, which was support the security state.
Just enough votes.
You had eight progressive Democrats who are members of the progressive caucus who have in the past voted against the Patriot Act provisions.
In fact, you had 13 who voted against Patriot Act provisions beyond the progressive caucus.
If seven of those had gone the right way, we would have had a different result, and the NSA would be in trouble today.
But instead, they always give enough votes, as they've done on every issue from the banking bailout to the funding of the Iraq war to supporting Obama's giveaway of the insurance industry.
He's called health care Obamacare.
I mean, all those issues, without the progressive caucus, none of them would have.
We would have stopped the funding of the Iraq war.
We would have stopped the banking bailout.
We would have stopped this giveaway of the insurance industry.
We would have stopped the NSA.
But because the progressive Democrats are frauds, you know, and always give their vote, enough votes to make sure that the leadership gets what they want, the country continues to go in the wrong direction.
Right.
Well, I love hearing attacks from the left on the health care scam, too.
Empty Wheel and Greg Palast and others have done great attacks on Obamacare and tend to get right to the real point better than the right-wing attacks on it most of the time, I would say.
But not to get too far off on that tangent, let's get back to the so-called harm done here, because one thing that I think is great about this Bradley Manning story is how the government has to admit that no harm was done, quote, unquote, harm, meaning none of their quislings got their throat cut.
Right.
No, no snitches or informants or secret, you know, Afghan agents betraying their own people or whatever.
Nobody got in trouble because of being exposed by Bradley Manning.
He deliberately did not leak top secret material, only secret and confidential level material, enough that people could know the truth and make reforms, but nothing that compromised sources and methods or really got any individual quislings killed.
But then here's the great part.
What he did do was expose all kinds of things that the empire was doing wrong, that they can't admit that his short circuiting of their policy amounts to harm.
Like, for example, his leaks led to the overthrow of America's sock puppet military dictator of Egypt for 30 years, Hosni Mubarak.
Well, they can't say, oh, we lost our favorite dictator.
That's harm to America because it's not harm to America.
It's only harm to America's evil empire that it has no right to have in the first place.
So they can't complain about it.
Yeah, it's pretty funny.
That's a good point.
You know, it's interesting.
I mean, of course, the prosecutors don't agree that there's been no harm.
And they call Manning a traitor, and they're going to bring in a lot of witnesses who will testify in secret about the supposed harm.
But we've not seen any proof of that.
I mean, everything that we've seen in public has been there was no real serious harm at all from these leaks.
And Manning testified clearly that he did not release every document that he saw because he thought some were too close in time and too recent that it would potentially cause trouble for the military and risk people's lives.
And so he held those back.
WikiLeaks itself also didn't publish everything that was given.
And then beyond that, The Guardian, The New York Times, and other publications didn't either.
So to get this idea that everything was released and it caused tremendous harm is just absolute falsehood.
And I think that will be a lot of the focus of the sentencing phase of this case.
And no matter how it happens today, Manning has already pled guilty to 10 charges, so there will be a sentencing phase.
And so I think it's really – the thing that really happened with this was it showed – and I love that so many documents were released because we really got a big picture of the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, Guantanamo Bay prison, the State Department's activities.
We got a lot – a really good glimpse inside the activities of the empire.
And we got to see the good.
There were some diplomats who actually showed how well they knew the local situation both in the government, in the opposition, and in the citizens.
Very impressive diplomatic work was noted in some of the cables.
It also showed not only the good but the bad, the ugly, and the illegal.
And the problem with the government is that there's been so much illegal and unethical activity that's been demonstrated by these documents.
That's why they're upset.
Because the truth about how the US empire operates with essentially abusive, illegal, and unethical actions on behalf primarily of transnational corporations, that's been shown.
And someone like Hillary Clinton, for example, who I can't believe is even viable for president but is the frontrunner, she was shown to be willing to break the law on behalf of the CIA.
She signed off on a memo that was part of the WikiLeaks documents that ordered US diplomats to spy on UN diplomats when they came to the United States.
That's against the law.
We host the UN.
That doesn't give us a right to spy on people who are coming to participate in the UN.
And Hillary sent out a memo asking people to get frequent flyer numbers, credit card numbers, iris scans, all sorts of personal information, data about these diplomats that she could use for the CIA and for US foreign policy's benefit.
And worse was the policies, right?
It wasn't the individual crimes.
It was the, hey, let's get Ethiopia to murder everyone in Somalia for us.
That's perfectly legal.
Yeah, no, it's crazy.
I mean, it's a very interesting historical reference.
And I really expect that in the future there will be really interesting work done by historians and human rights lawyers and scholars.
Already there are hundreds and hundreds of stories based on these WikiLeaks.
I mean, you can't even, if you're a regular consumer of even, you know, average quality journalism, you will come across WikiLeaks documents, detail, et cetera, et cetera, all the time.
Oh, yeah.
All the time.
It's been a great service to humanity.
All right.
Hey, thanks so much for your time, Kevin.
I sure appreciate your service to this show and to this cause.
Talk to you soon.
Appreciate it.
Everybody, that's the great Kevin Zeese from comehomeamerica.us.comehomeamerica.us and popularresistance.org.
He's on the steering committee of Bradley Manning Support Network at bradleymanning.org.
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