07/08/14 – Kevin Zeese – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I've got Kevin Zeese.
He's a lawyer and an anti-war activist and other kinds of activists, too, I guess.
A Bradley Manning, Chelsea Manning activist.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
Good to talk to you, too.
Let's see, comehomeamerica.us, that's one of them.
Tell me some more websites where people can look for you.
Well, the major one for me is Popular Resistance, which deals with all the various movements.
It's popularresistance.org.
If you want to see my legal writing, I do a lot of that on the greenshadowcabinet.org.
What kind of shadow cabinet again?
Green.
Oh, I gotcha.
It's an alternative to the existing government.
Gotcha.
All right.greenshadowcabinet.org.
That's interesting.
Okay.
Good.
Now, listen, the reason I brought you on is because you wrote this great thing.
It'll be running on antiwar.com tomorrow.
It's all about Edward Snowden and the case against him.
Well, Hillary Clinton said some things, so let's start with that.
What did Hillary Clinton say?
Well, you know, Hillary, she's spouting the national security state line and saying that Snowden should come back and face trial and claiming that he'll have a fair trial and an opportunity to defend himself.
She's echoing the comments of the current Secretary of State John Kerry, who also said Snowden should man up and come back and face prosecution.
Of course, the reality is that there is not going to be a fair prosecution if Edward Snowden comes back.
It's a rigged deck.
It's really a phony trial that he's charged with, several charges that would give him 30 years in jail, making him more than that.
And, you know, there are charges under the Espionage Act primarily.
I mean, that's an act that was written in 1917.
He mediates prosecution in history under that act, and that President Obama has more than doubled the number of prosecutions under the Espionage Act than any other president.
So we have a history now.
We see how these prosecutions go out, and it's not pretty.
It does not provide justice to the person accused.
Well, and of course, it's right there in the name of the damn thing that they're lying.
Espionage?
What espionage?
He gave this stuff to the Washington Post.
People want to make whatever kind of poster boy out of Greenwald.
He gave this stuff to Barton Gellman, who he's a hardworking reporter, but he's not a controversial reporter.
He's a Washington Post investigative national security beat reporter.
He wrote a biography about Dick Cheney that had a lot of great stuff in it, but it wasn't some kind of controversial fringe media, anything kind of thing.
This is as official as it gets in American society, and that ain't spying.
No, in fact, both the Washington Post and the Guardian won the Pulitzer Prize for public advocacy because of their coverage of the Snowden documents.
So they recognized the Pulitzer Prize, the top journalism award, recognizing that those leaks were done in the public interest, and that that's what would not be included in the evidence if Snowden were prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
The Espionage Act has become a law.
It's just bizarre.
It's recent decisions by lower courts.
So this has to be upheld by higher courts, and I think it will eventually make its way to the Supreme Court in the Chelsea Manning case.
But the key issue is, under lower court decisions, they've decided that the Espionage Act is a strict liability act.
So Whistleblower, who admits that he released these documents, has no defense, because it doesn't matter why he released them.
The very fact of releasing them makes him into someone who committed Espionage Act.
The fact that he did it in the public interest, exposed crimes in order to improve the country and make the country work within the law, would be not told to the jury.
The jury would not know that.
They wouldn't know that Ed Snowden received an award for intelligence integrity from a top former intelligence official in the United States.
It wouldn't even be admissible as testimony at all.
That's right.
I mean, none of that would be allowed in the record.
All right, well, now listen, my absurdity is, I mean, my specialty is absurdity, so let me do that.
Add absurdum, as absurd as I can.
So what if Edward Snowden had leaked, because we're talking about, you know, interpretations of 702 or some kind of thing.
Let's make it easier.
What if he had, you know, documentation that Obama was knowingly using the CIA to, I don't know, say, well, torture, I guess, is de facto legal now.
What's illegal?
How about smuggling heroin?
And he's keeping the profits, him and his old business friends from Chicago.
But they're using the CIA to do it, and it's outright criminal.
They're in violation of 100 felony criminal statutes.
You're telling me that if Edward Snowden leaked that to the Washington Post, that would still be espionage under the court's interpretation of what this law means?
Well, yeah, the law basically says if you leak security documents, you are guilty.
Now, the question is, would those be national security documents?
I don't know if they're, you know, a heroin smuggling ring led by President Obama would be classified as a national security document or not.
But assuming they did somehow classify it that way, and someone leaked those documents, that would be espionage under the law.
So maybe if he wasn't keeping the money for himself, but the CIA was spending it on a secret war in Nicaragua or whatever, that would be sovereign immunity.
And nothing really criminal on their part, because they're the government, they decide what's the law, but it would be criminal on his part if he told the truth about it to the American people.
Yeah, the crazy interpretation, they have a strict liability offense like this for something as important as essentially treason.
I mean, espionage is basically treason, and to have someone strictly liable for that, even if they're leaking documents to expose crimes, to me it's just absurd.
And then on top of that, we also have all these now security state cases, you know, where people have been prosecuted, and you find all sorts of anomalies in the way they go.
For example, they're almost always routinely denied bail, despite the Constitution saying you're right to bail.
They're due process at the horizon, adequate to arrive for a real trial, because a lot of it's conducted in private.
The Constitution calls for a public trial, and yet these trials routinely have large parts kept secret, because they claim it undermines national security to have this public trial in these kinds of cases.
And then these trials often take place in the Eastern District of Virginia, which is in Alexandria, Virginia, and it includes places like the Pentagon, Pentagon City, Roslyn, Crystal City, all areas there, massive numbers of weapons contractors, intelligence contractors, security contractors, the Pentagon, the families of all those people, and that's who makes the jury up.
So you get this very biased jury.
And so it's really, it's impossible to have a fair trial.
In the article you mentioned, I compare it to Alice in Wonderland, where in that scene, Lewis Carroll, the court scene, he really mocks the justice system of England as being unfair.
And so much of what happens in that Alice in Wonderland trial would apply in the Snowden case.
There'd be secrets, there'd be secret evidence, there'd be jurors that are idiots, there'd be a court, there'd be protests, there'd be silence.
Everything that happens in that trial would happen in Snowden.
So, especially Lewis Carroll and John Kerry are saying, hey, Ed Snowden, you should be Alice and get tried in Wonderland.
Well, that's supposed to be a loose metaphor, not a perfect analogy on every point, Kevin, but I guess you got a man on this one.
Well, it's a sad situation, and you know, I'm also a member of the Courage Foundation board, and that's a foundation that's devoted to protecting all whistleblowers, as well as protecting our right to know.
And the Courage Foundation has its first campaign, it's to protect Edward Snowden, and you can help out in a couple of ways.
You go to the Courage Foundation and see how you do it, but basically, there are two things you can do.
One is you can send a picture of yourself saying that you support Edward Snowden and mentioning your city and some country, because one thing we'll be doing is we're going to be approaching those countries to give him a political asylum when his asylum runs out in Russia.
We hope it gets renewed, but we're also looking for alternatives.
The second thing, you raise money for his defense, because it's an expensive process to get his side of the story out.
So check out the Courage Foundation, just like with the Chelsea Manning Support Network, which I'm steering from now on.
Check out the Courage Foundation and support Edward Snowden.
He's done so much to expose such incredible crimes with the government that he deserves our support now.
So even if you just send a picture showing your support, that's a big step.
Yeah, no, that's great.
And that's CourageFoundation.org?
Yeah.
CourageFoundation.org.
Kevin Zeese, everybody, the great Kevin Zeese, PopularResistance.org, GreenShadowCabinet.org, and CourageFoundation.org.
I sure appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
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Hey, Al Scott here.
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