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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.scotthorton.org is the website.
We're here live from noon to two Eastern time on No Agenda Radio, Monday through Friday, less Thursdays.
Our next guest is Michael Ratner.
He is President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and he's representing Julian Assange.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
How are you?
Good.
Good to be with you, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And so now, what's the latest with Julian Assange, anyway, the head of WikiLeaks?
He's holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London still.
Is that right?
Yes.
I mean, there's not a lot of movement there.
I mean, there's still a huge amount of pressure being put by the Ecuadorian government on both the United Kingdom and Sweden, and the pressure is twofold.
One, they are asking the United Kingdom to give Julian Assange a safe passage to Ecuador, because he has been given asylum by the country of Ecuador, and therefore the feeling of the Ecuadorians is that he's entitled to go to Ecuador without being arrested when he leaves the embassy.
Unfortunately, the British don't agree with that at this point, but we'll see what happens.
And the other piece of the pressure is to say to the Swedes, why don't you interview him in the embassy in Ecuador, or we'll bring him to Sweden, to our own embassy in Sweden, and you can interview him there.
But so far, there's been no movement on there.
The latest piece, there was two recent pieces of news related to Julian Assange.
One of them is my office, the Center for Constitutional Rights, about three days ago, last week, actually, sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice.
You can go to our ccrjustice.org website and see it.
The letter is on behalf of Julian Assange, but from the Center for Constitutional Rights and Julian's other principal lawyer, Judge Garzón, former Judge Garzón of Spain, and it's asking or really demanding of the Justice Department, tell us whether or not there's a prosecution going on of Julian Assange.
We don't know what answer to expect.
We believe there is a serious grand jury going on, and they're ready to extradite him when they get a chance.
On the other hand, if they were to answer that letter with an unequivocal no, then Julian Assange would feel like he could freely leave the Ecuadorian embassy, go to Sweden, deal with the questions in Sweden, and then be a free man.
I don't know when we're going to get an answer.
But now that hasn't changed since it came out that the U.S. government has labeled him an official enemy of the state on the level of Ayman al-Zawahiri?
Doesn't that mean that they could kill him or that they could take him off to a torture dungeon in Morocco or Thailand or something?
I'm glad you raised that.
And that is the other latest piece of news since we talked.
In fact, I've read those documents.
What happened is there was a series of documents revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request.
The request was on behalf of a Army or U.S. Air Force, actually, woman in the United Kingdom who'd been dismissed or left the Air Force.
And she'd been accused of, at least the allegations accused her of, meeting with various friends of Julian Assange, going to the trial of Julian Assange going on in the United Kingdom, being sympathetic to Julian Assange, being sympathetic to Bradley Manning, saying that the documents revealed by Manning, allegedly by Manning and by Assange, were ones that she felt shouldn't be secret at all.
So this is an Army analyst or a computer person with high-level security.
And so the military decided, we'd better investigate this person while she was in the military.
And they begin an investigation.
And the investigation is under a statute called Communicating with the Enemy.
It's the same one they are prosecuting Bradley Manning for, what's called 104.
And it's a very, very serious one.
It actually contains a death penalty.
And so if you look at it on its face, what these documents seem to indicate is that this analyst, by her communicating with Julian Assange, was being investigated for communicating with the enemy, which then, as you said, would put Julian Assange in the category of an Al-Qaeda person, a Hamas person, et cetera, or Al-Qaeda in particular, and its subsidiaries, and could either be captured or killed.
Now, that's one way to read the documents.
That's of course terrible.
I mean, that our government would do that and investigate Julian Assange as a, quote, enemy.
The other way to read those documents, and it's no less serious for Julian Assange, is the way essentially they've treated Bradley Manning.
If you look at the Bradley Manning case, allegedly Bradley Manning uploaded documents to WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks then put them out.
What they're claiming in the Manning case is that Manning, when he gave the documents to WikiLeaks, assuming he did so, when he allegedly gave those documents to WikiLeaks, that he knew that those documents would be read by, quote, the enemy, Al-Qaeda.
WikiLeaks was the intermediary and can be accused of arguably aiding the enemy by doing that, but in fact was not the enemy itself, but was seriously treated as aiding the enemy.
Manning was considered to be aiding the enemy directly, or communicating with the enemy through WikiLeaks.
You could say that this new set of documents that we got on Julian Assange and this analyst in the United Kingdom really are a similar story, which is to say, the analyst in the United Kingdom, they feared would take documents that were secure documents, she would give them to WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks would publish them, and then they would be read by Al-Qaeda, and therefore the analyst in the United Kingdom would be indirectly aiding the enemy, Al-Qaeda, through WikiLeaks.
That's another way to read the documents, in which Julian Assange is not the enemy, but is aiding the enemy.
You can't tell from the documents which one.
It certainly could be that Julian Assange is the enemy, or it could be that he is not simply, because it's a serious crime, the intermediary for aiding the enemy.
It's very serious in either case.
Right.
But now, I mean, as long as that's not clear, then is it really clear, well, first of all, I think, isn't there pretty good journalism that they do, in fact, have a grand jury?
I forget whether the government official sources have said, yes, there is really an Assange grand jury or not, but I was at least under the impression that there was some good journalism saying that there was.
But then you were saying, if the U.S. government was to make clear that, no, there's not a grand jury, and we are not seeking espionage charges, etc., then he would feel fine to go to Sweden, you say?
There's no question there's been a grand jury since December 2010.
There's been a grand jury going on for quite a while.
We actually have official documents from that grand jury.
We have a copy of a subpoena issued to one of the people who would testify at that grand jury.
We have copies of subpoenas that were sent to Twitter, asking for the records of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
So there's no question it's a grand jury.
The grand jury is investigating conspiracy to commit espionage, and it's investigating Julian Assange.
Whether or not it's returned an indictment yet, obviously I don't know, because that would be a sealed secret indictment.
The documents from the private security company Stratfor, that were allegedly gotten by Anonymous, do say that there's a sealed indictment against Julian Assange.
But in any case, it establishes a grand jury investigating conspiracy to commit espionage, and that they've subpoenaed records having to do with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
So that's established.
The question is whether there's an indictment.
And the real question is whether, even though there was a grand jury, is this government really planning to indict and ask for Julian Assange's extradition.
I think the answer to that is yes.
And that's why Julian Assange is in the embassy in Ecuador, because he knows if he goes to Sweden it'll be a one-way trip to the United States and into the awful prison system, the same one that Bradley Manning was essentially tortured in.
So that's why he's taken refuge in Ecuador.
The letter that we sent to the Department of Justice, we have some hope that it will help clarify that situation, but I'm not holding my breath either.
As far as plain old freedom of speech issues and all that, would you say that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are simply, you know, metaphorically speaking, or whatever, they're just the New York Times.
They're really no different.
It's just journalism.
It's not espionage in any sense.
I think that's 100% right.
Why I think this case is causing so much difficulty is that Julian Assange did something that a lot of the major media never do, which is actually reveal a fair amount of the, quote, secrets of our government and its crimes and its corruption, et cetera.
But to every listener, to everyone out there, he is really in the same situation as the New York Times.
If you think about it, the New York Times on occasion, when they get their courage up, will tell us something about what our government's doing secretly.
The best example recently, of course, is the warrantless wiretapping program run under President Bush, which James Risen revealed.
Now, it's true the New York Times spent a year sitting on that story and even asking the White House what would happen if they revealed it.
But they did reveal it.
And so you have to ask yourself, what's the difference between the New York Times and James Risen, on the one hand, revealing a highly classified secret, arguably more classified and secret than anything WikiLeaks did, what's the difference between that and WikiLeaks and Julian Assange?
And the answer is, as you really have implied, is absolutely zero, that they should be treated exactly the same, which is to say, they're legitimate journalists doing their jobs and the government should not be saber-rappling, which is what they've done, and more with the grand jury.
When the government's asked what, you know, when they were asked a while ago, the State Department was actually asked, what's the story with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, they said, well, we have a continuing investigation going on.
So they would not really say that about the New York Times.
So Julian Assange is being really treated differently.
Yeah.
Now, I mean, seriously, I almost interrupted you laughing when you talked about the government's theory that journalism is the same thing as communicating with the enemy.
I mean, under that theory, if you were a local reporter for the Austin American-Statesman and you said, hey, this company in town that stores dangerous chemicals doesn't even have a chain link fence around it, and what if a bad guy got it?
If you wrote that in the local paper, then, oh, you're telling Al-Qaeda what to blow up rather than you're exposing a security hole that needs to be fixed or whatever.
You could spin basically any journalism as, or for that matter.
It's a laughable story.
You're exactly right, Scott.
That's exactly correct.
If I have a reservoir upstate by my house, it's a New York City reservoir.
They've now put up security because they're afraid someone's going to poison the reservoir and blow the dam or something.
But if I wrote a story that said there's a weakness in the dam and we ought to fix it, could they argue that I was therefore aiding Al-Qaeda in helping make a target?
And that's how crazy the whole theory, the whole Bradley Manning case is completely crazy.
The worst charge against Bradley Manning is that he's aiding the enemy, and the enemy is Al-Qaeda.
And the point is, any time you write any story, or let's say this program you and I are talking on right now, and Al-Qaeda listens to this program, or somebody, some alleged terrorist listened to it somewhere in the world, is that considered aiding the enemy?
Because that happens?
That's completely absurd and crazy.
Well, and you know, we were just talking with Noreen Shaw about how when the Bureau for Investigative Journalism did all their good work counting dead civilians in Pakistan, that anonymous administration officials accused them of aiding the enemy, and they didn't say, and so we're coming to get them, but they were, you know, like Ashcroft, using the language of the treason statute to say you shouldn't criticize them for taking your liberty away, that kind of thing.
The implication is that really any bad PR on the United States, any reporting of facts about dead kids in Pakistan that make America look bad could help bad guy enemy recruitment against us, and so therefore is aid and comfort to the enemy.
That's right.
What that tells you is that who gets prosecuted or persecuted is really as long as the official's arm, which is to say, if the official decides who they want to go after for political reasons, in this case it was Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, and not the New York Times.
So I think that's a really strong point.
And now, can I ask you about the Manning case?
Do you know much about that?
Yeah, let's do a minute on the Manning, and then I have to run.
Yeah, I was just going to ask you, there are a couple of real big, obvious things, like you're not allowed to torture people, and also the commander-in-chief is not allowed to instruct the judge and the entire jury that the accused is guilty before he's had a single day of his trial, as has happened here.
In fact, even the defense secretary has announced the exact same thing to his military subordinates.
And there's a few others, but I'll let you go with those, and my assertion that, like, come on, man, you just can't prosecute somebody after you've already done these wrong things to him.
His due process is already ruined.
His speedy trial is another one.
So now my question for you is, what wins, politics or the law?
Are they going to nail him to the wall anyway?
You know, we follow Manning closely.
We send people to the trial.
We actually have a lawsuit that people can, again, look at our website, it's on behalf of The Nation, WikiLeaks, et cetera, because the first thing about that trial, which is really crazy, is when I go there, none of the public papers are actually public.
Even though they're not classified, like the motions that are filed, the court's order, and in all kinds of cases, discovery, whatever it says about witnesses, you can't get those papers.
So you're sitting there, you feel like you're in a cave looking at shadows on a wall, because even lawyers can't understand the proceedings because none of the papers are public.
So we went to court just to get the papers public in the Bradley Manning case, and so far we've lost.
We lost in the firm of the judge, we lost in the middle appeals court in the military, and now we're in the highest military court, and I'm hopeful, hopeful that we'll win.
That's just another aspect of how bad the Bradley Manning case is.
But the two points you bring out, Scott, are really important.
One is that he was kept in nine months of what constitutes cruel and human and degrading treatment and most likely torture, and that's not just me saying it, that's the U.N. repertoire for torture, Juan Mendez, saying conditions under which Manning were held, which is stripping, you know, all kinds of hard, you know, no mattress, no clothes, et cetera, those are essentially cruel and human and degrading treatment and torture.
And you ask yourself, well, why was that?
Well, it wasn't for any reason except one, which is, or two maybe.
One, they wanted to punish him before he actually was convicted, and so it's a type of punishment that's illegal because it's before he's convicted.
And secondly, they want him, they think he somehow has evidence around Julian Assange and what Julian Assange did, that they want him to testify against Julian Assange or give them evidence.
And I don't know whether he has anything or not, but so far, even through their torture, Bradley Manning has apparently not been willing to bend an inch on this stuff, which is quite remarkable.
So on that point, there is going to be a motion and a hearing at Fort Meade in the next few weeks, really, I think, on whether the trial, the charges ought to be dismissed because Bradley Manning was tortured.
The second point you made, which is also a strong one, is since when does the president pronounce somebody guilty, which is what Obama did here, before there's an actual trial?
And that also should cause for, it should be a cause for dismissal.
But I think as you ended it, and then I sort of have to end as well, Scott, is as you ended it, is this going to be political or legal?
And I think in this case, so far, we're seeing a political case being brought and not a legal case.
Yeah, which just means more precedent set for the rest of us, too.
But your honor, in the case of the U.S. versus Bradley Manning, they threw out the speedy trial as a requirement for a trial anymore.
That's right, the speedy trial.
We didn't talk about that.
It's 120 days normally.
If you go to the WikiLeaks website, it tells you how many days.
If you remember that Bradley Manning has been in prison, it's nearing three years now.
So that's like nine times the amount of time he's been in prison that he should have been under the speedy trial rule without having a trial.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate it, Michael.
Bye-bye, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Michael Ratner from the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here.
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