11/26/12 – Nathan Fuller – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the show.
Our first guest today is Nathan Fuller from bradleymanning.org.
Welcome back to the show, Nathan.
How are you doing?
Great, thanks.
Appreciate you having me on.
Well, good.
I appreciate you joining us today.
There's quite a bit of news in the saga of Bradley Manning since we last spoke.
First of all, before we get to the most current stuff, I think the most important that I've heard recently was that the defense counsel offered a plea deal to the prosecutors and said that Manning would agree with them that he did all of what they claim he did if they would drop the charges, calling it espionage and aiding the enemy.
Is that basically correct?
It's actually a little different than that, and it's been kind of hard to clarify because legal jargon can get easily confusing.
But it's actually a plea offer, and it's not a plea deal.
That means it's made to the court and not to the prosecution.
So he's not trying to get any deal necessarily at this point with the government.
What he's trying to do is make the court aware, meaning Judge Lind aware, that he could accept responsibility for passing information to WikiLeaks but that he's not pleading to anything that the government is charging him with.
So basically he wants to get the forensic part out of the way where the government proves that it was Bradley Manning who was on the computer that transmitted information to WikiLeaks.
And he wants to focus the remaining litigation on the fact that he's a whistleblower and not that he did this out of some reckless disregard for his fellow troops.
I see.
Well, and that makes a lot of sense unless – well, does that imply that his lawyers are fairly certain the judge is even going to allow them to pursue that line of defense?
Well, I think they do feel that the judge has been getting more sensitive to the defense's arguments.
And as another example of that, we see that Bradley chose to have just a military judge alone adjudicate his trial instead of a jury of his military peers.
So I think she is listening more and more to his arguments, and it's very possible that she would accept this offer that Bradley pleads to lesser-included offenses, meaning the lesser charges – not what the government is charging, but lesser charges included within those.
For example, that he transmitted information but that it was not a breach of these higher laws.
Okay, and now – was it today or yesterday, March 900 days that Manning has been held without charges?
Is that correct?
It was, I believe, a little more than a week ago, so it's well past 900 now, and it's far from anything close to a speedy trial.
And it'll be near 1,000 days by the time he's – the trial actually starts in February.
Okay, and now I guess most of us, I have to assume, are not veterans or active-duty military, and so we don't know too much about these things.
We hear about speedy and public trial, and we kind of have a context, even if we don't have all the court decisions memorized.
We have a context for what that means in civilian life within a couple of months or something, barring really extraordinary circumstances, right?
But is that different in the military?
It's only different in the sense that in the military, it's less stringent rules.
In civilian court, it has to be 120 days for the trial, but in military law, there is case law that says – that supports the idea that a speedy trial has to start – or the arraignment has to happen anyway within 120 days of the arrest.
And Bradley Manning was arraigned 635 days after he was arrested, so they broke that rule by five times.
So that was the most recent motion before this one this week, was that the defense move to dismiss for lack of a speedy trial.
And that motion will be continued in December 10th through 14th hearing, which will follow this one this week.
Well, and now, you know, try to be fair here to the opposition.
Is it the defense lawyer's fault that – are they the ones dragging this out and asking for continuances and dragging this out?
Or is it the prosecution that's making it take so long?
Almost all of the delays, I believe eight of the nine or so, were requested by the government, by the prosecution.
And the government's convening authority excluded all of those delays from the speedy trial clock.
And the defense wants to examine those delays and examine the justification for those.
And as he proved at the last hearing, there was no real reason for those delays.
The convening authority granted the government's delays basically whenever it asked.
It was just a rubber stamp to push the hearing further along.
And so, no, I mean, the defense has been asking for a speedy trial for nearly two years now.
It's been pressing for a faster trial.
And the government's basically ignored that request.
And it will only be the judge who can hold them to account for that.
Okay.
Now, this piece is in the Daily Telegraph – oh, the Australian Daily Telegraph.
Okay.
Bradley Manning back in court.
It says here that he will be testifying about his treatment at Quantico.
What do you know about his treatment at Quantico?
Well, we were able to learn a lot more than we did before earlier this year when the prosecution handed over e-mails to the defense showing that a Pentagon official, a three-star general who was not at Quantico, ordered Bradley's prevention of injury watch, which is known to us as solitary confinement, maximum security conditions.
Bradley was forced to stand naked at night to be embarrassed by these military officials.
He was only allowed 20 minutes of sunlight every day when he couldn't sit down during those 20 minutes.
He was forced to sit on his bed and not lie down, but he also couldn't sit up against the wall.
He had to keep his back straight up.
And he was also monitored every five minutes.
He had to respond to, you know, are you okay every five minutes.
And a lot of people have called this tantamount to psychological torture.
I mean, I don't think I could hold up under these conditions, and Bradley endured them for nearly 10 months.
And so that's why this is a really huge week for Bradley Manning.
He's going to testify either Wednesday or Thursday, we expect, explaining his treatment and why it was so clearly unlawful and brutal.
And now, you know, the thing of it is, too, and I don't know how much this has to do with the legal case, whether it will end up having anything to do with it or not, but the president of the United States took responsibility himself for the way Manning was treated.
He said he asked about it, talked with the secretary of defense, and decided, okay, everything's fine.
Right, which really makes us wonder, you know, how far up did this order go?
Why was it someone in the Pentagon ordering this treatment?
And, yeah, is Barack Obama going to be held to account for assuring us that, oh, Bradley's fine, when, in fact, he was enduring solitary confinement for no reason, when Brig psychiatrists for nine months recommended that he be on medium security, which means not solitary confinement, and these officials just totally ignored that.
This week is when we'll find out if anyone will pay the price for that.
And now, you know, I don't know exactly what the rules are, again, you know, military versus civilian or not.
I know we already have a big problem with solitary confinement in this country as it's applied to convicts, you know, presumably and mostly in cases of violent crime or, you know, at least people who commit violent crimes once they're in prison or something like that, credibly threatens violent crimes.
Here's a kid who their whole smear campaign against him is how weak he is.
So apparently they don't feel like he's much of a physical threat.
And then here he hasn't been convicted of a thing at all.
That's what makes it so ludicrous.
But the government's defense, their argument is that they were making sure Bradley was safe.
They say this is in Bradley's interest.
They're preventing him from injuring himself.
But when you look at psychiatrists who talked to Bradley for nine months who say the complete opposite, you can see that that doesn't make any sense at all.
Psychiatrists talked to Bradley, determined for nine months straight that he should be on medium security, no solitary confinement, not danger to himself.
And these officials took it on themselves to say otherwise and just totally ignore them.
So it seems clearly punitive.
That's what the issue is this week.
It's unlawful for the government to punish a detainee before trial, and it seems very clear to those who've looked at the case anyway and to the U.N. torture chief who called the treatment of Bradley Manning cruel, inhuman, and degrading, that this was clearly punishment, not in Bradley's interest at all.
I don't know if there's any journalism along these lines, but at least I'm suspicious anyway, just speculative-wise and whatever, that they were deliberately doing this because they were sort of giving him, I don't know, two-thirds or three-quarters of the Jose Padilla treatment.
And what they were doing with this sensory deprivation is they were trying to drive him out of his mind so maybe they can just hold him forever as a psychological problem and not have to actually take him to court.
But it looks like it didn't work.
Others speculate that the government was trying to psychologically mess with him so extensively that he would surrender or submit in some way and implicate Julian Assange if he had any information that he might flip on Assange.
But it's not clear to us that Bradley even had that information.
WikiLeaks is set up to be an anonymous-sourced transparency site, and so it's not clear if that was even possible.
But that seems the government's intent.
We can't really think of another reason why they would want to do this other than to make an example of him, show fellow soldiers this is what happens when you expose crimes.
This is what happens when you don't just go along with what you see.
Well, and as far as implicating Assange, I think they leaked to The Post or The Times or whatever, right, the narrative they were trying to establish was that Assange went to Manning and asked him to go and do it, maybe even identified which files should be taken, that kind of thing, in order that they could make it an espionage conspiracy rather than pure whistleblowing to an online newspaper, which is basically all it is under the old law.
Right, and that's the narrative they're trying to push.
But if you look at the forensics and the logistics of that, they don't really have, as far as I've seen, any concrete proof of that or any evidence that would point to that.
They say WikiLeaks sent a tweet that asks for certain information, but that's not contacting Bradley directly.
There's no indication that Assange and Bradley had any contact.
And as Assange said, he didn't know about Bradley Manning until the government arrested him, until Adrian Lamo informed the FBI on him.
Right, and now, well, jeez, there's so many different tangents we can go down here, but I'm kind of hoping that this part of the interview, maybe we can talk a little bit about Manning himself.
I guess, first of all, if you could tell us, you know, does he seem like he's OK now?
Like he survived the trauma of Quantico more or less intact?
And then maybe after that, if you could go back and get into who was this kid and why was it that he did what he did, because you know how it is.
There are people who just decided they wanted to start paying attention to things like this yesterday, listening now, or last week, you know, and they don't really know about Bradley Manning other than, oh, blood on his hands, blood on his hands.
Right.
Sure, so there are multi-parts to that question, but our indication, from every indication we've seen, is that Bradley is in strong spirits, he's in good spirits, and that he told his aunt that he has a lot of confidence in his legal team.
And I thought it was an inspiring move that he chose to go with the military judge alone.
That means he feels that the proceedings have been, that the judge at least has been listening thus far and feels confident that she might fairly adjudicate this trial despite the violations by the prosecution thus far.
And as for this, you know, the blood on his hands is another narrative that the government wants to push.
I believe it was Admiral Mullen who tried to say that he has the blood of Afghani soldiers on his hands, but, you know, look who's saying that, the person who's perpetrating a giant war on Afghanistan civilians.
And it's Bradley Manning who uncovered civilian casualties, especially in Iraq, that the government did not previously acknowledge, you know, 15,000 uncounted deaths.
You know, this is the kind of thing that Bradley was exposing, not his fellow soldiers' sources or their whereabouts or anything like that.
Right.
I mean, that's the whole thing about this, actually, that really gets me is it's not like there's some things here where, wow, he really did leak the names of a bunch of spies and got them killed, but I'm going to try to rationalize that away because of how valuable the Afghan war logs were or something like that.
No, everything he leaked was confidential and secret level, nothing top secret.
No sources and methods compromised.
Not one example that anyone can credibly cite of a quisling who got killed because it was revealed he was working for us in the WikiLeaks.
And at the same time, he's completely changed the history of the world.
He's completely changed the history of the Iraq war and the way it will be written.
Same with Afghanistan.
And for that matter, a lot of the State Department cables have revealed things that have, you know, moved, you know, major events in history like the Arab Spring apparently got started in Tunisia when not only did this guy with the vegetable cart set himself on fire out of frustration at the local taxes and authorities preventing him from selling vegetables at his little cart.
The reason apparently the reason the reaction of the population to that was so, you know, sudden and widespread was because they had spent the last six weeks talking about what the WikiLeaks State Department cables said about their corrupt dictatorship.
So when this kid set himself on fire, that was the last straw.
And then, blam, the page of history turned.
Everything was different because of this.
So on one hand, it exposed horrible truths that were secret.
It caused wonderful things to happen.
And it didn't get any innocent quizzling skill like in the claim of the smear artist.
It's actually like the best, most perfect whistleblowing thing you could have ever written in a novel or anything.
Right?
It's just great.
Exactly.
And that's why we defend him.
I mean, you talk about Tunisia, these activists in Tunisia set up TuniLeaks, a method to funnel the Tunisia-based WikiLeaks releases into a website that Tunisian activists could look at and understand the corruption of their government.
It's very clear that they were incredibly inspired by WikiLeaks to learn more about their government and when they realized how, you know, the full extent of its corruption to revolt against it.
And the government is starting to concede that WikiLeaks actually didn't cause any harm.
Embarrassment is not harm.
And that's why they've moved to preclude harm from discussion at the merits portion of the trial.
They're saying it's not relevant to Bradley's guilt or innocence whether WikiLeaks caused any harm.
You know, he could have.
They indirectly aided the enemy by just making this info available.
They don't say that he caused any harm and it's pretty clear that, you know, as a whistleblower Bradley understood that this is not top secret info.
This is secret or lower and that's not going to put people at harm.
And the government, as you say, has not pointed to a single source who's been, you know, killed or injured or had anything worse than maybe forced to relocate.
And embarrassment, again, is not harm.
Well, and now when it comes to aiding the enemy, I mean, come on, we all know it's in the chat logs assuming that they're correct, which I think even if they're not 100 percent complete there, nobody's really accused him of being manipulated or forged.
He makes it pretty clear in there that he had pure whistleblower motives.
In fact, the rat even asked him why not sell this stuff to the Russians or the Chinese or something.
He said, because that's not what I'm trying to do, make money here.
That's not what I'm trying to, you know, cause worldwide reforms against criminal actions and, you know, all this kind of language.
But so how do they, they're saying that Al-Qaeda could have read about some of these revelations in the Pakistani newspapers and that would amount to aiding them?
It's totally absurd.
The essential argument here is that Al-Qaeda reads WikiLeaks.org but doesn't read the New York Times.
I mean, look how many top secret bits of information are on the front page of the New York Times.
Are those people ever prosecuted?
Is Bob Woodward ever in jail for putting top secret information in his books?
No, never going to have it.
If you took the side of the war party on this, you could point a finger, you know, with kind of more to back you up at anyone who's not even using any classified data at all, but just making a very compelling case against the government's current policy there.
I mean, if it goes without saying that they're convinced whatever they're doing is for all of our best interest, then any real persuasive argument against what they're doing is, you know, just like the Weekly Standard and the National Review all called treason, Fox News all called treason back in 2003.
Any disagreement with the national security state's policy is tantamount to aiding the enemy, right?
Exactly.
I mean, they're trying to equate whistleblowing with terrorism.
You know, saying he's indirect by just knowing that they could access it, but they still want to make sure we're all still, still keep al-Qaeda and the Taliban in our minds whenever thinking about WikiLeaks.
And it's just absurd.
The people in Afghanistan and Iraq knew about what the U.S. government was doing.
It's the U.S. people that Bradley was trying to inform.
It's the U.S. people that this has been kept secret from.
You know, he wanted a better and more informed democracy.
And you can see how the government feels about that with their reaction to these releases.
All right.
So the best I understand it, we've got basically the obvious kind of bottom line reason he ought to be let go is because this isn't criminal activity.
He's an American hero.
And they got to put giant posters of him in Times Square for his greatness and all of that.
But then we have the three technicalities, which are severe technicalities.
I don't mean that in a minimizing way.
The speedy trial, the abuse at Quantico, in my view, clearly amounting to torture.
And then also the fact, which I'm not sure if you'd mentioned this yet, but the fact that the president and the secretary of defense have both already pronounced him guilty.
They have both already said in declarative statements he broke the law or something along those lines.
So then now I'm referencing back the fact, like you mentioned, that Manning has agreed to forego a jury trial and just stick with this judge.
And I wonder whether they're trying to make the argument that the president's ordered to you to consider me guilty.
You know, judge, we can't trust you to overlook that.
I mean, what would they have to do there, push for her to recuse herself?
Is it her, I think you said, to recuse herself?
Or are they not going to mount that objection because they like this judge, they want to go ahead and keep her?
Or what's with that?
Well, that was mentioned last December at the article 32 pre-trial hearing to decide if this would go to arraignment.
But it hasn't been brought up in litigation yet.
And that's something we might see at trial, that both, yeah, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, and Commander-in-Chief President Obama both declared him guilty.
And that's a clear violation of military law, which prohibits influencing, you know, undue influence of the trial.
It's clear that the military judge and military officials who would be on the jury take their orders from the commander-in-chief and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
They've declared him guilty.
How could people go against that and still expect to retain their jobs?
It's a lot of pressure put on these people.
But it's unclear whether or not Coombs will bring a motion on that or whether he expects that will just be so quickly shot down that he will instead try to just work with Colonel Denise Lind, who's the military judge here.
I guess we'll find that out fairly soon, though.
Yeah.
Ah, man, I hate to say it, but whatever hope I have for this kid getting justice is just, you know, evaporating.
I just can't.
These people have to admit to doing too many things wrong in order for them to let him go based on how wrong they did things.
You know what I mean?
Well, even if the judge doesn't think that the torture at Quantico merits dismissing the case and previous cases have been dismissed for less abuse of a pretrial detainee, but even if she doesn't want to dismiss charges, she can give him credit for sentencing, so maybe seven or ten days credit for every day he was abused at Quantico.
And he was abused for nearly ten months.
And so that, if he's given a relatively short sentence, not a life sentence, that could have a serious impact.
So there are ways that this can at least be mitigated in some ways, and we hope that if the judge doesn't dismiss that, then she'll at least consider that a reasonable way to deal with this.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I was thinking of Daniel Ellsberg, and I'm pretty sure I'm very roughly paraphrasing the story here, but I think basically the story that he told me, and I think this is pretty much the way it is in the book too, is that the reason the judge dismissed the charges and let him go was because it came to the judge's attention.
I think the prosecutor admitted to the judge, Hey, judge, I found out that Nixon had actually hired some Cuban hitmen to take out Mr. Ellsberg.
And the judge said, That's it.
That is it.
You're free to go.
Enough.
Enough.
And so it basically had nothing to do, it was the fact that Nixon had taken out a hit on Ellsberg's life, something completely extrajudicial, the kind of thing that's perfectly fine to do now, I guess.
That was the only reason that they let him go.
Otherwise, they were going to go ahead and give Ellsberg life.
Yeah, that's what they wanted to do.
But I would argue there have been some severe enough breaches of military law in this case to warrant that, to warrant a full dismissal.
I mean, torture for 10 months, solitary confinement, nothing close to a speedy trial, nearly a thousand days.
This has not been a fair trial.
I mean, we're not going to get something as dramatic as the president ordering a hit on him.
But he declared him guilty.
I mean, many articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice have been violated here.
It would really, I think, be in a judge's legal interest anyway to then dismiss the charges.
Yeah, I'd sure like to see that.
And you know what, I'm going to go ahead and emphasize this point, too, just because I've gotten a lot of response on this in the past.
When I pointed it out, people really went, oh, yeah.
And it's another Nixon anecdote, that Nixon had said something along the lines of, yeah, Manson's guilty, everybody knows he did it or whatever.
And then he fell all over himself trying to take that back and say, oh, my God, I'm so sorry and whatever and whatever, because he was screwing around with us.
They were in the middle of a prosecution.
The state government was prosecuting the guy.
Nixon wasn't in the chain of command, had no responsibility whatsoever for the prosecution of Charles Manson and the Manson family.
He had no reason to believe, no one had any reason to believe that he had explicit or direct influence or control over the jury or what they would think.
It was even just the appearance of impropriety that the president's pronouncement could have affected the trial.
They were worried that the whole damn thing was going to get thrown out.
And that was, you know, I just want to emphasize how much more removed Nixon was from that trial than Obama, Secretary Panetta, the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff are from this one.
It's just there's no comparison whatsoever.
If that was a problem, then this is a freaking problem.
It should be a much bigger problem.
And I believe the day after Obama made his statement, there was some press spokesman, spokesperson's attempt to say, oh, we don't want to comment specifically.
But first of all, the damage had already been done.
He's already declared him guilty.
Second of all, he didn't fall all over himself the way Nixon did.
He's not trying to clear himself in that regard, not realize that command influence is a legal problem.
And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dempsey, did not make any attempt to apologize for his remarks.
He's been said nothing since he said Manning did violate the law, which is totally illegal for him to say under the UCMJ.
But, yeah, you're right.
It's a much bigger problem here, and that has not really been addressed.
Well, a lot of things have changed since then for the better and for the worse, so I guess it still remains to be seen.
But we'll stay hopeful.
Everyone, you can take part in helping the hope happen here at BradleyManning.org.
They still need your help.
Please head on over there and do what you can.
Thanks very much for your time, Nathan.
Thank you.
Appreciate having me.
That's Nathan Fuller from BradleyManning.org, the Bradley Manning Support Network.
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