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And if you're paying close attention, you can tell I'm getting back in the habit of reading books.
Well, I knocked out going to Tehran, and I thought, you know what, if I can sit down and read that thing in a day and a half, I can do anything.
And so, I'm back into it, and now I finally got around to reading The Passion of Bradley Manning, The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History by Chase Medar, who writes sometimes for Tom Dispatch, and is a lawyer from New York.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Great to be talking to you live, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
I'm thrilled to be in the company of Flint and Hilary Mann Leverett.
I think that's such an important book they wrote, Going to Tehran, and I think everyone should read it.
Yeah.
You know what?
I just saw your review of their book.
Mm-hmm.
It was good.
I saw that they liked it, too.
Yeah.
They did.
Yeah.
Well, no.
Yeah, that's good, and I sure hope that people will take a look at that thing, too.
It's something else.
This is a bit easier to handle, although it's deceptive because it's thin, but the words are really small.
And I don't mean short words.
I mean the type.
The font is like eight or six or something.
Anyway.
So there's a second edition of the book coming out from Verso, and I'm hoping they're going to make it more readable.
It'll be out in April.
Well, it was plenty readable.
I'm not trying to turn people off of the thing, but I'm very happy to hear you got a new version coming out.
And now, are you working on updates right now based on the news from last week?
Oh, I'm afraid it's a little too late for me to get that under the wire into the new edition, but yeah, there's big news last week.
As many of your listeners might know, Bradley Manning did admit to the facts of 10 out of the 22 charges, 10 of the lesser charges.
This is very similar.
This is all but pleading guilty on those 10 lesser charges, which will carry a term of 20 years in prison.
It's not a plea bargain because they haven't bargained for anything, the defense.
This is just on their own.
It's one-sided by the defense, but I think it's a smart move because the defense lawyer knows that Bradley Manning is going to do time, and by showing this gesture, that might be a good disarming way to at least push for the best possible sentence.
Well, after all, he is pleading quote-unquote guilty to the things he's actually guilty of.
All this aiding the enemy is a bunch of nonsense, like he had Zawahiri's interests in mind or something.
Come on.
Yeah.
And the aiding the enemy charge that you just mentioned, it's a capital offense, even though the Obama administration has made it clear they're not pressing for the death penalty, but it still carries possible life in prison.
It's the most serious of the charges leveled against Bradley Manning, and it is also the most ridiculous, because as you said, it's not as if Manning had any intention of aiding Al-Qaeda.
I mean, that's just ludicrous.
It's a bit like prosecuting Nike shoes for aiding the enemy, because I'll say some Al-Qaeda operative was photographed wearing vintage Air Jordans, and yes, Al-Qaeda, they have access to the internet like a great many hundreds of millions of other people in the world, but that doesn't mean that leaking the WikiLeaks is specifically aiding them, either intent or an actual outcome.
Well, and let's get a little further into that, because you quote the chat logs at length.
I guess I'll let you describe the chat logs, if you would, because I think they kind of need description, but then specifically on the motive, and of course, he made a statement last week in court as well along these same lines, and he's just, it's funny in a way, right?
Like, if you were writing a movie like this, it would be too corny for you to put so many absolutely purely political whistleblower words in somebody's mouth.
Yeah.
No, I'd be accused of overdoing it, but these chat logs that he just mentioned...
Although it comes across as perfectly genuine coming from him.
I don't mean to say that, like he's faking it and overdoing it himself.
It's almost unbelievable how obvious it is, his good intentions.
Yeah.
You know, people can disagree about the impact of the leaks and their effect, but I don't think there's really any room for debate about Bradley Manning's political intention, and that intention is that people need to know what the U.S. government is doing.
They need to know how the war in Iraq was really going and how the war in Afghanistan is still really going.
And I fail to see what is so objectionable about that.
But we see in the chat logs between Bradley Manning and the famous hacker turned police informant Adrian Lamo all of these things, too, why Bradley Manning did leak these things.
And he just says at one point in these chat logs, instant message chats, that I think people need to see the truth regardless of who they are so they can make well-informed decisions as a public.
And it's just very disheartening that that's taken as some kind of extremist, utopian goal here in 2013.
This has long been a central part of American political thought, a central part of any kind of liberal, democratic political thought, that people should know what their government is doing, that government should be as open and as transparent as realistically possible.
And it's amazing how moderate, I think, Bradley Manning's rhetoric is, too, in these chat logs and in the long statement that he read aloud in court last Thursday.
There's nothing about total transparency.
You know, this isn't a statement from the Red Brigades or the Weather Underground.
This is just about people need to know what is going on, what their militaries are doing, what their governments are doing in time of war.
It's very clear.
All right.
Now, when it comes to Bradley Manning, the person rather than the character, the well, and when it comes to the motive, TV likes to focus on his gender identity issues, right?
He was gay or he was in the process of maybe getting surgery or who knows what.
And apparently this is why he did the leak, if I read the New York Times correctly.
I'm not sure what one has to do with the other, but...
Again, this is something that you and I both see as totally ridiculous, just from the standpoint of mere logic.
There are 850,000 Americans, plus or minus, with a top-secret security clearance, and you can bet that several thousand of these people with top-secret security clearance are gay or lesbian or bisexual, and probably a few who are contemplating gender transition.
So that is not anywhere close to an adequate explanation of why Bradley Manning leaked what he leaked.
But this is something that whistleblowers and political dissenters of all kinds always have to endure.
They are always marginalized.
Their motives are always pathologized and psychologized.
So instead of being about the politics of the nation, it becomes about individual psychology, and it's essentially a smear tactic.
Daniel Ellsberg had to put up with it.
It's after all why Richard Nixon sent his goons to break into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, so they could dig up dirt on him and smear him as some kind of individual nutcase, instead of as a principled, politically-minded person, deeply concerned with the fate of his country and the fate of other countries, too.
On the other hand, in your book, you do yourself go at length to explain how difficult he found joining the army and fitting in with the army, and how much trouble he had.
If I want to be charitable to the people pointing out how gay he was all the time, that's probably what they mean, that they're getting at, right, is that he just didn't fit in with the army, and so he did it still as a personal thing, not necessarily because of his gayness, but because of how badly he fit in with everyone else, that he, you know, shouldn't have been there.
He wasn't, you know.
Anyway, you understand what I'm trying to say.
Yeah, I understand what you're saying, and I think it's true that Bradley Manning did struggle in the military, and he was almost discharged from the military right after basic training.
And I think he's someone who, it's fair to say, is not really cut out for the military.
I don't mean that in a slanderous way at all.
We all know plenty of people who are very good at what they do.
They're productive citizens who contribute to the life of the community around them, but who aren't military types.
I mean, I know plenty of people who have worked in the military, served in the military, and they're also productive.
But Bradley Manning has always just shown a fierce independence of mind and of will, and that's not the kind of behavior that gets rewarded in any military.
And, you know, what is to say what's remarkable to me about Bradley Manning's own story in the military is he was, I think, a true believer in military service, and he really wanted to serve in the military and fit in, and he tried his damnedest.
And he, after getting bullied and having problems at almost every step of the way in training, he really believed in this kind of national patriotic service.
Not in a jingoistic way that the U.S. is always right and we can do whatever the hell we want, but he just felt this kind of patriotic responsibility.
And according to childhood friends, that's something that he had felt from a pretty young age.
Well, and you write in the book, too, that he took it very seriously that other soldiers were counting on his intelligence product to make sure that, you know, things were okay and that kind of thing.
And he took that very seriously, that people were counting on him.
Yeah.
He really embraced his job at first as an Army intelligence analyst, and he hoped that he really thought that Operation Iraqi Freedom was going to be about Iraqi freedom and that he would be helping with that.
And again, this is true of many whistleblowers, Daniel Ellsberg, too.
They aren't malcontents.
They aren't, you know, the nutballs that the media try to portray them as.
Actually they are true believers in the system in which they serve, who realize that they are nearly alone in that kind of squeaky clean, by-the-bookness, who believe in that kind of principle.
That's true of Thomas Drake, the national security agency whistleblower, too, I think.
And again, I think Manning's real downfall was due to the fact that he really thought Operation Iraqi Freedom was going to be about Iraqi freedom.
And when he found out otherwise and took a harder look at the kind of work he was being asked to do as a U.S. Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, he had to leak.
All right, now, there's so much to cover here, but I was hoping that you could kind of give us a brief overview of what it was that he did leak.
The Iraq and Afghan war logs, of course, the collateral murder video and the State Department cables, maybe people don't really remember.
They really think this WikiLeaks story is just about that weird white-haired Australian guy.
And they don't really know about, well, what was the substance?
Every once in a while, if you read the newspaper, they'll go, well, there's some WikiLeaks that explain this, that, and the other thing.
But they still don't want to really give them credit.
They only have to, you know?
Yeah.
I'm glad you asked that, because so often the actual leaks themselves get lost or obscured in the whole drama of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
But it's important to remember what's really at stake, and it's a rich trove of information.
They fall into a few groups.
First, you have the Iraq war logs.
Now, these are mostly field reports, low-level stuff, none of it's top secret, from the Iraq war.
And they are richly informative.
We've learned all kinds of things.
We have learned that the practice of torture in Iraq was ongoing and widely practiced by the Iraqi authorities, even after the U.S. occupation.
We also learned that it was explicit U.S. policy to not interfere with this torture.
This was Fragmentary Order 242, issued from high up in the Department of Defense.
And that goes against the official rhetoric that was coming out of the military and the White House at the time.
They were saying that this was a war for human rights, we were there to stop torture.
We know that was a lie now.
Not to mention casualty estimates, civilian death estimates, which the military had falsely denied that they were keeping track of, and just so many tragic small-scale snapshots of checkpoints, shootings gone wrong, of night raids gone wrong.
We also have that kind of mosaic portrait in field reports of the Afghan war, where scholars and journalists and writers are still sifting through it, but it is this mosaic, pointless portrait of counterinsurgency warfare that is failing.
You have the potted history of individual outposts, and the failure of their efforts to get the Taliban out of particular regions.
And again, checkpoint shootings and night raids gone wrong.
There's the Granai massacre, an air raid that demolished an entire village.
It's a rich trove of information that people are still sifting through.
Now the State Department cables, that's about a quarter million cables, more than half of which are not classified in any way.
And this is about U.S. statecraft more generally.
You see the State Department acting as a lobbyist for American garment makers to keep the minimum wage down in Haiti, poorest country in the Americas.
The Leverets, whom you were just talking to, use a lot of the WikiLeaks in their analysis of Barack Obama's policy towards Iran.
Was there a good-faith effort to negotiate with Iran in the first two years of Obama's presidency?
And that's a very sure response, because they have access to the documents, thanks to WikiLeaks.
So it's a rich trove of information, scholars and journalists are still working with it, and it resulted in thousands of media stories all over the world.
So these leaks are important, and we are much better off knowing what our government has been doing there.
And you know what, too, and I don't want to overstate this, because what the hell, I ain't Tunisian, but at least it sure seemed at the beginning that the background of the revolution in Tunisia wasn't just that everybody hated their government and the kid set himself on fire after the local cops' harassment and all of that, but that the background was everyone had spent the last six weeks talking about what the WikiLeaks cables said about the government of Tunisia and just how absolutely corrupt our sock puppet dictator Ben Ali was, and his wife and her family, and how they were just looting the whole country.
And everybody already knew this, but here it all is, it might as well be on the front page of the New York Times, it's right here in the State Department cables, the whole society was talking about it, and that was the background of the revolution that started the Arab Spring.
And then of course it also brought in friends from Anonymous, were drawn right to the story and actually helped the people keep their alternative internet up and going, helped to give them medical advice in the middle of being attacked by government soldiers and that kind of thing.
It was important.
History of the world changed.
And absolutely, to have everyone in Tunisia's suspicions about the extent of the corruption in the government confirmed by the U.S. State Department, which they see as a reliable source, was very powerful.
And that added more sparks that set the uprising going.
And we don't want to overstate the role of WikiLeaks there, but it certainly helped.
And I talked to one Tunisian expat, interviewed him for the book, he said you really can't tell the story of the Tunisian uprising, rebellion, without talking about WikiLeaks at least a little.
You know, Scott, isn't it U.S. policy to spread democracy in the Middle East?
This should be a good thing.
This is another reason to give Bradley Manning the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
We only want to, our government only wants to spread democracy in countries that we don't already control their dictatorship.
But now here's the thing that you point out in the book, that, you know, you take one step back and you look at the mosaic painted by the State Department cables, for example, and you see that none of this has the first thing to do with the interests of the American people whatsoever.
It's simply just the corruption of empire and special interests.
Yeah, there's a lot of lobbying for special corporate interests.
And I can tell you that no one in my extended family, and we're a really varied lot spread over geographically in income groups in the United States, benefits from the State Department lobbying for big pharmaceuticals companies in France or lobbying to keep the minimum wage down in Haiti.
Why is our State Department doing this?
And, you know, it annoys me when people say, oh, well, Bradley Manning, he's not really a whistleblower because all the stuff, it's not real atrocities or crimes.
I find this stuff to be thoroughly atrocious, even though it is, strictly speaking, not illegal.
And we should know about it.
Right.
Well, and that's the thing, too.
We were talking about this with Kevin Zeese the other day that Manning talked about at his and, you know, in his statement in court last week, which was that he very specifically went through and made sure that he wasn't giving up anything that would reveal sources and methods.
That was the reason it's all only secret or confidential level or lower than that.
He was certainly not trying to, you know, get anyone hurt at all.
He was trying very hard not to.
And so that's why you don't see the very worst things in there, because the very worst things are all top secret and probably do concern, you know, or have sources and methods written into the same cable because it's top secret, that kind of deal.
So he didn't even mess with that stuff.
He said this is all the stuff that shows almost criminal behavior.
This is it ought to be bad enough to wet your whistle and get you going, basically.
Right.
Yeah.
But, you know, for listeners who aren't that familiar with the story, you touched on something really important.
And these leaks have been out for nearly three years now, and no one has been able to show any evidence, any strong evidence beyond speculation that anyone has been harmed as a result.
Not a hair on the head of a single U.S. soldier on a single State Department source on a single Afghan collaborator.
The evidence is not there.
But the same smears were leveled against Daniel Ellsberg, too, that he had blood on his hands, that he had, you know, harmed all kinds of people, civilians as well.
And this drives me nuts, because we have had colossal carnage of civilians and even of soldiers in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan.
And there is a fair amount of media silence about this, a stony silence that doesn't want to cop to the real damage that's been done.
And yet these same people in the media suddenly become brave gushers of humanitarian concern when it comes to these imaginary, purely speculative deaths that have been supposedly caused by WikiLeaks.
It's horribly hypocritical.
I think it stinks.
Yeah, it seems to me the only thing good about it is how laughable it is, right?
When Wolf Blitzer, for the first time in six years, mentions a civilian casualty in Afghanistan, it's one that could possibly be caused if one of Afghans' quizzling traitors, you know, gets his for selling his own country out to the foreign imperialist occupiers, which never even happened.
Yeah.
I mean, it's pretty ridiculous.
I think the people who have blood on their hands are precisely Bradley Manning's persecutors, both in the government and the media.
Right.
Which brings us to one last thing here real quick, because we're way over time almost or something.
Anyway, last thing, and this is a silver lining and something you talk about at length in the book, is that Bradley Manning's case may have brought extra attention to the torture of solitary confinement as practiced in the United States of America.
Yeah.
I mean, one of the more shocking things about Bradley Manning's treatment, held in strict punitive isolation for 11 months, right after he was captured nearly three years ago, is that this is pretty common in the United States.
We have between 70 and 100,000 Americans doing long-term solitary confinement after a conviction.
We know it drives people crazy.
I think the Supreme Court really needs to get its act together and declare this a violation of the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The law is certainly edging in that direction, but this is normal.
In a way, the treatment of Bradley Manning has not been some horrible aberration.
It's been all-American, as American as baseball diamonds and type 2 diabetes.
Yeah.
That's a good way to put it.
That really is, it makes it a problem, right?
That's sort of what makes Bradley Manning such a problem, is he's not describing America having gone off of our path.
He's telling us, this is our path, and it's a horrible one.
It's too damn much truth for people.
They either have outrage fatigue on one hand, or they have, that would overwhelm me with outrage objection on the other hand, and they're just not going to hear Bradley Manning tell them the whole world is screwed up by the American system as it exists right now.
Yep.
Couldn't agree with you more.
That's too damn bad.
Well, anyway, at least you got a book about it, and I'm glad to hear the revised edition.
You know, hey, books are important things, man.
That's why the First Amendment says that they can't make them illegal, because they're very important to have.
The Passion of Bradley Manning, the Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History, by Chase Medard.
There's a brand new edition coming out next month.
Thanks very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for listening, Scott.
And by the way, check out Chase's review, I think it's at TomDispatch.com, his review of, and you can find it at GoingToTehran.com, his review of the Leverett's new book, Going to Tehran.
It's good stuff for you.
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