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Hey guys, I got his laptop.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
The website is scotthorton.org.
I'm here from 1101 Texas time, 12 to 2 Eastern.
Weekdays at scotthorton.org and at noagendastream.com.
You can follow me on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube at slash scotthorton show.
And next up is Chase Medar.
He's a lawyer from New York and he is the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning, which is great.
Please go out and get it in paperback today.
In fact, you don't even have to go anywhere.
You can go to a website and buy it somewhere.
Hi Chase, how are you?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks so much for having me on again.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Thanks very much for doing the show.
I know you're incredibly busy, so I'll let you go early if you need to go early.
I meant to say that off the air, but I forgot to.
For sure.
We're talking the whole time.
Okay.
So, the American hero Bradley Manning, who has pled guilty to being the American hero, Bradley Manning, who has liberated the Iraq and Afghan war logs and the State Department cables and uploaded them to WikiLeaks, where Julian Assange and company have made them available to the world.
He's on trial today, not on the charges he's already pled guilty to, but on much worse.
So, court-martial today.
Can you please fill us in on the charges that he's still left to face, that he's fighting, and what's happened today as far as you know and everything that you know?
Okay.
So, Bradley Manning, he faces 22 charges, all for being the WikiLeaks source inside the U.S. military.
Ten of them, the ten lesser charges, he already pled guilty to.
Some of those lesser charges are for trivial things, like improper use of a government computer.
But together, they still carry quite a maximum penalty, 20 years.
And that's what he has already pled guilty to.
Some of the remaining 12 charges, what's there, the two big ones, okay, you've got the Espionage Act of 1917, and several of the charges stem from that.
And then the most serious charge, also, in my view, the most ridiculous charge, and that is aiding the enemy, a capital offense.
And Team Obama has made it clear they're not going to seek the death penalty, but it still does carry a possible life term in prison.
I give aiding the enemy, that charge, only a one in three chance of sticking.
I mean, that's still a serious risk.
What the government is going to have to prove there with aiding the enemy charge is that Bradley Manning specifically intended for Al-Qaeda and associates to get a hold of these leaks and to benefit from these leaks.
Now, the government, in kind of a ridiculous, absurd, kind of theatrical twist, they're bringing to the witness stand a member of SEAL Team 6 that assassinated Osama bin Laden and took bin Laden's laptop to testify that there were some leaks, some WikiLeaks material on bin Laden's laptop.
Now, this is a bit like saying that if you found, I don't know, some vintage Air Jordans in bin Laden's closet in that compound bag stand that you could sue or prosecute Nike Corporation for aiding the enemy.
I mean, everyone in the world who has an Internet connection had access to the WikiLeaks, and that includes bin Laden.
That's why I only give it a one in three chance of sticking, but, you know, military judges can surprise you, not always in a good way.
Yeah.
Well, now, the thing of it is, too, right, what they're going to try to do is define that down, where, well, he would have, could have, should have known that Osama bin Laden could end up with those documents and would have access to them eventually, and so that counts.
That's the same thing.
Sort of like you sitting down and having barbecue with your cousin is an imminent threat to the U.S. if Obama has just killed you with a Hellfire missile.
Yeah, I mean, there's going to be, the prosecution is going to try as hard as they can to water down the mens rea requirements.
You know, mens rea, that's the intention.
And whether that sticks or not, it's going to have a huge impact, not just on an individual named Bradley Manning, but also on journalism.
It's going to criminalize a lot more leaking than is already criminalized, and, you know, anyone who talks to a journalist, if that can be shown in the most loosest way to have helped the enemy, if you know how loose that's interpreted now from the example you just gave, well, then that's suddenly a capital offense.
So it's not just a chilling effect.
It's really dumping a truck full of liquid nitrogen all over journalism.
And that's not bad just for journalism, but that ultimately is going to have really horrible consequences for our foreign policy in general.
When we don't have real facts or free media doing the kind of reporting that they should be doing, and, you know, occasionally really do do, then we're going to wind up in deep doo doo.
Yeah.
Well, the thing is, as far as convicting him on his motives there, might they be able to exclude the chat logs and the relevant portions there?
I remember there was a thing in the court, what, a month ago, where they said, I forgot, you'll have to clarify, something about he can claim the chat logs as proving his motivation on some charges but not on other charges or something like that.
But anyway, to anyone who's ever read the chat logs, you can see that he's got the most pure whistleblower motives.
A script writer couldn't have come up with better statements as far as the selflessness, the whistleblower nature of his leak.
Yeah, I mean, they're going to try to exclude them as much as possible.
I mean, the judge has actually showed a little bit of backbone in this particular case.
She has to realize that the consequences are huge if this law becomes suddenly so much broader than it already is and so much vaguer than it should be.
So, I mean, but that's really the most important battle zone in this prosecution.
Everything else, I think, is pretty much a foregone conclusion.
I mean, he's already pled guilty to 10 of the charges.
I think they're going to have a pretty easy time of convicting him, most of the others.
I wish that I could give you some good news and say there's a real chance that Bradley Manning will be acquitted or walk free or get a light sentence.
I think there's no question that he's going to be convicted of most of the charges, maybe even all of the charges, and get a sentence of, oh, about 40 years, plus or minus, maybe even 50.
And this is just a terrible thing.
I want to stress that this is not an example of a court and a prosecutor taking a good system of laws and manipulating them improperly to railroad some guy.
This is an example of a really bad system of laws that's being applied inexorably to Bradley Manning.
Now, people leak all the time in Washington.
You can't go a week without reading a story based on a leak in The New York Times, The Washington Post, or other places.
But usually the law is not applied.
Elite officials generally operate with impunity here.
And it's very rare and not a good thing either that the law is being applied more consistently all of a sudden with this leak about North Korea being prosecuted and other leaks too.
That's the direction we're going into.
I prefer the hypocrisy of elite leakers getting away scot-free than with these draconian anti-leak laws being applied across the board.
What would it take for him to be set free?
The judge would have already had to rule that, oh, they tortured you, you've done your time, you're free to go, or something extraordinary like that.
And that's already not happened.
Yeah, that's already not happened.
The judge made it clear that she does not think Bradley Manning was tortured.
In fact, all she did was shave off 127 days off Manning's sentence for being improperly held in prevention of injury watch, you know, strict punitive isolation, form of psychological and even physical torture.
So we already know that's like that.
It's important to look back at the Ellsberg trial.
The only reason why Ellsberg's a free man, pardon my siren there, the only reason why Ellsberg walked from that case wasn't because he was acquitted or they found some ingenious legal argument to get him off.
The reason is the Nixon administration was just so over-the-top criminal the way they went after him.
I mean, they made Idi Amin look subtle, and the judge had no choice but to declare a mistrial with prejudice.
And I think the prosecutor was even happy to go along with it at that point because they had found that Nixon had actually hired Cuban hitmen to come and take care of Dan, something like that, and the judge and the prosecutor both were like, forget this, man, just let him go.
My favorite bit of Nixon corruption there was they tried to bribe the trial judge in the middle of the trial, saying, hey, you know, there's this job opening.
J.
Edgar Hoover just said, you want to be head of FBI?
And the judge in his vanity was like, oh, that sounds really intriguing.
Well, very interesting.
Then he must have woken up in the middle of the night a few days later, like, oh, my God, they're trying to bribe me.
He realized it, and only then did he report it.
But, you know, it came out well in the end.
But there you have it.
We have a terrible system of laws in this country when it comes to regulating leaks.
It's a good thing that they're only rarely enforced.
But until we have a government that is much more candid, much more open and honest with us, us mere people, then we depend on leaks.
And this is how we found out about everything from the Watergate break-ins to our drone strike program is through leaks.
It's nothing new.
It's been going on for a long time.
Good thing, too.
And people have published gastronomic guides to the different kinds of leaks that happen in Washington.
I mean, it's nothing new.
What is new is the level of panic and hysteria that is bipartisan.
Diane Feinstein is every bit as bad as John McCain on this.
And it's not just the executive branch.
I would love to say this is all the executive branch going crazy and throwing the book at leaks.
They certainly are doing that.
But they're being egged on, and they have lots of encouragement and, in fact, demands for this behavior from Congress.
So, you know, both the executive and the legislative, both the Democrats and the Republicans, have really a rotten record.
And it seems to be getting a little worse, frankly.
Well, the president of the United States is on the record taking responsibility for his mistreatment of Quantico as well, which I think is quite remarkable that he went ahead.
He didn't have to answer the question, but he went ahead and said, yeah, I talked with the secretary of defense about this, and I told him to continue on as he's been doing, which was humiliation and torture.
Yeah.
And then you heard the president mouth that, you know, that horrible line is over.
I talked to people, and they assured me that it's really for the young man's own good, which is just the most chilling thing to hear, I think.
That's what they said about Soviet dissidents who were locked up in psychiatric prisons.
Yeah, I'm not so concerned about his spin on it, only that he admitted that he personally said words to the effect of good.
Keep it up to the secretary of defense.
He took responsibility.
That's all that counts, you know.
He can call it whatever he wants to.
Yeah.
Mad man.
Now, here's the thing, too.
Well, a couple of things real quick.
I think we can pretty quickly dispense with nobody got hurt here as far as sources and methods.
This was all secret and confidential level stuff that was leaked, the Iraq and Afghan war logs and the State Department cables.
No mission was compromised.
No JSOC raid got ambushed.
No Afghan quizlings got strung up by the Taliban, according to the DOD, right?
There wasn't a single instance of this.
But what did happen was it was what the politicians call embarrassing, and that means it screwed up horrible conspiracies of theirs that they can't really admit to it being a problem.
Like the WikiLeaks that helped Maliki politically refuse to allow America to stay in Iraq because the WikiLeaks came out and showed that the Americans had massacred this family, including massacred babies at point blank range infants.
And they called in an airstrike to try to cover it up.
And then the airstrike hit the wrong side of the house.
So they tried to cover it up further.
But then the local coroner got the bodies.
This is a huge scandal in Iraq right at the end of 2011.
And Maliki is saying to the Americans, I'm sorry, you know, I'd try to keep you here if I could, but I just can't give you immunity.
So they can't now.
So it's frustrating.
What Manning has done is frustrated the plans of the evil empire.
But he hasn't compromised anything of theirs that's legitimate.
So they can't really point to that.
No, they can't.
They can't point to any concrete harm.
They can't point to a single civilian or soldier who's been harmed in any way from these leaks.
And, you know, this is after so many, you know, apocalyptic predictions, a diplomatic meltdown and Armageddon and so many accusations of, oh, Manning and Assange, they have blood on their hands.
There's no evidence for any of that.
You know, it's a very difficult thing to humiliate shameless people.
But I'd say Bradley Manning almost pulled it off by showing the horrible things that Hillary Clinton was signing on to at her State Department.
You know, ordering American diplomats to spy and collect information, whether it's biometric information, credit card numbers, passport numbers of foreign diplomats, and then all kinds of sleazy stuff.
Like you see the U.S. government lobbying on behalf of Fruit of the Loom and Hanes to keep the minimum wage down in Haiti, poorest country in the hemisphere.
And, you know, I know you're libertarian-minded.
You might not do that into the minimum wage, but I have no doubt you'd agree.
If this is a mistake, then that's Haiti's mistake to make, not the State Department's.
Yeah, of course.
You know, it's their country.
So you see a lot of these sleazy things.
But one thing that's interesting to me is that I'm not sure how much of this sleaze would really be protected by the Whistleblower Protection Act, which the government always loves to interpret narrowly.
There's a huge carveout for national security-related material.
But even if you didn't have that, much of the sleaze and atrocities that these leaks reveal is legal.
Or, you know, there's a strong legal argument for it.
That doesn't mean it's a good thing, but I guess that's a backhanded tribute to the power of lawyers today that so much sleaze and atrocity, whether in the fighting of war or in everyday statecraft, is legal.
Right.
Well, and then here's the thing, too.
You know, I was looking around.
I'm sure this exists somewhere, Chase, but I couldn't find it.
There must be.
It should have been me, I guess.
I know you do a good job of this in the book.
I was looking online.
I was trying to find a good comprehensive list of the stories broken, the incredibly important stories.
Again, no Quisling strung up over it, but still earth-shattering truths about American foreign policy.
Not just, you know, Hillary Clinton stealing people's credit cards, but, you know, forcing Melissinawe to invade Somalia and butcher men, women, and children to death for years on end.
That kind of thing.
I mean, scholars and other journalists have made hay with this.
I mean, you've probably had Flint and Hillary Mann-Leverett, you know, in their book about Iran.
They make great use of the WikiLeaks, getting into the stories to show, to argue very convincingly, using the WikiLeaks, that the Obama administration never made any good faith effort to have a diplomatic opening with Iran.
I mean, it was an empty gesture before you put the screws of more sanctions on.
And, you know, there's a great book by David Keene, a professor at the London School of Economics, called Useful Enemies, all about the dynamics of modern war.
And he uses the WikiLeaks.
So many scholars, historians have welcomed this with open arms, and it's just kind of seeping into consciousness there.
It's not going to happen overnight because there's so much material, but that's a good thing.
You know, knowledge is not evil.
Knowing what our country is doing and has done, this is a good thing.
It makes us more safe.
It's going to help our decision-making in the future.
It doesn't contaminate us.
I don't know.
We have this bizarre idea that the more clueless we are, the safer we are.
And it's almost at the instinctual level.
We need to get over that, overcome it, and welcome some knowledge here.
Right.
Yeah, and you know what?
If you go through all of the Iraq and Afghan war logs as much as you can, the State Department cables, the real truth buried in all of this is that they lie about everything.
It's incredible what they lie about.
It's not like any of their lies are convincing, necessarily, but they don't approach anything, honestly, our government.
And that goes for the Bush years or the Democrats as well.
Yeah.
I mean, about Iraq, our government said, oh, we don't keep count of civilian casualties.
Well, it turns out they did keep count.
They were keeping count.
It was a much higher number than they would ever have let on to.
They were saying publicly that it's the absolute duty of every American soldier to stop torture if they see it in Iraq.
Those were the words of General Peter Pace when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
It turns out there was Fragmentary Order 242, Rumsfeld's order, to turn a blind eye to torture when it's being conducted by Iraqi authorities and just let it happen.
Don't interfere.
We know this thanks to Bradley Manning, thanks to Lisa, and it's a good thing that we know this.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, the epidemiologists and the people keeping track of the Iraqi body count numbers, as you said, it was more than the government had admitted to, but it also was, for example, like the Iraq body count, those guys go for the minimalist approach, only doubly confirmed independent media report type casualty numbers, and they were like, wow, this is a whole batch of, I don't know, tens of thousands at least of casualties, of incidents that they had never heard of before, that had never been reported before.
Yeah, yeah.
It was a whole other side of the Iraq war.
Like, we knew about the Wolf Brigades.
We were doing a Newsweek about the El Salvador option and how, you know, anybody reading Bob Dreyfuss in real time back then knew all about using the Baader Corps to basically try to hunt down and decapitate the Sunni insurgency under the Rumsfeld theory that it's all just former Baathists, and once we kill a few dozen of them, then the whole thing will end or whatever, you know, ridiculous kind of thing back then.
But then this was just the confirmation of it all.
This is the stuff that you're a lawyer.
We could give you a grand jury, and you can put them in, you know, indict them and then put them in prison for this stuff with this proof.
Hear, hear.
But, of course, it's not the killers or the torturers or the, you know, the torture lawyers who are being indicted.
It's the truth teller.
It's Bradley Manning.
And this whole, you know, ugly and sordid trial of Bradley Manning, in a way, it's a very fitting last chapter to our Iraq war, a war that we toasted into so catastrophically, in large part because of government secrecy and distortion, and it's now ending in the prosecution of the young private who got the truth out, a trial that is masked in extreme government secrecy and the like.
It's fitting in the most ugly way.
Yeah.
And, you know, too, especially when you look at the chat logs and you see the thing that finally pushed him over the edge where he said, that's it, I'm taking this stuff and I'm leaking it to the Times or the Post or somebody.
It was when his superior officers had ordered him to continue after he complained and objected.
They ordered him to continue helping the Iraqi government in prison and probably, you know, disappear forever, torture, murder, whoever, whatever, who knows, fate worse than death, for people just for writing articles criticizing the government, right?
The core of what Americans consider basic free speech rights, to write an article called Where Did the Money Go?
about your local kleptocrat, you know, and that was the war crime that he was ordered to participate in that made him say, that's it, I'm telling the Americans about this, all of them.
Absolutely.
I mean, Bradley Manning's big mistake was believing that Operation Iraqi Freedom was really going to have something to do with Iraqi Freedom.
When the scales fell from his eyes, he just, I mean, he didn't look back.
He started leaking.
Well, I'll bet off for it, too, to know what happened.
I don't know how many times we have to learn this lesson about just how brutal asymmetric warfare is, about how brutal and usually, almost always, what a failure counterinsurgency warfare is.
And I don't know what it's going to take to kill this kind of vampire zombie doctrine that keeps coming back.
Even after it failed horribly in Vietnam, it got brought back to life, and I hope that historians and political scientists and military intellectuals use the WikiLeaks to really drive a stake through its heart so that everyone sees what a failure our counterinsurgency wars have been in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
And we need to just let go of this belief that we can make that kind of war work.
Yeah.
Well, and you're right, too, that the way they do this war on whistleblowers, it certainly is a bigger threat than it used to be.
Something real bad could happen to an American government employee who does the right thing by telling on his boss.
It's the only kind of good rat that you have in the world, right, is an American government employee telling the people the truth about what their bosses are up to.
But, you know, Dan Ellsberg used to say on this show all the time back years ago, before anybody ever heard of Bradley Manning, that, you know, what we need is for people to be willing to do life in prison, for people who, you know, after all, they're willing to go and risk their life killing Iraqis, defending their own country from foreign invasion.
They ought to be willing to risk, you know, prison time in order to tell the truth to the American people, if they have access to it, if they can get the documents that show what's really going on, contrary to what the government is selling the public.
Then they have a duty to the public, to the rule of law, to the Constitution, not to these politicians and their lies.
Yeah, we've got the ethics backwards.
I mean, Ellsberg's exactly right.
You know, this extreme secrecy, it's a national security threat.
I mean, I'm not one to threat inflate, but we keep having these self-inflicted wars and wounds that we perpetrate in large part because we don't bother to check the facts or to know what's important.
And we think that the more clueless we are, the better off we're going to be.
Absolutely the opposite is true.
All right.
Now, back to the specific case for a second here.
This guy, Coombs, is the best lawyer Manning could be hoping for.
Am I right about that?
I think Coombs is doing a terrific job.
I mean, there's not a whole lot he can do.
I think by waiting things out, by letting things cool down a bit, already, you know, the way people talk about Manning is substantially different.
Even on right-wing talks, it was like Bill O'Reilly.
I mean, I was shocked when I saw Bill O'Reilly say, ah, yeah, 10 years, that'd be enough for Manning.
I'd be cool with that.
I think 10 years is 10 years too many in a sense, but that's very different from the tenor of the fiery condemnations of Manning where people were literally calling for his death.
My favorite is when Mike Huckabee, soon after Manning got busted, looked up from signing a children's book about Christmas at a bookstore.
Someone asked him about this, and he still had his children's book about Christmas in his hand.
He said, oh, yeah, I think he should be put to death.
Then he went back to signing his children's book.
I mean, that's a grotesque anecdote that kind of captures so much about the United States, I think.
Yeah, yeah, something else.
But you're right.
I mean, I don't know specifically about Bill O'Reilly because I haven't watched him in a long time, but I can see how he must have been exposed to the truth of the fact that this guy's a good kid, and he did what he did for the right reasons.
He's no traitor to America.
He's a patriot.
That's why he did what he did.
It's undeniable truth, even to a lunkhead like Bill O'Reilly.
Yeah, and that says it right there.
All right.
Thanks, Chase.
I sure appreciate your time on the show and all your work along these lines.
Okay.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Great talking with you.
Oh, yeah.
All right, everybody, that's the great Chase Medard.
He's the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning.
He's a lawyer from New York.
He writes for TomDispatch.com from time to time, and he's been paying close attention to the trials and the travails of Bradley Manning culminating in his court-martial this week.
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