06/07/13 – Nathan Fuller – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, so welcome back to the show.
Just in time, we got Nathan Fuller from BradleyManning.org.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Great.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
Thanks for joining us today.
Oops, I got to turn you down there a little bit.
Hey, so what's the latest from the Bradley Manning court-martial?
Well, we're on a little recess right now and going to resume on Monday at Fort Meade, Maryland.
And we're going to hear from other people who worked with Bradley as an intelligence analyst and at Fort Drum before they deployed.
And we're going to hear about what he was expected to do as an intel analyst.
And we just heard a little bit about that last week.
On Wednesday, we heard from his supervisors as intel analysts.
And we learned that the government has been trotting out this Excel spreadsheet that Bradley made with all of the Iraq war logs in it, these significant activities.
And they're trying to show that he was preparing lots of information to be given to WikiLeaks, that he was harvesting information for WikiLeaks, essentially working for WikiLeaks.
But we learned that he was actually just doing his job as an intel analyst, and he was one of the most organized intel analysts they've ever seen.
And he was actually just researching to try to determine patterns of violence.
And once he saw that and collected that months later, he decided that that was something that the American people needed to know.
And then he later gave it to WikiLeaks.
But it certainly contradicts the government's claim that he was working for WikiLeaks.
So now in the government's claim, this is from their opening statement and or direct questioning of their witnesses?
Can you elaborate?
Yeah.
In their opening statement, they talk about this Excel spreadsheet that he made, that he was essentially just harvesting information was their phrasing.
They're trying to show him that someone who's just working at doing this on direction and just preparing all this instead of doing his real work.
But it turns out he was just doing great work.
He was a junior analyst, but he was providing more information than more experienced analysts.
But it was once he saw these patterns of violence and these dozens of atrocities that he decided the U.S. people should know about it.
Now this was refuted by the prosecution witnesses under cross-examination?
That's correct.
David Coombs asked about the various assignments that he was expected to do, and his supervisor said that she essentially asked him to do this.
She expected him to create the spreadsheet.
And so that really rebuts the government's claim that he was not doing his job.
Absolutely.
Well, I mean, unless I'm missing something here, it sounds like you're describing complete incompetence on the part of the prosecution here.
Have they not tried to falsify their own case to make sure that they're not being made a laughingstock up there?
I was honestly pretty surprised to hear it, considering I was a government witness, and you would think that they would have known that by now, but they didn't seem to care about that in their opening statement.
They just wanted to paint Bradley in a certain light.
We also got another revelation that rebutted government claims.
The government has been saying that Bradley should have known, as an intel analyst, that WikiLeaks is a site that foreign adversaries would go to.
But that same supervisor was asked about specific websites that America's enemies go to, and she never mentioned WikiLeaks.
She's saying, you know, oh, we're supposed to know generally that they go to all sorts of sites on the Internet, but the only specific ones she mentioned were social media sites.
She said Facebook, Google, Google Maps, and she never mentioned WikiLeaks.
So there's no real justification thus far, anyway, for thinking that Bradley should have known that WikiLeaks was some sort of conduit to the enemy.
That's funny.
And now, you know, I meant to follow up on this when I talked with Marcy Wheeler on the show the past two days in a row, actually.
I still never got around to really getting this clarified.
But she had written something on her blog that you may have seen about some kind of document that, you know, regardless of what anybody may or may not have told him at any training mission or whatever, training session or something, that there was a document that seemed to imply, in a way, that maybe the bad guys would look at WikiLeaks.
But then that document was sort of self-refuting in a way, too.
But I never really got my handle on that.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, Marcy wrote a great post on it, and it's a 2008 Army Counterintelligence Special Report.
And it purports to delve into the issue of WikiLeaks as the conduit to the enemy.
But as she says, it's actually pretty ambiguous.
It says, you know, it's just something we should essentially look into, that it could be used, but it's certainly not definitive, and it's certainly not justification for the claim that Bradley knew that enemies would be using it.
And the defense, as I've mentioned before, is going to bring witnesses to talk about how WikiLeaks was really understood as an open-source news-gathering information website, and Bradley was an all-source analyst, and so he was expected to use a wide range of sources and keep an open mind and research a lot of different websites.
So there's yet to be any clear evidence that WikiLeaks is some conduit to the enemy.
Right.
Well, and you know, okay, it's part of his story when he pleaded guilty to some of the charges here, as far as the actual facts of the case, where he said that, you know, he tried to contact the Washington Post and the New York Times, and they never got back to him, so he went ahead and went to WikiLeaks.
I wonder, do you know, has the case by the prosecution and the judge, has it been set up in such a way where are they going to have to confront the question of, well, what if he had given it to the Washington Post, and the Washington Post had published information based on the WikiLeaks, and Osama bin Laden read the Washington Post?
I mean, are they, is it all hinge upon them trying to claim that Assange is not a newspaper publisher, which would be one thing, he's a James Bond villain, which is something entirely different, or what?
I certainly hope that does get explored in this trial.
The judge has asked previously, you know, would you try Bradley Manning the same way if he leaked to the New York Times, and they said yes, and so that's a pretty dangerous precedent to set, and so I do hope that they're going to have to confront that.
Well, that's a precedent that hasn't already been set, right?
They've never gotten away with prosecuting somebody, or have they gotten away with prosecuting someone for aiding the enemy, for giving something to the New York Times on that narrow of a trial?
No, I mean, this is what's so dangerous about Bradley's case, is that it would set a precedent and essentially criminalize whistleblowing.
Turning the Internet into a conduit for the enemy is not something that we want to establish.
Okay, so the one government expert witness failed to identify WikiLeaks as a place where Al-Qaeda likes to surf.
That's fun.
And then the second one is, oh, well, Bradley Manning was compiling this Excel sheet.
It must have been just because he was an agent of Julian Assange doing something other than journalism, but then, oh, no, it turned out his commanding officer requested that he carry out that task.
Oh, okay, fine.
Anything else debunked or anything else really notable this week?
I know Lamo the Rat testified.
Do you want to tell us the highlights there?
Well, yeah, so David Coombs, the defense lawyer, essentially just went through a lot of the chat logs to confirm a lot of what we knew already, which was that he trusted Adrian Lamo and that he was good intentioned but a little naive at least, or at least idealistic anyway.
And so it was pretty emotional to go through that, but it didn't bring a whole lot new because it was basically confirming the chat logs that we had read before.
Right.
Although, you know, that's only for those of us who've gone to Wired and read the chat logs, but that's pretty damn important in this.
You know, he's the prosecution witness, and they're up here saying here he is aiding the enemy, and the prosecution witness is having to admit that, well, his problem was he's such a good kid, he naively thought he could change the world for the better by doing this or something like that.
Exactly.
And so Coombs asked him flat out is there anything to suggest that he is not loyal to the U.S., that he would be of any anti-American sentiment or things like that, or that he expressed any interest in trying to aid the enemy, and Lamo said no because, of course, there's no proof of that.
And if you look at Bradley's statements, it's the opposite.
He wanted to inform the public and could have sent this information to al-Qaeda or a foreign government for money or for help, but he didn't.
Did they talk about that specifically?
Because that's in the logs that Lamo, after he was already in contact with the government, apparently, the way I understand it, started trying to tempt Bradley Manning and say, hey, why don't you sell this stuff to the Chinese or the Russians instead of passing it on?
And they reviewed that, and Bradley's response was that information should be free.
Did Coombs and Lamo tangle about that on the witness stand there?
Well, it wasn't so much tangling because Lamo doesn't really have proof to refute it, so they just reviewed what was said, and that was that he believes information should be free, that we deserve access to this information because it's not going to harm anyone, and it's about our government.
But so Lamo confirmed that, yep, I tried to tempt him, why don't you sell it to the Chinese, and he told me hell no.
Well, he wouldn't phrase it that way, but, yeah, that's basically what happened.
Excellent.
I mean, because before it was just chat logs as published by Wired, right?
Who knew?
Right, and so now we have direct confirmation.
Right, by the prosecution witness.
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, tell us about the effort to crowdsource and fund.
Is it covered?
It's only partially covered.
The very beginning of the transcription is paid for at this point.
Am I right about that?
That's right.
So we have multiple stenographers that are in the press room now, but they still do not have official credentials.
The government right now still says that they're not a media organization and therefore don't deserve credentials, but others have been willing to provide their press passes so that they can get in, and, yeah, they have transcripts up at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and they're only partially funded so far.
They cost about $2,000 a day, and I believe they've raised $70,000 total, but they're going to need some more money.
So you can donate to them at pressfreedomfoundation.org.
Okay.
And now, man, you're going to have to either change the URL or change the title of the foundation so that they're the same thing.
You're driving me crazy.
Pressfreedomfoundation.org.
Right, and it's the Freedom of the Press Foundation, but you should be able to find it.
Right on.
Okay.
Hey, listen, it's so important, the work that you're doing.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate you having me.
Thanks.
That's it.
That was Nathan Fuller from bradleymanning.org.
Oh, and you know what?
I screwed up and confused him with Trevor Tim again, didn't I?
That's not his website, the Press Freedom thing.
Hey, y'all.
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