07/11/13 – Nathan Fuller – The Scott Horton Show

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Especially right this second because right now we welcome our first guest, Nathan Fuller from the Bradley Manning Support Network at bradleymanning.org.
Welcome back to the show, Nathan.
How are you doing?
I'm great, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, you're very welcome.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
I sure do appreciate it.
And, man, I appreciate all your great journalism.
You've been doing such great work attending the Bradley Manning trial.
And I take it that the defense has rested.
It has, indeed.
It finished up yesterday after three days of ten witnesses and presenting all of its evidence and filing motions to dismiss the greater offenses left against Bradley Manning.
Okay.
Now, I read your piece, Manning's lawyers rest their case with Yochai Benkler's stirring defense of WikiLeaks.
And people might remember I've interviewed him on the show before, I think, about WikiLeaks.
Yeah.
Probably, yeah.
And, oh, you heard that one.
There you go.
I did.
It was good.
Yeah, yeah.
And you have a great little part in this article where you talk about him tangling on cross-examination with the prosecutors.
But I saw a few tweets that came out yesterday where people were really laughing at the prosecutor and saying, oh, man, don't try to tangle with this Benkler guy because you're not smarter than him.
Stuff like that.
Basically making it sound like he had, you know, really made short work out of the cross-examination and the prosecutor had to basically give up pretty quick.
Is that about right?
Yeah.
I mean, the prosecution pretty quickly tried to object to Benkler being qualified as an expert.
And in its objection, the prosecutor had to admit that he didn't really understand a good deal of Benkler's work, the essential part of Benkler's work.
And so he looked pretty silly early on.
But after that, yeah, Benkler just refuted his basic arguments, which were that activism and journalism are trying to, you know, the prosecution is trying to separate the two.
And Benkler's whole thesis in a lot of his work is that the two are actually intertwined, and that's how the Internet has fueled journalism and activism together.
Sure.
And you know what?
I mean, I don't know whoever made up this whole thing about objective journalism, but think about somebody like, you know, who's obviously beyond question.
Jane Mayer at The New Yorker or Jonathan Landay at McClatchy Newspapers, right?
These are extremely credentialed.
Or even David Sanger at The New York Times, just for argument's sake.
These are people who decide what to cover based on what they think is important to cover, right?
Now, OK, maybe not Sanger.
Maybe he's a sign of the Iran nuclear beat, but no, he wants the Iran nuclear beat, right?
And if Jane Mayer decides that she wants to write a book on torture, why?
What kind of, who does she think she is that she can have an opinion that torture is even more important to write about than high school football?
Who, you know, who is supposed to decide this?
The president or, you know, some court somewhere?
Does anyone ever even have to attempt to grapple with this question?
Of course every journalist has an opinion.
The reason you're a journalist, you're covering this because for whatever reason you value the story and think it has value for others, which is a purely subjective judgment on your part, Nathan.
And in fact, according to a lot of other people, you're wrong.
They don't care at all.
So how do you like that?
Exactly.
And that's what the prosecution just failed to understand throughout the testimony.
It was really trying to paint WikiLeaks as activists, as people who are trying to get leaks and trying to undermine U.S. government policies.
But they're journalists at heart.
Even if what they do is document leaking and whistleblowing, that's journalism.
And the prosecution asked flat out, isn't mass document leaking, would you agree mass document leaking is inconsistent with journalism?
And Benkler said, no.
Why would I agree with that?
That goes against everything I've been saying.
And then that's the part where the courtroom starts laughing, right?
Yeah.
I mean, everyone had understood Benkler's argument except, it seems, the government in that case.
And that was pretty ridiculous.
You know, I don't know if anybody cares, and this is such a little sidebar.
I'm sorry to distract off the main point, but it's something that's come up quite a few times as we've talked about this case so far, Nathan, is that the prosecutors here are pathetic and ridiculous.
I mean, this is not Tom Cruise and a few good men or whatever the hell.
I mean, this is complete and total incompetence.
They don't even understand their own case that they're making, much less even at all the angle the defense is coming from.
What do you mean that journalism is journalism, professor?
Huh?
Yeah.
I mean, the main problem seems to be that they charged first and figured out the evidence later.
And that becomes a big problem when they don't have the evidence there.
They've tried to put on this big argument for all of these greater offenses, that Manning aided the enemy, violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, stole government property, but even their own witnesses are contradicting them in little ways throughout their case.
And the defense really chipped away at their big argument.
All right.
Now, so as far as Benkler, tell us more about this.
I'm talking too much here.
I need to let you go ahead and let you paraphrase his argument as best you can here because, you know, I'm sure it was not just a sentence or two.
I mean, this is a Harvard professor who's, you know, written studies about this, journal articles about what WikiLeaks is and how maybe it is different, but not different enough from the Washington Post or whatever.
I don't know.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
So he's written the most widely cited academic article on WikiLeaks.
He's a Harvard Law professor who coined the term the networked fourth estate, and the principle there is that advances in technology, much like advances in Internet technology, much like with software, video, and music and movies in the last couple of decades, has changed the way that journalism works.
And so WikiLeaks is an essential part, he said, of the networked fourth estate, the Internet as a new tool to provide a check on power and our other estate.
And WikiLeaks, he said, was part of a high point in journalism in the way journalism functions as a check on democracy.
And that's an essential argument.
I mean, and Brad Demanding knew that at the time.
WikiLeaks was known.
He's done a lot of research on how WikiLeaks was understood in the mainstream press and in smaller press and really around the world.
And there were three shifts, he said.
WikiLeaks was first, you know, people kind of questioned it.
They thought it wasn't going to be a good authentication process.
And then when they started providing some real leaks, they had documents on corporate corruption in Europe, censorship in China, and then extrajudicial killing in Kenya.
People started to take them seriously.
Amnesty International gave them awards.
They're recognized as a whistleblower outlet.
But then it came to 2010 and Brad Demanding's leaks and things started to change.
And the reason he cited for that was government rhetoric, trying to paint WikiLeaks as an anti-American terrorist association website.
And that's when media began to follow along.
Right.
Now, yeah, I mean, that's such an important, well, there's a few really important points there.
But first of all, for the people who weren't really familiar with WikiLeaks before the Manning thing and the collateral murder video and the Iraq and Afghan war logs and State Department cables and everything, it probably was pretty easy for the government.
And then, as you say, and as he says, the media falls right in line with the government portraying them as really Assange as some sort of stateless James Bond enemy type guy.
I mean, he's got the white hair and everything.
They sort of made this kind of rogue villain kind of character out of him.
And, of course, the New York Times and the Washington Post and all the papers threw WikiLeaks overboard and said, oh, no, what we do is journalism.
What they're doing is this other thing, and it's at least half espionage or something and that kind of thing.
And so people could really be under the impression that maybe there's an argument there.
But, you know, what you're pointing out, what's so important here is what was WikiLeaks to Bradley Manning at the time that he leaked to them in the first place?
And it was, wow, these guys have broken some really good stories, some really big stories, and not about America, about these other countries.
In fact, maybe places like China where America likes having leaks like this so we can beat China over the head with them if we're Hillary Clinton or something like that.
And so that really was what he was arguing.
What you're saying is that to Bradley Manning in 2010, there was just no question that WikiLeaks was a journalistic source, no matter what you heard since then, that WikiLeaks was sort of this newfangled but certainly journalistic outlet, you know?
Right.
And there's only the media falling in line with government kind of dangerous rhetoric.
I mean, Biden calling him a sonja, a high-tech terrorist, and the media falling in line with that kind of thing, that really changed the way WikiLeaks was viewed.
And so the government brings evidence that Osama bin Laden asked for WikiLeaks documents and that Adam Gadon, an al-Qaeda member in June of 2011, that they were citing WikiLeaks documents.
But if you look at the dates, that's well after Bradley Manning leaked.
And it's also, more importantly, well after the government was painting WikiLeaks as a terrorist-associating group.
And so it was bin Laden and Adam Gadon and al-Qaeda only knew to go look for WikiLeaks as a source for classified information because of government rhetoric, government continually associated with terrorists, trying to fearmonger about leaks and protecting classified information.
And that's what led al-Qaeda to realize, hey, there might be something of value here.
But that's certainly not Bradley Manning's intention.
And think about that, too, where it turned out that that wasn't even right.
They said, oh, this is certain to hand all this vital information over to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and it's going to get our quislings in Afghanistan killed.
All of our informants are going to get their throats slit, and you've got blood on your hands and blood on your hands, and yet Secretary Gates of the Department of Defense said no.
There's no evidence that this was used against the Americans in any way, that any person, whether an American military or State Department employee in Afghanistan or any of their paid informants or quislings of any kind suffered consequences like that.
So it really was just their PR that like, boy, what if Osama got his hands on this, right?
And made it seem like it would even be useful at all.
Gates called the government reaction over-raw, the government that he was a part of.
He said that no sources or methods were released.
And other key witnesses have testified to that, that sources were actually identified by number and not by name, and so there are enemies, al-Qaeda and other foreign adversaries, already had the information that Bradley leaked.who were not kept aware of what our government was doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And Benkler talked about that as another reason why WikiLeaks should be seen as a vital journalistic outlet, citing the Iraq body count, the group that counts civilian casualties, and which used the Iraq war logs specifically, released by WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning, to provide a check on the government's count and found that the government had actually been lying to us about how many civilians were killed in Iraq.
And without WikiLeaks, we would not know about that.
Right, exactly.
In fact, I think as you say, that was his answer to the, well, wouldn't you agree that leaking a bunch of documents isn't journalism?
That actually one or two documents would not have helped.
What it took was a group like Iraq Body Count being able to go through a stack of documents and analyze them kind of in total to see the discrepancy between the body counts they'd been keeping and the ones that the military had been keeping.
Exactly, yeah.
Without this big set of documents, without a full clear picture of the Iraq war, we would nearly not have the same view that we have today.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, this is the other thing too that I just think is kind of ironic, that in truth, what Bradley Manning did really did screw up American policy in a lot of ways, but not in any ways that they can admit or accuse him of.
For example, it helped get us kicked all the way out of Iraq when Obama was trying so hard to stay.
But the WikiLeaks, one of them that got a lot of attention, I think we've talked about this before, was an Iraq war log document about a U.S. Army masker of an Iraqi family, including little babies, and then they called in an airstrike to try to cover up, to blow all the bodies completely with smithereens and cover it up, but the airstrike hit the wrong part of the house, and so the bodies were all taken to the medical examiner anyway.
Of course, the Iraqis knew all about this and whatever, but when the document came out, it caused a major storm that, see, here's the proof, the Americans knew all along, and they lied about it all along, etc., etc., and that was the big news in the background, right as Maliki was telling Obama at the end of 2011, sorry, domestic politics just will not allow for me to sign this new status of forces agreement with an immunity deal, so you're just going to have to go.
And so they can't call that blood on his hands and whatever, he ruined our attempt to keep Iraq.
We killed all those people, and we don't even get to keep the place because of him, because they can't admit that they're that evil and that determined to colonize somebody else's country, so they just have to shrug it off.
It's tough, and it doesn't even make it into his trial.
And what he did, I mean, he just screwed up a, I mean, the Iraq war, right?
This is the biggest American government policy of the century so far.
He completely ruined it, and they can't use it against him.
Exactly.
That's the last thing they want to admit, that he might have, I don't know, saved lives instead of actually having any blood on his hands, and they're not going to bring that into court.
Right, or admit that they have any nefarious motives for other people's countries and trying to stay against their wishes and that kind of thing, you know?
Right, exactly.
Very good, in their face.
All right, so tell me some more about this defense case, because I guess I've been, from everything I understand from talking with you and Chase Madar and others, everybody has the greatest confidence in Coombs, the defense lawyer, and says he's doing just a hell of a bang-up job.
Obviously, as we've talked about, the prosecutors have not red-teamed their own case whatsoever here, so they have failed in so many numerous ways that we won't go down the list right now, but we've covered them on the show in the past few weeks here.
So I guess just tell me as much as you can about the defense's case so far before they rested it yesterday, and then after you're done with that, we'll talk about what the hell is a rebuttal?
The prosecution gets to rebut the defense?
What?
Yeah, so the defense only had three days for its witnesses, and they brought in supervisors from Manning's unit to talk about the fact that Bradley was actually allowed to be surfing the classified networks and be browsing and download the CDs, and that was actually all allowed, and that goes to key charges for whether or not Bradley stole information or whether he exceeded his authorized access.
They said there were no prohibitions on that type of thing, and so that directly undercut major government arguments, and that was all before the Hioki Benkler testimony.
They also had Colonel Morris Davis on, a former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, to testify that the detainee assessment briefs that Bradley leaked were not damaging at all.
It did not help the enemy because the enemy had that information, and actually a lot of it was available in open source information in news reports, and we were able to, Alexa O'Brien in the media room, was able to crowdsource and find that information and determine which detainees the government was talking about, and so that's pretty available in open source movies and documentaries and books that are already out there, and so Bradley didn't release anything that the enemy didn't know about.
But the defense's case was only three days long because most of their successes came with government witnesses just chipping away at the government arguments and eliciting evidence that Manning did not search for things like al-Qaeda or the enemy or terrorists, but searched for WikiLeaks because he knew they were a journalistic and whistleblower outlet.
Oh, I'm sorry.
So, yeah, so the defense just at the end of the government argument filed these four motions to dismiss charges, basically summarizing the lack of government evidence and the evidence that Manning did not violate these greater offenses, and so we'll hear likely a ruling on that next week, but before that, yeah, the government has to present a rebuttal case.
Which, that's strange.
Of course, it's a military court-martial system, different than a civilian court, but I've never heard of that before.
Does the defense, tell me the defense gets a chance to rebut, the prosecution's rebuttal at least.
Well, I think they'll only be able to come in cross-examination.
I don't think the defense will be able to call new witnesses, but they will be able to cross-examine whatever government witnesses come back on the stand, and they'll cross-examine to challenge that.
So, yeah, I mean, it is a court-martial, so they're kind of restricted in what they're allowed to do.
Wow, the prosecution.
Get that, everybody.
Did you hear that?
The prosecution, they get the first word and they get the last word.
Yeah, that's how that works.
But at least on Monday there will be arguments in court over the scope of what the government's allowed to rebut, so the defense will be able to challenge on those grounds and try to say, well, they've already tried to present evidence and it wasn't there, so they shouldn't be allowed to try again.
But we'll see what happens on Monday, and that'll determine the way forward.
If the government does intend after Monday to go ahead with a rebuttal case, that'll happen next Thursday, a week from today.
If not, for some reason, if they change their mind, we'll go right to closing arguments on Tuesday, and then we expect a ruling shortly after that, a verdict on guilty or not guilty.
And then in the next week or two, probably we'll move into the sentencing trial.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
Yeah, are we messing up by focusing on the trial as though there's a trial here?
I mean, this whole thing is just a put-on, isn't it?
Well, Bradley did plead guilty, as he felt he had to do, to the lesser offenses, stuff that would put him in jail for up to 20 years.
But there's also, important to remember, there's no minimums.
Even if he's convicted on these lower charges or even on the greater ones, there's going to be a long sentencing case to show there's no harm.
Manning intended no harm.
Manning had pure motive.
They'll probably bring in the chat logs to show Manning did not.
He explicitly was asked to sell information to Russia or China and chose not to, and that'll mitigate any type of potential sentence that he'll get.
So there will be at least a conviction on the lower charges just because he pled guilty, but that doesn't mean prison time, so there's going to be a long fight over that, too.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong.
I want the defense to try their very hardest in everything, but it seems like it's just such a political trial.
It's not really about the actual facts of the case.
You know what I mean?
The president has announced that this man is guilty.
This judge is going to convict him of as much as she can anyway.
She's under a lot of pressure, so it'll take a lot of legal arguments, but also, yeah, you have to take her pressure into account.
So that's pretty unfortunate that Obama said he was guilty, didn't apologize.
Martin Dempsey, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, said the same, and that undoubtedly has an effect that we can't ignore.
Well, and the former Secretary of Defense when he was still the Secretary of Defense, so I think that counts, too.
Yeah, and so that'll come into play as well, and hopefully that'll, you know, Gates saying that this was overwrought and no sources or methods were released, that'll have a good effect on Manning's trial.
Oh, no, I meant Panetta announcing that he was guilty along with Obama.
Oh, well, yeah, there's that, too.
Yeah, yeah, along with Obama and Dempsey.
So that's all the arguments, I'm sure.
Yeah.
And you know what?
I'm sorry, because this is redundant for people who've heard this before, but I think this is an important point, and I've gotten reaction for it like, you're right, that's a good point.
So it seems like it's, you know, good for illustrating the thing, that when Charles Manson was on trial in California, Richard Nixon said something to the effect of, yeah, everybody knows he did it or whatever, and then he went, oh, my God, I'm so sorry I said that.
Forget I said that.
I did not say that.
And now he was nowhere near the chain of command there, right?
This was a state trial in California.
It had nothing to do with him.
I mean, he was from California, but still.
He was the president of the United States at the time.
He had no jurisdiction over, I guess, maybe he could have appointed a judge that could have heard an appeal at some point or something, but he was very far removed from the trial going on.
But just even the appearance that the president was saying that he was guilty was such a big deal then.
Now, in this case, it's, like you said, Dempsey, Obama, and Panetta too.
I mean, these are basically direct orders to this military judge, directly from the top three people in the military chain of command, to do her job and convict on as much as possible.
Exactly.
It's unprecedented pressure.
I mean, I can't imagine greater pressure unless she was talked to in private, and who knows what's happened there.
But, yeah, she's expected to find a guilty verdict, and that's why we're going to have to fight it back even harder than we would otherwise.
And what do you make of the judge?
Does she seem fair and honest at all, or does she have much of a poker face when the defense is scoring good points?
I mean, she's pretty fair in court.
She is as critical as both government and defense arguments when they need to be sharpened, and she has allowed some defense arguments that we might not expect.
But by and large, I would say overall, she's ruled in favor of the government.
If you look at the trial over Bradley's treatment in Quantico, when he was held in solitary confinement, she only took off four months when Bradley was looking to dismiss charges based on punitive treatment.
And so, unfortunately, that could be seen as a harbinger of what's to come.
Yeah, I'm afraid so.
I mean, he should have been free to walk out of the court that day, the first time she ever heard anything about his abuse at Quantico.
That should have been the end of his captivity.
And maybe she'll take that into consideration later on or time served or something like that, but we'll have to see.
Yeah.
And, you know, this point, it's kind of a side point, but I think it's worth bringing up.
I swear I read the chat logs.
I don't know how I missed this, but Angela Keaton from AntiWar.com pointed out to me that Bradley Manning calls himself a libertarian.
Yeah.
In his chat logs with Adrian Lamo, the rat.
I think they were in chats with Zinnia Jones, who testified as Lauren McNamara.
He calls himself a libertarian, and later he said it was liberal views.
So it seems to be kind of less libertarian, you know, civil liberty supporting viewpoints.
That's cool.
I guess I just, you know, assumed he was some kind of progressive or whatever.
And when I saw, I think he tells, he says, why would a gay atheist libertarian be in the military?
And, of course, the answer is because his dad was trying to make a man out of him or whatever, but his dad just ended up creating the greatest American hero ever.
So how do you like that, old man?
Exactly.
He's probably not happy, but a lot of other people are.
Yeah, yeah.
And you know what?
Now that we're a couple of few years out to think about the mainstreaming of the Manning is gay argument against him back when he was first arrested.
I mean, you had the New York Times attacking him over sexuality.
These are the arbiters of political correctness in our society.
But when it comes to Bradley Manning, oh, I heard he's a sissy boy.
Let's not talk about those war logs.
Let's not talk about what he says in plain English are his actual pure as the driven snow whistleblower motives in exposing these war crimes.
Oh, let's pretend he was just having an identity crisis and blah, blah, blah.
I mean, those people ought to all be, you know, taken out before Twitter and shot.
You know what I mean?
I can't believe those people still can even show their face in public.
They might as well call them the N word.
In fact, Bill Keller, former executive editor of the New York Times, actually still doesn't understand Bradley's motives.
He still thinks he was, you know, besides maybe having some slight political motives, was mostly just having a crisis and lashed out.
And this is the editor of the most read newspaper in the country.
Still cannot figure out Bradley's motives when they're tracking the exact same from chat logs in private in 2010 to his plea in front of the court in 2013.
The motives track the same.
There couldn't be more clear.
And yet Bill Keller still thinks it's all about some kind of identity crisis.
Amazing.
What is this, the 20th century or something?
Yeah.
Tell you.
All right, Nathan, you're great.
Thank you so much for your great work on this story.
Everybody, that's Nathan Fuller at Bradleymanning.org.
He's got a day by day account of this trial.
You've got to go and delve into it.
Thanks again, Nathan.
Thank you, Scott.
We'll have you back again very soon.
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