08/16/13 – Nathan Fuller – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is our friend Nathan Fuller from the Bradley Manning Support Network.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Nathan?
I'm great.
Thank you, Scott.
Appreciate you joining us on the show today.
So, man, I was sad when I read Bradley's begging the state for mercy the other day.
But you know what?
He's been through hell and back to poor kids.
So I can't really hold it against him that he didn't defiantly take on the judge and insist that he did the right thing.
Because because, of course, he did do the right thing.
And his confession, his Soviet show trial worthy confession, was completely ridiculous that he should have gone through proper channels.
Well, that's not true at all.
And I sort of wondered whether maybe it was so overdone on purpose so that we would all know that he didn't really mean it.
But he's a poor kid.
He's been tortured.
He's been held in solitary.
He's been treated in a way where you prosecute somebody if they treated a dog like that.
So, you know, maybe he just wants out and is willing to say or do anything at this point to get out of there.
I don't hold it against him, the poor guy.
I don't know.
What do you think?
Yeah, I mean, you got to always keep in mind that he's facing 90 years in jail.
He's facing a military judge that has sided with the government throughout this case that has even allowed them to change their own charge sheet.
And so, you know, it comes down to it.
He needs to show respect for the military, even if it was certainly what a military doctor even called an openly hostile and hyper-masculine environment that gave him no outlet to seek any guidance where he needed it.
And he called his fellow soldiers, you know, trigger-happy, ignorant rednecks, basically.
But, you know, he made the whistleblower defense already in this case.
He explained that he released documents to WikiLeaks essentially as an act of conscience back in his February statement.
He said, I wanted to spark a debate on war.
I saw the bloodlust in the collateral murder video, and it was disturbing to him.
And that got him six espionage act convictions.
And so that's what the military thinks of a whistleblower defense.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, I think it's kind of what we should have expected.
He shows respect for the military, didn't mean to incur harm to his fellow soldiers.
He merely wanted to help people.
He wanted to help all people.
And that was clear from the start.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, again, the United Nations reporter on torture was forbidden from interviewing Bradley Manning.
But from what he could tell anyway, he said that he had undergone degrading and inhuman treatment, which is, you know, if you ask me, that means he's already done his time.
Absolutely.
And if you look at the details of his confinement, you can see just how cool it was.
He was sometimes forced to strip naked.
He was woken up in the middle of the night.
If they couldn't see his face, there was a light blaring 24 hours a day.
When asked if he had sunlight, he said he saw the reflection of a reflection.
And so, you know, that's as close as he got to outside.
Sometimes he got 20 minutes outside a day.
And so that's really psychologically incredibly burdensome.
And he dealt with that for a long time.
Yeah, and it makes perfect sense that his lawyer would have told him, Let's just get out there and beg them, and we'll see if we can get this sentence reduced at all.
As you pointed out, the judge, after the case was over, and people, if you're not familiar with this, you're not going to believe me, but it's true, Nathan, that after the case was over, after the prosecution was done, after the defense was done, and then after the prosecution got to go another round, the judge rewrote the charges so that she could convict him.
Right, both sides rested their case.
Then the defense pointed out, hey, the way the government has charged Bradley, they didn't prove that at all.
They did not prove this theft charge.
They completely screwed up in their charge sheet.
And he preempted them, knowing that this is what they would try to do, and saying, you know, it's way too late to change the charge sheet.
We've already rested.
We've already heard from all these witnesses.
And yet the government said, okay, well, we're just going to change our charge sheet.
Don't have to call any new witnesses or prove anything new.
We're going to change the wording of the sheet to mean something that is actually different than what they initially intended.
And the judge signed off on it.
And Bradley was convicted of those offenses.
And each one of them carried ten years in jail.
So it's just an absurd, after the fact, just, you know, just making a mockery of the previous weeks of testimony.
And now as you say, as he pointed out in his statement, he never did mean to hurt anyone.
That part was true.
All the rest of the shame and whatever in this recent statement notwithstanding, the part about he never wanted to get any American soldiers hurt, that is absolutely the case, isn't it?
That he had access to top secret data that did include sources and methods and information that could, in fact, have gotten American personnel, soldiers, and otherwise hurt.
And he deliberately chose, as he stipulated in his original statement when he pleaded guilty to some of the charges, he deliberately vetted these documents and made sure that what he was leaking to WikiLeaks was not top secret data that could get anyone hurt, but it was secret and confidential level stuff that exposed important truths that the American people and the people of the world needed to know, but nothing that could get anyone hurt.
Absolutely.
He made sure not to release any top secret, but even within the secret documents he was more discriminant than he could have been.
If he wanted to harm U.S. sources and soldiers, he had access to human reports, which are human intelligence, which name names and give away people that we rely on, say in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he did not choose those.
He chose instead reports of past events that would give Americans and the world really an idea, a clear idea of how this war worked.
It gives not just one document that shows one abuse, but a series of documents, a database that gives us a clear picture, and that allowed, for example, a rock body count to find 15,000 deaths that the U.S. government essentially kept hidden from us, and systematic covering up of torture and of other war crimes.
That's what Manning wanted to expose.
He didn't want to harm anyone.
Actually, a military doctor spoke at greater length, and we've heard about this before.
He kind of wanted to crowdsource opposition to the war.
He wanted people to review all these documents in a set and come to the conclusion that not only were Iraq and Afghanistan wars not worth it, but that really no war is worth it.
Yeah.
Well, and he exposed so many foreign policies that fall short of quote-unquote war, but they might really feel like a war if it's a coup d'etat against you and your party and some little country somewhere.
Right.
Proxy wars and corporate influence and massive corruption throughout the way U.S. conducts diplomacy.
One that people point to a lot is lobbying against the minimum wage in Haiti, where we've, of course, championed our successes while putting things like that under the rug or allowing major gas companies to have massive influence in Africa.
It's really disturbing, and one or two documents wouldn't have given that clear picture.
And now, so Colonel Morris Davis, he said that there's a chance if you account for good behavior, this, that, and the other thing, that he could end up serving as little as 20 years.
What do you think about that?
Is that consistent with what you've been learning?
That's possible.
It depends what the initial sentence is.
There is some potential for getting off of good behavior.
If there's a military parole, the way there is in federal court, and I'm not positive how that works, but I don't see a military appeals court looking kindly on Manning because that's what the military does.
But sure, I mean, if you got something like 25 or 30 years, you could get out in less than that.
But I really hope that's not what we're facing.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it shouldn't be played down either.
I mean, the most important thing, what's really going on here is this isn't even about Manning.
In a big way, what this is really about is Barack Obama and the rest of the Republicans and the Democrats threatening any other national security whistleblowers with torture if they dare do the right thing the way he did the right thing.
Exactly.
It's all about setting an example and trying to strike fear in the heart of those who would otherwise want to be inspired, want to think that he did the right thing, and then maybe expose crimes themselves.
And we saw what Edward Snowden had to do.
He looked at what happened to Bradley Manning and thought, I'm going to get the heck out of here.
I'm going to flee the country and seek political asylum because he certainly does not want to be persecuted the way Manning has, although the U.S. is going to try to do that anyway.
Right.
Yeah, and, you know, jail is one thing, but torture is something else altogether.
That used to be called a fate worse than death back before it became official U.S. government policy.
Now it's just an enhanced interrogation technique, you know.
Yeah, it's psychological torture.
It's undeniable.
Scholars and doctors call it psychological torture, and not just for a couple of days, but nine months, more than nine months of that, including the more than a month that he was held in a cage in Kuwait.
He was just basically in a big metal cage, didn't have anyone near him.
Night was day.
He was working bizarre hours and was just basically attempting, it seemed, to drive him to suicide.
Yeah, or at least drive him to have the excuse to put him under so-called suicide precautions so they could isolate him even more.
And now, I mean, sleep deprivation, that's physical torture.
I don't care what anybody else defines it.
Absolutely.
And that's exactly what they did.
Then that drove him to create nooses in Kuwait, and they then used that to justify keeping him in just incredibly cruel conditions for the rest of the time at Quantico.
And it was his entire time at Quantico.
They weren't going to let up if they didn't move him out of there.
They were going to keep him in solitary his entire time.
It could have been the whole three years if we didn't get him to Fort Leavenworth.
Yeah, and people should remember, too, that Barack Obama, the President of the United States, the most powerful man in world history, probably at least second place behind George W. Bush, he has taken personal responsibility for the torture of Bradley Manning by answering a reporter's question and saying, yeah, I asked Robert Gates about that, and he said, yeah, it's all good, and I told him, carry on.
Yeah, he said he's doing fine.
That's what he said about the tortured whistleblower.
He said he's doing fine.
And so, yeah, he took it on himself, and now it's his responsibility.
Not to mention that it was around, I believe, a couple months later that he declared him guilty in public, declared him guilty against the military UCMJ, and that has yet to be reckoned with, and I'm sure that's going to be coming up in appeals courts.
All right.
Well, and now, so I guess we've got to leave it with this because we're almost out of time here.
I know you've got to head back into court, but talk to me about your confidence in his legal representation here because, well, I've got to admit I was a little bummed out when I read the statement, but that must have been his lawyer convinced him to go ahead and throw himself on the mercy of the court this way.
Yeah, I'm actually very confident in David Coombs, and from everything we know, so is Bradley.
Bradley had the choice of any attorney that he wanted, and Coombs was the one that he took.
And I think this is actually, you know, I guess we're going to see next week when the sentencing comes down, but this just kind of makes sense to me.
If someone's facing 90 years, it would have been mad, I think, to try to just be defiant to the very end.
Facing 90 years in jail, I think I would have done the same thing.
All right.
All right.
Hey, listen, thanks very much, Nathan.
I sure appreciate all your work on this issue.
It's just great.
Sure thing.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
That is the great Nathan Fuller from the Bradley Manning Support Network of BradleyManning.org.
We'll be right back.
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