08/22/13 – Alexa O’Brien – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, next up is Alex O'Brien, the independent journalist who's covered virtually, I believe, every aspect of the Bradley Manning trial this whole time.
Alexobrien.com, and that's O-B-R-I-E-N, alexobrien.com, although if you spell it wrong, I'm sure Google will help you out anyway.
And anyway, you can also follow her on Twitter, and that's KarWinBee on Twitter, and just type in Alex O'Brien.
She'll come right up on there, too.
Okay, great.
So thanks for joining us on the show again, Alex.
Good to talk to you.
So, first of all, you got the first interview with Bradley Manning's lawyer, Coombs, and I'm sorry I didn't get to watch the whole thing, but I saw a good portion of it anyway.
They ran it on Democracy Now at democracynow.com, or .org.
And so I was just wondering if we could start with the most important points from that interview that you picked up that you needed clarification on that you got from him, if you could.
Well, I think there were a couple.
I mean, I do want to say this before I go into those, though.
You know, you have to understand, for many of the reporters who've been covering this trial for two years at Fort Meade, three years since Manning's been arrested, there's been so many things that we've observed in the courtroom.
We probably know the case better than anything else.
And it was just great to finally sit down with David Coombs and also have the American public see, you know, from his own mouth, so to speak, him talk about the things about the lack of damage, what kind of evidence the government was presenting.
I think fundamentally what was really, really important about what David Coombs talked about yesterday with me after the sentence was exactly that, the lack of damage.
But also the role of the FBI and the State Department in the investigation and the prosecution of Bradley Manning, to also explain Bradley Manning's motive.
Once again, this trial has been really conveyed through other people, to have him speak about his own client, I think was all very, very important.
Right.
OK, well, let's start with the lack of damage, because that's according to even the state's witnesses, correct?
Sure.
Sure.
So I was saying that the most important thing that David Coombs talked about was the fact of the lack of damage.
And I asked him to characterize, you know, exactly what kind of evidence he got in the closed session.
And he said, listen, what we heard in the closed session was no different than what we heard in the open session.
It was speculative.
It was testimony about people's opinions about what could happen.
Like, for example, we had a guy from the Defense Intelligence Agency named Yusuf Abu-Anay.
And he's supposed to be an al-Qaeda expert.
And you know, he came into court and he testified that the releases could possibly be used in future al-Qaeda propaganda efforts.
And when the judge actually asked Abu-Anay when was the last time they had mentioned — al-Qaeda had mentioned WikiLeaks, the witness said basically 2011.
So that was one of the sort of portions of the interview.
And then, of course, talking about also the role of the FBI and the State Department, I asked him if, you know, the investigation and the prosecution of Manning was being directed by the National Security Council or the White House.
And he said that while he didn't have evidence himself of that — I mean, this is, of course, I've asked these questions from Defense's own discovery request early on in the trial — that certainly, you know, there was no question there was a coordination amongst all the sort of alphabet soup agencies.
And more stuff.
I mean, that extended interview is actually going to be viewable on the Democracy Now!website.
And then there's also an even longer interview with him that'll be up, I think, this evening on my website.
Okay, great.
And again, that's alexaobryan.com.
And then, now, I don't know if you had a chance to hear, probably not, but I interviewed Morris Davis yesterday.
I'm sure you probably talked with him at length in the past.
But we went over what he called fertile grounds for appeal, quite a few of them.
Is that your same interpretation of the trial you just witnessed here?
Absolutely.
I mean, this trial has had so many problems with it.
And one of the things that was clear is that if you look at the court record, it's 40,000 pages long.
There is a very, very long and strong court record as well, which is good for the appellate process.
So other than the big three, the abuse and the command influence and the speedy trial issues, which certainly have been gone over a lot of times on this show in the past, were there any other things, big missteps that you could point to by the prosecution or by the judges, her rulings during this case?
Absolutely.
Well, first of all, the judge changed the charge sheet after the close of evidence.
So you remember she asked for, she let the government equate databases to be records, to be information.
So that certainly is an issue that can come up.
Also, there are the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act charges, the whole idea of exceeding authorized access.
No question that her interpretation of the CFAA, which has come under a lot of attention lately with the death of, sorry, the indictment of late and the death of Aaron Swartz, who was indicted with multiple CFAA accounts for downloading scholarly journals.
And then we have Weave, who is actually sentenced to three years in federal prison for accessing information on a publicly available website.
So similarly, you know, here Manning was using a classified network, but he had access.
He didn't hack anything.
And yet he was charged with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for the diplomatic cables, and he was convicted on one of them.
What's interesting about the charge is that, a couple things.
The judge interpreted access to be that because it was a classified system, Manning's nondisclosure agreements were a form of sort of a, you had to exceed it, you know, by going through the, you know, over the nondisclosure agreement.
That is a little weird.
So that will actually be reviewed.
And then also, the issue of WeGet, I'm sorry, WGet, of using WGet to actually obtain the cables themselves.
You know, WGet is a freeware program.
You can get it online.
It's not a hacking program.
The government tried to insinuate somehow that it was.
And the thing that's kind of controversial about WGet is that the government, their entire case was built on a non-existent acceptable use policy.
So there's a couple things.
All of the hard drives that were destroyed, except for Manning's, even though both the defense and the government requested preservation of them.
And then on top of that, all the acceptable use policies for the 2nd Brigade Combat Team were destroyed, including Manning's, which, you know, you would, which the law enforcement agents that testified in this court case had actually, you know, sought early on in the investigation in Iraq.
They all knew to preserve at least one from the 2nd Brigade Combat Team.
So when you have an offense that, you know, at least the maximum is 10 years, you would hope that the government would have more than a nondisclosure agreement, especially if it's related to computer usage, because fundamentally, the acceptable use policy is said to have prohibited the use of executable programs like WGet on classified systems.
But, you know, when we look at the other hard drives, we would have seen soldiers, you know, also installing executable files on their hard drives as well, and, or I'm sorry, on their desktops, like WGet.
And we have to remember, there was a major information assurance breakdown in the 2nd Brigade Combat Team.
It's not like Bradford Manning was, you know, somehow some, a great, greatly distinguished in terms of just general usage.
Fundamentally, there were soldiers playing movies on pirated DVDs that they purchased from Iraqi nationals at local markets on their classified systems.
I mean, you want to talk about like, you know, a security problem.
So there's a lot more to this story than perhaps people are, you know, have been aware of, or perhaps are capable of sort of, you know, gleaning from sort of high level pieces.
But that'll definitely come up on Appeal.
Right.
Yeah, well, and especially, I think their point was, wasn't it that he had, you know, gone beyond the access that he was supposed to have in order to create this spreadsheet and get all this going.
And it turned out their own witness under cross-examination, his superior officer admitted that she had ordered him to create that database.
It had nothing to do with helping them prove their theory, that he had begun preparing to leak way back before he ever had his change of heart and decided to in his narrative.
That's right.
I mean, you know, Manning was a young intelligence analyst, so he was often ordered to data mine the significant activity reports.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act charges will, they pertain to the diplomatic cables, and they'll definitely come up on Appeal.
Um, you know, the database issue of whether or not Manning took records, information, or actually the databases and what, and in fact, the government was allowed to change their charge sheet.
That'll definitely come up.
And that relates also to the SIG Acts and Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diary and the Cablegate and stuff like that.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, and yeah, back to his motives.
I wanted to ask you about the testimony of Adrian Lamo, because, or is it Lamo?
I don't know if it really is Lamo.
I don't want to have been mispronouncing it this whole time and let him go ahead and have that.
But, uh, it's Lamo.
Okay.
And so now he was there called as the prosecution witness, not just to testify to the facts that, yeah, I was participating in this chat log you're reading here, and I can testify to that being true and whatever, but he was there also to be a kind of character witness against the corruption and criminal intent of Bradley Manning, right?
Well, he was called as a motive witness at trial.
I mean, back at the Article 32, back in 1852, and I'm sorry, back in December, 2012, because it's been such a long trial, you know, Lamo came and testified to the authenticity of the chat logs and the fact that he worked with law enforcement and where they got it and all that kind of stuff.
But, you know, we have to remember these chat logs are really, uh, have really, were the map for the entire law enforcement investigation.
I mean, the forensic work was guided by what was in the chat logs, um, and, you know, aiding the enemy and all.
The government tried to use the chat logs in any and every way.
So, here, it was interesting, because defense actually took out all of the more commonly known sort of impeachments of Adrian Lamo, the fact that he was working with law enforcement, the fact that he framed Bradley Manning, and actually just spoke directly to motive.
The things that Bradley Manning said in the chat log, which are, like, that he wanted to help other people, that he cared about other people, um, that he, you know, he wanted, he did this for, you know, good intentions.
And all of that was to go to aiding the enemy and then to also go to the, um, reason to believe could cause injury to the United States, that part of the espionage charge.
So, yeah, I mean, in a certain sense, in some ways, defense tried to extract what was most important from the chat logs, that Manning had no intent to harm the United States.
Well, and it's notable, too, that it wasn't just that he said nice things, it was that Lamo, I don't know if you can tell us whether this is before or after he had already started talking to the government about what was going on here, tried to tempt him with the dark side.
And said- Let me say something really important about the Lamo chat logs.
You know that first two, like, sentences that are, like, hi, you know, Lamo, Lamo, Lamo, and then Bradley Manning goes, if you had access to unclassified networks, you know, however many times a day, what would you do?
At that moment, that is the moment that Adrian Lamo went to law enforcement, according to a sworn testimony.
So everything after that, which is pretty much the chat logs, Lamo was working with law enforcement.
Okay.
So, and then, I don't know if they put him up to this or not.
Maybe it was his own idea, but I wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt on that or anything.
But he says to Manning, hey, why don't you sell these to the Russians or the Chinese?
You could become a very rich man.
And so it's not just that Manning had said, well, I'm doing this because I care about people that, but the informant who had his trust, who told him, I'm a minister and a journalist, so you can double extra trust me and all of this stuff, told him, you know, tried to tempt him.
And he responded basically with, what are you talking about?
I would never do that.
No, really.
I just want to help.
That's right.
Anyway, but then now the prosecutors, I saw where David Coombs, the lawyer, told you that they just overcharged him to the point of, we say they push the envelope and sometimes went beyond it on every charge, but also with their rhetoric and their demonization of Bradley Manning as well, and trying to portray him as some kind of master criminal or some kind of very terrible person.
They didn't even say like, hey, listen, we know you meant well, but what you did was wrong.
That was not their take.
They wanted the judge to believe that Manning was this terrible criminal.
That's right.
I mean, you know, and interestingly enough, I mean, we know from the court arguments that there are punitive articles under the Uniform Code of Military Justice that have really harsh punishments for negligence.
I think one of them is like, if you are supposed to be guarding a sentinel and you are found to be drunk or disorderly, there's grave punishment for that in the military.
But the government didn't charge him that way.
The government really built their case for the fact that Manning was a bad person, intent to harm people, that he was working for WikiLeaks, that he was harvesting information, this kind of stuff.
They couldn't find anybody who would say that Bradley Manning was doing that, except for Jeraliah Shulman, who was completely impeached and really honestly raised on the witness stand by the defense.
I mean, they really just destroyed her testimony.
Well, and this is where after the defense got to put on their case, then the prosecution got to go again.
Is this the witness you're talking about?
That's right.
I mean, they really just brought her out a couple times.
She was the supervisor.
I mean, even though she was not much of a higher rank than Bradley Manning, but she was a supervisor of Bradley Manning.
And she had even written good reports.
She actually recommended him for employee of the month at one point.
But Manning had filed an equal opportunity employment complaint against her, and that came out.
They had actually had a long history of kind of just antagonism towards or her antagonism towards Bradley.
You know, she would talk about, you know, Bradley using the terms kind of like spaghetti and all this kind of other stuff came out.
And she's the one who suddenly remembered a year and a half after Bradley Manning was arrested.
This was never written down.
And you have to understand in the military, everything's reduced to writing.
If you get counseled and it's good, you know, it's reduced to writing because that's the way in which the chain of command can keep track of things.
And fundamentally, she just remembered like a year and a half after Manning was arrested that, you know, oh, he said something about being disloyal to the U.S. government, and he only joined the Army to go to college.
And, you know, it's funny because in the back and forth on the stand with showman, defense brought up this sort of term of using the term spaghetti.
And she said, well, I think he misunderstood what I meant by that.
And defense said, well, maybe you misunderstood what Bradley Manning said when he said that he didn't believe in blind allegiance to a flag, which is different than saying that you don't have allegiance to the American flag.
You know, Manning was a very empathic person.
I mean, he definitely is a kind person.
You can tell that just by his behavior in court for the last two years.
Well, you know, it seems like when it comes to all the overcharging, pushing the envelope, as the defense attorney called it, it seems like there's sort of work in the dialectic, right, where they're basically saying, listen, we charge him with aiding the enemy, then at least you'll have to convict him under the Espionage Act.
So if they had only charged him under the Espionage Act, then you'd only have to convict him of downloading too many documents in an unauthorized fashion.
You know what I mean?
Compromise.
Absolutely.
I mean, I will tell you something.
It's a really important point that you're making.
I mean, fundamentally, they, let's say we stripped all the federal violations out of his charge sheet.
Your audience might have just like went to sleep when I said that.
But let's say you take out all the espionage and you even take out all the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
You know, fundamentally, Bradley Manning would have been, you know, had a maximum sentence of 60 years, I think is what I've calculated at one point.
You know, for even if it's 40 years, he's a 25-year-old man.
So like, you know, this is really like almost a life sentence.
They really stacked it against him.
And there's no access to the court records.
So the press was always focusing on aiding the enemy.
And wow, he got off of aiding the enemy, but he was only convicted on six other espionage charges.
I mean, he really had this case stacked against him.
The other thing that could come up on appeals, actually, interestingly enough, is the multiplication of charges.
Like, Manning was charged with stealing the Iraq War Logs, as well as, you know, espionage.
And defense had early on in the motion hearings had said, like, listen, he took the Iraq War Logs to communicate it.
Like, why do we need to break this up into, you know, three charges?
Why can't this just be one charge for the criminal act?
So there are kinds of things like that that could come up on appeal.
Yeah.
Well, and I think Colonel Morris said yesterday he still got, or maybe this was from your interview, Coombs said there's still, what, four other levels of appeal to go here.
Oh, and it was Morris said yesterday, it can't ever be worse than this.
This is the absolute maximum sentence he's ever getting from now on.
It's all downhill from here.
Yeah, it was really devastating yesterday, you know, hearing that sentence.
I think because I think defense had hoped that she would find some kind of reasonableness to what was going on.
I do believe, though, that, you know, Manning is a kind of character, and I hate to turn him into a character, but because I know he's a human, she's a human being, and I guess we need to refer to her as Chelsea, is such a strong character.
And one of the most, I think, important characteristics of Manning is this being able to prevail despite circumstance.
And I'm not talking about some kind of, you know, smarmy Hallmark card.
I mean, Manning is the real deal.
The earnestness that came through, especially, you know, in the last year of court where Manning was able to speak and have a statement was really incredible.
I'm I'm saddened for us that Manning was convicted to 35 years.
I am certainly, you know, aware of that.
You know, it's not it's not a great existence to be in a military prison, but I know that no matter what, Manning is strong enough to be able to handle whatever is in front of her, because fundamentally, you know, this is about what's more important than simply, you know, putting things into doing the right thing.
Exactly.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time.
It's great to talk to you again.
I learned a lot.
All right.
Take care, man.
Appreciate it.
OK, not the best choice of bumper music for that that outro, but there you go.
Alex O'Brien.
Alex O'Brien dot com and follow her on Twitter.
Search Alex O'Brien.
We'll be right back after this.
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