08/09/13 – Nathan Fuller – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the thing.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
Appreciate y'all tuning in, man.
I sure appreciate Nathan Fuller.
He's been doing journalism on the story of Bradley Manning for a long, long time.
Really great stuff.
He writes at bradleymanning.org.
That's the Bradley Manning support network, and he's attended the trial all along, and now he's been attending the sentencing hearings post conviction here.
Uh, welcome back to the show, Nathan.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
Always good to be back.
Uh, very good to have you here.
How's Bradley Manning doing?
Well, he's okay.
Uh, since we last talked, I believe his sentence has his maximum potential sentence has been reduced, uh, from one 36 years to 90 years.
So maybe feeling a little bit better about that, a little more hopeful.
Yeah.
Cause what?
He's 25.
So 90, he'll be out in time to be dead.
No.
Well, you know, uh, let me ask you about this.
I don't know if there's been any other followup, but I did see where Colonel Morris Davis, who he was, I believe he's one of the former Guantanamo prosecutors who resigned, um, in disgust.
Um, and, and he tweeted something about, uh, you know, if he gets sentenced to 90 years with good behavior and this, that, and the other thing, he could be out in 20.
Is that possible?
You think?
I, what I've heard is that parole, uh, he'd be eligible for parole after one third of the maximum sentence.
So if he got the full 90, I don't think it would be until the 30 year mark.
But, um, but, uh, you know, he gives a full 90 years.
I think the government would have to prove a whole lot of farm and they're, they're really failing to do that.
So I could see the judge, uh, you know, not going that full way, despite how, how much he sided with the government thus far.
Well, you know, it's really too bad.
The same judge who rewrote the charges in order that she could convict him as the one in charge of sentencing.
I mean, yeah, it's pretty problematic.
She, uh, allowed the government to change their charge sheet at the last minute, totally accepted their new interpretation and then convicted them of that new charge.
And, uh, uh, pretty kind of, kind of disturbing chain of events there.
I forgot who it was on the show that said that there's actually quite a bit of leeway in military court to do things like that, that you couldn't do in a civilian criminal trial, rewrite the charges after the case is done.
Uh, but that it's pretty unheard of in a case as high profile as this anyway.
Yeah.
You'd think they'd want to kind of get that down beforehand with this much media attention.
Um, but, uh, apparently, yeah, it was not really a problem.
They did it, uh, after closing their case, change those charges up and, uh, and convicted.
Unreal.
I mean, this is the USA.
They still call it that.
I don't know why really, but it's the homeland now, despite all of Bradley Manning's best efforts.
Um, all right.
Well, so, um, we've, we've talked in the past, uh, and not that it really counted that much, but, uh, about, uh, what a failure, um, the prosecution team was in, in attempting to present their case against him.
And I guess what necessitated, uh, the, the judge helping them rewrite their charges so that they could still win at the end there, uh, how have they been doing, uh, on the sentencing?
Uh, well, there's that, you know, very large rhetoric, you know, fear mongering rhetoric about all this harm that he put his fellow soldiers at risk and the sentencing is about actual harm, not just what could have happened, but what actually happened.
Uh, and all of their, their witnesses are, are, are saying no deaths have come from WikiLeaks releases.
There are no casualties that they know of.
Uh, and that, you know, this, this completely undermines the 2010 claims that we heard from every top government official about, uh, WikiLeaks has blood on their hands.
They're international or high-tech terrorists.
Um, and that they, you know, put a lot of people at risk of harm, but that has not happened.
Uh, these people, the government witnesses are talking about notifying potentially identified forces, uh, maybe relocating some diplomats, uh, helping relocate some, uh, democracy activists and in other countries, uh, but no one is harmed that they allege.
Uh, and so it's going to be pretty hard, I think, for the judge to, to convict him of, or, you know, to sentence him based on, on harm that is simply not there.
Yeah.
And these are the prosecution witnesses.
Right.
This is allegedly going to the government case that, you know, under espionage, you're convicted of, uh, could cause harm, whether or not the information you released could cause harm to the U S or aid a foreign nation.
In sentencing, it's all about what actually happened.
Uh, and the details have been scanned, but a big problem with sentencing is that about half of it is conducted in secret in classified sessions, closed off to the press and the public, uh, because the documents referred to are classified, uh, in court, in open court, we get a little bits of kind of foundational information.
What could be expected, uh, we talked about in these closed sessions.
Uh, but, but it's interesting now, post conviction, even the state department cables and the war logs that are all over the internet, uh, easily available for you and me are referred to as purported cables, like the, you know, alleged cables, uh, as if they, they don't even exist, uh, officially.
Uh, so they, they can only be referred to in, in secret court.
And so we don't know the exact details, but, uh, the defense has made point has made a point to ask an open court, uh, you know, so are there any casualties resulting from these, uh, war logs from these disclosures?
Uh, and the answer has been no.
Um, and now when they do the secret testimony, uh, by the prosecution witnesses there, are the defense attorneys even allowed in the room?
Yeah, the defense gets to, uh, gets to cross examine in the, in the closed court.
Uh, so Bradley and his defense lawyers are there, but, uh, we, the press and the public can't find out what happened there.
The defense obviously is not allowed to tell us about it.
Uh, part of the judge's order to close the court for these sessions includes, uh, the government is forced to provide us a, an underdraft or a redacted transcript of what happens so that we can at least, uh, figure out what, what was talked about, even if we can hear the classified names and places and things like that, uh, and the military has failed to provide that there, there was closed testimony a month ago, uh, from a government witnesses witness, and we still haven't heard what happened in that session.
Uh, so they, they keep telling us they're working on it.
They're eventually going to get, going to get this information to us.
And, uh, we haven't seen it yet, so it's, uh, it's pretty secretive.
Hmm.
That's amazing.
The way they get away with that.
Now here's the thing.
I don't know how much this has come up in the sentencing here.
Um, but it's certainly a big part of the public smearing of Bradley Manning.
They like to do this, uh, well in context of Snowden's leaks and otherwise too, they like to say that Manning leaked so many documents, he couldn't, he couldn't possibly have read them all.
Uh, he couldn't have possibly known what harm would or wouldn't come.
And so what he was doing was extremely careless, uh, indiscriminate, that's the word that they love to use indiscriminate leaking of information.
Uh, is that your understanding of what happened here?
Uh, that's certainly how the government wants to frame it.
And they even charged him and convicted and got a conviction on a brand new charge in the military called wanton publication that he just wantonly released this information, which basically means yeah, reckless and indiscriminate.
Um, but the defense portrays it.
And from what we've seen, uh, Bradley actually knew a great deal about the documents that, uh, that he was releasing.
He knew that, uh, I mean, he certainly knew that he had access to much higher information, top secret information that he didn't release, uh, but also human intelligence, human reports, uh, that include names of lots of sources.
And he each goes not to release those.
Uh, he released big acts reports, which are significant activities, uh, basically informing the public about civilian casualties that we didn't know about otherwise.
And that the military had sometimes worked to cover up.
Uh, he had read, uh, several of the, you know, a lot of the state department cables.
We can't know that he read every single one, but, uh, he knew the type of documents.
He knew the type of information that would release that would be released.
And therefore it means that it was not going to be, uh, the type of information sensitive enough to cause harm to the U S.
Now, I think that's such an important point is why I bring it up that, as you mentioned there, that he said in his, uh, admission to some of the facts, you know, the ones that were correct, that he was, uh, accused on there when he, when he pleaded guilty to some of those that he had access.
This is a point that Daniel Ellsberg likes to make too.
He had access to top secret information and he did not leak it.
In fact, there was, uh, if you go back a couple of years, you can find all kinds of kooks who convinced themselves that this was some kind of limited hangout, because if this was a real whistleblower, then where's all the documents that I want to see and whatever.
But the fact is, as he explained, he very purposely did not include a bunch of top secret information that very well could have compromised sources and methods got Americans, their agents, their informants, their quizlings in danger or even, uh, activists abroad, international democracy and human rights activists, uh, have not been harmed.
Uh, and, and that's what Bradley wanted.
He said so over and over he's a humanist.
He put human, human life above all.
And that doesn't just mean American life.
Uh, that means exposing these kinds of abuses when the U S is disregarded human life as we saw so clearly in the collateral murder video.
You know, it'd be a fun project.
See if somebody could, could hack together all the different clips of the TV news hairdos, repeating the lie blood on his hands, blood on his hands.
Yeah, I've seen a couple of clips actually.
Some people have put them together and it's just relentless.
And you see the, the government making these statements and then the media kind of falling, falling right in line right after, uh, sometimes using the same kind of language, uh, which is pretty, pretty telling about, uh, about how they get their, their opinions in the news.
But, um, but yeah, blood on his hands and we've seen no, no evidence of that.
Well, now, you know, I can see if you're a government spokesman and they tell you that this is what you're supposed to spokes, then go on out there and do it.
But how does any civilian feel comfortable letting the government put words in their brain and in their mouth like that?
How could any civilian, any regular American citizen who's ever repeated the phrase blood on his hands in regards to Bradley Manning, how can they live with themselves?
Like, geez, well, that's, that's the problem with the media.
Just repeating what they, uh, what the government says.
And that's how people get their news.
That's what they're going to hear.
They're going to hear and think it's a uninformed opinion, but it's, you know, and it's frequently just repeating actual government claims.
And then here's what's funny though.
What's in the documents.
It's all about the state department and the defense department killing people and having people killed their blood spilled all over the ground.
Exactly.
You know, blood on whose hands, blood on the, on the hands of these soldiers who were complicit in these crimes.
Some, some of them covered up intentionally.
We've seen horrific examples of that.
Um, but you know, of course no prosecutions like the one, one we see for Bradley Manning.
Right.
Yeah.
War criminals get away with it.
Exposure of war criminals that cannot be tolerated.
Not at all.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
And you know, what's funny is I think, you know, going through, and I've read quite a few of these documents myself.
They don't have the right to classify any of this stuff anyway.
Now the very top secret stuff.
I mean, not that I'm justifying whatever missions they're on, wherever they're off on top secret missions and whatever, but at least there's a plausible argument for don't release the names of our undercover officers in Russia or whatever kind of thing.
Right.
But they didn't have the right to keep secret the innocence that they killed in Iraq in the first place.
The, uh, there's the information security oversight office, which is supposed to review the classification of documents.
And even the government's own sources said that 64% of the time, uh, the classification guide was not followed.
They were incorrectly classified.
Even the government is saying that two thirds of documents classified should not be classified the way they are.
And so that is pretty telling.
I mean, I think we classify probably 95% too much.
We, we classified, uh, what, 92 million documents last year alone.
Uh, what Bradley released was less than 1% of that.
And still people consider it a massive data leak.
Uh, so if you, if you really have an understanding of how much we classify it, uh, it's just amazing that we know anything that our government does, uh, given how much they conduct in secret.
Right.
And I defy any conservative or anybody out there to go ahead and tell me, yeah, I didn't have the right to know this or that that's been reported out of these wiki leaks.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Why don't you want to know what you're doing with your tax dollars?
You know what your government does in your own name?
Uh, why don't you want to know when, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of people report that, uh, what our government does is increasing the best recruitment for Al Qaeda.
So you want to know that what your government's doing, it's going to put you in more harm's way.
Uh, I, I certainly do.
Yeah.
I mean, I can't think there's been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of news stories, maybe more than a thousand news stories that have been based on these wiki leaks.
And even to this day, you'll see, well, you know, a cable from release in 2007, uh, detailed how this, that, the other thing, um, uh, to this day, new stories are being written that cite the wiki leaks, at least as background, uh, the, the banning leaks at least as background is the greatest gift to journalism of the 21st century bar none.
Sorry, Snowden, you're in second place behind the American hero, Bradley Manning.
And I can't think of a single one of those news stories where I thought, oh goodness, we should have never been allowed to find that out.
Exactly.
It's, it's information we need to know.
We deserve to know.
And yet Bradley, you know, and Bradley was the source for so many of those documents.
And, and we see, uh, these establishment media outlets largely ignoring the rest of his case.
They come here for the big days and, and yet don't, uh, don't show up for the day-to-day when it's revealed.
Hey, no, no actual casualties from these warlocks.
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to pick on Jake Tapper because he's actually one of these guys on TV that does real journalism from time to time anyway, but he, uh, in regards to a question about Snowden, I think, um, was sort of just setting up the premise that, well, you know, it's widely agreed that what Bradley Manning did was absolutely terrible and nefarious and whatever.
But so how do you compare what Snowden did to that?
And I just thought, boy, this guy really doesn't get out very much.
Does he?
Because it's not widely accepted anywhere outside of the CNN newsroom in Washington DC that what Bradley Manning did was wrong.
Is it?
No, I mean, that's Jake Tapper's circle.
That's what he knows.
And so according to him, it is widely known.
And that just means that with the government sources he talks to, uh, but, uh, but beyond that limited sphere, Bradley's widely revered, actually thanked and applauded for, uh, for revealing, uh, war crimes.
And by the way, can you cite some polls for us on that?
Do you know?
Uh, no, I mean, uh, it's been, it's been changing.
It's been rising.
Uh, certainly a couple of years ago, a lot of people thought Bradley was a traitor and that's thanks to government rhetoric and the media, uh, repeating that, but, uh, it's definitely been on the rise.
Uh, I haven't seen a new poll of late after the conviction, but, uh, we've definitely seen support for the Bradley Manning support network, uh, donations coming in and organization, fellow organizations, uh, holding solidarity rallies have definitely been on the ride.
Hey, I got another new project for a listener out there.
How about compiling all of the journalists who have cited Manning's leaks and yet have done nothing to defend him?
Yep.
It'd be a pretty big list.
Might take you a while.
What a disgrace.
American journalism is just in the dumps right now.
Uh, well, except for our few favorite exceptions.
Um, okay.
So now I guess, can you tell us more about who's testified exactly?
State department, this defense department, that, and, and what exactly they've had to say?
Uh, yeah, probably the, the biggest, uh, state department witness was Patrick Kennedy.
He's an undersecretary for a department of state.
And, uh, he testified at length in an open session, uh, about what he called a chilling effect.
He said that asked what the greatest damage to, uh, to diplomatic relations after WikiLeaks releasing the state department cables, he said, it's a chilling effect, not anyone getting harmed, not anyone getting killed, uh, but just the chilling effects, meaning people, uh, were reluctant to talk to the U S or were reporting slightly less than their diplomatic cables, uh, following the relief.
Um, and that's really all we had.
And, and, uh, the judge did not even allow some of these ridiculous claims of totally indirect harm.
You know, the government is only supposed to be allowed to show direct harm that resulted directly from Bradley's releases and the government taking hours of testimony to talk about this chilling effect, about how it could affect our diplomatic relations in the future, uh, about how our relationships with places like Pakistan and Nicaragua, which, which they have to allege were so great before are now deteriorating and eroding.
Um, uh, but it's just, it's just vague.
It's very speculative.
And even the judge is throwing out some of that testimony as, as too long-term and speculative.
Um, so only portions of that are going to be allowed, uh, others from the defense department and state department that have testified about the information review task force, the R I R T F, uh, which basically just spent months, uh, trying to identify sources that could be at risk.
Uh, they had to relocate some diplomats, um, relocate some human rights and democracy activists in other countries.
Um, but still, uh, by and large, uh, you know, in, in total, as I've said, have alleged no harm.
Uh, but again, the biggest problem with this sentencing trial, as far as the journalistic standpoint is that so much of it is conducted in secret, closed off to, uh, to those who, who want to know what's being talked about.
Yeah.
It's just amazing the way that this whole thing has been carried out from the time he was arrested and held in isolation in Kuwait and his, uh, at least damn near torture in Quantico, if not, you know, however you define that.
Um, and then now with the secrecy and the rewritten charges and everything else, it's just, the whole thing is, it's, it would be a forest except for how horrible it is, you know?
And you would hope that that would make it ripe for appeals that, uh, on the appeals court that it would, uh, but we have judge Lind, uh, the judge in Bradley's case is actually moving up to the army court of criminal appeals.
After this, we learned in a Washington Post story recently, uh, and that's the court, the court that would adjudicate his appeal.
Now, of course you would have to recuse yourself, but, uh, that's got to paint how they might look at this.
Now you think, I mean, it's going to be pretty, pretty problematic from the start.
And so we hope it moves beyond that to the, uh, armed forces appeals court, but, uh, it's going to be a struggle.
Yeah.
I don't know how they did it, but they've just abolished the term conflict of interest from the English language.
Now nobody ever even uses that phrase anymore.
Hey, what about this conflict of interest?
You know, this is how many, uh, this is how Ellsberg's charges were dismissed.
It wasn't just that Nixon had hired some Cubans to murder him.
Uh, it was that he offered the judge a promotion and the way Ellsberg tells his story, it took a couple of days to sink in.
And all of a sudden the judge realized, Hey, wait a minute, you're trying to bribe me.
Not that's it.
And he dismissed the charges.
And wasn't it a problem?
I believe in Jeremy Hammond, who, uh, gave documents to WikiLeaks, uh, hacking the Stratfor intelligence firm that, uh, the judge in that case was related to someone in Stratfor.
I mean, conflicts of interest abound and, and are, as you say, yeah, rarely paid attention to.
Yeah.
It's just amazing what they can get away with.
And now, again, this is the top headline.
This is the most important point here for, for, you know, critical listeners, uh, from courthouse news service here.
Expert found scant Al-Qaeda mentions of leaks.
There was nothing in there that was even valuable.
I'm an Al-Zawahiri anyway.
No, I mean, Al-Qaeda will use whatever they can.
And he has only found these two mentions of WikiLeaks documents and hasn't seen any since 2011.
Uh, this is a militant Islam scholar.
So he says, uh, Yusef Abouli 9.
And he says he achieved this one Adam Gadan Al-Qaeda video in 2011, an issue of Inspire Magazine from, uh, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from winter of 2010.
And this is the government's witness.
There's a government, government witness saying that he sees only two, two items of WikiLeaks being mentioned in, uh, in enemy sources, uh, and not since 2011, nothing in 2012, nothing in 2013.
Uh, the government portrays it as some, uh, you know, incredibly, uh, treasure trove for the, for Al-Qaeda that they would want to use for years to come.
Uh, but that's not even the case for a government witness.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there's still plenty in there for when I'm the judge at the war crimes trial though, like about, uh, a lot to, a lot to testify about that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Tons.
I mean, there's a million of them, but here's one that really sticks out in my mind.
Nathan is the documents that prove that George Bush's government twisted the arm of their sock puppet dictator in Ethiopia, Melissinawe to have him invade Somalia at Christmas 2006, leading to the death of more than a quarter of a million women and children, men, women, and children, uh, who've died in that horrible war.
And then the famine that the, you know, markets could not compensate for the famine because the country had been destroyed by America's war.
And there was just no, I mean, everybody knew that the CIA and the J sock had helped with the initial invasion, et cetera.
But the, the WikiLeaks showed that America made them do it.
And you know, when I'm in charge, those people are going to prison there.
They'll be lucky if they're not buried under the super max in Florence, Colorado.
Yeah.
I mean, this, this incredible abuses, atrocities, confirmation of the U S involvement in all kinds of these atrocities, uh, I mean, trying to get Afghanistan to prevent them from banning a certain kind of a bomb, uh, kind of manipulating Haiti, uh, lobbying against the minimum wage there, uh, helping corporations gain influence in Nigeria.
I believe it was a shell.
Maybe I think it was, uh, but it's just rampant and it's throughout in almost every country we're involved in.
It's something heinous.
Yeah.
It's just amazing.
Hey, you know what?
This one, it's the most important thing of all, but it always escapes my attention.
But Daniel Ellsberg brought up on the show, uh, what last week or the week before, whatever, right after the conviction immediately after the conviction was announced, uh, that first and foremost, Bradley Manning's leak to WikiLeaks of the state department and Iraq and Afghan war logs led to the real end of the American occupation of Iraq because Barack Obama was working very hard at convincing the Iraqi government to grant immunity when the status of forces agreement was expiring.
The UN resolution was already expired.
He needed a new immunity deal to keep the U S army in Iraq.
And because of the WikiLeaks and the war crimes revealed in there one specific war crime where American army soldiers had actually executed an infant along with the rest of his family, uh, that created the political cover anyway, for Maliki to say, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
Thanks for winning the war for us now beat it.
Exactly.
And that's so rarely mentioned because it's such a clear case.
I mean, uh, CNN was the only one I saw report on it at the time and it was buried, of course, deeply in their article that this WikiLeaks document is what really screwed up these, uh, negotiation talks.
Uh, but, but it's very clear.
Maliki saw this document and realized the U S wanted immunity for, for atrocities and covering up atrocities.
And that was, as you say, political cover enough that he just couldn't accept it.
Um, and that's a huge benefit to the U S to, to Iraq, uh, and, and Bradley deserves.
Thanks for that.
Yes, absolutely.
And listen, you know what you and, and the very few other independent journalists who have been, uh, so determined and worked so hard, uh, on covering this trial, you and Alexa and a few others.
You're just great, Nathan.
I appreciate it so much.
Thank you.
Always glad to be, to be back with you.
Okay, great.
Everybody that is Nathan L Fuller.
He's from Bradley Manning.org, the Bradley Manning support network, and man, they got a ton of great journalism there.
And all the information that you need to know about the, the trial and now the sentencing hearings on a Bradley Manning and all things, Bradley Manning, the American hero leaker of the collateral murder video, the Iraq and Afghan war logs, the state department cables, and some Guantanamo documents too.