All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Chase Medard.
He's an attorney in New York and a member of the National Lawyers Guild.
He writes for Tom Dispatch and the American Conservative Magazine as well as Le Monde Diplomatique and the London Review of Books, and he's got this new one out at tomdispatch.com.
We talked about it with Tom Englehart on the show yesterday.
It's just out this morning.
Chase Medard, the trials of Bradley Manning, a defense.
Why Bradley Manning is a patriot, not a criminal.
An opening statement for the defense of Private Manning.
Welcome back to the show, Chase.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Great to be here again, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Now, I think I should just be quiet and let you make your statement as best you can.
We've got two ten-minute segments here, and we'll treat our live audience today as our jury.
Well, the pressure's on.
Well, I'd like to introduce your audience to Private First Class Bradley Manning.
He's someone who's been written about a lot, screamed about a lot on talk radio, and like all whistleblowers who upset the government, he is having his character impeached.
He is being smeared right, left, and center.
And it's important to know who Bradley Manning is, what he has done, and I think what a great patriot he really is and what a great price he has paid for his love for the country and to get us back on the right track in our state-crafted foreign policy.
So Bradley Manning, he's an Army Private First Class, just turned 23 just a few days ago.
And he comes from the small town of Crescent, Oklahoma, population 1,281, according to the last census.
He enlists in the military because he wants to give something back to his country, like so many young people who enlist.
And to see a bit of the world, he deploys to Iraq in October 2009, and he is expecting that he will be helping Iraqis build a free and open society after the long nightmare of Saddam Hussein.
Instead, Private Manning finds himself helping the Iraqi authorities round up Iraqi citizens simply for the act of distributing a pamphlet that investigates financial corruption in the Iraqi government.
Where does the money go?
That's the name of this pamphlet.
Now, the penalty for distributing such a pamphlet in Iraq, it's not just a slap on the wrist.
It's not just a fine.
It's imprisonment.
And we know, in large part thanks to Bradley Manning, that torture is incredibly widespread in the Iraqi prisons and that the Iraqi authorities and Iraqi federal police have been torturing their own people in all kinds of atrocious ways.
And we know that we knew this.
We know that the U.S. military was quite aware of this.
Let me just read to you some of the kinds of torture that the Iraqi police and authorities were doing to Iraqi prisoners, talking about shooting Iraqi prisoners, beating them to death, pulling out fingernails and teeth, cutting off fingers, burning with acid, torturing with electric shocks, all kinds of sexual abuse.
Now, it is, and this is not uncertain in any way, it is a war crime to hand over prisoners to an authority that you know will torture them.
And Bradley Manning, well, this is not what Operation Iraqi Freedom was meant to be all about to Bradley Manning or to anyone else.
So Bradley Manning took his concerns up the chain of command.
He told his commanding officer, you know, hey, what's going on here?
All they're doing is passing out a pamphlet looking into financial corruption in the Iraqi government, which is notoriously corrupt, by the way.
And we're handing them in to the authorities where they're likely to be tortured.
There are all kinds of credible accounts of torture.
Why are we doing this?
Now, the response to Bradley Manning's question is not very encouraging.
Bradley Manning is told to shut up and just help round up more prisoners.
I mean, I ask you, is this what Operation Iraqi Freedom was really supposed to be all about?
I don't think so.
Anyway, the next time Bradley Manning encountered evidence of torture, he decided to do something else about it.
And he is alleged to have leaked many documents, thousands of documents, about the war in Iraq to WikiLeaks.
Now, I'm going to assume that Bradley Manning did these leaks because I think it's an admirable act.
And if it turns out that Bradley Manning didn't do this, then, well, what I'm about to say goes for whoever did leak these documents to WikiLeaks.
Because we, the American people, have a right to know about the important things that our government and our military is doing.
We cannot function as a free society, as an open society, if we are left in the dark.
These things are far too important to be left to just a narrow group of political elites, of military elites.
So, Bradley Manning is alleged to have leaked thousands of documents regarding the Iraq war, including the now infamous collateral murder video that shows the Apache helicopter gunship's view of, well, shooting dead 18-plus civilians in Baghdad in broad daylight.
Bradley Manning is also alleged to have leaked thousands of documents about the Afghan war, showing that that war is going very poorly, much worse than we'd like to admit, including the Army's own report about what's called the Granai Massacre, a U.S. military airstrike that destroyed the small town of Granai and, according to the Afghan government, killed 140 civilians.
I don't think that's how you win hearts and minds.
This is something very much at odds with the PR we get about the Afghan war, that it's some kind of Peace Corps project that happens to have, oh, a couple of hundred thousand armed soldiers in it.
So, it's important that we know these things.
And then Bradley Manning is also alleged to have leaked these, oh, 250-something, 250,000 State Department cables and diplomatic cables, which have, well, provided the world with a lot of amusement, but no real damage to the United States.
So, it's just important, first of all, to recognize why Bradley Manning did this.
He did not do this as a vandal, as some hacker, as some, oh, wild-eyed anarchist.
This is a young man who loves his country, who enlisted because he loves his country, and wants to steer the United States back on the right path.
We have a right to know about these incidents.
They aren't important.
They are not trivial.
They are unknown to most Americans, but it's not as if the rest of the world doesn't know about this.
If you ever watch Al Jazeera, which is readily available in most countries, although not in the United States, you hear reports, you see reports, and you see very graphic footage of dead bodies, dead civilians, that have been killed by the U.S. military in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
So, the idea that this is destroying America's otherwise pristine name is just nonsense.
It's too late for that.
We've already wreaked what we've sown in Iraq and Afghanistan, and although we Americans are kept in the dark by our own government, by our own media, this is not news to the rest of the world.
So, we know that we've heard all kinds of the sky-is-falling rhetoric about these releases, these leaks, that they're the worst blow to American prestige since Pearl Harbor or since the Tet Offensive.
I think all of this is horribly overblown, and do you know who agrees with me?
Well, how about the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates?
He himself has told reporters that he thinks that all the prophecies of apocalypse because of these leaks are horribly overblown.
All right, now we'll hold it right there, and we'll come back with more from Chase Medar.
He's not Bradley Manning's attorney.
This is sort of a mock opening statement in defense of Bradley Manning.
It's sorely needed in this debate, and it's going really good so far.
We'll get back to more right after this.
You can find the essay at TomDispatch.com.
All right, y'all, it's Antiwar Radio.
I always wanted to be a judge for a day.
I'd rather be sentencing government officials to prison terms, but instead now I'm presiding over the opening defense argument on behalf of Bradley Manning.
We're just pretending, but it's all right.
We have a qualified litigator here, Chase Medar from the National Lawyers Guild.
He's got this essay at TomDispatch.com, and it's sort of a mock lawyer's opening argument in defense of Bradley Manning.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, again I bring you Chase Medar from the National Lawyers Guild.
Go ahead.
Thank you, Scott.
So to recap, the supposed damage that these leaks have caused our country and our interests have just been hysterically exaggerated throughout the media for the past few months.
And that's not just my opinion as someone sympathetic to Bradley Manning.
That's also the opinion of our Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates.
Robert Gates has expressly denied that these leaks are a meltdown or a game changer.
He says, quote-unquote, I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought.
Every other government in the world knows the U.S. government leaks like a sieve, and it has for a long time.
So this is not the biggest blow to American prestige since the Tet Offensive.
I think that's just nonsense.
And as for worries that our Afghan collaborators and informers would be targeted by the Taliban when their names came out in the WikiLeaks cables, well, that hasn't happened either.
Pentagon Senior Spokesperson Colonel David Lappin told reporters last September that there is so far zero evidence that any of the Afghan informers working with the U.S. military and ISAF forces have been injured by Taliban reprisals.
So there just doesn't seem to be any downside to these leaks that we can see so far, certainly none of the more lurid predictions.
So two points that I want to make is that Bradley Manning is really part of a long tradition of patriotic enlisted men and women who have stood up for their country and really performed with great honor in the military.
First of all, he has refused to comply with illegal and invalid orders by leaking these documents.
He has refused to be complicit in a military that was handing over Iraqi prisoners to Iraqi authorities who we knew very well were going to torture them.
And, you know, this is not just something new.
The duty of a soldier to disobey illegal orders, this is something that is in the Nuremberg Principles from the Nuremberg Tribunals right after World War II.
But it goes farther back than that, deep into our own common law legal system.
It goes back to 1851 with the great legal case then.
It goes back to 1804, pretty much at the dawn of our republic, with the great case of Little v.
Burram that established that soldiers have a duty and the right not to follow illegal orders.
And Bradley Manning is part of this American tradition.
And, you know, this isn't some new law or some new sinister use of international law.
This is a deeply American tradition.
Bradley Manning is also part of a long tradition of patriotic whistleblowers in the military from Daniel Ellsberg to Lieutenant Colonel Daryl Vanderveld.
And I want to talk a little bit about Dan Ellsberg, who's been on your show before, I believe.
People remember him as the famous leaker of the Pentagon Papers, that secret internal history of the Vietnam War that was ordered by the Secretary of Defense himself.
And people, you know, 40 years later may have the idea that Ellsberg must have been one of these hippies or some anti-American or some long-haired subversive type.
Well, nothing could be further from the truth.
Daniel Ellsberg was a model Marine.
He's someone who graduated first in his class at the Marine Corps Basic School, first in his class of 1,100 lieutenants.
He served as a platoon leader and rifle company commander in the Marine 2nd Infantry Division for three years.
And you know what?
Daniel Ellsberg deferred his graduate studies so he could remain on active duty with his battalion during the Suez Crisis of 1956.
Now think about that.
This is exactly the opposite of what so many of our leaders from Joseph Biden to Dick Cheney have done.
But Ellsberg deferred graduate school to stay in the military.
He's a great whistleblower.
He performed his duties as a soldier and as a citizen when he leaked Pentagon Papers with great honor.
He's now a national hero.
Even the State Department, which is, you know, crying that the sky is falling thanks to these week-in-week documents, now honors Dan Ellsberg as a great American and is sponsoring a documentary about Dan Ellsberg and what a great American he is in a traveling roadshow of American documentaries that the State Department is putting on.
So really, Bradley Manning, he's not some foreign agent.
He comes from a long tradition of a long American tradition of patriotic whistleblowers, specifically within the military.
And I also want to point out that the idea that diplomacy should be conducted somewhat openly and somewhat in the public view with public input, this is not some radical new idea that just popped out of the head of Julian Assange or something new to the Internet era.
This is something that's very old and also has deep roots in our American history.
Everyone has heard of President Woodrow Wilson's 14 points for the League of Nations, but it's important to remember that the very first point of the 14 points calls for open and public diplomacy.
I'd like to read it.
Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.
Now think about that.
Frankly and in the public view.
I think this is exactly the national tradition that private first class Bradley Manning has sacrificed so much to uphold.
And I think he should be given a medal for what he's done.
All right.
Well, I want to congratulate you for what you've done here, Chase.
I think it's a very important part of the debate, and we're almost out of time.
But I was wondering if you could give a comment as to why it was that you wrote this great essay at Tom Dispatch and gave us your time giving your presentation today.
Well, I'll tell you, whether you think that Bradley Manning is a hero or a scoundrel, in large part depends on what you think of the past 10 years of American statecraft.
I think most of us see the past 10 years of American diplomacy and foreign policy as a series of disasters.
The war in Iraq, a nonstop disaster.
We haven't reached the full whirlwind of that.
Neither has the world.
The war in Afghanistan and now Pakistan is going horribly.
We, for the past 10 years, have been dealing with the consequences of foreign policy that is made in secret by a very narrow coterie of foreign policy leaders, and we are suffering for it.
Bradley Manning is the antidote.
Well, thank you very much.
I really appreciate that.
And, everybody, again, it's at TomDispatch.com.
It'll be under Tom's name at AntiWar.com later on today.
And, again, that's Chase Medar from the National Lawyers Guild.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
