All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm joined now on the phone by Marcy Wheeler, known as Empty Wheel, at her blog at FireDogLake.com.
EmptyWheel.
FireDogLake.com.
She also writes for the Huffington Post and all over the internet.
Welcome back to the show, Marcy.
How are you doing?
Hey, thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
So, I'm very happy to see how much coverage you have of the Bradley Manning story at your website and his apparently continuing mistreatment.
I guess the very latest is that they're moving him to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.
What do you know about it?
Yeah, they just announced yesterday.
The sequence yesterday was that the AP reported he was being moved, which is how his attorney learned about it.
And then they did a big press conference, and in the press conference sort of said, well, we had no business keeping him for as long as we have in detention at Quantico, so we're moving him to Leavenworth because we expect him to be in pretrial detention for some time yet.
Huh.
Well, that's funny.
You know, when actually I saw the headline, I just somehow was, I'm such a Sony optimist at heart, I guess.
I was thinking, oh good.
Maybe somebody's in trouble for mistreating the guy.
And now, you know, somebody got somebody else in trouble and now they're in trouble.
And so they've moved him to somewhere else.
And this has nothing to do with accountability for the mistreatment of him as far as we can tell here, right?
Well, you know, DOD officials, yesterday we heard from the Pentagon General Counsel, Jay Johnson, and the Undersecretary for the Army.
And they said repeatedly, well, we're not going to say anything bad about what happened at Quantico.
But there was a really interesting article from Jim Miklaszewski, who is NBC's longtime Pentagon reporter.
And he, first of all, he was one of the first people to report on people within DOD complaining about Manning's treatment.
But yesterday, he added sources to that story before he had sourced it entirely to anonymous military officials.
Yesterday, his story included Pentagon officials.
So Pentagon officials have reviewed this and said effectively they found it to be a problem as well.
And then in yesterday's press conference, and let me get the quote exactly right, they said there's no way he's going to be sent back to Quantico.
He's still at this point scheduled to be tried in the D.C. area.
And they have said specifically that rather than having him stay at Quantico for the time he would be back in D.C. for a trial, they would find some other means to put him up.
And that suggestion is pretty stunning because that says they're not even willing to leave Manning in Quantico for a couple of days at a time.
That seems to me that internally they admit that something went wrong at Quantico.
Well, but now it seems kind of odd the way that they didn't even notify the lawyer that they're moving him to Kansas.
And of course, that's very problematic.
If his lawyer is in D.C., the trials in D.C., the work of defending him is in D.C. and they're moving him to Kansas.
And one of Manning's family members who has visited him is in Maryland.
So it's going to be a lot harder for her to get to visit him as well.
One of the things, I mean, the timing is all very interesting because President Obama was asked on March 11th whether he thought Bradley, whether he agreed with P.J. Crowley, then the spokesperson for the State Department, whether he agreed with Crowley that Manning's treatment was ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.
And Obama said, oh, D.O.
D., the Pentagon has told me that it's all appropriate.
Sometime after that, according to the press conference yesterday, sometime after that, the Pentagon actually started reviewing Manning's treatment.
So that we need to believe what Obama based his statement on back on May 11th.
And as part of that review, they realized that it may be unprecedented for somebody to be held for nine months as Manning has been in pretrial detention in Quantico.
At the same time, a bunch of other things have been happening.
The U.N. Special Rapporteur for Torture has been asking to visit Manning in an unsupervised visit and D.O.D. has been saying no.
The day after he had a conversation with top people in the Pentagon and State Department, Manning all of a sudden got a psychological interview that they've been talking about doing since July.
Germany has weighed in.
The U.K., because Manning technically has citizenship in the U.K., they weighed in.
Amnesty International weighed in.
So all of a sudden, the international community was criticizing this detention.
And that's precisely the time period where D.O.
D., where the Pentagon all of a sudden decided they would review his treatment and voila, they discover that, you know, there were problems with it.
Now, in addition, Manning's lawyer, David Coombs, was preparing to submit a habeas petition based on treatment that happened to him in January when he was pretty much harassed.
The psychiatrist in Quantico had been saying over and over again, take him off prevention of injury watch.
And the brig commander said, no, we can do whatever we want to do.
And pursuant to that, there was four or five days after that happened, the guard started harassing Manning, yelled at him for saying, yes, sir, instead of aye, sir.
And that's the day he was first stripped down at that point down to his boxers.
They took away his glasses.
They put him on suicide watch.
And there's a number of sources who, again, in Nikolshevsky's reporting, which has been really good on this, who have been saying that was punitive, not preventative.
And I suspect that's one of the things DOD reviewed and said, we got to get him out of there.
Well, that's interesting.
I wonder if Barack Obama will be asked if he still takes the responsibility that he happily took the other day for the treatment that the military is now apparently backing away from.
Yeah, I mean, push comes to shove.
Either Obama misrepresented what had happened when he said that he had asked the Pentagon whether the treatment was appropriate.
Again, this was back in March.
This is about five weeks ago.
Or somebody in the Pentagon lied to Obama in saying that this was all standard procedure.
Well, and no matter what, he still knows what that procedure is, and he has the power to stop it if he wants to.
And we can all see that what they're doing is trying to intimidate other whistleblowers, trying to get Bradley Manning to break down and point his finger at Julian Assange and everything else.
So it's not like poor Barack Obama is innocent at the mercy of whatever some general tells him.
Well, and the concern, too, is that some of Manning's independent visitors, notably David House, were prohibited from visiting him about the same time.
It appears to be sort of a response to Obama being asked this question.
And so no one who is kind of providing an independent assessment of how Manning is doing has been doing that in the last month.
And one of the things DOD said yesterday was that, oh, one of the reasons we're moving him to Leavenworth is because we have better psychological treatment.
So you, I mean, you sort of wonder whether this isolation and harassment over the past nine months really has affected Manning, and whether it's almost too late.
I mean, whether they've accomplished their objective in Quantico and now they're going to send him to Leavenworth to try and hide that fact before trial, before he has to appear publicly.
Yeah, they, in the name of psychological treatment, they mistreat him, deliberately trying to break him down and drive him crazy so that he needs psychological treatment.
Yeah, and again, one of the things Johnson said yesterday, again, the general counsel of the Pentagon, is he kept, he made two allusions to this possibly not going to trial.
And given that they're supposed to be in the middle of this review of whether Manning is competent to stand trial, it sort of makes you wonder whether DOD isn't moving towards declaring him incompetent and therefore never trying him, and therefore never having the evidence.
I mean, the evidence in this case is really sketchy because they're relying on Adrian Lamo, this hacker who turned him in, who's crazy and may have been set up to it by law enforcement.
It's very clear, given recent congressional testimony, that DOD didn't have even the most basic security measures in place on their classified network that would have allowed them to find somebody.
Right, so just lock him in insanity prison rather than admit all this in court.
All right, hold it right there.
Sorry.
We got to take this break, everybody.
It's Marcy Wheeler, EmptyWheel.
FiredogLake.com, and we'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Marcy Wheeler, EmptyWheel.
At EmptyWheel.
FiredogLake.com.
Welcome back from the break, Marcy and everybody here.
Now, I said something inflammatory and then went out to break and that wasn't right, but we were talking about the problems with trying Bradley Manning, some of the problems in the government's case and how, you know, now you were saying it's kind of suspicious the way they're going to hold this hearing about whether he's fit to stand trial or not.
Maybe they're trying to get out of giving him even a fair trial if you can call a military trial that.
Yeah, I mean, there are two reasons their case against Manning is very weak.
The first is that they would be relying on Adrian Lamo, who's this hacker who turned him in, and Lamo has his own problems both with the law and mentally.
And so he's not going to be the most credible witness on the witness stand.
So in addition to that, it appears they have some kind of forensic evidence of files being transferred off the computer.
But what we know they don't have is very basic security information such as proof that it was Manning who was on a particular computer.
Basically, because DOD security on their classified on their classified network is abysmal.
You know, they've had to admit after the fact that it's still possible to go into DOD's classified computer and stick in a Lady Gaga CD and download what you ever want and upload, frankly, as happened three years ago, upload things like malware onto DOD's network.
They don't have any kind of personal keys to make sure they know what one person is doing on the network.
They don't audit the system to see whether there's any kind of unusual activity on the system.
And all of that is stuff that, you know, for your listeners to work in the private sector, that's really, really basic security.
And yet the Department of Defense doesn't have that on our classified network and doesn't plan to have that, will not fix those problems until 2013.
And so now, but then back to the point, I didn't want to put words in your mouth.
I wanted to let you explain what you're saying about the maybe they're trying to duck this trial, I think is what you're trying to get at, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the point is that because they don't have these security places, these security measures in place, it's going to make their computer forensics case against Manning a lot harder to prove because some of the really easy ways to prove something like this just aren't available to them.
They don't have the technical capacity to do it.
Now, I know you're not an expert in military law or anything like that, but do you know, have you done any research or heard from any lawyers about the time limit on what's considered a speedy trial under military law in this country?
Well, thus far, the holdup has been this psychological evaluation and technically the defense asked for that.
They did start to complain about speedy trial issues.
I want to say it was back in January, but it is right to say that it's not unusual for a case like the one against Manning to have an extended pre-trial detention system.
But that's why it's so important that in pre-trial period before somebody has actually been proven to be guilty, they don't have to undergo forced nudity, for example, because that effectively starts punishing them even though they haven't been proven guilty.
Right.
And even though no law in America would allow the treatment of any prisoner like that, I mean, not legally anyway, obviously there's a lot of terrible things that happen in American prisons.
No law says, oh yeah, part of your punishment is we make you stand at attention naked whenever we feel like and poke you in the back when you're trying to sleep in the middle of the night.
Right.
So I think the key issue here is, I mean, there are two.
One is, was there a delay?
I mean, one of the things I find really interesting is that this interview that DOD says needed to take place in the D.C. area happened the day after the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture had a personal conversation with both the State Department and DOD.
And I find that a pretty remarkable coincidence that all of a sudden they're in trouble with the Torture Rapporteur and all of a sudden they have this interview that's been held up since July.
So, I mean, one question I have is, was that delayed deliberately so that they could keep Manning in this kind of treatment?
And then, as you point out, I mean, the treatment is not acceptable.
The forced nudity would not be acceptable for anybody.
And a number of sources say that it was done punitively.
It was done precisely because Manning wasn't being, you know, and I think you're right that the suspicion is it was done not so punitively, but it was done to break him down.
There was one amazing quote when the brig commander first used forced nudity with Manning.
He said, well, my job is to be your God.
And that's almost a direct quote of what Abu Zubaydah's interrogators used with him when they were starting to subject him to torture.
So we're using the same concept of forced helplessness that we used with the worst accused Al-Qaeda detainees as well.
And that's something Americans should be really concerned about.
Yeah, you know, as far as a signpost on the road to hell or something, I feel like we're so low on the slippery slope.
I can't even see the sun from here.
We have a UN torture investigator come to America where there's no law and where even our best and brightest American Idol heroes can be tortured lawlessly in a prison for what, you know, obvious punitive reasons and then they're turned away and are not allowed to come in and do their interview or something like, it's us and Sudan are basically in the same boat on this one on the planet Earth right now.
It is absolutely maddening.
What's really sick, Scott, is that if you recall, one of the reasons Obama gave for bombing Libya is to ensure UN credibility.
Yeah, that's what Bush said about Iraq too.
He said specifically that he needs to have these unsupervised meetings for his credibility.
So, you know, at one level we're bombing Libya to ensure UN's credibility, but at the other level we won't do even the most basic thing, which is let the torture repertoire speak to Bradley Manning, even though that hurts the UN's credibility.
Well, you know, I'm a Declaration of Independence kind of guy and I don't like even my own national government really.
I certainly don't like any government bigger and further away than that, but this is all our own fault.
We're doing this.
We're torturing our own independence here by throwing away our law, violating the international law that really it's our government that forced the whole world to accept after World War II anyway.
Right.
You know, this whole project of international law is, you know, the American collective security and all that, you know, we'll never let war between major powers break out again because we'll control them all.
But when it comes to credibility, it only matters if we can bomb somebody, but not if we can have one of our own detainees interviewed.
Yeah, it's absolutely crazy.
I just well, and here's the thing too, and I just I don't have a stomach anymore to sit around reading the right-wing blogs.
I don't know if you do, but it really is pretty successful in America.
Isn't it?
This meme that this guy Bradley Manning is the worst guy ever.
He's worse than Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen put together for his treachery in the minds of many Americans now.
Yeah, and you know, they're in a completely different case recently DoD actually argued that the guy who allegedly leaked to James Reisen on an Iran story was worse because he leaked to the mass media rather than leaking to our enemies.
And I really think the government is beginning to believe that.
Wait, who said that?
When?
In what context?
DoD in the case of Jeff Sterling.
He's alleged to be he's alleged to be James Reisen's source on what's called a Merlin program and in a court filing.
They actually said it's worse that this guy leaked the mass media that it would be if he leaked to one of our enemies in a court filing.
Wow.
Yeah, and so the argument that the government is now making and you know, you know, presumably if they believe that was Jeff Sterling, they definitely believe it was Manning that it's worse for somebody to leak to allegedly leak in Manning's in both cases.
Actually, it's worse for somebody to leak to the American people than it is to leak to Iran or China or somebody else and you know, frankly that really holds up when you see how bad DoD security is their network security.
I'm sure China and Iran can just lick what they want at will and the only I mean another reason I think why they're harassing Bradley Manning so badly is to discourage any other whistleblowers leaking because there's no security on there.
I mean, there's no real there's no adequate security on the classified Network.
Well, you know, this is a part of what Julian Assange wrote in that manifesto was that as the leaks come out the institutions have to clamp down on their own use of information that you know, they have to use in order to get their dirty work done and whatever and so it ends up making it harder and harder for them to do their dirty work.
They try to ban thumb drives and ban, you know, removable DVD drives or whatever, but they need those thumb drives and DVD drives to wage their world Empire, you know, so at some point the security clamped down and the ability to carry out the policies they want to carry out come in a major conflict and hopefully will lead to some breakdown.
Yeah.
Yep.
Sounds good to me.
I like it.
I don't know if I call it good.
But yeah, I think that's about where we're at.
Yeah.
Well, again, I want to thank you for your time on the show and for your time on this story.
I think it's just so important that here's this guy who in his own words, allegedly anyway, pretty credibly.
I think in the chat logs published by wired says the American people have a right to know I don't want to give this to our enemies and help them the but I think it, you know, the people can't do the right thing if they don't know what the truth is and the truth is some pretty criminal things and I think they need to know and it just seems like the whole country ought to be rallying in support of this guy instead of turning the other way while our president tortures him, but so I think it's, you know, you may underestimate the effect that your coverage of this story has and so I just don't want you to it's really important that you stay on it.
Thank you, Oscar.
All right, and thank you very much again for your time on the show today.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
That is the great Marcy Wheeler empty wheel dot FireDogLake.com.
