07/26/10 – Mike Gogulski – The Scott Horton Show

Alright everybody, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott, I'm talking with Mike Kogolsky, now he's our next guest on the show, he's from BradleyManning.org, help, Bradley Manning, the American hero.
Welcome to the show, Mike, how are you?
Good afternoon, Scott, thanks for having me on, I'm doing okay but having an allergy attack.
Ah, geez, well I'm sorry to hear that.
Okay, so now, you know, there's, I don't know, one percent chance that somebody driving around listening has no idea who Bradley Manning is and why anybody ought to help him.
Maybe you can help straighten him out.
Bradley Manning was, or I guess technically still is, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst who was based in Iraq, and at the end of May he was arrested and charged at the beginning of July with a series of offenses related apparently to the release of the, quote, collateral murder video by WikiLeaks, which shows the American helicopter gunship shooting 11 people in the street of Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists and two children.
And now, apparently, 92,000 documents released to The Guardian and online to the whole world at WikiLeaks.org, this is also Bradley Manning's work, isn't it?
Or do we know yet?
Well, the release today from WikiLeaks through Der Spiegel, The Guardian and the New York Times is certainly substantial and sounds like it could be related to what's been reported as having been disclosed by Manning on the chat logs to the person that he trusted with the story of what he had done.
But, of course, we're dealing with allegations here we don't really know, and at least from the chat logs that we've read that have been published, it didn't suggest that this was the kind of thing that was coming out.
It was suggesting more along the lines of diplomatic cables and communication of this nature.
So I'm not quite sure.
Okay, well, it is true that Julian Assange told the TED Talk group when he did a surprise visit last week, well, according to CNN anyway, he said that they've gotten a substantial number of very high-level disclosures since the so-called collateral murder video.
At the very least, Bradley Manning and his actions with the collateral, well, alleged actions with the collateral murder video has inspired this leak, if it's not him who did it.
I kind of, my gut tells me that it is him and that this is just, you know, one more reason of what a hero he is and the time he's facing.
By the way, how much time is this kid facing?
The estimate, or rather, the total that's come out of the military PR office is that the charges carry a maximum of 52 years in confinement.
Additionally, this would come with dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and benefits, plus an unspecified amount of fines that could be imposed by the military court.
Do you think he had, does it say in the logs that he had any idea what he was risking doing what he did?
Well, there's one segment of the log, and I don't remember the wording exactly, but what it says effectively is, you know, did I imagine myself risking life in prison to do this kind of thing?
Not really, but if that's how it is, so be it.
And I'm probably quoting very badly from this alleged log.
So it sounds like he wasn't really trying to confront that possibility head-on, but he did consider it, huh?
Sounds like it.
Well, the sense that I got from reading these chat logs that were published was that, you know, if this is Bradley behind it, that he had gotten access to some things by virtue of his job, that he, you know, that he pondered for a good while and said this stuff should not be secret.
This stuff has got to go out to the general public, and it's important enough for him to take the risk in doing so.
Yeah, well, you know what, let's focus on his motive a little bit more, because I saw, I don't know if it was Dan Sonora's wife or which one of these people it was, maybe it was Alan Greenspan's wife on TV today, and they're smearing this guy, Bradley Manning.
Let's not talk about what's in the documents.
Let's not talk about the new Pentagon Papers, the new secret history of the Afghan war that hit the web, 92,000 pages worth.
Let's talk about what's wrong with Bradley Manning, and this is, of course, the Washington Post way of doing things and the Wired Magazine way of doing things, is that, you know, this kid apparently had some problems.
If you type in Bradley Manning and despondent, you'll get, I don't know, 100,000 or more hits, I think.
That was the meme that they're pushing, and also, as I think it was Justin Raimondo pointed out at antiwar.com, they're trying to use the word vacuuming as much as they could as well, and I think that started with Adrian Lamo, the rat, who was trying to basically say that this kid was just, you know, some careless kid, you know.
Nobody liked him.
He didn't like anybody.
He didn't like his job.
He hated his life, and he didn't have a girlfriend and whatever, and so he was just vacuuming up all this stuff and turning it over and completely leaving out of the narrative.
What's obvious in the logs, if you read them, correct me if I'm wrong, the kid's crisis of conscience, the truth that he had available to him that he didn't know about before and knew that the rest of us didn't know about and thought, you know, it was, like you said, maybe, you know what, so be it.
Maybe I am risking life in prison, but the people got to know this.
Yeah, well, that's a very common tactic, I think, is, you know, you ignore the issue and attack the man, so there's been plenty of smear all over with respect to Bradley Manning, you know, regarding his history, regarding his, you know, quote-unquote troubled childhood and all of this kind of thing, and as far as I'm concerned, all of that is irrelevant to the issue.
I mean, here you've got somebody who apparently is a whistleblower bringing very important material to the attention of the American people and the world at a time when the war in Iraq has been going on for something north of 2,700 days, and in the words of Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers who was on the scene and who carried away one of the injured children from the van, what's shown in this video is not an unusual event.
It's more or less, you know, every workaday sort of thing that goes on for the military occupation of Iraq.
So multiply that by 2,700 and you've got a massive crime, and I can't imagine being, you know, the 22-year-old guy who's sitting there looking at this stuff and thinking, okay, on the one hand, I've got my non-disclosure agreement, and on the other hand, I've got doing what's morally right, even if that means breaching the agreement and taking this material public.
So I'm personally very glad that this stuff is coming out.
I'm very nervous that whether it's Manning or whether it's somebody else who was inspired by him, that it seems the Obama administration is going to crack down as hard as they can.
Yeah, well, you know, we talked with Daniel Ellsberg on this show about how Barack Obama actually has taken an unprecedented number of prosecutions for whistleblowing and leaks, which is directly counter to what he campaigned on.
And I guess George Bush indicted a couple people or threatened to investigate it, maybe prosecuted one guy, and Obama's now already on three, and I think Bradley Manning makes four whistleblowers that have been put up against the wall, so to speak, by the Holder Justice Department.
And by the way, I just got a message here from world-class radio producer Angela Keaton that Julian Assange will be on the show on Wednesday.
So everybody make sure to stay tuned from now all the way through then.
I'm sorry, you were going to say, sir?
That's great.
Julian's going to come on and say something.
No, I listened to your show with Dan Ellsberg and also heard him say in a couple different fora that Obama is setting a record for prosecuting whistleblowers, which really is somewhat shocking.
First of all, I didn't realize that the previous record for a president's administration prosecuting a whistleblower was exactly one.
I would have expected the number to be much higher, but here we are now with Manning being either number three or number four.
Yeah, well, and with the advent of WikiLeaks, it might be dozens before we're done.
Hang tight right there.
Hey everybody, it's Mike Gogolski from Bradley Manning dot org.
Go Google that up right now, please.
This is the Liberty Radio Network broadcasting the latest Liberty oriented audio content 24 hours a day at LRN dot FM.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And if anybody in the audience works in bronze, you want to get to work on the gigantic statue of the American hero, the human hero, Bradley Manning.
I got five on it.
Let me know.
Scott at Antiwar dot com.
All right.
I'm talking with Mike Gogolski.
He's running Bradley Manning dot org.
Help Bradley Manning.
Save Bradley Manning.
But nobody knows how to do that.
Everybody's been sitting around wondering.
This kid was in confinement in imprisonment in Kuwait for three weeks, four weeks before they ever even charged him.
And then they charged him.
He's still locked down in Kuwait.
Nobody knows.
Or I don't know.
Maybe somebody knows.
Maybe, you know, Mike.
But none of the rest of us know who his lawyer is.
Does he have one?
Is his lawyer allowed access to him?
Is there any legal process?
You know, are they going to apply the UCMJ?
Are they going to call him unprivileged enemy, belligerent, and crucify him or what?
Well, I can share a few things with you on that.
First of all, he is in detention in Camp Arishan, I believe is how it's pronounced in Kuwait, in what they call the theater field confinement facility there, which is the fancy new name for the brig.
He has had two military JAG lawyers appointed to him as trial counsel.
Additionally, there are two other JAG attorneys attached to the case as advisory counsel.
I've had limited communications now just in the past couple of weeks with those attorneys and also with a member of Bradley's family.
And the current situation is that Bradley has not yet chosen civilian counsel.
He's had some options presented to him, which come with very high price tags, and he has not yet elected one or the other out of several.
Our group, now we have a name, the Bradley Manning Support Network, we have also forwarded contact information of a prominent attorney with experience working in the military courts through his attorneys to Bradley, and this attorney is very interested in taking the case.
Our group is also committed to doing the organizing and the fundraising necessary to fund a vigorous defense if that's what Bradley chooses.
We're preparing a press release that's going to go out either tomorrow or Wednesday that's going to actually announce one of the two funding vehicles that are going to be available to people to donate.
I can't really say much more on that right now, but there you have it.
All right, well, so people need to know that this is the real deal, that if they end up sending you some dollars through PayPal or something like that, that it's going to go to whichever lawyer he ends up deciding on, et cetera, like that, right?
That's right.
The funding mechanism is going to be through a reputable organization that's sponsored by a 501c3 corporation, so they've got reporting and funds disposition requirements that they have to adhere to, and they're also going to be providing transparency to the donor public with respect to the use of the funds.
Right on, because people can easily come up with the idea I just came up with, which is that anybody can make a Bradley Manning website if they want, but this is the one, bradleymanning.org.
This is how you can help Bradley Manning.
That's right, and it's over these issues that I haven't started out to collect funds right away because I didn't have any place to send them, and I don't want to be the guy who gets the finger pointed at him of swindling the generous public, so this is why we're hooking up with somebody who's reputable.
Right on.
Well, that's great to hear, and I don't know.
Well, geez, I guess I think back to the Ron Paul campaign.
People started putting up his picture as their profile picture on MySpace.
That's how long ago that was when he ran for president, and that really helped make it go viral.
A lot of people were saying, well, who's this old man on everybody's profile and taking a look, and the same thing is going on right now with Facebook here in 2010.
I've been seeing it everywhere.
People have Googled Bradley Manning as their profile picture, and that's something that they can go and find the JPEG.
I see it on the front page of the website here at bradleymanning.org.
Yeah, and there's several of them floating around right now.
That idea actually emerged from another Internet radio show I appeared on about a week ago and seems to have taken off pretty quickly, so that's encouraging, but obviously we need to translate Facebook fans into real numbers in donations and also political pressure to have the charges dropped if he's convicted to have them pardoned and so forth.
Well, now I guess the anti-war movement is just by default so desperate for the truth about what's happening in these wars that we know they keep secret from us that we just automatically hail the guy.
But I wonder among the imperial class up there in the corridors of power between New York and D.C., are there any major editorial pages taking up this kid's cause or any major opinion makers that you know of?
Is there any news like that where people with actual influence are saying, hey, lay off of this kid?
Not from the establishment media that I've seen.
I mean, the only person that I would really call influential that I've seen writing about the case is Glenn Greenwald with Salon, who did a pretty deft dissection of most of the early news regarding the disclosures to Adrian Lamo and the publications in Wired Magazine's online threat-level blog.
So unfortunately, we don't have the allegiance of the establishment media on this in any way, shape, or form, at least not at this point.
What about in Congress?
I know, stupid question, right?
I don't know yet.
We had a little joke back and forth on our mailing list a few days back that somebody was saying, yeah, yeah, we've got to get together and collect money for legal defense.
And somebody else said, yeah, we've got to get to Congress too.
And I wrote back and I said, geez, you know, but congressmen are really expensive.
Yeah, well, for regular people anyway.
Well, I'll tell you what.
Well, I just want to reemphasize to people that they can find out a lot of what they need to know about this entire case.
This is the biggest story in the whole world.
It's the most important thing in the world going on right now.
This kid, I think, you know, heroic until proven otherwise.
I'm giving him credit for this massive dump of 92,000 documents until I know a reason why not to here, which makes him the greatest hero of the 21st century so far, I think.
This ought to be the Dan Ellsberg moment.
This ought to be the part where people finally decide that they're over it and they no longer support this and they want an end to it and they want an end to it sooner, not later.
I don't know if it really will do that, but.
Yeah, I very much hope so.
And like I said before, the thing to keep in mind is, you know, we're going to focus on one guy, Bradley Manning, who allegedly did a heroic thing, and that's fantastic.
But the thing that these disclosures point to is the much broader context of the war, which I think has been going on for so long that it's become unconscious to a lot of people.
And here we are north of 2,700 days in Iraq, north of 3,000 days in Afghanistan.
And this stuff just goes on and on and on and on.
And it's even difficult for people who are passionate about ending these wars to even feel any outrage anymore because it's just daily occurrence.
It's just background noise now, and that's terrible.
Right.
Well, and, you know, this is where these are both the same story.
I mean, what we're talking about is, you know, one guy who apparently, you know, all things being standard issue here is going to be in prison for the rest of his life and deprived of his liberty for the rest of his life over doing something right.
And it's not too much different than counting up all the Iraqis and all the Somalis and all the Pakistanis and Afghans who've been in prison, who've been kidnapped and renditioned and tortured, the people who've been killed and had no chance to even, you know, wait out the rest of their life in a cage, who has had their lives taken from them.
That's what we're talking about here is human lives being taken.
That's why Bradley Manning was willing to risk his to forward on the truth to Wikileaks.org.
And there's the millions who have been forced out of their homes and have been living in refugee camps for years.
There's the millions of survivors who have to live with, you know, the violent loss of a loved one in one country or another.
It just goes on and on and on.
Yeah, and, you know, I don't know.
You're absolutely right that people are just jaded and over.
I mean, I know when I cover Iraq on this show that it just sounds crazy to even talk about it or whatever.
It makes me sound so fringe that I even think it's a topic of discussion when the rest of the entire society think it's not has decided, I guess, you know, together that whatever.
The search worked and I don't have to care about the Iraq war anymore.
And I hope that that, you know, all of this news is going to help kind of reawaken people to the real, the truth of the matter, the problem we're facing here.
And I really appreciate your efforts here, Mike.
Again, everybody, that's Michael Golgoski from Bradleymanning.org.
He really does need your help, and it's a really cool thing that you're helping.
Thank you, Scott, for having me on board.
All right, everybody, James Bamford next.