Mike Gogulski, founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network, discusses the successful legal-defense fundraising effort that has landed attorney David Coombs, substantial monetary pledges from Michael Moore and WikiLeaks and the establishment of a mail delivery agreement with the Quantico brig so Manning can read the letters from his many supporters.
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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton and on the line is Michael Goskey, geez I hope I'm saying that right, I think I might have your vowels mixed up.
Mike, welcome back to the show.
No, it's all good Scott and thanks for the anthrax there through the break.
Yeah, well, you're welcome, I'm happy to bring them to you.
Hey, so the website is BradleyManning.org and Bradley Manning is who and why should anybody care and why would you make a website with somebody else's name on it?
Bradley Manning is the 22 year old Army Private First Class Intelligence Analyst, currently jailed by the Department of Defense at Quantico, Virginia and charged with the release of classified video to WikiLeaks which shows the killing of 11 some people in the streets of Baghdad including two employees of Reuters back in 2007.
And so, of course, you decided early on, we've had you on the show numerous times talk about this, that boy, this kid's going to need a lawyer, he's going to need help, he's going to know that there are people out here who think that he did the right thing and would like to see him go free and you got to work.
So tell us about the project.
Well, I got to work and I mean there were a whole lot of other people who eventually came out and wanted to get to work too and I've just been the guy who kind of seeded the thing.
The good news is that now Bradley has a lawyer, Mr. David Coombs out of Providence, Rhode Island, has 10 plus years of experience in the military justice system as a military lawyer and even holding positions up to professor of law within the military.
So we're pretty confident that Bradley now has good representation and the network has raised just over $50,000 towards Bradley's defense.
About 40 of that will go directly to legal fees with the balance going to pay for promotional activities and outreach and things like that.
Michael Moore, who has joined our advisory board, has pledged $5,000 and Wikileaks has pledged an additional $50,000.
So at least for the first round of this thing, initial trial, which may kick off this year, we're confident that we've got a qualified and capable defense funded.
Right on.
And so tell me one more time this lawyer's name, how he spelled the last name and I think I understood there that you're saying you're already in touch with this guy and have it worked out that he's getting the money you're raising or not yet?
Yeah, well, his name is David Coombs, C-O-O-M-B-S.
He's based out of Providence, Rhode Island.
He's defended a number of prominent military cases in the past, although he's only been in private practice now for just over a year since going off of active duty with the army.
And yes, our organization, or more precisely our partner organization, Courage to Resist, will be turning over funds that have been collected from donors to date to Mr. Coombs on the basis of his invoices, and we've already begun that process.
That is so great.
I'm just thrilled to find out how well this is going already.
So, I don't know, why don't you talk a little bit about how people can get involved, phone numbers, snail mail addresses, email addresses, et cetera, et cetera, like that.
Well, the website where everything comes together is www.bradleymanning.org, Manning with two N's.
People who want to donate to the Legal Defense Fund should make their checks payable to Courage to Resist, write Manning Defense on the memo line and mail them to Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Avenue, number 41, Oakland, California, 94610.
Listeners who would like to send letters and postcards to Bradley can also mail them to that same address, and these will be opened and sorted through death threats and things of this nature.
If any will be taken out, items that aren't allowed into the Brig facility will be discarded, and then the letters will be forwarded through somebody who has access to send mail to Bradley while he's in confinement.
Okay.
Now, does anybody have access to him at all?
Has he seen his family or anyone else?
We know from a CNN report about a week and a half ago that he was able to meet with his aunt at Quantico, and I don't know the substance of that conversation, but there was a meeting.
One of his personal friends also met with him last week and has passed a bunch of information to me about that conversation that he had, some of which is confidential and I haven't exactly sorted through what I should speak about and what I shouldn't, but the main message was Bradley's healthy.
He's in as good spirits as could be expected from somebody in his position.
He's been very appreciative of the support that's been expressed from people outside, and he's hanging in.
Well, that's good to know, and I'm just happy to hear that he's been able to talk with somebody because then they must have told him that, hey, there are millions of people who know your name and they changed their Facebook picture to yours, and they love you, and they care about you, and they're with you, and they're supporting you, and they're putting their money where their mouth is and everything else.
I hope he knows that sitting in a cage can't be much fun, it'd be nice at least if he's heard about all the people rallying to his cause.
Yeah, well, there's that, and I think that's a positive for him.
At the other side of things, there's also very practical considerations.
I know that he asked this one friend to help in procuring a television for the Brig to use.
We were going to do a fundraiser for that, but apparently it got taken care of already through some other channels, so, you know, it's the big things and the small things, I guess, that go into a person's life in that situation.
Yeah.
Now, I hate to keep bringing this up when I talk to you because I don't want to amplify it, make it worse in any way, but it seems like it's out there enough that it's got to be confronted, and that is all the personal attacks against this kid.
The New York Times ran one of the most shameful pieces they've ever run, and that's at a paper that publishes David Sanger and Michael Gordon, you know, I mean, Judith Miller, Walter Duranty.
And they just attacked, just savagely attacked this kid.
And yet, as published by Wired and as published by the Washington Post, the supposed, at least we're to understand, transcripts, seemingly highly edited transcripts of this kid Manning's conversations with the rat, he makes very clear what his motivation was.
And it was that he saw unbelievable wrong, that he could no longer abide, that he felt he was morally duty-bound to tell the people the truth about the secrets that he had access to on that computer, about the things that he saw with his eyes doing his job, they call it, in Iraq.
Well, that's right.
I mean, the only words of Manning's that we have, and we don't know, of course, whether they're really his words, but the only words attributed to him are those that have been given by Wired as part of these chat transcripts, and there was another channel that released some of them also.
And yeah, the motivation for this seems pretty clear.
At the same time, he does express in these messages that he was having a difficult time with life in the army, which is not an unusual thing.
But to go from that, and then to set aside the noble motivation of exposing criminal activity into just this kind of endless yellow journalism is, well, unfortunately, far from the course.
Yeah.
Well, I'm so thankful for the work you're doing.
Tell them one more time the website.
Come on over to bradleymanning.org, and we'll see you there.
Thanks Mike.
Thanks Brad.
My pleasure.
We'll be back, y'all.
