All right, Sheller, I'm back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Joining me on the line is Mike Gogolsky.
Man, I always say it wrong, I'm sorry.
Gogolsky, Gogolsky, Gogolsky, Gogolsky, Gogolsky.
Mike Gogolsky from BradleyManning.org, the Bradley Manning Support Network.
How's it going?
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me on.
You did very well with the surname.
I always screw it up.
I can say it in my head right, but my teeth and my tongue, they fight about it.
All right, well, anyway, so please tell me all about everything going on this weekend in support of, wait a minute, who's Bradley Manning anyway?
Tell them that first, and then tell them about this weekend.
Sure.
So Bradley Manning is the 23-year-old U.S. Army private who was accused last year of passing classified information to WikiLeaks, which is believed to be connected to WikiLeaks' releases of the collateral murder video that showed an American Apache gunship gunning down 11 people in the streets of Baghdad, the Afghan war diary, the Iraq war logs, and now the ongoing release of the U.S. State Department diplomatic cables, which have led to and fed into so much unrest in the Middle East and North Africa in the past couple of months.
Manning has been held in jail now for 296 days.
He is in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia, where, amongst other indignities, he is forced now each night to strip naked and sleep under a very coarse suicide blanket of some sort.
And his mental health has been reported by friends who have visited to have been deteriorating in the last couple of months.
What makes it a suicide blanket in this sense?
Well, yeah, Manning has been ordered to strip naked every night.
All his clothes are taken away.
He has no personal possessions whatsoever in his cell.
He's got a mattress with a pillow built into it, and they give him this very coarse, I guess, rip-proof blanket to sleep under, which he describes as very unpleasant, in addition to being cold from not having his boxers.
Now, one of the big developments this week, actually, I'm going to put off the activism for this weekend for a second.
One of the big developments this last week has been, I guess, really the exponential growth in public criticism of the treatment of Bradley Manning by the Obama administration, by all different groups and high-level officials, one of whom lost his job, and all kinds of things.
Maybe can you update us a little bit on, well, first of all, some of those developments, and then whether any of that has had any effect on how he's being treated in custody there at Quantico?
Well, the effects on his treatment seem to be going continuously in the negative direction.
What has become very interesting in the past week is that, I believe it was last Thursday or Friday, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley was making statements to a gathering at MIT up in Boston and characterized the DOD's treatment of Manning in custody as ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid.
That led to, essentially, his forced resignation on Monday, and a statement from Barack Obama to the effect that he had been assured that Manning's treatment was perfectly okay.
So now the situation has gone from one where we could point to the military command and say, the abuse might be sanctioned up to this level, now it's sanctioned all the way up to the Oval Office.
Yeah, I thought that was great, the way he just gave kind of a, well, you know, the military says it's okay within the guidelines, they're minimal standards or something.
Like, what?
A very lawyerly kind of answer he gave for that.
Yeah, well, there's a real abuse going on here, and the idea is that apparently, at one point, they put Manning on suicide watch earlier this year, basically the same day that there was a major protest at the Quantico base.
Later on, he was, I guess he was being interviewed by somebody at the Brig, and he made the statement about, they were talking about whether or not he was suicidal, and he said something sarcastically to the effect of, well, you know, if I really wanted to kill myself, don't you think I could do some damage with the elastic band on my underpants and maybe my flip-flops?
So at that point, they started taking his clothes away every day.
However, they didn't put him on suicide watch.
Putting him on suicide watch would have required that the forensic psychologist who works for the Brig determine that he was suicidal.
That hasn't happened.
So this appears to be purely punitive, you know, no backtalk.
Yeah, well, on Glenn Greenwald's blog, he has even the New York Times and Washington Post editorial pages.
Even the National Review editorial has a piece condemning this treatment of Bradley Manning, a piece by Robert Verbruggen.
Yeah, this is really kind of spiraling out of control now, and it's good to see that even some of the conservative news outlets are starting to pick up the torch on this and say, hey, look, this has gone way, way, way too far.
This is not America.
Well, and here's the thing, too, is it just can't be ignored.
Like I was saying, even the Post and the Times are saying that, look, you can call it whatever you want, harm prevention, suicide watch, this and that.
This is all punitive.
They're picking on this guy.
They're not, you know, depending on, I mean, I don't know, the solitary confinement conditions themselves can be, you know, have been called torture by people who are experts in human psychology and that kind of thing.
You can't just keep somebody locked up all by themselves, no sunshine, no exercise, no human contact at all like that.
And then the daily humiliations and all that.
I mean, come on, if this was going on in any other country, the State Department would be flipping out and pointing at it as a reason why we need to have a color coded revolution over there or something.
Yeah, it seems exactly right.
I mean, the conditions that he's being held under have been condemned by by officials in the UK.
Now, members of Parliament have started speaking out because Bradley is is a UK national, although he doesn't is not a holder of a UK passport due to his being born to a Welsh mother.
It's been condemned by Amnesty International.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has launched an inquiry.
Congressman Dennis Kucinich has been making repeated requests to visit with Manning at Quantico and evaluate his conditions, which have so far been rebuffed.
So it's it's just really it's it's really the military seeming quite out of control.
And every time they're, you know, kind of provoked in the slightest way, it gets worse for the man.
Yeah.
I mean, it's so easy to see that scene, too, isn't it?
Like some crappy TV show, the kid makes a crack about his flip flops and they use that as the excuse to strip and bear, make him stand at attention, probably give him 50 push ups or whatever they want.
Oh, it's disgusting.
And it's it's it's arguably sexual torture at this point, as well as as being just torture.
Well, and the other part of this, too, that's obvious is that they're trying to make an example out of him so that other whistleblowers might think twice and think, you know, it's not worth it to have that happen to them.
Even, you know, going to jail is one thing, but being tortured in there is something else.
And, of course, also, they've already said to The New York Times, well, we're trying to make up this conspiracy theory where Julian Assange made him do it.
And we're trying to get him to say that.
Well, we had a secret grand jury for that.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, hold tight, everybody.
We'll be right back with Mike Gogolski right after this.
Anti-war radio.
All right, so welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Talking with Mike Gogolski, Gogolski, Gogolski from the Bradley Manning Support Network.
It's Bradley Manning dot org.
We're talking about his treatment.
And wow, a friend in the chat room sent me this link to a piece by Kevin Zeese out yesterday at Truthout, where apparently he's got an appeal to the military court to relax the conditions.
That includes a very long essay, a first person essay about his treatment there, about, first of all, just how the conditions that he is being held under are not being applied to anyone else at that brig.
And that ought to be a big clue that he's being singled out for persecution in the name of harm prevention, rather than is actually being protected by these guys and their thuggery.
Yeah, absolutely.
And there's there's even grounds in the law, as I understand it, that with this kind of, you know, abusive treatment going on, punitive pretrial detention, there's a there's a constitutional breach here that if the law was really going to be followed, ought to him ought to lead to Bradley Manning simply being released.
Right.
Sure.
I mean, that's what I'm saying about the guys at Guantanamo who, you know, were tortured.
Like, you know, hey, if you were tortured, you did your time.
That's fair enough to me.
Unfortunately, that's not the upside down, you know, black is white.
Freedom is slavery.
World we live in.
Yeah, it's the homeland now.
When I was raised, it was the USA or at least I still thought it was anyway.
But hey, we're going to go bomb Libya this weekend anyway.
Yeah, well, but it's for their own good.
And so you need to get behind that.
Absolutely.
All right.
In fact, there's someone else in the chat room was saying Philip Sands, who's the leap sands, whatever, the guy that wrote Torture Team and has been one of the leaders in the forefront, you know, filing briefs and really trying to get it done, trying to get the Bush administration lawyers indicted for, you know, the so-called legal justifications that they wrote up in order to allow George Bush to torture people.
And here he is saying, yeah, it's time to, you know, fire up all the jet engines and load up the bombs and head to Libya to keep the people there safe.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's just it's it's just unbelievable.
But as somebody wrote yesterday, you've got to imagine that the folks at Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Sperry Rand still around.
I don't know.
They must be, you know, chortling over their beer right now.
Oh, thank you.
Right.
And meanwhile, the Americans are backing the Saudis and the monarchy in Bahrain, putting down the protests there and in Yemen.
And, you know, Hillary Clinton says, oh, well, geez, we wish that the violence in Bahrain was a little bit less.
So with her statement on that, they really care about Libyans, though.
The Libyans are really special people.
I got a good friend who was working in Bahrain until just a couple of days ago.
Yeah, fortunately, her her employers evacuated her.
So she's now in in Dubai for at least a couple of weeks.
But she she sends us some reports and some photos, which were quite astounding.
Tell me about it.
Well, I mean, she's she's maintained a blog now.
I think it's called News News from Bahrain.
News from Bahrain.
Wordpress.com, where she was maintaining, you know, kind of a daily chronicle as things unfolded.
She was going down to the pro roundabout, talking with people, getting photos and then also reporting on, you know, what was going on elsewhere in the city, compiling tweets and news articles and so forth.
But the latest piece of news just this morning, my time was that the military forces that are in the capital now actually destroyed that monument at the pro roundabout.
That kind of great arcing sculptural thing.
Yeah.
Pour it down as well as bulldozed out the temporary encampments that were there.
All right.
Well, so to get us back to the point here, Bradley Manning is.
Well, you know, they're treating him like he's the Rosenbergs taught the Soviets how to make nuclear bombs or something.
But really, all he did was reveal secret level cables of, you know, State Department gossip back and forth about things that, yeah, are classified.
And, yeah, led to a giant revolution against American back dictators across the Middle East.
But, you know, hardly was, you know, a bad thing or could be really construed by anyone other than, you know, the mouth breathers over at the Free Republic or whatever as being, you know, some kind of treason.
And this is heroism.
This guy has set millions of people free already and set in motion, you know, Arab awakening.
That's not going away, whether the king of Bahrain gets away with it this time or not.
Oh, it's spreading beyond that now, too.
I mean, the the the the India cable release that the newspaper The Hindu has done in coordination with WikiLeaks now has got the the Indian government and citizenry in an uproar because the corruption that's been going on in Indian politics is now plain for all to see in the State Department cables.
And, you know, we found out the truth about the Americans really pressuring the Ethiopians to invade Somalia.
Found out, of course, that Iraq and Afghan war logs prove that the government was lying about 10,000 different things.
I mean, what this guy has done is I can't see how anyone can question the value of it or, you know, if they take one look at the chat logs, the motivation behind it.
I think the rat Lamo even asked him, why not sell it to the Russians or North Korea or something?
And he says, no, that's not why I'm doing this.
But people need to see this.
People need to see this.
Yeah.
Are we supposed to be a democracy and make informed decisions if every criminal thing our government is doing is a secret?
And he really elaborates and really talks about his motives there.
And they're pure whistleblower motive.
And, you know, even if you think that somehow, you know, violating your secrecy agreement with the government is just an unconscionable thing.
You know, the idea that he ought to be, you know, just mistreated this way, like he's some terrorist, like he was trying to hurt this country rather than help it.
You know, to me, it's just I don't know.
It's really amazing to me that they're getting away with this at all.
I mean, you know, you could say, you know, the path to hell is paved with the silence of millions of good men.
Yeah.
Indeed.
They are forced into these situations.
Yeah.
You know, the Egyptians, they can tear down their whole regime.
Why can't we march on Quantico and set this boy free?
Oh, now we can't talk about that.
You know, that'd be that'd be revolution or something.
Yes.
Addition.
Oh, yeah.
The Democrats outlawed that back in the teens.
Well, yeah.
Tell us very quickly where they can learn about where to show up tomorrow, the next day to support Bradley Manning.
So it's actually over the next three days.
There's currently 30 events around the world.
Real quick.
Real quick.
Bradley Manning.
Bradley Manning.org/events.
Major event at Quantico Marine Base.
2 p.m. on Sunday.
I'm going to be speaking at an event in Vienna, Austria tomorrow evening.
And there's events that range from California to New York, from Australia to London.
It's going to be big.
That's Bradley Manning.org/events for people to take part.
All right.
Thanks so much for your time, everybody.
That's Mike Gagolski from Bradley Manning dot org.
Donate to Bradley Manning dot org.
It's all for the legal fees.
It's all legit on the up and up.
It's good stuff.
Bradley Manning dot org for the Bradley Manning Support Network.
Thank you very much again, Mike.
Thank you, Scott.
