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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

24:23

The Truth About Bradley Manning

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Mullin of Freedomain Radio.
	This is the truth about Bradley Manning as his trial winds its way down.
	So PFC Bradley Manning is charged with 22 offenses under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
	He has given up the option of a jury trial and he has pled to 10 lesser included offenses and currently faces up to 20 years for what he's already pled guilty to.
	He also faces life plus 154 years in military prison if convicted of the prosecution's case.
	And it's been nearly three years since he was arrested and he has had pretty cruel and inhumane treatment and denial of basic civil liberties at the hands of the U.S.
	government.
	He's currently facing a court-martial in Maryland.
	So the government's charge, basically, is that Manning aided and abetted the enemy, which carries a possible life sentence in prison, and it's based on the argument that the information, the 700,000 documents that he released to WikiLeaks, was of interest to Osama bin Laden and other terrorist organizations.
	And needless to say, this charge poses a serious threat to the freedom of the press and turns virtually all leaks and whistleblowing into a form of treason.
	So, for instance, bin Laden also claimed that he read and recommended Bob Woodward's journalism.
	Does that mean he should also be locked in solitary confinement for three years and stripped of his clothing?
	Anything which then aids and abets the enemy, or which the enemy claims does, could be a treasonable and prosecutable offence.
	So, Bradley Manning sent more than 700,000 government documents to the anti-secrecy website Wikileaks.
	What he released was about 1% of what the US government classifies in a year.
	This is the first time in US military history that a soldier is facing the aiding the enemy charge for giving information to the media for what he claims was the public good, which we'll get into in a moment.
	Now the last time that the aiding the enemy was really used was in the Civil War era and past U.S.
	court cases involving aiding the enemy charges almost always involved direct or indirect physical contact with the enemy, handing something over, a betrayal or treason of that kind.
	So one case involving someone giving information to a third party and then that party making the information available to the enemy was in 1863.
	A Union officer gave a newspaper rosters of Union soldiers and was later sentenced to three months of hard labor for that.
	Now, the charge is that names were revealed, particularly names of informants who had talked with U.S.
	ambassadors, particularly in the Middle East.
	But former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that Manning's leaks had not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources or methods, which is really one of the fundamental requirements for this.
	And this trial is, in fact, the largest criminal investigation ever into a publisher and its source.
	So Bradley Manning of course has been charged with aiding the enemy for leaking information to the media.
	Now the enemy is called Al-Qaeda and also Al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula.
	There was a third enemy which remained classified but that was withdrawn by the prosecution just before they closed their case.
	Julian Assange of course, the head of WikiLeaks at the time, did attempt to work with the US government to redact sections of the documents but the government rejected his offer.
	A version of Manning's documents was published with the names of people who'd had confidential discussions with US diplomats, like publishing, this is sort of like publishing the informant list of the local police department.
	And WikiLeaks did not really release anything that was not also released by their media partners.
	Now there was a lot of stuff that was in the documents that Manning released, not least of which was that the president of Yemen was lying to his own Congress about American drone strikes in his country.
	It had some degree of fueling the Arab Spring and so on.
	So, earlier this year, Manning pled guilty to 10 offenses that will get him probably about 20 years in custody.
	Military prosecutors insist on pursuing charges of aiding the enemy in violation of the Espionage Act, which carries life in prison.
	There's not really much appeal possible, of course, if he was tried in a regular court.
	He could appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court.
	Eugene Fidel, an expert in military justice at Yale Law School, says that even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected architect of the 9-11 attacks, has greater rights of appeal than Bradley Manning.
	Quote, if he's convicted by a military commission in Guantanamo, KSM will get a straight shot at the US Supreme Court, he said, by contrast if CAAF, that's the Appeal Board for the Army, denies Manning a review, as it does in most cases, he will be out in the cold.
	Is it true?
	Well, how he's been held, he was 22 years old when he committed the acts for which he stands criminally accused.
	For the first 11 months of his confinement, Manning was held in solitary confinement and subjected to forced nudity during inspection.
	Juan Mendez, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, characterized the treatment of Manning as cruel, inhuman, and degrading.
	He said, I conclude that the 11 months under conditions of solitary confinement, regardless of the name given to his regime by the prison authorities, constitutes, at a minimum, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment in violation of Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture.
	If the effects in regards to pain and suffering inflicted on Manning were more severe, they could constitute torture.
	Mendes could not conclusively say that Manning's treatment amounted to torture because he was denied permission to visit Manning under acceptable circumstances.
	Mendes also concluded that, quote, imposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of his presumption of innocence.
	So what was included in what Manning gave to WikiLeaks and through to the public?
	Well, he exposed the unjust, not he, the documents exposed the unjust detainment of innocent people at Guantanamo Bay.
	It revealed the true human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
	It helped fuel pro-democratic movements in the Arab world.
	And there is little to no evidence that anyone was harmed as a result of the leaked information.
	So, Robert Gates said no one, of course some people's names were published, but there's no evidence to my knowledge, or at least from what I've researched, please feel free to correct me on this, is everything that I say that anyone was harmed as a result of the leaked information.
	Quite the contrary!
	You could make a very strong case that thousands of lives were saved.
	After WikiLeaks published evidence of the commission of war crimes against the Iraqi people, the Iraq government refused to grant criminal and civil immunity to US troops if their stay in Iraq was prolonged.
	This is very important.
	We all saw, I don't know if you saw, these attack helicopters and so on gunning down actually innocent people and journalists.
	But prior to all of this information coming out, criminal and civil immunity was granted to U.S.
	troops.
	They basically could do whatever they wanted, so to speak.
	But after this came out popular Iraqi sentiment refused to extend this and the government said no you can't have criminal and civil immunity and this was one of the main reasons that Obama withdrew them from Iraq.
	This saved of course many American and Iraqi lives.
	So he's charged with crimes for sending hundreds of thousands of classified files, documents, and videos, including the collateral murder video, the Iraq war logs, and Afghan war logs, and State Department cables, all the way to WikiLeaks.
	Now, a lot of the information that he transmitted contained evidence of war crimes.
	So people who say, well, Manning signed a document to be confidential, and he was being well-paid, and so on, it's a little more complicated than that, as it usually is.
	So the collateral murder video depicts a U.S.
	Apache attack helicopter killing 12 civilians and wounding two children on the ground in Baghdad in 2007.
	The helicopter then fired and killed the people trying to rescue the wounded.
	Finally a U.S.
	tank drove over one of the bodies cutting the man in half.
	These acts separately constitute three separate war crimes.
	Now manning has a legal duty.
	to report war crimes.
	He complied with his legal duty to obey lawful orders, but also his legal duty to disobey unlawful orders.
	So section 499 of the Army Field Manual states, quote, every violation of the law of war is a war crime.
	The law of war is contained in the Geneva Conventions.
	Article 85 of the first protocol to the Geneva Conventions describes making The civilian population or individual civilians the object of attack is a grave breach.
	The firing on and killing of civilians shown in the collateral murder video violated this provision of the Geneva Conventions.
	Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions requires that the wounded be collected and cared for.
	Article 17 of the First Protocol states that the civilian population, quote, shall be permitted, even on their own initiative, to collect and care for the wounded.
	That article also says, quote, no one shall be harmed for such humanitarian acts.
	The firing on rescuers portrayed in the collateral murder video violates these provisions of the Geneva Convention.
	Section 27-10 of the Army Field Manual states that maltreatment of dead bodies is a war crime.
	When the Army jeep drove over the dead body, it violated this provision as well.
	Enshrined in the U.S.
	Army subject schedule number 27-1 is, quote, the obligation to report all violations of the law of war.
	At his guilty plea hearing, Manning explained that he had gone to his chain of command and asked them to investigate the collateral murder video and other war porn, or as I call it, warnography, but his superiors refused to investigate these war crimes.
	Quote, I was disturbed by the response to injured children, Manning stated.
	He was also bothered by the soldiers depicted in the video who seemed not to value human life by referring to their targets as dead bastards.
	The Uniform Code of Military Justice sets forth the duty of a service member to obey lawful orders, but that duty includes the concomitant duty to disobey unlawful orders.
	An order not to reveal classified information that contains evidence of war crimes would be an unlawful order.
	If you sign a document that says, I will not release information, but that information, the information contained to those documents contains a crime that you are lawfully duty to report.
	Have a lawful duty to report?
	It's complicated.
	Manning had a legal duty to reveal the commission of war crimes.
	So to prove Manning violated the Espionage Act, prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he had reason to believe the files could be used to harm the United States or aid a foreign power.
	When pleading guilty, Manning stated, I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this, it could spark a debate on the military.
	And our foreign policy in general, as it applied to Iraq and Afghanistan.
	in.
	He added, it might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counterterrorism while ignoring the situation of the people we engaged with every day.
	So, if harm to the United States is a standard for treason and life in prison, George W. Bush, did he harm American interests, American lives, the American economy, when he lied about WMDs in Iraq, triggering one of the most brutal And yes, I stand by that, by people who say, "Oh, there are much more brutal invasions throughout history."
	Not many invasions throughout history have resulted in depleted uranium shell dust known as "white death" in Iraq, which has a half-life longer than the remainder of the planet, causing significant rises in leukemia pretty much from now until the end of time.
	Yes, it was a particularly brutal invasion.
	Also, sewage, water treatment plants and so on were targeted, or at least blown up, which resulted in massive outbreaks of cholera and so on.
	About a million dead.
	And of course, thousands and thousands of Americans killed in combat.
	Thousands and thousands of American soldiers have committed suicide.
	30, 40,000 of them, 20, 30, 40,000, hard to even count, have been injured or killed in training accidents.
	So, harm to the United States, perhaps lying about a war causing an invasion that causes the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and over a million Iraqis.
	Which of course triggers massive amounts of retaliatory impulses in the Muslim world.
	How about the ordering of torture, which seems to have occurred at the highest levels of the U.S.
	government, which then showed up in the various camps in Afghanistan and Iraq?
	Well, how does that work?
	Does that harm U.S.
	interests?
	Of course it does.
	Now, back in 2011, President Obama, commenting on Manning, said, We are a nation of laws.
	We don't let individuals make decisions about how the law operates.
	He, Bradley Manning, broke the law.
	This is prior to his plea bargain.
	Well, the Constitution Obama swore to uphold clearly states that, quote, No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
	So our Obama, of course, ordered the extrajudicial drone murder of an American teenager.
	Is that an individual decision about how the law should operate?
	The Justice Department recently told the federal court this week that both NSA spying and the legality of drone assassinations cannot be challenged.
	A former FISA judge recently admitted that the FISA court is secret, lawless, and flawed.
	The executive branch even hides evidence from judges who are deciding cases and submits secret evidence beneficial to the state.
	So, if Bradley Manning should go to jail for not following the law, should Obama go to jail for not following the Constitution and ordering an extrajudicial murder?
	To ask the question is to answer it.
	And now, of course, Obama himself also violated Manning's presumption of innocence, saying two years ago that Manning broke the law.
	Although the Constitution requires the president to enforce the laws, Obama refuses to allow the officials and lawyers from the Bush administration, who sanctioned and carried out a regime of torture, which constitutes a war crime under Geneva, to be held legally accountable.
	So remember, of course, people who break the law should be held legally accountable.
	But, of course, only if they're privates, not if they're presidents.
	If Bradley Manning had committed war crimes instead of exposing them, he would likely be a free man instead of facing life in prison.
	He was never going to face life in prison for not reporting war crimes, but when he reported war crimes to the public because his superiors weren't doing anything about it, as he was contractually and legally and morally really obliged to do, well, now he's facing life in prison.
	But this is the madness of the society that we live in.
	Right?
	Small crimes get you a cell.
	Great crimes get you a crown.
	Let's look at torture.
	So regarding Guantanamo, Obama said, quote, in some cases, I believe we compromise our basic values by using torture to interrogate our enemies and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.
	Adding, we unequivocally, we unequivocally banned torture, he said.
	But Obama failed to point out that the United Nations Human Rights Commission determined in 2006 that the violent force feeding of detainees at Guantanamo amounted to torture and that he, Obama, has continued his policy.
	More than half the remaining detainees are refusing food to protest their treatment and indefinite detention, many having been held for more than a decade with no criminal charges whatsoever.
	Of the 4,700 people who've been killed by drone strikes, only 2% were high-level terrorist suspects.
	And that's suspects, not even proven, just suspects.
	And what about the Bin Laden?
	I mean, most of the people there were unarmed.
	Could he have been captured?
	Of course he could have been captured.
	Ben Emerson, UN Special Rapporteur on Counterterrorism and Human Rights, said that the drone strikes in Pakistan violate international law.
	Quote, as a matter of international law, the US drone campaign in Pakistan is being conducted without the consent of the elected representatives of the people or the legitimate government of the state, he said.
	Obama said we are, quote, narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us.
	He did not exactly address his administration's policy of using drone strikes to kill rescuers and attendees at funerals after the original strike killings.
	America's top two military commanders have already pronounced Manning guilty.
	Almost a year ago, President Obama, actually about two years ago, the Commander-in-Chief pronounced Manning guilty saying he broke the law.
	More recently, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, echoed that finding of guilt before trial, saying, he did break the law.
	Dempsey's comment was published in Stars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the Department of Defense.
	This openly violates Article 37 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which forbids unlawfully influencing action of court.
	And this is a very heavily litigated area, because the command structure of the military makes higher-ranking officers very powerful.
	over their subordinates.
	In 2004, the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Services issued a unanimous decision that affirmed the power of the military judge to dismiss charges and specifications with prejudice in the face of unlawful command influence.
	So if somebody above you in the chain of command attempts to influence a court or the prosecution, then the whole charges can be dismissed.
	And I don't believe there's a huge amount of people with more power for the U.S. military than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president of the United States.
	But again, rules are for the sheep, not for the shepherds.
	Whatever you think of his obligation to follow the rules, we have to at least accept and admit that the rules were contradictory.
	That he has a duty to report war crimes.
	Now, he did ask for investigations.
	Those investigations were refused.
	Does his moral obligation end there?
	Well, I don't think so.
	I think his moral obligation is to report and reveal war crimes because he has an obligation to disobey unlawful orders.
	And to not get the war crimes out there would have been...
	to obey an illegal order because he was obligated to get them out.
	So it's complicated to say the very least.
	You can sort of pick a side if you want.
	It just shows you how crazy these rules are.
	But even those who are appalled at what Bradley Manning did must at least understand that he did have a duty to report.
	And to report without anything happening is not to report at all.
	You can't transfer your moral obligation to other people.
	You say, well I reported it and therefore I don't need to do anything more about it.
	That's not right.
	Now, there is a very large principle involved here which I think is very important.
	One of the things that happened at the end of the Second World War, shortly after the end of the Second World War, was of course the Nuremberg Trials.
	And one fundamental aspect of the Nuremberg Trials was the understanding that even if something is legal, That does not make it moral.
	This is a very fundamental right.
	Positive versus natural law.
	Natural law says that there's a morality which law is supposed to reflect, and if law doesn't reflect it, then the law is unjust or wrong, immoral.
	Whereas positive law is that which is legal is moral.
	The morality follows the law.
	Now this was very popular in the sort of first half of the 20th century until the Nazi regime was revealed, at which point people began to say, well, just because it was legal, it wasn't right.
	One of the fundamental principles that occurred in the Nuremberg trials at the end of the Second World War was that the people at the bottom were not responsible.
	In other words, if you were a German soldier, you were probably drafted and you would be shot for disobeying orders.
	Well, then you're not particularly responsible.
	The chain of command is where the responsibility lies.
	The very tip of the pyramid is where the responsibility lies.
	for immoral actions, for torture, for actions against civilians, for the targeting of civilians, or at least a failure to protect civilians, for the desecration of bodies, and all of these sorts of war crimes that occur.
	And so it's the very top of the hierarchy that were most responsible.
	And the soldiers, the German soldiers, were generally released, and the people in charge were generally shot or hung.
	The death penalty is associated with the international crimes of aggression and war crimes and so on, which is why George W. Bush's travel schedule is somewhat restricted.
	This is very important to understand, and this is natural.
	So when you're the victor, you impose the rules on your enemy, but then when you end up doing the same thing yourself, those rules no longer apply, and now you're targeting the people at the bottom who revealed the crimes rather than the people at the top who were able to authorize or order the crimes.
	This is natural.
	This is the natural cycle of justice.
	Morality is used as a weapon against the weak by the strong, and then when the weak attempt to use the same rules against the strong, it's completely ignored, and the media, of course, is largely complicit in this as well.
	But the larger question is, why is this even an issue?
	Why is it even an issue?
	Why does it matter?
	Why is it even coming up?
	Why does America have more than 700 bases around the world?
	Why is America still in Germany and Japan more than 60 years after the end of the Second World War?
	Why is America the world's largest arms dealer and arms seller throughout the world?
	Why does America have the military might that it has?
	It really is Just astounding.
	Oh, I just saw breaking news that he's not guilty of aiding the enemy in the WikiLeaks case.
	Well, that's good.
	That's good to know.
	At least there's some level of justice there.
	Fantastic.
	But why is America in all of these places?
	Why has America, which is found as the very smallest government in the world, the most limited government in the world, supposed to be bound down by the chains of the Constitution?
	Why has America become just another typical Roman-style empire?
	You know, the old saying from the 19th century, power corrupts, absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.
	What was called absolute power in the 19th century was so insignificant relative to the amount of power available to political leaders now that they wouldn't even be able to conceive of it.
	Rulers now presidents and prime ministers now even in the West have the kind of power that in the 19th century would have only been associated with God himself and this kind of power is always going to corrupt one of the grave dangers of having a government that promotes property rights and free trade is that The establishment and protection of property and the allowance of free trade creates massive wealth.
	Massive wealth is then used as collateral by governments to grow themselves at the expense of the future while bribing people in the present with gifts stolen from the unborn.
	And it is very instructive to those of us interested in peace and security that the multi-hundred year experiment called America, which started off as an attempt to found the very smallest government known to mankind has now transformed itself, this experiment, into the reality that America is now the largest and most powerful government, and in many ways the most destructive government,
	This is very important.
	This is why I in particular advocate statelessness.
	No government.
	When you shrink a government, all you do is rewind the tape.
	Ask your parents!
	And it will simply play the same way again.
	You're just taking the movie back to the beginning and playing it again.
	The only way to break the cycle of small governments becoming large empires is to take the government so small that it vanishes.
	And then we can have a peaceful and prosperous society without the fear and the certainty that our peace and prosperity are going to feed the greatest devils the world has ever known.

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