Le Show; 2013-05-05

From deep inside your radio, ladies, Jumlin once again from New Orleans, Louisiana. Once again, the so's of the week, and this week, we thank a listener. This program has been spotlighting folks who begin the answers to questions, interviewer questions with the word so as if it's well or something. This week, thanks to the listeners' tip, we spotlight an interviewer on an interview we begin seemingly every question and almost every sentence with the word so. Very gross of fresh air, our featured performer this week on the so's of the week, so sit back, relax, and enjoy sentences that begin with so.

So I don't usually start interviews with questions about suicide attempts, but so since you brought it up, what did you try to kill yourself? I just had a lot of suicidal ideation going on. So you found it kind of relaxing to know that there could be a way out if you wanted one. Yeah. So your podcast now, which is really popular, has it helped you as a comedian to talk comedy with a lot of comics in the podcast? I don't know if it's helped me as a comic. So you have a really terrific WTF podcast with Conan, and you write about that podcast in your memoir. So you write that you were really uncomfortable about Conan coming over to your garage. Why were you so uncomfortable about him coming over to the garage to do the podcast?

Well, there's still a thing about, you know, he's a TV guy, he's a big TV star. So I'm going to ask you to do a short reading about what the interview was like and what it was like afterwards. So this is Mark Marin reading from his new book. It was time for him to go back to his wife and me to get on with mine. So Mark Marin, do you relate to that? Do you relate to the idea of suffering being an inspiration? I relate more to the fact that, you know, comedy is a relief. So do you think of some of your dread and panic and anxiety? Let me back up and say, Conan saw suffering as being a really Catholic thing. Do you see any of your dread and anxiety as being a Jewish thing? I don't know, I may be. So I want to ask you about another podcast that you did. So in this interview, part of it was about your relationship, it's really an amazing piece of tape. It's choking me up now.

So how did the podcast change the relationship? Did you call each other afterwards? Did you go out for a cup of coffee? Well, yeah. So sometime after that podcast, he wrote a role for you in an episode of his TV series, Louis. So he goes over to your house to apologize. From the NPR series, Fresh Air, Ms. Terry Gross, and now, ladies and gentlemen, news of our friend, the Adam, starring at it. How do you enjoy New Orleans? Yeah, dig in the music, dig in the sounds. Great. Love and Adam who digs the sounds. Ladies and gentlemen, you probably have seen the story in the New York Times and elsewhere about the problems with the rising amount of radioactive water at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, the large amount of storage tanks that Teppko is building to make room

for the ever increasing amount of tainted radioactive water. So we'll just move on to this. The operator of that Fuk nuclear plant said this week, it has logged a $7 billion fiscal year net loss as it faces ballooning compensation costs for the nuclear thing. The battled utility at the center of that worst nuclear accident in the generation said it shortfall came out at $7 billion. The latest figures were worse than a previous estimate of losses that Teppko had announced just two months ago. The massive loss, mainly due to growing compensation, it booked a trillion, a little more than a trillion yen in extraordinary losses related to expected damages for nuclear accident victims. It's cheap. The utility is facing multiple-class action suits as critics say company executives failed to take preventive measures after Teppko estimated in 2008 that the plant was vulnerable

to its finale higher than 50 feet. It also faces increased expenses for substitute energy since the yen is falling. Well, somebody go catch it. Alright, we'll do that. A pair of radioactive goldfish have been found swimming in a lemonade pitcher in the bowels of the peri nuclear power plant in Ohio. Don't drink it. I won't. The presence of a steam tunnel after a 43-day plant maintenance shutdown has led the reactor owner first energy on a hunt to find the owner of the fish. The federal regulators to ask a lot of new questions about the plant and whether plant operators can control access to radioactive areas as required by regulation. Quote, clearly somebody brought the two goldfish into the plant. They did not swim into the plant, said a spokeswoman for the plant. She spoke well. She did. Fish occasionally do turn up and power plants, pulled in with the cooling water. Investigators are pretty sure though these two came in through the front door. Security checks of employees involved detection of metal and bombs, not fish in plastic

bags, employees and contractors are not padded down and are not subject to body scans. Investigators are questioning employees and contractors in reviewing video recordings of the tunnel in which super-heated steam from the reactor building is carried to the adjacent turbine building, which houses the plant's steam turbine. The tunnel is off limits as a radiation area when the reactor is running. Waste in the bottom of the pitcher, convinced investigators the fish had not been in the container for very long, still early Thursday morning, both of them died. It was probably due to lack of care before they got to the plant, said the plant spokesperson the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has more questions than answers, quote, this is not something that happens every day. We want to know why it happened and how it happened. So do I. Good. Curiosity doesn't kill the atom because of a life threatening incident during refueling two years ago at the plant in which three contractors were briefly exposed to hard radiation. The NRC has put the plant under a microscope on the issue of worker safety, but apparently not fish safety.

Clean. Yes? Nothing. Clean, cheap, safe, too. Clean the steam meter. Our friend, the atom. And now, the apologies of the week. Will sir, a county commissioner in Tennessee has apologized for posting a photo suggesting that the best way to wink at a Muslim is from behind a shotgun barrel. Coffee County commissioner, yeah, they got a county in Tennessee called coffee. So some morning, make sure you go there and smell it. County commissioner, Barry West posted a photo on Facebook that showed a man pointing a shotgun, closing his eye to aim the weapon, the caption read, how to wink at a Muslim. West came under fire for the posting and eventually issued an apology on the Facebook page of the American Center for Outreach, who knew, quote, I want to issue a heartfelt sincere apology to anyone that I've offended or hurt in my sharing of a Facebook post, unquote, not just heartfelt, but heartfelt sincere.

West at first have refused to apologize, saying he felt he was being ganged up on because he's an elected official. The nation's second largest educational testing service apologized this week for computer issues that disrupted federally mandated online tests for thousands of students in Indiana in Oklahoma this week, exams that are already controversial for their outsize role in determining school funding, student evaluations, and teacher salaries, quote, we sincerely regret the problems we have caused, said a spokesman for California-based CTB McGraw Hill, which holds contracts for testing in all 50 states and controls nearly 40% of the market. Following Mr. Sherman, quote, we regret the impact of system interruptions and have made changes to correct the situation. Unquote, state officials said they would hold CTB McGraw Hill accountable, ooh, and raise the possibility of financial penalty penalties, ooh, double, ooh, three thousand students in Oklahoma, thirty thousand in Indiana lost their computer connections during testing.

Monday and Tuesday mornings, according to state officials, CTB Mark McGraw Hill said the outage in Indiana occurred, quote, because our simulations did not fully anticipate the patterns of live student testing. Unquote, I blame the students. This is the third straight year that Indiana students have experienced service interruptions during online testing administered by the company. So yeah, let's just consider financial penalties for three years in a row of screwing up. Dateline Pittsburgh, the president of Carnegie Mellon University, has apologized for a student who dressed half naked as the Pope during a campus fine arts parade last month. President Jared Cohan said in an email he had planned to remain silent until his school completes its ongoing investigation, but he instead decided to apologize for the unnamed student whose pubic hair was shaved in the shape of a cross as she threw condoms to onlookers in the wake of criticism of the incident by Pittsburgh Catholic Bishop David Zubik. Quote, this act was highly offensive, and as we have said, the university has been investing in the matter and following our procedures.

Cohan wrote, Zubik says he trusts the school would respond responsibly. He said it felt a need to speak up for offended believers and erase the issue of tolerance bigotry and is concerned at sacred symbols such as the cross not be mocked. No time for news of the godly this week, so that just remains its own irony. Stateline China, General Motors Company seeking to boost China's sales 75% by 2015 apologized for a Chevrolet ad that included a song referring to, quote, the land of Fumon Chou, where all the girls sing Ching, Ching chop sui, an ad which one Hong Kong newspaper called racist. Quote, our intent was not to offend anyone and we're deeply sorry if anyone was offended. There's your if apology. That's from Reini Karni, a GM spokeswoman. We're reviewing our advertising approval process to make sure this doesn't happen again. Here she said, sorry, Rindy Karni, the English language ad for the Chevrolet, tracks sport

utility vehicle featured in the 1920s motif and included music from Austrian performer and disjockey, Power of Stellar, isn't enough, you might say. The eight line St. Louis, the suburban St. Louis based healthcare company is a politicized while acknowledging that a neurosurgeon operated on the wrong side of a patient's brain. SSM healthcare's apology followed a lawsuit filed on behalf of Regina Turner. Her attorney said the surgery was necessary to reduce her risk of stroke which was high. The surgeon operated on the right side of her skull and brain instead of the left. President CEO Chris Howard of the hospital system apologized in a written statement, said SSM is devastated by the mistake. He said an internal investigation was initiated and steps have been taken to make sure a similar error doesn't happen again. I would suggest giving patients a magic marker to draw on their head which side of the brain to operate on, but that's just me. The apologies of the week, a copyrighted feature of this broadcast. This is Lesho and you may have heard the name of private Bradley Manning here and there

for over the last couple of years, but I'll wager that if you're like me or if you just plain like me, you probably haven't heard much coverage of what's been going on with him in most of the media. We're going to try to rectify that situation today. I have a guest in New York City who has been resolute if not absolutely determined in her coverage of the legal proceedings involving Bradley Manning and she's going to take us through it and tell us what's been happening with him. Alexa O'Brien, welcome to Lesho. Thank you for having me. Let me start by sort of setting the table and saying what I think I know and then correct me and then we'll go from there. Bradley Manning was a private in the army, got sent over to Iraq in an intelligence position where he had access to the same information that as I understand it, about 400,000 Americans are cleared to have access to.

In that position, he saw information that was increasingly distressing to him regarding America's role in the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and other activities and he ultimately liberated that material, one way of putting it, the government says stole it and made it available over a period of time anonymously to the WikiLeaks organization and what was released was first of all a videotape called collateral murder showing US helicopter crews killing folks from the air, including one or two people from the Reuters news service and then coming back and shooting at the rescuers who were coming in to tend to the bodies of those who had been originally killed, a videotape which came to be known as collateral murder and then sequentially released war logs from the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war and ultimately about 250,000 is the number that comes to mind, diplomatic cables from US embassies and legations abroad to Washington which were profoundly embarrassing to the United States

and to a certain foreign leaders. And at some point he went into contact with an anonymous chatter on a chat board, internet chat link, who I believe assured private manning that the conversation should be treated with the same as if he was talking to a priest or a doctor that it was confidential and confessional in nature and that person turned out to be a once convicted hacker named Adrian Lama who at some point decided to change his position on the material and went to the FBI and told him what was going on, private manning was arrested, served for about 11 months in despite the fact that it was an army private in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Virginia in conditions that some people have described as abusive and is now undergoing pre-military trial proceedings

and Alex O'Brien you have been covering those proceedings scrupulously and in depth. Most of all do I have anything wrong about the background? Yeah, there's a couple of things, I just want to just because the scale is important. Actually four million federal employees and contractors have access to the level of information that manning leaked, manning leaked secret to below so he actually leaked unclassified material as well. In fact the video that you referred to collateral murder is unclassified and also defense will argue contains a transcript that was published in a 2009 book by David Finkel at the Washington Post so these were before the charge defenses against manning. So the question is for that piece of material is really how closely held was this quote-unquote national security information.

The other thing is that half a million individuals according to the Washington Post had access to the State Department cables that Bradley Manning leaked. So these were marked siptis which means they were similarly low level classified or unclassified emails or cables by the State Department and were intended for why distribution outside of the State Network that manning had access to them on. So nothing top secret? No, and in fact if you compare that to Daniel Ellsberg's leak, he did leak top secret material, Bradley Manning didn't. Okay, so now his pretrial proceedings commence and how do you become involved in all this? What's your background? I had been covering the WikiLeaks releases from late 2010 into early 2011 and so I had covered Manning's nine months of confinement at Quantico where the judge actually ruled that his treatment was unlawful in her recent ruling and I went to the pretrial and nobody

was covering this trial. This is the largest leak trial in US history, you know in the age of the secular age of information we're going through a type of reformation of sorts and these source documents are in a certain sense our Bible in the vernacular language so to speak and so this is such an important trial and known was covering it in the way in which I felt that this story needed to be covered so I started to actually transcribe the trial that was being conducted in secrecy with no public docket. So when you say in secrecy but you were allowed to attend proceedings at this is at Fort Mead, is that right? That's right, there are what they call Article 39 A sessions that are open to the public. However, there's no public docket for this trial so whereas in a federal criminal investigation you would go into the PASER system and if a defendant filed something or if a plaintive filed something you could read the filing you could read the court ruling, here we don't

have access to that. In fact, we don't have access to over 30,000 pages of filings. I have reconstructed the appellate list that doesn't exist and it looks like we have 518 appellate exhibits that we know of. Of those 518 appellate exhibits we probably have access to about 10 court rulings, a smattering of defense filings and no government filings at all. This is being held under the military commission's legislation, is that the umbrella for this proceeding? This is being held under Title 10. This is essentially a court-martial process for a soldier in the armed forces. In this case the trial is being conducted by the US Army's first judicial circuit and the trial judge Colonel Delice Lind is essentially the chief judge for that circuit. And what's the normal procedure for court-martial trials? Are they similarly held closely in secret and with no public docket?

Yes. I mean, there certainly is, according to the military expert from the Pentagon, this is standard protocol for lack of access to public documentation of the court filings. However, in a trial of this stature and importance with regards to the First Amendment, Bradley Manning has been charged in a way that has never been seen in military court marshals. He's also been charged with unauthorized disclosure to the press and his charges include eight or nine charges of espionage as well as eating the enemy. This trial is of a great public interest and today, however, we lost our case against the military judge to actually have access to those filings. Let me just backtrack for one second, a question that's always lodged in my mind since I started following this story. Why was an Army private held for any length of time in a Marine Corps penitentiary or brig?

That's a very good question and I have an answer for that. For one thing, if you look at where the headquarters for Army criminal investigation command or CID is held, it's actually at Quantico. And so I suspect that they brought him to this rundown brig at Quantico not only to put pressure on him, but also because they wanted him to be close to the organization that was leading the military investigation in partnership with the Departments of Justice and Defense. I'm sorry, and state. But of course, in the intervening time, he has been moved to an Army brig and has been serving pre-trial time there. What's it? What's the, you've been keeping very close among the things that you keep rigorous count of is the number of days that he's been in pre-trial confinement. It's way over, it's way over 300. Is it over 500 at this point? Bradley Mann, he has been in pre-trial confinement for more than a thousand days.

By the time of his trial, he'll have been in pre-trial confinement for 1,101 day. And in fact, he has been in pre-trial confinement longer than any other accused awaiting court martial in US military history. I think all of us who went to school in this country remember there's a part of the Constitution that guarantees a speedy trial. That has been litigated in this case, what's been the result of that? The judge ruled that his speedy trial rights had not been violated. What's so interesting about the man in case, in context with the federal investigation into Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, a media organization in the digital age, as well as the sort of socioeconomic changes that have been happening with the, essentially the maturation of the game generation or the digital generation, you know, vis-a-vis the boomers, is the fact that in many regards, this trial encompasses a joining together of all the major issues of our age in the post-9-11 world, for example, the entire interagency process has been

zeroed in on this young soldier and the WikiLeaks organization in probably one of the largest criminal investigations in US history, and yet the press hasn't been covering it. Before we get into the details of the pre-trial proceedings, one more question about that. As you sit there day after day, working your way through these proceedings and creating these transcripts, what's your best guess as to why the rest of the press isn't covering this? I think there's, this has multiple layers to it, and I think on one sense, if we look at it purely from the bottom line perspective, is that WikiLeaks represents a challenge to the market power that the mainstream media organizations have over audiences. And of course, you know, it costs a lot of money up front to produce news and especially investigative journalism and entertainment. It costs relatively little in the digital age to distribute it.

And so therefore, control of audiences is very, very important as these media organizations enter this new era. So I think that they've taken a defensive posture towards WikiLeaks because of that, fundamentally. And I think also it's a question of access to information. I mean, WikiLeaks, the reason why it's so revolutionary is that it allows the janitor to leak, and not simply the high-level Obama administration authorized leak to, you know, Bob Woodward, so to speak, to sell war or a particular political agenda of the elites. So there's a lot going on here that is reason for them not to cover it. Okay. Let's go to the charges. Now, some time ago, early this spring, a private manning pleaded guilty to, I believe, around 10 of the charges in his indictment and made a statement, which was the first time he'd been heard from since this whole process began, a statement which subsequently was leaked, the recording of which was leaked.

What's the charges he pled guilty to were what? And as you say, the remaining before him are charges that are much more serious, including violation of the Espionage Act, which carries a possible death sentence. That's right. Bradley Manning pled to nine lesser included offenses of the Espionage Act, and one, a violation of a lawful general regulation order under Article 92, which is essentially that, you know, a lawful general regulation or a lawful order. In the case of the Espionage, he pled to every lesser included offense for every Espionage charge against him, except for what was called spec 11 of charge two, which relates to the

grawny video. And that is, dovetails into the grand jury investigating WikiLeaks, and there's a reason why he didn't. He'd pled not guilty to stealing U.S. government property. He pled not guilty to the multiple charges of, there's two charges of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which are very provocative charges because he did, he had access, he didn't hack anything. He also pled not guilty to the aiding the enemy charge. And then he pled not guilty to one of the more provocative and disturbing charges against him. It's never been used before. In fact, it's not tied to any existing federal criminal violation or punitive article under the uniform code of military justice. It's what's called wantonly publishing. I think we do, we both of us do that every day. Yeah, that's why it's so terrifying. But the crazy thing about this charge is that the knowledge element parallels the knowledge element in the aiding the enemy charge.

So it essentially dovetails into aiding the enemy. Now wantonly publishing is actually legislative language in some, some law? Well, in oral arguments early on in the pretrial, the government argued that it was in terms of punishment that it was analogous to espionage, but that it was far, far worse than espionage. And the defense came back and said, this is a made up offense. This shouldn't be allowed. So one of the reasons why I've been covering it as I guess intently is because there's such important things going on here, and I want to empower other people, subject matter experts in military law, for example, to be able to actually make commentary on this in a way that's useful and valuable to the public. So you've been wantonly covering it? I've been wantonly covering it in publishing transcripts. The part that's attracted my attention most recently has been discussion on this aiding the enemy charge, and I believe much of the recent proceedings have been involved with

the judge ruling on elements of this that for in preparation for going forward with trial. Take us through some of that. What has she ruled and what's in and what's out regarding the aiding the enemy charge? Essentially, she says that the only thing the government needs to prove to convict manning of the aiding the enemy charge is that he had knowledge that he was dealing either directly or indirectly with the enemy. In this case, it's indirectly and according to the bill of particulars, which is like a legal document that the government, the prosecutor has to give the accused so that he knows what he's being charged with, the indirect means is via the WikiLeaks website. The judge recently ruled that receipt was required receipt of this information was required to prove aiding the enemy.

Manning has been charged with giving intelligence to the enemy according to this recent court ruling, not communicating with the enemy. There's different types of aiding the enemy. The problem for manning with this particular ruling is the fact that the government is going to introduce a classified witness who they've named John Doe, who was involved in the raid of a summit bin Laden in May 2011. This gentleman is going to come into court from what we know and say, or he's actually going to come into an off-site location in a light disguise dressed in civilian clothes with the name John Doe, and he's going to essentially say that all the Afghan war logs as well as state department information was found on a summit bin Laden's computer or some digital media. It involved the letter, correspondence between a summit bin Laden and somebody else, and that that is sort of essentially proving not only aiding the enemy, but once again, we come back to this provocative charge. It will also prove, according to the government, causing to be published. Now, what WikiLeaks did with this material depended on which of the releases we're talking

about. In some cases, they've published via The New York Times, The Guardian, L.P.E.S., and other cases they've published concurrently with those newspapers or with a couple of those newspapers and on their own website. But establishment media have been involved in the release or publication of much of this material. We know, at this point, whether what was found in al-Samba bin Laden's computer were the documents themselves or reports of them as published by The New York Times or The Guardian. We don't know. All we know is basically one reference made that was descriptor by the government when it was talking to the judge in a calliquy about even admitting this evidence. They wanted to have a classified review in camera, which is in chambers with the judge to sort of talk about this evidence, and we know that it consisted of the Afghan war logs and State Department information.

So theoretically, speculating here, the evidence could constitute the presence on al-Samba bin Laden's computer of stories from The New York Times and The Guardian, which included reports on some of this information. Absolutely. You know, it's interesting because I think Glenn Greenwald, a highly respected former constitutional lawyer and journalist, has said that Bob Woodward writes books that has top secret classified information in it, and Osama bin Laden has produced videos recommending to everybody to read Obama's war by Bob Woodward. What's the difference here? Okay. What are some of the other issues that have been dealt with in the pretrial of proceedings that you've been covering? One of the other issues was earlier on that I really was disappointed there wasn't enough serious, or enough serious coverage of was the fact that the State Department has really been, in my own words, a bit of a puppet master in this military prosecution of manning. The criminal investigation of Bradley Manning encompasses the Department of State, the

Departments of Justice and Defense. The Department of Defense is leading the military prosecution of Bradley Manning. At the Article 32, which is akin to a military version of a grand jury, essentially, everybody else had to leave the courtroom except for members of the Department of State and presumably the Department of Justice for these closed sessions. Defense had tried to get information from the Department of State, and they were basically pressuring the military prosecutor to prevent the defense from getting this discovery, namely the damage assessments, or the, quote-unquote, lack of damage assessments, and the like. They even came into court and testified that they weren't aware who amongst them had actually testified to the U.S. Congress about WikiLeaks. So there are enormous role in this global multi-agency investigation of not only manning in WikiLeaks, and yet the lack of recognition of their importance and significance in this investigation, combined with the fact that they are looking to prosecute, along with

the FBI, Julian Assange, and WikiLeaks, is very troubling. Now, a couple of questions following up on that. One, I think that casual observer can be permitted for thinking during all this time that the United States government was treating Bradley Manning, shall we say, without the usual niceties of pretrial confinement, in an effort to get him to crack to aid the government in its prosecution, or its proposed prosecution of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Has that been borne out by what you've seen so far? Yeah, it really has. I mean, for one thing, if you look at the fact that Manning did not plead guilty to specification 11 of charge 2, I had mentioned that earlier on, that relates to the Grony video, or alleged Grony video, although it's pretty clear because that's been said in testimony by agents. The Grony video is what we call Carl Adderamurder, or is it a different video?

No, it's another video that was unpublished by WikiLeaks. Essentially, this is a video of an agent said it's a flight over battle space, but the Grony air strike in May 2009 killed hundreds of women and children in the Farrah province of Afghanistan, human rights organizations referred to it as Judgment Day. And it was a very damning incident. The Pentagon had said that they were going to release the video and then they backtracked from it. And so essentially, the timeline of this offense within the Manning case is, starts in November, early November 2009, and it spans until about January 8th, which is when we know WikiLeaks tweet, you know, have encrypted, I don't know the exact tweet, but it was basically have encrypted video, you know, need supercomputer time to decrypt. Well, the reason why Manning had come into court during the pretrial sessions in a period

of court where the accused comes in and sort of says, I might plead to this and I might plead to that. And then the court says, well, that's a proper plea. That wouldn't be a proper plea. Well, he came to court and he says, I might plead to specification 11, but in April, the same time that I might and he eventually did plead to spec 10, which was included like videos of burn victims and women and children and all the sort of carnage after this Grony air strike, but they were like JPEGs and images and the 156 investigation and things like that. And the government came back and said, well, we have actually forensic evidence for a November transmission and an April transmission and we could charge him two times. And the defense said it only happened once and it was on April 10th or 11th of 2010. And that's why Manning didn't plead guilty to that charge because if you look at the November timeline, it actually feeds right into the timeline of all the public documents

that we have from the grand jury investigating Julian Assange and what we know from the Manning trial, seven civilians being investigated by the FBI for criminal behavior are wrongdoing. Those dates for those what they call 2703D orders, which are essentially secret subpoenas for information from Twitter of the IP addresses for logging on and any kind of metadata or identifying information, identifying, yes, thank you. Those also start in that November 1st, 2009 timeframe. So this really is an attempt to get Manning to plead, I mean, there's a pressure on him. He has 22 charges against him. He's been kept longer than any other accused. There is certainly the pressure of prosecutorial power upon him to plea out to get Julian Assange and some kind of conspiracy. Backtracking on another note, I glossed over the details of the conditions of Manning's

confinement, which as you noted, a judge had later ruled was unlawful. Take us through the treatment that he experienced during those nine months at Quantico. Yeah, Bradley Manning was at Marine Corps based Quantico Brig for nine months from July 29, 2010 until I think April 20, 2011. And while he was there, he was on what's called prevention of injury watch and suicide risk. There are two different statuses, and they allow the brig to do certain things to him. In the case of suicide risk, he's stripped and he has to put on this basically suicide smock and he was also precluded from being able to go outside for many, many months, except for like, I think it was 15 or 20 minutes. And when he first got there, he had admittedly tried to, he thought about suicide while

he was in Kuwait, where he was housed in this cage and, you know, he didn't have access to his lawyer and he sort of had a bit of a basically mental breakdown. But by the time he got to Quantico, he felt better. He also had been put on, I think, anti-anxiety drugs. And so what the court had found was that there was a period also, I should probably mention because it really stood out as where he was, you know, basically ordered to stand naked at parade rest in the morning. The court ruled that one episode in particular while he was at a Quantico was considered on lawful pre-trial confinement because the brig kept him on suicide risk against the recommendations of his mental health care providers. These more mental health care providers hired and paid for by the Marines, right? They weren't his private men, okay? Yes. So essentially, the distinction was that they were always recommending that he not be on prevention of injury watch and that he be de-downgraded from maximum custody to medium,

that he wasn't a harm to himself. So the brig needed their permission in order to put him on suicide risk. So the brig had the right to keep him on prevention of injury at their discretion. This is according to the judge's ruling, but the time that the brig essentially treated him as if he was on suicide risk by stripping him without their recommendation was actually a violation of his article 13 rights. Wasn't there a period of time where guards were instructed to check on him and if he were asleep to wake him every five minutes? That's right. He went through that. Essentially, every five minutes, they would ask him if he was okay when he was on suicide risk. And they had a log book specifically just for manning and it was so crazy and preposterous like listening to the testimony because they were forced to write this log, they would write down everything and then these items would brought into court in a very sinister

fashion like for example, we had essentially commanders of the garrison at Marine Corps based Quantico describing the fact that they heard that manning was playing peekaboo in the mirror and that this was really very irregular behavior for a maximum custody prisoner or that he was rave dancing, but manning wasn't allowed to exercise in this six by itself. And so he said in his testimony that he tried to do things that weren't I guess according to procedure exercise, but in which he could actually move because he was going a bit baddy. Yeah, and there's also a matter of atrophying your muscles. In most cases that involve charges that would be relatively close to the ballpark of want and publishing, want and leave publishing, one would see friend of the court briefs by other media organizations or other media personnel than the person or persons that are under charge.

Have we seen any of that or is that possible in a military proceeding? Have there been any friend of the court briefs filed by anybody in the media? There's been a smattering of public commentary about this, but there hasn't been anything formally filed that we know of with the court itself regarding his treatment or the charges against him. Now you've been in court every day of these proceedings, is that correct? Pretty much, yeah. And how many days has that been so far? Oh, God. More than 40 days of actually being in court or session. And then of course you have to also factor in cleaning up the notes or properly like formatting them, correcting them, fact checking them, all that kind of stuff. Do you have legal background? No. That's the crazy thing about this trial, you know, I started off in the pre-trial like what is going on, especially with just all the military abbreviations, but I've had an education. And is anybody paying you to do this?

No, I'm self-funded, I mean people donate, they make small donations and people donate services to me, like I don't have to pay for a hotel in the area, I stay locally. So my costs are low. And is there a date yet set for the trial? There is. We go into an article 39 on the seventh, it's supposed to be closed, but I have a feeling they're going to litigate stuff on the open record, so I'm heading there. And then we go back on the 21st of May, sorry, yes. And then the trial starts in earnest according to this court calendar on June 3rd and is expected to go 12 weeks. Now when you're saying these dates, there doesn't seem to me from what I read and what you say to be a really clear, necessarily clear, explication of what one can expect in these proceedings. So you're going there just on the expectation that something will be considered. We don't know what issues are yet to be litigated in the pre-trial situation, do we?

According to the last court discussion, anytime the government says not to show up, that's when I show up. When the government says they don't plan any open sessions, that's when I show up because there's going to be an open session and there'll be details that'll be important for my own understanding and analysis of the case. We know that they're going to have a closed session on the 7th or 8th of May and it's going to be essentially a dry run so that the court can kind of try to understand how to handle classified information. I just published a transcript a couple days ago with a list of 28 witnesses that the government is trying to have testify at least partially or in their entirety in a closed session away from the public. And of course, this is not how we do things in the United States of America, at least not in theory. So the court has to go through to see if there are alternatives to closing the court to protect this quote-unquote classified information. And we don't know the nature of this classified information, obviously, right?

Well, that's why I'm really glad that I published that list of 28 witnesses because today Marcy Wheeler published a piece on one of these individuals who is Ambassador Stephen Sache from the State Department and based on her own expertise in the National Security Arena. She expects that he's going to come and be a sentencing witness, probably, I mean, this is speculation, and that he's going to testify that Bradley Manning harmed, he will likely or could testify that Bradley Manning harmed U.S. national security by exposing not only the drone strikes in Yemen, and U.S. bombing in Yemen. We were hiding that, or the government of Yemen was hiding that from the people saying it was their bombs. But also the original, the sort of initial targetings of alawake, an American citizen who was killed without judicial process by the executive branch. I seem to remember that, and correct me if I'm wrong, was it Robert Gates, who said publicly,

and perhaps in congressional testimony, that as far as he knew, there had been embarrassment caused to the United States by these leaks, but as far as he could determine, no harm had come to any specific individual, at least as of the time that he spoke. Was that Gates? It was Gates, and it was also Hillary Clinton, and it was also admirable Mike Mullin. And the fact of the matter is, is that, and this is published in a January 2011 article by Reuters, a congressional aide, an anonymous source to Reuters, said that the State Department officials were playing up damage in order to bolster a prosecution of not only Manning but also wiki leaks. If you look at the State Department letter by Harold Koe, their legal advisor, who is a Obama proponent of drone warfare also, and the board member of human, or a former board member of human rights first, which I always find a bit strange and weird.

But he wrote a letter to Julian Assange, essentially, right before the publication of the U.S. State Department cables, in response to a letter from Julian Assange to him, saying, you know, we're willing to redact whatever you need us to redact, and they essentially the State Department essentially said, like, you know, you're forbidden from publishing this, and this is harmful to the U.S. national security. Well, that letter, and the language of that letter, was used by PayPal, and also, you know, Visa, MasterCard, and the like to actually initiate their banking blockade of wiki leaks. Now in case listeners might find that, that two-way communication unusual, it should be said that that is the kind of communication that, let's say, the New York Times will have with the State Department, or with the Defense Department, if somebody leaks something to them, usually before they publish, they will go and say, tell us what to redact, tell us what might affect national security will take it out. Is that not correct? That's correct.

And the government usually cooperates with the New York Times in that request. That is correct. That's why the New York Examiner, and I followed suit after them, have foiled all the communications between the New York Times and the Department of State about this release. The Freedom of Information Act requested, as for you, right? Yes. Yes. And you put these transcripts online at AlexaObran.com, is that right? That's correct. But you also tweet from the, why you're, when you're covering on a minute-by-minute basis, I've noted. Yeah, and I try to cover the trial in a very accurate and very sort of, it's really I do this for subject matter experts, so that's why I tend to focus on what case law, what are the elements of the rulings, to try to empower other journalists who might want to cover the case from afar. And the most severe penalty that awaits, potentially awaits Bradley Manning, is a death sentence. Is that correct under the S.P. and Ajak? The government says that it won't execute him, but that's really not their decision.

They're just basically recommending that they don't execute him, and fundamentally the decision is up to the military judge. Bradley Manning faces multiple life sentences for the charges against him. And based on his recent plea to the nine lesser included and then the one article 92, he's already has an exposure of 20 years. Finally, let's talk a little bit about Bradley Manning, the person. You made some observations, I think, in another interview that I found intriguing. What we had been hearing from, I think, mainstream media sources were mainly observations or rumors or something about his state of mind in Iraq and his sexual identity issues while he was in the army in Iraq. You gave us, tell us about that and then tell us how you described him in court. I think the word that stood out to me was the words that stood out to me were very obedient.

So contrast those two views of Bradley Manning if you could for us. Well Bradley Manning is really young, first of all. When he leaked these, he was in his early 20s. He's currently 25 years old. He's also very, very bright and precocious and he's very methodical and very logical and he's incredibly earnest. He's earnest in the way that really bright, passionate people can be and so they can oftentimes be also a bit intense and he was also at a stage in his life where he was sort of figuring out how to deal with adult world. He was not ever closeted, I mean from what we know in public reports, I've never spoken to Bradley Manning so I want to apologize if I get any small detail wrong but from what we know from what's already been published, I mean he was always a very forthright in his, even in his sexuality. There is evidence from the article 32 that he wasn't sure if he had certain gender identity

issues with regards to this time period while he was in Iraq and he didn't have a lot of guidance. I mean one of the interesting things about the evidence that's come out related to his sexuality and I'm not an expert on this particular issue but he did have a scholarly paper on, it was called flight into hypermasculinity and it was an article about the fact that there is a higher proportion of people with gender identity complexes within the military and then oftentimes they join the military because it's a very hypermasculine environment in the case of their male and they have a more feminine identity. So that there's that issue going on but you know fundamentally Bradley Manning is actually a very obedient and earnest young man and if you see him in court he has the kind of personality that would even disarm and has disarmed this very aggressive and boisterous military prosecutor.

During the article 13 when Manning was on the stand for nine hours by the end of his cross-examination with the government, the government prosecutor was smiling at him. There isn't much mendacity to Bradley Manning and in many ways he answers questions in the way that you or I would answer the questions if we were on the stand for these serious charges. I think you really, really, truly believe that he was doing the right thing and that he couldn't handle in a statement he talked about the fact that he didn't want to work for the Iraqi security police because he knew that these people would just be disappeared or would be tortured and he just couldn't live with that. I guess the question about him that lingers with me is after following the story of his treatment, his pretrial confinement especially the treatment at Quantico, the person you describe by means certainly within the broad parameters of what we consider normal sounds utterly normal. He doesn't sound like somebody who's been tortured for nine months, doesn't sound like

he behaves as like somebody who's been tortured for nine months. Bradley Manning is an amaniac, he's a very reasoned person and even if you see how he's instructed his lawyer to handle himself with the press, he said to his lawyer that he only wanted text-based documents published, that he didn't want to do any kind of exposés. This is a person who's very scientific in his thinking. I think the fact that he leaked source documents is a thread throughout that, that he wanted the public to really be informed, that he believed in the idea of self-governance and the requirement of public information and knowledge as a requirement for that. This is not somebody who is a showboat, a glory boat, a media whore so to speak. So I think he can, even in his plea, he said, I admit guilt that these actions are service discrediting and prejudicial to the good order and discipline of the U.S. armed services.

And I can see how these leaks harmed U.S. reputation as to how it could handle information. And for that, I take full responsibility. And finally, I think just to wrap this up, Alexa, in all of the testimony and all of the evidence that you know of, obviously much evidence that's been submitted, much evidence won't be submitted until the trial itself, but much has been submitted in secret. Is there any evidence that Bradley Manning has ever been in communication with any representative or associate of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban? Absolutely not. Alexa O'Brien at Alexa O'Brien.com and on Twitter, what's your Twitter handle? Carwin B. You want to explain that? Just C-A-R-W-I-N-B. I used to go by a screen name and Carwin Bill a question and I just abbreviated it.

Okay then. On Twitter, for the best and most comprehensive coverage of what's the legal proceedings surrounding private Bradley Manning, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you for having me. Just time for one more apology. John Paulk, former chairman of Exodus International, famous for having been an advocate and spokesman for the Christian ex-gay movement, and reparative therapy, has formally recanted his position and apologized through a letter distributed to numerous gay publications.

He says, I know countless people were harmed by things I said and did in the past. I do not believe that reparative therapy changes sexual orientation. In fact, it does great harm to many people. I am truly, truly sorry for the pain I have caused. To quote the ex ex-gay spokesperson, that's going to conclude this week's edition of the Show The Programme Turns Next. You could turn ex ex ex-gay, you never know. The programme turns next week at the same time over these same stations, except in Los Angeles, over NPR Worldwide throughout Europe, and then you sent 440 cable systems to Japan, around the world through facilities of the American Forces Network, up and down the East Coast in North America via the shortwave giant WBCQ, the planet 7.490 megahertz shortwave on the 9104 in Berlin, around the world via the internet at two different locations live and archived whenever you want at harryshira.com, and through KCRW.com slash news slash news-24. That's easy to remember, isn't it?

Now, in stereo, too, available as a free podcast at KCRW.com, as well as at iTunes and Side Show Network, and available for your smartphone through Stitcher.com, and it'd be just like somebody else paying attention to that trial. If you'd agree to join with me then, would you already thank you very much, huh? A typical a show, shout-out to the San Diego Pittsburgh Chicago in exile and Hawaii desks. Thanks, as always, to Pam Hallstead and thanks to Stephen Dixon, at POP Sound in Santa Monica and Paul Roost at Argo Studios in New York for engineering help with today's broadcast. This program's website is harryshira.com, you can send email there, or find out what music is played on the broadcast, and on Twitter, I'm at the harryshira, aren't you? The show comes to you from Century of Progress Productions, and originates through facilities of the change is hard, radio network.