Between The Lines - Michael Ratner: Bradley Manning Trial Now Underway (Week Ending June 14, 2013)

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

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Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

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In Bradley Manning Trial, U.S. Government Strives to Intimidate Future Whistleblowers

RealAudio MP3

Posted June 5, 2013

Interview with Michael Ratner, Julian Assange's attorney and president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

The trial of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning got underway this week in a military courtroom at Fort Meade, Md. Manning was arrested just over three years ago and is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified government documents to WikiLeaks. He has been held in prison since his arrest, including time held naked in solitary confinement, purportedly as a measure to prevent his suicide, although Manning was never determined to be a threat to himself.

Among the documents Manning admitted to downloading and distributing was the so-called "collateral murder video," showing a U.S. helicopter crew shooting and killing two unarmed local Reuters journalists and several civilians in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. In February, Manning pled guilty to some of the less serious charges, which could result in up to a 20-year prison sentence. During those court proceedings, he read a 10,000-word statement explaining how he hoped his actions would "spark a dialogue" about U.S. foreign policy. In the current trial, Manning now faces charges of espionage and aiding the enemy, and if convicted could face life in prison.

Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Michael Ratner just before Manning's trial began. Ratner is president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the attorney representing Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who received the government documents from Manning. Here, Ratner puts Manning's trial in historical perspective during the current post-9/11 era, when the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other U.S. presidents combined. He also compares Manning's actions with that of another famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the top secret Pentagon Papers in 1971.

MICHAEL RATNER: I was in court a few months ago when he pled guilty to a number of "lesser included charges" that could give him a maximum of 20 years in jail. The judge hadn't sentenced him yet and won't until the end of the trial, so he could obviously get lower than the 20 years, but he did plead guilty to charges that could get him 20 years in jail. It was one of the more moving days I've spent in a courtroom; he gave his political reasons, everything from the "collateral murder" video to the Iraq war logs. What's going on now is particularly nasty because I think the hopes may have been that if he pleaded guilty to 20 years the government would say, Okay, we're not going to go ahead with this huge trial with 150 witnesses; it's going to take three or four months, and includes some very heavy charges like aiding the enemy and espionage and could also get him life in prison, in fact, hundreds of years in prison. You would hope the government would come to their senses and say, this young man of conscience – no question he's a man of conscience, who did what he thought was right – pled guilty, and let the judge decide what sentence he should get up to 20 years. Instead, they're going for everything about him; they obviously want to put him in jail for the rest of his life. That's really sad and outrageous. They also want to get some precedents on the books, I think, about soldiers who whistleblow, give to the media, whether it's New York Times or WikiLeaks, and then are considered to be aiding the enemy by doing so.

BETWEEN THE LINES: What are the less serious charges that he did plead guilty to?

MICHAEL RATNER: The basic charges were around unauthorized access to computers or misuse of computers – lower charges that carry about two years, and when they all added up, it came to 20 years. The bigger charges now have to do with two charges: espionage, which has a very long sentence attached to it; and aiding the enemy, which has a death sentence attached to it, actually, although the U.S. has said they won't ask for the death penalty. We'll see what happens. So he's facing a very, very heavy time. There's going to be a lot of witnesses at the trial that are going to be secret witnesses. It's one of the more bizarre things of the trial: that all of the documents that you and I and every person listening to this show can look at online, that WikiLeaks put up online – all of those documents are considered secret still by the government, and so every time one of those documents comes up in court, the court closes the courtroom, kicks everybody out, and discusses them, even though we all know what's in them.

BETWEEN THE LINES: In Bradley Manning's case, is the government actually alleging that anybody was actually harmed or injured or killed as a result of anything he released?

MICHAEL RATNER: That's very important. Both with Julian Assange and Bradley Manning – and of course, Julian Assange from WikiLeaks published the documents. The initial spin by the administration is that they have blood on their hands, that people are going to be killed because of this, people who helped the U.S. in war-torn countries like Afghanistan, etc., are going to be injured. In fact, no evidence at all about anybody being injured, anybody having to move location, or anybody being killed as a result of these releases. What these releases are, is one, they are very embarrassing to the United States, but more so, they do reveal criminality by the U.S.: the killing of thousands of civilians – more than they acknowledged – in Iraq and Afghanistan, the collateral murder video, the secret wars in Yemen. The accountability that we ought to have here is not the accountability for what Bradley Manning did; it's the accountability of our own government for what it did, and what we ought to be focusing on is not Bradley Manning in terms of persecution, but we ought to be going after high officials of our own government who were involved in criminality.

BETWEEN THE LINES: I was in college when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, and my recollection is that he wasn't vilified the way Bradley Manning has been. And I'm not sure he spent any time in jail. It just doesn't seem there's been widespread outrage at Bradley Manning's brutal treatment since his arrest and imprisonment three years ago. Nor has there been widespread outrage about all the secrecy and the persecution of both whistleblowers and journalists. Are we just living in different times? I think we're moving into an era of more activism. And we should mention that Ellsberg has been one of Manning's most outspoken supporters.

MICHAEL RATNER: What you're saying is very accurate. One difference of course is that when Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers – which were actually top secret – nothing that Bradley Manning released was higher level than secret. So what Ellsberg did, you could argue, at least from a government classification point of view, was much more capable of causing damage than what Bradley Manning did. But there was a huge anti-war movement at the time Daniel Ellsberg did it, so he was releasing those papers in a country that was tired of war, gotten lied to about Vietnam – this was 1970 or 1971 – so in that context he was looked at as a hero. He certainly was; he could have gone to jail. He was prosecuted for espionage; the trial ended badly for the government in the middle, but I think the political context was very different.

And yes, I think we're moving a bit in that direction, but we're not there yet. You know, I'd conclude by really two things. One is that the government ought to just back off at this point. I would hope this trial collapses in very short order, the government accepts the guilty plea of the 20 years that he pleaded to, and we go to a sentencing phase. That's the minimum I would hope for. The maximum, of course, I would hope that he gets released, gets time served and gets a medal on his chest, because that's what he deserves.

Find more perspectives on Manning’s trial by visiting the Center for Constitutional Rights at ccrjustice.org and the Bradley Manning Support Network at bradleymanning.org.