Policy and legal experts weigh in on the alleged quartet of new appointees
by Cyrus Farivar
Ars Technica
Aug. 22, 2013
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ALEXA O’BRIEN: Mr. Coombs, Bradley Manning was convicted of 20 offenses and just sentenced to 35 years. What is your reaction?
DAVID COOMBS: Well, I look at the sentence, and I can’t believe that that was actually the sentence he received. Anyone who sat through the hearing, heard all the evidence, even in the closed sessions, there is not evidence there where you would think 35 years would be the appropriate sentence. I wonder now, if there had actually been damage, or if he had really intended to harm the United States, or if he wanted to obtain personal gain from selling classified information, just what the sentence would have been, because this was a person who had true intentions. He wanted to help America. He wanted to get people to think about what was going on in Iraq. And he didn’t have an evil motive in what he did. You heard from the sentencing his background, his story. And yet, that was the sentence he received.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: And how is Bradley Manning?
DAVID COOMBS: Interestingly, he was the person who had probably the most cheerful mood afterwards. There were a lot of people who were very upset. He said, "Hey, it’s OK. It’s all right. I know you did everything you could for me. Don’t cry. Be happy. It’s fine. This is just a stage of my life. I’m moving forward. I will recover from this." So it was odd that I wasn’t the person who was trying to comfort him. It was just—just the opposite.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: My sense—I don’t know Bradley Manning, but my sense is that he has grown up through his court-martial process. He is actually quite a strong character in the courtroom. And he is—and I’ve described him as being incredibly earnest. I really think, you know, it’s the best way I can describe the sort of sense of sincerity that I get from hearing him testify. What’s your sense of Bradley Manning? How have you seen him grow through this process? Or—
DAVID COOMBS: Oh, he definitely has matured. When I first met him three years ago, it was a young man who—still very idealistic, but, you know, when he had to explain certain things of what his thought process was, he had sometimes trouble articulating how he was feeling. It was clear he had these feelings, and it was clear he was sincere, but he couldn’t really talk about it. He also wasn’t a person who really knew how to connect with others, because he was so used to being judged. So, even though very caring, he would have difficulty whenever you got onto a personal level with them. I think over the years, the three years that I represented him, I’ve seen all those barriers break down. He is not just a client, he is a friend. And to see him mature over the last three years gives me great hope for him in the future. And that’s really why I believed an appropriate sentence would have been one that got him back to society sooner rather than later, because he has so much to offer. He is really somebody who in life didn’t have a lot of opportunities, didn’t have a lot going for him, and in spite of that, he turned out to be the type of person that he is, somebody who puts people first, who cares about people—even when these people don’t care about him. And that’s the amazing thing when you see what he does. His conduct really does back up his beliefs.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: Let’s talk about what 35 years means, the sentence, because a lot of people are talking about mitigating factors like, for example, the Clemency and Parole Board. In realistic terms, what does a 35-year sentence look like to you?
DAVID COOMBS: Well, he’ll have several opportunities to lessen that time. Because it’s more than 30 years, he’ll be eligible for parole after 10. And so, that will be the first time they’ll look at him for parole. And then every year thereafter he’ll get a look. From my perspective, he would be an excellent candidate for parole, because he’s not a risk of recidivism. He’s not going to have access to classified information, clearly. His crime was not violent. It was not for personal gain. He has no anti-person—antisocial personality problems. So, this is a person who could be put in society today and be fine. So, my hope is that at the 10-year mark, which he gets time—credit for the time that he’s served, so really that’s seven years from now, roughly—that he would be somebody who is paroled. Every year thereafter, if he’s not granted parole, then he has another hearing. Although that’s not my specialty, I’m going to make it my specialty, and I’ll be there in 10 years.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: Great.
DAVID COOMBS: Or, actually, seven.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: Yeah. And this would be part of time off for good behavior? Is that what you’re talking about? Or separate from parole?
DAVID COOMBS: Separate from that. So when he goes into confinement, he will get two dates. They will figure out his maximum release date and his minimum release date. So the 35 number really doesn’t mean that’s the number you serve. You’ll get two different dates. And he’ll find that out within the first week that he’s there. He’ll convey that to me. I’ll make sure that that’s accurate. And then I can give some more information as to the possible release dates for him.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: I really want to talk to you about this case, because this case has been obscured from the public, from closed sessions, not having a public access to court documents. And before we get into sort of aspects of the case, I want to ask you how has the way the government has prosecuted this case or Manning’s conviction been unprecedented.
DAVID COOMBS: Well, I think that, for starters, you go with an offense of aiding the enemy, and that offense really is unprecedented. When you look at how that was used in the past and how the government tried to use it in this case, they had to go back to an 1800s case to even make an argument, a colorable argument, as to why you would go after somebody who gave information to a journalist and say that they aided the enemy. That is an unprecedented aspect of this case. Not only there, but in every other charging decision that they made, they pushed the envelope of, and even strained, any realistic reading of what the law is. And yet, they seemed to not have a problem with that. It was almost a win-at-all-costs mentality. And I think that ultimately will be something on appeal that will get reviewed, and perhaps at that point Brad will get some relief, even on appeal.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: Now, Manning wasn’t convicted of aiding the enemy. Do you think that the fact that it stood up as long as it did in the prosecution sets any kind of precedent?
DAVID COOMBS: I do. I mean, I think, if I were a journalist, or, for that matter, somebody who is a concerned citizen who has access to information, is considering being a whistleblower, I think this sends a chilling message. And that message is one in which, even when your theory is you had no intent to get this information to the enemy, it was not your belief, there’s no evidence to show that you would have actual knowledge—and that was the key aspect there—that the enemy would receive this information, and yet you’re going to be charged with this, it’s going to survive motions to dismiss, even after the government’s presentation of the evidence, which then it became clear they had no evidence.
It survived a 917 motion, which is a motion to dismiss based upon a failure of proof. That, to me, was amazing. I could not believe that the offense survived that long. And it does send a chilling effect and chilling message to anyone who may think about releasing information for the betterment of America, or any journalist who might think about receiving that information, because it’s not a far step to go from the person who gave it to the person that received it, the journalist. And I think, recently, with Glenn Greenwald’s significant other being stopped—I think if Glenn was with him, he would have been stopped, as well—I think that is an indicator that just because you’re a journalist, the government is not going to turn a blind eye to the fact that you’re part of that process.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: I want to talk to you about the espionage charges, because a lot of the press focused on aiding the enemy, because it was such a grave charge, but here we have Manning convicted on six espionage offenses, or Espionage Act offenses. Manning was convicted on probable harm at trial, and it wasn’t really until the sentencing phase that we got to really discuss if there was any damage at all. So, I wanted to ask you just sort of point-blankly: Did these disclosures damage national security?
DAVID COOMBS: Not from my perspective, no. And that’s the other difficult aspect of this case. We would expect to see some damage that they could articulate, given the amount of information. Understanding the type of information—and that information usually would not have something in there that would be harmful, given that most of it’s dated. It’s looking backwards instead of forwards. The one exception might be the diplomatic cables. So, I fully anticipated seeing something that even I, from my perspective, would have to say, "Yes, that is damage," and that’s going to affect his sentence. But we didn’t see that, and didn’t see that in the open session, did not see that in the closed session. And so, because of that, that’s another reason why I have difficulty accepting the outcome in this case.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: How would you characterize the evidence that the government presented at sentencing, the aggravation evidence? How would you describe—
DAVID COOMBS: Speculative. I’d say it’s pure speculation. They got individuals to come up who were so-called subject matter experts in their field to essentially espouse their personal opinion as to some potential harm in the future.
When asked to give concrete, you know, specific examples, something where we could say, OK, this person was hurt, or this person was harmed, or, God forbid, this person was killed, none of that came out from any of these witnesses. And because of that, that really kind of changed our position on what we wanted to try to do in our sentencing case. Initially, we were thinking on offering the damage assessments from the respective agencies. And our thought process behind that was, when you read the damage assessments, you get a sense of some potential harm at a particular time, but the long-term harm, when they’re looking at this from the damage assessment standpoint, is even in there speculative. And they start to say there’s a potential for this, but it’s remote, or it’s unlikely. And so we initially thought those damage assessments would be vital in order to impeach the witnesses that the government would call.
At the end of the day, we saw that the witnesses that they called gave even worse testimony than what was in the damage assessments, from the standpoint of harming. And so, what looked initially to be our—one of our better mitigating circumstances, the damage assessments, actually would have been harmful, so we decided not to offer that. And I fully expected that the government then would offer the damage assessments, because it actually did a better job of capturing speculative damage in a more convincing manner than their witnesses did.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: I want to talk to you about the closed sessions. I mean, you know, I’ve sort of graphed out all the critical evidence as it relates to certain elements, for the espionage charges, for aiding the enemy, and into sentencing. And most of the critical evidence in this trial is classified. And, you know, we got into the sentencing phase, and the public sort of wanted to know: You know, was there any damage? And most of these sessions were closed, especially in the sentencing phase. So I want to talk to you about how the prosecutors may have used classification. Do you think that they used classification to hide their case from public scrutiny?
DAVID COOMBS: I don’t think so. And that might be a surprising answer. I don’t think they used classification to hid their case from the public. I think they used classification to try to convince the public that there was something in there that was harmful, so harmful that you, the public, could not hear it. But reality, there wasn’t.
Classification in this case was really used to hide information from the defense. The fact that it was a classified evidence case really hurt our ability to discover information that in any other case I would be able to have access to. When you have to rely upon the government—and this is the government counsel—to look through evidence and determine what information should the defense receive in their preparation of their defense, you have a problem.
I had a security clearance. I had the ability to see any of the information. I should have had equal access to everything the government looked at. And then I could make an intelligent argument at that point why I needed certain classified information. Instead, I had to rely upon a trial counsel, whose job obviously is not to look after the best interests of Pfc. Manning, to look through information and say, "No, you don’t need to know this; this is not going to be helpful to your defense." I am certain that there was classified information that would have been helpful to the defense that we did not receive.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: Throughout the beginning of the discovery process, in the motions part of the trial, you know, there was an attempt by defense to get communications between Russell Travers, who was a senior official at the National Counterterrorism Center, who was picked essentially to be the National Security Staff’s senior adviser for information access and security—and the White House Press Secretary called the investigation of WikiLeaks and Manning administration-wide. So, I really want to talk to you about this case in a larger context. And have you found any evidence that the investigation or the prosecution of Manning or WikiLeaks was being coordinated by the National Security Council or the White House?
DAVID COOMBS: I haven’t, but I would have no doubt that multiple agencies, certainly Department of State, FBI and other agencies of the alphabet soup-type example, would have some involvement in this case. It was clear that every day we had a group of people behind the prosecution, that just sat there. Occasionally they would pass notes to the trial counsel. Obviously I don’t know what was on those notes.
During some of the breaks, I would walk up and introduce myself, say, "Hi, I’m David Coombs. How are you? And what do you do for a living?" And they would never answer that question. So, from my perspective, clearly there were outside influences. And it would explain why the government did take the position that it did of essentially win at all cost. They never deviated from pushing the envelope, where I would think a trial counsel who’s really kind of concerned about not only getting a just outcome, but having that outcome stand up on appeal, take certain steps to eliminate appellate issues. In this case, the government was never concerned about any of those.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: Let’s talk about what—what you just said in terms of you said that there were definitely other interests around this prosecution. Can you—can you tell me what you think those are, or what purpose the trial counsel’s case or objective was in this military prosecution beyond punishing Bradley Manning or deterring other people from following in his footsteps?
DAVID COOMBS: Sure. I think you don’t really have to look any further than the 2008 ACIC, the Army counterintelligence report, to get the answer to that. It was important that once the government found a whistleblower, somebody who was leaking information to a journalist, to make an example of them. It was important that that example be a very loud message to show that you couldn’t have the belief of safe disclosures, even to an organization like WikiLeaks. And that goal was to destroy that mentality of I can give stuff in an anonymous fashion that I think is beneficial for the world to know without risk to myself. Manning’s case is the case that tries to destroy that belief in order to essentially deter any other person from ever following in his footsteps.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: Do you still believe that the way in which the government has prosecuted this case, in addition to deterring whistleblowers and destroying any kind of sense of trust between a media organization and a whistleblower—do you think that the way in which the military prosecuted this was to actually plea your client out?
DAVID COOMBS: I don’t know if it was necessarily to plead my client out. You would expect, if that were the goal, that you would have a reasonable government on the opposite side offering a reasonable outcome to the case. When I first came on to this case back in 2010, I knew many of the key players from the government side. And at that point, rather foolishly, I had the optimistic belief that I could obtain a very favorable outcome for Bradley. Reality, though, set in pretty quickly after that.
They were not interested in pleading the case, certainly not when they made the offers to us of what they would support. Those offers were so far out in the stratosphere that even today’s outcome looks outstanding compared to what they were offering us. So, from my perspective, I don’t believe they ever wanted to plead this case. I believe they wanted to make an example of Pfc. Manning.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: How important was it to defend Bradley Manning against the Garani airstrike video, which was a video of a May 2009 airstrike or cluster bomb bombing in the Farah province of Afghanistan? Manning was found not guilty of this charge. The government came forward with trying to assert a November transmission date.
DAVID COOMBS: That was—it was pivotal to our defense that the judge did not believe that Pfc. Manning was working for WikiLeaks, because he wasn’t. It was pivotal for our defense that the judge did not believe that he started to do his leaks in November of 2009, because he didn’t. The government wanted to show that he started at that timeframe for their argument that within two weeks of coming to Iraq he turned his back on his soldiers, his fellow soldiers, and went to work for WikiLeaks. That could not be further from the truth.
The reality of the situation was, nothing happened in November. He did find out about WikiLeaks, like a lot of other people, when they released the 9/11 pager messages, and he paid attention to WikiLeaks at that point. He did go on to IRC chats and spoke with other people both working for and with WikiLeaks and other people who were just interested in WikiLeaks. And he found fellow like-minded people there that could talk about issues of not only computers and programming, but also important issues that are important for the world to be discussing. And that’s the December time frame.
So, in January is the first time that he actually discloses anything, and that’s the SIGACTs, the significant activity reports. From our perspective, it was pivotal that the judge believe that, because had the judge believed that he went to work for WikiLeaks in November 2009, I think the chances of being found guilty of aiding the enemy would have been significantly higher.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: What issues are going to come up on appeal, as you see them? What are the sort of major mistakes of fact or legal understanding that are going to come up on appeal?
DAVID COOMBS: I think the biggest one is speedy trial. The fact that we demanded speedy trial relatively early on in the case and yet still had to wait well over a year to get Pfc. Manning to his day in court, I think will be one of the bigger issues.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: And Manning was held longer than any accused awaiting court-martial.
DAVID COOMBS: To my knowledge, yes. And, you know, when you look at the speedy trial issue, the government avoided that problem by just simply going to their—the first-level commander and asking for him to just say, "I’m going to exclude this time. This time will not count against you for any future speedy trial issues," and did that time and time again. And when you think about that, if that’s all it takes to wipe the slate clean for the clock, the speedy trial clock, then there is no speedy trial clock. And in this instance, that’s all the government really had, and yet it was condoned. So I think speedy trial will be a huge issue.
I think the unlawful pretrial punishment will be a big issue. I think the judge’s rulings on the 1030 offense, the exceeding authorized access on a computer, will be a huge issue. Her last-minute allowing the government to change the larceny offenses, the 641 offenses—
ALEXA O’BRIEN: To change the charge sheet.
DAVID COOMBS: To change the charge sheet—
ALEXA O’BRIEN: After the closing of it.
DAVID COOMBS: —to change the nature of the offense, to change what was charged, after the close of evidence, will be a huge appellate issue. So there are several issues that I think will give the potential for relief on appeal.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: What’s your sense—I mean, in the middle of this trial or towards the end of it, Colonel Denise Lind, the military—the presiding military judge, was promoted to the Army Court of Criminal Appeals, which will be the court of appeals that this case will go to. What’s your sense of that?
DAVID COOMBS: Well, it is a promotion from the standpoint of going from a trial level to the appellate level, although it’s not atypical. So, I’ll say that in the past judges have gone from the trial level to the appellate level, and then they go even back down to the trial level. So, she wasn’t promoted from the standpoint of rank. I don’t think it had really any bearing on the case. She certainly won’t be the appellate judge listening to the case. So I’m hopeful that the other judges that are on the Army Court of Criminal Appeals will look at the issues and see what we litigated and hopefully come to a different conclusion.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: Was Manning scapegoated for any kind of leadership or policy failures within either his 2nd Brigade Combat Team or within the Department of Defense or even the U.S. government?
DAVID COOMBS: I don’t know about scapegoated, but he was a—and in my opinion, when I argued, also in sentencing, he was a victim of a very poor chain of command. One of the things that you would expect from a chain of command, especially from the non-commissioned officer side, is that they take care of soldiers. That is the very first thing that any NCO learns, and that’s the first thing that they think of every given day that they get up, put the uniform on: How do I take care of my soldiers?
In this case, Pfc. Manning was not taken care of by his unit. Had they taken care of him, they would have realized that he was struggling with something, struggling with issues, and they would have addressed those issues. I’m not to say—and that’s not to say that this wouldn’t have happened still, but it’s certainly, if he had a caring command, if he had an NCO leadership that looked out for him, they would have recognized, at least in December of 2009, that there were some issues with what—his behavior and what he was struggling with.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: I want to talk to you about your client. Your client has—you know, in the court record, has had personal issues that they have struggled with that are a part of this case. They’ve also had gender identity issues or—that have come up at the sort of the climax of the sentencing case. And Bradley Manning came forward and offered an apology to the presiding military judge. Could you give the public a context for all of those issues and how you saw they fit into the case, and your concerns as a defense attorney as to how you were going to handle those issues?
DAVID COOMBS: Sure. I mean, I think to minimize Brad and say he is one thing and only one thing is not to do justice to him and how complex he is as a person. I think, from the defense’s perspective, we had to look at the entire picture of why he did certain things. And it was clear—and you can see that from the Lamo chats—why he would leak certain information, believing that this information was important for the public to know, believing that it might spark reforms, it might spark debate, it might make a difference in the world. Those are firmly held beliefs that we embraced, obviously, as part of his defense.
But you wouldn’t do justice to what he was going through without recognizing that he had those beliefs at the same time that he was struggling with a very, very personal issue that was really at the center and core of who he was and who he hoped to be. And he was in a position now of dealing with that in a deployed environment, where he couldn’t reach out for help, where he couldn’t turn to the next person and say, "Hey, I’m struggling with this issue. Can you help me?" because if he did that, he would no longer be in the military. So, early on, we had to address that issue. And even though it was uncomfortable for him, and even though at the time he didn’t want it to come to the forefront, I told him that we needed to embrace that part, because that was part of the narrative, that was part of what was happening, and that was the truth, and we needed to bring it out.
But at the same time, we also really wanted to make sure that people knew that we weren’t offering that as an excuse. We weren’t saying that because of the struggles, he chose to leak this information; because of his personal issues, that that led him to share information with WikiLeaks. The two are not related. But because they happened at the same time, it’s important to understand that, because that provides context. And certainly, as we all know, when you’re under a lot of stress, and when you’re under a lot of pressure, and when you’re dealing with personal issues, that does affect your judgment.
That does affect how you might internalize things. And so I think it had an impact on him. It didn’t cause him to do his actions. But it was important, from the defense’s perspective, that the military judge got that full picture. And our hope was, if she got that full picture, she would understand that who she was sentencing was a good young man, a moral young man, a man with probably one of the stronger moral compasses of what is right and wrong. And he has that compass in spite of his childhood, in spite of his upbringing, in spite of how other people treat him. And this is the type of person that you have in front of you.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: How did other people treat him?
DAVID COOMBS: Well, you have people treating him as essentially a pariah, as an outcast. They recognized from the beginning he doesn’t fit the typical mold. And so he has very little friends. And one of the aspects that came out, through some of the people who would talk about him, was even those people who were rude to him, even those people who belittled him, made fun of him, he was still kind to, he was still respectful to. So, you see a person like him, and you think, you know, if only he had somebody who was a strong leader, if only he had somebody that he could go to and talk to, things might have been different.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: Do you think things might have been different meaning that these would not be released as they were released?
DAVID COOMBS: I don’t know. I mean, I think even if Brad didn’t have these issues, I think when he deployed and he started to see the things he was seeing, and when he started to read about the things that were being done, I think, from a moral standpoint, he would have had that problem and still would have had that issue. And I think that’s where we get to the apology, where he says, "Look, you know, I could have done other things." I think if he had a strong leadership, he would have explored other options. He would have explored what the mainstream would say you would need to do: go through your traditional channels, through your elected leaders, through your internal inspector general who would investigate anything that you believed was unethical or illegal. He would have at least explored those. I don’t know if he would have gotten any relief going through that, and so ultimately he might have done the same thing. But it would have maybe delayed his actions.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: What was the most damage done in this case?
DAVID COOMBS: I—personally, I think the most damage done in this case was the sentence that my client received. If you’re talking about damage from a standpoint of what he released, embarrassment. Embarrassment was the most damage. It’s not—when you look at the SIGACTs, when you look at the other charge documents, all that stuff is, as I said before, something that looks to past acts. It’s kind of an historical record. I don’t believe any of that gave away anything that was sensitive.
The diplomatic cables, on the other hand, I think the damage there was an embarrassment of having other people see that we don’t always do the right thing for the right reasons as the United States, which might come as a surprise to some people. You would think that when we deal with other countries, when we deal with people who are less fortunate than our country, that we’re doing so in a way that helps everybody, that’s in everyone’s best interest. But that’s not always the case. And, in fact, frequently we do things that are in our own national interests, and sometimes that is to the detriment of people who are struggling to have what we have here in America—a democracy, a free and open press. And that’s a little disheartening when you see that. And I think that’s probably the biggest damage, because if people actually look to these documents, they will see that we don’t always do what we should do, and we are not always the country that we should strive to be.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: What drove Manning to release these documents?
DAVID COOMBS: I think what he was seeing, and the amount of time that he had to deal with this. If you’re in a deployed environment, which I have been several times, you have nothing else but your job, and perhaps going to the gym to work out, to eat, to sleep, then you go back to your job. And for him, I think what probably caused this to accelerate was that’s all he had to think about. And because of his moral compass, because of what he was hoping to achieve when he went there—you look back at the Laura McNamara chats, the now—back then she was called Zachary Antolak—you look at those chats, and you see a young man hoping that when he gets there, he can make a difference, he could hopefully save lives, hopefully get people back safely.
How disheartening it must have been when he got there to see that that really wasn’t always the mission. And we didn’t always just kill bad people. Sometimes we just killed people because they were in the wrong place. And no one asks questions. And no one investigated to see did we do something wrong. And when we did do something wrong, we didn’t come forward with that information. We didn’t readily admit the mistake, say we’re sorry, and show how we’re going to prevent this from happening again in the future. We owe that to American public. We owe that to the publics that we go to protect and to help them build a good country. And yet we didn’t do that. And so, for Brad to see that, I think that probably is what accelerated his belief that the public needed to see this information.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: This is my last question for you. You have said in the past that a court-martial is the best, most fairest courtroom for Bradley Manning. Has this trial, in your experience through it, changed your perspective on the military justice system?
DAVID COOMBS: It hasn’t changed my perspective on the justice system, but what it has done is it has brought to the forefront—for me, at least—problems with our justice system, things that need to change. And the first thing that needs to change is Rule for Court-Martial 806. That’s the rule that prevents cameras from coming into the courtroom. We need to change that rule. We need to have cameras in the courtroom. We need to have the media have access to see what happens at every moment inside the courtroom.
Hopefully this could be aired on C-SPAN or some other network where the average public person could tune in and see what is going on in a court-martial. And the reason why I think that’s important is, majority of the things that happened in this trial I don’t think would have happened if you had the eyes of the public firmly fixed on it. And in this case especially, if you had cameras in the courtroom, you would have had more media. You would have had journalists there. You would have had Nancy Grace, I’m sure, would have been live from Fort Meade every day talking about this case. It would have been on the front page of newspapers.
And people would then see for themselves what I know, and that is there is a good young man who received 35 years, and he didn’t need to receive 35 years. There’s a good young man who did what he thought was morally right, and for the right reasons, and he was sentenced the way we would sentence somebody who committed murder, the way we would sentence somebody who molested a child. That’s the sentence he received. So, yes, I still believe military justice is fair. I still am very proud to be a member of the military. But I can recognize where there are problems. And cameras in the courtroom, we need to have that. We need to change that aspect of the system.
And then, secondly, classified evidence cases—the rules are not balanced. The government has too much power over what is discoverable, over what will be shared, over how things are given to the court and not to the defense. Those rules need to change. Also in this case, you get a situation where I’m asking for witnesses that are clearly relevant. I’m asking for people to come testify that would be beneficial to my client, and yet I have to go through the government to ask for that. I have to get their permission. And when they deny it, then I have to go seek relief from the judge. That’s wrong. We shouldn’t have that aspect of the system. We should have equal access to witnesses, the ability to bring them in without having a trial counsel say yes.
ALEXA O’BRIEN: Did Bradley Manning receive a fair trial?
DAVID COOMBS: I think Bradley Manning received a trial in which people will look at it and say, "I don’t think so." And that’s really the question that people should be asking now: Did he receive a fair trial? In my perspective from his legal representation, I would like to think he received a fair trial. But I have to admit, when you look at this and you see the outcome and you see what came out, it would be hard for somebody to say that this was fair. And at the end of the day, whether or not it’s fair, perception is what matters. And the perception is, no, he didn’t receive a fair trial. And that should be problematic for people. That should be problematic for our military, and hopefully that will be problematic for the president of the United States, and he’ll do something about it.
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Movements Without Leaders
What to Make of Change on an Overheating Planet
By Bill McKibbenThe history we grow up with shapes our sense of reality -- it’s hard to shake. If you were young during the fight against Nazism, war seems a different, more virtuous animal than if you came of age during Vietnam. I was born in 1960, and so the first great political character of my life was Martin Luther King, Jr. I had a shadowy, child’s sense of him when he was still alive, and then a mythic one as his legend grew; after all, he had a national holiday. As a result, I think, I imagined that he set the template for how great movements worked. They had a leader, capital L.As time went on, I learned enough about the civil rights movement to know it was much more than Dr. King. There were other great figures, from Ella Baker and Medgar Evers to Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X, and there were tens of thousands more whom history doesn’t remember but who deserve great credit. And yet one’s early sense is hard to dislodge: the civil rights movement had his face on it; Gandhi carried the fight against empire; Susan B. Anthony, the battle for suffrage.Which is why it’s a little disconcerting to look around and realize that most of the movements of the moment -- even highly successful ones like the fight for gay marriage or immigrant’s rights -- don’t really have easily discernible leaders. I know that there are highly capable people who have worked overtime for decades to make these movements succeed, and that they are well known to those within the struggle, but there aren’t particular people that the public at large identifies as the face of the fight. The world has changed in this way, and for the better.It’s true, too, in the battle where I’ve spent most of my life: the fight to slow climate change and hence give the planet some margin for survival. We actually had a charismatic leader in Al Gore, but he was almost the exception that proved the rule. For one thing, a politician makes a problematic leader for a grassroots movement because boldness is hard when you still envision higher office; for another, even as he won the Nobel Prize for his remarkable work in spreading climate science, the other side used every trick and every dollar at their disposal to bring him down. He remains a vital figure in the rest of the world (partly because there he is perceived less as a politician than as a prophet), but at home his power to shape the fight has been diminished.
Source:That doesn’t mean, however, that the movement is diminished. In fact, it’s never been stronger. In the last few years, it has blocked the construction of dozens of coal-fired power plants, fought the oil industry to a draw on the Keystone pipeline, convinced a wide swath of American institutions to divest themselves of their fossil fuel stocks, and challenged practices like mountaintop-removal coal mining and fracking for natural gas. It may not be winning the way gay marriage has won, but the movement itself continues to grow quickly, and it’s starting to claim some victories.That’s not despite its lack of clearly identifiable leaders, I think. It’s because of it.A Movement for a New PlanetWe live in a different world from that of the civil rights movement. Save perhaps for the spectacle of presidential elections, there’s no way for individual human beings to draw the same kind of focused and sustained attention they did back then. At the moment, you could make the three evening newscasts and the cover of Time (not Newsweek, alas) and still not connect with most people. Our focus is fragmented and segmented, which may be a boon or a problem, but mostly it’s just a fact. Our attention is dispersed.When we started 350.org five years ago, we dimly recognized this new planetary architecture. Instead of trying to draw everyone to a central place -- the Mall in Washington, D.C. -- for a protest, we staged 24 hours of rallies around the planet: 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, what CNN called “the most widespread of day of political action in the planet’s history.” And we’ve gone on to do more of the same -- about 20,000 demonstrations in every country but North Korea.Part of me, though, continued to imagine that a real movement looked like the ones I’d grown up watching -- or maybe some part of me wanted the glory of being a leader. In any event, I’ve spent the last few years in constant motion around the country and the Earth. I’d come to think of myself as a “leader,” and indeed my forthcoming book, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, reflects on that growing sense of identity.However, in recent months -- and it’s the curse of an author that sometimes you change your mind after your book is in type -- I’ve come to like the idea of capital L leaders less and less. It seems to me to miss the particular promise of this moment: that we could conceive of, and pursue, movements in new ways.For environmentalists, we have a useful analogy close at hand. We’re struggling to replace a brittle, top-heavy energy system, where a few huge power plants provide our electricity, with a dispersed and lightweight grid, where 10 million solar arrays on 10 million rooftops are linked together. The engineers call this “distributed generation,” and it comes with a myriad of benefits. It’s not as prone to catastrophic failure, for one. And it can make use of dispersed energy, instead of relying on a few pools of concentrated fuel. The same principle, it seems to me, applies to movements.In the last few weeks, for instance, 350.org helped support a nationwide series of rallies called Summerheat. We didn’t organize them ourselves. We knew great environmental justice groups all over the country, and we knew we could highlight their work, while making links between, say, standing up to a toxic Chevron refinery in Richmond, California, and standing up to the challenge of climate change.From the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, where a tar-sands pipeline is proposed, to the Columbia River at Vancouver, Washington, where a big oil port is planned, from Utah’s Colorado Plateau, where the first U.S. tar-sands mine has been proposed, to the coal-fired power plant at Brayton Point on the Massachusetts coast and the fracking wells of rural Ohio -- Summerheat demonstrated the local depth and global reach of this emerging fossil fuel resistance. I’ve had the pleasure of going to talk at all these places and more besides, but I wasn’t crucial to any of them. I was, at best, a pollinator, not a queen bee.Or consider a slightly older fight. In 2012, the Boston Globe magazine put a picture of me on its cover under the headline: “The Man Who Crushed the Keystone Pipeline.” I’ve got an all-too-healthy ego, but even I knew that it was over the top. I’d played a role in the fight, writing the letter that asked people to come to Washington to resist the pipeline, but it was effective because I’d gotten a dozen friends to sign it with me. And I’d been one of 1,253 people who went to jail in what was the largest civil disobedience action in this country in years. It was their combined witness that got the ball rolling. And once it was rolling, the Keystone campaign became the exact model for the sort of loosely-linked well-distributed power system I’ve been describing.The big environmental groups played key roles, supplying lots of data and information, while keeping track of straying members of Congress. Among them were the National Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and the National Wildlife Federation, none spending time looking for credit, all pitching in. The Sierra Club played a crucial role in pulling together the biggest climate rally yet, last February’s convergence on the Mall in Washington.Organizations and individuals on the ground were no less crucial: the indigenous groups in Alberta and elsewhere that started the fight against the pipeline which was to bring Canadian tar sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast graciously welcomed the rest of us, without complaining about how late we were. Then there were the ranchers and farmers of Nebraska, who roused a whole stadium of football fans at a Cornhuskers game to boo a pipeline commercial; the scientists who wrote letters, the religious leaders who conducted prayer vigils. And don’t forget the bloggers who helped make sense of it all for us. One upstart website even won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the struggle.Non-experts quickly educated themselves on the subject, becoming specialists in the corruption of the State Department process that was to okay the building of that pipeline or in the chemical composition of the bitumen that would flow through it. CREDO (half an activist organization, half a cell phone company), as well as Rainforest Action Network and The Other 98%, signed up 75,000 people pledged to civil disobedience if the pipeline were to get presidential approval.And then there was the Hip Hop Caucus, whose head Lennox Yearwood has roused one big crowd after another, and the labor unions -- nurses and transit workers, for instance -- who have had the courage to stand up to the pipeline workers' union which would benefit from the small number of jobs to be created if Keystone were built. Then there are groups of Kids Against KXL, and even a recent grandparents' march from Camp David to the White House. Some of the most effective resistance has come from groups like Rising Tideand the Tarsands Blockade in Texas, which have organized epic tree-sitting protests to slow construction of the southern portion of the pipeline.The Indigenous Environmental Network has been every bit as effective in demonstrating to banks the folly of investing in Albertan tar sands production. First Nations people and British Columbians have even blocked a proposed pipeline that would take those same tar sands to the Pacific Ocean for shipping to Asia, just as inspired activists have kept the particularly carbon-dirty oil out of the European Union.We don’t know if we’ll win the northern half of the Keystone fight or not, although President Obama’s recent pledge to decide whether it should be built -- his is the ultimate decision -- based on how much carbon dioxide it could put into the atmosphere means that he has no good-faith way of approving it. However, it’s already clear that this kind of full-spectrum resistance has the ability to take on the huge bundles of cash that are the energy industry’s sole argument.What the Elders SaidThis sprawling campaign exemplifies the only kind of movement that will ever be able to stand up to the power of the energy giants, the richest industry the planet has ever known. In fact, any movement that hopes to head off the worst future depredations of climate change will have to get much, much larger, incorporating among other obvious allies those in the human rights and social justice arenas.The cause couldn’t be more compelling. There’s never been a clearer threat to survival, or to justice, than the rapid rise in the planet’s temperature caused by and for the profit of a microscopic percentage of its citizens. Conversely, there can be no real answer to our climate woes that doesn’t address the insane inequalities and concentrations of power that are helping to drive us toward this disaster.That’s why it’s such good news when people like Naomi Klein and Desmond Tutu join the climate struggle. When they take part, it becomes ever clearer that what’s underway is not, in the end, an environmental battle at all, but an all-encompassing fight over power, hunger, and the future of humanity on this planet.Expansion by geography is similarly a must for this movement. Recently, in Istanbul, 350.org and its allies trained 500 young people from 135 countries as climate-change organizers, and each of them is now organizing conferences and campaigns in their home countries.This sort of planet-wide expansion suggests that the value of particular national leaders is going to be limited at best. That doesn’t mean, of course, that some people won’t have more purchase than others in such a movement. Sometimes such standing comes from living in the communities most immediately and directly affected by climate change or fossil fuel depredation. When, for instance, the big climate rally finally did happen on the Mall this winter, the 50,000 in attendance may have been most affected by the words of Crystal Lameman, a young member of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation whose traditional territory has been poisoned by tar sands mining.Sometimes it comes from charisma: Van Jones may be the most articulate and engaging environmental advocate ever. Sometimes it comes from getting things right for a long time: Jim Hansen, the greatest climate scientist, gets respect even from those who disagree with him about, say, nuclear power. Sometimes it comes from organizing ability: Jane Kleeb who did such work in the hard soil of Nebraska, or Clayton Thomas-Muller who has indefatigably (though no one is beyond fatigue) organized native North America. Sometimes it comes from sacrifice: Tim DeChristopher went to jail for two years for civil disobedience, and so most of us are going to listen to what he might have to say.Sometimes it comes from dogged work on solutions: Wahleah Johns and Billy Parish figured out how to build solar farms on Navajo land and crowdfundsolar panels on community centers. Sometimes truly unlikely figures emerge: investor Jeremy Grantham, or Tom Steyer, a Forbes 400 billionaire who quit his job running a giant hedge fund, sold his fossil fuel stocks, and put his money and connections effectively to work fighting Keystone and bedeviling climate-denying politicians (even Democrats!). We have organizational leaders like Mike Brune of the Sierra Club or Frances Beinecke of NRDC, or folks like Kenny Bruno or Tzeporah Berman who have helped knit together large coalitions; religious leaders like Jim Antal, who led the drive to convince the United Church of Christ to divest from fossil fuels; regional leaders like Mike Tidwell in the Chesapeake or Cherri Foytlin in the Gulf or K.C. Golden in Puget Sound.Yet figures like these aren’t exactly “leaders” in the way we’ve normally imagined. They are not charting the path for the movement to take. To use an analogy from the Internet age, it’s more as if they were well-regarded critics on Amazon.com review pages; or to use a more traditional image, as if they were elders, even if not in a strictly chronological sense. Elders don’t tell you what you must do, they say what they must say. A few of these elders are, like me, writers; many of them have a gift for condensing and crystallizing the complex. When Jim Hansen calls the Alberta tar sands the “biggest carbon bomb on the continent,” it resonates.When you have that standing, you don’t end up leading a movement, but you do end up with people giving your ideas a special hearing, people who already assume that you’re not going to waste their energy on a pointless task. So when Naomi Klein and I hatched a plan for a fossil fuel divestment campaign last year, people paid serious attention, especially when Desmond Tutu lent his sonorous voice to the cause.These elders-of-all-ages also play a sorting-out role in backing the ideas of others or downplaying those that seem less useful. There are days when I feel like the most useful work I’ve done is to spread a few good Kickstarter proposals via Twitter or write a blurb for a fine new book. Conversely, I was speaking in Washington recently to a group of grandparents who had just finished a seven-day climate march from Camp David. A young man demanded to know why I wasn’t backing sabotage of oil company equipment, which he insisted was the only way the industry could be damaged by our movement. I explained that I believed in nonviolent action, that we were doing genuine financial damage to the pipeline companies by slowing their construction schedules and inflating their carrying costs, and that in my estimation wrecking bulldozers would play into their hands.But maybe he was right. I don’t actually know, which is why it’s a good thing that no one, myself included, is the boss of the movement. Remember those solar panels: the power to change these days is remarkably well distributed, leaving plenty of room for serendipity and revitalization. In fact, many movements had breakthroughs when they decided their elders were simply wrong. Dr. King didn’t like the idea of the Freedom Summer campaign at first, and yet it proved powerfully decisive.The Coming of the Leaderless MovementWe may not need capital-L Leaders, but we certainly need small-l leaders by the tens of thousands. You could say that, instead of a leaderless movement, we need a leader-full one. We see such leaders regularly at 350.org. When I wrote earlier that we “staged” 5,200 rallies around the globe, I wasn’t completely accurate. It was more like throwing a potluck dinner. We set the date and the theme, but everywhere other people figured out what dishes to bring.The thousands of images that accumulated in the Flickr account of that day’s events were astonishing. Most of the people doing the work didn’t look like environmentalists were supposed to. They were largely poor, black, brown, Asian, and young, because that’s what the world mostly is.Often the best insights are going to come from below: from people, that is, whose life experience means they understand how power works not because they exercise it but because they are subjected to it. That’s why frontline communities in places where global warming’s devastation is already increasingly obvious often produce such powerful ideas and initiatives. We need to stop thinking of them as on the margins, since they are quite literally on the cutting edge.We live in an age in which creative ideas can spring up just about anywhere and then, thanks to new forms of communication, spread remarkably quickly. This is in itself nothing new. In the civil rights era, for instance, largely spontaneous sit-in campaigns by southern college students in 1960 reshuffled the deck locally and nationally, spreading like wildfire in the course of days and opening up new opportunities.More recently, in the immigration rights campaign, it was four “Dreamers”walking from Florida to Washington D.C. who helped reopen a stale, deadlocked debate. When Lieutenant Dan Choi chained himself to the White House fence, that helped usher the gay rights movement into a new phase.But Dan Choi doesn’t have to be Dan Choi forever, and Tim DeChristopher doesn’t have to keep going to jail over government oil and gas leases. There are plenty of others who will arise in new moments, which is a good thing, since the physics of climate change means that the movement has to win some critical victories in the next few years but also last for generations. Think of each of these “leaders” as the equivalent of a pace line for a bike race: one moment someone is out front breaking the wind, only to peel away to the back of the line to rest for a while. In movement terms, when that happens you not only prevent burnout, you also get regular infusions of new ideas.The ultimate in leaderlessness was, of course, the Occupy movement that swept the U.S. (and other areas of the world) in 2011-2012. It, in turn, took cues from the Arab Spring, which absorbed some of its tricks from the Serbian organizers at Otpor, who exported many of the features of their campaign against Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s around the planet.Occupy was exciting, in part, because of its deep sense of democracy and democratic practice. Those of us who are used to New England town meetings recognized its Athenian flavor. But town meetings usually occur one day a year. Not that many people had the stomach for the endless discussions of the Occupy moment and, in many cases, the crowds began to dwindle even without police repression -- only to surge back when there was a clear and present task (Occupy Sandy, say, in the months after that superstorm hit the East coast).All around the Occupy movement, smart people have been grappling with the problem of democracy in action. As the occupations wore on, its many leaders were often engaged as facilitators, trying to create a space that was both radically democratic and dramatically effective. It proved a hard balancing act, even if a remarkably necessary one.How to Save the EarthCommunities (and a movement is a community) will probably always have some kind of hierarchy, even if it’s an informal and shifting one. But the promise of this moment is a radically flattened version of hierarchy, with far more room for people to pop up and propose, encourage, support, drift for a while, then plunge back into the flow. That kind of trajectory catches what we’ll need in a time of increased climate stress -- communities that place a premium on resiliency and adaptability, dramatically decentralized but deeply linked.And it’s already happening. The Summerheat campaign ended in Richmond, California, where Chevron runs a refinery with casual disregard for the local residents. When a section of it exploded last year, authorities sent a text message essentially requesting that people not breathe. As a result, a coalition of local environmental justice activists has waged an increasingly spirited fight against the plant.Like the other oil giants, Chevron shows the same casual disregard for people around the world. The company is, typically enough, suing journalists in an attempt to continue to cover up the horrors it’s responsible for in an oil patch of jungle in Ecuador. And of course, Chevron and the other big oil companies have shown a similar recklessness when it comes to our home planet. Their reserves of oil and gas are already so large that, by themselves, they could take us several percent of the way past the two-degree Celsius temperature rise that the world has pledged to prevent, which would bring on the worst depredations of global warming -- and yet they are now on the hunt in a major way for the next round of “unconventional” fossil fuels to burn.In addition, as the 2012 election campaign was winding down, Chevron gave the largest corporate campaign donation in the post-Citizens United era. It came two weeks before the last election, and was clearly meant to insure that the House of Representatives would stay in the hands of climate deniers, and that nothing would shake the status quo.And so our movement -- global, national, and most of all local. Released from a paddy wagon after the Richmond protest, standing in a long line of handcuffees waiting to be booked, I saw lots of elders, doubtless focused on different parts of the Chevron equation. Among them were Gopal Dayaneni, of the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project, who dreams of frontline communities leading in the construction of a just new world, and Bay Area native activist Pennie Opal Plant, who has spent her whole life in Richmond and dreams, I suspect, of kids who can breathe more easily in far less polluted air.I continue to hope for local, national, and global action, and for things like a carbon tax-and-dividend scheme that would play a role in making just transitions easier. Such differing, overlapping dreams are anything but at odds. They all make up part of the same larger story, complementary and complimentary to it. These are people I trust and follow; we have visions that point in the same general direction; and we have exactly the same enemies who have no vision at all, save profiting from the suffering of the planet.I’m sure much of this thinking is old news to people who have been building movements for years. I haven’t. I found myself, or maybe stuck myself, at the front of a movement almost by happenstance, and these thoughts reflect that experience.What I do sense, however, is that it’s our job to rally a movement in the coming years big enough to stand up to all that money, to profits of a sort never before seen on this planet. Such a movement will need to stretch from California to Ecuador -- to, in fact, every place with a thermometer; it will need to engage not just Chevron but every other fossil fuel company; it will need to prevent pipelines from being built and encourage windmills to be built in their place; it needs to remake the world in record time.That won’t happen thanks to a paramount leader, or even dozens of them. It can only happen with a spread-out and yet thoroughly interconnected movement, a new kind of engaged citizenry. Rooftop by rooftop, we’re aiming for a different world, one that runs on the renewable power that people produce themselves in their communities in small but significant batches. The movement that will get us to such a new world must run on that kind of power too.Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. His next, to be published this September, is Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist.Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.Copyright 2013 Bill McKibben