AMY GOODMAN: After nearly two months of trial, a military judge will now consider the fate of Army Private Bradley Manning, accused of being behind the biggest leak of classified information in U.S. history. Prosecutors in Manning’s court-martial made their closing arguments Thursday, and the defense followed on Friday. The 25-year-old whistleblower is the first-ever defendant to face an “aiding the enemy” charge for leaking more than 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks and other news sources, which carries a potential life sentence in prison and could set a major precedent for future cases involving journalists. The judge in the case, Colonel Denise Lind, is now deliberating on the 21 charges Manning faces and has not said when she will rule.

Many of Manning’s supporters are calling for the convening authority on the case, Jeffrey Buchanan, to dismiss a potential guilty finding by Lind and reduce the whistleblower’s sentence. On Friday, protesters blocked the gates of Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., where Buchanan’s office is located.

JOHN PEPPER: I don’t think he’s claimed to be naive; I think he has claimed to have done the right thing. I don’t think the question is whether he was naive; I think the question is whether or not he did the right thing.

RACHEL ATWOOD: The very idea that he is being punished for coming out against war crimes and such cruelty by his fellow servicemen is—it’s really disturbing.

AMY GOODMAN: Over the weekend, protesters in dozens of cities around the world also held rallies to mark an international day of action calling for Manning’s release. Last Thursday, the Bradley Manning Support Network published a full-page ad in The New York Times that read in part, “We are American military veterans, artists, journalists, educators, homemakers, lawyers, and citizens. We live in red states and in blue states, in communities urban and rural. We ask you to consider the facts, and join us in declaring: Enough is enough. Free Bradley Manning now,” the ad read, in part.

Well, for more, we’re joined from Fort Meade via Democracy Now! video stream by Alexa O’Brien, independent journalist who has been in the courtroom every day since the trial began. She is in her car in the parking lot outside the courtroom. O’Brien was the first to make transcripts of the proceedings publicly available when they weren’t being made available by the court. She was shortlisted for the 2013 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in Britain.

Here in New York, we’re joined by Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a lawyer for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Both were brought up repeatedly during the prosecution’s closing arguments. And Michael Ratner was also there for the opening and closing arguments in the Bradley Manning trial.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Michael, why don’t you start off by describing the scene in the courtroom on Thursday and Friday, and what, first, the prosecution laid out, and then the defense.

MICHAEL RATNER: You know, it’s a small courtroom. They make you wait a long time to get in. There’s 25 spectators only allowed in. There’s an overflow. You’re very close to Bradley Manning, I mean almost as close as I am to you, Amy, here. So it’s very small, compact. But it’s very, very intense.

And the prosecutor spent all of Thursday on his summation, and he wasn’t supposed to. And I’ll tell you why in a second, but it was an awful thing to sit there and listen to him basically smear and go through a diatribe about the character of Bradley Manning as well as the reasons he claims Bradley Manning did what he did, as well as go after my client, WikiLeaks, saying they’re not a journalist at all. It was a complete fantasy. But to sit there and painfully listen to these smears the entire day—you know, everything from “he’s a traitor” to “he did this for fame, he’s self-interested”—none of it is based on the evidence, none of it’s true. And that’s what David Coombs, Bradley Manning’s defense lawyer, pointed out on Friday.

But when I say it took the whole day—because here’s what happened. We were supposed to get both summations on Thursday, but I think the prosecutor purposely repeated things constantly—six-hour summation, seven-hour summation—so that the press that night—and it was the most press we had for a long time, 60-some press—would only put in his characterizations of Bradley Manning. It wasn’t until the next day when David Coombs really, utterly destroyed the idea that Bradley Manning was doing this for anything but the highest motives, to get information out to the American public about U.S. war crimes and U.S. criminality.

AMY GOODMAN: Alexa O’Brien, you have been there every day of this trial, including Sunday, as Denise Lind, the judge, was deliberating. On the closing days and the closing arguments, can you talk about how the reporters were being treated by the military?

ALEXA O’BRIEN: We have a new public affairs officer here at Fort Meade, and we had armed guards basically roaming the aisles of the media operation center. But even more than roaming the aisles, they were actually standing behind reporters, peering into our computers, coming every five minutes behind us. It was—it was quite a shocking behavior.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain—I was reading Charlie Savage’s piece in The New York Times, who described what was happening in the media center, talking about how the—let me see if I can find the words. “While Major Fein made his arguments, reporters watched the trial on a closed-circuit feed at the media center. Two military police officers in camouflage fatigues and armed [with holstered] handguns paced behind each row there, looking over the journalists’ shoulders, [which had not] happened during the trial. No explanation was given.”

ALEXA O’BRIEN: You know, it’s interesting because I was here yesterday while the judge deliberated, and the commander came up to me—and I’m not allowed to name her, actually, or I could lose my press credentials. I can’t name any staff by their surname, etc. She told me that she was actually the media person responsible for all the images of Saddam Hussein’s capture and that those photographs were taken with her digital camera. So, she clearly understands how to manage the message. And that’s really central to this trial, is how Fort Meade has managed the message by the lack of public access to court documents, the subject matter expert, by the Military District of Washington, which is responsible for convening a fair and impartial trial for the accused, Bradley Manning. The first subject matter expert we had was a member of the prosecution. Nobody in the press pool knew that. It’s really what Mr. Ratner just spoke about, the fact that the prosecution wants to make sure that it makes the headlines, so it takes up a whole day of court and essentially squeezes any kind of press attention away from the defense. The fact of the matter is, is that if this trial were to be televised, if people could actually see Bradley Manning, see how earnest he is and how sincere a character and sympathetic a character he is, public opinion about this trial would change dramatically.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the fact that you’re at the headquarters of the National Security Agency, right—it’s right there at Fort Meade—and a military base, and talk about just the trouble you have with the Internet. And what is your ability to work? Describe what happens in the courtroom, in the media center. And can you go online at all there?

ALEXA O’BRIEN: We can no longer go online. The military—sorry, the Public Affairs Office here says it’s because of commercial Internet issues with Comcast. However, the fact of the matter is, is that we’re—we have to go outside in order to file. Let’s say something dramatic happens in the courtroom. We can’t tweet or publish anything, even send an email. We have to leave the media operations center, stand on the steps, open up our phone, which we’ve gotten out of our car, and then tweet something or, you know, email something or file something.

You know, we have to also look back. There was a period of almost eight months when it was just simply a small cadre of independent journalists, where we didn’t have a media operations center, where transcripts were pen and paper, and where we were trying to get out as much information as possible about a trial and motions related to aiding the enemy, whether or not the government was trying to craft an Official Secrets Act in this trial. It has been a completely surreal experience.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the court artists, you know, self-appointed, who drives a WikiLeaks truck, he was banned in these last few days from coming onto Fort Meade?

ALEXA O’BRIEN: Yeah, that had to do with his conduct. He did actually send an apology letter. I’ll let him speak more specifically, because I’m not completely briefed on exactly what specific conduct it was. It was related to his tweets about the prosecution—that, I know. He has been banned. The judge said she would reconsider it, because he sent this apology letter and explained himself. However, because he’s possibly banned from the base itself and not just the court-martial proceedings, it has yet to be determined what the garrison commander will do, whether or not he will actually sign the document banning Clark from the base itself, which would make the court-martial ruling sort of moot.

AMY GOODMAN: The artist—artist is named Clark Stoeckley.

I wanted to ask you, Alexa, during closing arguments Thursday, military prosecutor Major Ashden Fein accused Bradley Manning of betraying the nation, concluding: “He was not a whistleblower. He was a traitor,” Fein said. He went on to say, “His mission, as an all intelligence analyst, was a special trust. But within weeks of arriving at Iraq, he abused and destroyed [this] trust with the wholesale, indiscriminate compromise of hundreds of thousands of classified documents. He delivered these documents ready made for use by an enemy via a platform he had long researched and come to know, WikiLeaks. He delivered these documents for notoriety.”

Fein goes on to say that leaking to, quote, “established journalistic enterprise like The New York Times or Washington Post would be a crime,” but that this did not happen. Major Fein argued that, quote, “[Pfc] Manning deliberately and intentionally disclosed his compromised information through WikiLeaks to the world knowing that WikiLeaks would release the information in the form they received it and that is … exactly what happened in this case,” so Fein said.

Alexa O’Brien, talk about the actual charges that Bradley Manning faces.

ALEXA O’BRIEN: Manning is charged with 22 charges. In the trial portion, or the merits trial, which was related to these offenses, he has pled to lesser included, and so the government accepted one of his pleas for the transmission of Reykjavik 13, a diplomatic cable related to the, basically, banking—banking corruption and ineptitude in Iceland. And so, he was only really tried on 21 charges in that portion. But the whole trial is 22 charges. If he’s convicted on the government’s case, he faces life plus 154 years. He has pled to 10 lesser included offenses of the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And so, he already is exposed to 20 years. The defense strategy has really been to offset any greater offense, to try to keep it to his plea to 10 lesser included, so that when they get into the sentencing phase of the trial, which is imminent, they can really actually try to mitigate his sentence down as much as possible.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, you were there for the opening arguments. You went back a number of times and then were there for the closing arguments. Making the point that the prosecution used up a lot of time on Thursday, and so the big reports were on Friday, when the defense had not made its arguments, and then—isn’t really the prosecution’s problem, it’s the reporters who—half of them didn’t come back, and so they don’t have the defense’s view of things. Now, the prosecution called him an anarchist who was seeking to make a splash; he betrayed the U.S. trust. Could Bradley Manning face the death penalty, even if the prosecutors don’t ask for it from Denise Lind?

MICHAEL RATNER: Right, aiding the enemy does carry the death penalty. The judge, even though the prosecutors said they’re only going to go for life, or they won’t give him more than life, the judge can do what she wants, and she could give him the death penalty for that. That’s correct.

I mean, you know, the courtroom was really—it’s hard to describe how horrible that day of Thursday was, in some of the statements that you’re saying the judge said—that the prosecutor said, because there was no evidence of any of that. The idea that he was a traitor came from a witness who never wrote anything down, who clearly made it up after the fact, about something about his attitude toward the flag. The idea that he was doing it for fame was ridiculous, because, as David Coombs, the lawyer for Bradley Manning, pointed out, he tried to be anonymous the whole time. He tried to, quote, “cover his tracks.” So how is he becoming famous from doing this?

And then, the defense went through three different times in which it was clear that Bradley Manning had the highest motives: before he even went to Iraq, that he wanted to save people, that he wanted to save fellow soldiers; when he’s there and talking to Lamo, Lamo is quoted as saying Bradley Manning is idealistic; and Manning is also quoted in that saying, “If you had seen the horrible things, horrible things that I’ve seen, would you just leave them on the Internet?”

Then, of course, after, he gives this incredible day of testimony as to why he leaked each of these sets of documents, from the Iraq War Logs to the “Collateral Murder” video. One of the most moving moments in the courtroom was on Friday, when they played excerpts of the “Collateral Murder” video. That’s the video in which you see the Apache helicopter people killing the Reuters journalists and then firing on the van that’s going to pick up the wounded people, and then firing again and again, and using language of basically saying, “We just got another target.” And—

AMY GOODMAN: This was the attack in New Baghdad, Iraq, by a U.S. Apache helicopter on July 12th, 2007.

MICHAEL RATNER: Right, and you’ve shown it here a number of times. It’s one of the most moving things. And what David Coombs asked the judge to do is said, “Put yourself in the position of a 21-year-old soldier watching that video, and try and not remove yourself from what’s going on there.” Nine people are killed in that video, nine people, that the implication was clear, unjustifiably killed, with incredible—

AMY GOODMAN: I think the total was 12, right? Including two Reuters employees, Namir Noor-Eldeen, the videographer, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh.

MICHAEL RATNER: It may be. They mentioned nine, but I think that’s certainly a number—I think he even said nine or more in that video. And he asked the judge to say, “Look at Bradley Manning and what he did with that video and why he did it. Don’t talk about it the way the government talks about it”—this is somehow releasing, you know, information about the angle of the helicopter or something, which was absurd, because most of the information, if not almost all of it, had come out about that helicopter attack, and it wasn’t even classified. But that was an incredibly stirring moment in which the judge—in which the prosecutor is trying to say these are Bradley Manning’s motives in doing it.

Now, one interesting aspect of this, of course, is the aiding the enemy charge. I just want to go to one point of it, because one of the reasons—and you mentioned it, in saying—they’re painting WikiLeaks in a certain way, because they want to say that Bradley Manning, by giving this to WikiLeaks, knew it would go up on the Internet, and WikiLeaks is a bad organization, it’s not a journalistic organization, and therefore—it’s nefarious, and therefore, when Bradley Manning did it, he did it with a motive, by giving it to WikiLeaks, that might have been different had he given it to The New York Times. Well, that was just smashed to bits by the prosecution—by the defendant, defense, first by a witness they had, Benkler from Harvard, who said WikiLeaks is a legitimate journalistic organization, there’s a role for organizations like WikiLeaks in doing this, and that—and that WikiLeaks doesn’t put out everything it gets. It actually has—is discreet about what it puts out. It’s had less than 1 percent of its documents put up have been somewhat, possibly, less inaccurate—less than 1 percent. That’s probably a better record than The New York Times. But the prosecution is trying to show Bradley Manning in a certain way and WikiLeaks in a certain way, as these two organizations that essentially want to undermine the United States, rather than the whistleblowing journalists they are.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break and come back, and then I want to ask you, Alexa, about the witnesses that were called, and then talk about the implications of this for journalists, overall, in releasing information, and particularly look at this aiding the enemy charge. Alexa O’Brien is with us in her car outside the courtroom, because no other accommodation could be made to talk to her right now as the judge deliberates the verdict of Bradley Manning. Alexa O’Brien has been in that courtroom every day since the trial began, the first to make transcripts publicly available. And we’re joined by Michael Ratner, who is the attorney for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Almost Gone,” by Graham Nash, about Bradley Manning, a special song for the young man on trial right now. His fate is in the hands of the military judge. This is not a jury trial. I’m Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now! We’re talking about Bradley Manning, the trial that just wrapped in closing arguments Thursday and Friday, now in the hands of Colonel Denise Lind at Fort Meade, which is the headquarters of the National Security Agency in Maryland. Our guests are journalist Alexa O’Brien, who spent every day in the courtroom from the beginning of the trial to the end—she’s sitting outside in her car now in order to be able to speak to us—we are also joined by Michael Ratner, attorney for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He, too, has been attending the Bradley Manning trial, not every single day. But we also want to talk about the significance of how often WikiLeaks and Julian Assange were raised in this trial. Is this trial a preparation for a next stage? But, Alexa, talk about the list of witnesses and the significance of them, what you found most interesting.

ALEXA O’BRIEN: Are you talking about on the trial and the merits that we’ve just finished?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

ALEXA O’BRIEN: You know, here we have the government bringing out their original classification authorities, and these are government witnesses who will testify that the information Manning allegedly or admittedly leaked was national security information and that it was closely held. But what was really, really interesting is that, fundamentally, as defense has pointed out, these original classification authorities that are oftentimes the commanders of CENTCOM, Central Command, or Pacific Command or Patrick Kennedy, who’s the undersecretary for management at the Department of State, they will—they have a vested interest in essentially saying that their classification determinations of the information was actually accurate. So, this is an important point, because we have to understand: Manning is not on trial for actual harm; he’s on trial for probable harm. So the government brought out witnesses that essentially testified to those two criminal elements.

But they also tried to bring out witnesses that were going to say that Bradley Manning was a bad soldier or that he was, you know, as Mr. Ratner had said, a traitor. But really, except for Showman, who the defense impeached her credibility of her testimony when she said that Manning, you know, said he didn’t have any loyalty to the flag when she tapped her shoulder and the flag on her uniform. They’ve all said that Manning was one of the best analysts, that he was the go-to analyst, that he was a hard worker. Something that was interesting in defense closing arguments is they said that the government can’t have it both ways. They can’t say that Manning was lazy because he was, you know, working all night trying to exfiltrate information and that he was also the go-to analyst, using disjointed logic depending on which charge or which aspect they were trying to essentially assert in court.

In terms of the defense, we had one of the most—really, a historic elocution by a law professor, Yochai Benkler, who was the defense expert on WikiLeaks, who talked to the judge in a very candid manner about the threat to the delicate balance between the national security reporting and the First Amendment, if she found Manning guilty of aiding the enemy. One of the important things that we have to remember is aiding the enemy, Article 104, is one of the two violations under the Uniform Code of Military Justice that applies to any person. So it’s beyond Manning’s duty as a soldier. This is about really every citizen in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Alexa, the ability to get information out—I mean, what you started doing in this trial, for people to understand how closely held the information was, that you were the one providing the public with transcripts at the beginning. Explain why the court wasn’t doing this.

ALEXA O’BRIEN: The court—this is a military court-martial. And Judge Colonel Denise Lind believed—it was her contention—and Mr. Ratner and CCR, you know, filed suit in respect to this—she felt that there was no legal—First Amendment legal precedent for public access to the court documents. So what she would do is read these really long, mile-a-minute recitations of the motions into the court record and then deprive us of a media operations center, so that we had to actually scribble these things down in our notebooks.

And we’re not talking about just merely the trial of Bradley Manning, as important as it is. We’re talking about setting legal precedent for the future of national security reporting and also whistleblowers—and also, really, even beyond that, just simply people using the Internet, communicating in legally protected speech, First Amendment rights, because the government is asserting in this case that, essentially, the enemy uses the Internet, and so if you publish intelligence or you aid the enemy with whatever is classified as intelligence, which in this case only has to be true and useful to the enemy—that’s the definition; it doesn’t have anything to do with classified information—that you could be brought up on the charge of aiding the enemy. So, it’s very important that we—we should have had access to these public records. And I think it tells you—it leans more towards a long record of Colonel Denise Lind being deferential to the government, the prosecution, and doing whatever she can to help them manage this trial and the public perception about it.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, actually, Denise Lind, the judge, is going to move out of her position after this, isn’t she?

MICHAEL RATNER: Yeah, she’s been given, apparently, from a Washington Post report, a appellate judge job, the higher court, which I found pretty extraordinary. I don’t know whether it’s—I don’t think it’s necessarily illegal, but it does—it’s interesting to me that she’s going upstairs during the very trial that’s going on, and given that promotion. And it reminded me when the Ellsberg judge, the judge in Daniel Ellsberg’s case, the federal judge, during Ellsberg’s trial on espionage was offered to be the head of the FBI, secretly, by the Nixon administration. And, of course, there was a huge stink. I don’t see any stink so far in any of the media about the fact that Denise Lind, the judge, is being offered to a higher position. And then, think about the higher position. She’s sitting up there on the court when the Bradley Manning conviction is going to be, assuming there’s—well, there’s a conviction because he’s already pleaded to 10 counts—is going to be reviewed. She won’t sit on it, but her fellow judges are going to be sitting there, and are they going to want to reverse one of their fellow judges? So, it—basically, it stinks, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: On the issue of aiding the enemy, what would you like to add to what Alexa said?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, you know, in some way it’s the most serious charge, because it’s life, if not even death. But the government’s theory is what really is awful here. It’s basically saying you can aid the enemy by putting information up on the Internet that’s intelligence, doesn’t classified, and because the enemy reads the Internet, you can be accused of aiding the enemy. So that—which is a death penalty. That ends whistleblowing. What person is going to actually start whistleblowing and giving information to the media if they can get the death penalty?

But it also puts the journalist or publisher in the middle, indirectly, according to the government, of aiding the enemy. Now, they claim, well, WikiLeaks is different. But that—but they also understand, and the government understands, that WikiLeaks, The New York Times, The Washington Post, anybody in the middle there indirectly could be accused of aiding the enemy. And it’s part and parcel, of course, of the war on whistleblowers and publishers that’s going on. And the two that are really relevant to aiding the enemy are what happened with James Risen recently—he was the reporter who was trying to say he doesn’t have to testify because of reporter’s privilege in the case of—in the Sterling case having to do with—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain. James Risen is a well-known New York Times reporter who wrote a book, and this has to do with Iran. And explain what the court’s decision was recently.

MICHAEL RATNER: Right. And the court’s decision is he has no First Amendment right not to testify, no reporter’s privilege not to testify.

AMY GOODMAN: In implicating Sterling in the trial as being the whistleblower.

MICHAEL RATNER: That’s—and the language of the court should be a warning to every single publisher and journalist out there. It says Risen is the only eyewitness; he’s inextricably involved in the crime; without him, the crime would not have occurred. So this is saying that the journalist who is reporting on a whistleblower is actually inextricably involved with the crime. Think about what message that sends every publisher in the country about using sources for their stories. It’s a terribly serious problem. It’s one that, you know, makes me very upset that people aren’t now seeing that and coming to the defense of WikiLeaks, which is being put into that—into that position.

AMY GOODMAN: WikiLeaks, for a moment, let’s just talk about that. I was reading that quote of the prosecutor saying that Bradley Manning deliberately and intentionally disclosed compromised information through WikiLeaks to the world, knowing WikiLeaks would release the information in the form they receive it, and that’s exactly what happened in this case. What about the emphasis on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in the court-martial of Bradley Manning?

MICHAEL RATNER: You know, I’ve sat there stunned every day I’ve gone to the courtroom. Julian Assange was mentioned 10 times in the morning of the prosecution’s opening, WikiLeaks 20, 30 times. I don’t even know. So, there’s two things going on here. One is they want to use WikiLeaks as a nefarious organization to paint Bradley Manning as somehow having a bad intent by the two coming together. But secondly, they’re obviously trying to paint in the public mind, and obviously what they’ve been doing at the Justice Department is to—is the next stone that will be unturned here or uncovered here is probably the prosecution of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. We think it’s very likely. There’s already an indictment of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. And you could look at this trial as the setup, really, for getting Julian Assange and—Julian Assange indicted on this indirect aiding the enemy, etc.

AMY GOODMAN: Alexa O’Brien, before we leave you right there in the parking lot of the headquarters of the National Security Agency, where you are awaiting the verdict, explain what the schedule is, what will happen now with the judge, and why this is even a judge trial, not a jury trial.

ALEXA O’BRIEN: Manning opted to be tried by the military judge alone. He had the option of a panel of officers and enlisted personnel. If you look at the pretrial record, typically—also, first, if you look at just the history and—jury trials tend to be more partial to the accused. But here we have an accused who is gay in the military, and there is evidence of a struggle with gender identity while he’s in Iraq. The defense was concerned that Bradley Manning couldn’t get a fair trial with a panel of officers and enlisted personnel, firstly.

And secondly, I think that the defense strategy has really been to have the same judge that they could educate over the course of 18 months about very important ideas, like access as it relates to exceeding authorized access under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Also, while the statement that Bradley Manning made in February isn’t admissible at trial, where he pled to 10 lesser included offenses, she’s aware that he made this statement. A jury would not have been aware of that. So there are very important, strategic aspects to choosing Judge Lind alone.

MICHAEL RATNER: On that one issue—Alexa is right, those are the reasons. But also, the jury in a military case is appointed by the convening authority, who is the general in charge of the proceedings, and it’s not taken randomly by choice from a pool.

AMY GOODMAN: Alexa O’Brien, the best place where people can go to get your reports, the transcripts, alexaobrien.com?

ALEXA O’BRIEN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us. We’ll be in touch with you. We are awaiting the verdict in the judge trial of—the court-martial of Bradley Manning. Alexa O’Brien, independent journalist, in the courtroom daily covering the Manning trial, did not miss a day. Michael Ratner, lawyer for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Michael, I’d like to ask you to stay with us after break, because we want to turn now to developments around the case of Edward Snowden. Stay with us.