i walk a lot of people up to the actual realities of this world right and he deserves you know a medal. and he had private first class bradley manning is being tried as a criminal charged with handing national secrets over to wiki leaks i'm going to introduce you to brownlee the person to take a look at the hurdles he faces and his upcoming trial. oh. no. and as protesters gather to show solidarity for the alleged wiki leaks whistleblower others are quick to criticize his actions so while so many other whistleblowers are praised for coming forward what makes some heroes and others

traitors. and worse thing in vide to american rights indefinite detention and internet spying and that's just the tip of the iceberg well look at the day the americans freedoms died. it is friday december sixteenth five pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for you watching our team. well today is the day that private first class bradley manning begins his first stage of his military trial manning is accused of leaking thousands of secret military and diplomatic documents plus a video showing u.s. military pilots gunning down civilians and a reuters journalist in fact that back in two thousand and seven to the whistle blowing web site wiki leaks phase one of his trial comes five hundred sixty nine

days that's one year six months and three weeks after he was first taken into custody after reportedly admitting to a former hacker what he had done who then exposed manning to authorities now if you dozen people showed up to protest outside the pretrial hearing for its first day now the hearing is expected to last five days and tomorrow hundreds are expected including bus loads from the occupy wall street protests that is also when daniel ellsberg the pentagon papers whistleblower is scheduled to speak now we will be talking a lot about the implications of his case today but i want to give you a quick look at the ins and outs of the case what has both been revealed about him and about the u.s. government leading up to his appearance today in the courtroom. it was this video. of u.s. army pilots in iraq eagerly firing shots at innocent people on the ground and hundreds of thousands of secret military documents and cables leaked to wiki leaks

there have been some criminal acts committed by u.s. government employees and those employees have never been held accountable for them all this made public over a year and a half ago by bradley manning a twenty two year old army private turned whistleblower for the past eighteen months that bradley manning has been behind bars has become somewhat of a symbol to his supporters he represents the extreme secrecy and lack of transparency within the u.s. government and the documents that make up like reveal that the u.s. has a dark secret that shows that in my opinion in the last decade there's been no real . lessening of the standards of diplomatic reporting and in our military the the real disregard for life of of torture of assassinations of mass executions have become more of the norm really. and for bringing all this to light

he's regarded by many as a hero he has impacted governments around the world he's lifted the veil of the us empire to show us what we really are basically i got a military because of bradley manning michael patterson is an iraq war veteran he says seeing this video changed his life from the wiki leaks stuff started coming out and that's when i kind of hit that wall that wall and basically i decide i was i can do something more but today manning is paying the price he's been locked up behind bars as a maximum custody detainees subject to solitary confinement and forced nudity which some argue are forms of torture he was being treated as if he had already been convicted and the punished. it was going to be a very brutal punishment he's now charged with aiding the enemy his critics say he put american lives in jeopardy just because you don't like the country's foreign policy doesn't mean you can out it to the planet that doesn't make you

a truth teller that makes you a tree a traitor and as manning finally gets his day in court his supporters say the only thing he's guilty of is telling the truth he awoke a lot of people up to the actual realities of this world right now and he deserves you know a medal if the truth is actually undermining our national security but there's something wrong with the truth. in washington liz wall r.t. bradley manning story is and has brought about some ugly truths about the u.s. government both about what has happened behind closed doors and how the government values secrecy and will stop at nothing to punish those who reveal government secrets and you may remember former army lieutenant dan choi basically the face of the movement to overturn don't ask don't tell in this country he is a gay soldier himself now today he spoke to r.t. outside of fort meade and this is important i want to play you his take on all of this on the questions of fairness and some of the larger implications this case has

for the country the question is not about fair anymore the question is about whether america is going to be america when we help all of the people in the world we proport to export democracy we report to share our values with all these other countries while we invade them we say we say we're helping but the question is always what do you do to your own people who rightly manning is not on trial our very system of government is on trial our moral ascendancy is on trial and the referee actions a reprobate government would most always be questioned by good and well informed citizenry. so this case with bradley manning it's a tough one on one hand leaking secrets might reveal things that make people in other countries hate the us more on the other hand doesn't it also affect our national security when our guys our military guys are indiscriminately shooting civilians i pose that question to kevin zeese

a member of the bradley manning support network here's what he said. so i guess we are having some trouble. you know a lot going on here in terms of this bradley manning case and it is expected to last at least five days just the preliminary part of this there are so many different aspects of this we of course have been covering this since the first day since the wiki leaks video was revealed i personally went to the press conference interviewed julian a songe i think we have my interview now with kevin zeese with the bradley manning support network. exactly that's that's exactly what the documents and videotapes that bradley manning is accused of leaking show us foreign policy needs a major reevaluation when you move away from militarism and empire foreign policy and move toward a policy of diplomacy and that's what music come out of. the manning for a while is important for barely manning and for the contrary but what's even more

important is the discussion of our foreign policy and it's way off track it's been all cracked for a long time and he's a good reconsidered and really changed dramatically and i hope that the documents that were released with a broad brush meaning or anybody else whatever we please put out there are darknesses show we need to really reconsider what we're doing i think also the documents there are hundreds of thousands of them but the video as well a lot of people i know we have it on our website more than a million hits if you watch this video in full it's not just that these apache pilots are gunning down these people it's that you hear them laughing you hear them almost treating war you know like a video game you see the video here what ends up happening is they think that somebody is carrying a k forty seven and it's actually a reuters photographer carrying a camera. you know and then they're killed and then they just kind of go on and you hear their voices you hear the discussion while they're in the helicopter. and certainly when you hear that it makes people mad it makes people realize what kinds

of things are being said by our own military by and by the military that our taxpayer dollars funds so talk about this in terms of you know the argument is that playing this and showing this and making this public what it does to our reputation well the point to be able to understand is that secrecy is killing more people than troops during the truth will result in a better foreign policy there is a list of americans and others result in a foreign policy that makes sense not one that's made just done for making. for transnational corporations one thing that the wiki leaks document showed was that the state department and the military work hand in glove with transnational corporations for their profit and not for a national security what's under my our national security is not bradley manning if you do what he's accused of with our air national security is our own foreign policy numerous repeated intelligence assessments by all of our intelligence

agencies say these wars in iraq and afghanistan no doubt in other countries that were involved as well are resulting in more terrorists than we can capture or kill and creating more faster than we can capture or kill them so it's really a foreign policy has way on track and undermine our national security now of course a phase one of bradley manning's trial it just started today but many people including it seems president obama obama himself have already sort of made up their mind about amending skills i want to play something the president said recently the you know in the video with the you know the the. all right so there you see president obama being questioned sort of on the side. he broke the law you know that you would think with. the united states going at least

try to make this look like a real trial and not a kangaroo court they pointed to the top of the problem which is under command influence resulting in everyone involved in this case from the prosecutor the judge the jury or under obama's command he says they broke the law where are they going to find against their commander in chief now they put in place a judge judge on monza who works for the department of justice which is investigating wiki leaks and he's going to be the judge of this kangaroo court david manning his lawyer today said the judge recused himself because of conflicts of interest he's refused who is asked to appeal the judge's ruled against manning a critical point allowing the witnesses who classified these documents to explain why they were classified these documents that were released should not of human class of are these are low level documents that were didn't show any troop movements and there's going to undermine national security what they said was embarrassment they showed the truth about u.s. foreign policy and now they put

a judge in who's not to listen as in why those documents are classified another those who be cross-examining court already this is off to a kangaroo court type of experience let's our first day let's talk about the other side that haven't i mean critics of this have an argument a little argument that is at the very least somewhat strong that manning is accused of being a traitor people say that what he's done is the equivalent of somebody spying on the u.s. government among the twenty two charges twenty or so charges that he faces one of them is aiding the enemy. so talk about that i mean don't critics don't people the prosecutors don't people have a right to be angry and to feel that that if manning indeed leaked these documents that that is a threat to our national security the enemy charges of tickly the most serious one is that carries the death penalty and ensures that manning is now free. going for disclosing war crimes for getting information out of work we should mention though nobody has said if at least to my knowledge that they planned to take the death

penalty up to the presiding authority and not up to the prosecutors but the charge carries the death of your friends i can tell you that david kuo has been preparing to defend a death penalty case because it is a possibility and if manning was a traitor he would be giving the documents to china or iran or you know the taleban or some enemy of the united states. if he was someone who was going to proffer these are as he was sold these documents to the highest bidder and become a millionaire that's the reason he's accused of leaking documents to the media so the american public can know the truth about what our foreign policy is in a representative democracy where we vote to represent us we know the truth kevin isn't there a time when the truth is too sensitive i mean when do you think it is ok for the u.s. government to mandate secrecy but i think when you do it only troop movements at the present moment that's a high risk you know to the troops and i think that even though it's even though it's an illegal war in unjustified war i can see an argument there for you know

keeping those kinds of movements secret but when it's stuff that's you know years old describing you know daily activity of the troops and of diplomats it doesn't undermine secure that we in fact robert gates the second force or sense that the man said no one was harmed by this let's talk about whistle blowing in general in our society there have been amazing movies sixty minute shows about top whistleblowers daniel ellsberg he's scheduled to speak tomorrow he's been one of the most outspoken critics of how the bradley manning case has been handled he himself was the whistleblower for the pentagon papers case back during the vietnam war he's praised to this day now as a hero so what does whistleblowing ok and when isn't it well i've no doubt that he will look back at the bradley manning case in our turns out they will historians will go through these documents and they will review them carefully. comparing what we know and what the military said about our impose who was secretary of state and the met save our foreign policy compare them to the the real record of the wiki

leaks documents it will be the most incredible history of u.s. foreign policy probably in the era when the empire foreign policy is failing will be critically important storable documents and. turns out with him facing life in prison or a death sentence it will be a great black eye to the american history it will show that we were afraid at this time of lies to see crimes on other behavior even war crimes we were so afraid of the truth that we put somebody to death or threaten or put them away for life for telling the truth finally today it was announced that the united kingdom supreme court will hear arguments in the julian assange case joining us on one of the founders of wiki leaks charged with sexual assault in sweden he faces extradition he's won his appeal to fight extradition what do you see in terms of that aspect of this as sort of a in direct incident in the case overall well the department of justice which is where the judge in the manning case comes from has been trying very hard to find

a way to prosecute. i suspect that the one year torture of bradley manning in solitary confinement with force knew the despite the. regulations the psychologist in quantico despite that they said don't do that to me is needed. that torture was because they want to maintain. or the one manning to plead guilty they wanted to that's what they want to meaning they did they were not able to break in with torture and they didn't get what they wanted so it's a real shame but i think that is also an example in this case the u.n. torture investigators still not allowed to meet with manning in the fischel capacity as another black i've you know i spoke to him very recently one man does the un special rapporteur on torture that's all he says he wants to meet with bradley manning kevin zeese a member of the bradley manning support network and always a priest. your insight thanks so much for me. so i had on our team taking the country by force the u.s. congress might not be able to agree on how to fix the economy but they sure do

agree when it comes to signing away american rights like indefinite detention of u.s. citizens and internet spying big brother is getting even bigger i'll explain next . we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old and just you know look through. i'm a confession i am a total get a friend that i love rap and hip hop music and pretty. much it was kind of a yesterday. i'm very proud of the world with its place.

r.f. oakes there is a lot going on right now decisions are being made are unprecedented and will have an overreaching impact on what it means to live in the united states of america a few things the case of bradley manning his treatment and his precedent his case will set for future with whistleblowers and for transparency we talked a lot about that but that is just scratching the surface also congress your elected officials both the senate and the house of representatives have just overwhelmingly passed the national defense authorization act now it's not just funding for the pentagon that's included in this bill this legislation also has two provisions that give more power to the military and the government and so massively alter the constitution that it's almost laughable or at least it was laughable when president obama said he would veto the bill now it turns out he won't so here's what squeezed into this military funding bill not just money but lots and lots of power first

a provision that expands the use of military force in afghanistan to include indefinite detention of anyone suspected of being a member of al qaeda or quote associated forces so basically anyone but here's the big one folks it gives the military the power to indefinitely detain american citizens even those captured here in the united states suspected not convicted of some sort of involvement or affiliation with terrorism so no trial prison based solely on suspicion the fourth amendment is out the window as you may be able to tell and i kind of think this is a big deal but i'm not the only one earlier i spoke to jason leopold the deputy managing editor for truthout dot org and asked for his opinion i asked him what some of the biggest things that are being ignored right now regarding this here's his take. well the biggest thing that's being ignored is exactly how this bill

would apply to u.s. citizens now we've heard from various members of congress carl levin who is the chair of the senate armed services committee who worked on this bill with senator john mccain we've received assurances from various lawmakers that u.s. citizens would not be. affected by this that it would not apply to this however immediately after the bill was passed senator dianne feinstein introduced the legislation referred to it the due process act of two thousand and eleven and what that would do is ensure that this particular bill more or less would not apply to u.s. citizens basically that indefinite detention of u.s. citizens would not happen unless there was an express act of congress and that's what her or her legislation says it's very short and it's

proposed at this point it seems to be a protection that was introduced because there's so much murkiness and with the national defense authorization act so there are many people right now that are defending the bill and what they're truly defending is president obama that's what this comes down to they're defending him they're defending the fact that he had caved in on the promise to veto it simply because congress made minor changes to the legislation and so the outrage is somewhat being you know limited to just people who feel that the bill would actually just affect u.s. citizens but again there's a bigger picture here and that's the indefinite detention of people. all in general

without. giving them the opportunity to hear what the charges and a couple things that you said here jason i mean first of all president obama originally did say that he would veto this it was sort of because it didn't give the white house and his administration and enough power. i think there's a little bit of politics involved here too because if you look this bill passed in the senate i think it was ninety three to seven and in the house two hundred something to one hundred something i don't know i haven't done the math totally but it seems to me that even if the president said he would veto this that this could get overturned by a two thirds majority not not sure about that you have this could be politics as well so let's talk about obama's role i know a number of people have pointed this out i know you did as well. something that is clear as day this was articulated by president obama in a proclamation commemorating the sixty third anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights the president said quote all people should live free

from the threat of extrajudicial killing torture oppression and discrimination regardless of gender race religion nationality sexual orientation physical or mental disability all right so jason give me some examples some ways in which the president and his administration have blatantly gone against this. well you know this was the basis of the report i put together yesterday prior to the passage by the senate of the bill and of the national defense authorization act and what are you really want to point out here and articulate to people is that indefinite detention is a human rights issue that has not been it has not been spoken about in those terms it's not just a civil liberties issue and this is not just about whether this bill applies to u.s. citizens ok this is a human rights issue as early as wednesday as i pointed out in this report the state department issued

a press release noting that they had implemented sanctions against two iranian officials for. acts that took place during the disputed presidential election in two thousand and nine x. that included the indefinite detention of iranian citizens and the torture of those citizens if if you take the time to go and look on the state department's website every single allegation that is included in that press release is exactly what we have done the united states has done to war on terror detainees during the bush administration and what it continues to do and that was jason leopold deputy managing editor of truth out dot org all right now i want to talk about last night's republican presidential debate the final debate finally before the iowa caucuses on january third i gotta say it was a little less fun and exciting without herman cain but one exchange from last night

is worth noting at the back and forth between michele bachmann and ron paul on the issue iran. about a shadow of a doubt that with iran will take a nuclear weapon they will use it to wipe our ally israel off the face of the map and they have stated they will use it against the united states of america look no further than the iranian constitution which states on equivocally that their admission their mission is to extend shahade across the world and eventually to set up a worldwide caliphate we would be fools and needs to ignore their purpose and their plan. obviously i would like to see a lot less nuclear weapons i don't want iran to have a nuclear weapon i would like to reduce them because there would be less chance of war but to declare war on one point two billion muslims and say all muslims are the

same this is dangerous talk yeah there are some radicals but they don't come here to kill us because we're free and prosperous or they go to switzerland sweden i mean that's absurd if you think that is the reason we have no chance of winning this they come here and they explicitly explain it to it the cia has explained it to as is said they come here and they want to do us harm because we're bombing them what is the whole world about the drone being in iran and we're begging and pleading and how are we going to start a war to get this drone back why were we flying that drone over iran why do we have to bomb so many countries why are we and not have nine hundred bases one hundred thirty countries and we're totally bankrupt how are you going to rebuild the military when we have no money if we have an avowed mad man who uses that nuclear weapon to wipe nations off the.