MOORE: As far as Assad and Syria goes, I just think as Americans now, whenever we're told anything -- somebody comes on and says there are reports that maybe this and maybe that -- we have to have the most skeptical, critical eye and ear to what we're being told.

MORGAN: See that's my problem with it, is that here we go again: we were told Saddam had chemical weapons and was about to use them. Now we're told Assad does. Many will say this is just a pretext for going in, and going into some kind of advanced war with Assad. How do we know who to believe here?

MOORE: Well, you start by not believing the people who lied to you before. The American government lied to it's own people. Honestly, I don't know of a worse lie one could tell, other than a lie to take a country to war, to make up things to take people to war. That's just got to be the most obscene, immoral thing to do. So this government hasn't earned the right to be trusted. If it says 'Assad has chemical weapons,' or if it says, 'Ahmadinejad has a nuclear weapon' --

MORGAN: But it's not this government, is it, that went to war with Saddam? You have to differentiate that.

MOORE: Which government are you talking about, you're talking about Obama versus Bush? No, no, no, I'm talking about the real government: Wall Street, the banks, the corporations, the people that made... 2 trillion dollars is what we spent on the Iraq War. Who made that money? Soldiers in the field? I don't think so. No, no, this is always about the people who have the purse strings and the politicians who are bought off by them.

So if they come on now and tell me anything about this, ya know, 'Ahmadinejad is building a bomb' -- really? I'll believe it when he walks in the room here and shows it to me. Frankly, that's how much I would not trust anything being said by the Military-Industrial complex of this great country.

Paralyzed in a 2004 attack in Sadr City, Iraq War veteran Tomas Young recently announced that he will stop his medicine and nourishment, which comes in the form of liquid through a feeding tube — a decision which will hasten his death. Joining us from his home in Kansas City, Young reads in full his letter, A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran. "My day of reckoning is upon me," Young says. "Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness."

JAY: Now, last time, they had this document called the Project for a New American Century, which kind of set a tone, I think, for the Bush administration, the idea that the United States should use its overwhelming superiority in military power to sort of reshape the world as it likes. And it really came down to the issue of regime change. And one could manipulate the media and the intelligence in whatever way was necessary to achieve that. Is that still the agenda?

WILKERSON: I think that's basically the game plan. It's a little more sophisticated this time, as you might suspect. They learned a little bit. And it features some new characters. But it's basically the same plotting, careful, methodical use of the media, use of the Congress, use of Israel and AIPAC, use of all the instruments that they can get their hands on to kind of prod the American people, and mostly, of course, the administration, into a point where it doesn't really have any choice but to go to war with Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: Dan, we want to play more clips of Bradley Manning. In this one, near the end of his remarks in the courtroom at Fort Meade, Bradley Manning says he decided to leak secret U.S. cables because he believed transparency would encourage better diplomacy. Manning appears to cite the—President Woodrow Wilson’s famous "14 points" during World War I. Wilson called for "no private international understandings" and for "diplomacy in the public view." Although acknowledging he knew they would embarrass individual officials, Manning said he did not believe the cables would harm the U.S. as a country. The more he read the cables, Manning said, the more he came to the conclusion that this was the type of information that should become public.

BRADLEY MANNING: The more I read the cables, the more I came to the conclusion that this was the type of information that should be—that this type of information should become public. I once read and used in a quote on open diplomacy, written after the First World War, in how the world would be a better place if states would avoid making secret pacts and deals with and against each other. I thought these cables were a prime example about the need for a more open diplomacy.

Given all the Department of State information I read, the fact that most of the cables were unclassified and that all the cables had a SIPDIS caption, I believed the public release of these cables would not damage the United States; however, I did believe that the cables might be embarrassing, since they represented very honest opinions and assessments—or statements behind the backs of other nations and organizations.

AMY GOODMAN: Bradley Manning, discussing the video showing U.S. helicopter pilots killing 12 people in Iraq, including two Reuters employees. Manning went on to tell the court he was encouraged by the public reaction to the video’s release. He said he hoped the public would be as alarmed as him about the conduct of the aerial weapons team crew members. Listen carefully.

BRADLEY MANNING: I hoped that the public would be as alarmed as me about the conduct of the aerial weapons team crew members. I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure-cooker environment of what we call "asymmetric warfare."

After the release, I was encouraged by the response in the media and general public who observed the aerial weapons team video. As I hoped, others were just as troubled, if not more troubled, than me by what they saw.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: [...] The issue in my case was whether any law had been broken. Apparently, The New York Times never got to understand how I was pleading not guilty when I had indeed admitted to exactly what I had done. Bill Keller, obviously, the later executive editor of the Times, has never come to understand the problematic nature of the charges I was faced with and that Bradley Manning is faced with. I know them by heart: 18 U.S.C. 793 paragraphs (d) and (e). The best legal advisers at the time, like Mel Nimmer, said that those acts were unconstitutional, those portions, as applied to a leaker, instead of being applied to someone who had secretly given information to a foreign government or an enemy, the espionage that the Espionage Act was named for. To use them against someone like Manning or me who gave information for the benefit of the American people was not at all the intention of Congress, never was the intention of Congress. And so, whereas I did what I did, essentially, in my era, the comparable acts to what Manning did, the argument is very strong, legally, that we had not broken any law that could hold up as constitutional.