All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and on the line is my buddy Jason Ditz.
He's the news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
At the top of the page is Justin Romano's article, Defend Wikileaks, Boycott Amazon.
And not so much the boycott of Amazon, but the subject of Wikileaks is what we're going to get into with Jason here.
Welcome to the show, Jason.
How are you, man?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great, man.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
Speak up loud and clear for us now.
Top story, Swiss government closes Wikileaks account.
No, come on.
Is Swiss bank account got shut down?
I thought you can't do that.
It's a Swiss bank account.
Well, the Swiss has changed a lot of their banking laws over the past couple of decades.
That's not really the case anymore, but they're saying that this account was open to the Swiss post office and it's a specific bank account for non-citizen residents because Assange is applying for residency in Switzerland right now.
And they said he put down the wrong address for where he's living because he's not living in Switzerland right now.
He put down the address of his lawyer for correspondence and they're saying that that was reason to close the account.
And then your sub headline here says U.S. warned Swiss not to allow him residency.
Right.
The U.S. ambassador to Switzerland is openly warning, even being quoted in Swiss newspapers as saying Switzerland better not allow Assange residency.
Well, if there's a silver lining on this, I like just seeing the members of the state panic of the truth of what devils they are leaking out and they they reveal themselves and their guilty consciences all over the place, you know?
Oh, absolutely.
But it's also a little scary because on the one hand, they're insisting that none of this is all that big a deal, that they do this all the time, which they probably do do this all the time.
We just don't hear about it.
But the response against WikiLeaks from members of the U.S. government has just been incredible.
A call for assassination and calls to declare them a foreign terrorist organization.
I mean, a few months ago we were talking about whether or not U.S. foreign clerics might be the new Osama bin Laden, but now it seems like the U.S. government's pretty convinced Julian Assange is going to be treated as the new Osama bin Laden.
Which is amazing, because in essence, he's just a journalist.
That's all he is.
Right.
But he's he's a little too good of a journalist.
Yeah, he's got an upload button on his website.
That's it, right?
He's a reporter with an upload button.
Yeah.
And, you know, the funny one is and this is Ron Paul was making fun of this, and then I saw Lou Rockwell's blog had a clip of some guys on CNN making fun of Ron Paul for saying that it was ridiculous to for these people to be talking about trying Julian Assange with treason.
And Ron Paul is going, look, you know, you've got to be an American to be guilty of treason, right?
You know, come on, man.
What are we talking about?
Like, even in the most dumbed down definition of treason, you got to be one of us to betray us.
You know, this guy's an Australian.
And then the guys on CNN are saying, well, you know, Ron Paul, he's like Marvin the Martian.
He's a crazy kook.
Don't listen to him.
It's unreality, man.
It's crazy.
It's I saw a thing today about the new money and how they got to burn it all because they did it wrong.
And how it is is like life in a Terry Gilliam flick where, you know, we're talking about I was just telling the people about this speech I saw at the Freedom Summit where America's like Rome and repeating Rome's mistakes.
And it's, you know, the first time tragedy, the second time farce where this is just so ridiculous.
Back to the hard news here.
You say U.S. eyes embassy shakeups in wake of WikiLeaks shaming.
And that's what I'm curious about, whether there's going to be any accountability or repercussion for any of the American criminals named in those State Department documents.
There are all kinds of laws broken here.
And never mind just the outright shameful things.
Yeah, I really doubt it.
There's no indication so far, at least, that there's any intention to prosecute anyone in the State Department for any of the crimes committed in these documents.
But the shakeups are going to be pretty much obligatory, whether they want to or not, because come on, you've got ambassadors openly condemning the leaders of the country that they're ambassadors to and mocking them and ordering spying into parties that are members of coalition government.
I mean, those people can't possibly have any sort of credibility if they retain those positions.
So it seems like right now the official answer is that they're just going to juggle everyone around, you know, send them to a different country that maybe hasn't heard what that specific ambassador did.
That's funny.
Well, and I guess, you know, intelligence agency analysts all over the world are still poring over those things, 250,000 documents.
There's a lot of journalism still in there to be discovered.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, we've only we've only got uh, what are we at?
926 currently released so far.
Really?
That's all that's come out so far?
Yeah.
Wow, man.
I hope they don't murder Julian Assange before the rest of that gets done.
Yeah, we've got way, way less than 1% of these documents.
Oh, man.
Oh, I can't wait to find out what's in there.
Somebody get Julian Assange on the phone and tell him to hit enter on that thing, man.
Yeah, it's sometimes been a little frustrating.
Sometimes they'll go for 12, 12, 18 hours without releasing a single document, and then they'll release 20 or 30 or they'll release one or two or Yeah, well, maybe I need to just stay up really late and catch up current.
And then every time they release a couple of new ones, I can stay up to date on it.
You know, that's what I've been trying to do.
And I was current up to about the first 700.
But they, they dumped a couple 100 over the weekend.
And I've read some of them, but not nearly all of them.
Yeah.
Jason ditz works hard for you people.
You better appreciate it.
So Clinton had to say something.
I think the last time we talked, uh, she denied right that she stole credit cards from people and now she's apologizing for it.
Well, she never really denied it.
The White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs denied it.
That's just nonsense.
Even though we've got this obvious, conclusive evidence, which is now one of the documents that's been released, so everyone can read it.
Obvious conclusive evidence with Secretary Clinton's signature on it ordering spying, and he was insisting, Oh, she never did that.
But even at the time that he was saying that the State Department was already trying to justify it.
So there wasn't a lot of credibility.
And now she's got to the point where she met with UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and didn't really apologize.
In fact, a lot of the newspaper reports were clear to say that it wasn't technically an apology, but she expressed regret for trying to steal a credit card.
That's funny.
Uh, well, you know, that one's really not that important to me other than the fact that it's a crime.
It's an outright, you know, criminal act.
She doesn't have diplomatic immunity.
She's just an American citizen.
She's not allowed to steal people's credit cards.
That makes her criminal, right?
There's laws against that even in D.C.
Right.
Absolutely.
And stealing it from UN officials is doubly a crime because it's also a crime under international law.
Right.
Yeah.
Glenn Greenwald had a link to the piece, a part of the Treaty of Vienna, which discusses exactly that.
Yeah, I mean, that one's more the attention grabber and it's the kind of thing that she ought to go to prison for.
So I like that one.
But I wanted to ask you a bit about what's revealed about Afghanistan and these WikiLeaks and the internal deliberations and discussions about what the hell they think they're doing over there.
Jason, what can you tell me about that?
Is there a reality that they all share at least?
And could you describe what you think that might be?
Well, it does seem like there is.
And this is one of those unusual cases where the comments that there's nothing really new in the documents is sort of true.
They're really the State Department officials and the foreign officials that they talk to and report about in the cables all seem to share in essentially the reality that this war is going terribly.
No one really expects it to be won.
Corruption is out of control in Afghanistan.
It's a disaster.
And really, I mean, the revelation that they're aware of how bad things are is certainly new, because publicly they always insist things are going fine.
But they seem to be quite aware of how bad things are going.
Well, they had this problem right a year ago.
They tried to rig this election and replace Karzai, the sock puppet from the bogus election of 2004, left over from there with this other guy in another bogus election, Abdullah Abdullah.
Then that didn't work out because Karzai stole it better.
And so then they started to throw him overboard right around this time a year ago.
Right.
And then they kind of brought him back and said, oh, no, we love Karzai.
And they brought him to America at least one time, I think, or Obama went and bowed to him or something.
And then now, apparently, it says in these WikiLeaks that this guy, he's just the center.
He's the epicenter of corruption.
And so all he is is a magnet for leeches to come.
Right.
And again, that's sort of we've sort of known that all along, that Afghanistan's constantly being called the most corrupt nation on Earth and for good reason.
And our tax dollars, these leaks do show us is just how high up that corruption goes.
I mean, when the media reports, it's usually about crooked cops or crooked bureaucrats who won't let you get electricity without bribing them first.
But this sort of bribery culture and corruption really just goes all the way to the top and pretty much stops everywhere on the way down.
All right.
Well, so what are they talking about in terms of, you know, the Taliban and the Haqqani Network and their opposition there?
Are they really worried about how the war is going?
Never mind, you know, the confidence of the people in their mission and whatever nonsense.
Well, that's sort of an odd thing, because they really don't touch on it all that much, how badly the war is going, except to acknowledge it.
And when they're talking to foreign officials, like one of the one of the big leaks to come out yesterday was the European Union's President Van Rompuy from Belgium telling them, you know, nobody in Europe thinks this war is going to be won.
And the only reason European troops are still there is just out of deference to the United States.
And the State Department officials getting that cable didn't really act all that surprised by that assessment.
And it seems like that's basically what everyone in the department thinks.
But they don't seem to be panicking about the prospect of the nation collapsing outright, because, well, there are a lot of US troops there, and it's enough to at least keep the nation in a state of permanent civil war for quite some time.
Yeah, which, you know, if you want to have a long war, then that's how to do it, I guess.
And I think it's fun that they admitted that that's what they call it, you know, in the Pentagon, they brag about that this is the long war, you know, like Eurasia is the Old West, it's our manifest destiny, just conquer the whole damn thing someday.
Well, and they seem surprisingly comfortable with the status quo, even as they acknowledge just how bad it is.
I mean, there doesn't seem to be any sort of illusion among them that this is a good situation or a sustainable situation, or that there's some sort of victory on the horizon, despite what they might tell us publicly.
This is a disastrous war, and it's getting worse all the time, and they seem fine with that.
Yeah.
Well, now, and that's not just hyperbole or, you know, it sounds good or whatever.
When you say it's getting worse all the time, tell me about some of the casualty figures and the changes in the casualty figures in the last few years there, this year, even.
Well, for one thing, the Bush administration was in Afghanistan for, what, almost seven years, compared to the Obama administration's less than two, and the Obama administration's death tolls are actually considerably higher than the entire period of the Bush administration in the war.
And that's American and Afghan casualties?
That's just American casualties, but it's also true among British casualties or NATO casualties or really Afghan soldier casualties or any other way you want to calculate it.
The war is just progressively worse on all sides.
For many years, we were having annual casualty figures in the dozens, and now it's in the several hundreds.
Well, could it be argued that, well, we're taking the fight to the enemy?
We're winning this thing.
We've got David Petraeus in there, man.
He knows what he's doing, and it's hard work, but we are making progress.
That's what George Bush would say, right?
In fact, that's what George Bush said the other day.
There's one thing I really like about Obama is his war in Afghanistan.
Well, it apparently can be argued that because that's what they are arguing, but I don't know how credibly they can argue that because it seems like every year since about 2007, they announced an escalation of the war in Afghanistan with the preface that, yeah, death tolls are going to probably go up for the next year or so, but then things will start to get better, and every year literally since 2003, we've had a worse year than the previous one, and every year since 2005 has been the worst year on record.
Well, you know, I'm looking at this headline, news.antiwar.com from December the 3rd, Obama tries to assure troops Afghan war being won.
President vows no policy changes on war.
As you say, they're just kind of going to muddle through.
I guess the Afghans can't really kick them all the way out until the dollar breaks, you know, so they can just basically stay, but never win, but just keep fighting, and there's no plan to even do anything different.
This is the doing something different, the coin strategy or whatever.
Right, and it seems like the most recent Pentagon report to the Congress, which came out a couple of weeks ago, showed they don't really think this war is working.
They don't believe that this situation is getting any better.
In fact, they talk about how surprisingly resilient the Taliban are, and how it seems like the coin strategies just aren't working at all, but at the same time, officials seem really comfortable with just leaving it in place.
All right, now we have very little time left, but can you tell me if there's any progress in a parliament being formed in Iraq?
And it's not that I'm really in favor of parliaments, Jason, it's just that it seems like maybe some of the violent feuds there could be resolved through compromise somehow, and yet the election was in March, and the last I heard, there's still, no matter all the talk, there still is not a parliament, a government, an elected prime minister in Iraq.
Well, there's a, they're partway there.
I mean, there's an agreement to form a government.
Maliki has been appointed as the new prime minister to try to form a cabinet.
There hasn't actually been a vote to confirm him yet, but it seems like that's in the offing, and right now there's a lot of infighting about who's going to get what ministries in the new cabinet among the different parties.
The Iraqi bloc claims to have gotten a promise to get the defense ministry, which would be quite a big deal for them.
That's Iyad Alawi, the guy that more or less has some support in the Sunni provinces you're talking about there.
Right, and they've also got control of the Justice and Accountability Commission, which is sort of incredible if you think about it, because Justice and Accountability Commission had banned large numbers of Iraqi candidates before the election, and also banned a couple of the winning candidates after the election.
Yeah, well, you know, that's how it goes.
So, well, but you think that'll really make a difference, or they'll just take the power away?
I mean, who really controls that state now?
Baghdad's 85 percent Shia city.
They're not going to give that whole thing to Alawi and his friends in Fallujah.
Right, and I really don't think this government's going to last for the long run, but it does seem like there's some movement towards it at least lasting for a few months or a year or two.
Well, procrastination on violent feud is better than going ahead getting it over with most of the time, so let's hope they can maintain it.
Thanks very much, Jason.
I really appreciate your insight on the show as always.
Sure, thanks for having me.
Everybody, that's Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
