All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
We're on chaosradioaustin.org and lrn.fm.
And our first guest on the show today is Fred Bronfman.
He's got this great piece at Alternet.
He also writes for the Huffington Post.
And his own website is trulyalive.org.
This piece at Alternet is called WikiLeaks' Most Terrifying Revelation, Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us.
Welcome back to the show, Fred.
How are you?
Oh, thanks, Scott.
I'm doing fine.
Well, that's good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
And this is a really great piece.
I guess I'd like to give you an opportunity to go through some of the particulars that illustrate your point.
But why don't you kind of get to the bottom line here, what you're saying about all these lies?
Yeah, the bottom line is this.
Until now, when a reporter reports that civilians have been murdered by the United States, the government denies it.
The average person doesn't know what to believe.
The importance of these WikiLeaks cables is they reveal from within the United States government that we know we're murdering carloads of civilians, that we've turned over to the Iraqi police thousands of people who we knew were being tortured with electric drills and acid and burned alive and then murdered, even though as the occupying force we were responsible for maintaining law and order.
So these are now known.
You cannot debate anymore, is the United States committing war crimes, crimes of war in Iraq or Afghanistan?
That is no longer a matter for debate.
In fact, these WikiLeaks documents would by themselves suffice for the evidence for a Nuremberg-type tribunal.
You would not need witnesses, you wouldn't need to prove anything, you just need to publish these cables.
Now the point I make in my piece is that the most important thing that's happened, in my opinion, was when General McChrystal, to his credit, when he was the head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said, and this is pretty much a quote, for every civilian you kill, you create ten new enemies.
Right, that's the insurgent math.
That's from Michael Hastings' piece in Rolling Stone, The Runaway General.
Yeah, that was in the Rolling Stone piece, and it wasn't just one statement.
McChrystal, to his credit, implemented an entire policy trying to protect the civilian population, these so-called rules of engagement, which Petraeus, General Petraeus' successor, has now torn up.
He's returned to a policy, in fact he's escalated a policy of wholesale mass murder.
Now what this means is not only objectionable to anyone with a conscience or anyone who cares about non-American human life, but it also means that these people are endangering the United States.
They are ensuring that there will be future 9-1-1s in America while they claim to be protecting us.
They're calling for Julian Assange's death on the grounds that he has violated national security and is endangering Americans.
What these documents document, without any question in my mind anyway, is that the people running this country are bunglers, they're fools, they have no idea what they're doing in the Middle East.
And what they're doing is ensuring, increasing the danger to Americans, and as I point out in my piece, not only did McChrystal say that for every one civilian we kill, we create new enemies, but this is in fact occurring and also is revealed in the WikiLeaks document.
You know, General Petraeus is selling to the American public his body count.
He brags, like some kind of a, I don't know, some guy out of a bad movie, that he's locked in.
You know, in the last month we've had 500 jackpot kills.
That's Petraeus' phrase.
But the fact is, this was the issue in Vietnam, it's not how many people you kill, it's how many you create.
And for every insurgent that Petraeus is killing, he's provoking intense hatred throughout the Muslim world.
And as I pointed out, there are 1.6 billion Muslims.
Now, if only one hundredth of one percent of these Muslims are provoked to take revenge on all this killing we're doing out there, that's a pool of 160,000 folks who are committed to killing Americans.
It's beyond belief what they're doing.
You know, in Vietnam, there were 31 million Vietnamese total in North and South Vietnam during the war.
500,000 American troops could not kill enough Vietnamese to triumph.
There were always more Vietnamese coming.
Why?
Because of the birth rate, because of the population pool, and because of that insurgent mess.
Do you know that in the Pashtunistan alone, that is to say, there were 28 million Pashtuns in Pakistan who were murdering with these drone strikes.
There were 13 million Pashtuns.
That's where Petraeus is now waging his present, one of the most savage offenses that I can see since Vietnam, murdering right and left with no idea who he's murdering, just killing wholesale because that's where the Taliban is the strongest.
These are the families of the Taliban.
There are 41 million Pashtuns, and we only have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan who will not be there indefinitely.
What he's doing, Petraeus, just in order to burnish his own career, to show some kind of a short-term victory so he can claim that he's a good general who's beating the Taliban in Afghanistan, he's sowing a whirlwind.
The 41 million Pashtuns alone provide a huge pool of manpower if he keeps provoking them.
He's making them stronger.
As I also point out in my article, and I think you and I have talked about this in the past, the most serious situation is in Pakistan because Petraeus is launching all these drone strikes in Pakistan, sending in what we now know from WikiLeaks, local assassins, as well as American assassins into Pakistan.
The insurgents have been joining forces.
It's helped al-Qaeda.
They're now providing a coordinating role.
And they've moved east, into the Pakistani heartland, into Punjab, into Karachi, which is the biggest city in Pakistan, it's the financial center and the biggest port.
There are whole sections of Karachi now where even the Pakistani government can't go.
And let me just say one thing that I think we all ought to realize.
I know it sounds fantastic to suggest that U.S. leaders are not only war criminals that we know already, we've seen that they've killed over 21 million and wounded, excuse me, they've murdered, maimed, and made homeless over 21 million people in Indochina and Iran alone.
But what's more important, I think, at this point, is that they're incompetent.
They're bunglers.
And if you don't believe that, just remember the story of Iran.
Throughout the 1970s, we were told, we gave all of our support to the Shah of Iran.
He had a strong economy compared to Pakistan, and he didn't have nukes.
He fell.
He fell.
Why did he fall?
Because American policy was supporting a hated leader.
They hated us there.
So when he fell, the Ayatollah took over, and we've had 30 years of pain, and I imagine 2011 may even see the bombing of Iran and more chaos in the Middle East.
And Iran is nothing compared to Pakistan.
The same mentality that lost us, Iran, that lost us in Indochina, that destroyed Iraq, is now seeing Pakistan fall apart.
It's not falling apart entirely because of the United States, of course, but our policies are helping it fall apart.
And if we'd spent a tiny fraction of the $100 billion, let's say we spent $30 billion that we're now totally wasting in Afghanistan, let's say we spent that in Pakistan, maybe we could shore up the economy.
If we ended our drone strikes, if we stopped violating their national sovereignty, if we spent $30 billion on, why don't we send some of our troops to Pakistan, help them repair the dikes that they lost, then we might have a shot at stabilizing Pakistan.
Instead, we're destabilizing Pakistan.
This is also in the WikiLeaks cables.
The U.S. ambassador, Ann Patterson, says that unilateral U.S. action in Pakistan risks destabilizing the Pakistani government.
I wrote that years ago.
I didn't know until now that our own embassy officials admit this and know this.
And yet, knowing that they're destabilizing Pakistan, they're increasing and escalating into Pakistan.
If I sound upset, I am, and the reason I'm upset is not only because we're killing innocent people out there, but these people are setting the stage for more 9-1-1s, which will turn America into a police state.
They are, I cannot describe how upset I am at them provoking and increasing the number of Muslims who want to kill Americans.
Another point I made in my piece, Scott, is, you know, when 9-1-1 happened, there was a huge debate in this country.
Was it just some incomprehensible fanaticism that we can't understand, or did they have justified grievances?
Oh, no, they hate us because of how good we are and how evil they are, and that's all.
Now, hold on right there, Fred, I'm sorry, we've got to go out to this break.
We'll be right back everybody.
This is Fred Bronfman.
He's got a great piece at Alternet about WikiLeaks and government lies.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I've got Fred Bronfman on the line.
He's got this great piece at Alternet, you can find more at the Huffington Post.
It's called WikiLeaks' Most Terrifying Revelation, Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us.
And you were talking about the motive for the September 11th attack in the first place there.
Yeah, right.
I was saying that most Americans were confused.
The government claimed it was some kind of an incomprehensible fanaticism, but the one thing we know is if, God forbid, there's another 9-1-1, which I fear a great deal, the reasons for it will be quite clear, and this is what the Swedish, this is a quote from the Swedish bomber who almost succeeded in Sweden, quote, so will your children, daughters, brothers and sisters die like our brothers, sisters and children die.
The Times Square bomber said the same thing.
In other words, if Petraeus and Obama and our security establishment are creating a situation in which thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people are now motivated to kill Americans for pure revenge for the hundreds of thousands of Muslims we've killed since 9-1-1.
Which, whatever you think about what caused 9-1-1 in the first place, since 9-1-1 our leaders have murdered hundreds of thousands of Muslims.
And the people, and we know already, because many of the people who have tried to bomb us since say, I'm doing it in revenge because you're killing our people, we're going to kill your people.
I personally think this is insane.
I think anybody who thinks that General Petraeus can take on the entire Muslim world and kill all the people who want to kill us is nuts, and it's against all evidence, and it's against what General McChrystal himself said.
Now I'm sorry, anyone listening to this might think I'm being rhetorical here, so let me just read you one or two key quotes from the Wiki, from actually in this case this is from the New York Times description of the WikiLeaks documents.
And let me just say that the headline, listen to this, I think this is one of the most important things.
This is the New York Times headline on July 25th for what Julia Assange has given us, and it says, quote, view is bleaker than official portrayal of war in Afghanistan, unquote.
In other words, the documents by American officials themselves say something entirely different than what they've been telling the American people.
This means that they've been lying to us.
This means that even the U.S. mass media, the New York Times is admitting here that even they didn't get the story right.
It wasn't until Julia Assange came along and released these documents that the American people actually found out what their leaders are doing in Afghanistan, and I think we owe Julia Assange, rather than threatening him with death, we owe him a debt of apology.
Now let me just read you a New York Times description.
This is just one example, they read all the documents, here's how they sum them up.
Incident by incident, the reports resemble a police blotter of the myriad ways Afghanistan civilians were killed, not just in airstrikes, but in one and two, in shootings on the roads or in the villages, in misunderstandings, or in a crossfire, in chaotic moments when Afghan drivers ventured too close to convoys and checkpoints, unquote.
The Guardian the same day, a huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents.
They weren't only unreported, the military always says that the only people they kill are insurgents.
This is what the American people learn.
They don't understand that we're killing countless, hundreds, thousands of innocent civilians, which according to General McChrystal is increasing the hatred of the United States.
This is what we're facing today, Scott, and I think the importance of the WikiLeaks document is that this is no longer open for debate among reasonable or serious-minded people who believe in rationality.
This is now officially confirmed by these documents that the U.S. government is murdering people, it's covering up its murder of civilians, it's denying that it ever murdered civilians, and the other side is stronger than it's ever been.
This is the situation we're facing, and I, as you can tell, I'm upset about it.
First of all, I happen to object to killing civilians anywhere, but secondly, in this particular case, our own U.S. officials are endangering U.S. national security, and this is the ironic thing.
They're prosecuting Julian Assange on the grounds that he's endangering national security, whereas the documents that he's revealing reveal that, in fact, it's our officials bungling, our officials trying to prop up a totally unrepresentative government in Afghanistan that has no support from its people.
This is also revealed in the documents, extending the war into Pakistan, creating many more enemies than he's killing.
All of this is in a very harming situation for anyone who cares about this country, and I would even go so far as anyone listening to this broadcast is, the leaders of our country are endangering your life.
Well, you know, the thing about it is, as you portray it in your article as well, it's this mosaic of lies from beginning to end, and really beginning with September 11th.
As you said, they pretended this attack just came out of the clear blue sky to this day.
They pretend there's no other motivation for it other than Islamic extremism, and once somebody's Islam is extreme enough, they start killing good, innocent white people or whatever they want us to think.
When the fact is that history began before September 11th, and the blowback that you talk about from the risk of tearing Pakistan apart and the kind of consequences we could face from that, we have to recognize, in total, to undermine this whole mosaic of lies, the first lie, and the truth is that we were doing the very same thing in different contexts before September 11th, and that's what got us attacked.
More than anything else, it was the occupation of Saudi Arabia from which to blockade and starve and bankrupt a million people to death in Iraq in the 1990s that got us attacked on 9-11, and that's the whole thing that Americans can't face, because they could even maybe agree with a lot of what you say, Fred, and say, you know, maybe they're not using the best tactics over there in fighting this war, but what are you going to do?
They started it.
When the truth is, no, they didn't.
This country started it.
There's no Arab caliphate occupying North America.
It's the other way around, and it's been that way for much more than ten years.
Well, there's a lot of truth in what you're saying.
I mean, you know, I forget the exact number, but I believe 13 of the 21 hijackers were Saudi Arabians who grew up under a totally unrepresentative government.
Right, and the rest were Egyptians, and one was from Lebanon but was raised in Kuwait.
They were all from countries friendly to the U.S.
And none were from Iraq, Iran, or Syria, the so-called rogue states.
And they grew up under a totally oppressive, I mean, the people running Saudi Arabia were the most corrupt and filthiest people on the face of the earth, cutting, they stoned people for adultery and for misbehaving sexually while they run around the world spending billions of dollars buying up prostitutes and having orgies.
I mean, anyone growing up in Saudi Arabia would hate them.
Now, by us supporting this kind of behavior, they hate us.
I mean, it's just so obvious.
And even before you get to anything else, if any American grew up in Saudi Arabia, I assume they'd hate their government unless they were one of the princess.
But let me read you something that really struck me particularly, and I want to quote to you Hamad Karzai, our present president of Afghanistan.
And I think really this quote sums everything up in a nutshell.
As you know, the United States is now, Petraeus has tripled airstrikes, he's quadrupled assassinations, he's brought in 9,000 U.S. assassins who are murdering people around the clock without a trial, without any evidence, without any oversight, other than Petraeus' worry that they're so-called insurgents.
And the president of Afghanistan, we're trying to build a democracy, and Afghanistan has begged Petraeus to stop with these night raids.
They're breaking into people's homes, hundreds of people all over Afghanistan, three or four in the morning, screaming at the top of their lungs, terrorizing the women and children, and then either murdering, torturing, and or imprisoning the men.
I'm sorry, Fred, I have to stop you for just a minute.
We're going to take a short break.
We'll be right back.
This is Fred Bronfman from Alternet.
Night raids, drone strikes.
All right, y'all, it's Anti-War Radio.
We've got Fred Bronfman on the line here, and we're talking about war crimes, this time in Afghanistan, and David Petraeus' loosening of the rules of engagement, especially for air power and, I guess, special forces raids in the middle of the night.
You were addressing, Fred, Hamid Karzai's pleas to stop the night raids.
Yeah, I mean, if you want to know what they're like, just remember any of the Nazi World War II movies, where they break into people's homes in the middle of the night, screaming at the top of their lungs.
The kids and women are traumatized for life, and they drag the men off, and they either murder them, and or torture them, and or imprison them, indefinitely, with absolutely no evidence.
No trial.
No chance to prove your innocence.
Purely an accusation.
Now, this is what the president of Afghanistan, the person ...
Remember, we're bringing democracy to Afghanistan.
He said, the raiding homes at night, terrible, terrible, is an exact quote, a serious cause of the Afghan people's disenchantment with NATO and the Afghan government.
How can you measure the consequences of it, in terms of the loss of life of children and women, because you have captured Talibé, and who is this Talibé?
Is he so important to have 10 more people killed?
Civilians?
Who determines that?
Well, what happens a lot of times, too, is Afghans, especially Pashtuns, they're the type that when they hear a loud ruckus in the middle of the night, at the next door neighbor's house, they go outside to see what's going on, and back them up, and the whole neighborhood ends up getting waxed.
They're all a bunch of insurgents.
Now, what you have is the president of Afghanistan calling General Petraeus a war criminal.
He's accusing General Petraeus of killing civilians.
Secondly, General Petraeus has refused Karzai's request.
So we've put in the president of a country, we say we're trying to build a democracy, but he has no right in his own country to tell Petraeus to stop with the night raids, stop with these assassinations.
Another quote, just in case, I don't want to sound retarded, I'm trying to back up what I'm saying with facts.
This is an exact quote from General McChrystal in March 2010.
He's talking now about the U.S. murder of civilians at checkpoints.
Quote, we have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat, unquote.
So we've shot hundreds of people at these checkpoints, none has ever been proven to be a threat.
Now, that's face-to-face killing.
When Petraeus triples airstrikes and sends them out in the middle of the night, if we're killing civilians at checkpoints where we can see them, obviously he can't see anybody who he's killing at night.
This is simple mass murder.
Now that would be objectionable enough on moral grounds, but I keep coming back to my point that if McChrystal's correct, that for every civilian we kill, we create 10 new enemies.
Let's say he's off by a factor of 10.
We only create two new enemies.
We are sowing a whirlwind which is going to kill Americans.
And I think our biggest problem as a nation is really a psychological one.
We turn to leaders for protection, so when they tell us they're protecting us, we tend to believe them.
It's who else is going to protect us if not our own leaders?
And I think the hardest thing for Americans to grasp, and this is not a liberal issue or conservative issue, is our leaders are not protecting us, they're endangering us by the behavior that these WikiLeaks cables reveal, and therefore, far from threatening Julian Assange, the person, the people, we ought to be bringing under control as our own leaders.
Right.
After all, here's an entire world empire worth of secrets to be leaked.
They're not the secrets of a humble commercial republic mining its own business over here.
The secrets being leaked are, as you say, about war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, not to mention Yemen and Somalia, and you know, I think that you really hit on the most important point there, Fred, when you talk about the unraveling of Pakistan at the hands of American intervention there, turning that entire society against us for no good reason, no explainable reason, other than, I guess, if you're a general, you want to keep waging war.
But for the rest of us, they are potentially creating that clash of civilizations the neocons have been trying to get us to believe in and embrace this whole time, that it must be the future of mankind is the West versus Islam, from here on out, or whatever, and it seems like we're, maybe it's already too late, but it seems like, you know, Pakistan unravels, as you said, perhaps an air war against Iran and the unintended and predictable consequences of that, more and more intervention in Africa, it seems like we really could be getting to a tipping point here, where it really does become a war against all billion Muslims, because all billion Muslims have to decide to defend themselves and join up against us.
Well, and in the meantime, you know, there are 1.6 billion Muslims, you don't even need more than 101%, as I pointed out, to get angry enough about this, to have created a pool of 160,000 Muslims who want to kill Americans.
And if it's two tenths of 1%, that's 320.
If it's 1%, you know, you're up to millions.
And this is a very, you couldn't have a more serious situation.
Now, one thing I want to mention about Pakistan that actually surprised me is they did a poll of the people of Pakistan, 59% consider America their enemy.
But the interesting statistic was that 64% want better relations with America.
The reason they consider us their enemy right now, besides they believe that we're tilting towards India, which is true.
But in addition to that is they're very angry about the drone strikes.
And they're very angry about the infringements on their national sovereignty, which are, you know, the WikiLeaks revealed that we have stationed US Special Forces in Pakistan, which is now revealed to the people of Pakistan.
They would have found out one way or another.
And let me mention something even worse than all this, Scott, that I've just, I've written a second article about that, which I hope will be published on Truthdig today or tomorrow, and we could do another interview on it if you're interested.
The most disturbing, we haven't even talked about the most disturbing revelation from the WikiLeaks document, is that the United States government itself is terribly worried that forces hostile to the United States are going to get a hold of Pakistan's nuclear materials.
Point one.
Point two, the US government in these cables says that if we continue to do these unilateral actions in northwest Pakistan, like drone strikes and so forth, we risk destabilizing the Pakistani state.
I believe that anyone reading these cables can only conclude that number one, the US, that number one, Pakistan's nuclear stockpile is the most unstable in the world.
It's the most dangerous in the world.
It's the least tightly guarded in terms of people sneaking off with materials.
This is what the US Ambassador Patterson says she's worried about.
But secondly, that we're making this more likely.
There are 130,000 people who go every day to work with Pakistani nuclear materials.
If, let's say, they're not like the general population, where 59% regard us as the enemies, let's say 10% regard us as the enemy, let's say 5%, that's thousands of people who have access to nuclear materials who regard the United States as the enemy.
All right, well, we're just going to have to leave it there and let everybody in the audience's imagination pick up from there, but it isn't good.
We can all see the possibilities there that our government is playing with there.
Thank you very much for your time, Fred, and for your great work.
Everybody, that's Fred Bronfman.
His most recent article at Alternate is called WikiLeaks' Most Terrifying Revelation, Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us.
