All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Greg Mitchell.
He's the author of the book, Hiroshima in America.
So I was so wrong for so long and many others.
He's the former editor of editor and publisher, and now he writes the media fix blog for thenation.com, a new edition of his book, the campaign of the century.
Upton Sinclair's race for governor of California and the birth of media politics.
Winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize has just been published by Polypoint Press.
Welcome back to the show, Greg.
How are you?
Always happy to be here.
Oh, and there's I would be very remiss if I didn't mention that you're the most prolific Twitterer in the history of Twitter.
And that is not quite true.
But I and I'm not sure that's a compliment, but.
No, it is.
No, no, I follow your links quite often.
And in fact, I don't spend that much time on Twitter as much as I did before.
But certainly you're one of the highlights of it, no doubt about that.
So I appreciate I wasn't poking fun.
OK.
All right.
So you've been live blogging WikiLeaks.
Yeah.
So I guess you just got that Google alert or you just reclick Google News for WikiLeaks every couple of minutes and you get everything right.
Well, that's not quite how I do it.
But I do I've been doing it for 38 days now, which which someone said must must be a record for live blogging on any one subject, although someone added that that's only true because blogging didn't come around till after the O.J.
Simpson trial.
No, right.
So but in any case, it's been 38 days and I keep expecting each each day will be the last that the interest will fade or, you know, the popularity will fade.
But but somehow it seems to keep keep growing.
It's it's been the number one or number two most popular feature at the nation's site for, you know, for over five weeks now.
So that's very good to hear.
Yeah.
So certainly the people who care seem to care even more.
So I'll keep going until we run out of items or run out of interest.
Right.
Well, I sure hope the interest stays there.
You're not going to run out of items for quite some time.
It looks like there's still have only released, what, two thousand documents.
Yeah, well, it's hard to say what what's happened with the documents.
And it's gotten interesting in the last couple of weeks.
You know, the first first two or three weeks was kind of easy to follow them because because the the partnership that Assange had made with the top news outlets.
And so the the cables were all coming out from them.
And then, you know, this Norwegian paper got a hold of the whole the whole thing.
And others have been dipping into it.
So now every day you're seeing very little from The New York Times and The Guardian now and you're seeing new things every day from more far flung sources.
So it's a little in some ways it's a little harder to cover.
But we're still getting a lot of a lot of really interesting items.
And it really is impossible to judge what's in the other two hundred and forty nine thousand cables.
It may be it's all junk.
It's minor, super minor stuff.
It's stuff that, you know, that has no interest at all.
Or it's just it's taken it's taking so long for people to get through them.
You know, we're going to keep having things for months and months out of it.
So we'll see.
Well, now, a big part of your career or their editor and publisher was media criticism and kind of lambasting newspaper editors for getting things wrong and that kind of thing.
And, you know, I wonder about your sort of big picture take on the way at least the elite in the American media are treating this story.
Yeah, well, it's interesting.
It's, you know, I've followed WikiLeaks carefully all year and, you know, earlier in the year, earlier last year through through, you know, middle of the year, the newspapers were were covering WikiLeaks.
They were they were running exclusives.
They were, you know, getting access to the material.
But the latest Cablegate release found them in kind of full partnership.
Not only did they embargo everything until, you know, the same hour or the same day, but they vetted, you know, they vetted the cables.
In fact, WikiLeaks turned over to them the the right and responsibility to vet the cables.
WikiLeaks really hasn't published until recently was not publishing anything on their own.
They were sort of republishing the cables that had been vetted by these top news organizations.
It's only been in recent days that we're seeing more of a more of a freelance approach.
So on the one hand, they've had this this growing partnership with these top news outlets.
On the other hand, these news outlets seem to be turning against them more and more and more in their coverage.
You know, critical of Assange, you know, critical of some of the moves he's made in relation to this this rape, rape charges and so forth.
And many, many in the media not jumping on board the, you know, defending WikiLeaks, you know, right to publish and right to to leak and First Amendment rights in the U.S.
And, you know, a lot of people in the media not wouldn't be totally upset if he got, you know, extradited to the U.S. and put on trial and so forth.
So it's been a very, very odd relationship with the media throughout.
Mm hmm.
Well, yeah, it seems like if the government says, oh, well, this is clearly just the act of enemies of America and they must be destroyed or stop somehow that at least in terms of the cable TV news anchors accepting, you know, Keith Olbermann or whatever.
But, you know, you figure the average news reader types on CNN, they just completely buy into that narrative.
As Glenn Greenwald puts it, Assange is Saddam Hussein.
He must be hunted down to his last Heidi spider hole.
Well, I don't know whether you follow the it's really almost a daily show or Saturday Night Live, this whole thing with Judy Miller, who was probably did more harm than anyone with her false Iraq WMD stories for The New York Times coming out and slamming Assange for for not verifying his sources.
And then today she was asked, you know, asked to explain that.
And she sort of, again, defended the New York Times, of course, verifies and we check our sources and we take this seriously.
And Assange just puts these leaks out.
And, of course, it was her her fake sources and her horrible sources that led to so many false stories and essentially led to the war.
So, you know, to this date, no one has been able to find a single person who has died because of any of the WikiLeaks leaks.
While one might say that Judy Miller has, you know, helped lead to hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq dying.
Yeah, well, and there's really no doubt about that, considering the central role she played in laundering a lot of those lies from Amit Chalabi and them into The New York Times, as you reported really, I think, in real time back then.
Right.
I mean, we know that 2002.
Well, yeah, editor and publisher was, you know, I'm very proud to say was among the few mainstream media outlets who from the get go were, you know, suspicious and critical of how the press was handling the run up to the war and then and then covering the war in its early months and years when, you know, they were sort of making making light of the problems and the, you know, what would be happening in the future and progress.
And I know I took a special interest in military suicides and what was happening with our soldiers and psychological problems and so on and so forth.
So for several years there, we were in the forefront of probing the official narrative that was coming out of the U.S. media.
Well, now on the subject of the week, and that's all true, by the way, because I was here and I was reading that stuff and interviewing Greg about it on the show.
Well, not not way back to 2002, but still anyone could have gone antiwar dot com and found links to your work back then.
You know, I'm I'm interested.
I know that you pay close attention to the editorial pages and kind of the consensus among newspaper editors.
And I wonder whether you found any kind of gruff, hard nosed old reporter types in charge of these editorial pages who, you know, really are taking a firm stand in favor of not necessarily the content of the WikiLeaks or anything else, but on the right of WikiLeaks to publish this information.
Well, it it hasn't been too thunderous, you know, there's got to be a couple of heroes in there somewhere.
Greg, you know, actually, most of the top editorial pages and most of the top columnists are steering clear.
You know, it's it's it is kind of amazing that there's this great kind of gap.
It's it's it's not that it's better, I guess, than than if they were all critical.
But basically what we're seeing is a lot of critique, some support and this vast middle ground of silence.
So I think that's that's the most most common characteristic right now.
All right.
Hold it right there, everybody.
It's Greg Mitchell from the nation dot com.
We'll be right back.
Art of a sense of war radio, I'm Scott Horton, I'm on the line with Greg Mitchell.
He's writing in real time, he's blogging the WikiLeaks day 38 or is it 39 now at the nation dot com.
All right.
So tell me, I just posted a new item during your commercial break there.
Oh, there you go.
Well, I guess I need to hit refresh on this thing, don't I?
All right.
So tell me about Bradley Manning, because it goes without saying on this show, although I like saying it, that this is an American hero.
It's obvious from what's been published of the chat logs that he had the highest whistleblower ish motives in doing what he did.
And he's just like Daniel Ellsberg.
And I'm very concerned that he's being mistreated.
And Glenn Greenwald wrote a piece as a lawyer.
I know has done an interview with The Daily Beast and wrote a couple of blog entries.
And I was just wondering if you can keep us up to date on what you know, or at least what journalism has what more journalism has been published about the treatment of Bradley Manning in military custody?
Well, up close, as I feature at my blog, there's been periodic blog postings by his lawyer, David Combs.
So you can find him on on Twitter.
But he just every few days he posts something.
It's usually legalities, what are possible routes they may take and looking at the military law and things like that.
So it's a little technical, but it's certainly relevant to the case.
There's I'm sorry, his name escapes me now, but there's a fellow who knows Manning as a friend of his who visited him in prison a few times, who writes stuff gets picked up at Fire Dog Lake first.
I think it may get picked up elsewhere after that.
But every week or two, he writes something maybe after he's visited Manning about actually what his conditions are.
And that's certainly the most up close and personal look at it.
And according to him, you know, that, you know, Manning doesn't particularly like to talk about his conditions, but he's talking about it more now than he used to.
And apparently, mainly what he does is refute some of the claims when when when people made charges about his confinement and what he was allowed to do and not allowed to do and so forth.
The military would sketch out things that, you know, made the treatment look not so bad.
And then Manning would refute some of the details.
So that's probably about the only way you can really follow it.
Otherwise, it's just a little groups protesting or groups who are saying that he's been held too long without trial or he's being held in solitary beyond, you know, beyond all fairness.
And there are speculation on whether they're trying to break him so that he fingers Assange.
And then a lot of stuff came out last week that, you know, they're very, very, very well, maybe no link to Assange as Assange has claimed.
So it's an interesting case, but so little has come out because of the just nothing's much.
Nothing much has happened in the case.
Well, just now you're referring to when Glenn Greenwald called out Wired for not verifying or disputing whether it was in the chat logs that what Adrian Lamo had claimed about what Bradley Manning had claimed to him about his working with Julian Assange on the leaking itself.
And this goes right to the heart of something that I have to assume you're an expert in, which is the right of the press in this country to publish what they want without prior restraint, without being prosecuted for it.
They can't figure out what law to prosecute him under other than maybe he conspired with Manning to actually do the leak in the first place.
Right.
Well, that's some people in the media that draw a distinction.
They say, well, you know, Assange is a mixed bag.
WikiLeaks has done some good things, et cetera, et cetera.
But Manning's all that, you know, maybe some of the people do it in a way to sort of say, well, I want to give some support for Assange.
And so I'll I'll do that by by, you know, calling for, you know, the the hanging of Manning.
So they're making a big distinction.
Now, others, you know, may feel that both of them are heroes or one of the some of them may feel that, you know, Manning's a hero and Assange is kind of a wild man.
But, you know, the fact remains that, you know, the media has had a difficult time dealing with this whole thing.
Part of it is is because so little evidence has been presented.
You know, in fact, it's sort of assumed that Manning is guilty.
You know, so you don't know 100 percent sure that that's true.
Second, you don't know whether he did.
Maybe he did some of the things that he's being charged with and didn't do others.
And then, of course, it gets into, you know, his motivation and and so on.
And then, of course, it comes back to the why did he have access to this material?
But, you know, maybe he did the country a favor by pointing out the security lapses.
Maybe it was better that he blew the whistle on this rather than, you know, Iranians or some other people getting access to material.
So, you know, it's a very complex case.
And so it makes it interesting to follow every day.
But it is also maddening because in the case of Manning, you know, we know so little about the actual charges and we don't know whether it's this one, you know, the one Lambeau is really the only witness against them, the only evidence that emerged is, you know, stuff that's come out because of that or whether there's all kinds of other stuff.
Well, you know, aside from the whole Julian Assange is a terrible, evil culprit narrative on TV, it doesn't seem like they've really let the WikiLeaks change the narrative about any particular thing.
So like if there's important news about Diego Garcia or about Somalia or about Yemen, I guess the Yemen broke news a little bit.
But if there's something counter to the narrative, say, for example, about Somalia, that that Dick Cheney and George Bush and Connelly's rise hired the Ethiopians to invade, basically cajoled them into invading Ethiopia Christmas 2006.
If that's not part of the media narrative, it doesn't matter that it's in the WikiLeaks.
You can find it at foreign policy and focus.org or FPIF.org on their blog, but that's about it.
Well, it's, you know, in the US and I think this was the New York Times approach to the cables.
They ran hot and heavy with these cables for 10 days and spun it all against Iran.
And that's literally all that was it was virtually all of it was focused on areas that the US was strongly involved where you could look at and say, yeah, this could have a big impact for the US or this is how the US would implicate it or what the US is going to cause trouble for the US or whatever.
But since then, they've had very little of what you might call international stuff.
Now, the Guardian kept that going for a couple of weeks beyond that.
They've had and they still have some stuff.
And then they they tend to not care if it has any particular fallout for the UK.
You know, it just would be some fascinating or nasty story involving some far flung country that, you know, it should be of global interest, but is not really UK centric.
And now, you know, now we're seeing more and more of these these cables emerging from widely scattered places.
And, you know, particularly if you're an international buff, you know, you might find fascinating any revelations, whether it's about Tunisia or Zimbabwe or, you know, Somalia or Canada, for that matter.
But they're not mainly they're not the US flashpoints of Iraq and Afghanistan and so forth.
So so that's the way it's kind of shaken down.
And you could argue that.
You know, Americans just aren't much interested in international things, they're not outraged unless something I mean, look at Afghanistan, we've been there for all these years and you still it's hard to get a rise out of people about the massive number of deaths and money and everything else that's being spent there.
So so how are we going to get them to care about some other other spot in the world where we're not occupying to share?
He's right.
You've got to be the demand for them to be the supply.
Well, thanks for being a supply.
I really appreciate it.
Greg Mitchell blogging at the nation dot com.
Thanks again.
OK, thank you.
