All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
By the way, I made a New Year's resolution, which I'm implementing kind of late.
I'm giving up my Facebook page.
I think it's the biggest time waster in the whole world.
I'm reclaiming my stress blog, so check out thestressblog.com.
I'm going to try to remember to write stuff there from time to time now.
And the Facebook page will still be there, but my buddy Nick is going to be running it now.
And by the way, if you go to thestressblog.com and you go to the green writing on the right side of the front page there, that's the instructions on how to join up.
The chat room where everybody hangs out during the show is really funny reading.
I always take a look during the break and sometimes get ideas for questions for the guests and so forth from there.
So you can go check that out.
It's at thestressblog.com.
There's a free node chat room called Two Number Signs Anti-War Radio.
And some of those guys hang out in there 24 hours a day, it seems like.
All right, so on to our next guest now.
It's Greg Mitchell.
He writes themediafixblogforthenation.com.
And a new edition of his book, The Campaign of the Century, about Upton Sinclair, is being published soon.
He also wrote So Wrong for So Long about the American media and primarily about the coverage of the Iraq War in this country.
Welcome back to the show, Greg.
How are you?
Hi, Scott.
Happy to be here.
I'm very happy to have you here.
By the way, when did you leave editor and publisher?
Because you were the editor and publisher of editor and publisher for a long time, right?
Well, I wasn't ever the publisher, thank God.
I was the editor for quite a few years.
That was a year ago, almost exactly a year ago.
Sometimes I quit following Twitter.
That's where mostly you can be found, it seems like.
Make good use of that thing.
Well, the blog at The Nation has been going since May, and I really started, for better or worse, devoting myself to WikiLeaks at the end of November.
For better.
Today's edition was Day 53, the 53rd consecutive day of posting dozens of items and links and even videos and so forth.
So it's been quite an endeavor.
And in the scheme of things, we're just getting started, too.
There are thousands more documents to come, right?
Well, like I say, it's like the godfather.
I try to get out, and they keep pulling me back.
Literally, almost every day I get up and I think, this may be the day where there's really not much that happens, and where I really start to feel it should really maybe end it.
It's not that it's going to lose popularity and people are going to stop coming, but in fact it's gotten more and more popular.
It's the most popular feature at The Nation site virtually every day.
It seems to have a global audience, and I'm actually finishing a book now that will be out perhaps in a couple weeks.
On WikiLeaks?
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Made up of your coverage here.
Yeah, well, like I said, this wasn't the grand plan when I started.
I've had other cases in the past at big events where I've live-blogged for a day or two, including the earlier WikiLeaks.
I think one of the values of this book that I'm doing is it's going to, of course it will come up to the cable gate, but it will have just as much material on what came earlier this year, which most people have forgotten, mainly because the media forgot about it, which was the collateral murder video from Iraq, the Afghanistan war logs, the Iraq war logs.
We'll also catch up with the Bradley Manning arrest and so forth.
Massive things that happened earlier in the year, but it kind of fell out of the media, and so I think you have probably a majority of people who have been following WikiLeaks carefully since Thanksgiving have a very hazy recollection of most of what happened earlier in the year.
Well, and there's a lot of really important stuff in those war logs, too.
Yeah, so I think that's the goal of the book.
Well, I've got to tell you, Greg, I think you need to just embrace this.
We're all counting on you.
You're doing great work, and you need to get over that whole thing where any day now it'll be over, because it's not going to be over, and who's doing as comprehensive work as you're doing here at this blog?
You just need to keep going.
Well, I appreciate that, but I think it's also healthy to have the attitude of don't just keep beating that horse.
It's like get up every day and say, show me something.
Yeah, but it's not a dead horse.
That's important stuff in there, right?
Right.
Every day new things emerge, and, of course, there's all the court cases and the threats against Assange and all the issues that it's raised about the media, the future of the Web and journalism.
So there's ways to talk about so many things in this one, via this one subject.
And I think surprisingly, well, not really surprising to me, but to a lot of people, is so many interesting and important cables have been published really since the New York Times more or less dropped out.
The Guardian is still going, but not as much.
But what's happened is some of these smaller papers and regional papers and so forth keep pulling things out that are kind of earthshaking in their areas, in their areas of interest, in their regions.
Of course, we've seen the reports.
Some people feel overhyped, but reports about the WikiLeaks cables virtually sparking this revolt in Tunisia.
I mean, for that country, what could be a more important event than this revolt and so on?
And of course, a lot of people, there's great debate about it, but a lot of people, smart people, have said that the publication of the WikiLeaks cables had a lot to do with it.
Other people think that's saying too much.
But in any case, it goes to show the media, particularly in the U.S., going back almost two months ago, who were saying, oh, there's nothing new here, it's not a big deal, these cables are old, and they don't make the U.S. look so bad, and so forth.
But it's just having tremendous reverberations around the world.
Yeah, they can't seem to get their narrative straight.
On one hand, it's just embarrassing, nothing to see here, no big deal.
It's also the worst treason in the history of the world.
These people ought to just be hunted down like Mullah Omar isn't hunted down, or whatever.
But here's the thing, too, about what makes me so happy, just the story that you're the one on this case.
Because I know, because I've been reading your stuff for years, that you really do have the breadth and the depth of knowledge required to understand what's important here.
Where most people might just say, I asked Amalia, you remember the invasion of 2006, and the American JSOC and CIA participation in that, the renditions, and so forth.
So then it comes out that, yeah, here's the American diplomats putting strong pressure on the Ethiopians to get this done for us.
You understand that's important in a way that, you know, I dare say the super-duper majority of American journalists would not.
Well, I have maybe a wide but thin understanding of a lot of things.
But, you know, I think as a blogger, as you know, I've written many books, I've written many articles, I've been editor of magazines and so forth.
But my current guise is sort of as a daily blogger.
And, you know, and on Twitter, a very large following on Twitter.
But the same thing in the blog as at Twitter is virtually everything I write has links.
And it's not just me spouting off or something.
So I think if you have a certain, if you have an open mind and you have, you know, a certain amount of knowledge or you know the history of a certain number of things, it's mainly a selection process, you know.
I mean, I link to plenty of things.
I don't even, you know, I don't read like I read an entire piece or something.
I see something that I know is interesting, that I know is fresh, that I know is credible, because the source is credible.
And, you know, frankly, I don't have time to read everything I link to.
But, you know, if you have enough, you know, judgment and background to make wise choices, you know, a lot of the job is making, you know, is cherry picking.
And, you know, any cherry picking includes sometimes presenting different points of view or linking to things I may not really agree with.
So that's what I'm trying to do.
Right.
All right.
Well, hold it right there.
Let's get back to some of what you think is most important in the cables themselves here.
It's Greg Mitchell, live blog in the WikiLeaks over there at thenation.com.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Scott Horton.
On the line is Greg Mitchell, live blog in the WikiLeaks and related news over there at thenation.com.
Day 53 over there.
Now, tell me and include, as you mentioned, the often overlooked Afghan and Iraq war logs as well, if you like.
But go ahead and cherry pick for me.
What do you think are the most important, not necessarily the most noticed by the rest, but the most important to you revelations to come out of these WikiLeaks this year, this last year, Greg?
Well, I actually have a piece that's in the current.
I keep track whether it's this week or next week or people have already read it or it's arriving in the mail now, but it's a piece that in the nation print, a rare print article these days called Why WikiLeaks Matters.
And what I've done is partly, and I guess it's what I'm also going to try to do in the book, is to resurrect some of these things that have happened over the past year, not just over the past month.
So I end up listing a couple dozen key things that have come out in the course of the year beyond the collateral murder video.
So some of the things I list are the Saudis, who are our allies, turn out they're among the leading funders of international terrorism.
The scale of corruption in Afghanistan tops even the worst estimates.
The Pentagon basically lied to the public in downplaying sectarian violence in Iraq for a couple years.
Our military also handed over many detainees they knew would be tortured to the Iraqis.
The Iraq war logs brought the number of documented civilian casualties in Iraq to over 100,000.
The Pakistani government was shown to be holding strategy sessions with the Taliban.
The Yemenis have lied to their own people about the airstrikes in that country.
They said that they were attacking, it really was the U.S.
And it goes on and on.
We remember the State Department asking our diplomats to spy on people, including the top people at the United Nations.
The Obama administration worked with Republicans to protect Bush officials who faced criminal investigation in Spain for alleged torture.
Pope Benedict impeded an investigation into alleged child abuse in Ireland.
Israel destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007.
Nah, that wasn't a nuclear reactor, come on.
And on and on.
That's the only one I've got to dispute, that was a bunch of crap.
Well, it was what they were claiming.
And it just goes on and on.
Here's one thing, too, though.
David Sanger over at the New York Times and the rest of his ilk around this country, they've been cherry-picking, too.
And they like to say that the big lesson of the WikiLeaks is that everything wrong that happened, bad in Iraq, well, that was all Iran's fault.
And, oh, yeah, the reason that we're not winning in Afghanistan, Iran.
And, oh, yeah, everybody knows they're making nukes.
And they just go on and on and on, cherry-picking out what they want to make their bogus war propaganda seem true.
Well, one of the – and, again, people forget this.
But going back to the first days of the cablegate, something that I kind of blew a whistle on, and Peter Hart over at FAIR really jumped on it, which was that the New York Times ran a big story.
I don't know if it was the first day or the second day, but it was kind of their lead story on how North Korea had supposedly sent missiles to Iran.
And it was supposedly proven by the cables and so forth.
But a lot of people, such as myself, looked at the evidence as they wrote it, and it seemed like it was one person's report on one meeting.
And yet they took it as gospel.
And sure enough, the Washington Post a couple days later and others then completely poked holes in the story.
And it turned out to be the most thinly sourced story as possible, and the Times eventually walked it back.
Yeah, well, and Sanger even explained that, well, the White House asked us not to publish the document.
But everybody went and found the document over at the Guardian or WikiLeaks site anyway and read it.
And the American official doesn't even argue with the Russian about it.
The Russian goes, I don't believe this.
And the ambassador person says, OK, well, whatever.
It was thoroughly unprofessional and embarrassing.
And yet, again, it was a one-day story.
So much has come out.
So much is coming out.
There are plenty of other things to cover and so forth.
Well, that leaves a major impression, though, doesn't it?
North Korea and Iran working together on long-range missiles.
It's no wonder we need defensive missiles in Poland, right?
Well, it revealed that there are different camps at The New York Times.
There are people, super professional reporters who really try to get at things and are, let's say, more willing to be more critical of the U.S. or to look at material that could paint the U.S. in not-so-great light.
There's a whole other faction, which used to include Judy Miller and still includes Michael Gordon, who seems to be their leading sort of Iran guy in terms of jumping on things that will connect Iran to militias in Iraq and Taliban and so forth.
And so that faction has its way on certain stories.
And this was a good example.
The Washington Post is the same way.
There's a lot of terrific – the editorial page is terrible on international issues.
But there are still a lot of very good reporters at The Post.
And then there are a lot of reporters now at The Post who are very willing to go along with the official line on almost everything.
So you can't look at these giant news outlets.
We may be disappointed in them often.
We may feel they're only doing half the job.
But we do have to distinguish sometimes between real pros who really do do a very good job and then these very many examples of regrettable reporting as well.
Do you think within the newspaper industry there's consensus that David Sanger is one of those Michael Gordons?
You don't take him seriously, do you?
I would hate to say anything.
I don't have a strong opinion on that.
He certainly is someone who is kind of all over the map.
Because I kind of have fun where I notice if he has a William J. Broad co-author in the piece with him, then they'll go ahead and say, oh, yeah, Iran's nuclear weapons program.
But if Mark Mazzetti is co-writing the piece, then they'll explain that.
Well, no, actually it's safeguarded by the IAEA, and it's not a nuclear weapons program.
So I think those two names pretty much define the two camps right there.
I really respect Mazzetti's reporting, but Sanger deliberately gets that wrong on the specific topic of Iran's nuclear program as often as he possibly can.
I mean, if you just were to Google Sanger and, quote, nuclear weapons program, you'll have an afternoon of reading, I guarantee, where he just asserts it's true.
He never says, here's the proof that there is one.
He just goes, well, you know, in regards to Iran's nuclear weapons program, et cetera, et cetera.
All right.
Set in the baseline.
That's how they do it.
And you really kind of document that and talk about that in your book So Wrong For So Long, right, where the lie is just the premise of the rest of the reporting or the rest of the pundit's argument.
It's never really, you know, they never even really attempt to prove it, right?
They just say, trust us, we know there are warehouses full of sarin.
And now that we know there are warehouses full of sarin, what are we going to do about it?
Well, I think that's what always – what's always bugged me is the tendency to just sort of straightforward if news comes from the military or comes from the Pentagon or sometimes comes from the White House or other official sources.
The opening approach is to take it as, you know, as truth, as fact.
You may attribute it.
The headline, it's like when there's, you know, airstrikes in Afghanistan or something, you know.
It will say, you know, the first day headline is, you know, 49 insurgents killed in drone strike.
And then if you read the story, it might say, you know, the Pentagon announced at the end of the paragraph.
But the whole tone of the story, the headline, the placement is all very much, oh, this is, you know, this is fact.
Then the next day, there may be counter stories.
And then by the third day, it may be, well, it turned out that virtually all of them were civilians, you know.
So you might say, well, they eventually got it right.
But the problem is this, you might call it prejudice or bias towards official sources, even though these sources have often been – you have a very poor track record.
So I guess that's what, you know, I would almost say any time – you hate to use the word claims, but you almost want to have the headline to say Pentagon claims, claims killing 49 insurgents.
Yeah, or Pentagon wants us to believe for now.
Unconfirmed reports.
Unconfirmed reports, you know.
Well, they succeeded in turning Assange into Saddam Hussein.
It seems like the media people in general basically believe that this is an evil guy out to destroy us, if that's what the government says.
That's amazing to me, too, how easy they've gotten away with that narrative.
Anyway, I'm sorry we're out of time, but I really appreciate your time on the show today.
We'll keep our eye on your blog there at thenation.com.
Greg Mitchell, everybody.
All right, Scott.
Thanks.
