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 keeps the Media Fix blog over at thenation.com, keeping track of WikiLeaks.
Looks like today's day 73 since the Cablegate release.
Is that right, Greg?
That's right.
All right, so give us the update.
I know there's a lot.
Well, today is, of course, the Assange hearing for the sex crime case, just adjourned for the day.
It was supposed to be a two-day hearing, and now there's going to be final arguments on Friday.
And there's really no sense of what the ruling will be and so forth.
But it does look like that'll be wrapped up this week.
And it's really a little too complicated to go in here, but they've had back and forth on this case, the charges and how it's been.
The hearing's mainly been about how it was handled in Sweden.
They give Assange a chance to answer charges.
There were details leaked that shouldn't have been leaked, ironically.
So either way, it's sort of coming down to whether he's gotten a fair shake.
And it sounds like if the judge rules that he's gotten a fair shake, then they might approve the extradition.
But if it seems like it's been shaky from the start, then they would rule in his favor.
Well, has his lawyers abandoned the argument that the Swedes are likely to extradite him to the United States, where he's- No, no, that's very much a part of it.
They also raised the argument that in Sweden, in rape charges, which is what it would technically be, I guess the law is it's held in secret.
And so they're raising all sorts of concerns about that.
Secret trials, and then, of course, you have what the US might try to do secretly in rendition and so forth.
Do you know anything about whether the law in Britain is very strong on these kinds of things?
I'm not an expert on the law.
I know that the charges he's being charged with or what they want to question him about are quite different in Sweden.
And I know it's odd, because a lot of people think of Sweden as kind of more of an easygoing place.
But they actually have stricter laws on this.
So again, that's another argument that the Brits should not approve this, because it's not really part of their law.
So it's complicated.
And of course, there's all kinds of views about Assange from the beginning, different people who feel that these are very serious charges, and maybe he hasn't always treated them that seriously.
And some of his defenders have not always treated it that seriously.
But it's in the courts now, so we'll see what happens.
It's interesting here you note that Donald Rumsfeld is WikiLeaking himself.
What's that about?
Well, as much as we may be trying to ignore the fact, he does have a new memoir that just came out this week that's gotten slammed in most places.
It's an 800-page defense of his actions in Iraq and Afghanistan and so on and so forth.
So as part of his defense, he has got to give him credit for being hip to the web.
He's posted online some primary source documents from his tenure, sort of leaking documents that make him look better, decisions in Afghanistan and Iraq and so forth.
So some people are calling it the rummy leaks or whatever.
So he's trying to do cherry-picking, obviously, documents that may make him look a little better.
Well, now have any Republican politicians, say, senators, called for his assassination for leaking classified data?
Isn't that high treason?
Well, I guess these are no longer classified, the once-classified documents.
But certainly he and others have, and other officials, not to mention mainstream reporters, have frequently released or written about or talked about the highly-classified documents.
And no one has called for their execution.
Yeah, George Tenet certainly did.
Yeah.
I mean, it is interesting, looking at what Rumsfeld has said in the doc, it's always interesting to go back and look at the WMD arguments, because at least it makes people go back and look at what was said.
Rumsfeld saying that, admitting that he may have made a couple misstatements, not lies.
He basically says, no one lied, and then says, well, I made a couple misstatements, and these people made a couple misstatements.
And he basically says, the pattern is that we did it rarely, and things could have been said better, and they're not really lies.
All right, now, one of the major, I'm scanning on your blog here, but I did see this new WikiLeak about Israel's role, or friendship, relationship, with, I guess, the next dictator in line, the next mustache in line, as Greg Pallast would call him, Omar Suleiman.
Yeah, well, that's kind of dribbled out in different cables, the fact that they seem to favor him, that they've been, that he has made various approaches to them, and assured them of things, going back a year or two years ago.
This new cable suggests that there was what they called a hotline for them to communicate.
Suleiman had various views about Lebanon, and Hamas, and Hezbollah, and views about Gaza, at one point, said he could intervene in a Gaza election, throw his weight around, and so forth.
Again, it's very detailed.
I always suggest people follow links, look at the original cables, look at the write-ups, ranging from what you might call left-wing sites to foreign policy.
The site for foreign policy, a magazine, has detailed analysis of these things from kind of a more centrist position, but they really get into some of these.
So there's a lot of ways to probe deeper into various cables that may interest you.
Yeah, it's amazing the kinds of stuff, well, even just with the slow trickle that is coming out of WikiLeaks, so much stuff has come out, and with the regular news cycle that goes on anyway, it's amazing how important some of these stories are that just seem to disappear.
Well, I think we talked a couple weeks ago, and I think I said at that time, we were talking about how long my blog had been going, and I think my book had just come out, and I was talking about how every day almost, I think this could be the last day of daily live blogging, and more things keep coming out, and you can't have two or three days where there's nothing that earth-shaking, and then suddenly there's incredible stuff, certainly there is, well, incredible stuff about Egypt that's still coming out about torture and rendition and so forth, but even apart from Egypt, which is always gonna be interesting, there are other corners of the world and other factors that come up from nuclear issues that could be involved, Pakistan, for example, to things still related to the various wars we may be engaged in, or just more local things that may not mean much to us, but in Zimbabwe or in Australia, they're giant stories.
Well, and it seems like a lot of these, really, in some other time, standing alone as the most important story of the week or a giant 60-minutes piece, say, I don't know, in the mid-'80s or something, it would change things.
There would be a hearing, and then something would happen or something, but I'm thinking particularly of the Chagossians who were driven by the Americans and the British from their islands, most especially Diego Garcia, but the whole Chagoss archipelago there, and they'd been living in exile, the ones who have still survived, and they'd been fighting legal battles to try to get back their property, and there's a WikiLeak about how the Brits and the Americans were talking about coming up with a lie about environmentalism and protecting coral reefs and all these things, and invoking the World Wildlife Fund and all this stuff in order to justify keeping these people from coming home.
That's earth-shattering news, but just when in one ear and out the other, and that's even just for the people that just formed policy.
Anyway, we'll be right back with Greg Mitchell from The Nation right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
We're talking with Greg Mitchell from The Nation.
He writes the Media Fix blog there, keeping track of the WikiLeaks for us.
He's the author of the Campaign of the Century, Upton Sinclair's race for governor of California, and so wrong for so long about how we got goofed into killing a million Iraqis, and it's day 73 over there at the WikiLeaks.
I'm sorry to talk at you like that, Greg, all the way up into the break like that, but the point was it really is a remark upon our times, isn't it, of how unimportant a story like, for example, that one about Diego Garcia is when they're so cynically talking about how to exploit environmental causes to keep these people from coming home.
I mean, that's a big story, but with everything else that's going on, it's not.
Well, I recently, I think last week, as an excerpt from my book, and I should mention just to get the commercial in, the book is called The Age of WikiLeaks, and it's available at blurb.com in print.
Oh, right on.
And just today it went up as an e-book for Kindle and BlackBerry and Android and so forth.
So you can search for it at Amazon now and you'll find the e-book.
It's only $4.99, and the print book's $11.99 at blurb.com.
Right on.
But I've printed, if you go to The Nation, you'll find about five excerpts from the book, free excerpts.
And one of them was, I can't remember what the, no, I guess it was 32.
I was sort of like 32 revelations in cables that you may have forgotten about, something like that.
And it just sort of went through 32 revelations.
I'm not sure the Diego Garcia one is in there, unfortunately, but it went into 32 different revelations.
And it's sort of an answer, in my book in a way, the whole book is in some ways, it's an answer to people who have said, going back to the Iraq, the collateral murder video in Iraq last April, who have said, what's the big deal?
Everyone's talking about Wikileaks, there's nothing new here.
We hear this from government officials.
We hear it from many in the media, pundits and so forth, who would just say, some embarrassing stuff, but there's no big deal, no big scoops, no big revelations.
Turn the page, move on.
And so it's useful to recall all the things that have come out.
Now, if people still wanna turn the page, that's fine, but my effort has been an attempt to counter the people and give lie to people who have said, no big deal.
And I mean, just, if the Wikileaks for the past, since April, which is the period I cover in the book, if they had done nothing but help fuel the Tunisia revolt, which everyone agrees that they helped fuel.
Now, some people have said they were major, major players.
Some people have said they've contributed some, but no question, the cables they released had some effect, perhaps major in Tunisia.
That of course, in turn has helped spark revolts throughout the region, Egypt and elsewhere.
So if they'd done nothing except publish five cables from Tunisia, that would be a tremendous positive impact.
But in actuality, there's been dozens and dozens and dozens of other sort of positive things that have come out.
So it's good to be reminded of some of those.
Yeah, well, it's very important work that you're doing over there.
I don't think people, well, I'm sure you read your own comment section stuff, but I sure appreciate it for one.
Now, talk to me about this piece that you have at the Huffington Post, Greg.
It's called Bradley Manning, forgotten no more about how the media has treated the character of Bradley Manning throughout this saga.
Yeah, well, that's another sort of excerpt from the book with the updated to the events of the past week.
I gave it actually a different title at the nation, which was the Bradley Manning and the Tomb of the Well-Known Soldier.
And it's sort of been about his treatment, different views about it over the last weeks and months and how he was forgotten, really.
When you go back, and again, I traced that in the book, how it was sort of a big deal when he was arrested and so forth, and then he went off the radar screen, even among most people who are interested in WikiLeaks and people on the left from July, August, September, October, November.
It wasn't really till Firedog Lake and Glenn Greenwald really started publicizing the conditions that he was under there in December.
And then ever since December, there's been a lot about him, a lot that his lawyer has gotten a higher profile.
Dennis Kucinich is now threatening to visit him.
And the International Human Rights Watch and so forth have come to his support in terms of improving his conditions.
That he's under.
So there's been a lot of activity on that front just in the last couple months, but he was largely forgotten for quite a long time.
Well, yeah, I saw a headline this morning, although I didn't have a chance to take a look at it, that said his lawyer is arguing that because of his mistreatment, he ought to be let go.
Time served.
Yeah, well, that's, of course, they would like that to happen.
Not likely to happen, but they're trying to get, it's a complicated thing because everyone agrees that he had some mental issues.
And then, of course, exacerbated by being in virtual solitary confinement for months.
And so the Marine prison people, while they have helped drive him to that condition, then turn around and say, well, he needs to be on suicide watch and he needs a special treatment and so forth.
And they argue that they're doing him a favor because he's had this mental pressures.
And sometimes that's true.
Sometimes people do need that treatment.
But whether that's needed in this case or if it's punitive, a lot of people have looked at this and said that he's being punished.
It's a punitive punishment.
And so that's what it'll come down to.
Hey, what do you think of reporters without borders announcing Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and all this giant split in media?
There's some journalists who I've come to respect over the years who've had terrible things to say about how WikiLeaks is not journalism.
It's not quite the First Amendment the way I look at it.
And maybe Karl Rove over there on Fox News is right.
What the hell?
Well, you may have followed, most people who followed it have followed the growing bad relations between Assange and the New York Times and the Guardian, which, again, I really trace in my book the reasons for it and how it's happened and so forth.
That's what most people have followed, the bad fallout there.
And there's a lot of reasons for that.
And so a lot of people have respected the Guardian, the way they've handled the whole WikiLeaks thing.
So a little bit more of a surprise.
The New York Times probably didn't surprise that many people that there'd eventually be a split.
I think Assange is a difficult character.
And there's always gonna be complaints about how he's handling things.
And I think that the other issue is where do they go from here?
Except for these major leaks, all related to the U.S.
Since last April, WikiLeaks hasn't released anything.
And so I think there's a growing fear that there may not be much more there there, that because of Assange's legal problems, because of technical problems, because of defections from WikiLeaks, financial problems, Assange's writing a book, that they just can't handle what's gonna be coming.
So whatever they've done in the past year will stand.
And how much more can they do under those kind of restrictions and problems?
Is it that they really have a functioning organization?
Are they going through, they promised these banking revelations.
That hasn't happened.
They had promised Guantanamo Bay prisoner records.
That hasn't happened.
They just got this massive leak from the Swiss banker blowing the whistle on tax cheating and so forth.
God knows when that will come out.
So I think until they do another major release, there's gonna be a lot of doubts on how well that organization really is functioning.
Well, I don't know.
It seems like they already have giant piles of stuff that's been uploaded.
Who knows what?
I'd sure like to see it.
But yeah, it seems like your attitude is, all right, well, let me add these cables.
Let's see what's in there.
And that ought to be the attitude of every journalist.
That's the definition of what a journalist is.
All right, secret information, bust out.
Let's write about Diego Garcia.
Well, I think the feeling is that the mainstream newspapers, and this goes, there's a leading newspaper in Norway that's been uploading cables and doing a really great job with it.
And now the Telegraph in London is the British newspaper of choice for WikiLeaks and so forth.
And these newspapers have been redacting names and when they put things up, they've done it in a responsible way.
But I think the fear is that these cables are gonna be dumped in a raw way.
I wish they would.
Just go ahead and publish them.
Like the State Department's the right to keep secrets and all.
Come on, all right.
Well, the New York Times did show all the cables they used to the State Department and killed some of them.
Yeah, people, you ought to read Bill Keller's self-justifying thing about that.
It's incredible.
Hey, thanks, Greg.
I really appreciate it.
Greg Mitchell, everybody, from thenation.com.
