I see your element got about 400 mb's, I don't know how long this is.
You're clear.
Alright, firing.
Let me know when you gather, or shoot.
Light them all up.
Come on, fire!
Roger.
Keep shooting.
Keep shooting.
Alright, that's some keep shooting.
Audio from the collateral murder video.
Apparently, allegedly, heroically liberated from the military's archives and uploaded to the website Wikileaks.
And then disseminated to the world.
Found this copy on YouTube.
All you gotta do is Google collateral murder.
It's also on the Wikileaks website.
And it's the starting point for this article by Chase Medar, written with Tom Englehart.
It's at Salon.com and at Tom Dispatch as well as Antiwar.com, where it's running today.
Chase is a Tom Dispatch regular and author of a new book, The Passion of Bradley Manning, and is a lawyer in New York.
Welcome back to the show, Chase.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
And I just love the way you always pronounce my last name correctly.
Oh, really?
Oh, good.
Usually that's all I do is get everybody's name wrong.
But I'm always right on the facts, except for the times I screw up.
Alright.
I think you do a great job.
Thank you.
So I really like this article.
What the laws of war allow, as you quote some smarty pants in here saying, hey, just because innocents died doesn't mean what happened was unlawful necessarily.
And I think the sad conclusion of this article is that something like what we see in the collateral murder video is not necessarily a war crime.
As you say, that's just war.
Or maybe better, that's just occupation.
This is what happens under so-called legal rules.
You can wax people from your Apache helicopter in the middle of a city in broad daylight in a foreign country as long as you claim you're helping what you call the legitimate government there hang on to power in the face of resistance.
That's right, Scott.
And contrary to widely held belief among, well, mostly among the center left in the United States and in Europe, the laws of war in international law in general were not written by a conference of angels, desert saints, and then edited by Glenda the Good Witch.
The purpose of the laws of war turns out not to be the protection of civilians, but to shore up the privileges of modern army.
Modern occupying armies in semi-colonial situations very often.
And the real purpose of these laws is to authorize violence, to give license to military violence, and above all, to legitimate military violence.
Wow.
I want to make it clear, it's a strong statement, but the problem here, it's not that we have good laws of war that are getting twisted or perverted or being ignored and we just need more enforcement.
That may be true some of the time.
The real problem that we see in that horrific collateral murder video is that the laws of war are written by and for the modern armies who just want to do whatever they want without having any sticks and stones or anything else thrown at them.
Well, now, so then the Geneva Conventions today, is it that apparent, I guess, to read through them that these are about the rights of major powers to occupy kind of weak third world countries?
Like, say, for example, the former outright European colonies in Africa and Asia?
Or are they not?
I guess my impression, since I'm completely ignorant of it, except for, you know, whatever little I've picked up along the way kind of thing, would be that these rules were actually written concerning wars between major European powers.
You know, wars of basically equal powers against each other, no?
That's exactly right.
The Geneva Conventions, most of them were written right after World War II.
And the kind of war that's in mind there is war between more or less equal modern military without non-state actors, without colonial occupation in mind.
And I don't want to say that they are totally useless work.
I'm not turning all John Yoo on you, Scott.
And I don't think they're quite, I think they're valuable.
But they really don't apply in a useful way to most of the wars we've had recently.
If you look at Iraq, okay?
Now, we invade Iraq, we occupy it.
It turns out the Iraqi authorities that are still in business, they're rounding up people.
Arresting them, detaining them, and torturing them horrifically, often to death.
Now, we are still in charge in a lot of ways in Iraq, as we have a massive occupying army there.
But it turns out the Geneva Conventions, according to most interpreters of international law, really don't force a duty on the occupying army to make sure that torture stops in the occupied country.
There's a vague duty of, well, you have to ensure the respect of prisoners.
And if the occupying army is handing over prisoners to be tortured, well, that might be something else.
But most of the time, and we see this in the WikiLeaks revelations, they're very scrupulous records that our military kept.
It's Iraqi authorities who are detaining people and then frequently torturing them, sometimes to death.
And that's something that's actually quite kosher, according to the laws of war.
So, in other words, what you're saying is, I was right to say that the main body of these laws does concern the major powers.
They're the ones who were the ones writing them, of course, in that war with each other throughout history, really until the invention of the A-bomb, right?
But then the parts of these laws that apply to weaker nations, maybe colonies that were lost in a war by one empire to another empire, something like that, all of that basically legitimizes what America is doing in Iraq or Afghanistan right now.
Absolutely.
I mean, European and then American international law and the laws of war does impose more duties when you have a war between equals, between equal powers.
But there's a lot missing when applied to colonial wars, wars of occupation and invasion.
Well, there's only one solution to that, which is an all-powerful Security Council, where no one gets a veto and they take responsibility for writing regulations about everything that ever happens, and then we'll have peace.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I laugh, but that just shows that people, I think, are looking for peace in all the wrong places when we expect international law to solve the problem.
I don't think international law is meaningless, and it should just be entirely thrown out.
But I am always surprised when I hear my fellow anti-war activists and intellectuals throw down the legality of a war or the illegality of war as the most powerful argument that it's some kind of trump card to say this war is wrong because, wait for it, it's illegal.
And, you know, we know that that doesn't cut much ice in the world, certainly not in the United States among, you know, in Washington or even in the country at large, where people in our country, for better and for worse, just don't seem to care about international law very much.
Yeah, and even our own federal laws that make it a crime to torture somebody under the color of law, for example, a behavior banned by our Eighth Amendment from the very get-go, the foundation of the national government, and people don't care about that at all.
They turn around, not content with torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who, you know, deserved to be beaten up good and hard at least once or something, right?
But no, they go and do the same thing to Bradley Manning, the alleged American hero who liberated the Iraq and Afghan war logs, which detail all these war crimes that we're talking about here, legal and illegal ones, you know, moral crimes for sure.
And he's being ruthlessly prosecuted.
In fact, he'll probably have it much worse than this guy, Robert Bales, the perpetrator of the massacre in Afghanistan, who he's, you know, in a jail cell next to.
Oh, I'll be shocked if Robert Bales doesn't get out of jail before Bradley Manning.
That's just grotesque, but that's how it is.
I'm sorry, we've got to hold it right there, Chase.
It's Chase Medar, everybody.
TomDispatch.com, original.antiwar.com, slash Engelhardt.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio, and I'm talking with Chase Medar.
He wrote the book The Passion of Bradley Manning, writes for Tom Dispatch, and I'm willing to guess, am I right, to say you leaned a little bit left, and yet you're starting to sound like a bircher on this whole international law thing.
I think maybe, do we have agreement that the U.N. and its baby blue flag is nothing but a humanitarian fig leaf for naked, blood-soaked imperialism?
You know, I love what you just said, and I think very often the U.N. does serve as a fig leaf.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not part of the nutball crew that thinks the U.N. is the work of Satan and it's part of the anti-Christ plot.
I don't think you've got to go quite that far to be against the U.N., though.
Even the birchers just call them commies, that's all.
I think the U.N.'s humanitarian agencies do great work, whether it's UNESCO or helping with refugees, and they do a lot of useful work in the world.
I think we'd all be pretty much the same, I don't think we'd be worse off or better off if the Security Council and the General Assembly dissolved tomorrow.
The main function of the U.N. is just to put legal window dressing on great power politics.
I'll put it that way.
And I don't think that the U.N. is guilty of frustrating the U.S. and blocking our national interests, a very common right-wing criticism.
I think the problem is the U.N. is always too ready to help us do foolish imperial projects.
A lot of people have forgotten that the sanctions against Iraq and the Oil for Food Project throughout the 90s were U.N.
-backed.
And these sanctions brought hundreds of thousands of people, up to half a million Iraqis, to an untimely death, according to many studies.
That's more people than died in the more recent Iraq War.
And yet all this carnage and this slow grind of death thanks to our sanctions was legal, according to the United Nations.
The fact that something has U.N. authorization is absolutely no guarantee of its morality, of its rightness.
But the flag has such a peaceful color.
It couldn't possibly be a symbol of aggression.
And even if, I mean, you look at the Iraq War where that was, and I know they probably woulda, coulda, shoulda had a second resolution authorizing outright invasion if they could or whatever.
But the first resolution, 1441, that the Bush administration invoked said, do what we say or else there will be consequences.
And so Bush, all he said was, hey, look, when the U.N. speaks, do those words have meaning or not?
Well, we're determined to protect the honor and glory and valor of the United Nations and respect for its dictates by enforcing its resolutions, whether it wants them enforced or not.
And really, I mean, that's, as you said, it's just a new center of a war of power.
That's what the U.N. Security Council is, the people who are allowed to wage aggressive war if you can get China and England and Russia and America to agree or at least abstain.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it's just all about putting legal window dressing on great power politics.
And even when we don't get the U.N. Security Council resolution to go our way, we saw that the U.N. trailed after us into Iraq like a loyal camp follower with disastrous results for many U.N. workers who got blown up in that bombing, one of the first signs that our invasion and occupation of Iraq was going sour.
So I do wish that those of us who are anti-war, whether on the left like me or whether on the right or anywhere, would loosen our grip a little bit on the legalism that seeped into the anti-war discourse.
International law is not nothing.
It has some meaning, but it is not dispositive.
It doesn't mean that whether something is legal that it's therefore right.
I wish that the anti-war crowd that we would learn to talk a bit more about consequences and even interest, and talking about national interest in an enlightened, broad-minded way, that doesn't make you a selfish bastard.
That just means you're looking at the reality and the consequences.
And we know that looking at the Iraq war, at the AfPak adventure, the consequences have been terrible.
Well, and you look at the war in Libya, too, where somehow, I mean, when Bill Clinton lied us into war in Kosovo, he pretended that 100,000 men, women, and children had been massacred.
Obama only had to pretend that 100,000 men, women, and children would be massacred and launched a U.N. war based on that.
Bill Clinton even has his Secretary of Defense telling the Senate that, yeah, really, that's where we get our authority from is the United Nations, not you.
Yeah, I mean, and again, that's another great example of an imperial power, Washington, using the U.N. for its own advantages.
My next-door neighbor is a guy from the Ivory Coast, the former French colony in West Africa, and you should hear him talk about the U.N. because France, under color of the U.N., just invaded his country when they didn't like the way a contested election had gone.
He has a post-colonial perspective on the U.N., a very different point of view than you get among central left intellectuals in the United States or Europe, for the most part.
Also, I wanted to point out, because it's so important, and I actually have my own little thing to add to it here.
You talk about Ethan McCord, who is, his battalion is the subject of the book The Good Soldiers by David Finkel.
He was the Washington Post reporter who clearly had access to that collateral murder video but never showed it to anybody because he wanted it as exclusive for his book and whatever, and Bradley Manning wrote about that in the chat log, so that was one of the reasons he thought it was so important to release it.
But I want to say real quick that Ethan McCord and Josh Steber, who is from that same battalion, both on this show, said that they heard the order that they were to kill every expletive in the street, 360 degree rotational fire any time an IED went off.
They both said that they heard that personally from their commander.
Not that that order was passed down to them somehow by hearsay and word of mouth.
They both themselves personally were ordered to engage in that definite war crime.
Absolutely a war crime, your expert says in the article here.
And they both said that on this radio show.
And, you know, talking about the legalism and the Bradley Manning case, so many people want to lock up Bradley Manning for life, and their reason is, well, he broke the law, and the law is the law.
If we don't enforce it, we're going to have chaos and anarchy and flesh-eating zombies and all that stuff.
But we know that our law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, has been violated frequently with illegal orders, like the kind that Ethan McCord heard his commanding officer give.
And yet there seems to be little uproar about these instances of lawbreaking and their consequences.
It's a very selective enforcement of our military laws.
And if you look at the damage, the real flesh-and-blood damage to people that's resulted from these orders just to open up 360-degree fire and kill every expletive around, compared to no discernible damage to anyone from the Bradley Manning alleged leaks, the hypocrisy is staggering.
And I guess as you're saying here, too, it's really not a matter of the Bush era or the Obama era or either of these presidents or their political agents making this happen.
It's really been like this at least, I guess you could go back to before World War I and that kind of thing, but at least since World War II, the modern age of the United Nations and American-backed international law, it all got started off with the war crimes trials for the Nazis and the Japanese that, of course, let off all the British and Americans and French and Soviets who had committed war crimes.
They were the victors.
They didn't have to be found guilty of anything.
I mean, they didn't hold a single trial for one of the Allies, did they?
Not that I'm aware of, no.
Certainly not at Nuremberg and not with any of the kinds of consequences that you face there or in Tokyo.
Local prosecutions, maybe, but nothing from the international courts that held the big show trials for the enemies?
No.
I mean, and this is consistent too.
Look at Lieutenant Calley, the commander of the My Lai Massacre.
He spent three months in what was a real prison, and then he was under house arrest for a while.
He really escaped without virtually any penalty for commanding and leading the massacre, the systematic slaughter in a Vietnamese hamlet in 1968 that killed over 300 civilians, mostly women, children, and elderly.
All right.
Well, I'm so sorry that we're out of time, and I'm also very sorry that I haven't gotten to the book yet, but it's next on my list, Chase.
It's The Passion of Bradley Manning, just out.
It came out in paperback right off the bat, right?
That's right.
Available only at ORBooks.com.
ORBooks.com.
Everybody check out Chase Menard.
He's at TomDispatch.com, at Salon.com today, as well as AntiWar.com right there in the highlights at the top of the page.
Thanks so much for your time on the show.
Chase Menard.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Great talking with you.
