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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Next up is Greg Mitchell, formerly the editor of Editor and Publisher, now writer for The Nation.
And you know what?
I'm sorry, Greg.
I know you have a website of your own, but I forgot what it was.
I don't have it in front of me.
Well, if anyone searches Greg Mitchell and pressing issues, you'll find it very quickly.
I knew that.
I just forgot it.
Okay.
But no, I read that thing, too.
Okay, good.
So listen, I appreciate you joining us today.
You are the author of a lot of things.
One of them is called So Wrong for So Long, which is what we'll mostly be talking about today, I guess.
But I also want to make sure – oh, yeah, this is it.
And you can get the e-book version of the very same thing, right?
Right.
It just came out this month, the e-book.
For the first time, it's the e-book edition of a book which came out a few years ago.
And it's one of the very, very few books to chronicle the real crimes of the media in both the run-up to the Iraq War and in the years that followed.
So you really can follow many years of the Iraq tragedy and how the media malpractice, as I call it, followed.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I read the whole thing when it was brand new in hardback.
And so I can vouch for that as well.
I also wanted to mention your great work on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Atomic Cover-Up, Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made, and also The Age of WikiLeaks, From Collateral Murder to Cablegate and Beyond.
And that one also you can get in Kindle edition.
It's only $4, y'all, so why not?
$3 for So Wrong for So Long, which is, as you say, a great catalog of just how wrong they got it.
And, you know, it's too bad that I didn't have the time.
I wanted to prepare some clips from the great documentary War Made Easy by Norman Solomon, where he just has these great montages of the media.
Just it's so ridiculous now.
It was scary then, but it's just such a farce to go back and listen to media from 2002, 2003.
I remember Shepard Smith literally crying tears running down his face, saying, but he's already in material breach.
He already breached the breach.
And so how come the war hasn't started yet?
It's not fair.
It's supposed to start if he breaches the breach.
And that was in, I think, February of 03.
Right.
You know, literally crying.
Yeah.
Well, my book gets at a lot of that.
You know, it is astounding looking back.
But, you know, frankly, the Fox News people and the right wing talk radio never interested me as much as the so-called liberal media, The New York Times and The Washington Post and MSNBC and so forth back then.
So a lot of the book has to do with when you read through it, you see these quotes.
They're not quotes from, you know, Rush Limbaugh.
It's more, you know, Chris Matthews and Tom Friedman and, you know, other New York Times people.
And and also updating it.
You know, I follow the the attempts, you might say, by the particularly The New York Times and The Washington Post to explain themselves for their blowing the coverage.
And, you know, and in my view, I know a lot of people don't agree with this, but in my view, making the war possible, being co-conspirators.
I know some people just say, well, Bush would have gone to war anyway.
So what's the big deal?
It's a very popular view, and I'm sure it's the view of the those two newspapers and, you know, in the mainstream media in general.
But I just don't think that's necessarily true.
So I you know, it is one of the crimes, crimes of the past century.
And it is very interesting when the you know, when The New York Times later tried to explain itself.
Some people called it an apology, but it was that was far from an apology.
You know, it was dubbed a mini culpa.
You know, they basically tried to explain it.
They said, yes, we got some things wrong and so forth.
And they kind of buried it in the newspaper.
And The Washington Post didn't really do it on its own.
Howard Kurtz, who was then the media critic, did it.
And he again, he got people to admit they made big mistakes.
And, you know, you can read it as coming to terms with what happened.
But in reality, you know, The Washington Post has never done a full apology.
The New York Times has never done a full apology.
And in fact, today I have a piece up at my, you know, my blog Pressing Issues about the New York Times editorial just today.
They have an editorial for the 10th anniversary in which they, you know, they point fingers.
And, you know, how bad Bush was and Cheney and everybody else and Paul Wolfowitz and name names.
They never once mentioned that their own newspaper was extremely involved in in promoting the war.
Michael Gordon still works there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Michael Gordon co-authored some of the Judy, some of the worst Judy Miller stories.
And not only did he stay, he thrived.
He's written a couple of books since then.
And he's been been sounding the alarm about Iran for the last few years.
Right.
In 2007, he was the leader of the Petraeus media scam that every roadside bomb in Iraq from now on must have come from Iran.
And they never even tried to prove it.
But they said it a thousand times because they're trying to get strikes on Revolutionary Guard bases.
Remember, this came up in the Hagel thing just the other day.
McCain accused him of refusing to classify the Revolutionary Guard forces as a terrorist group.
And he said, yeah, but that's because that was a backdoor to war.
Well, this was the exact same thing was they were saying, well, if a bomb has a copper core and it had to have come from Persia.
Yeah, well, that's yeah, that's the more most worrisome is the continuing hyping of the Iranian nuclear threat.
And it's, you know, what the irony of Obama landing in Israel today in the 10th anniversary.
And all the speculation is about him talking to Bibi about, you know, what the timetable for attacking Iran on the 10th anniversary of the attack on Iraq.
So it's kind of amazing.
Yeah, sure.
And of course, David Sanger would be the Judith Miller lead on that one.
Where virtually every one of his pieces is chock full of innuendo and very short on facts.
Well, you know, you can even debate.
I mean, it's like with with Saddam, you know, if we had had a year long debate over.
I mean, I don't I mean, I don't in a way I don't blame or I don't define in our American system.
If the neocons and Cheney and all those people tried to get us into war or raised false evidence and so forth.
But in the normal run of things, that evidence would have been explored, shot down by the media, shot down by the Democrats.
And they'd say, well, OK, they they brought this up.
They pushed it.
Maybe Saddam even made some changes, maybe did a little bit of good.
You know, and we didn't go to war.
The same thing with Iran.
You know, there could be some good things that happen, I suppose, as long as we don't go to war.
But, you know, there's certainly no guarantee that that won't happen.
So, you know, it's fine to put evidence out there and debate it and question it and look at it.
But it's when it leads to this overwhelming desire to go to war that the problem really comes in.
Well, now here's the thing, too.
The biggest myth that's lasted this whole time because of this very same lack of accountability is that, well, everybody was bad on it because that was the complete consensus and everybody knows that.
But meanwhile, if we remember back, it was at least almost half the population was against it.
And, you know, yesterday I spoke with Jonathan Landay, who at Knight Ritter newspapers with Warren Strobel and a couple of others, exposed virtually every single Iraq war talking point as false before the war and quoted mid-level CIA analysts at length saying, you know what?
Nothing has changed in 10 years.
No dark angels came and delivered weapons of mass destruction to Saddam.
So, therefore, he still doesn't have any.
Come on.
Well, it's true.
The Knight Ritter people, now McClatchy, have gotten well-deserved praise, including in my book, for their coverage.
And they showed that it could be done.
And as he probably told you, the reason they did it is because they didn't rely on the usual sources within administration, within the Pentagon.
You know, there was a moment I also put up on my blog yesterday, what I wrote in the book about Bill Moyers, famous, and really the only major TV probe of the media's malfeasance in this from about five years ago.
And he, you know, there are many great quotes in it, but one of them was Tim Russert when he actually, he confronted Tim Russert and said, we've gone through your transcripts and we found 200 sources for stories, and not a single one was, you know, either unidentified or they were all official sources.
There wasn't a single sort of non-involved person, expert.
And Tim Russert had no answer to it.
And so what the Knight Ritter did, people did differently.
They went to other people, and they got the true story.
And, you know, so it showed it could be done.
And as you mentioned, there was, people forget, there was massive, you know, anti-war demonstrations of 200,000 people, you know, San Francisco and New York and other places, massive demonstrations.
Austin, Texas.
Hey, I'm here to tell you, I witnessed maybe no less than 50,000 people protesting on February and March 15th here in Austin.
Well, and also, I read another piece this week on, as bad as newspapers were in general on the actual news coverage of the run-up to the war, their editorial pages, like almost half of the editorial pages, came out against the war, just said we should wait or the evidence is not compelling right now, or we should give more diplomacy more time to work.
There was not, from editorial pages, there was not this overwhelming cry for war.
And the other myth that people forget is that, you know, they say, well, inspectors were, you know, Saddam didn't allow inspectors or something.
But, in fact, the inspectors were on the ground in Iraq continually, and they weren't finding anything.
And they finally left a couple days before the war started because they didn't want to die.
But, you know, they weren't finding anything.
And, of course, our view was, well, it's well hidden or whatever.
But, you know, it's just a complete myth that, you know, we had to go to war because, you know, Saddam wasn't allowing inspections, and everybody was on the same page, and, you know, the whole country was clamoring for this war.
Well, you know, what's funny is it wasn't really a left-right split in the media.
It was a class split, and I don't mean ruling class versus the paroles.
I mean, like the classroom, the smart kids at the front of the class or the smart kids at the back of the class.
The smart kids at the back of the class have a broader perspective and a better one, whereas the smart kids at the front of the class seek the approval of the teacher more than even the good grades, or they seek that as, like, step one to the good grades or whatever, short of a deal.
So at AntiWar.com, I was reading the truth in the top headlines, which that's not all original reporting.
That's links to everybody else.
And I'm reading the truth for a year and a half straight about Iraq right there.
Even the Washington Post would do a thing on page A43 of the paper issue about how the aluminum tubes are for rockets, not centrifuges.
But that would be the top headline on AntiWar.com.
And then so I had to sit there, pull my hair out, listening to the politicians and the rest of the media referring to the aluminum tubes for another two years after that, you know?
Yeah, well, that's the way it was.
As you mentioned, I was an editor and publisher at the time, and we were raising questions.
So I know that people in our audience, which was all the newspapers in the country, really, were aware.
We were posting things on our website and so forth, raising questions, and you often picked up at AntiWar.com.
But it was almost like a fatalism set in when it got to be February and March.
It was, well, it looks like Bush wants to go to war, and if we try to fight that, it's going to look bad for us.
And when he finds, I mean, that was a very great quote by Bob Woodward that's in my book, where he said, basically, Woodward said at the Washington Post, well, we were afraid to raise or to claim that there were no WMDs because if they found them, we'd look bad.
So somehow the fear of being wrong about the WMDs was greater than the fear of being wrong about them and that they didn't exist, which led to nine years of war and hundreds of thousands of deaths and everything else.
But the fear was that they'd look bad if the WMDs were found, and wouldn't that be awful?
So that was very, very revealing.
Well, you know, I actually played a clip earlier in the show of me in October of 2002 reading a story, I think from the New York Times, about how a letter, a memo from George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, to Bob Graham, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, or he might have been vice chair of it at the time, I forget, majority or minority at the time.
I guess, no, he would have been the chair at the time.
Anyway, it said that, well, we do judge that he has some chemical weapons.
He's referring to the NIE conclusion.
We judge that he may have some chemical weapons, but that he would never attack the United States with them unless we invaded.
He might use them to defend himself.
And that was the official position of the intelligence community of the United States.
And as I'm sure you're aware, Vincent Bugliosi, the guy that prosecuted Charles Manson, the famous prosecutor from Southern California, said this is the murder rap.
Right now he wants to indict Condoleezza Rice and say either you read this and then lied to the president about what it said and said that Iraq is actually a threat in spite of what this says, or you told him the truth, and he's the one who's guilty of murder for ignoring the truth and going ahead.
But one or the other, the national security advisor of the president is guilty of premeditated murder here.
Yeah.
Well, that's, you know...
And that was in October of 2002.
That was all out in the public.
Yeah, well, you know, just as the media has not really been held accountable, of course, neither have these officials.
So, I mean, even in Inspage, you might say, you know, have not been held accountable, and most of them have gone on and thrived and survived, and, you know, they, you know, it's basically some people have a black mark against them, but not, you know, even Scooter Libby's, you know, getting out there.
He's had his voting rights restored recently, and Judy Miller's on Fox News, and so I'm pushing for a Scooter and Judy show on Fox, you know.
Wouldn't that be great?
Punch and Judy.
I would call it Punch and Judy.
Yeah.
That'd be perfect.
Well, I guess it's like Bush said in 2004 that we've had our accountability moment.
You reelected me, sort of kind of Ohio, give or take this and that, but you reelected me, so that means you've just ratified everything I've ever did.
Thanks a lot.
You've also just told me I can continue doing whatever I want, and I will.
And that was really the same thing with the media.
There was no accountability after they didn't find the weapons, after the war turned into a complete disaster.
They never had a house cleaning where they said, all right, you guys are fired, and you're replaced with Greg Mitchell and Eric Margulies and all the people who told you so.
Well, I'm not sure that'd be a great idea, but the...
I am.
I'm positive.
But the, you know, like I said, I think probably many in the media feel they have been, they have, they've taken responsibility, or they feel they've made corrections or made apologies or something, but you look at the, you know, what they write.
Even Tom Friedman today at the Times has a column, and you read it, and you can see between the lines he's basically saying I wasn't so wrong on Iraq.
It wasn't a bad idea, and it hasn't, maybe hasn't turned out so bad.
He's basically saying we paid too high a price, but there may still be decent results in Iraq, and maybe it was worth it.
So if you read between the lines, it's basically saying, yeah, I was good-hearted.
I wanted the right thing, so don't blame me.
It just, you know, maybe it didn't turn out so great, but it still might turn out well.
So, you know, that's still going on.
Right, because the New York Times never told the real history of that war when it was happening.
They continued lying not just to get us into the war, but they continued pushing, we saw the Michael Gordon thing going along with Petraeus in 07, but it was really like that all along.
So in fact, as far as Bill Keller knows, the Iraq war went great, and never mind the increased power of Sistani and Sadr and the destruction of women's rights and al-Qaeda guys running around doing suicide bombings all over the place and helping our allies, the al-Qaeda warriors in Syria.
Bill Keller doesn't know the first thing about it.
He didn't read it in the Times, anyway.
Well, he even wrote his own personal, when he became a columnist a couple years ago, instead of editor, he wrote his own sort of personal accountability.
He wrote a lengthy column about explaining himself.
He called himself a liberal hawk or a reluctant hawk on the war.
Again, his piece was extremely self-serving.
Maybe I made a mistake, but here's why, and here's how you have to understand it.
We were kind-hearted.
It's really kind of disgusting reading, because it still is.
That's still what makes me mad.
That's still what drives me.
A lot of people kind of want to turn the page in a way and just say, yeah, it was a mistake, but let's move on.
When, in fact, it was this massive, massive mistake, both on the part of the media and the country as a whole.
But it wasn't like sometimes the media screw up.
They may look back and there's some particular issue or incident or something, and they say, yeah, we should have done better.
But it's not this kind of life-or-death event that goes on forever and kills hundreds of thousands of people.
To me, the punishment, if you want to call it that, the punishment for our officials and punishment for our media has not fit the crime.
It should be serious, serious, whatever you want to call it, but just the most serious penalty you could have to fit the crime.
But people, in a way, downplay the crime.
So they sort of feel like, yeah, well, we've been punished.
People think we kind of screwed up, so move on.
Mistake is such a great euphemism there.
When mistake was going along with the plan to rob the bank and shoot the hostages.
Yeah, that's a pretty bad mistake you made.
Clinging, right?
Off to prison with you for making that mistake in judgment.
Yeah, well, like I said, that's why I stay interested in it, you might say.
I mean, you mentioned my book, Atomic Cover-Up, on Hiroshima and all the other writing I've done on Hiroshima for over 30 years.
In some ways, it's similar in that what drives me there is I feel that the country has not come to grips with what happened there, the crime of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And so it kind of drives me because it is kind of something where people turn the page and feel, well, it's not that big a deal.
And so when there's an issue like that, it can engage me for decades.
And I think the Iraq War will be the same thing because I sort of feel that one of the other things I've done for all these 10 years is probably written more about the suicides for U.S. soldiers and veterans than practically anyone and used to chronicle it every week.
And so that kind of thing is forgotten, sort of like all the soldiers who were maimed for life and brain injuries and everything else.
So again, people will say, oh, yeah, the war ended, the U.S. isn't there, move on.
But instead, you've got people killing themselves.
You have people who are going to be in hospitals or laid up for the rest of their lives.
And you've got the enormous costs, billions and billions of dollars of all the aftercare and all the money we're going to be spending the rest of the country's life on what happened in the war.
And, yeah, again, because of the acquiescence of the media here and, of course, Stephen Colbert, no matter what ever happens, will always be a hero of mine for taking on Bush and the press corps.
But he didn't even get a chance to until, what, 2006, right?
Yeah, 2007.
You know, I have a theory, Greg.
I wonder what you think of this.
But the way the occasion seems to me, basically I could sum it up like if you had a problem with anything the government was doing between 2001 and Hurricane Katrina, then you're the jerk.
And your problem is you just hate Bush and blah, blah, blah like that.
And that was the official position of MSNBC and CNN and all the newspapers and everybody was that everything going on here is legit.
And if you have a problem, you're the one who's a crank.
And then, finally, New Orleans drowned.
And everybody was waiting around on Saturday going, wow, it's been six days.
I wonder if the government's going to start doing anything.
And then Anderson Cooper was on TV crying.
And, finally, that was when the dam broke.
And now, actually, not that everybody who said so has been right all along, but at least from August 2005 on, now it's okay to dislike Bush.
And now it's okay to think that actually what he's doing is not good and what a good reason to not like him kind of thing.
That's how long it really took was until New Orleans drowned.
Do you agree with that?
Yeah.
And you've got the other thing that happened was the Web got stronger and stronger.
I mean, there always was a liberal presence on the Web and so forth.
But the explosion of sites that rely on different sources or at least rely on many sources and the Web becoming the principal means of communication, it happened around that time.
And, of course, then, of course, Twitter came on and so on and so forth.
So there's been many Web-based radio shows and Web-based video shows, TV and so forth.
So it's sort of like the airwaves and the Internet then was taken over, at least partly by people who were more skeptical or more on the left and so forth.
Then, of course, MSNBC, which was a cheerleader for the war, started to change.
It'd be interesting if you had the same lineup at MSNBC back then what would have happened or what's going to happen with Iran.
MSNBC is often extreme cheerleading for Obama, and if Obama takes us into a war of some kind beyond the drone strikes, how critical would MSNBC be?
So that could be interesting to see.
Yeah.
Rachel Maddow, she's sitting in the front row of that classroom, guaranteed.
Pat my head, Mr. Professor.
Okay, listen, I really appreciate your time and all your great journalism, Greg.
Thank you very much.
Well, thank you.
And, again, the e-book of So Wrong for So Long is just out, and it's been updated.
I've updated it with things from a recent time, so it's really a new edition.
Good deal.
Yeah, it's a very valuable work.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
I read the whole damn thing.
Thank you.
All right, thanks very much.
All right, so long.
That's the great Greg Mitchell, formerly with Editor and Publisher, and now with The Nation magazine.
And you can find his great blog there and at gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com.
Hey, everybody, Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well, maybe you should.
I've got a few good ones to choose from, including How to End the War on Terror, The Case Against War with Iran, Central Banking and War, Uncle Sam and the Arab Spring, The Ongoing War on Civil Liberties, and of course Why Everything in the World is Woodrow Wilson's Fault.
But I'm happy to talk about just about anything else you've ever heard me cover on the show as well.
So check out YouTube.com/scotthortonshow for some examples and e-mail scott at scotthorton.org for more details.
See you there.
Hey, all.
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