06/14/13 – Greg Mitchell – The Scott Horton Show

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Please help support the efforts of the Council for the National Interest to create a peaceful, pro-American foreign policy.
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And as long as I mention that, I'll tell you, I got one new one at YouTube.
A speech I gave at the end of April at San Angelo University on North Korean-Iran policy and then questions and answers on Syria, Libya, Mali, Afghanistan.
So, you might like it.
It's a new speech.
It's at youtube.com/scowhortenshow.
So go check that out.
Alright, good deal.
First up today, and maybe our only guest, not sure yet, it's our good friend Greg Mitchell.
Formerly at Editor and Publisher, now at The Nation Magazine.
He's got a new edition of his Bradley Manning book just coming out.
Or maybe it just came out.
It's Truth and Consequences, co-authored with Kevin Gostola from FireDog Lake.
And he's got his own blog, Pressing Issues, as well as his blog at thenation.com.
Welcome back to the show, Greg.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Always happy to be here.
Well, good deal.
I'm very happy to have you back on the show.
And I sure was glad to see this article that you wrote.
And never mind what spurge you to write, because I don't even want that guy to get any credit whatsoever here.
But I'm happy you did this thing, just like I'm happy you did your book.
It's very important work.
And I've been looking everywhere.
I don't know why I didn't think of you first.
Sorry about that.
But I've been looking everywhere for who's got the best, kind of mastered list of Bradley Manning's greatest hits.
What are the most important stories that came out of the Iraq and Afghan war logs and the State Department cables?
And you know how it goes.
We've got half an hour.
So please, take your time and give us, you know, go through the list of your favorites and explain what's so important about them.
And then, you know, I'll try to chime in here and there, but not too much.
Okay.
Well, as you mentioned, it was sort of inspired by a number of articles.
Basically, coming out of the Edward Snowden current case, where many people, mainstream people, even some people on the left, have said that, you know, the revelations are not that shocking, they're not surprising, and, you know, it's not that big a deal.
And then kind of doubling back on lumping him as a whistleblower or a non-whistleblower with Bradley Manning, and then taking the same approach to Manning.
We're sort of saying that, you know, what he released was mainly what people already knew and was no big deal, and, you know, he shouldn't be praised for, you know, as one liberal editor, well-known writer said, claimed that he had only released a couple of things that exposed wrongdoing, which was probably the stupidest thing he'd ever, ever written.
And it shows that, yes, two years, more than two years have passed since the WikiLeaks Manning revelations began to peter off.
They go back three years, really.
And so, you know, you could accept a certain amount of forgetting how they came out, what came out on the subject, even though Manning is now on trial, and, you know, we're starting to revisit some of these.
So I think in some cases it's kind of forgetting.
In others it's just laziness.
It becomes like a common, you know, conventional wisdom that, well, what did WikiLeaks really expose?
You know, because it wasn't like Watergate where, you know, a U.S. president was hit in the press every day and eventually was impeached and so forth.
So a lot of people say, well, what did he really accomplish?
Or even worse, what did he expose?
So, you know, I thought it was useful this week to roll out or revisit the Manning WikiLeaks revelations as they unfolded over the course of many months.
And so I put together both at my blog and at The Nation this long list of things that came out, you know, taken for, as you mentioned, the new edition of our book.
We have all these and many more in that book.
But, you know, for your audience, again, just to revisit, you know, it was, you know, the first thing that came out was the collateral murder video.
And, of course, that alone was, you know, was an eye-opening, important look at, you know, how U.S. gunships could attack civilians or, in that case, two Reuters staffers and laugh about it.
So I think that should have been a troubling revelation for many people.
Then, of course, we got the Afghan war logs.
And, again, people might poo-poo what was really in there.
Well, what was really in there, and that was significant, and maybe helped turn the tide in beginning to turn back the U.S., you know, getting out of Afghanistan where the documented shocking cases of corruption and, you know, Afghan ministers with millions of dollars in suitcases, the killing of many civilians, many, many more than had been pictured before, civilians in Afghanistan, involvement of our Afghan allies with the drug trade, and, you know, on and on.
And it also showed that it's always valuable to show that the U.S. press had missed so much of it, in passing, even though now, thanks to Manning and WikiLeaks, the U.S. press, you know, notably the New York Times, was carrying these documents or writing about these stories.
It also was exposing the failures of the U.S. press over the, you know, the years.
Right.
And then after— Let me interrupt you for just a moment here, because before you move on from Afghanistan, anyway, you may have more on Afghanistan, but I wanted to mention about how— and really this was the case with the Iraq stuff, too.
The U.S. found, and the major media—it's amazing sometimes to watch how easily led they are, how willing to be led they are by the government, where out of these, what, thousands of cables from the Afghan war logs, and the only thing that the media could find in there to talk about was, oh, my goodness, Pakistan is not the loyal, bestest friend in the world we always thought they were, and they seem to have different agendas in Afghanistan than we do, which talk about dropping the ball up until then, and it was like that was the only scandal that they could find in there was, you know, somebody else has a splinter in their eye, you know?
Right.
Well, the other thing they brought out about Pakistan, which should have been valuable, was the—and a good reminder to the world, I guess, that their nuclear weapons were maybe not in the safest hands, and I guess we've forgotten about that since then, but it was quite startling at the time, the lack of controls or the dangers of their control of nuclear weapons.
Well, like you're saying, I mean, here they—these papers describe all these civilian casualties.
They describe the rise of IED attacks, and they seem to show, and maybe I have my causation and correlation mixed up here, Greg, but they seem to show that the more Bush and then Obama escalated, the more war they got.
They didn't really, you know, seem to achieve anything other than escalating the violence in reaction to their escalation.
Right.
Well, it painted a very disturbing, pessimistic view of the war there, and again, I don't know how much it was a factor in Obama subsequently sort of admitting, well, we can't really win there, and we just have to manage and get out, but it certainly must have contributed somewhat.
And then the Iraq War logs, which came out a little after that, even though the Iraq War—well, actually, the Afghanistan— our war in Afghanistan did start before the Iraq War, but the Iraq War cables, it was similar in the sense they exposed the— and documented for the first time a massive number of civilian casualties, gave a more true and fuller picture of the civilian carnage there, which alone was worth it, extremely valuable at the time and for history.
And they also, you know, just to mention one thing, one major shocking thing, you talk about wrongdoing, you know, one of the major cases of wrongdoing was the U.S. documented turning over prisoners to the Iraqis, knowing they were going to be tortured.
Again, this was covered by the New York Times.
It caused a bit of a flurry, but then it was quickly forgotten.
But, you know, nothing could have been more damning, especially with our claims of not endorsing torture and so forth, many cases of the U.S. turning over prisoners to the Iraqis, knowing they would be tortured.
So, I mean, that alone was a valuable thing to come out.
And again, as in the case of the Afghan war logs, we saw how badly the American media had dropped the ball in many of these cases, including how we've for many years downplayed civilian casualties there, downplayed just the number of times our side killed so many civilians and then had to pay people off.
So that's just a brief description of some of the Iraq war logs.
And then after that, we got the cable gate.
And then, well, if we stay on Iraq for just one second, I wanted to point out, and there's an important point to get here, too, other than just the anecdote.
There was one of these cables that I think came pretty late in 2011.
I'm not sure why this one took so long to come out.
I don't know if it didn't come out with the rest of the batch or what.
But anyway, there was one of these cables described horrible war crime where American soldiers rounded up and executed an entire family, including their babies.
And then called in an airstrike on the house to try to cover up and destroy the bodies, obliterate them.
But the airstrike hit the wrong part of the house.
So the bodies all survived the attack.
So the coroner ended up getting his hands on them anyway.
And I guess I had missed this one at the time, but apparently some of the local officials had raised hell about this at the time and had been dismissed.
But this came out, right, I think in November of 2011, right when Obama was pushing to try to negotiate the diplomatic immunity so that the soldiers could stay.
And obviously Maliki was kind of playing him and saying, oh, yeah, I'm trying real hard to convince everybody to go along with this.
But he wasn't really trying anyway.
But then this cable gave him all the out he needed to say, sorry, Obama, domestic politics in Iraq will not allow me to give immunity, not on the heels of this confirmation.
From this secret document.
And so that kicked us right out of Iraq.
And then the real point that I'm trying to get to with that then is, this goes to the question of whether Bradley Manning's leaks harmed anything or anyone or not.
What his leaks didn't do was get any innocent people killed.
What his leaks did do was turn American imperial foreign policy completely upside down.
He ruined virtually every plan they had going.
But they can't call that real harm because they don't want to admit that they illegitimately, aggressively invaded Iraq because they meant to conquer it and stay there no matter what.
So they can't really admit that it's damage that Bradley Manning's leak got them kicked out, right?
They're married to their public relations that we're only here in Iraq as long as you want us to stay and help you.
So they can't really blame Manning for ruining their plan to enslave those people forever.
The problem is that the public supports us getting out of Afghanistan and the public supported us getting out of Iraq.
So if you want to blame Manning for helping us get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, that's not going to go over too well.
So they don't want to do that.
So if indeed it's true that the Afghan and the Iraq war logs helped speed us out of Iraq and set us on the course to getting out of Afghanistan, those are popular measures.
So I think if the public fully understood that, they would show more support for Manning, not less support.
And the same thing goes for they can't cry about, well, Manning ruined our sock puppet dictatorship in Egypt, and now they have elections and stuff.
Oh, man.
You know what I mean?
Well, it is amazing.
It is amazing.
That's why I called profoundly stupid the one remark about that it only exposed two or two pair of wrongdoings.
And the other thing to emphasize here before we go on to the cable gates is in the case particularly of the cable gates, even what I've listed, you know, I list 20 or 30 significant things, in some ways only scratches the surface because there were so many others.
The peak of these revelations when the Guardian and the New York Times and the other major, major papers were covering and accepting these leaks and covering these things, you know, that went on.
But that ended more than two years ago.
But what continued for months was newspapers in smaller countries, what we consider to be out of the way, not so important countries abroad, continued to publish these.
They got the specialized documents for their country, which in many cases would mean nothing to us, the Americans.
Some cases didn't really have anything much to do with America but had to do with local issues and local scandals and corporations or companies in those countries or politicians in those countries.
I really can't go into it because there were so many and out of the way places that caused an uproar.
And sometimes produced positive change or in any case, you know, added transparency to local disputes that people couldn't make heads or tails of.
And now here were some documents that showed what was really going on.
And, you know, the big scheme of things may be minor in our eyes, but, you know, you can make pages and pages of these more local things that came out.
Right.
Well, and this is, and I think you talk about this a bit in the piece too, is the background really to the start of the Arab Spring where this one desperate man in Tunisia set himself on fire because the local authorities wouldn't give him the permit so he could sell vegetables from his little cart.
And he said, fine, you want me to lay down and die, I'll lay down and die.
Blam, he set himself on fire.
But the background was the whole country had been talking about the WikiLeaks and what the WikiLeaks exposed about Ben Ali's dictatorship in Tunisia for weeks and weeks and weeks leading up to that.
So when he set himself on fire, that was just the spark that set off the whole country into a riot.
And they stood up, what, they overthrew their dictatorship in three days or a week?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, that's all true.
That's gotten the most attention in terms of the cables that caused something pretty, you know, pretty much an open and shut case.
But, you know, not as much emphasized is that the cables also showed that the U.S. knew about the massive corruption there going back until at least 2006, but went on supporting the government anyway.
So we didn't like that.
We liked the idea maybe that they kicked off Arab Spring, but the revelations about how U.S. backed them didn't get so much attention.
And, of course, Egypt, they got a little more attention because we were so clearly and blatantly backing Mubarak.
And, you know, again, the documents showed all that, showed the torture and corruption and so on and so forth in Egypt, and, again, helped lead to Mubarak's exit.
And then, of course, it's, you know, mixed feelings about what's followed.
But there's no question that that had some effect.
But we saw, you know, the cables were all over the globe.
I mean, that's what we tend to remember.
And there were little, you know, local things like the – some people think one of the most significant ones was showing how the U.S. pressured the European Union to accept genetic modification, something we don't think about much anymore, our role in that.
And, you know, so it went around the globe with various larger countries, you know, our involvement with the British abroad in different countries, for example.
And then it showed our spying at the U.N. in a much, much, much bigger role than had been accepted.
And, you know, on and on.
So our relations with Israel, some very significant revelations there.
Let's talk about that for a second.
Well, it showed that some of our – you know, particularly in the period where Israel was trying to bring – one of the stories was that Israel wanted to bring Gaza to the, quote, brink of collapse, and this was something that Israel had always denied, that they didn't really want to go that far.
But, you know, the documents showed that, indeed, this was their policy to go as far as bringing them to, you know, to the brink of collapse, and other, you know, and other things that had to do with, you know, with their actions over there.
In other words, you're talking about the siege that they say is just to keep weapons out of the hands of Hamas.
Right, right.
That actually what it is is it's a war against the civilian population and their ability to intake calories.
Right, right, exactly.
You know, the various restrictions of supplies and food and so forth coming in.
So, you know, it was – you know, but again, there were so many of these.
You know, when they came out in the Times and the Guardian and so forth, you know, they kind of rolled out over the course of a few weeks, and you could concentrate on them, you know, briefly as they emerged.
And, again, a lot of them caused more uproar abroad than here and had a significant effect on – I know there were revelations about, for example, the Catholic Church and the Vatican covering up sexual abuse among priests in Ireland.
You know, that's, you know, one specific place, you know.
And then in the U.S. it was pretty much forgotten.
We have our own issues with our own priests.
But it caused a tremendous uproar and aftermath, you know, in Ireland.
Now, who would think, you know, I mean, that's such a – you think about diplomatic cables, you think of other things that involve military or, you know, ambassadors or local disputes and so forth.
You wouldn't think of something like that would be in such cables, but they were.
So – Well, and you've got to figure what a big deal that is to the raped, right?
That might not matter at all to somebody who has nothing to do with Ireland or the Catholic Church, but it sure as hell matters a lot to the victims involved.
Well, yeah.
Well, and it did spark investigations there and confirmed other things.
I mean, they even had – it was only in this leak, you know, for some of us who go way back.
Of course, we remember the famous cable from Ambassador April Glaspie in the first Iraq war on meeting with Saddam before the Kuwait invasion.
And it always had been rumored.
It was reported.
It was, you know, said to have – people said to have known the contents and so forth.
And, you know, Manning released the whole cable.
So now it's a historical document.
You know, people covered it for a while and it was forgotten, but now it exists.
You know, so you can go into books or websites or anywhere you want, and now her document is out there.
Well, yeah, and you can see that, like, Willy Wonka, she's protesting about, hey, please don't come back.
She's not really protesting at all.
She's making it clear, just like in the rumors all along, I think it's pretty obvious that Secretary Baker asked me to emphasize the instruction to you to go right ahead.
All right.
So, I mean, you can go on and on.
One of the other things that got a fair amount of attention at the time was that the president of Yemen had lied to his own people in claiming that somehow his military was carrying out these airstrikes against militants when this was actually being carried out by the United States.
And it sort of exposed that he was giving the U.S. full reign and going after terrorists there.
Of course, we've seen it since then with the drone strikes and so forth.
So I guess this kind of anticipated what has followed in the years since.
But this was a tremendous uproar in Yemen.
It got coverage in the U.S. as well, but it was an open and shut case.
There were actual meetings, a dialogue back and forth, basically a cover-up.
And so it was all out there.
I'm not sure if Yemen, the Yemenis then rose up in protest around the country, but it was a very significant thing at the time.
Yeah, I mean, I think they all hated his guts anyway, solid.
And maybe it didn't have that much to do with that specific uprising.
But still, you're right, it did prove that.
And, in fact, I think from reading Scahill's work, nobody believed him in the first place because the parts of the bombs, the cruise missiles, and whatever were clearly Western technology, not Yemeni military technology that would kill.
And it wasn't militancy, there was just a bunch of women.
And there was a lot else, and I can't recount all of it, but in the cables, a lot of greedy detail about the rendition program, about torture in other countries, about us delivering prisoners to Spain or wherever, and then kind of a nod and a wink and knowing what was going on there.
So a lot of things were kind of tied to the rendition program.
I think Turkey, they found out for the first time that Turkey was allowing flights to land for rendition.
So, I mean, you go on and on and on.
So if it was just the cable gates, there would be all these numerous valuable things.
But then you go back to the Iraq war logs and the Afghan war logs.
And then the Gitmo, I don't even list here, but the Gitmo files, there was subsequent to what they called the Gitmo files, which was a separate release.
And that was from Riley Manning?
Yeah, documented prisoners and the scope of the program and so on and so forth.
That's sort of the forgotten release.
So, I mean, it goes on and on.
So I think if people want to say that Manning should still be prosecuted, if they want to say that he did something wrong and that he should face consequences, I mean, that's fine.
You can have a good debate over that.
But for people who downplay the releases themselves or emphasize the unproven charges that they caused any harm or that anyone was threatened or died or anything like that, we still don't have a documented case of anyone who was killed or nearly killed because of them.
So, I mean, you can have debates on all that, on the effects and whether people should be able to release classified information.
Certainly you should have debates on why the leaker should suffer so much and no one ever goes, really goes after the press.
You've had this phenomenon with Snowden of pundits blasting, you know, Well, like you said, because they're shown up for their failures every time this happens, Greg.
Yeah.
You know, that's the bottom line.
They're happy to cover the documents.
They're happy to.
I mean, it just seems like it's a double standard, you know.
I mean, the press would either say, look, we get these leaks all the time and we don't publish them because, you know, we think they could cause harm.
And then they'd be criticized for not releasing them.
But at least it would be consistent.
But, you know, they want to release all these things.
They want to make the headlines and get the credit.
And then they turn around and blast the guy, you know, the leaker.
So, you know, in fact, even in the Snowden case, we saw both the Guardian and the Washington Post did show great restraint, maybe too much restraint, but they did show great restraint with the PRISM program in releasing five out of 41 slides.
Right.
And so they're, if anything, they're getting heat for saying, well, what's on the other 36 slides and what are you covering up?
Greenwald actually defended it stridently, too, and said, hey, look, we're not trying to leak secrets about how they do it that would actually compromise, you know, whatever.
We're just exposing wrongdoing here.
That's our business, journalism.
Right.
That's it.
We're out of time.
Thank you.
Greg Mitchell, everybody.
He's got a great blog at thenation.com, and he's got his own pressing issues and read his book Truth and Consequences about Bradley Manning, the American hero.
Thank you, Greg.
Bye.
Bye, Scott.
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