All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line is the great Patrick Cockburn from The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk, the most important Western reporter in the Middle East, of course.
All these terror war years long, and his latest book, and he's got a lot of them and they're all great, the latest is War in the Age of Trump.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Patrick?
I'm doing good.
Good to be back.
Thank you.
Really great to have you here, and I'm kind of pleased and kind of disappointed about what happened with the Assange hearings.
You were allowed to testify, but only in print.
They wouldn't let you talk, is my understanding.
They just submitted your statement for the record, but I know you've been, you know, like me, have really prioritized the issue of Assange and WikiLeaks for the last decade here ever since the Manning leak, and I found in the defense submissions, I found bits and pieces of your testimony, and Kevin Gosselaar was just sending me the download of the whole thing here.
Too late for me to read, but I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about what you told the court there.
Well, I had just written another piece about it.
I told them about the significance of the WikiLeaks disclosures in 2010.
I mean, we journalists in Baghdad knew a lot of this was happening, and of course the Iraqis knew all about it.
I mean, incidents like the famous incident, like when the Apache helicopter opens fire on a dozen civilians, including two Reuters journalists, and kills them.
But many other incidents which never got reported, individuals who, their car got maybe close to a U.S. convoy, usually the soldiers in the convoy that might shoot into the engine first and then shoot through the windscreen, or they might shoot through the windscreen first.
I remember once, I should explain that it was very dangerous to be seen by U.S. soldiers with a phone, because the soldiers had been told that guys with phones might be about to detonate an IED against them.
But of course, Iraq is full of people using their phone, but beside the road.
And on one occasion, I think it was near Ramadi or Fallujah, I remember getting out of the car to make a phone call.
And then suddenly there were sort of screams, and I sort of looked up, and there were these sort of half dozen U.S. soldiers running towards us, shouting, hands up, get down on your knees, and so forth.
Which we did.
I mean, fortunately, I speak English, but if I hadn't, and being Iraqi, I would have been shot very, very rapidly.
And then, you know, there were a few seconds where we might get killed, and then, you know, I kept shouting that I was a British journalist and so forth.
And I was speaking in English, so, you know, eventually they went away.
But, you know, there are endless episodes like that.
I wanted to make the point also that what Julian Assange from WikiLeaks did was really the journalism of the highest type, which is, you know, what's the point of journalism?
It is to find out important information from the government or elsewhere and hand it over to the public.
And that's how democracy works, or should work.
The public then, hopefully, has the information on which they can judge what things go on, and above all, you know, what its government is up to.
And WikiLeaks certainly did that, and it did that on a gigantic scale.
I don't know why you find some journalists saying that Assange wasn't really a journalist.
You know, he's a journalist in the electronic age, where this is transferred, you know, information is transferred electronically.
He also transferred raw information, not sort of edited little scraps, you know, like you often get in the newspapers or on television.
So, anyway, I wanted also to make the point to the court that seems to be extremely obvious, and something that actually a U.S. official unattributably made to me, I remember just after the Iraqi war logs came out in 2010, I was in Kabul, and he said to me, he asked me what the code at the top of the documents was, and I read it out, and he said, oh, that's not real secrets.
And what he meant was that this was a network called Sipanet, which was an archive, which over certainly half a million, maybe several million U.S. soldiers and diplomats and others had access to, and you just needed a password to get into it, and many of these guys could get into it.
But he said, look, you know, we're not stupid.
We don't actually put the names of our agents and spies and informants on this network.
I'm sorry, who was it you were talking to?
I was talking to a U.S. official in Kabul, but it was unattributable, and he was saying, you know, this was not a network which actually had the names, you know, had really secret information like the names of agents and so forth.
The main accusation of the British lawyers representing the U.S. government at this court in the Old Bailey in London has been that Assange and WikiLeaks endangered the lives of people who were working covertly for the U.S. government.
But, you know, I think we talked about this before.
It's on the record.
The Pentagon admitted that although it set up a special task force with 120 counterintelligence officers working on it to try and find at least one person who had been killed because of the WikiLeaks revelations, they couldn't even do that.
So actually, the people who really published this information was, you know, the U.S. government when they put it out to on a system that millions of people could actually get into.
One of them was Private Manning, Private Chelsea Manning, who then gave it to WikiLeaks.
But one of the weird things about the hearings was that this main accusation is not backed by any evidence at all.
They can't find anybody who was actually killed as a result of this, of the disclosures, you know, and the informants, some informants, they say, were, you know, exposed, but nothing much seems to have happened to them.
And mostly they seem to have been some politicians and a few others who were talking to the U.S. embassy or somebody.
And all that they really were vulnerable to was embarrassment.
So there's a few things there already to discuss.
In fact, on that last point, what about worst case if 50 informants had been killed or 100?
Does that really make a difference in the sense of whether it was the right thing to liberate this information for the American people and the people of the world to see or not, maybe?
Well, you know, this is one of those hypothetical questions which comes up, but it's not in the real world, you know.
I've been a journalist a long time and nobody's ever given me the name of an agent or nor have I seen a document the name of an agent that I might leak, you know, so it doesn't really happen.
What does happen all the time is that governments invariably say when there are disclosures of classified, supposedly classified information that they find politically embarrassing because it shows they've been doing exactly the opposite of what they said or they knew something that they've been denying for years.
They said, oh, whoever leaked this has blood on their hands.
They never do.
It's always untrue.
Um, and it was untrue in this case, but it was interesting.
This case is completely provably untrue because, you know, the Pentagon devoted a lot of time and a tremendous effort to find somebody.
You'd think somebody by accident would have been run over by a car or something.
Yeah.
And conceded in Manning's court martial under oath that, well, yes, your honor, we couldn't find anything.
That's pretty ironclad.
Yeah, that one moment they I mean, it's funny if it wasn't so serious.
They believed they'd found somebody was the Taliban claimed that they killed somebody, an agent, a U.S. spy who'd been unmasked by WikiLeaks.
So the task force pursued this and went all through the WikiLeaks documents and found the Taliban was lying.
They never had done that.
The name of this guy had never appeared in the WikiLeaks documents.
Somebody had been killed, but he wasn't one of the informants in the documents.
He wasn't referred to in the documents.
I see.
And Robert Gates at that time, the secretary of defense also conceded, you know, publicly that, yeah, there we don't really actually have evidence of that.
He said that those arguments were significantly overwrought.
Sure.
I mean, what's the real purpose of this, which is to intimidate journalists, you know, and if Assange is extradited to the U.S. under the the Espionage Act of 1917, that means that any other journalist is vulnerable to exactly the same thing.
And, you know, that he gets a classified document, you know, maybe the menu of the canteen in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.
And he's down as a spy.
This is the criminalization of ordinary journalism, of ordinary reporting.
It's the sort of thing, you know, we've seen happen in Turkey.
Turkey used to have a flourishing free press.
It doesn't have anymore because it's been crushed.
It's journalists, hundreds of journalists have been arrested, imprisoned, forced to run for their lives.
And how do they do it?
Exactly the same way that is proposed, which is that reporting is criminalized, that anything based on anything the government doesn't like.
They can claim that a reporter has got some classified material and therefore he's a spy, therefore he's helping terrorists.
Guys end up spending long times in jail because of this.
You basically can frighten people who might write anything.
That's the end of the free press.
Right.
I mean, and that's the whole thing that the modern disgrace of the free press here, where they're not sticking up for Assange, when he is the, you know, the precedent, he's the Rubicon they're trying to cross.
And almost all of the media is silent on it.
It jumps up in your face, doesn't it?
I mean, you don't have to think too often about it.
You know, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, said, you know, the First Amendment does not apply to non-Americans.
He sounds as though he's a bit sorry it applied to Americans, to American citizens, but it certainly doesn't apply to non-Americans.
Which is, of course, not true.
Right.
I mean, in American law, anyone subject to the federal courts is a U.S. person and is protected by the Bill of Rights.
So, yeah, but he's lying.
Spent a long time in jail.
That's right.
I mean, that's the whole thing is he's not in the county lockup.
They're treating him like he's already been convicted of mass murder or something in just all pretrial times, you know, here for years now, essentially.
And into the near future.
I mean, even if he's prosecuted in America, he won't be actually convicted for another couple of years from now, but he's going to be held in solitary from now through then, too, as he has been for the last year.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, his punishment has already begun, you know, a very severe punishment.
And it's basically this is to intimidate the media.
And to some degree, it has.
You know, why doesn't he get more coverage from the rest of the media that should feel under threat?
Well, you know, some people have pointed this out, Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of The Guardian, which published the cables, has said, you know, perplexed as to why journalists aren't more worried about what is happening to Assange when all he did was exact was very much the same as they do.
You know, there's an immediate reason, the coronavirus epidemic.
But, you know, this treating Assange and Wikileaks as pariahs long predates that.
The sort of fear in a lot of the media that Assange has radical politics that could probably alienate a certain number.
The most important thing is probably the the rape allegations in Sweden in 2010 that sort of frightens off a lot of progressives.
You know, there's a lot of the right thinks that somebody like Assange should be put in jail anyway.
But a lot of progressives avoid the case because they think that even the allegation, allegations which have never turned into a charge, he's never been charged with any of this, has nothing to do with the present case, that even the allegation somehow makes him anathema.
So they don't go to protest in his favor or even want to mention it.
You know, you look through all the columnists here in The Guardian, The Times and all the other newspapers, you know, you see some pretty good people.
I mean, Peter Hitchens and The Mail, Peter Obon, another great journalist.
They've written columns about this, but all sort of point out the amazing silence of the rest of the media.
Yeah, it's totally true.
And I think you're right.
There's something to that, that they're already afraid.
That's the problem is he doesn't need to be convicted for the chilling effect to have already kicked in.
And most reporters are a bunch of government stenographers anyway, so they don't need much incentive to decide to not stick their neck out the one time they might have on the margin, this kind of thing.
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You know, I want to go back to, it's all tied around together, but you know, back where you started about how this is essentially the perfect leak in terms of journalism, because it's not the highest, you know, above top secret nuclear codes and the identity of every CIA agent in Russia and who all get their throats slit and what, you know, just submarine technology and what, it's nothing like that.
It's all essentially day-to-day reports from the State Department and the military, and the military, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq, on this secret, not top secret, but just secret and confidential level that, as you said, millions of people had access to because the government had already decided, I guess, after September 11th, that in this case, we would err on the side of sharing information within the government, even knowing that we're risking that some of this stuff is more likely to get out, because we've already deemed that we don't care that much if it does, because it's not the kind of stuff that really would get you indicted for treason.
It's the kind of stuff that just goes to show that, look, here's Americans committing war crimes knowingly and cooperating with them as their subordinate, you know, native armies that they've built commit them as well, and here's what they call embarrassing things, which, you know, if it wasn't the government, it'd be criminal, the kinds of things that they do in the State Department cables.
And even, of course, coming up next, we're talking with Andy Worthington about the Guantanamo Files revelations in there as well, and this stuff has been the source for tens of thousands of news stories.
Literally, if you put in the State Department cables reveal or the WikiLeaks show or something like that into Google, you will get tens of thousands of results for such important facts that people needed to know.
Yeah, I mean, let me take up on that point, because one of the problems about this whole saga about Assange and WikiLeaks tends to make people forget just how important their revelations were, and, you know, I just, Daniel Ellsberg gave evidence at the hearings saying, you know, that what WikiLeaks had done was exactly what he did with the Pentagon Papers, that the two cases are parallel, are very similar, that the Pentagon Papers showed the U.S. was continuing in a very bloody war that it knew it couldn't win.
The same was true of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I looked up actually some stuff I'd written when the Afghan war logs came out in the summer of 2010, published by WikiLeaks, and I saw that I'd quoted, you know, one of the things about Afghanistan is why the Taliban, having been defeated, came back.
Why is it that this government, which in 2010, I think, had 90,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but this government still didn't seem to be able to, Afghan government still didn't seem to be able to win the war.
But when you looked at WikiLeaks, you could discover it very rapidly as to why this was wasn't happening.
The, yeah, I found a report from an American civil affairs official that he'd been in a place called Gardez, which is in south, southeast Afghanistan.
And a member of the local Afghan provincial council had just told him that they had said, had told him, quote, the general view of the Afghans is that the current government is worse than the Taliban.
And the official sort of laments that this is probably true.
And that's why the security is going to get even worse.
And why Afghans felt like that.
I saw another report, which was dated 22nd, October 2009, from Balk, which is in northern Afghanistan, which explains why Afghans had come to hate the Afghan government forces.
And I quoted a description from a U.S. report of how soldiers, Afghan soldiers and police had mistreated local civilians when they refused to cooperate in a search.
And that the report goes on to say that a district police chief raped a 16 year old girl when a civilian protested.
The police chief ordered his bodyguard to shoot him.
The bodyguard refused, was himself killed by the police chief.
You know, once you've read that, you kind of know why the U.S., that war, the war in Afghanistan is not going to end, why tens of thousands more people are going to be killed, why the U.S. is not going to be able to defeat the Taliban.
That's sort of endless.
There are endless stuff in the WikiLeaks revelations which tells you about how the world really works, which is, I guess, the reason that they want to put Assange in jail for a very long time.
Yeah.
And, you know, I want to go back to Manning and Manning's explicitly stated motive for leaking this stuff to WikiLeaks in the first place, and that was captured in the chat logs with the FBI informant, Adrian Lamo, who had promised Manning, I'm a journalist and I'm an ordained minister, so I'm double extra protected from having to testify against you so you can tell me anything.
So Manning spilled his guts to this guy who went to the FBI and the FBI said, well, see if you can get him to commit a worse crime.
So he said to Manning, hey, why don't you sell this stuff to Russia or China and make some money and get some power?
And Manning said, what?
Are you crazy?
This is all, you know, wrongs.
This is about righting wrongs.
And the American people, it's like straight out of Thomas Jeffersonian, you know, basic American principles of free speech.
This information must be brought to light so that the American people and the people of the world can see it and can debate it and can decide through their democratic processes how to implement reforms for the better.
I mean, you couldn't make this stuff up, Patrick, in the way that it was phrased as just absolutely the most perfectly civic minded, selfless act on behalf of these innocent people and by someone who was being made to participate in the torture of a guy simply for writing a newspaper article about Maliki's corruption.
And Maliki had him arrested and he was being processed to be sent off to be tortured to death by the Wolf Brigade or God knows what.
And Manning was told, Manning complained to his commanding officer, her commanding officer, who said, get back to work, private.
And it was then that Manning decided to take this stuff, try to leak it to the New York Times, try to leak it to the Washington Post and even Politico, who paid him no mind until he went to WikiLeaks to bring this stuff forward.
And that gets obscured.
But this really is God's gift to journalism here.
This is essentially perfect if you don't work for the national security state.
But if you're a regular human on this planet, this was for you.
Sure, yeah.
This was the greatest scoop, journalistic scoop, you know, in my journalistic lifetime.
And what's now happening in London at the Old Bailey Court is the biggest threat to the freedom of the press in my lifetime also, you know.
So it's one of the many weird things about the trial is that, you know, Trump-appointed officials were cited as being reliable and objective observers or witnessing guides to what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan and the danger to U.S. personnel, you know, as if these were apolitical figures.
You know, so all this is sort of basically nonsense, but very dangerous nonsense.
Right.
And, you know, so let me ask you about the tradition in England.
I know it's different.
There's no constitution, or for the Great Britain, I guess I should say, there's no constitution.
And they have the Official Secrets Act, which is essentially, it's like the worst side of the Espionage Act, but it is invoked over there where it's mandated by law, where here it's really just mandated by tradition, as I understand it, that the big companies kind of work with the government to decide what they should publish and whatnot, where in England, they really have to.
They could go to jail for printing a document, something like that, right?
Yeah, and people have gone to jail.
You know, it's all a sort of balance of power between society and the government, between the media and the government, you know, the present government.
And it's sort of in the tradition and the growing tradition of the sort of populist, nationalist regimes that have been popping up all over the world, you know, the so-called illiberal democracies, though that's probably being too kind to them, you know, from Hungary to India, Turkey, you know, Turkey used to have a flourishing free press, you know, very high level reporting.
And it's been crushed by basically criminalizing reporting that anything appears that the government doesn't like, you can find yourself in jail accused of terrorism, insulting the head of state and so forth.
So, you know, Britain and America are, that's the direction of travel.
They may not have gone that far down that path.
But and we'll see when we get to the 4th of January, when this court makes a decision on the extradition, we'll see, you know, how far we are going to go down that path, whether we'll go at all.
You know, but the things look pretty ominous.
Yeah, it reminds me of when Jose Padilla was arrested by FBI agents, civilian police on American soil at O'Hare Airport, an American born American citizen.
Then they turned him over to Donald Rumsfeld in the military who held him in a brig in South Carolina for a few years and let the CIA have access to him where they did God knows what to him with their no touch torture routines, you know, mostly drug induced and sensory deprivation and stuff like that.
But and the Supreme Court ducked it the first time.
But the second time when it was really coming back up to the Supreme Court for review, Bush flinched and went ahead and indicted the guy and tried him in court, which and then the jury went along with the most ridiculous case as a footnote there.
He's in prison right now.
But but the thing of it was that there was a real worry that this would go and that, you know, rather than good old Supreme Court, we can count on them to protect our freedom and strike this down, that they might just have rubber stamped it.
And Jose Padilla, who actually really was associated with Al Qaeda, you know, that they could have set such a huge precedent there.
And so that's kind of the thing here is, you know, I presume he will be extradited and tried and convicted in Virginia.
And then the question is whether the courts will say absolutely not or whether they'll say that's right.
It's a brand new century in America when it comes to national security reporting.
And today's the first day of the rest of your life.
And any of you guys are up for grabs.
I don't think his extradition is certain.
I think one can be sort of self-destructively pessimistic about these things.
You know, I think that, you know, I think people would.
I think that's another sort of line of attack on freedom of expression and criticism of the government, that the government wants to governments all over the place want to say, well, it's not, you know, it's all a done deal.
We're so powerful.
You're so puny.
It doesn't really matter who's right or wrong.
You know, they want to say, you know, that, you know, as an old saying, the battle goes to the big battalions.
But I think that's just propaganda put around by big battalion commanders to demoralize small battalions.
You know, if one keeps fighting this thing from day to day, one can win.
You know, one shouldn't believe I think there's a set of fatalism, particularly among progressive people or people defending what is essentially American or British democracy sort of from, you know, Jeffersonian democracy or British parliamentary democracy.
I think there's sort of fatalism, which is, as I said, is self-destructive because it means people sort of go to bed and think there's nothing we can do about this.
You know, it's all over.
I don't think one should think like this.
It's not a done deal.
Well, your life is testimony to that and all your great journalism showing people what the truth is and and, you know, what to care about the most, what to prioritize to try to affect and change.
And I I'm ashamed to say, Patrick, I have not had a chance yet to read War in the Age of Trump, but I'm going to get to it very soon here.
It's The Defeat of ISIS, The Fall of the Kurds and the Conflict with Iran.
The latest available at all your favorite book buying websites and, of course, a regular writer for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
And I have here the the file of your submitted testimony to the court in this case.
And we're going to run that on the blog at antiwar.com as well.
So I really do appreciate your time again on the show, Patrick.
Hope we can talk again soon.
No, that's great.
Thanks so much.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.
