All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
We're joined on the phone now from Skopje, Macedonia, by my old friend and Antiwar.com's old friend, Chris DeLiso.
How's things going, Chris?
Very well, thanks.
It's great to have you back on the show.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
Now, you guys may be familiar with Chris's website, BulkAnalysis.com.
Always lots of great journalism there, and of course, if you go back and look at his Antiwar.com archive, there's a bunch of great journalism and opinion pieces for you there to entertain you.
But I wanted to have you on the show today, Chris, to talk about WikiLeaks and not so much the specific stories coming out of the WikiLeaks and certainly not the sex scandal stuff.
I want to talk with you about what WikiLeaks means because, of course, Republicans want to say they're a terrorist organization.
They're out to kill us all and whatever.
And I read this amazing quote from George Packer at The New Yorker.
He said, well, they have an agenda, so it's not journalism.
Get them.
And they're talking about indicting.
I don't think they have indicted, but they're talking about indicting Assange under the Espionage Act and all these things.
And certainly, WikiLeaks is not the same as The Washington Post.
It is something new and different.
But let's just start with that.
Is it so new and different that it's not journalism?
That it's something outside what we would traditionally think of as First Amendment protected behavior?
Well, first of all, this has been such a big topic that in changing almost daily, I haven't written anything about it, to be honest, because it's just so much stuff is coming in and every day I'm forced to take a rethink of what is actually happening with this.
There are two things.
If it's just a dissemination of data, of documents coming in and out, and there's no intervention, then it's not specifically journalism.
But when they made the film about the Iraq War atrocities and so on, then it becomes journalism once you have some intervention with the source material, which leads to other issues.
But for me, the prime interest is the structure of what's happening since I work in the media and what this actually what it all means for us in the future and for the future of information and communication.
Well, I wonder, even on that point, though, before we get too much into that, if the Toledo Blade just published a document on the front page without commentary, we think of that as journalism, right?
Because it's on the front page of a newspaper.
But if there's not a story accompanying it, it makes it not journalism?
I'm not so sure.
No, no, no.
You may well be right.
And as I said, Wikileaks has done journalistic things before, so they have a reputation as, you know, as that is part of their thing.
So they could, you know, qualify.
Yeah.
But this is this is really the issue with open leaks and all these other things happening now is what are their mandates going to be?
What is their what is their angle with what they're doing with that primary source material?
So we might end up having a whole bunch of, you know, varieties and sub varieties, and maybe the whole concept of what is media and what is journalism will change fundamentally.
Yeah, it seems like it already is.
And that's the thing about the Internet.
It's pretty much too late for them to take it back.
They have, last I checked anyway, more than 1500 mirrors of Wikileaks up right now.
And in fact, I just noticed it for the first time today, actually, the button on the front page of Antiwar.com, where our Amazon button used to be, we're boycotting them.
But where that button used to be is now button Wikileaks.antiwar.com.
And that will forge you to the most robust, most recently updated, nearest mirror to you.
And that kind of thing is not going away.
Of course.
So why it was it was funny when you saw how the government reacted and then other people who had, you know, been miffed by this in the first week or so kind of a hysterical reaction.
But now they're getting used to it.
And the question becomes, you know, how to work with it, because this is obviously, when you have that many mirror sites and things going on there, there's no way that they're going to ever be able to get rid of this, no matter what they do to any specific individual.
Right.
Well, the question is, how do you live with it?
Right.
And that's the thing.
And that's going to prove itself to be the case here really fast as Julian Assange sits in jail and Wikileaks continues on.
It's almost as decentralized as the computer networks it's operating on.
Yeah.
Well, so how do you think this is going to change the journalism of, say, the legacy papers that we've all been dealing with this whole time, the Los Angeles Times and that kind of thing?
I think what it is doing is it's making us all more sort of worker bees.
You have the you have this huge amount of data and the media demands with especially with the speed of information now that people expect, you know, to refresh your browser and in five seconds, there'll be a whole bunch of new stories.
People expect more and more information all the time.
And with this sheer volume of data, there's this going to be this sort of evolution of journalism as well as history writing and a sort of instant history that can develop.
But for me, what is interesting is, you know, we've seen in every war in the past that the media can distort events, say, if a journalist is present at a massacre that didn't happen and they can say the massacre happened and so on, that can distort events and then they report that.
But now there's this very interesting thing that even the primary sources could end up being distorted, despite the fact that they exist as a record which you could find.
Right.
Because because, you know, there are really so many things.
And the first article that reports what the what the document said or what was the most important thing in the document that's going to become the, you know, the established history, even if, you know, somewhere down the line, they said, well, actually, that was disinformation.
Or, you know, the guy said this for this reason, and it was meant for that people will will take whatever is the first interpretation of the fact.
Right.
Well, we saw that we saw that in the first week here, when David Sanger in The New York Times came out with this piece about the North Koreans has supposedly sold these awesome new missiles to the Iranians.
And then it turned out that not only was there no evidence, and even in the memo, it was pretty clear, there's no evidence that these missiles even existed.
Yeah, they've been paraded outside in North Korea.
But those were suspected to be mockups, not actual working rockets.
And they never been tested.
And there's no evidence they were ever sold to Iran.
And instead, all we have is one part of a diplomatic memo quoted out of context by the liar David Sanger.
Yeah.
And that became the dominant narrative for the first three, four days of this other than Julian Assange is the devil was Iran has missiles that can now hit England, I guess.
And the other one, as far as I remember, was the most celebrated story was Hillary Clinton authorizes spying on the UN, right?
That was one of the very first ones.
For me, what became interesting, I'm interested in the structure of things, how things actually work.
Reading a few follow up pieces that were citing various security officials in the US government about the way that such a, you know, that such a an operation would work.
And the very fact that they said many diplomats just ignored that request.
And that in itself is very interesting.
And then they're saying, you know, what channels the State Department has, how they request certain kinds of information, what they requested for, what are the chances of it being used on and on who and so on.
So for me, that is a very valuable sort of civics education and how the government actually works more than the specific details of you know, who did what to who.
So in that sense, for me, WikiLeaks is valuable in this sense, just just by having the raw material, you can come to your own conclusions, but that it is there.
And you know, for everyone to be able to use.
Well, yeah.
And you know, this is where the real journalism comes in reading the Guardian and so forth to get some of the context.
And another thing that happened that first week was Larissa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane wrote a piece at Raw Story about and there were a few things in it.
But the point I'd like to focus on is how Mayor Dagan, the head of Mossad, is discussing with the Undersecretary of State for killing people or whatever, a guy's name, Nicholas Burns, and saying, yeah, we need to support Baluki and Kurdish separatist factions inside Iran as part of our plan for regime change.
Well, we already know what that means.
That means support for suicide bombers and PJAK, Marxist death squads.
And so these guys have already been at war in Iran.
We know what he's talking about.
She went and got the quote from Robert Bair, the CIA officer, saying that's what it sounds like they're talking about to me.
And so now we have, you know, the journalism and the confirmation and the explanation, the background behind what does it mean when Mayor Dagan says to Nicholas Burns, let's support PJAK or let's support Kurdish separatists.
Now we know what he's talking about.
The primary source is one thing.
The context is something else.
They could have been talking about the student group that just wants more and better elections all the time.
Right.
But no, they weren't.
They were talking about terrorists.
Right.
Well, the very interesting that's happening now with, you know, open leaks and various others, Brussels leaks, I think, Balkan leaks.
I've heard like five of them and they're morphing more and more every day.
And this is a different model.
And it sounds to me, I don't know the fellow who's doing it, but it seems what they want is to get the glory without having to take the heat by saying we're just going to take that.
We're going to be a recipient for this information and then people can, you know, nominate it to the entity of their choice, the NGO or whatever organization, foundation that they would prefer to be the one that will publish it.
And this is a very slippery slope because all of the problems in the past with leaks of false information about the Iraq war and millions of things throughout time before this has been deliberate leaks of false information for political purposes.
And if you want to become a clearinghouse for this, then this means that you're simply trying to be at the center as an influence peddler, you know, just to be sort of a person in the middle who doesn't have to actually do anything, but people will actually come to them to get whatever various agendas they have.
All kinds of vetting is dangerous.
If, you know, the original thing with WikiLeaks are saying now is that they took out some names where they thought it could get somebody killed or whatever.
How do you know?
Do they have a better judgment?
You know, you could have someone killed for something that doesn't seem randomly or remotely like that.
And the other thing is, is that then there's somebody in the Guardian or wherever that knows more than we do.
And it's all incredibly arbitrary.
So one school of thought is either you release it all or you don't.
The other one, which is seems to be what's happening, is that there will be various pet projects that sound like the sort of, you know, we love freedom of speech and so on and open society and transparency that actually will not be that way.
So it's going to be harder and harder to choose and to see.
So this, you know, this great service of leaking documents might end up just causing more disinformation and confusion the more, you know, different franchises branch out from it.
Well, what about the danger of WikiLeaks being used that way itself?
I guess you're saying if they would just dump everything at once, it would sort of ameliorate that.
If they dump everything at once, I think you're just gonna, a lot of stuff will just never get read.
Because I mean, you've had what, 1% or less than 1% of all the stuff they have.
It's come out and it's been two or three weeks.
And people haven't hardly digested that yet.
So I don't know how the whole world, the media economy, as it were, could handle that.
It's not like they have to release it now or else, you know, everything will go to hell.
If the things are going to hell anyway.
Everybody sees that this is a new sort of media model.
And so the question then for the powers that be and for other people who want to get involved is where is the angle going to be?
In a way, it's depressing for traditional journalism.
Because you know, you could, these kinds of sources are very hard to come by.
And you could in the old days, let's say until a few weeks ago, you could do research for a long time for one story and get a great sense of gratification out of finding, you know, some such thing.
And now that it's on an industrial scale, it's sort of like all you're left to do is interpret or comment.
And, you know, where's the fun of the research now, in terms of the human side?
That's just one observation.
I don't know if that will actually be the case, but it just seems that way at the moment.
Well, you know, once it came out that apparently, you know, this guy Bradley Manning had been arrested and that he had told Lamo the rat that he had given up this, that and the other thing, it would make sense to think that beginning that day, if not before, that all the at least most powerful intelligence agencies of the world would have done everything they could to, if not infiltrate, if they couldn't infiltrate, at least try to manipulate something like WikiLeaks and start uploading documents of their own, right?
Try to mix this in with that or who knows what.
Because, and you can have, as you were saying, single source document comes out.
And so one State Department flunky talking to another doesn't necessarily mean anything, but then they can turn it into whatever they want.
We've seen a lot of anti-Iran propaganda come out of the thing in Pakistan, where, you know, they could have, this is the kind of thing that they could have started a war with India.
Because of, you know, fake WikiLeaks documents saying that, you know, the US thinks all terrible things with Indian generals or whatever.
And then, of course, they made a apology the next day.
But for your average, you know, person in a village somewhere in Pakistan, you know, it's the first headline that's going to make the impression, not the apology afterwards.
So this was just one example of this could happen on any scale, for any reason, probably for multiple reasons or multiple places in the same time.
And it will be a bit of a more anarchic media world.
The question is just going to be, will the public care after a while?
Will it become so, you know, Survivor was a fascinating show in the first year.
And then after this, people sort of get used to it.
Will this actually result in the public saying, it's just another leak?
Why do we care?
Right.
Well, and you know, it is interesting to think about.
Yeah, well, and it's even before WikiLeaks is we all kind of have scan of fatigue.
Anyway, we all know that they're violating each and every one of the Bill of Rights all day, every day.
And still, the outrage just isn't there.
Not over the torture, not over the spying, not over lying us into war, starting wars, you know, pretending like they're hunting Osama bin Laden or whatever, like nobody overthrows them for anything.
So, you know, some of these leaks are talking about the danger that Israel might get us into a nuclear war with Iran.
And yeah, you know, let's talk, you know, as far as TV is concerned, let's talk about how anti-American Julian Assange is and all the trouble he's trying to get us in instead of all the trouble the Israelis are trying to get us in actually in the WikiLeaks themselves.
You can just take it and do whatever they want with it.
Right.
It's curious that you mentioned that.
It's funny.
Some of my friends in Europe are sort of amazed.
Here is sort of the center of the world, you know, people coming from everywhere.
And they say, how can, you know, average American citizens not be, you know, more up in arms about various things here?
And I think, you know, they basically don't care.
The world ends beyond the, you know, at the at the oceans.
And most people just want to get on with their life.
And these things, if they don't directly affect them, they're not going to be interested.
So it's very rare that people are actually interested in foreign affairs for, you know, for its own purposes, rather than, you know, just as it affects them specifically.
And that's probably part of the part of the problem.
Right.
Scopia, Macedonia might as well be Mars.
If we did airstrikes and bombed the women and children of Scopia, Macedonia, Americans wouldn't care about that.
They're not human beings, really.
They got a whole ocean between here and there.
Might as well be outer space.
Please don't do it, Scott.
I'm anti-war, man.
I'll stay this way, I promise.
You be safe over there.
All right.
Thanks very much, Chris.
I really appreciate your time on the show today, man.
Okay, thanks.
Take care.
All right, everybody.
That's Chris DeLuca.
So from Balkanalysis.com, check out his old archive at Antiwar.com as well.
We miss you, pal.
All right, we'll be right back.
