03/24/08 – Greg Mitchell – The Scott Horton Show

All right, introducing our first guest today, it's Greg Mitchell, he's the editor of Editor and Publisher, the website is www.editorandpublisher.org, and he's a man with x-ray eyes, in economic terms, his foresight and dedication are what's called his comparative advantage that he holds over the rest of us, which I guess is why he's the editor of Editor and Publisher for a living, seems a good fit.
The new book is called So Wrong for So Long, How the Press, the Pundits, and the President Failed on Iraq.
Welcome back to the show, Greg, how are you doing?
Hi, happy to be here again.
It's very good to have you here, sir, and this is really an incredible book, a catalog month by month, year by year, of editorials that you wrote for Editor and Publisher, almost all of it critiquing media coverage of the war, the war that George Bush called America's golden moment, and now that we're five years later, 4,000 Americans killed, the Nobel Prize winning economists are saying this thing's going to cost us $5 trillion before it's over, in no small part taking care of the 50,000 something wounded, including all the post-traumatic stress disorder and brain injuries and so forth, seems like a good time to review how it was that we got here, and the biggest part of the story almost, really, besides what they were cooking up at the White House and in the Pentagon, was the role that the American media played in transmitting whatever ideas the government wanted us to hold to the minds of the American people.
Somewhere in this book you say the press is supposed to be the last line of defense for the people, and instead it turned around and was the defense for the government, against us.
Right, well, that's true.
As you mentioned, the book is, it sort of surprised me to be able to say at the fifth anniversary that it's really the only book that really looks at the whole history of the war, from the run-up to the debate over the surge, last fall.
It's surprising there were not more books that came out, so I guess this is the only real history out there of the full five years.
And as you said, it does chronicle month by month, you know, through my own writing, it does have an original, I wrote an introduction for it, a quite lengthy new introduction.
Joe Galloway, the famed war reporter, wrote a new foreword, and Bruce Springsteen provided a brief preface as well, so there is a lot of new material as well.
But, you know, it's useful to go back and look again at both the run-up to the war and what's happened since, and you kind of see, and these are a lot of stories in there that you kind of remember, you know they happened at some point, they're lodged in your memory somehow, but when you can read them in really chronological order, you kind of see how things developed, you see how public opinion was shaped, you see how what was being said at different stages of the war, particularly when you look at what pundits, columnists, talking heads on TV have said, how that went on year, month after month, year after year.
I know Tom Friedman of the New York Times gets a lot of heat for his, every six months saying, just give us another six months, but really that was the majority view of editorial pages and columnists and so forth, and it is instructive to see that played out over a long period.
Well, the most striking thing about the book is just how prescient you are.
You talk a lot about Vietnam in the book, and I guess your views of how seriously government is to be taken when they're trying to get us into a war were formed by that era, but it seems like you were one out of a thousand in the run-up to the war who could see exactly where this was going.
I think it's your interview with Bill Moyers from before the war, where you say, this is only the very beginning of the story of America and Iraq in the 21st century.
We'll be dealing with this for decades to come, you told him.
Right, well, I wish I was proven wrong, but I think I may have been just about the first person to use the word quagmire to describe what was coming in Iraq.
I think I used it about two weeks into the war itself, even before Baghdad fell, and I used it for many months after that, and I was sort of ridiculed and mocked by many people, what does Vietnam have to do with Iraq?
It's desert versus jungle, and the food is different, I guess.
It was interesting to note that John Burns, the famous New York Times war correspondent, when he did his fifth anniversary wrap-up last week, actually used, in the middle of his piece, he used the expression Iraq quagmire.
He didn't use it ironically, he didn't use it as a joke or anything like that, it wasn't in quotes, he just stated it as a fact.
And here, five years ago, I was being ridiculed for using it.
So, and of course, the point is that, you know, once we went in, and there were other people like Chris Hedges and Daniel Ellsberg and other people on the left who were making the same argument I was making, but it was that the Vietnam connection is really that, you know, once you go in, it's hard to get out.
Once you've lost a number of soldiers, it's hard to, you know, you continually want to justify staying in to make their lives worth it, as they say.
So, you know, the title of the book, So Wrong For So Long, is meant to connote this five-year adventure that we've had there, and I'm afraid I'll have to do a sequel five years from now.
Yeah, well, and it's really the six years almost, the five and a half, six years, since they started luring us into it.
Right.
And now, let me ask you this, aren't most of these reporters that we're dealing with here from your generation?
It seems like, if, well, you know, I was born in 76, right?
So I would have an excuse if, you know, I had never read a book before, something to think that wars are just great, and when the president says we ought to have a war, then hell yeah, we should.
But it seems like people who live through Vietnam, these are the reporters, it seems like they would know better than me, and they didn't.
Well, I mean, you're right, most of the, maybe not most of the war reporters in Iraq who went to Iraq were not mainly the problem, you know, it was mainly columnists and editors back home, a lot of the talking heads on TV, and you're right, they were certainly old enough to remember or actually have even been in journalism during Vietnam.
And so, yes, they should have known better.
Now, there were some older people like David Halberstam, like Joe Galloway, who I mentioned before, and others, a lot of people who actually have covered previous wars could see the dangers of what was coming, could see that the real, as you mentioned, the really human cost, as evidenced in Iraq by the phenomenal number of injuries, not the death so much, but the traumatic brain damage and lost limbs and so forth.
So the 4000 number, which we've passed this week, you know, is a little misleading, because you have many, many more higher percentage of grievous injuries than in any previous war.
So, and of course, you mentioned the financial cost and the trillions, which is also badly covered by the media until the past few weeks.
Well, tell me if this is right.
I actually find myself so immersed in the news all the time that sometimes I have trouble figuring out what it is that my neighbors think about what's going on in the world and so forth.
And I think my best approximation is that the media in general didn't really begin to even question the White House's point of view on pretty much anything until the Katrina disaster in 2005.
Was that pretty much the breaking point, do you think, where they finally decided, hey, wait a minute, this guy, George Bush, isn't some, you know, Gabriel?
Yeah, well, I that's often said, I'm not sure that that's true.
I mean, there was there was growing criticism of Bush.
I mean, his approval ratings were already, you know, plunging by then.
And, you know, there was growing criticism.
A lot of reporters, after the it turned out there were no WMD in Iraq, you know, they started being more critical, asking tougher questions and having some more honest reports from the war zone.
So that had already set in.
There's no doubt that the Katrina episode had a bigger effect on public opinion, I think, in terms of seeing that this guy was really was handling Iraq like he had Katrina.
So I think that was kind of the revelation.
But I think it was setting in that the, you know, that Rumsfeld was a screw up and, you know, Colin Powell had totally misled the country at the United Nations.
And Condoleezza Rice really did, you know, did nothing.
What where was she at?
So it was starting to set in that, you know, the administration as a whole was more incompetent than people had ever let on.
Well, now, maybe it's because I'm young and I don't have as much historical context.
But have you ever seen a press corps so entirely devoted to an administration and their party line as what happened in the run up to the war in the first couple of years of this war?
Well, it's hard to compare, because there really was nothing quite like this, where you had this drumbeat for war, you know, you had 911, which was unique, whatever, you know, whatever you think of it, it certainly was a unique action, we went after Afghanistan, which the press was certainly behind.
And, you know, that should have been, you know, when you look at the analysis, and some people say, well, the press wanted to prove they were patriotic, and the press wanted to get behind a war and the press wanted to, you know, strike back at 911.
Well, that was accomplished in Afghanistan, you know, it was sort of like, okay, we got that out of our system, and fine, you know, but, you know, then we went, went into Iraq.
And so I think that the people who say that, you know, that was understandable, the press coverage, I think that's true.
And in in terms of Afghanistan, but once you get another year later, and you're talking about Iraq, where, you know, we'd never, never had not attacked us.
And I think, you know, one of the other continuing themes in the book, which is, you know, I think illuminating, if a little depressing is I continually every, you know, 50 pages or something, talk about a new public opinion poll, which, you know, invariably keep showing that, you know, a majority or close to a majority of Americans continue to think that, that Saddam helped plan 911, and that Iraqi hijackers were among the hijackers, or and or that inspectors had found WMD in Iraq during, you know, before the war.
In fact, when it just last year, some of those numbers had gone up.
Yeah, they went up slightly.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's no longer the majority.
But, you know, ways, particularly when when we went to war, the last polls that were done just before we went to war all showed majority belief in those complete myths.
Now, who is to blame?
Well, you know, part of it was the media in general, doing a poor educational job.
Part of it is, of course, a large number of Americans who get all their news now from talk radio and from Fox News.
So the mainstream media didn't maybe have much of a chance with those people.
But nevertheless, it's just shocking.
I mean, I think when history is written, and I guess my book is the first first draft of complete history, I guess.
People go back and look at these numbers.
I just think it's it's one of the most shocking things about the whole episode that, you know, we went to war with public support that was based largely on myth.
Yeah, well, and largely, you mean 70%?
That's a super duper majority, I think.
Yeah.
Belief that there it was Saddam Hussein was behind that attack.
In fact, I remember in 2002, telling the guy that, hey, listen, man, you know, if you listen closely, George Bush has not even said Carly's arise has not even said that Saddam did it.
Yeah, I said to me, I always had a little bit nervous, they would kind of say it and then say, well, you know, it's not proven or, you know, we don't really know or whatever.
So they would say they would say the reason we have to attack Iraq is because of 911 dot dot dot seven second pause.
And then they'd say, because we learned the lesson that from now on, we have to attack everybody first.
Right.
But this guy's answer to me was that I must be crazy that, of course, Iraq did it or else why would we be invading them?
Yeah, a little backwards, I guess, like, surely we wouldn't be invading a country that didn't attack us.
Of course not.
So and of course, but, you know, I think there is I think another thing the book does is that this five year chronology does is shows, you know, shows people that as long as three or four years ago, the public opinion polls had already shifted to a majority view that a the war was a mistake.
B, it's not worth it.
It's not worth it as the expression would go.
It's not worth it continuing and see that we should start withdrawing and even that we should, you know, should withdraw within 12 months.
These became, you know, 40 percent and then 50 percent, 60 percent, 62 percent, whatever the current figure is for all those things.
So you kind of balance that to going back three or four years ago with what the media was saying.
And, you know, the media and their editorials and on TV and so forth was not sort of reflecting.
It's almost like where were Cheney most recently when they, you know, in the recent interviews where they said, well, what about public opinion being against the war?
And he said, so what?
You know, it's kind of where the media has acted.
And, you know, it wouldn't it would not have been a profile in courage for the media to take a stand here.
In fact, it would have reflected the majority of their viewers or readers.
Right.
And so it's I mean, sometimes you sometimes we demand that the media take kind of a courageous step or something that's a little ahead of public opinion.
But I noticed that in the book, you chronicled editorial pages, particularly of The Post, The Times, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today.
And it's not until the end of the book where you finally start getting in, I guess, early last year, you finally get the first newspaper editorials calling for withdrawal.
And up until this time, as you say, the polls have been reflecting the American people have been feeling that way for a long time.
And yet it was considered beyond the pale.
They would even write in the papers that, well, no one is seriously talking about a real withdrawal and an act like this was the kind of thing that, oh, well, you know, those lefty kooks over at MoveOn.org are talking about it, but nobody else in America is seriously considering leaving, even though a supermajority wanted out.
Right.
Well, that's it is odd.
You know, there there was this continual belief that, you know, progress is around the corner.
And, you know, I think one of the one of the little noted, really, uh, every everyone kind of has read about or knows about the media failures before the war, the W WMD misreporting and so forth.
But, you know, second on the list for tragic, you know, mistakes or that really led to horrible results was, as I show in the book, in the weeks before Bush's surge announcement.
If you want to relive that period, remember, the Iraq study group came out with their, you know, 10 point plan or whatever it was, and people said at first, well, this is very reasonable.
It calls for, you know, started negotiations, start of withdrawal somewhere down the line.
It was very modest, moderate.
And everyone thought that Bush was going to grab onto that like a lifeboat.
Well, and it was on the heels of the Republicans losing both houses of Congress.
Exactly.
And so, and, and then of course, it came out and Bush immediately did hands off and said, well, I'm going to come up with my own plan.
And then as, as that December developed, it was plain as day that he was going to propose some sort of escalation.
And yet, as I chronicle in the book, there wasn't a single editorial that, uh, a newspaper that came out before the surge and said, Hey, you know, hold off, or we got to get into this, or, you know, that there was no, uh, you know, there was very little coverage and, and no, uh, no one trying to, uh, put a halt to it.
And then once he announced it, then a lot of editorials denounced it, or a lot of columnists said, Oh, this may not be a good idea, but it was, it was way too late.
Right.
I remember Bush had basically announced in at the beginning of December, 2006, that I'll get back to you about the middle of January.
And then the press just said, okay, great.
Let's just take Christmas off.
That's the end of that.
So you say, what, what lessons did they learn?
You know, it was sort of like when we went to war, there was this March, March over several months where the press, uh, even the Washington editor of the Washington post said, uh, you know, well, we knew he was going to go to war.
There's nothing we could do to stop it.
So our coverage didn't make much difference.
Uh, there was a sense of a slow motion going to war.
It couldn't be stopped, et cetera.
Um, the same thing was true with the surge, even though it took place over a month, but nevertheless, the writing was on the wall.
And, you know, again, I wrote a couple of columns about it and I, I, I think I might've been the first to call the, call the media surge protectors and, um, you know, and it played out exactly the same way.
And now here we are a year and, you know, two months later and, um, you know, we have more troops there than we had four years ago.
And, um, so now you can debate whether the surge has had some success or some positive results, et cetera, et cetera.
But, you know, nevertheless, we went from the Iraq study group saying, let's start to pull out to, you know, a year and three months later with more troops there.
So in terms of the U S public opinion, and of course, American deaths and everything else, it's an incredible tragedy to be, to actually have a reversal.
And what, what all of us said at the time, you may remember when all of us were again, made fun of for trying to call this an escalation instead of a surge.
And of course that's what it turned out.
I mean, a surge is supposed to be for a few months, you know, a surge was temporary, a surge was, uh, you know, there were benchmarks and the surge would be reversed after a few months.
And, uh, you know, some of us were saying, no, this is like a Vietnam style escalation.
And of course that's exactly what it's turned out to be.
Yeah.
All the great results were supposed to have been accomplished by last fall, all the benchmarks and so forth.
The September I mean, a surge is supposed to come and go.
It's not supposed to be a permanent, not supposed to be permanent.
So, uh, let's stop for a moment, uh, Greg Mitchell, editor of editor and publisher and give credit where credit is due.
The guys at Knight Ritter newspapers, uh, which has since been bought by McClatchy newspapers, particularly, uh, Wolcott, Strobel, Landay, uh, Joe Galloway, who you've mentioned, uh, Lasseter and recently Nancy Yusef.
These are actually real reporters.
I like reading McClatchy.
I know that, well, just last week, for example, when Bush said that the Iranians had declared that they wanted to use nukes to kill a bunch of people or something, uh, Jonathan S Landay went and explained how, no, that's just not true.
And, and his article was better than any of the others that were written along the same lines that day.
Well, I think they have been models from the beginning.
Um, you know, because they don't, you know, they, they're, they're not small, but they're smaller compared to the times in the post that they, they went to alternative sources.
They have other sources.
They can think on themselves.
They're not stuck in inside the beltway mentality.
They, they look at sources below the top officials who leak things and, you know, uh, self-serving, uh, kind of statements and so forth.
So, and, and, but even since, um, the war started, they, they, they, they start off from a position of let's look at the, you know, uh, look at the facts, look at the truth, look at, uh, you know, get away from the spin zone.
And so a lot of their stories, they're very refreshing because you read them and you see that they don't, rather than most mainstream stories, which start from the spin, which start from the official statements, which start with a tremendous respect for whatever the Pentagon or white house line is.
And then they may chip away at, may chip away at that, uh, sometimes very well, but they, you know, you have this giant monument and then you chip away at it where with the McClatchy folks, they seem to start with, okay, well, it's a level playing field.
So these people say this, these people say that here's some facts over here.
And now we're going to look at the, at the whole level playing field and, you know, try to find out what's the, what's the truth.
It's a, it really is a different way of going at it.
Well, it's just kind of funny to hear you describe it like that.
I mean, this is ought to be journalism 101.
Even if you take journalism in high school or something, that's how it's supposed to be.
And this is the shining example as compared to the rest of them.
Well, I, I say in the book, um, you know, I, I've got, I think I mentioned my journalism school days and I, I say that, um, you know, about the first rule you're taught is just to be skeptical, not necessarily critical, not necessarily negative, but skeptical.
And so whether you're talking to the local, uh, you know, uh, highway, uh, department chairman, or you're talking to the, uh, you know, the secretary of defense, it should be the same rule.
If someone has a dog in the fight or someone is, uh, in a position where they're trying to justify something or they want to get something, you say, okay, well, that's an interesting that they're saying that I'll take that down.
But you know, God, they're biased or they're, you know, they're, of course they want us to, uh, you know, believe this.
And now I'll go out and find out what's really going on.
And, uh, you know, too often it's the official line becomes the, the only line.
And so that, that, that's why I keep using the word skeptical because skeptical is the key word, not necessarily critical.
Let's talk a little bit about censorship in the newsroom, self-censorship, uh, on the part of reporters, uh, particularly the ones reporting from Iraq, the embedded soldiers, uh, uh, embedded reporters, uh, sorry, slip of the tongue there, uh, toward the early days of the war.
And particularly Greg, if you can, uh, touch on the pictures and how we just don't see pictures of the consequences of this war.
I mean, when I think of the war in Iraq, all I can picture is the nice neighborhood and the green grass out my window.
I don't even know what the war in Iraq looks like, Greg.
Well, uh, again, that's a continuing theme in the book, uh, raised early on.
We have had a lot of coverage of the embed, the embedded program pros and cons, uh, rules and, uh, you know, whether the reporters were too rah-rah, uh, because of, uh, traveling with the, with the, with the soldiers and being protected by the soldiers and so forth.
So that's kind of one continuing theme.
And then another continuing theme is the images, um, you know, starting with the Pentagon's ban on showing the returning coffins from Iraq, um, which went on and year after year, year after year.
The Dover test.
Yeah.
Um, but it was, but it's more than that, as you, as you suggest, it's, uh, it became, um, you know, the failure of the mainstream media to show images of, uh, you know, graphic images of Americans who were injured or killed in Iraq.
Uh, now, you know, they, there's a couple of reasons for it.
One is that the Pentagon rules prevent showing anything like that until all family members have been notified that can take a three or four days.
And by that time, the photos are no longer news.
And so they get discarded because they're not news.
Uh, but the media at the same time could always use those photos later.
Um, they make choices all the time on what to show and they, they, they will claim they're just a matters of taste and matters of, uh, you know, not wanting to show, uh, you know, there are ways to show things, uh, graphic things without showing bodies and blood, but I would disagree.
And I think that as, as a show in the book, uh, as it goes along, there's more and more criticism of the failure to give Americans the true sense of the war.
Uh, they may have some sense of the war, but without seeing some of these images and of course they are available online if people want to look for them and so forth.
But in terms of, uh, you know, 90% of the public, um, has not really seen much on TV or in newspapers of a really graphic nature where they'd step back and say, geez, this really is, you know, blood and guts.
Well, part of this is the American people too, because the war is not, uh, just, uh, you know, someone giving a press briefing, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
With a hundred thousand dollar, uh, Hollywood set behind them.
But the thing is, as you point out in the book, uh, all these editors, their excuse over and over again, and it's the somewhat plausible one is that if they ever show a picture of a dead body anywhere in their newspaper, they get all these phone calls from people calling them America hating traders, right?
Right.
Yeah.
And some of them have, some of them have stuck to their guns and other times they have apologies or they say, well, we won't do that again.
And so forth.
So, um, I mean, I can understand, uh, the feelings of some people seeing these images, but you know, the greater good or the greater, uh, duty is to show anything, you know, in its true dimensions.
And certainly a war, um, you know, that we've, you know, we've lost so many people, but also the cost of all of us without, you know, I, I think we should focus on the human cost, but, uh, when you look at the financial cost and how all of us are going to be paying, I guess you'll be, you're younger, you'll be paying for it a lot longer than I will.
But, uh, you know, I have a, I have a 20 year old son and I have a daughter and so forth.
So, um, you know, we're all going to be paying for children and grandchildren for, uh, for the rest of the century for, for this war.
So I think, uh, the media has a responsibility to, to show everyone what's going on.
Remember when they were saying that the war was going to be revenue neutral?
Yeah, we were going to pay for it with the oil revenue and so on and so forth.
So I don't know what happened to that plan, but, uh, I guess the pipelines got blown up.
So that was a little bit of a problem.
Yeah.
Well, if anything, that'll just drive the cost up more, which ought to mean they can finance their own reconstruction even better, right?
Well, something like that.
I don't know.
I don't know where the money, I guess the money left the country and, uh, you know, brown paper sacks.
Now you mentioned, uh, Tom Friedman in the, in the term of the Friedman unit, which is, uh, how left wing bloggers make fun of Tom Friedman and his many, many statements as you catalog in the book of where, uh, right around the corner, the next six months are going and so forth.
And so in that sense, he has been targeted.
And yet in my mind, Tom Friedman is the perfect example of the kind of, uh, media commentator who completely gets away with it.
Here's a guy who has the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on his hands.
And yet somehow still to this day, here's a guy we ought to listen to.
Here's a guy who's really serious in his analysis of foreign policy.
Here's a guy that's gotten everything wrong this whole time.
Why is he still on anybody's editorial page anywhere?
Well, you know, there's a lot of others in that position.
Um, I hate single out poor Tom, but, uh, you know, it, it certainly pick on him, Greg, because he's not a neocon because he's a neoliberal, right?
Well, I, I'm not sure what he, what he is, tell you the truth.
Uh, but the, uh, the, uh, as I, as I state in the book, uh, you know, it's not just him, but many others, Bill Crystal being a leading example, you know, someone who can be wrong about everything and yet be on TV more than ever, you know, run a magazine and then end up getting a column in the New York Times.
Um, no, I mean, I'm not opposed to the New York Times having diversity, but, you know, to pick someone who is, has been wrong about everything, uh, forever, you know, it's, it's really a disservice to readers, you know, get someone who has some, some credibility and it has at least occasionally, right.
Uh, if you want to give a different viewpoint, but, you know, almost all of the people who were so wrong about the war have, uh, if anything, have flourished and, uh, you know, um, so that's, you know, there's no backlash, I guess you might say.
Yeah.
See, that's really the puzzling part too, because you would think that there would have to be some kind of major house cleaning at CNN and NBC, even if not Fox.
Well, what troubles me is, as we've seen it just, uh, in the last week or two in the, you know, tremendous amount of coverage about the, uh, war or the fifth anniversary of the war, um, and, you know, hundreds of stories or thousands of stories and hundreds of TV hours and so on and so forth.
And, um, in all that time, fingers were pointed, you know, analysis of everyone's shortcomings, this went wrong and so on and so forth, but the media didn't do hardly any reassessment of the media.
There was, when you think about it, maybe it hasn't occurred to you that much, but anyone, uh, listening, just think and say, well, wait a minute.
Did I, did I see much or did I see anything or, you know, I didn't see anything about the media's performance and all this.
And, uh, you know, I'm afraid it reflects, I mean, maybe it's shame or guilt or whatever, but I think maybe they want people to forget about it.
And, and when you, when you talk about this lack of, of backlash, just people who are wrong, it almost, it's almost as if the media feels, feel that it's not that big, that this war is not that big a deal.
It's almost like, you know, it's a bad thing or it's, it's something that's not good and a bad episode and so forth.
But you know, it's not all that bad because otherwise you would look at it and say, this is like the greatest tragedy this country has been through for, you know, 40 years at least.
And, uh, it was preventable and it was criminal and, uh, that's still going on.
And yet, you know, it's just not worth reassessing the media's own role in it.
And that's, you know, and no one pays the price.
Yeah.
Well, they'd almost have to resign in mass, I guess.
Right.
I mean, I'm just picturing in my head, Chris Matthews and the guys at MSNBC, as you're talking, uh, Joe Scarborough, the former congressman, these guys would all have to just resign in disgrace all at once.
They're just as guilty as anybody else.
There's the people they're covering.
Well, you know, like I said, it's almost as if it's, it's not that big a deal.
You know, they got the, you could say, well, we got this one wrong, but you know, it's an enormous one to get wrong.
You know, uh, it's like a doctor who, uh, you know, misdiagnoses something, uh, you know, a whole, a whole, uh, town is wiped out by some, uh, you know, some plague.
And well, I got that one wrong, you know, you know, I got that one wrong.
Yeah.
Well, in fact, in the book where you talk about the deaths, the first city on your list that you compare the number of deaths to is my hometown of Austin, Texas.
Imagine the population of Austin, Texas being wiped out over lies over nothing.
Well, that's the, what you're referring to is the, uh, you know, some studies that show that hundreds of thousands of rare, you know, it's generally the official line is that only tens of thousands of Iraqis have died, but a lot of studies suggest that to hundreds of thousands.
So it's, um, you know, when you compare that number to certain flex cities, you know, medium size or, you know, good size cities being completely wiped out.
That's where, you know, you can, you know, you think about that.
And then of course you think about the another 2 million that have fled the country.
So, you know, even if the surge, you know, I don't want to want to get into a debate on the surge, but even if the surge has been, you know, has been somewhat successful in curbing violence and so forth, you still have to imagine that the country has been, you know, emptied out of, uh, uh, of people and, um, already, you know, massive killing, sectarian slaughter and so forth.
So, um, yeah, I don't think anybody's just being the refugee numbers there.
Yeah.
The, uh, the, the 2 million something refugees who've had to flee the country.
I mean, that's for Austin's worth of people who've had to flee.
And that's incredible when you put it in those terms, when it's just add 2.5 million people, that's just a number.
But when you think of the entire population of Austin having to flee to Houston or something, that's a big deal.
Yeah.
Yep.
That's incredible.
Uh, now something else.
And if I understand this story, right, you deserve, uh, the lion's share of the credit for this.
The, the government at the beginning of the war, uh, did not want to classify any non-combat deaths in Iraq as part of the casualty count.
And you basically call them out on it and force them to revise that policy.
Is that right?
Well, I, I, I'd like to think that we did it.
I, I, at the time, uh, I, I thought it was mainly our response, our responsibility.
I don't know for sure, but, uh, you go back now, this is going back almost five years ago, uh, when there weren't as many casualties, but that the way they were being reported in the paper, they were separating out the, you know, the real, you know, death in combat with a, you know, a bullet versus, uh, all the many other, uh, casualties, which were coming from act, you know, people rushing to, uh, to a war zone and the, you know, the, uh, Humvee went in the ditch or people who died from other, uh, accidents and, uh, friendly fire and so on and so forth.
And they were trying to, uh, repeat the numbers down by, uh, just releasing the ones that were strictly speaking heavy combat.
And so we, uh, noted that and, uh, plugged away at it.
And after, uh, after a little while, uh, the papers, uh, their numbers changed and, uh, sort of continued to this day.
I'm talking with Greg Mitchell.
He's the editor of Editor and Publisher.
The website is editorandpublisher.org.
The new book is .com though.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Is it .com?
Yep.
Oh, my mistake.
I'll fix that right here in my notes.
The book is so wrong for so long, how the press pundits and the president failed on Iraq and, and something else that you've been focused on over all these years.
And this is, I think, uh, the subject that I first interviewed you about, if I remember right, is, um, uh, suicides among the soldiers and how little attention that that gets from the media and from the government.
Yeah.
And it's continuing.
I write about it, uh, almost once a week at our, our website and very, and blog postings.
Um, it continues to this day.
In fact, I just put up a posting at the Huffington Post on a story about a, uh, well, so I'm calling, you know, um, uh, Iraqi deaths or U.S. death 4001.
It's a guy who was, uh, had severe, uh, head injury, had facial surgery from an IED, came back to the U.S. and a few months later, he was found dead in his barracks and they can't figure out exactly why he died.
Um, may have been suicide or may not have been, and they, they haven't classified.
And so he's not, he's not considered in the 4000, um, because they can't prove anything one way or another.
So his mother is just besides herself saying, how can you not, this guy was, I mean, I've used this expression myself, killed by Iraq.
Uh, and it's like anyone who has served there who then is so damaged by it, uh, physically or mentally that they end up dying, you know, in a short, short time later, um, you know, should be considered death, dead, killed by Iraq and should be considered, uh, you know, fatalities just like any other.
Um, remind us if you would, the story of Alyssa Peterson.
Well, this was, um, a, I came across this, um, uh, from a, in a small radio station, someone, uh, who lived near her, I believe the fellow's name was Kevin Elston who, uh, lived, uh, near Alyssa Peterson's hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona.
And he, I guess, had been interested in this case and kept at it and got some freedom of information act papers.
And a couple of years ago or a year ago, uh, came out with the first information that, um, a young woman named Alyssa Peterson, who was a, I believe, a sergeant and was a, uh, sort of interpreter of the new, new Arabic.
And so she was assigned as a sort of interpreter in interrogations in Iraq.
And this was early in the war when they were particularly rough, uh, sessions.
And, um, she was sort of a deeply religious, religious young woman and so forth.
And she was so appalled by the interrogation techniques.
Uh, you know, maybe it was tort, absolute torture or just borderline torture, but she was so appalled that, uh, you know, just a few, few weeks after being, you know, begging to be taken off that detail, she was, uh, she shot herself to death.
And, um, you know, it seemed pretty clear that the, her experience and her disillusionment, uh, was, uh, was a main cause for that.
So I, I wrote about it and it got picked up many places.
Actually, I wrote about it.
I sort of returned to it a couple of weeks ago.
And again, it got a lot of attention.
It's just such a sad, uh, and revealing story.
It seems to really hit, hit, hit people.
Well, and then the military, I don't know if they outright lied about it, but they certainly did not tell the whole truth to the public or to the family.
I didn't know about it until, I mean, it took a radio journalist to get these papers, which revealed the, you know, the true cause and details of her death.
Her family didn't even know about it.
They, they said, um, so this is often the case with suicides, um, that, uh, they kind of go into limbo.
They go into a cosmic, uh, investigation that goes on for years.
And, uh, the press, you know, fortunately the local press, uh, sometimes gets, gets the true story.
A family member will say something, you know, maybe someone's being, um, you know, it's in the local paper and then someone talks to a family member and they say, oh yeah, yeah, it's, it was, uh, they say he shot himself.
And so that fact will come out, which we never would have gotten otherwise.
In the book, you make quite a few references to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and their satire news coverage on the comedy channel.
How important do you think those two shows have been to coverage of the war, Greg?
Well, you know, you can probably think back to yourself five years ago, they, they were not seen as so, uh, you know, liberal.
I mean, I think Jon Stewart has kind of come out of the closet a bit.
Um, and I think, um, you know, night after night kind of, um, making fun of the, uh, you know, the president and the pronouncements on the war, they call it Mesopotamia.
Um, you know, certainly has a big effect on people because there are more and more people who get much of their news from those two shows, which are, you know, for, for better or worse.
So we could, we could debate that too, I suppose.
But, um, you know, since so many people do, uh, get, get a lot of their attitudes from those shows, certainly that has an effect.
Now, Stephen Colbert, um, has also had a, uh, I mean, both of the shows, as you know, make fun of the media as much as, as much as the president and, uh, uh, the media itself is mocked regularly.
So I think that's contributed to the whole mood as well.
You know, Colbert and his famous white house correspondence, dinner routines, people remember it as, uh, making fun of the president, but he spent just as much time or nearly as much time making fun of the media and they didn't particularly like it.
And so they, when they gave him, when they, they either ignored what his routine or they, when they reviewed it, they said, Oh, you know, he wasn't that funny.
But I actually just watched that footage again about a week or two ago, I guess.
And it really is amazing.
Kind of the, uh, this giant audience of, of media people all sitting on their hands, you know, justice Scalia at least laughed at the jokes directed at him.
People didn't think it was very funny at all.
The media response was so defensive and, and yet, and there, the evidence was on, maybe in the, in the old days, first of the old days, no one would have known about this, um, the whole routine.
Um, and, uh, but now with YouTube and everything, people can judge for themselves, you know?
So people say, well, the media said he wasn't funny and blah, blah, blah.
Well, uh, gee, I watched it on YouTube.
I thought it was hysterical, you know?
So again, it gives the media a black eye because it's like, well, they're telling me something that's not true.
So what else aren't they telling me?
Right.
All right, everybody.
That's Greg Mitchell.
He's the editor of editor and publisher.
Uh, the website is editor and publisher.com.
The new book is so wrong for so long, how the press, the pundits and the president failed on Iraq.
And I know that, uh, there's, uh, an article, uh, that you wrote in the, uh, viewpoint section today on antiwar.com and another one in the frontline news section as well.
I've been writing all over the place lately.
So I urge everybody to Google your name and try to find out what they can.
And I want to thank you very much for your time today, sir.
Well, thank you, Scott.
It's always a pleasure.
And, uh, you know, I think obviously an important issue that I'm, again, I'm afraid I'm going to be back here five years from now giving you the same type of interview.
Well, you know, I'm afraid that that's probably true, although I will, I'll at least take a little comfort in knowing what an example you serve to the rest of them in the meantime.
Well, I appreciate that.
Thank you.
Thank you.