Jason Ditz, managing news editor at Antiwar.com, discusses the notable early discoveries within the huge cache of leaked documents from WikiLeaks, the impressive Afghanistan ‘War Logs’ spread set up by the Guardian, the leak’s effect on public opinion and Congressional war funding, roaming U.S. assassination squads in southern Afghanistan and evidence that IED attacks are as deadly and unstoppable as ever.
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I'm not a cool guy anymore, is it like everyone before?
I took a look at all the signs, they're rolling over in my mind.
Jason Dentz is the managing news editor of Antiwar.com.
He keeps an eye on every newspaper in the world, all day, every day.
And he compiles all of it in order of most important to you at news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you?
I'm doing good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
All right, so we just got a little bit of wisdom from Eric Margulies about the meaning of these Afghanistan war logs.
But I thought maybe I could get some detail from you.
I know you've been poring over these stories here.
First of all, can you just kind of describe sort of an overview to people of what kind of documents we're looking at here, how many, and what form, and that sort of deal?
Well, we're looking at about 92,000 documents total.
Yeah, I love that, man.
That's just a lot.
It's amazing.
And obviously, since it's been out for less than 24 hours, I haven't even close to looked at all of them.
No, no, of course not.
There's just an incredible number of incident reports and statements on policy, and it's amazing.
There are dozens and dozens of these stories which, if one of these papers leaked on a normal news day, it would be the top story, no question.
All right, give us some examples of that.
Well, Eric Markle has went over quite a few of them.
I mean, the missiles, the whole shooting down the helicopter thing, the shooting civilians at checkpoints, shooting civilians while on patrol, shooting civilians when they just happen to be close to a convoy.
I mean, there's just an incredible number of these reports in here.
So these examples of civilian deaths, say drone strikes or checkpoints, that standing alone on any given day, these would be top story.
Right, there are easily 40 or 50 top stories out of this leak, and probably quite a few more than that as we delve further into it.
Right, that's just first glance there.
So now the guys over at The Guardian have put together this interactive map where it's got all these colored dots.
You click the colored dot and it pulls up a key report from that area at some certain point in time.
How's that working?
Oh, The Guardian's done an incredible job with these.
They call them their war logs.
I mean, they have spreadsheets and video interviews, a video tutorial on how to read these documents, and it's amazing.
Well, and even The New York Times kind of put together something.
Yeah, but I think The Guardian does have them beat.
Now, you know, when I was talking with Eric earlier, he was pointing out that, I guess if you were just listening to Eric Margulies' interview, you know that we already know that the Pakistanis have been backing the Taliban in Afghanistan, and we've known that this whole time because that's what Eric says and has been saying on this show for years in a row and in writing too.
But now The Times and The Post apparently are really playing that up.
I saw on MSNBC this morning they're really playing up the angle of those dastardly Pakistanis.
Now that they'll finally admit that this part of the story is true, they're kind of really hyping it up against them.
But Eric was saying that at The Guardian, all they ever say is, well, there are some quotes in here of people saying that, that a sergeant reporting to his lieutenant that, hey, I heard this, or something like that.
But there's no smoking gun about it in these actual documents.
Is that right?
Right.
Well, certainly there doesn't appear to be a smoking gun, and if there is, I haven't seen it yet.
But a lot of the stuff that they report seems pretty absurd.
There's, I mean, PLOS to assassinate Hamid Karzai, the ISI, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, Pakistan's largest of several military intelligence groups, who is being blamed for all of this.
But perhaps the most incredible one is that the ISI supposedly was being accused of plotting to poison all the beer in Afghanistan because they figured it would kill a lot of Western troops.
Well, yeah, I guess it's not the locals drinking the beer they're on.
Right.
Geez.
Now, here's one from The Guardian.
Afghanistan war logs.
Secret CIA paramilitaries role in civilian deaths.
Innocent Afghan men, women, and children have paid the price of the Americans' rules of engagement.
America's lawless Hessian mercenaries over there.
Right.
And again, the fact that the CIA has this quasi-legal assassination team roaming the Afghan countryside killing people that they assume are bad guys, it really isn't new.
But the details of just how widespread their killings are and how many times they've just killed women and children is certainly a revelation.
And the fact that it's coming out this way is getting it a lot more coverage than it ever got before.
Well, it's almost like the Phoenix program or something, it sounds like.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, the CIA semi-confirmed the existence of programs like this several times in the past.
I mean, they're always sort of tight-lipped about details, but we've known that there were CIA assassination programs in Afghanistan for years.
And it's just now that we're getting the real specifics in these reports.
Now, what do they say about Osama bin Laden in here, and who says it?
Well, to be honest with you, I don't think I've seen anything about Osama bin Laden in here, in anything that I've read anyway.
Yeah, I haven't found it.
I keep hearing that they say there's stuff in here about that he was in Quetta or Quetta, however you say it, and I think that's in southern Pakistan.
Yeah, well, it's in the far western part of Pakistan.
It's part of Pakistani Balochistan.
Which, you know, at least if that much is true, that's counter to the conventional wisdom that he's, you know, hiding up in the mountainous region up in the north of the country, right?
Right, but they have had the Quetta Shura, which was also where they assumed all the Taliban leaders were hanging out in Quetta.
But obviously they haven't got any specific details.
I mean, Quetta's a big city, and they're probably not hanging out in a hotel or anything.
They probably are somewhere in the area around there.
Well, you know, one thing, just looking at the dates on here, I mean, I don't really know what else to ask you along those lines, so who cares?
Let everybody else look into it.
It's all on the Guardian's website.
It's all at wikileaks.org.
But just looking at the dates on here, Jason, it puts the lie to the rat Adrian Lamo's allegation that somehow this was going to get American soldiers killed.
This ends in, what, December 2009, something like that.
There's nothing operational here.
This is not putting American soldiers' lives at risk.
If anything, you know, if the American people cared at all, this would be what would get them home safe, so they could all have jobs as local cops or whatever, you know?
Right.
If this is putting American soldiers at risk at all, it's because it's going to stir up a lot of anti-U.S. sentiment because of the shameful policies that they've set about over the last five or six years.
I mean, most of these documents are 2004 through 2009, and I'm sure it's going to rile up a lot of people, and the fact that it riles up some people might put some people at risk, but it's not the leaks that's putting them at risk.
It's the policy.
Seems obvious enough, but we've just got to keep telling them over and over again.
By the way, a friend in the chat room just sent, Osama bin Laden reported to have issued orders to suicide bombers in Afghanistan.
This is at theguardian.co.uk from the war logs.
We'll be back with Jason Dix, news.antiwar.com after this.
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That's 760-569-7753.
That's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott.
I'm talking with Jason Dix.
He's managing news editor over at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com, and like I was saying when we went out to break Jason, somebody in the chat room sent me the link here.
Osama bin Laden reported to have issued orders to suicide bombers in Afghanistan.
This is from 2006, and let's see here, track and number this.
I'm trying to figure out where the report came from, who it was that says so.
The rank or something, anything, I don't know, but it does say here that apparently their intelligence anyway is saying that there were these meetings going on in Quetta, Pakistan.
They do have a QU going on there, so I think it's Quetta, and that Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden were there, and it says here that they were meeting regularly once a month, and there are usually 20 people present.
I tend to think that it ain't true, but, you know, who knows?
In fact, they say that he had ordered an attacker, a suicide bomber, to go and kill Dostum, the Secretary of War.
General Dostum, of course, has been in a few scandals himself.
But, yeah, these certainly fly in the face of, if they're true at all, they certainly fly in the face of Leon Panetta's claim that they haven't had any decent intelligence on where bin Laden is in years.
Right, that is what Leon Panetta, that's what the director of the Central Intelligence Agency said, that they haven't had any good intelligence since 2001, right?
Right, well, he said the early 2000s.
He didn't really give a specific date, but, yeah, he said they haven't had a real decent idea since then.
Well, who knows?
I tend to think he's just hanging out in some guest house up in the mountains where nobody can get to him, or in a valley between some mountains where nobody can get to him up there, but who knows?
Maybe he's at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C.
Okay, so let's just kind of go through some of the stories here.
The Guardian, I guess, is where you found the best reporting.
First of all, direct people to the front page of Antiwar.com.
You'll see, I guess, the second or third headline is U.S. Strongly Condemns Mass Publication of Afghan War Docs.
It's by Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
On the front page down, you'll see links to, I guess, all the biggest headlines that jumped out at you here.
Did you want to talk about some of these?
Well, yeah, there's so many things to talk about here.
I mean, how the coalition is losing the IED war, which, of course, details something.
Again, we really knew that the IED attacks have continued to escalate year after year despite all these claims of progress on that front and despite the billions and billions of dollars that they've pumped into anti-IED programs.
But, again, it gives us a lot of detail on just how bad things are getting, and they seem to be quite a bit worse than officials were letting on.
Well, that was one of the things that Eric focused on, was that the people running the war don't believe in it.
They say one thing to each other and turn around and tell the camera something else.
Part of this makes me wonder, too, all this bombing wedding parties and the Phoenix program type stuff with the CIA going around killing people, whether they're not doing this on purpose because they want the blowback.
They don't want to be able to pacify the country.
They want the conflict to continue.
It's just now then, if that is right, which maybe it's not, but if that is right, then it looks like they've overdone it and they've only succeeded in getting themselves driven out of the country, maybe in slow motion, but the army guys seem to have concluded already that the war is lost.
Right, and that's particularly incredible right now because all of those top officials are, of course, right now, petitioning Congress for more money for the war, and they're all telling them how the corner's just about to be turned and momentum is picking up and things aren't going as bad as the media is claiming when, of course, these documents show that they're going at least as bad as the media has been claiming and probably worse.
Yeah, it's funny to see the TV coverage, you know, where they say, oh, well, you know, what was the motive of this guy, Bradley Manning, anyway?
It was probably a bad motive, even though it's already settled that he had a crisis of conscience.
He could no longer abide being a participant in war crimes, and so he decided to do the right thing and leak the truth out of the highest of motives, of any, you know, just the quintessential whistleblower.
They try to make it sound like Bradley Manning's after a book deal, and then their second talking point is, oh, but this is all really old.
This is all really old, even though, of course, the Pentagon Papers came out, and they were years out of date by the time they came out, and yet they still showed that the entire war had been a lie up until, well, a couple years ago, anyway.
It's not like Nixon started telling the truth when he inherited the damn thing from LBJ.
Right, and again, a lot of these documents are showing Bush administration policies, but they also show the early, early part of the Obama administration's policies.
Yeah, almost the whole first year, right?
Right, and not much has changed, and if anything, things just keep getting worse.
All right, so let's go through some more of these stories here.
Talk to me about some of the NATO troops, the Germans and the French and the British.
Are we learning anything more about their role in the war?
Well, the big focus seems to be on the British, which I guess isn't surprising, because the British troops are the second largest force there, plus, of course, the Guardian is a British paper, so they would tend to focus on them.
And the British troops are in some of the more heavy fire zones, but they're engaged in quite a few more friendly fire incidents with Afghan troops and with each other and with other NATO troops than we ever really hear about.
There are just an incredible number of friendly fire incidents going on over the course of this five- or six-year span.
You know, I'm pessimistic that this will have the impact it should have.
I hate that, the effect that it should have on the American people.
However, this could really be a deal-breaker for the French and the Germans.
It was only, what, just a couple of, well, maybe it was six months ago or something, or four months ago or something, where WikiLeaks put out that CIA report about how to manipulate the people of France and Germany into supporting the war.
France to show them Obama.
In Germany, tell them it's all about the women.
Or maybe it was the other way around.
It's all about women's rights, whatever.
This is the CIA plot to somehow make the people of Europe think that they're on the side of the angels fighting that war.
And I wonder if this is going to be the final nail in the coffin for NATO participation in this war.
Well, you would think it would be, but, again, I'm pretty pessimistic, too, that it actually will be, because those talking points aren't going to go away.
I mean, they can still sloganeer all they want about women's rights in Afghanistan and how the Taliban are anti-woman, and they'll be right about that.
But, of course, then we have all of these reports of them shooting women and children, the U.S. troops.
And you would think that would have some sort of impact, that if we're doing this for women, maybe we shouldn't be shooting so many women.
Yeah, you would think that sometimes these ideas would conflict with each other.
I guess not.
The 12th edition of the Newspeak Dictionary is out now, and those terms are no longer contradictory anymore.
But, no, maybe that's a slogan for the anti-war movement, Jason.
Hellfire missiles are sexist and prejudiced.
It should, you would think, help out with the fighting against the war funding vote coming up in the House, too.
But exactly how much, I don't know.
Because, of course, the Senate just sent the emergency war funding bill back to the House without all of the added domestic spending, and they're going to have to vote directly on the war itself in the next probably week or two, and they're going to have to do it with all of these stories just having come out.
Well, you know, I'm usually not one to believe in the power of the people to control democracy or anything silly like that, but maybe if there's a day for people to call their congressman and say, you know, I'm one of the ones who's angry and I'm not alone, maybe today's the day.
Jason, what do you think?
Maybe, but, again, it's so hard to say how much of an impact this will really have other than to be another embarrassing thing for those that vote in favor of continuing the war.
Yeah, well, you've got to get that point hammered home and the big lie revealed rather than just the little ones.
But that's it for this part of the show anyway.
Thanks, Jason.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
