All right, y'all, welcome to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, we're on ksradioaustin.org, we're on lrn.fm and anomalyradio.com and antiwar.com/radio and whatever, I don't even know what else, there's more, but I don't know what, can't keep track of it all, 88.3 in Riverside, California, all right, Jason Ditz is first guest on the show today, welcome back, Jason, how are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott, how are you?
I'm doing great, thanks a lot for joining us, especially on short notice like this.
Now, everybody, you know Jason, he's the news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com, and I was thinking since you read every newspaper on earth all day every day in order to make sure that the readers of antiwar.com have access to everything that's going on, maybe you could help me kind of go through and catalog what it is that we've learned or that you've learned that's been learnable from the Iraq war logs leaked by WikiLeaks last Friday, Jason, we've had about a week for different journalists, different papers to go through, I'm sure you've done a bit of your own looking through the documents yourself, and I wonder, I guess, well, first of all, I could try to form this in the form of a question, I keep hearing people say that, oh, well, there's nothing new in there, and I wonder if that's really right, is there nothing new in the Iraq war logs?
Well, there's nothing new from the perspective of officials that had clearance to read the documents in the first place.
Oh, right, so if you're a high-level government employee with access to classified information, then it's nothing new.
Right.
There's a lot new in this.
I mean, there are somewhere in the realm of 15,000 deaths that had just never been reported before, and I guess the fact that there were a lot more deaths than were ever being reported isn't news, but the fact that the military was keeping such good track of it while insisting that they didn't have any sort of figures is itself something of a story.
Indeed, yeah, I mean, it seems to me like whatever numbers the military has is going to be a way lowball estimate, because even just the reports that they get in from the field that, yeah, a few civilians were killed in this or that engagement, all those numbers are going to be lowballed in the first place from the very first level.
But it does show that they were lying about their own numbers, regardless of how low.
If there's 15,000 new deaths revealed in here, we don't know what that really represents in terms of the actual numbers.
Right, we have both the realization of the new deaths and the realization that they were keeping track, because all along, while they were issuing these incident reports to the media, they were insisting, well, we don't keep full track.
But of course, General Casey, this week, while trying to defend the numbers and insisting that there wasn't a deliberate attempt to undercount, said that the military was going around and sending troops to the morgues to count bodies.
And this is the same military that insisted it wasn't even trying to count civilian deaths.
Right.
And, well, so now tell us about this FRAGO 242, because I guess certainly anybody reading antiwar.com knew that Donald Rumsfeld had decided to hire all these Shiite militias, the Marine Corps and the Wolf Brigade and the Mahdi Army, to wage these decapitation strikes against the budding Sunni insurgency back in 2003 and 2004, and it was just no secret about what brutal torturers those guys were.
But now we get to kind of see, behind the curtain, there actually was an order explaining that, go ahead and let the Wolf Brigade torture people, more or less.
There was always sort of an understanding that this was going on and that the military wasn't really on top of it, but it was sort of taken to be just a disinterest and maybe a little bit of sloppiness on their part.
But as it turns out, this FRAGO 242, there's an actual official order that was given to that you send in a report on abuse if it's committed by someone other than coalition troops, but you don't go any farther than that.
You don't investigate.
You don't try to stop it.
You just basically cover it up.
Yeah, you know, the Guardian said that not only was there this order that you were to basically just ignore this, but that there were actually documents that proved that the Americans were handing people over.
They weren't just ignoring abuse.
They were handing people over to the torture squads.
Oh, absolutely.
Well, many of these abusers are the same people that ended up running the jails around Iraq.
So if nothing else, when the Status of Forces Agreement went into place and they started the mass handover of prisoners, they were handing them over knowing that they were being handed over to torturers.
Well, which is, I guess, no big deal since, at least from Donald Rumsfeld's point of view, as the other Scott Horton was saying on the show today, well, yeah, of course they torture.
Torture is good.
That's what we do, too.
And, you know, all this news about Iraqi torturers being allowed to get away with it under America's eyes shouldn't be allowed to obscure the fact that American policy was to Gitmo-ize the whole process and basically treat any insurgent in Iraq as though they were a terrorist enemy combatant type without any of the protections of judicial process or prisoner of war status either.
So it was, from Donald Rumsfeld's point of view, of course the Wolf Brigade is, you know, electrocuting people and putting drills in their heads.
You know, that's right there in the memo.
Go ahead, put a drill in their head.
Well, yeah, that's true, too.
Certainly prisoner abuse was going on among the coalition forces as well as the Iraqi forces, but it was sort of interesting both in that they were trying to cover up what the Iraqis were doing and the State Department's response after the WikiLeaks report came out, insisting that this is a matter of an internal issue for the Iraqi government to deal with and it's none of our business and that it's sort of an issue of sovereignty when this is the same U.S. government that made one of the cases for war Saddam Hussein's similar treatment of his prisoners.
Right.
Yeah, that's the whole thing.
The excuse for the war is, you know, since they didn't have any weapons and they weren't really a threat, the Ba'ath government there, well, they were bad to their own people and we closed Saddam's rape rooms and we closed his torture dungeons.
No, we didn't.
We just reopened them under different management.
All right.
Well, so it seems like the United Nations, or I don't know what part of the United Nations, I guess one of their reporters on human rights or something, and also the Deputy Prime Minister of Great Britain has said that America should open official investigations into the war crimes revealed in these WikiLeaks.
Huh?
That's a pretty big deal, it seems like.
Well, it is, but it doesn't seem like it's going to happen, at least not from the early indications from the administration that they're basically treating this as no big deal and to them the big story is that WikiLeaks was allowed to leak it and a lot of the American media coverage really has focused on that sort of position, so I'm not sure the public is really getting this whole picture of what's going on unless they happen to read AntiWar.com or read The Guardian or Der Spiegel the day it came out.
Right.
Yeah, it's a very important point, and it really is amazing, isn't it, in its own right, just how different the American media can treat this subject than the entire rest of the world.
Everyone else in the world is saying, look, torture, look, civilian casualties, and the Americans are saying, look, Julian Assange.
Well, and the New York Times, which had a 10-week lead on this, their big take on it was that it was something to do with Iran.
Yeah.
All right, well, hold it right there.
That's a very important part to pick up.
On the other side of this break, everybody, it's Jason Ditz, News Editor at AntiWar.com, news.antiwar.com, and we'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is AntiWar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz.
He is the News Editor at AntiWar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com, and Jason, you were making the point when we got interrupted by that break that after, what did you say, the New York Times had these WikiLeaks for 10 weeks, and all they found in there was that Michael Gordon was right after all, everybody, huh?
Is that really right?
Their story, they ran three stories on the day of the WikiLeaks release, and they were the big American news outlet that had advanced copies of the reports to cover it, and their major one was the Iran take on it, and that this was all about drumming up more support for hostility towards Iran.
Yeah, it really is amazing to see this self-justification that is allowed to just continue on.
I don't know how it was that Michael Gordon survived the firing that Judith Miller got, although I guess she didn't get fired for her Iraq lie.
She got fired for the Scooter Libby nonsense.
Anyway, it's amazing that Michael Gordon's reputation is intact at all when he's the guy for the entire first half, at least, of 2007, was pushing this lie that Iran was responsible for everything wrong in Iraq, as though America hadn't been fighting the war for Iran all along and wasn't still at that time, as though the surge wasn't all about consolidating the Iraqi National Alliance's power over Baghdad.
And then to see him come out two and a half years later, three years later, and say, oh, look, everybody, see, I was right, and hardly get called out for it at all is pretty amazing.
Right.
Well, I guess their coverage was a little step up from CNN's, though, because they at least covered the contents of the documents instead of making the entire release about Julian Assange's personal life.
Yeah, although that was their lead story, was, you know, at the New York Times website, that was the lead story, was the one about Julian Assange's personal life.
And the rest was like, oh, yeah, by the way, we got 400,000 documents, the biggest leak of military information in the history of mankind, you know, all at once here, but nothing to see here other than that, yeah, those Iranians sure are some bad guys, huh?
4,000 Americans just died fighting for them, and it's all their fault that, you know, things went other than smoothly.
Well, it's really amazing how little coverage it's gotten.
I mean, this 400,000 documents that we're talking about, that's just an enormous amount.
Yeah, I mean, you talk about it possibly being a college course being taught on this.
You could make this almost an entire degree program where someone could spend years studying all these documents.
There's just so much there.
Right, yeah, it reminds me of, like, the Innocence Project or whatever, where they have entire law school populations, you know, the entire law school, all those kids and the graduate students at one university or another, all working on cases of one or two innocent prisoners, that kind of thing.
I mean, that's the size of project we're talking about here, to go through almost half a million documents.
It's an unfathomable amount.
I mean, to try to sit down and go through these individually is just overwhelming.
When you're reading individual reports, what do you do with them?
I mean, there's just so much there.
Yeah, I really wish that I had the time to sit and read through them all, because that's where you'll really find the truth, right, is in reading year after year after year worth of these things and following the narrative through, checking that off against what you think you already know about it, that kind of thing.
And there are people who have tried to do that with the Afghan war documents, but we're talking several times as many.
I mean, six times as many documents, five times as many documents.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
Maybe I just need to find the time to try to get that done.
There is this piece of The Guardian here I wanted to highlight.
I mentioned earlier, Iraq war logs, US turned over captives to Iraqi torture squads.
The CIA and their contractors and the military did torture people to death in some circumstances more than 100 times, according to Colonel Larry Wilkerson and others, but they didn't do the kind of tortures they're talking about in here, electrocuting people to death, I don't think, putting drills through their heads, through their shoulders and arms and whatever as torture, and then killing them by putting a power drill through their head.
I mean, this is the most medieval, unbelievable kind of human behavior, and this is all going on under the legal authority, so to speak, of Donald Rumsfeld and the American Pentagon.
I mean, they deliberately had a policy toward this, and it would be amazing to think that they could just continue to get away with it.
No consequences.
But I guess maybe they can.
It's incredible enough that they were able to get away with it when it was a secret, and that there weren't a lot more soldiers that were aware of this order rising up and leaking these reports.
But now that the reports are out, it's incredible to think that so many people are willing to just blow them off and say, well, it's still in place, because the policies really haven't changed from these reports.
Yeah, well, and as we see now that this kid, Bradley Manning, I shouldn't call him a kid, he's 23 years old or something, he's basically, looks like he's facing life in prison over this, over, you know, like, many Bothans died to bring us this information or whatever.
There's a real sacrifice, and that's the reason why nobody leaked all these things before, is because they're not brave enough to give up, you know, they're brave enough to go die killing innocent people, getting blown up by a landmine on the side of the road, but not to maybe sit in a brig for 50 years in order to bring the truth about the war to the people.
It took this one kid to do it.
And then the problem was, he was just too dumb to keep his mouth shut about it.
Well, and it's been really interesting when I've heard people talking about the WikiLeaks which really hasn't been as often as I might have hoped, that a lot of them don't really understand why Bradley Manning would do this, knowing that he faced such a long jail term.
Right.
Well, I think he thought that maybe, just maybe, if the American people knew the truth about some of this stuff, that we would, I don't know, demand an end to it or something like that, but wishful thinking on his part, I guess.
Yeah, I wonder what his reaction would be if he's privy to the fact that all these documents are going public and, by and large, the American public is just shrugging them off.
All right, well, folks, you don't have to.
It's all at The Guardian.
It's all at Der Spiegel.
And even, I think, the Washington Post posted this stuff up.
Just Google up the Iraq war logs, look at news.antiwar.com to keep up with everything on Earth that matters.
Thanks, Jason.
Thanks for having me.
