All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
We're on ChaosRadioAustin.org, Antiwar.com/radio, and the Liberty Radio Network streaming online at LRN.fm.
And we've got a jam-packed show for you today, starting with our first guest, Melvin Goodman.
He is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.
He's the author of six books on national security, the latest being Failure of Intelligence, Decline and Fall of the CIA, or that should be The Decline and Fall of the CIA, which if you Google my name and his, you'll find an interview by me of him all about that book, which was excellent, by the way.
And I think it was also, Mel, you were also formerly at the State Department as well, right?
That's right.
I was in the State Department in the 1970s and taught at the National War College in the 1980s and 1990s.
Okay.
So now we got the complete bio here, and I know that you are a Russian expert at the CIA, right?
Right.
At the CIA, and that's the course I taught at the National War College, Russian foreign policy.
Cool.
So I'm very interested to know what you think about the WikiLeaks revelations about Russia, and in fact, I got a lot of different Russian type questions, but first I want to kind of give you a chance, I've been asking everybody what they think of WikiLeaks.
One of your fellow former CIA guys, Phil Giroldi, was on the show the other day and he said that, you know, he was pretty open to the idea that somebody other than Bradley Manning is feeding information to the WikiLeaks and there are some pretty powerful leaks.
A lot of it's innocuous, but some of these State Department documents very well could have been placed there by people with an agenda.
He was at least suspicious of that.
And then of course, in the mainstream media, there's the big debate as to whether Julian Assange should be given a crown or a rope around his neck.
So I guess I figured I'd let you go ahead and chime in on that.
Sure.
Well, first of all, let me try to dispel the conspiracy notion that somehow foreign intelligence agencies are getting involved in this dump of documents that are ending up on WikiLeaks.
I think this was started at least the first time I heard it was Big Neb Brzezinski on the Lair NewsHour, and I think it's typical Central European paranoia.
I think this is clearly a data dump.
This is a young man, for whatever his reasons were, and it's not clear.
He's certainly not a whistleblower.
There's no specific policy that I think he's trying to change or challenge.
This was just a dump of 250,000 U.S. cables.
I think the interesting thing about this, and again, I would spell a lot of notions about the harm these cables are going to cause, is that they're, for the most part, embarrassing.
They're not really sensitive.
Occasionally, there's a sensitive cable, but that cable that may be sensitive is certainly not compromising.
There's very little discussion of genuine U.S. policy.
There's no discussion of U.S. policy disagreements.
There's no discussion of U.S. operational policy or clandestine activity.
In fact, if you read as many as I've read, the United States doesn't look all that bad in terms of what our motives are around the world and what we're trying to achieve.
Now, we look kind of embarrassed when we talk about various national leaders, but we're not saying anything about these leaders.
That hasn't been said before.
Look at Russia, for example, the whole notion of Medvedev and Putin as Robin to Batman.
Well, Russians have been telling me for years that Medvedev is referred to in Russia as Russia's first lady.
So, again, we didn't say anything that the Russians themselves aren't saying about each other.
That's certainly true for the Italian leader, Berlusconi.
It's true for Sarkozy.
It's true for Merkel, who's extremely timid and very cautious, and that is well known.
What I found very interesting that no one's really talking about is that there is material in the cables that essentially argues with open American policy and state of American policy.
For example, we were the only country in the Western Hemisphere that did not acknowledge that a very dangerous coup had taken place in Honduras.
Officially, we refused to go that far.
But if you read the cable traffic from Honduras, the embassy officers unanimously agree that this was indeed a coup that should have been denounced quickly and forcefully by the United States.
Look at the material on Iran, given, again, what the United States is telling us openly about Iran's missile threat.
Now we're seeing a lot of cable traffic that it's not clear Iran has this BM-25 missile.
If they do have it, they've never tested it.
If they do need to test it, they're going to have to do this over a period of several years.
And there are a lot of experts out there, according to WikiLeaks.
Who don't believe that Iran right now has the capability to mount a nuclear warhead on one of their launchers.
And then when you get to an episode that took place several years ago, that was the war between Russia and Georgia.
It's clear now that the United States embassy was giving very false information to Washington, that there was a real intelligence failure.
All of the embassy accounts that I've read from WikiLeaks are based on articles or comments that Georgian officials made, most of which were outright lies.
So what the embassy did was repeat some of the alarmist material from the Georgian president, Bakhashvili, which argued that Georgia was not going to go to war.
Georgia had no intention to use force.
Georgia was not trying to challenge the Russians in South Ossetia.
And all that turned out to be false and that the Russian arguments for the war and their perception of the war were far more accurate than what the United States was saying.
So I think we have to be very careful when we look at WikiLeaks and we have to be extremely skeptical about this argument that it's going to damage U.S. diplomacy.
It won't.
It's going to damage U.S. policy processes.
It won't.
That's going to damage U.S. credibility.
I don't think that it will.
The world's going to go on just as before.
The United States is still out there trying to solve problems and playing a very powerful role.
Mistakes are being made.
But I don't think U.S. credibility has suffered as a result of WikiLeaks.
U.S. credibility is suffering because of an outrageous war in Iraq and the continuation of outrageous war in Afghanistan.
That is the cause of U.S. failure.
So I think what the United States is trying to do is to divert attention.
And that gets me to the matter of Julian Assange.
His motives are far more interesting than Manning, who apparently delivered these documents on a CD to Assange.
It's clear if you look at Assange's past that he is probably an anarchist.
But he's not a nihilist.
He's not just trying to bring things down for the sake of destruction.
I think there are things he strongly believes.
He may be right.
He may be wrong, but he has a definite belief in openness.
And Woodrow Wilson, President Woodrow Wilson, said open covenants openly arrived at.
So Assange is not alone in this matter.
And look at the way President Obama campaigned in 2008, talking about transparency and openness.
Of course, he's walked away from that.
But once upon a time, the change we were to believe in had a lot to do with transparency and openness.
It's clear that Assange is trying to accumulate documents that have been kept secret for far too long, whether it's on private matters like Enron or the coming cable traffic, I'm told, on the Bank of America or on governments such as human rights violations in Africa, for which he was given a citation award by Amnesty International.
So I don't think the man is bad.
I don't think he's all bad.
I don't think we know a lot about his motivations.
He's a very strange individual to begin with.
A lot is not known about him.
The best profile I've seen was in The New Yorker several months ago, and we didn't learn a lot from that.
Now, on Russia specifically, I don't see anything that's going to harm Russian-American relations.
The greatest harm to Russian-American relations could occur in the next month or two in the Senate, where people who are opposed to Obama and don't want to see Obama have any success, and I'm talking about people like John Kyle of Arizona, are going to try to defeat a strategic arms treaty.
That's certainly the interest of the United States.
You know what, Milt, let's go ahead and hold that till after the break, get into the Russia stuff, because there's so much that you said there that I'd like to chime in at least a little bit on.
I think at least it's somewhat obvious, I don't know, maybe not conclusive, but somewhat obvious what Bradley Manning's motives were, because in the chat logs published at Wired and The Washington Post, he explains that he was ordered to cooperate with Iraqi police arresting innocent people, and that was what set him off in the first place.
And then he had read through these war logs.
He had seen the collateral murder video.
He'd seen the war logs and the State Department logs and said, this is almost criminal activity, the West exploiting the third world and whatever.
So he seemed to have high motives.
And we'll be right back with Mel Goodman, former CIA analyst after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the line with Melvin Goodman.
He's the author of the book, Failure of Intelligence, Decline and Fall of the CIA.
It's a very good book.
And so anyway, a lot of things were brought up there, Melvin, in the first segment.
And I just want to make sure to mention that, at least it occurs to me, it seems to me that Bradley Manning had the highest of motives in bringing this information to us, which brings up the point that Glenn Greenwald made on his blog that even the innocuous here, you know, some of these make the American government look really bad.
Some of them are basically meaningless.
All of that is a scandal that this stuff is classified.
The whole premise of this society, if of no other government on Earth, the premise that we all supposedly believe in in this country is that man is born free.
He allows government to exist to protect his rights.
He gives them a charter called the Constitution that defines their powers and that, you know, we're to govern ourselves.
We supposedly are superior to the state.
They are supposedly our servants, which means that the entire slant should be, as you pointed out, Obama's campaign statements, at least on complete openness.
The only excuse to classify anything secret is if it absolutely needs to be secret.
And even then, I'd like to debate it.
But the fact that we have, you know, six hundred thousand documents here, hardly any of which deserve to be classified, almost all of which are information that is that could be important to Americans.
You know, if it was reported on, it just seems like the whole argument in the mainstream media is completely backwards about this, you know, where even the reporters are taking the side of the state.
Why would why would this Assange guy try to bring us this information?
He must be trying to destroy America or something.
Well, I find that Rousseauian notion that man is born free, frankly, to be rather naive.
All organizations, whether they're churches or educational institutions, government institutions, social institutions, deal with a certain amount of secrecy.
There are matters that they feel are not ready to be vented in the public arena.
And I think in the area of diplomacy, going back to the writings of Harold Nicholson, I think we've come to accept that.
Certainly in America, isn't it kind of different?
We don't call ourselves subjects, right?
These people are supposedly our servants.
Excuse me.
Certainly there are abuses of this.
I think the cables show that there's a tremendous amount of over classification and there's a tremendous amount of numbers of people who are allowed to even read this classified information.
Over three million Americans with the government have security clearances.
But now, if Manning were this noble character that you think he is, and I'm somewhat dubious about that, he would have as a whistleblower and as a whistleblower myself, I think I know something about work specifically on those areas with regard to Iraq that were of concern to him.
But this was a data dump.
This was every cable he could lay his hands on and put on a CD.
I don't see anything really noble about that.
I think we should take advantage of the information that we have.
And I don't think Manning's motives are clear at all.
You may think they are, but I don't agree with that.
And there's not much that we know about Esfandi that's really helpful in this regard, even though he's a foe, an opponent of all formal government, of all formal, formal institutions.
I think possibly he's more of an anarchist than anything else.
But I think he's performed a very important service.
I think the tape of the killings of the Reuters journalists in Iraq was extremely important.
I think that Robert Gates was extremely callous and unconscionable in his remarks when he said that looking at that film is like looking at the war through a soda straw.
I thought that was an outrageous remark, which was very typical of Bob Gates.
But I think we should try to step back and see what these documents are and try to analyze them and not glorify the people who provided them to us any more than I would glorify the leaders of the countries who have brought us these policies.
It's the policies that are wrong.
That's where the focus should be.
And frankly, I don't find any of these cables that helpful in that regard.
Well, for those who want to pick a fight with Iran, they seem to be pretty helpful, huh?
Well, no, they're not, because there are a lot of there's a lot of material.
And obviously you weren't listening to what I said in the first half of this interview.
There's a lot of material that disputes the notion of Iran's nuclear capabilities.
And if you read the cables carefully, which I have, it seems we're getting information from the Israelis that is highly exaggerated and information from Russia that's probably understates the problem.
But then when you look at the totality of the information that we have, it's just there's no reason to go to war against Iran.
Well, I agree with that.
I mean, that's all right there in the documents.
But what I'm talking about is the media.
Excuse me a second.
One final remark.
The whole notion that we need to have a missile defense in Europe because the Iran plot to target Central Europe in its national security designs is, of course, ludicrous.
And that's what needs to be addressed.
I think there's been too much attention on some of the processes of how we got these documents and not enough attention give to the policies that are involved.
Yeah, well, that's what I was getting at, was the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media following their lead in bringing up this story that apparently is far from as conclusive as originally portrayed in the Times about North Korea delivering these new, better missiles to Iran.
And that's why apparently we have a justification for this missile shield.
Well, I don't know why you would be critical of the New York Times.
I mean, I have been in the past, but the New York Times was the only paper that had the gut to publish these documents the way they have.
And they stood up to criticism from the mainstream media, including the Washington Post, which was extremely critical of the New York Times for giving as much attention as they have to the document, which they have today, which is probably day five of this story, which could have blown away in 24 hours.
So I don't know why you're critical of the New York Times.
A lot of what you know, a lot of what you know is based on what you've read in the New York Times.
Well, they ran that piece by David Sanger that completely omitted the fact that the Russians didn't believe this story about the North Korean missiles for a minute and how the Americans didn't even really say, trust me, we know they just.
Well, then did you read today's New York Times, the Mark Bozzetti piece and the William Broad piece?
No, I hadn't seen it.
Broad and Bozzetti, that's progress.
It talks about the murky view of this whole issue.
It tries to put it to some focus.
Now, to look at an initial article is like a rough draft.
Here is someone like William Broad, who's one of the best military and scientific writers in the country, magazine or newspapers.
There's no one on the Internet who's as knowledgeable as William Broad, who I'm aware of, who talks about this murky situation and tends to downplay some of the sensationalist arguments about Iran.
So let's be fair here.
Well, I'm not the only one.
The New York Times was taken to task all over the place.
For that original piece that that David Sanger ran about the North Korean missiles and how they completely omitted all of the contradictory assertions in the same document he was referring to.
But I think they've gone out essentially and corrected that.
You know, you're always going to be able to pick up an article or an editorial comment, newspaper and blast it.
I do that myself regularly in the column I write for Truthout.
But I think when the newspaper makes an attempt to go back and reappraise and reassess, you ought to at least acknowledge that.
The New York Times has a pretty good record of correcting the material in the paper.
But they only did it after Walter Pincus and Fairness and Accuracy and Reporting and Gareth Porter and everybody else under the sun took him to task over it.
It's really no different than any piece by David Sanger ought to have a retraction the next day, obviously, you know.
But OK, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to run.
I hear the music.
You have to run, too.
All right.
Well, thanks again.
Appreciate it.
Good to be with you.
Bye bye.
All right.
All right.
That was Melvin Goodman.
The book is Failure of Intelligence is antiwar radio.
We'll be right back.
