Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 128

The government's one-way mirror

(updated below)

One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does.  Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that "knowledge is power," this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling class omnipotent and citizens powerless.

In The Washington Post today, Dana Priest and William Arkin continue their "Top Secret America" series by describing how America's vast and growing Surveillance State now encompasses state and local law enforcement agencies, collecting and storing always-growing amounts of information about even the most innocuous activities undertaken by citizens suspected of no wrongdoing.  As was true of the first several installments of their "Top Secret America," there aren't any particularly new revelations for those paying attention to such matters, but the picture it paints -- and the fact that it is presented in an establishment organ such as The Washington Post -- is nonetheless valuable.

Today, the Post reporters document how surveillance and enforcement methods pioneered in America's foreign wars and occupations are being rapidly imported into domestic surveillance (wireless fingerprint scanners, military-grade infrared cameras, biometric face scanners, drones on the border).  In sum:

The special operations units deployed overseas to kill the al-Qaeda leadership drove technological advances that are now expanding in use across the United States. On the front lines, those advances allowed the rapid fusing of biometric identification, captured computer records and cellphone numbers so troops could launch the next surprise raid. Here at home, it's the DHS that is enamored with collecting photos, video images and other personal information about U.S. residents in the hopes of teasing out terrorists.

Meanwhile, the Obama Department of Homeland Security has rapidly expanded the scope and invasiveness of domestic surveillance programs -- justified, needless to say, in the name of Terrorism:

[DHS Secretary Janet] Napolitano has taken her "See Something, Say Something" campaign far beyond the traffic signs that ask drivers coming into the nation's capital for "Terror Tips" and to "Report Suspicious Activity."

She recently enlisted the help of Wal-Mart, Amtrak, major sports leagues, hotel chains and metro riders. In her speeches, she compares the undertaking to the Cold War fight against communists.

"This represents a shift for our country," she told New York City police officers and firefighters on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary this fall. "In a sense, this harkens back to when we drew on the tradition of civil defense and preparedness that predated today's concerns."

The results are predictable.  Huge amounts of post/9-11 anti-Terrorism money flooded state and local agencies that confront virtually no Terrorism threats, and they thus use these funds to purchase technologies -- bought from the private-sector industry that controls and operates government surveillance programs -- for vastly increased monitoring and file-keeping on ordinary citizens suspected of no wrongdoing.  The always-increasing cooperation between federal, state and local agencies -- and among and within federal agencies -- has spawned massive data bases of information containing the activities of millions of American citizens.  "There are 96 million sets of fingerprints" in the FBI's data base, the Post reports.  Moreover, the FBI uses its "suspicious activities record" program (SAR) to collect and store endless amounts of information about innocent Americans:

At the same time that the FBI is expanding its West Virginia database, it is building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.

To get a sense for what kind of information ends up being stored -- based on the most innocuous conduct -- read this page from their article describing Suspicious Activity Report No3821.  Even the FBI admits the huge waste all of this is -- "'Ninety-nine percent doesn't pan out or lead to anything' said Richard Lambert Jr., the special agent in charge of the FBI's Knoxville office" -- but, as history conclusively proves, data collected on citizens will be put to some use even if it reveals no criminality.  

To understand the breadth of the Surveillance State, recall this sentence from the original Priest/Arkin article:  "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."  As Arkin and Priest document today, there are few safeguards on how all this data is used and abused.  Local police departments routinely meet with neoconservative groups insisting that all domestic Muslim communities are a potential threat and must be subjected to intensive surveillance and infiltration.  Groups engaged in plainly legal and protected political dissent have been subjected to these government surveillance programs.  What we have, in sum, is a vast, uncontrolled and increasingly invasive surveillance state that knows and collects more and more information about the activities of more and more citizens.

But what makes all of this particularly ominous is that -- as the WikiLeaks conflict demonstrates -- this all takes place next to an always-expanding wall of secrecy behind which the Government's own conduct is hidden from public view.   Just consider the Government's reaction to the disclosures by WikiLeaks of information which even it -- in moments of candor -- acknowledges have caused no real damage:  disclosed information that, critically, was protected by relatively low-level secrecy designations and (in contrast to the Pentagon Papers) none of which was designated "Top Secret."

It's crystal clear that the Justice Department is engaged in an all-out crusade to figure out how to shut down WikiLeaks and imprison Julian Assange.  It is subjecting Bradley Manning to unbelievably inhumane conditions in order to manipulate him into providing needed testimony to prosecute Assange.  Recall that in 2008 -- long before anyone even knew what WikiLeaks was -- the Pentagon secretly plotted on how to destroy the organization.  On Meet the Press yesterday, Joe Biden was asked whether he agreed more with Mitch McConnell's statement that Assange is a "high-tech terrorist" than with those comparing WikiLeaks to Daniel Ellsberg, and the Vice President replied:  "I would argue that it's closer to being a high tech terrorist. . . ."  "A high-tech terrorist."  And consider this pernicious little essay from Eric Fiterman -- a former FBI special agent and founder of Methodvue, "a consultancy that provides cybersecurity and computer forensics services to the federal government and private businesses" -- that clearly reflects the Government's view of WikiLeaks:

In the WikiLeaks case, a fringe group led primarily by foreign nationals operating abroad is illegally obtaining, reviewing and disseminating American intelligence information with the stated intent of hurting the United States (WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange himself made this declaration). That not only meets the definition of aggressive, hostile and war-like activity, but squarely targets America's diplomatic positions and intelligence interests while inflicting collateral damage against our financial institutions and service providers who cut-off their relationship with WikiLeaks. This, folks, is war.

That's the mindset of the U.S. Government:  everything it does of any significance can and should be shielded from public view; anyone who shines light on what it does is an Enemy who must be destroyed; but nothing you do should be beyond its monitoring and storing eyes.  And what's most remarkable about this -- though, given the full-scale bipartisan consensus over it, not surprising -- is how eagerly submissive much of the citizenry is to this imbalance.  Many Americans plead with their Government in unison:  we demand that you know everything about us but that you keep us ignorant about what you do and punish those who reveal it to us.  Often, this kind of oppressive Surveillance State has to be forcibly imposed on a resistant citizenry, but much of the frightened American citizenry -- led by most transparency-hating media figures -- has been trained with an endless stream of fear-mongering to demand that they be subjected to more and more of it.

Obviously, every state is necessarily authorized to exercise powers that private citizens are barred from exercising themselves (governments can legally put people in cages, but if a private citizen does that, it constitutes felonies:  kidnapping and false imprisonment).  But the imbalance has become so extreme -- the Government now watches much of the citizenry behind a fully opaque one-way mirror -- that the dangers should be obvious.  And this is all supposed to be the other way around:  it's government officials who are supposed to operate out in the open, while ordinary citizens are entitled to privacy.  Yet we've reversed that dynamic almost completely.  And even with 9/11 now 9 years behind us, the trends continue only in one direction.  WikiLeaks is one of the very few entities successfully subverting this scheme, which is why -- from the view of the Government and its enablers -- it must be stopped at all costs.

 

UPDATE:  Two related points:

(1) Joe Biden not only voted for the Iraq War, but was Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 2002 as the Senate authorized that attack, one which resulted in the deaths of well over 100,000 innocent human beings and which was launched under the strategic banner of "Shock and Awe," designed explicitly to terrorize Iraqis out of resisting through the use of a massive display of urban devastation.  Julian Assange has never authorized any violence, never killed anyone, never advocated killing anyone, and never threatened anyone's death.   Yet the former can accuse the latter of being close to a "high-tech terrorist" without many people batting an eye -- illustrating, yet again, what a meaningless and manipulated term "Terrorism" is; to the extent it means anything, its definition is this: "those who impede or defy American will with any degree of efficacy."

(2) Of all the surveillance state abuses, one of the most egregious has to be the Government's warrantless, oversight-less seizure of the laptops and other electronic equipment of American citizens at the border, whereby they not only store the contents of those devices but sometimes keep the seized items indefinitely.   That practice is becoming increasingly common, aimed at people who have done nothing more than dissent from government policy; I intend to have more on that soon.  If American citizens don't object to the permanent seizure and copying of their laptops and cellphones without any warrants or judicial oversight, what would they ever object to?

Joe Biden v. Joe Biden on WikiLeaks

It's really not an overstatement to say that WikiLeaks is the new Iraqi WMDs -- and I'd add that Julian Assange is the newest Saddam Hussein -- because the government and establishment media are jointly manufacturing and disseminating an endless stream of fear-mongering falsehoods designed to depict them as scary villains threatening the security of The American People and who must therefore be stopped at any cost.  So often, the government/media claims made in service of this goal are outright false, which is why I have focused so much on the un-killable, outright lie that WikiLeaks indiscriminately dumped 250,000 diplomatic cables without regard to the consequences (on Thursday, The New York Times, in its article on Assange's release from prison, re-printed the lie by referencing "Mr. Assange's role in the publication of some 250,000 American diplomatic documents" only to delete it without any indication of a correction in the final version of the article, while the always-conventional-wisdom-spouting Dana Milbank in The Washington Post -- in the course of condemning "the absurd secrecy of the Obama administration, in some ways worse than that of George W. Bush" -- today wrote of "Assange's indiscriminate dump of American government secrets over the last several months - with hardly a care for who might be hurt or what public good was served").

But this new example from Joe Biden is extraordinary, and reveals how government officials are willing to say absolutely anything -- even things they know are false -- to demonize WikiLeaks.  First, here's Biden with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell -- on Thursday, December 16 -- happily insisting that the leak of the diplomatic cables has done no damage to U.S. relations (video below):

MITCHELL:  This is Vice President Joe Biden, who told me that the leaked cables created no substantive damage -- only embarrassment . . . .

BIDEN:  And I came in [to the U.N.] to almost all to embraces - it wasn't just shaking hands - I know these guys, I know these women - they still trust the United States - there's all kinds of --

MITCHELL:  So there's no damage?

BIDEN:  I don't think there's any damage.  I don't think there's any substantive damage, no.  Look, some of the cables are embarrassing . . . but nothing that I'm aware of that goes to the essence of the relationship that would allow another nation to say:  "they lied to me, we don't trust them, they really are not dealing fairly with us."

But here's the very same Joe Biden, in a preview of an interview with David Gregory -- taped the following day, Thursday, December 17 -- to air this Sunday on Meet the Press, gravely lamenting that Julian Assange has harmed American foreign relations (video below):

This guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of other parts of the world.  He's made it more difficult for us to conduct our business with our allies and our friends.  For example, in my meetings -- you know I meet with most of these world leaders -- there is a desire to meet with me alone, rather than have staff in the room:  it makes things more cumbersome -- so it has done damage.

In one day, Biden went from giddily declaring that "I don't think there's any damage" to gravely warning that "it has done damage."  I have no idea whether Biden was told that his Thursday no-damage admission would severely harm the Government's efforts to prosecute Assange, but what is clear is that he was perfectly willing to march into Meet the Press the following day and say things that he knew were false in order to depict the WikiLeaks diplomatic cable disclosures as harming U.S. national security.  It's true that in the first clip, he was asked specifically about diplomatic cables, while the second interview may have encompassed all the releases, but in that second interview, he clearly claimed that the disclosures harmed relations with other countries:  exactly the opposite of what he said the day before.  Even his demeanor completely changed, from breezy, fun dismissiveness into serious, concerned leader talking about a True Threat.

And, of course, the establishment media leads the way in disseminating these falsehoods.  I was on an MSNBC program yesterday discussing my article on the conditions of Bradley Manning's detention, and the host, Chris Jansing, suggested that these repressive conditions might be justified by the "grave national security harm" Manning has cause.  What grave national security harm has he caused?  None.  Even Robert Gates, in a moment of real candor, mocked those making this claim about the diplomatic cables release as "seriously overwrought."  But no matter.  There is a menacing demon which all of official Washington agrees is pure, unadulterated Evil who has damaged us all and who must be stopped with the full force of the United States -- Julian Assange and WikiLeaks -- and thus anything must and will be said to sustain that fiction.

Here's the MSNBC clip of Biden, December 16:

 

Here's the Meet the Press clip of Biden, December 17:

 

Getting to Assange through Manning

(updated below)

In The New York Times this morning, Charlie Savage describes the latest thinking from the DOJ about how to criminally prosecute WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.  Federal investigators are "are looking for evidence of any collusion" between WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning -- "trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped" the Army Private leak the documents -- and then "charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them."  To achieve this, it is particularly important to "persuade Private Manning to testify against Mr. Assange."  I want to make two points about this.

First, the Obama administration faces what it perceives a serious dilemma:  it is -- as Savage writes -- "under intense pressure to make an example of [Assange] as a deterrent to further mass leaking)," but nothing Assange or WikiLeaks has done actually violates the law.  Moreover, as these Columbia Journalism School professors explain in opposing prosecutions, it is impossible to invent theories to indict them without simultaneously criminalizing much of investigative journalism.  Thus, claiming that WikiLeaks does not merely receive and publish classify information, but rather actively seeks it and helps the leakers, is the DOJ's attempt to distinguish it from "traditional" journalism.  As Savage writes, this theory would mean "the government would not have to confront awkward questions about why it is not also prosecuting traditional news organizations or investigative journalists who also disclose information the government says should be kept secret — including The New York Times."

But this distinction is totally illusory.  Very rarely do investigative journalists merely act as passive recipients of classified information; secret government programs aren't typically reported because leaks just suddenly show up one day in the email box of a passive reporter.  Journalists virtually always take affirmative steps to encourage its dissemination.  They try to cajole leakers to turn over documents to verify their claims and consent to their publication.  They call other sources to obtain confirmation and elaboration in the form of further leaks and documents.  Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau described how they granted anonymity to "nearly a dozen current and former official" to induce them to reveal information about Bush's NSA eavesdropping program.  Dana Priest contacted numerous "U.S. and foreign officials" to reveal the details of the CIA's "black site" program.  Both stories won Pulitzer Prizes and entailed numerous, active steps to cajole sources to reveal classified information for publication.

In sum, investigative journalists routinely -- really, by definition -- do exactly that which the DOJ's new theory would seek to prove WikiLeaks did.  To indict someone as a criminal "conspirator" in a leak on the ground that they took steps to encourage the disclosures would be to criminalize investigative journalism every bit as much as charging Assange with "espionage" for publishing classified information.

Second, Savage's story appears to shed substantial light on my story from yesterday about the repressive conditions under which Manning is being detained.  The need to have Manning make incriminating statements against Assange -- to get him to claim that Assange actively, in advance, helped Manning access and leak these documents -- would be one obvious reason for subjecting Manning to such inhumane conditions:  if you want to have better treatment, you must incriminate Assange.  In The Huffington Post yesterday, Marcus Baram quoted Jeff Paterson, who runs Manning's legal defense fund, as saying that Manning has been extremely upset by the conditions of his detention but had not gone public about them in deference to his attorney's efforts to negotiate better treatment. 

Whatever else is true, the DOJ seems intent on pressuring Manning to incriminate Assnage.  It would be bizarre indeed to make a deal with the leaking government employee in order to incriminate the non-government-employee who merely published the classified information.  But that may very well at least partially explain (though obviously not remotely justify) why the Government is holding Manning under such repressive conditions:  in order to "induce" him to say what they need him to say in order to indict WikiLeaks and Assange.

* * * * *

On MSNBC last night, Keith Olbermann did a segment on the conditions of Manning's incarceration, with FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley.  At least on its website, CBS News also reported on the story.  And I was on Democracy Now this morning elaborating on my Manning article yesterday, as well as discussing Savage's article this morning and the imminent release of Assange from prison:

 

 

UPDATE:  Several others make similar points about the DOJ's prosecution theory, including Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin ("the conspiracy theory also threatens traditional journalists as well"); former Bush OLC Chief and Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith ("it would not distinguish the Times and scores of other media outlets in the many cases in which reporters successfully solicit and arrange to receive classified information and documents directly from government officials" and "would be a fateful step for traditional press freedoms in the United States"); Politico's Josh Gerstein ("Reporters seek classified information all the time in telephone conversations, in private meetings and other contexts" and thus "the distinction . . . strikes me as patently ridiculous"); and  ("the slippery slope is only the slightest bit less steep" than charging Assange under the Espionage Act).

Indeed, Bob Woodward's whole purpose in life at this point is to cajole, pressure and even manipulate government officials to disclose classified information to him for him to publish in his books, which he routinely does.  Does that make him a criminal "conspirator"?  Under the DOJ's theory, it would.  All of this underscores one unavoidable fact:  there is no way to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks without criminalizing journalism because WikiLeaks is engaged in pure journalistic acts:  uncovering and publicizing the secret conduct of the world's most powerful factions.  It is that conduct -- and not any supposed crime -- which explains why the DOJ is so desperate to prosecute.

The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention

(updated below)

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime.  Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months -- and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait -- under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture.  Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning's detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems.  He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a "Maximum Custody Detainee," the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement.  For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell.  Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions.  For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch).  For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs.  Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not "like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole," but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

In sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America's Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado:  all without so much as having been convicted of anything.  And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig's medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.

Just by itself, the type of prolonged solitary confinement to which Manning has been subjected for many months is widely viewed around the world as highly injurious, inhumane, punitive, and arguably even a form of torture.  In his widely praised March, 2009 New Yorker article -- entitled "Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?" -- the surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande assembled expert opinion and personal anecdotes to demonstrate that, as he put it, "all human beings experience isolation as torture."  By itself, prolonged solitary confinement routinely destroys a person's mind and drives them into insanity.  A March, 2010 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law explains that "solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture."

For that reason, many Western nations -- and even some non-Western nations notorious for human rights abuses -- refuse to employ prolonged solitary confinement except in the most extreme cases of prisoner violence.  "It's an awful thing, solitary," John McCain wrote of his experience in isolated confinement in Vietnam. "It crushes your spirit."  As Gawande documented: "A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam . . . reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered."  Gawande explained that America's application of this form of torture to its own citizens is what spawned the torture regime which President Obama vowed to end:

This past year, both the Republican and the Democratic Presidential candidates came out firmly for banning torture and closing the facility in Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of prisoners have been held in years-long isolation. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, however, addressed the question of whether prolonged solitary confinement is torture. . . .

This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. . . . Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America's moral stature in the world.  In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement . . . .

It's one thing to impose such punitive, barbaric measures on convicts who have proven to be violent when around other prisoners; at the Supermax in Florence, inmates convicted of the most heinous crimes and who pose a threat to prison order and the safety of others are subjected to worse treatment than what Manning experiences.  But it's another thing entirely to impose such conditions on individuals, like Manning, who have been convicted of nothing and have never demonstrated an iota of physical threat or disorder.

In 2006, a bipartisan National Commission on America's Prisons was created and it called for the elimination of prolonged solitary confinement.  Its Report documented that conditions whereby "prisoners end up locked in their cells 23 hours a day, every day. . . is so severe that people end up completely isolated, living in what can only be described as torturous conditions."  The Report documented numerous psychiatric studies of individuals held in prolonged isolation which demonstrate "a constellation of symptoms that includes overwhelming anxiety, confusion and hallucination, and sudden violent and self-destructive outbursts."  The above-referenced article from the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law states:  "Psychological effects can include anxiety, depression, anger, cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, obsessive thoughts, paranoia, and psychosis."

When one exacerbates the harms of prolonged isolation with the other deprivations to which Manning is being subjected, long-term psychiatric and even physical impairment is likely.  Gawande documents that "EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement."  Medical tests conducted in 1992 on Yugoslavian prisoners subjected to an average of six months of isolation -- roughly the amount to which Manning has now been subjected -- "revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement.  Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury."  Gawande's article is filled with horrifying stories of individuals subjected to isolation similar to or even less enduring than Manning's who have succumbed to extreme long-term psychological breakdown.

Manning is barred from communicating with any reporters, even indirectly, so nothing he has said can be quoted here.  But David House, a 23-year-old MIT researcher who befriended Manning after his detention (and then had his laptops, camera and cellphone seized by Homeland Security when entering the U.S.) is one of the few people to have visited Manning several times at Quantico.  He describes palpable changes in Manning's physical appearance and behavior just over the course of the several months that he's been visiting him.  Like most individuals held in severe isolation, Manning sleeps much of the day, is particularly frustrated by the petty, vindictive denial of a pillow or sheets, and suffers from less and less outdoor time as part of his one-hour daily removal from his cage.

This is why the conditions under which Manning is being detained were once recognized in the U.S. -- and are still recognized in many Western nations -- as not only cruel and inhumane, but torture.  More than a century ago, U.S. courts understood that solitary confinement was a barbaric punishment that severely harmed the mental and physical health of those subjected to it.  The Supreme Court's 1890 decision in In re Medley noted that as a result of solitary confinement as practiced in the early days of the United States, many "prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition . . . and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better . . . [often] did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community."  And in its 1940 decision in Chambers v. Florida, the Court characterized prolonged solitary confinement as "torture" and compared it to "[t]he rack, the thumbscrew, [and] the wheel."

The inhumane treatment of Manning may have international implications as well.  There are multiple proceedings now pending in the European Union Human Rights Court, brought by "War on Terror" detainees contesting their extradition to the U.S. on the ground that the conditions under which they likely will be held -- particularly prolonged solitary confinement -- violate the European Convention on Human Rights, which (along with the Convention Against Torture) bars EU states from extraditing anyone to any nation where there is a real risk of inhumane and degrading treatment.  The European Court of Human Rights has in the past found detention conditions violative of those rights (in Bulgaria) where "the [detainee] spent 23 hours a day alone in his cell; had limited interaction with other prisoners; and was only allowed two visits per month."  From the Journal article referenced above:

International treaty bodies and human rights experts, including the Human Rights Committee, the Committee against Torture, and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, have concluded that solitary confinement may amount to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment.  They have specifically criticized supermax confinement in the United States because of the mental suffering it inflicts.

Subjecting a detainee like Manning to this level of prolonged cruel and inhumane detention can thus jeopardize the ability of the U.S. to secure extradition for other prisoners, as these conditions are viewed in much of the civilized world as barbaric.  Moreover, because Manning holds dual American and U.K. citizenship (his mother is British), it is possible for British agencies and human rights organizations to assert his consular rights against these oppressive conditions.  At least some preliminary efforts are underway in Britain to explore that mechanism as a means of securing more humane treatment for Manning.  Whatever else is true, all of this illustrates what a profound departure from international norms is the treatment to which the U.S. Government is subjecting him.

* * * * *

The plight of Manning has largely been overshadowed by the intense media fixation on WikiLeaks, so it's worth underscoring what it is that he's accused of doing and what he said in his own reputed words about these acts.  If one believes the authenticity of the highly edited chat logs of Manning's online conversations with Adrian Lamo that have been released by Wired (that magazine inexcusably continues to conceal large portions of those logs), Manning clearly believed that he was a whistle-blower acting with the noblest of motives, and probably was exactly that.  If, for instance, he really is the leaker of the Apache helicopter attack video -- a video which sparked very rare and much-needed realization about the visceral truth of what American wars actually entail -- as well as the war and diplomatic cables revealing substantial government deceit, brutality, illegality and corruption, then he's quite similar to Daniel Ellsberg.  Indeed, Ellsberg himself said the very same thing about Manning in June on Democracy Now in explaining why he considers the Army Private to be a "hero":

The fact is that what Lamo reports Manning is saying has a very familiar and persuasive ring to me.  He reports Manning as having said that what he had read and what he was passing on were horrible -- evidence of horrible machinations by the US backdoor dealings throughout the Middle East and, in many cases, as he put it, almost crimes. And let me guess that -- he's not a lawyer, but I'll guess that what looked to him like crimes are crimes, that he was putting out. We know that he put out, or at least it's very plausible that he put out, the videos that he claimed to Lamo.  And that's enough to go on to get them interested in pursuing both him and the other.

And so, what it comes down, to me, is -- and I say throwing caution to the winds here -- is that what I've heard so far of Assange and Manning -- and I haven't met either of them -- is that they are two new heroes of mine.

To see why that's so, just recall some of what Manning purportedly said about why he chose to leak, at least as reflected in the edited chat logs published by Wired:

Lamo: what's your endgame plan, then?. . .

Manning: well, it was forwarded to [WikiLeaks] - and god knows what happens now - hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms - if not, than [sic] we're doomed - as a species - i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens - the reaction to the video gave me immense hope; CNN's iReport was overwhelmed; Twitter exploded - people who saw, knew there was something wrong . . . Washington Post sat on the video… David Finkel acquired a copy while embedded out here. . . . - i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.

if i knew then, what i knew now - kind of thing, or maybe im just young, naive, and stupid . . . im hoping for the former - it cant be the latter - because if it is… were fucking screwed (as a society) - and i dont want to believe that we're screwed.

Manning described the incident which first made him seriously question the U.S. Government: when he was instructed to work on the case of Iraqi "insurgents" who had been detained for distributing so-called "insurgent" literature which, when Manning had it translated, turned out to be nothing more than "a scholarly critique against PM Maliki":

i had an interpreter read it for me… and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled "Where did the money go?" and following the corruption trail within the PM's cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn't want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…

i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that was a point where i was a *part* of something… i was actively involved in something that i was completely against…

And Manning explained why he never considered the thought of selling this classified information to a foreign nation for substantial profit or even just secretly transmitting it to foreign powers, as he easily could have done:

Manning: i mean what if i were someone more malicious- i could've sold to russia or china, and made bank?

Lamo: why didn't you?

Manning: because it's public data

Lamo: i mean, the cables

Manning: it belongs in the public domain -information should be free - it belongs in the public domain - because another state would just take advantage of the information… try and get some edge - if its out in the open… it should be a public good.

That's a whistleblower in the purest and most noble form:  discovering government secrets of criminal and corrupt acts and then publicizing them to the world not for profit, not to give other nations an edge, but to trigger "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms."  Given how much Manning has been demonized -- at the same time that he's been rendered silent by the ban on his communication with any media -- it's worthwhile to keep all of that in mind.

But ultimately, what one thinks of Manning's alleged acts is irrelevant to the issue here.  The U.S. ought at least to abide by minimal standards of humane treatment in how it detains him.  That's true for every prisoner, at all times.  But departures from such standards are particularly egregious where, as here, the detainee has merely been accused, but never convicted, of wrongdoing.  These inhumane conditions make a mockery of Barack Obama's repeated pledge to end detainee abuse and torture, as prolonged isolation -- exacerbated by these other deprivations -- is at least as damaging, as violative of international legal standards, and almost as reviled around the world, as the waterboard, hypothermia and other Bush-era tactics that caused so much controversy.

What all of this achieves is clear.  Having it known that the U.S. could and would disappear people at will to "black sites," assassinate them with unseen drones, imprison them for years without a shred of due process even while knowing they were innocent, torture them mercilessly, and in general acts as a lawless and rogue imperial power created a climate of severe intimidation and fear.  Who would want to challenge the U.S. Government in any way -- even in legitimate ways -- knowing that it could and would engage in such lawless, violent conduct without any restraints or repercussions?  

That is plainly what is going on here.  Anyone remotely affiliated with WikiLeaks, including American citizens (and plenty of other government critics), has their property seized and communications stored at the border without so much as a warrant.  Julian Assange -- despite never having been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime -- has now spent more than a week in solitary confinement with severe restrictions under what his lawyer calls "Dickensian conditions."  But Bradley Manning has suffered much worse, and not for a week, but for seven months, with no end in sight.  If you became aware of secret information revealing serious wrongdoing, deceit and/or criminality on the part of the U.S. Government, would you -- knowing that you could and likely would be imprisoned under these kinds of repressive, torturous conditions for months on end without so much as a trial:  just locked away by yourself 23 hours a day without recourse -- be willing to expose it?  That's the climate of fear and intimidation which these inhumane detention conditions are intended to create.

* * * * *

Those wishing to contribute to Bradley Manning's defense fund can do so here.  All of those means are reputable, but everyone should carefully read the various options presented in order to decide which one seems best.

 

UPDATE:  I was contacted by Lt. Villiard, who claims there is one factual inaccuracy in what I wrote:  specifically, he claims that Manning is not restricted from accessing news or current events during the proscribed time he is permitted to watch television.  That is squarely inconsistent with reports from those with first-hand knowledge of Manning's detention, but it's a fairly minor dispute in the scheme of things.

Attempts to prosecute WikiLeaks endanger press freedoms

(updated below)

During the Bush era, I frequently wrote about escalating attacks by the U.S. Government on press freedoms.  The Bush DOJ vowed to prosecute whistleblowers while steadfastly refusing to do the same for the high-level criminals they exposed.  Alberto Gonzales openly threatened that the DOJ could prosecute editors and reporters of The New York Times for revealing the illegal NSA spying program.  CIA Director Porter Goss vowed to subpoena journalists who publish classified information in order to compel them to disclose their sources or go to prison. 

And, worst of all, Bush officials sought for the first time in American history to obtain an espionage conviction -- under the Espionage Act of 1917 -- against non-government-employees who had received and disseminated classified information.  About that case -- brought against two AIPAC officials who had passed classified information they received from a Pentagon official to the Government of Israel (the Pentagon official pled guilty) -- I wrote about "the Bush Administration's broader, unprecedented assault on a free press of which the AIPAC prosecution is but a part," and argued that "the Bush Administration is seeking to criminalize the very act which defines what an investigative journalist does and has always done in America."  The Washington Post's Walter Pincus reported at the time, quoting a legal expert, that "administration officials 'want this case as a precedent so they can have it in their arsenal' and  added: 'This is a weapon that can be turned against the media'."  After a series of adverse judicial rulings against the Government, the DOJ finally abandoned that AIPAC prosecution.

Amazingly, the Obama administration is surpassing its predecessor when it comes to assaults on whistle-blowing and a free press.  As Politico's Josh Gerstein reported, "President Barack Obama's Justice Department has taken a hard line against leakers. . . .'They're going after this at every opportunity and with unmatched vigor,' said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists."  The New York Times similarly documented:  "the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks."  The Obama DOJ has launched nothing less than a full-on war against whistleblowers; its magnanimous "Look Forward, Not Backward" decree used to shield high-level Bush criminals from investigations is manifestly tossed to the side when it comes to those who reveal such criminality.   And they even revitalized an abandoned Bush-era subpoena issued to The New York Times' James Risen, demanding that he disclose his source for an article in which he revealed an embarrassingly botched attempt to infiltrate and sabotage Iran's nuclear program.

But if current reports are correct -- that the Obama DOJ has now convened a Grand Jury to indict WikiLeaks and Julian Assange -- this will constitute a far greater assault on press freedom than anything George W. Bush managed, or even attempted.  Put simply, there is no intellectually coherent way to distinguish what WikiLeaks has done with these diplomatic cables with what newspapers around the world did in this case and what they do constantly:  namely, receive and then publish classified information without authorization.  And as much justifiable outrage as the Bush DOJ's prosecution of the AIPAC officials provoked, at least the actions there resembled "espionage" far more than anything Assange has done, as those AIPAC officials actually passed U.S. secrets to a foreign government, not published them as WikiLeaks has done.

To criminalize what WikiLeaks is doing is, by definition, to criminalize the defining attribute of investigative journalism.  That, to be sure, is a feature, not a bug, of the Obama administration's efforts.  Just two days ago, The New York Times' James Risen wrote a story disclosing substantial classified information about the CIA, the DEA and Afghanistan, revealing that a high-level Afghan drug trafficker being prosecuted by the U.S. was long on the payroll of the U.S.; should he be tried for espionage?  I wrote in detail back in August about the dangers posed and distortions required to prosecute WikiLeaks under the Espionage Act.

After a pro-prosecution consensus toward WikiLeaks in America's political and media class quickly formed, it seems some journalists -- both domestically and around the world -- are now realizing the dangers to them which such a prosecution would pose.  To his credit, The New York Times' Scott Shane on Sunday exposed the lies being told about WikiLeaks' alleged "indiscriminate document dump" by making clear how indistinguishable its disclosures are from the world's leading newspapers (including his own); read the first three paragraphs on this page from Shane's article. 

The Washington Times' neoconservative reporter Eli Lake last night wrote:  "I oppose the application of the espionage statute to Assange because the same kind of prosecution would make me a criminal too."  Leading newspaper editors and television producers in Australia have banded together in a letter to the Australian Prime Minister defending WikiLeaks, which reads:

In essence, WikiLeaks, an organisation that aims to expose official secrets, is doing what the media have always done: bringing to light material that governments would prefer to keep secret.

It is the media's duty to responsibly report such material if it comes into their possession. To aggressively attempt to shut WikiLeaks down, to threaten to prosecute those who publish official leaks, and to pressure companies to cease doing commercial business with WikiLeaks, is a serious threat to democracy, which relies on a free and fearless press.

The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau and The Washington Post's Dana Priest -- both of whom won Pulitzer Prizes for publicly exposing classified programs of the Bush administration -- warned that prosecuting WikiLeaks would endanger investigative journalism generally.  The Denver Post editorialized that the idea of prosecuting WikiLeaks "is about the only one in recent memory that has attracted bipartisan support in Washington" but "is ill-conceived and fraught with problems" and that "acquiring and publishing information is at the heart of the definition of a free press, which has substantial First Amendment protections."  Even the government-revering Washington Post Editorial Page came out in opposition to prosecuting WikiLeaks on Sunday, recognizing that "the government has no business indicting someone who is not a spy and who is not legally bound to keep its secrets" and that "doing so would criminalize the exchange of information and put at risk responsible media organizations." 

What's most striking about all of this, as usual, is how the worst and most tyrannical government actions in Washington are equally supported on a fully bipartisan basis.  It is, of course, a Democratic President -- elected on a promise of creating the "most transparent administration in history" -- that is leading these attacks on whistle-blowing and press freedoms.  And it's leading Democratic Senators like Dianne Feinstein demanding Assange's prosecution under the Espionage Act.  And it's Democratic operatives like Bob Beckel -- Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign manager -- calling for Assange to be "illegally" murdered, stating on Fox News:  "A dead man can't leak stuff.  This guy's a traitor, he's treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. And I'm not for the death penalty, so...there's only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch" (note the illiterate-though-standard claim that Assange, an Australian citizen, has committed "treason" against the U.S.).

Back in the Bush era, this mentality was the province of hard-core conservatives, and Democrats typically reacted with horror.  Behold how Bush followers universally spoke about the need to prosecute not only whistleblowers but also journalists.  The Weekly Standard and Commentary repeatedly ran articles advocating the prosecution for whistleblowers and The New York Times under the Espionage Act.  Bill Bennett demanded that all parties responsible for the disclosures of the NSA program and CIA black sites be prosecuted and imprisoned. 

Over and over, the Right during the Bush era argued what has now become the battle-cry of both official Washington and Democratic leaders:  that leaks of classified information cannot be tolerated and must be punished to the fullest extent of the law.  Everywhere one goes, one hears such a mentality being advocated by Good Democrats, Progressives and Obama followers.  Indeed, the only member of Congress who has thus far stood up and defended WikiLeaks and opposed prosecutions is . . . the universally disparaged GOP Rep. Ron Paul.  It's just amazing how seamlessly the two parties end up mirroring each other's arguments and mindsets when in power.

* * * * *

Several related notes:  

(1) It is true, as Politico's Ben Smith reported yesterday, that I resigned yesterday from the Board of Directors of CREW -- which I joined several months ago -- as a result of the irresponsible and falsehood-laden condemnation of WikiLeaks by that group's Chief Counsel.  Politico published my resignation letter explaining my decision, but I also spoke with Sam Seder about it yesterday in greater detail in an interview here.

(2) The Guardian details today that Julian Assange -- whose renwed bail hearing is taking place right now -- has been held in solitary confinement under quite repressive conditions.  As will be detailed shortly, the conditions under which Bradley Manning is being held have been far worse.  Both of them, of course, have been convicted of no crime, yet are being subjected to inhumane incarceration.

(3) Kudos to Michael Moore, who is putting up $20,000 of his own money for Assange's bail and authored quite a good defense today of the imperative of defending WikiLeaks.

(4) For Brazilian readers or those in Brazil:  I'll be speaking on WikiLeaks tomorrow (Wednesday) at 2:00 p.m. in Rio de Janeiro, at the IESP (Instituto de Estudos de Sociais e Políticos) in Botafogo; the event is open to the public and in Portuguese.

 

UPDATE:  Moments ago, a British court approved Assange's bail application on several conditions, including his wearing an electronic tag and observing a curfew, though he will be released from prison.

Richard Holbrooke's last words

Richard Holbrooke, President Obama's envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, died yesterday after undergoing surgery for a torn aorta.  Holbrooke's record as a government official is long, complex and mixed on many levels, but -- based on the last line of his long Washington Post obituary -- I just want to flag what his "last words" were according to his family members, which he uttered as he was being sedated for surgery:  "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan." 

Ironically, Holbrooke was the author of one of the volumes of the Pentagon Papers -- which revealed that government officials knew of the futility of the Vietnam War at the same time they were falsely assuring the public they could win -- and Afghanistan seems to be no different.   As official Washington rushes forward to lavish praise on Holbrooke's wisdom and service, undoubtedly they will studiously avoid acknowledging his final insight.

Nir Rosen on the "Aftermath" of America's wars

(updated below w/transcript)

Nir Rosen, currently with NYU's Center on Law and Security, is one of the best war journalists in the world.  Since 2003, he has spent substantial time -- always unembedded -- in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other nations in the region directly affected by American wars (Syria, Egypt, Jordan).  Few people have as effectively given voice in the Western World to the impact which these wars have on those who live there.  Rosen has now written an amazingly good and moving book, which I read this month, that narrates -- from both a geopolitical and very personal perspective -- the havoc, misery, chaos, instability and pure evil these wars have unleashed:  Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World.

What makes Rosen's book so compelling is that it focuses on exactly that which both media accounts and elite foreign policy discourse in the U.S. systematically ignore:  namely, the effects from America's wars on the lives of the people who are most affected, and the geopolitical consequences of the wars from the perspective of those in the region.  The book has garnered praise from such diverse analysts as Tom Ricks ("If you think you understand the war in Iraq, or just think you should try to, read this book"), Noam Chomsky ("The image this meticulously detailed rendition brings to mind is of a brutal ignoramus wielding a sledgehammer to smash a complex structure he does not understand, with unpredictable but predictably awful consequences"), and Andrew Bacevich ("In this brilliantly reported and deeply humane book, Nir Rosen demolishes this self-serving picture, depicting the relationship between the occupied and the occupiers in all its nuanced complexity").  After having finished the book, my praise is every bit as lavish.

Rosen is my guest today on Salon Radio to discuss the book and recent developments in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I had originally intended the discussion to last 20 minutes, but I was every bit as riveted listening to him here as I was by Aftermath, and so it lasted roughly 50 minutes.  I hope everyone will listen to the entire discussion, as he brings a depth of knowledge and insight that really is unique among war commentators.  And a transcript will be posted a little bit later today.  But for those who right now can listen only to selected excerpts, I highly recommend the question about Iraq that begins at 18:50 (the question after that about the myths of the surge is very worthwhile as well), and the last two questions about Afghanistan, beginning at roughly 37:00. 

This is genuinely a gripping and highly informative book from which anyone with any interest in these matters will benefit greatly.  I've included the link to Powells Bookstore above, which I hope everyone will use (for this book and all others) rather than Amazon (for this reason), although for those for whom it makes a big difference, the book is substantially discounted at Amazon.  To listen to the discussion, click PLAY on the player below.

 

UPDATE:  The transcript of this discussion is here.

Transcript: Nir Rosen

To listen to this discussion, click here.

Glenn Greenwald: My guest today on Salon Radio is Nir Rosen who I think is unquestionably one of the best war journalists and commentators in the country probably in the world. He is a freelance writer photographer, film-maker, and he is currently a scholar associated with the New York University Center on Law and Security, and he has just written a book that I finished reading actually today entitled Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World. It's really an amazing book. It describes the impact of multiple American wars on families and people in various countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and other countries where Nir has spent a great amount of time. I'm really excited to talk about this book. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

Nir Rosen: Thanks for reading the book.

GG: It was definitely my pleasure, and I mean that sincerely. One of the things that struck me about the book was, there's a lot of factual analysis and reporting from what you've seen of the kind that one would expect, but also there are a lot of parts of the book I think are very personal in tone and perspective, and that's clearly because you've spent so much time in war zones and places devastated by war in the Middle East and other parts of the Muslim world. Can you talk about just what your experiences have been, like where have you been over the last decade and more so what led you to start visiting these dangerous and war-torn places, and what drives you now to do that?

NR: Well I've been working as a journalist since April 2003, when the war in Iraq came to an end. I got to Baghdad April 13, 2003, and that was really the beginning of my career as a journalist. I was very curious; I knew—I was in DC at the time—I knew that we weren't going to get the full story, we weren't going to get the point of view of the Iraqi people. It was clear that the war was predicated on lies to the American people and the US Government and US military wouldn't be able to understand or deal with the culture and politics of Iraq.

So I came with a real curiosity and a certain sense of anger as well, just for being lied to. I very quickly made a lot of friends in Baghdad. It was pretty easy to operate there in those days, very safe. Those friends introduced me to their friends and their relatives, and ended up meeting the nucleus of a network of contacts and friends that I rely on to this day. I just got back from Iraq a couple of months ago and I'm going again in a few weeks. I became very emotionally attached to the country, to the people, and their plight and struggle.

But I've also spent most of the last eight years in neighboring countries as well, and in particular Lebanon where I was living, I was able to witness first-hand the effects of Iraq in terms of instability and militias and Sunni/Shia violence. What motivates me in part is an anger at being lied to which I realize maybe late by some standards when I was a freshman in college that the government and the media so often deceive us, and then I was angry and the anger remains as a key motivating factor, and I think mistrust of authority whether it's a militia leader or an American general is one of key motives and what inspires me to actually try to find out for myself what's going on on the ground and avoid official statements and people in government offices we know are just going to give you propaganda, but they are so often treated as the main sources in the mainstream media.

GG: One of the topics that you convey really well in this book is how much of a gap there is between how American elites talk about our wars and the reality of those wars and the things that you actually see by being there and in an unembedded function, and there's this interesting speech that I've written about a few times by Ashleigh Banfield, who at the time was an MSNBC war reporter who was sort of the rising star of the MSNBC and NBC news and she was relatively new to covering wars, and she had come back from Iraq and she gave this speech at Kansas State University and she talked about the huge disparity between how television conveys wars to the American people and the reality of wars and all the things that embedding does in terms of distortions and this sliver of reality that ends up being conveyed.

What do you think are the realities of American wars and occupations that end up getting the shortest shrift in terms of how elites talk about our wars and what the American citizenry ends up hearing about them?

NR: I suppose with the majority of what Americans get to see is the American point of view, or even a limited one at that, but the point of view of white people who speak English. Very few voices from the occupied side, from the other side, are permitted. Too often when American journalists actually visit a country, if they're not going to focus on American elite or the American military, they end up focusing on local elites, people who speak English, the Ahmed Chalabi types, people who are sort of like us, they will serve you wine and talk about their favorite football team back when they were at university in the US, but not people who actually have any popularity or legitimacy on the ground.

It's harder to meet those people—you have to deal with diarrhea and drinking dirty water sometimes and mixing with people who aren't like you, they're not going to serve you alcohol, they're not going to speak English most of the time. It's just inconvenient, and I think most journalists don't want to put up with that kind of inconvenience when it's much more convenient to be with American soldiers who are a lot more like you and in the evening you can go back to the chow hall and get a burger and chit chat with them, rather than putting up with the risks both gastrointestinal and more serious of actually reporting on people that they're besieging in the occupation.

I guess one thing we miss is just the deep humiliation and disruption that results from a foreign occupation. Now, most American soldiers are familiar with the movie Red Dawn, so sometimes I try to use that as a way to get them to understand the other side, although I guess they're these days probably too young to remember that movie. But even if the American soldiers aren't necessarily killing innocent people or torturing them, it's the mere presence, it's so brutally disruptive, the checkpoints, the strangers going into your house, constantly having foreigners with guns pointed at you wherever you go, people telling you what to do who don't speak your language. If they arrest one of the men in your house, you don't know who to appeal to.

If you're lost and scared, there are huge guys with helmets and vests and weapons who are shouting at you. And even if they were girl scouts, they have these immense vehicles and they go on the roads and are breaking irrigation pipes and accidentally running over your car or damaging it. It's a constant disruption and humiliation and fear which I don't think Americans have been able to appreciate. To us to perceive the American military is acting somewhat like cops on the beat or boy scouts whereas for locals it much a more painful and humiliating and scary experience.

GG: One of the realizations that the American military has had I guess in the last 10 years is this need to be more culturally sensitive to the local populations in the countries where we're occupying, simply out of self-interest, and of course that's part of the whole counter-insurgency doctrine and all of that. Just in general, and I want to ask you about the specific countries that you focus on in a minute, but just in general, how capable is the US military do you think of actually bridging these centuries-old or millennia-old religious and cultural nationalistic gaps that just create this huge divergence between Americans' understanding of the world and the understanding of so many different kinds of people in that part of the world?

NR: I think the American military and to a large extent the American policy establishment, the State Department, are deeply challenged, they are unable to really deal with, to understand, comprehend, or translate with the cultures that they're dealing with. The military, you can't necessarily blame them, it's not their fault, they're recruited from a pool of people who aren't exactly world travelers necessarily, and the mentality they inculcate is more of an engineering one, how many inputs do you need to get a certain output, what can you put into a chart, a PowerPoint presentation.

You can't put a culture—these are organic and complex phenomena—into these PowerPoint charts in which they try to understand the world. There are no formulas for understanding human being and all the complex things that can motivate them. And I too often also found that Americans keep on going back to the same books, the same orientalist books which are used to justify empire, that Arabs only understand force, they are tribal, they are Bedouin. I've seen very little progress actually in the Americans' ability to grasp the cultures in the Muslim world and they refer to a handful of academics who are far outside the mainstream of academics trying to understand the Middle East of Afghanistan, but who have been used to justify various wars and occupations.

So they still will talk about tribal societies and Bedouin societies as if they are some kind of cultural secrets, and if you just unlock these secrets, if it's Pashtunwali in Afghanistan or Islamic code or Bedouin code, or Koranic society—you heard these weird terms often—if you just unlock these codes, you can understand the people and manipulate them and control them. Because the academics who actually would be useful for understanding these kinds of cultures would be the first to advocate against any kind of foreign occupation of course.

So I've been dismayed by their inability to understand the motivations behind the people that they're dealing with. Time and again, for example, I see people in the American military insisting that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere are fighting for money. This is a mistake I've viewed happening over and over again. And neither I nor any of the journalists who are friends of mine who have met with insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan ever met anybody that was motivated by money.

But you often hear American soldiers talking about if you, as if it's the Sopranos, they like to go back to Sopranos metaphor, as if the primary motivator for people fighting occupation is money and not what it really is, issues of dignity, of freedom, of nationalism, of ideology. It's almost as if Americans aren't able to understand those concepts and they think that Taliban are fighting for $10 a day. And I just have not seen that with the Shabab in Somalia, I haven't seen that in Yemen, or Lebanon or in Afghanistan or in Iraq. They're fighting for their communities.

But I guess if the Americans were able to understand that, then that would make us seem like we were the bad guys, and we don't want to feel like we're the bad guys, we don't want to feel like we're the British in Braveheart fighting locals who are nationalists and freedom fighters. So I guess we have to try to understand their motives as being more financial whereas in reality I think they're much more deeply ideological and nationalistic.

GG: Let me ask you this—one more question before asking you about specific places—and that is the type of elite discourse. What always, honestly what always baffles me is that, I can understand how Americans who aren't paying attention to politics full-time can end up not paying adequate attention to the impact that our invasions and bombings and occupations have because it actually takes a lot of work to go and read about it and hear about it and think about it, 'cause it's not something that normally is included in standard media narratives.

But for people who actually pay attention to and work on foreign policy issues full-time as their profession, the foreign policy community, and related cliques, there's almost a formal, but certainly an informal role that those kind of considerations are excluded from their discussions, so they'll spend lots of time talking about whether prospective wars can be justified in terms of how they advance US interests. They'll spend lots of time talking about which particular tactics can advance those strategies, but there's no talk of whether specific American wars are justifiable in a legal sense, and there's definitely no talk about whether they're justifiable in an ethical or moral sense based on the harm that it will do to the people in those country who we're invading. Even though you're generally very independent and kind of unembedded, you also have a good familiarity with that world just because of how often in those places and talking about foreign policy.

What do you think it is that accounts for that extremely narrow suffocatingly narrow range of issues that they end up considering?

NR: I guess that the kind of description, the answer I can give is that they're concerned only with what they perceive to be the interests of the US, and whatever can achieve those interests is legitimate. A purely American nationalism. And therefore anything is justified in terms of attaining perceived American interests. Well I would argue that even from a narrow American nationalistic or imperialistic point of view, they end up harming what's in our best interests.

But I think there's probably a much more deeper racism inherent in that too. Because we would care if the victims were white. We care much less when the victims are brown, or Muslim, or are perceived to be somehow inferior. International law and these legal constraints are perceived to be useful for the weak, but the powerful don't need to refer to them, 'cause in the end, what are you going to do about it? There's nobody who could challenge us. And there's also a sense, a deep sense among people in the policy world, in the military, that we're the good guys. It's just taken for granted that what we're doing must be right because we're doing it. We're the exceptional country, the essential nation, and our role, our intervention, our presence is a benign and beneficent thing.

I imagine that's what it is because the policy makers aren't, they don't let you meet with them, they don't seem necessarily evil, even though in the end the policies are very destructive and disruptive and harmful even to American interests. But they believe that they are doing the right thing, at least for the American people, and that what we want is in the end somehow good for the world.

I guess it's striking when you think about Iraq today, here in the US, it's perceived to be some kind of a success. There's no guilt, there's no hand-wringing, there's no remorse, no lessons learned about the terrible destruction that we brought upon the society and the region. But alone, an inquiry into the legal issues, whether it was a war that was somehow justifiable in terms of international law. International law is something which, I mean, people just scoff at. In fact they to get to scoffing at it so much that I even scoff at it because it just doesn't matter. It matters for weak countries. It's a way for the strong to imprison the weak, to limit their freedom of action. The weak—small countries, non-state actors—certainly don't believe that the powerful are restrained by international law.

GG: I just finished a book actually about how the rule of law is perverted in that exact way domestically, that is, that the rich are exempted from it and use it as a means of coercing and controlling the powerless and the poor, and I actually at one time did a report on drug legalization in Portugal, and went there and talked to policy officials, and they actually wanted to legalize drugs, not just decriminalize them, and I remember one of the drug policy officials said that there are treaties that ban them from legalizing, and he said that since we're a small country, we actually have to abide by our treaty obligations, and I guess that's pretty much, you know, how the world sees those.

So let me ask you about Iraq, because as you just said, there's very little remorse on the part of the people who supported it or enabled it, and you said, these people, a lot of them anyway, don't actually seem evil, and I guess that's the banality of evil, that well-commented upon and well-observed. You've been there—people can look at statistics and see how many civilians were killed and see how many people were displaced externally and internally, the several million people who were. 

But just describe in a kind of summary way what was done to that country. Obviously there are some people who are better off because under Saddam they were so repressed, but on the whole, talk about what was done to that the country as a result of our invasion.

NR: Well, our relationship with Iraq didn't begin in 2003. You can't—so I can't begin there. It certainly began in the '70s or before. Our distinctly negative one began in the '80s, I guess. We support, along with our Gulf allies, the creation of an immense Iraqi military. That Iraqi military was much larger than the country could handle—hundreds of thousands of people—because we were supporting the Iraqi war against Iran of course. And many of those people who eventually demobilized or dismissed ended up joining the resistance or the insurgency. So we helped create a very militaristic Iraq which when it was done with Iran ended up looking towards Kuwait and aggressively trying to conquer Kuwait.

We of course devastated Iraq in 1991 Gulf War and brought Iraq to the level of the Stone Age and the sanctions era throughout the '90s. Hundreds of thousands of children died, the middle class was destroyed, the government of Saddam became much much more powerful because people grew to depend on him much more. People became more religious. Congenital diseases and growth stunting and malnutrition and diarrhea, all these things became much more serious problems. So when we arrived in Iraq, it was already a society that was deeply weakened and destroyed and sick, and we had very much contributed to that. We also bombed the hell out of Iraq in 1998. So we can't begin in 2003.

But, having said all that, what we did in 2003, right from the beginning, even if the invasion itself was wrong, had we invaded with hundreds of thousands of more troops the way American military planners would have wanted, at least we could have prevented the looting that occurred, and this massive and pervasive sense of lawlessness which took over, because there was just no security. If you got rid of the mayor and the police, the government in New York City, and the electricity, and put nothing in place to replace them, you'd very soon see self-defense militias forming, former policemen would sell their services out, or prey upon the people, you'd see Jewish militias fighting Porto Rican militias and Upper East Side militias fighting East Harlem militias, and the Upper East Side militias wouldn't do too well probably. Iraq wasn't unique.

We removed the state and allowed militias to take over, and those militias in a sense remained in power. So from the beginning you had militia warfare, you had total destruction of the state infrastructure, a civil war which began in 2003, but grew more and more intense, kidnapping and rapes and serious crime being committed right from the beginning and anybody with any kind of money, middle class, doctor or whatever, their kid would be kidnapped for ransom.

So rampant criminality, which also led to people seeking protection by forming militias. The dominance over Iraqi society on the part of religious groups would have gotten much stronger in the '90s thanks to the sanction devastating society and the flight of Iraqi liberals. Then of course we arrested tens and tens of thousands of Iraqi men, primarily men; the majority of them were never tried or sentenced, but they languished for years in American detention and in Iraqi detention where many were tortured and abused both in American detention and in Iraqi detention.

That left hundreds of thousands of people whose men and sons and husbands and fathers disappeared. Kids watching their fathers being taken away, the kids are screaming, daddy, daddy, and father's desperate and he's bleeding and being beaten and dragged away. So that's hundreds of thousands of families horribly brutalized and traumatized and children who were urinating on themselves at night because they're so scared, the Americans are coming and take them away too. And the women are left with nobody who can care for them and feed them, families devastated. Millions of refugees created. They are displaced either internally or abroad, living in poverty. People who may have been wealthy or middle class even.

Secular Iraqis, liberal Iraqis, educated Iraqis, now reduced to prostitution, having their kids sell cigarettes on the street, lives totally ruined when you're 50 years old, you cannot begin again, especially in a country like Syria or Jordan where there's already a poor economic environment and you don't have access to any kind of employment. And their kids can't go to school, so you now have a generation of children who haven't gone to school for about the last five years.

Every family that I've met in Iraq, or Iraqi refugees as well, has been touched by kidnapping and murder and rape and displacements. You have half a million Iraqis today living inside Iraq who are homeless, squatting in illegal settlements, living in shacks made out of tin cans and cardboard—I saw a house made out of used air conditioners piled up on top of each other—living in massive pits of sewage, stinking of shit, flies all over the place. And, of course, let's not forget you had hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, murdered, disappeared, tortured to death with power drills, with beheadings, their bodies found weeks later in garbage dumps. Hundreds and hundreds of villages in Iraq totally destroy in a civil war, like in Rwanda or Bosnia. Every house blown up. All that's left is a pile of rubble and women's shoes.

It's a totally destroyed society, and militias may not have a real hold today the way they did in the past, but torture is routine and systematic now. If you get arrested, you get tortured. Corruption is rampant; it's one of the most corrupt countries on Earth. Services are terrible, almost no electricity, dirty water, terrible malnutrition, kids not going to school. It's just a destroyed, brutalized and beaten place where the worst kind of people have taken over. There's no space for women—certainly it was better to be a woman under Saddam. Honor killings have increased. It's just a real betrayal of the hopes that Iraqis had with the removal of Saddam.

GG: Now, this is pretty jarring, and that's the kind of thing that your book so powerfully conveys, is that people know rationally some of that, maybe a lot of that, but to hear it laid out from somebody who's seen it in a way that makes it clear how affected you've been, is very moving and valuable. So, let me ask you about the claim of the Surge and the success of the Surge and where things in Iraq are now. Talk about some of the myths that have been attached to the idea of the surge and its efficacy, and in 2010 in Iraq, are you optimistic that things have gotten better and will continue to get better, or not?

NR: It is really, really important for Americans to understand what happened in Iraq during the surge. Not necessarily because they care about Iraq—I think most don't, at least some care about Afghanistan—we can't understand what's happening in Afghanistan with the Americans think they are doing in Afghanistan, what they're trying to do, what they can and cannot do, without understanding what really happened in Iraq. There is the notion that the surge was a success in Iraq. Petraeus and the surge was a success in Iraq, so Petraeus and the surge will be a success in Afghanistan. Now, the surge, strictly speaking, was just an increase in troops by 30,000 people, which began in 2007.

But the surge has come to mean a lot more than that, and it now signifies a period from late 2006 until 2008 in which a complex synergy of primarily Iraqi dynamics interacting with some changes in what the Americans are doing ended up reducing violence from the terrible terrible levels of 2006-2007, to the just really, really bad levels of today. Even calling what you have in Iraq today a success is deeply offensive because violence in Iraq today is still worse than it is in Afghanistan; people are being blown up and assassinated every day. The government is brutal and ugly and torturous and corrupt.

But violence did go down. It went down primarily not because of the American surge, primarily you had a civil war and the Shias won. It wasn't so much that the Americans defeated the Sunni Arab insurgency, it was that Shia militias brutalized the Sunni population. Shias were the majority, so they had that numerical superiority, and they had the Iraqi police and the Iraqi army working for them too, those were acting for the first three years basically as Shia death squads, and they had the American military on their side. So they brutalized the Sunni population until Sunni militiamen began to realize by summer 2006 that they had lost.

And that ended up translating itself into sort of a Sunni ceasefire, which began in some areas in 2006, that was known as the awakening phenomena, in which Sunni militiamen realized that they were better off allying with the Americans and hoping that they could regroup and fight the Shias eventually, because Sunnis were devastated. Al Qaeda, which had been a self-defense militia at one point, was becoming oppressive; Shia militia were killing them, Shia police, Shia armies, and the American military. Everybody was punishing Sunnis, and they were watching in 2006 American debates in the Senate where Democrats were calling for withdrawal. And Sunni friends of mine who had supported resisting the American occupation, were suddenly panicking, and they were saying if the Americans leave, we're going to get wiped out. I mean they were staring at the brink of genocide basically.

I was meeting with Sunni resistance leaders in Iraq, in Syria, in Jordan, and they were telling me, we lost, we lost, we miscalculated in 2003 when we obeyed the fatwas of our clerics and boycotted the Iraqi state, and now it's in the hands of Shias. I think that was basically true. It wasn't so much General Petraeus who defeated the Sunni Arab insurgency as Black & Decker, and by that I mean power drills. In a sense, power drills were the hallmark of Iraqi militiamen, the signature way of killing somebody. If you found a body, and they had power drill marks on it, you knew that that guy was killed by Shia militiamen. If you found a body that was beheaded, you knew he was killed by Sunni militia. And it was just Shia brutality in the civil war, you just had more Shias, which basically eventually taught Sunnis their place in the new Iraq, in an inferior marginalized one.

And if Sunnis responded to the American surge by realizing that if they cut a deal with the Americans, the Americans might be in Iraq long enough that Sunnis wouldn't be abandoned and betrayed and killed for revenge by al Qaeda, which had happened in the past when they had tried to make deals with the Americans. Now, you no longer had any more mixed areas to speak of in Iraq; Sunnis and Shias were separated.

GG: Including Baghdad? Are there...?

NR: Neighborhoods. For the most part, there were cleansed, Shia neighborhoods were cleansed of Sunnis, Sunni neighborhoods were cleansed of Shia. So you had less people to kill in that sense. Various neighborhoods that were sort of like zone of influence for a variety of warlords, Sunni and Shia warlords, and in 2007 Iraq resembles Somalia I thought, but there less people to kill because so many had already been killed and militias succeeded in cleansing their areas of potential victims, and so many people had fled outside of Baghdad or outside of Iraq.

And it almost more than the American surge itself, the American declaration of the surge from the Iraqi militiamen on Sunni and Shia side to reassess what was in their best interests, strategically. So as I said, Sunni militiamen realized that if they ally with the Americans, maybe they can eventually go after their Shia foes, and they won't get wiped out, and were able to go after their al Qaeda foes, because there was a clash between the Sunni resistance community as well between the minority of guys that were al Qaeda and wanted jihad until judgment day, and wanted to use Iraq the way they used Afghanistan in the 1980s, a launching pad for endless war, and the mainstream Iraqi resistance guys who just wanted to control Iraq and make sure it was in the hands of Sunnis. They were more nationalistic and narrow in their interests. So better to ally with the Americans against their various enemies and get some protection and assistance.

It was a very strategic decision, the creating of these awakenings, not a mercenary decision. But Shia militiamen also had to reassess what was in their interests. They knew that the Americans were going to focus on Baghdad, because Baghdad was now in the hands of Shia militiamen. And from their point of view, it was better to lie low and wait out this American surge and they'll back out on top afterwards. So you also had a Shia ceasefire. You had a Sunni ceasefire followed by a Shia ceasefire. After that Shia ceasefire you had a huge drop in violence, and that ceasefire occurred about eight months after the surge began.

The violence continued to peak and peak and peak during the surge, and it was only after the Shia ceasefire there was a huge drop in violence. But both of the militias miscalculated, because Prime Minister Maliki, who at first had been very close to the Shia militiamen, had been weak, and decided it was time to go after his Shia rivals. So he devastated the army, with help from the Americans, while the Sunni militiamen would never go back to being the rules. They were effective guerrilla fighters when they were underground, their identities were unknown, they were swimming among the Sunni masses.

But now the Sunni masses had been depopulated, basically, their neighborhoods were ghost towns, and these awakening guys, former insurgents, their identities were known. The Americans had all their biometric data and their addresses, so too the Iraqi police and the Iraqi army, so they could never go back to operating as effective insurgents. And as soon as the Americans handed authority over the awakening groups to the Iraqi state, they began arresting these guys and devastating them.

So now the Sunni militias were emaciated, the Shia militias were emaciated, and the Iraqi security forces, which had once been a party to the civil war, the Shia death squads, were basically cleansed of their worst elements, so they could fill that vacuum that had originally led to the existence of self-defense militias. It was diverse array of Iraqi factors that led to the relative decline in violence to the still terrible levels of today. The surge was meant to create an opening that would allow for political reconciliation. You had that decline in violence, but you never had a political reconciliation or any kind of just settlements of how Iraq was going to look in incorporation of Sunnis and others.

But, it turns out, that wasn't even necessary. It looks like Prime Minister Maliki can be as authoritarian as he wants to be, and there is nothing anybody can do about it, because the Iraqi state is sort of returning to its authoritarian roots and he can be brutal, he can ignore the legitimate or illegitimate demand of Sunnis, and there's not much they can do because they are just so weak.

GG: Right. So, obviously the irony is that at least judging by the propaganda prior to the invasion and even during the invasion, we were there to liberate the Iraqi people, and ultimately there was a realization that really the only solution to this horrendous violence that we had spawned and unleashed was really a return to the sort of strong leader model, which Iraq had of course prior to the invasion. Let me ask you this, which is, obviously things are horrendous in Iraq still, but what you just described, in the last couple minutes, is at least an improvement over the peak of the civil war atrocities in 2005, 2006 and into 2007, namely the militias had been weakened, there has been a more centralized power that's emerged in a relatively less corrupt and brutal centralized police and army.

As bad as that is, can that serve as a model for improving things in Afghanistan? And just along those lines, a couple of questions about Afghanistan as well: is there the kind of prospect for reconciliation with the Taliban that happened with say the Sunnis even though the motives might be different, and is there even such a thing as the Taliban in some monolithic sense, where we can even talk about what the motives are and what the prospects are for reconciliation?

NR: I'll answer the last question first. It's ridiculous to talk about the Taliban, because it's a pretty diverse movement. In fact, these days the Taliban isn't necessarily composed only of Taliban, in that, strictly, Taliban just means student. Young men in madrasas with mullahs teaching them, who historically when they were fighting the British occupation, the Russians, or the Americans, would take up arms when foreigners invaded their country. But now a days it's much more than the Taliban fighting the Americans, it's farmers, it's normal villagers. But, there are sort of large groups within that; certainly Mullah Omar and the original Taliban leadership are still very influential, and it is possible to negotiate with them, and in fact that's the only way you'll ever have any kind of improvement in the situation.

But going back to looking at Iraq, none of the factors that you had in Iraq which led to an eventual relative decline in violence exist in Afghanistan. The Americans accidentally created a civil war in Iraq, and it was the victory of one side in that civil war which was the main factor in the reduction of the violence. Sunnis in Iraq, Sunni Arabs, are 20% of the population, and they were brutalized and devastated until they were taught their place, taught that they were the losers in a new Iraq, to speak about it very callously.

Pashtuns dominate the Taliban. Pashtuns are the largest group in Afghanistan, 40%. And they do not feel like they are losing. They have every reason, the Taliban, to feel like they're winning. They control 80% of the country now. Their control has been spreading and improving year after year after year. The American surge in Iraq led to a certain reassessments of what was in their best strategic interests on the part of Sunni and Shia militias. You've had successive American surges in Afghanistan since 2005, every year we've had a surge, and every year the violence gets worse and worse. The surges have not led to any improvement.

We've been using counter-insurgency in Afghanistan since 2006 at least, and you have no sign of improvement in any sector in Afghanistan. Now, the Iraqi security forces were actually very effective in 2006 and 2007, during the civil war. The were effective at killing Sunnis, but at least they were effective at something. The Afghan security forces are totally non-existent. The police are corrupt; they're not doing drugs or stealing, but they're not a party in any kind of civil war. They're just being killed off by the Taliban. The Afghan army is a joke and never really fights. So you don't have an Afghan partner who can brutalize the population, get them to be pacified the way Shia militiamen and Shia security forces were able to in Iraq.

And a key element in the improvement in Iraq was Maliki's growth as a leader. He's brutal, and in many ways he resembles a Shia Saddam, but he asserted himself and the Iraqi state became much stronger and now dominates Iraq, and nobody can overthrow it. And he went after the Shia militias. Crucially, he made a decision to wipe out the Mahdi army and he did that effectively, which even won him the grudging acceptance of many Sunnis. He's credited with improving security somehow and with transcending narrow sectarianism.

And a key element of the American counter-insurgency theory is that you build the capacity of local governments so they can take over from you. Karzai is no Maliki. Even Maliki isn't that great, but Karzai is no Maliki. He has no legitimacy, no credibility; every election we've had in Afghanistan has only led to greater chaos, greater violence, and disappointments and the lack of rule of law, and deepen the fissures in Afghanistan. He's unable to assert his authority anywhere in the country, except through some patronage networks because of the money he gets from the Americans or the Iranians or drug deals.

So you don't have a state you want to support; in effect, this is a predatory government which is hated. The last thing you want to do is build his capacity so he can further alienate people. The Taliban are an Afghan movement. They are Afghans fighting for local Afghan causes and reason with the support of communities throughout Afghanistan. We cannot fight a war against the Afghan people and defeat them. The US military thankfully isn't that brutal, and I'm a huge critic of the US military, but it's not the Israeli or the Russian military. They are not going to brutalize the Pashtun population sufficiently to teach them that insurgency is not going to work.

The only successful counter-insurgency in history perhaps is the British in Malaya, which the Americans often refer to in their books on counter-insurgency. But the British in Malaya took half a million ethnic Chinese and put them in concentration camps, and that worked because the insurgency in Malaya was dominated by ethnic Chinese, communists. We are not going to take millions and millions of Pashtuns and put them in concentration camps.

Iraq was also much easier in the sense that the battle was an urban one for the most part, and you could build these immense walls around different neighborhoods. It was very oppressive, it was like Palestine; it disrupted the social fabric, it made life hell, but it allowed you to control the people and control who went in and who went out of neighborhoods. You could conduct a census and determine who belonged. You could prevent arms and bombs from going in a neighborhood because you controlled the only entry and exit point to it. You could prevent militias from going into a neighborhood.

So once the Iraqi civil war had sufficiently devastated its population, the Americans came in there, kind of froze the gains of the civil war with these massive walls, in a way that reminded me of the way that the Dayton accords froze the Serbian gains in the Bosnian civil war. So you were able to control the population of Baghdad as an American occupier. Now Afghanistan is not an urban conflict. The center of gravity as they say of the insurgency is in the rural areas, where most of the people live. In the '80s the Russians controlled the cities, the communists controlled the cities in Afghanistan. The Mujahideen controlled the countryside.

Likewise today the Americans may control the population centers, the Taliban control the countryside, and once you leave the cities, the few capitals of the provinces, you are in Taliban territory, and you have thousands and thousands of villages with no roads, impossible to even physically control these areas. The Americans ended up living with the people in Iraq, able to base themselves in communities. You cannot in Afghanistan do that.

So even from an American counter-insurgency point of view, it's just much too challenging. They are living in bases remote from the population, they go out, they rumble along a road slowly for a couple of hours, shake hands with an elder in a village, drink tea with him, they feel like they're Lawrence of Arabia or something, and then they rumble back to their military bases a couple of hours away in time for the chow hole to be opened to get a burger before going to play video games in their rooms.

Meanwhile, that night, the Taliban can knock on the door of the elder whose hand we shook, and remind him who his neighbor is, and who is watching him, and undermine any deal you're going to strike with that guy. Another difference: Iraq, the conflict was fundamentally about controlling the state, because the main resource in Iraq is oil. Whoever controls the state controls the oil, and is rich. Afghanistan has not resources to speak of. In theory they have lithium, but they're never going to it. The main resource in Afghanistan is American dollars. We, our presence, is fueling a conflict economy. It's this corrosive presence, and everybody wants a piece of our money. The warlords in Afghanistan, even the Taliban, are getting our money.

In Iraq, our convoys were protected by private security companies like Blackwater. In Afghanistan, these convoys are protected by Afghan warlords. So it's our money which is fueling warlordism and corruption in Afghanistan. And the warlords pay off the Taliban, it's the Taliban that's more effective and will allow them to operate in Taliban areas. So Taliban is getting American money as well. It's a perfect storm of this conflict economy driven by American money which is flooding into a place that has no capacity to actually absorb it.

GG: So let me ask you this, and this is the last question, which is, one of the things that struck me, and obviously you're a critic of the Iraq War from the start, and yet one of the things that you said, and I got this sense from what you wrote as well, when you talked about the fact that Sunnis were petrified that as the Democrats in Congress agitated or at least pretended to agitate for an end to the war, that that would leave them vulnerable to genocide at the hands of the Shia, and no matter what your view on the war is, that gives you cause for at least some pause before advocating withdrawal or certainly some ambivalence because even if you think we had no right to invade in the first place, once you invade and destroy the country it can create new obligations that you didn't have before.

So, thinking about that principle in terms of Afghanistan, of course one of the things that people frequently argue is that even no matter what we're doing there that isn't right, that things are going poorly that make no sense, that leaving is not an option because if we leave we're going to leave the country back in the hands of the Taliban, which is both a problem morally because of how oppressive and brutal they are, and also strategically because of the problems that it created for the United States the last time the Taliban controlled Afghanistan. What's your view of that argument?

NR: I think that one way or the other the Taliban are gaining control of Afghanistan. That's self-evident when you see even provinces in the north and the west are falling into Taliban hands, or at least the countryside is and the villages are, and that you have no Afghan state to speak of outside the cities. So the country is going in that direction anyway. But, obviously, you wouldn't want your daughter to live under the Taliban rule, although in general I wouldn't my daughter to live in any part of Afghanistan under anybody's rule. It's not like the culture is very liberal, and the Taliban are merely a manifestation of Afghan culture in many places. But, that's not really our problem as Americans. Certainly our presence there is only fueling radicalism and conflict, but are the Taliban a threat to the US? Absolutely not.

They're locals fighting for Afghanistan. And they've been pretty clear that they themselves have learned from the mistakes of their relationship that they had with bin Laden. They saw that it had been, the Taliban inherited bin Laden in Afghanistan and they took over much of the country and inherited him. But I think it's pretty clear to most experts on the Taliban that they would not allow al Qaeda back into their country.

But even al Qaeda has changed. At the time of September 11, you had Arab legions in Afghanistan; it wasn't just terrorists, there were Arab soldiers fighting in the Afghan civil war. And also Arabs going in for a variety of training. Those guys are totally devastated and decimated. Al Qaeda was destroyed in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. So we basically won and achieved our goals in 2002. And al Qaeda has also learned from its mistakes, and they're never going to go back to Afghanistan and set up bases, because if you think that these drone strikes are undermining al Qaeda leadership, it would be much easier for the Americans to go into a valley in Afghanistan where they suspect there is an al Qaeda base and just devastate it with B-52s.

In Pakistan the Americans have to be very delicate and discreet, with respect for Pakistani sensibility. Here everybody knows that they're collaborating with us, but we have to use drone strikes. If al Qaeda were to set up bases, you know this is the American military, they will just carpet bomb the entire valley. So I don't see why al Qaeda in Afghanistan is more dangerous than al Qaeda in Pakistan. All that we've really succeeded in doing in the last 10 years is pushing the problems of Afghanistan into Pakistan, where the real trouble is.

I mean, Pakistan has 80 or so nuclear weapons, 170 million people, and this long-standing conflict with India. But as a result of our invasion of Afghanistan, you now have a Pakistani Taliban, you now have al Qaeda in Pakistan, you now have drug networks from Afghanistan pushing to Pakistan, and our drone strikes on the border area are only pushing the Taliban and al Qaeda deeper into Pakistan, into Punjab and Sindh, into Karachi, so we are destabilizing Pakistan, a country which does actually matter in terms of international security, out of some twisted perverse idea that Afghanistan matters and is somehow a threat.

No, I don't think if the Taliban took over in Afghanistan again, I don't think Mullah Omar would come back, and I also don't think that they would invite al Qaeda back, because they would clearly be against their best interests. We've seen an evolution in the way that the Taliban think as well, in how they have learned from their mistakes. And finally, I guess I don't think al Qaeda is that big of a deal in the first place. A couple of hundred angry guys, not very sophisticated, who used their A team on September 11 and killed 3000 people in the US. Terrible, but that's been their only success in the last 10 years. So I think it's insane to go to war in several countries and invest billions and billions of dollars all for what I think is really a pretty minimal threat to the greatest empire the world has ever seen.

GG: Well, Nir, this has been really fascinating, which is why it's gone on for several of the time or more than I anticipated, and it's a very good reflection of why the book is really so informative and gripping as well, and I don't use those adjectives easily. I mean, it really is a great book and I definitely appreciate your taking the time to talk to me. I think a lot of people are going to get a lot out of it.

NR: Thanks a lot.

[Transcript courtesy of Thames Valley Transcribe]

The media's authoritarianism and WikiLeaks

(updated below)

After I highlighted the multiple factual inaccuracies in Time's WikiLeaks article yesterday (see Update V) -- and then had an email exchange with its author, Michael Lindenberger -- the magazine has now appended to the article what it is calling a "correction."  In reality, the "correction" is nothing of the sort; it is instead a monument to the corrupted premise at the heart of American journalism.

Initially, note that Time has refused to correct its blatantly false claim that WikiLeaks has published "thousands of classified State Department cables" and posted "thousands of secret diplomatic cables" when, in reality, they've posted only 1,269 of the more than 250,000 cables they possess: less than 1/2 of 1 %.  It's true that they provided roughly 251,000 cables to five newspapers, but they have only "posted" and "published" roughly 1,200 of them.  Time just decided to leave that statement standing even knowing it is factually false.

More significant is the "correction" itself.  It applies to Time's clearly false claim of "a distinction between WikiLeaks' indiscriminate posting of the cables . . . and the more careful vetting evidenced by The New York Times."  That is false because WikiLeaks' release of cables had not been "indiscriminate" in any sense of the word.  As this AP article documents -- and as a casual review of its site independently proves -- WikiLeaks has done very little other than publish the specific cables that have been first released by newspapers around the world, including with the redactions applied by those papers.

So did Time correct its false statement by acknowledging its unquestionable falsity and pointing to the evidence disproving it?  Of course not.  Instead, they merely noted this at the bottom of the article: "Correction: The story has been amended to reflect the fact that Assange rejects claims that WikiLeaks has 'indiscriminately' dumped documents on its site."  They also added to the body of the article a sentence noting that "claims that Assange has simply dumped the documents without reviewing them, much like a traditional editor would, have been disputed" because "Assange himself told TIME that each diplomatic cable his site has published has been vetted by his own team or by the editors of newspapers with whom he has shared the documents."

In other words, the most Time is willing to do -- when forced by public complaints -- is note that "some" people (i.e., Assange) "dispute" the Government's accusatory claims of "indiscriminate" document dumping, ones uncritically amplified by Time and countless other media outlets.  The most they're willing to do now is convert it into a "they-said/he-said" dispute.  But what they won't do -- under any circumstances -- is state clearly that the Government's accusations are false, even where, as here, they unquestionably are.  Anticipating that this would be the "correction" they issued, I even emailed Lindenberger before it was posted and wrote:

One thing, while I have you - the appropriate correction needed is **not** a he-said-/he-said formulation ("we said 'indiscriminate,' but Assange denies this").

That WikiLeaks has (with a handful of exceptions) published ONLY what other newspapers first published is a VERIFIABLE FACT. AP reported it, and all you have to do is look on its website to see that virtually all the cables published were ones first published by the five partner newspapers.

To say "some say 'indiscriminate' while Assange denies this" as a correction is misleading. As a journalist, you should tell your readers the verifiable FACT: that virtually all of the cables published thus far by [WikiLeaks] were first published by these newspapers.

What was vital here was to have Time state clearly that the claim of "indiscriminate" dumping of cables is factually false -- not merely that Assange disputes it.  That could then be used to quash this lie each time it appears in other venues.  Of course, all of that fell on deaf ears, because my demand required that Time do exactly that which establishment media outlets, by definition, will rarely do: state clearly when the facts contradict -- negate -- claims by those in political power, especially when the target of the false claims is a demonized outsider-of-Washington faction like WikiLeaks.

The same exact thing happened when Time was finally forced in 2007 to issue a "correction" to Joe Klein's factually false statement (which he was told by GOP Rep. Pete Hoekstra) that the Democrats' FISA bill "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans."  Rather than admit what was 100% clear -- that Klein's statement was categorically false -- Time instead merely noted in its "correction" that "Republicans believe it can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don't."

That was Time's "correction" to a factually false statement -- some say yes and some say no: who are we to say which is true? we're just "journalists" -- and that's what they just did again in the WikiLeaks case (by contrast, The Chicago Tribune, which had run Klein's original Time story, issued a clear correction: "A Time magazine essay by Joe Klein that was excerpted on the editorial page Wednesday incorrectly stated that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would require a court approval of individual foreign surveillance targets. It does not" -- that's what a genuine correction looks like).

The reason this matters so much is because this falsehood is at the center of both the propaganda war against WikiLeaks and the efforts to criminally prosecute it by claiming it is not engaged in journalism.  Almost every radio and television show I've done over the last ten days concerning WikiLeaks -- and most media accounts I read -- have featured someone, somewhere, touting this lie, usually without contradiction: that WikiLeaks has indiscriminately dumped thousands of cables, whereas newspapers have only selectively published some.

As I wrote yesterday, WikiLeaks has every right to publish more cables than these newspapers decide to publish, and even to publish all of them -- if it does that, that won't change the legal issues one iota -- but since they haven't done that, media outlets have a responsibility not only to refrain from saying they have, but to state clearly that those who make this claim are spouting falsehoods.  That's what "journalism" is supposed to be: stating what the facts are for one's readers and viewers. Time's "correction" explicitly refuses to do that (though the magazine's response is at least mildly better than the gross irresponsibility of The New Republic, which published at least two columns promoting this falsehood -- one by James Rubin and the other by Todd Gitlin -- and then did nothing other than publish a piece by Gitlin days later which devotes a couple of paragraphs to insisting he bears no responsibility whatsoever for his factually false statements and then the rest of the piece to attacking me for pointing them out).

* * * * *

Beyond the need to destroy this pervasive zombie lie about WikiLeaks' conduct in the diplomatic cables disclosure, the broader point here is crucial:  the media's willingness to repeat this lie over and over underscores its standard servile role in serving government interests and uncritically spreading government claims. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has an excellent analysis today documenting how, in the wake of 9/11, they dropped all pretenses of checking those in political power and instead began explicitly proclaiming -- as The New York Times' chief stenographer and partner-of-Judy-Miller, Michael Gordon, suggested -- that "capturing the dominant view within the government was the job [of journalists], even if that view was wrong." As Rosen writes, "our press has never come to terms with the ways in which it got itself on the wrong side of secrecy as the national security state swelled in size after September 11th," and thus: "To understand Julian Assange and the weird reactions to him in the American press we need to tell a story that starts with Judy Miller and ends with Wikileaks."

That's why this cannot-be-killed lie about WikiLeaks' "indiscriminate" dumping of cables has so consumed me.  It's not because it would change much if they had done or end up doing that -- it wouldn't -- but because it just so powerfully proves how mindlessly subservient the American establishment media is: willing to repeat over and over completely false claims as long as it pleases the right people -- the same people to whom they claim they are "adversarial watchdogs."  It's when they engage in such clear-cut, deliberate propagandizing that their true function -- their real identity -- is thrown into such stark relief.

Just to underscore this point a bit further, consider this remarkable (and remarkably good) Editorial from The Guardian yesterday, which not only vehemently defends WikiLeaks, but -- extraordinarily -- also justifies the "denial of service" attacks from anonymous individuals around the world aimed at various companies serving the Government's war on WikiLeaks by depriving them of all services (MasterCard, Amazon, Paypal, etc.):

These companies all considered that their association with WikiLeaks damaged their brand image, a reflection prompted in some cases by a helpful call from the US state department. In essence they are trying to have it both ways: pretending in their marketing that they are free spirits and enablers of the cyber world, but only living up to that image as long as they don't upset anyone really important. . . . .

The hacktivists of Anonymous may be accused of many things – such as immaturity or being run by a herd instinct. But theirs is the cyber equivalent of non-violent action or civil disobedience. It disrupts rather than damages. In challenging the credit card companies and the web hosts in this way, they are reminding these businesses that their brand reputation relies not only on how the state department sees them, but also on how they maintain their independence in the eyes of their users. . . .

In times when big business and governments attempt to monitor and control everything, there is a need as never before for an internet that remains a free and universal form of communication. WikiLeaks' chief crime has been to speak truth to power. What is at stake is nothing less than the freedom of the internet. All the rest is a sideshow distracting attention from the real battle that is being fought. We should all keep focus on the true target.

The damage caused by the "denial of service" attacks on these companies has been trivial. Even a CNN article today -- which absurdly asks in its headline: "Is WikiLeaks engaged in 'cyber war'?" -- quotes Bruce Schneier comparing "the pro-WikiLeaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa to a bunch of protesters standing in front of an office building, refusing to let workers in. It's annoying, but it didn't shut down the operation."  It was basically an act of civil disobedience -- aimed at protesting the collusive role these corporations played in trying to punish WikiLeaks despite no finding of wrongdoing -- which caused virtually no real damage.

Despite all that, it is impossible to conceive of any establishment media outlet in the U.S. uttering a peep of support for what those protesters did.  The immediate consensus in the American political and media class was that these activists were engaged in pure, unmitigated destruction -- even evil -- and should be severely punished. That's because the greatest sin in our political culture is doing anything other than meekly submitting even to assertions of lawless and thuggish government and corporate power.  If the Government and the largest corporations collaborate to lawlessly destroy WikiLeaks for the crime of engaging in threatening journalism, then you simply write polite letters to Congress or complain on your blog; what you don't do under any circumstances is resist or fight back using even symbolic gestures of disobedience.  That's the authoritarian mentality pervading -- defining -- not only the establishment media but (as a result) much of the citizenry.

Just contrast the angry denunciations over these activists' simplistic, relatively innocuous denial of service attacks, with the apathy toward (or even support for) the far more sophisticated and damaging "cyber attacks" launched at WikiLeaks, which resulted in their permanent removal from any recognizable URL (and now can only be found through some impossible-to-remember numerical address).  Whoever was responsible for those attacks aimed at WikiLeaks -- even if it were a government agency -- is acting every bit as lawlessly as the adolescent (though well-intentioned) activists responsible for shutting down MasterCard's website for a few hours. But it is only the latter transgressions that trigger any real anger.

Identically, note how few object to the fact that the DOJ is investigating the pro-WikiLeaks attacks, but not -- of course -- the ones directed at WikiLeaks.  That's because we collectively believe -- with the establishment media leading the way -- that the most powerful authorities have the unfettered right to do whatever they want to anyone who is sufficiently demonized as Bad, while the worst sin is to do anything outside of approved (i.e., impotent) means to protest establishment power and authority, no matter how destructive and criminal the ends are to which that power and authority is being applied.

This is the same mentality that expresses such self-righteous outrage over the mere prospect that disclosures of the truth by WikiLeaks might hypothetically one day lead to the death of a single innocent person, while barely uttering any real anger over the massive numbers of innocents actually being killed right now by the U.S. Government.  And it's the same mentality that purports to acknowledge the massive secrecy abuses, deceit and pervasive crimes of the U.S. Government, while demanding that one of the very few people who apparently risked something to do anything meaningful to stop all of that -- Bradley Manning -- be severely punished, or that Julian Assange be punished.  This is authoritarianism in its classic form -- an instinctively servile loyalty to power even when it is acting corruptly, lawlessly and destructively -- and it finds its purest and most vigorous expression in those who most loudly claim devotion to checking it: our intrepid adversarial journalists.

 

UPDATE:  For a slightly different but related service the establishment media dutifully provides to the Government, see this excellent Marcy Wheeler post from today, entitled:  "Hatfill and Wen Ho Lee and Plame and al-Awlaki and Assange."

The crux of the WikiLeaks debate

WNYC's Brian Lehrer has spent the last week hosting one WikiLeaks critic after the next on his program, and it seems rather clear that he, too, is a fairly emphatic critic of the group and its founder, Julian Assange.  I appeared on Lehrer's show this afternoon for what was a rather contentious 25-minute interview that involved obviously adversarial (and perfectly appropriate) questions from him and from a few callers.  I've been doing countless radio and TV interviews and debates over the last few days, making it difficult to write as much as I'd like, but this segment, in my view, really highlights the core disputes -- and many of the misconceptions and falsehoods -- at the heart of this controversy, one that I think will be seen as easily one of the most important political developments of the last several years:

This afternoon, at 2:30 pm or so, I'll also be on Warren Olney's To the Point program, along with former Deputy Secretary of State James Rubin, who recently denounced WikiLeaks in The New Republic.  That can be heard live here.  

Speaking of The New Republic, it's now been more than 24 hours since Todd Gitlin vowed to "think about" the factual inaccuracies in his article which I brought to his attention and TNR's Editor-in-Chief Franklin Foer's attention, and they have still done nothing to correct them.