Video - RT News - Transcript - Julian Assange - Iraq War Logs

TRANSCRIPT [For quotations, confirm audio] Final SOURCE - VIDEO Title YouTube Upload:  Julian Assange to RT:  WikiLeaks gives 'most accurate picture of war' Channel:  RTNews Duration:   [8:17] Link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBsMK1eQ7A8 RT News Reporter So these documents come from the US military, so lot of them are obviously about US involvement.  What about implications for the UK? Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Well, it's 400,000 classified reports:  field reports by the US army, and some intelligence reports are by marines intelligence in there, as well. The US Army, of course, was the - was and *is* - the dominant military force in Iraq.  Its presence is everywhere.  So it intersects with the operations of the CIA; it intersects with the operations of US Special Forces; it intersects with the operations of the UK military and other coalition partners.  It intersects with Iraqi police and so on. But it is not reports by those other groups, they are reports through the eyes of the US army. RT News Reporter What have we learnt that's new from these documents, or is it just the sheer scale of that we're talking about? Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Well, you know, when you increase the scale of something, it does become new.  So we have learnt that the - we have counted now, 122,000 civilian casualties in the war.  This material has revealed 15,000 previously unreported, undocumented, civilian casualties. That's an extraordinary number of people to have never have been spoken about before. That's the equivalent to five (5) 9-11s.  That is something that is very important. We also see the cover-up of torture by coalition forces, well after  Abu Ghraib; a concrete policy - secret policy - to not intervene with torture conducted by the fledgeling Iraqi government, and thousands of cases relating to that.  Some of them, to give an example, of how bad the situation is; some of them resulted in detainees in the custody of the Iraqi government deliberately confessing to being terrorists, in order to get transferred into US custody where the conditions were better. So, if you think about it, this is - you're retained by the Iraqi police and you stand up and say "I am Osama bin Laden" equivalent, in order to be treated better.  That's how severe their conditions were. Flagrant violations of the rules of law, such as the deliberate slaying of people in the act of surrender. RT News Reporter I mean, you've talked yourself before about the everyday squalor of war.  I mean, a war scenario is something extraordinary. We've done quite a lot of work with soldiers who have PTSD and other sort of combat related conditions.  I mean, it's just a different environment that we can't possibly imagine. Should our sort of - our kind of ... moral ... moral opinions be applied to that scenario? Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Well, we should start imagining it or stop doing it.  Or stop supporting it. It's not good to support things that you do not understand, and this is the most accurate description of a war that has ever been released into the historic record.  There is nothing comparable. It is the details of the deaths of 109,000 people; the wounding of some 170,000 people; the detainment of nearly 200,000 people during a course of six (6) years. And, of course, that's only about half the military action that went on during that period, because it's only the US view on things.  But, even so, extraordinary. We see that there's nearly no street corner in Baghdad that didn't have a body found that had been killed through violence in one form or another.  This everyday squalor of war, of course, for the people in Baghdad and other cities in Iraq was *their* everyday life for years and years, and we need to understand what the reality of war is, if we're going to choose to engage in it. And it's clear that the reasons for getting into this war - the 'weapons of mass destruction' and so on - this is a clear lie.  There's no debate about this anymore. And the other - the second most stated reason that we would - 'we,' being the West - would clean up the government system of Iraq, introduce rule of law and prevent torture, has completely failed.  During that period of time lawlessness, absence of rule of law, and arbitrary killing, were much higher than they were under Saddam Hussein; and now we are left with an Iraqi government that commits torture. RT News Reporter Last question.  The Pentagon have put their PR machine into operation after you released the Afghan War Diaries.  What are you expecting from them this time around? Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Well, we expect a similar sort of counter-attack.  Every time you release something like this, we expect a counter-attack.  You're never quite sure what it is.  It tends to be a different thing, [that] each time is seized upon and then amplified [cough].  Last it time it was names appearing in the material, which the Pentagon managed to successfully fool the press into believing was going to be a great big assassination list for the Taliban.  But, in fact, nearly all of those names were right to appear:  they were the names of governors who were taking bribes by the US military, or the names of radio stations that were taking bribes to put on propaganda content.  Not at all something that can lead to a proper, democratic state and, as recently as last week, NATO officials in Kabul said that they could not find a single person that needed protecting or moving. The Pentagon says that not a single person has been wounded or killed, and a letter has come out that was originally written on August 16th by Defence Secretary Gates to a US Senator, stating that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods - no sensitive intelligence sources or methods - were revealed in that material.  But, of course, that wasn't the public line. The public line was that, in fact, many had been revealed.  So we  this was just some kind of propaganda. I don't think - they've tried that in the - that was the first card that they played in the release of this material about Iraq.  We expected that it would be the first card that they would play, which is why we went through extra steps to make sure it couldn't be distracted from in that way.  But I also think that they have overstepped their previous position and the  press and the public knows this now, so they can't keep on trying the same old trick. People should understand that - not the Pentagon as a whole, because there are good people in it, but at the top - the Pentagon issues statements which are simply not credible.  It has done so for years.  It has been exposed by various members of the press (including us), and, you know, from our point of view, looking at these attacks on us, the Pentagon's public statements are about as credible as that of North Korea. ..............  8:17 end   .............. COMMENT Best line was: "Pentagon's public statements are about as credible as that of North Korea". Find it had to believe that there's any nice people at the Pentagon. Text checked against audio.  Couple of corrections made. OTHER Link to related blog post - here ---------------------- ꕤ  ---------------------- Please support journalist, Julian Assange Under Siege Ecuador embassy, London (3 Years) Detained 5 Years No Charge FAQ & Support https://justice4assange.com/ ꕤ