WikiLeaks Update: U.S. Tries To Contain Damage From Leaked Embassy Cables

A clip from a Democracy Now! interview with John Le Carre:

DENIS MOYNIHAN: January of 2003, one of the largest antiwar marches in world history happened just behind us here.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: I took part in it, yeah.

DENIS MOYNIHAN: And what are your reflection­s now?

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, I think that my anger still stands. I can’t understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretenses has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed. We’ve always got to be careful of that. I think that—I wasn’t speaking as a prophet, I was just speaking as an angry citizen, I suppose. I think it’s true that we’ve caused irreparabl­e damage in the Middle East. I think we shall pay for it for a long time.

One of the problems, surely, is that victims never forget, and the winners do. And they forget very quickly. If people knew basically, for example, what we had done in Iran when we ousted Mosaddeq through the CIA and the Secret Service here across the way and installed the Shah and trained his ghastly secret police force in all the black arts, the SAVAC, if people understood the extent to which we had humiliated Iran, then they would understand the later developmen­ts in Iran and Iran’s posture now. If people would look at the map and see the extent to which Iran is encircled by nuclear powers, they wouldn’t take it perhaps quite so seriously that Iran is seeking to arm itself with—if it is—with nuclear weapons.

I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particular­ly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies. Mussolini, I think, defined fascism as the moment when you couldn’t put a cigarette paper between political and corporate power. He assumed, when he offered that definition­, that media power was already his. But I worry terribly that the absence of serious critical argument is going to produce a new kind of fanaticism­, the new simpliciti­es that are as dangerous as the ones which caused us to march against Iraq and as misunderst­ood.

The entire interview can be seen here.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost