This is the third segment - of four - snipped from Democracy Now's rapid transcript of Amy Goodman's interview with Wesley Clark. The topics, raised by Amy Goodman, are 24 (the Fox TV show), civilian casualties, and weapons bans. The fourth diary will cover his discussion of President Eisenhower, foreign policy, Middle East oil, response to President Carter's recent book, and Congress's authority with regard to war. I changed the order to keep each diary close to 1500 words. Find the first two here.
Poll below.
Fox, 24 and popularizing torture
AG: I wanted to ask -- you're a FOX News contributor now?
WKC: Oh, at least.
AG: I wanted to ask you what you think of the Dean of West Point, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, together with a military interrogator named Tony Lagouranis and the group Human Rights First, going to the heads of the program 24, very popular hit show on FOX, to tell them that what they're doing on this program, glorifying torture, is inspiring young men and women to go to Iraq and torture soldiers there, and to stop it?
WKC: And not only that, but it doesn't work. Yeah, Pat Finnegan is one of my heroes.
AG: So what do you think about that?
WKC: I think it's great.
AG: And have you been involved in the conversation internally at FOX, which runs 24, to stop it?
WKC: Well, as far as I know, they actually put out a call to all the writers in Hollywood. My son's a writer, and he was one of them who got a call. They were all told: stop talking about torture. It doesn't work. So I think it was an effective move by Pat Finnegan.
AG: So you support it?
WKC: Absolutely.
Civilian casualties.
AG: General Clark, I wanted to ask you a tough question about journalists.
WKC: Well, now, that would be the first tough question you've asked me tonight. [heh]
AG: There are more than a hundred journalists and media workers in Iraq who have died. And particularly hard hit are Arab journalists. I mean, you had Tariq Ayoub, the Al Jazeera reporter, who died on the roof of Al Jazeera when the US military shelled Al Jazeera, then went on to shell the Palestine Hotel and killed two reporters, a Reuters cameraman and one from Telecinco in Spain named Jose Couso. Many Arab journalists feel like they have been targeted, the idea of shooting the messenger. But this tough question goes back to your being Supreme Allied Commander in Yugoslavia and the bombing of Radio Television Serbia. Do you regret that that happened, that you did that?
WKC: No, I don't regret that at all. That was part of the Serb command and control network. And not only that, I was asked to take out that television by a lot of important political leaders. And before I took it out, I twice warned the Serbs we were going to take it out. We stopped, at one news conference in the Pentagon, we planted the question to get the attention of the Serbs, that we were going to target Serb Radio and Television.
… that night, Milosevic got the warning, because he summoned all the foreign journalists to come to a special mandatory party at RTS that night. But we weren't bombing that night. We put the word out twice before we actually did it.
AG: You told CNN, which was also there, to leave?
WKC: I told -- I used -- I think I used CNN to plant the story and to leak it at the Pentagon press conference. But we didn't tell anyone specifically to leave. … we told them … it's now a target. And it was Milosevic who determined that he would keep people there in the middle of the night just so there would be someone killed if we struck it. So we struck it during the hours where there were not supposed to be anybody there.
AG: But you killed civilians.
WKC: Six people died.
AG: I think sixteen. But I think it's the media -- it’s the beauticians, the technicians. It was a civilian target.
WKC: Yeah, they were ordered to stay there by Milosevic. Yeah.
AG: But it was a civilian target.
WKC: It was not a civilian target. It was a military target. It was part of the Serb command and control network.
AG: What do you think of Amnesty International calling it a war crime?
WKC: Well… it was investigated by the International Criminal Tribunal in Yugoslavia and found to be a legitimate target. So I think it's perfectly alright for Amnesty International to have their say, but everything we did was approved by lawyers, and every target was blessed. We would not have committed a war crime.
AG: Upon reflection now and knowing who died there, the young people, the people who worked for RTS, who -- as you said, if Milosevic wanted people to stay there, they were just following orders.
WKC: Well, it was a tragedy. But I’ll tell you something. If you want to talk about tragedies, how about this one? We bombed what we thought was a Serb police station in Kosovo. We saw the Serb vehicles. We flew unmanned aerial vehicles over it. And we did everything we could to identify it. And we found that there were Serb police vehicles parked there at night, so we sent an F-16 in, dropped two 500-pound laser-guided bombs and took it out. We killed eighty Albanians who had been imprisoned by the Serbs there. They were trying to escape, and the Serbs locked them up in this farmhouse and surrounded them with vehicles. So, I regret every single innocent person who died, and I prayed every night that there wouldn't be any innocent people who died. But this is why I say you must use force only as a last resort.
I told this story to the high school kids earlier, but it bears repeating... We had a malfunction with a cluster bomb unit, … a couple of grenades fell on a schoolyard, and I think three schoolchildren were killed in Nish. And two weeks later, I got a letter from a Serb grandfather. He said, “You've killed my granddaughter.” He said, “I hate you for this, and I’ll kill you.” And I got this in the middle of the war. And it made me very, very sad. We certainly never wanted to do anything like that. But in war, accidents happen. And that's why you shouldn't undertake military operations unless every other alternative has been exhausted, because innocent people do die. And I think the United States military was as humane and careful as it possibly could have been in the Kosovo campaign. But still, civilians died. And I’ll always regret that.
Weapons bans
AG: Do you think cluster bombs should be banned?
WKC: [I think we used] 1,400-plus cluster bombs. And there's a time when you have to use cluster bombs: when they're the most appropriate and humane weapon. But I think you have to control the use very carefully. And I think we did in Yugoslavia.
AG: Right now, the US has rejected an international call to ban the use of cluster bombs. On Friday, forty-six countries were in Oslo to develop a new international treaty to ban the use of cluster munitions by -- I think it’s 2008. Would you support that?
WKC: Well, you know, people who are against war often make the case by trying to attack the weapons of war and stripping away the legitimacy of those weapons. I’ve participated in some of that. I’d like to get rid of landmines… and I was part of the team that put together the agreement that got rid of laser blinding weapons. I’d like to get rid of nuclear weapons. But I can't agree with those who say that force has no place in international affairs. It simply does for this country. And I would like to work to make it so that it doesn't. But the truth is, for now it does. And so, I can't go against giving our men and women in uniform the appropriate weapons they need to fight, to fight effectively to succeed on the battlefield, and to minimize their own casualties.
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Last week, General Wes Clark and VoteVets.org, launched StopIranWar.com to help stop the Bush Administration from taking us down a path to another war. They need our help. From SecuringAmerica.com
Today, we're launching a web video urging Americans to sign our petition to stop a war with Iran. This will be the first in a series of video blogs we'll be releasing over the next month to help stop George W. Bush from starting another war.
Sign the petition today. Then watch the video, and forward it to everyone you know..... We need to create a movement so large that the Bush Administration will be forced to pay attention.... Only the shared voice of millions of Americans has any chance of stopping a war with Iran... Sign the petition today. Then watch the video, and forward it to everyone you know.
And I would add that, even if the Bush Administration doesn't listen, I think Congress will.