06/25/14 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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Now on to Jason Ditz to talk about stuff that matters.
He's the news editor at news.antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
I really appreciate you coming on short notice and all this.
I got so much to talk to you about, and most I want to talk about what's going on in Israel, which I'm way behind on.
But first of all, I got to talk about the top headline here because I never did get a chance to talk about it with Dart, and it's such an important thing here, and I actually should have hit refresh because maybe worse has happened.
But the top headline on antiwar.com is, I think, officials, Syrian airstrikes kill 57 Iraqi civilians.
The Syrians are now bombing ISIS in Iraq, or at least ISIS targets inside Iraq.
Is that right?
Right, right.
They launched airstrikes against a few towns, mostly border towns, but all of them in the Anbar province that are under ISIS control.
But it doesn't sound like they really hit anything of ISIS's in those attacks.
The attacks ended up killing at least 57 civilians, wounding another 120.
Mostly they went after marketplaces that they thought were arms bazaars.
Syria's denying that any of the slain were civilians, but of course that's what they always say.
Now, did they openly accept responsibility for the attacks, though, in the first place?
Did they make a show of it?
In fact, is what I'm more curious about is whether they kind of announced it or not.
It's sort of weird.
I mean, the Syrian state media reported the airstrikes yesterday as, okay, airstrikes happened, Syrian airstrikes happened according to Iraqi officials.
But they never got any official comment from the Syrian government, which, you know, SANA, the Syrian state media, is run by the Syrian government, so it's bizarre that they wouldn't have at least some official position on it.
Yeah.
Well, they let it run, at least.
It's what they would have us believe, I guess, would be my interpretation of that.
So, or at least the PR department.
I don't know how well coordinated it all is.
But now, so, what makes it a big deal to me is that it's a PR stunt, right?
This is Assad's way, and of course, he just butchers a bunch of innocent people in order to do it.
But it's his way of making the point that he's on America's side and Maliki's side in the new Iraq war, right?
Right.
And Iraq and Syria have been coordinating in the past, over the past few weeks, about the strikes along the border on each side of the border.
But it's, officials say it's not clear if these specific attacks were discussed beforehand, which it seems like they would have been, because that seems like a huge deal to cross the border, even though in practice, that border doesn't exist anymore.
Yeah.
Well, actually, even without the phone call, I think Assad could probably count on Maliki nodding and smiling.
And I mean, Joe Biden and John Kerry have been crying for two years, three years.
Hey Maliki, stop helping Iran arm and fund Hezbollah and Syria, please.
Ever since George Bush put Iraq in that Shiite crescent where it didn't used to belong.
But so yeah, anyway, what a disaster.
Okay, now to the West Bank.
Some Israeli settlers' children were kidnapped.
Correct?
How many?
How long ago?
Who's got them?
And what all has happened since?
Well, it's been a couple of weeks now, three teenagers.
One of them was an American citizen too.
Three Israeli teenagers though.
One of them, I believe, was dual citizenship, were kidnapped somewhere.
It's not entirely clear where.
The group claiming responsibility for it calls itself ISIS of Palestine, and has been handing out leaflets insisting they did it.
But Israel has sort of said, well, we don't really think these guys did it, for some reason.
First, they were blaming Hamas.
Then they were saying, well, the Palestinian Authority in general is responsible for it.
There were times in the Israeli parliament, where they were blaming John Kerry saying, if he hadn't forced us into peace talks, none of this would have happened.
But the response from Israel has been insane.
I mean, a huge military operation in the West Bank.
Let me stop for a second.
As far as the whodunit, is there any indication of whodunit at all?
Does it sound credible to you that maybe it was some new group?
I mean, it doesn't sound like the kind of thing that Abbas would have done.
I don't know if Hamas, Abbas being the head of the Palestinian Authority, I don't know if Hamas has really any presence on the West Bank at all, do they?
They have some, but very limited presence.
It wouldn't seem like the sort of thing they would do right now.
I mean, of course, Hamas has done kidnappings in the past when it stood to gain them something.
But right now, having just formed a unity government with Fatah, they're pretty close to elections.
This seems like it would hurt them more than help them.
And it's one of those cases we see all the time in the Gaza Strip, too, where some nothing group fires a couple of rockets that land in a field in Israel.
Hamas goes and tries to arrest them, and then Israel bombs a Hamas-run police station or something in retaliation, because they say, well, it's their fault.
Yeah, well, and more about that in the next segment, because that's been happening in Gaza here.
But now, as far as the whodunit, no real indication?
It could just be any old group of two or three people who did it, right?
Right.
Israel hasn't provided any evidence to suggest Hamas did it.
This other group that insisted did it hasn't provided any evidence that they have those kids.
So it really could be about anybody.
All right.
And then so now the response?
Okay, well, the response has been insane.
Israel's mobilized a bunch of troops in the West Bank, nominally looking for these kids, but they've killed at least five Palestinian civilians.
They've arrested hundreds of people without charges on the notion that they might conceivably be connected to a kidnapping.
It doesn't seem like any of them knows anything, or at least what Israel has indicated is they don't have any new leads.
Are they just going house to house on these raids?
I mean, I've seen on Twitter where everybody's house is just completely ransacked, and they post it up.
It's amazing, 2014, they post up their ransacked living room on the West Bank there.
Are they just doing this to everybody?
Well, it seems like they're hitting areas around where the teenagers were likely at when they disappeared, and just arresting random people to see if they know something.
I mean, that's the impression I get.
They're not arresting people who have known ties to any group where they might possibly know something.
It seems like they're just grabbing whoever might have heard something.
Crazy.
And now, you say hundreds have been arrested, huh?
Yeah, it's in the hundreds.
The exact figure, I'm not sure.
I believe it was 215 a couple of days ago.
I'm not sure if that's changed.
All right.
Okay, now, when we get back, I want to ask you, Jason, a bit about what's been going on on in the Gaza Strip, and I admit I'm cheating by using you here.
I have not been doing my homework, but I did see something about some airstrikes in Gaza, for all I know, in the name of this kidnapping in the West Bank.
I don't know, but I'm going to ask you here in a minute.
It's Jason Ditz.
He's news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Back in a second.
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Hey, I'm Scott.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz.
He's the news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
And man, I screwed up, Jason.
I meant to ask you about Israel's strikes on Syria after Syria's strikes on Iraq in order to juxtapose whose daylight is between what interest over there and all that kind of thing.
Can you please fill us in before we switch back to the Gaza Strip here?
Oh, sure.
Well, a couple of days ago, there was an incident along the, I guess you'd call it the frontier and the Golan Heights between the Israeli-occupied portion and the Syrian portion.
An anti-tank missile was fired across into the Israeli side and hit a civilian car and killed a 15-year-old.
Any indication of what kind of anti-tank missile that might have been?
There really wasn't.
And that's sort of an unusual thing.
I mean, of course, there's always stray fire back and forth across that border, but Israel immediately blamed the Syrian military for this and launched airstrikes on nine different targets across southern Syria, killed 10 soldiers and wounded several others and destroyed one of the military bases there.
But the bizarre thing is why would Syria's military fire a random anti-tank missile at a random passenger car near the frontier?
And why would they do it particularly at a time where groups like ISIS and all of these other Syrian rebel groups are bragging about all the US-made anti-tank missiles that they've gotten a hold of?
Right, exactly.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's not the kind of thing we'd run at antiwar.com, but there was a thing at the Long War Journal where they were saying that, well, I may be putting words in their mouth a little bit, but it sure seemed to me between the lines, like they were saying that the so-called Islamic Front is just a name for the procurement arm, the new name for the procurement arm of the Al-Nusra Front, and that they had to call themselves something else when they walk up to the CIA agents and ask for money and guns.
And but that really, you know, whatever tow missiles the FSA and the Islamic Front were getting were ending up in the hands of the Al-Nusra Front immediately, as those sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Certainly, and these, I mean, this has been happening for a long time, basically since the US started arming any Syrian rebels, even when they were just arming the FSA, the Free Syrian Army, which is supposedly the secular group, the weapons were showing up in the hands of basically everybody.
Once arms show up in the country, they pretty quickly get scattered around among all the rebel groups.
And ISIS, which is, of course, the big one, has not only what weapons they've managed to secure out of the US shipments to Syria, they've also looted an enormous number of US weapons in Iraq, as they've taken over Iraqi military bases.
Including Blackhawks, which, you know, I guess if they're working with the Ba'athists, they could well have people who could fly those things and use them.
Yeah, it's possible.
I mean, we haven't seen any Blackhawks show up anywhere on the battlefield yet fighting for ISIS, but we have seen a lot of Humvees and a lot of armored personnel carriers and things like that, sort of...
Yeah, I wouldn't expect the ISIS guys to be able to fly a Blackhawk, but I bet there could be some Ba'athist officers who could, you know?
Oh, sure.
All they need is the internet for the instruction manual, download it right into their brain, like on the movies.
Study for a little while, is what I mean to say.
Can't be that hard.
They're made by monkeys for other monkeys to fly, so...
Right, they'll figure it out.
Yeah.
All right, well, so...
God, what did I miss over there?
So, in the same collective punishment sort of sense, we've got to switch the topic back to the prisoners of the Gaza Strip, most of whom are under the age of 18.
Tell us what's going on over there these days.
Well, what's going on in the Gaza Strip is basically what's been going on in the Gaza Strip for the last decade, only more so.
There have been a few rockets fired by a few of the ragtag militant factions that are rivals to Hamas.
None of them's really done anything when they've reached Israel, if they've reached Israel.
Some of the rockets have injured some other Gazans when they misfired, and Israel's launched a lot of retaliatory airstrikes and blamed Hamas for everything, as usual.
But the escalation on the Israeli side seems to be a lot more right now because of the sort of hysteria surrounding those kidnappings in the West Bank.
Yeah, and now, this resolution that the U.S. blocked in the U.N., is that what this was about?
Was it about the collective punishment in the name of these kidnappings?
Right, it was.
It deplored the deaths of the five Palestinian civilians killed in the West Bank and expressed concern about the mass arrest of people without charges in the West Bank.
Mass arrest of people without charges in the West Bank.
Jordan was sort of critical of the resolution because they felt like deplore wasn't a strong enough word, and they wanted it to be changed to condemned, which I'm not sure if they have a list at the U.N. of which word is worse than which word.
But then the United States came along and said, oh no, our red line on this is, you can say you deplored the deaths of the Palestinians, but you can't mention anywhere in there the fact that they were killed by Israeli troops, and you can't mention Israel at all in the resolution.
And so, veto.
Right.
Did it actually get that far where they vetoed it, or did they just kill it in committee?
Right, and it never came up to a vote after that.
Once the U.S. laid that out as a red line, it was basically dead, and there was no point.
Right.
Same old, same old there.
And then the siege is still just the same as ever, or the same as since Morsi was overthrown a year ago, and the Egyptian military clamped back down on the only somewhat partially reopened Rafah crossing.
It's still just full-scale siege like back in since 2008, 2009, right?
Right, it's back to that.
And you know, it's not really very controversial in Israel right now, because of the kidnapping hysteria.
In fact, you've got politicians on the hawkish end of the parliament calling for them to clamp down even more in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, saying, well, we should shut off all the electricity to both occupied territories, and getting some support, although it doesn't seem like it's enough to pass a bill, at least not yet.
I wish we had more time, because I wanted to ask you a little bit about the party politics in Israel and their debate about annexation of the West Bank and all that, but I guess I'll have to wait till next time.
But thank you very much for coming back on the show, Jason, I sure appreciate it.
Sure, thank you for having me.
He's great on everything, right?
Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
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