07/11/14 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, next up is our good friend Jason Ditz.
He is the news editor at antiwar.com.
News dot antiwar dot com.
Welcome back, Jason.
How are you?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
What a bunch of bad news.
Alright, so I guess the most important question that I can come up with to be my first one is what's with the land invasion of the Gaza Strip?
Truly imminent or a bluff?
I think very probably imminent.
It doesn't seem like there's much pressure against it.
I mean, the U.S. has said they hope Israel can avoid it, but they certainly don't seem like they're going to put any real pressure on Israel not to do it.
And they're loudly endorsing the airstrikes.
Prime Minister Netanyahu says he feels no pressure to stop the attack, so I think we're seeing escalation now for the foreseeable future.
And so far it's just airstrikes, though?
Yeah.
I saw where they had warned the people of Gaza, get back.
What are they supposed to do?
Just go drown themselves in the sea?
Get back.
We're about to invade you.
Alright, so now how many killed so far in the air raids on Gaza, Jason?
Well, it's at least a hundred.
And it's still rising.
We don't have the exact figures at any given time.
Alright, well, now obviously according to, I don't know who wrote the rules, but the rules say that if you're Hamas, then your life is forfeit.
So they don't count.
What about the others, the civilians in the Gaza Strip?
Can you give us a ballpark, at least, on the percentages there, or the numbers?
Unfortunately, it's really hard to tell at this point.
Israel insists that everyone they kill is Hamas, of course, but from what we've been hearing out of the hospitals, the majority are not Hamas.
There have been at least 21 children as of last night.
I haven't seen new figures for the children death toll this morning, but a lot of women, children, and the elderly are getting killed when they're hitting seemingly random houses in residential areas.
So certainly more than 50% are civilians, but any more than that, it would just be a guess.
Yeah.
Well, and I don't know if you saw this one yet today, but did you see the picture of the Israelis from Setarat, is that how you say it, where they just brought their lawn chairs up to the hilltop to watch the fireworks show, applauding whenever blasts are seen and heard?
Yeah, that's pretty common in these Gaza flare-ups.
Since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in June of 2007, this is the seventh time we've seen something like this.
I mean, not all of them have been as big as this one.
Some of them, of course, like the 2008-2009 one, were bigger.
But I mean, the Hamas rockets are such a minimal threat that, yeah, people really don't feel like they're putting themselves in any real danger to go up on the hilltops overlooking Gaza and just sort of watch the show.
Right.
But meanwhile, oh, boo-hoo for every single Israeli, the terror that they live under that, you know, the kidnapped prisoner in the basement is trying to get out.
It's so unfair to them all.
But meanwhile, nah, you can just sit on the hillside and watch it for fun, smoke a joint, listen to the radio.
It's incredible.
And I mean, we had our first real Israeli casualties today when one of Hamas's, I hesitate to even call them rockets because they're really just chunks of pipe that they lob in the general direction of some city.
Half the time they bounce off somebody's roof and do a little superficial damage to the building.
But one of them actually hit a gas station and caused seven injuries.
I don't know how serious the injuries were, but those were really the first meaningful casualties on the Israeli side of the war.
Yeah, it's amazing the way the government spins that here.
These people are basically just making, as you're saying, what you can barely even call a rocket in their garage.
And the fact that they're using them is proof that they're just randomly targeting civilians because they can't possibly target anything with them at all.
And it doesn't even matter that no civilians are dying of it.
But meanwhile, why Israel, they use laser pointers and all their sophisticated stuff as they're tearing little babies apart with their 500 pound bombs that they drop on people's houses.
But oh, they're abiding so carefully by the rules of engagement.
Sometimes they drop a bomb with the warhead not activated just to let you know they're about to destroy your house before they destroy your house, which is so humanitarian of them.
I was reading a story about that where they were talking about dropping the sort of smaller warning bomb.
Yeah, they're calling it the knock on the door or something, a warning.
And I mean, these bombs are so much bigger and so much more powerful than Hamas's quote unquote rockets.
I mean, the warning bombs are liable to kill more people than Hamas is over the course of this.
Yeah.
Now, let me ask you this, Jason, I'm not very good necessarily at telling what other people think, but you're exposed to so much media all the time doing what you do for antiwar.com.
I wonder whether you would agree with me that the average person is probably under the impression from the news that Palestine somehow or another is the state next door, whether or not we're still working on a two state solution or not is kind of beside the point.
But they they really don't understand that there is an occupation that these people are already occupied, conquered.
The war was already lost by them back 40 years ago.
And they're under this permanent martial law occupation.
Do the American people, are they exposed to that part of the story at all that we're really are talking about the fight between the guy upstairs and the prisoner in the basement rather than two neighbors?
I don't think they are.
Certainly, I mean, we haven't seen much discussion of if you watch television news of the Palestinian casualties at all.
Most most of the focus is on Israelis in bomb shelters.
And, you know, during the during the kidnapping with the three Israeli teams and then the subsequent killing of the Palestinian team, there was really it really was treated like the West Bank is just the country next door, not an occupied territory.
Yeah, Rand Paul called them, you know, Israel's Palestinian neighbors, like this is just another incursion over the line, you know, like it's Germany and France, you know, rather than an occupied territory.
It seems like that to me is what's that's what makes me actually hopeful about the situation is it seems like if the American people could ever be made to understand what's going on with just the basic facts of who's occupying who, that their opinions would change, you know, to a great degree, the way that they interpret this stuff.
I mean, for me, when I see the Israelis spin on this, it's just absolutely laughable and ridiculous.
And I think it for anyone who knows anything about it, really, it comes across that same way.
I'm hopeful that that's true.
Anyway, hang tight, Jason.
Hang tight, everybody.
We'll be right back with the great Jason Ditz, news.
Dot antiwar dot com in just a minute.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the thing here.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
It's Jason, it's news dot antiwar dot com.
So I'm looking here at Gaza bombardment further traumatizes children suffering from PTSD.
And this is because not only are they under, you know, severe bombardment now, but they live under drones all day, every day in Gaza.
I don't know exactly what's to come of this generation of children, but they're not going to be right in the head.
And, you know, that's a big part of this, right, is not just the people who are blown apart, but everyone else who has, you know, absolute reason to fear that they could be next and no reason not to.
Right.
In Israel, if you're running around in circles hiding from Hamas rockets right now, well, then you're ridiculous.
You're actually not in danger.
But each and every Gazan is in equal danger of getting blown up at any time at what must seem to them pretty much like random.
I imagine really living like that, bombs falling out of the sky in your neighborhood.
It's crazy.
Yeah, and it really does seem like it's pretty much at random.
I mean, Israel, of course, claims to have all sorts of intelligence that they're basing these attacks on.
But from the outside perspective, it certainly doesn't seem like they're hitting anything meaningful.
And from the Palestinian perspective, it's probably even less apparent what they're trying to accomplish when they're just blowing up random houses.
Yeah.
And now let me ask you, what do you know about the mobs in Jerusalem running around chanting death to the Arabs and checking driver's identity cards to see colleges and universities?
It's like it's Iraq or something.
Is that getting worse or is that now kind of winding down?
Has anybody else been lynched or what is going on?
So far as I know, no one else has been lynched.
It's sort of hard to tell whether that's getting worse or better or if the Israeli military is just censoring it more strictly because we're not seeing a lot of new reports of that over the last few days.
And there have been some reports that the military censors are making it a lot harder to get any information out of the West Bank or out of East Jerusalem as far as protests or anything like that.
Yeah, no First Amendment there.
They can just put down a gag order and they can literally lock Israeli journalists in prison for talking about what they don't want talked about.
Oh, right.
And we've seen that a lot of times in the past where the Israeli media will sit on a well-known important story for months because the military just won't let them publish it.
And then finally it'll get leaked to some Western paper and then they'll lift the gag order.
That's a crazy situation.
And now, I guess, I don't know, maybe I'll ask you about the Iran talks.
It's something that I don't know if there's really any news to cover other than they're still meeting.
But I want to believe in this so damn bad, Jason, not just because I'm so sick and tired of the Iranian fake nuclear issue.
It was a big fake issue.
But because I think I have one good reason to believe that the president really wants to do this.
And it's so someone anywhere will ever have anything good to say about him or anything that he ever did with his life or his presidency.
He's got to have one thing.
How about the beginning of detente with Iran?
It's right here in his grasp.
All he has to do is not be an idiot and accept whatever deal because they're not making nukes anyway.
So tell me it's going to work out by the end of the month.
By the end of the month it's not going to work out.
I'm still hopeful that they'll eventually come to a deal.
But the idea that they're going to come up with a deal by that July 20th sort of soft deadline when the six-month interim deal expires, there's no way.
They're so far apart on centrifuge numbers right now.
The last I saw Iran has about 20,000 centrifuges operating.
20,000, well, equivalent of what they're considering base centrifuges for this negotiation purposes.
The United States is pushing for the final deal to allow them to keep 10,000.
So they want them to cut in half the program that's pretty small realistically.
That sounds like a big number, but it's really not.
Well, Iran was looking to expand that program so they could be self-sufficient powering the Bushehr power plant.
And they're saying they need the equivalent of 190,000 just to power that one plant.
Oh, well, I don't know if that's really right.
I don't know if it isn't really, I guess.
But still, I mean, obviously their plan, as they've stated all along, is to have more and more power plants into the future, too, not just to Bushehr.
Right, they're negotiating with Russia right now on the possibility of expanding Bushehr and building five or six more power plants across the nation.
So am I right then, Jason, that the American position is the way to solve the problem that they could make nukes soon is to limit that number of centrifuges?
And their answer is, no, no, no, we want our centrifuges.
But the way we'll limit the ability that has you so scared to make nukes that we don't want to make anyway is we'll go ahead and oxidize all of our uranium hexafluoride gas and put it all into fuel plates, you know, kind of immediately.
So that there's really no risk that we can weaponize any of our safeguarded, verified nuclear material, because we'll be putting it to use or putting it in process for use immediately upon enrichment up to three and a half percent.
Do I have that right?
Or I know that that's Gareth Porter's journalism, but is that what they're saying about the talks now, that these are the two different positions and that somehow they've got to reconcile the two?
Right, that's basically it.
So Gareth really did get that scoop.
I knew it was right, but still, it's nice to have it confirmed.
The stockpile that Iran had of uranium is basically gone at this point.
It's all been converted into fuel.
It already has, you're saying.
Well, all of the 20% is gone that they were using for the Tehran research reactor for the medical isotopes.
That's all converted to fuel rods now.
And a good chunk of the stockpile of three and a half percent has been converted, too.
So that stockpile that, you know, Israel was constantly presenting this as a red line, once the stockpile gets to X amount, we're going to have to start an immediate war.
But it never got to that amount.
And in fact, it's been continually shrinking to the point where it's a fraction of what it was when the six month deal started.
Yeah, exactly.
That was what did it, right?
As soon as they started the interim deal, they started immediately doing, as promised, that was part of the interim deal.
They were going to go ahead and render all that uranium hexafluoride gas into uranium oxide powder for use for fuel plates and all that.
And they've just been non-stop charging down that path ever since.
Right.
You know, if you need any indication whether they really mean to continue following that path after the separate deal, sure sounds good.
You know, Gareth was saying, you know, come on, the breakout scenario that they're going to say, get out of our country, IAEA, we're making nukes now.
That was always the most ridiculous, stupid fantasy that could possibly be real.
And the so-called sneak out where they're going to somehow divert nuclear material that the IAEA never knows about in the first place or misses that it's being diverted and have some entirely separate secret clandestine nuclear weapons program.
That's just as fanciful.
Both of these are ridiculous comic book type situations.
Only two paths to a bomb, one or the other.
Neither of them could possibly be.
Or, you know, only in the most ridiculous circumstances that only America could make, probably.
You know, otherwise it's ridiculous.
When Iran was expanding their enrichment program, there's such a heavy level of spying on Iran that it was getting leaked to the media before Iran had even been required to publicly inform the IAEA about building new facilities, that there were facilities being built.
Right.
All right, well, listen, man, thank you so much for all the great work that you do, Jason, and your time on the show again.
I sure appreciate it.
Sure, I hope the audio quality wasn't too bad.
No, no, no, it's just fine.
Thanks again.
Sure, thanks for having me.
All right, that's the great Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
The best of the best there.
See you all next week.
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