07/31/14 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is our friend Jason Ditz, News Editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome, Jason.
How are you?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good, except that, man, did you see this thing here?
This wasn't really my plan, but we're going to talk about all kinds of different stuff for the interview today.
So I'm going to go ahead and start this out here.
Just breaking from Australian news media, Alex Seitz-Wall at NBC has the clip here.
On September the 10th, 2001, Bill Clinton told a group of Australian media people at some kind of, I'm trying to find out what exactly the event was where he was speaking, a group of businessmen, 30 businessmen.
On September the 10th, 2001, Bill Clinton talks about how he could have got Osama bin Laden.
Let's listen.
And I'm just saying, you know, if I were Osama bin Laden, he's a very smart guy.
I spent a lot of time thinking about him, and I nearly got it once.
I nearly got him.
And I could have gotten, I could have killed him, but I would have had to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him.
And so I didn't do it.
Well, so that's interesting.
And of course it's, and Bill Clinton is legendary for this, of course, it's just a partial truth.
According to Michael Scheuer, he and his CIA team gave Bill Clinton 10 different chances, 10 different chances to kill Osama bin Laden.
And according to one Senate reporter and other, at one point, Jason, they counted as many as 13 chances given by American intelligence to Bill Clinton, who, of course, Bill Clinton was the one who had Sudan kick Osama out and send him off to basically to safety in exile in Afghanistan back in 1996 in the first place.
And so anyway, it's not that I'm necessarily in favor of him murdering kids, but I don't, and, and the CNN, pardon me, the NBC article actually notes that intelligence officials absolutely dispute that two to 300 civilians would have died in, in that attack or these others too.
Maybe there would have been some collateral damage, but certainly not that much.
At least one of these was going to be an attack just on his farm where there were a few dozen people, perhaps including children.
But then again, he's still starting from the premise he would have had to just, what, drop thousand pound bombs on him or something.
It would have been impossible to send in, uh, you know, special forces to try to pick and choose targets more carefully and yet still get the guy, any of that.
But it's just amazing.
That's from September 10th, 2001.
I don't know what to ask you about it, Jason said, what do you got to say about that, man?
I don't know.
That's, that's incredible to me.
I mean, it's, it's not surprising, I guess, but the timing certainly is.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, sure.
I mean, it's just, sounds like just coincidence, obviously, uh, that that was the date on it, but uh, still, that's really something.
And anyway, I just, it's important, I guess, uh, not just for like trivia's sake, but that, you know, he's acknowledging some responsibility there for, if, if, if he's not acknowledging that it's his fault for helping to generate the Al-Qaeda enemy against the United States, um, at least he's accepting responsibility for not doing anything about it there before Bush ever arrived in town.
Right.
All right.
Well, so, uh, let's get to current crises and I guess we could just pick them out of a hat here.
I don't know, but you've got this very important piece here at news.antiwar.com.
Germany pushes broad plan to settle Russia-Ukraine dispute.
Oh my God.
You're telling me there's an adult that runs a government somewhere in the Western Hemisphere, Jason?
Is that right?
Yeah.
Freaking news.
I mean, there's an actual proposal here that apparently been on the table for a while.
Well, break it down.
Because it's a grand bargain.
That sounds pretty good.
It really does.
I mean, it's, it's kind of, uh, reaching at a lot of different disputes at once because of course, you know, from the U.S. perspective, Russia's just after land.
From the Russian perspective, the big problem is the gas dispute.
This tries to resolve everything.
Wow.
So that's pretty good.
And then, um, so what are the Americans saying about it so far or anything?
Nothing so far.
There hasn't been a single public comment that I can find from any U.S. official on it.
Although there's been some talk that the U.S. probably isn't in favor of this deal because it would ultimately have the international community recognize the Crimea as a session into the Russian Federation.
Oh, yeah.
Well, no, we can't have that recognition of outright reality that's obviously and absolutely irreversible.
Uh, okay.
Uh, well now, so was it June the 30th?
Was that the last time the Germans tried to work something out and the Americans stopped them?
I'm not really sure about that.
It seems like this has been on the table at least since then, but, uh, it's, it's not clear that they ever really completely stopped trying to work this out.
And yeah, I guess I phrased it wrong.
So it's really the Americans told Kiev to ignore the Germans and continue on attacking the East is really what I meant to say there.
Right.
And, uh, the people familiar with the situation say that this is basically the only game in town.
If you're going to be negotiating, no one else has put forward any plan at all, let alone a comprehensive one.
The U.S. plan is basically for Russia to unconditionally surrender, uh, all their disputes, just, uh, give Ukraine whatever it wants.
Uh.
But Jason, I mean, isn't it, isn't it the case that only the most right-wing ridiculous hawks in America, well, I shouldn't call McCain right-wing, he's a pretty centrist extremist, but anyway, isn't it just McCain and Bolton and how about the kookiest on the right who are, uh, who are for, you know, for example, bringing Ukraine into NATO at this point.
I mean, the Europeans certainly don't want that.
And I thought that most of the, uh, that even the consensus in DC had backed off from outright bringing them into NATO, at least in the near term.
No.
Well, that's true.
But as far as the status of the Crimean peninsula, as far as resolving the situation with, with the rebels in Eastern Ukraine, the U.S. public position has been Russia has to withdraw unilaterally from the Crimea despite the referendum and just let Ukraine re-enact it.
They have to, uh, forcibly disarm the Eastern rebels in Ukraine and let the Ukrainian military role roll over them.
I mean, they're positions that on their face, common sense would tell you Russia isn't going to possibly accept, so they're, they're really just a pretext for more sanctions and more, more hostility.
Well, now, and of course, if the American position in DC is, okay, we don't really want to bring Ukraine into NATO at this point, that might be a bridge too far.
That doesn't necessarily mean they're willing to promise that on paper to the Russians or anything.
That's a whole other question.
Right.
So, and now, so as far as, um, uh, the proposal itself here, it's proposed to who exactly?
Is it, uh, calling for talks between everybody involved or just here, here's a deal that could be brokered between Kiev and Donetsk or what?
Well, it's a deal that involves Kiev, it involves Donetsk, it involves Russia and...
What about the U.S.?
Well, it, it would have to involve all the permanent members of the Security Council as far as the recognition of Crimea as part of this offer.
Right.
But, uh, I mean, as far, as far as the war in the East, the settlement is basically the rebels agree to disarm in return for some significant concessions from Kiev, including increased autonomy for those, the two, uh, breakaway provinces.
And right now there's no indication the Ukrainian government would go for that, but as, as time moves on, they're going to be under increasing pressure to do this, especially from Germany, because one of the other key points of this deal is...
Now, hold it right there at the other key point, Jason, we've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, y'all.
News.antiwar.com for Jason Ditz's work.
All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz from antiwar.com, news editor there, news.antiwar.com.
You got to bookmark that.
You guys read news.antiwar.com every day, right?
Yeah, of course you do.
We're talking about Ukraine.
Jason's helped keep track of what's going on there.
And now when we were interrupted by the break, Jason, you were saying that pressure really is mounting, I guess, from the West on Kiev, that they're going to have to put an end to this thing by way of negotiation, not by conquering the East.
Is that right?
Right.
Because conquering the East doesn't really help anything.
I mean, certainly it resolves this particular dispute over this relatively worthless couple of provinces in the East.
But the real problem between Ukraine and Russia from the European perspective is the natural gas dispute.
It's been about two months now since Ukraine has gotten any natural gas from Russia.
They have a fairly substantial stockpile, and of course, it's summer, so they're not using very much right now.
But various estimates say they're going to run out sometime in the fall or winter.
And those pipelines going from Russia into the Ukraine are also the same pipelines that go into Western Europe and to countries like Germany that are getting huge percentages of their energy that way.
So the concern from the Europeans is once Ukraine runs out, they're inevitably going to start trying to siphon off gas, which means Russia is probably going to cut off the gas, which means they're going to be cutting off the gas to their European customers, too.
Right.
So in other words, the Americans can talk big all they want, but to the Europeans, hey, we got to make a deal here right now.
Their very stability internally is at stake here.
They've got to keep the energy coming no matter what.
Right.
And the U.S. has presented this as something that they can resolve with increased exports to Europe.
But it's really ridiculous to think that the U.S., even if they did start wholesale exporting liquid natural gas, could export anywhere near the amount that all of Europe would need to replace what they get out of Russia, because Russia's Gazprom company is the largest natural gas company in the world by a factor of 10.
I mean, they're enormous and there is no replacement out there.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, there's some talk about, well, America's just got to ramp up our fracking so much that we can then and I don't know how many years worth of new infrastructure building this would take.
We're going to take up the slack.
We're going to export so much, eventually export so much natural gas to Europe.
What kind of pipe dream is that?
Right.
And there are some plans to build some liquefaction plants that would allow us to export natural gas.
The prices in the U.S. are a lot cheaper than they are in Europe or Asia.
So there's a lot of appeal for the energy companies to do that.
But those sort of huge plants don't go up overnight.
That's something that's going to take years, if not decades, to complete.
And in the meantime, expecting Europe to just sit out in the cold and wait is ridiculous.
They're obviously not going to do that.
Right.
All right.
So now, can you tell us a little bit more about the war in the east and how many people have been killed and and just how how much it's been escalated recently?
I know they've announced a whole new escalation, but that doesn't necessarily always seem to pan out in practice.
But I don't know.
Well, it's really difficult to come up with accurate death tolls in in the east because the Ukrainian military offers sometimes wild death tolls in what they're calling an anti-terrorist operation.
There are times where they'll issue multiple statements a day claiming 500 rebels were killed here, 500 rebels were killed there, to the point where if all of these were true, the death toll would be in the tens of thousands by now.
And there's no indication of that.
I would say the death toll probably is in the low thousands, but it's impossible to come up with a reliable number.
It's even more difficult than coming up with figures out of countries like Iraq or Afghanistan.
Yeah, well, I guess.
So then the same answer for where any lines might happen to be or or which cities are under what amount of control of either faction?
Well, Donetsk is still under rebel control, certainly, and so is Luhansk, and those are the two big cities here.
Slavyansk, which was a rebel possession, fell to the military a couple of weeks ago.
A lot of villages are sort of under siege at any given time by the military, but.
Exactly where they stand, which ones have fallen, which ones haven't fallen, it really, really depends who you're listening to.
All right, well, again, to recap, the most important part of this is so far the Americans have nothing to say about this latest German push for peace.
Right.
And the fact that the Ukrainian military has kept going on fighting probably suggests the U.S. hasn't been very supportive of the deal.
Otherwise.
The Ukrainian military probably would have been pushed into more open negotiations on the terms.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't know how easy that should work with the Israelis anymore, but that sure as hell should work with Kiev if Obama says, all right, that's it.
Do what Merkel is proposing.
They will go along with that in a heartbeat.
Right.
Right.
For every reason to suspect.
So anyway.
All right.
Well, man, I'm sorry I asked you about Ukraine so much.
I didn't save time to ask you about the terror tunnels there, but I know you've got a really good right up there at news.antiwar.com about it, Jason, at least.
Can you just tell us very briefly whether all those tunnels are really just for killing Israeli civilians with or what?
Well, no, of course.
Of course not.
I mean, the tunnels almost exclusively go into Egypt, not to Israel.
There are some that go into Israel, but it's a very small minority of the tunnels.
And these tunnels have been being built for five to 10 years because of this blockade and.
I have become basically the entire economy of.
Of the Gaza Strip, this is how all imports and exports are conducted is through tunnels because there are no border crossings that are reliably open.
So this is not a whole new species of tunnels.
These are all the same damn tunnels we've known about all along.
Right.
They're just suddenly being rebranded as terror tunnels because there's a war going on.
Right.
And do you have any kind of guess as to the numbers exactly of tunnels that actually did go into Israel?
It's probably in the dozens.
I don't know that it's any higher than that.
The number of tunnels overall is enormous, of course, but.
Well, I guess I did see where some fighters, presumably Hamas fighters, went through a tunnel and attacked some Israelis, but they were not civilians in a kibbutz or something.
They were Israeli border guards just on the outside of the fence there.
And naturally, you know, when there's a major war going on, naturally those tunnels are going to be used for that.
But that wasn't why they were constructed.
Right.
And it also, of course, it goes to show what the consequences are going to be if the siege stays, but all the tunnels go and how much worse off they'll all be again.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for our great work.
Jason Ditz, everybody.
News dot anti war dot com.
We'll be right back.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
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