08/22/14 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
And if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable, and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
I came back in the room and it was that two seconds of dead air, two moments of dead air between spots and announcements.
I thought, oh my God, how long has it been dead air?
But no, it turned out it was all right.
Okay, good.
Yeah, I'm here.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I've got Mitchell Prothero, I believe reporting again from Erbil in Kurdistan, correct?
Yes, I am still in Erbil.
All right, good.
Erbil.
I need to learn how to say that right.
Welcome back to the show, Mitchell.
I appreciate you joining us today, tonight.
Thanks for having me.
Mitchell is foreign staff for McClatchy Newspapers.
That's McClatchyDC.com.
Also the Miami Herald and the SACB reprint all McClatchy stuff if you get stuck behind the paywall there, guys.
This one is rash of new abductions of foreigners in Syria.
Of course, I don't know, I guess you want to start off by telling us a little bit about Jim Foley.
You knew him?
Yeah, I knew Jim.
I didn't know him quite as closely as a lot of my colleagues and friends who are completely devastated.
He was well-known as just a really good-hearted, sweet guy.
In the times that I'd met him, he was just a very charming guy, had spent an awful lot of time in war zones over the last couple of years, and always tried to focus on the people, the misery, trying to tell their stories.
For him to be killed for basically having gone into a place in order to tell the story of the oppression of Muslims at the hands of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, it's just sickening and depressing.
Yeah, it's horrible.
And now, before the new rash of abductions here, how many other reporters are these guys believed to be holding, do you know?
Well, there's a thing that people have been following, whether we like it or not.
There's been some criticism of the policy lately, but news organizations have a tendency not to tell you when reporters are kidnapped.
It's a security thing.
It's a decision that people started doing primarily first, and it started in Iraq, but it became prevalent in Syria, where you would just not announce anything.
You would refuse to comment and ask other people to try not to report on it in order to keep it out of the media, to sort of take the drama and the heat off the situation while you made contact with the kidnappers and tried to resolve it.
What we've seen from the blowback from that, which is a very human way to handle something, is that one, people just haven't been aware of nearly how many people have been kidnapped.
I'm pretty close to most of the media organizations, have a pretty good sense of things, and I'm experienced, I've been doing this for over 10 years, and so I would hear about a lot of them, because they'd be people I'd know, or organizations that I'm close to.
What we're finding is a lot of freelancers who didn't have those sorts of contacts would show up in southern Syria and think they were about to go off and have an adventure and not realize that on that same road, five or six people in the previous month had been nicked at various checkpoints.
At this stage, in some ways, it's almost hard to say exactly.
We are aware that the Islamic State, by my latest count, has at least four other people that are American citizens, whether they're aid workers or journalists, and some of their names are not public right now.
There could be others.
Other people could be held, I mean there are other people that are missing that are public.
A colleague of mine, somebody who freelanced for McClatchy named Austin Tice, has been gone for over two years, is believed to be held by the regime.
There's some other Americans that are rumored to be held by the regime.
It's just, it's a very dark situation, particularly because the kidnappers themselves generally do not put out any statements.
They just sort of contact the families, if at all, demanding money, but in some cases, as in the case of Austin, they've been public about this, there's never been any claim of responsibility for Austin, and no demand at all either.
A lot of the time, people just fall into this black hole.
We've described Syria, it's one of the reasons why a lot of us stopped going in last year, was because if you disappear, you don't just get kidnapped, you literally disappear.
It's more than you can really ask your family, your news organization, your friends to go through while you're trying to be out there brave, be it a war correspondent.
But consider at least a dozen at this stage.
A lot of people have been released, they're a bunch of French, Spanish, Danish journalists.
There was sort of a wave of releases that people strongly believe involved payments of huge ransoms.
Those guys did get out, and there was at least seven or eight of those.
At one count, I think I had a count of 22 Westerners that I knew for a fact I could name them that were being held by, we believed, the Islamic State.
That number's gone down, I think, but again, it's hard to say.
All right, now, can you clarify something for me, Mitchell, about people are saying that this guy Foley was held originally by the regime, and then maybe was traded to ISIS which proves their conspiracy theory that ISIS has worked for Assad all along and that kind of thing?
Yeah, there's no evidence to back that whatsoever.
There's significant evidence that Jim was taken by, because one thing that people point out which is true is that he was kidnapped before the formation of ISIS.
What you see there is he was taken by what we call at this point a freelance jihadi group that had gone to Syria in order to fight on behalf of the rebels.
They hadn't officially named themselves ISIS yet.
There had been a group that had set up a camp right there on the border.
They had kidnapped some journalists a month or two before that had been freed in a rescue attempt by the FSA, which still had some military power back then.
By every account, it was a group, either the same group or a group very much like them that had dominated that area of Syria and Idlib that took Jim.
There's never been any evidence except for one report from a security company that I won't name that got paid millions of dollars to go and investigate and basically came out with all this information that they'd later turned over to the family that was essentially not backed by anything factual.
I don't know whether they were incompetent or whether they were fed B.S. or anything like that, so there was a little confusion because the Global Post had put out a statement about a year ago, maybe eight months ago, that it said they strongly believed Jim was being held by the regime.
Even at the time that came out, none of us believed it and were a little shocked because a lot of Jim's colleagues had looked into the event and had passed along the information that we had a pretty good idea who had kidnapped him.
Later on, it's possible a group took him that later traded him.
There's even one fairly credible rumor, in my opinion, that the group that had him used him as a way to show the Islamic State that they were with him and sort of traded him to the Islamic State as a franchise fee for membership.
Something like that's entirely possible, but there's never been a shred of evidence that I've seen or that I've talked to somebody who's knowledgeable on the subject who believes that Foley was taken by the regime at first.
All right.
And then, so now, how many more people have been kidnapped?
I guess when this headline you write, or I don't know the headline writer writes, a rash of new abductions, that means since Foley's murder?
Yeah, what happened was essentially there's, it's come out over the course of about a week.
What had happened was there was a, right now we've confirmed that two Italian nationals have been kidnapped from somewhere around Aleppo.
The Italian government is not specifically confirming it, but I've confirmed that through multiple sources.
There's a rumor that a fourth guy was.
We weren't really willing to go into the detail on that because right now it is still in the rumored stage that a Western national was taken around the same time in the same place and may or may not have been a freelance journalist, but we're just going to have to wait on that.
And then there's a Japanese guy who's a very interesting and confusing case who people have alternately referred to him as a photographer, an activist, maybe some kind of medical professional.
Or even to not be very nice, a war tourist who'd sort of shown up about a year ago, embedded himself with an FSA unit and sort of had claimed to join.
He's just sort of a strange individual.
He had been with an FSA unit that got overrun by the Islamic State and on Monday they put out a video saying we've captured a Japanese mercenary spy and so he's clearly in the hands of the Islamic State.
The two Italians right now, we really don't know very much.
They could be held by the Islamic State.
They could be held by any one of a number of rebel groups that have gone completely rogue and gangster or just looking for a payday.
It could have been that they were arrested by regime elements.
But what we do know is that they are missing and presumed held by somebody.
All right, and now I guess if we could switch to closer to where you are there in Erbil, what's the line like now between Mosul and Erbil and the front between the Islamic State and Kurdistan?
Well, the Iraqi Special Forces and the Kurdish fighters, the Peshmerga, who are on the brink of war themselves, managed to put their differences aside last week and with the backing of a huge number of American airstrikes, when you consider what a small area it is, managed to take over the Mosul Dam, which is a hydroelectric facility that can supply basically Mosul with electricity and also sort of controls all of the water for agricultural use in northern Iraq.
And they've been pushing out from that front a little bit.
They've managed to take over a few villages.
Other than that, the front in the north has been fairly stagnant.
What we found is the airstrikes are not going to be enough to dislodge Islamic State fighters.
But they are enough, at least for now, to keep the Islamic State from massing its forces for a major attack on something like Erbil.
They simply can't put 400 pickup trucks together in the middle of the desert in order to do an attack or else the drones are going to see them and they're just going to get thwacked by F-18s or B-1s.
It just made it a lot harder for them tactically to move around.
So that's basically what we're seeing in a stalemate.
But the most alarming news, and this is something that I'm just reporting now today, is that there was a massacre earlier today that details are still coming out on in Diyala province outside of Baghdad.
And details are still coming out, but they seem pretty credible.
I've spoken with a number of Iraqi government officials and witnesses from the scene, is that after a roadside bombing of a militia convoy, a Shiite pro-government militia group that had been fighting alongside the Iraqi government in Diyala, somebody tried to roadside bomb them.
In response, they stormed into a local Sunni mosque and by last count, massacred about 73 people.
You know, these numbers are not set in stone yet, reports are still coming out, but we've seen pictures and something terrible happened there.
This is going to be a huge watershed event for the reconciliation of trying to bring the Sunnis into the new government and get them to try to cooperate in trying to get rid of the Islamic State.
There's going to be retaliatory massacres.
It could very well turn out to be sort of a shifting moment like we saw in 2006 when al-Qaeda blew up the Shia mosque in Samarra and sparked a full-on civil war where everybody targeted each other.
This could very well be a moment like that.
Everybody's been pinning their hopes on essentially trying to convince Sunni tribes to drop their allegiance to the Islamic State, switch back over to government control, and then cooperate with the government to drive out the militants.
At this stage, that's going to be almost impossible to do in the short to medium term, because frankly, if you're an average Sunni tribesman, you look at the Islamic State, even if you don't like those guys very much, they're closer to you than this government in Baghdad that now you see as a sectarian death squad that's coming to massacre you and your family.
It's absolutely a disaster for the situation in reconciling this and addressing the splintering of a rock.
It's just another nail in the coffin.
Which is the purpose of the attack in the first place by the Shiite militia that did it probably, right?
Well, that's one of the things that you'd say.
I mean, Asib al-Haq, which is one of the most notorious Shiite militias, has already come out and flat out denied it.
I don't know how much you can take that to the bank, but let's just take it at face value.
There are a number of other Shiite militias.
Yeah, so there's two ways you can look at it.
One, yes, the Shiite are extremely angry over, you know, they see these things where, you know, the Islamic State essentially murdered 1,700 surrendered soldiers up into Crete.
We don't know if that number's exactly right, but we do know it was hundreds upon hundreds of guys executed on the only way you could describe it would be an industrial scale.
You know, people are still furious about that.
There's been, you know, bombings and killings all over the place, a third of the country has fallen to them.
So already the Shiite are furious.
So it's possible a roadside bomb could spark a retaliatory massacre.
We saw this in Haditha with the U.S. Marines, where a bombing that, you know, killed a couple of their guys, essentially the company lost its mind for an afternoon and killed, I think, between 13 and 20 Iraqi civilians in basically what was just straight up murder and retaliation.
It could be something along those lines.
But at the same time, it's awfully convenient that a group, you know, if it is a Shia militia that did this, a group that's fairly dedicated to fighting the Sunnis at a time when people were working very hard to reconcile the two, chose to undergo an operation, that would be the death knell for that.
So it is, you know, if it was a spontaneous act, it's a spectacularly timed spontaneous act, you know.
So it's a very alarming situation.
Yeah.
Well, I hate to change the subject back to Kurdistan for a minute, but I want to ask you about if I can make a comparison to Baghdad, where you have, you know, still Sunni Arab neighborhoods here and there.
And you have basically it's a big enough city that if the Islamic State really wants to infiltrate waves of suicide bombers in there, well, and they have, right?
But they could do a lot worse, probably.
But I wonder if that analogy holds at all when it comes to Kurdistan.
You know, you talked about how fleets of guys in Toyotas can't just come across the wide open desert without getting blown to hell by the Americans on the way to Erbil.
But can they walk in there one at a time and organize serious attacks, guerrilla attacks inside Erbil from there?
Well, I think they'd really like to.
The problem is, again, you're talking about Kurds are not Arabs.
They're ethnically different.
They speak a different language and they come from a, you know, a culture to a lay person might not seem tremendously different, but, you know, it is noticeably different the way they dress, the way they act.
You know, it's they're they're closer.
They'll kill me for saying this.
They're like in Kirkuk.
It's kind of a split population, right?
This is the differences.
Kirkuk, this is a very serious issue.
And I honestly believe the Islamic State's a lot more interested in taking over Kirkuk than they are Erbil.
Erbil does have an Arab population, but it's one that right now is feeling an awful lot of pressure from the security forces.
They're under constant surveillance.
If you want to try to enter into Erbil as an Arab, you'd really better have all of your permissions lined up or they're not going to let you.
It's it's just it's on lockdown.
If you think profiling at a U.S. airport's bad, you do not want to be a Sunni Arab from Mosul trying to pass through what we call Peshmerga, which is what we call the Kurdish militia security forces.
One of their checkpoints right now, they're just not having any of it.
And so there's even been some small demonstrations in Erbil saying we've got to throw out the Arabs that we have living here.
Their potential fifth column and they could start suicide bombing.
So it is something that could happen here.
I do think it would be on a limited scale.
Kirkuk, on the other hand, is split 50 50, if not more, to the Arabs.
And currently, you know, people are living under Peshmerga control and they're like, as I've described, there's tensions between the two.
And there are regularly some suicide bombings in Kirkuk.
There's probably been about one a week since this whole thing kicked off in June.
So that is a place that I would keep my eye on in terms of sectarian violence.
But it's also a place that regularly sees the most amount.
Oh, I lost you there.
Are you there?
Yeah.
You know what?
You're just broken up so bad.
So it's it's.
Yeah, we've got a really tough connection and I'm afraid you might have to edit down because I've just about got to go, man.
I'm on deadline right now.
I only had half an hour for this.
OK, great.
Well, that's all right.
I'll go ahead and let you go since we're at such technical difficulties anyway.
But thanks very much for time, Mitchell.
Good talk to you again.
No problem.
I'm sorry about that, Scott.
Yeah, no problem.
Bye.
All right.
That's Mitch Prothero.
He's in Erbil, Kurdistan.
Having a bad time with the Skype there, but that's all right.
We got some good stuff out of him.
It's all bad news, man.
You know, I don't think I heard him say a thing that's actually bad news for the Islamic State there.
Don't worry about things you can't control.
Isn't that what they always say?
But it's about impossible to avoid worrying about what's going on these days.
The government has used the war on guns, the war on drugs and the war on terrorism to tear our Bill of Rights to shreds.
But you can fight back.
The Tenth Amendment Center has proven it, racking up major victories.
For example, when the U.S. government claimed authority in the NDAA to have the military kidnap and detain Americans without trial, the nullifiers got a law passed in California declaring the state's refusal to ever participate in any such thing.
Their latest project is offnow.org, nullifying the National Security Agency.
They've already gotten model legislation introduced in California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas, meant to limit the power of the NSA to spy on Americans in those states.
We'd be fools to wait around for the U.S. Congress or courts to roll back, big brother.
Our best chance is nullification and interposition on the state level.
Go to offnow.org, print out that model legislation and get to work nullifying the NSA.
The hero Edward Snowden has risked everything to give us this chance.
Let's take it.
Offnow.org.
The military industrial complex, the disastrous rise of misplaced power.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
I'd like for you to read this book, The War State, by Michael Swanson.
America's always gone to war a lot, though in older times it would disarm for a bit between each one.
But in World War II, the U.S. built a military and intelligence apparatus so large, it ended up reducing the former constitutional government to an almost ceremonial role and converting our economy into an engine of destruction.
In The War State, Michael Swanson does a great job telling the sordid history of the rise of this national security state, relying on important first-hand source material, but writing for you and me.
Find out how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy all alternately empowered and fought to control this imperial beast, and how the USA has gotten to where it is today, corrupt, bankrupt, soaked in blood, despised by the world.
The War State, by Michael Swanson, available at Amazon.com and at Audible.com, or just click the logo in the right-hand margin at ScottHorton.org.
We should take nothing for granted.
Hey, Al Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee.
Lots of it.
And you probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee, company at DarrensCoffee.com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world, all specialty, premium grade, with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren's Coffee.
Order now at DarrensCoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and save $2.
DarrensCoffee.com.