11/18/14 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
I got Jason Ditz on the line.
He's the best thing ever happened, man.
This guy, he's the news editor at antiwar.com.
And what he does is he writes up all of what's happening in an antiwar way and with all the links to the background you need and the explanation of what it really means, despite the New York Times spin that he's linking you to.
And it's just the best goddang thing in the world.
You got to bookmark it.
You got to look at the top headlines every day on antiwar.com.
All seven wars and plus Guantanamo and the police state and the rest of it, too.
It's all there, news.antiwar.com, Jason Ditz.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Jason?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I'm going to kick my ass off about the top headline today at antiwar.com.
Mossad-backed Jandala vows support for ISIS.
What?
Tell me the story.
Well, Jandala's got a long, pretty complicated history.
It dates back to, well, right around the 9-11 era.
They were originally an Al-Qaeda affiliate, but Al-Qaeda sort of scrapped them in 2003 because they were too regionally focused and Al-Qaeda wanted to focus more internationally.
After that, they sort of just became guns for hire, particularly for attacks on Iran.
For a long time, it seemed like they were hired by the CIA because there were people – and they believed they were hired by the CIA – because there were people with American passports giving them U.S. currency to attack Iran.
But it turned out, and foreign policy broke that story in 2012, that these people were actually using forged American passports and they were with Israeli intelligence.
And then, you know, this came up just last week because there was a leak to the New York Times about how America had some kind of relationship with Jandala, which looked like it was leaked in order to enrage the Iranian right to try to sabotage the nuclear deal from that end as best they could, which of course reminded us all who were paying attention back then – and actually, I had missed it, I admit.
That's not true.
I was paying attention, but I didn't remember this until Ray McGovern had reminded me that Jandala killed a bunch of generals.
I knew they killed a bunch of Iranian generals, but Ray reminded me it was in October 2009, right when Obama was proposing his first nuclear swap deal with the Iranians that ended up falling through.
That was a big part of the reason it fell through on the Iranian side, was because of this Israeli-sponsored, again, al-Qaeda break-off group attack inside Iran where, if I remember right, they had kidnapped a bunch of officers and executed them to make sure to make their point well.
There were a lot of attacks in that 2009-2010 timeframe, and a lot of attacks on mosques in the southeast of Iran, but in 2010, Iran eventually captured the leaders of Jandala at the time, the Rizvi brothers, and executed them.
Since then, the group has sort of gone back to being Pakistan-centric, and had also gotten a lot smaller in profile.
We haven't heard as much about them since then, but that brings us to where we are now, which for a little while, they were working with the Pakistani Taliban, and now they've decided that they're joining up with ISIS.
Now, there was a bit of a controversy where a Taliban group had been quoted as saying they support ISIS, and then quoted as backpedaling, although maybe they were just clarifying.
I don't know if it was really backpedaling or not that they said, oh, no, no, we still, of course, are loyal to Mullah Omar, the caliph and would-be caliph and leader of the Taliban, first.
We're just saying we like ISIS, and they're doing a great job over there, and that kind of thing.
We don't want to compete with them, or whatever.
We're for them, but we're not saying that we are now led by them.
That was a bit of a clarification there.
Do you know how this, was this declaration that specific, or were they outright saying, forget Omar, we serve Ibrahim now?
Well, they were, and that was a big problem in the Pakistani Taliban, because there was a huge controversy around it.
The Pakistani Taliban spokesman was making a lot of these proclamations, so it was being seen as the entire group doing this.
But ultimately, it turned out he was sort of doing this on his own with a handful of other leaders within the group, and they ended up firing him and saying that he no longer speaks for the Pakistani Taliban.
And there were reports of him and five or six others defecting to Hustur.
Oh, and you know, by the way, since we're talking about such a controversial subject like this, it's important to clarify the source, Mark Perry from foreignpolicy.com, which is a project of the Washington Post and represents the foreign policy establishment center kind of wonkville there on the internet, foreignpolicy.com.
He was the one who broke that story, and then the way I remember it, Jason, it didn't come with a bunch of denials.
It came with a bunch of silence on the other side, because they didn't really want to talk about what he had written there.
Right.
It was a bizarre story, because a lot of times countries get caught in these things, and they issue denials that nobody really believes.
But there wasn't really any denial at all.
It was just silence after that story broke.
And in some ways, that worked, because a lot of people don't really remember that story.
Right.
Now, Hirsch was the one, Seymour Hirsch, in the redirection in the New Yorker in 2007, I think.
It could have been 2008.
Anyway, the article is the redirection, and that was where he said, America's backing all Al-Qaeda-like groups.
Oops, we accidentally put Iran in power in Iraq, so now we've got to redirect back toward the Saudi point of view, and we'll back Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, and PJAK, the Kurdish Workers' Party rebels in Iran.
The PJAK is the name of that break-off.
And Jandala in the east.
So it seems like that was the one part of it that was wrong.
It wasn't CIA running Jandala in eastern Iran.
It was the Israelis, and they were doing so in order to disrupt the American president's attempt to make a nuclear deal, which is a huge thing for our number one, most best ally in the whole wide world, Jason, to do to us, right?
It's not like they're saving us from getting into a war.
They're saving us from our president making a de facto peace deal.
Right, and a lot of the stuff about Jandala was also reported in ABC.
They had some pretty substantial coverage about it, reporting it as absolute fact.
But it turned out not to be true.
Yeah, and you know what?
That was Brian Ross.
We should have known.
So that confirmation bias will get you.
But when it's Brian Ross, the confirmation bias could have gone the other way.
That's what I mean to say.
All right.
Well, now, so we got a couple of minutes.
No, we don't.
Yeah, we do.
We got about a minute and a half for this segment or something.
Can you give us the latest from the Kobani siege there in northern Syria on the Turkish border where the Kurdish Workers' Party fighters are holding out against ISIS?
Well, it seems to be much the same that it's been for the past few weeks, except a lot less media coverage.
Kobani still a lot of fighting going on there.
It doesn't seem like either side's really decisively turned the tables on the other.
Both sides keep sending a few more reinforcements here and there, but it doesn't seem like either one of them is really changing anything on the ground.
Thanks so much for your time.
I know you've got to go, but I appreciate you clarifying this great story for us, this incredible story, Jason.
The great Jason Ditz, everybody, news.antiwar.com.
Thanks again.
Thanks for having me.
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