12/18/14 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
All right.
Hey, check it out.
I got the great Jason Ditz on the line.
Thank goodness for that.
Hey, Jason, how are you, man?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing really good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Everybody, you know Jason.
He's the writer of all important news stories, all day, every day, at news.antiwar.com.
He's the news director there, something like that, right?
Man, you just got to read news.antiwar.com.
Obviously, all the top headlines there are just bookmark the thing.
And all day, every day, the best write-ups of all the breaking news and all the most important news with all the most important parts that you need to understand highlighted for you with links to the original sources and the rest.
And just worth his weight in platinum.
And he's a big guy.
All right.
And I'm just assuming platinum is worth more than gold right now, but I don't really know.
And in fact, he could tell you that because he's also a financial writer, too.
Jason, I like you.
All right.
Now, let's talk about some news.
I don't want to know or care anything about this Korea movie thing, and I know that you probably don't either, but I know that you've already put yourself through learning everything about it, so you could explain it to the rest of us, so please do tell.
Well, Sony made this movie called The Interview, which they put a little over $40 million into creating and tens of millions of dollars into advertising.
And it's basically a comedy.
Seth Rogen goes to North Korea to interview Kim Jong Un and is recruited by the CIA along the way to assassinate him while he's there, because apparently that's a thing.
And North Korea expressed their usual outrage at any movie slash video game slash anything else that includes North Korea in it.
Somebody hacked Sony Pictures, leaked a bunch of their content, did huge damage to their servers.
The U.S. is saying they're convinced it's North Korea, but they don't really have any evidence to support that, because they're saying the attackers weren't in North Korea, but they think if nothing else, North Korea was probably supportive of it.
And that's apparently good enough.
But with this movie coming closer and closer to release, it was supposed to come out today at a couple theaters and then general release Christmas.
The hacker group, whoever they happen to be, threatened to 9-11 all the movie theaters, which is insane.
You know this is just Matthew Broderick in his bedroom goofing around.
What in the world?
I know!
I mean, first of all, what does that even mean to 9-11 all the movie theaters?
They're going to literally crash planes into every single movie theater in the United States.
And who's going to do that?
North Korea?
Yeah.
They've got sleeper cells all over America, ready to attack, huh?
I mean, even if North Korea is behind this, which there's some doubt about, they certainly aren't capable of attacking every movie theater in the United States.
And whatever hacker group they're working with, or is working on their own, certainly isn't capable of that.
But insurance premiums being what they are, and all insurance policies saying we don't cover terrorism, a lot of the big movie theater companies bailed on the movie and said, well, we're not going to show it on Christmas.
Oh, man.
And Sony, deciding that nothing was better than something, said, well, if the big theaters aren't going to show it, we're not going to release it at all.
And, in fact, they went so far as to say, not only are they not releasing it in theaters, there are no plans to even bring it out on DVD.
Which seems even more ridiculous, because...
They're going to 9-11 all our houses.
Yeah, they're going to attack every DVD player in the United States?
I mean, that's just even more ridiculous.
But for now, Sony is just saying, well, we're going to just sit on this movie forever.
And I'm sure they'll come around eventually, because they put too much money into it not to, but...
Man.
So, you know, this whole thing about the Sony hack started as a story that I'm seeing in the margin of all the things I'm reading, but I don't care about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Some producer said something about some movie star that I don't care about.
You know, big deal kind of thing.
And now they've gone and made it a thing that I have to pay attention to.
And what they've done, Jason, if I'm reading you right, if I'm hearing the story that you're telling correctly, what you're saying is that the Americans are doing everything they can, I guess, or the theater companies, the corporations involved here, the insurance companies involved here, are doing everything they can to show the world that there's no one easier to push around than the crybaby, tiny, little, helpless American people.
Absurd is what Benjamin Netanyahu called it.
It's worse than that.
If a non-existent threat from a hacker who probably does not represent the state of North Korea, which could not attack America in any sense, in any way, or threaten American movie theaters in any way, can get an entire movie pulled from being released at all due to just a threatening email that can shut down an entire movie across the country.
Somebody called it the Twilight Zone, but that's not right.
This is like Krusty the Clown Show.
This is just beyond the theater of the absurd.
I don't understand.
I must not understand.
What did I leave out?
What did I miss?
Did they actually kill somebody?
Did they do something to somebody?
No.
They just hacked Sony and then sent them a threatening email, like you said.
And that was all it took.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, Fitzy G is saying the whole thing is a publicity stunt anyway.
It very well could be.
I was just reading a thing about—I had no idea what it was I was reading, Jason, but they made reference to how during World War II, they even had a slogan for it that you're supposed to memorize.
You may know it.
The cliche for it about something about a stiff upper lip or something along those lines about how Brits, when a V-2 rocket goes off and kills 200 people, they're supposed to go about their day and go get a pint at the pub and be brave because what are you going to do, bow down and quiver and cry in front of Hitler and the Nazis?
No.
Right?
And so 40,000 people died in the terror bombing of the Battle of Britain.
40,000 people were killed.
And they didn't go and just sit and adopt as a national policy, flogging themselves and crying and being the biggest baby that they could.
I'm sure there was a lot of crying and a lot of grief, but it wasn't adopted as a national policy.
Oh, boo-hoo, what victims we are for crying out loud.
And this is unreal.
I can't even believe what you're telling me.
This sounds like the plot of some stupid movie.
It really does.
And, I mean— I'm sorry.
I should come up with good questions to ask you.
Well, it's just so absurd.
I mean, North Korea literally threatens to attack the United States and to wipe out the United States several times a year.
Yeah, yeah, at least every April.
They never miss an April.
Every April, there's the U.S.-South Korea joint war games along North Korea where they pretend to attack North Korea.
North Korea gets all riled up.
Everything calms down when they have to send their troops back to start planting crops so they don't all starve to death because their collectivized farm system just flat out doesn't work.
And if they didn't use the military to plant crops and harvest them, half the country would starve.
But they come up with these idle threats that nobody takes seriously anymore.
But somehow, Sony does.
Man, yeah.
It's amazing to me the way all the theaters reacted to this, too.
Instead of saying, yeah, right, I'll tell you what.
We'll post an armed guard.
You know, something easy.
I don't know.
But anyway, what a joke.
Well, when we get back, I'm going to ask you probably one more question along these lines, which is about what you know about the origin of the actual Sony hack for what interest it is.
And then we'll talk about important stuff like maybe some Palestine or some other things.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Jason Ditz from AntiWar.com.
News.
AntiWar.com.
And we're talking about this North Korea thing.
Apparently, a bunch of right-wingers are saying we've got to go to war with North Korea now, which brings us back to the question, Jason, do you know of any reason to believe that North Korea has anything to do with this, really, at all?
Not at all.
In fact, North Korea denied having anything to do with it, which, I mean, okay.
Then they say, well, they're probably lying, but when has that ever been North Korea's M.O.?
They always brag about everything they do and half the stuff they don't do.
Right.
And all the threats are coming from the same people who did the hack and not from any other North Korean known origin or anything like that.
Right.
And that's it.
Okay.
Yeah, you know, somehow I'm still not convinced.
Okay.
Well, next question.
So what about the State Department influence in here?
I actually saw a tweet yesterday from an AP reporter who said, well, I have sources in the State Department who say it's not true, but something from these e-mails say that the State Department gave at least an okay on this.
What about that?
Right.
On the movie, that is, on the production of the movie, which is the plot is killing the dictator.
Right.
And it goes farther than them just giving the okay to it.
The Rand Corporation actually had an advisor for the, advisor slash consultant for the creation of the movie, and he lobbied really hard for them to leave the successful assassination plot, spoiler alert, at the end of the movie in, even though Sony was like, well, we might get some flack from actually assassinating a foreign world leader at the end of a movie.
And the Rand Corporation thought it was a good idea to leave this in in the hopes that it would inspire North Koreans, who were obviously never going to see the movie in the first place, to actually assassinate him.
Really?
And that that's, that was the purpose of it.
It wasn't just that, well, we don't have a problem with it.
Yeah, go ahead.
I don't really care.
It was and it wasn't just, yeah, you know, we like the idea of spreading the meme out there in the in the world that, you know, Kim Jong Un died.
But but they specifically thought this will inspire North Koreans to turn around and kill him.
If only they see a movie like that.
Right.
Right.
Seth Rogen is all it's going to take.
Yes, there's something very absurd about this all, I think.
All right.
Well, speaking of absurd, that is, like I mentioned earlier, what Benjamin Netanyahu says about American support for his government.
Oh, yeah, they support us like 80 percent.
It's absurd.
The Americans, they're easily moved, he said.
Oh, yeah.
You can go watch the video of it on YouTube.
You get a friend who speaks Hebrew to translate it.
But I don't think anybody's really disputed the the subtitles there.
We can all go and look at it ourselves.
So that brings us to Israel's relationship with the Palestinians, which is, of course, entirely wrapped up in American foreign policy in every way.
There's there's no way to pretend that this is just like, I don't know, if there was a border dispute in Mongolia somewhere or whatever.
This is in which that would probably be America's fault, too, somehow.
But this is entirely America's responsibility here.
The U.S. government's responsibility, the situation going on there.
And there are a lot of new developments here.
And the latest headline you have at news.antiwar.com, Jason, says Geneva Conventions invoke rights of Palestinians.
But Israel insists Geneva Conventions don't apply.
How so?
Well, they're arguing that this is in particular about the fourth Geneva Convention, which covers the treatment of civilians under military occupation, which, of course, would include the Palestinians because they're under military occupation.
Israel's argument is, well, they're under military occupation, but the question of sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza is so murky that it shouldn't apply because it's not like we just invaded and occupied.
We've controlled this territory for decades and decades.
The Palestinians never had an independent state.
And Jordan doesn't want the West Bank back and Egypt doesn't want the Gaza Strip back.
So there's not a opposition faction claiming legitimate sovereignty over that territory.
So their argument is, well, then the fourth Geneva Convention just doesn't apply.
Well, but then even according to that bogus argument, couldn't Abu Mazen or Abu Abbas, the leader of the PA, he could just say, you know, I'm declaring myself the leader of a state.
This is a state and we want all these rights.
Wouldn't that undermine that entire argument right there without Egypt or Jordan being involved?
Well, it does.
And they have.
The Palestinians have claimed sovereignty over this territory.
But they don't even address that.
The Israelis don't address that in their argument.
Their argument is that there's no historical basis for an independent Palestine.
So they can't claim their own sovereignty.
OK, well, that's completely ridiculous.
And the law doesn't recognize that.
Of course, the Ottoman Empire used to rule Palestine.
They're saying unless the Ottomans had created an independent state and set it free back when or if the British had before they gave it to the Israelis, then that would be perfectly fine then.
And then they would, of course, have the right to invoke the Geneva Conventions in our military occupation of their territory.
But since the Ottoman Turks never gave them their own state back when, then that means we don't have to recognize their rights today.
Right.
And that's basically it.
And the conference, which the U.S. boycotted because it was about Israel and they boycott anything that's about Israel that Israel doesn't like, found that, yes, the Fourth Geneva Convention does apply in the occupied territories, which is important because Israel is violating that on numerous counts.
I mean, the big things in the Geneva Convention are no collective punishment.
You're not allowed to conduct any population transfers from the occupying state into the occupied territories, which is exactly what the settlements are.
Right.
And that's the excuse they're claiming is, listen, we're in the middle of stealing this territory, so it's murky.
We're occupying it.
We're colonizing it.
We're taking it from them.
So how can they say it belongs to them when we've gotten away with it so long so far?
Right.
And that's the whole point of the Fourth Geneva Convention is that you're not allowed to do that.
I know a lot of people get emotional about this, Jason, but I would just ask people in the audience who are just reacting against this, you know, knee-jerk fashion, to just stop and consider for a moment if it was the other way around.
If the Palestinian Muslim and Christian Arabs had rounded up all the Jews and forced them into the Gaza Strip concentration camp, or colonized them and built these giant walls to imprison them and treat them as at least, you know, 4th or 5th or 10th class citizens of one degree or another there in the occupied West Bank.
If it was the other way around and it was the Palestinian Arab Christians and Muslims doing this to the Jews, Americans would be absolutely freaking out.
Well, same difference.
It's the exact same difference.
That's all it is.
And in fact, you know what, Americans?
You know, the Jewish Israelis, more of them might look white and European like us, but you can't speak their language anymore and you speak Arabic, so what the hell?
Why should Americans defer to the Israelis in this situation when they're the aggressors, when their excuses are laughable because they're lying, because what they're doing is wrong and it's so obvious on its face all day every day.
It's wrong for Americans to continue to pretend that the poor Israelis are the underdogs in this damn thing.
It's just not so.
Well, right, and I mean, historically this happened a lot.
Historically, occupying neighboring lands and then colonizing them like this is how states grew.
But this is not the Middle Ages.
This is not the way things are supposed to work anymore, and the Geneva Convention, the whole point of them is to spell out that things like torturing occupied civilians, expelling populations, creating colonies, those things aren't to be done anymore in a civilized world.
But Israel does them openly and insists that this situation is just too murky to criticize.
Well, I know the excuse is wearing thin.
In a lot of places it seems like people are pretty much just over any kind of expectation that the American-led, Oslo-style, peace process thing is ever going to kick in.
It's a new day.
I don't know what's going to happen next.
I know a lot of people are pushing for a one-state solution or different routes to two states, but it seems like there are going to be big changes, politically speaking anyway, if not the facts on the ground here coming soon.
Well, what do you think?
The EU just took Hamas off the terrorist list today.
That's indication of something there.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
I don't always phrase things in the form of a question, Jason, and obviously we're out of time now, too, so sorry about that.
Thank you for your great journalism all the time, and you do great work.
Sure, thanks for having me.
That's Jason Ditschel, news.antiwar.com.
Thanks for listening.
See you tomorrow.
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Hey, Al.
Scott Horton here for offnow.org.
Now here's the deal.
Due to the Snowden revelations, we have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the national surveillance state.
Now they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress.
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How?
We nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy.
The offnow project of the Tenth Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
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You're always wondering, yeah, but what can we do?
Here's something.
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