01/05/15 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott.
Well, we got Jason Ditz on the line.
Thank goodness for that.
He's at news.antiwar.com, and thank goodness for that, too.
On top of just about every news story of importance in the world all day, every day, writing it up for you, linking to the original and pointing out the important part of what they say that ain't true, et cetera.
Really good stuff, as always there.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us.
So first of all, I wanted to say we're a day late and a dollar short on this just because of scheduling difficulties last week.
But, no, I saw the B.S. and the nonsense and the things that seemed to me like they just couldn't possibly be right on the TV news this morning, but somehow still it's North Korea hacked Sony and terrorists threatened every movie theater in America in an act of some sort of war, said John McCain, or an act of I forgot what Obama called it, some other jargon.
Anyway, so good.
The news story is still fresh.
There's new sanctions even that Obama continues to sign.
So tell me the truth.
What all do we know about who hacked Sony and what all they have to do with North Korea and or threatening to kill movie theater patrons, et cetera, et cetera?
Please, sir.
Well, the evidence as it's been shown to us by investigators who've been looking into this is strongly pointing towards this GOP group being a group of at least six people, including at least one former Sony Pictures employee who was disgruntled and had a lot of information about the inner workings of their network, which is really what people were saying when the hack first happened.
The North Korea theory only popped up later because the hack happened to coincide with the release of the interview movie.
So it looks like the first suspicion was actually the right one.
There's no indication these people were working with North Korea, except that the FBI mentioned the possibility.
And after the FBI mentioned that possibility, these people said, oh, yeah, yeah, we're North Koreans, which seems designed just to throw them off of actually catching the people who did it.
Yeah, well, it's funny, you know, I don't know if I want to get on the email list that all these TV news people are on that told them all what to say when they all say the same thing.
So there's real doubt as to whether the evidence cited by the FBI amounts to evidence at all that this hack originated in North Korea and IP address.
That doesn't mean anything, you know, this kind of thing.
Well, I guess the North Koreans must have hired whoever it was that did it where.
OK, I mean, they're basically all just saying that, but I don't know.
Am I missing anything?
Because they didn't seem to cite any reason to believe that.
It seemed like, oh, well, the answer is not one, maybe it's two, not maybe it's one and a half, you know.
Right.
And the FBI has kind of just gone along with this theory that basically they invented themselves that it could be North Korea.
And once the people said, oh, yeah, yeah, we were North Korea, that that was enough for them.
They haven't presented any serious evidence that it was North Korea.
These IP address claims aren't conclusive proof of much of anything.
It's it just seems like they.
They took a wild guess and they've decided to stick with it because it was politically convenient.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't even know why they're embarrassed to just backtrack 180 degrees.
Why only 90?
It's not like they have any shame anyway.
You know, Glenn Greenwald did that great write up where he just showed just, you know, and naming and shaming all these media stars, you know, pushing this stuff with no real reason to believe it.
And all the while, while you have real experts saying otherwise.
Right.
Like it took a full, I don't know, week or week and a half of articles at Wired and this and that other computer tech magazine or website.
Right.
People who it's mainstream media as far as it's perfectly acceptable.
It's just marginal because it's kind of niche technology groupings or whatever.
It's not politically marginal in any way.
Wired dot com.
Right.
But it took, you know, many, many, many days.
And then finally, CNN ran a story that said, OK, well, there's some discrepancies here.
And then it was OK for everybody else to acknowledge that.
All right.
Well, maybe.
But but that was what was most interesting to me was how the story was not holding up in, you know, according to people like Bruce Shiner Schneier.
You know, other other very kind of prominent technologists that mainstream media would listen to in any other case.
Right.
But in this case, they're contradicting the government.
So they just and they don't say, well, Bruce Schneier must not know what he's talking about.
They just ignore him.
They just don't even have him on for a week until somebody gives the OK to finally break narrative and go ahead and start incorporating new facts into the story.
And it's because the FBI narrative is is the more interesting story.
I mean, having this be just another in a long line of corporate hacks that involve a disgruntled former employee.
That's kind of boring.
Yeah.
I mean, we've done that before.
Having it the launch of a cyber war with North Korea.
I mean, that's big news.
Right.
Well, and it seems like they're getting a lot of mileage out of it, too.
I mean, the news is getting their mileage out of it, selling dish soap and whatever.
But the oh, and running ads for the Wounded Warrior Project for all the people that they've got maimed with their lives the last time around.
But it looks like Congress and the executive branch have their plans to to pass new cybersecurity measures and and maybe help push through the regulating of the Internet as a public utility on a national level and all this kind of stuff.
Yeah.
All right.
And this has been pushed for quite a while by the Obama administration.
They've had designs on this for years.
Every time they get a proposal into Congress, it sparks a major public backlash and they they kind of have to back down this time.
It's being presented not so much as protection against just general hackers, but as a national security issue because of North Korea.
And there's a lot of sense among Congress that they have to just move quick on this and not take a lot of time to debate the consequences for privacy, the consequences for freedom in general on the Internet and just give give the administration all the new powers they want.
Yeah, big trouble there.
And so you have a write up here from yesterday, Sony hack, a prime excuse for new U.S. cybersecurity laws.
Is it just I can't keep track of SOPA and CISPA and all these.
Is it one or the other of those exactly reincarnate?
Can you describe what you expect the new the new bills to really do?
Well, it's they haven't actually been presented yet.
The new Congress, when it when it begins meeting this month, is is expected to bring forward some plans and they're probably going to look extremely similar to CISPA and SOPA and all of these previous acts.
Even though most of the information sharing requirements and other, you know, giving the administration the power to shut down websites for national security reasons, most of this stuff has nothing to do with what happened at Sony and wouldn't even conceivably stop a hack like that.
Right.
And since we're now, you know, a year and a half out from the Snowden revelations, it makes you wonder why they need any of this stuff when, of course, they can have all our data whenever they want it, however they want it.
They got a workaround for every barrier, every time.
So anyway, hold it right there, Jason.
We get back.
I'm gonna ask you about Israel, Palestine and some other things listed there at news.antiwar.com.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here to let you know.
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OK, I'm talking with the great Jason Ditz.
He is the news editor at anti war dot com news dot anti war dot com.
And you have quite a few here about Israel Palestine politics going on.
And oh, you know what?
Well, maybe at the end I'll try to ask you about the upcoming elections and stuff.
I guess first I want to talk about what I know what's more important, really.
I want to talk about the Palestinians move at the United Nations, seeking to join the world court and the International Criminal Court and Netanyahu's reaction and all that, if you can fill us in, please, sir.
Well, sure.
After the vote at the UN Security Council on the Palestine resolution failed, it was the vote was eight to two in favor.
It needed at least nine to pass, but there were five abstentions and the US vetoed it on top of that, even though it wasn't going to pass anyway.
What exactly was that resolution again?
The resolution said basically that Israel hasn't till the end of 2017 to withdraw to the 1967 borders.
OK, so it didn't necessarily it wasn't exactly about the establishment of a state, but obviously it was along the lines of trying to create the preconditions for one of the facts on the ground there, correct?
Right, right.
It was about ending the occupation, which is the one thing really holding the PA back from being more than just a provisional state.
OK, and then I'm sorry to interrupt there.
And then after that resolution failed in the UN Security Council, then what?
After that failed, Palestinian President Abbas signed the documents that would cede the Palestinians into the international criminal courts, which the US and Israel are both loudly opposing now and presenting as a huge, huge act of aggression.
Because if Palestinian territory is under the jurisdiction of the ICC, then Israeli war crimes in these assorted wars on Palestinian territory that they get into every couple of years would actually be an international court matter.
And so, boy, I don't know.
I mean, I'm not an advertising executive.
I don't know if there's any kind of better spin that they really could put on this, but it seems like they're really failing when all they have to say is, hey, you, you stay away from that court that charges people with war crimes when they commit them sometimes because we do not want to be convicted of the war crimes that we've committed.
I mean, that's basically what they're saying here, right?
Right.
And...
It's not like they're trying to say, oh, yeah, right, as though we committed any war crimes.
They're just saying outright, hey, we don't want to be held accountable.
Right.
And that's been the case for the U.S. and Israel both in the past, because they both signed the accession papers into the ICC, but then they later refused to ratify them and informed them that they have no intention of ratifying them, specifically because they don't want to have world court jurisdiction for the war crimes they commit.
Now, I'm not really a big fan of these things myself.
I would prefer the American people hold their politicians accountable and the Israeli people would hold their politicians accountable, but so much for that.
So somebody's got to prosecute them, right?
Right.
And Netanyahu has argued that he doesn't think the ICC is going to accept the Palestinians because they're not a state.
The ICC is for states.
I think that argument, though, is a little weak because everybody recognizes the Palestinian Authority as a provisional government.
Even Israel treats the Palestinian Authority as a provisional government.
I mean, their first hostile action after trying to get ICC membership was to revoke tax money from the Palestinians.
I mean, obviously this is state-to-state diplomacy that we're talking about, even if the Palestinians' territory that constitutes their state is all under military occupation.
So I think there's really no good reason the ICC is going to have to refuse them.
The U.S. doesn't have veto power over the court because they haven't ever ratified the ICC charter to begin with, so they're not really a member in good standing of the world court to begin with.
So I don't see where the U.S. and Israeli objections are going to go all that far.
Although they can really severely damage, well, definitely the Palestinian Authority's authority, as well as the quality of life of the people of Palestine by withholding all that tax money.
Because, as we're discussing, the territory's occupied.
The Israelis collect all the border checkpoint money and all the trade tariff money and all that stuff, and the Palestinian Authority is completely dependent on the Israelis, or at least in large measure dependent on the Israelis, to give them the money, right?
This is how they seemingly, deliberately, or very stupidly got Hamas half-elected back in 2006, was by withholding all the money from Arafat and his guys.
Right, and Israel does this so often.
I mean, literally, Palestinian tax revenue gets withheld by Israel several times a year whenever Netanyahu's in a bad mood.
He's just, you know, a little showdown, we're going to withhold their tax money.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin is really criticizing that today, though.
He's pointing out that weakening the Palestinian Authority is just going to harm Israel's interests in the occupation.
Because, the Palestinian Authority, I mean, whatever else it is, and whether it is diplomatically at odds with Israel sometimes, is really helping the Israeli military administer this occupation in a lot of the West Bank.
Right, and now, so that's the other article here, is Israel diverting military budget to settlement expansion.
Now, of course, dollars are fungible, so Americans are subsidizing their socialist health care and education system, and every bit of their fascist occupation in the occupied territories and the rest of it.
But it is interesting when they're deliberately taking the money out of the military budget and giving it straight to the colonists on the occupied West Bank.
Right, and Beit El is such a disaster of a settlement.
It's right on the outskirts of two major Palestinian cities, including Ramallah, which is their de facto capital right now.
It's built almost entirely on privately owned Palestinian land, which is always a problem to begin with, but it's especially a problem here because it's also not contiguous.
Oh, right.
Yeah, this is the one that separates East Jerusalem from the rest of West Bank, right?
Right.
Yeah, I'm sorry, we're all out of time.
Thank you so much for your time, Jason.
Great talking to you.
Sure, thanks for having me.
That's the great Jason Ditz.
News.
Antiwar.com.
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Antiwar.com.
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