06/07/10 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

This is the Liberty Radio Network, broadcasting the latest Liberty-oriented audio content 24 hours a day at LibertyRadioNetwork.com.
Today's the first day of the new show, well, the same show on the new network here, Mark and Ian's network, Liberty Radio Network, that's LRN.
FM, and the show's, boy, if I can pull this off, I guess we're going to see if we can do this three hours a day, five days a week without me, you know, having a nervous breakdown.
I'm going to go ahead and get to my first guest before it's too late.
It's my buddy Jason Ditz, he's the managing news editor at Antiwar.com, and he knows a lot of things about a lot of things.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Jason?
I'm good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great, man.
I appreciate you joining us today.
So I got a news story here that I found.
It's up there today at news.antiwar.com, where you keep all your news summaries there.
Well, geez, let me see if I can find it now.
This is about the Israeli government.
Here it is.
Israel declares U.S. citizen on aid ship a, quote, terrorist.
Gulf War vet was opponent of 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
So what's going on here?
Who's this guy, and why is he being called a terrorist?
And how did his face get so messed up in this picture?
He says he was beaten up while he was in Israeli custody, but the Israeli government hasn't commented on that one way or another.
So that picture is a brand new picture?
Yeah.
Wow.
Because he looks like he got beat up pretty bad by somebody.
Yeah, that's a picture of him basically as soon as he arrived back in Turkey after the flotilla.
Wow.
All right.
So now, who is this guy?
What do you know about him?
Well, he's Kenneth O'Keefe, and he was a Marine in the first Gulf War.
And in 2001, he just basically had had enough and became a really staunch antiwar activist.
And in late 2002 or early 2003, he organized the human shield action in Iraq.
I'm not sure if anyone remembers that.
He went and they had a couple hundred people at one point, but by the end, there were only about 80 that went to Iraq and they were in hospitals and orphanages and places like that trying to discourage the U.S. from bombing them when they were invaded in 2003.
Yeah.
I'm sorry to interrupt here, but it just seems to me like such a funny phrase.
Human shields, meaning American shields, right?
Because the millions and millions of humans in Iraq, they're not shields and nothing.
They're collateral damage.
But a white guy from here, a veteran, maybe he has enough humanity to be respected, huh?
Right.
And it seemed to have worked because none of the sites that they were at ever got hit.
Oh, there you go.
All right.
So it says here, I guess he was on the the Mavi Marmara aid ship.
That was the one that took the brunt of the Israeli violent force last weekend.
Is that right?
Right.
And he's actually given some pretty in-depth interviews since then about his experience on there and talking about knocking a rifle out of the hands of one of the Israeli troops and basically when they pushed the Israeli troops, the Israeli commandos down the stairs, which you see in the video, how they he says they provided first aid for the troops and there was never any attempt made to harm them after they were knocked down there.
Well, no wonder they're calling him a terrorist if he disarmed an IDF soldier carrying an American paid for M4 rifle or something and disarmed him with his bare hands and then beat him up, push him down the stairs.
That sounds like something only the supermen of Al-Qaeda could do, huh?
Well, they call him an active terror operative in their press release and claim he's an operative of Hamas that was traveling to Gaza specifically to set up Hamas commando units.
Yeah.
Well, you know, this isn't the corner over there at the National Review, but is there any evidence that this guy is buddies with Hamas?
He's spoken out in favor of Palestinian independence, but that's basically the beginning and the end of it.
I mean, he's he seems to have renounced violence pretty much completely after he left the Marines and he's constantly spoken out in favor of nonviolent resistance.
So it seems ridiculous that he of all people would be the one that Hamas would look to to set up commando unit.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and never mind the fact that, you know, I don't know, the way they throw Al-Qaeda in here is so gratuitous.
It just is so laughable when, you know, anybody with a long term memory at all knows that it was just a few months back that Hamas mounted a major raid against some, you know, Al-Qaeda leaning kooks in Gaza and killed them like a dozen of them or more.
And Ayman al-Zawahiri from, you know, podcasting from Pakistan or, you know, whatever secret prison he's held up at or whatever, has done nothing but denounce Hamas for participating in democracy.
Right.
I mean, Hamas and Al-Qaeda certainly don't get along.
No, not whatsoever.
But I guess to the Israelis, they're so used to conflating all of their enemies with ours.
They don't know that we're over it by now and that it doesn't work anymore.
Not so well, at least.
And I'd like to mention, too, it wasn't apparent from the Israeli announcement of the five quote unquote terrorists, but there actually was a second American citizen on that list.
But she wasn't listed as an American citizen.
She was listed as an Iranian born U.S. resident.
But she's a 31 year old woman from Chicago named Fatima Mohammadi.
And they said that she was carrying what they call banned electronic components, which if you've seen the list of banned goods going into the Gaza Strip could be anything from a laptop computer to a cell phone with a really good camera on it.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, everything's dual use technology.
You can make a nuclear bomb out of that or something, you know, right.
Well, now, here's the thing, too, is we've seen and I'll be covering this more on the show here in a little while, but we've seen the reports coming out after a week of the Americans and others telling their side of the story and their side of the story all seems like the same story and the complete opposite of what the Israelis claim as far as who shot first and at whom.
But we'll pick that up on the other side of this break.
Stay on hold for me, Jason, and stay on hold.
Everybody in the audience will be right.
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How do you like that?
I'm Scott Horton.
This is anti-war radio.
I'm assistant editor at anti-war dot com.
My guest is news editor, managing news editor at anti-war dot com, Jason Ditz.
And we're talking about some of the fallout from the Israeli raid on the Free Gaza Flotilla.
And now we have apparently now you're saying two American citizens, Jason, that are accused of being terrorists, I guess, tied to Hamas by the Israelis.
One American killed.
We know he was shot or they say, I guess he was shot four times in the head.
Did they ever say about powder burns and at what close range these bullets entered his head?
Four shots seems like a lot for one head.
And and then, of course, I'd like to bring up the young lady who was peacefully protesting another American citizen, peacefully protesting what the Israelis did on the high seas from the West Bank.
And she was shot in the face with a tear gas grenade and lost her left eye over it.
You know anything more about that one?
Well, I don't know too much about either of those, really.
I mean, the freaking dog on the 19 year old that was killed, we know he was shot five times for the for the bullets hit him in the head.
But I know some of the autopsies showed that they were shot at very close range or shot in the back of the head.
But I'm not sure if he's one of those.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, the autopsies are saying that the activists were hit 30 times.
And, you know, you brought up earlier how this American accused of being a terrorist by the Israelis.
Part of his answer is that, hey, we were taking care of the Israeli prisoners that we took.
And now there are pictures like that.
I'm looking at a blog called Well, I don't even know how to say it.
But if you Google this title, Israel has Bara fails again.
Photos show Mavi Marmara.
That's the the boat passengers protecting, aiding Israeli soldiers.
And that's right.
And here is a gallery of photos published on the website of a Turkish newspaper that shows the first picture is an Israeli soldier who's been captured.
And the guy who's captured him is actually protecting him and putting his hand up and holding back a man with a camera, a man trying to assault this IDF man with a camera.
And the person imprisoning him is saying, no, no, get back and holding the guy back.
And then there are more with their one man has got a paper towel or something in his hand and is tending to the head wounds of this IDF soldier.
These are the pictures in the Turkish papers today.
Right, and that's basically what they people on the ship were saying, it happened all along and it seems like the photo evidence supports that.
Yeah, it's pretty convenient.
They see all the evidence for a week and then they had a week to tell the American TV audiences everything that they needed to hear to think that the Israelis were the poor victims here.
And Israel's changed their story several times in the past week.
From what to what?
Well, it started out that it was people with bats and knives.
And we saw that one slingshot in the video that kind of makes you a slingshot.
Then the Israeli troops originally supposedly aborted with paintball guns.
Then that was sort of disavowed.
And then most recently, the Israeli government claimed that there were 50 highly trained Turkish commandos that were ex-Turkish military hiding in the hold of the ship.
And they were heavily armed with their own assault rifles and flashbang grenades.
And that somehow all these people in the middle of this battle had the presence of mind to throw all their assault weapons and all the evidence of the grenades overboard.
And that's why they didn't find any weapons.
Right.
Yeah.
As 20 of them were killed and none of the Israelis, you know, it's funny, too, because they showed a short clip of, you know, edited clip of footage from the boat of a flashbang stun grenade going off in one of the Israeli boats down below.
And they go, oh, see, the terrible peace protesters were throwing grenades at us.
But everybody but them basically says, no, they were the ones throwing stun grenades.
The obvious conclusion is that one of them just bounced off the hull and fell back into a boat or into another boat.
And that's what's going off in that picture.
And these guys really lie a lot.
I'm having trouble keeping track.
You're amazing.
Some of the claims are just completely ridiculous, too.
I mean, the idea that there were 50 Turkish soldiers that were heavily armed hiding on the ship and that not only did none of them actually kill any Israeli troops, but that they all managed to hide all the evidence of their presence and apparently disappear without a trace because Israel certainly didn't charge anybody with any crimes for being on this boat.
Yeah.
I mean, where's their names on the list?
Show us their bodies.
If I mean, if they were the whole boat was captured, it ain't like they got away from a trap door into the sea.
Right.
So if they existed, we would see pictures of them by now.
But anyway, so tell me about this bright side of the story here to wrap up, Jason.
More flotillas are on their way.
They already seized the Rachel Corey, but there are more and more coming.
Right there, there are.
Obviously, Turkey has promised to send more aid ships, and it sounds like the next ones are going to be backed up by the Turkish Navy so that they don't get attacked again.
But beyond that, there have been several other groups looking to send aid ships of their own.
There's a Jewish group in Germany that's looking to send aid ship.
There's a group in Lebanon looking to send aid ship.
The Red Crescent in Iran is saying that they're going to send to aid ship.
It is so important, Jason, that the Israeli Voice for Peace, I believe is the name of the organization.
I think they're an international group, too, that they are taking part in this, that German Jews are going to break the blockade.
How are you going to call them Hamas terrorists, BB?
Huh?
I'm sure they'll try.
And, you know, I mean, that's the way it's got to be, you know, any you know, if you do it, you're an anti-Semite, man, whatever your problem is.
You work for Ayman al-Zawahiri, apparently.
But, you know, what are you going to do when it's German Jews, probably descendants of Holocaust survivors and so forth?
But I guess we'll see.
Is there any change at all from the White House?
I mean, basically, Obama said virtually nothing.
Yeah, that's still basically the case.
They've they sort of gave lip service to the idea of an international probe at the time when it was sort of a supportive of Israel thing to do.
But now that Israel is saying they don't want the international probe, the White House isn't really saying anything even on that anymore.
So it's not clear if they've completely backed off of that, too, or if there's something else.
Well, and here's a case where from the audio clip where they apparently took, as Max Blumenthal is reporting, they apparently took old audio from a previous flotilla from 2006 and admitted that they spliced it all up and lied about people saying, go back to Auschwitz.
They've been busted with fake pictures and telling lies this whole time.
Already, the prosecution is guilty of obstruction of justice and they're going to be the ones investigating themselves.
But I guess that's the news.
Thanks, Jason.