Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
Rock over London, rock on Chicago.
All right, so our next guest on the show is our news editor at Antiwar.com, Jason Ditz.
And he's got the breaking news for us.
I already told you earlier in the show, but still I like it.
Break it for us.
What's going on, Jason?
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great, man.
Especially, I love this headline, man.
Three stooges running this war here.
Okay, so we're talking about the Italian foreign minister calling for an end to the Libyan war.
That would be Curly, I believe.
Which makes, uh, I'm not sure if that makes Obama Moe or Shep or what.
Well, it seems like Sarkozy must be Moe, because it seems like the French government has been the one that's calling the shots and pushing the most for escalation in this one.
Oh, man.
All right, so, no, so, uh, yeah.
Tell us the news, man.
The Italians got cold feet, huh?
Uh, right.
After a couple of really embarrassing missile strikes against Tripoli and the surrounding area.
The first one killed nine people, and NATO immediately apologized.
The next morning, a second strike killed 15.
NATO angrily denied it and said it was all made up and they weren't even operating in that area.
And within 24 hours, then they turned around and said, oh, we made a mistake.
It turns out we were operating in that area and that was our missile, but we don't know about the casualties one way or another.
You know, it's funny about that.
Just on that one point, you would think that people being bombed by the Americans would lie sometimes, but no.
Every time the military denies whatever it is they're accused of in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or anywhere else, it always turns out that, yeah, they did it.
Right, and sometimes it's stuff that sounds so ridiculous that you wonder if it was just somebody making something up.
Like, in Afghanistan, we had the time where they shot the kids driving home from the volleyball game because they assumed they were insurgents.
I mean, sometimes these stories are so ridiculous.
Or the time that they broke in on a loud party and found two people tied up and killed in the back room.
And it turned out that, well, it was actually the troops killed them and then tied them up to make it look like they had already been killed before they raided the house.
Yeah, oh, was that the one where they accused the men of murdering their own wives and they'd use alcohol to clean the wounds and everything?
Right, and it's incredible how many times this comes up and then it turns out that what the people were saying that NATO officials were calling nonsense is pretty much exactly what happened.
Alright, so back to this one.
They said, we weren't even flying planes around where all these civilians apparently blew themselves up or something, and then they had to admit that, yes, they were.
And then this caused what?
Like a real political crisis in Italy?
Or what would lead them to change their mind like this?
Well, there's been a lot of dissent among NATO member nations about this, and Italy's been sort of on the fence about this war from the start because, of course, they're historical colonizers of Libya.
And they were really concerned that any war in which they took part might be perceived as another colonial adventure.
And now this war was sold to the Italian public as a dire humanitarian effort, and instead it's ending up killing large numbers of civilians.
So they're trying to be pretty proactive about not waiting for a backlash from the Italian voting public and just saying, you know what, we're done.
We need to stop this and allow humanitarian aid into the country.
And as far as you know, are they in fact done?
The Italian planes, were they doing bombing runs and have they ceased?
Or what exactly has stopped?
Well, we don't know exactly what stopped, but Foreign Minister Frattini made it sound like the Italian government is basically going to stop all of its involvement.
Certainly not to the extent that the French and the British were, but they were running some bombing runs.
Their biggest contribution to the war, though, and one that doesn't look like it's going to change any time soon, is letting them use air bases in southern Italy to launch all these bombing runs from.
Right.
Well, yeah, that'll be the real test to see just how much they're backing down, right?
Right.
Because right now, the French government condemned Italy and said it was their call for humanitarian aid.
If they'd gone through with that, that would be a sign of weakness from NATO, and they couldn't possibly allow that, and they have to escalate the war even more now.
But since most of the operations are coming out of Italian bases, if the Italian government wants to, they could make this war really inconvenient for the rest of NATO by just denying them access to those bases for the purposes of this conflict.
Well, they must have an aircraft carrier or two, American ones anyway, so that wouldn't necessarily stop everything, but it would hurt pretty bad.
Right.
I guess they need refueling and rearming all the time, too.
Right.
It would be very inconvenient, certainly.
And some of these planes could come from the south of France or other places as well, but Italy is just a stone's throw from Libya.
It's just a quick flight across the Mediterranean, and losing Italian at least acquiescence to the war could be a major blow to the cost and the effectiveness of the conflict for NATO.
Well, now, as you noted, the French kind of came out and said, no, we've got to keep going.
I guess you said they didn't directly contradict the Italians, but everybody knew that's what they meant, that kind of thing.
But before this happened, just before this happened, I was reading an article yesterday that I think was brand new yesterday, maybe it was one day old or something, but it was about how these civilian deaths have really shut Sarkozy's mouth.
You know, Mr. Hot Air up there is now keeping very quiet as his planes keep ending the lives of people under the age of 12.
Well, right.
And we don't know from NATO's very vague comments about what exactly they're doing in Libya who actually is launching these missiles that are killing all these people.
And I think it's deliberate that they don't want to say, well, this time it was a British missile or this time it was a French missile.
They diffuse responsibility, right?
Like at a public hanging.
It's NATO that's doing the bombing, not America.
Obviously, that's Obama's excuse for doing it is that it's NATO, not him.
Right.
And of course, that's effective to some extent.
But with this war not really having a lot of point to begin with and these vague claims of it being a humanitarian endeavor, civilian deaths are looking exceptionally bad in this case.
And I think across NATO, it's creating a bigger and bigger split.
I mean, countries like the United States and Britain are more or less used to the notion that they're going to cause large numbers of civilian deaths in a war.
And it maybe takes a little more to get the public riled up here than it does in some of these other countries that aren't used to fighting in the recent past.
But countries like Italy, countries like Germany and Poland, which have both refused to have any involvement in this war, they're really concerned about how this war looks to the rest of the world.
Well, is there any real talk at all about the possibility of negotiations or the terms for negotiations?
Are they saying maybe they, you know, the NATOcrats, I mean, are they saying maybe they could settle for splitting the country in half, something like that?
No, definitely not.
And it seems like the calls coming from outside of NATO for partition and for negotiations and even just temporary ceasefires for humanitarian purposes are falling on deaf ears in NATO and being condemned in some cases.
Well, and you know, Qaddafi has sued for peace over and over again, right, has said, come on, let's talk this out, let's end it.
Right.
And they just refuse to even answer him and dignify that with a response or whatever, right?
Right.
Most of the time there's no answer or if there is an answer, it's something that they just say, well, he has to resign immediately and no other talks are possible.
Yeah, like the Rambouillet Peace Accord.
Let us occupy your entire country.
All right.
Hang tight, everybody.
It's Jason Ditz from news.antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, kiddos, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
And now, Jason, I was hoping you could give the audience a little bit of a refresher course about the legal controversy surrounding Obama's participation in this NATO war, as they're calling it.
You know, a lot of people haven't been paying attention for a little while.
This is their first day back wondering about who's getting bombed and what have you.
So why don't you give them the lowdown on the War Powers Act controversy and all that, and then we can get into what McCain and Kerry are up to today.
Sure.
Well, the U.S. started bombing Libya on March 19, and they informed Congress of the bombing on March 21, which they started bombing on a Saturday and they informed them on a Monday, which is pretty normal.
But the thing is, after they informed them of starting a war with a country, they have, under the War Powers Act, 60 days to get congressional approval for that war.
And there have been some questions about the constitutionality of this War Powers Act, but interestingly, a lot of those questions originally were that, why should the president get a 60-day grace period in the case of an offensive war?
And officials now have been using that as like, well, this act doesn't mean anything at all, and the president can just start whatever wars he wants.
But the interesting thing was that, originally, the Obama administration didn't seek this approval.
They said, oh, this war will be over very soon, we have a 60-day grace period under the War Powers Act.
They explicitly cited the War Powers Act to Congress as a reason they didn't seek that approval in the first place.
But then the 60 days came and went, and suddenly there was still no request from the administration for approval, and the war is still going on.
People gave them an additional grace period of another month, virtually another month.
That came and went as well.
So now we've got 90 days into a war and no congressional approval, and now the Obama administration is arguing, well, the War Powers Act doesn't even apply, because this war isn't technically hostilities.
Because the United States' role is mostly just one of support.
Refueling planes, doing surveillance, spotting targets.
Although the U.S. is firing some missiles, they say it's not really enough to really count.
Which, an interesting part of the history of this act is, it was created during the Vietnam War, specifically didn't use a test of, is this technically a war or not, because they thought the Nixon government would use that excuse to not comply with the act.
So they specifically say in the act that if any use of troops in hostilities, so now they're saying it doesn't even count as hostilities.
It really is amazing.
You'd think they'd just say that, come on, the president has the authority to wage war all he wants like the Bushes did, and it wouldn't be true, but it would at least be a coherent argument, as opposed to this obvious war against the English language that any grade schooler could see through.
But now there's been a lot of movement in the House of Representatives this way and that, as you referred to there, where they kind of gave him extra month leeway.
Was that one of the resolutions that they passed in the House, or what was that?
Yes, that was the first resolution that actually passed in the House when they had the sort of competing resolutions between Kucinich's bill and Boehner's bill.
Right, that was the one that said, get back to us with an explanation within 14 days or whatever.
Right.
And that came almost 14 days after he'd already missed the deadline, so basically gave him an extra month.
And his explanation, which came the day that that 14 days expired, was, I'm not going to give you an explanation because this doesn't count.
Right.
This doesn't count as a war.
Well, you know, the great Charlie Savage, formerly of the Boston Globe, now the New York Times, had a piece the other day that I think this was astounding pretty much, where the Department of Defense, as they call it, lawyer and the Department of Justice lawyer said, yeah, you can't do this.
The law says, you know, you have to do what the law says.
And then he went to the State Department lawyer, Harold Koh, who said, oh, no, yeah, it doesn't count.
And the way Savage wrote it, they even, Obama himself, completely changed around the process where all the agencies are supposed to get together, come up with an opinion about what the law says in this case and what the president is, you know, what his parameters are and that kind of thing.
And he changed it and said, no, everyone submit your opinions to me and I'll decide which one I want.
It's like the Simpsons option, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, the Simpsons movie.
And so he made up his own, our constitutional scholar president made up his own nonsense that this doesn't count as a war because all we're doing is carpet bombing him.
And it's incredible.
And here's another quote that's only tangentially related that I think is just a fascinating quote.
I was searching for it earlier and I finally found it.
When they were discussing the civilian deaths, NATO's spokesman, I believe his name is Mike Bracken or is it Mark Bracken?
It's Mike Bracken.
And his quote about killing 24 people, including five children over the course of a couple of days was, let's not lose sight that it is the Gaddafi regime which started this.
That's funny because it wasn't that long ago and I remember it different.
But I guess we can go back and check news.antiwar.com from the end of the winter, beginning of the spring.
It's just amazing what these people are willing to claim.
In the course of, you know, when the first nine got killed, it was, oh, we're really sorry there was some sort of equipment malfunction.
Then they killed another 15 and now it's like, well, Gaddafi's fault.
We're bombing you anyway.
So now it's just a so what sort of position.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is something we talked about with Glenn Greenwald on the show last week, too, I think, or somebody else on the show yesterday or something.
Anyway, they announced their policy regime change in an op-ed, a joint op-ed between Obama, David Cameron, Nicholas Sarkozy, right?
And there was no speech.
There was no nothing.
Just we are escalating the policy, obviously, you know, is regime change.
Gaddafi cannot win or else all those civilians will supposedly be at risk, like in the original lie they told.
Right.
Right.
And that lie continues to come up.
We saw over the weekend Senator Graham, I believe it was, saying, you know, Gaddafi was at the gates of Benghazi.
And if we hadn't attacked Libya when we did, he would have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Benghazi, which is absurd.
His offensive was already stalling by the time these bombings started.
Yeah.
Well, and it's also absurd because for every town he sacked, the number of women and children and, you know, bystanders rounded up and shot was zero.
Yeah.
Well, so now is there any hint of, you know, what they would call progress here, that they're getting anywhere near the goal of ousting the regime and protecting those civilians?
There really isn't.
It's just, what, a stalemate, a thousand fighters on each side stuck in the desert outnumbered by reporters, huh?
Yeah.
It's incredible, though.
I can't believe that these claims continue to be made about this war.
It's such a clear stalemate.
Neither side is going to win, even with NATO involvement.
Yeah, I mean, they could send in the Marines, and Lord knows the Marines can sack a city, but, you know, whether they can do a successful social engineering project there or not, I think, is highly doubtful.
Right.
And there's certainly been no sign of it, despite all of the escalations of the past few weeks.
You know, I don't know if I'm really this cynical, but Adam Morrow brought up the point that, man, you would think that NATO could destroy the Qaddafi government and soften it up enough to be replaced by the one they're backing, and maybe their plan really is just to split it in half eventually, that they don't really want to overthrow him.
You think they're really just incapable?
I think so, because the Qaddafi government's already said they don't think they're going to be able to retake those cities anyway.
Well, and they have been killing his kids and grandkids in an attempt to get him, so it seems pretty clear they're trying to assassinate him.
All right.
Well, anyway, we're all out of time, but I thank you very much for yours, Jason.
Sure.
Thank you for having me.
Jason Ditz, everybody.
News.antiwar.com.
