09/07/11 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all welcome back.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm joined on the line by Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com, where he keeps track of everything important on earth all day, every day.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Thanks very much for doing this, especially on short notice.
I didn't even know I was doing a show for sure until the top of the show and the bumper music started playing and I said, oh no.
So I really appreciate you joining us.
But that's also my excuse for my first question, which is what the hell is going on in the world?
I have no idea.
Well, a lot of what's going on in the world is what's been going on in the world.
There's still a war in Libya, although it's starting to be a different war because now it's not so much rebels against Gaddafi as rebels against other rebels.
Well, tell me a little bit about that.
Who are these two camps?
I see your headline today on the site Libya on Antiwar.com.
Libya rebel camp set stage for second civil war.
That's quite a headline.
What's going on?
Well, this is something that's been sort of coming for a while.
When the Libya's transitional council formed, it wasn't really the protest movement that formed it.
It was some of the Gaddafi defectors.
And having gained the support of NATO to be the replacement government, they basically went on and started demanding that all the other opposition movements pledged loyalty to them.
So they were already fighting, for instance, in Benghazi against other rebels that they said were secretly Gaddafi loyalists, claiming that some of them were Islamists, some of them were just random groups that weren't keen on the whole transitional council.
But it really came to a head last week when the people in Misrata started protesting against the transitional council because they said that they were letting too many of Gaddafi's top military leaders just defect into the transitional council and become part of the new government, when a lot of them were the ones responsible for the bloodbath.
I guess it was Pepe Escobar said on the show a couple of weeks back now that this guy, Balhaj, I guess you can tell people who he is, but apparently he and his group were the ones behind the assassination of the former military leader of the rebel group that had been the Gaddafi defector.
Is that right?
Or is that clear?
That's been the speculation.
Whether that's confirmed yet or not, I haven't seen.
But there's been a lot of speculation to that end.
And really, when the transitional council was trying to take over Tripoli, they embraced about anybody that was willing to fight on their side.
But now that they've taken the city, they're starting to root out everybody that doesn't fit into a more narrow view of Gaddafi defectors than a handful of the acceptable reformists that they decided should be the new NATO-backed government.
Well, and by reformists, you're referring to people from formerly within the Gaddafi government?
Or you're talking about these guys who used to fight with Zarqawi in Iraq, and now they're saying, nah, we're cool now?
Well, definitely not them.
And that's one of the...
So this guy, Balhaj, is being frozen out by the... rather than...
I mean, I was under the impression he was the top military commander and really had the say, no?
Well, he is the top military commander, but a lot of these political leaders within the transitional council are using the excuse of people like Balhaj as Islamists and saying that that's the reason they're going to have to start fighting them too, which of course is going to require more NATO help and more NATO bombings.
Assuming NATO doesn't choose the jihadists.
Well, and I see now why you wrote your headline the way you wrote it.
It looks like they're ready to break out into a new civil war.
This is not a low-level squabble.
This is the rebellion divided in half.
Right.
And in Libya, all politics is local.
So you have a lot of the rebel movement from the Western cities that aren't particularly keen on what was basically an Eastern rebellion.
And even now that they've moved their capital to Tripoli, there's still a lot of resentment there, and especially in Misrata, that they've sort of had to do the bulk of the fighting over the last few months, but they got cut out of the government.
All right.
Now, last word on Gaddafi is he's where?
Anybody know?
Three days ago, he was in southern Libya in a car headed south.
And nobody seems to know where he went afterwards.
There's speculation he's in another country.
Could be Niger, could be Congo.
He could be in Burkina Faso or on the way there.
Nobody seems to know.
Well, now, what about this, I guess, pogrom against black Africans in Libya?
Is this still going on?
That is still going on.
That is still going on.
And are we talking about summary executions or just they're all being jailed or both?
There have been some executions, mostly it's mass arrests, though.
They've been rounding up anybody with skin a little bit darker than the normal Libyans, under the assumption that, well, of course, it was a big headline that Gaddafi was recruiting mercenaries from the surrounding countries when the civil war started.
But Libya's been one of the richer countries in the area for quite some time.
And there are a lot of migrant workers in the country when this all began.
And a lot of them weren't able to get out.
So there's tons of migrant workers from these same countries that the mercenaries were from that just happened to be black.
And the rebels have been arresting them and holding them on suspicion in what Amnesty International has reported as pretty awful conditions.
A lot of torture, a lot of threats of execution.
And the only evidence against them is their skin color.
Yeah, well, and we don't even really know if that was true that Gaddafi was hiring mercenaries from all over the place, right?
That's just what, for all we know, the CIA said or something.
Well, that was certainly the prevailing report at the time, yeah.
But Gaddafi did make a lot of friends in those surrounding countries.
And he did have some contacts in some of the key tribes there.
So it's plausible that he did recruit tribal fighters from those countries.
In fact, there's been reports already of some of the mercenaries, once they saw Tripoli falling, just grabbing as many weapons as they could and hightailing it out of the country, because a lot of them are showing up in countries like Mali with just massive amounts of weaponry that they took from the war.
Well, you know, I hate to skip ahead to the next subject already, but that's going to happen to the mercs, or I guess to the State Department people supposedly protected by the mercs in Iraq, too.
They're going to find themselves not protected if they actually are in danger, you know what I mean?
They're not sworn to do anything but collect a paycheck.
But on this, on the war in Libya, let me ask, oh man, I don't even have time.
I guess I'll have to ask you after the break.
I want to know, you know, what all has been leaked so far, trial balloons and different UN and NATO and U.S. plans for what they say they're going to do with Libya in terms of, you know, peacekeepers from Qatar and UAE and who knows what, the oil, the capital city, that kind of thing.
We'll be back, everybody, with Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Hang tight.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the line with Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
And we're talking about Libya.
And dumb commercials interrupted us here.
But Jason, I wanted to know what you know about what the people in power in D.C. and Brussels in New York City at the UN Security Council.
What these people are saying their plan for the future of Libya is so far, anyway.
Well, they've had a few plans.
And two of the plans have already leaked to the public.
One was the NATO and some of its other affiliates that helped in the war plan, which included a massive United Arab Emirates occupation of Tripoli.
That came out about a month ago and was confirmed to be accurate by one of the rebels' ambassadors.
But the United Nations had their own plan, which included a much smaller number of foreign troops, which they said would just be observers.
And since then, though, the rebels appear to have changed their position now that the Qaddafi regime doesn't appear to be a direct threat to their power.
They're not too keen on accepting foreign troops.
So a lot of them are saying absolutely no ground troops.
Well, but now, is there any indication that this group that's, you know, they're tearing each other's eyes out right now?
How are they to keep the peace?
Doesn't sound like they have a monopoly on force or that they will anytime soon, just because they overthrew Qaddafi doesn't mean that everything is all daisies from now on.
I think they're assuming that between the influx of money that they're going to get once they're recognized as the actual government of Libya and having NATO as their own personal air force for the foreseeable future, that they can handle any of these other groups within the rebellion.
Well, like Iraq, they have a lot of oil.
And, you know, the government claim on that they can make a lot of money, enough money off of that to pay for any internal security forces they might need, I guess.
They can, but not for a while, because they've said that there's probably going to be virtually no production of oil out of Libya for the next two or three years because of all the damage that the airstrikes and the fighting did to the oil refineries.
Is it that bad?
Two or three years, they're saying?
That's what the reports have said.
There were times during this war where NATO got frustrated at the toxic stalemates and just bombed an oil refinery because they said it would cut off the fuel from the regime.
Well, that'll be good work for Kellogg Brown and Root to go in there and rebuild this stuff, at least.
I guess let me give you a chance here to say anything else that's most important, you think, for people to understand about Libya from this week.
And I know it's ridiculous in this format, but it's best we can do before we move on to Iraq, where I have a few questions for you.
That's probably most important stuff.
OK, good deal.
All right.
So now I know that there was a whole big situation.
Maybe people can read about that.
Never mind that.
But for some reason, anyway, WikiLeaks released the rest of the State Department diplomatic cables, right?
Right.
And now these things say things about the Iraq war, don't they?
Oh, yeah.
John Glaser broke the news.
And it looks like that news is reverberating around Iraq.
Why don't you fill people in on that one?
Well, one of the cables revealed, didn't really reveal because we kind of knew it already, but detailed the massacre of a bunch of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops.
And the really interesting thing is how ridiculously in detail it gets into of what an awful thing this was.
I mean, the military officially said they were looking for collaborators and they got in an accidental gunfight.
But wait a minute.
Hold it right there.
Hold it right there.
Seriously, if you got kids in the room, this part of the story is not for them.
This is specifics, not generalities.
And you don't want them to hear what Jason's about to say about what happened there.
All right.
OK, good.
Go ahead, Jason.
OK, well, they they executed everybody in this house and it was mostly women and children.
One of the children was only six months old.
And the kicker here is, according to the cable, every single one of them was handcuffed at the time.
Now, I'm no expert in handcuffs, but do ground troops usually have handcuffs that'll fit a six month old?
Well, you got zip ties, you got those plastic zip ties.
Yeah, I guess that's true.
But following that, I guess they all got caught up in the moment or whatever.
And at some point, reality set in and they said, wow, this is a pretty bad war crime.
So they ordered in an airstrike against the house full of dead bodies in the hope that that would cover up the evidence.
Which, of course, it didn't.
In fact, all it really did was draw attention to, hey, here's a house full of dead bodies who medics better hurry up and pick them up.
So they launched the airstrike, right?
Right.
They launched the airstrike.
Ambulances rushed to the scene, pick up all these dead bodies and take them to the morgue.
And the Iraqi medical officials are like, wait a minute, all these people are shot in the head.
They're all handcuffed.
And most of them are children.
And then so this had been kind of buried back in the day.
It was just another atrocity in the Iraq war and the army cleared itself like always.
And that was pretty much it until John Glaser went digging through the WikiLeaks and found this thing.
I guess McClatchy looked like they were working on it.
They were a day or two behind him and didn't give him credit, unfortunately.
But but now the Iraqi government has reacted to this leak.
Right.
The at the time, the military launched a full investigation and confirmed that it was an appropriate use of force, which is what they always do.
But the Iraqi government is now opening their own investigation based on this cable.
And it sounds like it's going to be awfully hard for the military to cover this up at this point, especially with the cable now public knowledge.
But incredibly, the military is still insisting that they stand behind their investigation and that.
What what was contained in the cable was, quote, nothing new for them.
They knew all of this stuff.
They knew that everybody was handcuffed and shot in the head, and they still said it was appropriate for it at the time.
Amazing.
Well, now, so is this like big news in the news cycle in Iraq?
Everyone's reacting to this.
The media is talking about it.
Surprisingly, not.
It was it was semi big news the day they announced they were reopening the investigation.
But for the most part, Iraq's media is just caught up in the ongoing violence of the day.
Well, now I can't find it.
Here it is.
I had this piece from Think Progress.
No, this isn't it.
Where is it?
Oh, man.
Oh, I love this spin.
It's they're dropping troop levels to 3000.
Yeah, you got to love the Center for American Progress.
But anyway, they did have one that said that Maliki was reacting to this leak and saying that that's it.
The talks about maybe you staying are now off.
No.
Oh, well, it's it's not clear.
Again, they're saying that these 3000 would be almost entirely trainers.
And Maliki's already said, well, trainers can stay and we don't need parliamentary approval for that.
So it sounds like this is sort of what he wants.
And he's just reacting in a way that he thinks will be politically viable.
Yeah, well, and just, you know, there are always people who never were really into this stuff, but it might be worth, you know, rehashing that George Bush signed the deal in the in November of 2008, saying every last soldier be out by the end of December of this year, 2011.
And Barack Obama swore that he'd have them all out in 16 months, although he built in that loophole about combat forces and what he wants to call combat forces.
But now here we are creeping up on December and they're going ahead and letting us know now we're staying.
Stole that land fair and square.
In fact, when that a Panetta quote, hey, the U.S.
Army paid dearly for Iraq and we're keeping it right.
Amazing.
I was always just paraphrasing, put those words in their mouth this whole time that Panetta says it.
I kind of like that guy.
Thanks, Jason.
News dot antiwar dot com, everybody.
Jason Ditz.
Thanks for having me, Scott.