Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking, introducing Jason Ditz, he's our news editor at antiwar.com, that's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
Jason, how you doing man?
I'm doing good Scott, how are you?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Let me make sure I got you turned up loud and over.
I've kind of been out of it and I haven't had much chance to study this thing, I basically only know the sort of TV summary version.
I was wondering if you could teach me and then therefore also any listeners who don't already know about it, about this SOPA bill and apparently it's been stopped, right?
Am I even pronouncing this damn thing right?
Well it's been stopped for the time being, but a lot of its proponents, particularly the lobbying groups, the MPAA and the RIAA, which are the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Artists of America, I believe, have been condemning yesterday's protests by a lot of websites and are saying they're still going to try to push this thing through eventually.
Okay, now what exactly is the big deal about this law?
Well on the surface, it broadens the powers of the federal government to shut down websites that are suspected of dealing in copyright infringement and essentially we saw the Department of Homeland Security take a stab at basically what this is trying to legalize last year and the year before that when they shut down several websites that they said were selling, for instance, counterfeit NFL jerseys, that one of them was selling scarves that they said weren't authentically made by the companies they said they were made from.
They also shut down a Spanish soccer website that the Spanish government had refused to shut down and the way they did this was by seizing the domain name servers for that and rerouting them to a different website that says this website has been seized.
Domain name servers are when you type in, for instance, antiwar.com, that's how your computer finds antiwar.com's server.
If the federal government took over the name antiwar.com, even if our server is still up, typing that in isn't going to bring up our server anymore.
And so this law was basically going to say that what DHS was trying to do and I guess succeeded in doing in a few cases would be the standard practice, there was no ceiling on this thing.
I mean, because look, anybody who, that means anybody emails a song to their friend or whatever, everybody would be enforceable, I guess, under this.
Is that basically the problem?
Oh, absolutely.
And even if you didn't do anything wrong, just the suspicion that you did something wrong would be reason enough for the, I believe it was the Justice Department under this law to shut you down.
Well, I think I've even heard of like, you know, just amateur people, you know, a guy with a guitar plays a song, whatever, and then these industry groups basically claim the right to collect royalties on their behalf and that kind of thing.
So even if I record my buddy, maybe even email him a copy of a recording I made of him playing a guitar, we're both felons now, that kind of crap.
Is that basically what they're going for?
Well, that seems to be the long term goal.
Well, that's just to take our stuff, not prosecute us, right?
Right.
This is more about shutting down possible competition than anything.
It would be incredibly dangerous for websites like YouTube, which is why Google has been so strongly against the bill.
Basically, the first time Disney or any company says, oh, they're violating our copyright, the Justice Department could shut all of YouTube down over it.
Well, you know, I read a couple of headlines anyway that said that, I guess, kind of trying to follow the slippery slope and the chilling effect and all those kinds of phrases that basically what they're trying to do is turn it back into ABC, CBS and NBC one way Internet, like the good old days before the Internet.
Well, that certainly does seem to be the direction that it's headed in.
I'm sure it adds a few more people than that, but.
Well, the people who can afford the copyright on everything or afford an army of lawyers to protect them when the government comes for them, right?
I mean, that's basically it's sort of like the airwaves.
The government basically makes the licenses so expensive and the regulations so incredible that you have to be an arms manufacturer in order to afford to put together something like NBC, you know?
Well, right.
It turns freedom of speech on the Internet into something that you have so long as you have enough money to legally back it up.
And the big complaint from a lot of people is that the process through which they're doing this is identical to the way the Chinese government has set up their Internet.
It's, you know, they have these big master lists of sites that are blacklisted and that every Internet provider in the United States would have to block people from being able to visit any of these websites.
When already they kind of deputized all the Internet service providers, right?
And kind of require that they keep all kinds of information and all sorts of things, no?
Well, right.
They've been doing this as far as surveillance of individual Internet users, but this would expand it into restricting content from those users as well.
I guess the way I understand this thing, it just seems crazily unenforceable without just, you know, shutting the Internet off like they could never get away with.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't really understand what they were going for here, honestly.
It is sort of hard to imagine that they would be able to do what the bill empowers them to do, which, you're right, pretty much would shut down large portions of the Internet.
And it would make things like message boards virtually impossible to run, because anytime you run a message board, there's always the risk that somebody's going to post infringing material and that's going to be used as an excuse to shut down the entire website.
Man, this country needs to read some Stephen Kinsella.
Right.
Well, now, okay, so I don't want to sell them too short, but I guess I'm going to have to.
Tell us about the pushback on this.
The American people and their awesome democracy actually scored at least a temporary victory here, huh?
Right.
When this bill was proposed, it was pushed by those industry associations, the usual Hollywood industry associations.
And as usual, because those associations are big donors to a lot of these congressmen, there were just a huge number of co-sponsors for these bills.
Now, we've had protests sort of all along from people saying, hey, this is a really awful bill and it can't possibly become law.
Yesterday, we saw, I believe it was 7,000 different websites blacked out by their owners to protest the possibility of this law passing.
And we've seen a lot of the congressmen, including several of the ones that co-sponsored it, backing off entirely and saying they're going to vote against it if it ever comes up to a vote.
Yeah.
It's like Ron Paul says, one good thing about them having no principles is if you threaten to take their job away, they might react to that.
All right.
Hold it right there, everybody.
It's Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I am talking with Jason Ditz, news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
And now, Jason, I'd like to ask you about Obama's and America's great victory in Libya.
How's things going over there?
Well, not too well, and perhaps unsurprisingly so.
Libya has sort of become the mess that we all figured it would be in the wake of this civil war.
There is no real central government, despite all of NATO's backing of the NTC.
And a lot of these different militia groups that have been armed and funded both by NATO and by just looting all the former regime's weaponry have been fighting amongst themselves.
Well, is NATO, I guess, mostly meaning the French and the British?
Are they even really trying still to build a puppet government there?
Is there even a plan in effect here?
Or are they just waiting until people get tired of killing each other, or things get worse or better?
What are they doing?
It honestly doesn't seem like they have a plan, at least not on the surface.
It seems like they're just hoping that the situation will eventually work itself out.
Well, does this National Transitional Council have any kind of real authority, other than what's been handed to them by NATO?
Very little.
I mean, that anyone would respect, other than having a gun straight to their head at the time, very little.
And I would say what support they had, they lost most of it when they announced their cabinet and cut the Islamist side of the rebellion entirely out of their government.
Well, so that's the fighting then.
And now let's see, because I remember before they finally killed Qaddafi, we talked about how, well, and then so once the regime falls, then you'll have the people who were the pro-Qaddafi holdouts, then you'll have the people who were the, used to be Qaddafi guys, but then were defectors before the end of the regime.
And then you'll have the rebels, and then these will be the three main groups fighting.
And then, of course, within the rebels, you have the Islamists and, I don't know, whoever else is left over after that.
Does it look like anybody has the upper hand in this thing?
It really doesn't.
And in fact, we're seeing a lot of fighting that's not really along ideological lines so much as geographic lines.
We see militias that are, this town's anti-Qaddafi militia, and then the town 20 miles over is anti-Qaddafi militia.
And these towns have had longtime rivalries for whatever reason.
And all of a sudden, one of the militias attacks the other town and says they're going to arrest a bunch of people for being Qaddafi supporters, and then a big gunfight breaks out.
Man, yeah, well, it's all tribal society there.
I guess that's how it's going to be.
But then, so is Houston getting away with the oil?
Or who's getting the oil?
If all this blood's going to be shed, what's the silver lining?
Well, that seems to be NATO's hope.
In fact, the U.S. just yesterday, the State Department was talking about the oil embargo they're trying to push on Iran.
And they were saying, well, a lot of this oil to replace what we're going to block from coming out of Iran is going to come out of Libya.
Well, you know, Greg Palast said that back in 2002, the coup against Chavez in Venezuela wasn't even about him.
It was about Saddam Hussein had called Qaddafi and said, hey, let's raise the price of oil.
I forget if it was supposed to go up or down that week.
And they wanted to go the other way.
And so they did a coup against Venezuela because Hussein was still out of reach for another year.
Right.
And it seems like for the southern states in the European Union, the ones that get a lot of oil from Iran, like Greece, it seems incredibly dangerous for them to all of a sudden say, OK, we're going to completely cut off our trade with Iran and put all our eggs in the basket that Libya is going to be stable enough that we can actually buy oil from them reliably.
Yeah, well, it seems like sooner or later, these rival towns that are saying, well, this is our oil field, because these oil fields aren't anywhere near the towns, they're just out in the middle of the desert and you've got pipelines running to them.
Yeah.
These towns are going to start blowing up one another's pipelines just to claim the oil for themselves.
Well, I mean, it's no secret why Greece went along.
They had to.
Ben Bernanke was standing there with a checkbook, talking about, y'all want to starve to death or what?
So they said, yeah, do whatever, I guess.
But yeah, well, OK, so it does make much more sense, you know, besides just a PR stunt to try to pretend that America's Uncle Sam is not the backer of every king and sultan and Amir and tortured dictator, pretend president in the region that they thought, man, we really need to have a very pliant new government in Libya by the time we get the war going in Iran, because Lord knows we lost Iraq.
That's what they call strategery there in Washington, D.C.
You know, a friend of mine, Jason, was telling me a story about her dad sent home early from heart surgery with just over-the-counter painkillers.
And like, man, when all this, all the anesthesia wore off, he like damn near had a whole other heart attacks in his living room.
Like, man, he should have still been in the hospital kind of.
And and these are the doctors who we all look up to and respect and have all this education and are wise and smart and all these things.
And yet they screw up and make terrible decisions all the time.
And really, that's what Hillary Clinton is.
And that's what these people are.
Even if they're trying up there, the best that they can do is not good enough.
Right.
They're just schmucks, just like the doctor that you had a bad experience with.
You know what I mean?
That's what they remind me of.
Anyway, I can totally see Hillary Clinton going, oh, yes, well, I'm here.
Look at my white coat and I'm telling you what's going on here.
But really, she doesn't know because she's not even asking the right question.
Yeah.
Well, and this involvement is is sort of the unnecessary surgery of that analogy.
Yeah, exactly.
Oops.
Cut off your wrong foot.
I didn't mean to do that.
Well, and so what about the death toll here?
Because, you know, once they murder Gaddafi on the side of the road, Hillary Clinton style again, you got to love that man, just her laughter and all that on that occasion.
Once they killed Gaddafi, that was it.
He hadn't been on TV or that whole war hadn't been on TV since then.
It's over as far as the American media is concerned.
But, you know, the involvement has got to continue on here.
Right.
I don't know.
Well, it has to at this point.
Certainly, if not directly by the United States and by a lot of these European Union nations, which are are desperate to get that oil out of Libya and countries like Italy, Italy's national oil company has traditionally done a lot of business in Libya.
They were doing business during the Gaddafi era, and now they're planning to do business under the NTC era.
Well, of course, the BBC is reporting today that one of these militia leaders was tortured and killed in detention, as they call it, as a taste of the new regime.
They're not much different than Gaddafi's who, which, you know, as everyone knows, I think Gaddafi had a great relationship with the CIA, torturing people to death for them.
And of course, they even murdered Sheikha Libby for them in his cell and called it a suicide.
The guy that Dick Cheney specifically had tortured in order to make him come up with lies about Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda and chemical weapons back in 2003.
And it was one of the one of the leaders of the revolution is suing the British for cooperating in the CIA rendition and torture.
Right.
Abdul Hakeem Balak.
Yeah.
There you go.
Yeah, the guy that Pepe Escobar broke that story that he was the real military leader hiding in the mountains out there.
Well, as Michael Scheuer predicted, yeah, the CIA are talking to people, the people who will talk to them.
That doesn't mean they know what the hell is going on for the people who have the power and influence.
Oh, man.
Well, I guess we'll see how that one plays out.
How about Bahrain or Yemen, man?
Give me some Yemen news, Jason.
The latest news out of Yemen was earlier this week, they were rumoring that they were going to delay the election, the presidential election, which seems ridiculous because there's only one candidate.
But they were saying that security is so bad in the country that they didn't think they could hold a credible election, even a credible one candidate election.
And that one candidate is the handpicked successor of the former dictator.
Right.
And it's the U.S. backed Major General Abu Dhabi Mansour Hadi.
All right.
Well, we're out of time, but thanks very much for your time, Jason.
Appreciate you helping me catch up here.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
The great Jason Ditz, everybody.
That's news.antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
