07/28/14 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
All right, man, I got a lot of news to cover.
I've just been moralizing and going on.
Well, you know how I am.
I'm sorry.
I'm going to get back to covering a lot of the news here in a minute, but I got to take a break to interview Jason Ditz from news.antiwar.com about this very important story.
It's not specifically, sort of along the lines of Iraq News, I guess, but it's not specifically tied up with any of our three major conflicts we're covering right now, but it's the top headline on antiwar.com.
Obama seeks to dramatically broaden U.S. war on terror.
And in the ending, AUMF aims to push a new, vaguer version.
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 today.
So, yeah, it's a strange thing.
I hadn't talked with you about this, but I'm sure we both talked with Eric Gares about this, and that is how such huge numbers of members of the House of Representatives, including very many Democrats, voted for this thing to limit Obama's authority to go to war in Iraq late last week, which was pretty interesting that they would do that, and pretty great on its face, I think.
And I think Eric had speculated to me that the White House must have said that was okay to get that many Democrats to vote for it, so I wonder what he's going for there.
Now he turns around, he wants a broader authorization to use military force, not to replace the authorization that they passed in 2002 to attack Iraq, but to replace the AUMF from right after September 11th.
And I guess, so then that's supposed to be all-encompassing, even broad enough to include Iraq too?
Is that it?
Right.
I mean, the problem from the Obama perspective with the 2001 AUMF, the 9-11 one, is that it mentions 9-11, and it authorizes them to go after people that were involved in 9-11, which at this point is 13 years ago.
You know, that's quite a long time, and a lot of these various flavor-of-the-week terrorist groups that the Obama administration's got designs on going after didn't even exist back then.
So arguing that they were somehow tangentially involved in 9-11 is going to be a tough sell.
So instead, he's looking to revise the AUMF with a lot of vague words about terrorism instead of targeting one specific incident of terror.
So well, it's interesting that they think they even need to bother, really.
But I guess, now that Bush and Obama's policies all this time have changed al-Qaeda from a group of a couple of hundred guys into a movement of a few thousand around the world, they want basically authorization to kill any Sunni male with a rifle anywhere in the world, and any kids and anybody else who happens to be nearby.
Is that basically what they're doing here?
That's basically what they're doing, and I'm sure it's going to go broader than just Sunnis.
It'll eventually cover, I'm sure, terrorists of any stripe, or anything that they can even conceivably get the terrorist label to stick to, whether it's rebels in random other countries that have nothing to do with al-Qaeda, or just whatever.
Whatever wars they might want to start, they want to have this AUMF basically cover anything.
Right.
Which, you know, again, it's funny, because why bother?
You know, they didn't have authorization to do Libya, and they just kept right on anyway.
Yeah, that is kind of the one curious thing about this, is that the administration has constantly insisted, and continues to insist, that they don't really need congressional authorization to go to war.
And, you know, in the case of Libya, they complied with the part of the law that requires them to inform Congress when they send troops overseas, but they didn't comply with the part where they have to get congressional authorization within so many days after it happens.
Right.
They basically just argued, well, you know, it's done now, we're in it, and...
Yeah, well, in fact, they had their little controversy where some of the Congress, they tried to pass a thing to repeal it, they couldn't pass that, then, I think, if I remember right, they were going to try to pass an authorization, but they didn't have the votes, so instead they just went to recess, this is, like, what, June, July 2011, and then when they came back, they said, oh, debt ceiling, and no one ever heard of Libya ever again, until, you know, we came, we saw, he died, ha ha ha.
Right, and the administration used a lot of flimsy arguments on the Libya thing.
They, first, they tried to argue that because most of what the U.S. was doing in Libya was refueling other NATO members' planes, that doesn't technically count as being involved in the war, then there was also, well, it's a NATO operation, and because the U.S. is a member of NATO, they're obliged to get involved, even though there were other NATO members that weren't involved.
So under this new authority, you think they could attack, I don't know, say, resistance fighters in eastern Ukraine, even, something that has no conceivable connection to bin Laden nights, in any case?
Oh, absolutely.
I think wording it that broadly is the ultimate goal here, because, of course, the Ukrainian government has been calling eastern Ukraine terrorists, and calling their attacks on eastern Ukrainian cities an anti-terror operation for a month now, and I think the U.S. would very much like to get that model in place to use themselves.
Yeah.
Man, this is really amazing, I, you know, the only article, I guess, well, let me see what you're linking to here in yours, I saw, yeah, you got the Free Beacon, I saw something at Politico, yeah, you got the link to the Politico, too.
I didn't see any other coverage of this, but this is the hugest thing in the whole world.
I mean, this is what Bush wouldn't dare have said to Congress, even right after 9-11, that, in fact, I guess he did try to do this, and Daschle and, and, and Gephardt made him take this stuff out, where it would be, where the AUMF would be broad enough to go ahead and attack any country that they wanted.
You want to go to Iraq, you got to come back to us, they said.
And that was, you know, after Bush had all the political capital and a 90% approval rating from the biggest failure of any American president in all of our history.
And so, if he didn't have the capital to get away with it then, think of how far we've come where it's not even really big news, except at antiwar.com, and kind of right wing, kind of fringe even, right wing, you know, free republic-ish type places where they would criticize Obama's executive power rather than just celebrating it like you'd get at the National Review, you know?
Oh, right, I think, I think people are very much used to the idea now that the president is the commander-in-chief and therefore can just start wars whenever he wants to.
I think the administration's been very successful in selling that idea.
Yeah.
I don't know, we talked about this before about, you know, to what degree the average American thinks of this current era as peacetime, you know, if not around the world, at least here, you know, we're not involved in any of this stuff, all that was the Bush years, that's all over.
They don't even realize how up to our eyeballs, quote-unquote, we are in this stuff going on right now, all around the world.
So let's talk more about Ukraine, as you said, they've been labeling all the fighters in eastern Ukraine, oh, hell, the music's gonna start playing here in a minute, Jason.
When we get back, everybody, with the great Jason Ditz from antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com, I'm gonna ask him all about what the hell's going on in Ukraine, plenty of civilian casualties to report on from that new offensive breaking out.
And you know, something tells me all this distraction with Gaza and Iraq, we're really ignoring the most important thing, which is America's border dispute with Russia right now.
We'll be right back.
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All right, y'all, I'm Scott.
This is my show.
I got Jason Ditz on the line from news.antiwar.com.
News.antiwar.com.
And so now we got to go through the Ukraine stuff here.
I guess, can we start with the plane?
Jason, here's my thing about it.
Seems like Occam's razor is rebels must have shot it down for some reason.
Maybe even, this is just my imagination.
I don't know.
I haven't done the work.
Maybe the Ukrainian military kind of baited them into it and then, you know, flew away and left the civilian plane vulnerable or something.
I don't know.
Maybe they just, they thought they were hitting a military plane and they screwed up and they, yeah.
But then again, it seems like all the people saying that it had to have been the rebels and never even mind that, oh, yeah, and Putin must have helped them do it and all that kind of stuff, which is, I think, a lot more obviously kind of a red herring sort of thing.
But it seems like all the so-called accusations and confirmations that the rebels even did it, the government keeps climbing down from all those things, especially in that one big so-called intelligence briefing, what, last Thursday or Friday, whatever it was.
So I just wonder what you think is going on here, man.
Is it possible the Kiev government actually really did this thing or, I don't know?
It's possible.
I think there's a lot we still don't know about it.
And unfortunately, a lot that people don't seem particularly interested in finding out about what really happened.
The minute that plane went down, it seems like everybody got their fingers crossed, hoping they could blame it on somebody convenient, which in the U.S. case would be Russia.
In Ukraine's case was initially the rebels, but then was also Russia.
And in Russia's case was the Ukrainian military.
I think everybody just sort of went, oh, this is a great diplomatic opportunity to sort of parlay this into some sort of advantage.
Right.
Bastards all around, it's unbelievable, shooting down a plane full of 300 civilians.
And yeah, you're right.
I mean, they even said, yeah, this could be a game changer.
Yeah.
Nice.
What a fun game you're playing.
All right.
So can you go through a little bit of the, you know, kind of accusations about, you know, which side claims, which satellite photos show what and which of any of those kinds of assertions have held up that kind of thing and help us understand where we're at with the argument, at least?
Well, among among the claims, there's very little that was was very concrete.
We had some videos that were released by the Ukrainian government.
There was some pretty strong evidence that one of the videos, which claimed to show some intercepted phone calls between Russia and the rebels, were actually doctored footage of a previous phone call that they started a day before the plane even went down.
And the U.S., the State Department has been insane on this.
When they get asked about this during their daily press briefing, they're always just referring people to social media.
That's become their new buzzword is that, oh, there's all sorts of evidence on social media.
If you press types would care to look at it.
And which is like saying, hey, listen, I didn't make it up.
I heard it somewhere, at least.
OK, so it's on Facebook, it's on YouTube or wherever.
And nobody knows where the original tweet came from.
But look at all these retweets.
There must be something to it, Jason.
And when the when the intelligence community was asked to put forward their evidence.
They admitted, basically, we have nothing.
There's a plane that got shot down.
There's pretty good evidence that was shot down.
We don't know who fired the missile.
We don't know who they were affiliated with, what their nationality was, anything like that.
They're a pretty good idea of a missile and a pretty good idea of what type of missile it was.
But beyond that, there's just a lot they don't know.
And do you know of any real reason to believe that the rebels had that kind of weapon?
It's a curious thing, and I think it makes Ukraine and the US government look a lot worse than they realize, because throughout this war, the rebels were constantly being talked about as having these shoulder-fired, man-pad-type missiles that only go up to 5,000, 10,000 feet max.
And when Ukraine put forward the idea, oh, you can still fly over that area, but you have to fly at over 30,000 feet, so civilian aircraft were still cleared to go through there.
Now there's all these claims that, you know, first there were claims that the rebels had looted one of these vehicle-fired anti-aircraft missiles from the Ukrainian government, and there were claims that, oh, no, the Russians sent these into Ukraine and we knew about it weeks ago, but for some reason, whatever the case, if the rebels did get this weapon weeks ago, as is claimed by all these stories, neither the Ukraine nor the US government, which both claim to know about it, ever told anybody.
And they were still letting planes through this corridor on the idea that, oh, all the rebels have is these shoulder-mounted missiles that can't hit you if you're flying that high.
Yeah, you know, it's hard sometimes to make all your different lies line up with what's known otherwise to be true, you know?
Right, and if the rebels did have these weapons and the US government and Ukraine just chose to keep that a secret, then that's a pretty serious problem.
Right.
Yeah, more likely they didn't, I think, they're just bluffing.
But yeah, you're right, in either case, it does look pretty bad for them.
Now, okay, so let's talk about the current offensive that's going on now.
Do you have any kind of sense of the balance of power there on the ground in Donetsk now?
If the momentum is with the offensive from the West?
The momentum definitely seems to be with the offensive from the West.
Donetsk itself still is pretty securely in rebel hands.
There are some other cities in the surrounding area that the rebels control, but not as securely.
Incredibly, another thing that isn't getting much coverage is, despite the Ukrainian military promising a ceasefire in the, I forget if it's 30 or 40 kilometers surrounding the plane crash site, the military was openly sieging the plane crash site itself today and bragging about having seized part of the crash site.
That's interesting.
Yeah, they're openly fighting over the smoldering wreckage of MH-17.
Have they even gotten all the bodies yet, or that's still in progress?
There's no one in charge, I guess, hadn't they?
Yeah, they've gotten most of the bodies, but I think there are still some unaccounted for, a few dozen.
The black boxes, of course, have been gotten out of there and everything, so I'm not really sure what the strategic value of controlling the plane site is anymore.
You know, I saw this, they've been talking about the Russians sending in more heavy equipment.
Have they provided any evidence of that?
No, not at all.
You know, it sounded to me, I gotta tell you, just the way that they put it, it sounded like they were trying to fill in the gap in their missile story by just sort of saying, yes, the Russians are sending more weapons into the rebels kind of thing, you know, implying, you know, like those missiles last week, but without exactly trying to say that.
Well, and the State Department, once again, was at the forefront of this allegation, although the Pentagon also sort of piled on, and it led to a pretty funny exchange at the State Department briefing, because Spokeswoman Mary Harf presented this, said she wasn't going to give any evidence for it, and when she was pressed on how you could believe it when there was no evidence, she got really huffy with the reporters and asked if they just wanted her to not tell them important information if she couldn't back it up with evidence.
Yeah, I saw, my favorite quote out of that was, do you have a YouTube or anything you could show us?
All deadpan.
That was great.
All right, now, can you talk to me about NATO, oh man, we're almost out of time.
Real quick, they're doing some kind of NATO exercises in Poland, is that right?
Yeah, they've been doing these sort of off and on over the last couple of months.
It seems like, you know, there are always war games in Eastern Europe.
Is there much of a buildup that's going along with that, or still pretty slow?
It's pretty slow, but they keep doing these exercises just sort of to emphasize the fact that they're putting forces in the area.
All right, well, we gotta go.
Thanks so much, Jason, appreciate it, bud.
Sure, thanks for having me.
That's the great Jason Ditz already, news.antiwar.com.
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