Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, Ben, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, so you guys are introducing Jason Ditz.
He is the news editor of Antiwar.com.
And a good thing, too.
News.antiwar.com.
A friend was just saying to me on the signal here, don't hack it or tap it, that, hey, what's the deal with this thing going on in the Persian Gulf there?
And I said, well, geez, I'm busy interviewing Patrick Coburn right now.
But what you do is you just go to Antiwar.com and Jason's got all you need to know.
And you can rely on that.
And of course, that's true.
So here we go.
U.S. claims video shows Iran removing explosive mine from tanker.
And before that, Japanese Prime Minister Abe.
Iran has no intention to make nuclear weapons and on and on like that.
So welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, man?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good, dude.
Really appreciate you joining me here.
5,000 interviews today.
You're like 4,997.
Wow.
There you go.
There we go.
So thanks for joining me.
I'm holding up my Dr. Pepper like it's a beer.
Cheers to you.
I don't really drink, you know.
So here we go.
Tell me things that you know about this whole ships blowing up over yonder in the Gulf there.
Well, yesterday we had early in the morning, we had two ships in the Gulf of Oman, 25 kilometers off the coast of Iran.
Get hit with something and there was some sort of explosion.
There was fire on the ships.
Neither of them was oil tankers, despite all the U.S. media reporting it as Iran attacks to oil tankers.
I mean, there's no evidence that it was Iran and they weren't oil tankers.
They were tankers, but they were they were hauling other chemicals.
And then so what is the evidence either way, as far as you understand so far?
Well, the U.S. offered.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement yesterday in the afternoon announcing Iran did it.
We know Iran did it.
There's no question Iran did it.
Trump said the same thing early this morning in response to Iranian denials where Iran said, no, we didn't do it.
You have no evidence we did it because we didn't do it.
And Trump says, we know you did it.
The only thing that's been offered to the public is that video that you mentioned earlier.
We have a we have a link to it on antiwar dot com in that article.
Late last night, Central Command offered that video to the Associated Press.
Earlier in the day, they said there was such a video existed and it proved Iran was removing extra unexploded mines.
I guess with the implication being that those mines could identify where the attack came from and they had video of them doing it.
And then finally, they issued this video to the Associated Press, which which you can you can all see on antiwar dot com website.
It's the worst video I've ever seen.
I mean, it's it is ridiculous how bad that video is in the first five, six seconds of the video.
It's I mean, it's not zoomed in all the way, but you kind of see some movement, like somebody maybe was interacting with the tanker.
I mean, there's there's a boat with a bunch of people on board floating alongside the tanker.
You can't really see them doing anything.
The suggestion is that they're interacting with the tanker in some way.
I mean, maybe it shows that the first five or six seconds.
Right.
It wouldn't be accepted as anything.
But this is like, wow, that's a solid minute and a half, even if it's mostly nonsense.
Right.
It must have been in there somewhere.
I must have missed it.
Rewind it.
You guys saw it.
Right.
Where was the part where it happened?
Right.
Like the emperor's clothes.
I guess I just didn't see it, but it must be in there somewhere else.
They wouldn't be saying that.
Right.
And I watched that video a few times.
Yeah, me too.
I can't see anything conclusive in there.
I mean, at the very start, if there's anything, it's at the very start.
And that's not very convincing because it's I mean, it's incredibly unfocused.
They're they're zoomed out too far.
By the time they zoom in, everything's already over, if anything happens.
But the more interesting thing to me is is what we found out this morning.
From the Japanese company that owns that tanker.
That's the Coke Coca-Cola Courageous.
He was pointing out and you can see it in the pictures now.
This can't have been mines.
This can't have been torpedoes or anything else that the U.S. is claiming.
This these explosions happened further up on the side of the ship.
The two holes that are in the Courageous's side are well above the waterline.
Sailors from the ship were reporting that they saw something flying towards the ship right before the explosion.
So this is more like a missile or something hit it.
Or I guess two missiles because there's two holes.
But this whole narrative about the Limpet mine just doesn't work with the picture that we see.
I mean, the whole point of the Limpet mine is it floats in the water.
It's magnetic.
It connects to the side of the ship and then it explodes.
But it's meant to do that underwater.
I mean, it floats on the surface of the water and it's meant to make a hole at the waterline.
So that the ship that it attacks starts taking on water.
It's not meant to climb up the side of the ship, but it's got no way of doing so.
One of those holes is halfway up the side of the ship.
I don't know the exact height of a ship like that above the waterline.
But that's got to be 15 feet up anyway.
Well, and of course, you know, you look at that NBC report.
It seems pretty obvious unless you just start really making up stuff that this, you know, CEO of this Japanese firm has no reason to lie at all.
He has no reason to say this at all unless it's because it's true.
And he wasn't, I don't think, trying to pick a fight with the USA over it.
He was just answering honestly that what happened was it was hit by a flying object.
According to my guys on the boat, what else is he supposed to say?
Right?
Right.
Right.
He's just reiterating what people on the boat who are actually there saw.
Believers pray for that guy.
His long life.
I don't know.
I don't think he's supposed to say that.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, so here's the thing, too.
I have a friend and a source here who's a former Navy officer who spent a lot of time, as he puts it, years in the Persian Gulf monitoring Iranian activity.
And first of all, he just says this is completely out of line with the way they behave.
And he isn't buying it.
He wrote up a short little blog for me at the Libertarian Institute.
And he's got a longer one coming there.
And so he was saying, well, on this point about the video, of course, that they were sitting there for a while.
They were close enough to take this video.
They must have had some audio of the radio transmissions back and forth with this boat.
Were they not talking with the boat that had pulled up alongside their ship?
In other words, hey, at least play me some audio of them refusing to respond or something.
And, you know, Eric, I didn't see this, but Eric, our boss at Antiwar.com, he told me he saw Trump say, they look like Iranians to me, which I thought was just great.
It looks like my mom's old black and white TV in the kitchen from 1981.
But I couldn't tell exactly who they are.
But anyway, yeah, so that seems like a real big dog that didn't bark there.
If they have the video, where's the audio?
That's one thing.
And, you know, it was interesting, right, that the Military Times and Bloomberg and quite a few others ran articles casting doubt on this and wondering why in the world would Iran do such a thing at this time?
Especially with Prime Minister Abe in town and all of this stuff.
You know what?
I might entertain it a little bit longer.
I can't completely dismiss it 100%, I guess, but I don't really, I pretty much do dismiss it.
But I might not if they'd hit somebody else other than a Japanese tanker.
But I just don't think that the Ayatollah would approve of a mission like that.
And so maybe the IRGC did it to try to screw over the Ayatollah or something like that, but I don't think that's usually how they operate.
I can see them moving against the President that way, maybe, but it was the Supreme Leader that was sitting down to meet with Abe.
So if that is what happened, it seems like there's probably going to be a pretty obvious reaction inside Iran soon.
But I'm not counting on that because I don't think it's true.
Right.
And I mean, like you say, it would be ridiculous for them to go after a Japanese ship off the coast of Iran while a Japanese prime minister is in Tehran meeting with the Ayatollah.
I mean, that's just absurd.
And on top of it, Japan has historically been one of Iran's biggest trading partners.
And the whole thing with Abe being in Iran is being spun in the Iranian press as, oh, let's see how much Japan really wants to trade with us, even though the U.S. won't let them.
I mean, this would not make any sense for them to be suddenly militarily aggressive against the civilian Japanese ship.
Well, I did talk with Peter Ford, the former British ambassador to Syria, and I do like him.
He's written a lot of good stuff, and I've talked with him a few times.
And I mean, he did say pretty explicitly that he believes American intelligence.
If they say that they know this for good reason, that he's not going to question them on that, really.
And he had some arguments, too, but he had a pretty persuasive argument for why Iran might want to do this.
Essentially, as Pompeo lied, only with more nuance, that they threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz.
Well, they threatened to do that in a defensive reaction, but Ford chalked this up to that.
They are under all these sanctions, and essentially a blockade against them, if a virtual one enforced by the Treasury more than the Navy, but still.
And that this is a way for them to spend a very little amount of money, and yet demonstrate, and in fact, not and yet, but with that, demonstrate that they can very easily cause very big problems for very low prices.
And that they really, you know, it's time for the Americans to start backing down the other way.
Which seemed at least, you know, somewhat credible in the face of it, I guess, that that might be a motive for them to do that, or for at least part of their government to do that.
But, again, there sure seems like a lot of reason to doubt that, too.
Yeah, I don't see the...
I mean, I suppose that's possible, but I don't see where anyone had any real doubt that Iran had the military capability to close the Strait of Hormuz.
That's true.
It's not that long a strait, it's not that wide, and I would think you put a few... you put some artillery right on the coastline, you could probably close the Strait of Hormuz in minutes.
After all, Pompeo was saying, that's how we know it was Iran that did it, because they could do that, you know, really easily.
Hang on just one sec for me.
Hey guys, you gotta check out TheBumperSticker.com.
You play in a band, you need stickers?
You go to TheBumperSticker.com.
Maybe you have a business, and you need stickers.
You go to TheBumperSticker.com, they'll take care of all this stuff.
I created the company back, I don't know, a generation ago.
I sold it to Rick McGinnis, and he's done a great job with the company ever since.
They got what you need, over there, at TheBumperSticker.com.
But now, so are there any indications, as far as you can tell, any other news or analysis coming out about, you know, who may well have done it instead of them, so far?
There really isn't.
There's a lot of analysis doubting the U.S. claims that it's Iran, because it doesn't make a lot of sense, and because things like the Olympic mine story don't stand up to even casual scrutiny of the pictures of the ship after the fact.
But there really isn't an alternative explanation of who did it, why they did it, how they did it.
I mean, if something was fired at the ship in the air, I mean, it would be a surface-to-surface missile or something like that.
I mean, this is the Middle East we're talking about, and this is after the NATO regime change in Libya, when all of Gaddafi's stuff got looted.
I mean, those types of missiles are just all over the place now, so there's any number of groups that would have theoretical capability to do that.
Why they would attack those two ships, I have no idea.
I mean, Altair was carrying, what was it, carrying Naftala to Taiwan, and Coca-Cola was carrying meth in all of Singapore.
I mean, neither of those seems like it's an obvious target for anybody for any obvious reason.
Yeah, well, except, you know, just like Obama's red line basically signaling to al-Qaeda, hey, frame up Assad for some gas, if you're smart, which is orders they took, essentially, to go back to 2012 and 2013 there.
And that was how that played out.
And here you have the hawks and the Trump administration saying, we would regard anything that any Iranian proxy, as defined by us, does against anyone as an attack on us.
And this kind of deal, defining very broadly what could count as a provocation that could lead to war, and so then giving an opportunity for essentially every hawk in the region to try to frame Iran for anything.
You have to roll as much spaghetti at the wall as you can until something happens, you know.
And that's almost everybody in that region.
I mean, Iran doesn't have a lot of allies in the Gulf, and the Gulf of Oman either.
So pretty much any of the Gulf Arab states, with the possible exception of Qatar, would be very keen to see the U.S. go to war with Iran.
So any one of them has motives.
Israel, obviously, has wanted that war for decades.
Good chunks of the U.S. government have wanted that war for decades.
So there's no shortage of potential suspects here for if this is something where they're just trying to frame Iran and start a war.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry I was running so late by the time I called you today, but now I'm late again and got to go.
But I really appreciate all of your great work.
And today, of course, this week on this particular issue, but that goes for everything.
You do such great stuff all day every day over there at Antiwar.com, and it's really great stuff.
So thanks a lot.
Well, thanks for having me.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Jason Ditz.
He is the news editor, managing news editor, the news editor.
He's the editor of the news at Antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com for all of his great stuff there.
And, you know, just on the front page, all the most important of those top headlines are his.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
