11/01/10 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

All right, everybody, welcome to the show.
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I'm your host, Scott Horton.
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All right, first guest is Jason Ditz.
Speaking of, he's the news editor at antiwar.com news.
Antiwar.com, he keeps track of pretty much every newspaper on Earth all day, every day.
And he does a great job of writing up new summaries of what's most important about foreign policy.
Not just our wars, but pretty much all wars, from Kashmir to, I don't know, I guess they're not blowing each other up in Northern Ireland anymore.
But you know what I mean.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you, man?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Very happy to have you here.
Appreciate you joining us, especially on short notice, like you always do.
Yemen.
So Friday, TV was scared to death about some packages on some airplanes.
By the time the show was over on Friday, I don't think that anybody had established that there was actually a real threat at all.
Now, I guess Emperor Obama claims, anyway, maybe it's a fact now that there were explosives.
I read journalism at McClatchy, and if you can call it journalism over at the Washington Post and stuff, where they said their sources said there actually were explosives involved with these printer cartridges on these cargo planes that apparently left from Yemen on Friday.
I was just wondering here if maybe we can go over the development since then, what it is that you know and what you don't.
Well, there's a lot of stuff we still don't know about it several days later.
But what we do know is that there were certainly some packages that everyone seems to agree came from Yemen.
And a couple of them tested positive for explosives.
The exact size of the explosives in them or whether they posed any sort of real threat seems to sort of be unclear.
There were some rumors right after they tested positive for explosives that officials thought they might be that PETN that was in the under bombers explosive device.
And ever since then, a lot of news outlets have been reporting that that is an absolute fact.
But it's not clear that it's ever been officially confirmed that that's what was in them or if that was just the speculation becoming the truth.
Now, I mean, it's pretty obvious that the national security state needs a threat and they want to be able to point at a scary crisis.
But from the pictures that they showed, it doesn't seem like these were workable explosives.
It's sort of the same mystery of the under bomber, right?
Is that if this is such a dangerous threat, how come they gave them a bomb that doesn't work?
Right, and you look at these pictures and they seem sort of silly.
They're some printed circuit boards.
One of them apparently matched the circuit board on a cheap model of cell phone.
And they're sort of crudely screwed into boxes.
It's not really clear what they're designed to do.
But it seems to be enough that it got everybody worked up over it.
Yeah, well, worked up.
I saw one headline that said that even though these synagogues in Chicago were the addressees on the packages, that they were designed to explode in the air and bring conjuring up images of Lockerbie or what we all can imagine could have happened last Christmas.
Right, and British officials are the ones that started the idea that they were designed to explode midair.
And some US officials are also saying that now.
Which, if you think about it, doesn't make a lot of sense.
Because why would you address it to a synagogue in Chicago coming out of Yemen?
It seems like that, in and of itself, is going to set up some red flags.
Or if it's just designed to explode midair, you could address it to anybody.
I mean, why deliberately pick an addressee that's going to add to the scrutiny of the package?
Indeed.
All right, now let me change subject to this.
Top headline on antiwar.com right now from the national, .ae, student tricked into Yemen bomb plot.
The Yemeni woman arrested in the investigation in mail bombs found in Dubai and England has nothing to do with the terror plot, her lawyer said yesterday.
We believe she is innocent and has been tricked.
Do you know anything more about where these packages supposedly originated?
Well, not really.
It seems that some of the data regarding the origin of these packages had this woman's identification on them.
But now they're saying that it seems like it was a case of identity theft.
But the woman, of course, was detained briefly.
And pretty quickly, it became obvious that she wasn't actually involved in the plot, which is sort of amazing, because how many times do people get arrested in the US that turn out to have nothing to do with the plot and spend years and years in detention before they figure it out?
Yeah, well, over in Yemen, they have a really advanced judicial system that protects the innocent much better than ours.
It's based on the principle of fairness and due process, I guess.
It seems to have been quick, if anything.
Yeah.
So apparently, this lady and her lawyer, their story is that she didn't even have anything to do with it.
Somebody used her return address or her phone number on a piece of paper or something, but that she wasn't even there, doesn't even know what y'all are talking about, that kind of thing.
Right.
That sort of sounds like that's what happened.
Interesting.
So now, what about the political reaction to this?
Because I know there was one headline, I think, on Saturday where Barack Obama was promising what exactly?
Do you know?
He promised in his Friday speech to destroy al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Yeah, by what?
Invading the Arabian Peninsula, or what?
Well, he didn't really say how he planned to do it.
He just said he was going to.
Well, I hate to give him credit where I'm not sure it's due, but there was a really long piece.
You may have seen it in the New York Times Magazine a couple of weekends ago about Yemen.
And it had a quote in there from one guy where they asked him, so what's it like living in Yemen?
And he goes, what's Yemen?
I don't know what Yemen is.
All I know is that this guy's my local warlord and Allah's my lord up in the sky.
That's about all I know about the world at all.
And my local warlord, today's tax-paying day, so I'm on my way, that kind of thing.
But anyway, so they really did describe the situation there and how one of these airstrikes that was meant to kill this al-Qaeda leader, it actually killed one of the local most respected elders in the neighborhood who was on his way to tell them to get the hell out of the neighborhood because they were causing trouble.
And they ended up killing him, I think.
And if you stuck through it all the way through the end of the piece, the reporter basically concludes that this is no place to be screwing around.
This is a hornet's nest.
And if you want to swat it, fine, but you're going to get stung.
You're not going to be able to get all the hornets.
You're just going to make more of them.
And that was even the New York Times reporter's case, kind of was like, gee, it's interesting that anyone would consider putting boots on the ground here, pretty ironic.
So I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe in the halls of the establishment, somebody knows better than to invade a country on the Arabian Peninsula, Jason.
Really, right there near Mecca Medina, too.
All right, y'all, it's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz.
He's the news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Now, one of these here, Jason, says Yemen officials' packages didn't come from Yemen.
Officials insist no cargo planes even left Yemen in the last 48 hours.
What's up with that?
That was the official Yemeni position on Friday.
Have they followed up on that?
Anybody answered that?
Or did they just quit talking about it?
Well, it sounds like it may well have been true that no cargo planes actually left Yemen.
But these shipments were on passenger planes.
So I don't think that necessarily rules them out.
Oh, I see.
Well, they haven't mentioned it again since then.
OK.
That was their position on Friday.
And they haven't brought it up again.
So I don't think it's still a major position.
Well, one headline here says, pre-election bomb plot, a political boost for Obama.
Any chance you think that maybe Americans put those bombs on those planes just so they could have a stunt?
Well, I don't know about that.
That might be a bit too much of a conspiracy theory there.
But it certainly does work as a nice October surprise for the president.
Yeah, well, that's the thing about crisis and Leviathan.
They don't have to invent all the crises.
They'll just wait around for one.
And really, I mean, how many times can you smack Yemen in the mouth before they try to do something back to you?
And then you get to say, hey, look, everybody.
They tried to bomb us, those people.
Can you believe it?
Well, right, the Christmas Day under bomber was the first time a lot of people heard anything of Yemen as far as the war on terror.
But of course, two days before that, the US was launching cruise missiles at the country and killed a whole bunch of people.
Right, you know, you're often a very integral part of that story when I tell it.
Not just was the United States bombing Yemen through, I guess, most of November and through December leading up to that Christmas Day attack.
But our guy, Jason Ditz, at news.antiwar.com was cataloging every bit of it.
And it's all there.
So all you have to do is just go back to the news.antiwar.com archives for November and December 2009.
And there it is, drone strike after drone strike after drone strike.
And then when Obama gave his West Point speech, he made sure to tack on at the end, Somalia, Yemen, you're next.
Don't anybody think I'm weak?
Just because I'm claiming that I'm going to wrap up one war in a year and a half from now doesn't mean I won't expand into new ones.
And it was sort of like, well, and you were keeping track of it all.
It's undeniable which was the cause and which was the effect there.
Assuming that it was even al-Awlaki or any of those people who put that guy on the plane.
After all, he seemed to have help from Westerners when he got to the Netherlands.
But I mean, assuming the basic story, the basic narrative there was right, there's no question about which was the cause and which was the effect.
Right.
And it was never really a secret that the US was bombing Yemen right up through the Christmas Day failed attack.
It's just that it never really gets mentioned.
Right, yeah, because what could one thing have to do with the other?
Everybody knows it says in the Koran that you're supposed to kill people who believe in freedom.
That's why they do what they do.
Right, the Koran has something about sewing a condom full of explosives into your underwear.
Yeah, well, same story, different day.
Well, and you know, one of the things, too, is people don't realize maybe about the drone strikes on Yemen last year was they included the use of cluster bombs.
And the thing is about cluster bombs is the big bomb explodes, a bunch of little bomblets drop out, and they're basically anti-personnel weapons.
They're made to tear human lives apart, but they're made to tear Soviet soldiers in the Folded Gap apart.
But we use them on women and children, and they leave duds everywhere.
So then a little kid goes, hey, look, a little yellow plastic thing on the ground.
That's interesting.
And he goes and picks it up, and then we know what happens.
So these are weapons that countries all over the world, the majority of nations all over the world, have now got together to ban.
The United States refuses to go along.
Well, right, and the cluster bombs end up killing people for years after they're actually used.
We had a story just in the last couple of weeks of some Lebanese people getting killed in the explosion of a cluster bomb that was left there from the last time Israel invaded.
Yeah, in 2006.
Four years ago.
People can just look at the New York Times.
US ships bombs with wide blast, and that's the New York Times telling you that in the middle of that war, George Bush sent an emergency shipment of cluster bombs to the Israelis to use on the women and children of Lebanon.
Right, and the Israeli government's position on why the cluster bombs are still killing people is that they ran out of the good Israeli cluster bombs that all blow up, and they started having to use the cheaper American ones.
Anyway, so the thing is about that, though, is people got to ask themselves how they would feel.
Well, think about how worked up you get when somebody sends some hardly workable, weird, sort of half-plausible story, explosives over UPS.
Think about if people in your neighborhood were actually killed by a dud cluster bomb laying around on the ground, kids out in the soccer field, or whatever like that.
You might join up the freedom fighters, you know?
Well, and like you say, Yemen, as far as being a country, it's nominally a country, but there's not a huge central authority above and beyond the president just acting really tough and giving a lot of speeches.
Right.
Well, one good thing, actually, though, is when he talks tough, he says US stay out, which he's not talking about the drones or whatever.
I guess he is an American puppet, but he's, I guess, speaking frankly and saying the people of Yemen will not accept foreign forces in their country.
You know, an advisor here or a Nevada-based Nintendo pilot there is one thing, but actual Marines or Army soldiers on the ground, don't do it, he said.
Right, and he sort of has to take that position because his position as a sort of strongman dictator of Yemen depends on his being able to seem like he can tackle any of the threats on his own.
And if the US has to come in and save him from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which his government's been insisting for months is a small threat and only amounts to a few hundred fighters, it doesn't say much for his leadership ability.
Yeah, well, I saw a story today about the Iraqi politicians, the members of parliament there, making approximately my yearly salary per month to do nothing.
So that's just, you know, I'm sure over there in Yemen they heard of that and want a bunch of American.
Nobody can fund an imperial satrap like an American taxpayer.
All right, thanks very much, Jason, appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
Everybody, that's Jason Ditz, news editor at antiwar.com.
News.antiwar.com, keeping track of Yemen and everything else in the world for you there.