All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm looking at news.antiwar.com.
Our managing news editor, Jason Ditz, has written, what, now 5,000 articles here in the last, what, year?
Welcome to the show, Jason.
How's it going?
I'm doing good, Scott.
Did I get that number right?
Was it 5,000?
Yeah, it's 5,000 over the last, well, it's more than a year.
It's more like two years.
Well, still, that's a lot of articles, man.
Congratulations.
And honestly, you know, usually dependence breeds resentment.
But no, in this case, I absolutely cherish your work, man.
It's so good.
And I have come to rely on it so much, your news summaries.
Basically, you guys know how it is.
You'll have three or four major stories.
McClatchy and the Washington Post and the New York Times all have a story about the same thing that emphasize different things.
And then here's, Jason writes up one news summary, getting right to the point and linking to which article makes which point the most importantly and or develops it best, whatever.
And excellent news summaries and a lot of snark.
It's always fun to read as well, news.antiwar.com.
And I want to start today with this outrage.
Obama ordered to formalize permanent detention without trial.
Officials insist detention part of plan to close Gitmo.
What's going on here?
Well, it's being reported by a few different outlets that President Obama is about to issue a new executive order that will formalize his intention to keep the detainees at Guantanamo Bay in detention pretty much forever.
I mean, with open-ended, with no trials, and not necessarily having to charge them with anything.
Well, now, I thought that when he gave his dueling speeches with Dick Cheney that he promised he was going to pass a law that would give him the power to do this.
No?
Now it's just going to be an executive order, huh?
Well, it seems like getting a law passed was a little inconvenient.
So now it's just an executive order.
Well, it was just a couple of, well, it wasn't even a couple.
I think it was just one month ago or so when they convicted that guy in New York in civilian criminal court, federal court, for his role in the embassy attacks in 1998.
When they said, if he's not convicted, we're going to re-kidnap him and hold him as an indefinite prisoner anyway, even if the jury lets him go.
So I don't wonder if they even had an executive order to cite for that, or just the will of the great leader.
Well, it doesn't seem like it matters too much, because the executive orders really are just edicts by the president at this point anyway.
I don't know.
I guess I wonder at this point, is there a plan to close Guantanamo Bay?
I mean, they had a prison lined up in Illinois, right?
And they were going to bring Guantanamo home.
That seems like progress to a Democrat, right?
What are they waiting for?
Right.
First, it was Standish, Michigan, which is actually not that far from where I live.
And then it became Thompson, Illinois, which they actually bought the detention center there and started working on preparing it to house the detainees.
But the House has already passed bills making it illegal to put any money towards transferring the detainees to the United States.
So in effect, they've made it so that the facility is never going to close.
Not that President Obama has done anything to move it towards closing in the last year and a half anyway, but the claims now that this is part of a plan to close it are just ridiculous because, in effect, the House has already said that Guantanamo Bay is not going to close.
It makes me wonder why this guy ever claims he wants to do anything, because he only ever has to back down and look really bad.
It seems like he's willing to take one shot at anything.
And if it doesn't quite work out the way he'd hoped, then he just kind of forgets about it and moves on to something else.
All right, well, one day we'll all be cellmates down there in the commie prison in communist Cuba.
And I kind of look forward to, if we all got to go off to the camps, at least I'll be hanging out with all my favorite writers, you know?
And the weather's nice, too.
Right, and I read that the Republicans say it's nothing but lemon chicken and sunshine down there and nothing to complain about at all.
In fact, Charlie Daniels, the great musician that I used to have respect for, went and was taken on a PR tour down there and came back and told everyone how great it is.
And now I can't respect Charlie Daniels anymore.
You would even think he would go kind of in the pantheon of Americana or whatever, what people consider America.
And yet there he is, betraying it completely by coming out in favor of horrible things like a lawless prison in a communist country under the control of the United States.
So now anyway, I'm going to move on to this other important headline, also from yesterday, at news.antiwar.com.
AG Holder dusts off Bush-era scaremongering.
Holder up at night over vague threats of ill-defined terror.
Kind of mocking him right there in the headline.
What did Eric Holder, the attorney general, say that's got you so riled up there?
Well, he's really just, he didn't say too awful much.
But he made a big deal out of saying it.
He's saying how there's this great threat and that Americans are becoming radicalized and wanting to kill other Americans.
And he can't sleep at night because of this great threat.
And Well, now, is he talking about Tea Party activists or left-wing environmentalists or so-called Muslim extremists?
Or did he say?
It seems like he's going for the Muslim aspect here.
But he's so vague about it.
It's just a general scaremongering tactic where there are no specifics.
And it seems to fall into the same mold as that ridiculous arrest in Baltimore a few weeks back of the supposed bomber there, who was posting what the Justice Department called anti-U.S. sentiments on Facebook and then got approached by one FBI agent and introduced to another FBI agent who convinced him to plant a fake FBI-created bomb that made a loud explosion in suburban Baltimore.
Jeez, I'd miss that when there was the subway plot and then there was the whole bogus set-up at the Christmas tree thing up there in Oregon.
I'd miss the fake Baltimore plot, Jason, completely.
Thank God you're there to catch what I miss.
It was incredible, particularly in this case, because there's no indication that this guy that they arrested was planning to do anything in the first place.
He was just kind of posting stuff on Facebook.
And they kept, you know, putting forth FBI agents, introducing themselves as al-Qaeda and pushing him to get involved and finally culminating with this plot that was pretty much entirely invented by the FBI and just shoehorning this guy into being involved in it and then arresting him for the whole thing.
Well, you know, one day there's going to be a real terrorist attack in this country and everybody's going to say, oh, well, then, you know, we need to put a Homeland Security official in charge of every sheriff's department, which I guess they're already working on that anyway.
But no one's going to blame the FBI for spending the last decade running around, chasing their tails and trapping innocent people instead of actually working to make sure that no real terrorists get into this country.
I mean, you look at the actual terrorist plots that have been thwarted.
They're thwarted by passengers on airplanes.
And I guess Faisal Shahzad's case there in New York City, his own ineptitude.
But the cops haven't stopped the real plot at all this whole time.
They do nothing but entrap people.
And, you know, one day there's going to be hell to pay, not for them, but for us, for their continued criminal negligence on this topic.
All right, more Jason Ditz after this, y'all.
All right, y'all, it's Antiwar Radio, chaosradioaustin.org, lrn.fm, antiwar.com/radio.
And now it's time for the bad news about Somalia.
Jason Ditz is on the line.
He writes at news.antiwar.com.
This article is called More Attacks Predicted As Somalia Insurgents Merge.
Give me the bad news, Jason.
What's going on here, man?
Well, it's in the wake of a few offensives by al-Shabaab in some central cities that were controlled by the other major insurgent group in Somalia, Hezbollah Islam.
The two groups are merging, and what a lot of people are saying is really just al-Shabaab taking over the other group, sort of a surrender by the Hezbollah Islam.
And the Somali government, incredibly enough, so-called Somali government, because they're really a government in name only.
They're recognized by the United Nations, but they're a self-proclaimed government, and they only control a part of one city in the country.
But they're saying this might be a good thing because it means they'll only have one group to fight.
The problem with that being, of course, that those two groups were fighting each other a lot more than they were worrying about this do-nothing, self-proclaimed government that controls an airport and a port and a presidential palace along the coast.
And now it seems like if they're truly allied the way it sounds, they're going to be in a position to launch a lot more aggressive attacks against the African Union troops that are keeping them in power, even in that tiny region.
Wow.
So things could get really bad for the so-called Somalia government at this point if the two major, most powerful factions that refuse to submit to their pretended authority are now working together.
I wonder if the American-backed puppets in Mogadishu's days are really numbered now.
It seems like they've always been numbered, but somehow between the African Union and the Ethiopian government and the Obama administration, and before that the Bush administration, there's just an endless supply of foreign groups willing to back this government and at least enough to survive, but never really enough to gain any sort of foothold beyond just the coastline.
Now, I don't know if you saw this article.
It was a blog entry at Foreign Policy and Focus.
Oh, yeah, we ran it on the page.
And I interviewed the guy, Rob Prince.
It was a really good interview.
He's a really smart guy.
And he found in the WikiLeaks where he got rid of any question remaining that it was the Americans who more or less forced the Ethiopians or really pressured the Ethiopians to invade Somalia in 2006.
It wasn't that they said, oh, you want to?
Well, good, we'll help you, or anything along those lines.
They really pressured the Ethiopian government to do that, as revealed in the WikiLeaks.
Well, and that's probably not too surprising given how quickly the Ethiopian government declared victory and left the country, even though they really hadn't achieved any of their stated goals in going in.
And every once in a while, there are still reports that the Ethiopian troops along the border make a small incursion, but it seems like they don't really want to try another full-scale invasion like they did before.
Yeah, well, and how could they?
It's been an absolute disaster.
I talked with the lady from Human Rights Watch, Leslie Lefkow, and she talked about, you know, hundreds of thousands of people forced out of their homes, more than a million on the brink of starvation.
I don't know whether all those people are all dead now or what, but it took pretty much the smallest, most helpless, weakest little society in the world and I guess according to the Ledeen Doctrine, slammed it up against the wall just to prove that we mean business and destroyed the lives of uncounted people.
Nobody even cares about Somalia at all.
Our media doesn't cover this at all.
Nobody seems to mind if America hires the Ethiopian army to do an invasion and kill a bunch of innocent people.
It's not even, you know, noteworthy.
Has there ever been a single segment on 60 Minutes about the war in Somalia at all or one that wasn't just about pirates and how something's got to be done about these al-Shabaab people that apparently came from nowhere or some nonsense, you know?
Well, definitely.
It's a low priority for most media outlets if it's a priority at all and the situation there has been getting progressively worse.
If you go back even seven years before this self-proclaimed government, Somalia was in a state of complete anarchy and interestingly enough, it was doing quite a bit better back then.
Absolute anarchy was giving them one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, one of the best telecommunications networks in Africa, and it's only since the international communities tried to install this government, which seemed contented to just hang out in Kenya until they ran out of money to pay their hotel bill and got kicked out of their hotel.
Ever since they showed up, Somalia's just been a disaster and it's been one war after another.
Yeah.
You know, people really want to read the background on this.
I highly recommend a piece by Jesse Walker in Reason magazine.
I don't remember what it's titled anymore, but if you were to search Jesse Walker, Reason, Somalia, you could find a really great background on all this stuff and it really is like that, where the only reason the Islamic Courts Union got a monopoly on power in the first place was because America started supporting the warlords and then the only reason that we have al-Shabaab is because we supported the warlords and Ethiopians in invading the place.
Now, there was an article in the New York Daily News a couple of weeks ago talking about, oh my God, the biggest group of al-Qaeda-like terrorists that you could find in the world right now is al-Shabaab in Somalia.
And by the way, history began yesterday and there ain't no reason why it got this way that you need to be concerned about.
There's no lesson here about intervention and consequences of intervention.
There was no al-Shabaab in November, even December of 2006.
It's our intervention that's caused this.
Well, right.
This has been an ongoing story for, really for decades, of the U.S. making these half-hearted attempts to intervene in Somalia, killing a bunch of people and then wandering off.
And it just keeps spawning slightly worse groups than the ones that it intended to target, and after years and years of doing this it's gotten to the point now where the whole country is just complete mess.
Yeah.
Well, it sure seems like it.
And I guess this is supposed to be the role of the media, right, is that at some point, like Winston Churchill, the democracy, or the American people, they always eventually do the right thing, it just takes them a long time or something, which he was just talking about trying to get us into his war, the one that he later thought was unnecessary.
Oops.
Still, though, I was raised to believe that, that eventually the American people do the right thing, but that's all contingent on the American people having the truth.
And they don't tell us about what we, quote-unquote, are doing to the people of Somalia.
We don't even know this.
So that's why when Somalia eventually does blow up something and kill a bunch of people in this country, they'll blame it on Islam and blame it on radicalism and never explain to the American people this is blowback, this is the consequences of covert actions and just ignored actions, you know, that you don't know anything about.
That's why it seems to come out of the clear blue sky, is because the reasons for it are obscured by a bunch of lies.
How are we supposed to do the right thing when we don't even know what's going on in the world at all, when everything is secret?
Well, right, and like you say, the only thing we really hear directly out of Somalia is stories about pirates, but the other thing that we hear about Somalia is Somali-Americans being increasingly radicalized.
Of course, we're never given any reason why that might be, but that Somali-Americans should be viewed with growing distrust at all times, because sooner or later, it seems like officials do at least realize that there's going to be some sort of measurable blowback that they're going to have to address, and they're already preparing the scapegoat for it.
Right, and if it's radical Islam that they're really worried about, well, take the lesson here.
You invade a Sufi country where everybody wants to sit around chewing leaves and hanging out all day, and bomb them for going on four years in a row now, and then see how radical they are.
And, you know, I mean, come on.
They're doing this on purpose.
We know that.
All right, well, thanks very much, Jason.
Your news bums me out, but you do a great job covering it.
Thanks for having me.
All right, everybody.
That is the heroic Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
