01/18/11 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio, here on ChaosRadioAustin.org and the Liberty Radio Network, LRN.
FM, Antiwar.com/radio for all the archives, of course.
And now our first guest on the show is Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
Jason, how's it going, man?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So, there's so much news to talk about all over the world, but let's start with Israel.
I want to know what those crazies over there in the Likud party are doing.
Well, they're not really doing anything different other than expanding settlements.
And that's in all the West Bank or specifically in East Jerusalem now?
Well, specifically in East Jerusalem lately, but they have been expanding really across the West Bank, including a lot of the more remote outposts that they previously were sort of shying away from.
Well, so what's Hillary Clinton going to do about this?
Probably express regret at some point.
So, well, has she not even expressed regret?
Is this just go ahead?
Well, she's expressed regret in the past for some of them, but some of the more recent ones she hasn't responded on yet.
Yeah.
Well, I saw also that Ehud Barak, who is the head of the Labor Party and the defense minister over there, has now left the Labor Party and is making his own party.
What's up with that?
Yeah.
Well, there's been a factional split within Labor for quite some time.
In fact, shortly after the election, when Barak decided to join the coalition government in the first place, a lot of the more traditional members of the Labor Party tried to split off, but under Israeli law, you need a certain number of members of parliament to split your party, so they weren't allowed to leave.
And now, apparently it's gotten to the point where Barak was worried that he might lose leadership in the Labor Party, particularly after it came out that he tried to start a war with Iran last year and was foiled by the chief of the armed forces.
Yeah.
Let's talk a little bit more about that.
I read that.
That was General Ashkenazi.
Now, please mix into your answer something about, wasn't he the guy that was just saying some insanely hawkish Iran stuff the other day?
Well, yeah.
He's very much a hawk, too, but he's more of a rhetorical hawk, in that he's constantly talking about the need to attack Iran, but apparently when it came down to actually drawing up a plan to do it, he pointed out that there were going to be huge negative consequences if they actually went through with it, so he opposed following through on the attack.
And so, now, with Ehud Barak in trouble with half or so of his own party and now splitting off, why doesn't he just go and join Kadima, which, after all, at least is sold as sort of Likud lite, right?
That's when Sharon left Likud and created Kadima before he died and turned it over to Zippy Livni over there, right?
Right.
Well, the big problem is, if he joined Kadima, which might be an ideological fit, they're in the opposition right now.
Oh, right.
They don't have a place in the coalition, so he'd lose his spot as war chief.
Right.
That seems to be the primary drive about creating this independence party of his.
You know, Daniel Levy, I think it was, wrote a piece a couple of years back about Israel of the three Likuds or something, about how the Likud party, the Kadima party, and the Labor party basically are all Likud, you know, as far as what they're about and who's leading them, and now, I guess, it's Israel of the four Likuds.
Sort of like having the Republicans and the Democrats.
Well, yeah, and of course, the Labor party has long since lost most of its traditional voter support, and really, at this point, they're a fifth or sixth party even before the split, and now they're probably going to be even less influential.
But yeah, most of the foreign policy things, at least the things that we would notice, there really isn't a lot of difference between the major parties.
Yeah, domestic policy, how they spend our tax money is the kind of thing they argue about.
Sort of like here, right?
Small domestic issues that presumably divide us while they're united when it comes to who to kill overseas.
Right.
As with the U.S., any party that is so far off the beaten path that they're not pro-war or anything like that, they're never going to get close to power.
Right.
Hey, just ask the Barack Obama voters today who are trying to rationalize how he's being praised for his indefinite detention and aggressive warfare policies by none other than Dick Cheney himself this week.
Thought that was pretty funny.
But all right, so I want to get back to the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the so-called peace deal and all that in a minute, but I want to ask you more about what this Barack leaving the Labor Party means for the threat of war with Iran.
Because I guess, as you mentioned, the Labor Party is one of the things holding them back.
And I see this is your analysis here in this piece at news.antiwar.com.
Barack and Netanyahu united in desire to attack Iran.
The fall of labor could clear the path for doing so.
Right.
I mean, certainly Ashkenazi was one of the things that was in the way of starting a war, but he's on the way out now.
And the other thing that was a problem was that Ehud Barak always kind of had to play the moderate for the labor voters.
And now that he's created his own party that doesn't really have a clear platform other than keeping Ehud Barak in power, he's pretty much free to go with his own gut as far as policy, which seems to be starting major wars.
Well, and as the WikiLeaks showed, and as we already knew, the Israelis have directly threatened the American State Department that, look, when it comes down to it, if you don't start the war, we will, knowing full well that that means dragging us into the war.
Right.
And I don't think they really want to do that necessarily.
I think they would much rather have the U.S. start the war.
But there seems to be at least a little resistance on the U.S. side to starting that war.
So in the end, it might be doing exactly what they've threatened.
Well, you know, we kind of talked for a long time about how, you know, there's always all this hot air about threatening Iran.
They seem in the Pentagon and I guess in Tel Aviv as well to recognize the inherent dangers in something like that.
Not that Iran could ever really be a threat to Israel or America, but they could certainly screw up our government's plans in that region.
But, you know, I've always argued that by making all these hawkish statements all the time, even if they don't really mean that they're going to start a war at least anytime soon, that they basically are at least in effect, if not deliberately, marginalizing the moderates and moderate influence inside Iranian politics and strengthening the position of the hardliners.
Just like when Ahmadinejad comes out and or, you know, worse, never mind, given a speech holds a big Holocaust denial conference or whatever, seemingly made just to alienate people and for that matter, marginalize the moderates in the United States by coming across as such a Hitlerite caricature and what have you.
But it seems like the WikiLeaks are revealing, as Ali Gharib was saying on the show last week and wrote on the anti-war blog there, as well as this piece in The Atlantic called Do We Have Ahmadinejad All Wrong?
They're saying that the WikiLeaks show that Ahmadinejad has been undermined from the right over and over again and, of course, the right inside Iran, all they do is cite the war hawks in America as to why they ought to not give in.
Sorry, we've got to go out to this break, Jason.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
Talk a little bit more about that, Iranian politics.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz.
He's the news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
And when we went out to break, I was kind of babbling on and on trying to explain how it seems to me like all the war hawkish talk all the time makes it really hard for these people to work out a deal and apparently, according to the WikiLeaks, Jason, Ahmadinejad was ready to make the deal with Barack Obama where they wouldn't even have to swap uranium for uranium, where he was going to go ahead and export the uranium to Russia, have it made into fuel rods in France and have it shipped back at 20% for their medical isotope reactor, just like in Obama's proposal, and he was undermined by the right wing inside Iran.
It seems to me like there's nobody to blame for that other than, well, the right wing and the Democrats, of course, here in the United States for giving all those right wingers in Iran all the ammo they need to say that we can't work with the Americans on this level.
Well, and we can also blame the French for it because the French government had previously reneged on a nuclear deal with Iran.
Right.
Back in the 1970s, Hilary Mann Leverett explained that on the show, that they'd literally been ripped off for some uranium that they were trusting the French to give back to them.
And I think that was a big talking point in Iran when the third party enrichment deal first came up for debate was who's to say France isn't going to pull this again because France was to be involved in this process.
After further enrichment by Russia, it was supposed to be transferred to France to be made into fuel rods.
And that caused a lot of people to say, well, wait a minute.
Once the French get it, who's to say we're ever going to see it again?
Right.
And yet here, Ahmadinejad apparently was willing to accept the deal, which undermines the premise of the entire thing here.
Not only, it seems to me, are they hell-bent, or not only are they not hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, apparently they're not all that determined to hang on to this so-called breakout capability where they have enough low-enriched uranium laying around that they could make one bomb out of it if they kicked inspectors out and withdrew from the treaty and started working.
So here they were willing to give up enough of a quantity of their low-enriched uranium to be turned into these fuel rods by the Russians and the French that they'd be giving up their so-called breakout capability, a sketchy definition as that term has anyway.
Well, right.
And the fuel rods definitely were something they very much need and still do need, and that's always been a high priority for them because, of course, nuclear medicine in Iran is entirely dependent on that aging U.S.
-built Tehran research reactor, and that's what these fuel rods are for, is for operating that reactor.
And now, wouldn't it be the case, too, that this will be virtually, this American-built reactor, this will be one of the only ones in the world, I think, because the last Canadian reactor turning out these medical isotope target, whatever the hell it is, 20% enriched, what have you, that thing's closing down or is already closed down, and so that leaves, like, what, one in Europe and then this would be the second in Iran?
Do I have that right?
Do you know?
I'm not sure exactly how many are left, but, yeah, there's definitely, I mean, of course, there are more modern ways to get these isotopes that are replacing these aging research reactors, but from Iran's perspective, this is really the only way they can get a reliable supply of it, is to operate this reactor.
You know, I wonder, it's funny.
Did you read that article in The Atlantic about maybe we've got Ahmadinejad all wrong?
Did you see that?
Yeah, I did.
It's pretty interesting in here, how willing he is.
I mean, they kind of focus more on things that are of less interest to me, like, you know, he came out during the riots over the election in 2009, saying, well, maybe we ought to have more free speech, we ought to loosen up some of our rules here and there, and got himself in trouble with them, which I guess is a little bit interesting for context, but it's really amazing to me that he was willing to say, yeah, let's give up that quote-unquote, not in these words, but, you know, this is basically, in effect, what he was doing was giving up the breakout capability, and he was leading the push for that and failed.
Right, they need to get those fuel rods one way or another, and the problem is, as they've enriched more uranium over the course of the past year, since that last deal, now the U.S. is offering a new enrichment deal where they're demanding way more uranium to be turned into fuel rods, and the previous deal would have given them decades' worth of fuel for this reactor, and the new deal, I mean, it's giving them so many fuel rods that they're never, ever going to use it.
It's bordering on the ridiculous now, which is going to be another reason, I think, that it's going to be rejected.
Well, it's still amazing to me that they still get away with this entire argument.
As you put it in a piece just yesterday or two days ago, inside the WikiLeaks documents, all these bureaucrats talk to each other about Iran's attempt to get nuclear weapons.
None of them ever say what they're talking about.
They all just believe it, and the entire debate, even inside the U.S. government, is that this just must be true, that the Iranians are attempting to get nukes, and we've got to stop them.
And yet, to this day, we're just sitting here, we've got nothing but evidence to the contrary.
Well, right, and even the documents that explicitly accuse Iran provide evidence to the contrary in many places.
One of the documents explicitly says the reason why Iran is trying to acquire more uranium is because they would need more to power all these nuclear power plants that they want.
It's nothing to do with a weapons program or anything.
They just need more to generate more electricity.
And they're constantly talking about they want to have several plants built like the Boucher reactor that are just energy-generating plants.
Right, and I forget if you and I had talked about this, but Hillary Clinton actually was on TV saying that, hey, look, we never said we had a problem with the Boucher reactor.
You know, it's a light-water reactor, it doesn't make weapons-grade fuel.
But then she just referred in vaguery to what they're not allowed is nuclear weapons.
And that's what we've got to stop.
But as Hilary Mann-Leverson on the show, that's funny because Bill and Hillary Clinton have been saying for 15 years that the Boucher reactor must not ever go online or we'll all die.
Well, and the Susnet computer worm specifically targeted the Boucher reactor as well as the centrifuges.
Oh, that's way above Hillary's clearance, though.
All right, so speaking of all of this madness, if the Iranians ever got their hands on enough plutonium or I guess even uranium to make an implosion bomb, we know how.
They know how to make an implosion bomb.
It's not from doing 10 million tests with inert material and super-duper high-speed X-ray film and a million billion tests to make sure that all their little high explosives are set just right for the implosion.
All they've got to do is look at the blueprints the Americans gave them.
And people can read all about that.
Part of Operation Merlin, as described in James Rise in the New York Times reporter's book State of War, is about how the Americans had this former Russian, or I guess a Russian defector, provide these nuclear plans to the Iranians so then I guess they could be caught red-handed with them or something.
And yet the errors that they built in were so obvious that all the Iranians would have to do is just make a couple of changes.
And the Russian went ahead and made the changes himself because he didn't want to be caught out for peddling such obviously tweaked documents.
So basically if they have the plans to make nuclear weapons, it's because the U.S. gave it to them.
And now you have a piece here at news.antiwar.com today, Jason, that says, Justice Department whistleblowers worse than spies.
Court filing and disclosing to media much worse than disclosing to enemy nation.
This is in the case of Jeffrey Sterling, accused, or at least it's implied, that he must be the source for James Rise and this story about Operation Merlin.
Tell us more about this thing.
Well, like you say, it's implied that that's what he's accused of, but we don't really know that for sure.
Even his defense attorney hasn't been given clearance to talk to his own client yet about what he's actually accused of.
Well, now, Rise has been subpoenaed over this too, but I guess the judge eventually just let him go, right?
Do I remember that one right?
Right.
Very interesting stuff.
And they really did say that, right?
That if this guy had given the information to the Iranians themselves, that would have been better than giving it to a New York Times reporter to give to the American people?
Right.
They said that was more dangerous.
Appearances are everything to these guys.
Thank you, Jason.
Jason Ditz, everybody, news.antiwar.com.