Alright, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
All week long I've been trying to get an interview with Jason Ditz going, but I've been having the worst technical problems.
But I'm thinking third time's the charm here.
Welcome to the show, Jason.
How are you?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
Welcome to the show.
I'm in Texas.
There's a terrible Texas thunderstorm outside.
I love it.
We don't really have those in Los Angeles, so I'm happy to be back here.
But it took me a while to get here.
I had to pack up all my things, and I had to drive real far.
And I think I missed a pretty compelling week of news.
And I wonder if you could help me catch up.
Something about somebody shot Osama Bin Laden in the head, huh?
Yeah, apparently shot him in the face.
Well, I can't say I'm terribly sad about that.
Did they give him a chance to fight back?
I heard he was hiding behind his wife, using her as a human shield like the Imperial officer at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, and firing an AK-47.
Is that true?
Well, that was the initial story, but no, that wasn't true at all.
They retracted that shortly after coming up with it.
And then it was, well, the human shield wasn't his wife, it was some other woman that just happened to be there.
Then it was, well, he wasn't armed at all, and the woman wasn't a human shield, she was on the other side of the room.
So the story's kept changing, but right now it seems like he was unarmed, and he put up what they called resistance, but exactly what that means we're not sure.
So look, I mean, this is one thing that I was able to figure from the news, as much as I was trying to ignore it the first few days there last week.
It seemed like every part of the initial story that they gave about the raid turned out to fall apart.
So I wonder whether, which parts and how are you able to nail down what seems like the most plausible explanation of what really happened there and what didn't?
Well, we really can't.
It's more of a question of what's their latest story, and it seems like the first story was the most compelling, but it was also complete nonsense, as they revealed in later comments.
So whether the stories that they've given a sense in are any more true, I guess we don't really know.
Yeah, well, but it doesn't seem, I guess, you know, I was suspicious when they said they dumped his body in the ocean.
I was like, ah man, what is this, a big scam?
But then I guess it just seemed like the totality of the different sources disagreeing on many points.
One thing they all did seem to agree on was that this really did happen, right?
Is that right?
It seems like it, yeah.
Yeah, that at least that much is true, that they did find Osama bin Laden in that house and shoot him in the head.
It's just that it wasn't a mansion and he didn't fire an AK-47 and, you know, who knows what else as far as the details.
Somebody shot him in the head, at least.
There's been some talk that it may have been his own guys shot him after he was captured, but whether that's true or not, we don't know either.
So, but then the wives identified the body and everything like that or what?
No, it sounds like they just took off with him.
They were planning to take the wives with them, but one of their helicopters crashed when it landed in their yard, so they didn't have enough room to take the wives too.
So they did DNA tests and photographic tests.
I see.
All right, now, so I guess then the question is, so what effect does this have other than, well, I don't know, there's a couple of different ways to go here.
I guess I want to mention Kelly Vallejos' great piece about the just dim-witted arrogance of the American people pretending like the last 10 years never happened and all these college kids and everybody coming out and rioting and chanting USA and waving their yellow ribbons.
And it sort of seemed like, at least from a couple of articles I read, again, like I was completely on the road and not paying attention and unplugged from everything last week.
But I was reading some things that said, like, this was the defining moment of an era or whatever that the tweets and the Facebook messages and the TV stations and that all media was all locked in on this one thing.
It was this giant, you know, like American Idol or whatever, where all of America is all watching it and celebrating together and all this kind of thing.
And it seemed like, was that really right at all or is that, how much of an exaggeration is that?
How carried away did the American people get in their celebration of this thing?
Well, they were quite carried away with it for a very, very short period of time.
The biggest effect that it really had in practice was that it bumped up President Obama's approval rating by about 9%.
And even that has mostly gone away now, just a couple of weeks later.
It was sort of a blip, but it was a really big deal at the time.
Yeah, I saw a little clip of Jon Stewart just gushing and man crushing all over Obama and what a great thing this is.
And in fact, I think the quote was, we're back, baby.
Like, yeah, America's really been down ever since, you know, our giant erection in the sky got knocked over and this is just the Viagra we needed or whatever, you know?
Alright, so now tell me about the political effect of this.
Does this mean that the war on terror is justified after the fact now, finally, and we can keep going from here for another couple decades?
Well, that seemed to have been the case briefly.
Everybody seemed to be showing polls right after the fact that showed this was sort of an all's well that ends well situation, never mind trillions of dollars spent and God only knows how many people killed.
They finally got the one guy they were after and everyone seemed to be quite happy with it at the time.
But I think as reality has set in and people realize, well, this didn't actually change anything on the ground, all these wars are still going on, I think it's already started to fade this enthusiasm.
Yeah, you know, I wonder if maybe, especially because it was a SEAL Team 6 type of operation, special forces going in, surgical thing they like to call it, you know, minimal collateral damage, well, compared to the average, hellfire missile strike anyway, and I wonder if it's becoming more obvious to people that this is what the entirety of the terror war should have ever been, that this whole adventure that maybe they do remember, at least a couple hundred thousand Iraqis died, if they don't remember it was really more like a million.
Maybe the whole axis of evil and the whole completely overdoing it is now, in a little hindsight 2020, going to become a little clearer that that was a mistake, that we fell into their trap bankrupting ourselves when all we needed to do was send in SEAL Team 6 a few times here and there?
Well, that would certainly be nice, but I don't really expect that to be the case.
I think it's more a question of, people thought this meant the war was over when it happened and within a couple of days it was pretty clear that it wasn't, and now they're not as happy, but I don't think there was a lot of deep thought given to the justification of the war itself or the pretty negative effects this could have on our relationship with Pakistan.
Yeah.
Well, let's talk a little bit more about that.
There's the Telegraph story that says that we had a secret deal with them all along where we could go ahead and do a raid like this if we thought we were after Osama and they could pretend to protest afterwards, but really it would all be in the game.
You think that's what's playing out in front of our eyes here?
Is there more to it than that?
Well, that's possible, but there is a lot more to it than that, and I think even if there wasn't a deal in place at the time, that's probably all that would have happened if it was just a matter of this raid killing Osama bin Laden.
But the real problem was that the raid happened and then the White House said that this was a precedent and that they reserved the right to launch similar raids against Pakistan pretty much whenever they feel like it.
And so that's the part that, say, for example, in the Pakistani media is becoming the big deal or that's what their politicians are making a big deal out of is the statement that this is just the beginning, when of course it's not anyway.
Oh, absolutely.
The idea that the U.S. launched this single raid wasn't very popular in the first place, but since Osama bin Laden was kind of a special case, I think people probably would have mostly looked the other way and complained a little bit if that's all that it was.
But the administration is making a clip that's not all that it is, that there's going to be more of these raids, more of these SEAL teams and things like that just wandering around Pakistan launching raids without any permission from the government.
Well, and I guess more or less up to this point what they've done, it's been these very guys sitting at bases, right?
Special Forces and JSOC and the CIA sitting at their bases in Pakistan flying remote control planes around killing people.
But now it's the combat boots hitting dirt is the part that everybody's got a problem with, huh?
Right.
And especially that they're hitting actual cities inside Pakistan and not just the tribal areas.
Because that's a big difference to a lot of Pakistanis.
The tribal areas are treated very differently by a lot of people than the rest of the country is.
Right.
I actually knew a Pakistani guy who just said, oh, all those guys, they're just crazy, whatever.
Whatever happens to them might as well be in another country or something as far as he was concerned, I guess.
Right.
The tribal areas are really, I guess the closest analog would be to the Israeli attitude toward the West Bank.
They're basically occupied territories and these tribesmen are just people that are being occupied.
I mean, they have some nominal rights in Pakistan that perhaps Palestinians don't have in Israel, but the principle is mostly the same.
Yeah.
That these aren't real Pakistanis, they're just Pashtun tribesmen.
Yeah.
And I guess, I mean, the way I always understood it was, you know, the deal is we'll call this area Pakistan, you'll let us call this area Pakistan, but we won't use our army against you and occupy you all the time.
It'll just be a name only and that'll be our kind of agreement.
But that's, of course, America's policy this whole time is to force them to keep invading that tribal region in the name of, you know, getting the bad guys are up there somewhere.
You know, I wonder if anybody's reviewing that policy, like maybe that's all been for nothing.
Well, especially since bin Laden wasn't even found in those tribal areas.
He was found quite a ways away from the tribal areas and actually a lot closer to India than to the tribal areas.
All right.
Well, now let me ask you about, you know, best you can tell from the news coming in about what the Pakistani intelligence or military agencies knew about Osama bin Laden hiding out there.
Because, of course, you know, for the war party, it's pretty easy, you know, to just kind of sum up and say, well, you know, he was in a highly military area.
You know, there was the military academies right down the street, this and that.
They must have been hiding them there, kind of thing.
And there are some claims here and there that they must have known, I guess.
But I wonder, you know, is it that obvious that they must have or is there is that in dispute really, you think?
Well, it's definitely in dispute.
And the U.S. has admitted that they don't have any real evidence to support that other than just the gut feeling that they must have known.
And a lot of top Pakistani politicians, Nawaz Sharif in particular, are up in arms over the fact that apparently they didn't.
They didn't know that the ISI in particular, how could they have dropped the ball so many times here that they didn't know that Osama bin Laden was down the street from a major military base?
And how could they not have known that the U.S. was invading to go get him?
Right.
Yeah, well, then again, you read The Shadow Factory by James Bamford about how Mohammed Atta and his buddies were making arrangements at the supermarket down the street from National Security Agency headquarters on a Saturday when every customer in there must have been an NSA guy.
They're standing there on the payphone arranging their plane tickets and stuff.
But of course, you know, the standards that apply to us or our government anyway never applied to anybody else's.
Gee, so I guess, you know, let me move on and ask you about Syria real quick here.
Is it true that Barack Obama is about to or was going to or already did say that there must be a regime change and this is the end of the Baathists in Syria like he did in Libya?
Well, there's been reports that he's about to.
He hasn't done it yet.
And whether he does or not, I guess, remains to be seen.
But certainly, you know, there's a lot of anti-Syrian momentum in the U.S. government in the first place, of course, because of their traditional hostility towards Israel.
And this is pretty much a prime excuse to go that way.
Yeah, I wonder, I forget who it was I read that said that, you know, these neocons might want to check with Benjamin Netanyahu back at the home office.
Oh, I think it was Phil Giraldi in his last article said, yeah, they better check with Netanyahu in the home office about whether he really wants a regime change in Syria or not or is not Assad the most predictable and reasonable force they could ever hope to have there.
Absolutely.
There's a lot of concern of what's going to happen after Assad because there really isn't, again, a major opposition force.
Any opposition that had any sort of traction has been killed or thrown in jail or exiled over the years.
So there really is no decent prediction of what's going to happen.
And it seems like, as is so often the case in these one party systems, it's going to probably be a religious faction because it's one of the few places where you can organize people outside of government control is in the mosque.
Yeah, well, you know, I don't know, there's a few people who are really good on Syria around who really know a lot about it.
But I guess from what I've gleaned here and there, it seems like the Alawites, even though they're a very small percentage, it's sort of been more or less agreed upon by the different leaders of different factions that they make the good kind of center compromisers for everybody to get along sort of through them kind of thing.
And when those days come to an end, and it's just, you know, every little tribal group to themselves or for themselves, things could get really bad there.
And then again, you know, I guess that's what David Wilmser always wanted was to expedite the chaotic collapse in Syria.
So they may just get what they wanted.
Well, it certainly does seem to be heading that way.
It seems like the Assad government making a lot of mistakes with their reaction to this.
It was a pretty small movement to start with, and probably could have just been safely ignored in the first place.
I mean, you had that first week, a few hundred people in the city along the southern border.
It wasn't a big deal.
But then you had police shooting some of the protesters and that turned a few hundred into a few thousand, and then more violence.
And now you've got tens if not hundreds of thousands of people protesting most days across the nation.
Yeah, well, I guess, yeah, calling out the tanks and all that.
Assad is basically doing like Dick Cheney and falling right into the trap, overreacting to every provocation.
It'll be his undoing sooner or later.
Well, geez, we're almost out of time here.
I just want to mention real quick, I'm sure you saw that McClatchy story from a day or two ago about the crackdown in Bahrain and the brutality and the torture and the disappearances going on, the end of the protest movement, or well, the protesters turning into guerrilla protesters, and being picked off one by one by the secret police there, and by foreigners brought in by the government from Baluchistan.
And of course, they don't say in there, Saudi Arabia.
But that one, I think, is a pretty good way to gauge America's attitude toward freedom and democracy, is the actions of the monarchy in Bahrain, where we keep our fifth fleet, you know?
Oh, absolutely.
All right, well, thanks very much for your time.
Appreciate you helping me catch up here, Jason.
Sure, thank you for having me.
That's Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com, and we'll be right back.
