All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and it's our fundraising time at Antiwar.com.
Once every quarter, we come to you, hat in hand, talking about how, hey, we work really hard.
We don't just sit on the side of the road with funny signs about we'll work for beer and stuff like that.
We work real hard.
The hardest working among us, of course, is Eric Garris.
But second place is certainly Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back, Jason.
How are you?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
And I really could not overstate how much I appreciate your work and how much I rely on it.
It's absolutely great.
Every single day, I end up reading something that you wrote from beginning to end to people, all the absolute most important news, and usually with the most ironical, ridiculous propaganda surrounding it.
And you just tear it all apart, and you do it in a funny way, and you write like a Midwesterner and say anyhow and stuff like that.
And I just love it, man.
I love it.
It's great.news.antiwar.com.
And you know what?
If all the rest of us went away and all Antiwar.com was was news.antiwar.com, it would be absolutely worth your while to throw in and keep that thing going no matter what the price.
It's unfair that these things must be valued in quantitative terms, but they must.
And so why don't you help let Eric Gares know what Jason Ditz means to you by going to antiwar.com/donate and kicking in.
It's true, is it not, Jason, at news.antiwar.com, that people can donate every single way that anyone has ever invented to donate online, that they can donate cars like Salvation Army style, that they can get a credit card where we get a cut not from them but from the bank whenever they use the antiwar.com credit card.
They can do monthly payments of whatever amount, and we need their help.
They can find Angela Keaton's business phone number and antiwar.com snail mail address as well.
If you want to do it old school with the dead tree carcasses and envelopes and that kind of stuff, no matter how you could think of to donate to antiwar.com, we make it possible, especially Angela makes it possible for you to do so.
Is that not a fact, Jason?
We take everything but lima beans, and if someone really wanted to donate lima beans, Angela would probably find a way to make it work.
Right, plant them and then sell the crop of other lima beans.
Wait, are lima beans seeds?
I don't really know about lima beans.
I think they are, yeah.
Oh, okay, there you go.
So plant more and then invest the profits in antiwar propaganda, which is to say the truth.
Again, this is what's so valuable about news.antiwar.com.
Of course, the blog and all our regular columnists, this is really our priority.
All it takes, really, to oppose war is to tell the truth as opposed to what the people who are trying to get us into the wars want us to believe, right?
That's what we do.
It's certainly a lot more convenient than what the other side does because we don't have to worry about keeping our lies straight because we're just relying on the truth.
Yep, it's pretty simple.
And because we live in the era of the phony wars and there are no legitimate wars, then that means there's nothing but lies surrounding all of the many, many wars that we're involved in, which gives us plenty to do all day.
And we do.
All right, so let's start with, is it still the top headline?
I better hit refresh in case something else huge blew up in the world.
No, it's still the top headline right now at antiwar.com.
Panetta defends administration on Iraq pullout, in quotes.
Why don't you go ahead and tell me, what exactly happened yesterday when Leon Panetta met with the Senate Armed Services Committee?
As usual, the Obama administration has moved its story again from, we're going to have all the troops out of Iraq in 18 months, to we're going to have all the troops out of Iraq by summer of 2010, to now we're going to follow through with the Status of Forces Agreement that required us to have all our troops out by the end of this year, which now they're claiming was their plan all along.
But even that, they're having to qualify it and defend it in Congress because we have a number of hawkish congressmen who are acting like going along with President Bush's plan to end the war in 2012, which never really was a plan of course, they always assumed they could talk the Iraqi government into letting them stay.
That's some sort of betrayal of the last 8 years of occupation.
Well now, here's the thing, when the Iraqis had said that they refused, that it was politically impossible for them to provide immunity for any American soldiers staying behind, I don't think it was really addressed whether they would have immunity or whether immunity would be required for the State Department employees, the contractors, the CIA guys, etc.
And then also, there's this piece from Elizabeth Bumiller at the New York Times from last night, I guess today's paper, some troops to stay in Iraq as trainers, top officers said, so has there been a change in the immunity deal or they're getting around it somehow or what, do you know?
Not so far as I know, there hasn't been a formal change yet, but of course we saw with the whole Raymond Davis fiasco in Pakistan that the Obama administration claims ridiculously broad diplomatic immunity for anybody that's loosely affiliated with an embassy or the State Department.
With that massive embassy there, I'm sure they would be able to work out a way to at least claim, if not credibly, that they believe that massive State Department army has some sort of default diplomatic immunity.
Well, man, I guess I shouldn't have let my hopes get up at all.
I thought that when the Iraqis said, no, you can't have it, and they had to say, well, I guess we'll have the troops out and we'll just keep the State Department people and the contractors and the spooks, that that part was actually going to be true after all, but then again, as we said many times on this show, you still have air power to deal with, and of course the Marines have got to be there for force protection at the embassy, because the mercenaries can't be trusted that much, you know?
Right, and it remains to be seen what will happen as far as whether there will actually be troops on the ground doing anything outside of training at Iraqi bases, but I think it was an impossible sell for the Iraqi government after all that's gone on for years and years in that country to say, well, we want them to stay as trainers, but we also want them to have just absolute blanket immunity for arrests that they perform off base and any killings they happen to commit.
Yeah, well, you know what's funny here is in this Times piece, they talk about how McCain accused Panetta, he said, the truth is that this administration was committed to the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and they made it happen, and Panetta shot back, Senator McCain, that's just simply not true.
We did everything, I'm making this part up, we did everything we could to try to stay and we're still trying to do everything we can to stay here, we're going to call it training, please, we're going to have some, and so that's the accusation from the right, and the Obama team's defense is the last thing we meant to do is live up to our promise to withdraw from Iraq, you know?
I don't know if anybody mentioned Muqtada al-Sadr in the discussion or not.
But anyway, I was disappointed in the debate the other night, I wish Ron had had the time to say that the war in Iraq that all these other candidates supported was the nicest thing that anyone ever did for Iran, and here all they want to do is threaten Iran all day and say that they're the enemy, but we're their best ally they've ever had, and make them answer to that.
They won't.
Actually, maybe they would have to try something, Gingrich would give a shot, I bet, you know, try.
He'd at least get mad at the reporter that asked him.
Yeah.
Alright, well hold it right there because we have a hell of a lot more wars to go over, as many as we can fit in 10 minutes with Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
Alright, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And didn't I warn you in 2001 that the Office of Homeland Security would become a Department of Homeland Security and that it would become the National Police Force of the United States, just like your great-grandfather, or at least grandfather, not great-great-grandfather, would have gone to war over.
Well, here you go.
Did Feds coordinate, occupy Wall Street crackdowns?
Jason Ditz from news.antiwar.com, did they?
Well, we don't know yet.
It looks like they may well have, but we're still waiting on actual confirmation beyond a report in the Examiner about some unnamed federal official saying that they were involved.
Oh, it was a single unnamed source, huh?
Right.
I see.
Well, so we need two sources.
I bet, though.
Let's see here.
There's a couple of updates on his story.
My original source for the story still works at the Justice Department, stands behind the original story, and we're working to flesh out more detail today, he says.
Well, I guess we'll see.
I'll bet you, though, because we all know the Department of Homeland Security has nothing to do with stopping Osama bin Laden from hijacking our jets.
It never did have anything to do with that.
Although, that's what the 9-11 Commission was about.
It was about creating the Department of Homeland Security, not about finding out the truth of the story.
And it certainly makes sense, because we're suddenly seeing this massive policy shift in all these different cities across the country.
It's unlikely that just happened all spontaneously.
It seems like that would have to be guided from the top.
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a lot.
I guess they're claiming that a couple of mayors were consulted or something, but not police.
There was an official refutation, supposedly, of the story, correct?
Well, the official story so far from the Justice Department is that the consultation was just between the mayors, and that the feds weren't involved.
But, of course...
Well, that's interesting.
That means they're lying, if they're lying.
Right.
Hey, let's switch back over to the foreign wars, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
You've got a couple of very important stories here.
Karzai's Council to approve U.S. presence through 2024.
2024!
This 10-year-old war!
Right.
That's the whole goal of this council, basically, is to rubber-stamp the continued occupation for another decade beyond the 2014 NATO date that the Afghan government has already more or less signed off on.
And the reason that they called this council is because Karzai doesn't appear to think he could get support in the actual Afghan parliament.
As stacked as it is with people who won the election through incredibly shady means, he still thought it was a little too much of a controversial issue to try to push through the parliament.
Now, when the generals talk about our presence in Afghanistan, do they say 2024?
The generals don't, but there have been Pentagon spokesmen that have said that the U.S. presence will probably continue for at least a decade after NATO's war ends.
So, 2024 isn't an entirely new concept, but it's getting a little more public acknowledgement, especially from the Afghan government, than it ever has before.
Now, this one's from a couple of days ago.
Extremely important.
Pakistan launched bombing raids on tribal areas 5,500 times since 2008.
And then, come on, you must be lying to me.
Military use Google Earth to pick their targets?
That's what the air marshal, the head of their air force, said in his speech.
That was one of his comments that was a claim that they had made massive progress since the start, was that during the first year or so of the bombing campaign, they had no intelligence on the ground whatsoever, and they were just relying on Google Earth to pick out things to bomb.
And then they bought some sort of fancy reconnaissance gear from the United States in late 2009 and started using that.
And they said now they think they're getting more accurate as a result.
Yeah, I mean, Google Earth isn't updated in anything like real time, is it?
Oh, no.
I mean, even for the premium customer or whatever?
Right.
Google Earth quite often will have weeks if not months of lag time behind what it shows and what's really there.
I mean, we've seen many times images of sites after they've been bombed.
You can go to Google Earth and see what it used to be as opposed to what officials said it was.
Yeah, you used to be able to see my truck and the cat sitting on the hood out front of my house two years after I moved out of there.
It was the same picture.
You could see the little white blot on the hood, too.
It was funny.
But anyways, wow, yeah, so that's the travesty.
Now let me ask you, so how's that working out for them, right?
Do they have the bad guys on the run?
Well, they certainly seem to think so, but if you look at the reality of the situation, the federally administered tribal areas are just as big a mess as they were in 2008, if not more so.
So 5,500 sorties into the tribal areas doesn't seem to have accomplished a whole heck of a lot.
And if anything, they've killed a lot of innocent civilians and made the tribes around there all the angrier at the central government.
Hey, do you have any idea of the supposed, best you could tell, or at least what the government claims the numbers are, of, say, Taliban fighters or Haqqani Network guys or the Pakistani Taliban, if indeed that's who they're trying to fight up in Waziristan and all that are?
Do you have any idea?
You know, they've given numbers in the past, but they vary so incredibly that it's hard to tell.
There have been times where they've estimated the Haqqani Network had about 500 serious members.
There are times when they say they're 20 or 30,000.
The Pakistani Taliban, of course, its official membership is fairly low, probably in the hundreds.
But if you factor in all the tribesmen that are linked to the different tribesmen that are in leadership positions, the Tariqi Taliban Pakistan alone would go into the hundreds of thousands.
Well, you know, I don't know what I did with it.
I had Salim Shahzad's book all about the al-Qaedaization of the Taliban there, where the thing went on for so long that the Egyptians and I guess the Saudis ended up being the ones with the most military experience and the best advice to give and ended up kind of consolidating control over the distribution of the money to all the different groups and so really got a hold of the agenda, even though they're a very small percentage, and that really they've al-Qaedaized the locals.
I guess instead of making them ultra-conservatives, that makes them ultra-radicals or something.
But still, it's all just spitting in the wind.
None of this works.
It's kicking dirt uphill or something.
Well, right.
It doesn't work.
These have been disasters.
And really any student of history in the region could have predicted this because we saw the British fighting very much the same wars in what later became Pakistan's tribal areas hundreds of years ago, and facing largely the same problem.
They would kill a bunch of people and then relatives of those people would be resentful and start fighting them too, and eventually they would end up with such a big force fighting against them that they would just have to declare victory and leave.
All right.
Now, I'm really thankful that you found this article at the...
No, this was John too.
Man, I'm sorry.
I should have double-checked.
But anyway, I know you know all about this report at the Army Times about the CIA and JSOC intervention in Somalia going back to 2003, yeah?
Yeah.
Pretty useful, it seems like, for fleshing in the details of the intervention in the years before the Ethiopian invasion.
Well, right.
And we knew some of this before these new revelations.
Of course, shortly after the Somali government was kicked out of its hotel in Kenya for not paying its bill and tried to move into Somalia itself, they started appointing officials and many of them were very open about the fact that they were on the CIA payroll.
Even one of the first mayors of Mogadishu that they appointed, even though they had nowhere near control over the city, was openly talking about how he was receiving CIA funding as well as being a warlord.
Yep.
Well, and then I guess really the very best piece on this, probably for a long time to come still, will be Jeremy Scahill at the Nation Blowback in Somalia, where he tells this story.
It's the entire war on terrorism in miniature.
You can see your causes and effects and aggressions and blowbacks step by step in elementary school form.
It's just undeniable the way this thing works.
And in the midst of the world's worst humanitarian crisis now, the famine going on there, and of course all the people in refugee camps from the wars who have really no distribution networks for getting food and medicine and things to people who need them the most, it's absolutely the worst travesty since Baghdad 2007, I guess.
Somalia has been just a disaster essentially since that government showed up.
Of course, Somalia has had its problems for a long time.
They don't really have any decent natural resources or anything, but in between the previous government falling and the current government trying to prop itself up, they have one of the fastest growing economies in all of Africa, just by virtue of there not being any regulation.
Yeah, and America smashed it all in the name of a couple of suspected people who might have had information about the coal attack or something.
Right.
Hundreds of thousands killed.
All right, we're out of time.
Thanks very much for your time, Jason, as always.
Sure, thank you for having me.
That's Jason Ditz, everybody.
News.antiwar.com.
