04/13/10 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Right now I'm looking at news.antiwar.com.
The headline is Haaretz reporter Blau a fugitive felon over leaks.
Israel insists.
The sub-headline Cam's lawyer urges Blau to return.
But to what?
You may be wondering what in the heck I am talking about.
Well, here to explain is the guy who wrote it.
Again, news.antiwar.com, our managing news editor, Jason Ditz.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Okay, so what the hell is this?
Well, it's a story that's kind of been developing for the last few weeks in Israel, although it hasn't really been covered until last Thursday, because the military's been censoring it.
But in December, they arrested this woman, Anit Kam.
She's a reporter, but she was also a conscript in the Israeli military, working in one of their intelligence offices, and she was able to get her hands on a whole bunch of classified data about war crimes that the Israeli military was committing and pass them on to Yuri Blau, who's a reporter for Haaretz.
Okay, and so now, why is Blau a fugitive felon?
Well, it's not really clear why or how they can even make that claim, but at the moment, he's not charged with anything, at least that they've made public.
He took these classified documents, and apparently Shin Bet, the domestic Israeli spy agency, got wind of it and demanded that he turn them over, which he turned over apparently some but not all of them.
And there was a sort of gentleman's agreement with Haaretz over how this was going to be handled, that he would be allowed to publish these articles that he's published over the last several years based on this intelligence, but that he would turn over all the documents when he was done, and that there would be no effort by Shin Bet to find out who his source was for the information, and there would be no action taken against him either.
Well, now Haaretz is saying that Shin Bet has basically broken the agreement because they arrested his source, and they're demanding that he show up and submit to an interrogation, but so far he's not really charged with anything, and he's taken off to London and doesn't sound like he's coming back any time soon.
All right, so just to sum up, first of all, Anant Kam, was it?
Kam or Kam, I'm not really sure how it's pronounced.
Anyway, so she was a reporter and an intelligence agent, she worked for Haaretz?
Well, she didn't work for Haaretz, she worked for another media outlet in Israel, but she served as a conscript.
You know, everyone in Israel has to serve in the military for a while, and she was basically a secretary while she was in the military.
And what she stole here, they're calling Israel's Pentagon Papers, and now for those who are youngsters in the Chaos audience, that was the secret history of the Vietnam War that Daniel Ellsberg stole and risking life in prison, and he knew it, copied and gave to Congress and to the New York Times and Washington Post, and ended up really having a lot to do with the end of the Vietnam War, and in fact even the fall of Richard Nixon, as Nixon was impeached for sending the CIA to break into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in order to find blackmail information on him, etc., etc.
So for them to call this the Israeli Pentagon Papers, that means that's a big deal.
What is it about these documents that make them such a big deal, Jason?
Well, the big thing, and the documents appear to cover a lot of different things, but the major story that has broken out of them is that the military has been deliberately defying an order by the Israeli high court that said you're supposed to try to arrest political opponents when at all possible in the West Bank.
If you want to bring them in, you're supposed to arrest them, not just assassinate them.
Well, the military has a policy, apparently a long-standing policy since that order, of saying, oops, the arrest went bad, and the guy wound up dead, when they just basically would come in with guns a-blazin' and kill him and then say that they tried to arrest him but weren't able to.
Okay, so you have judicial rulings on the rules of engagement by the IDF, that's the Israeli Defense Forces, in their occupation of the Palestinians in the West Bank.
That's what we're talking about.
And these papers purport to prove that in fact the real rules of engagement were in direct violation of these court rulings, right?
Right.
Well, no wonder they're upset.
Well, right, but the odd thing is, every article about the Israeli military that's published in an Israeli paper or reported on Israeli radio or television has to be cleared through the military censor first.
And all of these articles were published over the past few years, and the military cleared every single one of them, except for one that they asked not to be published, and which wasn't published.
So now they're coming back and saying that this was a grave threat to national security, that these reports were published about them basically breaking the law and violating this court order, but they were the ones that allowed these to be published in the first place.
So what's the big deal?
Well, it's not really clear why this suddenly became such a huge issue, except that Shin Bet had been investigating it all along and figured out who the leaker was, and then basically disappeared her into her own home.
I mean, they put her under house arrest in December and told every single Israeli media outlet, you can't report this, you can't report that she's under arrest.
And so it was basically a secret until late last month when Western media started to get wind of it and started to report on it.
But in the Israeli media, they still weren't allowed to report on it until last Thursday when they finally lifted that order.
I wonder how long before the Knesset votes to repeal our First Amendment.
Or maybe that could just be an executive order by Netanyahu or something, you know?
Well, it's amazing how much outrage there's been in the Knesset over this leak, too, not at the sort of bumbling attempt to censor her arrest or anything like that, but the fact that Haaretz printed these reports that were okayed by the military censor, and you have MKs calling for Haaretz to be shut down for national security reasons, and you have people urging that people who are patriotic Israelis cancel their subscriptions to the paper, and it's really become quite a mess.
Very strange times over there.
Tell me about this new scandal about some order about figuring some kind of legal loophole to call everyone in the West Bank deportable on an individual basis or something, some kind of plan to deport everybody?
Yeah, there are new rules for when they can deport somebody, which seem to have been designed so that they can deport everyone that's from the Gaza Strip that's living in the West Bank back to the Gaza Strip.
I mean, that appears to have been the intention.
But it's so vague, and some of the requirements for Palestinians to stay in the West Bank, even ones that were born in the West Bank, are incredible.
They're demanding that every single Palestinian that lives in the West Bank have a specific permission from the military to stay there.
And if they don't have that permission, they can basically be deported at any time.
And the real kicker to this is, the Israeli military doesn't appear to offer that permission in the first place.
It doesn't seem like it's even possible to get a document from the Israeli military that would be considered sufficient permission to avoid this deportation.
Well, so let me ask you this, though.
What about General Dayton and his army?
And this is like the least reported story in the world or something, Jason, except at news.antiwar.com and I guess over at Robert Dreyfus' blog and a couple other places.
But an American general has been building a Palestinian army on the premise, I guess, begun at Annapolis in the last sort of pseudo-effort of the Bush administration to begin some kind of peace talks or something there.
But the program was, yeah, by the time we're done building this army, there's going to be a government in the West Bank for this to be the army of.
Otherwise, what has General Dayton just done, except train and arm up a bunch of Palestinian future resistance fighters?
Well, it does seem like that's all he's really done, because it doesn't seem like there's much chance that there's going to be a Palestinian state anytime soon.
So, I mean, certainly the U.S. has had its favorites within the Fatah faction, that it's supported and armed and trained over the years, and especially recently since Fatah has gotten more sort of international credibility as the only official voice of the Palestinians, since they're split with Hamas.
But as far as building a military for them, it seems like they put the cart before the horse and started building this military before they knew for sure that they were going to have a state for this military to be the military of.
Yeah, well, and I guess the Bush people who began the policy just figured, oh, well, what do we care?
It looks like we're doing something.
But now, I mean, obviously anybody could have anticipated that, no, there's not going to be a Palestinian state until the Likud party says they want one, which means never.
Right, well, everybody gives the, except for the very far-right settlers parties, everyone in Israel kind of gives lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state.
But whenever it comes around to actually making it happen, there seem to be so many obstacles put in its place that I can't imagine that the Bush administration ever really thought this was something that was going to happen in any sort of timely fashion.
Well, and, you know, it's such an important subject to me, the particular history of that, because, you know, after September 11th, and this was always part of the infighting, you know, Cheney and all them hated the way Colin Powell came in and acted like he was going to run the whole thing, and Cheney decided, no, I am, not you, and you had all that kind of faction fighting, and I guess they say the only battle that Colin, well, maybe two battles Colin Powell ever won was over the spy plane incident with the Chinese and whether or not to even take Iraq to the U.N.
Security Council.
But the story goes that right after September 11th, Colin Powell, who is himself a war criminal, I'm not trying to lionize the guy or anything, he told George Bush, look, man, now's our chance.
You got all the political capital in the world.
We got to force a settlement and resolve this Palestine issue, which is, guess what, at the source of a lot of our terrorism problem and resentment against us in the Middle East.
And Bush, I guess, you know, being the empty vessel he was, said, yeah, okay, that sounds reasonable to me.
And then Tom DeLay came to the White House and said, I am here to speak on behalf of all the Christian Zionists in America.
If you put the slightest bit of pressure on Ariel Sharon, we will all come after you.
And, you know, you will lose our support forever, whatever.
And he knew that was the mistake his father made, losing the support of the Christian Zionists, and he didn't want to do it.
And so the entire Powell theory that now's our chance to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue was put on the back burner for another seven years.
And then, of course, they gave the most half-hearted effort at Annapolis.
And, in fact, turned the whole thing over to Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.
Well, absolutely.
And there's always this sort of impression that this is something that the U.S. could solve relatively quickly if they really wanted to, but I'm not sure that's the case on either front.
I don't think it's something that is going to be easily solved, as we've seen with Obama trying to push for a settlement over the past year.
It's such a politically unpopular issue.
I'm not sure a government's ever going to put enough effort into it to get anything done with it.
All right.
Now, we've got a few minutes here left, so talk to me a little bit about Obama's new nuclear policy.
And do I have it right that, for intents and purposes, he threatened to nuke Iran?
Yeah, he threatened to nuke Iran and North Korea very explicitly, in fact.
When it first came out that his new policy was going to exclude Iran and North Korea, it was sort of presented as a loophole that was kind of built in, and they were going to make some vague reference to noncompliance with the NPP as allowing them to make a nuclear first strike.
But once it was actually released, and when Secretary Gates started talking about it publicly, it was pretty clear this wasn't a loophole that was being slipped in at the last minute at all.
It was a very explicit threat that Iran is subject to being nuked, basically, at any time.
All right, so here's the deal, right?
The policy has been all along, in the land of the free, in the home of the brave, in the place where we all believe that every individual is self-evidently born with natural rights all over the world, the official policy was we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in a first strike to start a war with any state in the world.
And Obama came, and now he's revised that standard to we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in a first strike to start a war with any nuclear power, or with any non-nuclear power, which we say is violating their international agreements, which was still the vaguest terminology to not differentiate between the actual nonproliferation treaty and a bunch of bogus UN Security Council resolutions.
Right, and the old...
I mean, that ought to be just, you know, my hair's standing on end, and I'm pretty used to this kind of thing, Jason, but man, you know?
Reserving the right to first strike and nuke a country that, even by definition, right?
By definition, Iran is categorized here as a non-nuclear weapon state, and that's what we're threatening them for, is their nuclear weapons, supposedly.
We've got to bomb them for.
Right, and the old Bush administration doctrine was sort of vague about when they would use it, but they kind of made it clear that it was something to do with first strike capabilities against nations that had biological or chemical or nuclear weapons.
And the Obama administration sort of publicly presented it as, no, no, we would never do that, except as a deterrent against other nuclear powers.
But then over the past several days, they've made it clear that, well, it's except for nuclear powers, and Iran and North Korea don't count, plus biological weapons still count, so it's not clear that they've changed the policy much at all.
Right, you know, that's what I thought when I read where Hillary Clinton said, no, all bets are off if anybody was to use chemical weapons on us, which, you know, that's so vague as, you know, five people get hurt by, you know, one guy tries to use some mustard gas in an ineffective way or something, hardly the same thing as an atom bomb going off.
And that was the threat against Iraq in the first Gulf War, or the beginning of the current Gulf War back in 1991, which was, if you use chemical weapons against our troops, we'll nuke Baghdad.
And that was with us invading them.
Right, and now it's basically the same policy.
So Germany and France and everybody are cheering Obama for making this bold new step towards a policy of deterrence instead of an aggressive policy, but it doesn't look like he's done much, if anything, to change the policy at all.
Yeah, well, you know, Chris Floyd, I think, says it best, as usual.
He had this whole thing about liberals who still want to justify Barack Obama.
But, you know, I mean, I think any of us, Jason, can, you know, even with minimal government school knowledge or whatever, and even if you have a more sophisticated understanding, where you know that the president is just a puppet of whatever interests put him in there, still, all of us know how much power the president actually has and how easy it would be, it's so easy to tell, how easy it would be for Obama to do other than what he's doing.
And so, I mean, how many years in a row can he continue to kill women and children every day before he's just a mass murderer like George Bush?
He's just a bloody-handed imperialist like George Bush.
We've got to be getting near that line here somewhere.
I'm not sure for a lot of people that that line is even possible to cross.
I mean, George Bush was the bad guy and Obama's the good guy, and the reality of the situation be damned, you can't compare the two.
Yeah, well, and so it really does come down to, I hate admitting this too, but, I mean, it's just, you can tell.
You could take the amount of blood of innocents spilled by Barack Obama in the last year and three months, two months, three months, and you could drown the entire American anti-war movement in it.
You know?
We ought to be way past that point.
It really comes down to, I heard this, you know where I heard this more than anywhere else, we all heard this for years and years, but where I heard this more than anywhere else was in Crawford, Texas, where the defenders of George Bush during the Camp Casey thing when Cindy Sheehan was leading the protest up there, and the defenders of George Bush would say, or the defenders of the war, the defenders of all of it, would say, you just don't like George Bush.
You just hate George Bush.
And, you know, my answer always was, of course I do.
Look at all the terrible things he's doing.
But, you know, it was the cause and then the effect, not the other way around.
But, you know what, it turns out that those jerks were right, and that really the vast majority of the anti-war movement, I guess they just believed that George Bush was from Texas or something, even though he's from Connecticut, even though he's George Bush's son.
Somehow he was a right-wing, redneck Texan who drove a truck, just like in the TV spot, and that's what they didn't like about him.
Apparently the mass murder really wasn't the problem.
Well, it certainly wasn't the problem when Bill Clinton was in office.
I mean, he killed plenty of Iraqis in his own right, and people loved him.
And there was very little protest about it.
And still do.
People still think the 1990s was peacetime.
Oh, jeez.
All right, well, now that we've broken everybody's spirit, I've got to let you go because the show's over.
Thanks, Jason.
Okay, thanks.
That, everybody, is the great Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at news.antiwar.com.
Really great stuff.
I mean, he is on top of all the most important news all day long, every day, kicking its ass for you there at news.antiwar.com at the top of the page.
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