All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, and I am pleased as punch to have the triumphant, heroic Jason Ditz on the other line.
And Jason is a news editor at Antiwar.com.
How are you doing, Jason?
I'm doing good.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
And just this last segment, I replayed your debate with Richard Pearl on the BBC, or most of it anyway, and I want to say thank you and congratulations.
I want to say thank you for being so strong and so not backing down and sticking to the facts and not being bullied or intimidated by any of his hogwash.
And thank you for speaking for so many people who hate these drone wars and think it's disgusting.
And it was just so great to hear someone speaking truth to power like that.
I want to thank you and congratulate you for that.
Well, thank you.
I know.
Please, thank you.
We could go on.
But just let me ask you, what was it like there in the moment actually facing down the Prince of Darkness himself, at least verbally?
What was that like?
I mean, what was going through your head?
Can you give me some kind of a recap?
Well, it was sort of odd because I knew I was going on BBC Radio 5 for a debate, but I didn't know with who.
Oh, really?
And I only found out who the other person was going to be about a half hour beforehand.
Really?
Which probably helped some because I think I would have been more nervous otherwise.
And actually, I think it being a Richard Perle type, actually, I was joking with Eric Garris, our webmaster beforehand, that it would be funny if it was John Bolton or somebody before I found out who it was.
And once I found out, I thought, well, that's a close, a reasonable facsimile of John Bolton.
Right.
But I think it makes it easier as far as the debate part goes, if it's somebody like that, because you're not going to run into any surprises or any sort of middle-of-the-road pragmatic arguments.
Yeah, they've got absolutely nothing except for rhetoric and the fact that they're wearing $3,000 suits and they're on TV and most of the time you're not.
That's all they got.
Right.
And certainly he's at a disadvantage debating on the drone strikes because he's just dead wrong on the drone strikes.
So it's always easier to debate from the correct position than the incorrect position.
Well, I would imagine so.
And you certainly did a hell of a job.
Again, kudos to you.
So I'm looking at anti-war news and there's just so much news and most of it's bad and you write up a lot of it and your partner, John Glaser, writes up a lot of it.
Let me ask you, Jason, what do you think is the most important thing going on today?
I mean, you've written about Syria.
You've written about a drone crashing in Maryland.
You've written three or four other stories.
Is there any one that sticks out in your mind that you think is more important or more interesting to talk about right now than the others?
Well, they're all certainly important.
I think Pakistan supply route is always an important issue.
Syria is always an important issue.
Yeah.
Why don't you catch me up on the Pakistani supply route and the listeners for that matter?
I know that ever since that so-called accidental strike killed those 20-something Pakistani soldiers, they closed the resupply route for the war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, maybe two.
Is that correct?
Tell me, Jason, what exactly happened?
Right.
They closed...
There are basically two roads going from Pakistan to Afghanistan, at least two paved roads.
I guess there are other dirt roads and side roads that civilians could use, but there are basically two roads for trucks.
One's going through Balochistan and one of them's going through the Khyber Pass.
And Pakistan closed these in November because of the U.S. attack.
About that attack, was that really an accident or was that intentional or does anyone know?
It seems like such a colossal error, hard to imagine how that could happen.
Do you have any insight or information on that?
It's just bizarre.
These weren't temporary bases or anything like that.
These were permanent, concrete, brick and mortar bases that would have showed up on any map of the area.
They had to know they were there.
That's what it seems to me.
But then why blow up 27 of your supposed allies who are supposed to be allying you?
That is insane.
What happened?
That's the mystery of it.
Nobody seems to know why this happened.
Wasn't there an investigation or something?
Didn't somebody have to resign or something?
There was an investigation, but it was inconclusive.
All it really came up with was that they felt that the Pakistanis were as much to blame as the U.S. for poor communication.
For being where the missile landed?
Was that their fault, I guess?
Pretty much.
I guess we don't know why it happened, but it did happen.
What were the consequences of that deadly attack on Pakistani soldiers with regard to the border crossing?
The border crossings were both closed to native supplies in November and they've been closed ever since.
The Pakistani parliament has said they would be open to reopening those supply routes, but only on two conditions.
One is that the U.S. apologized for the November attack, and the other is that they stopped launching drone strikes.
And it doesn't sound like the Obama administration is willing to do the apology part.
Why in the world not?
Everybody knows they blew up people they weren't supposed to blow up.
Why not apologize for it?
It's just words for crying out loud.
Ever since we can go back to the Republican primaries that were going on when this first happened, and we see Newt Gingrich and the like saying, oh, it would be a disaster to apologize for this attack, even though it was apparently a mistake and had a disastrous consequence.
What is their logic for thinking that?
I mean, or illogic or whatever you call it.
How would it be a disaster to apologize when you make a deadly mistake?
The argument is Pakistan doesn't deserve an apology for that sort of thing, because I guess Pakistan hasn't been quite as supportive in the global war on terror as they would ideally be from their perspective.
And so ever since then, President Obama has sort of stayed firm at, well, we'll express regret for the death, but we're not going to apologize for the bombing.
Wow.
Talk about mealy-mouthed, evasive, blankety-blank language.
I tell you what, Jason, it's pretty disgust-ipating.
Absolutely is.
And there seems to be just no momentum at all for that.
And certainly the drone strikes, probably to the end of the drone strikes, went nowhere, because if anything, they've actually increased the number of drone strikes in the area.
And what about this other condition about stopping the drone strikes?
Someone, I can't remember who, bad radio host I am, but someone was suggesting that they would pretend to stop the drone strikes or actually stop the drone strikes as a pretext to just increase the night raids, which is what they really, really want to do all along.
I don't know.
Do you have any ideas about that, Jason?
Well, that's more in Afghanistan.
And certainly that's been sort of the underlying thought in the promise to decrease the number of attacks on civilian homes in Afghanistan.
Oh, okay.
My bad.
I was conflating Pakistan with Afghanistan.
I apologize.
Right.
That is a key issue there.
They've been talking up, well, we're going to restrict the times in which we bomb a civilian home in Afghanistan, not get rid of it altogether, but restrict it to only the occasions when there's no other alternative.
And the assumption is the other alternative would be a night raid.
Wow, this voice is going through my head.
What is it?
Is it Obi-Wan Kenobi's voice saying there are always alternatives to fighting, something like that?
I mean, seriously, though, our only alternatives are to have a robot drop a bomb on this house or to have a team of commandos kick in the door and terrorize and possibly kill everyone in the house.
It's either or.
There's no third option, nothing at all worth considering beyond those two.
Right?
Right.
Ridiculous, man.
Totally ridiculous.
And, you know, you ran it on.
Oh, here comes the break.
But on the other side, maybe we can talk about the debate between Peter King and Representative Woolsey, where she brings up the immorality and ineffectiveness of drones and also the possibility that some other big power might use drones against us someday.
How about that?
We're talking with Jason Ditz, news editor of Antiwar.com.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif.
More on the other side, Antiwar Radio.
All right.
Welcome back to the show, everybody.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif.
It's Antiwar Radio.
This is the final segment.
We're wrapping it up with Jason Ditz, news editor at Antiwar.com.
And we were just talking about all kinds of things and drones.
And I was referring to the debate between the mad, rabid dog Peter King and Representative Woolsey, where she brought up a number of cogent points, not the least of which was, well, what if Russia wants to take out a Chechen person in, you know, the United States?
Or what if China wants to drone attack some Falun Gong, you know, activist somewhere in the United States?
Those are, you know, legitimate scenarios to consider.
And it got me thinking, what is the law with regard to drones?
And that reminded me of when you got asked that question during your debate with Richard Perle.
And I'm thinking nobody knows the answer, do they, Jason?
Not really, no.
And it seems like there are several different arguments for it.
The simple argument, which is the one I tried to make, is that there should be no difference between these and any other military strike.
Yeah, like you said in the debate, it's just a different vehicle, literally, a different means of delivering lethal fire into conventional soldiers or whatever.
What's the difference if the missile is fired out of a manned plane or an unmanned plane?
Still the same death and destruction on the ground, that's for sure.
But of course, then we have Leon Panetta arguing that American sovereignty is at stake if they don't kill these people.
So that gives them automatic right to use whatever means they feel is necessary, which would certainly open up the possibility of China or Russia doing the exact same thing on U.S. soil.
Well, so what's stopping them?
I'm sure there's some Falun Gong guys, the Chinese Politburo, whatever, don't like.
How come they don't send a drone over to bomb San Francisco?
I mean, because that's an obvious act of war and the U.S. can fight back.
Is that the reason?
Well, there's really two reasons.
One of them is certainly that, that the U.S. actually has air defenses where Pakistan's tribal areas and southern Yemen and Somalia, there really are no air defenses.
There's nothing stopping them.
But the other issue is that the drone technology really isn't there for China yet.
The U.S. has been way out ahead in developing drone technology and is sort of the first country to have this capability of launching cross-border drone attacks like this.
Also, it's not even really an option for the Chinese.
I didn't understand.
I didn't know that.
I presumed incorrectly that they had the same capabilities and you're saying no.
They don't yet.
But of course, with the U.S. putting such huge amounts of money in their drone program, we're seeing countries like Russia and China and Turkey and India and everybody is investing in drones now because they see that as the next big thing.
So this might not be an issue practically right now, but it might be in 10 years.
And what about the drone that somehow landed safely in Iran?
I mean, I can only imagine who's lining up to take a look at that thing and try to reverse engineer whatever they can.
And I bet Russia and China are on that list.
What do you think, Jason?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And that was one of the most advanced drones in the U.S. fleet.
Does anyone know anything about that?
I bet it's all classified what really happened, but does anybody know how that drone landed in Iran and got intercepted or what have you?
Well, the Iranian explanation is that they managed to hack into the control signal and order it to land.
Wow.
I'm not sure I buy that entirely, but I don't have an alternative theory to weigh it against, so I don't know.
And we don't really know enough about the program to dispute that claim.
We don't know, for instance, how encrypted that transmission is.
You would think it would be virtually impossible to do that, but the U.S. has done some sort of shoddy things in the past with the development of hugely expensive technology.
So who knows?
Well, Scott did an interview with a woman whose name escapes me off the top of my head, but they were talking about how unreliable these drones are and how they crash a lot and how they don't do what they're supposed to do some of the time, a lot of the time.
And that's another thing I didn't know.
So for Iran to hack into this thing and land it perfectly when even the U.S. has all these glitches and problems with it, I don't know.
I'm just saying none of it seems to make sense to me, but I don't know the answer.
Yeah, and we've seen the unreliability of that firsthand in Maryland yesterday.
Yes, good point.
You got to write up about the $176 million fireball that's burning up woodchucks in the swamps of Maryland.
Why don't you tell the audience about that?
This is the U.S. Navy's drone headquarters on this river in Maryland.
They signed a multi-billion dollar contract with Northrop Grumman to deliver a number of drones, exactly how many we don't know yet, but a number of drones to be used mostly for surveilling the ocean around where aircraft carriers are and whatnot.
They've run a couple of successful test flights around aircraft carriers in Hawaii based out of this Maryland base.
But one of the test flights yesterday just inexplicably lost contact with the base just shortly after takeoff and crashed and burned in a swamp.
I would call that a failed test, wouldn't you?
Absolutely.
Only it cost $176 million that we know of is part of the problem.
Right.
That's the estimated cost according to the Congressional Budget Office of what they paid for that drone.
What it would cost to replace it might be considerably more though, because we've seen other countries which have been trying to buy these drones from Northrop Grumman.
South Korea in particular has backed away from a plan to buy multiple drones from them because they said the price had more than doubled in the past couple of years.
Well, what's on these things, Jason?
Again, I'm sure some of it's classified, but $176 million for an airplane that doesn't even have a cockpit in it?
I mean, what is it, got a toilet made of gold in there or something?
What is on these things?
Well, certainly the most advanced thing that would be on them would be the array of cameras for taking all these high resolution surveillance photos.
And I guess you'd have to have some pretty darn sophisticated computer stuff to be relaying it all to the headquarters in a meaningful way.
And you're way out of my pay grade when you start talking about all that.
Although apparently not as sophisticated as they'd like, since they keep failing.
Good point.
And I'm sure that with overruns and bloated military industrial complex shenanigans, Jason and Zoe's drone company could make it for half of that and make it probably much better.
It's probably another factor in all that.
Oh, certainly.
Want to start a drone company?
I'm just kidding.
You'd probably be smart enough to actually do something like that.
Not me.
Anyway, yeah, drones everywhere.
Gosh, what a terrible tragedy.
And everyone else is going to get them.
And what's it going to be like in a world where everybody's got armed drones flying around?
I don't like the sound of that.
Not a bit.
We just got a few minutes before the end of the show.
Here's a story about U.N. observers in Syria attacked by crowds and shot at from Reuters at Yahoo News.
What's the latest from Syria, Jason?
Anybody know what even is going on down there on the ground?
Well, there seems to be a lot more fighting going on in the last week and a half, ever since the rebels pulled out of the ceasefire.
Which rebels are those?
I mean, is there one group of rebels here?
Or we just got a whole bunch of factions running around willy-nilly killing each other?
Well, there are several factions.
But the Free Syrian Army, in particular, repudiated the ceasefire last week and said that they no longer consider themselves bound by it.
Interestingly enough, after they said that, they issued a couple of statements accusing the regime of violating the ceasefire in incidents after they'd already said the ceasefire didn't apply to them.
Oh, speaking of Syria, have any heads rolled, or is there any consequences for the BBC in running those fake, or re-running the victims of an Iraq massacre and pretending like those were Syrians?
Do you hear of any fallout from that?
Not so far.
Wow, because they got busted real hard doing that one.
And I mean, I suppose that they're just lazy, but I have to think that somebody knew what was going on and thought they could get away with it and just didn't.
What's your take on that?
That's certainly possible.
But with virtually no media on the ground in Syria, and we've seen a handful of reporters try to get into the country.
We saw one last week, in fact, where a British reporter for Channel 4 tried to get into Syria along the Lebanon border, and the rebels sent him into a dead end zone in the middle of an open fire area.
And he's now saying that he thinks the rebels set him up to get killed by the regime, hoping that they could use that as a propaganda game on their side.
But I think with this lack of journalists on the ground, there's a tendency for these bigger media outlets that are so used to relying on their own journalists to just take everything at face value that they see.
Well, they sure blew it in this case.
Whether it was accidental or intentional, the effect is the same.
And that's just the worst kind of journalism, and it undercuts anyone's credibility.
And I quit watching the BBC a long time ago just because of that.
And we're out of time.
Thank you so much, Jason, for years.
News editor at Antiwar.com, Jason Ditz.
Thanks again, man.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
You're welcome.
