Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/19/24 Dave DeCamp on the Pager Attack in Lebanon and the Ongoing Slaughter of the Palestinians

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

Dave DeCamp was on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss the situation in the Middle East. They start with the ongoing slaughter in Gaza before moving on to the pager attack in Lebanon, the growing violence in the West Bank, the US withdrawal from Niger and more. Discussed on the show: “Israel's conduct in the war will consume us all” (Responsible Statecraft) “Nearly 1,000 Palestinian health workers killed by Israeli forces in Gaza named” (Middle East Eye) “US Says Four ISIS Leaders Were Killed in Iraq Raid Last Month” (Antiwar.com) Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com and the host of Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp. Follow him on Twitter @decampdave This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, September 19th, 2004, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, you all welcome to show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com. And the author of the book, Enough Already. Time to end the war.

on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, more than 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton show. And of course, I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA. And our guest today again is the great Dave DeCamp, our news editor at anti-war.com. Welcome back to the show. Dave. How are you doing? I'm good, Scott. Thanks for having me. Really happy to have you here. So time to get caught up on who all the Israeli Reich has been murdering in the Gaza ghetto for the last week. What have we missed? Well, I mean, in Gaza, you know, things have continued every day daily strikes across the Gaza Strip. I've been keeping track of the death toll put out by Gaza's

health ministry. You know, it's at least a few dozen each day. The one that they just put out today on Wednesday. They said 20 were killed in the previous 24 hours. The death toll is about 41,200 somewhere around there. And it is just relentless. And, you know, one thing we recently got was a account with Reuters to get their pictures and videos. And they have journalists in Gaza. So something I've been doing every day is just kind of going through those pictures. And it really gives you an idea. You know, in all these strikes, every day, children are being killed or wounded and you see them bloodied being brought into the hospital and you know things aren't as heavy as they were in the first few months of this thing you know last year when they were killing

hundreds every day but it's still just massacres daily daily massacres continue and it just doesn't seem like there's any end in sight now with the ceasefire talk seemed to be just completely done with at least for the moment and they continue and they're just kind of continuing continuing to encroach, taking territory, building these kind of land corridors where they're demolishing all these buildings. You know, it goes to show the long-term plan is occupation. And, you know, Netanyahu doesn't want to give up any of this territory that he's taken. That's been the whole thing about the ceasefire talks with the Philadelphia corridor.

So it just doesn't seem like there's any end in sight. And we're coming up on a year, which is almost unbelievable, you know, just a few weeks away from the one-year mark. Yeah. All right. So our friend Daniel Davis wrote a piece for responsible state craft that I wanted to bring up here and maybe get your comment and what you think of it. It's not our strict non-interventionism. He's saying that, you know, and he's a lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Army retired, but war veteran. And so he's making comparisons to wars he's been in and attempted counterinsurgency campaigns and so forth. And he's just saying there was a way for them to do. do this, accepting the premise of a full invasion and occupation of the Gaza Strip. Well, not that they didn't already have it under occupation, but you know what I mean? Boots on the ground all over the place, but without at all doing what they've done in erasing entire neighborhoods off of the map and all of this the way that they've done and killing all of these extra people.

And essentially, it would just be dividing the place into quarters or sixths or whatever, and moving the people from place to place and filtering out the fighting age males and trying to figure out who's the most dangerous, especially who's responsible for what happened on October the 7th and hold them responsible. And otherwise, try to ratchet tensions down, try to even, you know, it's coin, right? Counterinsurgency doctrine. Try to get the locals to accept the situation that the foreign occupiers are the security force and to go ahead and turn over the troublemakers. And it doesn't work that well, but it would have at least been worth a shot. But then what do we get instead? Just bombing the hell out of everybody saying that they're

going to obliterate Hamas. But there's two million people there. Whatever percentage of those are fighting age males between what, 15 and 40. You can't just make them all give up. Hamas is just a word for a Palestinian who would resist in the Gaza Strip at this point anyway. so as you say here we are a year into it and what they've embarked on is not any kind of counterinsurgency campaign versus what michael flynn would call an anti-insurgency campaign just bomb them just get revenge but it doesn't work it doesn't accomplish anything yeah you know one thing i've heard veterans say is that this there is there was a much different way that Israel could have gone about it, you know, sending in troops and trying to make sure that they

limit civilian casualties and taking risks. And the thing is that, you know, that would have risked a lot of more Israeli casualties on the ground. And, you know, of course, the Iraq war overall was a crime. And there were war crimes committed by U.S. soldiers. But there was also a lot of troops that I know some personally who were there who took great risks to, you know, mitigate civilian casualties and some of the counter-insurgency fights that they were doing there. And with Israel, we didn't see anything close to that. I mean, I mentioned the first few months of this thing. That's when they were really dropping those 2,000-pound bombs

on all the high-rise apartment buildings, just completely wiping the place out. And we learned from 972 magazine, the Israeli magazine, that what they were doing essentially was a campaign of terror against the civilians, what they call power targets. They said the idea is to put pressure on civilians to make them rise up, against Hamas, of course, that, you know, was never going to work.

And now what we're seeing is, you know, they've kind of said that they've transferred. They've, they have gone into a more targeted approach when it comes to their war in Gaza. But what we've seen is still just more airstrikes. It's not like they're sending. And, you know, there have been some ground raids to try to get hostages and things like that. But for the most part, what we're still seeing is just airstrikes in these intent camps, you know, they keep bombing this al-Mawesi so-called humanitarian safe zone and saying oh there was a Hamas command center there well they don't show any evidence for that and also there was a lot of women and children literally intense there where you're dropping these bombs so it's not anything close to that I mean it does go to show there is an option you know there was a much different option that Israel could have pursued even if they wanted to go in there and take out Hamas's leadership and people who were responsible for October 7th but But that's not what this is about.

This is about a campaign of destruction. You could see it in the rhetoric from the Israeli officials. Destruction, and now they want, you know, it's a land grab. They want to take this land, get these Palestinians out of there. The problem is that Egypt doesn't want to take them in. So they're just kind of keeping this thing going and slowly encroaching on the territory as they can. Yeah. Headline on anti-war.com today, 1,000 Palestinian health workers killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.

surely that's just incidental and not deliberate targeting of health care workers. Dave, what do you know? Well, so that Gaza's health ministry put out earlier this week a list of about, I believe, 34,000 names of Palestinians who were killed in Gaza that they say they have fully identified. That's about 7,000 short of their death toll. And, you know, it's very meticulous. And this is something that they did in the early, days of this thing when President Biden came out and kind of said he didn't trust the numbers coming out of Gaza, the health ministry then put out a list of all the names that they had up to that point, which I think was around 7,000 or so, or maybe less. I forget the exact number, but they're basically showing that, you know, they have a pretty meticulous process of, they only count bodies that they get that are brought into morgues or hospitals, and they identify

them. And so they listed all of them. And I know air wars, you know, this took them a long time, so they put this report out not that long ago. They looked at that initial list and kind of cross-checked with reports, with families who lost people and found that it was inaccurate list. So they did that again, a much bigger list here. And I know for a little while the health ministry said that they were marking people dead based on credible media reports, but now it seems like they've gone back to just counting the bodies that come in. You know, For instance, there was a strike recently on the Al-Mawesi camp that it looks like Israel used the 2,000-pound bombs.

They left huge craters. And the initial report said 40 were killed. And then Gaza's health ministry said 19 were killed, but that was just based on the bodies. The civil defense workers said that people were still buried under the rubble. So they also put out a list of names of all the health care workers, which is just over a thousand, doctors, nurses, you know, other hospital staff. And if you look at that list of names that they put out, the full 34,000, the first 14 pages, the ages of the people are listed as zero. These are infants who didn't make it to their first birthday.

And they number 710. So, I mean, you just think about that. 710 babies who didn't make it to their first birthday. And this is an incomplete list still. So, you know, again, it just goes to show. And they say of that number, 60% are women and children and elderly as well. It's also in that 60%. So it's just a complete horror show.

And, you know, again, we see people still say that the health ministry is not reliable. We've seen the State Department say earlier in the war that they believe the death toll is actually higher than what the health ministry is putting out. They don't count the people who are missing under the rubble. We've seen videos of Israeli troops shooting Palestinians and then just bearing them right on the spot. Then there's also the indirect debts that aren't counted. So I would say that these numbers are probably an undercount. And again, just from looking at all the pictures and all the videos coming out of Gaza from these news agencies, it's clear that this is a war on children and civilians.

I mean, you see the Israel supporters here in the U.S. I mean, that's one thing that's just so despicable to me is people here, justifying. these war crimes, you know, and saying things like, oh, Hamas shouldn't have started it, you know, when they hear about children being killed. We just saw this, if you want to get into the pager explosions in Lebanon, same thing. At least two children were killed in that, and you see people celebrating it, oh, this is the most targeted attack on a terrorist group that's ever happened. And they set off these bombs all over Beirut, all over southern Lebanon, just completely indiscriminate. people cheer for it here in the United States.

Well, it's not completely indiscriminate, but it's somewhat indiscriminate. I mean, their theory is that anyone who works for Hezbollah in any capacity whatsoever's life is forfeit. They're all terrorists, don't you know? But it's a lie. Nobody thinks that everybody works for Hezbollah as a terrorist. Ben Shapiro, the leader of the American conservative movement, says that. But does anyone actually think that that's true? If you stop and think about it for a single moment when clearly it's a political party and a state, a sub-state in southern Lebanon.

It has been for 40 years. And they haven't committed a suicide bombing since 1999. So who are the terrorists setting off bombs in civilian neighborhoods, in civilian shops and civilian homes? Yeah. And I just saw this story, the New York Times reported on. So there was a nine-year-old girl who was killed. And so apparently right before the paeders blew up, they beeped. And it showed that there was a message.

And then it got really hot and exploded. So this girl was in her home. And it was her dad's pager, you know, on the table. It beeped. She picked it up to go give it to him. And she was killed. And there's a video of, I'm sure you've seen, of a man, you know, shopping in a grocery store in a supermarket.

And there's children around. and the pager explodes looks like in his bag he was the only one who was it looked like he was wounded but i mean this is you know someone just out among civilians and and these were exploded all over and while people were driving their cars and you know in crowded streets so you talk about terrorism okay so dave yesterday there was another attack i don't know i think this time it was radios is that right yeah yeah so this It looks like it was radios, you know, kind of walkie talkies used by Hezbollah that exploded and at least three people were killed. Hundreds of them blew up. I don't know the details about

who died exactly. You know, I know the pagers, they said at least four medical staff died or in that attack. And there are paramedics who operate in southern Lebanon, who a lot of them have been killed by Israeli airstrikes, who, you know, if they're operating in that area, you know, They might have gotten some of these pagers or some of these walkie talkies as well, these radios. And this is just a huge embarrassment for Hezbollah, of course, and they're vowing that they're going to respond. And, you know, the timing of this thing, when the pagers exploded just that morning or it was either that morning or the night before the Israeli security cabinet met, and they added something to their war goals. war goals are something like, you know, eliminating Hamas in Gaza, returning the Israelis, you know, making sure the settlements in the South are safe. And now they're adding that, oh, and returning

the displaced Israelis to the north is one of their goals. And they said that that was basically to show that they're putting, going to be putting more focus on Lebanon. And then we see this pager attack happen right after that. So right now it doesn't look like it was kind of like a, you know, We don't see any big escalation when it comes to airstrikes or any sort of Israeli invasion, but I think that's certainly a possibility in the next few days. Hang on just one second for me here. You guys, I'm so proud to announce the publication of the Libertarian Institute's 14th book. It's Israel, winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War, Undue Influence, Deceptions,

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else who make similar calls on their own of course roberts and roberts can help you with platinum palladium and silver as well as gold don't let the fed in the war party inflate all your savings away look up roberts and roberts at rrbi dot co well i sure raises real questions about you know how badly this hurt has bala it took out so many of their guys at once and you know how far back it set them and disrupted their ability to resist or to attack to retaliate, you know, I guess we'll see how that shakes out. Yeah, and, you know, I've seen some people say maybe this Netanyahu could take this as a victory and say, look, you know, we disrupted them and, you know.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Hey, that's what we said about Afghanistan for 20 years. Just pretend you won and go. Nobody cares what you call it. Just stop killing people. God's sakes. And speaking of which, tell us about the pogroms against the Palestinians in the West Bank lately.

Yeah, I mean, things really escalated in the West Bank a couple weeks ago. Israel launched what they said was their biggest military operation since the second Intifada. And a few dozen Palestinians have been killed since then. And the settler attacks have escalated even more. They just stormed an elementary school the other day and attacked the teachers and tied up to principal. So all that stuff. Wait, wait, wait, I'm trying to remember. In America, do we consider it bad when people attack a school? I think, okay. I'm sorry, go back to what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians again. Yeah. So, yeah, this is a really, I mean, this is an elementary school that the settlers stormed.

And, you know, I mean, this is something that they do. They're the terrorists in the West Bank. They break into people's homes and threaten to kill them and their families if they don't leave. And they've been displaced. people like that. Again, this stuff has really escalated since October 7th and even just more recently since Israel escalated military operations because they have the backing of the Israeli military. The Israeli military showed up and they arrested teachers at the school when they stormed the school. Of course, also, an American Aishinor Agi was just killed. An American citizen, a woman, 26-year-old, she was born in Turkey, but she moved to the U.S. as an infant, grew up here, went to college here. She was, she joined some protesters against settlements in a Palestinian village

and she was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper. And, you know, of course, Israel says, oh, it was an accident. It was unintentional, but all of the footage, all the account from the Palestinian residents from the other activists who were there show that she was far away, you know, 200 yards away from the Israeli troops posed no threat at all. And again, she was shot in the head. An Israeli soldier doesn't accidentally shoot somebody in the head. And so this is something, of course, that's happened multiple times in recent years. The Israeli troops killing Americans, and the U.S. never does anything about it. They continue to supply them with weapons and everything. And this is something you see from the Biden administration. They kind of pretend like they care about this stuff that's

happening in the West Bank. They sanctioned a few settlers. They put out statements about the settler violence, but they're not, they're still giving the Israeli military, you know, full support and everything. So it's all just for show kind of the stuff that they're saying. Yeah. Oh, man, it's just crazy. Just for anyone who wonders why we go so hard against what's happening here, just read anti-war.com for a few days in a row. And you'll see. This is all on our time in our name. And September 11th has proven that they are not bulletproof. Some cooks can attack us with our own airliners with anything. And there's just no chance that there's not going to be horrific blowback against the United States of America for Israel's sins here,

because they do it with our money, with our weapons, and in our name. And everybody, knows it. There's no way to deny that. And so, you know, it's like Homer Simpson declaring there will be no comeuppance. You know something is going to happen to him by the end of the episode. There will be comeuppance. And I'm not saying that Americans deserve it. I'm saying that that's what terrorists will conclude and how they will behave. That's what I'm saying. We are all in danger because of Israel's murders. Yeah, we recently saw two American, I believe it was two,

two American Navy sailors, or actually they were Marines, but they were in Turkey aboard a ship, and they were attacked in the street by Turkish nationalists, and, you know, they said they named the Palestinians as a motivation for the attack. Yep.

And you know, I forget if I've been mentioned this on which show or what, but it's worth mentioning again. I just believe it because of my bias, Dave. I don't know how you feel about it, but the New York Times says that the CIA says that they thwarted an ISIS plan to blow up a stadium during a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, Austria. And they said as many as tens of thousands could have been killed, which at least, I guess, means that the plan was to collapse the columns and collapse the stadium full of kids at an American pop star show. And I think we just need to take that seriously, man. It's like that time that they almost knocked one World Trade Center tower over into the other in 1993,

and then nobody cared. Two days later, they attacked the Branch Dividians and changed the subject, and nobody ever looked back. But meanwhile, they should have taken that as seriously as if the bad guys had succeeded. And I think same thing here. We need to be really worried about the levels of violence that these bin Ladenites can dish out against innocent Americans. civilians here and abroad yeah from what i looked into that taylor swift thing it didn't seem like it was a genuine plot you know some of these cases it looks like in it you know FBI cooked it up but not so much in that one oh yeah no this is not the wheels were

yeah yeah you can always tell the different you know there was i think at least two fake plots against the new york subway and then there was one very real one you know what i mean two of them were clearly frame-ups by the FBI. The third one was like, thank God they found this guy in time. He was about to kill a bunch of people. That was Ozzy from Denver was going to do that. He wasn't framed.

He was guilty, and I mean, this is a real risk. You know, just because Robert Mueller made a career out of framing 300 innocent people doesn't mean that there's not actual guilty, dangerous terrorists out there that threaten us as well. And again, it never was because we're free.

It always was because of Lekudnik's murdering people, you know? And they've been murdering a lot of people lately. And they've been murdering a lot of people lately. And frankly, look, I know people say, Nuh, Scott, that was only number two on the list. Bin Laden's main complaint was America occupying Saudi Arabia to bomb Iraq for eight years. And the thing is, yeah, but why did he do that?

Because Martin Indick, who used to work for Yitzhak Shamir, and then came to work for Bill Clinton, came, and he's the founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. insisted on this dual containment policy because at again israeli behest america had beat iraq up so badly in iraq war one that they weren't powerful enough to balance against iran anymore so now america had to stay to contain them both because that's what israel wanted not because that's what exon wanted they didn't give a damn it was because of the israelis so that's what got those towers knocked down and three thousand killed and twenty years of war kicked off 23 years ago so what do we

expects going to happen this time, nothing? Yeah, and then what would the response be, you know, if there is a big attack? Like, what would be next? Real quick at the end here, let me ask you about the, at least alleged withdrawal from North Africa and Iraq. So the U.S. has completed its withdrawal from Niger, according to the U.S. military. They just put out a statement, and it looks like they actually got out of there. They're looking to kind of beef up their military presence in other countries in West Africa, but no sign yet that they're going to build anything like they had in Niger. They had that big drone base, Air Base 201, which was basically a hub for U.S. military operations, you know, drone counterterror operations in the region. So that's done. And that happened

pretty quickly after the coup in July 2023. But now Iraq, I'm kind of a little more pessimistic on this whole Iraq situation because, so we saw what happened last year and then, at the the beginning of this year when the U.S., there was the escalations between the U.S. and the PMF, and the PMF is kind of this coalition of Shia militias in Iraq that was formed in 2014 to fight ISIS. And a lot of those elements began attacking U.S. bases with rockets and drones after, you know, in response to U.S. support for Israel. I'm sorry, but it's so hilarious to me.

I just can't help it, Dave. I'm looking at an article from you from three days ago about America allied with the Shiite Iraqi army going out killing ISIS together. Yeah, yeah. There was a... But anyway, do go on about how our enemy over there are the Shiites that George Bush put in power and then Barack Obama fought Iraq War III 4 as well. Well, yeah, so there were all those attacks and the U.S. bombed the militias in response,

the PMF. And wait, hang on. Sorry, a baby just broke in here. Can you give me a second? Yeah, sure, buddy. Sorry. The U.S. was bombing them and Iraq. The Baghdad government wasn't happy about it because they're part of their military.

So Al-Sudani, the prime minister, said the U.S. has got to go. They entered these talks, and there's these reports of a plan that the U.S. is going to begin and withdraw. And the idea is to complete it by September 2026. Al-S. U.S. says this is going to be announced soon. But the reason why I'm not a little cynical about it is because all the reports also say that the U.S. is going to try to keep troops there as under some sort of. new arrangement. They're going to end the anti-ISIS coalition because Al-Sudani says that they don't

need help with them anymore, even though, as you mentioned, seven U.S. troops were just wounded in a raid against ISIS, and apparently the Iraqi government doesn't even think the U.S. should be involved in that anymore. But anyway, it looks like the U.S. is trying to stay. Last month, the U.S. State Department was asked about these reports, and that's basically what they said, that we're going to change our relationship to a bilateral security thing. And we're not even discussing withdrawing. That's what the State Department said. So then you have al-Sudani who's trying to balance all this.

You know, the big thing here is that the U.S. has the power to basically destroy Iraq's economy. They control their foreign reserves and control their ability to pay Iran for, you know, electricity and things like that. So the U.S. has a lot of leverage. People always wonder why, how is the U.S. still in Iraq when everybody wants them to leave? but that that's really why. So, you know, if this happens, it's going to take a while, two years or so. I think they're going to try to figure out how they can stay.

But, you know, you never know. Things could change in that time. All right, you guys, that's the great Dave DeCamp. He's our news editor at anti-war.com, and he hosts this great show every morning for you, anti-war news. Thanks, Ben. Thanks, Scott. All right, you guys, that's anti-war radio for this week.

I'm your host, Scott Horton. Check out the archives at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com. slash Scott Horton show, and I am here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. Thank you.