It's my pleasure to introduce our guest today, it's Phil Giraldi from the American Conservative Defense Alliance.
He's a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine and of course writes a column every two weeks for us at Antiwar.com called Smoke and Mirrors.
He's a former counter-terrorism officer for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Phil Giraldi, welcome back to the show, sir.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing good.
How are you?
Okay.
Good to talk to you.
I really like this article here, Israel's Get Out of Jail Free card, but let's talk about torture a little bit here since that's in the news.
I know how you answer this question because I've asked you before and you answered it before about whether or not waterboarding is torture back when that apparently was in dispute, but now we have Dick Cheney admitting that, yeah, I authorized the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
The question was that specific.
He didn't talk about anything beyond that, but isn't that a felony?
You used to work for the CIA.
Did you have a license to torture people or something when you worked for them?
Nobody in the U.S. government has a license to torture.
The United States is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on Torture, and so any government official would not be allowed to initiate or condone torture, including Dick Cheney.
So that means that all the principals and all their lawyers at least ought to all be on trial and facing life in prison, I guess, huh?
I don't know what the sentence would be.
I don't know exactly how that plays out, but I would – you'd have to talk to a lawyer about that, but I would say that certainly all these people – there should be some process now.
You know, going back to the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War, when people committed war crimes, committed crimes against humanity, there was a process.
South Africa, for example, had its – I believe they called it reconciliation laws and things like that, where they explored, you know, the things that were done that were criminal under the apartheid regime.
Pinochet in Chile, we've seen the same sort of thing.
There should be some accountability for this.
It's interesting, Glenn Greenwald points out on his blog and his article that's spotlighted on antiwar.com today that on the Sunday morning news shows, even though this declassified executive summary of the Senate Armed Forces Committee report was released on Thursday, there was only one question on all of the Sunday news shows that had anything to do with it whatsoever, and that was a question to John McCain about it, who said, well, we just have to make sure this doesn't happen again.
And yet, no question of any accountability being applied, and as Glenn points out, no question about how they're supposed to – how we're supposed to guarantee this kind of thing never happens again if there's no accountability for the people who did it.
Well, that's exactly right.
Accountability is the key to all of this, because in any system of government by law, you have to be accountable when you break the law.
And we – in fact, this will be reflected in when we discuss my current article on antiwar.
But this in particular, which is a crime against humanity, and it's considered a war crime by most people, that people are taking a walk on this is absolutely astonishing.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, and this really goes right to the chip on my shoulder, which is that the law – the law applies to me, and it applies to my neighbors, and in fact, if the SWAT team were to kick in the wrong door and murder a family in my neighborhood, they would all get away with it scot-free, no problem.
The law's for us, and it's not for them, which strikes directly at the understanding that I gained as a small child growing up in America, that we have a president, not a king, that we have a constitution, not the divine right granted by some church or something, you know, that people create government to protect their rights and all these wonderful things.
Our presidents always leave power after two terms.
All these great things that I was brought up to believe about America are being shown blatantly right in my face to simply not be true.
The law does not, apparently, apply to these men.
Well, that's true.
I would say that, you know, in fact, if you look all through American history, there's always been abuse of law by people in power against people who have no power.
I mean, that's just been a reality of the way the system works.
But at the same time, the system should be self-writing, self-checking, where when the abuse goes too far, there's a swing in the other direction, and people are made accountable for having done these things.
And this is what we're not seeing.
We're certainly not going to see it with the remaining weeks of George Bush, and it also appears we're not going to be seeing it with Barack Obama.
You know, I have a friend who, I think probably three quarters jokingly, has a conspiracy theory that the whole Monica Lewinsky charade was all a conspiracy to get rid of the independent council statute, to let that sun set so that we would no longer have these independent councils whose only job it is to investigate crimes in the White House and so forth.
Well, you know, that's an interesting theory.
I think it's probably a little bit tongue in cheek.
And of course, we have Mr. Fitzpatrick working out of Illinois, who would indicate that there is still some aggressiveness within the judicial system, which is another interesting story, because I heard yesterday from a very well-informed source that Obama has already taken some people who were kind of in the know on what the governor was doing from his campaign, and has given them political appointments as his close advisers to kind of get them out of the loop and shut them up.
So, you know, hey, the wheel goes around.
Yeah.
Wait, now you're talking about the governor, this whole corruption thing with the Senate seat?
Yeah, that's right.
Obama was a lot more, Obama's people were a lot more in the loop on this, and Rahm Emanuel also, than Barack Obama is letting on.
Oh, well, come on, it's the honeymoon and 100 days and all these things where we're supposed to not care about stuff.
Yeah, well, I don't give honeymoons.
Well, you know, this goes right to a great segue, really, I guess, between these different things is the nominee, Barack Obama's nominee to be the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, who apparently was deeply involved in the pardon of Mark Rich.
Yeah, that's the story, that he was the key man at the Justice Department back then that gave the go-ahead on it and was, I guess, the interface with Rich's wife, I guess, and the Israeli government, who were the ones who were pushing for this.
And now, for those of us who aren't all that familiar, who's Mark Rich?
Well, Mark Rich was a fugitive, I mean, he's still a fugitive in a number of jurisdictions, but he was involved in a number of major frauds in New York and fled the country to escape prosecution.
He was, in fact, convicted on a number of financial frauds, I mean, we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, as I recall, and he fled the country to avoid being sent to jail, and basically Bill Clinton gave him a last-second pardon that was, as I understand, it was greased by large political contributions that went through Mark Rich's wife, and also by pressure from the Israeli government saying that Mark Rich had done a lot of really good things for Israel and he should be pardoned.
And now this is the title of your article today, Israel's Get Out of Jail Free Card, at AntiWar.com, and wow, I guess, aside from being just a high-level White House employee, the other way to make sure that the law never applies to you is to be associated with the Israel op-ed, I guess.
Well, so it seems.
I mean, you really can only cite one case where anyone has been punished for committing treason with Israel, and that was Jonathan Pollard.
And let's be specific, in that case, he was selling American guys out to the Soviets, and he was giving away, I mean, it was basically the kind of thing, my understanding was that if Pollard hadn't have been convicted, that there would have basically been an uprising within the permanent government, that so many people in the intelligence establishment had been betrayed, that this was one that Clinton wouldn't dare pardon Pollard, because the CIA guys especially were saying, oh, no, you don't.
This is, we are putting our foot down on this.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Pollard was the case where the crime was so egregious that nobody could give him a pass on this one.
He stole the most sensitive secrets that the United States government has, the technical secrets, the secrets that tell you how the United States government is able to collect information and how it processes information, and so on and so forth.
And a lot of this information wound up in Russia, and the Israelis having traded for Russian Jews and allowed them to emigrate.
So, you know, this was very much in Israel's interest, but was not in our interest.
And you're right, there would have been a major rebellion in the intelligence community and also at the Department of Defense if Pollard had not been tried in the first place, and if he had been pardoned by Bill Clinton.
But the word is right now that George Bush is considering that.
Really?
That George Bush is considering pardoning Pollard?
That's right.
That seems to be the buzz.
Wow.
And so what kind of reaction?
I mean, is it the case that all the people who would have cared have already been purged from the government and we got nothing left but cheerleaders at this point?
Well, yeah, I think that's probably an accurate analysis of it.
The fact is that the generation that Pollard betrayed, they're basically gone.
They're retired.
There are a lot of people that are still, that know about the Pollard case, that would be very upset about it, but they're essentially powerless in terms of where they are and where the people that Bush would be answering to, you know, the Israeli lobby, large-scale Jewish contributors, that kind of thing, that Bush would be responding to.
So I guess if he does it, and I'm not saying he will, probably he's weighted up and figures that the people that complain about Pollard can go fish.
Incredible.
Incredible.
All right, now let's talk about the biggest case, the one that's right in front of the American people's eyes, right under their nose, and yet basically undiscussed anywhere in media, virtually invisible to the American people, and that is the trial of Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, which has been delayed and delayed and delayed, and these men are accused of conspiring to transmit stolen secrets, apparently about deliberations on the Principals Committee level in the White House about what to do with Iran policy to Israel, and one of their co-conspirators, Larry Franklin, has already pled guilty and been sentenced to 12 years in prison, and apparently the attempts by their defense lawyers and whoever else, I don't know, to perhaps put off this trial indefinitely are to the point that the case is just dismissed has been working so far.
It's been years.
These men were busted in, what, August 2004, right?
That's right.
It's going on four years, and the trial itself has been going on three years, and basically my understanding of it is that they have requested, of course, that people like Condoleezza Rice be required to testify on their behalf.
They've requested a whole lot of classified information to use in their defense, and this is what's basically being mulled over now by the presiding judge down in Alexandria, and the judge has already ruled in their favor on a number of issues that have prolonged this trial as long as it has been going on.
So my feeling is that this is Israel, so it's something that the government would like to just see go away.
They don't want to embarrass the Israelis.
They don't want to embarrass AIPAC, and so my feeling is that at a certain point we'll just see some kind of procedural resolution of this, and where Larry Franklin wound up in jail, as you correctly pointed out, for I think it's a 151-month sentence, these two guys are probably going to walk.
In fact, they're free.
They're basically walking as it is.
All right.
Now, talk to me about gray mail and the strategy of saying, well, bring in Conelisa Rice, bring in Dick Cheney, let me bring in every high-profile witness who we all know is above the law and can't be compelled to testify in such things, and release all this classified data, because that's the only way I can defend myself, is if you release all these classified documents.
Is that usually effective?
Well, it's usually not effective.
It's usually the court refuses to consider it.
The court can kind of rule on a state secrets principle that this kind of stuff is not admissible, and they certainly have done this in the case of a number of alleged terrorists in the United States, Jose Padilla and others.
They cite state secrets as reasons for not allowing cross-examination or people to be brought in.
In this case, Judge Ellis is, for some reason, not going that route.
He's basically looking at, I presume, the actual classified material that would be used and considering what the consequences would be of having the Secretary of State in a courtroom.
I think that's the way it's kind of playing out now, but this is all obviously playing to the benefit of the two AIPAC guys.
Well, now, I'm not exactly sure how this works, because the Fifth Amendment guarantees open trials, but I guess there's precedent for the kind of situation where federal judges obviously have security clearance, and Judge Ellis is able to look at all this classified data.
There's got to be, I don't know exactly, but there must be precedent for basically how to go about prosecuting a trial like this where there is classified information at stake, but the court needs to be able to see it without giving it all to the press or some kind of thing.
Yeah.
Basically, there are mechanisms.
Yeah, they could have a closed session where the information is not made public.
It's just revealed to what extent necessary to the jury and to the lawyers, and of course, the people involved in this process kind of have to be cleared to do that, but it has been done.
It's been done basically with grand juries before, and so it's not unprecedented to do it, but the point is I think this is a red herring.
I mean, these guys are basically trotting out all this stuff about, you know, we need classified information.
We need to talk to the Secretary of State.
They're basically doing it to make unacceptable conditions for the trial so that the trial will just basically be canceled.
All right.
Now, well, let's talk about what exactly happened here.
This guy, Larry Franklin, according to Laura Rosen on her blog, the Intelligence Beat Reporter, she says he was the highest ranking Iran specialist inside the Pentagon at the policy department.
They're apparently working for Douglas Feith in the first term of this Bush Jr. administration, I guess, right there during the same time as the Counterterrorism Policy Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans and the organizations that helped stovepipe the false intelligence to the White House to get us into this war.
Well, I think it's fair to say he was certainly the highest ranking military officer that was an Iran expert.
There's Harold Rohde and others, and Michael Ledeen floating in and out, who consider themselves to be Iran experts, too.
So he's not the only one.
But yeah, he was certainly a senior-level officer.
He's a colonel in the Air Force.
He's a senior-level officer.
He was very much wired into the Office of Special Plans.
And basically, as I understand it, the documents that he gave to AIPAC were policy documents.
In other words, the real big questions, like, what are we going to do about Iran type things?
And I think that's what he apparently shared.
Well, we can see, obviously, the motivation for that kind of thing on the part of the Israelis.
Why they would want that.
I mean, hell, we've seen ever since then that the Israelis have been threatening war with Iran and trying to get America on board for that same policy.
And they've been successful in convincing Cheney, apparently, at least on a couple of occasions.
It's been a real battle, even inside the government, over whether to bomb Iran or not.
Makes perfect sense why the Israelis would want secrets like that.
The more they know about internal deliberations in the American government, the easier it is for them to figure out which arguments to use to get their way.
That's precisely right.
I mean, obviously...
To start a war.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously, it's always nice to play poker when you know what the other guy has in his hand.
And that's essentially what intelligence gives you.
It gives you the inside information on what the other guy is doing or thinking.
And that's precisely the kind of information that Franklin gave them.
And then they were, in turn, I guess, handing it off to the Israeli embassy, right?
Neorgian and Danny Ayalon.
Yeah.
To the Israeli embassy, but also to the media, because, see, the media is a big player in the push to go to war against Iran.
So presumably, I don't know exactly who the media contacts were, but they're probably Judith Miller types, maybe at the New York Times, maybe at the Washington Post, Washington Times.
So, you know, they were using this information with the media so that the media would also be in the loop and be able to kind of push the process.
And I think that was a big part of this.
And now, you know, reading that indictment, it really is funny.
It sounds like kind of a made-for-TV, B-movie kind of thing about these guys meeting at restaurants and then going, leaving that restaurant, going to another restaurant, and they know they're being tailed, but they're having all these meetings anyway.
And it really does sound like some kind of ridiculous G-man movie or, you know, TV show.
Well, having been a spy myself, that's the way we operate.
Yeah, you do go, you know, you do break off a meeting, go somewhere else.
That is the kind of stuff.
And usually there are good, sound reasons for doing that.
But in the case where you know you're being surveilled, as these guys may or may not have, you know, it just kind of, it becomes a comic opera.
Yeah.
Boy, yeah.
And I recommend to anyone to read the indictment.
You can, you don't even have to have Adobe Reader.
You can get the whole thing in HTML format there at the Global Security, at the globalsecurity.org website, I think has it.
And it really is incredible.
They say that this guy has stolen so many documents that he had at his house, Larry Franklin, that it was like a lending library.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
I mean, he was, you know, basically, you know, but he's not the only one.
As I also point out in my article, there was people like Richard Perl and Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith and Stephen Bryan.
These people were all picked up or detected by the FBI and others, passing classified information to the Israelis.
And there were no consequences whatsoever.
These guys then went on to hire and better things at the Department of Defense.
So, you know, this is this is really the whole point of my article, in a way, that you spy for Israel is kind of a no fault situation.
You can't go wrong.
Well, a couple of things.
First of all, I was wondering if you could tell me more about this guy, Bryan.
I've read numerous times that Perl, Feith and Wolfowitz have been under investigation for passing classified information over the decades.
But who's this guy, Bryan?
Stephen Bryan was a was a Department of Defense employee, and he was detected on a number of occasions, on one occasion in a restaurant in Washington, D.C., having lunch with an Israeli government official from the embassy and actually passing him and discussing classified information in a loud enough voice where people at adjacent tables overheard it and reported it to the FBI.
And then there was an FBI investigation.
It turned out there were other instances where he had been detected passing classified information to the Israelis.
He was forced to resign, but then resurfaced with the the Rumsfeld Defense Department.
I think he was working for Wolfowitz.
And now, you know, all this really brings up the question of how these guys even got busted in the first place.
It makes me wonder whether, you know, there's some kind of firewall where the Israel lobby's just not allowed into certain parts of the FBI or something like that, where there's some kind of check and balance going on here, where Paul McNulty at the DOJ even raided AIPAC in the first place, announced the arrest of these men at all.
And then what happened to Paul McNulty?
Well, I'm not sure.
I guess he got kicked upstairs.
He got kicked upstairs to get him out of that loop.
So you know, there's the answer to your question.
Sure, there are lots of guys at the FBI and at CIA and here and there that are really, really angry about Israelis spying on the United States and Americans collaborating with them.
But the fact is that these cases tend to go nowhere.
And the FBI does have a special office, a counterintelligence office, that has responsibility for the Israelis and is quite aggressive.
And the people in the office would really like to see some prosecutions.
But when they collect the information, the people higher up in the food chain tell them we're not going anywhere with this.
Amazing.
And now, OK, now let's talk about this guy, Kaddish.
I forgot, Ben Ami Kaddish.
I don't think I've heard of this guy since you were on the show a year ago talking about him or something.
Yeah, yeah.
What happened to him?
Yeah, well, that's another...
He turned the transponder off and he disappeared off my radar screen, off of everyone's.
Well, I was thinking of trying to file a missing persons report and see if I could discover where he was that way.
This is a very interesting story.
Again, it's another Israel story.
As you might recall, Ben Ami Kaddish was part of the group that was run by the same Israeli case officer who was running Jonathan Pollard.
And he supplied the Israelis with a lot of highly classified information out of the job.
He was an engineer.
He had a job at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, where they do a lot of development of high-tech systems for ballistic missiles and for tanks and stuff like that.
And he was passing the information on to his Israeli case officer.
He was arrested in...
He was detected.
There was a very long story behind how he was finally caught.
But anyway, he was finally caught and he was arrested by the FBI last April.
And he posted a $300,000 bond.
They took away his passport because there was a considerable risk that he would flee to Israel.
And he was instructed to reappear one month later, on May 22nd, for the next step in the processing to lead to a trial.
And that's where he disappears.
If you look as hard as you can in the mainstream media or any media in the United States, you will not find any indication, any follow-up story, indicating that he had appeared or done anything, which intrigued me when I saw that.
So I actually went to the court and called them up.
I went to their website.
I called the Department of Justice.
And nobody is providing any information on what happened to Ben-Ami Kadish.
It's like he's disappeared from the face of the earth.
And this was a guy who was providing high-level, sensitive American defense information to Israel.
He's disappeared.
Well, now, when you say he's disappeared, they're not releasing any information on him.
I guess you mean that, for example, on the court's website, it ought to say he's scheduled for a preliminary hearing on this day, or he just had one on that day, and none of that is there.
That's exactly right.
You go to the court website.
It's the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, which is in Manhattan.
It's the Manhattan Federal Court.
And they have a website.
And on the website, every case that's either pending or has been settled is on the website or is supposed to be on the website.
But if you enter the name Kadish, nothing comes up.
And when you call them, they tell you, sorry, pal.
Well, when you call them, you speak to an officer of the court, and the officer of the court tells you, well, I don't know what the status of that case is.
I'll have to check, and I'll get back to you.
And, of course, they never do.
Right.
And I guess that could mean that he's trying to pull the information up right there, and he can't find anything.
So that's why he's got to call you back.
Well, it could be.
Or he's just not willing to talk about it under any circumstances.
So I don't know what the end of the story is, because, as I say, it suddenly seems to me that, you know, what's happened with this case?
This guy was a spy, and he sold, he gave away defense secrets that were very sensitive to a foreign country.
And what's happened with it?
And I tried to follow up on it, and I described in that article, you know, in an abbreviated way, my attempts to follow up on it.
And the follow-up led to a dead end.
Amazing.
It really is amazing.
All right.
Now, well, first of all, let me tell the audience, again, in case you're just tuning in, I'm Scott Horton.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with Philip Giraldi.
He's a former CIA counterterrorism officer.
He writes for the American Conservative Magazine and for Antiwar.com.
He's part of the American Conservative Defense Alliance, and he's got this article on Antiwar.com today.
It's right there at the very top of the page in the highlights section, Israel's Get Out of Jail Free card.
And we're talking primarily about, well, I guess the centerpiece of the discussion really is the Rosen-Weissman case from Doug Fyfe's office.
And one thing that you note about this guy, Steve Rosen, I guess I read something in the – was it the Forward a year or so ago that said that Weissman's a peacenik now or something?
But this guy Rosen is now writing at Daniel Pipe's website.
Is that really right?
Yeah, that's right.
He's a contributing editor at Daniel Pipe's website.
He writes a regular column now.
I think it's called the Middle East View or something like that.
But what he's doing right now is assessing Obama's appointments in the foreign policy area based on how – to what extent he feels they're good for Israel or not.
Well, and does he agree with Dick Cheney that Obama's done a great job in picking his national security team?
Basically, yes.
He has been rather positive on it.
He doesn't like General Jones, who he feels has been too critical of Israel in the past.
But I'm sure he's quite happy with Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel, and of course he's happy with Biden.
So the elements of the foreign policy team, such as there are, probably – in fact, I know based on his column – are people that he would support.
Oh, man.
And so what kind of – have you been reading many of his articles?
Aside from his assessment of General Jones, I mean, is it kind of outrageous, Daniel Pipe's level of ridiculousness going on over there, or what?
Well, I could only stomach reading one of his columns, but it was the one where he did discuss the foreign policy team of the Obama administration.
So he mentioned Jones, he mentioned Clinton, he mentioned Emanuel, and he mentioned Biden.
So yeah, it is that same kind of stuff.
It's like you're living in a fantasy world where the United States has no national interest and it's just a question of what's good for Israel, and he's right there.
Well, and not only that, I mean, Daniel Pipe's is a complete kook of all the neocons.
I think – well, I don't know to what degree the others keep him at arm's length at all.
They're all such a bunch of kooks, but this guy Pipe's is one of these – Barack Obama knows a guy who knows a guy who was the roommate's cousin of somebody who had something to do with the assassination of – oh, Sirhan Sirhan, somebody knows somebody who said something about – you know, and this guy's crazy, they're trying to link Obama to the murder of Robert Kennedy, what?
Well, Pipe's is notorious for his circuitous way of getting at the truth.
You know, the tragedy about Pipe's is he's actually among the neocons.
He's one of the better educated in terms of actually knowing something about the Middle East and about Iran and about – but he's a psycho.
He comes in with a – he takes his education and he uses his education as to establish his bona fides and validate what he's saying, but the fact is what he says is garbage.
It's a total Israel-centric view of the world, I mean, not just the Middle East.
I mean, you know Pipe's has been involved, of course, with Campus Watch and, you know, identifying people who are critical of Israel on faculties of American universities.
That's all Pipe's stuff, too.
Well, and also this whole theory of Islamofascism and everybody who believes in any sort of fundamentalist version of Islam is automatically a terrorist, and there must be, you know, more than 100 million of them in the world that all got to be killed.
They represent a giant network of internal subversion here in America and all kinds of craziness.
He didn't coin the phrase Islamofascism.
I think that came out of an Israeli think tank, but certainly Pipe's and Ledeen and David Horowitz are the ones that popularized it here in the United States, and Pipe's is probably number one on that list.
And now this is something that comes up in discussion a lot, and that is just how many terrorists there really are, and we've discussed this before, but I think it's such an important point when I debated self-appointed terrorism expert Harvey Kushner at Texas A&M on September 11th.
He basically did the math and said, well, it's about 10% of Muslims in the world.
If you ask all the Muslim governments, I don't know exactly what his source was there.
So that's 150 million terrorists, and there's only one way to deal with them, and that is to kill them.
And then I talked to you shortly after that.
You said, nah, there's maybe a couple of thousand in the world.
And even when I talked to somebody like Robert Dreyfuss, who wrote that great article, The Bogus War on Terrorism, about how most of Al-Qaeda, the vast majority of Al-Qaeda guys were blown apart by the Air Force and the CIA back in November 2001, and that there's not much terrorist threat.
I think it was him on this show last week who said, well, you know, I don't really know how many terrorists there are in the world.
That may be wrong.
Maybe it wasn't, Bob.
I think it was.
So what an important point, right?
Whether there's 150 million terrorists or whether there's 2,000 terrorists.
Well, I mean, if you had 150 million of them, all they would have to do is kind of march into your country and lay down.
And, you know, you would grind to a halt.
And, you know, that's ridiculous.
These numbers are absurd.
The fact is, what makes a terrorist?
A terrorist is somebody who has the training, the motivation, and the ability to carry out a terrorist act.
I guess that's a simple definition of what a terrorist is.
And if you go by that definition, there may be, you know, a few thousand, max, and terrorists of all types, including Sri Lankans and Colombians, and, you know, there just are not that many people willing to kill themselves to kill others.
And the fact is, yeah, they do exist, but let's not get carried away here.
I mean, this is not exactly like, you know, the Third Reich or anything like that.
They don't have panzer divisions.
And the whole neocon kind of agenda is to pretend that this terrorism problem is something that threatens the entire world.
And, of course, that is ridiculous.
It doesn't threaten the United States, not seriously.
It's something, yeah, that's not good, and we want to stop it, and we want to do away with it, and so on and so forth.
But to topple our country, it's not there.
It's not big league.
And it's not going to topple any other country.
And, you know, this whole thing, this whole argument by the neocons is ridiculous.
And, by the way, I'm sorry, that was not Robert Dreifuss, it was Andrew Bacevich, I think, who went up against the question of how many terrorists kind of had to admit that, oh, I actually have no idea.
And, well, that's why I'm glad I keep you around, Phil, because, you know, I trust you.
You make sense when you talk, as opposed to these guys who portray, well, like you said, as though there's panzer divisions, you know, as though a few pirates hiding out in the Hindu Kush mountains are the Soviet Union of the 21st century that are going to paint the whole world green if we don't stop them.
That's right, and that's the scary thing, and we're fighting this problem as if it were World War III or World War IV.
They prefer, of course, to call it World War IV.
But it's not.
This is something that you use law enforcement, that you use economic incentives to make people not join these groups and things like that.
There are a lot of things you can do, and historically speaking, the successful efforts against terrorism have used soft power in a lot of ways and used the law enforcement mechanisms.
And this whole idea of using airborne divisions and everything as a way to defeat terrorists, it's gotten us into the mess that we're in, precisely.
All right, well, do you have any reason to believe that things will be better under the Obama administration at all?
No, I don't, but I tell you this.
I think Obama is a very smart guy, and I think Obama will take advice from people like Hillary Clinton, but he will go, I think, with his own judgment on a lot of things.
And I'm hoping he's going to be smart enough that at a certain point, he's going to figure out just how bankrupt the current counterterrorism and defense policies really are.
I hope that.
Yeah, well, me too.
All right, so, Wahel, as long as I've got you on in a few minutes left, let's talk about...
Well, and Israel is a part of this, too.
Let's talk about the relationship between America and India and Pakistan.
And I guess, what, if any, role Israel's relationship with India plays in America's relationship with those countries, which seem to be backing down from the precipice of war as hard as they can, the state leaders, anyway?
Well, I think there's no incentive, really, for either India or Pakistan to go to war with each other.
But, you know, the Israel card is funny.
If you look at a lot of places around the world where the country, the government, is friendly to Israel, suddenly they become friendly to the United States, too.
I mean, the United States perceives that this is a sine qua non, that you have to be nice to Israel for the United States really to like you.
And, you know, Turkey's another example, obviously, and India.
The Israelis are very much involved in India.
The Israelis are very much involved in Georgia, as I think you and I spoke about fairly recently.
And, you know, they show up in all these places.
The Israelis have a huge, proportionate to their economy, defense industry, and they sell products all over the world.
And, basically, they're in a lot of places doing a lot of things.
But that doesn't, that shouldn't mean to U.S. policymakers that the fact that India is buying technology, military technology from the Israelis, makes Indians really, you know, like us that much more or anything like that.
India will pursue its own national interests.
And part of that, and it's funny because on one hand I read the Pakistanis saying, in just crisis mode, I can't believe it, the Indians are putting bases in Afghanistan.
We're surrounded.
We've got to do something.
And then I read news stories, and I don't know if this is just spin or what, but the Indians saying, you know, we really don't want to put troops in Afghanistan.
The Americans are insisting, and we're resisting.
Well, the last time the Indians had troops in Afghanistan was in 1839, and they had their butts kicked.
They were part of, they were the biggest part of the British Army that invaded Afghanistan.
So they probably have a historical understanding that this is not a good thing to do.
Yeah, I guess so.
And, well, and so what do you think we should be doing about Afghanistan?
If somehow you could get Barack Obama's team to listen to you, would you say it's time to go ahead and get out of that country and hope for some other arrangement to at least isolate bin Laden and Zawahiri where they can't get to us?
Well, there are three ways to look at this.
And I must admit I don't have an answer for what you're saying.
One way to look at it is that we can't fix it.
We're just going to kill more Afghans and more American soldiers.
Get out.
That's one way to look at it.
The second way to look at it is that an increase in the military presence will provide enough security where you really can get some kind of reconstruction program going on.
That would justify a contingent military presence.
And I'm not sold on that.
I think that history tends to indicate that that doesn't work.
And I think in Afghanistan in particular, given the lack of infrastructure, it won't work.
And then your third option is to increase the military to a Second World War type level and just destroy the country.
And, of course, that's unacceptable in a lot of ways.
So I tend to think that getting out is the solution.
And then the Afghans will have to sort it out themselves.
But, you know, I can see where if there were something positive we could do by maintaining some kind of presence there, and if I could be convinced of that, I would think probably that that would be a good thing.
But I'm not convinced of that in terms of what I've seen up until now.
Well, yeah, I mean, politically, how are you going to withdraw with bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri still on the loose, right?
Well, that's part of it.
But, of course, they're on the loose in Pakistan.
So why are you in Afghanistan if they're on the loose in Pakistan?
So that's one question.
And, of course, the Karzai government is hopelessly corrupt.
His administration runs on drug money.
So, you know, what horse are you backing here?
I don't know.
Yeah, well, it sounds to me like if we just default toward leaving everybody the hell alone, we'll be better off.
And, frankly, I mean, you tell me you're the intelligence guy.
Does the Marine Corps have any ability to invade the Hindu Kush mountains and track these men down and kill them?
Well, there are a lot of, obviously, political issues that go into that.
And I don't think so.
I mean, I don't think they'd.
.
.
All right, if you've got the Hindu Kush mountains, and you're talking of an area that's several hundred square miles, and you don't really know exactly where they are, how do you do it?
How many civilians do you have to kill before you kind of find out that you don't know where they are?
So I think there are political realities here.
I don't think anyone in the Defense Department is arguing that this is doable.
Right.
So it seems like that's the question that's never asked and answered, because when you answer it that way, well, then what the hell are we doing there?
Yeah, that's right.
And the President Hamid Karzai is already negotiating with the Taliban.
He understands the reality of what's going on there better than we do.
Yeah, might as well declare victory and go, sounds like to me.
Yeah, well, that's what we did in Vietnam, and we lost that too.
So obviously there's a pattern here.
Well, hell, as long as we're over time, let me ask you one more thing.
What do you think about, or what do you know, or what are you hearing about the effect of the financial collapse on the permanent state of, you know, readiness to fight two or three wars at the same time all over the world in the 130-something bases?
Is there any kind of talk inside the national security establishment that, uh-oh, we might really be up against a brick wall here and have to start scaling back?
Well, it doesn't have any immediate impact because, obviously, budgets are approved in advance.
So the money is in the pipeline for the next year or so in terms of our policies.
But, yeah, there's a lot of conversation going on right now.
There's expectation that Obama is going to initiate major cuts, and they're going to have a major impact on the ability to fight three wars.
And also, you know, I read a report today for the first time.
You would no doubt notice the fact that the Taliban and their supporters in Pakistan have destroyed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of U.S. military vehicles coming in to the port of Karachi and then going up through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.
So this has even apparently begun to have an effect on readiness and capability inside Afghanistan.
So it's quite interesting.
The economics of war in this case might be a good thing.
It might finally stop these wars and stop the sense that we can solve problems by fighting with people.
Well, that really is the thing.
I mean, if you rewind the clock back to 2002 or whatever, there was this overwhelming belief that, you know, right or wrong, even the anti-war forces who were saying let the inspections continue or whatever, it still sort of went without saying that, well, we all do know that the American military can do anything.
It was only a question of whether they should or not.
But that reality, so-called, just no longer exists anywhere, does it?
I think there's definitely a sense of that, that the limitations of our power are becoming clear to everybody.
And they've become clear, certainly, to our allies who are ready to pull the plug in Afghanistan.
And they've become clear to many Americans who are willing to think about these issues.
You know, this should have been something we should have been thinking about back then.
I don't know if you've ever read Paul Kennedy's book, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers.
Sounds true, though.
He's a Yale professor.
He wrote it back, I guess, about 10 or 15 years ago, maybe even a little earlier.
And it basically talked about the British Empire and how empires in the past, basically he called it imperial overreach, how you reach the point where you're doing things that your resources no longer support.
And, of course, Russia collapsed because of imperial overreach.
And what an important point.
You know, that guy John Mueller from the University of Chicago, I think, who wrote that great book Overblown, he points out in there that actually it was the defeat in Vietnam and the reluctance on the part of the American people to intervene any longer that actually ended the policy of containment.
And then, you know, it got kicked into high gear the other way with Brzezinski and trying to actually encourage the Soviet Union to expand and go ahead and commit yourselves in Angola and commit yourselves in Central America, commit yourselves in Afghanistan and see where it gets you.
And it got them destroyed.
Yeah, that's right.
And it's doing the same to us.
I mean, there's no question about that.
It's the same argument.
It's the same issues.
And, all right, the United States has a vastly more powerful economy than Russia ever had.
But fighting a war today costs vastly more.
I think the comparison between what it costs to be an infantry soldier during the Vietnam War and what it costs to maintain an infantry soldier in Iraq right now is a factor of about 13.
So it's an amazing difference.
And it's funny, you know, when you talk about all the supply lines being cut from Karachi through the Khyber Pass there, we're now turning to the Russians.
And I guess this is the silver lining, right, is a little bit of rapprochement.
We're coming with our hat in our hand to Vladimir Putin and saying, is it okay if we use your former Soviet paths into Afghanistan to bring our supplies in?
Yeah, that's right.
And that's happening.
And also they're looking at going even through Iran.
Are you serious?
They're talking about going through Iran?
Well, there were some discussions.
In fact, the Germans, I believe in the Spaniards, are transiting Iran with some of their supplies and equipment.
Amazing.
You know, see, there are two good things that we can put to George Bush's legacy right there.
Phil, here we thought it was nothing but negatives, but in fact we're on the road toward rapprochement with Russia and Iran because we need them to help us murder people in Afghanistan.
He's possibly our greatest president.
Very well could be.
All right.
Thank you very much for your time today on the show, Phil.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Phil Giraldi, antiwar.com, slash Giraldi, I think, or maybe slash Orij, slash Giraldi.php.
I'm not sure if just slash Giraldi works.
But anyway, it's at the top of the page right now, Israel's Get Out of Jail card by Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA counterterrorism operative and a member of the American Conservative Defense Alliance, contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine, and writes for us at antiwar.com every two weeks.
Here's some Reagan youth.
Helps celebrate Ronald Reagan's war for the Mujahideen against the Russians using our very same supply lines that we're using now back in the 1980s.
And then we'll see you all here tomorrow, 11 to 1 Texas time.
Thanks for staying late with me here today.
Antiwar Radio on chaos in Austin.
