02/12/14 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
So you made a little bit of money in this horrid economy, only to find that the Fed is more or less outlawed saving.
So into the treacherous waters of the stock market bubble you go.
But how to make a little money without too much risk of losing it all?
Check out wallstreetwindow.com.
Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager who opens a very real window into his main account, updating his subscribers on the facts of and the reasoning behind all his market moves.
Follow along on paper or with real money and see what happens at wallstreetwindow.com.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
We're here weekdays from 3 to 5 Eastern Time on the Liberty Express, and it's scotthorton.org.
Check out the chat room at scotthorton.org slash chat.
Trying to hang out in there more often than just during the show, but anyway.
All right.
Well, from underneath a giant pile of snow, it's Phil Giraldi.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us again on the show today.
Good.
Glad to be here.
So everybody, you know Phil.
He used to be a CIA officer.
Now he is the executive director of the Council for the National Interest, and he writes for unz.com, theamericanconservative.com, and antiwar.com as well.
So yeah, that's pretty good.
Everybody needs to know that.
And issue in question, first of all, at least today, is this very interesting article that you put together for the American Conservative Magazine, Old Testament Armed Forces.
Religious zealotry runs rampant in the U.S. military, and among those wishing to deploy it.
And you know what's funny, Phil, is that I actually know some religious people, but they're some pretty sort of center-left Methodist, not-too-dogmatic types, and I don't really know personally any religious crazies.
So I sometimes forget that there really are hardcore religious crazies out there.
But now, so how rampant in the U.S. military are they?
And how do you define the difference between a religious zealot, somebody dangerous, versus just somebody who's got perfectly legitimate faith, worthy only of respect?
Yeah, well, I think the basic issue is that, you know, religion is essentially a private matter in the United States.
I mean, the U.S. Constitution defines it that way, and I think that the issue I'm trying to raise here with a specific focus on the armed forces is that people who work for the government who maybe confuse that issue and think that what they have to do relating to their religious beliefs is more important than being someone who is objective vis-a-vis the public, I think that is something quite wrong.
And I think, particularly if you get that into the military, where it raises a lot of other issues, and one discovers that people who are religiously extremely conservative, or evangelical types, tend to support our wars overseas, and tend to support even issues like torture disproportionately compared to the rest of the population.
Well, yeah, and the article, you call that somewhat puzzling, but I'll go ahead and one-up you and say that's extremely puzzling, whatever happened to all that, you know, Sermon on the Mount stuff.
Yeah, well, that's really the question I raised.
I said, you know, I'm not a religious scholar, or even that seriously religious, but the fact is, if you read the New Testament, apart from the Book of Revelations, it's basically a message of peace and reconciliation.
And the fact that these people are basically reading the same Bible, although I tend to believe they tend to read the Old Testament more than the New Testament, they basically are coming up with a different conclusion, that essentially there is an agenda out there to be delivering one of the comments on my articles, and some guy said something like, Christians also have an obligation to deliver justice.
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
And you know, he obviously was attacking me, he was basically saying that this message of love is only part of it, the rest of it is doling out punishment to the people who struck the Twin Towers, you know.
In a way, I don't get it.
I don't get it, how you can be a Christian, and how you can be over-the-top supportive of this kind of stuff.
But the disturbing details I provided in the article are the fact that a lot of people, including General Petraeus, have in the past ten years or so been emphasizing spirituality as a defining virtue for officers in the military.
And that kind of mixes this whole thing together, and it creates incentives in the military for people to be overtly religious.
I think there's a lot of wish fulfillment in terms of how people want to see themselves, and how they want to see themselves as exclusive purveyors of the truth, which is another issue I raise in the article.
I say, well look, if you're basically someone who wants the world to end next week, that's really what you want more than anything, why should you be working for a government?
And also, if you believe that you have an exclusive handle on what is the truth, then I can't see how this should be a person that necessarily would want to interreact with people in the kind of way that a government employee would have to behave.
Yeah, it sounds like at that point, hey, all these people are determined to not be as enlightened as you in the first place, so leave them alone.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
So anyway, if you go to the article and you read the comments, I'm getting blasted by a bunch of Christian conservatives, obviously, for my ignorance.
Well, you know, what can I say?
But there are an equal number of comments saying, this is a great article, it's about time somebody started talking about this.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm anti-war as can be, but I can still at least conceptually see the difference between the way I think we're all raised to just accept that.
You know, like during World War II, there's a green uniform fighting for your country exception to the thou shalt not kill rule.
And, you know, you've got to squint your eyes real close to find it.
But it says there if it's for your country, like in World War II, then what are you going to do?
Yeah, it's OK to kill Nazis, you know, if FDR sends you to and that kind of thing, that's fine.
So, well, there is a Christian concept, there's basically a Catholic concept of just war.
And this was something that evolved over a couple of centuries.
It was developed by St. Augustine, and I think Thomas Aquinas also worked on it.
And the idea is to define what is an acceptable response for a Christian in a Christian community who is threatened by an enemy or, you know, or whatever.
And it was very carefully thought out to give justification for a Christian to be able to defend his community.
But what we're seeing now is that, you know, these wars overseas, there is no threat and we're fighting wars basically for obscure nationalistic reasons.
And yet we have the Christian community and the people who would call themselves the most Christian being the ones who are supportive of this kind of stuff.
Well, now, all right, I'm not religious at all, so I don't mean to hurt nobody else's feelings or whatever.
But you think maybe part of this is just, hey, if you're willing to believe what your minister says, you're willing to believe anything at that point.
Well, you know, the whole issue about about religion is it's an act of faith, isn't it?
And the fact is, if you believe things, if you believe things to be true, in spite of the fact that they're irrational, that basically that they raise all kinds of other issues that are difficult to grapple with, if you have the faith to believe all these things, then you believe it.
But I don't fall in that category.
And I believe that people should behave ethically because people should behave ethically.
And it doesn't necessarily mean anything to me that that you you're getting that message from God or you're just getting it from common sense.
And so, you know, but the whole disturbing thing about the evangelicals or again, I'm not actually I'm not lumping all evangelicals into this because there are a number of evangelical critics of this knee-jerk support of war and that sort of thing, particularly younger evangelicals.
But the fact is that, you know, if you're reflexively supporting wars without having thought through what the consequences of this kind of stuff is and what it does, then there's something fundamentally wrong about your religion.
I hate to say it, but that's really what it comes down to.
You know, I hate to quote George Galloway, the thief who stole a million dollars from Iraqi orphans, but I'm pretty sure it was him that was saying, hey, you stupid monotheists, you need to all get it together that you all worship the same God, Jews, Christians, all the different sects of Christians and Sunni and Shia Muslims.
If anything, you guys ought to be a war against Hinduism or something alien.
But at least, you know, you guys are just, you know, you're like brothers in a in a family feud.
But, you know, I've heard many Christians who they have no idea that that's even true that, I mean, they might know that they worship the same God as the Jews do, but they don't know that the Muslims do.
Yeah, yeah, right.
That's that's a bridge too far, I'm afraid.
But yeah, but in fact, if you go to it again, I'm no expert on any of this stuff, but if you go to all these major religions, they all have an essential core message, which is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
That's an essential message of virtually every major religion.
And here we're having these people who who are, you know, flag-waving, hard-headed Christians claiming that, oh, that's not the message that you can do unto others because God told you you can do it.
And I don't think that's the core message of Christianity.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I also wonder how much of this is just partisanship, right?
I mean, these polls about do you support aggressive wars and torture all were done when Bush was still in power, right?
And so it was only you, you know, Michael Moore, Pinko Kami, hippie liberals are against that.
Yeah, well, there's certainly some element of that that it's been politicized where anything that any kind of war that Obama would would fight would be less welcome than anything that Bush would would fight.
But again, it's the same, but it's the same mindset.
It's that George Bush.
I had arguments here in Virginia with George Bush supporters when we invaded Iraq and they were saying George Bush was a good Christian leader.
That was their justification for saying that they supported attacking Iraq.
They didn't know what what the attack on Iraq would do or why we were attacking Iraq.
But George Bush was a good Christian leader.
And when I hear that kind of stuff, man, that just turns me straight off.
Right.
Well, you know, I mean, I remember being a little kid and just knowing that somebody else is working that out.
Right.
The way they taught it in junior high was, well, it's a democracy.
So the people have an election and the leaders are legitimately elected.
Then the things that they do are right.
Kind of so facto or whatever.
You don't need it doesn't have to all the way make sense, but just you got to defer to your leaders like the pop star lady said, whatever name was Britney Spears.
Yeah.
But of course, that's the Fuhrer principle that came from Carl Schmitt.
In the 1930s, to justify Adolf Hitler, to say that whatever the government did was right because it was the government.
That's the Fuhrer principle.
And unfortunately, a lot of these fundamental Christians seem to have embraced the same idea that if it's the United States, we are intrinsically exceptional and good.
Therefore, what we're doing is is is is blessed by God.
All our sins become virtues.
I'm sorry.
We got to hold it right here, Phil, and go out to this break.
And by the way, I'm going to hang up and call you back because we got some kind of bad connection here, too.
It's Phil Giraldi, everybody at the American Conservative Magazine, Old Testament Armed Forces.
Back after this.
Hey, all Sky here.
First, I want to take a second to thank all the shows, listeners, sponsors and supporters for helping make the show what it is.
I literally couldn't do it without you.
And I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show.
Whenever you shop at Amazon dot com, stop by Scott Horton dot org first and just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page.
That way, the show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
It won't cost you an extra cent.
It's not just books.
Amazon dot com sells just about everything in the world except cars, I think.
So whatever you need, they've got it.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page at Scott Horton dot org or go to Scott Horton dot org slash Amazon.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi from the American Conservative Magazine and Antiwar dot com.
And this piece is called the Old Testament Armed Forces.
About evangelical Christians in the military turning our foreign policy bad enough as it is into some kind of holy crusade.
And although, you know, I guess we could say they failed so far to really turn this thing into a clash of civilizations between Christianity and Islam.
Right.
I mean, maybe to some degree, but not nearly as much as they've been hoping.
Yeah, I, you know, I think I think it's possible to get, you know, too excited about some of these issues.
For example, I'm not really suggesting in my piece that fundamentalist Christians dominate the armed forces.
They don't.
That's not the issue.
The issue is that there is a a virulent strain of fundamental Christianity.
If one chooses to look around in the military and it goes up to the highest levels, David Petraeus is cited in my article.
And and this thing, this kind of thing is is not correct for our constitutional republic.
People shouldn't be talking about soldiers proselytizing when they're in Afghanistan.
They shouldn't be allowed to be handing out Bibles in the local languages.
They shouldn't be putting up.
There was one bit I didn't use in the article about tanks in Iraq.
They used to have written in Arabic on the side, a four letter expletive, Mohammed, and things like that.
I mean, you know, these religious overtones are not acceptable and they're not acceptable, certainly to people like myself who believe that religion is a matter of conscience.
If I were in a situation in the military or the CIA and I had a senior officer who made it very plain to me that my attendance at Bible study classes would be in my interest, I would find that repulsive.
And that's essentially what I'm saying here in terms of these instances of military officers exploiting their their senior rank to encourage this kind of activity, because religion should remain divorced from what happens in terms of what the military is doing.
The military is a part of the state.
It's not a part of any religion.
Yeah, well, not under this constitution, supposedly anyway.
Well, now, so let me ask you this.
You remember Seymour Hersh talking about the Knights of Malta and how these guys saw their role over there as a crusade?
Now, that's a Catholic thing, right?
Yeah, the Knights of Malta was a Catholic order, was it?
I think it was originally the the Knights of the Temple or something.
No, that was the Templars.
These were the hospitalers or but anyway, they went to Rhodes and then they and then they wound up in Malta and now they live on the Aventine Hill in Rome.
But they were a military religious order.
But their their charter was to keep the keep the Muslims from taking over the Holy Land.
Yeah, well, they've been doing a real good job now, you know, since recently anyway.
But now but what about what's Hersh talking about, about the Knights of Malta inside the military out there?
You know, just I guess he's saying murdering Muslims to rack up that count, less Muslims in the world kind of.
Well, I when I was doing the research for this article, I really couldn't find much evidence of that.
I was I did actually look for it and most of the stuff was was kind of innuendo that you when you look for the sources, you it was all sourced back to itself.
So I didn't really find that I found a lot more activity by what we would describe as evangelical Protestants.
And a lot of it was linked to the second coming of Christ and various prophecies in the Book of Revelations and stuff like that.
So that that's that's what I discovered when I started looking around.
And then, well, so now down in San Antonio is the Cornerstone Church of John Hagee.
And I had almost missed this.
I just, you know, randomly saw one tweet on it or something somewhere about how the Christians United for Israel group of the Cornerstone Church there that they put together and they had 10,000 people call or they claimed 10,000 calls to Capitol Hill over the last few weeks demanding that the sanctions against Iran be passed.
Now, they didn't win on this one.
But boy, is that a lot of power in this case, pretty much directly in service to the state of Israel.
Yeah, well, it's Israel.
That's also, of course, it's got its constituency here.
I mean, if you if you if you listen to people who talk about Christian Zionists and what they really have going through their head, I mean, they they basically are less answerable to Israel than they are to what they think is going to be the second coming of Christ.
That's what they want.
And so, I mean, they believe that they're speaking to God and God is essentially telling them you have to do these things to fulfill the prophecy so that so that I can come back.
And as far as I'm concerned, that's, you know, that's nutty.
And it's nutty to have people believing that in the first place.
But they believe it.
They believe it.
But it's it's wrong when you have people like Tom DeLay who believe that and are extremely powerful in the United States government, because what these guys believe will have an impact on what happens to me and you.
And that's my objection to all of this.
Right.
Well, and think of how nutty it is from the point of view of the Israelis.
Your best allies in America would like to see Jesus kill you all with hydrogen bombs.
How do you like that?
Well, that's right.
That's that's the ultimate irony.
And, of course, the Israelis appreciate the irony, I think, and they realize that it's kind of a joke, but they essentially are using these people.
They're using them to to to, as you know, contact their congressmen to contribute money to come over and they go over in large pilgrimages to Israel and drop a lot of money when they're over there.
You know, they they're useful idiots.
I think it was Irving Kristol that said, well, hey, it's their theology.
It's our Israel.
So, you know, thanks a lot for the help.
Go ahead and continue on, believe in whatever you want.
Yeah, you got that right.
All right.
Well, so, man, we're almost out of time, but I wanted to ask you about, you know, which is your favorite Al-Qaeda group in Syria these days?
We've got at least four to choose from there, Phil.
Yeah, well, I'm not sure which one I like the most, but the fact is, as you say, we have a choice.
And if you listen to James Clapper during the past week, we are in the most threatening situation that he has ever seen in his life.
Apparently, he's forgotten about the Cold War and all that other stuff.
He's been doing a real good job these last thousand years, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, he's been in the government this whole time.
In fact, did we talk about how he was one of the guys pushing the Saddam's weapons that were all moved to Syria live back 10 years ago?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
So this guy, obviously, he has a memory problem and he has a problem also with the truth.
But the latest line is that we are under greater threat now than ever in this guy's lifetime.
And he's 72.
So apparently he just completely blanked out the Cold War.
So, you know, that's I guess his prerogative.
He's director of national intelligence, right?
Cold War.
What was the big deal there?
Yeah.
And look, I got to admit, you know, not to give him credit, but just on this one very narrow point about what he said that he may be right, that there are tens of thousands of jihadis who now have direct access to the Mediterranean Sea, right, and are now, you know, another few thousand miles or, you know, another thousand or two miles west, you know, of where they've ever been before.
Right.
Yeah.
But you've got to put it together with the other stuff he's saying, which is essentially that the ones he fears are the the American jihadis who are over there.
He claims there are 50 of them and that these people are the real threat.
You know, it's like people.
Yeah.
They define a threat pretty elastically, I think.
I mean, it's just yeah, when you when the U.S. government creates a crisis in a place like Syria and then the chickens start coming home to roost and suddenly these guys are empowered to hire more people, spend more money.
Yeah.
Well, you know, at this point, they didn't take my advice in 06, Phil, in Iraq.
But at this point in Syria, they could switch sides back to the Baathists.
Just go ahead and, you know, start a whole new drone war against the jihadis.
You know, that might happen.
They just step on a coin day to day at the National Security Council about the hell they're doing over there, right?
Yeah.
They're arming up Maliki at the same time they're denouncing him for helping Iran arm up Assad for the very same war.
Yeah, I think the switch back to the to the Syrian government could take place.
I mean, I'm sure they're discussing that at the National Security Council.
How do we save face and go back and support this other guy?
Yeah.
They're capable of anything.
Yeah, they are at this point.
And that, you know, it would be a horrible massacre.
But I mean, really, these ISIS guys and I don't mean David Albright, he's bad enough.
But the suicide bomber prisoner beheaders in in Syria these days, I mean, I wouldn't want to see them, you know, unleashed in Western Europe anywhere.
And I don't buy the 50 Americans.
But then again, there's been at least a couple of dozen American Somalis who've gone back to Somalia to fight in that war on the side of Al-Shabaab.
So I guess it's possible.
Anything is possible.
Yeah, that was that was what bin Laden said to Mohammed Atta.
What?
You have a German passport?
Cool.
Come here, kid.
Let me talk to you.
Exactly.
I mean, that kind of thing can come back to bite you for sure.
And in fact, think about that.
It's just the very beginning of 2014 now.
And this has been going on a long, long time.
It's it's kind of fun to imagine that maybe we're near the end.
But think about this is like 1981 in the war on terror.
This is just the start of Western support for the rise of a giant new Mujahideen army, which is going to blow back for another 20, 30 years, create another 20, 30 years worth of excuses.
Well, I mean, all they care about in Washington is the two year election cycle.
So, you know, I think in terms of all of all the advanced planning that the that the CIA and the Defense Department and the White House and the National Security Council do is based on who's going to get voted into office this year.
And, you know, two year cycle, two year cycle, two year cycle.
They don't see anything that that that goes beyond that.
That's Phil Giraldi, everybody.
Anti-war dot com.
The Council for the National Interest dot org.
We'll be right back after this, everybody.
Don't worry about things you can't control.
Isn't that what they always say?
But it's about impossible to avoid worrying about what's going on these days.
The government has used the war on guns, the war on drugs and the war on terrorism to tear our Bill of Rights to shreds.
But you can't fight back.
The Tenth Amendment Center has proven it, racking up major victories.
For example, when the U.S. government claimed authority in the NDAA to have the military kidnap and detain Americans without trial, the nullifiers got a law passed in California declaring the state's refusal to ever participate in any such thing.
Their latest project is off now dot org, nullifying the National Security Agency.
They've already gotten model legislation introduced in California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas meant to limit the power of the NSA to spy on Americans in those states.
We'd be fools to wait around for the U.S. Congress or courts to roll back, big brother.
Our best chance is nullification and interposition on the state level.
Go to off now dot org, print out that model legislation and get to work nullifying the NSA.
The hero Edward Snowden has risked everything to give us this chance.
Let's take it off now dot org.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for Braswell Business Communication Services at Fuse Powder dot com.
Braswell Communications can provide a credentialed media presence for your company at industry conferences and trade shows, as well as support services and consultation for publishing, editorial and technical writing, business to business and marketing communications, research and information campaigns.
Braswell also does website development and complete web content maintenance to include voiceover audio and copywriting.
Strengthen your business.
Fuse Powder dot com.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF dot org slash subscribe.
Since nineteen eighty nine, FFF has been pushing an uncompromising moral and economic case for peace, individual liberty and free markets.
Sign up now for the Future Freedom featuring founder and president Jacob Hornberger, as well as Sheldon Richmond, James Bovard, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy and many more.
It's just twenty five dollars a year for the print edition, 15 per year to read it online.
That's FFF dot org slash subscribe.
And tell them Scott sent you.
What was the only interest group in D.C. pushing war with Syria last summer?
AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
What's the only interest group in D.C. pushing to sabotage the nuclear deal with Iran right now?
AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
Why doesn't the president force an end to the occupation of Palestine, a leading cause of terrorist attacks against the United States?
AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
The Council for the National Interest is pushing back, putting America first and educating the people about what's really at stake in the Middle East.
Help support their important work at Council for the National Interest dot org.