04/23/14 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest on the show today is our friend Phil Giraldi from, well, lots of things.
First of all, he's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org, and he's also a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine and at unz.com, that's unz, unz.com.
The latest one here at the American Conservative Magazine is Turkey Cooks the Books in Syria.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show again.
And good one here.
Now I like to point out all the time that back on December the, I can't ever remember if it's, oh, it's the 8th, because it's not the 7th, because I'd remember it was Pearl Harbor Day.
So it must have been the 8th of December, 2011, you published a piece at antiwar.com called Washington's Secret Wars.
And in there, you said Obama has signed two new findings, both of them ramping up covert activity by the CIA and I guess whoever else, one against Syria and the other against Iran.
And then, but I often forget, although I did know this at one point, that you had a companion piece to that in the American Conservative right around the same time came out a few days later, where you elaborated on that quite a bit.
And in fact, it seems like now that you mentioned it broke the story of the arms pipeline from Libya to Syria.
Yeah, that's correct.
I basically, at that time, the American Conservative was still doing a print edition and that's where it appeared.
So it wasn't online.
And of course, antiwar was online and it was a somewhat different story, more so about the findings.
But the fact is that the, I picked up from sources in the Middle East that these weapons were being shipped off to Turkey to be used in Syria.
And this was in December of 2011.
So, you know, we had this story a long time ago, nobody paid attention to it.
And now Seymour Hersh has revived the story and come up with a lot of corroborating information.
And interestingly enough, the mainstream media is sort of ignoring him about it too.
It just shows that if a story runs against how the mainstream media perceives its role, it's not going to report it no matter what you do.
Right.
Well, now, first of all, I forgot to mention that you're a former CIA officer and former DIA officer.
And that's why it is that you're so plugged into the intelligence community, what they think and what they know and what they say and that kind of thing.
And you've broken many original stories in the past as well.
And yeah, it's an important point in it, how here Fox News, man, they don't ever stop crying about Benghazi.
Now, don't tell them that that was just one day and that, in fact, America waged an entire war for the jihadists that Fox News supported at the time back in 2011.
But man, they don't ever quit about 9-11-2012 there and the sacking of the consulate makeshift pseudo consulate there and the killing of Ambassador Stevens.
And here, Seymour Hersh hands them corroboration of their own, one of their own previous scoops to on a silver platter.
But they don't run it because they hate him.
And so, you know, he's telling their version, their narrative, they don't want to hear it from him.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, when Seymour's story broke about two weeks ago, I was thinking, you know, why God, this finally has come out.
And of course, he added a lot of new information about what the Turks were up to, which is the focus of the piece I have over at the American Conservative today.
But the fact is, I said, this is dynamite, and it appeared in the London Review of Books.
It was picked up in a few places, but, you know, the story has kind of died.
And I'm thinking this is really an important story, because it shows that if you take Obama and I hesitate to say bleach him a little bit, and you've got George W. Bush, these guys are doing the same things.
They're starting wars covertly.
They're engaging in regime change in the Middle East.
They don't seem to get the message at a certain point that this kind of stuff has not worked for us very well.
And this stuff goes on and on and on.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there's a silver lining to it, because, you know, if they did tell us the truth, they might make things worse there.
But they've just completely ignored what's going on in Libya since that war.
It's almost like it never really happened, other than that one day in Benghazi that they never stopped talking about.
Yeah.
But, you know, for those of us paying attention, we've seen...
Yeah, and to point out the Benghazi story is the wrong story.
I mean, you know, I think you would have a difficult time making the case that the government deliberately screwed up or covered up or anything like that.
But the whole thing was a misguided operation to do the wrong thing and to be delivering weapons to an insurgency that you knew nothing about.
So they missed the big story, and they're talking about the little story in an attempt to show that Obama and his and the people around them were nothing but screw ups.
Right.
And then...
But meanwhile, they mostly, at least, ignore...
Certainly they ignore the way that the Libya war blew back and weapons spread and jihad and ultimately a further Western intervention, this time by the French, took place in Mali because of the war there.
And then you had all these weapons, you know, that they're shipping off to Libya.
And yeah, when you say the wrong thing, I mean, what you're talking about really is backing Al-Qaeda guys.
I mean, when the Libyan Islamic fighting group existed as a force in Iraq, they were called Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
They were considered...
They were the Zarqawiites.
Any of the...
Right?
Of the foreign jihadists that came to fight in that war.
That's who these guys were.
In fact, I thought Rachel Maddow actually did the best job right off the bat on the Benghazi story in saying that, remember Sheikh Al-Libi that George Bush and Dick Cheney tortured into pointing the finger at Saddam Hussein that eventually Qaddafi murdered for us in prison there?
Well, his brother was murdered...
Sheikh Yahya Al-Libi was killed by Obama by a drone strike in Pakistan in June of 2012.
And then right before the anniversary of September 11th, Zawahiri put out a podcast saying, you know, dear Mujahideen of Libya, the Americans are dumb enough to have surrounded themselves with you.
Well, here's one of our guys, one of your guys who they murdered, and it's time for you to get vengeance against them for what they've done.
And Obama and Hillary had literally put an American base in the center of an Al-Qaeda hornet's nest.
I mean, they couldn't have believed their own BS worse, whatever.
Seemed like to me that she had the most plausible explanation for what really led up to that attack in the first place, even though that is still just the one day event.
It illustrates the fact that, yeah, the wrong thing was fighting for Al-Qaeda, not just in Libya, but then saying that worked so well, we need to export the damn thing to Syria and carry on.
Yeah.
That's the beauty of it.
I mean, the thing is, they fail to see that they're creating these very complicated schemes to basically interfere in other countries where, first of all, you don't really understand what's going on in any serious way.
And second of all, you don't understand the players that you're supporting.
And so they get into this thing again and again and again, and they never seem to figure out that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way they think.
And so here we see this terrible situation with at least 100,000 dead civilians in Syria playing out.
We were the major instigators of this event, and we were the ones feeding the insurgency without any understanding of who we were feeding.
So it's this kind of thing that you just kind of sit back and you say, well, yeah, I mean, when is this going to end, and when is George Bush and Barack Obama going to be in the International Court of Justice in The Hague and sent away to prison for the rest of their days?
You know, it's just so astonishing.
We've become the evil empire, and it's kind of a terrible thing to think of in terms of your own country.
But I don't know, you know, what to think about these people anymore.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's the thing.
I mean, there's a big difference between the land and the people and the politicians in charge of this thing here.
Hopefully we can continue to, you know, discriminate.
I mean, the truth is that the people agree with these kind of policies less and less now make more and more of a difference.
So you can hate your government and still love your country, Phil.
Don't worry.
Okay.
Well, thanks, Scott.
You know, well, I mean, hey, it's a big deal to me too, because I sure hate them.
But I'm from here and I don't hate my neighbors.
I disagree when they agree with my government, but I hold it against the politicians as all.
But anyway, so now let me ask you about this.
I know that you're helping over there at UNS.com and you guys have run this series by Patrick Coburn, which I would continue to urge you.
I would urge you to continue to run pretty much anything that that guy writes about anything.
And he wrote this five part series about the next generation of Al Qaeda.
And I've been talking to you for eight, nine years now on the radio, something like that.
And from the very beginning, you've been saying, look, just ramp this whole thing down.
We're just making more terrorists.
It's time to just cool it and support for their movements will dry up and that kind of thing.
And yet now I'm reading Patrick Coburn and he he's not prescribing a solution necessarily.
But the picture he paints almost sounds like too late.
American hopelessly anti-Geraldian foreign policy this last 10 years, since you first recommended they start doing the right thing here, has created thousands and thousands of new, young, angry, armed, American armed bin Laden nights from Mali throughout the Levant and into Iraq, where they've started a civil war back up again.
And I can't help but imagine that this is going to really be the excuse.
It's a war on Al Qaeda still after the next few absolutely horrible attacks by them happen is going to be the excuse for decades more of war against these guys, because because Bush and Obama have succeeded one way or the other in empowering them by the thousands and thousands and thousands.
It's this whole new generation.
Or what do you think of what he wrote there?
Well, I read those articles with a great deal of interest.
He's he's a guy who's very plugged in and he has a very independent way of thinking in terms of how he looks at problems and how these these issues develop.
So he's always worth reading, as you noted.
And you know, I've been arguing for some time now that the the whole concept of international terrorism has been overblown, that people have been exaggerating.
I tend to agree after reading his pieces that, if anything, we have revived it.
We have we have taken this movement, which was out of the defensive almost everywhere in the world and in decline.
And we've given it new life by what we've done in in Iraq and in Syria.
And it's it's quite an astonishing thought that, you know, we scream all the time about terrorism and the terrorist threat.
We are probably the ones in it assisted by our friends, the Saudis, who have done more than anyone to create the terrorist menace.
And it is indeed a menace that has found new life, I think, in Syria.
Yeah, well, back to Syria in one second, but and maybe this is stupid because it's by Eli Lake, but Eli Lake is saying today at the Daily Beast that jihadists now control a secret of U.S. base in Libya, that the special forces have built there to train anti-terrorist forces.
They were raided once and all their equipment stolen.
And so the Americans abandoned the base.
And now it's an al-Qaeda training camp, which I don't know if they're working, if these are pro or anti-American al-Qaeda this time, Phil.
We probably don't know.
Well, they're the moderates.
No, no, no.
These are the extremists.
Well, it's hard to tell.
We're trying to split off the Nusra from the ISIS, you understand.
All right.
Well, now.
And so now back to Syria.
But back in time, let's go back to 2011 here.
I actually just read an apology for Saudi intervention in Syria at the National.ae that said that it wasn't until after Assad's obliteration of Homs in 2012 that the Saudis began intervening there and arming up the al-Nusra Front and ISIS, et cetera.
And yet in your article, I mean, first of all, as we already we started talking about, it was at least by the end of 2011, they had these operations going on.
But you also point out in your article at the American Conservative Magazine that Robert Ford, the American ambassador, was out there in the streets and encouraging the protesters and picking sides and maybe financing them, et cetera.
Remind me now, was that early in 2011, the summer, the fall?
Or what do you know about how this really started, the American and Saudi intervention there?
Well, the Saudi intervention is a separate issue and it goes way back.
The Saudis, as you point out, were after Homs and they were out for Assad the elder.
Basically, this is essentially because Syria was perceived as being the wild card in the Arab deck, that it essentially had interesting relationships with Iran.
It also was a secular state, let's remind ourselves, which the Saudis are not terribly keen on.
And the Sunnis were not in control, which I don't think the Saudis are not keen on.
So the Saudis go way back.
The United States really got into this around about 2003 or so, and it was a combination of factors.
Israel had input into this, Congress, as usual, got into it.
The Bush administration was basically looking at Syria as yet another Arab domino, and we've been playing a clandestine role and an overt role.
Now, this is where it always interests me, and that's what you're talking about, a la Victoria Nuland in Ukraine, where we sent over a series of ambassadors in chargees who essentially were there to stir things up, and they did a lot of that.
And Ford was doing this, I think it's, I'm not sure what month, but it is 2011, I'm not exactly sure what month he was involved, it would be easy to look it up on the Internet, but he was going to meetings just like our ambassador in Russia was doing, our ambassador in Ukraine has been doing, with opposition figures supporting the opposition openly.
On a couple of occasions, Ford was actually pelted with tomatoes and rotten fruit, and then it was finally decided to pull him out, but the embassy was still there, and the embassy's second in charge is his chargee, deputy chief of mission, and they were doing the same thing.
I mean, they were basically stirring the pot, stirring the pot, stirring the pot.
So this is something that we see now, in retrospect, as a pattern for U.S. behavior in these other places and with countries that we don't approve of.
And you know what, I don't think it's the same to say that, yeah, and you know what, it has drawn out this war, as you mentioned before, it's got, you know, created all these refugees and all these terrible casualties, and the war may not have ever broken out in the first place, and or the Sunni insurgency in Syria may have been crushed by Assad, and that would have been a lot more peaceful, the piece of the stamping boot, I guess, for them.
But I don't think it's necessarily to say that that would be preferable to this isn't necessarily to side with the Alawites against the Sunni Arabs of Syria or anything.
I mean, they do have the right to resist and to declare independence, to secede if they need to or whatever, just like any other group of humans.
But, you know, the facts on the ground of what has actually happened here is that it's really just another Bay of Pigs, right?
It's really just another Shia uprising from 1991 in Iraq, where the Americans encourage them and then leave them high and dry to be slaughtered.
And it serves our interests and serves them.
What's interesting about this is none of this stuff is the proper role of an ambassador.
An ambassador is there to represent the American people.
She's basically there to help Americans in trouble, to help American businessmen who are traveling overseas, to serve as a channel for getting the views of the country that he's representing, that he's in, back to Washington for policymakers.
She's not supposed to be a CIA officer, you know, running around stirring things up.
And yet we've lost sight of this.
And we're basically perverting the whole function of diplomacy, because we don't understand it anymore.
And it's like so many other things that we're just kind of, we've become so used to being the on steroids Goliath, you know, walking across the world with all our nuclear weapons and our armies and ships and airplanes, that we don't have any kind of perspective anymore.
And this is what I think is kind of scary about all this stuff, because you see, if you see ambassador after ambassador after ambassador, both under Bush and under Obama going overseas, and basically serving as advocates for the political opposition in those countries, what kind of reaction do you expect to get?
Right.
Yeah.
And also, as you've written before, too, they're all a bunch of incompetent boobs who do nothing but create disasters everywhere.
They have no idea.
It's not like, I mean, I don't know if Alan Dulles ever really was good at this stuff either.
At least we can pretend that back in the good old days, they were good at this stuff.
Now they're just completely horrible at it.
Well, they have no perspective on the world.
I mean, that's the whole problem.
These are these people that come up through the systems are our apparatchiks, as the Russians would call them.
I mean, they're basically creatures of the system.
And that's all they understand.
They understand how to make the whoever the guy in the White House is smile.
And, you know, it's just it's just we have we have a country that's become totally corrupted by by our politics and our money and this kind of thing.
And we don't don't really understand anything anymore.
I don't think, you know, even our neighbors like Mexico and Canada, do any Americans really understand what's going on in either of those places?
I doubt that.
Yeah.
No, I mean, they certainly don't explain it on TV.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
All right.
So now let me ask you about what you think.
Hersh's report.
Do you buy in it?
Yeah, I think on balance I do buy it.
I because there's there's corroborating information that he didn't talk about in his story, which I outline in the piece I did.
Basically he's saying that the Turks got themselves into a corner on Syria, which is no surprise.
And essentially they tried to force Obama into attacking Syria because he had unwisely declared that there was a red line of the use of chemical weapons or weapons of mass destruction on civilians.
So the Turks, seeing this and understanding this, arranged this.
They basically worked through their own friends in the insurgency and they supplied them with the chemicals and they supply them with the means of delivery and so on and so forth, and essentially created this incident.
I believe that it's more plausible than anything else I've heard.
I know for a fact, and I've said this a number of times on your show, that both the U.S. and British governments know for a fact that Syria did not initiate the attack that was being used as a couch's belly to attack them.
So, you know, this is a highly plausible account of what may have occurred.
I think since Cy Hirsch, I know him personally, generally is a very reliable reporter, has very good sources in the Pentagon, intelligence community, and State Department, I tend to believe that this is correct.
And then I would throw into the hopper the fact that there was this, just before the recent Turkish elections, there was a recorded conversation between Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey and his head of intelligence, in which they were basically talking about how to get this thing going, basically by staging a false flag attack on their own soldiers.
So, you know, this is the kind of cynicism that prevails in that part of the world.
And so, yeah, I believe it.
On balance, I believe it.
Yeah.
Well, and by the way, for folks who don't know or forgot, you know, the Turkish intelligence guys, because you were a CIA officer stationed in Turkey for many years, right?
That's right.
And I know them.
They're very tough people.
They're capable of doing what they think they have to do.
And, you know, so I'm not surprised at any of this.
And there have been some arguments.
Oh, the Turks could never pull off anything as complicated as that.
Well, that's nonsense.
The Turks are quite capable of pulling off something like this or something even more complicated.
Well, you know, I think it's important that your reaction and also Flint Leverett and Ray McGovern, two former CIA analysts and Patrick Coburn, the I think the best Western reporter in the Middle East that we have out of all of them, if you had to rank them.
All y'all's reaction has been, yeah, that's Seymour Hersh for you, man.
He does good work, always has.
And check out the all the other reasons that we already know that this fits with, you know, who had the motive, what we already know about the CIA analysts' unwillingness to go along.
Oh, let me ask you about this, because Ray McGovern said that the Brennan had CIA guys there in Turkey who knew about this, too.
And yeah, yeah, yeah, there's no question that this was known to the American intelligence community.
I was hearing this, as was Ray, quite early on in the process when they were cranking up to a tax area.
You know, we knew it.
We were we were we were told that by by people who had, you know, pretty good access.
Let's let's leave it at that.
But the sure.
Yeah, there is.
There certainly were lots of people in the CIA that knew that this was phony.
And from the get go, that's really something not just the analysts didn't believe it, but as McGovern put it, Brennan's men, the operations guys, they knew from the get go it wasn't correct.
You're saying that's correct.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we got to run.
Thanks again, Phil.
Great talk to you.
OK, Scott.
Bye bye.
Bye.
All right.
That's Phil Girali.
He's at the American conservative dot com and the Council for the National Interest dot org.
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