For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm happy to welcome Phil Giraldi back to the show.
Of course, you all know this guy.
He is a former CIA and DIA counterterrorism officer.
He writes for the American Conservative Magazine and for Antiwar.com, for the Campaign for Liberty and the American Conservative Defense Alliance.
And boy, he always knows the answers to questions and stuff, so that's why I have him here.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm fine.
Let's start with the suicide bombing that killed all these CIA agents in Afghanistan.
What's the story behind this?
Looks like Al-Qaeda infiltrated the Jordanians and then they infiltrated the CIA or something?
Well, not exactly.
I mean, this guy was not a double agent.
He was a triple agent.
He was basically a radical Islamist.
He was a Jordanian doctor who was arrested by the Jordanian Intelligence Service, which is a rather rough, tough service.
And I'm sure his stay with the Jordanian Intelligence Service was not a friendly one.
And he was turned.
What they did was they basically had something on him.
I don't know whether they were criminal charges or just putting pressure on him in a more generic way.
But they convinced him to work against radical Islam, in this case against Al-Qaeda, and to be someone that they could seed into a militant group.
This is called a seeding operation in intelligence circles, where you take someone and you place them inside a group that you want to penetrate.
So they did that.
They thought they had done that successfully.
But it turned out, of course, that he was still really, or rather when he got in with Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, it's not completely clear.
He basically gave his loyalty to them and turned himself into a suicide bomber and killed seven CIA officers and his Jordanian case officer Handler.
Well, so what do you think is going to be the, or maybe it's already begun, the backlash from this?
I mean, one part of the story is just how closely the Jordanians have been working with the Americans, which I guess anybody could have guessed if you'd asked them, but that hasn't really been very publicized throughout the whole terror war here.
Well, it's going to have two effects there.
First of all, it's going to have a bad effect inside Jordan in terms of becoming public, the extent to which the Jordanian services is cooperating with CIA, which both CIA and the United States are extremely unpopular in Jordan, where the population is roughly half Palestinian.
So that will be one effect, and the other effect is, of course, the CIA will become nervous and will not trust agents or information that is being produced by the Jordanians.
So there's going to be a ripple effect in that direction, too.
Well, and what's it going to mean for the efforts of the CIA to kill people in Afghanistan and Pakistan?
Maybe this is a good thing and some lives have been saved here.
I mean, I hate to say that, but they kill innocent people every damn day over there.
We know that they do.
It's in the headlines every day.
They kill women and children.
Yeah, I think I saw some statistics the other day indicating that the ratio of civilians killed to an actual target is about 70 to 1.
So you're absolutely right about that.
I think, to me, there's a bigger story here, which is the fact that the CIA, it seems to me, doesn't have very good resources in a lot of these places in spite of all the money and all the personnel that have been thrown in.
So therefore, they're forced to use assets or agents that are given to them by other intelligence services or people who walk in through the door.
They're referred to as walk-ins in CIA jargon.
And this means that you don't have people that have the language and cultural skills who can go out there and recruit agents.
Apparently, the agency just doesn't have this anymore.
So that's another story there, too.
I quite agree with you.
The bottom line might be that they're going to be a lot more circumspect in terms of relying on this kind of information to use drone strikes against targets.
And that could be a good thing.
Now, let me ask you about this story about supposedly some students being taken out and shot.
I've got to tell you, I don't really know.
But the first thing that I saw about it, they said that this included a sixth grader, which, if that corresponds to the United States, means what?
Like an 11- or 12-year-old or something supposedly was taken out and shot in the back of the head.
I'm not buying it.
But supposedly the U.N. is saying that they agree with the Afghan authorities about this and what have you.
What do you know about that?
I don't really know a lot about that story apart from what just appeared.
And I was kind of surprised to see it.
And if you have anything more on it, I'd be interested in hearing it.
But, no, I don't really have any insight into whether this is true or not.
Certainly, there are a lot of stories that have been floated by both sides.
And some of them turn out to be true and some of them false.
Well, now, you know, it's interesting, right?
Because killing women and children from the sky is no problem, right?
But I just don't believe until I see real evidence that U.S. Army would handcuff a child, put him on his knees, and shoot him in the back of the head.
I just can't see that.
Maybe, you know, hey, what the hell, Stephen Green went and raped and murdered a 14-year-old girl.
So you never really know, I guess.
Well, having been in the Army, I would say this in defense of the Army.
I mean the Army, you know, understands that people go gaga when they're in combat situations or in high-stress situations where their lives are in danger.
And things like that happen.
But that's why you have sergeants around.
That's why you have officers around to keep these things from happening.
And I agree with you that the whole idea that a U.S. soldier would take a child and bind the child and shoot him or her in the back of the head is, to me, not credible.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, at TPM website there, the Talking Points memo, they had a piece about this.
And someone in the comments section put a link to a picture supposedly of the dead from this story.
And they all, from what I could tell, they all had beards and were full-grown men, you know, quote-unquote fighting-age males.
And I don't know anything else about it whether – I mean, hell, I don't think that American government forces have the right to kill anyone in Afghanistan or Pakistan at all.
So I'm not defending it or anything, but it didn't look like the atrocity that they're saying, that's all, as far as I know anyway.
Yeah, you can expect there's going to be a certain amount of exploitation of incidents, some of which might actually be legitimate self-defense, whether or not one supports that U.S. soldiers should be there at all.
But, you know, there's going to be that kind of thing, and I fully expect that the Taliban are very skilled at manipulating what they are given.
All right.
Now, have I given you a chance to say what you want to say about the Jordanian double agent here?
Yeah, I think, you know, what bothers me most about the story is that there was an extremely high level of incompetence – the triple agent now – extremely high level of incompetence on the part of the CIA people.
You know, I could go through all the kind of anecdotes about CIA and the way it operates and everything, but one thing that's drilled into your head literally from day one is that you never fall in love with your agent.
You never trust an agent.
An agent is basically someone who's betraying someone else, and it's only another step before they betray you.
And so the whole idea that you would take an agent, bring him into your secure facility, and then all gather around to hear, you know, what he has to say is absolutely incredible.
And to me, it's a symptom of a total breakdown in the discipline in the agency.
And then you combine that with the fact that obviously the agency is having extreme difficulty in even operating in these environments in terms of getting into the culture, getting into the language.
I think these are very disturbing sort of subplots to what took place.
All right, well, so let me ask you this.
This whole – if we believe the hype at all about Yemen here, which I guess, you know, I have a couple reasons to believe a little bit of the hype, which I guess we can get into.
But if we believe the hype at all about Yemen, then what the hell are we doing fighting the central front on the AfPak border here?
I mean, if it's all about geography and the base where they can attack us from, apparently the base is anywhere on earth where an individual can stand and decide to kill somebody.
Well, the convenience about having a central front is you can put it wherever you want it to be.
And yeah, I mean this is ridiculous.
By the most crazy estimates, there may be a couple of hundred people who affiliate in some way or call themselves something akin to al-Qaeda in Yemen.
And it seems that if there are people intent on carrying out terrorist acts in the United States among that group, they seem to be people who are products of our schooling system at Guantanamo.
So, you know, you kind of have to wonder what is the underlying story here?
Here again, we are there.
We've been carrying out drone strikes, as I'm sure you know, and that we've killed a number of people, many of whom were questionably of intelligence value.
And so, you know, it's again, it's the Ron Paul kind of comment, you know.
They're trying to get us over here because we're over there.
So where does this cycle stop?
Yeah, well, now there's a couple things there.
Most important one is I think you're referring to what Justin wrote about in two articles ago at antiwar.com slash Justin, the road ahead.
He talked about this, the Christian Science Monitor and the Al Jazeera piece.
And then, of course, the big one was the the Brian Ross story, ABC News, saying that it was Guantanamo Bay, former Guantanamo Bay inmates who were set free, who are apparently running this Al Qaeda in Yemen.
And now the way Justin puts it together is that, you know, this guy who's supposedly in charge over there is pretty obviously working for our side.
This is this kind of looks like a big scam.
Why would Al Qaeda accept or whatever you call them?
Why would legitimate insurgents against the American empire twice accept somebody who was in Guantanamo Bay and has already stabbed them in the back?
It doesn't make any sense unless he's they tortured him into working for us or something.
Well, unless you unless you kind of see this again as double agents or as people that have very divided, conflicted loyalties.
And, you know, and in fact, a lot of these people were not actually released into Yemen.
They were released into Saudi Arabia and placed in rehab programs where presumably they learned things like macrame and everything to keep themselves busy.
Yeah.
And, you know, these people look like let's let's face it.
What we see here that to me, I'm not really resting on judgment.
Justin's judgment on this is that, you know, you have people who are radicalized by the experience of being arrested by the United States, tortured by the United States and then released.
And these people, you know, in some sense, learned a lot of new skills while they were in prison.
They learned how to network.
They learned how to communicate.
They learned a lot of things.
So I would think Al Qaeda would indeed be interested in picking them up.
And, you know, this is this is just another spin that I'm throwing out there.
I don't know what what the what the truth is about this situation any more than than many people commenting on it do.
But the fact is that, you know, there are a lot of ways these things can spin and they don't spin in a good direction for us.
That's I think the bottom line that we have to be concerned with.
Well, are you as suspicious as I am about this whole thing with the Detroit bomber?
I mean, every time I see this kid's face on TV, he's got the word Patsy written across his forehead.
Whoever he whoever put him on that plane, he's some idiot kid that got put on that plane.
And I interviewed I don't know if you heard it.
The transcript is going to be going up tomorrow.
This lawyer, Kurt Haskell, who saw some mysterious guy help him get on the plane in the Netherlands.
And there are at least three witnesses and now backed up, finally admitted to and confirmed by the customs department or customs agency there that there was, in fact, a second person arrested at the airport in Detroit.
And, you know, I don't want to be a truther on this crap, but my government apparently are the only ones who are trying to make me be a truther on it.
They're not trying to say to me, Phil, that, yes, there were two Pakistani men involved and that's why we have to bomb Pakistan.
They're pretending that these two other actors don't exist in their narrative every time that they, you know, reproduce the official story in The Post or whatever.
It doesn't have anything to do with these two mysterious other men.
Yeah, well, you know, that that is something to be concerned about.
I think that to a certain extent, as someone who was inside the security apparatus of the United States, I can understand if they're conducting an investigation, trying to find out who these people are or to track back on what their connections might be.
Yeah, I could understand why they would be a little bit reticent about saying anything.
But even given that, they could say something like other investigations are pending.
We have received other information that we're following up on.
They could, in a way, be telling the public, yeah, we're not closing the book on all this stuff.
But unfortunately, I think Obama wants to close the book on all this stuff because we seem to have all of a sudden new agendas driving us.
Like, let's get involved in Yemen and let's not forget about Iran.
Yeah, well, and see, this is the thing, too, as we talked about before, I guess just last week.
We are already bombing Yemen.
And this is a great little after the fact here.
But we can just, you know, I guess we're all just supposed to pretend and get our cause and effect all mixed up and whatever.
But according to the official story of the thing, the al-Qaeda guys in the official statement said, yeah, this is revenge for you bombing us.
We decided to put this kid on a plane to attack you back.
That was even in the official story.
Yeah, that's right.
And that's one of the things that's being ignored.
Basically, as Ron Paul pointed out, this is payback again.
I mean, you know, we're always getting payback.
And then we wonder why we're getting payback.
Well, I mean, it's payback because we did it first.
Oh, man.
Well, we really could go that whole direction and talk about that.
We really have a lot of times.
But I guess I want to focus on the near-term future here a little bit, Phil, which is what are they going to do to Yemen?
Is it going to be just special forces and CIA at worst or send a lot of money to the local dictators and militias there?
We're not really going to put combat forces actually fighting on the ground 300 miles from Mecca, are we?
Well, Hillary Clinton said today it's a major threat to the world, not just to us, not just to its neighbors, to the world.
You know, there's like a war hysteria that's cranking up here.
And in response to what you suggested, what we might do, I think all of the above.
We've got some special forces already there, I believe is correct to say.
We are certainly beefing up CIA presence there.
Hope they do a better job than they're doing in Afghanistan.
And they've already announced that they're going to double the budget that they're giving to the corrupt government that is in place.
So it's going to be all of the above.
I don't envision, at least at this point, any kind of troop commitment, just largely because we don't have anything.
But, yeah, I mean, their ambition is no end when it comes to finding a new enemy to fight.
And it's just, to me, when I sit back and say threat from Yemen, I mean, is someone smoking something?
Is someone drinking something?
Because I'd like to get some of that stuff, I mean, just to see what it's like.
But this is crazy.
I mean, this is Yemen.
Yemen is, I mean, maybe a step up above Somalia, but it's in that league.
And it's one of the poorest countries in the world.
There's a civil war going on there.
There's an insurgency going on there.
Tribes are fighting tribes there.
There are religious divisions there.
The government basically controls the capital and little else.
And the security services have been completely corrupted.
So what is the American agenda there?
What is our national interest in getting involved there?
Well, that's what The Times is asking today, too.
I mean, they're saying, look, the local dictator there is not much for backing.
This is going to be another Karzai-type situation.
And, of course, the more we help him, the weaker he'll be.
Yeah, that's right, because then he truly does become a Patsy of the West.
Yeah, man, this is crazy.
Well, and now here's the thing.
If I can try to give the war party its due, if there's any due to be given to them, there was a safe house in Yemen that served as al-Qaeda's switchboard for years and years.
It was, I think, Hani Hanjour, one of the Flight 77 hijackers.
His father-in-law owned the house.
And this is where Osama bin Laden and all his guys would leave messages for each other and all those things.
And this is where, apparently, bin Laden's family is from, at least a few generations back, anyway, is from Yemen.
And, of course, it is part of what they consider to be the holy peninsula of Mecca and Medina.
So never mind the war party would say, well, their problem is they believe in some evil religion and they're just mean and whatever stupid kind of arguments they have.
I mean, we all understand the simple truth that American combat forces stationed on the Arabian Peninsula in the 1990s is what got us attacked, starting with the embassy bombing in 1996 and then all the way through.
You know, I guess what I'm trying to say is that the war party might, at least the case might sound plausible, that, yeah, there are guys there.
This is sort of the seat of the radicalism that Osama bin Laden and them represent, the so-called Salafists or whatever, who will, being the craziest and the most right-wing and radical, are the first ones to volunteer to fight in the war against the empire.
Well, yeah, sure.
I mean, you know, the war party will argue that this is the root of all evils.
But if it's the root of all evils, why didn't they say that a couple of years ago?
It just seems to have come up all of a sudden.
You know, I just don't, I think we're seeing arguments that are being tailored to produce the result that they want to come out of this.
And the result they want to come out of this is basically, as many of the advocates of this policy have said openly, we want a long war until we, you know, basically exterminate this, what do you want to call it, a way of life or a religion or a, you know, however you want to define it.
The will to resist us.
Yeah, the will to resist maybe is the best way to look at it.
And they want a long war in which we will serially be knocking off country after country, changing regime in place after place.
You noted, of course, last week that we now have 14 countries, 12 of which are overwhelmingly Islamic, that are now going to be doing body searches and everything if the people want to travel to the United States.
So we've made it very clear who the enemy is.
One of the other countries, interestingly enough, on that list is Cuba.
How many Cuban suicide bombers have there been lately?
I must have missed them.
Well, you want to talk about airplane terrorism in Cuba.
That's a whole different conversation.
And the terrorists are on the other side.
Other side, exactly.
Oh, man.
Well, so, no, I mean, we've got to go back over kind of the big picture here of this war.
I mean, because here's the deal, Phil.
If George W. Bush had said on September 12th or the night of September 11th, look, as long as America has a world empire, 3,000 or so of you civilians are going to have to die from time to time.
But that's what the Republican Party and this government are committed to.
So get yourself a stiff upper lip and prepare to get attacked some more.
I don't think that would have gone over very well.
You know, they had to lie to us and pretend like this attack came out of the clear blue sky, when clearly it did not.
And, you know, again, I have to go back and harp on any of the coverage of bin Laden and Zawahiri going back to 1996, their interviews with CNN, the declaration of war that came out right after he got to Afghanistan, after leaving Sudan on the heels of the Kana massacre in Lebanon.
The title of the fatwa, Phil, is the Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.
Get your stinking white Christian combat boots off of my land or I'll kill you.
That's what it says.
And so there's no distinction to Osama bin Laden or anyone who believes like him in the borders on that peninsula.
It's the whole peninsula.
It's the land of Mecca and Medina.
It's the most sacred place.
It'd be no different, hell, if some foreign country was occupying Austin, Texas, I don't even have a religion, but I would be shooting at them.
I would be doing whatever it took to liberate Austin, Texas, from some foreign power.
In fact, I sort of feel like resisting the state of Texas itself occupying Austin.
But the fact is that if we really escalate this thing in Yemen, literally a couple of hundred miles away from Mecca, we might as well be bombing Iran.
This is a whole other step, and very well could be at least, a whole other step in this bogus clash of civilizations that is obviously not even necessary, but is still this path that we're headed on.
Like Scheuer says, our choice is war or total war.
We're headed toward total war.
Yeah, well, I don't think there's any question about that.
I think that Obama is the smart enough person to realize that this is a recipe for disaster, but he's locked into it.
Certainly, when I voted for him, I had hoped that he would see through this.
To a certain extent, even if he has, he hasn't been able to do anything that has been able to turn this thing around.
If we're set on a course to be fighting the world's one billion Muslims for now and forever, then I think this is a fool's journey for us.
It has already done serious damage to our economy.
It will destroy our economy, and it will make America a backwater in every sense.
If that's what they want, I don't really understand it, but it seems that there are a lot of people in the United States that believe that this kind of policy is sustainable.
All right, so now we've got January 3, 2010, Brod and Sanger in the New York Times.
Basically, the story is that the administration officially accepts whatever lie about the Iranian nuclear program is necessary for them to go ahead and repudiate the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 that says the Iranians are not making nuclear weapons.
Right.
Mr. Obama's top advisors say they no longer believe the key finding of the much disputed NIE.
Oh, and you know what?
Isn't it interesting?
You're the guy who wrote the story in the American Conservative Magazine in the fall of 2006, saying that the CIA has made, or the National Intelligence Council, has made a National Intelligence Estimate about Iran and their nuclear program, and Dick Cheney is fighting to suppress it, because what it says is that they are not making nuclear weapons, and then it took more than a year, that was in October 2006, I think, and then it wasn't until November, the end of November of 2007, when the NIE was finally released, and then what exactly did that NIE say, Phil?
Well, the NIE basically said that the Iranians did indeed at one time have an exploratory weapons program, but that as of 2003, the program had been suspended, and there was absolutely no evidence that it had been restarted.
It was fairly simple.
It was a definitive conclusion based on the inputs of over, I believe, 17 intelligence agencies within the United States government.
It was a consensus view.
I don't believe there was any dissent on it, although there was some wiggling about the potential for restarting the program, but I don't think there was any dissent at all from the conclusion, and that's basically what it said, and since then, the director of national intelligence and head of CIA have confirmed on several occasions that that judgment has not changed.
Right, and now let's go back over that in specific.
In March of 2009, last March, Dennis Blair, the head of national intelligence, testified, or no, maybe, yeah, yeah, I think it was last March.
He testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under oath.
He told John McCain and Carl Levin that, yes, he still stands by the NIE from 2007.
Then there was that report in Newsweek that came out in, I think, late October, maybe late September, sometime in October, by Mark Hosenball that said that the CIA had just put a report on the president's desk that said that they still stand by the conclusion of the national intelligence estimate that there's not a nuclear weapons program, and then there was even media saying that the CIA had been fighting with the Germans and the Israelis, with the intelligence agencies, and having this big argument as to whether there was a nuclear weapons program or not, and the CIA was sticking by their guns and saying, no, there's not.
Yeah, that's accurate, and basically the disagreement about whether there is a program or not has been going on for a little while, in which the Germans and the French and the Israelis all believe that Iran has some kind of program.
Of course, the Israelis believe it is a very active galloping forward program.
The French and the Germans just believe it's some kind of program that they have difficulty in determining the scale of.
But the evidence is still there that basically Iran does not have a program.
They keep pointing to the so-called secret facility at Qom.
That would have been a very small backup facility, so it seems.
It was never operational, and it would have been another year before it would be operational, and it was set up as a backup in case the Israelis and the Americans, or some combination thereof, were to attack their main nuclear facility at Natanz.
So there's a plausible reason why this facility was somewhat of a secret.
It was eventually declared to the UN, but this is constantly cited as evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
Pat Buchanan had a very interesting article that appeared in Anti-War Today about why we should go along with the uranium proposals to help reprocess the uranium, because it actually would diminish their capability to do anything outside the box.
Right.
Of course.
That's the whole thing.
Well, two things here.
Let me put off the Pat Buchanan point for a second, because I want to focus on what you said about Qom, and how it was no big deal, and how they make it seem like the biggest deal in the world.
And I just can't resist a chance to beat Broad and Sanger over the head.
These guys at the New York Times, I don't know if they're agents of the Mossad or who they're working for, but they're damn liars, these guys.
They willfully misrepresent everything that they possibly can.
Oh, they now have enough low-enriched uranium to make a bomb, and then five paragraphs later you find that they'd have to enrich it to above 94% pure 235.
Scratch your head and forget that whole first part.
Anyway, here they are, just passing on a lie.
This is just a lie.
The biggest disruption came in late September when Mr. Obama, along with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, publicly exposed Iran's covert effort to build an enrichment plant near Qom.
Well, that is a lie, and we all know, and all we have to do is go to Google News, and they have that little calendar thing, if you click the right button there, and it'll take you, and you can see where the Iranians declared, like, quote-unquote declared, officially, legally declared to the IAEA, hey, we're building a plant.
And then four days later, Obama, Sarkozy, and Brown gave their press conference exposing, quote-unquote, this secret facility.
And what, like I'm supposed to believe that Broad and Sanger don't know this?
What is the matter with these two?
And when Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, went to inspect the site, he said, hey, it's just a hole in the ground.
It's just a hole in the ground.
There's not a single centrifuge in there.
And, yeah, the whole thing is just, it's amazing to me that it goes on like this.
And there are numerous intelligence reports indicating that the Iranians are having serious problems with their existing program, with the centrifuges are breaking down, they have engineering problems.
I mean, you know, this is a developing country with very limited resources, and the whole idea that it's hell-bent on creating a nuclear weapon at a cost of what, a couple billion dollars, which they don't have, and then they're going to make this weapon and hand it off to a terrorist group to use?
I mean, you know, some of this stuff just beggars the imagination.
And, of course, there's the whole thing, too, which, you know, I'm no physicist, but I know Gordon Prather, and if you're going to make a simple uranium bomb, it's going to have to be a gun-type nuke like they did, like they dropped on Hiroshima, which is a giant device.
You have to shoot one uranium pit into another down a long tube inside the bomb, that kind of thing, down a barrel in there.
And, you know, you can't just strap this on your backpack or whatever and take this thing around.
This is a huge device to be able to make even one of those.
And then when it comes to implosion, you can make a much smaller warhead if you use an implosion system.
But, you know, then the kind of implosion systems that we're supposed to believe the Iranians are using are the kinds of things like in this article from the London Times of August 3rd, Iran is ready to build N-bomb, it is just waiting for Ayatollah's order, where they say in here that the system operates by creating a series of explosive grooves on a metal hemisphere covering the uranium, which links explosives-filled holes opening onto a layer of high explosives enveloping the uranium.
By detonating the explosives at either pole at the same time, the method ensures simultaneous impact around the sphere to achieve critical density.
Well, Gordon Prather, who spent much of his career making nuclear weapons, who was in the Navy, worked at Lawrence Livermore and San Diego National Laboratories, was the chief scientist of the U.S. Army, and was an advisor to Senator Henry Bellman and others, said this was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard.
This is not how you implode a uranium warhead, cutting grooves in it and laying some prima cord or whatever ridiculous explosives on it.
They would have to test an implosion device with non-highly enriched uranium over and over and over again and film it with high-speed x-ray film and test it over and over and over to get it timed down to the millisecond to make it work, and then even then it's too big to fit on any missile the Iranians got.
I mean, this whole thing is so ridiculous.
It's just amazing to me where this conversation takes place, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
And what bothers me is that the problem is that people will read the New York Times or they'll read the London Times or they'll read the Guardian or they'll read where a lot of these stories appear, and they'll walk away from it and say, yeah, you know, those Iranians, they're completely outside the civilized realm.
We can't talk to them.
They're evil people that are driven by an evil religion and so on and so forth.
I mean, the fact is that Iran for, you know, this is not to be a cheerleader for Iran in any way, but Iran is a country that behaves very much like other countries in terms of looking at where its self-interests are and responding pragmatically to that.
And the people who think that this is a country of crazies are basically just closing the door on establishing any kind of relationship with Iran that could be a livable relationship, and they really just want war.
All right, now let's talk about the London Times some more here.
You were the source for an article by Gareth Porter where you said, and you said on this show last week, that you have intelligence sources who tell you they've rejected the documents that were in the London Times in December, on December 14th, that they don't believe in them.
They think they're forgeries.
Gareth Porter explained a couple of reasons why it seemed to make sense to him they were forgeries, such as no security seals, no dates, and George Machke chimed in the conversation a little bit there talking about how this is Arabic typeset in the computer rather than a Farsi one, and that was suspicious, although apparently almost all, from what I learned from Sabel Edmond, she said almost all computers in Iran come from the UAE and are in Arabic typeset, and so that may not be that suspicious of a part of it.
But now the guys at the London Times are defending the lack of seals and dates and these kinds of things by saying, actually they rewrote the thing.
Well, I haven't read this, but I talked with Justin this morning.
That's what he said they're saying.
I haven't read that part.
Apparently they're saying that, oh yeah, you're right, because the documents that we showed you, we recreated them, because we didn't want to show the actual original documents because that would have hurt our sources or something like that.
What do you think of that?
Well, the argument was ridiculous.
I saw it.
It was in the rebuttal to the rebuttal that I had made and that Gareth had made about their claims.
And they basically said, oh yeah, well of course we extracted the information, then we translated it, and this was because there was classified information in the thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, it was a BS argument, no question about it.
This document is a phony.
There's no question but that it's a phony.
And they are defending it to the last.
You know, let them do it.
I mean, they're just looking more and more stupid as they go along with this.
And obviously the technical premise that it's based on is also erroneous.
That's been looked at by a number of people, and it turns out that that doesn't make any sense in terms of how they describe the technology.
So, you know, the whole thing is bogus.
It's just another product of Rupert Murdoch and the London Times and the Rupert Murdoch media empire to promote demonizing Iran.
And the objective in demonizing Iran is to, just like with Iraq, to pave the way for a war.
Well, you know, one more thing on that is that I don't think this has come out yet.
If it has, I haven't gotten it in my email, I don't think.
But I talked with Gareth Porter, and he said his next piece on this, I think it's okay to say, because it'll probably… It is out.
Oh, is it out?
Okay, good.
Press News Service has it, yeah.
Okay, great.
So do you know then whether it says what he told me it was going to say was something about how the guy implicated in the documents as being in charge of this program is highly unlikely to be a guy in charge of a secret nuclear weapons program?
It's so far from his actual expertise.
Do you know that?
Yeah, apparently they got the bureaucracy, the details of the bureaucracy wrong in this document.
So, yeah, he does detail that in his account.
I wouldn't want to try to duplicate what he said because it's kind of complicated, but he does cover that ground, yes.
Well, now, boy, this is all begging the giant question.
Where's the giant scandal here?
Forged documents.
The Obama government telling Broad and Sanger in the New York Times that, oh, yeah, partly based on what didn't happen in the comms scandal there and partly based on these forged documents, we are now officially abandoning the apparently regardless what the intelligence community says, I'm not sure what the leaders of the CIA and the NIC are saying, but, you know, apparently they're going to go ahead and just pretend that the NIE is wrong and that there is a weapons program in Iran and that will be the basis of American policy.
Yeah, well, that's exactly what they're saying.
And, you know, it hasn't necessarily come from the White House yet.
This is stuff that's appeared in the New York Times based on their usual confidential sources and that sort of thing.
Yeah, but that is kind of the message that, you know, it's full speed ahead.
They've said that they will continue with the negotiations route with Iran, but they also are going to continue with the sanctions route.
So, you know, the one kind of cancels out the other.
And, you know, this is kind of, is it a replay of Iraq?
In some ways, there's no question about it.
These people are intent on war.
There is the Israeli lobby and we have to name them.
It's the Israeli lobby primarily that's pushing this and their friends like Rupert Murdoch and they really, really, really want war with Iran.
Yeah, and Garrett says the generals that run the U.S. Air Force as well are on board, although he says the leaders of the rest of the armed services aren't so sure they want to clean up the mess.
Well, let me tell you about the U.S. Air Force.
The U.S. Air Force is always on board of these things because these are things you can do from 20,000 feet.
They don't get their shoes muddy.
They don't get hurt.
Air Force people don't get killed.
So they have a whole different perspective on this thing.
If you talk to a Marine officer or an Army officer or even a Navy officer, you might get a different perspective.
All right, now, I know I've got to let you go and I've got to get out of here too, but let me ask you, give you a chance to go back to what you were saying about Pat Buchanan's article and the obvious solution that if our government, if the government had decent motives and what they were really trying to do was defuse the tension, the possibility that Iran will take the quantity of low-enriched uranium they have and turn it into highly enriched uranium, then the deal that's on the table that the Iranians have offered, their answer in the bargain ought to be perfectly good enough to accomplish that.
We'll swap what you got for some fuel rods that you couldn't possibly use for a bomb.
They'll be enriched to 20 percent.
You won't have to configure your centrifuges to do anything above 3.6 percent, the ones that still work, et cetera.
It's a perfect deal, isn't it?
Take it, right?
Well, it would seem to make sense.
I mean, the critics of it would argue that there is fungibility here, that if you have, by giving this ore or by not using this ore, you have other reserves of ore that you can use to enrich.
But, of course, that ignores, as I say, the technical issues.
That ignores a lot of other issues that come into play.
And plus, it seems very clear that Iran does not have a large supply of uranium that can be used for these purposes.
You may have seen there was another press report in the London Times last week about how Iran was trying to buy 1,300 tons of uranium from Kazakhstan.
That was another story that sank without a trace.
It's like, yeah, let's make up a story today and see where it goes.
And that seems to be the mentality behind all this sort of stuff.
Well, so, I mean, who's running the policy shop at the Pentagon?
Who's getting all this done?
I mean, you really are talking about, it sounds like, the kind of end run that happened in the run-up to Iraq.
All these bogus things.
Has Ledeen been going to Rome?
I mean, what the hell?
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know as much about Bobby Gates' staffing and what these people are like politically and everything.
Certainly the neocons who push these policies under George Bush are gone.
But I really don't know where the mindsets are of these people.
And certainly there are a number of hardliners that are advising our current president.
Rahm Emanuel would be one to point to.
But there are others.
Clearly there's a consensus within the Democratic Party, I think, unfortunately, that something has to be done about Iran.
And certainly they would find the Republicans behind them 100% if they were to do something like that.
So I think that's a danger.
Right, yeah.
All the political will is there to do the worst.
As we talked about before, the Pew poll shows the American people, scared as they are of this bogus threat, are worse on war with Iran than even the American foreign policy establishment.
Yeah, well, the American people need to sit back and put their feet up and take a stiff drink.
And if they seriously think that there is a threat coming out of Yemen, I mean, they have to really kind of sit back and think about it.
Or Iran, for that matter.
Iran's got no Air Force, no Navy, no power that can threaten America.
They can kill our guys stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, I bet you.
Because they're there.
Yeah, because they're within range.
Right.
We are far away.
Right.
Yeah, this whole fear-mongering that's being done by both Democrats and Republicans is an awful thing.
And it's an awful thing that the American public is buying into it.
But, you know, all I can say is that you have to keep speaking out.
I have to keep speaking out.
Other people like Justin have to keep speaking out.
And hopefully this kind of thing will shift.
There are already signs that I know I follow the blogs like you do.
You know, people on the blogs aren't buying into this stuff anymore.
You know, when something outrageous appears in the media, there's suddenly 300 comments and 280 of them are saying, God, this is BS.
Right.
That's true.
People are finally getting as cynical as I was when I was 13 or something.
So hopefully we're making progress.
That's right.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show again, as always, Phil.
All right.
Well, take care, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That's Phil Giroldi, former CIA and DIA man.
Writes for Antiwar.com for the American Conservative Magazine.
The Campaign for Liberty.
Check out his great articles there in the American Conservative Defense Alliance.
