06/02/14 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Help support CNI at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And next up is our friend Phil Giraldi.
He's formerly CIA and DIA, and now he's the executive editor, director, yeah, director of the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
They've got an America first foreign policy they push over there.
You might want to find out all about it, councilforthenationalinterest.org.
And then, of course, also he writes for the American conservative magazine, unz.com, and you can find some at Al Jazeera America as well.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Phil?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show again.
Hey, listen, so lately I've been getting paranoid about, and we talked about this recently, too.
In fact, there was the new State Department report came out.
There was some analysis by Jonathan Landay and McClatchy and all that.
And, you know, the administration, they're really wishy-washy on all this stuff because they're backing the terrorists in a lot of these instances.
And so they're not being completely honest.
But it seems like, you know, you've been saying on this show for years that, look, the real number of actual dangerous terrorists in the world is somewhere around a couple of thousand.
So don't panic.
Right.
But so now I'm wondering if maybe that number is quite a bit higher because of the Bush administration, foreign policy in Iraq and the Obama administration, foreign policy in Libya and especially in Syria.
And, you know, Landay, who is, you know, no dough on this stuff.
You know, I mean, I don't know if that's a phrase.
I mean, like doe eyed, naive person or anything.
He knows a lot about this stuff, too.
And he was saying, hey, man, yeah, I mean, these guys have statelets basically on the ground in Syria where they are raising tax money and they are, you know, building little kind of mini states.
And this is the most Al Qaeda anything ever.
And I just wonder whether, you know, maybe right now we're in the equivalent of 1999 or 2000 or something, and maybe there's another shoe to drop here is the next phase of blowback from America's foreign policy kicks in.
And I wonder whether, for example, we can trust the FBI who are too busy and trapping retarded kids into saying they love Osama in the microphone or something to stop the Boston attack or the Times Square attack or the Detroit airliner attack or anything else, whether we can depend on this government to protect us at all from the governments that they've created for us.
And so now that was a lot of talking.
You go ahead.
Well, I think everything you've said is true and everything that he said was true, too, about the, you know, this becoming a more serious issue.
But nevertheless, the bottom line in all this is that, you know, we're looking at Syria kind of like it's everywhere.
It's not everywhere.
It's Syria.
And we've created a situation in Syria that's become a breeding ground for a certain kind of itinerant terrorist who's been pretty much in existence ever since before 9-11 and has essentially gone from from fight to fight to fight.
These people are very dangerous.
There's no question about them, about that.
And if they also combine European nationality, which it did in the case of the most recent shooting in Brussels.
Well, then there's another security issue wrapped up into that.
And we have to consider what is the security situation that has been created by largely unassimilated Muslims in Europe.
And what does it mean?
But the bottom line is still, are we Americans threatened by all this?
I mean, is there a serious threat that requires us to be spending one trillion dollars a year that requires us to be using military forces in addition to intelligence resources and police resources?
And my answer is no.
All right.
Now, what if you trusted him?
What if, I don't know, all of a sudden, you know, the Bush's and Obama's and Clinton's were gone and you had some competent adults?
I don't know.
Your former best friend at CIA became the new guy in charge.
Somebody's judgment you really rely on.
And he said, listen, I don't want anything to do with world empire.
We're not pivoting to Africa or to China or to dismember Russia or anything else.
But we are going to hunt down and kill Al Qaeda guys from now on until they're gone.
Would you support that?
Or even that is still just counterproductive.
No, I absolutely would support an intelligence and law enforcement effort against terrorists.
But it has to be done with the full cooperation of the local governments in all these places where they have a terrorism problem.
The whole idea that the United States can go in and fix things is a fiction because we don't know the situation on the ground.
We don't know what the hell we're doing.
And you basically have to work with these people.
And even Obama last week in West Point, that's one of the smarter things he said.
You know, you really have to other people have to take the lead and we really have to work with them.
Now, if you're limiting that to using intelligence resources, law enforcement resources to deal with terrorism, I think that's the right approach.
What about drone wars?
Well, drone is a drone is a tool.
But if you're using drones to kill people, I'm opposed to in principle.
I think that if you use a drone as an intelligence device and using it to to to locate people, to identify possible targets that you then go after using, again, intelligence and law enforcement resources on the ground, I think that's a perfectly legitimate use of drones as long as they're not crashing into civilian airliners.
Yeah, which couple of close calls there so far.
We're just getting started on that.
Anyway, all right.
Well, now, so.
Well, let's go back to the beginning of the Arab Spring here, because it seems like Assad, if the Americans had just stayed out of the Syria thing altogether, and then Assad would have finished defeating the rebels a long time ago.
And maybe that would have been bad for the decent people who were among those fighting them.
But it seems like there's a lot of prisoner beheader and suicide bomber.
I'm in Al Zawahiri loving crazies among them, too.
And it seems like my guess is that the war would have been over a long time ago.
Not that the Americans have helped the jihadists to come anywhere near winning it, but they've just got 150,000 or so people killed.
Yeah, that's exactly what's happened.
And the thing is that, you know, when you get into these what if situations, it's not necessarily true that Assad might not have moved towards greater democratization if he didn't feel it was being done at gunpoint.
So, I mean, you have to, you know, you have to kind of put yourself in the heads of these other people.
By all accounts, Bashir is not a crazy.
And there are a number of options that he might have pursued if we had not pursued the military option by arming these people, by funding them and sending them in there.
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, this is problematic, too, because Bush's approach to Syria was, you know, like we were talking about outsource most of this to the local to the local guys.
That's part of what got us into this mess in the first place.
And, you know, the stories of all the the torture Bush paying Assad to torture al Qaeda guys for the United States ended up helping to recruit a lot of new al Qaeda guys into the fight in Iraq, for example, many of whom came across the border from Syria to fight there and now are are back again.
So it seems like we're sort of damned either way.
You know, we outsource this whole thing to Mubarak.
He ends up torturing Ayman al-Zawahiri and creating al Qaeda in the first place.
Well, that's that's unfortunately the way it all works.
I mean, the thing is, if you're constantly, you know, feeding the cancer, it's going to grow.
And we've been doing that for a number of years.
We've seen that invading Afghanistan just really pushed the terrorist situation into neighboring Pakistan.
And from Pakistan, it's moved by our invasion of Iraq, creating a vacuum there has moved into Iraq.
And from Iraq, it's moved into Syria.
And the whole point is that, you know, the United States has not quite ever figured out that military intervention doesn't fix anything.
The only thing that can ultimately fix anything in a country is the people in the country themselves coming together for one reason or another, and essentially deciding this is this is what we want.
This is what we're going to do.
And unfortunately, we've never we've never seen these other countries as real partners.
I mean, look at even this situation over the weekend with Bowie Bergdahl being released.
We didn't even tell the Afghan government that this was going on.
I mean, how incredible is that?
We've got 30,000 plus troops in the country, they've got an elected government that we kind of been propping up for so many years.
And we don't even tell the guys that we're doing this.
All right, we got to stop and take this break.
We'll be back with Phil Giraldi on America's terror war right after this.
I mean, there's real reason to be optimistic here.
They've gotten their model legislation introduced all over the place in state after state.
I've lost count more than a dozen.
You're always wondering, yeah, but what can we do?
Here's something, something important, something that can work.
If we do the work, get started cutting off the NSA support in your state, go to off now.org.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi.
He's at the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org, the American conservative magazine, unz.com.
That's U-N-Z, unz.com and america.aljazeera.com as well.
And now, so geez, I guess we can pick this up where you're talking about how after all this time, this government that America has installed and power and fought for all this time in the Afghan war, they don't even include them in on these highest level negotiations with the Taliban, their enemy on the release of Bo Bergdahl here.
And now apparently they're getting some of their very highest level leaders of the 1990s era back in exchange, or at least they're going to Qatar.
I don't know if they'll be back in Afghanistan.
I guess if I had to bet, I bet they'd be back in Afghanistan here before too long now that they're out of Guantanamo.
But so I guess I could ask you what you think the future of the war over there is going to be, because the whole point of the surge was to not really defeat the Taliban, but to hurt them bad enough that they would come to the table whimpering and make some kind of compromise.
And yet that hasn't happened.
And yet the war is ending anyway, more or less, I think, you know, going down to 10,000 troops.
So I just wonder what you think about the relative strength of the Karzai regime plus the 10,000 U.S. Army troops and air power compared to the Taliban, and how you think the next couple of years is going to play out there?
Well, I think that there's no question that since the 10,000 troops are to a certain extent going to be combat troops, and there is going to be, as you point out, air support, that basically the regime in Kabul will be able to sustain itself.
The question, the real question becomes what happens after that U.S. support is completely gone in the following year, in 2016.
And I think that the obvious answer to that is that the regime had better start cutting a deal with the Taliban, because there's no military victory in sight.
They're going to have to come to a political solution, which is probably what they should have tried to do 10 years ago.
But anyway, you know, again, you can't point to a single example of a military intervention by the U.S., certainly since 9-11, anywhere that's actually come out with a good result.
And I think that really is the argument to use against the neocons and everybody else who seem to think that the U.S. has to keep asserting itself to validate itself as a world power.
The fact is, the only thing that is invalidating the U.S. is the fact that so many things we've done have turned out badly.
Yeah.
Well, OK, so I talked with Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, back last Friday.
And one of the things that he's really concerned about is America validating itself to al-Qaeda and that if we leave after, quote, only 13 years, to them, that makes us the biggest joke in the whole wide world.
We're supposedly the world's preeminent superpower, and yet they can chase us away with AK-47s and homemade landmines.
And so why not finish us off or do whatever they want with us at this point if we're really that thin of a paper tiger?
And I wonder whether, I mean, obviously, there's got to be some truth to the idea that they would have that impression, despite all of the brutality of the last decade.
But is that going to be a problem, do you think?
No, I don't think so.
I think that's kind of inverting the problem or inverting the issue.
The fact is that for a long time now, for 20 years, the U.S. has been kind of a recruiting poster child for al-Qaeda and similar groups.
Let's not forget al-Qaeda is not unique, because of basically what the U.S. does around the world.
So that's a given.
And I think Michael is correct in saying that, in a way, the U.S. empowers al-Qaeda.
But the fact is, anybody who's following the situation in Afghanistan knows that the enemy is not al-Qaeda, it's the Taliban.
And the Taliban and al-Qaeda are two distinct organizations.
So if the question becomes the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is going to empower anybody, it will be the Taliban.
I don't necessarily see the connection with al-Qaeda.
Well, yeah, and again, it seems like if they'd wanted to make a deal a long time ago, they could have said, all right, you guys do whatever you want, except keep these guys out, or else again, that kind of thing would have been, they could have had that negotiation in the spring of 2002 or something, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And I don't think that this concept that al-Qaeda and Taliban are identical has never been true.
The Afghan government back in 2001 provided training camps for al-Qaeda because they had similar objectives, or at least they thought they did.
But the fact is that the Taliban, as you know, I'm sure, and maybe a lot of your listeners, back at that time was willing to cut a deal with the United States to expel al-Qaeda.
But the U.S. was required to make a case to prove that they had been behind terrorist acts and this sort of thing, and either was unable, or I think in the case of, since it was George Bush at that time, unwilling to do so.
Right.
Yeah, and that was something that Shoyer confirmed as well, that they were willing to turn him over on the slightest of evidence.
You know, just hand me a piece of paper that says he did it on it or something.
Give me an excuse to get rid of this guy, please.
They were begging.
But anyway, I guess that's not good enough.
Not for a Bush.
We surrender and run away is never good enough for a Bush, like Bill Hicks likes to say.
Yeah, well, we may have another one coming.
The thought of the choice between a Bush and a Clinton is one of those existential moments when you want to move to the planet Zark in the fifth galaxy.
Or hell, just Mexico.
Just, you know, anything.
Anyway, I learned Spanish.
I don't give a damn.
Immersion, that's how you learn it.
You just get right in there, man.
I love Mexican food as it is, as long as it's, you know, East Coast Mexico food.
Anyway, Tex-Mexish, you know, the West Coast stuff has all got cilantro in it.
All right, so let's talk a little bit more about these jihadis in Syria.
You're right, they're not all sworn to Ayman al-Zawahiri, just the leaders of the Al-Nusra Front and the so-called Islamic Front now.
ISIS is no longer sworn to Ayman al-Zawahiri, but all these guys are suicide bomber, prisoner, beheader, bin Ladenites in ideology and in, you know, method, apparently.
But so, you know what I really want to know from you, Phil, is if you could help explain to us just how much America has supported them directly or indirectly, kind of, you know, plausible deniability, having the Saudis and the Qataris do it, how much that has changed.
Of course, we found out from from Hirsch that they called off the rat line from Libya to Syria after the Benghazi attack of 2012.
So there's been some hiccups and some different things, but they keep saying, oh, you know, Obama's just dragging his feet and doesn't want to back him.
And yet it seems like he's been backing them all this time.
And it's even at the Long War or not Long War Journal, maybe it was Long War Journal or, I'm sorry, one of these pro-war, prominent pro-war blogs talked about how the tow missiles are already in the hands of the al-Nusra Front.
They got them from the Islamic Front that got them from the, whatever they're calling the FSA nowadays, something like that.
So I just wonder how much responsibility can really be hung on the president and his foreign policy for, you know, Nusra, ISIS, the different groups there and maybe over time and however you like to explain it.
Well, I think I think you have to give them responsibility for prolonging a severe humanitarian crisis.
This, as you pointed out in the beginning, would have been over a long time ago, but for the fact that the United States has been supporting what they thought were the good rebels, or maybe they didn't even think that, it's not clear.
But the fact is that, you know, weapons and money and logistical support is fungible.
If you give it to somebody and you're not really sure who they are, it's almost inevitably by Murphy's Law going to wind up in the hands of the guys you didn't want to give it to.
And then, of course, there were other players in the game too.
Qatar was a player, Saudi Arabia has been a player, and, you know, it basically, and Hezbollah on the other side has been a player in Iran.
There's like a devil's brew going on there, and I think you have to lay at the feet of the United States a lot of really bad policy, which has produced a really bad result.
And literally Obama would like to just probably walk away from it, but he knows that he can't, not anymore.
He would get hung by his petard by the Republicans if he tried to do that in a leader during an election year.
So we have the usual dilemma of American politics.
So, Phil, the unreality of this discussion where the whole debate is between backing them some, and or being complicit with the Saudis backing them, and at least, you know, providing these fungible items, weapons, and money, especially.
And the entire attack is that it's not enough support for them, even while everyone does recognize, and I'm talking TV pundits and, you know, mainstream newspaper and website pundits and so forth, everybody recognizes that there have been Ladenites among the rebels there.
And yet it's like these two truths don't ever show up in the same sentence anywhere except this show and the Moon of Alabama blog or something, right?
It's always, yeah, well, you know, there's a lot of bin Ladenites there.
And also, yeah, Obama's not doing enough to back the rebels who are never mind whether that's the very same bin Ladenites we're talking about or not.
In fact, the other day, I saw Chuck Todd on the morning show on MSNBC say, wow, yeah, and Al Qaeda is on the same side as us in this one.
That's like, well, wait a minute, you're talking about how we're not in it yet, and we're just deciding to get in it.
So how the hell are they on our side when we're the ones backing them in their war going on over there?
What in the hell?
Yeah, well, it's the usual cognitive dissonance that takes place where they can't, you know, the government and these people in the media clearly can't accommodate two conflicting thoughts at the same time.
And you're absolutely right.
Basically, the whole premise is wrong.
And yet they think that there is another issue that somehow sits in a box all by itself on the side, that you don't, you don't have to think in terms of how it's interacting with your first issue.
And it's incredible.
I mean, these people are supposed to be smart.
And some of them are.
But you know, people in government don't necessarily get ahead.
Because they're smart.
They're gonna they get ahead because they, they work well with others.
If you know what I mean?
Yeah, exactly.
I studied this in junior college.
Right, exactly.
The economics of what you say you're about, right?
That's what it all exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
All right.
Well, I'm a little bit less scared than I was after talking to Michael Shoyer about this.
But I guess the ineptitude of you know, I'm thinking what the Turks are gonna hold all these guys back?
That's really the question, right?
How much of a threat this poses to Western Europe and or America?
You know, what was great about Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Sheib to Osama bin Laden was you guys have German passports?
I wonder if you could get into America?
You know, right, right.
Well, those are the only ones we really should be worrying about people, people that actually can get over here that are motivated, that have access to have the brains to do this.
But you know, that's a handful of people.
And to create a whole foreign policy around that kind of threat is just crazy.
And that's why we've, we've created, we've made the problem bigger, because we don't recognize that, that there's a big dysfunction there in terms of the way we look at everything.
Right.
Absolutely.
All right.
Very well said.
Thank you very much for your time, Phil, as always.
Appreciate it.
Okay, Scott, take care.
Everybody, that's Phil Giraldi.
He's at the Council for the National Interest.org, the American conservative magazine at American conservative.com or the American conservative.com and UNZ.com.
Hey, y'all, Scott 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 now I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show.
Whenever you shop at Amazon.com, stop by Scott Horton.org first.
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.
And it's not just books.
Amazon.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.org or go to Scott Horton.org slash Amazon.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
Some stock market investors are making money hand over fist while others sit on the sidelines afraid of the dangers.
Are you looking for answers?
Before you invest $1, I'd like you to take the time to watch this new video from Martin Weiss at moneyinmarkets.com.
The video names the seven riskiest and four safest major stocks in America.
Learn from the experts and invest wisely.
Go to crisis16.com.
That's crisis16.com.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or war mongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Edited by libertarian purist Sheldon Richman, the Future of Freedom brings you the best of our movement.
Featuring articles by Richman, Jacob Hornberger, James Bovard, and many more, the Future of Freedom stands for peace and liberty and against our criminal world empire and leviathan state.
Subscribe today.
It's just $25 per year for the back pocket size print edition, 15 per year to read it online.
That's the Future of Freedom at fff.org slash subscribe.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.