12/09/14 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org.
Twitter.com slash ScottHortonShow.
Next up is Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA counterterrorism officer.
He is the executive director of the Council for the National Interest at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
And he writes for the American Conservative Magazine and UNZ.com.
So welcome back.
What do you know?
What do you think of the torture report so far?
Well, I'm a little bit surprised, actually.
It's much stronger than I thought it would be.
I thought this collaborative process with the White House and the agency redacting it and arguing over different points was something that basically was going to denature the article in a sense, the study in a sense, and make it less effective.
But there is some really strong stuff in this, and I would recommend to your listeners, if they don't want to wait through the whole 525 pages, just read the first 10 or so.
It's where they have the key findings and conclusions, and they run through a whole bunch of things.
I think there are about 12 or something like that, key findings and conclusions.
And this stuff is dynamite.
I mean, they talk about where the torture was far worse than it has been described for.
They use the word brutal.
They talk about how the CIA basically sold a bill of goods in terms of the whole concept of the enhanced interrogations, and then after they sold the bill of goods, they pretty much lied about how effective it was and kept stuff from both Congress and from the White House.
Considering that the White House was Bush and it was friendly, that's pretty astonishing.
Yeah, that was...
Scott Horton mentioned that a minute ago, how they didn't tell Bush.
Do you believe that that's true?
They didn't tell Bush that they were waterboarding anyone until 2006?
Well, that seems to be the conclusion.
Now, bear in mind that this is, this whole thing, the one thing that bothers me about this whole report is that it's document-driven.
They didn't actually talk to anybody.
And I would suspect that, you know, with my usual cynical spin on this, that if you're document-driven, that means stuff that was deliberately concealed isn't here.
So this could be the tip of the iceberg, and that it could be a lot worse than what we're seeing in this report.
And the only way to get at these other things was if they had subpoenaed a bunch of the actual interrogators and questioned them under oath about what they did and what kind of orders they were receiving, and so on and so forth.
But, of course, they didn't do that.
And now let me ask you, to be, well, what's exactly the proper term?
A CIA officer, an agent, an asset, all these things are different.
But to be a CIA officer, you have to be over 18, right?
Yeah, you have to be a high school graduate.
So, I mean, we're talking minimal requirements here.
I assume that there are other requirements beyond that.
I don't know.
Willingness to kill people on command or what?
You have to differentiate.
There are all kinds of CIAs.
As you know, there's the analytical section of CIA.
There's also an administrative section.
There's a technical and scientific section.
And that is what I was, which was a case officer.
We were operations officers.
But we operations officers were not the guys who did this kind of stuff.
This kind of stuff was done by a special activities branch, which was paramilitary.
And these were the guys who got involved in Afghanistan with, you know, running the operations on the ground with al Qaeda and subsequently running the operations in Afghanistan after the United States overran the country in late 2001.
So this is a paramilitary group.
Think of these guys as special forces.
They're not all ex-special forces or Navy SEALs.
They have kind of a different perspective of the world.
They're not exactly what I would call an intelligence officer.
And these are the ones that basically carried out this kind of stuff, running the secret prisons and so on and so forth.
And they're all over 18.
I'm pretty sure of that.
And so, in other words, they couldn't say, well, you know, they made me do it.
Like Omar Khadr was mentioned on the show earlier because they were, I'm not sure if this is the specific reference.
They might be talking about someone else in the piece.
But they certainly threatened Omar Khadr that they would rape his mother.
And then so, but, you know, part of his story was, hey, man, I'm here with my dad, and I'm a little kid, and it's not my fault, and he ditched me with these guys, and there was a firefight, and I got kidnapped in it.
I mean, what can I say?
You know, kind of thing.
He didn't, he, whatever war crime he committed, supposedly, in attempting to defend himself from the Delta Force, he could reasonably argue that he was a little boy at the time and wasn't responsible, in fact, for what he did.
And yet, but all of these CIA guys who carried out these acts, they are all, they don't have that excuse.
They don't have any excuse to argue that, what, they didn't know that torture was illegal, that they were breaking the law in violating their commander-in-chief's orders, that they didn't know that their oath is to the law and not to him, and that they don't have to, and that, in fact, they must not obey lawful orders?
Well, I, you know, that's the whole point here.
Unlawful ones, I meant to say, obviously.
Yeah, unlawful orders, sure.
That's the whole point here.
I mean, these guys essentially were participating in activities.
The CIA is making two defenses on this, basically.
On one hand, what they're saying is that this stuff worked, that they got actionable intelligence out of it that they otherwise would not have gotten.
Now, that's a stupid argument because that's been disproven, and it was even disproven by the, it was even rejected by the CIA's own inspector general.
So that's a ridiculous argument, and this is the argument Jose Rodriguez keeps making.
And the second argument was that it was legal.
Now, the legality, of course, is based on a couple of memos that were issued out of the Justice Department, the Bush Justice Department, John Bybee and Wu, you, and basically these guys said that anything short of organ failure was not torture.
Well, that's kind of a high standard or a low standard, depending on how you want to look at it.
But the fact is, a guy who even believes that physically coercing a terrorist suspect is justified under the circumstances of Post-9-11, if his brain is working at all, he realizes that taking a broom and shoving it up somebody's behind is something that goes a little bit beyond maybe pushing a guy around or even waterboarding him.
And the fact is, this report documents that a lot of this stuff was commonplace, and as I say, since it's document-driven, I would suspect there was a hell of a lot more of this going on than what we're seeing from the documents.
Yeah.
Well, I think we've got to hope that this is just going to kick in the gate and allow all the rest of these stories to start rising up to the top.
And there's been a couple of reports lately from people saying, well, no one talked to me.
I was tortured by the CIA, and no one talked to me, and I guess that's why.
They weren't really talking to anyone.
But you're going to have more and more people answering the phone and answering reporters' questions as this picks up.
And there's so much in here.
I don't know.
I don't know how long of a news cycle.
I'm hoping for a good week and a half or two out of this, damn it.
Maybe some kind of accountability for some.
Someone indict Addington and you, and then move from there.
Get them squealing.
Yeah, yeah.
I absolutely agree.
I mean, there are people that definitely should go to jail on this, and it starts right at the top.
I mean, clearly George Tenet was not being forthcoming even with the White House, for God's sakes.
I mean, these people, their heads should be rolling.
I mean, Rodriguez, Culver Black, Jim Pavitt, you know, all these people that were involved in this program are acquiesced in it.
And Rodriguez is, you know, now he appeared in the Washington Post on Sunday with another one of these idiotic op-eds, you know, claiming that it worked, it was legal, you know, we're all nice guys, we're wearing the white hats.
But, you know, if he was condoning this, he knew exactly what was going on, he should be in jail.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the other Scott was pointing out that this is such high-level illegality, and so much of it, and like you're detailing it in all kinds of different ways, too, that you can't help but notice the question is raised about the illegality of this entire institution.
Who the hell do these people think they are?
Yeah, exactly.
You know, exactly.
It's like you said when you started out.
You know, these are adults, and they know that they're torturing somebody.
There was no ambiguity about it.
All right, now, wait, wait.
I don't want the live audience to miss anything.
We'll be right back, everybody, with more Phil Giraldi in just a sec.
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Yeah, it's anti-war radio.
I'm so used to saying that still.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
Same old show.
Got Phil Giraldi on the line.
We're talking about the CIA torturers and how they all belong in prison, and the boss is what sent them to.
And so that was where we left off was just the outright lawlessness.
The revelation, I think, probably to a lot of people, Phil, of just what the national security state is as compared to the actual constitutional government of America that they learned about in civics class in high school.
And just who these guys are and just who they think they are, which is apparently the masters of the universe beyond any law.
Yeah, that's clearly where their heads are.
When we were breaking there for the commercials, the thing I was saying was that there should have been, given what this Senate report is saying and what these guys actually did to these suspects, there should have been no ambiguity in their own minds or anybody's minds that this was legitimate kind of physical coercion up to a certain level to get people to talk.
This went way beyond that.
This is stuff that I haven't seen yet in the report.
I would think that there's probably some stuff in here about people dying under these interrogation techniques.
And if they're not in the report, it's probably because the documents were shredded.
So, you know, this is just incredible stuff.
It's stuff that you and I growing up in this country, we would never have believed any of this could have possibly ever happened.
Well, now, so you were still at the CIA at the beginning of this.
You say it was a different division.
But did you guys in the – I mean, you other CIA spies must have known that, like, hey, they're torturing the hell out of people, right?
No, we wouldn't have known.
This kind of – CIA, first of all, operates like most intelligence agencies on a compartmented basis.
That means if you don't have a direct need for information for some reason, you don't see it.
You don't get it.
And this obviously – you remember when Brennan was up to get approved by Congress, some questions arose about his involvement in the program.
And he was at a very senior level, a very senior executive level.
And it was clear that he kind of knew about the program, but he claimed that he really wasn't an enabler or an implementer of it.
So the point is, even at that kind of level, he may not have had a lot of the details.
But there certainly were people that had the details.
And Rodriguez, who was chief of counterterrorism center at that time, in his recent op-ed in his book is essentially saying that, you know, he ran the program.
He was the one that ordered the videos destroyed.
Now, if he had the videos, we would probably have more evidence of outrageous behavior, of things being done, but that's why the videos were destroyed.
The – Rodriguez claims he did it to protect the interrogators from being identified.
And that's a stupid argument because, you know, I've seen interrogation videos and that sort of thing.
They focus on the guy who's being interrogated.
They don't show you the person asking the questions.
So the whole concept is ridiculous.
And essentially these were destroyed because they were destroying evidence of war crimes.
Right.
Well, now, so what about all of you former CIA officers who are anti-torture, that you guys go on a secret mission to get us the other 6,000 pages of this damn thing?
Well, that's an interesting concept there, Scott.
But if I could figure out how to do it, I certainly would do it.
Just break on in there and get it, man.
I've seen movies.
I know how you guys are.
I'd have to wrestle with Nancy Pelosi.
She might could stop you.
I don't know.
That's a pretty tough lady.
Yeah, sure.
It would be great if we could see the whole thing.
It would be great if we could just see the summary unredacted.
Because the redacteds are not as big as I thought they would be, but they still leave you wondering about some of the information that's been cut out.
Sometimes it's very silly.
Like it talks about detention facilities in various countries, and they delete the names of the countries, whereas, of course, we know pretty much what the countries are.
This has been in the public sector for quite some time.
Right.
Yeah, I was pointing out earlier on the show, I like to when this comes up.
It was my wife, Larissa Alexandrovna, that reported when the Washington Post refused to, that reported the site of the torture facility in Poland, which belonged to Hitler and then Stalin and his followers before it belonged to the CIA to be a torture facility there, which is a fun little footnote.
And the president of Poland called her a liar.
And, of course, she's absolutely vindicated by every other report that never mentions her original one, but still names the same damn facility.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so it's, you know, as I say, it's going to take a while, obviously, to read through this whole thing and try to piece together some of the redactions and figure out what they're redacting.
But I think it's a damning report.
I think this is worse than the Frank Church hearings in terms of what it's managed to dig up.
Because back in the 70s, you know, in the 60s, people kind of expected some of this stuff.
But now it's just this kind of detail on a worldwide torture program run by the U.S. government is just absolutely astonishing.
Well, and, you know, they keep saying that telling the truth about the torture, releasing pictures of the torture, even the current force-feeding torture down in Guantanamo Bay and the rest of this, that if you do this, you're going to engender terrorist attacks against us.
As though it ain't the torture, it's the truth about it.
But the truth about it is that Zawahiri was a friend of a friend of a guy who was in on the assassination of Anwar Sadat.
He didn't do it, but they tortured him for it.
But look out, because he's a surgeon.
He's extremely intelligent.
And now you made him mad.
And the same thing with Zarqawi, only he was a two-bit rapist nobody.
But in prison, he was tortured in Jordan by America's sock puppet king of Jordan and decided that he was going to be a pure, lifelong holy warrior of jihad against Western interests and their sock puppets in the region after that.
And he's the guy who did as much as Donald Rumsfeld to create the massive sectarian civil war that's tearing the entire Middle East apart right now.
And that's where those guys, that's where those monsters come from, is the torture laboratory of America's sock puppet dictatorships in the Middle East.
Yeah, well, I'm finding the whole pushback on this kind of ridiculous.
They're arguing that, oh yeah, we're going to be vulnerable overseas, and the Obama administration is playing into this too, that we're going to be attacked because of the torture department.
Well, that's ridiculous.
That the United States has been torturing people has been known to everybody for a long time, and it's certainly been known to these people who are in terrorist groups.
You think they need more motivation?
I don't quite understand that.
And the other argument being made is that this is going to hurt our relationships with other intelligence services because it reveals details and stuff.
Well, that's a lot of bull too, because intelligence agencies don't share information and help each other because they love each other or they're close bosom buddies.
It's because it is in their interest to do it.
And every time there's been sort of a revelation in the past where it said, oh, this is going to hurt our intelligence relationships, it just has not been the case because these organizations work together because they need to do that.
And so all these arguments are specious.
They're ridiculous, and it shows how desperate really these people are to come up with something that they think is credible.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, of course, I'm in 1,000 percent agreement with you about just how huge this is, the way you compared it to the church committee and all of that, but we have to make it huge because we still live in a world of Fox News that the 70s didn't have to quite deal with.
And they got some heavy spin, and they're relentless, and they're going to keep spinning.
So I wonder whether you would consider creating a group, something like VIPS, along those lines, probably many of the same members or something, but call it CIA Veterans for Prosecutions, where you're specifically calling for accountability.
Because just like with anything, everybody comes up with hashtag something irrelevant.
The question is, is anyone going to be held accountable or not?
And if you have especially conservative former CIA officers saying the rule of law is the rule of law, put them in prison, then that makes news, you know?
Well, I think that's a good idea.
I certainly know a bunch of former CIA officers who feel about this just the way I do, and it might not be a bad idea to try to pull something together.
Obviously, as you know, we're not about to get invited onto Fox News to give our viewpoints, and I don't think even MSNBC would be likely to have us on.
But the fact is, you know, let's try to get something out there.
Yeah, you know, the MSNBC types might, if they have a big opportunity in a short time frame, kind of a thing to do it, a good press release, you know, put the most famous one of y'all's name at the very top or whatever it is.
It'd be worth a shot, man, I think.
You know, I don't know.
It's better than a pirate radio host's call for prosecutions.
We're out of time.
Thanks, Phil.
We've got to go.
Appreciate it again.
Okay, Scott.
Bye-bye.
That's Phil Giraldi, everybody, American Conservative Magazine.
Hey, Al Scott here.
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