05/19/15 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

Don't you get sick of the Israel lobby trying to get us into more war in the Middle East?
Or always abusing Palestinians with your tax dollars?
It once seemed like the lobby would always have full-spectrum dominance on the foreign policy discussion in D.C.
But those days are over.
The Council for the National Interest is the America lobby, standing up and pushing back against the Israel lobby's undue influence on Capitol Hill.
Go show some support at councilforthenationalinterest.org That's councilforthenationalinterest.org All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
All right.
I got Phil Giraldi on the line.
He's a former CIA guy, so you shouldn't believe a thing that he says.
But, you know, he seems to try real hard to truth us out of war most of the time, so I don't really have much of a problem with him.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest, and they're the America-first lobby in Washington, D.C.
You might be interested, councilforthenationalinterest.org, and the Interested, too.
And then there's—that's for the interested.
And then there's also the American Conservative Magazine and, of course, UNZ.com, where he writes.
And he's got a new one at UNZ called Making the World Less Safe, Sending the Wrong Message to Russia, China, and Iran.
And there's a lot to go over there.
It's very interesting stuff to go over there.
But first of all, Phil, you're a former CIA guy, so tell me, what do you think of Seymour Hersh and all the brouhaha and all that?
Yeah, well, I know Seymour, you know, quite well.
I've known him for 15 years to the point where, you know, I've sat down with him over lunches and talked about the things he's doing and stuff like that.
I have a lot of respect for his integrity and also for his access.
I mean, he knows people in the national security state at every level, in every organization, up to the top.
And so he's got really good access to information when he writes stuff.
And as far as I can tell, his actual, you know, interviewing somebody and then writing what the person said is completely accurate.
So that's kind of a backdrop to this.
Well, wait a minute.
On the backdrop part, what about the whole Bob Woodward syndrome, though, where then that just makes him so spinnable by his super top-level secret access sources?
Well, that's why you have to have multiple sources.
And I think Cy Hersh does.
You have to not go with one guy who's selling snake oil, and you have to instead do things with multiple sources.
In this case, as near as I could tell from the piece that appeared in the London Review of Books, there's something like eight independent or actually kind of independent sources that he talks to.
He talks to three Americans that are – one of them may be the former chief of station in Islamabad.
Two of the others, I'm pretty sure, are connected with JSOC.
And then he talks to about five Pakistanis of various types.
And he told me on the show a week ago that he checked the story with a lot more than that, too.
I would bet he did because I've been part of the vetting process that he goes through when he was writing stuff for The New Yorker.
In a couple of cases, I had some information that supported what he was saying, and I was contacted by the magazine.
And, man, they put you through the rigor.
They really work to confirm that what you're saying is something you really have access to when you're not just kind of making it up or putting stuff together.
And I'm sure he does have more sources.
I would not be surprised.
All right.
Well, so anyway, now tell me what you think about the story.
All right.
The story is probably mostly correct.
The one part – it's easier to tell you the part I don't necessarily agree with.
I didn't find any evidence in the account that the two generals who were the head of the intelligence service and of the Army were actually on board with this.
My supposition is that these guys, who were receiving a lot of money from the United States government, might have been kind of winking and looking the other way.
I would think, having known these relationships overseas and how they work, I suspect it might be that.
Cy even admits in the – if you read the whole text of the piece, he admits that there is no direct evidence for linking them to the event.
Now, the other stuff, I think the courier makes less sense for a lot of reasons than the possibility that there was a walk-in.
Intelligence operations very often turn out to be produced by a walk-in.
It makes a lot of sense.
If somebody knew about bin Laden being there, there was a $25 million reward being offered.
Put it all together.
As far as the raid itself and the generals from ISI and the military participating in it, don't you have the gigantic kind of dog-that-didn't-bark thing going on there with not just two so-called stealth Blackhawks.
I don't know how you stealth a Blackhawk, but they sent in two of those, and then two Chinooks, too.
There ain't nothing stealthy about a god-ang Chinook.
They sent in two of those, but the Pakistanis didn't do a damn thing about it.
I guess they were just flying really, really low.
Meanwhile, when they got to the ground, obviously local forces were holding first responders back.
Where were the local cops during this whole time, right?
Yeah, that's a good question.
That's a question that Sai raises as a circumstantial bit of evidence to suggest that the hires up in the Pakistani military were basically involved.
But, again, that's by implication.
It's not a direct indicator.
The Chinooks, incidentally, were based in Afghanistan.
They were kind of standing by waiting to go in if something were to happen to the Blackhawks.
When they talk about stealth Blackhawks, basically they use shielding and that kind of stuff to obscure the heat from the engine and the radar profile and that kind of thing.
So that's what they are.
Sai points out, he says, look, these guys were on the ground 40 minutes, and as he puts it, he says, waiting for the bus before the Chinook came and bailed them out.
And, yeah, by implication, it's a strong argument that there was involvement.
Nobody came.
There was a blackout in that part of the city.
Police didn't come.
Firemen didn't come.
There were shots.
There were explosions.
And nothing happened.
Well, I guess you could say maybe that's the way things work in Pakistan, but I don't really believe that.
So I'm inclined to kind of lean his way, but I'm not completely convinced on the involvement of the Pakistanis at the top level.
But I do believe that the Pakistanis were holding him prisoner, Bin Laden.
And I can't see any other way that the fact I put in my article that will be appearing this week that every intelligence officer that I know cannot believe that they didn't know where he was and basically had him under house arrest.
And I think that's a given.
Yeah.
Well, now, so, well, I was going to ask you about Gareth, but I guess I should just have both you guys on the show at the same time to discuss it or something since he was just off.
I don't want to do, like, CNN and then have the critic of the critic after he's no longer there anymore.
So let me ask you about this.
What do you think about the cakewalk?
Because the way Hirsch makes it sound is like, oh, this is a big Jessica Lynch raid.
Basically, they sent their very best guys to walk right in there and do whatever they wanted and go.
And then they made it up like a big hero tale when really.
Yeah.
I don't know if he says he doesn't outright say no shots fired at all.
I guess he says a lady was shot in the knee.
One of the wives was shot in the knee or something.
Well, Sai says that the only shots were fired were fired by the Navy SEALs.
In other words, there wasn't a firefight.
There was no resistance.
And that's quite plausible.
I mean, even look at this.
I cited my story.
Even look at the events of this past weekend where there was this Delta Force raid.
If you read the accounts of that, they contradict each other.
I mean, basically, they're talking about a ground operation, Delta Force commandos landing and going in and everything.
There were a lot of stories about, you know, how the militants were using their wives and children as shields.
How many times have we heard that one?
It's like the Lego massacre.
Everything's all here.
We've got the Delta Force.
We've got the hostage rescue team.
Yeah.
But then it turns out, okay, they said a dozen militants were killed.
No civilians were hurt.
They were using their shields, but no civilians were hurt.
Get that one.
And then they were saying that the helicopters were riddled with bullet holes, but no Americans were injured.
Doesn't that strike you as a little bit odd?
I've seen that episode of the A-Team before, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I saw it on television.
It must be true.
And so you've got these contradictory things.
And then it turns out that they had air cover.
And you know what air cover means.
Air cover means they bombed the shit out of the target.
And there was a British monitoring team that there was a press account that appeared the next day saying there were at least 42 people killed in this attack.
Yeah.
So, in other words, they do whatever they want and they tell whatever lie they feel like, and that's the only restriction.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Phil Giraldi with more in just a minute.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Live here on the Liberty Radio Network, noon to two eastern time, 11 to 1 Texas time, weekdays, lrn.fmlibertyradionetwork.com.
On the phone with Phil Giraldi, and he's got a new one at unz.com, making the world less safe, sending the wrong message to Russia, China, and Iran.
And it says here you were meeting with a bunch of Ukrainian parliamentarians in Washington, D.C.
Is that right?
Were they wearing Nazi armbands?
They were a pretty rough group, but no, they didn't have any evident armbands.
Oh, okay.
At least there's that.
That's nice.
They left their SS lightning bolts at home for this trip.
Maybe they had some PR advice.
All right, so anyway, you met with these kooks, and then what did they say?
Well, basically I was supposed to be there to explain to them why we conservatives and libertarians and some progressives have misgivings about providing military assistance to Ukraine.
And I was explaining how there's no visible U.S. interest in doing this, that it dangerously escalates the situation, and a number of other things.
Where were you at?
I was at a foreign policy institute in downtown Washington, which is where these people were.
They were incidentally heading over to the Hill after the meeting with me to lobby Congress.
But anyway, their argument basically was that Putin is a madman.
They compared him to Adolf Hitler.
They said this is just like 1938 in Munich or 1939 when Poland was invaded, and they said we have to stop him now.
And I said, well, what does the United States get out of all of this?
And they said, well, you have a good democratic friend in Eastern Europe.
And I said, well, that's interesting.
Yeah, they're very democratic there.
Yeah, but anyway, and then one of the members of the group went to this horrific account of what Putin was all about and what Putin was doing and so on and so forth.
And when she concluded, I finally said, you know, you're basically giving me propaganda, and you're accusing Putin of selling propaganda, which he no doubt is, but you're doing the same thing.
And of course, they don't see it that way.
They see it as their legitimate rights to get the United States to protect them.
But anyway, the point of all this was that essentially we don't seem to learn anything from these experiences where we're getting all these little dependent states here, there, and everywhere that essentially interact with the foreign policy establishment in the administration.
So here we're playing games with Ukraine, which is not in our interest to do, and we're damaging the relationship with Russia, which whether we like Russia or not, it's critically important for the U.S. to have a right kind of relationship with Russia.
And so I said, you know, we send the wrong signals, and then we wonder why everything goes to hell.
And I pointed out that the Russians last week had a big parade for the 70th anniversary at the end of the Second World War.
And anybody who knows history knows that the United States and Britain did not win the Second World War.
It was the Red Army that defeated the Germans.
And so anyway, as a courtesy or as a sign of respect, we should have had either the president or secretary of state or someone there, and it would have opened the door probably to be talking about issues that are causing problems.
But instead of that, Obama sends nobody.
He throws out an insult instead of trying to make something work.
And then I went on in the article to explain, well, we do the same things with China.
We do the same things with Iran.
Here we're trying to get a deal with Iran on nuclear weapons, and what do we do?
Obama makes a public statement denouncing them for being state supporters of terrorism.
Is that going to help?
And it's this kind of thinking.
We don't seem to have anybody in Washington who can figure out that if you insult these people, they're not necessarily going to want to cooperate with you.
Yeah, and of course he's got to constantly protect his right flank for American political reasons and all of that.
But, yeah, he's playing the perfect mirror image to the Ayatollah saying hawkish things right when we're trying to get this deal sewn up, both of these idiots.
Yeah, yeah, and it's the same thing with Russia.
I mean, the crisis with Russia could lead to a cold war at a minimum.
Indeed, some would argue it's already going that way, and it could lead to something even more dangerous.
All right, well, so now the Germans and the French went in there and said, you know, out of the way, Obama.
We're making a peace deal here, and they made one, Minsk II, and it had, I guess, more substance to it than Minsk I, and it seems to be more or less holding.
I mean, there's kind of skirmishes, but it doesn't seem like the leadership on either side has ordered a continuance of the war, at least so far.
But then America sends in a bunch of troops to train and a bunch of trucks, and they say, you know, I don't know exactly.
Maybe you know what kind of weapons have actually been sent.
They say, oh, no, we only want defensive weapons, which means anti-tank missiles, I guess.
What they really want is anti-tank missiles to start taking our Russian tanks, and I can tell you where that's going to lead.
And, you know, the whole concept of, okay, fine, you guys claim you're defending yourselves, I understand that.
You claim you have a territorial issue with Russia, I understand that, too.
But the fact is, for the United States to get into this is to invite a new war by proxies, as we saw during the Cold War.
And that's not exactly something anybody needs.
Yeah, only this time the line is right on the Russian border, not halfway through Germany on the Elbe River.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
And so now, but is this, is Obama saying, you know, screw Angela Merkel.
We don't want Minsk to and the peace deal to succeed.
We want the war, so build up the moral hazard.
Go ahead, give them a bunch of trucks and guns and money and try to rebuild the Ukrainian military so that they can go ahead and get us into this mess.
I mean, is that what the hell he's doing deliberately here, or what the hell?
Well, I don't think he's doing it.
I think he's kind of holding back, but I think the pressure is again coming from Congress.
Congress is doing most of the agitating about helping the Ukrainians.
Well, he's the one telling the army to get on a plane and go over there and do these exercises with them.
You're absolutely right, but he is drawing the line and giving offensive weapons.
He's blocked these anti-tank missiles that the Ukrainians really want to have.
And beyond the training and the communications equipment and, you know, we can give the Ukrainian army all this stuff so that they can do like the Iraqi army did, and they can leave it behind when they flee the battlefield.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I think it's a good idea because that way our arms industries can just keep producing this stuff.
Yeah, and the thing is, you know, I think it's instructive, the conversation that you had with these guys, where really all they have to tell you is McCainian fairy tales about what's going on here.
Russia started it, and it's an invasion.
They're trying to recreate the Soviet Union or Tsarist Russia or Nazi Germany or whatever, this kind of nonsense.
They can't even shoot it straight because there's no real truth to it.
I mean, everybody knows they did a coup, and then the Russians moved to protect their interests in Crimea.
And then everybody knows that it was Kiev that launched the war against the so-called separatists in the east before they had done anything but occupy the buildings in the same way that the Maiden Movement had done.
And so, you know, come on.
I mean, you could try to embellish and stretch the truth a little bit, but you come at me with a bunch of complete nonsense.
You know, I guess that's really all they have to try to make their case.
Well, that's it.
And they even cited a couple times that, hey, you know, Russia invaded Georgia a few years ago.
I said, what?
I was paying attention then, too.
Sorry.
Yeah, and then I said, well, what about the $5 billion that Victoria Nuland was boasting about to change your government?
And, you know, they didn't want to hear it.
You know, if you want to shut out a contrary opinion, you just shut it out.
And unfortunately, they were really on that page.
I really thought going into it that they would be more interested in actually discussing the issues, but they weren't.
All right.
Now, this is really among the most important things in the world and shouldn't go unsaid.
I got to tell you how pleased I am to be wrong that I thought that we would have, I don't know, 20,000, 30,000 American Marines back in Iraq right now preparing for an invasion of Mosul from Kurdistan, something along those lines.
I can't believe that really the pro-Israel, anti-Iran, anti-Syria politics in America are strong enough to keep the policy all mixed up and divided in eastern Islamic State versus western Islamic State and who we're backing and whose side we're on here, even after a year of this.
So I'm really glad about that.
But, you know, then again, on the other hand, it seems like the Islamic State is, you know, I don't know, on a roll.
But then again, as Mitchell Prothero put it in his McClatchy piece the other day, this is, Ramadi is their biggest win since Mosul.
And, you know, Coburn treats them like, hey, they're a state.
This ain't ISIS.
This is the Islamic State.
And they've done it.
And there's nobody around to oppose them except, I guess, as Pat Buchanan said, I guess the Turks could do it.
They have a 300,000-man army, but they don't want to.
They seem to like the Islamic State just fine.
Yeah, Turks are not going to get involved.
For all the allegations that the Turks and Saudis are talking about some joint program, the Turks will not get involved.
The Turks have elections coming up in three weeks, and the public opinion in Turkey is like eight to two against any kind of military intervention in Syria.
So it ain't going to happen.
And all this other stuff is nonsense.
I mean, we created this situation.
Now we're discovering that air power doesn't quite do the trick.
Of course, we should have discovered that in Vietnam, but I guess we forgot that.
Yeah.
Well, and listen, I mean, the rise of the Islamic State sucks for the people of eastern Syria.
It may be more than that soon enough, and for Sunnistan and former Iraq.
I don't want to sound like I'm complaining so bad.
I want the U.S. government to do something about it or anything like that.
I almost can't believe that they're this hesitant to go ahead and put the ground forces in.
And I guess it will be interesting to see what the Republicans say.
They're going to have to try to differentiate from each other by making concrete proposals about what to do about Mosul and Fallujah and Ramadi in the hands of the Islamic State at this point.
Yeah.
The thing is, the Islamic State, if we put in ground troops, the Islamic State is going to fight back.
I mean, they're not going to cut and run like has been the experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, where basically the organized militaries in those places just were not willing or interested in fighting us.
But, you know, these guys will fight back, and there will be body bags coming back.
And, you know, hey, what's our interest there?
Our interest there is pretty hard to define because we've screwed up the geopolitics of that whole region so much that there's not really any solution or possible solution in sight.
Well, okay then.
So, hell, I'm keeping you over time here.
Let me keep asking you stuff.
Back to Seymour Hersh and his article in 2007, the redirection.
Oops, we screwed up and we fought a whole war for Iran and gave their militias and their factions Baghdad.
And so now we want to redirect back toward the Saudis.
And then I interviewed you about this stuff at the time.
We talked about Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Sunni-type jihadists in Syria, Jandala in eastern Iran, and PJAK, the Kurdish faction of the PKK in Iran as well at that same time, all to try to hem in Iran.
And now I sort of can't believe that they really anticipated and wanted the rise of the Islamic State such as it is, as powerful as it is, as big as it is, just in order to check Iran.
But then again, they've pretty much done it.
And we've been talking about this on the show for four years, that funneling arms to first the al-Nusra Front and then ultimately ISIS by way of the so-called Free Syrian Army all this time, and working with our allies in Turkey and Saudi to finance the rise of the rebels, so-called rebels anyway, in Syria.
It's led to this, and it seems to be, you know, it coincides with at least half of American foreign policy's aims and goals, which is to check, to go back to that Reagan policy, right, that George Jr. accidentally reversed there, and go back to containing the Shiite revolution in Iran.
So maybe they like the Islamic State.
I mean, I'm not saying that Baghdadi works for the CIA, but he might as well at this point, no?
Well, I think you have to look at who's actively supporting the Islamic State, and that's the Saudis and a number of the Gulf states.
And they do have a serious case of paranoia about Iran.
But, you know, I think that's largely mistaken.
I think Iran has certain constituencies, just like you can argue that Moscow has a certain kind of, you know, regional sway that's legitimate.
Every larger country does this.
But I think that it's been greatly overstated, the extent to which Iran might be a regional threat.
But yet these people actually believe it.
If you read some of the commentary coming out of Saudi Arabia, coming out of the Gulf, it's alarmist.
There's no question about it.
And the boycotting of our president last week by some of these leaders is sending a very strong signal.
I don't agree with any of it, but I think it's there on the table.
And these are the people that, unfortunately, are supporting the Islamic State because they think the Islamic State is going to kind of burn itself out and do serious damage to Iran at the same time.
I think that's a highly optimistic scenario.
Yeah, they're just not too worried about it, I guess.
That does make sense.
I mean, for the long term, that they would think that, although I don't necessarily agree with it.
That was what Margulies said.
I asked him, why do the Israelis prefer the al-Nusra crazy headchopper suicide bombers to Assad, who wears a three-piece suit and shaves his chin every morning and doesn't fight with Israel?
Never really has.
And he said, well, because he has an army and they're a bunch of kooks waving an AK-47 above their head.
But they'll never amount to any kind of threat, even a potential threat, to Israel the way the Syrian army poses to them.
And so, even though Assad is mostly compliant, he could change his mind about that, where they don't really care about what these jihadis want or try to do because they're powerless.
They're basically just infantry.
And so, easy to take care of.
Well, and basically, the jihadis do the work for Israel.
They basically weaken the Syrian regime.
They weaken the Iraqi regime.
And they weaken Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And, you know, those are all good points for Israel.
So, yeah, I think Margulies is right.
But I would say that it extends beyond Syria.
And it's nice to have the region in turmoil because if it's in turmoil, they can't focus on Israel.
Yeah.
Well, now, so, I mean, it sounds all so convoluted, but then again, it's pretty simple.
America is backing the Iran-Shiite side in Iraq, but we're backing the Saudi-jihadi side in Yemen and in Syria and in Libya and North Africa.
We're fighting them in Somalia.
And I guess we're fighting them now in Libya after fighting for them there, which I guess basically helps them either way.
But maybe it really is as simple as that.
Oh, yeah, no, this is just plain old divide and rule, and we're doing this on purpose.
It's not incoherent.
We know exactly what we're doing.
We're supporting the jihad in Western Islamic State and opposing it in the east because, yeah, we know what we're doing.
And they think they know what they're doing, or it really is all just fingers in the dike trying to figure out how to hold back the continuing consequences of George W. Bush's disaster here?
I don't know.
I think they actually think that they're skilled at what they're doing, and they're playing this out very carefully.
But I think the actual track record indicates that they're not, that they don't seem to know what they're doing ever.
And I don't know.
You know, I've been in the government, and I've been at a high enough level in the government where I know how these delusions kind of creep in.
And you get this groupthink, and you get these kinds of ways of looking at things that don't make any sense.
But if everybody is saying the same thing, you're not going to be the guy who's going to say, no, that's not true.
And that's the way the system works.
I have a feeling that Brennan was so dominant for so long in terms of national security policy that his kind of viewpoint has permeated the whole system.
And I think he's the one that has kind of all these dumb ideas about what we should be doing and how we should be doing it.
But I'm just kind of guessing.
Well, that was kind of the story.
I don't know if anybody ever really elaborated, but I think they said that this is why Hegel left was because he didn't know what our Syria policy was.
Which side are we on in this thing, both or neither or one or the other or something?
Somebody at least answer me.
No one would tell him.
Yeah, that's right.
Hegel did leave for that reason.
He was just saying, look, we need clarity.
I'm head of the armed forces for the White House, and basically we need some clarity on what we're supposed to be doing and who's the enemy and what's the endgame.
And, of course, you never get that.
You never get that ever.
Well, I kept you way over into drinking time here, man.
I'll let you go.
Thanks, Phil.
Appreciate it.
All right, Scott.
Take care.
All right, Joe.
That's Phil Giraldi.
And he writes for UNS.com.
This one is making the world less safe.
And also, you can find him at the American Conservative Magazine and the Council for the National Interest dot org.
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