07/15/15 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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It's fun to watch Obama on mute and pretend he's being honest.
Well, you see, the truth is, it looks like that's what he's saying, you know?
In fact, in this case, he may well be.
You know, when Obama first took office, Gordon Prather wrote an article called Obama the Great.
He said all he has to do is just give a speech where he promises the world, never mind Iran, but just the world that America will never bomb any IAEA-safeguarded facilities.
And that would be the end of that.
Cold War with Iran over.
It would be the end of all those threats and all that.
He didn't go that route.
He took the long way.
But he got the damn deal done.
Hey, I got Phil Giraldi on the line.
He's a former DIA and CIA officer.
Now he writes for the American Conservative Magazine and UNZ.com, the UNZ Review, UNZ.com.
That's with a Z, U-N-Z, UNZ.com.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing good.
Oh, I forgot to put my headphones on.
Now I can hear you good.
Hey, yeah, happy to have you on.
Happy to have you writing about the things you're writing about here, too.
This is important.
MH17, the blaming Putin game goes on.
Who shot down the MH17?
This is a plane that departed the Netherlands and was shot down by somebody and crashed over eastern Ukraine back right around a year ago.
It was, I think, on its way to Malaysia, Malaysia Airlines flight.
And so, boy, the rumors abound, and you've got some of your own.
I'll add that CNN is saying that they have secret unidentified sources that say that the Dutch report is going to come out and blame the Russians for providing the missile that shot down or maybe even blame the Russians themselves for shooting down the plane.
So what do you say?
Well, I actually don't think anything.
I believe that the United States government actually knows who did it, and that's what the article is basically about.
It's saying essentially that the one major investigation is run by the Dutch.
But interestingly enough, I was contacted by a Dutchman who told me that in his own media, this report has been described as being done in cooperation with the Ukrainian government and that the Ukrainian government had veto rights over a number of things that the report says.
So anyway, the Dutch report allegedly will say that there is no conclusive evidence, but that they believe, based on what they have, that the separatists did it and probably did it with the assistance of the Russian government.
So that's kind of a dynamite conclusion.
But I'm also hearing from intelligence friends of mine, former intelligence officers, that they've been hearing from their own contacts that this report, which is already being reviewed in Washington in draft, they went back to the Dutch and said, hey, we don't support this conclusion.
We think there were a bunch of other players, and some of them are more likely to have carried out the attack.
Now there's a lot here, Phil.
First of all, at the time that it happened, and I think you're the same way as me, we just want the truth on this thing, whichever way it falls.
We just want to counter any false propaganda that might lead us into a real conflict here, is what we're working on, of course.
But it seemed plausible enough, hey, there was a war on.
The Russians certainly are arming the guys in the ethnic Russian resistance in the east of Ukraine to some degree.
It kind of makes sense on the face of it that they misidentified a plane and shot it down, and oops, and some kind of cover-up from there.
So if that's the Occam's razor explanation of what happened, and I'm not saying necessarily that it is, but take the war party's argument for face value there.
What actually stacks up against that that makes you think that really that isn't correct?
Well, the Ukrainian government would have had strong motivation to create an event like this, an incident like this, and pin it on the Russians.
So let's say, you know, if the issue is who benefits, then the Ukrainian government was a major beneficiary.
And the people that I've been talking to privately have been suggesting that the governor of Donetsk region at that time was a joint Israeli-Ukrainian citizen, a billionaire, an oligarch, who had his own militias, and actually had access to these missiles, and he had Israeli advisors working with him.
So there are a lot of people that could have played a role in this, and apparently our intelligence community believes that there might be an alternative explanation, and that actually the separatists and the Russian government are maybe a little less likely as suspects than some of the others.
All right, now, so Robert Perry has repeatedly pointed out over there at ConsortiumNews.com that the government must be lying, basically, when they say that all they have, the U.S. government that is, that all they have is a preliminary report from the very beginning without any further research from there that they could possibly quote for you, and how that couldn't possibly be true.
And he's also been saying, albeit by citing a single source, but Robert Perry, by the way, pardon me, Ray McGovern, his colleague and another former CIA officer who I know that you know well, knows who Perry's source is and said he certainly vouches for that source's credibility, has been saying something a lot like I think what you just said, where it was maybe possibly a rogue part of the Ukrainian government, a local warlord, so to speak, who had gotten their hands on one of these missiles out of the Ukrainian armory.
And I wonder, I don't know, the way you tell it sounds different enough, just slightly different enough that I wonder if it's a different source or wonder whether maybe that's the same source.
Well, I don't know who the source is.
But they're saying that this is what the office says over there back at Langley, where they're just not buying that the rebels did it.
Well, I mean, it could be a source similar in place to the one I've heard from.
One would think in the U.S. government there are a lot of people that have access to this analysis.
The interesting thing is the United States claims that it hasn't done a report on the downing of this airplane.
The only official statement, as I think you noted, that came out was five days after the plane was shot down.
And basically that was a backtrack by Kerry saying, oh, well, we think it probably was the rebels, but we don't necessarily have any evidence, blah, blah, blah.
But my contention, just from sheer logic of having worked in the national security state, is that I would bet there is a report.
I bet there are all kinds of reports on this.
And whatever evidence, technical evidence they have, I'm sure can tell you what the most likely suspect is in this case, because if they don't have the SIGINT and ELINT, that's the signals intelligence, electronic intelligence that tells them about a shootdown by a missile, then there's not really a very strong case that what the Russians have been accused of by the media and apparently will be accused of by the Dutch, they lose a lot of credibility.
Well, now, so there's the question of the pictures of the wreckage and what looks like either machine gun holes from a Vulcan cannon of some kind or shrapnel from the exploding nose cone of an incoming missile.
I don't know.
From looking at it, I can't tell.
I don't have the experience, but Gordon Prather pointed out to me in an email that there have got to be thousands of retired Air Force officers who would absolutely tell you and not negotiate, but just tell you for a fact with one look whether that is shrapnel from a missile or whether that's machine gun fire.
I'm talking about the panels that are apparently from the cockpit of the plane, from the side of the, you know, right where the pilot's sitting there.
Do you have any information about that?
Has anybody asked the 10,000 retired American Air Force officers who could answer that?
Well, presumably the Dutch have a lot of photos, and I would imagine the U.S. government also has them, that could answer those questions.
That's why I'm saying the whole dilemma is here.
Why isn't the U.S. government, speaking on behalf of the intelligence community, telling us what they know?
You know, I think the answers to this stuff are probably not as simple.
Yeah, not simple, but they're there.
Right.
And now, of course, there's the German report too.
We'll talk about the German report on the other side of this break with Phil Drawley, and then he's got another very important piece about the domestic homeland security state that you're going to want to hear too, so hang on.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, wrapping up the show.
Again, congratulations to John Cornish, who won the raffle.
By the way, he emailed back and said that to anybody who's bummed out they didn't win, that you guys should know he listened to this show every day for years, and he's beyond interested in what's going on at Joshua Hughes Farm down there in Costa Rica, all the permaculture, this, that.
The other thing is right up his alley.
He's really excited to go, and so couldn't have picked a better winner and that kind of thing.
So that's pretty cool, right?
Yeah, right on.
Okay, thanks again to everybody, and especially to John there and to Joshua Hughes, et cetera.
Okay, so on the line with Phil Drawley here, the Blaming Putin game goes on.
Let's sit and say the title of the article.
MH17, the Blaming Putin game goes on.
It's at the UN's review, and it's about the shoot-down of this airliner, Malaysian airliner a year ago, and how they tried to pin it on the Russians and then, boy, and or their rebel friends in Ukraine, but it doesn't seem like that's panning out so much.
So do I have it right that the German report was that they think the rebels did it, but they don't think that they got the missile from Russia.
They got the missile from a Ukrainian base.
Is that right, and what difference does that make?
Well, the difference is it disconnects Russia from the activity, and that's an important connection because what basically Obama is letting happen by not speaking out on this, and it's the same thing that the Dutch are saying, they're alleging that there is a connection with Moscow, and if there's a connection with Moscow, then we go through the usual cycle of sanctions and what do we do about it and so on and so forth.
But if it's a rebel group that won off that shot, got hold of a missile and shot it, then that's a whole different story.
So the distinction is important.
The Germans are saying the Germans actually kind of believe that these rebels did it, but they think they did it with a missile that was, as you said, taken from the Ukrainian arsenal, so they disconnected from Russia.
And the Germans also claim that a lot of the photos, see a lot of the intelligence on this was provided by the Ukrainians, and they claim, for example, that the photos that they received from the Ukrainian government had been doctored.
And also there are, of course, reports that a Ukrainian fighter plane was up in the air at the time when this shoot-down took place, and there were also some recordings of conversations that it appears were fabricated too.
So there's a whole lot of stuff that is deliberately fabricated to make a case against the Russians.
The question is what does the United States know about this stuff?
What does it actually know about who did it and who might have done it?
Right.
Well, and you know what's funny here too is you take their worst-case scenario and spin, it still was an accident, right?
I mean, even if the Russians supplied the rebels who shot down the plane, nobody's really saying they were trying to.
The obvious argument would be, well, they thought it was another Ukrainian military plane come to drop bombs on their heads.
So they took a pot shot and they blew it.
These things happen.
It's terrible.
But so how does that mean extra sanctions against Moscow unless it's just an excuse for an agenda?
There's no logical connection for that whatsoever.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, the fact is that the rebels and Moscow, either one or the two together, had absolutely no motivation to shoot down this plane.
But there are guys on the other side that had a great deal of motivation to shoot down this plane and blame it on Russia and its friends.
All right.
So now let's talk about the American communist forces here, the U.S., NKVD, the revenge of the anti-terror state.
Once defeated, domestic anti-terrorism legislation is being quietly revived in Congress this week.
And this is at the American Conservative Magazine.
And, well, we all know there's 10 million laws.
What's one more, Phil?
What is it?
Well, this is the revival of, if you might think back a few years ago, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act.
This is the one that said anybody with a Ron Paul bumper sticker might be a terrorist, right?
That's right.
In fact, I covered mine up.
I was a bit worried.
But anyway, this was basically anti-Muslim legislation.
There's no other way to describe it.
It was to monitor their communities, to check them out, to send roving commissions around the United States to gather evidence.
It's just like the old House Un-American Activities Committee, same sort of thing.
And anyway, this thing, when it was proposed, it actually passed Congress by a huge margin.
But then there was an enormous outcry from libertarians and all kinds of people saying that this is the precursor of a fascist state.
And so they quietly let it die in committee.
And now we have it back.
And there's almost no media coverage of this.
I've seen hardly anything on it, like about two stories.
It's called the Countering Violent Extremism Act of 2015, and it's virtually the same.
It empowers Congress.
Or actually, in this case, what it's done is it's taken it away from Congress and it's given it to the Department of Homeland Security, which will run it.
Well, which is an important distinction, too.
So they took something that was just about basically persecuting and shaming and subpoenaing and doing that kind of thing in Congress, to now they've given that same investigative power to the actual stormtroopers who have the right to go and carry out whatever it is they scare themselves into pretending to believe during their investigations.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, basically, it's as usual, the language is extremely broad.
It defines the extremists as individuals who support or commit ideologically motivated violence to further political goals.
But, you know, where do you draw the line between somebody who's actually going to do something and somebody who's just talking about something or somebody who had a really bad day in the office and is really pissed off?
You know, the problem is this creates a huge window for people who are looking for trouble to find trouble.
And this is what we've seen all together too much of.
And the thing that bothers me, as I said, is it's not being reported in the media.
Today, in Congress, there's the final write-up of it, which means that it's in committee, it will be a finished product today, and it will be voted on by the committee where they apparently have enough votes to pass it.
And then it's going to be going to the full House for approval.
And so this is the kind of thing that, you know, we've been seeing all too much of in terms of a secret government.
And not only secret government, but secret government doing things that we maybe 15, 20 years ago would have been shocked at because, as Dennis Kucinich called this, it's a thought crime bill.
That's what it is.
Right.
Well, and, you know, you really hit the nail on the head there when you say that it's all about Muslims.
But how do you get liberals on board for it?
You point at a couple of neo-Nazi atrocities and you say, that's why we need to do this.
And then so they get on board for the persecution of people that they otherwise would be defending because it's, you know, their worst nightmare is a right winger without power, you know, is obviously determined on murdering us all.
And there's anecdotal evidence after all.
You know, the recent Charleston massacre, that kind of thing.
So they get scared into believing that the Klan is a force in American society when it really is not.
But that's enough to justify a whole new project and to mute all of that dissent from the left.
Yeah, that's exactly what happens.
In this case, I mean, the legislation was proposed by a Texas congressman, a Republican, McCall, I think his name is.
And he admitted as much as that this is really about Muslims.
But the language is broad enough so that you can go after other kinds of, quote, homegrown terrorists, you know, people on the right.
And the original legislation, the violent radicalization legislation, was proposed by Jane Harmon, who was a liberal.
Well, and they go after environmentalist hippies.
Hardcore too, man.
There's a guy.
Absolutely.
You can go after anybody.
Wait, wait.
Your phone got all terrible on us, Phil.
I'm starting to suspect it might be on my end, but it might be on yours.
I can hear you quite well, so.
Of course.
Here, I'll just turn you up.
I guess it's on my end.
I don't know what's going on with this thing.
Well, you're in Texas.
They're probably listening in on your phone.
Yeah, there you go.
That must be it.
But, yeah, the Earth First types who go and, you know, sabotage sports utility vehicles.
Some of those guys are in the special communication management unit prisons with the, you know, entrapped terrorists.
Yeah, well, to them it's all, you know, threats against the status quo.
And that's really what it's about.
But in this case, obviously, the threat against the status quo is, quote, militant Islam.
I mean, that's going to be our touch expression for the next year and a half until the election.
Yep.
All right.
Well, it's, I guess, my equipment's fault, but your phone's gone to hell, and we got to go anyway.
So thanks very much, Phil.
Appreciate it.
Okay, Scott.
Take care.
All right, y'all.
That's Phil Girod.
He's at the Council for the National Interest.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.
And he's at the American Conservative, theamericanconservative.com, Revenge of the Anti-Terrorist State.
And then this one, this other one is at unz.com.
You can always find his stuff at antiwar.com.
This one is at unz.com, MH17, The Blaming Putin Game Goes On.
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