08/25/10 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

Hey everybody, I'm Scott.
It's fundraising time again at Antiwar.com.
We need your help, and here's how you can help.
Stop by Antiwar.com slash donate or call Angela Keaton, our development director, at 323-512-7095.
That's 323-512-7095.
Or you can shoot her an email over to akeaton at Antiwar.com.
Thank you very much for your support.
Antiwar Radio Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Next up is Phil Giraldi.
He's the president of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
He's a contributing editor to the American Conservative magazine, a regular columnist at Antiwar.com and at the Campaign for Liberty and the American Conservative Defense Alliance.
He's got a new one in the American Conservative called Mossad in America.
Welcome to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing good.
Thanks for joining us today.
First of all, please tell us about this Council for the National Interest Foundation that you are now the president of.
Well, the Council for the National Interest is the oldest advocacy group in Washington that has been pushing for a change in policy in the Middle East, basically advocating a shift towards neutrality, shall we say, on Middle Eastern issues.
It was founded back in the 1980s and it has a number of former U.S. ambassadors and Congressman Paul Finley, for example, is one of the original founders of the group.
So it's a very high-level group of people who have actually been involved with policymaking and in many cases have lived in the Middle East.
So now Eugene Byrd, who we've talked to I think a number of times, two or three times at least on the show, is stepping down and you're taking his spot, huh?
Well, he's retired.
He's been doing this for 18 years and he's entitled to a rest.
Actually, Allison Weir is going to be the new president.
I'm the executive director, so we're basically kind of sharing control of the group and direction between us.
And that's good that you're working with Allison Weir because that makes this a left-right bipartisan effort, huh?
It's actually deliberate, yeah.
We said, well, you know, this is an issue that's a national interest issue, as the name of the group says, and it really has nothing to do with partisan politics.
The policy in the Middle East is hurting every American, whether they're on the right or the left or in the center, and our intention is to make sure that we reach out to people from across the political spectrum.
Oh, yeah.
Now, I forgot to say as part of your introduction here that you're a former DIA and CIA officer, which means that people will either think what you say is more credible or less, depending on what their point of view is, I guess, but it's important, I think, for your credit and for full disclosure.
So now tell me this.
How come so many of you former CIA guys have such a chip on your shoulder about the Israeli Mossad spying on Americans?
Well, it's because many of us have had firsthand exposure to it, either overseas where we've had to deal with what the Israelis were up to, very often doing damage control, or the people who've worked in Washington seeing the distorted type of information that the Israelis push through the system to get intelligence analysis that suits their agenda.
So, well, tell us some stories then.
What have you witnessed?
What have I witnessed?
Well, I've certainly witnessed firsthand in places like Turkey and when I was in Western Europe, the Israelis being extremely active in what you would call disinformation operations where suddenly stories would surface in various places, and these stories were always, always very negative about Arabs in particular, Palestinians in particular, Muslims in general, and very supportive of Israeli positions.
And this, according to friends of mine who are still working in intelligence, this has increased dramatically in the last few years.
And, of course, now it's particularly targeted against Iran.
Well, but don't they have a Council for the National Interest in Israel that says, hey, we ought to be good friends to the Americans like in the propaganda rather than coming up with reasons all day and night to make people resent us there?
I mean, we're talking about a long-term state that wants to survive into the indefinite hundreds of years from now here, right?
Well, yeah, obviously they do, but you have to argue, I think, that their perception of what is necessary for their own survival is dramatically different than the way most other people see the conflict.
I think most people are looking at it relatively objectively.
I mean, you don't have to be crazily objective, but most people would think that it behooves Israel to come to some serious understanding with most of its neighbors at least.
And yet there is serious resistance to doing that because that would mean giving up the colonial enterprise on the West Bank, and Israel is apparently very wedded to that.
Yeah, apparently so.
I was just reading an article yesterday about how this whole thing about, well, now that the freeze is ending, that makes it really hard for the Palestinians to come to the table to deal with Netanyahu.
And I'm thinking, freeze?
What freeze?
You can read in Haaretz for the last year straight about nothing but expansion of settlements in the West Bank, Phil.
Yeah, that's true.
There never was a freeze.
There was a limited freeze just to be able to make headlines in the United States about it in very narrow areas, but they never froze the really contentious developments in East Jerusalem.
All right, well, now, so explain, you know, maybe there are brand new listeners to Answer at War Radio today.
Why is it that the American national interest in the Israeli one is so different than in your eyes?
Well, you know, every country has a different interest than any other country.
I mean, in Israeli terms, they really have, their politicians have really sold the concept that they're under threat, and they're besieged, and they're in trouble if they don't act aggressively towards all of their neighbors.
And, you know, after you've been selling that for 15 years, people buy into it.
It's the same as in the United States.
I mean, the United States, you know, and I know, and probably a lot of the listeners know, that Iran does not in any way threaten the United States, does not appear to have a weapons program, and is probably years and years away from having a weapon even if they decided to do that.
But yet, because of the propaganda coming out of the White House, coming out of Congress, coming out of the media, most Americans believe Iran already has a weapon, and that we should attack them to disarm them.
I mean, you know, this is the virtue of controlling the message, that message is, in this case, a wrong one in the United States, and I believe the message in Israel about it being besieged, under threat, is largely wrong, too.
Well, you know, I guess it's always, there's always a disconnect between the insane foreign policy of pretty much any state and the people who actually live there.
And, you know, I don't know exactly what the people of Israel think about this, but I remember when I read Victor Ostrovsky's book, By Way of Deception, he's a former Mossad agent, I'm sure you're aware, who wrote this book, By Way of Deception, Thou Shalt Do War.
That's the slogan of the Mossad.
And one of the things he says in there is that their attitude was that the Americans, if they know anything about anything, they better tell us.
But if the Israelis find out something that the Americans need to know, well, they're big boys, they can take care of themselves.
And this seems to me, you know, maybe I'm not all that reasonable, Phil, I don't know, but it seems to me like that's a pretty bad way to make friends or keep one, especially the most important friend that Israel has, which is the U.S. state.
Well, that's why, you know, intelligence officers who've seen this on the working level know that's exactly what goes on.
You know, it's a one-way street where Israel gets good information and good access out of the United States, and the reverse is not true.
And, yeah, and I would point out, too, that, I mean, it seemed to me, anyway, to be fairly clear indicators that all of those Israeli intelligence officers and art students and movers before 9-11 had a pretty good idea that something big was coming up and possibly had some of the details of the actual events of 9-11, and they didn't share them.
Yeah, you know, I heard it asserted actually by Rye from Anti-Neocon, so I like very much, that the van full of explosives on the George Washington Bridge was actually connected back to urban movers, the Israeli intelligence front there in New Jersey.
Now, I don't think I have the footnote for that one, do you?
I need to track that down.
I've seen references to it.
I don't know what the original source of it is.
It would be interesting to determine just how credible that is.
But, you know, it's the obvious speculation, right?
Who would be running the van there?
I mean, there were Israelis, and we have the urban moving systems and the vans and things.
These add up, you know.
It's the obvious clue to follow.
That's right.
There should be an arrest record or something, if it's true.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, hang tight, Phil.
We've got to go out to this break.
Everybody, it's Phil Giraldi from the American Conservative Magazine, Antiwar.com, and the Council for the National Interest, where he's the new executive director.
And we'll be right back after this.
You can sign up for the Liberty Radio Network email updates at updates.lrn.fm and join us on Facebook at facebook.lrn.fm.
Two suspects are in FBI custody after a truckload of explosives was discovered around the George Washington Bridge.
That bridge links New York to New Jersey over the Hudson River.
Whether the discovery of those explosives has anything to do with other events of the day is unclear.
But the FBI has two suspects in hand, said the truckload of explosives.
Enough explosives were in the truck to do great damage to the George Washington Bridge.
All right, y'all, so that was a clip of Dan Rather via Ryu Dawson from AntiNeocons.com.
He's where I got that clip.
So, Phil, I think I should try to be as quiet as I can during this segment and let you give us an overview, well, I guess starting with what you think of that and what you've written here in this new article at the American Conservative Magazine, Mossad in America.
You actually, this thing about Phil Turney and all this, I want you to have time to get into that, too.
So, go ahead.
Well, I mean, regarding the bridge, I mean, this is one of those many stories that unfortunately never had any follow-up, that the people involved in this, according to other accounts, they were indeed Israelis and connected to the moving company, were basically just allowed to leave the country.
So, what's the whole story here?
Obviously, the story is that there's a cover-up.
And, you know, this is something we see again and again and again with anything that relates to Israel.
My story at the American Conservative website is, basically, it was three little stories, but the first story was essentially about spying against the United States, that there have been a number of Arab Americans in the New York and New Jersey area who have been approached by Arabic-speaking men who claim to be connected to U.S. intelligence.
And these Arab-speaking men asked the Arab Americans if they would be willing to spy, basically, on their friends, neighbors, business associates, etc.
And it turned out that, in about three cases that I know of, the Arab Americans became suspicious and reported these contacts to the FBI.
And it turned out that none of these contacts were actually U.S. intelligence or counterintelligence in any way, shape, and form.
And the investigation concluded that they were, in fact, Mossad employees working out of the Israeli Consulate General in New York City, and that these people were, in fact, Israeli Arabs who were working for Mossad.
So here you had Israeli intelligence officers very aggressively recruiting in the Arab American community and pretending to be American intelligence officers because they knew that their targets would not cooperate with Israelis.
So the big question, of course, becomes to what extent were these guys successful?
How many people did they actually get to cooperate with them?
How many others maybe turned them down and didn't go to the police or go to the FBI to see if this was all legitimate?
So this could be a much bigger story.
And, of course, the ending of the story is that the FBI has not moved aggressively against these people because the Justice Department just will not do it because it's an Israel issue.
So that's the first story.
I don't know if you have any other questions about that, Scott.
Yeah, I think maybe we better stop and follow up here on a couple of things.
Your sources are telling you that this has happened how many times, how many different Israeli agents have been found out posing as American agents, and, again, doing the job that the FBI is apparently for anyway, which is fooling people into at least beginning to act as terrorists.
Well, you know, but the point is when an American policeman or intelligence officer tries to get a source, at least he's representing himself honestly as an American.
In this case, it's the Israelis pretending to be Americans to get these people to cooperate.
I know of three cases where the people they approached, Arab Americans, then went to the FBI and complained, and that's how they found out about these operations.
Apparently the Israeli Mossad officers involved, there are two of them, operating or living or working out of the Israeli Consulate General in New York.
Is there any doubt in your mind who Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shib were working for?
I have doubts about everything, Scott.
Well, let's hear about them.
No, I mean, I just, you know, there are so many narratives going on outside of all these incidents and there's so much information that's been buried in U.S. government archives.
I don't think we'll ever know really all the ins and outs of 9-11 or anything else.
Well, you know, even with that whole refrain about the Americans are big boys, they can take care of themselves and all that, it is pretty hard to believe that the Mossad could have been following those hijackers around, knowing their every move, ready to celebrate with their butane on that morning and taking pictures of themselves, high-fiving and all these things, and have the CIA and the FBI and all the rest of these agencies none of us have ever even heard of before are deaf, blind and stupid.
You know, I met an Air Force intelligence guy that said, well, we heard that there was an attack, that it was probably going to be that day, but we didn't know who or when or where.
I mean, come on, is the American government really that dumb or did they leave the doors open for these guys?
Well, you know, again, until we get all the information, which we will never have, it's hard to make a judgment.
But certainly there have been enough studies of all this to demonstrate that if the United States intelligence agencies and police agencies had connected some dots, this would not have happened.
But again, you know, there are stories inside the stories inside the stories.
What was the Israeli hand in this?
What was possibly some kind of rogue operation by people that we paid to protect us in the CIA and FBI?
Was there a rogue operation going on inside the open operation?
I don't know.
I mean, I don't have answers to these things, I know.
But I do know that anything is possible, that basically there are so many conflicting loyalties out there and so many games being played that almost anything is possible.
All right.
Well, I guess I can think of a lot more things to say along the lines of 9-11, but I guess everybody just go read Christopher Ketchum on all that.
Now tell me about this thing with Phil Turney because this is just as important.
Yeah, well, this is an interesting story.
Phil Turney is a USS Liberty survivor, a very prominent one, very outspoken.
I guess you could characterize him as extremely anti-Israeli as a result of his experiences.
And for your listeners who probably all know about the USS Liberty, it was the US intelligence ship that was attacked by the Israelis in 1967 and they tried to sink it and kill the entire crew.
I don't think there's any doubt about that.
And so anyway, he's been very outspoken.
And he was in a hotel in Southern California and he was approached by a gentleman who appeared to be of Middle Eastern origin, judging from his appearance and his accent.
And this gentleman quickly got into a confrontation with Turney about the USS Liberty and said, among other things, that those sailors on the USS Liberty, they all deserved it, they should have all been killed.
And it was clear that he was either trying to provoke a fight or something or he was just trying to make a point.
And anyway, he revealed at one point that he was an Israeli government employee.
He then went on to threaten Mark Glenn, who's a journalist up in Idaho, who has also been very active in telling the Liberty story.
So it was kind of an interesting little episode.
You're saying it was the same guy that harassed the other guy too?
No, no, no.
Well, yeah, yeah.
He threatened Turney.
He delivered a threat against Glenn also to Turney.
I see.
But anyway, the point being that you would think this story is almost too bizarre to be possible, but there were witnesses to it, including Turney's wife who was there, witnesses who were in the hotel.
And so the story appears to be credible.
And both Glenn and Turney went to the FBI, and the FBI, of course, did not seem interested at all in pursuing the story.
And they said, you know, we'll check into it, and that's kind of where it died.
So if it's true, and I have to believe the evidence suggests it's more likely to be true than not, it's kind of a scary episode in which somebody perhaps connected with a foreign government that is threatening people inside the United States for exercising their First Amendment rights.
Yeah, well, don't worry.
I'm sure that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will stand up for him.
Yeah, they've stood up for a lot of people lately, especially for that mosque in New York City.
I noticed that Barack had a real firm position that lasted 12 hours.
Yeah, exactly.
He's walking backwards.
Yeah, well, and just like they spoke out about the murder of Farouk Dogan, if only Americans are humans, well, then he was at least half a one or something.
You'd think they could have at least mentioned it in some context, but no.
No, of course.
And then the third story I told in my little piece on the American conservative was about Stuart Nozet, who was the most recent Israeli spy arrested last October for providing classified defense information, or attempting to provide classified defense information to an FBI agent who was pretending to be a Mossad officer.
And anyway, this trial seems to be going in the direction of the AIPAC trial, where he's demanding that information be produced as classified, and if they produce the classified information, it will reveal more than it's worth, and so it looks like the prosecution will probably have to drop the case.
Amazing.
You know, 250, it could be a big or a small number, depending on the context, but in the context of John M. Cole, the former FBI counterintelligence officer, saying that that's how many investigations into Israeli activities, criminal activities in America, or at least activities that fall under the jurisdiction of counterintelligence and counterespionage, that went nowhere, that seems to me like a pretty big number.
So how could that really be possible, that in Washington, D.C., a foreign government really has this much free reign, any foreign government?
I mean, this rivals the British during World War II or something.
Well, you know, the point is that the politicians in Washington are afraid of the Israel lobby.
It's that simple.
And so they sort of sit down, just like Barack Obama clearly did, and at a certain point they sort of decide, you know, is this really worth it to me to take them on?
There's a good chance I'll lose.
There's an even better chance that they're going to muddy the waters so much that it'll make me look bad.
You know, and every politician makes this decision, and the ultimate decision is not to mess with them.
And I think that's what is 90 percent of this.
And the same thing, you go to Capitol Hill, if you talk to congressmen privately, they all dislike the Israeli lobby.
They dislike the pressure they're under.
But they're never going to vote against it.
They're afraid.
These people are afraid.
Well, and, you know, the problem with that is, and I'm sorry to be so young and idealistic here or something, Phil, but, you know, if you're a congressman and it comes to something really important and doing the right thing or undoing something very important or, you know, along those lines, you're supposed to be willing to not have your job anymore if that's what it comes to.
So what if they defeat you in the next election if it comes to doing the right thing about espionage in America, especially when, you know, a former CIA officer on the show saying, hey, you know, these suspicions about prior knowledge and the deliberate allowing at least a 9-11 are valid suspicions for reasonable people to hold on the show here.
I mean, this is a pretty bad situation to have a blind eye turned to over the long term.
Well, I mean, you're assuming that congressmen actually do have an ethical base.
I would suggest that they do some of the time.
But ultimately what they're most interested in is incumbency and getting reelected.
And getting reelected means, in many cases, not making waves.
It was funny, but the Council for National Interest and I drafted up a House resolution.
You know about the House Resolution 1553, which gives the green light from Congress for Israel to attack Iran.
Well, I drafted up a resolution that I called H.R.
1554.
And 1554 uses the same inputs, the same information to come to the opposite conclusion, that attacking Iran would be a disaster.
You need to send me that.
I'll make sure and put it on the NLR blog.
Yeah, I can do that.
But basically we've been looking around for a congressman who might actually, you know, submit it in Congress when they come back after Labor Day.
Sounds like a lot of fun.
Yeah, well, we haven't had a hit yet, that's for sure.
Dennis Kucinich, we haven't been able to approach yet.
He might be the only one.
But it would be kind of fun to watch that move through the process.
You might even talk to Ron.
You never know.
Sometimes I kind of think, yeah, maybe Ron won't say the right thing on something.
He won't be quite as hardcore as I want.
And then he never, ever lets me down.
He always says the right thing, and the way I've had him say it, too, he's great.
Yeah, he's had some good comments lately, for sure.
I mean, I was kind of worried that on the mosque he would say, well, you know, it's a state's rights issue and federalism and the Constitution, and I'm a congressman, it's not my job.
And sort of technically right, but kind of a weasel sort of thing.
He came out and said, enough of this demagoguing, Islam isn't what attacked us, and I'm not asking you, I'm telling you, listen up.
And, man, I love that guy.
Yep, yep.
When he said it's our policy that was attacked, he's absolutely right.
Yeah, and you know what?
It's kind of ridiculous, Phil, that we're still having the same conversation years later, but back when Rudy Giuliani attacked Ron Paul in that debate, and it was really Ron Paul's shining Reagan debate moment, unlike what TV concluded that night.
I set about interviewing all you former CIA guys to tell what's up with the war on terrorism, and it's on AntiWar.com.
It's called Ron Paul's Reading List for the Farsighted.
Maybe people don't like to read that much.
Well, I interviewed all the authors, everybody that Ron Paul said to read, and then Phil and Ray McGovern on top of that, and I think every bit of that is still relevant, especially when it comes to this Moss conversation now, and Phil, you're part of that.
Well, listen, I could keep you on forever.
We're already over time and the show's over, but I'm sure you have to go.
I think Angela said you're real busy today, so thanks very much for your time.
I really do appreciate it.
All right, Scott, it's a pleasure being on.
All right, everybody, that's Antiwar Radio.