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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been killed.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came.
He saw us.
He died.
We ain't killing their army.
We're killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
How do you feel about that?
How do you feel about that?
How do you feel about that?
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How do you feel about that?
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How do you feel about that?
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How do you feel about that?
How do you feel about that?
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How do you feel about that?
How do you feel about that?
How do you feel about that?
We're running this article at Antiwar.com today under the title, The Russian Hacking Indictment is a Joke.
Over at UNZ.com, the official title is The Establishment Strikes Back.
But so, yeah, you have an interesting take on this.
I guess there are quite a few people who have been saying things along the lines of, oh yeah, well, let's see some evidence instead of just some assertions.
But you're just balking at the assertions.
This makes no sense to you?
Yeah, that's pretty much true.
I mean, there are a whole bunch of things about this indictment that smell bad.
And the first thing I cite is just the timing.
I mean, the fact that they would release this indictment, which is in no way time sensitive, three days before Trump was supposed to be meeting with the Russian president.
That tells you right off the bat that it's a political statement.
And essentially, they were trying to make sure that Trump wouldn't probably come to some kind of deal with Putin, which of course, this is why the article, Establishment Strikes Back, because the establishment, that's its worst nightmare.
Yeah.
Well, apparently so.
Well, let's go ahead and go with that for a second.
Why is that their worst nightmare?
Well, because obviously, as we've, we construe the establishment in terms of a function of the military-industrial-congressional Congress that really needs money, and it needs power, and it needs authority to keep going.
And they always need an enemy.
And the enemy has, for a long time, you know, gone here and there, where Saddam Hussein was the enemy.
But Russia is always the first choice, because Russia is a country that palpably is a threat to the United States militarily.
And in this case, you know, the thought of Trump and Putin actually sitting down and talking nice and making the military complex somewhat irrelevant is their worst nightmare.
Yeah.
Now, so in terms of the timing of the indictment, how clear is it that, oh, yeah, that was definitely, because, you know, I guess the opposite spin would be, well, that was the day the indictment was supposed to come out, and what did you want us to do?
Reschedule it just to accommodate Trump's foreign policy, and especially on appeasing Russia?
No way.
That would be worse.
Well, I mean, that argument, you know, is totally baseless, because essentially the indictment comes out when they want it to come out.
I mean, this is a document that's prepared by people.
And the fact is that there is no mandate that it had to come out that Friday.
And there is nothing internally in the document.
I guess you, like me, has read probably the whole 30-page document.
There's nothing in it that's time-sensitive that it was an imperative to get this thing out.
So, you know, it was purely a political decision on the part of the Justice Department to release this.
And that was a signal being sent.
Well, and it made a huge difference, right?
I mean, think of how different the narrative would have been.
I mean, already we have the whole Russiagate story, obviously.
But with the indictment coming out just, what, two days before the meeting, three days, it completely, you know, cranked up the negative coverage on TV and everything by 100 or something.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, my wife and I were watching the CNN coverage before the press conference in Helsinki.
And it was repeated comments from the three or four people that were there about this indictment coming out, this indictment proving the case that Russia had done it, and, you know, so on and so forth.
So this gave a lot of ammunition to the people that wanted to shoot down the importance of this whole meeting in Helsinki.
And they cited it over and over and over again, New York Times, Washington Post, it was everywhere.
So the fact was, this was incredible ammunition that was given to people who don't want rapprochement with Russia.
Well, and now on back to your point about the motive here, I was reminded, talking with Andrew Coburn the other day, he had this report in Harper's back in, I guess it was a few years ago now, where he talked about, and he had a source who was there, a lobbyist who was there at this meeting in Crystal City.
And his source, I guess, wasn't an arms merchant, but everybody else there was, or were lobbyists representing the arms dealers in DC.
And this was the day that the Russians seized the Crimean Peninsula, without killing anyone, by the way.
But the day they did, and he said, I think the word was euphoria there in Crystal City.
This was the most exciting thing in the whole world.
You know what?
Bombing helpless brown peasants in Afghanistan or Iraq, that's one thing, but selling aircraft carriers and long range bombers and all these huge big ticket items, arming up the Eastern European NATO vassal states and all this stuff, that's where the real money's at.
Forget the Taliban.
Sure.
I mean, the whole thing is, you know, they always say follow the money, and it usually turns out to be true.
And of course, we forget that arms and weapons and defense is a huge industry.
It's the biggest industry in the United States.
And these people have a stake in having this go the way they want it to go.
And unfortunately, there are a lot of people in Congress and in the media that support that view.
All right.
So actually, before we get into the nuts and bolts of the indictment, you want to give us kind of an overview of how you look at this entire Russiagate thing here?
Well, I'm still, I guess, best describable as an agnostic.
I don't, as a former intelligence officer, I don't necessarily doubt that the Russians were poking around and doing things.
The question is, to what degree were they doing them?
And the other question is, of course, what were the motives?
And so I believe that, yeah, there could be something there.
But the fact is, we've had over a year of this, and I haven't seen any evidence of anything yet.
And that includes this indictment, which had a lot of very detailed information, but there was no hint of where this information came from.
And there was no idea promoted about the reliability of it.
So we have a big question about, sure, the Russians poke around in elections of countries that are adversaries, just like we in the United States do and have been doing for a long time.
That's what intelligence agencies do.
But the fact is, the degree to this is the important question and the motive.
And I don't see where we know any of that.
The stuff that was produced in this document that allegedly makes the claim or makes the case actually doesn't do that.
It basically throws some stuff out, which, as I point out in the article, and we'll get to, is easily challenged.
Well, now, I'll kind of...
So I'll be paraphrasing here, but Ray McGovern says, look, this whole thing is a conspiracy between Comey, Brennan, Clapper, and their co-conspirators to frame up Trump.
That's all it is.
They're lying.
They've been lying.
This is their excuse for why Hillary lost.
That's all.
Yeah, I agree.
That's an element in it.
There's no question.
But these guys came into this partisan, and they essentially were involved in torpedoing Trump right from before the election all the way through to the inauguration.
And there's no question about that.
These guys were engaged in a criminal conspiracy, which they'll never be hung for, unfortunately.
But the fact still remains that Russia was up to something, and if it was a conspiracy to, as they keep saying, to overthrow our democratic form of government, which is in itself a joke line, then it's something we should know, and it's something we should get to the bottom of.
But the fact is, I don't see where any of this evidence has been produced, and I don't go quite as far as Ray, but I believe that there was indeed a conspiracy within the intelligence community and in the law enforcement community, which is still playing out.
So I read this thing by Andrew McCarthy at the National Review, and I got a grudge against him left over from the terror wars, which are still going on, by the way.
But he made the point that this whole thing was always, and especially in, and he's buying the premise of what it says in the indictment.
He's not challenging that.
He says, yeah, you know, evil Russian enemy hacking us or whatever.
But he says, look, this whole thing is a case for the counterintelligence division.
There's no reason in the world this should have been turned over to Robert Mueller and a special prosecutor.
The only reason it was is because Rosenstein was implicated in the firing of Comey.
So to cover his own ass, he appointed this special counsel.
But that the law says that you're not supposed to do that unless you have actual evidence of criminal activity here on the part of the Americans, in this case, the Trump campaign for colluding here.
And since they had none of that, he even quotes Rosenstein saying, and now that we're done with this indictment, we're going to turn it back over to the counterintelligence division, which sounds, at least part of this, like they're washing their hands of it.
So I don't know, you know, what else they have in store, but he seemed to make a real good case that this should have never been a criminal investigation in the first place.
You don't do criminal investigations into foreign intelligence officers that you can never prosecute.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
I can't think of any other cases where they've done this kind of thing.
And it's, again, if you're going to make a criminal case, as you know, and I know, you essentially have to have all your ducks in line, right, from the criminal act all the way through, you know, the cover up and everything else that took place as a consequence of this.
Because when you get to court, if, say, one of these Russians were to be produced by Putin, they would have to have disclosure, they would have to have cross-questioning of sources and stuff like that.
They would never be able to sustain this case.
So the whole thing, which is one of the points I make in my article, which is, so the whole thing is ridiculous.
I mean, there's just no way that this is a sustainable legal case on criminal activity.
They haven't demonstrated that at all.
All right, now, so what do you make about all the accusations about the GRU and who these guys are and how they did what they did in there?
I mean, other than, obviously, like you're saying, it's all unproven, it's just a bunch of claims.
But you kind of make some judgments about that in the article as well.
Yeah.
I basically say that looking at it as a former intelligence officer, laying out the names and the jobs and the activities of all these people, these GRU officers, the 12 of them, suggests that you had some kind of penetration of either the GRU or of the Russian government at the level of Putin.
And if you had that kind of penetration, you're going to spell it out in an indictment, because you know the first thing that happens is the Russians will find out where the leak is, and you will no longer have any information coming out of those sources.
So it's, from an intelligence point of view, it's ridiculous.
And I had dinner with some people the other night, and they were saying, well, of course there's the story that came out in January about how the Dutch, apparently, intelligence service got into the GRU, and they were actually in the room that the GRU was using to do all these interference operations and stuff like that, and were even able to manipulate the surveillance cameras in the room so they could take pictures and stuff.
But this is kind of a, again, this smacks to me of a cover story.
You don't reveal, if you have that kind of access to information at the high level, you don't reveal any of it.
So none of this makes sense, and I just don't see where, you know, we would be exposing this kind of information if this were all for real.
They're certainly assuming that the Russians will not produce anybody in court.
But if the Russians were to do that, man, it would be devastating.
Because they would be able to ask for discovery.
Yeah, absolutely.
They would demand to know where does this all come from, how credible is it, and, you know, that would blow up the whole thing.
Well, and this whole thing about the surveillance cameras, I mean, just how high definition of surveillance cameras does the GRU keep inside their offices?
I mean, I guess it makes sense that they've got to watch their own people, but to such a degree that Dutch can read off the screens in front of the guys?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, exactly.
And that's, again, that's another element of it.
You know how surveillance cameras work, and they're not going to be that detailed.
And unless the Russians are going around referring to each other by their names, how do you pick up who they are?
I mean, this is another question.
I mean, all this stuff.
So I hypothesize that this whole list is probably something that was dreamed up either by the CIA or NSA with names of known GRU officers.
Now, that's not hard to get, because they show up overseas, they travel, they do those kind of things.
You can come up with names of GRU officers, and you put them all together and say, this is a list of the guys who were guilty.
And that makes the indictment look like, boy, this is really solid stuff.
So you know, again, I just don't get it.
Or alternatively, if the United States is able to hack into the files of the GRU or something like that, by revealing that they know who these GRU guys are, again, they're destroying their own sources and methods, which in intelligence terms, is the big no-no, the biggest crime you can commit.
So I can't see how any of this makes sense.
All right, Shaul, here's who sponsors this show, Mike Swanson, author of The War State, The Rise of the Military-Industrial Complex in America After World War II.
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Well, okay, but so hypothetically, though, if it's an important enough case, they might have to burn a source or a method, right?
That's a possibility.
And of course, I have never heard of anyone burning a source or a method, particularly at this kind of level, but it's certainly a possibility.
But again, this is something that would come out in discovery, and you wonder to what extent the United States would be willing to expose the background and how they did it and so on and so forth, if it's true.
So there are a lot of things that are just very, very confusing about this whole thing.
When you say in here, everyone would be working in alias on standalone machines, and the transmission of information would be done using cutouts to break any chain of custody.
You talk about this like this is just spycraft 101.
If you believe these guys are sitting around at GRU headquarters B, or whatever it is, doing all of this in a way to get themselves caught like this, that that's just crazy.
They know there's such a thing as the National Security Agency.
They would do better than this.
They would send a guy with a thumb drive somewhere far away or something.
Yeah, and if they wanted to overthrow our democracy, there wouldn't be 12 guys doing this in a room.
There'd be 100 of them.
And they'd be operating on these standalone machines that are not connected to networks.
They would be in full alias.
And I tell you one other thing, I didn't mention the article.
You know what a SCIF is, right?
Yeah, that's a secure information facility type thing, right?
Right.
They would be working in a SCIF.
They'd be working in a bubble, a security bubble, where they could not be penetrated by the Dutch or anybody else.
I mean, this high level with the political ramifications that it would have if they were indeed doing what is claimed, you know, it's impossible to conceive that it would be done in this slapdash way with a dozen guys in an office that basically the Dutch from 3,000 miles away were able to somehow penetrate, right?
You know, the whole thing, the whole story just smells.
Yeah.
So, you know, I saw Scott Ritter pointed out in a piece at Truthdig that, huh, that's funny.
Let's see.
I don't know.
And he goes back and he finds the reality winner document from the leak to the intercept.
And he says, well, look here.
It's all color coded, red, yellow, green lines between the different blocks.
It's basically like a PowerPoint slide, this document.
And he says, well, look, where they say that it's this GRU officer in charge of the thing By the color code, that's just a judgment of an analyst.
It is not, you know, it does not go color code back to scientific fact proven with ones and zeros by computer experts.
This is an opinion of a CIA analyst, apparently.
Yeah, that's right.
And one suspects this whole indictment was the work of a team of analysts that were out to make the Russians look as bad as they possibly could.
And I guess that's why I suspect they might have had a list of names of suspected or known GRU officers that were then in turn used and manipulated as part of this process.
So I think there's a whole lot of stuff here that's exactly in that same category.
It's stuff that's, you know, we have an objective here, which is basically, we have two objectives.
First of all, we're to torpedo the talks between Trump and Putin by releasing the document at all.
And the second objective is to make it look like the Russians were overthrowing our democracy and manipulating our election and basically making it so that Hillary Clinton could not win.
You know, but it's these are political decisions that are made.
And that's why the CIA and all these organizations these days are so fucked up.
It's because they become politicized.
And this has all happened in the last 15 years or so.
Well, you know, something here, too, I hate having to disclaim, Phil, but I don't want people to misunderstand because I hate Donald Trump.
He's a war criminal and I've already judged him and found him guilty.
And if it was up to me, he'd be buried under the supermax with George Bush and Barack Obama.
I don't give a damn what happens to him.
I am glad that Hillary Clinton is not the president for what that's worth.
But it should have been Ron, not Donald goddamn Trump.
So I don't want people to think that this is some defense of Trump.
I don't know what your opinion is.
Maybe, you know, I know that you preferred him to Hillary, but I don't know exactly what you think of the guy.
But I don't think this is really about Trump as much as it is about Russia.
I mean, it's both.
But that's what really worries me.
It's like, you know, Trump himself was the leader, basically, of the birther movement, claiming that Barack Obama wasn't a damn liberal Democrat from Illinois, but instead was a secret Muslim terrorist infiltrator from Kenya who had usurped John McCain's rightful throne.
So if anyone deserves this, it's Donald Trump personally, specifically.
However, the collateral damage in the case of Obama was that we might have a real violent conflict with Kenya.
In this case, all of mankind's fate is in the balance here.
Yeah, yeah.
No, my opinion of Trump is the same as yours.
I'm disgusted by him.
Today's comment he made to Iran, addressing them with annihilation, is revolting.
The man is playing with ending the world as sort of something he has on his desk.
I mean, I think he's insane, to be honest.
But that doesn't change the fact that for the United States to be talking to Russia is in our interest.
It's in the interest of the whole world.
So that's why I think the meeting in Helsinki was a good thing.
And, you know, it all comes down to the tradeoffs.
I mean, if we had had Hillary Clinton as president, we probably would be at war with Russia already.
And certainly Obama was no prize either in some of the stuff he did.
But but the fact is, Trump takes this to a whole different level.
And I am I voted for him basically because he was running against Hillary.
But at the same time, I have been disgusted.
I wrote him off the first time he staged the cruise missile attack against Syria without any justification, without any intelligence backing up what he was doing.
And so as far as I'm concerned, that was it.
Yeah.
Well, and yet back to Helsinki, the first thing he did was he went up there and he said, America's relationship with Russia has never been worse, except that ended four hours ago.
And I like that.
I mean, what can you say?
I mean, this is what I'm supposed to hate him for.
Not for bombing Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Iraq, but Niger, but for making peace.
I don't know, man.
But yeah, that's that's that's the dilemma.
I mean, in this case, you know, you talk about exchanging one devil for another.
And we really have that, unfortunately.
And this whole, as I say, this stuff over the weekend that came up both from Trump and Pompeo about Iran.
I mean, you know, a war is coming and this is a war against a country that doesn't threaten us in any way.
And that basically is doing everything it can to to avoid that.
And it's just incredible.
I mean, it makes it makes my brain go into meltdown.
Yeah, I mean, it's really bad, this tweet that he put out last night.
Don't you ever threaten us?
When actually the statement from Rouhani was, hey, peace with Iran can be the mother of all peace.
But war with Iran would be the mother of all wars.
And Trump goes, oh, yeah, I'll nuke you, basically.
That's what he did.
That's what he said.
Yeah.
Crazy, man.
Yeah.
Well, but so maybe you're just a traitor, Phil Giraldi, you and your opinions, because you and Jill Stein were there at that dinner and Putin showed up for a minute a few years ago.
And so you must be compromised by the GRU yourself.
What about that?
In fact, you even went back to Russia recently, I guess probably to receive your marching orders.
Yeah, that's right.
It's all true.
When I went and I spoke at that conference in December 2015, Vladimir Putin personally gave me a bottle of vodka, which I still have.
And, you know, I've been I've been cooped up.
Yeah, right.
I know you're lying now.
You still have it.
I do still have it.
Yeah.
Oh, the empty bottle on your shelf.
I get it.
OK.
Well, yeah, kind of.
But I mean, you know, it's a special vodka they give out.
That's that's the the Kremlin private stores that they give the speakers and that kind of thing.
Everybody else got one, too, I have to admit.
So I assume they're all co-opted also.
So, you know, the whole thing comes down to we've gone through so much nonsense in the past 15 years that people like you and me finally have to stand up and say, look, we don't need another war.
We don't need any more of this kind of stuff.
We have to we have to bring our soldiers home.
We have to cut the defense, the defense budget.
And we essentially don't need to fight Iran.
We don't need to fight Russia and we don't need to fight China.
But nevertheless, the talking heads that seem to run the media and run what goes on in Washington, they're in love with all those things.
Yeah.
Well, they certainly don't know any better, but they don't want to.
So but let me ask you this.
I'm not saying I believe it, but I wonder if you think it's possible that, you know, for example, his trash talking with Iran is rather than a setup for another war instead is a setup for another round of peace talks, just like all his hawking it up against the Koreans.
I think he even there was even a quote leaked out somewhere where he said that, look, come on, all that fire and fury stuff was just to get the media off my back while I went to go ahead and try to make peace.
Yeah, I've seen that theory, but I think that the the animosity towards Iran has been more sustained.
And you have to you have to recognize the fact, too, that it's completely unnecessary.
I mean, Iran was in compliance with the with the nuclear agreement.
And Trump knew that.
And Trump knows that.
And so this whole thing has a much deeper basis within the people in the Trump administration and, of course, with the Israelis.
So I think this is a real thing, I suspect.
I think that if this were a tactic, it wouldn't be going on as long and quite as as harshly as it's been going on.
So I suspect this is for real.
Yeah, I mean, they'd be crazy, which I guess I can't completely discount that.
But they'd be just completely nuts to think that they're going to get a better deal than the JCPOA, where what they're going to give up all their missiles and they're going to abolish the IRGC and whatever.
I mean, come on.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
I mean, there's no there is no zero possibility of a better deal by blustering and screaming that, you know, we're going to annihilate you.
There's no possibility of a better deal.
So if you cut out the possibility of a better deal, all you have as an option is the military option.
That's the military option is just crazy.
I mean, even an air war would require sending basically all of SOCOM in there to try to take out the anti-aircraft, which is and then, of course, Bagram Air Base, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq.
All our guys are within range right there.
Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, everybody.
Yeah, yeah.
And we have at last count, I think, three vulnerable aircraft carriers within easy reach of the missiles that Iran does have.
Yeah, you know, the whole thing is stupid.
It makes no sense because because Iran does not threaten us and it doesn't even really threaten the region, which is the other argument that keeps coming out.
And the fact is that if anyone is threatened, it's Iran by its neighbors.
And so, you know, this is not to mitigate what the mullahs represent.
I was in Iran, as you know, back about six weeks ago.
And yeah, it's everyone I talked to privately said they really would like their government to change, but they don't want the United States to do it.
And so it's, you know, the government is a relic of history that eventually will go, but it has to go because the Iranians make it go.
And even then, though, I mean, that's just in the big city.
I mean, we saw this with Ahmadinejad.
George W. Bush said, you guys better not vote for the right winger.
And boy, did they come out and vote for the right winger and put Ahmadinejad in there back in 2005.
And yeah, well, that's the whole thing.
It's been demonstrated that the threats against these countries always bolster the regime.
So they're counterproductive.
And yet we have these leaders that do it over and over again.
I mean, how stupid are they?
I mean, because it's like when Obama came out against Brexit in Britain, that probably motivated 10 percent of the voters to vote the other way.
Yeah, man.
Oh, man.
All right.
Well, man, I better go because I'm actually late for Stockman.
I could sit here talking with you all day.
It's been way too long.
We've got to do this again soon, Phil.
OK, I'm around.
OK.
All right.
Thanks very much, man.
Appreciate it.
Take care, Scott.
Bye bye.
All right, you guys, that's Phil Drawley.
I forgot to say at the beginning, former CIA officer, writes for UNZ.com, UNZ.com.
The establishment strikes back as this one's running today on Antiwar.com under the title The Russia Hacking Indictment is a Joke.
And also he runs the Council for the National Interest at Council for the National Interest dot org.
All right, y'all, that's it for the show.
Check me out at Libertarian Institute dot org, Scott Horton dot org, Antiwar dot com, Twitter dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
Appreciate it.
And buy my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
