12/01/10 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
My next guest is Phil Giraldi.
He's a former DIA and CIA officer.
He writes for the American Conservative Magazine and for AntiWar.com, and he's the executive director of...
I almost said the National Council for Resistance in Iran, but that's something different, isn't it?
Phil, welcome to the show.
Hi, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm sorry, the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
That's what it's called.
He's the executive director of it.
This is what I get for going off my memory.
And I just got M.E.K. on the brain today, Phil, but we'll get to that.
First of all, it's all over the Facebook.
WikiLeaks is a CIA plot to make Iran look bad.
Afghan war logs, Iraq war logs, now the State Department documents, all the headlines are that Iran's bad and we need Obama.
Well, I don't think so.
I mean, I'm willing to believe almost anything, but there are certain reasons why it's not CIA.
First of all, the CIA is impelled by law not to fool around with the media in the United States, and this would very definitely be an operation involving the media in the United States.
No, come on.
Well, it's illegal.
Well, I mean, you know, CIA will bend the rules as much as it can, but there are certain things they won't do, and I'm pretty sure this is one of them.
And so, anyway, the question then becomes, if it's not CIA that's manipulating this information, then who is it?
And, of course, everybody else is saying it's Israel.
So my answer on this is I don't know.
You know, here we have a dump of 250,000-odd documents, of which some of us have read a few of them and some of us have read maybe more than a few, and we're having people like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Steve Hadley, who was National Security Advisor under Bush, suggesting that this is indeed an intelligence operation, where what we should be looking for is the stuff we're not seeing.
Like, for example, are they selectively releasing information in this dump that's out to make a certain point and suppressing information that makes other points?
I don't know.
I mean, I haven't seen the stuff.
I can't say.
But certainly it's plausible.
And you're saying Brzezinski says exactly what now?
Brzezinski said that we should be considering that this is an intelligence operation run by somebody.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah, he said it like two days ago.
And Hadley, I think, said it yesterday, said that Brzezinski's point was well made and it should be considered.
The point is, it's like the dog that didn't bark in the night, the Sherlock Holmes story.
Yeah.
That's what this is.
I mean, it's the stuff we're not seeing that you have to wonder about.
I mean, we have to say, for example, would we expect to see, for example, more criticism of Mubarak than we're seeing in this dump?
Would we expect to be seeing more criticism of Bibi Netanyahu?
You know, there are a lot of issues that are quite plausible to raise in terms of why is this so selective in terms of the kind of information we're seeing.
There might be good answers for that in terms of how this database was created in the first place.
But we don't know the answer to it.
And you have to consider that this could be a very sophisticated influence peddling type operation.
And the one thing that seems to be somewhat visible at this point is that there seems to be a consensus that Iran is a real bad player.
And a lot of people would like to see it go down, which is certainly an agenda.
Well, now, it's clear that when you unleash David Sanger and the New York Times on some documents, they're going to find headlines about Iran.
And if Wolf Blitzer gets to have his show in the afternoon, he's going to make it about Iran, and then he's going to make it about smearing Bradley Manning as being a sissy or whatever else, other than just digging for the truth.
But, of course, Larissa Alexandrovna, full disclosure, my girlfriend, she dove right into those documents.
The first thing she found was what she quoted you in the article as saying is the Israelis blackmailing the United States into war.
Well, I mean, that's certainly part of it.
But, of course, you know, that doesn't come as a surprise to anyone who's listened to your radio show or has read any of my articles.
Israel has been playing this kind of blackmail game in terms of if you don't attack them, we will have to, and you'll be drawn into it for quite some time.
So that was not really a big surprise.
I must admit the one bit that really surprised me was the bit about collecting all the personal information on foreign diplomats by State Department personnel, because there's only one reason to do that, and that's to give the information to the national security agencies so you can get into their personal communications.
Well, which that's to be expected anyway, right?
Why wouldn't any of those people assume that all their communications are being tapped by the NSA at all times?
Well, I think they can make that assumption, but here we have State Department people, diplomats, who are not supposed to be engaging in this kind of thing.
That's why you have CIA, and that's why you have other ways of collecting this information.
And you have diplomats being tasked.
Now, bear in mind that this is coming straight from the Secretary of State, which was Condoleezza Rice initially, and then Hillary Clinton demanding or giving high priority to diplomatic personnel overseas to collect this kind of information.
That's unprecedented.
Well, you know, my problem is I haven't been able to spend enough time.
I'd like to go through on Wikileaks.org.
You can just click IS and read everything that's about Israel, whether it's from the embassy in Brussels or whether it's from the embassy in Tel Aviv or what have you.
And I'd really like to go through there because I'm sure there's a lot more little gems buried in there like that.
In fact, even in that one document from the Ross Story account, and it's linked right from there, they talk about their five-point plan for regime change, basically, and including covert activity inside Iran.
And she quoted former CIA agent Bob Bear as saying, yeah, this is, you know, the Mad Max approach, he called it.
Just finance anybody who we could get to bomb anything in the country to destabilize it, basically.
Yeah, I'm afraid that's actually true.
That doesn't sound like too much of a modified limited hangout.
I mean, I guess we've known about DOD and CIA support for Jandala and MEK and PJAK for a while now, but not too many people did.
Yep.
Well, that's a fact.
I mean, you and I have talked about it, I think, at least a couple of times.
And it's an ongoing operation.
Oh, it's a huge story.
It's so important.
I mean, America backing Jandala, you know, al-Qaeda-like Salafist terrorists inside Iran.
I mean, this is huge.
Yeah, well, it should be huge.
And also, to me, I mean, the whole agenda of carrying out terrorist acts, either directly or by proxy in some other country with which you are not at war, I mean, this is quite astonishing.
I mean, this goes beyond credulity in terms of what our country as a relatively, or allegedly relatively transparent republic with an allegedly transparent government should be doing.
I swear to you, last night in the Washington Post, I guess in this morning's Washington Post, the headline was Hillary Clinton defends openness in Kyrgyzstan, or was it Kazakhstan?
Yeah.
And there was no irony or subtle laughter or anything.
I mean, I guess it's possible that the guys at the Post who wrote the headline were giggling about it.
But, you know, this is the same day that she said that WikiLeaks' disclosure here was an attack on the world.
Yeah.
And, you know, I got one more thing to say about the limited hangout, which very well could be, and I don't really know, maybe Vladimir Putin's behind it or whatever.
But best I can tell, Bradley Manning, the hero, is the one who liberated the Afghan and Iraq war logs and these State Department documents and sent them to Julian Assange and his cohorts at WikiLeaks.
So I guess it's possible, I guess we have to assume that every intelligence agency in the world has tried to infiltrate WikiLeaks one way or another to have their say in how it works as best they can or something.
But I'm looking for, and believe me, I'm a conspiracy nut.
I'm looking for room for whichever intelligence agency in the world, whether it's the Indians or the Chinese or the Israelis or whoever else, to be the ones behind this.
But I just can't imagine why really any of them would want a leak this big.
I mean, this is chaos.
They don't even know what we're still going to find in there.
And there's still hundreds of thousands more to come.
I mean, this is the biggest leak in the history of mankind here.
I can't believe that the Americans would want this, even though they're not top secret.
They're just secret documents.
But still, there's dirt unimaginable still to be mined out of this.
Yeah, well, you know, you raise the whole question of what the value of this is and what the objective is.
It's kind of, I know not a whole lot is known about Julian Assange, but the thing is people tend to say he's like an anarchist.
And maybe that's the answer.
He calls himself a libertarian in a recent interview with Forbes.
He says, I guess the closest you could say is an American libertarian.
Anyway, hold that thought.
One second, music's playing.
We've got to go.
But it's Phil Giraldi from Antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Phil Giraldi from the American Conservative Defense Alliance, the American Conservative Magazine, Antiwar.com, the Council for the National Interest.
He's the executive director there.
And now someone in the chat room, Phil, sent me the link to the transcript of Zbigniew Brzezinski on PBS, talking with Judy Woodruff and saying that due to the fact that some of these documents seem to, for example, I think he cites Turkey here, they seem to be designed to disrupt our relationship with Turkey from, you know, the mouth of Mr. Blowback himself.
But I just wonder whether, you know, of course, if there's hundreds of thousands of State Department documents, it's going to have things written by State Department flunkies to each other that say all kinds of things that are going to piss people off all kinds of ways.
Some are going to be inconsequential gossip about, you know, the royal family in England or whatever.
And other stuff is going to be pretty serious, right?
I don't know.
He seems to be, like, you know, getting his cart before his horse or his cause before his effect or whatever.
But maybe I don't understand.
Well, you have to assume that there's going to be a large dump of information, some of which is just reports of, you know, every time a State Department official or CIA official goes to a meeting with a foreign government official that you have to go back to the office and write a report.
And a lot of this is what we're seeing in this dump, stuff that was considered not sensitive enough to classify in a way that would keep it from being read by others.
But it was put in basically a pool of documents where if somebody's working, say, an analyst over at the Defense Intelligence Agency were working on Turkey, he could, you know, dial up Turkey and pull up some recent stuff showing what discussions have taken place with government officials.
So it's kind of innocuous stuff in most cases, which leads one to wonder, you know, again, what is the selection process here?
Because most of it is, as I say, it seems to me that a lot of it is subject to interpretation, but it's stuff that people kind of who are in the know knew about already.
All right, well, so to take another example, these documents that talk about the eventual reunification of South Korea.
Brzezinski cites that as one of these very important ones.
Are you saying that you would think that that would be classified, but somehow it's in here?
And that's what's suspicious?
Well, no, actually I'm saying that I don't know what the basis is for these documents being in there as they are.
And I think that the interesting thing about this document was not basically about the Koreas, but of course it was about China, the fact that China would be acquiescent to Korea being reunified as basically as South Korea.
So that is kind of a really interesting statement that's come out of these documents.
Why a document like that would wind up with this other stuff that's kind of innocuous is hard to understand, but that's a question that one should be asking State Department or whoever classified this.
But I don't know.
To me, it seems to me that there are a couple of issues here.
I think anybody who leaks documents should be prepared to pay the consequences.
If they're a government official, they've agreed to protect the security of these documents, like it or not.
So I think Manning should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
I really do.
But that said, I think that there have been some leaks that have come out of WikiLeaks, and I'm thinking particularly of the first leak or one of the first leaks, the helicopter attack in Iraq that aroused a lot of interest.
This basically was a serious story because it showed that the government was lying.
It was covering up at the killing of civilians and how civilians were being killed.
And I think that was a serious story that deserved to be leaked, and I think that that has to be out there in the public area.
But, you know, private conversations with U.S. diplomats, with senior government officials and everything overseas, that's what we pay diplomats to do.
And there's an expectation on both parties that these discussions will remain confidential.
So I don't particularly feel comfortable with all this stuff being out there where it's just being dumped out there.
And I would like to see leaks that are real leaks, leaks of stuff that is information where the government is essentially lying to the people or covering up the stuff that it's doing.
So that's the kind of leaks I would like to see.
Yeah.
Well, I half agree with you and half disagree.
I mean, I think I would prefer, too, hey, everybody, look at this.
One is, you know, we found the important stuff, and never mind the Prince of England or whatever, or, you know, gossip about this or that.
But on the other hand, I'm for complete transparency.
I'm for abolishing the classification system.
I mean, most of what it all is is about how to get away with killing people is by keeping it secret.
How to get away with lying all the time is keeping it secret.
You know, they never told us, well, who says that Iraq has mobile biological weapons labs?
Well, that's classified.
And it turns out it's a drunken German cab driver.
Yeah, well, I see where you're going.
But, in fact, I would agree with the cases that you're citing.
I would agree that that's the kind of stuff that should have been leaked.
But I'm just a little disturbed, you know, when a guy who's a PFC in the Army, I mean, I was a PFC once.
There's nothing lower than a PFC in the Army.
I mean, he took it on himself to, you know, give a half a million documents to some guy that he presumably knew through the Internet.
Oh, that's what I love about it.
Well, although he was a specialist, I think, at the time that he did this.
He's been demoted since then.
Well, I was a Spec 42, so anyway, I understand where that's coming from.
But, you know, it's just that you can't put people in those positions in the position to make those kind of decisions.
But, on the other hand, if somebody's willing to pay the consequences, and, you know, someone like a Sybil Edmonds, someone like Manning in some of the better stuff that I think he leaked, then you're willing to pay the consequences and you feel it's in the public interest to get this out, you do it.
And I think they're doing a great service to the country when they do that.
But I think somehow we're getting into the kind of Robin Hood mentality where we think that anything that kind of whacks the government is something that we're happy about.
And I must admit I enjoy seeing, at the present time, seeing Mr. Obama getting whacked because I'd love to see him get up on his hind legs and do something for a change.
And maybe things like this will impel him to do something, but he's going to do the wrong things.
He's going to make it more difficult for the truth of what the government is doing to come out.
Well, yeah, I'm particularly happy to see the State Department taking the hit here because, of course, that's their job is messing with people in the world.
I mean, back at the, I guess, right around the time of the beginning of World War I, America only had ambassadors to like 10 or 15 countries or something because they didn't have a world empire.
They didn't need this giant State Department to go around threatening and bribing and both every country on Earth, like is what they do here.
Justin Raimondo in his piece today talks about the contest of bribery to the Kyrgyz, I think is how you say it, their government over the Manas Air Base where the Americans have a base just over the hill from a Russian base.
And, you know, this is the kind of thing I really want to know about.
This is the kind of thing people, you know, if your cousin came home from the Army and said, yeah, I've been in Kyrgyzstan, I mean, what would you do, right?
You don't even know where that is.
That's crazy.
How do we have bases right near Russian bases in Kyrgyzstan and how much do they cost us?
Well, I think actually the Russian and American bases share a border or something.
I thought there was at least a hill between them or something.
That was just my imagination.
Yeah.
But anyway, yeah, sure.
And the reason why we have the bases is so that we can bomb Afghanistan.
Right.
Which the Russians are perfectly happy to see us bogged down in their exact same position from 20 years ago.
Right.
Exactly.
Amazing.
All right.
Well, thanks for all the bad news, Phil.
Keep up all the great work.
Anytime, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right, everybody, that's Phil Giraldi.
He's antiwar.com/Giraldi.
And check out the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
He's the executive director there, the anti-Israel lobby, you might call him.