Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Phil Giraldi.
He's the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
He writes contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine and of course regular columnist at AntiWar.com.
That's AntiWar.com/Giraldi.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How's it going?
Okay, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
You're a former DIA and CIA officer and that's my first question for you.
Could you tell us a little bit about your time in Turkey?
What was your job?
You were the Station Chief of the whole country or just one neighborhood or what was the deal there?
I was in Turkey during the 1980s.
I was CIA Deputy Station Chief.
I was the number two guy in Istanbul.
I spent three years there and I basically was working on counter-terrorism and a number of related issues.
All right.
So in your job there or I guess within your expertise surrounding that, you're dealing not just with terrorists but also Turkey's relationship with the rest of the Middle East as well, right?
Yeah.
Well, I was also in what they call liaison with the Turks.
So I was meeting regularly with Turkish intelligence officers and sharing information mostly on terrorism type issues but of course it was much broader than that because at that time there were problems in the relationship with Iran and there were problems in the relationship with Syria in particular.
So it was kind of an interesting time.
All right.
Now the reason I ask you that is because I want to ask you all about Turkey today and I just wanted people to understand, including myself, exactly what you know about it, that kind of thing, your background in it.
So the first issue regarding Turkey today is from the Associated Press.
Official says Turkey-Israel in talks to mend ties.
I thought Turkey and Israel were always really close.
What happened to their ties?
Why would they need to mend them and do you think they'll be able to?
Well, yeah, I've seen some of the press coverage on that.
There's been coverage from both sides, from the Turkish side and also from the Israeli side and apparently the Turks and the Israelis who had basically a very good relationship up until recently, the relationship was soured pretty much by the Israeli invasion of Gaza, the Israeli attack on the aid ship that was going to Gaza in which they killed nine Turkish citizens.
This has soured the relationship very definitely but it's essentially in Turkey and Israel's interest, both their interests, to have a better relationship and apparently the Turks, I believe, took the initiative in this case but Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister apparently, was quite receptive to it.
He's running into serious problems in his own cabinet where Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, is demanding reparations from Turkey rather than give them an apology and so it's not clear whether this is going to go forward or not.
Yeah, well, I mean it seems like for the Turks it would be really hard for them to go ahead and mend fences with the Israelis unless they get that apology, right?
That's it, yeah.
They're demanding an apology, nothing more than that and so Israel has to basically come up with some formulation that amounts to an apology.
I think actually the stumbling block seems to be the word apology, that the Turks insist on apology and not some weasel word that implies something different but Netanyahu has problems within his own cabinet, obviously, and he may not be able to have the leverage to do this.
Right.
Well, and how can he say to a straight face to the people of Israel that he's sorry for defending them from what was, after all, a Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda terrorist invasion that he had to protect the Israeli people from which was the gigantic pile of lies that they fed the people of Israel as well as the United States at the time.
Yeah, the fact was the Israelis portrayed it as an Al-Qaeda group, the Turkish relief group that headed this was called a terrorist group by the Israelis by no one else.
I don't think even the United States has gone along with that line.
So the, yeah, Israel sold this basic fiction that this was a terrorist attack of some kind and as a result Netanyahu will have to do some explaining.
But at the same time, there's a big net gain in terms of having an improved relationship with Turkey.
Well, sure.
I mean, their intelligence agencies and their militaries are very close and probably would like to stay that way, right?
Yeah, the intelligence agencies and the military have traditionally been very close.
And this has been true for 15 years now, something like that.
So it's something that's repairable.
I mean, you might argue that geo-strategically this doesn't really matter a whole lot.
But certainly for the Israelis to have a relationship with an Islamic country is important.
And the Turks to have a good relationship with Israel to keep from Congress, our Congress, from being on their backs is also a plus.
All right.
Now, the next topic I'd like to ask you about here is this headline by Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
U.S. warned Turkey not to publicly question allegations on Iran.
Can you give us the background on that?
Well, which story precisely is that?
Because I've seen a couple.
Which allegations?
This was about the nuclear program, I guess.
Oh, yeah.
Well, this was, but this is the kind of old stuff, I think, that goes back into the WikiLeaks, a couple years ago when there was a different ambassador there.
He was a neocon, and he was a Bush administration appointee.
That was Eric Edelman.
And I think Edelman at that time was basically questioning Turkey's willingness to do the right thing in terms of Iran's nuclear program.
And the administration, the Bush administration, and then I think the Obama administration early on, were putting a lot of pressure on Turkey to basically conform with the U.S. line.
That's the story you're talking about, right?
Well, actually, this one is, it says here, Prime Minister Erdogan had criticized Obama's allegations about Iran's nuclear program as gossip.
And let's see.
The documents revealed today, as part of the WikiLeaks cablegate release centered around Prime Minister Erdogan's criticism of Obama's allegations as gossip and advised top Erdogan aides and Turkish President Gold to, quote, rein in the Prime Minister.
Okay.
Well, I hadn't read that story.
That's interesting.
Erdogan, obviously, basically was taking a more extreme position than the administration would like him to take, and they were clearly pressuring him.
I was reading some other stories that have come through on the wire.
There have been so many WikiLeaks revelations about the U.S. apparently supporting the Kurdish terrorist group, PKK.
Oh, right.
That was next on my list.
Yeah.
I was going to ask you about, on the nuclear program still here for a second, I wonder, you know, this guy is the one, right, the Prime Minister is the one who worked with the Brazilians to come up with that offer to try to find middle ground between the American and the Iranian offer and counteroffer over enrichment up to 20 percent for the medical isotope reactor that the U.S. built for the Iranians back in the 70s, right?
Yeah.
The President and Lula of Brazil worked out a deal with the Iranians, and it was turned down by the Obama administration.
So you can see why this guy would be a bit resentful that, you know, here's the Obama administration crying wolf about Iran's nuclear weapons program again, and he's the guy who had worked out something that should have been acceptable to all sides and who was completely rebuffed and criticized for daring to stick his nose in.
Yeah.
So actually, it was worse than that, I think.
I think the Obama administration actually encouraged the Brazilians and the Turks to try to come to some arrangement with the Iranians, and when they did so...
Really?
Yeah.
Oh, I missed that.
Yeah.
And when they did so, they kind of shut them down, and apparently this was an internal debate in the Obama administration about how to deal with the Iranians, and the hardliners kind of won the argument.
And as you correctly point out, Erdogan and Lula were then denigrated in the U.S. media and also by the U.S. administration for what they had done.
Yeah, completely chastised.
Even at the New America Foundation, they criticized the president of Brazil, saying that, hey man, you know, you were just starting to make a lot of friends around here.
This was really bad politics for you to try to do this.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's typical.
It's like every time there's one step forward, there are two steps back.
You and I talked last week about WikiLeaks, and you know very well that I was not totally convinced by WikiLeaks, but the more of these documents I see, the more convinced I become.
Right on.
Well, let's pick up that, and then we'll talk about Turkey's civil war with the Kurds as well.
It's Phil Giraldi, former DIA and CIA officer of the American Conservative Magazine, counsel for the National Interest Foundation, antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
On the line is Phil Giraldi.
It's a former CIA guy, but I trust him.
He writes for antiwar.com and the American Conservative Magazine, and now you're bringing up WikiLeaks there, and how their credibility with you has been established better since we talked last week.
How's that?
Well, I was skeptical about whether this was just a dump of documents that somehow wasn't going anywhere, but as more and more documents come out, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that at least a certain percentage of the documents are of value that are discussing issues that the U.S. public should know about, and I would cite specifically the fact that we're waging a secret war in Yemen with the collusion of the Yemeni president, for example, that basically the reporting that came out today about the PKK, which I assume we're going to talk about, we're essentially supporting a terrorist group, and we're supporting a terrorist group against an ally.
So this kind of stuff is explosive, and I think that the fact that we're learning these things is really important in terms of showing just how dysfunctional the American empire really is.
Yeah.
And their reaction, and their turning of Julian Assange into the new Emanuel Goldstein, Osama bin Laden figure, and the various calls for him to be killed, and these ridiculous trumped up charges, I mean, it sure looks like he's got the American empire right where it hurts.
As Bradley Manning said, right, Hillary Clinton's going to wake up one morning and have a heart attack when this stuff comes out.
Well, we can pray for that day.
Yeah, no doubt.
All right, so, yeah, let's go ahead and get right to the PKK.
Now, my understanding is, and this may go to your time in Turkey, my understanding is this civil war's been going on a long time, and America all along has helped our NATO ally Turkey, for what, 60 years now they've been our NATO ally, we've helped them wage a civil war against the Kurds in their country, and now we're backing the Kurds against them.
Is that right?
Well, that seems to be the implication of the documents.
I haven't seen the actual text of the documents, but this is what's being reported by secondary sources that have seen the documents and are reporting on them, that apparently the U.S.
Army in Iraq released PKK guerrillas that they had captured, and also apparently provided weapons to some PKK units.
Now, I find that pretty astonishing stuff, but if the documents bear out the story, it's amazing, because the Turks have been fighting not exactly a civil war, but more like an insurgency against the PKK, which wants an independent Kurdish state that would include parts of Turkey, parts of Syria, and parts of Iran, and the Turks have been fighting them for over 30 years, and this is a hot-button issue for the Turks.
It's not like just one other thing in the history of a relationship with the United States.
This is something that's an existential issue for them, and it's very much like if there were an armed insurgency in the southwestern United States or something, and we discovered that it was being aided and assisted by Mexico or somebody else.
It's the same kind of issue, and this ain't going to go away.
If this is for real, this is an enormous mistake on the part of the U.S. military authorities in Iraq.
Well, the Kurdistan issue goes back to the 14 points, and with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the Kurds ought to have their own independent self-determination, thought Woodrow Wilson, not like he pulled it off, and I guess they never have, but the entire issue of greater Kurdistan is not going away, whether you're talking about Syria, Iraq, or Iran, or Turkey.
Yeah, that's right.
There should have been, obviously, the creation of a Kurdish state back at the end of the First World War, but it didn't happen.
No, the British owned it.
Yeah, the British basically took over Iraq, took over those parts of the Ottoman Empire, and they weren't interested in Kurdish independence.
So anyway, but it's a festering issue.
It's a transnational issue, and for the Turks, where the Kurds set off bombs in Istanbul and Ankara and other tourist sites and things like that and kill a lot of people, it's a very real issue, and to me, it's astonishing how clumsy American foreign policy has been in the last 10 years.
Yeah, but you know, you and I have been talking on the show for at least a couple of years now since that Seymour Hersh piece came out about American support for P-JACC.
Maybe even before that, we talked about this group, P-JACC, is basically the PKK only in Iran, right?
That's exactly right.
The P-JACC is the version of the PKK that operates inside Iran.
So naturally, some idiot at the Pentagon or CIA decided that we have to support these people because there'll be a problem for Iran.
They will overthrow the Iranian government or something like that, and of course, all this stuff is idiotic.
We're supporting one group of bandits against another group that we don't like, and we keep doing it over and over again, and we forget about blowback.
We forget about all the awful things that happen as a result of this, and we're seeing it again.
Remember, we talked about P-JACC a couple years ago.
Yeah.
Well, and here's the thing about them, too, and you know, they don't have power, so it's not like, oh, boo-hoo, scary Stalin or something like that, but they're communists.
America's backing the communists.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, there's so many of these little subplots and substories.
For example, I mean, the other group that we're apparently supporting is Jundala, right?
Right.
And we've talked about them.
I mean, they're an Al-Qaeda affiliate.
And they kill civilians, too, in large numbers.
Absolutely.
So, you know, the question becomes, where do we stop this idiocy of going and supporting groups and causes that we don't understand, people that we don't know, that we can't control, and you know, when are we ever going to draw a line?
That's why, when I see this kind of stuff now appearing on WikiLeaks, I'm saying, hurrah, at least now we have documentary evidence that this kind of crap is going on.
Right.
Well, and, you know, if you take it back a step, maybe if we hadn't supported the Turks internal war against the Kurds this whole time, they could have come to an accommodation a long time ago.
There wouldn't even be a PKK to fund, maybe.
Yeah, I kind of doubt that, knowing Turks, but I would say, yeah, I mean, we're not, you know, we really shouldn't be in other people's quarrels.
And that's really what it comes down to.
If the Turks have a problem with the Kurds, and it's very much an internal problem, because, well, there are a lot of historical reasons, but, you know, we don't have time to talk about all that, but the fact is that there are a lot of good reasons why both sides are entrenched in the views they have, but it's not our quarrel.
Turkey's a NATO ally.
We have a responsibility to have a decent relationship with Turkey, but it doesn't mean we have to get involved with terrorism operations that have nothing to do with us.
Yeah.
Well, America has kept Kurdistan and Iraq autonomous, basically, since 1990.
They've been protected by the United States, and I guess I wonder, the PKK, are they close to the Barzani or Talabani crews, or they're sort of the third wheel up there in Kurdish power in Iraqi Kurdistan?
Well, they're not a major player, but there certainly have been a lot of reports to indicate that they are supported by the government there, and that essentially they have a certain amount of autonomy, and they're allowed to operate freely, which they shouldn't be, out of Iraqi territory to attack Turkey.
Yeah.
Well, I think it was a few years back, or a year or so ago, or something you said on the show, that, well, you know, if it really comes down to it, the Kurds have oil, and the Turks don't, so maybe our relationship, our 60-year alliance with Turkey is coming to an end.
Well, it could be.
Ah, geez.
All right, everybody.
That's Phil Giraldi, antiwar.com/Giraldi, and you can also find him at the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
Just make an acronym out of that and Google it up.
Thanks very much, Phil.
Appreciate it.
