All right y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, our next guest is Philip Giraldi.
He is the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation and he writes for the American Conservative Magazine like our previous guest and of course he is a regular columnist at antiwar.com.
And the big news today is that the CIA's Raymond Davis has been quote pardoned after payment of gigantic sum of money to the government of Pakistan, apparently.
Phil, welcome to the show, what the hell is this story about?
Well, this is pretty much how it normally would have been handled in the first place in previous incidents like this in Muslim countries that have this provision in their law that you can obtain a pardon by paying what is basically blood money to the family of the people that were killed.
The countries that have that provision in the past, this has been exploited by U.S. government officials who've been involved in accidents or have killed people one way or another overseas as a way of mitigating the process.
Right, yeah.
In fact, they seem to look at it as permission.
We're like, oh well, we got pallets of money, we can just kill whoever we want and here's $1,500 and they'll be happy with that.
Don't worry about it.
They've really adopted it as a policy over the years, it seems like.
Yeah, in fact, as you are noting, in Afghanistan when they kill civilians and stuff like this, this has become a routine policy and it was also pursued in Iraq.
So it's something that the U.S. government exploits because we don't have much in the way of moral scruples, but we do have a lot of money.
Yeah, pallets full of cash.
Actually, you even made a bumper sticker about that.
If the empire kills your daughter, you get $1,500.
With a picture of a little dead Pakistani girl on it and a drone strike.
Nobody ever took down her name or reported on it here, but she's real to somebody, it seems like, probably.
Maybe they died in it too, so.
Yeah, so normally, I mean, this Raymond Davies case would have been settled this way by the CIA or by the embassy dealing with directly with the Pakistani government or the intelligence service and it would have kind of gone away quietly, but the fact was the crime itself was so egregious.
I mean, shooting these people down in the street and shooting them in the back and then another guy getting run down by the bus that was coming to Davies' assistance and the fact that it was in the media right away meant that they couldn't quite cover it up that way.
Right.
But the thing is about this is, as far as I can tell from here, because I didn't go to Pakistan really to check it out, but I was reading some articles and it had it that there are at least some factions of people who are really angry about this and they've sort of seized on the character of this Raymond Davies as sort of the personification of the so-called covert American military and intelligence policies in their country, meaning, you know, robot drone strikes and, well, you know, special forces and Blackwater and who knows what running around in there and this has probably made them really angry, right?
I mean, what kind of consequences would you expect from him being let go here or is blood money supposed to be good enough, really?
Well, I think that obviously there are possible consequences here.
I think that the government of Pakistan itself is going to be under a lot of pressure and it's quite possible that I know in the Pakistani media, I was reading some of it today, there were projections of the government possibly going down and so that would be a very serious consequence and obviously the Pakistanis are much more alert now to the fact that the CIA has basically been running operations right under their noses and a lot of that has been shut down too, so there have been consequences.
Whether or not the CIA operations actually were doing anything or not, I don't know, but the fact is the U.S. is going to be a lot more constrained in terms of how it operates and, of course, I guess the favorable rating by the Pakistanis vis-a-vis the United States was 12 percent.
In a recent opinion poll, it's probably gone down to about 3 percent.
Yeah, well, and it was, you know, above 90 percent were opposed specifically to the policy of the drone strikes and, you know, it's funny because we're just talking with your colleague at the American Conservative Magazine, Jack Hunter, about how, you know, what Faisal Shahzad, the attempted Times Square bomber, was mad about and it was just this.
It wasn't that he read some verse in the Quran that hypnotized him and, you know, made him come over here like Reggie Jackson in the Naked Gun or something.
He was, you know, he was angry because he saw a bunch of dead people when he was on vacation, went back home to see some relatives, saw a drone strike.
Yeah, I think, you know, I think that the problem is that we, when we're trying to project ourselves into what other people think, where the chances of making a mistake are huge and I don't want to claim that any of us, either Jack or myself or yourself, can think like a Pakistani or someone who was raised in Pakistan thinks in terms of his cultural roots and how this impacts on his religion and everything else, but the fact is, I mean, there's a simple equation here.
When you go into another country and you start killing people, there are going to be consequences and somehow we seem to think we can use our money and our power to make all this stuff go away, but it doesn't really work like that anymore.
Well, for example, Libya.
It seems like, last I heard, I don't know if Benghazi has fallen, but it seemed like the rebellion's days were numbered there.
I got it wrong.
I thought Gaddafi was going to go.
Yeah, well, we all thought that, I think.
I think the one website that I read regularly that got it right was Colonel Pat Lang.
I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he has a website called Six Semper Tyrannis in which he, on like day two of the rebellion, said, wait a minute, there's a lot of time here to play out and Gaddafi has a lot of resources, and he was right, and everybody else seemed to have gotten it wrong.
Yeah, well, and we had good reason, though, too, because when the whole thing first started, there were huge protests in Tripoli.
It seemed like that was it.
He was just, it was going to be another Egypt.
Well, but, you know, if you have the will to start shooting people, that can turn things around real fast.
I mean, it's not to say Gaddafi is going to be sitting easy on his throne, that's for sure.
The fact is, you know, when you do have to start shooting people, again, it has consequences, and the thing was, as you and I were discussing, I think the last time I was on, I said that Mubarak went down basically because the generals talked to the junior officers, and the junior officers, yeah, our men are not going to fire on fellow Egyptians, so that was the factor there.
Different setup in Libya, where the army didn't really have the power, it was just his own personal SA types that had all the power to fight.
Yeah, mercenaries, and a lot of them are not even Libyans, so the thing is that it's, you know, he had cards to play that Mubarak did not have.
Yeah, well, so what do you think the White House is doing?
Because, honestly, I haven't been paying, you know, really close attention to the day-by-day, you know, leaks to the New York Times about who's saying what.
On one hand, it sort of seems like they're hiding behind the UN in order to take too long and then go ahead and not intervene after all, but then again, on the other hand, it looks like, no, they just want to empower the UN if they can while they're at it, as they start a war and have a little bit of baby blue diplomatic cover for getting away with, you know, the kind of thing that otherwise they would look like Republicans about, you know?
Well, I spoke to someone this morning who's a recently retired senior official who was working at the White House, and he told me that he's been hearing from his former colleagues that Obama is just terrified by the situation, he doesn't know what to do, and basically he's just buying time to make it go away.
I mean, eventually it's going to go away one way or another, and he doesn't want to make a decision, he doesn't want to get involved.
Well, and what about what's going on in Bahrain here?
I mean, is it fair to say that if the King of Saudi Arabia sends his military to help the Kingdom of Bahrain put down their protest movement there, that that's basically all decided in his office at the National Security Council?
Well, I don't think that the U.S. government had much of a say on this.
I think this was something where the Saudis basically see it as their interest to keep Bahrain propped up as it is, and you know, you can see why that would be.
I mean, Saudi Arabia doesn't want any problems spilling over into its oil fields, which are right next door.
Well, wouldn't they have to get permission from the home office?
From our home office?
Yeah, you know, corporate headquarters, D.C.
I don't think they've paid much attention.
I think everybody in the Middle East realizes that Obama is a weak read, and they're not taking him too seriously on most of this stuff.
Yeah, well, maybe he's the perfect guy to oversee the fall of the empire, you know?
He does have that Gorbachev kind of quality about him, by the way.
That's right, that's right.
All right, it's Phil Giraldi.
He writes for Antiwar.com.
Thank goodness.
Hang tight.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi.
He is the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation, and he writes for Antiwar.com and the American Conservative magazine.
Now, Phil, before we get back toward Egypt and that area, which is what I want to talk about, did I change the subject too quickly from this CIA officer recently sprung in Pakistan?
Was there anything important left to cover there, you think?
Well, I think there's still a big part of the story we don't know about.
I mean, there were allegations that basically he was involved in driving around and making phone calls and looking for meeting sites and something like that.
But as a former CIA officer, I can tell you that doesn't make any sense.
This guy was either himself in a meeting with someone that he was trying to keep secret from the Pakistanis, or he was maybe covering a meeting by someone else that was doing the same thing.
So my question becomes, what does this guy know?
I mean, what was he involved in?
If he was involved with meeting maybe with a high-level Pakistani official or a general or a terrorist or something like that, there obviously was something going on.
So there's another story that we still don't know anything about.
And including what he told them while in their custody, right?
Well, that's exactly right, too.
I think the big fear on the part of the CIA and the U.S. government was that this guy knows a lot and that if he had, for example, been kept in jail and convicted, he might have been quite willing to do a plea bargain with the Pakistanis, tell them everything he knows in return for not being executed.
Well, you think he probably kept his mouth shut for just a few weeks here, right?
I would think so.
Yeah, I would think he basically avoided saying anything for this period of time that he's been in.
Yeah.
Well, I guess the CIA can thank goodness for that.
Well, all right.
So back to Egypt, you had this piece, Uncle Ned Comes Calling, about the National Endowment for Democracy.
And I was wondering if you could maybe briefly explain what that is, maybe its relationship to the CIA and the State Department and the foundations and how exactly that works and who these people are, what they're doing.
And then from there, what's the CIA and the State Department up to in, say, for example, Egypt right now?
I mean, do they have any kind of plan for dealing with which government comes to power there?
Are they still pushing for Omar Suleiman, for example?
Well, I think in terms of who they're supporting, Suleiman would obviously be the candidate of our military and of the CIA.
But I don't think that's even a possibility.
But the thing is that, you know, getting back to the issue of the Ned, the Ned is a very poorly known, it's a non-government organization technically, and that it's not part of the U.S. government, but it's largely funded by the U.S. government.
And it's called the National Endowment for Democracy.
It has a Republican half and it has a Democratic half and it has another constituent that's AFL-CIO, labor union type constituency and so on and so forth.
And basically the mission of this organization is to go around the world and spread democracy.
Now, of course, we've heard that recently a lot.
And the thing that bothers me about Ned in particular is that it's kind of a loose cannon on deck.
It doesn't really have much in the way of adult supervision.
It goes around and sets up projects and it starts to do things and it does what it thinks makes sense.
But what it did that didn't make sense, for example, was all of the confusion we saw in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism, in which Ned was heavily involved in all these pastel revolutions.
And this is a pattern I'm afraid we're going to see again.
Ned is involved already in Egypt.
Ned is involved already in Tunisia.
Ned is going to be involved in every country where we see government change going on.
And as for the State Department and CIA, I think State Department is basically almost like a junior partner on a lot of this stuff.
Hillary was in Cairo, what, two days ago and she made a big announcement.
We're giving the new government $60 million in assistance.
Well, that's what, 75 cents for each Egyptian.
And it's not really anything.
And the fact is that CIA, I know from my own sources, has pretty much been blind in terms of what's been going on in Egypt because essentially the Egyptians did not approve of CIA running operations and were all over the CIA officers to such an extent that they were incapable of doing much.
Hey, I wonder if the guys that you still know in there have entertained the possibility that this is like 1989 in the fall of the Soviet empire, only it's our empire that's falling and that this is it.
This is the house of cards.
Why not just throw up your hands and give it up, guys?
I don't think their imaginations run that way.
They probably see this as the fall of the Arab desperate regimes and they're kind of wondering what comes next, but they don't see the implications for the fact that the United States was intimately involved in propping up these regimes.
That's an interesting question.
I kind of wonder what people in the government who obviously have a vested interest in government, how they see these situations in a way that's probably different than the way we see it.
Yeah.
Well, it seems like everybody who's ever seen Return of the Jedi knows that empires fall.
You know, the way to preserve your country for a long time is by being restrained and prudent and all that stuff, like George Bush Senior would have said, but not done.
Yeah, something like that.
I think the problem is that, yeah, what you're if you're if you're inside the empire, it's a little bit hard to to see it the way outsiders see it.
And I think that's the biggest problem that Americans have.
I mean, I I was I was thinking of writing an article this morning.
I was running through some of Hillary's recent speeches and they all have the same pattern, which is essentially, you know, we're here to help you.
But, you know, we have a plan and the plan is basically we want a certain kind of democracy.
And the thing that really kills me is Hillary keeps referring to the United States as being the world's oldest democracy.
And, of course, we're not.
We're a republic.
And there are very specific reasons why we're not a democracy, because the founding fathers mistrusted mob rule.
And and, you know, if our secretary of state can't get it right, you kind of wonder what what kind of message are we sending in terms of what we're talking about?
Right.
Well, but see, her values do not include liberty.
In fact, she said when she was running for president and this speaks to what's so lousy about democracy, we'd turn over power to somebody like her or even give her a shot at all.
But she said, don't call me a liberal, because that kind of includes the idea that liberty is important on the list.
And it's not for me.
That's why you should call me a progressive.
Like that was specifically why not to call her a liberal, because liberty is the root word of that.
We want to stay away from that.
Yeah, we don't want any of that stuff going around.
I mean, that's and shamelessly to like everybody knows that right.
Liberty, that's an old fashioned thing that we all know better than now.
Anyway, but yeah, so I'm sure that, you know, not just the current regime, but certainly they as bad as the last one have done a lot to convince people that even the idea really of self rule and democracy is a pretty poisonous concept.
That's, you know, a lot of the sloganeering is this is freedom, huh?
Well, then we don't want that.
We want rule by our local clerics or whatever, you know?
Yeah, well, I think that clearly what people like Hillary and Obama, to a lesser extent, want is something that they can manage.
I think that's really what we're talking about here.
It's they don't particularly want any one thing or another, but they want a situation that they could control to their advantage.
I mean, if you can, if you can, if you can tell the Egyptians that you want various things in their democracy, and they go ahead and they do that, then, then, you know, you can say that mission accomplished.
So I think that that's kind of what it is that we're talking about, about control here more than we're talking about values.
Well, and you know, they really seem to have gambled that the governments in Yemen and Bahrain and the rest of the region are basically going to stand and they're trying to prop them up.
Do you think that they'll really get away with making it look like the Americans are on the side of the people by using the Libya example, and just ignoring all the rest of the region where they're scrambling to support the dictators and keep them from falling?
No, I don't think they're fooling anybody anymore.
I think that it's pretty clear that what they really want is for stability, which means you keep the ruling classes in place.
But I don't think they're fooling the public.
And I don't think they're fooling even the rulers.
I think the rulers realize that the United States is playing a double game here, wanting to sound one way and actually do another thing.
And so that, you know, they know their long term prospects with the United States are not good, but the United States is the only game in town for them.
Yeah, well, you know, I wish I could be on the email list of the very highest levels of the war party where they all say, Okay, everybody, this week, we're all going to pretend like we're American revolutionaries on the side of the Libyans against their evil dictator who we've never shaken hands with and don't know nothing about.
And then they all do it in unison, the whole government, everyone on TV, they all just go, Oh, yeah, you know, America has never supported a dictatorship in the Middle East, we're only against them.
And now's our chance to help those poor downtrodden people, Olivia, and they all agree about it for weeks on end in a row.
It's really amazing.
I've been taken aback, even me.
Everybody, that's Phil Giraldi from the American conservative magazine and anti war.com.
Okay, thanks, Scott.
All right.
Appreciate it, Phil.
All right.
Bye.
Bye.
Be right back.
