All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Phil Giraldi, former CIA and DIA counterterrorism officer and contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine and regular contributor, of course, to AntiWar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
Oh, also, I don't know how I forgot to say this, but he's the executive director, Phil Giraldi is, of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
And I think that if you were to go to their website and read the substance, you would be impressed and informed.
So that's, I believe, cnifonline.org.
Is that right, Phil?cnionline.org.cnionline, yeah.
I don't know where I got that from.
I don't know what the hell's going on.
Anyway, hey, so thanks for joining us today.
I was wondering, first of all, if you could comment on the recent scandal, Bruin, about the CIA keeping information about Hamze and al-Midhar, the al-Qaeda hijackers that landed in Southern California, from the FBI until the very last minute.
And apparently from Richard Clark.
And there was a documentary that was, or at least part of one, that was supposed to be released on September 11th.
And the CIA is threatening them with legal action because they say they're going to reveal, they've already revealed a guy named Richard Blee, who was the head of the bin Laden unit, for a time there anyway, and his two or three subordinates who supposedly obstructed the FBI from learning about these 9-11 hijackers.
Phil, your take?
Well, I mean, this story and its general outlines has been out there for quite a while.
I mean, it was actually, even the 9-11 commission came up with information indicating clearly that the CIA was being obstructionist in terms of providing information across the board in terms of the intelligence and law enforcement communities.
And so it's not really a surprise to hear about this.
It's kind of a surprise to see names that I'm familiar with, like Dick Blee and everything, showing up.
And the fact that very specific information on specific hijackers is now surfacing.
That's the interesting aspect of it.
But I think we've kind of known in a broad brush way for a while that this was going on.
Yeah.
It sure seems like after 10 years of counting them up, there's a lot of warnings and a lot of information ignored.
You can see why people think, at the very least, that there had to have been a deliberate blind eye turn to all this information, that this obstruction was for a reason.
We're going to take one on the chin.
That way we can go ahead and get this terror war started off on the right foot from the point of view of the people in power.
Is that crazy?
Well, it's not crazy, but it's not the whole picture either.
I think that it's the same kind of argument that was made that Franklin Roosevelt let Pearl Harbor happen to start the war.
You know, I think people who've been in the government, as I've been in the government and most other people who have had the same experience, I think would argue that this is certainly possibly true.
But the fact is that government is essentially inefficient in the way it operates.
And because of that, these kinds of glitches are more normal than one might think.
And I think that actually is another story that people should be talking about, that government is so inefficient that you really don't want to be giving them all these resources for them basically to piss away and not make you any safer.
I was reading the accounts this weekend of the two airliners that were followed by jets because there were five individuals who were spending too much time in the lavatories.
I mean, this would be comic opera, except that it's dead serious.
These people were hauled off the plane, put in handcuffs and interrogated.
So it's just, you know, these stories become more and more absurd.
Yeah, well, you know, I went to New York City over the weekend to give a little talk about the causes of September 11th, the way I see it.
And on the way home on September 11th at JFK Airport, I was the only one to refuse the naked body scanner and get the pat down, which is just as bad, really, instead.
But I just sat there and they made me stand there and time out for five minutes and watch everybody else go through.
And everybody's just staring at their socks, putting their daughters through the naked porno scanner, Phil, like it's no big deal.
Like we're all a bunch of East Germans or something.
Well, maybe we have become East Germans.
It's ill.
Well, you know, you were at the CIA.
Remind me about how your career went there because I think you were kind of retired and then went back as a contractor after 9-11, some kind of thing.
Yeah, I was in for 16 straight years as an operations officer overseas and I was in Europe and the Middle East.
And then I left and came back in 2001 and was at CIA headquarters when 9-11 occurred.
So I was back for about a year and then left it again.
Yeah, well, I don't know if you can.
Well, I don't know, whatever.
I'll go ahead and ask you.
You've always been a straight shooter with me and you can always say I have no answer if you have no answer.
But I wonder about, you know, the chatter, as the CIA calls it, at the CIA after September 11th about everybody knows we had 10 million chances to stop this thing.
Well, most of the chatter at that point was just kind of pure panic.
You know, the day when 9-11 happened, the building emptied out so fast into the parking lot, it was unbelievable.
And then the anniversary of 9-11, the following year, the building also emptied out into the parking lot.
You know, our brave desk-ground warriors showing their medal, I think.
You know, there was a lot of confusion at CIA.
People, even within the agency, people don't share information very much.
And there were people like myself when, as this process started to play out after 9-11, who began to get concerned because suddenly the focus shifted to Iraq and nobody could quite understand what was going on.
For good reason, I would say.
But, you know, the 9-11 business, some people were in the loop.
There were a lot of people, I remember, at headquarters who were saying in August, July and August before 9-11, that something was coming and they were like in a panic mode about it.
But they didn't know exactly what.
Yeah.
Although, yeah, apparently some of them did know, like here are some guys we followed from the Malaysia meeting to Southern California.
Yeah, that's right.
We allow Qaeda dudes in the country that they can connect directly to, you know, the Yemen switchboard house and whatever.
It was the son-in-law of the guy that owned the Yemen switchboard house, Phil.
Sure, some of them did know.
And they were both wanted in the coal bombing by the FBI and the grand jury.
Yep, some of them did know.
But, you know, it might have been a circle of about five people who decided they were going to keep it secret because they were going to develop this information into something much bigger.
You know, I'm sure that's the way they were thinking.
I wouldn't doubt it either.
I mean, people say, you know, the fighter jets should have gone immediately up and saved the day in every way.
And I'm going, look, the fighter jets are patrolling the DMZ over there at the 38th parallel.
When have they ever defended DC from an aerial attack?
Never.
Yeah.
Well, and you can imagine the reaction if they'd shot down a civilian airliner.
Yeah, well.
I mean, how would you know, how would you know what the target is until it hits it?
According to Andrew Coburn, Dick Cheney ordered 11 planes shot down and the Air Force basically just said, no, you know, we're just not going to pass that order down.
We won't do it.
These are the 11 planes that failed to immediately say everything's OK.
Well, they should have probably found out where Dick Cheney was and done something with him.
But anyway, yeah, I mean, the whole thing is absurd because, you know, you have here you have a fighter jet.
It's flying near a civilian aircraft and the civilian aircraft, you don't know what the target is until it actually kind of veers off and hits it.
And so what are you going to do?
You're going to shoot the airliner all out of the skies over Virginia or something like that, just just because it might be going somewhere to hit something.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
I mean, if they really had narrowed down which planes had, you know, said we have a bomb on board or whatever and they were nearby enough and knew that this was definitely a hijack and not one of the maybes, I guess I could maybe see it.
You know, to save the Capitol building and the Congress from being obliterated.
Well, let's not go too far with that argument about obliterating Congress.
I mean, Scott, come on.
I want rid of them.
I want a natural disaster to sink the Capitol into the sea or something, but I don't want it to just leave the White House and Dick Cheney and George Bush with no more checks and balances in the world either.
You know?
Yeah, I guess you've got a point there.
Yeah, I know, but it never was much of a check and balance, was he?
No, not really.
No, but I mean, the problem with that argument is that you don't actually know until they actually hit the Twin Towers, nobody actually knew that the planes were going to be used as weapons.
So here you're shooting down civilian airliners for something that might be happening, but you don't know.
All right, well, hold it right there.
We're going to come back.
We're going to talk about all kinds of other things too.
It's Phil Giraldi from antiwar.com.
All right, so we're back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi, former CIA and DIA officer and contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine, writer at antiwar.com and executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
And I got at least three different subjects I want to cover with you real quick here, Phil.
First of all, I'm wondering if you're enjoying possibly being the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation to see whether you're an agent of a foreign power due to your affiliation with antiwar.com.
Well, I think I've been on that receiving end a few times already, so I'm not too disturbed by it.
And getting back to our subject of competence of government, I assume the investigation will be so incompetent that they won't be able to find me.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, to read through the redactions of the FBI PDF file there is to betray the ignorance of the author in such a bad way.
You know, people say that they can go back through the Bible and compare different books supposedly written by John to see if it was really the same author by literary comparison or whatever.
Well, I'm not that sophisticated at that technique.
However, in reading that document, I thought this guy could be teaching Jim to fifth graders.
It's ridiculous.
Well, that's what it's all about.
I mean, you know, you give our investigative agencies a lot of money.
They have a lot of time on their hands.
They hire a lot of people.
And that's the result.
Oh, there you go.
All right.
Well, OK, so next subject I want to ask you about, I guess, is the coming very soon.
I don't know the day on it that they're supposed to have this vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York, whether Palestine can be recognized as a state under international law.
The U.S. has promised to veto it and it seems to be coming to a real head over in the Middle East as the Saudis are announcing, as it says on the front page of antiwar.com today, that their alliance with us is broken.
If we veto this thing, I don't know whether you think that's credible or not.
Maybe you can comment on that.
And also tensions between the former allies, Turkey and Israel seem to be at all time high for a long time anyway.
So please fill us in.
What the hell is going on in the world over there, man?
Yeah, well, what's going to happen is in a week's time, the 22nd is the date I've seen.
The Palestinians are going to apply for full membership in the United Nations.
They already have basically what they consider statehood in certain other capacities and they have observer status in the U.N.
But the fact is that they're not recognized as a full member state in the United Nations.
Israel is, of course, very opposed to it because there are a number of issues.
I mean, the Palestinian statehood would mean statehood within the 1967 borders.
So that would be a big problem for Israel with its settlements policy.
It would also, you know, there is actually a lot of downside for Israel if the Palestinians were to get full membership in the U.N.
They would have access to the International Criminal Court, for example, where they can try Israeli officials and military officers as war criminals.
They would be able to use UNESCO as a tool to keep the Israelis from knocking down Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem and elsewhere.
They would also be defining their state by the 1967 borders, which would create tremendous problems for Israel.
So Israel doesn't want this.
The United States is, of course, on board and will use its veto.
But then, you know, the payoff is going to be that the United States is going to pay the piper on this because essentially we're going to be blamed for enabling this, which is, of course, correct.
We will become even more so than now targets of terrorism.
There'll be a lot of genuine rage on the Arab street about this.
Countries like Egypt and Turkey are not going to take it well, nor Pakistan.
So it's there's a lot of downside for the U.S.
What about that threat from the Saudis that they're going to break off their alliance with us?
Do you think that's plausible?
I've seen that voiced a couple of times.
It was first came up a couple of weeks ago in an editorial written by Turkey, Al-Turki, who was the ambassador of the U.S. saying essentially that that this would break, essentially break the relationship because it just goes too far.
And so I would take it seriously.
Well, it's not that I have any love for the Saudi kingdom or anything like that.
It's just the instability of the whole thing.
If there's going to be, you know, 500 different unforeseen consequences breaking out all over, that's the problem.
Yeah.
Well, you know, you know what's interesting?
There was a there was an article on in the New York Times on Sunday discussing the whole issue of Israel vis-a-vis Egypt, Turkey, and the Palestinians.
And it basically it conceded.
It said, you know, we forget that essentially there is incredible.
There are incredible levels of rage among Muslim and Arab communities about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
And that's what's driving all this process.
And we forget about that.
And we we we try to ignore the fact that it is a a there's a real reason why this why this this thing goes on the way it does for in the way it does.
And so it was kind of interesting to see that in the New York Times, which has been in denial for for a long time now.
Right.
Well, and as James Bamford explained earlier on the show that Mohammed Atta and Osama bin Laden both cited the Israeli war in Lebanon in 1996 as the, you know, that's it.
You cross the line and it's on now.
You know, demarcation in this thing.
Yeah, I mean, you know, we tend to think this is all kind of politics playing out, but people actually get angry about some of this stuff with good reason.
And, you know, we're seeing that happen now.
And the Egyptian army actually is, of course, serving as a restraint on the people because the people would like to see even even stronger action against Israel.
But again, Israel, Israel plays it so stupid.
I mean, all they had to do was apologize for killing those five Egyptian policemen at the border, explain it was an accident and apologize.
All they had to do with the Turks was apologize for the nine Turks that they killed.
But they won't do it.
And, you know, it it's just it boggles the mind to think how idiotic these people are in terms of the posturing that they go through.
Well, which brings us back to Turkey here, because ever since the Mavi Mamar attack back in, you know, a year and a few months ago, a relationship, the relationship between the Turks and the Israelis seems to have been really falling apart.
And lately, I don't know too much about it, honestly, but I saw at least news articles saying that they were going to that the Turks were going to use their Navy next time to protect to protect the next Gaza blockade, breaking flotilla of humanitarian aid, something like that.
And I was thinking there's are these former friends really that far apart now that they're actually screwing around with situations that could lead to war?
No, I don't think so.
I think if you examine the Turkish statement carefully, what the Turks said was that they would use the Turkish Navy to protect Turkish vessels going to break the blockade of Gaza.
Now, the fact is, there are no Turkish vessels currently planned to be going to break the blockade of Gaza.
So it was more or less a shot across the bowels of the Israelis saying, look, we're serious about this and it could come to something like this.
But there's no intention to push it that far, at least on the Turkish side.
But, you know, you have Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister of Israel, saying that he's thinking about doing something with terrorist groups that are attacking Turkey, which would be the Kurds.
So, I mean, you know, this stuff gets insane.
Yeah, well, the Turkish military and spy services have been best buddies with the Israelis for a generation or something, at least, right?
Yeah, at least.
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
Well, and they're still friends or those relationships have been broken as well in the last year, you think?
I think a lot of those generals are now gone.
All right, we're out of time.
Thanks very much for yours, Phil.
OK, Scott, take care.
Phil Giraldi, everybody.
Antiwar.com/Giraldi and the Council for the National Interest, CNI.org, CNIonline.org.
And the American Conservative Magazine.
