10/12/11 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Philip Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA counterterrorism officer.
He writes for the American Conservative Magazine and for Antiwar.com.
He's also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation at, I forgot the website, .org.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
Hey, Scott, how you doing?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So tell me everything that you know and think about this, obviously, something, fill in the dots, Iranian assassination, terrorist bombing plot.
Well, you know, I must admit, I've been talking to a lot of people this morning, and some people who are in the loop in terms of having seen the evidence and been involved somewhat, at least, with the FBI and DEA investigation.
And unlike a lot of these other things that we've talked about and where the FBI gets in and informs it and inserts it into a case and then turns it into something it ain't, this started out, I think, as genuinely something.
The Iranian in the United States clearly appeared to have been approached by his cousin, who is a member of the Revolutionary Guards, and apparently that information has been confirmed.
And this ridiculous concoction of a plot then kind of came together.
So there was something actually there to start out as to what has been going on for the last nine months or so while the DEA and FBI have been kind of running it.
That's not very clear.
But I think we're kind of looking at the wrong end of the stick on some of this stuff.
We should be very concerned about what's going to happen as a result of this alleged plot in terms of what the United States is likely to do and what Israel and Saudi Arabia are cranking up.
Because there's apparently, according to my sources, a top-level meeting of the National Security Council going on right now as we speak.
And the military option, according to Joe Biden, is on the table, and Biden is at the meeting.
So there are kind of serious consequences coming out of this.
I think that the consensus is that nobody believes that this was an operation that was condoned by anyone at a top level in the Iranian government.
So what we may be looking at here is some kind of rogue operation.
Huh.
Well, there's obviously quite a few things to go over there, and the possibility of war is obviously clearly the most important one.
But I'm confused.
If this is real at all, how come they ended up, when they went to hire the Mexican drug cartel to do this, they just happened to hire an undercover DEA informant to be the one to carry out their plot?
I mean, it sounds very...
Well, according to my source, the DEA informant is actually a cartel member who was turned by the DEA after he was caught and arrested.
He cut a deal with them to have his sentence basically mitigated by cooperating with the DEA.
So he is a real cartel member.
As to how they identified him and how they got in touch with him, I don't know.
I mean, it just, you know, it's one of those things we won't know until the whole story comes out, if it ever does.
But all I'm saying is, you know, we're so used to the government lying about everything that I think that sometimes we jump to the conclusion that they can't do anything but that.
But I think this is a story that has some kernel of truth at the middle of it.
And the real issue has to be, I think, for us is to decide, was this an Iranian government sponsored thing or was it something weird?
And if it is not an Iranian government thing, then the possible consequences of it have to be a lot different than if this is some kind of strange one-off.
So I think that's, I would like to see the US government looking at it in that kind of serious way.
And in fact, already, if you look at some of the recent press coverage coming out of the government, they're backing off from the assertion that this was an Iranian government controlled operation.
Right.
Well, ABC News last night had a piece that said, you know, that in spades, it had all kinds of quotes from the White House saying there's no reason to believe and quite specifically saying there's no reason to believe that the president of Iran or the supreme leader of Iran was in on this.
This does not mean that we're going to have to go to war with them now.
And that was the headline, actually.
In fact, I'll have to find it.
So I get the headline just right for you.
But it was, you know, an anti-war headline that we don't have to have a war based on this.
Right.
And then Joe Biden, as you said, the vice president was on TV this morning saying all options are on the table doing his best Hillary impersonation.
Oh, no, she's the secretary of state.
That's absolutely right.
That's the scary thing about this.
I mean, this is what we're seeing now is all the people who hate Iran are coming out of the woodwork and they're saying, look, this is what they're doing.
And they're they're looking at this like it's some kind of conscious belly.
And I mean, it's quite incredible.
The and apparently from from what I've been hearing, the the Saudis are pushing for some kind of military response and the Israelis are pushing for a military response.
So we have a we have a perfect trifecta working up here in terms of people who want to see some kind of military response to this, even though even though there's no evidence whatsoever that the Iranian government was actually involved.
Well, do you see a motive for some guy's cousin in the Quds Force to want to do this?
Well, you know, there are certainly people in the Quds Force, as far as people can tell, that are opposed to any kind of, you know, friendly gestures towards Saudi Arabia or towards the United States, towards anyone.
So, I mean, you know, they're always nuts in all these organizations.
So it's plausible that that's someone at some level would have authorized this operation because, you know, otherwise it's hard to explain how did they come up with $100,000.
It had to come from some kind of source somewhere that that that commanded that kind of money.
And but but on the other hand, you look at it and the money was apparently transmitted in a way that it was easy to identify.
And the whole thing is like it was not the kind of thing that a professional intelligence organization would run.
So there are a lot of indicators here that this is a kind of a one off weird operation that came out of maybe nowhere.
And it should be regarded that way.
So, yeah.
Well, Hillary Mann Leverett, former Bush administration, State Department and National Security Council staffer, was on CNN International this morning and saying that this doesn't serve anybody's interest whatsoever.
This is clearly 100 percent contrary to Iran's national security policy.
And, you know, what's happening in the region is they're winning anyway.
You thank George W. Bush for that, for one.
And there's no reason in the world.
She said they correctly believed and knew that Saudi Arabia was helping to finance Saddam Hussein's invasion and war against Iran for years.
And they still never struck out at Saudi Arabia one time during all of that.
Yeah, she's right.
I mean, she's absolutely right.
I mean, normally, when you look at this kind of situation, you say, who benefits from it?
And this is where the situation nobody benefits from it, even if they had succeeded.
And the fact is that, you know, the Iranian government, which basically reacts rationally to most international situations, doesn't benefit at all from this.
If this had been carried out, what good could possibly have come out of it?
It probably would have produced a war.
So, you know, yeah, none of it makes any sense.
That's why I'm leaning more and more towards the explanation that this is just something strange.
This is something, you know, out of the normal ballpark and something we have to and we have to look at it for what it actually represents.
And it doesn't represent an excuse for war.
But unfortunately, that's what seems to be coming to the surface.
Well, you mentioned the amount of time that the FBI and the DEA were playing with this.
And then yesterday was the day they decided to announce it to us.
And John Glazer, in his analysis at Antiwar.com, said, hey, isn't that interesting?
Because just, I guess, day before that, they were again offering to immediately suspend their 20 percent uranium enrichment and try to work out a swap deal to allay everyone's fears that they're enriching to anything above 3.6 percent.
Yeah, I think there are obviously other agendas playing out here.
I think that obviously the United States is dealing with Israel on certain levels on this issue.
I understand that Panetta, when he was in Israel last week, again warned them that the Obama administration does not want them staging a preemptive attack on Iran.
And so, you know, there are all kinds of different signals to be sent.
Every time they send a signal to Israel to cease and desist, they turn around and do something nice for Israel to show that, you know, they're not serious about it.
So it could be that kind of situation.
Well, let's hope they're not serious about this.
All right.
Well, hold it right there, everybody.
It's Phil Gerald, the former CIA and DIA officer.
He's saying this looks like the plot was sort of real anyway, not directed by the Iranian top levels, but somebody over there.
The question is, what's Barack Obama going to do about it?
Oh, God.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Phil Gerald.
He's a former CIA and DIA counterterrorism officer.
He writes for the American Conservative Magazine and for antiwar.com.
And he's also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Is that a new URL?
No, it's actually cnionline.org.
Well, I found that councilforthenationalinterest.org, too.
Anyway.
Well, it'll come up.
Yeah, it'll come up that way, too.
Sure.cnionline.org.
That's right.
OK, I knew that.
All right.
I sure hope that your piece for antiwar.com this week is going to be your treatment of this story.
You know, it's not because I had to get it in by this morning for tomorrow.
So I wrote on something different and I knew I didn't have all the pieces for the story at that time.
I still don't.
I'm waiting for some calls and I'm trying to get some more detail on what actual evidence they have of some of this stuff.
But people that you know and trust inside the government who claim to actually know about this firsthand are telling you that part of this, at least, is real.
Yeah.
And I did a blog item about an hour ago for the American Conservative blog site.
If you want to go over and take a look at that.
Yeah, I actually pulled up the blog this morning, hoping to find something, but it wasn't up there yet.
Yeah, it was about an hour ago.
OK.
Yeah.
So, you know, basically, yeah, I think, you know, I think where the old saying where there's smoke, there's fire, you know, there's there's something there on this one, I think.
And but I think it's the danger here is that it's being exploited by people who want war with Iran and not just Americans.
We're talking about about Saudi Arabians and Israelis, too.
And I think there's a certain danger that it's going to escalate into into something that would be very unpleasant.
Well, one thing is clear, I guess, and, you know, you mentioned this at the beginning, and this is pretty clear in the indictment, I think, that, you know, with the money being transferred to what you call here an undercover FBI bank account and all that, that this plot basically all of the fanciful things that were supposed to happen, a bombing at a restaurant, this, that, whatever.
This is all much after the undercover part of the operation is going on right after they've been contacted by their informant about this and they're telling him how to proceed, etc.
So, yeah, the part that is your hearing is true is that, well, that somebody in Iran who I guess was a member of the Quds Force was sending money to his cousin here.
But we don't know anything else, really, about what the cousin back in Iran supposedly knew about what that money was being spent on, do we?
Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right.
I mean, we have a period of about nine months here where this operation was being run and it was being run with an FBI, DEA actually informant in the middle of it.
And so we don't know to what extent they were enablers of this operation.
But all I think I'm saying is that there certainly was something there to start, because this guy got in touch with the DEA informant by himself, obviously, apparently under direction from his cousin, who is a Quds member.
We don't know how senior, but nevertheless, a member of the force and apparently had kind of recruited him, if you want to put it that way.
So, as you know, I'm not saying all the outline of this story is all filled in yet, but there certainly seems to be a kernel of actual threat, maybe, at the beginning of this, which then led to other things.
That's all I'm kind of willing to commit to at the moment.
But it's not like one of these other cases where the guy is going to fly a model airplane into the Pentagon, where you know the FBI played the key role in all that coming about.
And this, I think, is maybe something we should be a little more, not exactly accepting of the official narrative, but at least willing to look at it.
All right.
It's Phil Giraldi.
One step closer to war is the blog at theamericanconservative.com/blog.
That's a new URL.
And you say here that the Saudis are believed to be in direct contact with the Israelis, telling them that King Abdullah is in favor of a strike on Iran and proposing that the two countries coordinate their activities to get Washington fully on board.
They are believed by who?
Well, they are.
I have a source who has very good contacts with the Saudi intelligence service, so I'll leave it at that.
But basically, this is one of those unique situations where the Saudis and Israelis are actually talking to each other.
And that, of course, is particularly dangerous.
Well, and how about the TV narrative here?
Is it I mean, it seems like some doubts are creeping in about this, you know, to a degree.
But I wonder how quickly the consensus could be brought together that we got to go ahead and have this war.
We've been putting it off.
And now we know we can't wait any longer.
These dang terrorists over there.
Well, you know, as is very often the case, there are two simultaneous narratives going on here.
One of them is if you look at a lot of these news accounts and then go down to the comments, you'll find that they're running heavily against the news accounts saying this is nonsense.
I can't believe this.
And this is just another government story.
But unfortunately, there's the official narrative.
The U.S. government and Joe Biden and people like him don't necessarily believe that they have to pay any attention to what the public is thinking.
And if they decide they're going to take military action, they're going to take military action.
Well, OK, so how about the army and the Marine Corps?
Their highest level generals must be saying that they don't want to have a war with Iran because they know that they're the ones who have to do all the dying and failing in it.
Well, I'm not talking necessarily about a war with Iran.
I'm talking about some kind of, shall we say, punitive action that might not necessarily lead to war.
I mean, there are all kinds of halfway house things.
They could launch a cruise missile at where they think the headquarters of the Quds group is located.
They could do, you know, these are certainly acts of war, but they're not war per se in a full sense.
And it would be up to the Iranians then to decide whether this is something they would want to escalate or not.
So I don't rule out that kind of thing.
You know, these people are, let's face it, I mean, Bill Clinton did this kind of thing.
George Bush did it repeatedly.
Barack Obama certainly has not flinched at doing this kind of thing.
So let's be a little bit worried that the people making these decisions are not going to exactly be completely rational about what they're doing.
Well, and that's the whole thing about war is it never survives the first.
The battle plan never survives the first engagement.
I guess I just take it for granted that if bombs start falling, it's on and things are going to escalate from there to God knows what horrible level.
Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right.
But in the minds of a Joe Biden or, you know, a president of the United States, they would be looking at some kind of limited response, I would think.
And I have no idea how that could play out.
I mean, it's just these these these guys are essentially see themselves as as controlling force.
And that force is the response that's needed to to deter countries like Iran from from doing things.
It's a whole crazy cyclical scenario.
But we've seen it play out so many times before.
Yeah.
Well, and part of this, too, is the domestic politics of pretty much every conservative accepted the American Conservative magazine, at least the Republican Party types attacking Obama, you're not doing enough in response to.
Sure.
In the campaign right now, every Republican candidate, but Ron Paul has been calling for tough measures with Iran.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We got to go because Kurt Haskell is up next.
Tell us about what he saw the day Abdul Mutallab changed planes in the Netherlands.
Thanks, Phil.
OK, Scott.