All right, 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 a former CIA and DIA officer, writes for the American Conservative Magazine and antiwar.com.
He's also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation at councilforthenationalinterest.org or cnionline.org, whichever you like typing better.
Welcome back, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So, give us an update.
What do you know about this so-called Iranian plot to blow up a restaurant and kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States?
Well, I kind of have to believe at this point that there is clear evidence that there was some kind of, shall we say, plot or conspiracy going on at the beginning of this, but it doesn't necessarily relate to an assassination or anything like that.
I found Gareth Porter's article on the subject very convincing, that this could have actually started out as a conspiracy to sell drugs to the cartels in Mexico.
That makes more sense than certainly what we're hearing from the White House.
I think another possibility that keeps nagging at me is that this was some kind of complicated false flag operation, either run by the Israelis or the CIA, or the Israelis and the CIA, in which they basically set up a very complicated and contrived scenario in which these guys got kind of sucked up into it.
And that would, of course, be a real scary one, because that would indicate that either or both governments were interested in producing this conspiracy, probably as a way to, certainly as a way to heighten tensions with Iran, and maybe as a way to initiate a conflict with them.
So, in other words, on that second possibility there, to draw that out a little bit better, what you're saying is, you think it's possible that the Israelis and or the Americans had someone, an agent or a flipped asset inside the Iranian government, and they had him send this money and precipitate this thing just to get caught and make them look bad?
Well, that's possible, but they also could have set up the account by themselves.
That's what intelligence agencies do.
They have the capability of setting up accounts anonymously.
And the other thing, let's not forget, the U.S. government in particular, and the Israelis, I think, too, have very high levels of capability to play around with technical aspects of various operations.
In other words, they could make it look like a check had gone from almost anywhere to almost anywhere just by altering the electronic trail of it.
Same thing with telephone calls and things like that.
When I was in the CIA, you could make a telephone do almost anything you wanted.
You could make a guy dial a call, he thinks he's dialing Paris, but actually the phone is really being switched and ringing in Washington.
So, you know, there are all kinds of things an intelligence agency could do to play around and play with tricks in this kind of thing.
Well, so in other words, you don't give them any benefit of the doubt that it's even true that any of this happened on the Iranian end at all, necessarily?
I'm absolutely convinced that the fact that the Iranian government had absolutely zero motive to do this, I'm completely convinced by that.
In fact, you can look at it another way.
They had a disincentive to do anything like this because they would have clearly understood that a terrorist plot in Washington, D.C., would invite massive retaliation, possibly, or at a minimum, sanctions that would be incredibly painful like we're seeing kind of being cranked up right now.
So, what is the possible motive or incentive of the Iranian government to do something like this?
Now, I would even dispute that.
I would say sanctions, nothing.
If a bomb went off in a restaurant, killed some senators, killed a Saudi ambassador, and they traced that back to the government of Iran, they would be bombing Tehran the next morning.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, you know, I have no convincing line coming out of Washington about the administration as to why they would want to do this.
And there's some bull crap this morning in the Washington Post, as usual, you know, talking about, oh, this shows how dysfunctional and how fragmented the government in Tehran is becoming and how, you know, these are all afterthoughts.
They're throwing out things that they hope somebody will pick up on and chew on for a while.
But the fact is, I think anybody who's looked at this story and look at the whole lineup of former intelligence officers like Bob Bair, Ray McGovern, you know, people have looked, Paul Pillar, have looked at this case and they say, this just doesn't make, this doesn't pass the smell test.
Right.
Yeah, well, I mean, and it is amazing.
You, Paul Pillar, Ray McGovern, and McGovern cites, I forgot the guy's name, in his article as well, the former station chief in Saudi Arabia.
Ray Close.
And then, of course, Flint Leverett was on the show the other day.
He's going to be back on the show the other day.
He's a former CIA and National Security Council guy and he didn't buy it for one minute either.
Nor did his wife, who is an expert on the same level he is.
Yeah, I mean, this is right across the board.
You know, people who are kind of used to these things know what the atmospheres are around.
Yeah, Gary Sick, that wrote October Surprise, who's been an Iran expert for 40 years.
All these guys.
Yeah, nobody who knows anything is buying it.
Well, you know, I'm confused at why they would even, I don't know, maybe I'm just embarrassed for Eric Holder here.
You know, if you're going to make up a terrorist plot, shouldn't it be plausible on its face?
Well, yeah, but, you know, maybe they couldn't come up with one that was plausible.
You know, I still think that if we ever find out about this, and I suspect we never will, even if this guy goes to trial, they're not going to give us a whole lot of information.
I think we would discover that this is, however it started, this turned out to be 90% entrapment, either by CIA, Mossad, FBI, whoever was playing the game on this one.
And it's going to be that way.
And I think I might have mentioned last time I talked to you, there's also that intriguing subplot about Israel, too, which is that Panetta was, of course, in Israel the week before this happened, before this was revealed.
And he apparently warned the Israelis against starting a war with Iran.
And then this plot kind of pops up, which heightens tensions with Iran.
I kind of suspect it might be a quid pro quo.
You tell the Israelis, look, just cool it, but at the same time, we are going to stick it to the Iranians next week, so just be standing by and waiting for that.
You know, that also is one of these things that's at the back of my mind that seems to make a lot of sense.
Yeah, well, I wonder if the rolling up of these supposed Syrian spies is along the same lines there.
Yeah, that's quite possible, too.
And then we have this rather intriguing thing two days ago where the White House is demanding UN documents to suggest that the Iranians are onto a nuclear weapon or are developing certain aspects of a nuclear weapon.
It's very vague what they were asking about.
Ironically, today in the Washington Post there was a feature story saying that the Iranians are having huge technical problems with their nuclear program.
So, you know, it's like they want you to believe the story that they're throwing out because they have a political motive in doing all these things.
But as far as I can tell, the political motive is insanity.
Why are they cranking up yet another war when we can't even manage the six or so that we're at now?
Yeah, six or so.
It's time to start rounding up there, Bill.
Just invaded sub-Saharan Africa and that's a big place with a lot of little nation states and borders to be redrawn there.
Yeah, that's right.
We're taking on the Lord's Army.
Well, if we can beat the Lord's Army I guess that's a good sign, isn't it?
Well, so, but the effect of this I'm looking at tabletmag.com Was the Iran plot real?
It barely matters.
That's the effect of this thing, right?
It barely matters, really.
Yeah, that's right because you have a number of congressmen that are already calling what they know or what they think they know already an act of war.
So they're getting what they want which is an act of war.
It doesn't matter that it doesn't amount to that and that the details are awfully hazy on this whole thing.
It's quite astonishing what's happening.
You're right.
Yeah, in fact they end here with and of course on cue Bill Kristol calls for war Glenn Greenwald calls it a wag the dog scenario.
Got that right.
Alright, hold it right there, Phil.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Phil Giraldi from Antiwar.com after this.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to this here thing.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Phil Giraldi former CIA counterterrorism officer contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine and Antiwar.com also he's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation cnionline.org and we're talking about this Iran plot, Phil.
You mentioned how obvious it is that whatever this thing started out as, it turned into a big scary Iranian terrorist plot after it fell into the lap of this, apparently of this government informant and his agents handling him.
I mean, that much is pretty much clear right in the indictment and especially if you go and, as you mentioned, read through Gareth Porter's work, parsing line by line what's in there and what it seems to reveal and all that it's pretty clear that you know, the whole thing is well, at least all the worst parts of it really come from the American cops, not some, whoever was on the other end of the bank account transfers or whatever in Iran if that's even real at all.
Yeah, that's right and also bear in mind that this informant for DEA, about which we know very little, assuming that's really what he was, his incentive in this game would be to turn it into a terrorist case.
If this is a guy who had been, as the narrative goes, previously arrested and was now being a good boy informing for the U.S. government, he would have every incentive to turn this thing as nasty as he possibly could in as quick a time as he could and bear in mind also when you're thinking along those lines, that the same thing is true for whoever his handlers were, whether they were FBI or DEA or CIA or a combination thereof.
These guys are guys that get promoted based on catching terrorists.
There's a whole incentive system built in which militates that whenever you find somebody like any one of these characters over the last 10 years that they've found and turned into terrorists, the whole system is geared towards making someone a terrorist, even if they didn't start out that way.
I wonder if there's another major terrorist attack in America.
Will Robert Mueller be hanged for directing the FBI to just chase their tail and trapping innocent people all this time while real al-Qaeda, somebody's getting away with mass murder?
I don't think the public will ever know because the media won't tell them that.
Probably Robert Mueller, if he's listening in on this conversation, which he probably is, is sending someone over to my house and to your place.
We'd better be careful what we suggest.
But no, there's no accountability.
I think he should get a trial.
I didn't mean to suggest a lynch mob.
I was thinking more like a trial and then for whatever the number is of innocent dead, it would just be that many counts of criminally negligent homicide.
Nobody's been accountable for anything since 9-11, so why should we start with him?
Good question.
He was real lucky that he'd only been on the job for two weeks when 9-11 happened.
It was hard for anybody to blame him.
That's right.
You know what?
Speaking of that, did I already ask you, have you been looking at this Secrecy Kills, the sequel basically to Press for Truth about the CIA keeping all this information from Richard Clark and the FBI about Homsi and Al-Midhar in San Diego before 9-11?
Yeah, I've seen the coverage on that.
That stuff has been out there for a while.
What's new is Richard Clark saying, look, 50 different CIA people lied right to my face.
They all knew it.
Yeah, Clark is definitely a credible witness on this.
He was very well placed in those days and had access to everything.
Yeah, you know, I can recall from my time in the CIA that it was kind of routine to lie to other government agencies because that was part of the job in a way.
But when you're in the White House and you have the White House Counterterrorism Coordinator and you're lying to him, that's taking it to a different level, I think.
I don't...
I can believe it, and I think that again this is a case where you can identify the people who did it, and the people who did it should be in jail.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing.
And, you know, for the truthers out there who think this was all because Dick Cheney wanted to allow it to happen, well, fine.
Let's indict all the CIA guys who let it happen, and then if they want to turn state's witness and testify against Dick Cheney, great.
Let's get started with the criminally negligent homicide prosecutions.
That'll be a good start.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that one of the things that the truthers are dead right about is that when you look at the 9-11 report like that, there are just huge holes in the report, things that are not explained, things that are not even looked at.
And that's, of course, deliberate.
I mean, what the 9-11 report was intended to do was to reassure the public.
It really had nothing to do with finding out the truth.
Well, it was an outcome-based commission.
They were to recommend a Department of Homeland Security at the end.
That was announced on the first day.
Yeah, that's right.
And so, you know, it had an agenda which was very clear right from the beginning.
And, you know, it's like the Warren Commission and everything else.
Do you expect the government to investigate itself?
I mean, that's almost Stalinist in terms of how you do that.
Well, they're a monopoly.
That's how it works, right?
They're the final arbiters in all disputes, including those, you know, about themselves.
They always side in their own favor.
I'm sure you're aware.
We're having elections in a lot of parts of the country right now that are very hotly disputed.
I live in Virginia and I keep getting calls.
It seems like every 20 minutes from one or another pollster or somebody advocating one or another candidate.
And it's funny, but, you know, we have the no-call policy but when the politicians wrote up the law, they exempted themselves from the law.
And it's like that in everything in the United States.
I wonder, you know, why we have so many lawyers.
We have so many lawyers because they've managed to create a dictatorship in which the law has been written to support an oligarchy.
I hate to say that, but it's the way it looks.
Yeah, it's absolutely true.
Especially over the last 10 years, it's just gone into such overdrive.
This is Glenn Greenwald's new book that I think comes out today, actually.
It's the two-tiered system of justice.
Complete immunity and impunity for people with power and an absolutely irresistible police state for the rest of us.
Yep, yep, yep.
Alright, well, now listen, I want to ask you about this.
There's a guy named Charles Davis has an IPS news piece we're running at antiwar.com today called Alleged Plot Weakens Claims of Iran's Sway in Latin America.
And he makes reference to the Washington Post's repeating of an anonymous official's claim that the reason that the coup force chose this guy's cousin was because he was from Corpus Christi and they figured if he's from Texas then maybe he knows somebody in the Mexican mafia that they could hire to assassinate this or kidnap this Saudi ambassador or something.
It seemed pretty win-win and it was fun to read the comments there at the Washington Post website where everyone was making fun of him.
But, pardon me, real quick, the point being that Davis is saying, his point being, is that I thought Hezbollah and Iran ran all of Latin America according to the American Enterprise Institute so why would they have to go to these lengths to get a hold of the Zetas?
And so I wanted to ask you whether to what degree any of that is true about Hezbollah and, I don't know, radical Islam or whatever infiltrating in Latin America and amounting to some threat on our southern border.
Well, I think the real answer to that is that the threat from Hezbollah in Latin America and from Iran in Latin America is about zero.
If you go back and recall when this story popped out, it popped out when they were also coming out with allegations that Hezbollah was buying uranium from Venezuela.
This was about a year and a half or two years ago.
And they started popping out, oh yes, and there's a Hezbollah presence and they were tying all this together with the usual crowd in the media that was coming out with these stories and then the stories kind of went away because I think that when actually a U.S. government spokesman was confronted on the issue sometime afterwards, he admitted that there was no evidence and there was no evidence that Iran was trying to buy uranium.
So it's just like how these stories get out there and everybody believes them.
I think there was an opinion poll on anti-war a couple days ago saying that most people believe that Iran is now a major threat against the United States.
I mean, I guess you float these stories often enough and people start to believe them but the problem is this is Nazi Germany, this is Stalinist Russia where we don't have a free media anymore and people hear the crap and the crap is stuff where the government and the media are complicit in coming out with these lines and these lines are going to lead us to war.
Well, and they're so bad at it and for so long in a row you would think that people would just default to, well, I don't believe you.
Prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt or shut up.
That's my attitude.
Yeah, and I wish it were the attitude in general but people just tend to believe the nonsense and unfortunately the consequences are going to be terrible.
Yeah, well, there's one for a whole other interview what a war with Iran might look like in fact if you go back through the archives I'm sure y'all could find Phil and I talking about that very subject but for now we gotta go.
Thanks Phil, appreciate it.
Okay, Scott.
It's Phil Giraldi, everybody.
Antiwar.com, the American Conservative Magazine.
