All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio now to our first guest.
It's a Philip Giraldi, former CIA and DIA officer, and now executive director of the council for the national interest foundation, contributing editor at the American conservative magazine, and of course, a regular writer at antiwar.com/Giraldi.
Terrorism arithmetic is his most recent piece about the report on terrorism.
The annual report on terrorism that just came out.
Welcome back to the show.
Phil, how are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Before we get into the terrorism thing real quick, I was just talking with the good people out there about the reports that the DIA and the CIA, which I know this would be after your time, but still, they apparently came to the conclusion late that Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi national Congress of exiles who lied us into war with Iraq and lied the neocons into war with Iraq and then lied us in a war with Iraq, that they were working for the Ayatollah in Iran all along, that it was an Iranian plot to lie us into war as much as it was a plot originating in Ariel Sharon's office and in Dick Cheney's office too.
The Iranians played their part.
Chalabi was working for them.
Do you agree with that conclusion?
Well, I think it's probably a question of, you know, how you interpret what was going on in Chalabi's head, which is maybe a little bit hard to do, but there's no question that Chalabi was playing both sides and certainly one of those sides was Iran, so it's a plausible conclusion.
I don't know what other kind of documentary evidence they might've come up with to support the view that this was an act of collaboration right from the beginning, but it's certainly plausible.
I wouldn't be surprised.
I mean, I'd like to see it reported over at the Weekly Standard or something like that so they can have a discussion about it.
Yeah.
Well, don't wait too long for that.
You might grow old.
I will recommend to people, they can read about this.
I could have swore there was one at the Seattle Times or something that was the best one, my favorite, but I can't find it.
But there's one at the Guardian and there's one at the Jewish Daily Forward.
This one is called Intel Agencies Fear Iran Used Chalabi to Lure U.S.
Into Iraq.
And in fact, there was that great one at Salon.com by, I can't remember the guy's name, called How Chalabi Conned the Neocons.
And that was the one where it talked about how he promised him he was going to build an oil and water pipeline to Haifa and that Iraq was going to be Israel's best ally in the region from now on.
And they bought it.
Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz were like, wow, that's really convincing.
Yeah.
Well, they obviously thought this was, you know, heaven had come down to earth for them.
Then it turned out the guy was a con man.
Well, I mean, everybody knew he was a con man.
He was on the CIA list of do not touch people before all of this started.
And he was a bank swindler.
He was like, he was embezzled from a bank and fled the country from Jordan.
Right.
From prosecution.
That's right.
That's right.
All right.
Well, there you go.
So this to me is important when arguing the question of whether Iran is run by crazy people or not.
They were smarter than all the Americans who supported the Iraq war, the very same ones who support war against them now.
And yet when it comes to who's zooming who, it was the Americans that get zoomed by the Iranians.
So maybe they're rational and we're emotional on this side.
That would be a reasonable judgment, I would think.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so this is a really important report here.
Your report, not the report you're reporting about.
It's not that important.
The National Counterterrorism Center's annual report on terrorism.
You did us a favor and went through the darn thing and learned some things.
What'd you learn?
Well, basically, I learned or I had confirmed my own belief that the terrorism problem for the United States is minuscule in proportion.
I mean, this this particular report, there are two annual reports.
The other one is done by the State Department.
But this one is is done by the National Counterterrorism Center.
Which is what exactly?
That's the cops and the spies together.
Yeah, it's like a clearinghouse type place.
Joint jurisdictional task force and all that.
Right.
And for that reason, this report is not really analytic.
It's statistical and it breaks down where terrorism victims are all over the world and and so on and so forth.
And it comes to the conclusion that last year, 2011, there were only 17 Americans that were killed by terrorists.
And out of those 17, 15 were in Afghanistan, which was a war zone.
And there were only three Americans who were kidnapped.
And all three of them were in war zones.
One was in Yemen, one was in Somalia, and the third one was in Afghanistan.
So the fact is that, you know, terrorism is is, as I say, in one point of the report, more people in the United States get killed yearly by their television sets falling on them than get killed by terrorists.
And yet we're spending something like one trillion dollars a year to counter this threat.
Isn't it great?
You know, it was so obvious, too, on September 12th that, wow, they're not going to call this the war on al Qaeda for one minute.
This is going to be the war on fear from now on.
It's the perfect boogeyman.
It's better than Trotsky to Stalin.
Well, and then it even got bigger because then they made it a global war.
It was it's everybody.
And then George Bush said, you're are you're either with us or against us.
And so that's that was kind of the parameters of what this was.
And it's unfortunately we have we have this dum-dum in the White House right now who's not any smarter, is infinitely smarter than Bush, but not any smarter on this issue.
And these people just keep grinding and grinding and grinding.
And all the evidence is that these countries that were attacking with drones and we're only making the problem worse.
We're making more people our enemies.
We're we're creating political problems for those countries.
And it's just it's unbelievable how anybody can be sucked into this this whole narrative.
Yeah, well, you point out in here that, yeah, some of this violence that counts as terrorism in the report is al-Shabaab in Somalia, which what American civilians do they even have access to other than perhaps CIA employees on the ground there?
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, there are very few Americans.
And I also point out in my in my story that the a lot of people were calling Americans are are actually indigenous to the countries where they're living in.
There are people who have an American passport for one reason or another, but actually live and look like and, you know, speak the language of the country where they're at.
So a lot of these people were saying are Americans are not.
And the fact is that that makes these these numbers even smaller in reality.
Yeah, it's not some guy from Kansas who and his wife were getting kidnapped or something.
It's it's a guy who's actually living in that country.
He might be getting kidnapped because they want a ransom.
And it probably may or may not have anything to do with the fact that he has an American passport.
They may not even know that he does.
Yeah.
Why should it be fair that any 10 guys standing together with rifles who call themselves Al-Qaeda, we have to acknowledge that and treat them as such.
I mean, come on.
Al-Shabaab is not Al-Qaeda.
Because why?
One of them, you know, passed a note across the mouth of the Red Sea there and supposedly talked to a guy in Yemen.
And then what they did, like a little mob ceremony where to imagine or something.
And so now all the Al-Shabaab guerrilla fighters in Somalia are all somehow part of Osama's legions from beyond the grave.
And yeah, that's that's another crazy thing, because if you talk to any terrorism experts, one of the first things they'll tell you is that the terrorism that existed over 10 years ago was basically better organized.
It was more centralized.
It was it was controlled in a sense.
And today you have franchises.
So these people don't really communicate very much.
They operate on a local level and they operate against local issues.
And so these reports from the U.S. government are very contradictory because they're basically admitting on one side that these people are franchisees that don't have much of a connection to anybody.
And on the other hand, they're portraying this like it's an international and global threat.
I mean, you can't have it both ways.
Right.
Which that was the whole unique thing about Al-Qaeda was that they were focused on the United States and bin Laden and Zawahiri's doctrine was we got to get the Americans to go bankrupt and leave the region first.
Then we can wage our local wars of resistance and whatever and overthrow our local dictators, which wasn't exactly right.
It was sort of right.
But you look at the Arab Spring, America's still there.
And we're not all the way bankrupt yet.
And yet still the major changes are happening right there underfoot.
But it's the Iraq war that that really did this.
It's like in Fantasia, Mickey Mouse with the brooms and keep smashing them and they just keep multiplying and multiplying.
Anyway, sir, we got to take this stupid break.
We'll be back in a minute with Phil Giraldi.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Phil Giraldi, his piece at Antiwar.com is called Terrorism Arithmetic.
And speaking of Somalia and the bogus threat of terrorism, the fake excuse, I forgot exactly the words you use in the article.
But you bring up the turn toward Africa, how this they're not even really pretending anymore.
They just sort of have this, you know, they'll just say, oh, yeah, we're fighting terrorism.
But really, they just want to conquer Africa and I guess keep China out and and control those resources.
And it's just empire, pure and simple.
And if you really, you know, push them, they'll say, well, you know, there's Al Shabaab over there in Somalia, you know, almost like they're joking.
It's it's really to anyone who's paying attention at all that this is even happening.
The the veneer of the excuse is worn pretty thin.
It's pretty transparent, right?
Yeah, pretty much.
I mean, it's like, you know, you would think that if the United States is making all this effort to have these overseas bases and to have these these major operations against terrorism and everything like that, they would at least make sure that there's an actual threat there.
And that that standard has gone out the window now for years and years and years.
I mean, it's just that, you know, the obviously the United States acting against Al Qaeda.
I mean, you could you can talk about that in a lot of ways in terms of how that developed and happened and everything.
But the bare fact is, OK, this was a genuine threat.
I think anybody looking at it would would say, yeah, after 9-11, this was for real.
And but all this other stuff is fantasy.
I mean, Al Qaeda has virtually no capability of projecting itself anywhere.
What's going on in most of these other places, people we call terrorists are essentially people who have a local grievance.
And that's what they're involved with.
They're either trying to change their government locally or they have some other issues they're fighting about.
They don't threaten the United States.
And the only time they threaten the United States is when we go over there and get involved.
Right.
Hey, it was even in The New York Times, right?
They printed an op ed by Yemeni saying, you know what it is?
It makes us, hey, you, it's the bombs.
And that that's like it's very newsworthy that that was allowed to be in The New York Times now where, oh, OK, it's sort of like after Hurricane Katrina.
Now it's all right.
You're no longer a jerk for thinking George Bush is a jerk now.
OK, decent people think he's a jerk.
He's the one not, you know, kind of thing.
It's like that.
Maybe it's finally getting through to people.
Like, what's the cause of this problem in the first place?
Yeah, I think it actually is because you're seeing more and more pieces on it.
There's been a series in The Washington Post.
I don't know if you've seen it or last couple of days about how it's from a book by one of the Post's journalists that basically shows that the how screwed up the whole Afghan war has been because the politicians and the diplomats and the military officers were not on the same page ever.
And it's not necessarily a revelation because I think we all suspected that.
But the fact is that you see it's kind of laid out in terms of, you know, who was doing what to whom is kind of interesting.
It shows you that if there's one thing that's true about the United States is that we you know, we can't get anything right.
And so, you know, that's as good an argument for getting out of all these places as any.
Right.
Yeah, it really is funny, too, because you would think that, you know, come on, don't they respect the structure enough, the people who are at that level of it that, hey, the president tells his national security adviser something and he coordinates the secretaries of whatever and then they do it because, hey, he said so.
He is the boss.
Right.
And they don't it's not even anything like that easy, even when we're only talking about the top five or six guys on these questions.
Well, you got to realize these five or six guys have egos that you can't even imagine.
And you have Richard Holbrook.
Yeah, exactly.
And that Holbrook was one of the ones that was was talked about in these articles I'm talking about.
The he was basically getting undercut by Jones, who was the national security chief and also by the White House and where Holbrook would not even be invited to meetings with Karzai and people like that, even though Holbrook was technically the the guy who was the the Afghan honcho in terms of negotiating some kind of settlement.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, there are Domino's pizzas in the neighborhood that are run as much tighter ships than this.
It really is a study of incompetence.
And, you know, I try not to put too much stock in a Bob Woodward version of anything, but at least there's kernels of truth in there.
If you read the Woodward books about the Bush team, it's like that to Rice and Rumsfeld and Tenet and Powell and all these people.
They don't work together.
Even Rumsfeld and Cheney don't work together very well.
Everybody said everything was everybody else's responsibility when asked about anything.
And I think it's Andrew Coburn talks about Rumsfeld quit even sending the deputies to the deputy meetings anymore because he was afraid if anybody showed up someone asked them to do something.
These are the masters of the universe.
These are like the most powerful men ever in history.
Yeah, well, they all have they all, you know, have the same flaw, which is essentially to have the ambition that gets you up to that level makes you basically insane.
Yeah, must be.
I had kind of noticed that about Dick Cheney and a few of these other guys and and Hillary Clinton, for that matter.
Yeah, she's one of those people you could never convince her she's crazy either.
Yeah, well, she's basically too busy right now, you know, taking on China and Russia and telling them about the error of their ways.
But I just, you know, I find the whole foreign policy establishment now to be kind of a crazy place.
We used to kind of see things in terms of a national interest and and tried not to create problems.
But that seems to have gone out of the window, certainly in the last 10 or 11 years.
Well, you know, one thing that is really problematic about having a Democratic president, of course, is that the all the pressure on him politically in D.C. is to be worse and all the pressure on him to be better is gone because to the Democrats, they'll take the most genocidal Democratic leader.
I mean, the Democratic voters, they'll take the worst Democratic leader over the very best Republican from, you know, the other team or whatever.
So they'll just forget all of their principles.
And I think McCain was crazy enough.
We might all be dead in a nuclear war with the Russians by now if it had been him.
But he's kind of aberrational.
If it had just been Mitt Romney last time, for example, who'd won the nomination, we'd have been better off with him than Obama, I think, because all the pressure on him politically at the grassroots level and in power would have been against all of this intervention.
And, you know, he would have had the Kagan's and people attacking him in his own party probably or not attacking him, but trying to push him to the right.
But with Obama, he's just got the permanent permission slip.
And then he's always got Romney and everybody else to his right saying that he's not man enough and he needs to kill even more.
And so another four years of this.
I mean, who knows how how much worse this could get?
I don't know.
Well, the scary thing about Obama is that he seems to really like this stuff.
Which is, I think, a surprise to people who supported him and knew him, because there are many people like myself voted for him because we figured McCain was a lot scarier.
But the fact is, he really seems to like this stuff.
If you read the New York Times exposés of these kill lists and everything like that, I mean, this stuff is chilling just to read it.
And here's the president United States kicking off the baseball cards.
You know, there's something seriously wrong here.
And what's really seriously wrong is that nobody's jumped up and said, you know, we have to impeach this guy.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, you read that Times piece is based on interviews with 15 people at the the 15 top people at the White House or whatever, and at the CIA and the Pentagon.
This was clearly this article was ordered, written by the president himself.
That was the point he wanted to get across more than anything, was that he's just as bloodthirsty as any Republican you got.
Yeah, that's right.
And it's that we've come to that in this country, that, you know, presidents are outdoing each other in terms of who they would attack and who they would kill.
I, you know, it's just I can't even believe this is the America I grew up in.
And but, you know, on the other side, people are starting to wake up to this.
I don't I don't imagine it'll be much waking up in Tampa at the Republican convention, particularly as Ron Paul has basically been silenced.
But, you know, if there's got to be a wake up call at a certain point to this kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Well, unfortunately, it probably won't be until the dollar becomes worthless really quick.
And we're spending hundred dollar bills like dimes if we have any at all that people realize that, wow, it wasn't free.
All that taken over the world, you know?
Yeah.
All right.
That's Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer, writes for the American Conservative and Antiwar.com.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
And when we get back, we'll talk about American intervention in Syria.
He really broke the story.
Phil did at Antiwar.com on December the 8th about American covert support, working with the Saudis and the Qataris and whoever supporting the rebellion in Syria.
So we'll be covering that topic when we get back after the top of the hour break here.
All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
So just like I was claiming a minute ago here, December 8th, 2011, Washington's Secret Wars by Phil Giraldi at Antiwar.com says there are two findings by the president.
That's a finding is when the president orders the CIA to break the law.
And one of them says intervene in Iran and the other in Syria.
And ever since then, or perhaps before, I guess, Phil, the Americans have been coordinating and even The New York Times and The Washington Post are putting this on their front pages now, have been coordinating the Saudis and the Qataris and the Turks.
And I'm not sure who all else.
I guess European powers, too, in their intervention in Syria.
Can you tell us?
I don't know everything you know about it, please.
Well, as you noted, yeah, I reported it six months ago and The New York Times just got it.
Yeah, I mean, they had it, but they didn't want to use it.
So, I mean, the fact is that this has been going on for quite a while, that everybody's meddling.
I mean, it's particularly the a lot of the money for the supporting the dissonance is coming from the Saudis and Qataris and for various reasons.
The Turks are kind of sitting back watching this.
They're afraid that there's going to be a huge flood of refugees if they don't do something.
And they're also worried about terrorism threat if if water breaks down the other side of the border.
So they have their own issues.
But the United States has been meddling.
Obviously, if you listen to Hillary Clinton, you would learn that we intend to bring about regime change in Syria.
And that's what we're doing.
And we've been doing it for a while.
And so how's it going?
Well, the interesting thing is the current issue of The American Conservative.
I have a column, Deep Background, in which I discuss there's a national intelligence estimate.
You know what that is, I'm sure, where they look at the specific situations around the world and come up with policy recommendations and an intelligence assessment of what's going on.
And there's an NIE, that's what it's called, sitting right now at CIA on the subject of Syria.
And the White House basically is having problems with it because what the analysts who are following Syria are saying is that there is no predicting what would come out of a post-Assad situation, that more likely than not, it would be worse than the status quo, that essentially we know nothing about the insurgents and that it would it would be a big mistake to intervene in any active way in terms of what's going on there.
But of course, we're intervening already.
Right.
Yeah, I remember Michael Shoyer being interviewed on CNN about Libya.
He said, look, the crazies, they're not going to come and talk to the CIA.
They're going to stay in the background.
They're just going to do their thing.
And so the CIA can find plenty of people who want to be friends and accept the CIA's money and weapons.
But that doesn't mean that those are going to be the people running things at the end here.
And I guess, you know, really, it's like Robert Gates said about that collateral murder video.
It's watching the war through a soda straw.
Everybody has their own very narrow point of view on the thing, but they're not even here.
We are.
As you said, we're already into this thing more than half a year.
And only now they're asking, huh, well, geez, what do you think might happen, Dave, if the Assad government falls?
Then what?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And that's what we're seeing happen.
And of course, you don't even have to go back to ancient history to to come out with parallels.
Looks like what's happened in Libya.
I mean, what kind of control do we have over that?
And and even Tunisia, what kind of control do we have?
All these things that we encourage and and and also aided.
And so you get these situations where you, you know, you have no just because a guy's taking weapons from you and money from you doesn't mean that after he overthrows the government, he's going to pay any attention to you.
And and and he might and he not only might he, but he certainly will have his own agendas and his agendas will have nothing to do with you.
Right.
Well, what's funny is that guy, General Hammond's running AFRICOM even cited when he was citing al-Shabaab in Somalia, he cited jihadists in Libya as part of the reason we have to invade Africa.
And then we're just supposed to forget that it was his war against Gaddafi for them.
That increased their power and influence.
And then I think he even mentioned Mali, which was a direct consequence of all the flood of weapons leaving Libya after the American regime changed there.
These people are so cynical.
They don't even go half a year before exploiting their own mess as the excuse for another one.
Yeah, that's exactly what they're doing.
I mean, they're they're they're see there's no there's no accountability in the U.S. government.
So when somebody messes up something really big time, they just go to plan B and plan B is to say, OK, well, we've got this situation now.
We have to deal with it.
And of course, they created this situation.
And, you know, this this this White House and I'm not trying to say that this White House is any worse than George Bush, although I think it is.
The fact is, they just don't seem to have figured out that that these situations in these foreign countries that you don't understand very well, these situations are dynamic and they're changing, you know, constantly.
And the fact that you think you can go in there and you get one of these English speaking, you know, Chalabi showing up to tell you what's going on, then you should really know that you're in trouble.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
It makes you wonder whose word Hillary Clinton is taking for it over there.
But, you know, I can't I can't let this one go.
She said it on CBS.
They the form of the question was what's taking so long for us to go and save the day over there in Syria, Madam Secretary?
And so her excuse was, well, you know, Hamas and Al-Qaeda in the form of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who you could say from whatever basement he's hiding in, that's what's left of legit Al-Qaeda in the world right there.
They've endorsed this thing.
So are we sure we want to intervene on their side?
And then that's exactly what she continues to do.
The people she's backing would be, you know, the direct cousins of what we used to call the Sunni based insurgency in Iraq.
Right.
I mean, that's who it is.
That's exactly right.
It's basically that.
And, you know, after we go in and make a mess of it and overthrow the government and these guys kind of take over or take over one bit of the country, whatever it'll result in, in whatever the solution would be.
The fact is, these guys are going to be beholden to their neighbors and their friends there.
They don't give a damn about what what Hillary Clinton's interests are in this.
And they know that.
Yeah.
Well, so I don't know.
Do you think that well, does that CIA report the new NIE you're referring to, does it say that they think that Assad is going to make it?
I mean, would anything short of a full scale NATO type intervention like what happened in Libya dislodge him from power?
Yeah, I don't know that.
And I would assume the report addressed that.
But but I was not told whether that was the case or not.
But the you know, I talked to a lot of people from the region, other Arabs from neighboring countries and everything like that.
And and there's a there's still a fairly strong feeling that Assad has survivability because he's got he's got a lot of the smaller communities inside Syria basically are afraid of of possible consequences if he were to go.
So, you know, he may be survivable.
But the problem is, of course, if if the United States gets involved, you know it's going to be a bad result and and they're essentially going to come up with somebody like a Chalabi.
Well, you know, if Obama is, you know, afraid to actually go full scale for regime change in Damascus, you know, with American power and he's just going to leave it like this.
My feeling is and I'm not the world expert on Syria or whatever.
What it seems like is that Assad's not going anywhere at this rate.
All that's happening is this low scale warfare that's just getting people killed and making matters worse and making whatever future settlement that much harder to reach.
And basically we're just feeding rebels into the grinder and they're going to lose anyway if we're not going to actually commit to fighting for their cause, which obviously is not advisable for whatever other reasons we already discussed there.
You know?
Yeah, well, one of the other interesting things in the NIE that I was told about was that basically the CIA and the NSA, of course, have been monitoring communications both by the government and by the rebels and and that they have all apparently accumulated a lot of intelligence suggesting that a lot of these massacres that have been blamed on the government were actually carried out by the rebels.
And there was one person who told me about this kind of made a joke.
He said, you know, these guys are such amateurs that they forgot to turn off their cell phones.
So here you have NSA and CIA listening in on their conversation as they're as they're carrying out massacres.
And this is in the new NIE?
Yeah.
Did they say whether they're talking about the Hula massacre specifically?
Do you know?
Well, the Hula massacre, of course, the German media is reporting was carried out by the rebels.
But I don't know if that specifically is addressed in this report.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we're out of time.
Thanks very much for your time.
Appreciate it.
OK, Scott.
All right.
Bye bye.
Phil Giraldi, everybody.
