All right, my friends, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio on Chaos 92.7, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and our guest today is Philip Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA operative, contributing editor to the American Conservative magazine, writes Smoke and Mirrors for Antiwar.com.
He has a blog over at the Huffington Post and can occasionally be found in the pages of the National Interest as well.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing good.
How are you, sir?
Okay.
That's good to know.
And we've got a lot of good stuff to talk about in the show today.
I'm starting a little bit late in getting you on the air.
I hope we can squeeze most of this in.
The first thing we need to cover here, and I guess probably the most important thing, would be your article in the Huffington Post, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, sponsored by Jane Harman in the House of Representatives, already passed.
And has it already passed the Senate, or are we still waiting for it to pass the Senate?
It's my understanding that it's sitting in the Homeland Security Committee, which is chaired by none other than Joseph Lieberman.
And once his committee passes on it, it will go to the Senate for a full vote.
All right.
And now, why should anybody be concerned about this Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, Phil?
Well, you know, I mean, first of all, the name itself, I mean, you couldn't come up with a better one if you tried.
But my concern about it is that basically it's going to be, I don't know how old much of your audience is, but some of them certainly should recall the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was active into the 1960s and was finally abolished in 1974.
HUAC, as it was referred to, used to go around the United States looking for communists.
And what it did, it would convene hearings in various cities and just summon people in to question them about their political connections.
This committee that would be set up by this act is somewhat similar in that it is empowered to go around and look for terrorists.
Somewhat worse than HUAC, all 10 commission members would be separately empowered, which means you could have simultaneous hearings being carried out in various parts of the country at the same time.
You're saying the members of the commission can go around and do what themselves now?
Well, when HUAC used to operate, the whole committee would go to various cities and hold hearings.
This commission, apparently, the way the bill is structured, all 10 individual commission members can each individually go to separate cities and hold hearings.
So you could have five hearings going on in various cities at one time, ten hearings.
It's quite possible that that could take place, magnifying the impact of what this commission is doing.
And I guess it seems like their basic purpose here is to come up with new laws that ought to be passed, new powers that ought to be granted to the Homeland Security state.
Yeah, I think that's the idea.
If you read the bill, as I've done and perhaps you have, you see that since Congress is a legislative body, they're looking at proposing new laws to make it more difficult for terrorists and terrorist groups to come together and plan activity.
And that's something we all support.
But basically, the mechanism is the bad idea.
They're going to be going around and finding people that have not been convicted of any crime, have not been accused of anything.
And they're also going to use a selection process, which is somewhat ambiguous in that it's not clear at all how it will function to identify who these people are.
And I suspect what will happen is you'll have basically the usual people over at the American Enterprise Institute and Weekly Standard coming up with lists of names of terrorists for these commissions to look at.
Oh, well, yeah, we'll have to get to the deputization of the AEI here in a minute.
But tell me this, you're a former counterterrorism officer on the covert action side of the Central Intelligence Agency, right?
Yes.
I mean, in your opinion, do you believe that the national government, the United States, needs any more power in order to protect us from terrorism?
I mean, there are those who said, well, you know, the Patriot Act has some bad things in it, but there's some really necessary things in terms of breaking down walls, barriers between agencies, sharing information, this, that.
Does the United States have all the power it needs to protect us from terrorism at this point?
Well, I would possibly argue that it already has too much in terms of the two versions of the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act.
It gives the federal government considerable ability to intrude in the daily lives and the public records and private records of citizens.
But, you know, taking that position, we certainly don't need another commission that would operate more like a witch hunt or a vigilante group going around looking for terrorists.
To me, the fact that this could even be considered as something necessary or desirable by 405 congressmen is appalling.
Now, I guess when you say terrorists now, most people, I guess, would think of, you know, an Arab extremist, some kind of Osama bin Laden follower and so forth.
But if you just go back, you know, not even 10 years, there were, you know, left-wing kids wearing all black in Seattle who were called terrorists for throwing bricks through Starbucks windows.
Is that terrorism?
Well, that's it.
The problem is there's no generally accepted definition of terrorism, at least in terms of what people are thinking and in terms of when people carry out a criminal act like throwing a brick through a window.
I mean, where is the line between criminal acts and terrorism?
This is not really a very clear line.
And let me point out that, interestingly enough, when this bill was being considered in committee in the Congress, the only group that I know that actually went and spoke as expert testimony was the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles.
And they basically said that anybody who's questioning the established account of 9-11, as you probably know, there are some groups of scientists and architects who have questioned some of the accounts and also people like Justin Raimondo who have questioned Israeli involvement in it.
Anyway, the Wiesenthal Center said that all of these groups should be considered homegrown terrorists.
Now, to me, that's just funny because there are so many 9-11 kooks in this country of all different variations and descriptions, how anybody's going to even call them a group or begin to round them up, good luck.
I mean, I guess if believing in 9-11 conspiracy theories is terrorism, then I expect for full-scale martial law to be declared here in Austin, Texas tomorrow.
Well, I hope you're not right.
But certainly, I mean, when you open the door to this kind of thinking, that's exactly what can come about.
And that's why I'm very concerned in particular about this bill.
The other interesting thing about this bill is that it has flown completely under the screen.
There's been no discussion of it in the mainstream media, and it basically has just surfaced in the last couple days on some blogs and alternative media.
This is astonishing.
This is, to me, a major attack on our liberties.
You know, going back to the hype before the Y2K thing and the turnover at the Millennium, there was an FBI report that I guess they were passing out to local jurisdictions, local police around the country called Project Megiddo, where they said, you know, somebody's got a constitution in their glove box, they might be a terrorist and somebody who goes to anti-abortion meetings regularly or is a member of a church that we've never heard of or, you know, 500 things that are innocuous in and of themselves, you may very well be dealing with a terrorist if it's someone who, for example, can tell you what the Fourth Amendment says without reading it.
That's right.
Yeah, well, obviously reading the Constitution is becoming an indictable offense.
Yeah, wow.
And see, that's really scary.
We would expect that if anybody among the general public is going to support this kind of thing, it would be, you know, the right wing, the people who are still standing behind their president and so forth.
But that ought to be a wake up call that, oh, so you're a member of a gun club, huh?
That's kind of suspicious.
Oh, you're opposed to abortion, huh?
Well, and now all of a sudden, basically anybody who agrees with whatever the government's doing about anything could be called a terrorist at some point here.
The other scary fact is that a lot of the people who are pushing this legislation, like Jane Harman, are liberal Democrats.
They're admittedly Democrats that have been basically pro-war ever since before Iraq started.
But nevertheless, these are Democrats that are pushing these programs, as well as the Republicans from their side.
When this thing came up for a vote, it was two weeks ago, no, actually it was October 24th, got 405 votes.
Absolutely crazy.
That's out of 435.
Yeah, whatever, of course, 65, but I'm not sure.
And now, Jane Harman, help me if my memory's faulty here, Phil, but wasn't she supposed to be the head of the Intelligence Committee until it came out that she was under investigation from the FBI for illegal ties with the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee?
Yeah, that's correct.
When the Democrats swept into Congress last year, she had long been on the Intelligence Committee and was apparently the favorite to take it over.
But then it turned out that she was involved in that activity that you're describing, and also I understand there were some leaks of documents and that sort of thing that it was suspected that she might have been or her staff might have been involved in.
Do you know if that's an ongoing investigation still?
I haven't seen anything in the media, but one would not expect to see anything.
I don't know.
Well, I have to tell you, I think your predictive powers about where this thing is headed are pretty on the spot here when you talk about, well, who's going to be an expert?
Who are they going to turn to for advice about deciding who's a terrorist and who's not and so forth?
They're going to go to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the American Enterprise Institute and hire a bunch of neo-con crazies to be the ones to define who else is a terrorist.
That's right.
There's no question about that.
Invariably, when they call in an expert, they call in Daniel Pipes or they call in Steve Emerson, call in Frank Gaffney.
They call in all these people that have a significant anti-Muslim agenda, and what do they expect to get as a result?
That's exactly what's going to happen.
We've already seen David Horowitz and these guys going, I guess they call it academic freedom or something, where they go around trying to shut the mouth of any professor who disagrees with the global terror war?
That's exactly right.
Anybody who disagrees with the war on terror and the way it's being implemented is labeled as anti-American.
Also, of course, there's the Israeli agenda.
Any professor at a university who's critical of Israel is also thrown into the same bag.
Well, I don't know.
In a sense, it almost serves the liberal university types right for all they did to shut down free speech during the 1990s, but I guess this is the chickens coming home to roost kind of thing.
Yeah, it's funny.
You're exactly right.
When you start taking away people's rights and people's liberties, there's no going back.
Eventually, the situation just turns around and bites you on the rear.
You wind up being a victim just like everybody else.
You're absolutely right.
The liberal consensus on American campuses shut out the conservative voices for a long time, and now all of a sudden they're saying that it's payback.
It's funny, too.
You even talk about in your article how the House Unknown American Activities Committee was originally founded not just by a communist, but actually by an agent of the Soviet government, the only actual Russian spy known to have ever served in the U.S. House of Representatives.
He's the guy who founded the damn thing in the first place before all the big second red scare and all that.
Yeah, he was out to get the fascists, but of course he was doing that on behalf of the Soviet Union, and yeah, he founded it.
And then, of course, if you say House Unknown American Activities Committee now, all anybody remembers is the persecution of people who lean left, but there you go.
Yep, yep.
That's the way it works.
It's funny, too.
You know, I was reading through your article here and you talk about the language used in the act about, you know, what's dangerous and what's not, and they talk about people with extremist belief systems.
And I thought, well, so are they talking about the guys at the American Enterprise Institute need to be all rounded up and thrown in prison here?
I mean, they're the ones who seem to have the least connection to reality and the most connection to an ideology of violence.
Yeah, well, you know, obviously you and I would like to see perhaps some action in that direction, but that's kind of unlikely.
I think obviously the language is deliberately vague to permit this commission to do basically what it wants to do.
And what it's going to do, of course, is it's not going to go after polygamists.
It's going to go after Muslims and Muslim groups, and it's going to do this on the basis of information given to it by people that have a very clear agenda.
Yeah, and then once Hillary Clinton's the president, then they'll go after the polygamists.
We'll have some more Waco massacres around.
Now, let me ask you about this.
I wrote an article with David Beto for LewRockwell.com about why in my view Ron Paul is right about the terrorist threat to this country and why he has been right.
And therefore why Republicans ought to go ahead and vote for the guy because, hey, he's right about the one issue that you're scared he's not right about, et cetera.
And I was just wondering if I could get you to chime in here about, never mind the war on terror, Phil, but what about the war on Al Qaeda?
What is the threat from Al Qaeda?
How many members are there who will do what Osama bin Laden says?
Where are they?
How much power do they have?
How much danger are we in?
What needs to be done to end the war against Al Qaeda so that it's over?
Well, that's a whole bunch of questions.
The fact is that Al Qaeda, and I have to rely to a large extent on what has appeared in the media from government sources, that Al Qaeda has succeeded in reconstituting itself.
It's a serious threat in that it's capable of carrying out terrorist acts in many parts of the world and that we have to view this in the most deliberative way and realize that it is a serious problem.
That said, the group has largely decentralized.
It has done a response to pressure on it.
It realizes it can't communicate by cell phones.
It can't move money around.
It can't do these sorts of things, which means that the groups operating in various countries and in various regions are pretty much autonomous.
That makes them both stronger in terms of catching them, and it makes them weaker in terms of being able to carry out large-scale missions.
The other issue, of course, is what we as Americans should do in response to this.
Basically, what we should do is put it into a perspective, and the perspective is that Al Qaeda is not a threat to our national existence, is not necessarily even going to be able to stage any major terrorist attacks against the U.S. in the foreseeable future.
So we have to put this in context and continue efforts to try to kill and capture its leadership insofar as that's politically, militarily, and in terms of intelligence, feasible.
We should continue to work with people around the world in an amicable way, not pressuring them to do things that are against their national interests necessarily, but trying to get a cooperative effort going worldwide.
Eventually, the terrorism problem, which is fueled by situations like what's going on in Iraq, is manageable.
So if, for example, you were Bush's deputy national security adviser or something, and Hadley was sick for a day, and you were allowed to address George Bush, you would tell him basically that overreacting makes the problem worse, that what he needs to do is take kind of a moderate approach, a deliberately extra-reasonable approach to the problem?
Yeah, you have to do basically what the Europeans did when they were confronted by terrorism in the 70s and thereafter.
Terrorism is a law enforcement and an intelligence problem.
It's not a military problem.
And it's fueled by specific issues.
And the fact is that Al Qaeda has become enormously popular because of the horrific effect of the Iraq War and also of Bush's heavy-handed war on terrorism.
So you try to take away the causes as much as you can, you treat these people like what they are, which is criminals, and you go after them.
And eventually, as the Europeans did in the case of the IRA in Britain, the Basque terrorists in Spain, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army faction in Germany, these groups are defeatable.
Okay, now when you look at Iraq and you see the so-called Sunni awakening where in Anbar province and other areas where the Sunni insurgency basically had a deal with so-called Al Qaeda in Iraq, it seems like in the last half a year or so, a deal has been made where the local Sunnis will accept American weapons and American money and turn on Al Qaeda in Iraq, the so-called foreign fighter jihadist types who have gone there to fight.
Have you been or are you surprised at the ease in which the local Sunni insurgents in Iraq were able to just flick Al Qaeda in Iraq off like a switch?
I'm not surprised at all.
And in fact, if you go back about a year or more, you will see that people like Michael Scherer were predicting that this is precisely what would happen when the political winds shift a little bit.
This was a marriage of convenience.
This wasn't a real affinity between the two groups.
They have a lot of things that they do not share.
And certainly as soon as the political circumstances became such that the Sunni leadership in the tribal areas decided that the relationship with Al Qaeda was more damaging to their people than it was helpful, they turned it off.
Now, I forget which article it was.
I think it was the article that you wrote about this homegrown terrorism prevention act.
You talked about this fantasy universe that the American people live in where we are beset by enemies on all sides.
And I just wonder if you can kind of compare and contrast what you think the average American has been led to believe about America's situation in the world versus where we really sit.
Well, I mean, if you listen to the Giuliani's and the Romney's and indeed the Cheney's, you would get this vision of the United States under siege by terrorism.
And we have to do everything that we can do to destroy this menace and that there are no reasons for this except for the fact that they irrationally hate us and that we are good and they are bad.
This is a bizarre view of the world and the fact that so many of our leaders can indulge themselves in expressing this view is probably a reason why we have no credibility anywhere.
The United States, as we saw with the Arab-Israeli farce yesterday, has no credibility.
What the United States does by and large is some kind of pantomime that has no point.
Now, when you say the farce yesterday, you're referring to the Annapolis peace conference there?
Yes, I am.
And in what sense do you consider that to be nothing but a farce?
Well, because it did nothing.
The Israelis and Palestinians have agreed to talk again, but it did not resolve a single issue that divides the Israelis and the Palestinians.
So, it's not one step closer.
It's not a step in any direction.
It doesn't lend itself to any kinds of policies that will lead to a resolution.
Anyone who has followed the issue knows that the fundamental issue that makes a peace agreement hard to achieve, to use a bit of a euphemism, is the fact of the Israeli settlements.
Until the settlements and the occupation that those settlements represent are addressed, no solution to this problem is possible.
Now, yesterday Charles Goyette interviewed Dennis Ross, and he said, well, nothing is possible until Hamas admits that Israel has the right to exist, etc., and that they refuse to do that.
Well, Dennis Ross, of course, works for an Israeli lobbying group and has long been identified as coming down on that side of the argument, so I'm not surprised to hear him say that.
Hamas has signaled on numerous occasions that it is open to some modification of its views if there is forward motion in other areas.
So, all these issues are interconnected to a certain extent, but the fundamental physical fact that makes peace between the two sides impossible is the settlement issue.
And Dennis Ross can dance around that all he wants, but it's not correct to say that Hamas is the problem.
Hamas is an issue, but Hamas is not the central problem.
It's interesting what you say about the loss of credibility, not just from American actions, but I guess you seem to imply just from foreigners around the world watching American television and saying, oh my God, these people live on a different planet Earth than the rest of us.
Well, I certainly hope that nobody around the world is watching any of the presidential debates, because that would be a scary thought if they actually thought that these people are contenders for the presidency of the United States after eight years of George Bush.
At that point, we might as well all pack it in as a country.
You think it's that bad, huh?
With the exception of the people who have been marginalized by their own parties, people like Ron Paul, people like Kucinik, gravel, Biden to a certain extent, nobody's talking any sense about anything.
All right, now let's see if we can wrap up the interview here about Iran.
You wrote an article, your last one for Antiwar.com.
It should be Antiwar.com/Giraldi.
People can find it.
It's a conservative view of Iran, and of course you're a contributing editor or something like that to the American Conservative magazine.
I know from talking with you in the past, you're no liberal leftist Democrat of any description.
So please, kind of outline form, share with us your conservative view of Iran, Phil.
Yeah, well, I tried to make the point in that article that a traditional conservative should not support a war policy.
If you go back to the roots of conservatism, even the political roots, going back to Barry Goldwater and through Ronald Reagan, you would discover that the traditional conservative philosophy is towards more liberty for the individuals, smaller government, less intrusion in people's lives, no involvement in wars overseas that are anything but required by a vital national interest.
So I'm trying to say, look, conservatives, let's kind of think back in terms of what our traditional values are.
And George Bush, and indeed his father, are fake conservatives.
They use the conservative label to basically validate their policies, but they are not conservatives in any traditional sense.
So Republican conservatives or any other kind of conservatives really should not be supporting these policies and should not be voting for people who are promising more of the same.
Yeah, but Iran has promised to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and they're working on nuclear weapons and they're killing our guys in Iraq and they're a terrible threat and they've got to be confronted.
You want to just do nothing in the face of all this aggression?
Well, I think that first of all, a lot of those claims are not totally substantiated by the evidence.
And what I'm saying to conservatives also is to be skeptical based on what happened in Iraq and to look at all these claims very carefully to see if they're really true or not.
As you know, I'm sure the claim about Iran saying that it would wipe Israel off the map is not just a mistranslation.
It's a complete misconstruing of a number of statements of Ahmadinejad that were kind of glued together.
And also the status of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, of course, is very debated.
The IAEA basically in a report that came out two weeks ago said that Iran was largely in compliance, but that's not the way it was reported in the U.S. media.
Right, it was actually reported exactly the opposite in the New York Times and the Washington Post.
It made it sound like the IAEA has nothing but a list of complaints about Iranian intransigence.
That's exactly right.
So what I'm saying to the conservative audience out there, and indeed to any audience, is to be very skeptical about what you read and what you hear.
And basically Iran is, and I'm sure you have heard, the Israeli foreign minister, Chippi Livni, has said privately that the whole Iran situation has been blown up out of proportion and that the problem posed by Iran is containable.
And that's coming from an Israeli hardliner who was in the intelligence service who is speaking candidly.
That was Livni even talking about if they had nuclear weapons.
Right, that's assuming they had them, which of course is not a given.
So there are many shades of gray involved in this debate, and I would not for a second say in any way minimize the threat posed by any country in that region with a nuclear weapon.
But at the same time, we have to look at it carefully and see if it's a serious threat and see what exactly it would mean in terms of consequences downstream.
Now, I want to just read a little bit from the first paragraph of this article.
Again, a conservative view of Iran, the smoke and mirrors column at antiwar.com.
The likelihood of war that will be a catastrophe for both belligerence and almost certainly for the entire Middle East and possibly for the world at large remains at a high level.
War might even be regarded as inevitable because it is the only option remaining for decision makers in Washington who have effectively closed the door on other approaches that might reduce the level of hostility.
So I guess what you're telling me is that there are some open questions about the nuclear program, there are a lot of accusations about the Iranians did this and did that, and yet on the Washington, D.C. end, the policy makers have basically painted themselves into a corner where they really have no option at all but war if they mean to carry through on their policy.
Yeah, this is what Dick Cheney refers to as narrowing the options.
It means that if you don't have a middle ground that you can go to to avoid the more horrific options, the horrific options are all that remain on the table, and I'm afraid that's what essentially has been done.
Condoleezza Rice is constantly asserting that the United States is open to diplomacy with Iran, but it's not true.
The United States has basically closed the door to diplomacy unless Iran capitulates on every key issue before the negotiating starts.
So that's not diplomacy.
So if you've cut off the diplomacy, if you've cut off other options of dealing with the Iranians or trying to work with them, what are you left with?
Let me ask you this.
I guess about a year ago, almost a year ago, it was reported that the Joint Chiefs...
Well, it was reported, I guess, in the spring, but it was right about a year ago that this happened, supposedly, was George Bush went and met the Joint Chiefs staff in the bunker or whatever at the Pentagon, and they told him, listen, we don't want to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities.
I love part of this was the reason.
We don't know where it all is, as in there must be secret stuff or what have you.
But anyway, I guess it was the leaders of the military were telling George Bush, war on Iran, no deal.
And then Gareth Porter's reporting has basically drawn the picture that the policymakers decided that if they could pin deaths of Americans in Iraq on the Iranians, that they could get the military to go along with beginning a war against training facilities, so-called, and weapons caches and Revolutionary Guard Corps stations in Iran in order to get the war started, and that, I guess, the policymakers figured that if they could use attacks on Americans in Iraq as the pretext to get the war started rather than an inevitable nuclear weapon or whatever as their excuse for war, that they would then be more successful in bringing the military guys along.
Do you think that that's about right, that they have a better chance of getting Admiral Fallon and the rest of these guys on board for the war if they can pin it on a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident happening on the ground in Iraq rather than just we have to stop them before they get an atom bomb?
No, I don't think that's actually true.
I think that Fallon and Gates and these other people who are indeed resisting the march to war are too smart to be taken in that way.
But what they're trying to do is they're trying to create popular pressure through the media, which of course is always subservient to these kinds of stories, and build up the pressure where the military won't be able to effectively resist if there is an eventual attack on Iran.
And basically, Seymour Hersh has reported the same sort of thing, and this is one of the most ridiculous concepts ever, that somehow this will be a selective war where you're going to hit only certain targets, and at the end of it, hitting these targets, you're going to tell the Iranians, okay, it's over.
It doesn't quite work that way in the real world.
This idea that you only hit training centers or you only hit al-Quds force or you only hit the Revolutionary Guard is fallacious, because you're attacking the Iranian state, you're attacking the Iranian people, and that's how they're going to perceive it.
Well, our guys probably know that, right?
They want to hit a nuclear target here or a Quds force target there just to get the damn thing started, right?
That's exactly what people like Cheney or Abrams, who are in favor of a war against Iran, are thinking, that basically you have to, you narrow the options, you make it so that only certain choices are being discussed in the media, only certain choices are being proposed by the government, and that those options will inevitably lead to warfare.
Now, there's political considerations here, too.
If they start a war with Iran before the primaries, they might as well just hand the nomination to Ron Paul.
They don't want to do that.
Well, I think it might not be that they're going to hand the nomination to Ron Paul.
Another way to look at it is if you time it right, you create sort of a war hysteria in the United States, which could favor people like McCain and Romney and Giuliani.
So it depends on the timing, and if we started a war with Iran and it went badly fairly quickly, that would help a peace candidate.
But I'm not so sure that they're thinking that way.
Now, it's been reported that Admiral Fallon would resign before letting a war like this happen on his watch.
Are you confident that that would happen?
No, I'm not confident that would happen.
Too many times we've kind of heard that senior military officers were willing to play the Trump card and resign.
Admiral Seymour Hersh has reported that a couple times in different contexts.
First of all, Fallon, of course, has not told anyone that he said that, that this has been reported by sources that are not Fallon.
Right, it was hearsay.
Yeah, so, I mean, he might not have said it.
And there's a tradition of these military officers just basically, when they disagree with a policy like Zinni did and a number of others have done, they essentially allow themselves to be retired.
They don't resign.
I wish they would resign, but they don't.
That really is how it went down in the run-up to the war in Iraq, too, isn't it?
Yes, it is, exactly.
There were a lot of people who had misgivings about it, both in the intelligence community and in the military.
Nothing.
A couple of State Department officers, as you might recall, did resign.
But that was it.
Well, and I think this is the kind of thing that everybody's hanging their hat on is, well, at least the military is opposed to it.
But if military opposition won't stop it, if Bush's poll numbers can't stop it, I mean, I'm not going to put one moment of faith in the Democrats in the House and the Senate to stop it.
Is there anything in between Dick Cheney and war with Iran right now?
Well, the way I see it right now is that I think Bush and the people around him, not to include Cheney, are gun-shy as a result of what happened in Iraq.
And they're probably not willing to go to war with Iran unless Iran were, say, next spring or something, suddenly to pop up with a nuclear weapon in hand.
I think short of that, they're not willing to go to war with Iran.
But there's a considerable danger that, again, with this narrow option playing field, that something can happen that will escalate.
And if something happens that escalates, it could very, very easily lead to war.
And that's my biggest fear right now.
I think that the president is probably not willing to pull the trigger, barring some dramatic change, but the sense that with these narrowed options, with no negotiations going on with Iran, something could easily escalate into a war.
Now, you're a retired CIA guy, and I'm sure you still have lots of friends and acquaintances in the intelligence community and so forth.
I know you live somewhere near D.C. up there.
Tell me this.
Does the CIA guys, the guys who write up the National Intelligence Estimate, the guys you talk with on the weekend, whatever, does the CIA believe that starting this war will help make Jesus come back faster?
Well...
That's not in the N.I.
E.?
That probably is one of the redacted paragraphs.
Oh, I get it, yeah, one of those footnotes that they're still haggling over.
Yeah, I think that most CIA officers are essentially pagans, and are not that concerned about the second coming.
Yeah, they believe in the state before you.
Well, they believe, obviously, in a different form of government, probably a form of government that none of us would be comfortable with.
All right, well, I really appreciate your insight today.
Everybody, Philip Giraldi is a former CIA and DIA officer.
You can read what he writes in the American Conservative magazine, at the National Interest, antiwar.com, and the Huffington Post.
Thanks a lot for your time today, Phil.
Thank you, Scott.
