12/26/12 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, Shel, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.scotthorton.org is my website.
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And our next guest is Philip Giraldi, former CIA officer, executive director of the Council for the National Interest, and writer for the American Conservative magazine, as well as antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
Fine, Scott, how are you?
How was your holiday?
It was real good.
How about yours?
It was pretty good.
I had the whole family here, so it was a little bit too busy, but it was fun.
Well, right on.
Good times.
Yeah, yeah, I love the holidays.
Let's talk about 2013.
You're the executive director of the Council for the National Interest, which is the pro-American foreign policy lobby in D.C., I think the only one.
So what are y'all's plans for the new year?
Well, the new year, we're going to be expanding our activities considerably.
We have plans for a major conference that we'll be looking at the broader aspects of the Israel-American relationship.
We're going to have speakers like Chas Freeman, Paul Pilar, possibly Mearsheimer and Walt, and people like that.
We'll be talking about it from a perspective of what it does or doesn't do for the United States.
So that's our big, big item coming up probably in April.
We're also doing some panel discussions of the Islamophobia issue, which, of course, ties in with Christian Zionism and what the Christian Zionists have been promoting in a political sense.
So we're going to be focusing on sort of the political aspects of a lot of the things that are going on day to day.
Right on.
Yeah.
Well, that's really great to hear.
And, you know, especially that Islamophobia topic, I don't think it's possible for that to get too much attention.
And there's so many people who, you know, I don't know, I guess the I hate to say it, but the SPLC is actually sort of kind of good on this, right?
And I know that like the Center for American Progress, they had Eli Clifton do that great study.
And Max Blumenthal, of course, is another progressive writer who has covered this real well for Tom Dispatch.
But just, you know, the more symposiums you can have with people who aren't Muslims like yourself, explain why you know that this is a bunch of crap is, you know, I think that's so powerful.
You know, people, everyone in America needs to know that that's going on, that like here are conservative Americans, a former CIA officer formerly stationed in the Middle East region and everything telling you that this whole be afraid of Islam thing is just not where it's at.
Yeah, I had an interesting experience just before the holidays where I did some some speaking in front of groups of kind of tea partiers and to a certain extent, libertarians, mixed groups in the Carolinas.
And virtually every time I spoke, the issue of Islam of Islam came up and with people saying that that Muslims are taking over the United States and that Sharia law is about to become the ruling law in the United States.
I mean, these these concepts are so ridiculous and they have political consequences because the even if people in the US aren't watching this kind of stuff very closely in the Islamic world, they are watching it.
And they and they have really a very negative impression of what the United States is up to that derives from this.
Right.
Well, and of course, you know, for I don't know exactly how it is.
And I can't say I know too many Muslims, but I know there are lots in Austin, Texas and all over this country.
And it seems like, you know, it's not quite the Jim Crow South.
But on the other hand, it's kind of a time of intimidation around here.
It's you know, it's not even as bad as it was in, say, 2002 or something.
But still, you know, it seems like that kind of bad propaganda against an entire class of people like that can be very harmful for the long term, for the media.
That's right.
And it has political consequences in that that it basically is what drives a lot of this sense of we have, you know, a right to be over in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and everything like that, because these people, there's something wrong with them and they really don't know how to how to govern themselves.
You know, it's a broader concept.
And that's that's what's really scary about the whole thing.
And when you explain to them that Muslims constitute something less than two percent of the U.S. population and they have a very good success rate on being assimilated and a very low crime rate, people are surprised.
Yeah, they don't even really have any idea.
Right.
It's portrayed like there's oh, man, what are we going to do?
They're coming.
Yeah, that's right.
That's it.
Yeah.
And and you're right, too.
It's almost like about the foreign policy angle there where the domestic red scare helps bolster the foreign cold war that like, my God, there's a commie under every bed.
If they're that successful at infiltrating our society here in North America, just think how unstoppable their international juggernaut must really be.
You know, that's right.
That's how it plays out.
Sure.
So, you know, the fact that, you know, local talk radio hosts are saying, oh, my God, this Sharia thing then oversees that Islamo fascist caliphate of the imagination gets colored in that much more and becomes like there must be some major foreign force behind this.
All right.
Well, anyway, I think that's great that the Council for the National Interest takes that on.
I think it's such an important thing.
And, you know, especially when the economy is bad and, you know, typically I'll point my finger at conservatives.
They look for the weak to pick on whether it's, you know, immigrants or religious minority or gays or somebody else's somebody weaker and easier to beat on is is the one to blame for all the bad times and that kind of thing.
And and that kind of thing can also get very out of hand.
So I really like seeing it debunked, especially from the right.
If I don't know if it's fair to characterize the entire CNI that way, but I know, you know, you write for the American conservative for a reason.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm basically the conservative on board.
And but essentially, we all see it the same way that this this kind of race baiting and religion baiting is just it's not productive.
It's never been productive for anybody anywhere.
And it's a mistake to think now that somehow it's different.
It's not different.
It's the same thing.
Well, now, for people watching the news lately, I don't know how invested in this you are, but it has been quite a spectacle to see the Israel lobby say that anybody who says there's an Israel lobby is an anti-Semite and the Israel lobby must assemble to destroy them.
And apparently that argument is winning.
Are they winning?
It doesn't look to me like Hagel is going to get the nomination.
What do you think?
I do not think Hagel is going to get the nomination.
I think that right from the beginning, this was the same thing that the president pulled with Susan Rice, where the name gets floated to see what kind of reaction there is.
And if there's any appreciable reaction, the president goes another way.
And I think that's what we're going to see.
And I never felt that Hagel had a good shot at this.
Scott McConnell writing just just now over at the American conservative website, saying that he's picked up stuff this weekend that indicates that the move is away from Hagel.
Yeah, I was sort of surprised they even raised the issue.
I mean, why get themselves in such trouble in the in the days leading up to the reinauguration here?
Yeah, well, there's been a lot of theories about what all this means.
I mean, to a certain extent, you could argue that Obama is in a way sticking it to the Israeli lobby by making them show their power in a way that many Americans will find unpalatable.
I'm not so sure it's that subtle.
I just think that Hagel seemed to be a good choice because he was a Republican or at one time was a Republican.
And I think Obama seriously at least considered him in a way.
But I think that he he played the whole thing in this rather cautious way to make sure that he wouldn't be left there, you know, looking like he made a bad choice.
And I think he's going to walk away from it.
But, you know, it's it's it's typical that a guy basically, as far as I can tell, there's a lot of debate, would be a good choice and very well qualified for the position and might be a voice in the government that actually, you know, instead of being a yes man, would provide some alternative ways of looking at things like Chas Freeman was four years ago, is is being marginalized basically for the same reasons.
Well, it sounds to me like, you know, they're pretending he's a Chas Freeman.
That guy actually seemed to be a little bit brave when it came to saying what he thought about something, whereas Hagel, to me, is just another Bob Gates.
What's so unacceptable about that?
Yeah, you're right.
If anything, Hagel is is a much more cautious version of a Chas Freeman.
If you want to put him in that same basket.
But yeah, he's just Colin Powell to me.
Yeah, yeah.
That's why the whole objection to him is so ridiculous.
The it's just, you know, it's it's unfortunate.
But I think at senior levels in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, to include the Defense Department, the the the loyalty to what Likud Israel represents seems to be a litmus test.
And unfortunately, that's that seems to be what's played out here.
I don't see any other way to interpret it.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I didn't really set up this part of the conversation very well, because I don't really explain for the people haven't been watching about.
Well, former Senator Hagel was floated as a possible new secretary of defense in the Israel lobby, led by Bill Kristol and the neocons completely flipped out.
And then now, of course, Barack Obama, who's got to be the biggest wimp to ever be an American president, is backing down, looks like.
And, you know, it's funny because I'm pretty much in the school that thinks that all American presidents are horrible war criminals who ought to be dug up and tried and hanged.
And yet Obama, I think maybe uniquely is just the biggest wuss ever.
I've never I could never imagine a president who would just say one thing and then immediately back down only to turn right around and say another thing and back down from that and another thing and back down from that.
Who is he trying to prove?
It's ridiculous.
It's like a Saturday Night Live skit or something.
Well, I think I think to a certain extent, it is his personality.
He's a you know, he's a he's one of these classic kind of compromisers who was always kind of looking over his shoulder to make sure that he's not being second guessed.
But I think at the same time, it's a it's a symptom of how weak he is politically.
I mean, he's got he's still got a House of Representatives that's Republican dominated.
He has a razor thin margin in the Senate.
And essentially, he's he's nervous about what the media is saying about him.
And he's got a lot of things that are that he floats that he he really doesn't get behind like this budget talk stuff.
I don't know what you're seeing in the paper you read, but it looks like he's going to accept the Bush tax increases now as as which is a complete back down, as you point out, from what he said a month ago.
You mean the tax cuts?
That way, he's going to have to be reading it.
So I don't know.
Yeah, he's going to he's going to accept the Bush tax cuts instead of a of a tax increase.
That seems to be what he's agreeing to now.
Yeah, well, I'm in favor of that.
Only, of course, it's just going to come at the expense of the poorest people on welfare and that kind of thing.
Food stamps and unemployment benefits and that sort of stuff.
Well, that's that's the way, you know, the people who are politically powerful don't pay the price.
Yep, afraid so.
Well, and what a great segue into the torture chronicle.
Your piece at the American Conservative here about this new classified Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Now, are you talking to former CIA guys and current CIA guys who've read this thing and know all about it or just from the press here?
No, I don't know anyone who's actually seen it.
It's very, very tightly held.
Apparently at CIA, apparently the only people who've seen it are two or three top people and the and the CIA corporate council that they're the only ones who have reviewed it, as far as I understand it.
Now, this is a 6,000 page Senate.
I'm sorry, a 6,000 page Senate Intelligence Committee investigation.
Wow.
Right.
With 35,000 footnotes and it interviewed, what, 50?
It reviewed three million documents, official documents as part of the input of the process.
That's why it's taking so long.
It's taking two years to write.
But it concluded clearly, according to Dianne Feinstein, who has seen the whole document and obviously was involved in its creation, that the use of torture accomplished absolutely nothing.
It did not lead to the death of bin Laden.
And basically in every single CIA case, and they examined every single one, it did not produce information that could not have been produced in another way.
Mm hmm.
So I guess that's the closest that the tour, the pro torturers can get on the bin Laden spin here is that someone who had been tortured at some point said something that they later found out from another place to that indicated something that was as close as they could get.
Right.
Is that even?
Yeah, that's right.
They they they were they were basically unable to demonstrate that there was any unique information coming out of torture that led to any positive result in terms of the so called war on terror.
So it's like it completely destroyed the argument.
Of course, the Republicans refused to approve the report because it is critical, intrinsically critical of the Bush administration and what the administration was doing.
And and so it's that kind of thing with a bit of political football.
But it seems to me that the conclusions are clear.
They've demonstrated that torture does not work.
And also, of course, the political consequences of Abu Ghraib and places where people were tortured are have been so negative for the United States.
I would go one step farther and argue that torture has had a major negative effect on the United States in terms of national security and national defense.
Well, yeah, you know, I guess the most direct evidence of that that I know of is the testimony of, well, it's not all that direct.
I know that the pseudonymous Matthew Alexander, the interrogator from the Iraq war, who said that time after time after time when he was interviewing the foreigners, the so-called al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Libyans, the Syrians, the Saudis who were traveling to Iraq to fight in the Sunni based insurgency against the American occupation, that they said, you know, what radicalized them and made them decide to come was the pictures from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prison.
They said, you know, occupying Arab land and torturing people.
And so they made the trek to go and join in the fight.
Yeah, that's right.
And indeed, it even radicalized a lot of Americans, I think, too.
I know a lot of American friends of mine who suddenly became very negative about the war and very negative about aspects of U.S. national security policy as a result of those pictures and as a result of the torture being carried out by the U.S. government.
I think it's not surprising that people would kind of move in that direction.
Yeah.
And of course, again, that's the whole point of terrorism in the first place, right, is to provoke the overreaction that leads to more recruitment for the terrorist side and overextension for the targets.
Well, that's what bin Laden said right from the beginning.
He wanted to provoke the United States into overreacting and eventually destroy its economy.
Now, that's quite an amazing prediction because it's been pretty accurate.
And now, all right, so our previous guest was Jonathan Landay from McClatchy Newspapers.
And of course, he famously, I hope for people in the audience that you guys know that he was debunking all the aluminum tubes and all the rest of that for Knight Ritter back in 2002.
His journalism could have stopped the war if The Post and The Times had been running it, which they didn't.
But anyway, he was on the show and he wrote a piece back in, I guess, 2009, where he showed a very direct correlation between torture right before and right after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that was meant to produce the result that captured al-Qaeda guys who, I guess, would be presumably legitimately tied to al-Qaeda, would be tortured into saying that they were also friends of Saddam Hussein.
And that included that guy, Sheik Al-Libi, who claimed that Saddam had taught al-Qaeda how to use chemical weapons and taught them how to hijack airplanes, wink, wink, because he figured out real quick that that was what his torturers wanted to hear.
So you see, torture does work.
If that's what you're going for, tell me a story.
Yeah, a false confession is always welcome.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, you are friends with Saddam Hussein, aren't you?
Yeah.
No, McClatchy was one of the few media outlets that was reporting honorably at that time, and they were quite good, and I have a lot of respect for them.
Yep.
Well, so, okay, so that's the torture thing.
And now, I guess, is there any reason to believe this thing could ever be leaked, 6,000 pages?
Is it going to take a Daniel Ellsberg heroic-type effort, or do you think the Congress will ever actually release it deliberately?
Well, because it's politically explosive, and that it really says awful things about the Bush administration, I don't think it'll ever be released willingly.
There would have to be a Daniel Ellsberg-type situation, I suspect, to get it out.
You know what amazes me more than that is, you saw my story on it, which appeared at the American Conservative, I guess, two weeks ago, and there was a feature article in the New York Times that I...
In fact, it wasn't a feature article.
It was kind of an op-ed about the report.
But, you know, there's been silence from the mainstream media, pretty much, about this.
Nothing.
There's no coverage of it.
To me, this is a major report, and it's a major conclusion that the American people have to know, because this torture was carried out in their name, whether they want to accept that as a truism or not.
But it was carried out in the name of the American people, and something that had to be done for national security.
So, I mean, there should be a lot more chatter about this, I think, but there isn't.
Well, and, you know, it is kind of confusing, too, because what a great thing for the Democrats to use against the Republicans.
I mean, it is that much of a...
I mean, it doesn't even cover the time after 2009, right?
So, for example, like Obama's renditions and that kind of thing.
I think the fact is that if you go back on the record, of course, there were a heck of a lot of Democrats that were complicit in this, too.
I mean, it mainly is an indictment of the Bush regime, because the Bush regime was the one that carried it out.
But there were a lot of Democrats that were on the various committees that were briefed on this.
And I think it's a bilateral indictment to a certain extent, which may explain why the Democrats are not keen on exploiting it.
Yeah, in fact, that was going to be one of my questions, but I forgot it.
Or maybe it's just kind of a comment.
I was surprised that Dianne Feinstein would push this hard.
Is that how this thing even got done?
Because wasn't she briefed?
Wouldn't she have been one of the people on the Gang of Eight or whatever?
I don't know what the politics of it were.
I know that this thing has been delayed for a long time, and as it turns out, it may have been delayed just because of the sheer volume.
But Feinstein was attacked, in fact, by someone after the report came out who said, yeah, and she knew all about it, meaning the torture.
So this is obviously going to, if they ever have to defend themselves, the Republicans are obviously going to defend themselves by saying this was bilateral.
Yeah, which, of course, it was.
And same thing for all the domestic spying and all that.
You have the heads of the House and the Senate from both parties and then the heads of the intelligence committees from both parties, minority and majority leaders and chairs and sub chairs and whatever.
And then that's it.
Right.
Those but those people, they know they are read into all of this stuff eventually.
Yeah, I think you can argue that a lot of them were confronted by a lot of this stuff.
They don't even read it, but they let a staff person read it and tell them what it means.
But the fact is, yeah, they were these people were complicit in the process.
They had, to a certain extent, full access or pretty close to full access in terms of what was going on.
And at that time, they just didn't care.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, you know, you wrote this thing for antiwar dot com about Christmas in Connecticut and your reflections on the mass shooting at the school there and the foreign policy and all that.
You want to talk about that?
Because you kind of tell a pretty compelling story about your your point of view on the Iraq war, for example.
Yeah, well, you know, I was I was somewhat, as I said in the article, I was somewhat disturbed because after the Connecticut massacre took place, I received a lot of emails and phone calls from friends who are kind of like me and that they're antiwar and come from various kinds of backgrounds, but many of them from more conservative backgrounds.
And and and they were kind of saying, oh, well, this is just like what we do in Pakistan.
This is like just like what we did in Iraq, like what we do every place we go.
We kill children and everything like that.
But what bothered me a little bit was that it to make that argument was kind of trivializing what happened up in Connecticut, because what happened up in Connecticut should be something that we as Americans should should have particular shame about and have particular shock and feelings about, because even the most horrific incidences in in places like Afghanistan, I mean, there's been a couple exceptions that are you don't find somebody lining up twenty five year olds and executing them with automatic weapons fire.
So I said, look, we have to we have to separate these two things.
We have to talk about how this is not a trivial incident or just one more incident of kids being killed.
But then I went on and said, look, the problem in the United States is that we have in the past 10 years have changed as a nation.
We've come to accept people being killed.
We've come to accept drone strike, killing five or six kids or in a wedding party.
Or we've we've come to accept that that the kids in Fallujah are being born with deformities as a result of of our military action.
We've accepted all this kind of stuff.
And all this stuff is shameful.
And we we we shouldn't view it all as one package, not should we ban magazines and guns or should we do this or should we do that?
We have to look at ourself as a nation and say how shameful this is and how terrible and how terribly we have behaved in the last 11 years.
And we have to start with that.
And and and when we're talking about Connecticut or talking about Afghanistan or Pakistan, we should be thinking that the evil is in us.
It's coming out of us.
And this is what has has these are the manifestations of it.
Yeah, that's what George Carlin was saying about the political parties and the politicians.
And he says, I don't complain about politicians because I figure this is who we are.
I mean, who are these people anyway?
They don't come from outer space.
They come out of our schools and our families and our churches and our neighborhoods.
And this is the best we can do.
And that, to me, is the real point of it's not about diminishing the the deaths in Connecticut to point out and highlight the deaths in Afghanistan.
I mean, you look at what that guy Bales is accused of doing in that massacre there, for example, and a lot of what's been going on this whole time.
It's just to point out that I mean, especially for me, it's about how can we listen to politicians crying crocodile tears for the kids in Connecticut like Barack Obama, who kills kids every day?
And in fact, it was just that very week.
It was what, three days before the massacre, something like that, where the Military Times was reporting the Marines saying, hey, listen, if a child displays possible hostile intent, then 12, 10 and eight years old is not too young to be killed by us in Afghanistan.
I mean, yeah, I cited that in my article.
Yeah, that basically the Marines had children with hostile intent is how they defined it.
You know, it's just that we have we have become a nation that accepts all this kind of stuff without question.
I pointed out that when Madeleine Albright made her famous comment about 500,000 Iraqi children dying as a result of sanctions, nobody called for her to resign.
I mean, you know, and this was under Clinton.
That's how many years ago.
It's pre 9-11.
And so we've been going down this road for a long time, this idea that American exceptionalism means you never have to say you're sorry, right?
Yeah, it's just the whole thing.
I've been totally depressed since Connecticut.
You know, it was like a whole week.
I couldn't sleep.
It's just like what what has happened to us?
Where have we where have we gone to come to this point?
And that's what we all should be thinking about.
Well, you know me, I'm going to always blame the state first, because really, you know, I don't know.
Most Americans say that they're religious, but I don't think they really are.
I think mostly the state is the closest thing we have to a religion in this society.
And just like I learned in junior college, you know, over there in England, they have their queen who's the head of state, but it's the prime minister who's the chief executive over here.
We don't have a head of state to represent us.
But boy, we sure do want one real bad.
We want some kind of, you know, Kennedy or whatever, like sub royalty to lead us here in this country.
And we'll settle for whoever happens to be the president.
But that's the same guy who happens to be the commander in chief of the military.
And and so there's nothing realistic about, yes, the standing army is this horrible, necessary evil that we must put up with to defend our liberty or anything, anything close to a realistic assessment of what a military is for in a free society.
Instead, you know, he's the grand marshal of America, you know, constantly on the march and the embodiment of all of his leadership value is in how many people he kills and how good of a job he does at it.
And and especially, you know, you look at the the Republicans are all such strutting tough guys, they pretend.
And then the Democrats got to outdo them by double because Democrat means wimp.
So they have to be even worse.
You know, it's you know, that's that's a trap we've gotten into.
It's just like it's a it's a it's like, you know, a kind of a shoplifter who keeps shoplifting because it's it's become a mental aberration of some kind or a killer who keeps killing.
I mean, we just we have to break the mold.
And unfortunately, that we we have a president now and any foreseeable president, including the sainted Rand Paul, who are not going to do anything on these issues.
It's just I don't know.
I don't know what the answer is.
I don't have an answer, I guess.
Yeah, well, that's all right.
None of us do.
I mean, at least you're looking at it with clear eyes.
But I mean, that's the whole thing is that, you know, you're always going to have evil and corruption in society.
The question is whether you and you know, I have to kind of blame Karl Rove.
Right.
What about that?
That is it really a lot of this like look at the torture debate, for example, in the Abu Ghraib pictures came out.
You say a lot of people that, you know, were very revolted by that.
But of course, a lot of people said, no, hell, yeah, I'm for Abu Ghraib then because I'm on that side.
I already decided that Bush is fighting for what's right and all of that.
And everybody who had joined up for Team Bush and Team Iraq Adventure and all of that, they all doubled down their bet on being pro torture and being 24 fans and all of that crap, you know?
Yeah.
Have you seen this movie, Valentino's Ghost?
No, it's going to be on PBS, I think, starting right after the first.
It's it was partially commissioned by PBS, but there are a number of others in it.
It features people like Robert Fisk, Mearsheimer and a number of people talking about the the images of Arabs and the images of Muslims in the United States.
And one of the interesting there were a number of quotations included in that just blew me away.
And one of the interesting ones was was Rush Limbaugh talking about Abu Ghraib, and he said it was just like a college frat prank.
And I heard that and I was thinking, my God, you know, how can anyone, anyone come out with a comment like that?
And as you are noting, it's politically driven.
It's essentially a political statement that we're the good guys and it really doesn't matter how much damage we do.
It's a college frat prank.
I just I was I was astonished by it.
Yeah, and and well, and he was just, you know, that was only at the very beginning.
And that just set the tone for the entire Republican, you know, especially talk radio kind of spin on the entire situation.
And so, yeah, I mean, it's just like you're saying in your article, this is, you know, it's already a rotten society halfway anyway, but it's just rotten worse from the head down, from the top down, from Washington, D.C., and all the corruption that makes the empire go.
And then, you know, the rest of us kind of internalize it.
It seems like we're becoming their worst nightmare, what they want us to be.
Yeah, I think I think that's absolutely true.
That's I think we've evolved into into this kind of monster state.
And it's it's it's it's a little bit hard to even understand, even though we're in the in the middle of the process.
It's made, you know, another point that made this movie was that it it it kind of it makes the entire world unintelligible to us because we've we've so framed the arguments in euphemisms and national, you know, extremist policies and things like that, that it's no longer possible to understand what's going on anywhere.
And I think that's an interesting point of view.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and especially as they've shown over and over for the consumers of Fox News and talk radio news, people who don't even care about politics and news and don't even pay attention to that stuff at all answer better on the current events quiz than the consumers of that.
Which really is something, you know, that echo chamber.
But it's so powerful.
And, you know, I was we're talking about on the show last week about how on the left side on certain issues, they're just as bad with the whole.
Hey, all three of us agree.
And so we sure are smart and right kind of thing.
Like when it comes to gun control, for example, you have that same kind of echo chamber effect where like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz agreeing that they are so smart that they ought to do this Iraq war.
You have just, you know, it's the perils of groupthink, right?
And that a book that came out about the Cuban Missile Crisis way back in the 60s or that know about the Bay of Pigs and how they had convinced themselves to do it, even though 15 things had already gone wrong.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the thing is, any argument you make, it all depends where you start.
And in the case of the Bay of Pigs, in the case of Iraq and everything else, they started with basic premises, which, of course, were completely wrong.
And as a result, the result, the result that comes out the other end is also wrong.
But of course, you know, when you're in the middle of the process and you start in the middle, even very smart people can be very dumb.
Well, and of course, you know, when it's a subject like torture, only torture can save Western civilization.
Not even a six thousand page report is going to address the question of whether torturing people is a dismissal and an abandonment of what made the West the West and a return to barbarism.
And what the hell is worth saving anyway if we're all a bunch of torturers?
Yeah.
And there were good reasons why torture has been has been made illegal in virtually every society in existence.
Yeah.
We're leading the way back.
Right.
All right.
Thanks again, Phil.
It's always great to talk to you.
Happy New Year.
And to you, Scott.
Thanks.
Everybody.
That's Phil Giraldi from the Council for the National Interest.
It's Council for the National Interest dot org and the American Conservative Magazine.
And of course, antiwar dot com.
Christmas in Connecticut is the latest there.
And so here I got to play a couple of spots and then I'll be back in just a sec.
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