08/01/13 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

Hey all, Scott Worden here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Worden.
This is my show, the Scott Worden Show.
Appreciate y'all tuning in.
Our first guest today is the great Philip Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer, but now he's a good guy.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest and writes, of course, for the American Conservative Magazine and for antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today on the show.
Lots and lots of stuff to talk about, but first of all, I've got to ask you this.
Did you see this thing about if you Google pressure cookers and backpacks, the Joint Terrorism Task Force comes to kick in your door?
Yeah, that's right.
Since the NSA is able to do word searches on your emailings, yeah, you immediately become suspect.
So this guy, apparently he was Googling backpacks in one room.
His wife was looking up pressure cookers in the other, and then they're at his door.
That's right, yeah.
I saw that story, and it's a little bit hard to believe, but it happened.
Amazing, and then this guy, Bump, Philip Bump, writing at theatlanticwire.com is saying, well, wait a minute.
Whatever happened to, nah, somebody would have to be in a foreign country, and the NSA is not giving domestic stuff over to the FBI like this, unless, et cetera, this, that, whatever, but apparently, well, I don't know.
We don't know, apparently, but the quote from the victim here is that they mention they do this about 100 times a week, and that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing.
Yeah, well, it's probably, actually, it's probably 100 times that they turn out to be nothing, but they're not going to admit that.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Like, oh, really?
Which terrorist did you guys bust since Moussaoui?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, it's all part of the militarization of everything in this country.
My local, I live out in the country in rural Virginia, and my local police force just obtained possession of an armored car.
The most serious crime that's committed out here is jaywalking, so it's going to be interesting to see how this is employed.
Right, well, you know, those SWAT guys hate just sitting around all day with nothing to do, so they'll find something to do.
Well, that's why they serve warrants now, and, of course, they go heavily armed and they on occasion shoot people.
There was an incident here in Fairfax County, Virginia, not so long ago, where a guy who had been gambling illegally was shot dead by a team of SWAT people.
He was just standing next to his car when it happened.
Yeah, well, here in Austin, Texas, they kill people all the time, especially unarmed black guys.
I don't know if they ever shoot any armed black guys, but they shoot unarmed black guys all the time.
Just the other day they did.
And with the shadiest excuse, get this, there was a bank robbery.
Nobody says that they even suspected for a moment that this guy had anything to do with it or anything.
He just walked up to the bank in the middle of the daytime and tried to open the door, but it was locked because there had been a bank robbery and the cops were there and whatever.
So I guess he was confused or something.
He came back again, and the detective came out to talk to him.
We don't know exactly why yet the guy took off running, not that he had anything to be afraid of or anything.
So the cop then stole some civilian's car like a movie.
Oh, I have to requisition your vehicle as though that's the law.
He steals the guy's car, chases the guy down, and then shoots him in the back of the neck, they say, is the fatal wound of the unarmed guy.
And then get this is their shady excuse.
They go, well, he wasn't the bank robber or anything, but we're convinced that he was there to commit a fraud upon the bank.
But they could not explain, never mind any evidence, they couldn't even explain a narrative of, oh, yeah, what kind of fraud is that?
Did you find somebody else's traveler's checks in his pockets?
And what are you talking about?
They didn't even have an excuse.
They're just making up hot air.
Wow, that's incredible.
And they just hunt him down, the guy hunted him down and killed him.
And I'm here to tell you, I can already speak for the grand jury.
No, Bill.
In fact, here's a medal.
Thanks.
Yeah.
You know, happens all the time.
Well, the cop felt threatened, I guess.
Well, that's all it takes.
It doesn't matter if he started the fight or not.
That's the law.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so speaking of who started what fight, John Kerry says he's going to solve the Israel-Palestine thing and that the Israelis are going to let him.
Yeah, well, I'd be awfully surprised if that happens.
But he's already let himself off the hook by saying it's going to happen in nine months.
So he's, in effect, admitted that he doesn't expect any results to come out of this actual meeting.
And, of course, you know, the value of appointing someone like Martin Indyk as your chief negotiator, the guy who has been a lobbyist for Israel all his life, basically, sends a signal to the Arabs that, you know, hey, forget it, guys, you might as well go home tonight.
Right.
You know, I saw a thing where they said, well, Indyk is a good choice because he's trusted by all sides.
Right.
Which all sides or which sides count as all of them?
Because I think he might not be counting all of them.
Yeah, well, the sides in question are the White House and Israel.
And is that Jerusalem or Tel Aviv?
Yeah, I'm not sure.
But they have a good idea what it is.
But, you know, it's insane.
I mean, as soon as I saw his name pop up, I couldn't believe it.
I mean, it was almost like Dennis Ross coming up.
Not quite, but pretty close.
And I was thinking, my God, this guy.
I mean, at least Ross was in the government, for God's sakes, for a long time.
This guy, Indyk, came over here as a lobbyist for Israel.
He worked for AIPAC.
And then he set up WNEP and basically has been a lobbyist and advocate for Israel all his life.
And I just had this vision this morning of a poor Maqbool Abbas sitting across the table and looking at a grinning Indyk on the other side.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it was the Americans and the Israelis that picked Abbas in the first place.
So, for all we know, they get along fine.
They're all drinking buddies or whatever.
Why not?
I wonder what they have on Abbas.
I mean, he certainly has money salted away somewhere that he's stolen in one form or another, just like Arafat did.
But the fact is they must have something on him because, you know, these repeated humiliations, even for a lot of money, must at a certain point get you.
And I'm just amazed that he keeps showing up for these things.
Yeah.
Well, you know, and I think maybe it's a side issue and it's kind of silly because we just keep going over it.
But I still don't understand and for some reason I want to understand why the president thinks that this is in his interest at all to pretend.
Because, I mean, really, there's nobody on the side of the Palestinians in this country.
There are no more Arabists at the State Department who even care about America's interests more than Israel's in the Middle East at this point.
And so who's he got to please by pretending to care about this?
He sure as hell isn't fooling anyone between Morocco and the Philippines.
Yeah, that's one of the great mysteries.
I guess he feels he has to engage in this kind of thing every once in a while.
Maybe it's kind of a distraction, you know, from other stuff going on in Washington.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if it's some kind of red herring to keep them off his back on other issues, keep the Republicans off his back on other issues like health care.
I don't know.
It's got to be a mystery because he knows he's not going anywhere with it.
Everybody that's participating knows they're not going anywhere with it.
So who's being fooled here?
I don't know.
I guess maybe John Kerry just wanted another humiliation on his record before he falls down dead, you know?
Yeah, well, that could be.
Just wait until we have Hillary as president.
Then we're really going to see the sparks fly, I guess.
God help us.
Well, speaking of Hillary Clinton, Liz Cheney's running for Senate.
She's the Hillary Clinton of the Republican Party.
She scares the hell out of me because she seems capable, I guess, is the thing.
You know what I mean?
She's sort of the spitting image of her father.
I guess you want to take bets on how long it takes for her competition to go ahead and retire to spend more time with his family rather than sticking through the primary fight?
Yeah, as opposed to being shot by her father.
Yeah, it's a funny thing because obviously she's got no real ties to the state of Wyoming.
She's lived in, I guess, Virginia most of her adult life, and all she has is basically the usual Bible, guns, and the social issues, and that's all she's got.
But basically the other guy, Enzi, has the same agenda she has, so it's so stupid.
It's so screwy, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of maneuvering that brings her in.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, I saw at first he was all indignant, but I thought, man, that's not a smart tone to take with a Chinese man, and he must know that, too.
I don't know.
I sound like I'm a bad guy in today's interview, don't I?
There's no hope for Palestine.
Nobody in America cares about them, so why would he even bother?
Yeah, that Enzi, if he knows what's good for him, he better step out of the way.
I'm just that cynical.
I'm really not on the bad guy's side in this one, I swear, y'all.
Well, just look at it this way.
I mean, pretty sure the government will be probably fracking in your backyard, and your gas prices will go down.
So the government is doing something good for you.
Oh, there you go.
Yeah, I'm going to really appreciate that.
They're only up about 500% from 2001, but anyway.
Yeah.
But I'll take a 10% discount from here.
That'd be all right.
Right.
Hey, by the way, back to Israel issues for a minute there.
I wanted to refer to this great article that you wrote, article before last, I think it was, at Antiwar.com, about the lobby never sleeps, it's called.
Really good one about the power of the Israel lobby in the United States.
And I was thinking, you know, maybe for people who aren't that familiar with the power of the Israel lobby and how it ranks and how effective it is and what their agenda is, and, you know, maybe some representatives of it that they didn't really realize that that's where they're coming from.
Like Bill Kristol, for example.
If you're just some Republican, you might not know that everything Bill Kristol says is actually, this is what I think Israel wants you to think, kind of thing.
So, you know, if you could just kind of talk a little bit about the Israel lobby and the neoconservative movement and paint a picture for people who maybe are kind of new to this subject and don't really understand just how screwy things are.
Well, I mean, Bill Kristol and the neoconservatives are basically a wing of the Israel lobby, because the one thing that all neoconservatives believe is that the United States and Israel are tied at the navel.
And basically all Israeli policies, as determined by Israel, are naturally American policies.
So in other words, we do what Israel wants.
So that's all neoconservatives believe that.
Now, the Israel lobby is the most effective foreign policy lobby operating in Washington.
It only has one issue, and that issue is to advance what it perceives as the interests of Israel.
And that means, in effect, to advance the interests of the right-wing and extreme right-wing governments that have been in power there for a number of years.
So that's basically what they do.
But as I point out in the article, the real danger is here.
You know, when we start arguing about foreign policy, we argue about Syria.
We argue about what's going on in Egypt.
But the fact is there is only one foreign policy issue right now that could seriously damage the United States, and that is if we were to go to war with Iran.
And that's what the Israel lobby has been pushing from behind the scenes and in front of the scenes for several years now and has continued to do so.
So basically we're taking our eye off the ball.
We worry too much about Egypt.
We worry too much about Syria because this is the real issue.
This is the war that could well crash the American economy to a point where it will never come back.
So it's something we should be thinking of all the time.
Right.
And see, this is the thing about that.
And I think you probably suffer from this the same way I do a little bit, is we sort of feel like the boy who cried wolf just because we're pointing out that the boy is crying wolf.
But he won't stop.
It's been unending, the cries from the Israelis in the Israeli lobby about the danger of Iran.
And it just gets boring debunking it all.
And when it's not in the top headlines and it's not really the height of the propaganda that the public is caught up in, then the feeling of the urgency that this stuff needs debunking and right now kind of goes away.
I mean, when I'm deciding in the morning who I'm interviewing today, like you're saying, I am taking my eye off that Iran ball.
And it's much, you know, I got Yosef Butt on my list of people to interview because he's written some good things about Iran lately.
But I've been also thinking to myself, eh, but yeah, Iran's nuclear program.
We talked about that so much kind of thing.
But, you know, it's still the number one agenda of the Israelis and their agents and their agents of influence and friends and synonyms and whatever the hell you call them all across this country trying to get us into that war.
So you're reminding me that I really need to refocus on that.
The Senate, they haven't lost track of the issue.
They know what they're about.
Yeah, no, I mean, the Senate and House obviously are preparing to institute even more draconian sanctions against Iran, which will destroy Iran's economy, basically.
And yet the Iranians have elected a new president who has indicated during his campaign and has indicated since that he really wants to come to some sort of solution about these issues that are being raised constantly about Iran's nuclear program and about everything else.
And yet, you know, we're basically kind of ignoring that.
Surprisingly enough, there have been, I think, what, 130 congressmen who actually signed on to a letter saying we should consider maybe talking to these people a little bit.
And the White House has ignored it.
Yeah, well, and they've got this new president that, you know, I don't know who's a moderate and who ain't and what anybody even really means by that other than they aren't as annoying and obnoxious as Ahmadinejad or whatever.
If he's the gold standard of obnoxious, then this new guy with the white hat over there, he doesn't seem so bad.
Maybe, you know, we could hire some adults to sit down at a table with him and maybe they could work on some things.
All the facts are there if you wanted to create that narrative that, yay, now that Ahmadinejad is gone, we can really get somewhere with these negotiations, but they don't want to do it.
They don't want to take advantage of the situation at all.
They want to sabotage it.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, Paul Pilar, I'm sure you're familiar with some of the stuff he's written, a former senior analyst at CIA, has said repeatedly, he said there is an easy solution to this problem with Iran.
It's just we know what steps would have to be taken to satisfy them that they could have a peaceful nuclear program with strict inspections and they know what the issues are, and it's just a question of kind of crossing the bridge to start talking about it and work out a solution.
But the White House is locked into this and has been locked into this mindset that's pretty much driven by the Israel lobby that Iran is somewhere outside the stratosphere.
It's not a normal country.
It's a country that all suicidal people, that it's out to destroy Israel and everybody else.
It's an incredible myth that's been kind of created around what Iran represents.
Right, and Obama himself, he'll outright lie about this and just say, well, Iran is in violation of the nonproliferation treaty and they have to live up to their international obligations and whatever, and it's just not true.
But they'll base a whole policy.
In fact, he even said he's changing our nuclear first strike policy, where we used to reserve the right to use a nuclear first strike against any country in the whole world.
And he said, no, we're going to scale that back now, where we only reserve the right to a nuclear first strike against nuclear weapon states or Iran, because they're outside of the nonproliferation regime and whatever.
What is he talking about, you know?
Yeah, well, I don't know what he's drinking.
Does he drink?
I don't know.
He can drink.
I'm more of a stoner, you know.
Yeah, well, why not?
It'll be legal soon.
Well, maybe not in Texas.
Yeah, well, we might have to travel.
But anyway, yeah, I don't get it anymore.
I mean, you know, this stuff is, there are simple answers to a lot of this stuff.
And, unfortunately, everything gets reduced or expanded to this complex, you know, kind of explanation of threats and so on and so forth, none of which are true.
And we've been seeing this now for, you know, certainly since 9-11.
And we certainly saw it in smaller doses before that time.
But this is incredible.
It's like we're living in a fantasy land where nothing makes sense anymore.
And Obama was on television last night.
And it's one of these moments where I want to put my foot through the screen.
He was at Amazon, and he was talking about how, oh, we created 12 million jobs, and now we're going to create 27 million more.
And, you know, it's like watching a Monty Python sketch.
You know that none of this is going to happen.
And, you know, it's just this sincere-looking black man standing up there and telling me all these things in a very articulate way, which I know is all a lie.
And it's been repeated now for five years.
And, you know, I guess we're doomed for another three years of it.
You got to hand it to the Madison Avenue guys, though.
I mean, they really figured it out after George Bush just completely took whatever conservatism ever meant, destroyed any of that, and gave it all the worst name in the whole world.
And they said, you know, what we need is a black guy with a foreign-sounding name as opposite of George Bush as possible, someone who can speak in complete sentences and all of that kind of thing, and just give a whole new face.
It's like changing the logo on a box of cereal or something, you know, changing the sports star on the Wheaties box or something like that.
It really works, you know.
I guess if you do sociology for a living or social psychology for a living, you can see how this is great.
We could just hire a fact.
I saw a comment last night where someone apologizing for him said that, Obama, he's just a faceless technocrat carrying on the bipartisan consensus established by George W. Bush.
And yet, as you say, oh, wow, he sure is inspiring up there waxing on about all the great deeds and whatever.
And it's kind of played out now for you and a lot of people, but I think it still works on a lot of people too.
It certainly did work in the past on a lot of people.
I mean, he got reelected after all.
Yeah, absolutely.
But that's partly due to who the Republicans ran against him.
I think if they had actually come up with somebody who was vaguely normal, he would have beaten Obama.
But anyway, yeah, I mean, it's a con job.
The whole government is a con job.
And it's like what Smithley Butler's statement that war was a fraud or war was a big business or something.
Yes, a racket.
A racket, that's right.
He said a racket.
I was looking for the word.
Government's a racket.
I think I pointed out in one of my articles last week that the primary function of government, which we forget all the time, is to preserve itself.
It's not to put food on your table.
It's not to avoid getting into a war.
It's basically a mechanism that exists to support itself.
And every bureaucracy is like that, and you forget that.
And so you know these people are lying.
Like, you know, the NSA head, General Lockheed, what's his last name?
Alexander.
Alexander.
You know, I mean, he's lying through his teeth about all this stuff.
And, in fact, yesterday in Las Vegas a bunch of hackers took him to task and were telling him it was bullshit, what he was saying, which it is.
And these documents that Obama released yesterday on NSA even contradict what Alexander was saying in terms of the reach of this stuff.
These programs are completely invasive.
I mean, they just can take over any communication system that you have that's electronically based, and they can get into it.
Right.
And, you know, it's been like this for so long, too.
I don't know.
I guess maybe they're not able to store all of it, but they've been vacuuming up everything all along.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And the danger is, of course, now with computer capacity being what it is, they can store it, and they can retrieve it, and they can search it.
So you're never safe anymore.
Yeah.
Well, and you can see, too, and this is always my point, just because, you know, I don't read really smart stuff, mostly just current events stuff, but one smart guy book I read was Technopoly by Neil Postman about the surrender of culture to technology and just how, in America, more than anywhere else in the world, even in Japan, because they have a lot more culture in the first place, I guess.
But here, any gadget that can be invented, will be invented, will be implemented as soon as it's cheap enough.
It's just as simple as that.
There's no vote.
There's no democracy.
There's no decision.
Just when the cameras are cheap enough to put up on every corner, the cameras go up on every corner.
And when the NSA has the ability to keep track of every Google search and save it forever, that's exactly what they're going to do.
And a big part of what he talks about in that book is how the definition of truth has changed.
The definition of opinion has changed.
The definition of a lot of the ways that we conceive what's real in the world is different because of the different technologies that we use to measure them, sort of like a Heisenberg uncertainty kind of a thing.
And what we end up doing is supplanting wisdom or knowledge with just data that's more or less meaningless and which is often misunderstood and which the computerization of it all helps to defer the responsibility or helps humans to defer the responsibility for any of the decisions that they have to make or discretion that they might apply to, well, the computer says, sir, so I'm sorry that's just the way it is.
And here this guy got his door kicked in this morning because his wife Googled pressure cookers while he was looking up a backpack.
And they got it wrong, and he's lucky they didn't kill him, you know?
Yeah, that's right.
That's the thing where they're drowning in an ocean of data rather than surfing on it is kind of the thing.
The big irony, of course, is you're right.
They're drowning in an ocean of data, and then they claim, well, this data doesn't mean anything.
Well, if it doesn't mean anything, why are you collecting it?
It's just they don't ever seem to have a plausible answer to any of this stuff.
And I've yet to see anybody making an actual case that collecting all this information since 9-11 basically has led to a single terrorist case being disrupted.
There is no evidence of that.
Right, just a couple of assertions, and the ones where they tried to get specific and cite a couple of cases, they were immediately smacked down by Marcy Wheeler and others.
Right, exactly.
It turned out what they were citing was actually incorrect.
Even Alexander, Keith Alexander, when he says this stuff has contributed to.
Well, contributed to means nothing.
It means essentially that we arrested a guy, and it later turned out that he had in his wallet a telephone number that we had been listening to.
Okay, that's what it means.
Yeah, or I think with Zazie he emailed an account of a terrorist in England that they'd already been looking at.
That's right, yeah, that's right.
All right, now, hey, listen, I talked with Doc Prather this morning.
By the way, everybody, Doc Prather's doing fine.
He's retired from writing anymore, but he's still doing fine, and I had a nice little conversation with him, and one of the things that he was talking about and wanted me to ask you about was about classification, the different levels of classification, and particularly in regards to the Bradley Manning case, and I'm sorry, I know I'm keeping you a little bit over time here, but, yeah, so he was talking about, I think he said he thinks that confidential is gone now, so there's secret and there's top secret, and that most of this stuff, that the damage assessments from state and defense departments on the Manning leaks, that I think he was saying that he thinks they would have had to have decided that most of this stuff shouldn't have even really been classified in the first place.
It's just a matter of CYA, classify everything kind of a thing, but that if their damage assessment is saying that there really was no harm, I guess he's saying that's more or less equivalent to saying that they shouldn't have been classified or at least they're no longer really secret, right?
And he gave the example of, well, where the president's going to be tomorrow at 1.30, that's classified.
Where the president is going to be tomorrow at 1.30, the day after tomorrow, nobody cares.
He was already there and everybody already knows, so it's not classified anymore kind of thing.
And so a lot of this stuff that Manning leaked was old enough that it wouldn't have even been really considered secret.
Along those lines, I was just wondering if you could comment on that.
I don't know.
I can't really form a very meaningful question because I'm not sure if I really understand, but anyway.
Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of stuff is classified just because it's a government paper.
It doesn't have anything to do with the content.
So as you say, it's generally everything is basic classification level is secret.
Top secret is one level higher.
Usually top secret stuff is top secret because it names names and has specific information that could be embarrassing.
That's usually what it is.
But, yeah, one stuff is classified.
It's not declassified.
And a lot of the Manning stuff was archival.
It was stuff that related to discussions between U.S. officials and foreign officials years ago and that kind of thing.
So you wonder to what extent that kind of stuff is genuinely sensitive.
I think in most cases it isn't.
So, yeah, a lot of the Manning stuff is basically to refer to it as secret in the same sense that, say, a Jonathan Pollard stole secrets or a Hanson or an Ames is a bit of a joke because it's not the same kind of stuff.
Right.
Yeah, and, of course, completely and totally different motives when those guys were all self-interested spies for foreign powers committing high treason or whatever you call it.
Exactly.
And people died as a result of what they did.
But, yeah, in the case of Manning, it's a whole different thing.
Do you think there's a chance, I mean, maybe it was just sort of a dialectical thing where they charged him with aiding the enemy just so they could go ahead and convict him under the Espionage Act six ways anyway or four ways anyway or something.
But do you think that there's any chance, like based on the fact that he was acquitted at least of the most serious aiding the enemy charge there, that the sentencing could be based on the reality rather than the politics of it, that really what he did was just whistleblowing, something like Jonathan Pollard treason, and nobody really got hurt other than American policies that we've got no right to in the first place, like if we lose a favorite dictator for a little while or something like that?
I actually don't think that.
I think they're going to throw the book at him just to discourage other people from doing the same thing.
I think that's what's going to happen.
And I agree with you that they could do a realistic assessment of what damage was actually done, and I think they're going to do that.
Yeah, it's too bad.
The fact that they convicted him on the four charges under the Espionage Act, as serious as that was, it was sort of overshadowed by the news that he was acquitted on the aiding the enemy charge, which obviously that would have been a really big deal.
But yeah, he's facing up to 136 years, I think I read there.
That's right.
I thought they were only going for 57.
I guess they added on more charges.
And then did you see where the judge helped the prosecutors rewrite the charges so she could convict on them?
Yeah.
On some of those?
Yeah, I saw that.
What in the world?
Have you ever heard of that?
You're a former military guy, right?
Have you ever heard of that in the military?
Military judges have a lot of discretion in terms of what they can do, so I'm not surprised to see it.
I would think in a high-profile trial like this they would have avoided something like that, but they didn't.
Yeah, because I remember it wasn't just me.
I think a lot of people said, what?
You can do that?
What are you talking about?
Yeah, yeah.
Boy, how unfair is that?
Absolutely.
Liberty and justice for all and this and that.
And oh, by the way, after the prosecution and the defense are done, oh, and the prosecution's rebuttal to the defense is done, where we allow them to introduce all brand-new evidence on a whole different line of argument, then we can go ahead and rewrite the charges against you so that they fit what's left of the government's case.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, well, that's called due process, right?
Jesus.
Yeah, well, due process is what takes place between two hemispheres of Barack Obama's brain, right?
We read that in the New York Times.
That's how he – that's the due process involved when he takes your life with a remote-control plane.
Exactly, exactly.
Well, Obama thought it over.
He didn't just think about it.
He thought it over.
See?
Well, plus he feels real bad after he does it.
Right.
A tear in his eye.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, geez, that's just too bad.
Now, tell me this before I let you go, Phil.
What do you think of Riley Manning?
You think he did the right thing?
You think he deserves to go to prison?
You think he deserves to be pardoned?
You think he deserves to be blasted off into space?
Well, I think, A, he did the right thing.
I think, B, he deserves to go to prison because he did reveal classified information, which he had agreed to protect.
But I don't think he deserves life in prison or anything like that.
I think he deserves a prison sentence that is commensurate with the actual deed and the fact that he is quite plausibly a whistleblower.
So, yeah, I don't know what the – the guy seems to be rather an asshole.
But, you know, that's not a crime.
And he clearly felt that he was doing something that was for the good of the American people, and I think he was.
And, you know, but at the same time he committed a crime.
So he has to pay the consequences, but at the same time he did the right thing.
Yeah.
But then again, you know, CIA guys that torture people to death, they get off scot-free.
So, you know, the Apache helicopter pilots.
Yeah.
I think they should be in jail.
I mean, you know, I think all those people who committed torture and all the people who approved it, those are the ones who really get off scot-free since they all have cushy jobs now.
They are the ones that should be in jail too.
All right.
Good.
This is long as we're equally applying the law here, then I'll go with it.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So what kind of sentence would you imagine then?
Well, I would imagine like a 10-year sentence with, you know, possible time off of a behavior, which maybe would equate to five or six years in prison.
All right.
I just want to bronze him and make a giant statue out of him, but, you know, whatever.
I can settle for that, I guess.
It sure is a hell of a lot better than what they're going to do instead.
Yeah.
But we'll find out.
But I think it's going to be a serious punishment.
All right.
Well, I'll let you go.
Thanks a lot for coming on the show as always, Phil.
Great talking to you.
Okay, Scott.
Take care.
See you.
Everybody, that's great.
Phil Giraldi, he's executive director at the Council for the National Interest, at councilforthenationalinterest.org, and he writes for the American Conservative Magazine and antiwar.com.
The brand newest one at antiwar.com is spinning yarns in the mainstream media, and it's in regards to the NSA and to America's greatest ally in the Middle East.
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