10/09/12 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Here every day from noon to two, eastern time at No Agenda Radio.noagendastream.com is the site there.
And of course, all my interview archives are available at scotthorton.org Okay, next up, today is Phil Geraldi, Mr. Raleigh, he's the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.
He's a former DIA and CIA officer, and of course he also writes for the American Conservative Magazine and antiwar.com.
Welcome back, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us here today.
So I've totally fallen down on the job on keeping up with this AP story and all the developments about the NYPD going way out above and beyond their jurisdiction and apparently working with the CIA on some of this.
And then you wrote this great piece of what, last week or a week and a half ago or something for antiwar.com, The Ubiquitous New Yorker.
And this is really the, at least that I've read, the single best kind of retelling of the story of just how far out of control this Mayor Bloomberg guy has really gotten in the creation and use of this new NYPD intelligence unit and its deployment to India, even to all across all four corners of the globe.
Please do tell.
Well, yeah.
Well, basically, you know, after 9-11, the NYPD was on steroids and their budget was increased dramatically.
The chief of the department, Ray Kelly, apparently got in touch with the agency and hired a former senior, by the agency I mean the CIA, hired a former CIA senior officer to set up an intelligence unit.
And a lot of the things that you're talking about basically come out of this intelligence unit.
What they did was they basically treated the United States like it was a combat zone.
And like the bigger CIA in Washington, set up a whole intelligence system where they had NYPD officers in residence in, as far as we can tell, 11 overseas cities.
Now so is this just the NYPD as a CIA front at this point, or this really was led by Bloomberg and the NYPD?
No, there's no question but that this was internally generated.
The CIA was cooperative to a certain extent in that it allowed one NYPD officer to go down and train at the CIA training center in Williamsburg, Virginia.
But this guy, David Cohen, who was the former CIA guy, he wasn't still in a way answerable back to Langley?
He had just an answer to the mayor?
Yeah, exactly.
He was answerable to the mayor.
He was the head of intelligence for the, actually he was actually the chief of police, Ray Kelly, but also to the mayor.
And basically this was an internal recreation of the Central Intelligence Agency for New York City.
And the disturbing thing, of course, is that they used this mechanism to surveil not only Muslims and Muslim organizations inside New York City, they used it to check out things in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and as I say, even extended their reach to overseas.
All right, now let's pretend that somebody in the audience doesn't know the first thing about any of this.
Is it not the case that just plain and simple, no exceptions, you just can't do that.
City police from one state going around to other cities and other states surveilling, enforcing, maybe only if they're part of some kind of multi-jurisdictional thing where they're invited in by the locals, but otherwise, you just can't do that.
Am I right?
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I mean, police in any jurisdiction are licensed locally to act as law enforcement officials.
They can't, for example, like whatever town or county you're in, the policemen in that town or county have no jurisdiction if they go two miles and they cross a county line or a city line.
So the whole idea that the New York Police Department had a jurisdiction that extended to the entire world is quite psycho.
And the funny thing was, when a lot of this stuff was exposed, Mayor Bloomberg said that NYPD had a perfect right to do this kind of thing, to carry out investigations wherever it felt that there was a threat.
Did he sign any footnotes for that or?
Yeah, well, I don't know where he got the authority to say that, but I guess straight from God or something.
Yeah.
Wow.
You know, it's interesting to me now.
Has there been much outcry from the other jurisdictions?
Because that's the one hope that we have here, right, is Federalist 10 and the different pigs will all fight each other over who gets to be a pig in any particular jurisdiction.
And hopefully they'll be so busy fighting each other that they'll leave us alone some of the time, right?
Yeah.
Well, obviously, when they were caught, they were caught initially in New Jersey.
And then after that, it came out that they had been operating in all kinds of other places.
But they were caught in New Jersey, and obviously the governor of New Jersey got quite annoyed by this.
And in fact, there was an investigation in New Jersey, which oddly came to the conclusion that no laws had been violated.
I'm not sure how they came to that conclusion, but that's what they came up with.
Yeah, well, I know.
It's because there is no law.
They can do what they want.
I think that's actually the answer, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, this is just amazing.
I look at this article, and then check out this list.
I like the way you say it, too.
A little bit of New York has turned up in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and even Williamsburg, Virginia.
It's in Canada, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Spain, India, the Dominican Republic, France, Germany, and Israel.
I'm looking for a pattern.
I'm afraid I don't see it.
What do these countries even have to do with each other?
France and Germany share a border, okay, but any of the rest of them?
Oh, that's me.
Well, I suspect they must have had New York PD officers who came from those places and wanted to go back home for a vacation.
Yeah, that's what I was just thinking, too.
You know where we really should set up a shop would be in Singapore, because there's a lot of Islamo-fascism there, you know.
Yeah, I don't get that one, I must admit.
Some nice resorts, too, and go golfing.
And even Spain, I mean, for God's sakes, you know, what is the Spanish connection with New York City?
You know, some of these are just totally off the wall.
That's kind of hilarious.
And now, let me ask you this.
It's the former CIA guy that NYPD hires to set this thing up, and as you write it in this article, you quote him, actually, even saying, yeah, our whole thing was just to take a big net, throw it out, catch as many fish as you can, see what you get.
Is that central intelligence?
Is that what counts as information to a government employee?
That's how you do it?
That's how you find out what's going on in the world, is you just go fishing on everyone that you can until you come up with something?
Well, unfortunately, I have to say yes.
But the point is, you know, if you're operating against an adversary overseas, like we were working against the Soviet Union before it collapsed, yeah, that's exactly what you do.
You throw out a net, you try to find people that have connections that you can exploit and things like that.
So that is the way you work.
But you don't operate that way inside the United States.
And you don't operate that way either when you go over to a foreign country and you really have no legal authority to be there or to be doing anything, and you try to get involved in their terrorist operations.
I mean, it's just this kind of stuff is just crazy.
Yeah, I see the difference.
There was such a thing as the Soviet Union.
There are no terrorists in America.
Well, they're having a tough time finding them because, as I say in the article, one of the interesting things was that they recently admitted that in spite of this program where they were going around and hanging around at places where they thought Muslims would be found, there were no arrests or not even any cases of terrorism that were developed as a result of all this time, money, and effort.
Yeah, but you say it was the one thing that they did was they're the ones who framed the slowest kid at the bookstore on the subway plot, right?
Yeah, that's right.
They had one kid working at a bookstore, 18 years old, born in Pakistan, and they kind of set him up with two informants.
And when the kid refused to carry a bomb into, I think it was a train station or something, they arrested him anyway for conspiracy.
You know, if you saw a movie with Peter Sellers and this kind of stuff going on, you would think this is really ridiculous.
But this is the United States.
I mean, it's just, you know, and listening to Romney yesterday kind of convinces you that if anything happens, it's going to get worse.
I know.
Well, you know, I was going to ask you about that.
Did you see Romney's speech, Phil?
Yeah, I did.
I watched it on C-SPAN.
I had a tough time with it.
Fortunately, it was not too long.
But you know, basically, this guy doesn't have a thought in his head, doesn't have any conception of what other countries are like or what people in other countries might be thinking.
It's all, we're going to be the biggest bully on the block, and if anyone wants to contest that, we'll bomb you.
I don't know how people can, and the media today, if you read the media today, it was all like, you know, puff pieces basically saying that he laid out his program.
A lot of people saying it was very similar to Obama's program, but nobody really saying this guy is an idiot.
Right.
And that's an important point, right, is that he actually doesn't know anything.
He's just some senator's son.
Yeah, well, governor, yeah, Romney was a governor.
Yeah, he was a governor.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, he's a rich guy who doesn't really know anything.
He did a Mormon mission to France where he apparently learned nothing, and he has no conception of the fact that other countries have interests, that nothing is as simple as the way he describes it in terms of the interests of other countries.
I mean, it's just like, how did we get so dumb?
I mean, I think, I thought when we went to, when we created a public education system, the idea was that people would kind of understand, at least to a certain level, some of these things.
But I guess that doesn't prevail anymore.
Yeah, it's really strange that there, you know, somebody like McCain is the same way.
And I don't mean to just pick on the Republicans.
It's just last three Republican presidential candidates in a row.
They really are, you know, Larry, Curly and Mo up there.
They really don't know anything.
They're the kind of people who don't like knowing things.
As much as I hate Bill Clinton's guts, at least he wanted to read late at night, you know.
You know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to read this book about this important subject.
You know, is that too much to ask, really, that you have an actively literate president?
Yeah, well, and I think Obama understands the issues.
I mean, he came in without any experience, but he's a smart guy.
And I think he understands the issues in terms of foreign policy.
Whether he feels free to act that way is, of course, another issue altogether.
But I think he does understand it.
And the tragedy is that, you know, here we have some of these people with empty heads like John McCain.
I mean, he actually he's another guy.
He knows a lot of stuff.
But the fact that he's so ideologically wrapped into a certain mindset, that it doesn't make any difference as if he doesn't know it.
Right.
Yeah.
A few times he gets anything right at all, he quickly retracts it.
Yeah.
Oh, I'm sorry.
That was the old me who was, you know, actually trying to think things out at all.
I didn't mean to say that.
That's right.
We are all Georgians.
Lunatic.
All right.
And now.
So but here's the thing, too.
When you're a Republican and you're a big stupid, then that means, yes, Bill Kristol what to do.
And that's basically what's going on with this Romney character is he's letting the weekly standard set the standard and pick his cabinet.
Well, I mean, but John McCain did the same thing with Sarah Palin.
I mean, the weekly standard were the people that discovered her, as it were.
So this is a long tradition of the Republican Party.
And the thing is, I mean, you know, it's just that there should be a simple question of that these politicians should be answering, which is basically the world is a very complicated place.
And what is in the American interest to do in various situations?
They never ask that.
It's always like this, this convoluted process whereby they come to the wrong answer.
And I, you know, it's just it's frustrating as hell.
And it's frustrating as hell to watch the whole process.
And I like I'm astonished by some of the recent e-mails, which I'm sure you've seen from from Rand Paul, where he wanted to cut aid to Libya, Egypt and to and Tunisia.
And, you know, it's if you read the thing, it's like something written by Pam Geller or one of these Islamophobes or Frank Gaffney.
And it's I'm thinking, what happened to Rand Paul?
Didn't he ever listen to his father?
Yeah.
No, I'm done being disappointed in him.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
No, you stab your own father in the back.
I'm pretty sure I don't trust you.
You know, that's basically the deal with him.
Right.
Well, I'm doing a piece for next week for any war, which is going to discuss that.
But I just, you know, when I saw it's unfortunate because I saw people on Facebook saying, yeah, good old Rand Paul coming out against foreign aid.
And it's like, wait a minute, man, if you actually just take a look at what he's really saying here, you'll see it's quite different than a Ron Paul column at antiwar dot com.
For sure.
He's saying if you're going to no longer be our loyal sock puppet, then fine.
We won't pay you.
Of course, meaning if you fall in line, we will continue to pay you.
That doesn't sound like a very Paulian speech to me.
That's right.
And and of course, it's no coincidence that all three countries are Muslim, which makes it an easier mark.
And it it ingratiates Rand Paul with the power structure in the GOP.
Yeah.
And of course, you know what we need to do now?
You know, he's talking about Pakistan.
Yeah.
What we need to do is stop bribing them.
But by all means, keep bombing them.
You know, he doesn't have anything to say about that.
Hey, Rand, the reason we pay them is so we can bomb them.
Oh, you know what?
Maybe we'll have to knock off both at the same time, huh?
That's right.
Well, there there again, I mean, this is this process whereby they, you know, whatever thinking they do, it's channeled and they they think in a certain way and they they know what's acceptable and what isn't.
And so now he's portraying himself as a great budget cutter.
Well, in fact, the email, I think the headline of it is something like, bring our bring our dollars back from overseas.
You know, like this is what he's concerned about.
Right.
That's the big problem with all of our foreign aid is just the price.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not the consequences.
No, no.
That's not an issue at all.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, so he's just another conservative Republican politician.
I'm no longer surprised or disappointed.
There only ever was one Ron Paul in all of world history.
Why would there be two in one era like this?
Just yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
And that's that's the unfortunate thing was we're kind of stuck in a situation where there is a lot.
There are a lot of people who think like you and I think in terms of how dysfunctional the foreign policy and everything else is.
But we have no no way of venting that frustration anymore.
It's it's we have one bad choice or another bad choice.
And then somebody like Rand Paul pops up and pretends to be something else.
And he's a bad choice.
Yeah.
Now, I'm not so sure about the cause and effect on this, but I thought it was an interesting point and I wondered what you thought about it.
It was it's a blog entry by John Glazer at Antiwar dot com.
But he's quoting Paul Pillar, who's a former CIA analyst, partly responsible for the Iraq and IEA vote, too, if I remember the story right.
But anyway, what he's saying is that at least one of the consequences, I don't know if he's saying the whole thing is a ruse for this purpose, but at least he's saying every time that the Americans meet with the Israelis and the subject is Iran.
That means the subject is not the West Bank and that, you know, you could at least imagine that that's what's really behind all this barking and yelping about Iran all the time is just to change the subject from the facts on the ground being established in the West Bank.
Yeah.
Well, you know, a lot of people have made that observation.
I think I read that piece by quoting Pillar, who is a very smart guy and has followed a lot of these issues very closely.
And I think that obviously it's in Netanyahu, Netanyahu's interest to change the narrative.
And he doesn't want people talking about the what's going on in the West Bank in terms of the expansion of Israeli settlements.
So a good way to avoid that is by every week you raise the issue of Iran.
Yeah.
It's very plausible.
And I would not be surprised if that is is at least a motive for what we're hearing.
OK, well, so the answer to that is easy.
Just every time you hear the word Iran say West Bank, like, oh, I'm glad you bring up Iran, because did you know what's going on in the West Bank right now?
Yeah.
Well, that's Mitt Romney has it all figured out now that the Palestinians were not interested in peace and.
But he still stands by a two state solution, at least he does.
As of yesterday, he stood by a two state solution.
So did he say that?
Well, yeah.
He said, yeah.
Separate and equal.
It was it was basically the Georgie say separate, but equal, separate, but equal.
Yeah.
He quoted Plessy versus Ferguson.
It'll be great.
It'll be like the old South, you know.
That's right.
That's right.
All right.
Well, yeah.
Just like that protest the other day when they were having the riots over all the Ethiopian refugees and was the cover of Haaretz, I think was Israel is for the white man.
Yeah, that's right.
And of course, that's not being reported much in the US.
You have to go to Haaretz to see it.
Boy, is that something else or what?
What a strange planet I live on.
That's what I think.
It's a very strange plant.
All right.
So, well, I still got time.
Let me ask you about Syria.
You, I believe, were the first, at least credible source saying, oh, yeah, I'm telling you, there are two new findings.
And it was six months later that the Time magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times confirmed this.
But you said last December the 8th in a column at Antiwar.com, there are two new findings.
One is on Iran and the other is on Syria.
A finding is the president's permission to the CIA or an order to the CIA for them to go ahead and break the law.
And he says it's OK.
Right.
He said to go ahead and break the law in terms of Iran and Syria.
And now there's all these stories.
Of course, that's confirmed that the CIA is helping run this war out of Turkey.
But I was just hoping you could give us an update.
The headlines are screaming that there may really come to, it may come to full blows in a real war between Turkey and Syria.
Do you think that that's possible or likely here?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, you know, I do I do talk frequently to Turkish journalists and to some Turkish diplomats.
They're all friends of mine.
And Turkey is very nervous about this whole thing.
And I'm not sure what their what their overriding motivation would be in in going to that level.
I know a lot of people in their foreign ministry believe that Erdogan has the prime minister has very much overplayed his hand and that he should not have allowed the level of involvement that Turkey is already at.
And so there's a lot of misgivings about this.
And there's also, if you read the Turkish media, there's a lot of negative commentary from normal Turks about this and the opinion polls indicate that they're strongly opposed any kind of military action.
So I think it's it's kind of a bluff, at least at this point.
The United States certainly is is and a number of NATO countries are covertly assisting the rebels.
There's no question about that.
And a lot of the money to pay for this is coming from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.
And the whole thing is a complete mess.
And the for example, one of the things that's funny, you talk about disinformation.
What triggered this this recent issue between Syria and Turkey was mortar rounds that were fired from Syria into Turkey, and they killed a Turkish family and some other people there.
And these borders are are portable.
And the rebels have them.
Now, who would have a better motive to get the Turks involved than the rebels?
Yeah.
And if you went to the U.S. media, you saw that it was the Syrians who had provoked this by firing these rounds into Turkey, which they would have to be insane to do.
The government would have to be insane to do that.
It doesn't need, you know, 450,000 Turkish soldiers, you know, suddenly coming across the border.
And so the the obvious answer here is that it's most likely the rebels who are instigating these attacks.
And yet you never get a whiff of that in the U.S. media.
Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, because, well, I read Dan McAdams, who's very sharp on these things, writing at Lou Rockwell's blog, speculating that maybe that was the case.
And he pointed out where every time the Turks retaliated against the mortar sites that had fired, it ended up being basically the last straw and forcing the remnants of the Syrian army to go ahead and cut their losses and leave those positions and turn them over to the rebels.
And that happened three times in a row or something.
And so it seemed to them that, you know, it was the rebels.
He was speculating, I think, but it was, you know, putting it together that the rebels are killing two birds with one stone here.
They're giving the Turks an excuse to invade or provoking them into doing something about it.
And then, of course, at the same time, they're winning a short term tactical victory on the ground as well, although they're certainly risking pissing off Erdogan, right, if he's not in on it, and making him, you know, think twice about backing them.
That's quite a risky maneuver on their part, right?
Sure.
I think all these things are kind of playing out simultaneously.
And if anything, the United States is in a position where it doesn't know what to do, and quite rightly.
And there's a lot of pressure, obviously, coming from Congress and from people like McCain and Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney to entertain some kind of military solution.
And this is ridiculous.
We haven't had a military solution that's worked since the Second World War, you know?
So this kind of thinking is just insane.
Well, you know, I saw this is the one part I saw a very, very small portion of the Romney speech yesterday.
And I saw that was one thing he was saying was, you know, I will really intervene on behalf of the rebels, but I will also do a great job of vetting which rebels get our support and take real good care of the thing.
And it reminded me of that great clip of Michael Shoyer on CNN a year and a half ago, talking about Libya and saying, yeah, the CIA is talking to people on the ground in Libya.
But the true bin Laden nights on the ground in Libya, they're not talking to the CIA.
They're back in the mountains waiting and buying their time and whatever.
Just because the CIA is talking to somebody who speaks English and is making big promises doesn't mean that they really control the future of that place.
And you'd be crazy to think that you can just vet which rebels are going to benefit from these arms.
And it's on.
Of course, he got a big fight with the CNN hairdo ladies about it, and it was hilarious.
But but what a great point.
And they've been saying over and over, yeah, we're vetting.
We're being very careful that, you know, the Free Syrian Army is not made up of bin Laden nights.
So, you know, I guess once they're done winning, then we'll help them defeat the suicide bombers, too.
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
Well, I don't know if you saw a piece by David Ignatius last week.
It was on Afghanistan and on the peace talks going on.
And it was quite scary to read because the Taliban apparently did the negotiations, according to Ignatius, is pretty well wired in are basically that the U.S. wants to the only absolute condition it has for for peace talks is that the Taliban have to basically participate in a multi-party government and that they should give equal rights to women.
And and the Taliban's only condition was that all foreign troops have to leave Afghanistan.
And I and I wrote a little blog I was speculating that.
How exactly are we going to enforce the Taliban giving equal rights to women after we've left the country and they're in charge?
Well, they'll be honor bound like a Guantanamo guard.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, this stuff gets so ridiculous that, you know, why does anyone think that this is something that's enforceable, that we can actually make happen after all the things that we haven't been able to make happen over the over the last 30 years?
I have no idea.
Maybe they're crazy.
I think maybe they are, you know, because people say power corrupts and people also say power makes you stupid.
But maybe power makes you crazy.
And maybe Hillary Clinton is living in an entirely different dimension than you and me.
Do you ever consider that?
Well, maybe she wants to be president in 2016.
God help us all.
All right.
I got to go.
Thanks very much, Phil.
OK, Scott.
Bye bye.
All right.
That's the great Phil Giraldi.
He's the editor of the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
And he writes for Antiwar.com and the American Conservative Magazine.
And he's a former CIA guy, too.
I should say that every time so you don't think I'm covering up that secret fact or something.
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