11/13/13 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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First guest up on the show today is our friend Phil Giraldi, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest and writer for the American Conservative and Anti-War.com.
And man, you got some...
Oh, former CIA, former DIA officer as well.
And boy, you got some breaking news for us here in the American Conservative magazine, or at least on their website, theamericanconservative.com today.
Phil?
Yeah, they posted an article that actually appeared in the magazine version, which came out a few days ago, which I had written a couple weeks ago.
It's about Syria.
And basically, it explains the background to the decision of the White House to issue a position paper on justification to go to war with Syria.
What the piece explains is that the intelligence community, in the form of a number of senior analysts, basically staged a revolt and refused to allow the argument, the paper, to go out from the intelligence community, because they did not have a very high, very good feeling for the credibility of the information.
Wow.
And isn't that something else, too, because people probably remember that at the time, you and others were reporting, or I guess it was pretty obvious right away to critics that, hey, wait a minute, this dossier is not a CIA product.
This came from the White House, and they use a lot of CIA-ish language to sort of, you know, fool the Chuck Todd's of the world or something like that, but you can't get that by Gareth Porter, Phil Giraldi, and you guys immediately were going, well, wait a minute, how come this is a White House product and not a CIA product?
Yeah, that's precisely the issue, because obviously the normal pattern for this kind of thing would be for the director of national intelligence or the head of the CIA basically to come out with a document and say this is the consensus of the intelligence community.
But in this case, the intelligence community didn't have any consensus.
They felt that a lot of the information was dubious in nature, and that some of it was even quite likely fraudulent.
And a number of analysts basically went to Clapper and the DNI and to Brenner at CIA and said, look, we're not going to sign on to this.
And if this document goes out as a CIA or DNI document, we are going to resign and go public with it.
Wow.
And can you tell us a ballpark estimate how many different CIA analysts we're talking about were willing to go that far?
You know, I don't really know.
I tried to pin that down in terms of numbers, but apparently the number was significant.
It was a big enough number where it wouldn't have been like in the lead-up to the Iraq war.
There were a few resignations.
This would have been more in the nature of a mass resignation.
A number of people, very reputable among the analytical community, resigning and making very clear what the issue was.
So they really, what they were saying is, you know, we don't want a repeat of the George Tenet sitting in the United Nations behind Colin Powell and vouching for information that he knew was false to create a case to go to war.
Because the aftermath of that was, of course, the intelligence community was blamed.
And the fact is, of course, there were a lot of people that should not have been blamed because they knew damn well the information was wrong and they had said so.
But the political leadership of the agency and then the White House basically wanted a war.
Right.
Yeah.
And of course, Tenet later claimed that when he told George Bush that it was a slam dunk case, that when they said that, that they're basically almost lying about him, taking that out of context, because he did not mean that it was a slam dunk case that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
What he meant was it's a slam dunk case that you can get the American people to go along with this war if you can make them believe that there are chemical weapons in Iraq.
Now, that's exactly what he was doing.
He was saying it was a slam dunk, politically speaking, that they could sell it.
But the fact was, I was at CIA when this was going on, and there was a lot of chatter in the halls and everything.
And people say, you know, this just doesn't make sense, this information doesn't support what they're saying.
So there were a lot of people, if I knew about it, at my low-ish level in the agency, there were a lot of people that knew that this was going on.
And now, in fact, wasn't it, what's it called, Winpack or something, sort of this separate little part of the CIA that specialized in WMD, and they, I guess, Joe or Mike or Jim or somebody from there was the one who was the world's greatest champion of the bogus aluminum tube story.
Yeah, that's true.
I don't really recall who it was exactly.
That would have been part of the, all of that stuff was part of the proliferation staff that dealt with all those issues.
And they were very specialized people.
And I didn't really have much contact with them.
I always forget the name of that little sub-agency.
It always reminds me of WINEP, but that's different, slightly.
All right.
And now, well, by the way, so then in 2002 and early 2003 then.
Was it common knowledge in the halls of the CIA that Donald Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle are running their own little separate Office of Special Plans, digging through y'all's trash, looking for something that can seem like a case?
Well, it wasn't common knowledge.
There were people at the higher levels that knew it because they had objected to it.
In fact, Tenet at several points objected to the fact that this information was being stovepiped through the system.
And, you know, so it was it was known at higher levels, but most of the people at middle levels and so didn't see the evidence of this because this stuff was not going through CIA.
It was going directly to the White House.
So it was there was not much opportunity to see it.
But if people, you know, if an experienced analyst had looked at this stuff, he would have said it was garbage.
But they didn't give them the chance to do that.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, well, you know, as Wilkerson said, though, they threw out the Libby speech entirely.
And the one that they wrote for the United Nations was wholly with the cooperation of the CIA and was not that that part of it.
Anyway, the Powell speech at the U.N. was the CIA.
And that was bogus enough.
I don't know why they even needed Doug Feith.
Yeah, well, they I guess they didn't eventually.
But the fact was that Tenet was Tenet was a political player and he was he was quite willing to go along with the charade.
And when you say it was coordinated with CIA, it was coordinated with Tenet and the people immediately around him.
And those are all political players that are interested in supporting the White House, whatever it wants to do.
And so that's the kind of result you get.
Right.
All right.
Well, we should change subject back to what we're talking about here with this current day stuff.
It occurs to me that people in the audience, probably many of them, ought to go ahead and start patting themselves on the back.
Anyone who suspected that the Israeli intercept of the Syrians ordering this chemical weapons attack might be fabricated, apparently that was the exact same conversation going on at Langley, Virginia, at the very same time.
So what a bunch of coops y'all aren't.
Yeah, there was there was a lot of suspicion both at the Pentagon.
You know, these are Pentagon analysts, too, that I don't want to say this is all CIA.
In fact, I think the evidence that I've gotten is that there were more people at the Pentagon that were upset about this and were complaining about the the information they were getting than there actually were at CIA.
So what this was like across the government, that people were looking at this information and saying it was it just didn't work.
So that would mean DIA or Navy intelligence or.
Well, the Pentagon has a whole lot of different intelligence groups within it.
DIA would be the the obvious one that had most of the analysts.
And they were certainly the ones that were in the forefront of this.
And so anyway, they were saying, look, this is really intelligence comes comes through very conveniently when we're looking for something depended on Al-Assad.
And they were very skeptical about it for a lot of reasons.
And as I point out in the article, for example, there was no corroborative intelligence from U.S. satellites or, you know, U.S. snoopers, U.S. sources on the ground to indicate that to support what the Israelis were claiming.
And now, which that's interesting enough, I mean, I don't want to believe in them too much, but it seems like if the Israelis were able to intercept something like that, the NSA would have picked it up, too, right?
Or one of their five or a million eye partners out there.
Yeah, I would think so.
I mean, I think that would be we're talking basically about telephone conversations.
The Israelis have a, you know, a semi secret unit, which is like a field unit that that is deployed on a border close to where they want to pick up communication.
So they have a good capability to get in close and pick up things that maybe aren't strong enough signals to be picked up by NSA.
But at the same time, as I say, the thing that was out about this was that if if indeed the phone conversation were true with a Syrian army officer, first of all, the conversation itself, even as reported by the Israelis, was somewhat ambiguous.
And secondly, the United States satellites, which were focused on this area, would have picked up on the preparations that were that are necessary to launch a chemical attack.
The Syrian arsenal is what they call binary chemical systems, which means they have to be combined.
You have to see, you know, you will see the actual process of of the chemicals being combined and armed onto the onto the missiles.
And then, of course, is also the problem that the missiles that were shown in the news coverage of this were missiles that were not even in the Syrian arsenal.
So there were a lot of problems with the story.
And this is precisely what the analysts said.
Both the Pentagon and CIA and the office of the DNI were focused on when they said, no, this this stuff just doesn't work.
Well, it seemed like the direction that the shells came from was everything, according to not just John Kerry, but I guess all the media that that seemed to agree or I guess that was a U.N. report, too, right, was that, well, geez, when we trace all these shells back to where they came from, it's this base, you are a Syrian government army base.
Yeah, the only problem with that is, I mean, you know, how do you trace a trajectory exposed back, though?
I mean, you got that you got the exploded missiles on the ground.
What kind of evidence do you have?
How do you get a sideways shot that shows you what their trajectory is?
I can't quite figure that one out.
And it was, I guess, by the crater, the shape of the crater.
But that's certainly not ironclad.
You know, I'm sure that would give you a divergence of 90 degrees or something like that in terms of where it came from.
And this was Kerry's comment.
Actually, I don't think the United Nations ever confirmed that or said that they felt that that was that was conclusive evidence.
I don't think they did.
But anyway, in any event, you know, all of this information, just there were lots of holes in this information.
And so clearly it was an issue of, you know, is this stuff for real or is it not?
Or do we go to war?
I mean, you know, bombing Syria is an act of war.
And do we go to war based on another group or another collection of information that that doesn't quite hang together?
Well, that's what that's essentially what the analysts were saying.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's amazing the politics of that thing.
Looking back, I mean, it's just it's almost a fairy tale ending the way that they all of a sudden went with this, you know, Russian plan to just get rid of the chemical stocks that remain and stay out.
I mean, can you imagine America staying out of a thing?
And mostly I think because the American people insisted, I guess the Pentagon really didn't want to get in there too bad either.
But no, no, but it's amazing that they were willing to even get near to this based on such shoddy intelligence that they're willing.
I know Obama on one hand is saying, well, I can't get the CIA to tell the story I want him to tell.
So I'll go ahead and have my guys tell it themselves, you know, from the White House.
And then on the other hand, he's telling Congress, why don't you guys do a conscience vote, which means go ahead and tell me, no, I don't mind, basically.
That's right.
And of course, the basic premise, which was, you know, we have to stop them from killing more Syrian civilians by killing some Syrian civilians of our own.
And, you know, it was like a solution that was no solution.
And the whole thing was so stupid.
It was it was hard to imagine that a serious government not headed by Peter Sellers could actually come up with this plan.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, the only real negative thing I can find anybody saying about it really is that, well, it makes America look like a bumbling clown and all that.
But I don't mind that at all.
You know, in fact, if that makes the D.C. types feel a little bit embarrassed and a little bit more reluctant to stick their neck out so far on something like this next time, so much the better.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, hey, listen, I want to know what you think about what happened last weekend with these Iran talks.
Man, I really thought it was going to happen.
But then other things happened.
What happened last week, obviously, there were there were the French were motivated by two things.
I mean, the first was they had assurances from the Saudis that the Saudis would buy lots of weapons from France.
And France did the right thing vis-a-vis blocking an agreement with Tehran.
So they had that.
And then, of course, they were under pressure from the Israelis.
And, you know, it's France and France has a very large Jewish population.
The population is very political, very involved with the government.
Hollande, in fact, the Francois Hollande is in Israel right now.
And and anyway, so there was a lot of leverage coming from active French partisans for Israel on the French government to block this.
And and so they did it.
They had two good reasons, they thought, and they did it.
And the question is, is this something that has so screwed up the process that it can't go forward from here or not?
That's what scares me a little bit.
I have a feeling that we had our opportunity and maybe we blew it.
Yeah, you know, it's really something else, I guess.
I mean, I don't know, maybe this is the the mythology of the American superpower or something, but God, it just seems like if John Kerry had grabbed the French guy by the arm and said, hey, man, don't do this or you're going to piss me off and I'm going to do something back to you or something like that, that it wouldn't have happened.
Right.
If the Americans were serious.
I think that's true, but I think what happened here was that the the Americans and everybody else were blindsided.
They didn't expect this to come from the French.
And when it came from the French, it was late in the process and there really wasn't any way to recover from it.
So I think I suspect that that would be the right way to view it.
As I say, the question is, are these really things that the French are going to go to the wall about?
Because they do have veto power in the U.N.
They're one of the five nations that that that do have that.
So it's it becomes a question of to what extent is this a serious game being played by the French or something?
They were just paying off favors or trying to get some special treatment.
And of course, it's too early to tell that.
But as I said, the real danger here is that it's damaged the process.
For example, you can see it already in the United States, where Congress is now cranking itself up at the behest of AIPAC essentially to block Obama from doing anything.
So it's bought Congress some time to get this going, which is a bad thing because if Kerry had come back with a deal last week, it would have been very hard for Congress to say no.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, I even saw where Obama said that the sanctions were a path to war.
The American people don't want this path to war.
And boy, I wish he would make up his mind what the hell he wants and try to come up.
I don't know.
Hire somebody else's chief of staff or somebody to come and help this guy figure out what the hell he wants and how to do it, because this is just ridiculous, man.
I don't know.
I just you know, good thing for him.
He was running against John McCain and Mitt Romney.
Otherwise, how did this boob ever become the president of the United States?
I can't figure it out.
You know, that's the same thing I keep asking.
But of course, I then think of John McCain and Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin and I say, well, thank God we have them.
Yeah.
Well, and the blowback from George Bush, too, is what caused it.
But yeah.
And then the thank God it's not Mitt Romney right now.
Yeah.
Well, no.
So Rothkopf from foreign policy dot com wrote a thing saying that actually, you know, the Americans were worried.
He kind of read the politics the other way, that if they'd come home with this partial deal in the midst of the rising political storm at home, it might have fallen apart and that maybe the Americans had decided, I think he claims to know that the Americans had decided to not push back against the French, that they would take this out for a little bit of breathing room so that they could try to cool off the domestic politics a little bit more and then come back in 10 days with their support a little bit more shored up.
But that's an awful risk.
Yeah, I hope he's right.
I mean, obviously, I'd like to see them succeed and I hope he's right.
But I find that a little bit.
I'm not too sure about it.
Well, now, so how's the Mujahideen doing in Syria these days?
Well, let me say that the reports, of course, today from Aleppo about how Aleppo is becoming an all Sharia city.
And if you don't, if you don't comply with Sharia, you get killed.
So that's I guess that's how the Mujahideen are doing.
And I hope everybody's proud about their support of the rebels in Syria.
As you well know, I was one of the first ones screaming that this whole rebel Syria insurgency and everything was a load of crap and that it was basically it was not going to turn out very well.
So anyway, I feel vindicated, but it's not a good vindication.
Yeah.
Well, you're also the guy that broke the story that Obama had signed the new finding authorizing stepped up support for the Mujahideen back in December of twenty eleven and to Washington's secret wars.
Well, and, you know, so I'm reading this thing.
I don't know what to make of this thing in The Guardian about Riyadh is fighting two wars in Syria.
They're backing a whole new rebel force that they're training up.
This is when we spoke about maybe this is when we spoke about a couple of weeks ago that Janes claimed that the Americans were training them in Saudi Arabia.
But anyway, this Guardian piece says that, well, I guess Bandar's plan is to use them against the Al-Qaeda guys, which would be ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra.
And then these guys will be the ones to take the lead then and defeat Assad when they're done with the Mujahideen.
Although hadn't the Saudis been backing the Jabhat al-Nusra and the ISIS guys all along?
And why would they quit that now?
Well, yeah, I think the only reason they would quit it now or at least pretend to quit it now is that there's been a lot of international pressure on them because of the radicalism, the demonstrated radicalism of the rebels.
I don't think they had a problem with it until suddenly this stuff started coming to light.
Before that, they were probably quite comfortable with it.
And, you know, there's been some media coverage about how the Saudis, you know, are really are kind of a worse enemy in terms of internationally, in terms of the extremist form of Islam that they've been propagating around the world.
And that basically this is the, you know, this is the seedbed of a lot of these radical movements.
So I wouldn't I would not take the Saudis at face value.
Yeah, so we can believe that they're backing up a force here, but not that they're going to use them to limit, to try to take on al-Nusra, certainly not before the Baathists anyway.
Well, if their intention is to bring about regime change, which it is, they're going to support everybody that basically has that same objective.
I mean, that's that's just the way they're going to work.
And that's to a certain extent, it's common sense in terms of what their objectives are.
So I, I think that they will be supporting the extreme groups.
They will be supporting moderate groups.
They'll be supporting whoever they can support that they think might be effective.
Well, and then but now, so what about Bashar al-Assad?
I mean, you mentioned Aleppo and their at least attempt to institute Sharia law there.
Do they have the regime on the run or does this just mean more Hezbollah and more Iranian support for Assad and Russian support and on the war will go or?
Well, I mean, all the indications seem to be I mean, I have no special information on this, but all the indications from people on the ground seem to be that the government is clearly winning right now, that today it took one of the last suburbs in Damascus that had that was controlled by the rebels and that its forces are moving to Aleppo, which is, of course, the principal to the principal business city and the largest city in Syria.
So anyway, it looks like the rebels are not doing very well.
That's possibly why the Saudis in particular are panicking.
But, you know, it's it's it's not exactly a situation where somebody is going to win next week.
This is this is a situation that's going to that's taken years to develop.
It's going to take years to resolve.
Yeah.
Well, you think it's much in question whether Syria is even going to outlast this battle?
Well, it could it could become a collection of autonomies in the way that Iraq is going.
So that would seem to be the the likely outcome.
The Kurdish region of Syria has has basically gone autonomous already.
And obviously the the Sunni Shia conflict, which is developing, you know, sort of projects itself to become the same sort of thing for the rest of the country.
Yeah, well, it's sort of like we saw in Iraq where the Sunnis can't retake Baghdad, but the Shia government in Baghdad can't really occupy the the Sunni triangle.
And in fact, I guess Coburn was reporting that even withdrawn at least for a time and sort of giving up even the attempt.
So I wonder is speculating.
But I wonder whether we'll actually see what some of these kooks have talked about.
And I mean, the kooks, the suicide bomber types, the Al-Nusra types have talked about, well, hey, you know what, maybe we can't take Damascus and we'll just make an alliance with the Sunni triangle part of that's how he called it.
But that's what he's talking about.
We'll just make an alliance with the Sunni parts of Iraq and we'll have a new Sunni stand here.
It'll be the beginning of the Islamo-fascist caliphate of bin Laden and George W. Bush's dreams.
Sure.
And there'll be a Kurdistan in the north, which will unite the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.
Sure.
Anything is possible.
And then we'll all have a nuclear war and it'll be great.
No, I mean, that's the one that's the real problem, right, is the interest of all those states in trying to keep their Kurdish populations divided from each other and inside their states.
I mean, can you imagine the Iranians letting their part of Kurdistan go?
Yeah, well, that's the that's the whole issue that people are forgetting now that the Kurdish issue is a much bigger regional issue than even the Sunni Shia in terms of individual countries, because Kurdistan, it spans all four countries and it's a significant part of the population in all four countries.
So this could be interesting to watch.
But, of course, we Americans are the ones who triggered this by invading Iraq.
Yeah.
Well, why you got to bring up old stuff?
What's that got to do with the surge work, Scott?
Yeah.
Hey, say it six times and it starts down.
Hey, listen.
So, you know, Mohammed Sahini was on the show and he was reminding us about American and or Israeli support for PJAK, the communist Kurdish terrorists.
They're like the PKK, but more focused on Iran.
Right.
What's up with that lately?
I haven't heard much on it lately, but I would assume it's still active.
I don't I don't know to what extent.
I mean, they'd be operating out of Kurdish, the Kurdish part of Iraq, and they still have good ties in that area, both the U.S. military and intelligence community and also the Israelis.
So I would suspect that's still an active program.
I I would be surprised if PJAK is involved with some of these assassinations and bombings in Tehran.
They've been blamed on the on Mec to a large extent.
And that has a certain logic to it.
But but, you know, the Kurds have the same same ability to carry out these acts.
They're pat.
They pass can pass as Iranians.
They can move around.
Now, there were even in the middle of all the negotiatings there or in between negotiations there with first and second Geneva meetings, there were Jandala attacks on border guards in Baluchistan in southeast Iran.
I know there's a history going back there of CIA and Mossad pretending to be CIA and whoever else.
Do you think that that was Mossad did that or they're just acting on their own?
I would tend to think at this point, from that area, they're acting on their own, but certainly they were enabled pretty much by by the United States, possibly acting with Mossad in the beginning to get this thing started.
All right.
We got to go.
Thanks so much, Phil.
Appreciate it.
OK, Scott, bye bye.
That's Phil Giraldi, everybody from the Council for the National Interest, the American Conservative Magazine and Antiwar dot com.
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