01/18/13 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
And now introducing the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.
He's a former CIA officer.
He writes for the American Conservative Magazine and for AntiWar.com as well.
Councilforthenationalinterest.org is the site there.
It's Philip Giraldi.
Welcome back.
Thanks, Scott.
How are you doing?
Welcome back to the show.
Well, good to be here again.
It's been an interesting week.
Yeah, so how do you like the new war?
Pretty cool, huh?
Well, it's another one of these situations where you can't exactly predict what's going to happen in any of these parts of the world.
But once you intervene and you overthrow a government and basically you don't have anything to put in its place, you should anticipate that the results are going to be bad.
Yeah.
Hey, this is kind of your specialty.
You're a former counterterrorism guy, that kind of thing, right?
Can you tell me how many natural gas facilities in Algeria had ever been seized by Islamists before the war in Mali?
Well, there have been a number of attacks through the years.
I don't think, I can't recollect that they ever actually seized a major facility.
These facilities are pretty heavily guarded by the Algerian army.
But there are a lot of smaller pipelines and pumping stations and stuff like that that have been attacked with fair regularity through the years.
In fact, we're talking about 20 years now since Algeria has been having political problems.
And that's kind of a normal thing to do.
Obviously, the insurgents, whatever, there have been a number of different insurgencies in Algeria.
And the insurgents focus on the fact that the government is relying on the money coming from oil and gas to fight them.
So it's an obvious target.
We talked years and years ago, really, this whole time, we've been talking about how many actual terrorists are there in the world, not just suicide bomber types, but just real international terrorists that are a threat.
And how the Bush guys especially would always like to pretend that Al-Qaeda was the Soviet Union out there, when it turned out the Islamo-fascist caliphate was the attic of a house out in the suburbs in the middle of nowhere in no man's land, Pakistan somewhere.
So what does that say about Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb?
How seriously do you take this group?
Is it fair for them to even claim the Al-Qaeda brand name at all or what?
Well, in a sense, they're all salafist groups that have a similar philosophy.
In fact, you could say Al-Qaeda is a salafist group.
So it's part of a bigger subset or set.
And these other groups have a similar philosophy.
But the point is that, you know, if you look at these conflicts and you analyze what they're all about, they're usually local issues or national issues.
They don't really have much of a spillover.
Now, North Africa is a little bit different in that you have a large Sahara region, which is very sparsely populated and not very well controlled by any of the governments in the region.
And you have so you have people that are able to move through this area and engage in acts that we would consider terrorism.
But most of the terrorism actually consists of, you know, trying to overthrow the government and take over like happens everywhere else.
Yeah.
So in other words, I mean, and this has always been the thing with Al-Qaeda, right?
Was it was there are always a bunch of Islamist insurgencies hither and yon, plenty of veterans of the old Afghan war against the Soviet Union floating around.
And then their whole thing was to try to get the Americans to come and escalate it all and turn all these little wars into bigger wars spread throughout the region, radicalize and and get as many American sock puppet regimes overthrown as possible, that kind of thing.
And it just seems like we're still following that same script.
Yeah.
If you look at if you look at the what bin Laden and other leaders of Al-Qaeda and similar groups have been saying, their their main focus is on overthrowing the Saudi regime and it was on overthrowing the Egyptian regime.
They basically have a focus on on changing the governments in the area that are already Muslim.
Yeah.
And then, you know, you look at the American government's enemies list, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad.
These are the guys who are keeping Al-Qaeda down.
You know, the guys who attacked us, the ones who are, you know, the suicide bombers, the threat.
And these are the guys that we take out.
Are those secular fascist dictator types?
Or I guess Qaddafi is sort of more common.
Sure.
The secular guys are basically are are are dictators.
I mean, they're essentially been put in place precisely to keep their countries under control and to keep the oil flowing in a lot of cases.
Yeah, sure.
That's what it's all about.
And the fact is that the insurgents, such as they are, they have a certainly they have a religious agenda, because for a Muslim, religion is is a whole lot more part of how you think and what your life is like.
And it is for most of us in the West.
And but the fact is that it's not all about religion.
It's all it's all tied in with politics.
Yeah, well, and, you know, how did they get the people of the West to accept the idea that any government that's based on Islam in the Islamic world is somehow an al Qaeda takeover, part of the caliphate thing we have to resist and overthrow?
I mean, that's not the really their position on the Turks.
Right.
They're still our allies.
And they democratically elected Muslim Party to power and that kind of thing.
Right.
Yeah.
And and there's every indication that the Muslim Party would step down if it loses an election.
There's no there's no incompatibility necessarily between Islam and and elections and some kind of political process.
But what scares people is is scares at least some people is the fact that these people are devout Muslims.
And that kind of scares them.
I scares people in Washington.
They don't want to hear that.
It's like, let's have something like the French Enlightenment take place here where people turn on religion and and and do not want to have it as part of their political actions.
And, of course, that's just not viable.
That's not reasonable.
Yeah.
Well, of course, the same story here in America.
Right.
They don't want anybody believing in anything higher than then the state in Washington, D.C.
That's the highest authority on Earth and in heaven.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, that's what we we've really replaced what what what might call a theocracy with with something much worse.
It's a glorification of the state.
And, of course, many people would consider that fascism.
Yeah, I would, too.
In fact, that was one of your recent articles, too, about America's descent into fascism.
And, you know, I kind of like that word because it's so charged and it makes people flip out.
But really, all it means is mercantilism with a police state and a war.
Well, we got all that right.
And exactly right.
The only thing we still have that most fascist states wind up as as more or less dictatorships.
We don't technically have that.
We have two dictatorial parties that exchange power.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
A pin the tail on the autocrat.
I'm ripping that off from somebody else.
I'm sorry.
I don't know who to attribute that to.
But anyway, so let's talk about this piece.
It's all about Israel.
No, it is all about Israel is the title here at antiwar dot com.
Just remando has been I guess he invented the petition at the White House website and has been pushing so hard for Hagel to be nominated because that'll be the neocons losing mostly, which is his highest priority.
And I can see that.
But then so he wrote so many pieces about the Hagel thing that I guess he decided he would talk about reasons besides Israel, why people with power would oppose Hagel.
But then so this article you're attempting to bring us back to the point here.
Who really is behind this?
Stop Hagel at all costs campaign.
And what is their motivation?
So take us through this here because you should do a job in this article.
Yeah, well, Justin did indeed write a piece a couple of weeks ago saying it's not all about Israel.
And basically his point was that there is is kind of a what I refer to as a rainbow coalition of militarists, of of military industrial complex people, of people who just hate the thought of Obama, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And so I wrote this piece saying, no, it is really all about Israel.
And my point is that, yeah, all those other groups are out there, but they're not the groups that are placing full page ads in The New York Times.
They're not the groups that are appearing on Saturday morning talk shows and and pushing the against Hagel and appearing in newspaper editorial pages.
And so these are all these people that are doing that and appearing in these places are basically what one might describe as Israel firsters.
And my my central point is that without these people, there wouldn't be any real controversy about Hagel getting appointed secretary of defense.
So you have to say that the critical factor here, the critical element is that these people are are people who are doing this because they believe they believe it's good for Israel.
Yeah.
And those people being.
Who, for example, Bill Crystal would obviously be the name that pops up most readily.
He's on this.
He's the head of this emergency committee for Israel, which has been placing the ads.
They placed a full page ad in The New York Times on Tuesday.
I think that cost about eighty thousand dollars.
And there and he's been on television repeatedly.
And so it's it's it's the crystals.
Jennifer Rubin at The Washington Post would be another one.
The Washington Post editorial page, the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
You know, it's the usual suspects.
Man, I wonder how to get Sheldon Adelson to finance this show.
I guess I'd have to change what it's about.
You might have a little bit of difficulty convincing him.
But yeah, it's worth a try.
He's getting old.
Maybe he's getting a bit doddery.
I mean, for 80 grand, I might just do it.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
Why not?
But that's yeah.
Yeah.
So you have to, you know, it's like anything else.
You have to follow the money and figure out, you know, who's really pushing this and who's behind.
Oh, another one of Justin's points was, you know, Christian Zionists.
Well, Christian Zionists have no access to the media.
The Christian Zionists are not placing any ads.
They've they've gone around and they've recommended that their supporters email or telephone their congressman in the White House against Hagel.
But that's as far as they've gone.
So, you know, I'm just saying, all right, if we're looking at really why there is a controversy about Hagel, it's about Israel.
Right.
And then so now what's so controversial about this guy?
Because, well, I mean, I don't know.
Go ahead.
Well, obviously, the controversy is is over the fact that he made one statement.
He referred to the Jewish lobby as opposed to the Israeli lobby, which everyone is latching on to as being anti-Semitic, you know.
But in reality, the Israel lobby is mostly Jewish.
And so why should anyone get upset?
The Israelis in their own media refer to it as a Jewish lobby, the U.S. lobby.
And so they're not upset by it.
And the other thing is, that's true.
I mean, if you're if you're M.J. Rosenberg, you can call it the Jewish lobby all day.
For me, I mean, I'm kind of sort of Jewish in a way or whatever, but my last name is Horton.
And so I, you know, I'm careful to always discriminate more closely.
And I always say the Israel lobby because it is, you know, truer to the fact.
And, you know, MJ himself will point out what a small percentage of Jews are actually represented by the Israel lobby in America.
You know, whatever you call it.
But you're right that it's it's ridiculous for because, you know, probably half the references to the Israel lobby in America call it the Jewish lobby.
And probably more than half of those references are by Jews themselves.
And of course, if you call it the Israel lobby, they'll say you mean Jews, you racist anyway.
So what's the difference?
Yeah, well, when you're talking to Bill Crystal or Jennifer Rubin, yeah, you can't escape either way.
But and then the other issue, of course, is Iran.
They're saying, look, if this guy was in combat, he got wounded twice.
He saw people getting killed around him.
He's going to be reluctant to commit American troops to attack Iran.
Well, you know, basically the argument for attacking Iran is paper thin anyway.
And Hagel is merely saying that that going to war should always be the last option, which I think is a rather refreshing thing to hear.
But obviously, the people who are really pushing for a red line or a deadline to attack Iran don't want to hear that sort of thing.
Did I admit that if they actually cite his wounds and say because he has actual experience in war, he'll be too reluctant and that's why to oppose him?
Yeah, they said that in print.
Go over and check the piece I did for the American conservative, which is still on the Web site.
It's Jennifer Rubin and Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins both say that the fact that he has this military experience is a liability because Cohen was saying basically that the Vietnam War has nothing to do with today's style of warfare, etc., etc.
And Rubin was basically saying that this will make him afraid to use force when necessary.
You know, they're using every conceivable argument that they can come up with to denigrate this guy.
The problem with Chuck Hagel, he's not a chicken hawk.
Well, that's that's the fundamental problem.
Yeah, they want a nice chicken hawk who's who's so detached from what it means to go to war that he thinks it's like a video game.
I mean, you know, I suppose that's what they want.
Amazing.
Yeah.
And then and this guy, he's still got shrapnel in his chest.
But here's my thing.
He's just Colin Powell, right?
It's not like he's some kind of I saw Jennifer Rubin was a Jennifer Rubin that said the closest thing to Chuck Hagel is Ron Paul.
Man, he's a million miles from Ron Paul.
All he is is just well, like Colin Powell would have said, did say, I think, on one of the Sunday morning news shows the other day was that he's just like me.
He's a George H.W. Bush, centrist, realist, Republican.
He's not an old right guy.
He's just he's a liberal Republican, really.
Right.
A Rockefeller.
I mean, there's every indication that that he essentially is being nominated because he's he's 100 percent supporter of the kind of foreign policy and defense policy that the president has, which is far from extremist in in in any direction.
I mean, there's certainly aspects of it that I think are are are terrible.
But the fact is that he's not the president certainly is not unwilling to to go to war and get involved in conflicts.
And Hagel will reflect that.
It's it's crazy what they're cooking up about this guy.
And again, this supports the argument that really it's not about that.
It's about Israel.
And the whole issue is really Israel.
And the issue, the secondary issue on top of Israel, of course, is Iran, which is all part of Israel, too.
Right now, how important do you think it is that Obama went ahead and nominated?
I mean, Bill Kristol and all of his guys made their preemptive strides and Obama went ahead and named him.
He hadn't been confirmed yet, but it seems pretty much they've got a rule that you try to put a former senator in your cabinet.
The rest of the senators have to go along with that so that the same rules will apply to them if they ever get nominated.
Right.
I mean, they're not going to ban him.
So is this going to be some kind of major defeat for the neocons, do you think?
I don't see it that way.
I think that this kind of stuff plays out in Washington, inside the beltway and among people like yourself and myself who follow these issues.
But generally, the public doesn't care.
They don't really know what anybody is talking about.
And so I don't see it's a major, major defeat.
The neocons are very well entrenched in the media.
They're very well entrenched in terms of the think tanks in Washington.
I don't see any change in that coming about.
As for Obama's nominating him, I think it was a courageous act.
I think he clearly floated the name first, realized he was going to take a lot of heat.
But I figure that he basically decided at the end that he would win.
Republicans are going to vote for him, I think virtually against him, virtually en masse.
But he still should get enough votes from some individuals, certainly in the Republican Party, that should get him enough to get approved.
Yeah.
Well, it's just amazing that, well, you know, you had, I was complaining earlier to the audience about this piece in the, I think it was the Daily Caller, the Tucker Carlson one, where the headline is Rand Paul looking ahead to the presidency goes to Israel.
And I was just thinking, and then, you know, like you're talking about this entire controversy about Chuck Hagel is about whether or not he's a good fit for foreign countries, foreign policy.
And I'm just thinking, do you think this is beginning to get counterproductive for even the goals of the neoconservatives here?
Because it's looking a little blatant and it's looking pretty corrupt and obviously wrong, you know?
Yeah, well, one of the interesting things was Justin did emphasize, and which I also mentioned in my piece, is that there quickly was a counterreaction from a lot of prominent American Jews who were journalists and involved in politics and saying, look, this whole thing is wrong.
Hagel is not a crazy.
He's not against the interests of Israel or anybody else.
And there's been considerable pushback.
So that is an interesting aspect of this, as to what extent this monolithic support of Israel, where, you know, many American Jews don't go along certainly with Netanyahu and his government and his policies, but they kind of keep quiet about it.
But I think in this case, we're starting to see that there's a pushback developing and people are saying, hey, this whole thing is wrong.
And that's an interesting thing to watch.
Because after all, it's the, just like in anything else, it's the 1% at the very top who have the most money and who are very right wing and who are very different than most American Jews who have very liberal values.
Like people say, they make money like Republicans, but they vote like Puerto Ricans, you know?
They do, they're liberals and they put those values, human rights values and free speech values and these kinds of values way before the interests of the Likud party, far away across an ocean and a sea from here.
That's right.
And it's interesting, as you say, the 1%, the 1% is always there on every issue.
It's like Bill Kristol, who obviously is well funded by people like Adelson, he does nothing but this and he pushes this issue and he pushes this issue.
And Abe Foxman is another guy that's on board.
He clearly, his own success and everything is tied in with him doing this 100% all the time.
And most other people just kind of care less.
I mean, they don't want to punish Israelis, they don't particularly want to punish Palestinians and they certainly want to do what's best for America.
But the problem is this all gets lost in some kind of political equation where the people who are screaming the loudest and screaming most often are the ones who are heard.
All right, and now we could sit here and count the ways that our support for Israel ends up leading to consequences for the American people.
But I think most people pretty much already know the answer to that.
But where I know you have real specialized knowledge is in Israeli covert operations in the United States.
And I think when people hear a good story about this kind of thing, it really puts a different spin on exactly what America's relationship is with Israel.
I remember reading an article by Christopher Ketchum in Counterpunch that begins, scratch a former American intelligence officer and he'll start complaining about the Israeli intelligence services inside the United States.
And I'm pretty sure you're quoted prominently in that same piece.
Yeah, I was.
I was interviewed for that.
Well, I mean, the fact is that the FBI used to have an annual report on foreign intelligence operations inside the United States.
And Israel was always number one of all friendly countries in terms of conducting operations against the US.
And now that report is classified, so you don't see it anymore.
But I've been reliably informed that it's still basically the same in spite of whoever is in power in Israel or whatever the situation is, they spy on us.
And a lot of it is military technologies and industrial technologies that they can market.
And they do sell, indeed, a lot of military hardware.
I think they're the seventh or eighth biggest arms seller in the world right now.
And a lot of it is derived from American models and some of which they get legitimately and obviously some of which they don't.
Yeah.
And then, well, so I don't know, man.
I think a lot of people just think, well, some economic harm to some military industrial complex companies.
That's not too bad.
Well, it depends on how you look at it.
If your job is dependent on it, I guess.
I mean, I would say that this kind of stuff does have a serious impact.
Obviously, I'm not even too happy about the U.S. being a major arms supplier for the rest of the world.
But I guess that's something that we'll probably have to discuss on another show.
Yeah.
Well, and we have before, and it is important.
Can you tell me, do you know specifically the one about we gave them, the U.S. gave the Israelis some really fancy missiles and radar systems?
And then they turned around and gave that to the Chinese?
Yeah.
The Sidewinder missile, which is a missile that's fired from an airplane, normally to shoot down another airplane, I think Raytheon was the principal developer of it.
And the Israelis basically, shall we say, borrowed the technology.
They stole the technology and they developed their own version of it, which they then sold to the Chinese.
So that's one example of the kind of stuff that goes on.
And it's very hard to obviously control.
There have been other examples.
For example, the U.S. is going to be selling its most advanced fighter, the F-35, to Israel.
And the Israelis are insisting that they want to have access to the planes to be able to service them.
Now, if you can service the plane, that gives you access to the avionics that basically gives you the really sensitive information and the sensitive resource in the airplane that makes it special.
So the Pentagon has been resisting this, but the Israelis have been insisting on it.
And of course, the Pentagon knows that if they give them access to service the planes, then they're going to steal the technology.
Right.
Well, geez, if it's the F-35, I don't know which joke to make that, you know, good luck to them if that's going to be flying those around.
Or maybe, hey, well, maybe the Israelis will figure out how to make them work and then teach it to the Americans.
Did you know that when the U.S. was supplying the German Air Force after the war with the F-101, the Germans used to refer to it as a flying coffin?
Yeah.
You know what?
I actually a few years back, Phil, I had a fan of the show sent me.
I have it here somewhere.
He sent me a whole collection of songs all about that, about the Lockheed plane, Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters.
And it's all about the aircraft salesman and the board meeting and all this stuff.
And all the songs are about the Lockheed salesman convincing the German government to keep buying these things after they keep falling out of the sky.
That's great.
Good stuff.
It doesn't sound very good, but it's fun.
You know, once.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I guess it's fun if you're not one of the pilots that crashes with it.
Right.
Yeah.
Or anyone who cared about them.
All right.
We got to go.
Thank you so much for your time, Phil.
Appreciate it.
OK, Scott.
Take care.
All right, everybody.
That's Phil Giraldi.
The Council for the National Interest is at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
He's executive director there.
Oh, and I meant to mention, and you can read about this at the antiwar.com blog.
They've got a big event coming up against Islamophobia and with all great experts on a panel all about Islamophobia coming up the end of this month.
He's still there.
No, he's gone anyway.
So that's happening.
And then also read him, of course, at the American conservative dot com, where it's Rubin and Cohen.
No soldiers need apply is the recent one.
And in fact, you ought to read his the spy who loved us about Israeli spying in the United States for that same publication.
That's the American conservative dot com.
And of course, he writes for antiwar dot com, where he's got one from just the other day.
It is all about Israel.
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