12/16/13 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org and Facebook, Scott Horton Show and all that.
All right.
Next up on the show today is Philip Giraldi, former CIA and DIA officer.
Now he's a writer for the American Conservative Magazine and Antiwar.com and UNZ.com.
He also is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Hey, do you have a title of some kind at UNZ.com?
You want to talk about that for a minute?
Yeah.
Well, this is a new website.
It's founded by Ron Unz, who was the publisher at the American Conservative and has been a longtime supporter of Antiwar.com.
And basically we conceive it as a website for alternative views.
And what we mean by that is we're not locked into any kind of ideological position.
If you can make a good argument, make the good argument, we'll print it.
We don't want to be cast as libertarian.
We don't want to be cast as traditional conservative or as progressive.
We just want to have stuff appearing that will be of interest and we'll be making compelling arguments for alternative viewpoints.
I'm the editor of the National Security and Foreign Policy section, so that's my connection with it.
Great.
And that's UNZ.com, Unz.com, an alternative media selection.
And of course, Antiwar.com has been running a lot of good ones from there lately.
And like you say, from all different perspectives, but only top quality stuff.
So I've been enjoying reading it lately.
And we're going to talk about your piece, which is really something else here.
Why Remain in Afghanistan?
Some of the best stuff about Afghanistan I've read in a while, actually.
But we'll put that off for a minute because I wanted to ask you about Robert Levinson.
This is the big story about the former FBI agent missing in Iran.
It was Ahmadinejad holding this guy hostage.
Apparently, everybody said on TV anyway, until the AP and then the New York Times came out and said, well, he was working for the CIA.
There's a whole mystery about a separate rogue faction of analysts running this guy instead of the covert action division and all of this and that.
So what's the story?
Set us straight, Philip.
Well, the story is that nobody who's writing about this really understands how this stuff works at CIA.
And after 9-11, the CIA hired something like 10,000 contractors.
And essentially, this guy, Levinson, was the product of that.
He was picked up by the CIA as a contractor.
He had been an FBI investigator working on Russian organized crime, which is, of course, also Israeli organized crime, which is also organized crime and drug trafficking for much of the middle part of the world.
And so anyway, he was an expert.
So he was picked up by the division of the Proliferation Division, which has a branch that deals with money transfers relating to drug trafficking and other things.
So anyway, this is quite normal.
And the guy would have been picked up, given his background, as an investigator.
Now, does this make the guy a CIA agent or anything like that?
No, he's a contractor.
He's picked up.
He has particular expertise in terms of criminal activity of a certain type.
And I'm sure this committee or this group in CIA, which was consistent of analysts, was essentially using him in a perfectly legitimate fashion to go to places like Latin America, check out public records, bank account information, that kind of stuff.
So he wasn't a spy.
Okay.
Now, what happened at some point, the woman who was running this decided that she was going to use him for other things that were forbidden, that basically were spying type activities.
And she was going to cover it by just not telling her bosses about it.
And of course, you know, you figure out how a big bureaucracy works, that's easy enough to do.
And so I think a lot of these other kind of, you know, innuendos and stories that are being fed into this are basically a failure to comprehend that, yeah, this guy was a CIA contractor, but that doesn't mean that CIA sent him on this mission.
This woman with whom he had a personal and kind of a business relationship was the one who did it.
And I think people are looking for something deeper than that.
They're not going to find it.
Well, why not?
I mean, hey, it's...
Because it ain't there.
And I would suspect, I mean, if you read the whole story on this guy, I'm sure you have, he was involved with, you know, organized Russian crime.
Organized Russian crime is organized Israeli crime.
It has a lot of other things that are pulled in with it.
These are very bad people.
These are people who are killers, who are drug traffickers, who are, you know, responsible for all kinds of crimes.
So anyway, these are the people that he got involved with.
And I would suspect when the Iranians are telling us that we don't know where he is, I would believe that they don't know where he is.
And I would suspect if he's still alive, he's somewhere else.
He's in Pakistan or he could even be in Israel.
He could be anywhere.
And I think there's a lot of confusion.
They're looking for a conspiracy theory inside CIA to explain this, but it just ain't there as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah.
And now, as far as what all he was up to, you're going on Occam's razor here or you're going about, you know, based on what you really know because of what people in the CIA are still telling you or what?
Well, people aren't telling me anything about this.
I mean, I read the after action report.
I read the critique that the agency made about the activity.
And it rings true to me that this is, you know, I worked as a contractor back in 2001, 2002 for the agency.
I won't tell you what exactly I was doing or anything like that, but I was making a lot of trips.
I was not spying.
I was going to various places and I was doing things quite openly, accessing public records and doing various things.
And there's no reason to assume that this guy wasn't doing something similar until until the woman he was involved with decided that she was going to have him do stuff that she knew would not stand scrutiny.
So I, you know, it all just it fits to me.
And I'm not seeing a whole lot of stuff from my fellow ex spies in the usual circles that I discuss these things to give any contradictory argument on this.
I think that's the way it is.
Yeah.
All right.
So now I want to talk about Afghanistan because I think this is a lot more important than that old story.
I never did pay much mind to it anyway, because it's just some guy.
Well, the problem is it's being exploited by guys like McCain.
See, because it's they're trying to nail the Iranians on this and to imply that the Iranians have taken this guy and have tortured him and held.
So there is a you know, there is an important sub story here.
And that's what's disturbing that is being politicized as being played like a political game in terms of, you know, let's get the administration and let's get the CIA and let's and let's basically derail negotiations with Iran.
That's what's happening.
Yeah.
Now, Kerry, I think he seems to be operating under the same assumption that you're saying, though, that he doesn't probably he's acting like he doesn't think Iran really does have him or he's not accusing them of having him, right?
Yeah, I, you know, I suspect that they don't have them, because this is small potatoes.
If they had them, they would probably let them go.
I mean, they're serious about cutting a deal with the West on their nuclear program.
I think they would let them go.
I suspect they don't have them.
Yeah, that was my impression, too, that if they did, I'm a dean of job would have said, ha ha, we caught your CIA agent or something like that back then.
Absolutely.
Sure.
They could they could have ground that into the, you know, into the propaganda mill.
And they would have a pretty good story about this CIA spy sent in into Iran.
And they didn't do it.
Yeah.
All right.
So yeah, that is an important point, though, that it's it's one more talking point for those trying to ruin the nuclear deal.
And I guess you must have seen that the Iranians refused to let Obama's imposition of new sanctions ruin everything.
And they've agreed to keep talking.
How much more of this abuse do you think they can take and still get all the way to the deal six months from now, five months now?
Well, my sources are telling me that they're dead serious about this, that they really want a deal.
So I think the Iranians are willing to bend.
Now, the question is, is Obama going to do something that he knows will deliberately derail it because he's under pressure from his own party?
I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that one.
But I think the Iranians will will do everything possible to make this work.
Well, you know, everybody keeps saying that the Senate is going to pass the sanctions in January.
But even if they do, Obama can veto them, right?
Or not?
It's not like they can override his veto.
They don't have that many votes.
Well, he could he could veto it.
And of course, then the question is, does he have enough?
Does he have enough votes to not have them override the veto?
Well, who knows?
Israel very often gets, you know, 99 senators lined up behind it.
Yeah, you see that napkin.
I can get 77 senators signatures on that by morning.
Remember that?
That's the head of Rosen.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Rosen.
He was more than just the head of APEC.
Anyway, yeah, he was their their their bagman.
Okay, so now why remain in Afghanistan?
Phil, who's going to remain in Afghanistan?
What's the deal?
I thought Obama said by the end of next year, it'll all be over finally.
Well, what I did was in the article, I went through the what I thought were the possible reasons why it made sense or why the government is trying to make sense of staying.
And I couldn't come up with a good reason.
I basically said, look, it's like an Iraq situation where you have this big embassy and you have a big CIA presence and everything like that.
And you want to have the military around just to protect them.
Well, okay.
But CIA is pretty well able to protect itself.
And and the embassy is just going to hire six thousand guards.
So that argument doesn't make sense.
And then you but you go a little bit deeper and you start thinking about it.
You say, well, really, it's it's it's to avoid in Iraq situation where everything kind of breaks down without an American presence.
But that's a bad argument, too, because nobody in their right mind would think that that's anything but a Band-Aid and that it's it's just a temporary expedient and basically whatever is going to happen in Afghanistan is going to happen.
And if we put it off by five more years, we're just going to kill a lot more people in the process and just spend a lot more money.
So that doesn't make any sense either.
And then the final argument I came up with was just that the U.S. government is so embarrassed by by the horrible things that it's been doing for the last few years that it's trying to save face and pretend that this is actually a viable option to keep the thing going.
And so I figure, well, that's I'll just throw that out for what it's worth.
Yeah.
Well, now.
I guess their argument of trying to prop up Karzai makes more sense than, oh, we're going to try to find the last 10 Arabs in Waziristan and kill them with drones or whatever.
But how bad how bad of a catastrophe would it be if the Taliban took over Kabul?
And would it be another 1990s, you know, five, six years civil war, all that kind of madness all over again and totalitarian Taliban rule eventually under Mullah Omar or whoever's next?
Well, who knows?
I mean, the fact is, we don't know.
But the obviously what what even Karzai is pushing for right now is negotiations with the Taliban, because, you know, he knows he doesn't control most of the country controls very little of it.
And there are a lot of warlords who control other bits of it.
So there has to be some kind of, you know, integrated solution to what's going on there.
And basically, a continued U.S. military presence doesn't necessarily guarantee anything.
I think that's part of the problem.
And one of the interesting thing was when I wrote the piece, and I'm sure you read some of the comments on it, this argument about the pipeline, you know, the pipeline that's going to be constructed across Afghanistan and everything.
I mean, that that has a project hasn't been viable for years.
And it keeps popping up because people want to find a reason rooted in capitalism or in classic imperialism to explain why we're there.
I just don't think that that argument holds at all, that we're there for a lot of stupid reasons like we got in for, you know, probably for a good reason in the beginning and then never could quite figure out what we were doing after that.
And we've done that everywhere else.
Yeah, well, it's just like LBJ said, I don't want to be the first president to lose a war.
So make it happen on Nixon's watch.
I'm out of here.
Somebody else's problem, not mine.
That's exactly the thinking.
Yeah, that's exactly the thinking.
I think, you know, the United States is is like a wounded beast.
I mean, it's just it doesn't make our policies just don't make sense anymore.
And as much as you want to listen, it's pretty hard to listen to Kerry.
But I mean, you got to listen to him and see if he's actually saying something.
And, you know, his comment about the Palestinians the other day, where he said that the Israeli Arabs were a what, a time bomb in the heart of Israel.
I mean, he's basically giving them, you know, a green light to actually cleanse them.
I mean, how stupid are these people?
Are they don't they realize that what what they're saying?
I don't I don't really know.
Yeah, that's probably not what he meant at all, either.
But he really is just that bad at talking, you know, which I can sympathize with, because I'm pretty bad at talking sometimes.
But boy, that John Kerry, he's another Joe Biden, you know, where whoops, I didn't kind of mean that.
Yeah, Biden and Kerry, actually, they're probably, actually, they're probably separated at birth.
Yeah, I mean, what Kerry's really saying, he's trying to beat the Palestinians, the Israelis over the head and say, you know, come to an equitable solution here so that this isn't a continuing problem.
But then, as you point out, he accidentally completely dehumanizes a million people and, you know, justifies their, you know, massive relocation.
Oops.
Yeah, it's just it seems like, you know, I wrote a piece.
I don't know where it was.
I guess it was in the young's place.
And I basically said the problem with the U.S. foreign policy is that it's linear.
They they treat every problem like it's a separate problem and they try to figure out some way to to to fix it.
And they don't realize that all these problems are interconnected.
And that's why our policy is so bad.
And it's, you know, the previous imperial powers like Britain and France and the Roman Empire, they kind of figured out these things a lot better than we do.
Yeah.
You know, a friend sent me a link to the the Houston housewife who she's the lobbyist lady who worked with the congressman on funding the Mujahideen in the 80s.
And I'm sorry, Charlie Wilson's war and all that.
Right.
The lady right there.
Right.
Julie Roberts in the movie.
And right.
And he the reporter, the I guess it's the Houston Chronicle reporter asked her, well, what about the idea that what you did back then is what led to September 11th?
And she just says, oh, dear, you know, if we knew what the consequences of what we did was going to cause the next wars and we wouldn't have them.
So too late for that.
So, you know, we must persist in folly because we're doing great at folly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, my conclusion of the article was basically there are no good reasons to stay in Afghanistan when you weigh the downside and the downside is, you know, what it's going to cost us.
And you have a completely corrupt government there that's not going to be fixed.
You know, an American presence is not going to make us any safer necessarily.
And so it's it's one of those things where the argument or where's the where's the beef, Mr. Obama?
I don't get it.
But I suspect it's you know, but again, I guess I really didn't explore this in the in the article.
But, you know, it's domestic politics again.
Obama doesn't want to look like a loser before the 2014 congressional elections.
And he probably wants to, you know, also be able to fudge this issue into 2016 before, you know, for the next presidential election.
It's you know, I bet a lot of that is that is what drives this.
Yeah.
Hey, that's what happened with the whole surge back in 2009 in the first place was the you know, the political hacks in the White House said you can't end two wars or the Republicans will call you a wimp and you'll be a one term president.
So he decided to make the bet on more power for him and more dead bodies for everybody else.
Yeah, that's that's I think probably that's probably the most compelling reason for why we want to stay in Afghanistan.
Otherwise, it just doesn't make any sense at all.
I mean, yeah, sure.
I mean, if we pull out, they're going to be they're going to be people killed.
And but we say they're going to be people killed.
I mean, it's just it's a it's a it's a Faustian bargain.
If you think that this thing is going to work.
Yeah.
In fact, you know, The Washington Post, you might remember reported it was an excerpt from the book Little America about the war in Afghanistan.
And part of it was about how there was a CIA report in the fall of 2009.
Everybody might remember that Sarah Palin and other Republicans were accusing Obama of dithering.
And even the generals were coming out saying it's taken too long to decide on the surge and all of that.
And the CIA report said, don't bother surging because it's not going to work.
All it's going to do is prolong everything and talk just like what you just said.
And and that Obama knew he had already been told what was in the report.
And so he refused to read it.
He didn't want to be on the record of having read the report.
He refused to look at the report.
He already knew what it said.
Don't do it.
And then he did it anyway and escalated another 60,000 troops.
Well, that explains why we're in the mess we're in, because we have we have, you know, leaders that basically are are not interested in leading and not interested in doing what's good for the country.
They're just interested in doing what's good for their faction.
And of course, that's what George Washington and the others all warned about.
Yeah.
And did you see the thing in The Washington Times about where the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan and his counterpart at the State Department and one of the other guys in in uniform, I believe they didn't.
None of the three of them could name even estimate the number of dead Americans from the last year of war or the cost from the last year of war over there.
Well, they were stumped.
It was Dana Rohrabacher asked them about it.
And it was literally the scene was them sitting at the tables.
They're looking at each other saying, does anybody know?
Does anybody know?
No, I'm sorry, Congressman.
None of us know.
They didn't even have a ballpark estimate, Phil, for how many Americans had died in the war in the last year.
Can you believe that?
Well, it's because for them, war is an abstraction, you know, and it's funny stuff going on in Ukraine right now, which I'm sure you're following closely.
And so, you know, it's a replay of the funny stuff that went on in Georgia and the funny stuff that goes on in Belarus and goes on everywhere else.
It just seems like there's no learning curve.
Victoria Nuland was in was in Kiev the other day passing out candy to the kids and the kids didn't want to take the candy.
They were more serious than she was.
Oh, that's funny.
I didn't see that.
Yeah, we got actually Dan McAdams is coming on to talk about that in a few minutes from the Ron Paul Institute.
Yeah, I asked him about that because it was apparently Victoria Nuland was with.
This is our diplomacy and Victoria Nuland is she's now the assistant secretary of state for for Europe and Central or Central Europe.
I'm not sure what it is, but it's frightening how these people she's I mean, she's married to Kagan.
These people never disappear.
They Democrat, Republican.
It doesn't make any difference.
They're always with us.
Yeah, especially the Kagan's those guys.
They'll attach right to you.
And even their spouses, too.
I mean, it's just, you know, it's like they have they have, you know, if it's a if the government is inclined towards hiring a woman for the sake of hiring a woman, they've got a woman.
Right.
Yeah.
It's always either their wife or their sister or something as Jim Loeb said, hey, it's all in the neocon family.
This Thanksgiving, all of the worst neoconservatives in the world are sitting down and having turkey dinner together.
That's right.
Marrying each other's mom.
All right.
And now you did a review for antiwar dot com of Congress scares the people and you compared the hysterical cries of Dianne Feinstein and Mike Rogers about all the terrible terrorist dangers that are facing us that justify their unlimited power over our lives.
And you were comparing that with the government's official estimate of how many terrorists there are in the world and how much danger that actually amounts to.
Could you please give us a brief rundown of that?
Yeah, the U.S. government through the State Department every year issues a global terrorism report.
And the numbers have been going down every year.
Now, the numbers have shot up this year purely because of one place, and that's Iraq.
And there have been lots of killings in Iraq, sectarian killings, no question about it.
And they count all these killings as terrorism.
And of course, it's 100 percent Muslims that are being killed by other Muslims.
But yet they've conflated this into a terrorist threat.
There are more terrorists.
The terrorists are all over the place and the terrorists are out to kill us and so forth.
As I pointed out in the piece, there are very few terrorists anyway, that there are even fewer of these terrorists are either disposed to or have the capabilities or the training or the language ability or the money to attack the United States.
And so all this stuff is kind of, it's alarmist.
It's taking a threat that doesn't kill anyone.
There were three terrorist killings in the United States in the last two years, and they were at the Boston Marathon.
So that's one and a half killings per year statistically.
And the U.S. government and local governments and state governments are spending something like a trillion dollars to counter this threat.
So there's something out of sync here.
And of course, people like Feinstein and Rogers are people whose reputations are based on the fact that they've been part of this program, part of this agenda.
And so they don't want to face up to the fact that this is all a fraud.
Yeah.
Well, first of all, the fact that they would use the continuing civil war left over from our late war in that country in Iraq over there and just use that to build up the numbers for PR sake.
That's pretty disgusting.
If you ask me, those are real people whose lives are being literally blown apart to this day because of that madness.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's it's pretty scary.
I mean, they're they're basically smart people.
They have access to the best information.
And just because their mindset is their mind is set a certain way, they're never going to see anything but what they want to see.
And that's what it's been the horrible thing of the last 12, 13 years.
I had a yeah.
The Syrian jihadists in this to their suicide bombings count as terrorism or not?
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're counting those two.
And of course, those are those are terrorists that we supported, you know, because we wanted to throw out the terrible Assad.
So I'm sorry, but I interrupted you there with that.
Yeah, no, I was just saying I had I had lunch with some former CIA colleagues last week, and it was it was kind of shocking.
And we were talking a bit about I always try to low key my view, actual views, because I know that most of them won't quite go along with, you know, the extent that I see it.
But the you know, we're talking about this.
We're talking about the terrorism and stuff like that.
And these are people who have served overseas.
They speak foreign languages.
They know foreign cultures and stuff like that.
And yet the wife turned to me.
She said, well, but at least we're the good guys.
And I was freaked out at that point, and I said, you know, how can we be the good guys when we have a president who kills U.S. citizens without any due process?
When we kill wedding parties, that was the day when the wedding party was wiped out in Yemen.
And I said, we wipe out whole wedding parties and we never have to say we're sorry.
I said, how are we the good guys?
And they didn't even answer.
They just kind of looked away, you know, like he's talking crazy again.
Yeah.
Depressing.
I can completely identify with that because I remember being a child and I remember when I was a child, there was us and them and their lives don't count because that's what I was taught.
If you dress up in green and you kill like against the Nazis in World War Two or whatever it is, that's the Great Bay exception to thou shalt not kill government employment.
So.
Whatever, man.
Foreigners don't really count.
And, you know, they're like, it's like the three eights compromise or whatever the hell you're like that.
It's just it's fine to kill.
I remember even when I was 14, it was the first Iraq war.
Nuke Iraq till they glow.
And I remember thinking that that was fine because I just thought a nuclear explosion would look cool.
I don't care how many people died in it, but I was 14 and I kind of got over it.
But apparently that's just the way that's what it means to be an American is to see it that way, you know?
Yeah, I'm afraid it is actually.
It's just it's so depressing because, you know, it's just, OK, let's let's at least sit down and figure out that the last 12 years really haven't worked.
I mean, they've killed a lot of people.
They've cost a lot of money and we're no more secure or anything now.
Or if we are more secure, it really has nothing to do with the with the policies.
And, you know, so let's kind of figure that out.
But they won't even figure that out.
It's like there's a one of the other CIA people at this lunch was he said, well, you know, we have to use drones because we have to get at those terrorists hiding up in the mountains in Pakistan.
And, you know, I said, well, you know, that would be fine if you knew that the guy you're zapping was a terrorist.
But if you're just if you're just a terrorist, you're not going to a terrorist.
But if you're just if you're doing a signature strike and you're kidding, catching some young guy who's going to see his girlfriend or something, what's the point there?
And, you know, again, they sort of shrug and it's like it's just don't tell me these things.
They may not be true and I don't really care.
It's nationalism is poison.
Anyway, we're out of time.
But thanks, Phil.
OK, Scott.
OK, bye bye.
Appreciate it.
That's Phil Zarate, everybody.
He's executive director at the Council for the National Interest, former CIA officer, UNZ.com as well as antiwar.com and the American Conservative Magazine.
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Why does the U.S. support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
Because that's what Israel wants.
Why can't America make peace with Iran?
Because that's not what Israel wants.
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Because it's what Israel wants.
Seeing a pattern here?
Sick of it yet?
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Support the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org and push back against the Israel lobby and their sock puppets in Washington, D.C.
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As you may already be aware, Jacob Hornberger, Sheldon Richman, and James Bovard are awesome.
They're also in every issue of The Future of Freedom, and they're joined by others of the best of the libertarian movement.
People like Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, Lawrence Vance, Joe Stromberg, and many more.
Even me.
Sign up for The Future of Freedom at fff.org slash subscribe.
It's just $25 a year for the print edition, $15 to read it online.
That's The Future of Freedom, edited by Sheldon Richman at fff.org slash subscribe.
And tell them you heard it here.