12/30/15 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show, etc.
Guest today is Phil Giraldi, former CIA officer, now executive director of the Council for the National Interest at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
And regular writer for the American Conservative Magazine and Unz.com.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm okay, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing good.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and all that stuff.
Same to you.
Yeah, cool.
Hey, man.
So, I'm guessing that you saw the Wall Street Journal today.
U.S. spy net on Israel snares Congress.
Yeah, well, I saw it.
It's a bit tricky to see stuff in the Wall Street Journal because you have to pay them and log in.
But I managed to find it through another link.
Yeah, it's an amazing story.
Yeah, okay.
Well, here's the secret to that, too, for everybody who doesn't know the trick for the Wall Street Journal.
What you do is they'll let you see the front of the story so you can copy and paste the title into Google News.
And then at Google News, if you hover over the link and wait a minute, it'll change to a Google link.
And then when you click that, it'll let you through.
So that is the magic trick to get to the Wall Street Journal for people.
Well, thank you.
That's worth the price of admission.
Yeah, there you go.
So, yeah.
Oh, and so here's what's funny to me.
Let's start with what's funny.
On Twitter, which I think you're not on there, but you're missing out because watching all the neocons cry and cavail.
They're so scandalized by this story, Phil, that Obama and the NSA would dare to spy on Israel.
They can't believe it.
And that's the only scandal that they can find in the whole story, too.
It's really funny.
They're beside themselves with indignation over there.
Yeah, I've noticed that.
And also the Israeli media is picking up on the same line, that this is a shameless incident of the U.S. spying on a, quote, friendly government.
And of course, you know, that's understandable from their perspective.
But from the U.S. perspective, the Israelis were spying on the U.S. to find out what they were doing with Iran.
And they were also using that information to manipulate Congress and Jewish organizations inside the U.S.
Yeah, I was going to say, there's a lot more to this article than just Obama was being dishonorable, spying on his own best friend.
There's what he learned, what his spies found out when they were spying on the Israelis.
That's in here, too.
But anyway, so, yeah, you know, I would I mean, I think the big the big story really is to figure out who the who these people were.
I mean, both the organizations that they were working through and also the congressmen.
And to find out exactly who these people were and exactly what they committed to do, because there are serious stakes here.
And in terms of the organizations, if they were cooperating with the Israeli government, which apparently they were, they should be registered under the Foreign Agents Act.
And once they're registered under the Foreign Agents Act, all kinds of things kick in.
And then on the part of the congressmen, if they were sharing classified information with the Israelis, which they clearly were because the Israelis knew what was going on in the negotiations, then they were in violation of the Espionage Act.
Boy, you know, what an onion to start peeling.
Amazing that this was it was the journal that that, you know, came out with this.
But yes, certainly you're right that it could have been two way communication, not just the Israelis telling Congress, you know, hey, we'd like you to do this.
But, hey, Congress, you know, tell us what's the answer to this and to that.
Sure.
Either congressmen or people who were working on the negotiating team, one or the other, were keeping the Israeli government informed.
Now, you can you might argue that the Israelis picked all this stuff up by intercepting communications, but that clearly does not seem to be the case.
If you read the Wall Street article carefully, you see that it's they were getting it through espionage.
They were getting it through through sources.
And no one should be surprised at that.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so I mean, man, there's so much to this story.
But like you say, the focus of the Israelis, of course, was thwarting the Iran nuclear deal.
And clearly that was Obama's incentive to keep the NSA program going, was to try to prevent the Israelis.
And they were eventually successful in preventing Israel from stopping the deal.
But it was a pretty close call, it sounds like.
Yeah, it was.
I mean, it really came down to about two votes.
That might have gone the other way.
And then that would have been at least it would have been a major obstruction on the deal, whether it would have stopped it.
Because, as you know, the deal was basically negotiated by five parties and also had the U.N. getting into it.
So it wasn't exactly a bilateral U.S. and Iranian deal.
But the fact remains that they could have thrown a spanner into the works in terms of the U.S. participation in this.
They're doing the same thing right now, which I'm sure you picked up on.
They're talking about the second phase or the second act on the Iran deal.
And what they're trying to do is essentially reinstate sanctions.
They're saying they're not necessarily going to enforce that, but they're going to have it there on the table.
And then they'll be looking for things that they consider to be Iranian violations to kick the sanctions back in.
And that would destroy the deal.
Right.
And not in the name of anything nuclear, right?
Not because, hey, you're abiding by your side of the deal too quickly.
Stop it.
But because of, oh, you support Hamas or some nonsense.
Yeah.
Or the other thing they keep trotting out is this, the fact that the Iranians have some ballistic missiles.
I mean, that was not part of the deal and not been a part of the negotiations at all.
And yet they're bringing it in as if it's a deal breaker.
I mean, you know, they're playing every side on this.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I guess it's not really a surprise or I don't know, maybe it's a little bit of a surprise.
The degree to which they're tapping the prime minister himself and having success in doing that.
Did I read that right, that they're really listening in in his office?
Well, you know, in his office could mean a lot of things.
There are probably a multiplicity of phones in Netanyahu's moving office or his office that he uses when at the Israeli embassy, when he's here.
And the prime minister's office doesn't necessarily just mean the room.
It means everybody directly under his authority and all that.
Right.
It could mean anybody on his staff.
It could mean a lot of different things.
I don't imagine that the FBI has succeeded in actually bugging the Israeli embassy if they did, that would be something discoverable by a sweep team.
But the fact is that, you know, picking up phone conversation is a lot easier because a lot of these phone conversations don't go out on hard lines anymore.
They go out through the air and you just have to basically break the cipher, which our NSA, thanks to the tens of billions of dollars we've given them, are quite capable of doing.
Yeah, there was an interesting mention in the article, too, reminiscent of James Bamford's reporting back from his book, The Shadow Factory, about the Israelis saying, Hey, NSA, here's some really useful software for you guys to use.
And then, of course, it's reporting back to Israel everything that the NSA does with it.
Yeah, that's referred to as a backdoor, essentially, that whatever goes on in the software is accessible by a third party who has a special key to get in.
And we do it, too.
I mean, you know, we've done it in terms of all the wonderful software we've offered to our allies around the world and stuff that we've sold to people.
You know, we do exactly the same thing.
I wonder if they ever gave the NSA software to use that doesn't have a trick embedded in it just to try to build confidence a little bit before they do it again.
You know what I mean?
Because Bamford names three or four or five different programs, I think, that all were written up by Israeli companies in the friggin' first place that run the NSA system.
Yeah.
Well, that's a good question, of course, and I'm sure the NSA checks out these systems very carefully.
But, you know, if you disguise something cleverly enough, it might be hard.
You know, a lot of these systems...
Yeah, they ain't so careful.
I mean, Edward Snowden walked right out of there with everything.
So how careful is careful?
Exactly.
And the problem is a lot of these access systems, the back doors, actually have to be running for you to detect that they're there.
And if they're not running, you know, you don't know they're there.
And remember this one, too.
This never made the New York Times, I don't think, a single time.
But it was in The Guardian on September 11, 2013, by Greenwald.
NSA shares raw intelligence, including America's data with Israel, the entire haul, including all the spying on Congress that the NSA does from morning till night, too.
So it's a morning till next morning.
That's right.
That's right.
One second.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the great Phil Giraldi right after this.
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You know, I sent a tweet to the authors of this Wall Street Journal article asking them, when they write that the Israeli officials were saying to the lawmakers, how can we get your vote, what's it going to take, I wanted to know how many of them answered.
Here's what you could do.
And how many of them changed their vote.
And, you know, I don't know why they didn't go that far in publishing that part of the story.
Maybe their sources didn't tell them that much.
But it's hard to imagine that every congressman said, sorry, man, no way, or whatever.
You know what I mean?
I'm sure their conversations were a little bit more complicated than that, especially considering, like I was saying during the break, the U.S. government, the NSA, turns over their entire haul to Israel, including all their spying on Congress with the rest of us, every day.
And so the Israelis already have the entire Congress by the balls anyway.
Yeah, I mean, I think the question we should be focusing on is, where did the leak to the journalists come from?
And if it came from the White House, they're probably very carefully not including information that would tend to blow back on them one way or another, so they would withhold the names of the congressmen and maybe the fact that a number of congressmen were actually collaborating with the Israelis, which I suspect would have been the case.
They might have even gotten to the Israelis and offered them stuff.
Our Congress is quite capable of that.
And so if it's not a White House leak, and since we're talking about the Wall Street Journal here, it might not have been, then it maybe has to be a leak coming out of NSA, coming out of whoever was privy to the reports that came out of this process.
So it's kind of an interesting question.
Who would leak to the Wall Street Journal and why?
Yeah, I'm actually scanning through.
Oh, here's how they characterize their sources.
They say, So that sounds like an official leak to me, Phil.
Maybe I'm jumping to too much of a conclusion.
But that sort of sounds like one that had permission from on high, no?
Yeah, it kind of suggests that.
If, indeed, they're not telling a lie.
I mean, they might be kind of spinning their numbers in a way, using one or two principal sources and spinning the rest of the story.
I don't know.
But, yeah, it does smell like an official leak, and that would have been approved by the White House.
On the other hand, why would the Wall Street Journal print something self-serving from the White House?
I don't know.
Yeah.
You know, it was always interesting to me, the larger question here of why Netanyahu, and I guess the article ends with this, why he was willing to go and just fall on his own sword on this one, take the argument to the nth degree and lose anyway.
And it says here that, well, Ron Dermer was telling them, yeah, we got the votes.
We're going to win.
And it just seemed, it always did.
I think we talked about this last summer, too.
This seemed like the biggest PR mistake the Israelis could have possibly made, going to full-scale war, basically, against the U.S. president, politically speaking, on this issue when, come on, man, he's the president of the United States of America.
It comes down to it.
He's going to win out.
Yeah, that's interesting.
But if you think back also, there was a lot of mainstream media reporting suggesting that they had the votes.
So whether this was kind of a self-fulfilling bit of propaganda or non-self-fulfilling, in fact, or something else, I'm not really sure.
Yeah, like they were believing it anyway, their own lies.
Well, they might have been wanting to create a consensus.
You know, the congressmen say, hey, look, we're going to defeat this anyway, so you might as well get on board.
Maybe it was just that kind of a crude propaganda-type gesture.
It's hard to say at this point, but the fact is, yeah, there was a lot of media.
There were many media accounts that said that it looked like they were going to get the votes to override the veto, and, of course, that didn't happen.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, this is the same Netanyahu, not Dermer, although, no, I think Dermer was involved in this, too, back then.
I forget.
He was involved in some way in Netanyahu's full-scale embrace of Romney over Netanyahu in the election of 2012, which was, you know, for my eyes, an obvious huge blunder at the time, when Romney didn't have a prayer, because no matter how many people hate Obama, some people love him, but nobody loves Mitt Romney.
Nobody.
You know, when it came down to it, he just, you know, and Obama's the sitting president, which gives him such an advantage.
There's just no way.
So Netanyahu was a damn fool to do that the way he did.
Well, you have to suspect that Dermer or some other advisor who had Netanyahu's ear was basically telling him, look, if we support Mitt in Florida, that's where the major effort was, we will probably get a Republican victory in Florida, which would probably mean a Republican upset victory in the election.
And whoever gave him that advice was stupid, because that was never in the cards.
Yeah, whoever gave him that advice was a Republican.
Yeah, but, you know, maybe it's a good thing that Netanyahu was getting a lot of bad advice from somebody.
Right.
Yeah, yeah, it's definitely to our advantage how ham-handed he is in his approach to all of these things.
I mean, he really couldn't have screwed this up worse.
And, you know, I want to remind people, I mentioned it earlier in the show, but it's worth repeating during the interview, too.
And believe me, we talked about this.
Everybody can go back and check the archives at the time when we covered this.
But there's real precedent for this kind of corruption in Congress, although it's not described in very much detail in this article.
Jeff Stein responded immediately to these Wall Street Journal reporters yesterday on Twitter and said, yeah, don't forget about Jane Harman and what happened there.
You want to remind him of that story, Phil?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, that was another classic where Jane Harman was approached by either the representative of or a major Democratic Party donor who has been identified in some circles as Haim Saban, who was, of course, going to be Hillary Clinton's principal donor.
And he basically threatened her.
He threatened her.
He said, if you don't take steps to get the two AIPAC guys, Rosen and I can't remember, what's the other one?
Weissman?
Weissman.
Yeah, Keith Weissman.
Yeah, if you don't get the two of them off the hook on this prosecution for violation of the Espionage Act, suddenly there's going to be a major drop in donations to the Democratic Party.
And if you do do it, we will make sure that you are the next head of the House Intelligence Committee.
And this was all recorded, of course, by the FBI and eventually came out.
And the whole thing kind of went south.
But the fact is this is the level of interference that takes place routinely from the Israelis and from their surrogates in the United States.
That's really amazing.
They're really just like the Americans in terms of the short-term interests that they're always working to satisfy with the complete neglect of any even medium-term consequences.
For what happens when the American people get sick and tired of this crap and decide that we're not going to give you billions of dollars and pay for all your kids' socialist health care and free schooling anymore or whatever it is?
Aren't they worried about that?
I don't know.
I think they figure they have control of enough constituencies in the United States where that's not really an issue, at least not in the short term.
And like you say, they only look at the short term.
So in a way, they're dumb like the same people who are running Syrian policy out of the White House.
I mean, how stupid can you be to be doing some of the things you're doing, but they keep doing them?
Yeah, they do.
Well, and we know because that's what Israel wants is a huge part of why they do what they do.
As Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, that's right, Jeffrey, a regime change in Damascus would be a great way to weaken Iran, which is what Israel wants, which is why I'm happy to be of service.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's the only level on which any of this stuff makes sense.
And of course, it doesn't really make sense in terms of U.S. interests.
By the way, I thought it was interesting in The Wall Street Journal piece too, Phil, that they said that the intelligence community, I guess meaning the NSA, the CIA and the rest of them too, they took very seriously Netanyahu's threats to start the war without the U.S. back in 2012, which I guess the consensus is now that that turned out to be a bluff, or at least that the Americans threatened Netanyahu enough to back off of that or something is why it didn't happen.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, well, I think that the way they explained it in the article was probably not completely accurate.
I think the real concern in the intelligence community from what I was hearing was that Netanyahu would do something to trigger a war.
It wouldn't mean necessarily that Netanyahu would in a sense start the war, but he would do something that would draw the United States into it.
I think that was always his intention, if he could figure out something that would finesse it and get the thing started.
And that was where Admiral Mullen actually went over there and made it known to the newspapers that he told the Israelis we're not going to have a USS Liberty type incident here, boys, which was huge, right?
I mean, that's an earthquake right there.
Right.
That he would dare say that to them.
Wow.
Good times.
All right.
Well, hey, man, thanks very much for coming back on the show, Phil.
Happy New Year to you.
And to you, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Phil Giraldi.
He writes at the American Conservative Magazine and UNZ.com.
Read this one at the Wall Street Journal, U.S. Spy Net on Israel, SNARES Congress.
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