12/03/15 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And next up is Phil Giraldi.
Oh, wait, first up, I meant.
Phil Giraldi, former CIA officer.
Now he writes for the American Conservative Magazine and UNZ.com.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
Welcome back to the show.
Phil, how you doing?
Hey, Scott, how are you?
I'm doing pretty good.
You sound tired.
Were you walking upstairs?
No, I've just been, you know, I've been on the phone and doing interviews and a lot of stuff.
Just everybody's interested about what's going on in California.
Yeah.
Well, I want to direct people and their eyeballs over toward this article that you wrote on November the 16th.
It was published here at the American Conservative Magazine.
How to Counter Violent Extremism came to mind.
Just after the show ended yesterday, the news broke of this massacre in San Bernardino County in Southern California, in the Inland Empire there.
14 people killed.
I think 14 wounded as well.
A husband and wife shot dead by police in a firefight on the roadside there.
And what does it all mean, Phil?
Tell us what you're telling them.
Well, I, you know, I've been, you know, reading everything that's coming up on it.
And it just seems to me, based on my own experience, that this is indisputably a terrorist act.
I can't see any other plausible motive for it in terms of the way it was planned, the way it was carried out.
This goes far beyond any kind of incident of workplace violence where somebody wants to shoot his boss.
You don't necessarily go on a suicide mission with your wife.
You know, the whole thing just reeks of a terrorist incident.
I think the only question in my mind is, you know, is this something that was homegrown or is this something that was inspired or directed even by somebody from overseas?
And I guess that's what, if they do decide it was terrorist, that's something that they'll be looking into in a very serious way.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm not saying it's my gut instinct on this one or anything, but I feel like I've got to raise the possibility that an FBI informant got into this guy's life and told him how great he would be if he would only, you know, go to war for ISIS or al-Qaeda or something like that, as they have so often done, and maybe the guy got out of hand of his informant and went and acted on it himself.
Yeah, you know, that's always a possibility.
You know, we know, you and I know, we've talked about this before, how virtually all terrorism cases in the United States turn out to be a kind of entrapment where the FBI inserts an informant who's a paid informant who's basically sent in there, they deny it, but the fact is they're basically sent in there to encourage the targets to do something stupid so they can be arrested.
So, you know, hey, I wouldn't rule out anything at this point.
That's an interesting point you raised.
Yeah, I mean, so far, as far as I can think of off the top of my head anyway, Phil, all of those have been, you know, thwarted.
Here's your inert powder, here's your dummy bomb switch and this kind of thing, but it sure seems conceivable that somebody targeted could then get out of control.
It seems like we've been really lucky so far that none of the entrapments have blown up in anybody's faces, but the entrapped it doesn't look like.
Yeah, I mean, particularly in, you know, I keep pointing out to people, they say, well, you know, a major terrorist action here in the United States is a lot less likely because our police and security and intelligence services are a lot better than those funky Europeans.
But the fact is there's also another side to this, which is once you're in the country over here, it's damn easy to get a hold of semi-automatic weapons.
And so you don't even really need to be able to be a bomb builder or to have any special skills or anything like this.
You can walk down to the corner of Walmart and pick up your AR-15.
Yep.
Well, or any old hunting rifle if you go back, you know, to the 80s or whatever before the AR-15s were ubiquitous.
Still, the country's lousy with soft targets.
You know, a nine millimeter Glock can do a hell of a lot of damage in a, you know, if somebody's unopposed in a room full of people.
I mean, and so really this goes back.
And this is something that the longtime listeners of this show are just having deja vu, right?
Because we've been talking about this for years and years and years.
The longer we keep up this war, the more open we are to these kinds of attacks.
And it's one of the reasons to call the whole thing off rather than, you know, double or triple down.
But, you know, even a friend of mine last night said to me, you know, I guess I'm starting to think maybe we do just need to go over there and kill them all or something.
And I said, no, damn it.
You know what?
I know that you know that that ain't true and that your government are the ones who got us into this mess and it ain't, you know, religion or whatever.
But people are frustrated, man.
It's been 15 years of this, and they just want to see an end to it one way or the other.
And at least H-bombs have that kind of finality to them, don't they?
Yeah, I think, you know, there's a lot of...
I was just interviewed by Russian television, and they asked me that question.
They said there are 351 multiple killings in the United States this year.
It's like one a day.
And I said, yeah, but, you know, the fact is that these don't fit into a nice category.
There are a lot of people in the United States that are frustrated and out of work and various things happening in their lives that it prompts them to turn to an extremist solution to what they're seeing around them.
And, of course, most of these multiple shootings are carried out by white Christians, and yet nobody's talking about Christian extremists.
So the whole thing is kind of a...
It's a war to kind of get to people's minds and condition them in a way that they're seeing this in a certain way.
But you're absolutely right.
We caused all this.
And the big question becomes, where is the way out of this?
And I don't have a good answer.
Well, so, you know, there's this quote from, I guess, Justice Brandeis, who had said that, you know, government, like it or not, for good or ill, is the great teacher, you know?
Like they used to call the president the great father or whatever is what they'd call him, to the Indians, that kind of thing.
And that is how people are raised, where government, especially the Republicans, they're daddy.
The Democrats are mommy, the Republicans are daddy, and they're sort of, you know, they lead us.
If we don't know what's right or wrong, we look to the law to tell us.
Well, the law says you can't, so I guess it's wrong, that kind of thing.
That's how people think, you know, mostly.
It's a matter of impressions, not, you know, very detailed reasoning, but just that's kind of how they go.
And then that quote of Brandeis, I'm pretty sure it's Brandeis, was quoted by Timothy McVeigh, who, of course, was, you know, who had killed Iraqis in the first Gulf War for the U.S. Army and then, you know, was claiming he was responding for Waco and was saying, government, you're the great teacher here.
You're the ones telling us it's okay to kill people all day long, so don't you cry about it when that's what we do.
And he's kind of got a point.
Not that I'm, you know, saying he is, you know, justifying his rationalization of his target or anything like that, but I'm just saying that is where he got the idea from.
He called those babies collateral damage.
Who taught him that?
It was Dick Cheney's Pentagon taught him that.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
And it's just, you know, I mean, we've reached the point as a country where, you know, you kind of have to begin to question essentially what is the glue that binds us together, if there is any anymore.
And it's, you know, a certain sense of civility that prevailed for a long time in this country where everybody kind of had a comfortable view of government and other things and of our institutions.
And that just ain't there anymore because even if I, you know, I don't know anybody within the circle that I move in various different circles that trust the government anymore.
And I'm talking about, you know, including blue-collar people, including, you know, highly educated white-collar people, including former intelligence officers, military officers.
Nobody trusts the government anymore.
I mean, Obama, you know, every time he gets up, you know, he's just waiting for the first lie to come out.
Right.
Oh, yeah, and they're absolutely, you know, just daily.
I saw him last night saying, you know, oh, it's just appalling that somebody who's on the no-fly list can get a gun.
Well, pardon me, but anybody can be put on the no-fly list for any reason and can never get off of it.
So what the hell is that?
Yeah, exactly.
You're the guy putting them on the list, and probably 99% of those people are completely innocent.
Yeah, in fact, I mean, and it's funny too because the no-fly list itself is almost like shorthand for the kind of arbitrary, broad-brush, ridiculous government policies, right?
Like, there's a million people on it.
We're supposed to believe there's a million Al-Qaeda guys threatening to hijack our planes right now?
I mean, come on, the guy that wrote the biography of Karl Rove ended up on the damn thing, and he's a Texas Democrat.
Yeah, I have personal friends who are on the list who have absolutely no idea why they're on the list.
Their friends of yours might be a big part of it.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, one of them is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant banker, for Christ's sake.
That's interesting.
All right, everybody hang tight.
We're going to be right back with Phil Giraldi right after this.
It's the Scott Horton Show on the Liberty Radio Network.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
Talking with Phil Giraldi, former CIA officer, writer for UNZ.com and the American Conservative Magazine.
We're talking about San Bernardino and the fact that it was a Muslim who did it.
It was his own workplace that he attacked, but he sure did attack it in a terrorist attack kind of way, it seems like.
And so, you know, Ted Cruz says we're at war.
And I was thinking during the break there what I meant to say when you were asking, you know, what is it that binds us, that makes us all Americans together?
Well, it ain't trust in the government.
I hope it's not.
It's trust or at least agreement, consensus that we want to keep our Bill of Rights.
That's it, Bill of Rights for everybody.
Even if I hate you, you still get to go to whichever church you want because it's none of my business, and you still get to be secure in your house because the government doesn't have the power to go in unless they have a real reason to believe that there's evidence of a crime in there, etc., like that.
And without that, we're lost.
Without that, we're all at war with each other forever, I guess.
And so, and I think that, you know, what people do believe in that, even if they don't know what the Bill of Rights says, they think they believe in it.
If you told them we're taking it away, they'd get mad probably, maybe, or something.
Yeah, I think there's a fundamental understanding of what liberties are.
And this has not been particularly well elaborated by politicians with the exception of Ron Paul.
Yeah, sure, I mean, the American Revolution was fought over liberties, basically.
And it's in our DNA, in a manner of speaking.
But now we have this irony of two governments in a row, one Democratic and one Republican, that basically have been stripping our liberties from us by fear-mongering, essentially.
And, you know, people haven't quite figured all that out, haven't quite put it all together.
But if they did, they probably would be quite upset, I would think.
All right, well, so, if we just take for granted our interventionist foreign policy is just going to be in the hands of the Kagans from now on, and they're in a damn thing we can do about it, Phil.
We're going to have this terrorist blowback coming at us.
I mean, how do we handle this without turning America into some kind of, you know, really fascist police state, where we really do lose our Bill of Rights?
Because it seems like just a few more of these would be enough excuse for our politicians to go ahead and scrap the old laws.
Yeah, I think actually this one alone might do it.
You know, I'm just waiting right now.
It's been kind of quiet for the past 24 hours, but I bet you by the weekend we're going to have all kinds of crazy stuff coming out of Tom Cotton's mouth and others in the Senate.
You know, I think they're kind of waiting for something like this.
So we'll see how it plays out.
You know, I would pass a simple law, essentially.
I wouldn't reinstate the draft because I haven't been a victim of the draft myself.
I know just what it's like.
But I would pass a law that if Congress approves of any military action anywhere in the world, the children and grandchildren of congressmen will be required to put on uniforms and serve.
I think that would be a good first step in restoring our democracy.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, but now, so I'm President Scott, and I make you the head of the FBI or the head of Homeland Security, and I say, Phil, look, Bush and Obama have spent the last – well, Bush and Clinton and Bush and Obama have spent the last generation making enemies for the American people.
How in the hell are you going to protect them without taking all their rights away?
Because no other cop in this land can think of what to do except violate innocent people's rights.
Well, I think to me the test of all this has been, have these violations of rights actually produced a good result, meaning have they impeded the ability of terrorists to make attacks or impeded the ability of ordinary citizens to engage in these massacres?
I think the fact is they haven't.
So I think once you understand that, then you say, well, basically, then all these laws are counterproductive, and eventually you, at that point, get rid of things like the Patriot Acts and the Military Commissions Acts.
And I think that's what I would advise.
I mean, first of all, you get rid of that crap, and then you stop intervening overseas, and I have a feeling that we might actually be able to go back and become a normal country again.
Yeah.
Man, I have to tell you, I can see it.
It ain't utopia.
It's just stop doing all the worst shit all the time, and maybe things will be a little bit better.
It's logical, you know.
It's not a panacea, but it makes sense on the face of it.
Like, it might work, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
I think it's empirically speaking.
I mean, there's no argument to support all these intrusions on privacy and on communities and things in the United States, putting them under surveillance and stuff like that.
None of this stuff has produced any good results.
And I would defy anybody to tell me otherwise.
I saw that idiot Jane Harman on television, I guess it was last week, after Paris.
Boy, you're being sweet to her to just call her an idiot, Phil.
Go ahead.
All right.
I won't go any farther than that.
But anyway, you know, and she was saying, oh, yes, and, you know, we have thwarted many, many terrorist plots, but I can't tell you about them.
Yeah, right.
And this is a person who's not even in Congress anymore.
And you mean to tell me that of all the many plots that they've thwarted, they can't give the public enough, you know, they don't have to give us all the sources and methods and all the secret stuff and everything like that, but just give us some broad outlines of what exactly you guys have been doing.
There's only one.
There's only one.
Zazie, right?
And that was kind of a fake, too.
Yeah, the Denver cab driver?
Yeah, yeah, right.
That was like kind of a half of an entrapment.
He started it and they finished it.
We can blame him.
Yeah, but then even like the Boston Marathon bombers, I mean, here are the Russians that passed this information on them, and we didn't use it.
We didn't know how to use it.
We didn't know what to do with it.
Right.
Yeah, and, you know, it was a cliché, but it was, you know, and you and I had said, you know, for years, especially people check the archives about how we're going to have real terrorist attacks while these guys, the FBI, are chasing their tail doing these stupid entrapments.
And then I didn't even find out until much later, actually, but Trevor Aronson was on it, that literally the Boston FBI had been in the middle of an entrapment job against some schmuck at the time that the Boston bombing plot was unfolding under their nose.
Amazing.
I didn't know that.
Just like we accused them.
This is exactly how it's going to play out.
And then, you know, not just some FBI agent somewhere, but the FBI agents who were supposed to be doing their job were doing this one instead.
Well, it's like yesterday they were running an exercise in San Bernardino while the actual thing was going down, right?
I don't know.
Yeah, they were.
They were.
The police were running an exercise simulating a multiple shooter incident at the very same time.
That's how they got there so fast.
I thought you were going to say that's why they got away, because they were on the wrong side of town.
Well, actually, that could be true.
Well, you know, and I know that people think that that's really suspicious, but I actually heard a little old lady tell CNN yesterday, I don't know if it was in reference to whether there was a drill going on, but someone had mentioned that they had practiced stuff like this before, and she said, oh, yeah, we practice stuff like this all the time.
And that goes back to why they chose this target.
It's actually brilliant if it was brilliant.
I mean, it might just be an accident, but it seems to me like targeting local bureaucrats seemingly at random in a place like that actually can really help to spread the terror right where it belongs and force security clampdowns in ways that are completely prohibitively expensive and terrible, right?
Every county commissioner's court and city council meeting from now on is going to have to have their own SWAT team or what, you know?
Yeah, it emphasizes the fact that we're all vulnerable to this kind of thing, and that's exactly what they wanted.
That's the message they want to get across.
And, you know, well, you know, we've sown the seeds of this, and starting with Afghanistan when the Russians were there, and this is something that could wind up destroying us.
It's such an awful thing, and yet you never hear George Bush or Barack Obama taking any blame as a nation for what we've done.
We've created a horrible monster, and we don't know what to do with it.
Yeah.
You know, it seems like Michael Brennan-Doherty and a couple others are pointing this out about Libya, but it goes for the whole foreign policy.
This is such a great opportunity for any candidate, Rand or Trump or anyone else, to just completely demolish, you know, all that's gone on for the last eight years and promise a return to normalcy.
They're like, hey, look, you know what?
Because of some jackasses, we got the 21st century off on the wrong foot, but it doesn't have to be this way, and so we're just going to quit.
Right.
Like, why not?
It doesn't have to be this way forever.
No, that's absolutely right.
It'd be good politics, and they got no counterexamples, right?
It's not like they're going to say, yeah, but what about our glorious victory in Libya?
They don't have any glorious victories.
They got nothing but failure to fall back on.
Absolutely.
If someone is willing to take it.
There are stories coming over the wire right now.
California shooter apparently radicalized.
Yeah.
That's what CNN says, too.
And I wonder what they're going to say.
He learned to pray five times a day, or he started talking about all the dead people in Afghanistan.
That's right.
Thanks again, Phil.
I sure appreciate it.
Okay, Scott.
Take care.
That's the great Phil Girali.
Man, we ran out of time to ask him about Jonathan Pollard.
He's got a great piece about Jonathan Pollard at the American Conservative, too.
Even better than Grant's, which is running today on Antiwar.com.
Phil's will be running tomorrow.
Anyway, this one is How to Counter Violent Extremism.
It's at the American Conservative, and we'll be right back.
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