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All right, so this is the Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
ScottHorton.org.
Sign up for the podcast feeds, et cetera, et cetera.
All right.
Our guest today is Phil Giraldi, former CIA and DIA officer, now regular writer for the American Conservative Magazine and UNZ.com.
That's U-N-Z, UNZ.com.
And he's got a couple of very important articles to talk about here.
The latest is what they said, the candidates at the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.
And then I also want to talk a little bit about this lawfare stuff in the New York courts a little bit later on.
But anyway, welcome back.
How are you doing, Phil?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
And I just realized I need to put my ear goggles on because I can't hear a word you're saying.
Okay.
Now how are you doing?
I'm still doing okay.
Oh, good.
All right.
I can't hear a thing without these things.
All right.
So, yeah, isn't it a tragedy or a farce or something, maybe both, what happened at the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee?
I'm certain that you're shocked but not surprised.
You want to tell us about it?
Well, you know, basically I didn't expect anything, but I did watch Donald Trump's speech because I was hoping that he would at least, you know, stick it to them a little bit.
And along the lines of some of his earlier comments about his not needing the Republican-Jewish coalition's money and how he would be an even-handed negotiator between Israel and Palestine.
But he didn't.
He came over all soppy about how, you know, tidy he was to Israel and how many Jewish friends he has and the usual thing.
And then what I did was in the article I tried to focus on one issue.
They all spoke basically in similar terms.
They were very much all starting out with describing how much they love Israel.
But then they got on to, obviously, Israel's enemies as perceived by Israel.
And of course Iran was number one on that.
So I went through the transcripts of the speeches and pulled out all the things they said about Iran and tried to summarize them in the article.
And so, you know, the stuff is outrageous, basically.
Iran is the enemy.
We're going to go, in some cases, advocating going to war against them, having Israel's back, the usual kind of stuff.
But this stuff is kind of crazy because, you know, this is an abrogation of U.S. sovereignty to say that we're going to be declaring war against somebody that's not threatening us on behalf of another country.
Yeah.
Well, it's strange, too, the way they just always use the term ally as though we have some kind of mutual defense treaty with Israel when we have no such thing.
What kind of agreements do we have with Israel as far as that goes?
Phil, anything?
We have none as far as I know.
I mean, there are there are there are lots of arrangements.
Arrangements.
Yeah.
Well, we have, for example, we've, quote, pre-positioned U.S. military supplies in Israel.
But in fact, that's a that's a myth.
It's not pre-positioned for U.S. to use because the U.S. never has no plans or intentions of using Israeli ground space as a as a, you know, launching pad for military action.
This stuff is there for Israel to use if Israel goes to war.
And so as far as I know, there's no arrangements.
And as I said in my article, this whole idea that that Hillary and Cruz came up with that Israel is a strategic asset to the United States is not true.
The Lawrence Wilkerson recently spoke and said that, yeah, we do have an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East, but it's called Kuwait, which is where we have tens of thousands of troops.
And we also have lots of troops in in Bahrain and Oman.
We have no troops in Israel and no arrangements or commitments in any way where Israel would come to the assistance of the United States.
Well, it's funny, you know, I scratch my head trying to think of a time where we fought a war and they fought by our side and helped us.
And I can think of a couple of wars against Iraq that the Israelis sure wanted, but that the Americans fought for them and they stayed out.
But then I guess I got to concede, Phil, that they have been helping Obama back out Qaeda in Syria over the last few years, except that he's only doing that for Israel in the damn first place.
Yeah, well, that was probably another interesting story from this past week.
The WikiLeaks cable from Hillary Clinton in which basically she said the best way to help Israel is to continue to use force in Syria.
So I mean, we're we're complicit in killing how many tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people in Syria and attempting to overthrow the government because someone like Clinton said it's the best way to help Israel.
I mean, this stuff, if you wrote it in a novel, nobody would believe it.
Yeah.
Well, hey, I mean, when we accused them a couple of years ago, when we were just figuring this stuff out and didn't have the emails, nobody believed it then.
I thought one thing that was really funny in the emails was one was from Jamie Rubin, who used to work for her or work for her and Bill in the Clinton years and married Christian Amanpour during the Kosovo war when he was the spokesman for the State Department, for crying out loud.
Anyway, in his letter to her, he says, you know, a big part of the reason he thinks that she ought to back Syria, it's not just to kind of neutralize Republican political criticism, which is part of it.
But he says that, you know, he believes, like many did at the time in 2012, that there was a real worry that Benjamin Netanyahu was going to launch a war against Iran without, quote, permission from Obama.
It was going to drag the United States kicking and screaming into the war.
And he says, you know, Madam Secretary, maybe if we crank up the pressure against Assad, that'll, you know, help mollify Netanyahu a little bit and and lessen the risk that he's going to drag us into war with Iran.
And what's funny is in in no way does he suggest maybe you could call Netanyahu and tell him, hey, you better cool it or anything like that.
It's only just, jeez, how can we make him feel a little better about himself so that doesn't get that bad?
Yeah, yeah.
And incredibly enough, I mean, the much maligned George W. Bush, for example, was able to call over and tell him to back down on any plans to attack Iran.
And basically overdid that.
And so it is doable.
But unfortunately, we have Hillary Clinton advising Obama to be concerned about what Israel's point of view is.
Yeah, that's amazing.
And especially when, as of course, we've discussed on the air for better than a decade now, Phil, when we're talking about a civilian Iranian nuclear program that is even more civilian than ever before, more safeguarded than ever before.
I mean, this nuclear deal is not nothing.
It's, you know, not not a surprise that Donald Trump's only criticisms of it really are that there's a time limit on it and that they got some money, but he can't even cobble together some fake complaints about the lack of inspection regime or anything like that, because it's an inspection regime beyond any historical precedent.
And and yet they just continue on as though the deal never happened.
And, you know, for all we know, Iran's making nuclear weapons and something might have to be done about it at this convention here.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, Paul Pilar did an article, I'm sure you've seen it came out last few days.
And he basically pointed this out.
He said, where else in the world would people be complaining about a deal that actually takes away somebody's ability to make a nuclear weapon?
I mean, where's the insanity in this?
Yeah.
And and where is the real threat from Iran?
I mean, they have I know they have some fiberglass fishing boats, but and what one battleship or two battleships filled, you know, I think the biggest ship they have is a frigate, which, you know, the couple hundred crew, you know, it's insane.
Yeah.
And Israel, of course, has nuclear armed submarines that are off the coast and so on and so forth.
And the U.S. has a has a battle fleet in the in the in the Straits of Hormuz.
I mean, you know, what what more does it take to neutralize whatever threat is coming from those fiberglass boats that the Iranians have?
All right now, so what do you make of the audience's reaction to Donald Trump there, Phil?
Well, if, as I say, I saw it live and they were literally cheering and and and braying, you know, as he was making his points against against Iran and against the Palestinians.
I didn't discuss that in my article, but the Palestinians were depicted by all of the speakers as basically being kind of subhumans, people that are have terrorism in their DNA and they are are basically killing innocent Israelis.
You know, a complete distortion of what's going on there.
Certainly there are, you know, the things to say against people who staged terrorist attacks against civilians.
But on the other hand, this is not exactly a a simple story.
There there are multiple sides to it.
And it's quite frightening that our people who aspire to become presidents don't seem to be aware of that.
Right.
Yes.
Trying to think of a good analogy about, well, you know, to to try to convince somebody, you know, on the war party side of this thing that like, well, I mean, because as you say, I mean, we are talking about attacks against civilians in some cases here.
But so what if a bunch of Russians moved to Aleppo and they not just, you know, the military, the Russian, because everybody hates Russia now.
Right.
Putin.
What if Putin moved all his people, not just his military, but his his population to Aleppo and and started claiming it as, you know, Russian property?
And then some of the moderate rebels started shooting them or stabbing them.
Would would wouldn't that be kind of obvious what was going on there and who started what and who's occupying who?
Well, guess what?
A huge population of Israel is from Russia.
That's exactly what we're talking about here.
It's a perfect analogy because they actually are Russians, even though Putin isn't the one who moved them there.
But that's exactly who's burning down the olive groves and stealing the West Bank is a bunch of Russians.
Yeah, well, I guess if we if we get the candidates to depict it in that way, they would start to sing a different tune.
But yeah, it's just, you know, the whole thing is insane.
There's every story has has a beginning and end.
And the way the story unfolds depends where you begin it.
And the whole Israeli narrative that the that essentially Palestine did not exist as a political entity and that the land was empty and so on and so forth, this is all nonsense.
And there's been a perpetuation of this this myth ever since to justify whatever the Israelis do.
And it is frightening now that the Israelis and there was an article in the paper today about how the Israelis have accelerated their their their occupation of Palestinian land and the West Bank.
And they're using legal pretext to do it.
I think it was in The New York Times.
And the fact is, whatever they do, they get away with and they get away with because we are the enabler.
And these political figures we have that that talk about the issue are pandering to such an extent that any true American and American who believes in the principles our country was founded on should be appalled.
Well, you know, in Hillary's speech, she at least sort of kind of mentioned, you know, a Palestinian state or something, but it was pretty easy to imagine a kind of last year half-assed effort like in Bill Clinton's administration or George W.
Bush's administration where, oh, look, here's a little Annapolis and never mind kind of thing going on there.
And, you know, Obama and Kerry only gave it at best a half-assed try when it comes to negotiating a two state thing.
But so if it's Hillary or Trump, do you imagine anything being, you know, changing at all or it'll just there'll be the status quo in eight years, more and more settlements, less and less land for more and more Palestinians to live on?
I don't see any any shift in Israel, Palestine.
The one thing I still hold some hope for with Trump is that he is, I think, is sincere in his non-interventionism.
I think he sees that the interventions over the past 15 years certainly have been disastrous in terms of U.S. interests, in terms of U.S. economic well-being.
And I it's the one thing I still sort of hold out for Trump.
And I don't know.
How do you feel about that?
Well, I've been saying for a while now, I think his first day in office, he's going to meet with the admirals, the generals and the CIA, and he's going to say, OK, boys, do whatever you want.
Just let me know.
Keep me in the loop, please.
And then that's it.
What's he going to do?
Fight them all?
Yeah, I think that happened with Obama, actually.
I think Obama came in with a lot of nice ideas about how he was going to fix things and he was going to be nice to people and so on and so forth.
But they have that first day, you know, as you say, when you show up in the White House and you're in this in this situation room and they're pulling out their slides and they're giving you the explanations and stuff like that.
And and suddenly you realize inside that you can't do anything.
I think you're right.
I mean, and in fact, we can see what it is that he could do, basically, right, was, OK, I want to negotiate with Iran in slow motion here.
Eventually we're going to put this nuclear thing aside.
There's going to be kind of a broad shift on the more macro level, but actually tell the generals we're closing down your bases and you're going to all have to go get jobs.
Yeah, right.
You know what I mean?
Like that's that's policy is one thing.
Actually firing these killers is something entirely different, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
No, you're right.
And it's not just that.
I mean, these guys, you know, they've been working on these scripts forever and they're good at it.
And I've been at these top level military briefings.
And let me tell you, they're slick.
And if you're not 100 percent on top of the issue, which, of course, no president is going to be, they are very convincing.
And and, you know, all right, it's where their bread is buttered.
They know that their jobs are on the line if if they don't convince the White House to do these things.
But the fact is, you know, they are good at it.
They're not very good at fighting wars, clearly, but they're pretty good at at talking about fighting wars.
Right.
And, of course, they can pull any wool that they want over.
I don't know, probably Hillary, but certainly Trump size.
Oh, Mr. President, you know what?
If we pull back right now, there will be a war between India and China.
I mean, why not?
They just make up whatever they want, you know?
Oh, we can't destabilize the whole thing and cause something worse to happen.
We can't leave now.
You know, it doesn't even have to be slick.
It just has to be something that he knows he doesn't know about, you know?
Yeah.
Well, it's like what we're watching in terms of you talk about slow motion in terms of watching the slow motion conflict with China building up.
And also the situation in Russia has kind of receded.
But that's still on a on a back burner.
I mean, it's like, you know, what are these people are?
They're always capable of coming up with this, this over the horizon, as they put it, threat.
And they exploit that to the fullest.
And one of the things I would hope from from Trump is that because it's the war party and the neocons that have been going after him so hard, I would think that at least when he gets into office, he'll be suspicious of them.
We might not have the benefit of Bill Crystal's advice in the future, but the generals and the admirals, they're all still there and they have they have the same constituency.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, Jeff Sessions is not that much better, but at least he was not a student of Albert Wollstetter.
Right.
Okay.
Like, we're settling now.
But and yet but, you know, and here's the thing.
Yeah.
On a personal level.
Right.
At least at least maybe he won't put, you know, Elliott Abrams and the boys in charge of all the departments and all that.
But, you know, as far as and, you know, I've seen it written.
And in fact, by neocon critics that like actually, you know, their statements from Trump going back 20, 30 years saying he's tired of all these freeloading allies taking advantage of us.
But, you know, he's pretending to not know.
And this is the kind of thing that the admirals would point out real quick is that, oh, no, we insist on paying Germany and Korea and Japan's way in the world because that's how we keep them down and us up.
And that's how we make sure that their policies don't become independent from ours.
And so to the American leadership for the empire, it's worth the cost.
And Trump looks at it only as how much it costs.
But he doesn't see, you know, he hadn't even I don't even think he's looked at it from the point of view of America is the empire.
America is the one who makes this stuff up, not Japan and Germany.
You know, yeah, he's he's kind of wrapped into a pre Second World War mode of balance of powers and that kind of stuff.
But actually, you're right.
I mean, the whole the whole system has shifted since the Second World War.
And essentially, that's what they're talking about.
They're talking about, you know, America as the decider in the world.
And that's what they want to maintain.
Yeah, well, I mean, if he wins, and I think he will, because, well, as Scott Adams routinely puts it, the guy from the Dilbert blog, the Dilbert cartoon, that he is a master persuader, and that he can change people's minds.
He's he's got those skills far beyond Hillary Clinton.
And plus, she just has such a reputation of corruption.
I think his reputation of bully probably will help him.
Whereas her reputation of corruption is just going to weigh her down so bad.
And she's just and never mind her horrible policies and her being Dick Cheney on every single foreign policy issue and that kind of thing, which I think he can attack her on that, too.
He already has a little bit.
But so I think he probably will be the president.
But I will be shocked if he actually acts any different than any other Republican president would.
You know, George W. Bush said, oh, we need to not be nation building.
We're going to have problems coming down the road, you know, and all this.
But he didn't believe any of that.
He was just that was just salesmanship for the rubes.
I don't know why we should take Trump really much, you know, different in a different context than that, you know.
Yeah.
And plus, bear in mind the fact that he's going to have he's going to have powerful constituencies pushing against him all the time, including his own party.
And, you know, so he's not exactly going to have a free hand on a lot of this stuff.
It just means basically we're going to have the same crap for the next eight years that we've had for the last 16 years.
Well, the thing that gets me is it could have been Ron and the American people were like, wait a minute, peace and freedom.
I don't trust this guy.
Get the hell away from me.
You know, and then Trump's like, look at me.
I have a white horse.
It's really fast and classy and I'm going to fix everything.
And they're like, yeah, that's right.
Well, everybody wants a white horse.
I guess so.
All right.
So let's talk a little bit more about this lawfare stuff, because it's a real big deal and hardly anybody writes about it.
We only see or I mean, in the in the context that you put it in, certainly we see from time to time what Iran found liable for the 9-11 attacks.
What in this kind of nonsense?
I saw one the other day where, oh, it was one of these Charles Lister, one of these, you know, pro Al-Qaeda in Syria weirdos or something was trying to push a line about, well, a court in New York found Syria guilty of backing Al-Qaeda in 2006 or whatever.
And so anyway, I thought, wow, a court in New York said so, huh?
I better ask Phil Giraldi about that.
So what do you say, Phil?
Yeah, well, this is kind of interesting.
And, you know, I noticed over the past couple of years, this pattern of people litigating against terrorism.
You know, this is what lawfare is all about.
You bankrupt these so-called terrorist groups and individuals by going to court in the United States and claiming that their terrorist actions, whether they're in Israel or anywhere else, were basically, you know, carried out in contravention of U.S. law.
And they often win.
And it's because there are clearly judges that are leaning their way in the southern district of Manhattan.
And the same names keep popping up of the judges.
I think Daniels is the one that's been in the most recent cases.
But anyway, the most recent case, Iran was accused of being part of 9-11, which, of course, is ridiculous.
And the judge imposed an $11 billion fine on them and even confiscated a building that some Iranian entities owned in Manhattan.
So it was this kind of, you know, stuff going on.
But there's a long history of this.
I mean, they did the same thing to the Palestinian Authority back about a year ago, and they've done the same thing against Arab banks, where there's these huge judgments based on very speculative reasoning that a bank, for example, is complicit in a terrorist act.
In the case of the bank that I looked at, the Arab Bank of Jordan, the bank was fully compliant with U.S. overseas financial arrangements.
They did everything that they were supposed to do.
And yet the judge ruled against them a multi-billion dollar suit.
So this kind of stuff happens all the time.
And it's political in nature.
And it's disgusting, to be quite honest.
Well, and you know what?
It makes great top of the hour news.
Iran, terrorism, Iran, nuclear.
Here's this weather report, you know.
And we just hear that all the time, all the time.
So it's part of that drumbeat, you know.
Boy, when will the Persians ever stop their permanent assault on the planet Earth, you know?
Yeah.
And the thing is, it's also done in commercial circles.
I mentioned the Argentinian default, where this Paul Singer, who was the financial backer of Rubio, he basically bought the bonds of the Iranian government, Argentinian government issued bonds for pennies on the dollar, and now is claiming that he wants his money in full.
And U.S. courts, New York courts have agreed with him.
And there was a news story today indicating that he's going to make $2.4 billion out of the deal for doing absolutely nothing.
Man.
And OK, by the way, everyone, I forgot to say Justice is Blind is the article at the Unz Review, unz.com, U-N-Z, unz.com.
Great article by Phil Giraldi.
This whole thing with the vultures is a really important thing.
And the author Greg Palast, the journalist Greg Palast has written, I think, two different books about these guys.
And I'm trying to remember now if he focuses on Singer or not.
But yeah, I mean, this is a really big deal where somebody with no interest whatsoever just sues to take ownership of the sovereign debt of some bankrupt third world country that their cronies put into bankruptcy through IMF and World Bank shenanigans in the first place, usually.
And then they get American courts, as you say, to basically confiscate property or whatever to the degree to make up for it in order to enforce judgments of full payment.
Whereas what usually happens if they just had to pay the big banks or the U.S. state, they would roll over the debt onto the American taxpayer and socialize it out.
And they would do it at a discount.
But instead, the court says, as you're saying, in this case, if I hear you right, Argentina's sovereign debt or some major portion of it is owed to this one man now because of his lawyers.
Yeah, because he calculated that the default would enable him to pick up these bonds, as I said, pennies on the dollar.
And so the guy makes two point four billion by doing absolutely nothing productive and by having a bunch of lawyers and by having a judge that rolls over in Manhattan.
I mean, you know, we talk about other countries like Bangladesh being corrupt.
I mean, what is more corrupt than the crony capitalism in the United States?
I don't know what is.
Yeah, no, nothing.
And, you know, of course, goes without saying, because, hey, why bother that this is all on the backs of the poorest people in the poorest countries are the ones who end up having to pay all this stuff back.
It's not like the people who took out the loans are the ones responsible for coming up with the two billion dollars now, whatever it is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Before they tapped Argentina, you're quite right.
The previous cases were in Africa and here, you know, the poorest of the poor, poorest countries in the world.
And you're getting these guys that are tapping them for hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
And basically just in what is a completely fraudulent arrangement from from day one.
Yeah.
Oh, and I want to go back to the, you know, blame in Iran for 9-11 thing.
Well, I want to I want to ask about Breitwieser in the Saudi.
I mean, it's one point that the courts keep ruling against the families, the 9-11 families who are suing Saudi because they know that Prince Bandar's wife sent money to the hijackers living in San Diego.
And what up with that?
They want the 28 pages released and they want, you know, accountability for whatever Saudi royals in and out of government had anything to do with back in Al Qaeda or back in the September 11th attack against the United States.
And the judges keep saying, screw you.
And Kristen Breitwieser, who is the leader of the 9-11 widows from the movie Press for Truth and everything.
She just wrote this great thing for The Huffington Post.
And we ran on antiwar dot com about how they keep going to the Supreme Court.
And Obama himself is having the government intervene to demand that the court and she's saying, you know, they're already going to rule against us anyway, but he's got to add this insult to injury by personally intervening with the court to make sure that they will not allow these cases to go forward.
Then they turn right around.
They blame the Ayatollah for the damn thing.
And so that's my real question.
I mean, if you have a remark about any of that, that's fine.
But then my real question is, what is the very best evidence against Iran on this that they're even clinging to, Phil?
And why do you say it's ridiculous?
Well, the story that has been going around ever since basically ever since 9-11 was that a couple of the hijackers transited Iran and were, quote, allowed to transit Iran.
There is virtually no evidence to support that.
There is a there is a crazy former Iranian Revolutionary Guard who has basically been popped up a couple of times by the prosecution and has alleged that this all took place with the connivance of the Iranian government.
This guy is clearly nuts and clearly doing it for money.
And there is really no substantial evidence to prove that Iran had any involvement in 9-11 or any foreknowledge of 9-11.
And I think when I say that, no intelligence service in the world, no reputable intelligence service believes anything like that.
But apparently courts in New York City do.
Yeah.
Well, and that's a very important point, too.
The one you made before last there about they didn't have any foreknowledge at all.
We know that many intelligence agencies around the world did warn America, hey, you guys know there's an al Qaeda attack coming and you're doing something about that, right?
But you're saying Iran wasn't even one of those.
Well, that's right.
And the fact there was there were a couple of intelligence agencies that probably did have prior knowledge that something was coming.
And I would include the Saudis and the Pakistanis and the Israelis in that.
So, you know, here are the guys that maybe did know something about it.
And nobody's even looking at them.
Yep.
You know, I one time interviewed that General Shaukat Qadir and I admit that I'm just not handy with Pakistani accents at all.
It was really hard to understand him.
I don't claim to have really got 100 percent of everything, but I tried to ask him about, well, what's the what's the deal with General Mahmood, who supposedly had this guy, Abu Sayyaf, I forgot his name now.
The guy.
Yeah.
Is that that killed him?
Sent one hundred thousand dollars to Mohammed Atta.
And so what's the story with that?
And oh, and then he was having breakfast with the head of the House and Senate intelligence committees the morning of 9-11.
So what the hell's going on there?
That always seemed to me like an effort to maybe compromise the leaders of the Congressional Intelligence Committees or something like that, you know, and Shaukat Qadir, who's for listeners, he's a retired Pakistani general, said that, well, what was happened, what happened there was he wanted to make sure it was a success and then he wanted to be in D.C. when it happened so that he could sell himself as the next dictator of Pakistan, that it was Musharraf's fault that this happened.
You ought to hire me and get rid of him, which, of course, blew up in his face and Mubarak fired him instead.
But they let him live.
Right.
This guy sent one hundred thousand dollars to Mohammed Atta.
They could have just as easily pushed him out of a helicopter in the Atlantic Ocean or something.
But he's like retired in a villa right now in Pakistan somewhere, I guess.
Yeah, well, it's amazing.
I mean, there's so many people who, you know, I often encounter, as I'm sure you do, the truth is about 9-11.
And I always tell them the same thing.
I say, look, if you read the 9-11 report, which I'm sure most of them have not, you would anybody with half a brain would recognize a whole lot of things in that report that weren't looked at.
And I said, that's my problem with the 9-11 report, not a question of the U.S. government having blown up the buildings itself or possibly Israelis haven't done it.
The whole point is that there are so many holes in that report that it begs the question as to what the credibility of the report overall is.
But, you know, you don't have to go into some crazy conspiracy theory to make that point.
The point is that the report itself is flawed.
All right.
Well, and of course, even according to the official story, which I personally never read that report, because to paraphrase Ron Paul on the Iraq war issue, I don't want to be confused by their propaganda.
I just try to read all the best journalists I can on it and and try to read, you know, between the lines as best I can about where they're simply relying on, you know, government statements and where they really know what they're talking about and that kind of thing.
But even according to the official view of it, as announced by the leaders of the commission, everything, it could have been stopped if the CIA and the FBI had worked together, could have been stopped.
In fact, there's a recent thing where Ali Soufan, it's a short little piece of a documentary with Lawrence Wright and Ali Soufan, the FBI agent.
And he says the day of 9-11, they called him in.
He was working the coal case in Yemen and they called him into the embassy and handed him a manila folder.
And there was everything about the Malaysia meeting, which was where the coal plot and the 9-11 plot were hatched.
And he went, oh, son of a bitch.
And he saw there it was, man, everything right there.
But they wouldn't tell him in time, you know, right, right.
That's the official version, right?
That's the geez, what a what a disaster that we're completely responsible for, you know, criminally negligent homicide of 3000 people.
And that's their excuse.
So, you know, if there's anything more scandalous than that to get into, by all means.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and in fact, they didn't they didn't actually take responsibility.
All they all they said was, gee, we didn't make the connection.
And, you know, this is the government compound.
Nobody ever gets punished for anything, because basically it's just what the intelligence services will call plausible denial.
It's plausible to say, oh, well, this thing was in the system.
We were going to share it with them, but we just didn't get around to doing it.
You know, right.
Exactly.
All right, Phil.
Well, I'm trying to make sure if there was anything more important about that APAC meeting that I forgot to ask you about.
It's been a couple of days since I read the article.
I might have forgotten, but I think I got a good one here.
OK, thanks very much, dude.
Appreciate it.
OK, Scott, take care.
All right, y'all.
That is the great Phil Giraldi.
He's at the UNS Review, UNZ UNS Review and at the American Conservative Magazine as well.
Of course, former CIA and DIA officer.
Thanks.
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