04/19/13 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
Here every weekday from 11 to 1 Texas time.
Well, every weekday, less Thursday.
From 11 to 1 Texas time on No Agenda Radio, NoAgendaStream.com.
And boy, there are a lot of things I meant to get to in the first half hour of the show today.
Oh, well.
Our first guest is Phil Giraldi.
He's a former DIA and CIA counterterrorism officer.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
He's a contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine and a regular contributor to Antiwar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How's it going?
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for joining us on the show today.
I told the people already, I don't have any reason to believe that you know anything special from talking to your CIA sources or anything, but I still just wanted to know what you think about this Boston attack and the government's response and what's going on around here, even if it's just your initial impressions.
Well, I would say, first of all, the initial impression is that this was kind of an amateur one-off terrorist incident.
If these guys had some genuine connections with organizations back in Asia where they come from or with al-Qaeda directly, they would have probably come across the FBI screen long before this.
The evidence from the two boys' uncle, who lives in Maryland, seems to indicate that they were extremely alienated from American culture and were having problems in that kind of area.
So that well could have been the motivation.
And of course, I'm in a way relieved that these were not Arabs, because that would, of course, created all kinds of ideas in the head of people like Peter King.
These are Chechens.
They are indeed Muslims.
But the Chechen story is, of course, wrapped up with Russia and with the fact that Russia has been a colonizing imperial power in that part of the world.
It's a lot more complicated than reducing it to some simple narrative that involves the Middle East.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that's a good point.
The neocons, they hate Russia way more than jihadists.
And so the jihadists in Chechnya or any rebel in Chechnya is a good guy to them.
So that's going to confuse their narrative, make it not so easy for them to promote the next war.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
In fact, there is, I saw some material this morning indicating that there have been fairly persistent contacts and support from leading neoconservatives for the Chechens.
So, you know, it's one of those things where it doesn't fit the formula very well for them.
Yeah, you're right about that.
I mean, if it had been.
Well, let's see, I guess if they were from Saudi Arabia, then they would just have to come up with some excuses.
If they were Syrians, I'm not sure what that would mean for American support for the rebels there.
You know, you know, or Palestinians.
I mean, you know, there are scenarios that that one can imagine.
But the fact is that it's Chechens, I think, is just going to confuse everybody.
And hopefully they'll capture the second guy, because, you know, the last thing you want is congressmen like Peter King and John McCain speculating on this or Lindsey Graham.
You want some definitive explanation of how this took place and why it took place.
And I think what we will find out is that it will be kind of one of these one-off type incidents.
At least I hope that will be it, because we don't need another war in Asia.
As a result of this terrorist attack.
Yeah, I was I immediately started thinking when I when I said that these guys were from Kyrgyzstan, I guess one was born in Kyrgyzstan, the other in Dagestan or something that maybe Chechnya connection where I start thinking that movie War, Inc., that CUSAC movie where they have just Blackwater.
They don't even have the U.S.
Army.
They outsource the entire thing to Blackwater and invade Turakistan.
In fact, the Blackwater company is called Tamerlane, which is this kid's first name.
Yeah, Tamerlane.
Yeah, of course, that's in fact, I was looking at the names this morning.
I was saying, well, those names are pretty actually pretty Russian.
Normally, the the serious Muslim families in that part of the world have a kind of an Islamic name that's Russian eyes to a certain extent.
But of course, Tamerlane does stick out.
But he wasn't a Muslim, was he?
Yeah, no, no, I guess not.
But I guess he did conquer a large part of Asia back then.
He was sort of the the pseudo Genghis Khan, right?
He wasn't quite as bad as Genghis Khan, but he conquered a huge part of Asia back in the 1300s, I guess, 1200s.
Yeah, all the way over to Turkey.
In fact, yeah, he fought the Turks in near the current Turkish capital, Ankara.
There was a famous battle there.
And he his war elephants defeated the Turks anyway.
I love that movie, by the way, if you've never seen War, Inc.
It's so great.
It's Ben Kingsley Kingsley has this great line.
War is the improvement of investment climates by other means.
That's Clausewitz for dummies.
Well, that makes sense, doesn't it?
I'm sure a lot of people in the United States that are licking their chops over what new security measures will have to be put in place now.
Right.
Yeah, that's what it means to be an entrepreneur in the United States right now.
What kind of deadly gadget can you sell to a cop?
Yeah, that's right.
And there'll no doubt be million dollar scanners now when you get on a bus and that sort of thing.
All right.
Well, now, so let's talk about the the Muslims here and the Islam and this and that, because, you know, I saw on Twitter right away this morning, which this is silly.
It's hardly even worth mentioning, but she's still waiting for moderate Muslims to denounce terrorism since September 11th.
Right.
Like that hasn't happened 15000 times on this planet in every part of this planet since September 11th.
And then so but I responded to that guy and said that, you know, come on, man, really, there's a billion Muslims in the world and maybe a thousand terrorists.
So what the hell kind of crap is that?
You know, and then but that got me into a big fight and I ended up citing you because you told me years ago that not just your opinion, but what from, you know, from your State Department and CIA friends that you still talk to that their assessment of the terrorist threat in the world are that there's no more than a couple of thousand real terrorists, jihadis or otherwise.
I don't know if that counts, you know, Buddhists in Sri Lanka, too, or what?
Or maybe it was the Hindus were the suicide bombers in Sri Lanka.
I get confused.
Anyway, he says no, no more than a couple of thousand people in the world that you could consider real international terrorist types.
Is that still right, you think?
Yeah, in fact, the numbers are probably lower than that.
I mean, if you want if you don't believe if they don't believe me, they should go to the State Department's annual report on terrorism, which lists incidents and listed terrorist groups and who they are and where they are.
You'll note two things, you know, first of all, that there have been less people killed by terrorists every year for a number of years now.
It's in the United States.
It's certainly more people get killed by falling furniture than than by terrorists, for example.
And and also, if you look at if you parse the numbers of the terrorists, there are actually very few in terms of numbers.
And if you further break it down by saying which of these few have the capability to stage an attack in Western Europe or the United States, that's that's just a handful.
There aren't that many terrorists that have that kind of capability.
And this is a problem across the board in many, many areas, foreign policy and everything else.
Americans just don't know anything about geography, Phil.
So if you tell them that we're allies with every state in Europe and that we're at least friends with the Russians and the Chinese, that there are no states in the Middle East that have any actual might that you could calculate whatsoever, that, you know, the worst, the worst that the South Americans and Latin Americans could ever do to us is declare their independence from our empire and that you're out of land masses where probable enemies could come from at this point.
They don't know that.
Right.
You can take off continents and in friendly places and and powerful state governments that keep terrorist type pirates like this at bay.
No problem.
But most Americans, they just can't do it.
And so, you know, as far as they know, there are five billion Muslims in the world and they control terrible, powerful states that are on their way here, that only the full, mighty American government is keeping them at bay or else.
What's all this for?
Yeah, that's that's the big fiction that, you know, that there are there are states out there that are supporting terrorist groups that are ready to attack and so on and so forth.
I'm not saying that that has never occurred or there has never been.
There have never been incidents where state sponsors will use a terrorist group for for some purpose or another.
It certainly has happened.
But the fact is, this is, you know, this is against the norm.
The norm is that any kind of government, the first thing that they're interested in is self-preservation.
And if you're interested in self-preservation, you're not going to nurture terrorist groups inside your borders.
So it's the whole concept itself is fallacious.
Well, and then what happens, of course, is you get into and this is the same conversation on Twitter I was in.
Now, our definitions start getting really slippery.
So now the Muslim Brotherhood counts as terrorists, too.
But so I don't know what the hell.
Tell us about the Muslim Brotherhood, Phil.
None of us know very much about it.
Well, the Muslim Brotherhood is like an umbrella organization.
It probably is is strongest in places like Egypt.
It was very strong in Syria before Assad's father dealt with them a number of years back.
But, you know, they're yeah, sure, they they they have a religious orientation, but that's not everything they're about.
They're also a social organization.
They're a political organization.
They have a lot of different faces.
I mean, the mistake people make is to say just because we in the West have a constitution that at least ostensibly separates religion from politics in many parts of the world, they see the the ethical basis that religion provides as a as a major part of the political system.
They don't separate the two.
So to argue that because the Muslim Brotherhood is somehow involved in politics and there's something bad with this is is begging the question.
I mean, you really should be seeing what kind of policies they support.
You should be basically giving them a pass in terms of of seeing where they are and what they what sorts of things they will do.
Right.
And especially, you know, when you look in the mirror and go, wow, look at all the terror the Americans paid for in Egypt to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out of power.
Well, at the same time, Ayman al-Zawahiri hiding in, you know, somebody's basement in Pakistan somewhere does nothing but denounce the Muslim Brotherhood for being a bunch of Hillary Clinton type sellouts and running for elections.
Elections are that's both ways.
Haram.
I don't know if you saw the the Constitution Project report that came out on Tuesday about the treatment of detainees.
Did you read anything on that?
I saw very little bit.
I read like half the executive summary or something.
I have not had a chance to get into it yet.
Well, it has some interesting stuff.
For example, as part of the rendition program run by the CIA, the U.S. was was renditioning Libyans back to Qaddafi to be tortured.
And these Libyans were subsequently Libyans that were in the revolt against Qaddafi that we and the Europeans supported to overthrow them.
And, you know, so the whole idea that we were we were using this rendition program to to deal with terrorists was nonsense.
We were basically doing it for a whole lot of different reasons.
And we were torturing people as favors to dictators like Muammar Qaddafi.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
I'm of so many minds about that.
In the case of Bell Hodge, who was like the military commander of the, you know, such as the Libyan force was that did any fighting in that war.
It was mostly special European special forces and airpower, I guess, that fought it.
But that guy, Abdul Hakeem al-Bell Hodge, he said, yeah, I did fight in Iraq and in Afghanistan against the Americans.
And yeah, the Americans in this in the British MI6 CIA and MI6 kidnapped me, torture me in a dungeon beneath Thailand, beneath Bangkok, Thailand or something like that, and then sent me back to Qaddafi to be tortured some more.
And then so now he's, as you said, America's friend, we just finished fighting a war to install him in power.
And now he's suing the MI6 in court in England for torturing him.
So on one hand, I want to go, hey, look, Obama is back in Al-Qaeda in Libya because that makes a great talking point.
Right.
Then I have to admit that, like, this guy doesn't seem so bad.
He seems like probably an innocent guy that they tortured or at least, you know, he he says, you know, let's let bygones be bygones.
Yeah.
And the fact is, we never learned from the experience because obviously the the stupid things we did in Libya were repeating in Syria.
And they're finally starting to figure out that, hey, all this stuff, all this stuff was not quite as simple as it as it seemed when people were coming to us for money and weapons and saying, oh, yes, we're Democrats.
Right.
And, you know, in fact, I've been making a habit out of talking with David Andrews on the show, you know, every two or three weeks.
He's been reporting for McClatchy out of Syria there.
And all indications, at least as far as I know, out of Syria are that the Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al-Qaeda in Syria, who are the forefront really of the Sunni based insurgency there, that there are only a couple of thousand guys and their couple of thousand guys completely preempt.
And that's not the right word, but marginalized their their very existence as the lead fighters, marginalized every other group of rebels who can't possibly keep up with their successes.
So, I mean, that just goes to show you how many jihadists are are readily available to travel to Syria to fight in this thing.
A couple of thousand.
Well, that's it.
The numbers I saw were precisely that were two thousand that they figured.
But, of course, you know, these numbers are are are flexible.
Probably those numbers come from Iraqi intelligence, which may or may not have a an agenda in terms of either minimizing or maximizing them.
There might be 200 of them.
There might be 10,000 of them.
I mean, who knows?
The thing is, you know, this is all political spin in terms of what the different players there want to see as an outcome.
And it's not clear to me what kind of outcome the Iraqis want.
Yeah.
As far as the war in Syria.
Well, if the Iraqis means Maliki, he wants Assad to live, right?
To survive.
I would think so.
I think that would be a better solution for him.
Although, you know, I mean, it might they might have other agendas that are playing out in terms of geopolitics.
You know, you just you don't know.
I mean, these things are so are so subtle and a lot of it is not based on anything that's logical.
It's just it's a question of how they see their their real politics and what their long term interests are.
Right.
Well, and it'd be easy to see how they might make a rational choice, but then it blows up in their face to like, hey, you know, maybe if we don't do too much to stop Iraqis, you know, from Maliki's point of view, if we don't stop Iraqi Sunnis from going to Syria to fight, then great.
That might help take the pressure off of us and the people who have been attacking us.
And so good, good riddance.
But then as we find out, the war in Syria ends up just energizing and reinvigorating the insurgency in Iraq.
And so, you know, it could be he chooses one thing, but he gets the other anyway.
That's right.
And of course, since the outcome of of whatever happens in Syria is far from decided, I mean, you wind up losing on both counts.
I mean, you know, it's just it's all these things are a little bit the Turks, for example.
The Turks got into this in the beginning with an assumption that it was this would not last long and that basically would stabilize their their situation with Kurdish insurgents and coming out of Syria and coming out of Iraq.
And of course, it's done nothing like that.
All right.
Now, you know, the first time I ever interviewed you was the summer of 2005, the story about Cheney's plan to nuke Iran.
And boy, good thing that didn't happen.
Good thing he's not in charge this week.
I'll tell you that we would have figured out who did this back on Tuesday and the bombing would have started on Wednesday.
Maybe it would have started simultaneously.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
What?
Something blew up, hit Tehran.
All right.
So but the thing is, I asked you then.
All right.
So look, man, you're telling me there are some pretty bad guys who if they could get to the United States and blow up a mall or blow up a marathon, kill a bunch of people that they would do it.
So if it's not regime change, if it's not the Bush doctrine, then what is to be done about this?
And again, by the way, people are just tuning in.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA counterterrorism officer and author for or contributing editor to the American Conservative magazine.
And I asked you then, well, so what do we do about these guys?
I mean, even if Ron Paul was the president and said, we're bringing all our base, we're closing all our bases, we're coming home, we're minding our own business, we've still created, I don't know, some number of thousands of people in the world who hate our guts and want to blow us up.
Phil, what's to be done without making more of them?
You know, yeah, that's, of course, the zillion dollar question.
I mean, the solution of the United States government has been basically to adopt a military option to to deal with international terrorism.
Now, that hasn't worked very well, because, as you know, it's created more terrorists than it's gotten rid of.
So that's that didn't work out.
And the right solution basically is that terrorism is a criminal issue.
And the U.S. government used to believe that before 9-11, that basically terrorists were criminals and you basically used law enforcement and you used intelligence resources to identify them, to capture them and to try them.
And that's what the United States did in the first bombing, for example, of the World Trade Center.
We caught them, we convicted them, we sent them to jail.
And, you know, we've gotten away from that.
Sure.
I mean, there's no point panicking about terrorism because there aren't that many of them.
And the likelihood of them carrying out a successful act in the United States or in Europe is relatively low.
And basically, we should we should get away from this Bush doctrine of of using overwhelming military force as a way to deal with the problem and get back to basics and get back to to the principle of law enforcement and intelligence.
All right.
Now, but your article this week at at antiwar dot com is called Drones and Deathless, the new face of warfare.
But now I think probably you could find.
Well, let's see.
John Brennan, probably.
Right.
Wouldn't he say that he's really leaning a lot more toward your position on this, that what we need to do is a minimal war on terror rather than Iraq style invasions?
What we need to do is drone strikes and that drone strikes are surgical.
Drone strikes are a great way to kill just the guys that you're trying to kill without, you know, doing a giant Iraq style catastrophe at the same time.
But you say, no, it needs to be more minimal than that.
Yeah, I would say it needs to be more minimal.
You know, the basically, you know, the argument about drone strikes is is a false one.
It basically says that these these attacks are surgical.
But the fact is that there is a convincing evidence that that's not true, that by far, most of the people that have been been killed have not been what you would consider Al Qaeda cadre.
And that, in turn, destroys the legal argument, because the legal argument that the US uses for drone strikes is that Al Qaeda is this enemy that was declared an enemy by Congress back in 2001.
And we can attack them anywhere we want.
But the fact is, if you're not attacking Al Qaeda and you know you're not attacking Al Qaeda, then you have no legal premise for doing it.
So there are a lot of reasons to eliminate or at least grossly minimize the use of drones as as killing instruments.
And I think they're sure.
Brennan is talking out of both sides of his mouth.
I mean, he knows that the CIA has largely been destroyed as an intelligence organization by what's occurred over the last 10 years in terms of turning it into a paramilitary organization.
He knows that.
But at the same time, he figures he's got to keep the the drone operation going, because that's essentially what the White House has decided.
It is strange.
And I'm sorry, I'm going back to the Boston story now or this week's news now.
One last question for you, though.
Isn't it weird that you have a rice and a letter thing at the same time as this bombing and then apparently they're unrelated again?
Yeah, that is kind of weird.
I must admit when it when it happened like that, I said, well, you know, that would seem to indicate there is some kind of agenda here by somebody who's organized and knows what he's doing.
But now it seems that they were both independent and basically carried out by people for personal agendas.
That's a strange thing.
The world is full of coincidences.
I got the same birthday as Han Solo, so I don't know how anybody could explain that.
But it just seems strange to me.
I guess, you know, at the same time, though, if you if you read The Wire a lot, you see where husband father kills child, wife, then self.
That happens pretty much every day.
Probably sometimes it happens at the exact same time.
People take drastic action, especially in this economy.
People are kind of pushed to the edge of, you know, their their nerves and whatever.
So I guess, you know, like this guy, the Mississippi guy, they're saying, you know, his problem is a personal problem about I don't know enough about it, but some kind of organ smuggling thing that he was a whistleblower that no one took seriously.
And then he got all cranky about it.
Who knows if he was really on to something or not?
But just that's the country we live in.
There's enough crazy stuff going on that people do even crazier stuff in response to that.
Yeah, I would say you don't have to look for a conspiracy a lot of the time.
It's just, as you say, people do crazy stuff.
And we particularly live in an age now in a country now where there has been a lot of disorientation, I would say, in terms of how people see themselves vis a vis the government, how they see themselves vis a vis society, families, the whole thing.
A lot of this stuff has broken down over the last five or six years.
Yeah, well, it's the terror war.
It's just thrown off everything.
You know, you think like back to the future, too, of what this era is supposed to be like.
Just obviously, it's silly.
But that, you know, that the premise of back to the future, too, is this whole big stupid terror war never happened.
And in fact, probably the 1990s expansion of the empire never happened either.
We got our peace dividend after the end of the Cold War in that future.
Now we've gone off on a skew to a tangent to this backwards ass universe where everything is wrong.
Well, we certainly have made everything wrong.
I mean, you know, I think if you and I are around at the point where historians are looking back on this era, if this country even survives, it's going to be interesting to see how they assess it, because it was like a nation committing suicide.
It's maybe unique in the history of the world.
Yeah, yeah.
One big face palm.
That's how they're going to look at it.
Just shaking their head.
Unbelievable.
Those Americans, those those early 21st century Americans.
All right.
We got to leave it that we're over time.
Thanks so much for your time.
Phil's always great.
Talk to you.
OK, Scott.
See you, everybody.
That's the great Phil Giraldi from the Council for the National Interest.
They're sticking up for an America first foreign policy there at Council for the National Interest or check them out.
Also at the American Conservative Magazine and at antiwar dot com.
Of course, a former DIA and CIA counterterrorism officer.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at Council for the National Interest dot org.
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