05/04/15 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Up next is Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA officer.
And he is the executive editor of the Council for the National Interest.
And he writes for the American Conservative Magazine and for UNZ.com, UNZ, UNZ.com.
And he sounds like Darth Vader today.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Phil?
Thank you, Scott.
You got your dark helmet on today?
No, actually, it's kind of sunny and warm here today, which is a big change.
We were in winter.
You sound like Rick Moranis in Spaceballs.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So it's not a bad day.
All right, well, that's good.
All right, hey, listen, so welcome to the show.
You and the Council for the National Interest, you've done some work in the past in this professional Islamophobia movement.
And, you know, I know you're a Bill of Rights kind of guy, too.
So I wonder what all interesting things that you have to say about the shooting here in Garland, Texas, last night at the Pamela Geller event.
Apparently it was a young convert to Islam, a lone wolf and his roommate.
Is that how that works?
Long known to the FBI, radical extremist attack.
He wounded a security guard in the ankle and then the cops standing there on the beat shot them both to death and finished that crisis off quick.
So that's good, at least.
But what do you make of all this?
Well, as you noted, I'm a civil liberties guy.
I believe that free speech is free speech.
And if it offends, it's too bad.
I think that if you're calling on someone to kill someone else, that's going over the line.
What the game that Geller plays is that she's essentially right on that line.
She's provoking Muslims to do something by herself, staging events that are completely offensive.
Like this event in Texas was a Mohammed cartoons type event to see who could draw the most offensive cartoon of Mohammed.
She recently had posters on buses in New York City saying in big letters, kill Jews.
Then when you read the poster, of course, it's Muslims who are killing Jews.
And so she's really big into this.
She's well funded.
I would like to see more exposure of her in the mainstream media to discredit her and what she does, because she's a real monster.
Well, and boy, did she succeed in provoking this, which is obviously the whole point.
Let's see how extreme of a reaction we can provoke.
And then there you go.
Got somebody shot.
Yeah, and apparently they had intensive security laid on by Geller and her people that had gotten the local police force active.
And there were security guards there who were armed.
I mean, to a certain extent, the expectation was that somebody would try to do something.
And, you know, that's totally wrong, but it's not illegal.
And, as I say, people should have the right to say what they want to say.
But, you know, people have to look at, the public has to look at people like Geller and start discrediting them.
And I'd like to see some politicians speaking out on the issue of what she represents.
But, of course, our gutless politicians aren't about to do that, are they?
Yeah, and, you know, the thing of it is, too, that I have a problem, a real problem, and I wonder whether you think that this will ever change with this policy that says that if some young kook decides he wants to go and take the side of the enemy and go fight in Somalia, that he be allowed to go and get himself killed in Somalia instead of keeping him around here where he can end up killing some Americans.
You know, I've wondered about that, too.
To me, again, it's a civil liberties issue.
If a guy wants to go to Somalia and enlist in whatever the hell group is catching his fancy at the time, al-Shabaab or whatever, well, why not?
Let him do it.
I mean, if you want to sanction that kind of activity, you have to pass laws on it saying that, you know, for various reasons, because this is a terrorist group, therefore, you know, you have broken the law, and when you come back, we're going to arrest you and prosecute you.
Okay, but let's play that angle.
But I agree with you.
I mean, you know, if any of us wanted to go and join one of these groups, I would think that to a certain extent, to a certain level, we have kind of the right to do it.
Yeah, well, and it seems like, just pragmatically speaking, too, you have the same thing in Canada where this guy wanted to go and fight in Syria.
They wouldn't let him go, so they attacked the parliament, you know?
Yeah.
And they really want to commit treason.
Let them go do it somewhere else and not go, you know, stage an attack on behalf of the Islamic State in our neighborhoods.
What the hell?
Yeah, well, this is always the problem with this whole war on terrorism bit.
There are a lot of pieces to it that don't make any sense.
And essentially, like, for example, there was a good article I read this morning.
You and I have talked about this before, how our policy in Yemen is to support the people who are actually fighting the people who attacked us on 9-11.
So it doesn't make any sense.
And this is another thing, too.
If you have people living in the United States who are so disgruntled and hate us so much that they want to go off and join a terrorist group and kill people, well, let them go.
Right.
And by the way, the thing I just said about in the name of the Islamic State, I just made that up as we were joking around.
I didn't mean to say that I read somewhere that these guys said they did this for the Islamic State or anything.
I should clarify that.
Yeah, the only connection appears to be Somalia.
And I'm not so sure what the real evidence is for that.
We're getting a lot of early stuff now where people are just guessing.
Yeah, and I mean, as far as they claim, he wanted to go there.
That doesn't mean anything, really.
It doesn't mean that they're on his side, just that he's on theirs, allegedly, attemptedly.
Yeah, well, maybe he wanted to volunteer for the CIA station there or something.
I mean, who knows?
Go work at the torture prison and pay well with our tax money over there.
All right, so now, and here's the thing, too, is all of this is just an alibi for this is all George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and Barack Obama's fault that we have this problem.
It's not Islam.
It's the occupation and the mass slaughter and the support for the Israelis and all the arms sales that Gareth Porter was just talking about in the last interview and all the rest of this.
That's why we have a terrorism problem.
You know, it was America that destroyed Somalia.
They were actually doing all right without a government before we came and foisted one on them.
Yeah, I mean, it was a free market economy, wasn't it?
Yeah, it was doing, hey, for Somalia it was paradise, you know?
Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with you.
I mean, you know, there's no question but that the United States has screwed all this stuff up.
There was an idiotic piece over at the American Conservative today by Jim Antle about how, you know, the U.S. and ISIS and all this kind of stuff and everything was basically that came out of nowhere.
But, you know, the whole terrorism problem and everything developed because we intervened and created a huge vacuum in the middle of the Arab world.
And this kind of stuff, there's always a cause and effect.
And for some reason our politicians and the experts in Washington can't quite ever figure it out.
Yeah, and you know, it's funny too to see Rand Paul, I mean, he throws his father's views under the bus on virtually everything.
But to go as far as throw him under the bus on the whole blowback issue, when that was the thing that made Ron Paul a hero, was that he was brave enough, the only Washington, D.C. politician brave enough to just go ahead and tell the simple truth to the American people.
This problem precedes September 11th.
That's why September 11th happened, because we were already over there bombing Iraq from Saudi for years and years.
And you all remember that, the 1990s, the bridge to the 21st century?
And the people said, yeah, we do remember that.
It was all Bill Clinton's fault.
And so maybe we don't have to have a permanent war over there.
If having a war over there is what got us into this mess in the first place, maybe we could just quit.
That was the thing that gave Ron Paul the most mileage of all, was fighting and winning over Rudy Giuliani on that.
And now Rand is saying, no, the problem is radicalism.
Right in the middle when there's a giant sectarian war between Tehran and Riyadh, Shia and Sunni across the Middle East, is right when he wants to lump them all together, even more than before, and run away from the great truth that was the best thing his dad had going for him campaign-wise.
And anyway, now I rambled all the way up to the break, which is probably better than asking a question that you won't have time to answer, Phil.
So be happy about that.
Hang tight.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Phil Giraldi on the Islamophobes and them.
After this, oh, and Iran, too.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
So I'm talking with Phil Giraldi, the executive director of the Council for the National Interest, former CIA counterterrorism officer, writer for the American Conservative Magazine and UNZ.com, the UNZ Review.
That's U-N-Z, UNZ.com.
And you guys even did a big conference about Islamophobia, and you've got quite a bit of material on the website at councilforthenationalinterest.org about that, too.
And now the bottom line of this – oh, let me – you know what?
Let me go ahead and name – Max Blumenthal did a great piece called The Great Fear that he wrote for Tom Dispatch.
That's also at antiwar.com.
It was back in 2010, but still, that wasn't that long ago, and it's a great piece.
And then at the Center for American Progress, Eli Clifton – I believe he was involved in both of these quite a few years apart here.
And now all of a sudden the title escaped me, but there's two of them at the Center for American Progress about the Islamophobia industry.
Maybe it's just Islamophobia Inc. or something like that.
Anyway, part one and two, and you can find it there at CAP.org, I guess it is.
And Eli Clifton is a great journalist, and he's got a great study of this.
And I think the bottom line, if I can sift it all, Phil, is that the Islamophobia movement is really just about demonizing enemies and would-be enemies of Israel in the minds of Americans from now on.
That's really what all this is about.
I would point out it's a European thing, too.
It's an attempt to really create a perception of Muslims in general, which is extremely negative.
And, of course, the real reason behind this is not necessarily because they are Muslim.
It's because they are perceived as being intrinsically hostile to Israel.
And, therefore, you have people like Pamela Geller who are closely tied to Israel and get their money from extremely Israel-friendly sources who are running this kind of thing.
And, I mean, she's not the only one.
There are quite a few of them out there, as I'm sure you're aware, and quite a few of them in Europe.
And the whole idea is if Israel can be seen as a beacon of liberality, then you get there by blackening all of Israel's perceived enemies.
And that's what they're doing.
Yeah.
You know, it's really interesting to me.
I think it's in – well, it's in Clifton's work, and I forget if you guys covered this part of it.
But the push to get – they have model legislation to get through in all the 50 states to protect against encroaching Sharia law takeover.
And in no case is there actually a threat of Sharia law takeover of anything.
But it comes with that giant built-in kind of silent premise there that, well, obviously they must be trying to roll back something if they're introducing a law to limit Sharia, and Sharia must have picked the fight.
But it didn't, but it doesn't matter because it just helps to reinforce that overall kind of idea that, no, yeah, Islam, bin Ladenism is a threat in your county.
Unless you do something about it now, unless you be afraid and back who we tell you to back.
Yeah.
I mean there's obviously an effort to portray Islam as primitive and dangerous.
And that's one of these generalizations that just doesn't wash.
I mean anybody who's known, I think, large numbers of Muslims or even reasonably large numbers would, I think, agree with me that there are all kinds of Muslims.
And this kind of painting them all by the same brush is wrong and it's evil.
And yet that's what they're doing and they're getting away with it.
Yeah.
And, you know, it seems strange, especially in America where, you know, I don't know the exact breakdown.
I only know kind of anecdotally, but it sure seems like the vast majority of Muslims in America are upper middle class.
They're the people who could afford to leave their home countries and come here for grad school and be engineers and owners.
They're, you know, would vote Republican if the Republicans probably didn't hate them so damn much.
And they're as integrated into American society as you could hope for them to be as far as all that melting pot stuff goes.
So it sort of seems like, you know, they're tilting at a caricature of the French Muslim ghettos that don't really resemble any situation that exists in North America.
Yeah, that's exactly what they're doing.
And you're quite right about the status of Muslims in the United States.
They're above average in income.
They're above average in education.
And they're way below average in terms of committing crimes.
Which, in other words, they have every interest in keeping the peace and living their lives and raising their children in security like everybody wants and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Exactly.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
It seems – well, you know, if nobody put this guy up to it, they might as well have because, you know, he's just served – this now dead guy has just served Pamela Geller's purpose better than anybody could have by attacking her in this way.
And by her, I mean Robert Spencer and the whole rest of this movement too, you know?
Right.
Well, maybe he was put up to it.
It certainly could be.
Don't rule that out.
Don't rule that out.
Yeah.
Well, I mean we've seen so many of these where the FBI puts a guy up to it through an informant and then swoop in to save the day.
It seems, you know, if this wasn't the time, it seems pretty likely that at some point we're going to have one where they go ahead and do the thing and the FBI is unable to stop them because their alarm doesn't go off in the morning or whatever it is, whatever the screw up is, you know?
That's right.
They figure out that they're being put on, but they go ahead, convinced anyway, and do the thing.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, man.
We went on too long about that.
I wanted to change the subject to your new article about the Senator Cardin and the Iran legislation.
We can go a little bit into the break too, which would be fine for the people listening to the recording later anyway.
So can you tell us about the conventional narrative of the status of the Cardin deal on the new Iran legislation going through versus how you see them here?
Well, I mean the conventional wisdom is that this is a watered down bill, the Corker bill as modified by Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland.
That basically it is something that takes the sharp edges off the Republican bill and gathers more support from Congress.
And this is seen as a good thing because it's more moderate in some ways.
And President Obama has vowed that if it's not changed, he's not going to veto it.
So anyway, that's what we kind of have.
And everybody's saying, well, that's a relief.
The Republican crazies have not taken over this bill and so on and so forth.
But I think what they're forgetting about here, there are a couple of agendas playing out.
And one of the agendas by AIPAC, incidentally, supports this bill and doesn't want any changes, which is uncharacteristic because normally they would want some really nasty stuff in there to really get the Iranians and derail the negotiations.
So they're not supporting that kind of extremism.
And I think the point is people are forgetting that AIPAC and the Israel lobby in general, plus a lot of congressmen, have been moaning about the fact that bipartisanship in support of Israel on everything Israel is doing has disappeared as a result of the Netanyahu visit and the response of the Republicans.
So one of the big agendas of this bill is to get the Democrats back on board with Israel, which it has done.
I mean, a lot of the Democratic senators and congressmen are supporting this bill.
It's creating a consensus.
So I think the intention of this bill is actually to get a bipartisan approval of this bill, which eventually will lead to voting against the negotiations with Iran.
That's the desired result.
So we have kind of a Ben Cardin leading this effort to liberalize the process, to bring more Democrats in.
But the real intention is to defeat the negotiations that the White House is conducting.
So I spell all this out in this article that's coming out tomorrow on ANZ.
And I think that this whole situation, believe it or not, is more dangerous than if it had been a Republican crazy bill because everybody would have seen it for exactly what it was.
Yeah.
It's too bad that the few Democrats who are actually committed to backing the deal didn't go ahead and help vote for the Rubio amendment and the Cotton amendment and all that to try to sabotage the damn thing.
I never understood why those idiots were doing that.
Are they really that stupid that they were trying to sink the deal, which was as good as they could get it without it getting vetoed?
Yeah, I'm not sure.
I mean, obviously every congressman is probably driven by whatever kind of information he's being given by AIPAC or whoever else is feeding him the info sheets.
And some of them certainly are cautious because they want to support the president.
But the fact is, you know, there are a couple of games being played here.
And I think that even the people that want this more moderate, allegedly more moderate bill to pass, they want it to pass because they want more votes.
They want more Democrats who are sitting on the fence to join them.
And eventually they want to torpedo the negotiations.
That's what they want.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Now, you know, I wouldn't want to underestimate their power because that wouldn't make sense.
But on the other hand, if they really have the deal in hand, then isn't the – don't all the political wins really shift toward the president at that point?
Wouldn't it be highly controversial for the Senate to shoot him down at that point?
Well, I mean, that's been the argument for either form of the bill, that basically the president, if he can pull off a deal with Iran, will have all the momentum going with him.
And I think that's true.
I think that the chances of this succeeding, meaning that we would have a deal with Iran, is significant if the president can pull it off, because I think there'll be a lot of people who may be privately relieved by not having to go into another war.
But at the same time, you know, we're looking at a solid Republican majority in both houses, which is dedicated to destroying these negotiations.
And if they get a certain number of Democrats on board, they can do that.
And so I'm just saying there are a number of games being played here, and it can go in a number of different directions.
I honestly, as you know, would love to see Netanyahu – Obama succeed on this, and I'd love to see him pull this off and have it as a U.S. policy.
So we'll see that.
But there certainly are powerful forces, including AIPAC, including Congress, that would like to see this fail.
All right.
That's it.
We've got to go.
Thanks so much for coming back on the show, Phil.
Appreciate it.
Okay, Scott.
Bye-bye.
All right, so that's Phil Giraldi.
He's at councilforthenationalinterest.org, the Council for the National Interest, and unz.com, as well as theamericanconservative.com.
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