08/06/13 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
My website is ScottHorton.org.
You can find all my interview archives there.
More than 2,900 of them now, going back to 2003.
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And before we go to our next guest, let me just mention real quick a couple of really important articles for you to read.
And I think we'll probably talk about this a little bit more in the last half hour of the show today.
But I just wanted to make sure and mention, in case you've never read, Hiroshima and Nagasaki by Ralph Rako.
It's at LewRockwell.com.
That's R-A-I-C-O.
Ralph Rako at LewRockwell.com.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It's an excerpt from John Denson's book, which I don't remember the name of anymore.
But anyway, man, it's really good.
And here's another one at LewRockwell.com by our friend Anthony Gregory.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the U.S. Terror State.
You can find both of those linked on my Facebook page today.
So great anti-Hiroshima, anti-nuking revisionism for you there at LewRockwell.com.
And Anthony, quite correctly, quotes the great Zora Neale Hurston, calling Harry Truman the butcher of Asia, which indeed he was.
So please go and read Ralph Rako and read Anthony Gregory to mark Hiroshima Day today.
I did interview Greg Mitchell about it yesterday.
That archive will be up tonight, I guess.
Okay, so now to our next guest, Phil Giroldi.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So TV says I'm supposed to be terrified of Al-Qaeda this week.
They're going to blow up everything.
We had to shut down every embassy between, I don't know, Morocco and India or something like that.
Pretty scary.
What do you think?
Well, you know, I'm a little bit confused.
Because on one hand, the government keeps telling us that they've basically destroyed Al-Qaeda.
And then every once in a while they seem to trot out a late or recent Al-Qaeda threat to justify what they're doing in the world.
And in this case in particular, none of the facts in the story as they've been revealed seem to make much sense.
Well, now, what are the facts?
What are the facts?
Because I heard something on NPR where they said, well, they found this intercept of Ayman al-Zawahiri.
And I thought, you know what?
Is that guy, is he in military custody somewhere and they're just using him or what?
Because if they can intercept his intercepts, then why can't they cut his throat?
I don't know.
I mean, but to me it was amazing to hear about the intercept because that's a leak, isn't it?
I mean, this is the kind of stuff that they're complaining about Snowden and saying that these people are leaking sensitive information.
I mean, if they're telling Ayman al-Zawahiri that we are able to read his communications to other terrorists around the world.
It's treason.
Then he's going to change what he does, right?
Yeah, it's treason.
It's aiding the enemy.
That's right.
I mean, so who in the White House is going to get hung out to dry for this one?
You know what?
I don't even believe them.
I think they're just making it up.
But also, you know what?
And this is just my imagination.
But have you ever seen that movie with Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis called The Siege?
It was about the war on terror back before the war on terror.
Right.
Yeah, I've seen it.
And it was actually written by Lawrence Wright, the author of The Looming Tower.
But anyway, that movie begins with Bruce Willis as the general He abducts the Osama bin Laden character, but then doesn't admit it, doesn't even tell the president that he's got him.
And he's holding them all along.
For some reason, I keep thinking of that, that like, did they capture Ayman al-Zawahiri six years ago and they're just pretending they didn't?
I don't know.
I don't believe the government, anything they tell us about this so-called war on terror.
I mean, the whole act of closing 22 consulates and embassies for what appears to be a nonspecific threat is pretty astonishing.
You know, it's and basically another way to look at it is that if you're really into this war on terror and everything like that, well, the terrorists just scored a big victory.
They made a shutdown, all our embassies and consulates in the Middle East and in Africa for an entire week.
With a phone call.
Just by faking up a threat.
Right.
Yeah, well, and this is bin Laden's thing all along, right?
The Americans, they're a paper tiger.
They're not that tough.
They just pretend they are.
Well, and of course, bin Laden long ago said that the idea was to bleed the enemy, was basically to make them do a lot of stupid things, to overreact, to make them spend all this money, waste all those resources.
And I think that's what we're seeing here.
Well, and, you know, here's the thing.
Oh, and I forgot in your introduction, because I'm so used to interviewing you and I just figure everybody listening knows, but they don't know.
You used to be D.I.A. and then you were C.I.A. and now you write for the American Conservative Magazine and antiwar.com.
So just so they know, you actually know a thing or two about this subject.
You're a counterterrorism officer in the C.I.A.
And so this isn't just some crank here.
This is Phil Giraldi talking.
Now, tell me this.
If you were on the staff and you heard that, hey, there was a real threat against some embassies and whatever, is it a good idea to close them all down like this?
I mean, it seems like you could send a message to the Marines that, hey, be on high alert.
Something might happen.
But closing them down like this seems like just a public relations disaster.
Well, yeah.
And to me, the other curious thing about it is, you know, if you have specific threat information that they're going to stage an attack, wouldn't it be smarter to, you know, stage a counterattack, to be sort of sitting there waiting for them and wipe them out if that's really what you're intending to do about terrorism?
So the whole thing is kind of stupid.
I just don't understand it.
And I think there's a lot more non-story here than there is story, that they're kind of justifying a panic response, and they're saying all kinds of things.
But I don't know how much of it is even true.
Well, I wonder whether the leak about the intercept was an authorized leak from the very top because they're trying to make it seem like we need the National Security Agency to do anything except go drown themselves.
Yeah, that's another suspicion I have, that somehow the National Security Agency would be tied in with this.
But it appears that at least the British media is reporting that the leak was developed with intelligence sources, which seems to imply something more like CIA.
Okay.
Well, they're not even using it as an NSA excuse.
That's interesting.
No, but it might come out.
I mean, obviously, we have a whole lot of desperate congressmen who want to convince us that we really need this program.
So I imagine before the end of the day, we'll be hearing from Lindsey Graham and John McCain.
Yeah.
Boy, well, I already saw them this morning on the Egypt thing, and I guess we could talk about that at the end of the interview, maybe, if we get to it.
So now just what is al-Qaeda at this point?
Because I remember reading this great article by Robert Dreyfuss called The Bogus War on Terrorism.
And it was about how you CIA guys with your laser pointers and the U.S. Air Force with their daisy cutters turned al-Qaeda into smoke, like on Saving Private Ryan where the guy just disappears and then there's pink dust where he used to be.
That that's what happened.
I think they told Dreyfuss, they said, if you want to go and find al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, bring Q-tips.
They blasted them to hell.
And it was only a couple of dozen guys escaped with Hekmatyar and bin Laden across the border.
Hekmatyar, who now works for us again, but at that time helped bin Laden escape.
But so what was left of al-Qaeda at all at that point?
And then, of course, there is there's been these offshoots and people call themselves al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda in Yemen, al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
But would you do them the honor of calling them al-Qaeda or not?
What counts?
Well, basically, they're franchise operations and they're using the name because it has a certain appeal and mystique.
But you're right.
I mean, they operate independently.
They basically are focused on local issues.
They do their funding locally.
They do their training locally.
These are not groups with any kind of international reach.
And if you don't believe me, I would recommend you go to the annual State Department report on international terrorism.
And you will see that the report is touting the record of the Obama administration and basically destroying al-Qaeda.
So how many ways you want to have it?
Right.
Well, this is why I always like to emphasize that you're former CIA and that you write for the American conservative, because the implication there is pretty obvious.
That if it came to a real enemy of the United States of America, you wouldn't have any problem killing them to death in an instant.
But it's all these other fake threats are the ones that you're not so interested in.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm afraid that really what's happened since 9-11 is we've sold a bill of goods right from the beginning and right until today.
And this is only one more aspect of it.
I mean, if you trot out this plausible global terrorist threat, basically you do that because you want to make the government look good and you want to continue funding and you want to do this and you want to do that.
It really doesn't have anything to do with reality.
Yeah.
Well, now, so here's the thing, too.
Like you said, local concerns.
It seems like a lot of these groups, like, say, for example, the guys that attacked the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, back last September 11th, Ansar al-Sharia, whatever.
They basically are al-Qaeda, but with local concerns.
They are, I think, Shoyer said, Michael Shoyer said on CNN at the time, if these guys were anywhere else, we would call them the Mujahideen.
Why are we fighting for them in this case?
And so whatever was al-Qaeda in Libya that came home from Iraq alive and was not crushed by Muammar Gaddafi, America fought a war for them in 2011 and put them in power, at least in the east.
I don't know exactly who's ruling Tripoli.
If anybody rules Tripoli these days or the whole country at all.
But it seems like, you know, our government wants to define al-Qaeda so broadly that it includes anyone that they want to target.
But then when it comes to Libya or Syria, now all of a sudden we've got to get really specific about who's al-Qaeda and who's not.
Yeah, well, the point is that, you know, the authorization to use military force, which is the legal thing for all this activity, basically began by specifying al-Qaeda and has expanded that to associated groups.
So somehow the government feels always compelled to, if it wants to make a case for doing something idiotic, to make that connection.
And I think that's what we're seeing.
Yeah.
Well, now, and so what do you make of this, the new CNN story about Benghazi?
I think we knew all along that, yeah, they were shipping weapons off to Syrian fighters.
I mean, Pepe Escobar reported back in 2011, I think, that they were shipping Libyan fighters off to Syria after their victory in Tripoli.
And then there was that great story in the Sunday Times about the ship full of guns and the Muslim Brotherhood and the Al-Nusra Front getting in a fight over who got to have the guns and all that.
But now there's this new CNN story, Phil, that says that the Obama administration is literally threatening the families of CIA officers who might even consider telling the truth about what happened there.
What?
Yeah, yeah.
I, you know, I don't, I wouldn't put anything past what this administration is willing to do.
And it's quite astonishing.
Well, if I was a president, I would not threaten CIA officers' families, man, because CIA guys will kill presidents.
They don't care, right?
Well, that's always a possibility.
But I think they're actually much more adept at destroying presidents.
So Obama better be careful, because there will suddenly be some stories appearing that have a great deal of credibility about other stuff he might be up to.
So, you know, I hope he's made a bad step on this one and that the CIA god will get him.
But I mean that metaphorically, of course.
Yes, of course.
Well, I mean, and, you know, I don't know exactly how it works in the CIA.
I know there's a lot of things that are supposed to be kept secret.
And I know that sometimes when things go wrong, there could be great incentive on a CIA officer to tell the truth.
But what could they possibly be covering up that's so important that they would go so far as to threaten the families of CIA officers?
I'm sorry I don't have the exact quote, but I'm not making that up.
I mean, it was in the CNN story.
Yeah, I saw the story, too.
It wasn't big on detail.
But the fact is there's probably a lot of covert operations going on right now, including assassination teams.
This is the thing I've always heard ever since, like, 2003, that there were a lot of assassination teams, mostly JSOC, but also using CIA intelligence, that were going around and bumping people off all over the place.
And there's been very little corroboration of that.
That could be the story.
And if that's the story, I mean, how low is the reputation of the United States right now?
I mean, it would go through the floor if that were really demonstrated.
Okay, now, I'm sorry.
In the chat room, they're talking about this New York Times piece, CATA messages prompt U.S. terror warning.
And, oh, let's see.
Some analysts and congressional officials suggested Friday that emphasizing a terrorist threat now is a good way to divert attention from the uproar over the NSA's data collection programs and that if it showed the intercepts, it uncovered a plot even better.
Yeah, it's sort of like Bill Clinton when he was launching cruise missiles into Sudan to cover up for an affair.
I mean, these people are completely unscrupulous.
What is it that happens when people are elected to senior office in this country that they lose all their moral compass and they lose any kind of sense they might have had?
I just don't get it because I think at the bottom, Obama would seem to be a moral man.
But maybe he isn't.
Maybe he's a monster.
You know, let me ask you this.
I'd hate to even bring up that crank Wayne Madsen on the show because, boy, is that guy full of it.
And I should have spent more time looking into this.
But there's been rumors all along that Obama's been CIA all along, that he worked for this company International Business Associates out of college and that that's just a CIA front and that maybe he's their handpicked guy all along.
I don't believe that.
I think that's one of those wild rumors that one reads on certain websites.
But if you look at his whole history, the whole background, what he comes out of, he's one of your cookie cutter progressives.
There's no question about it.
But somehow his moral compass changed after he became president.
Maybe he's just a weak man.
I don't know.
Certainly it's difficult to say.
But, no, I wouldn't believe for a second that he would have been someone that the CIA would have even tried to approach or would have sought to bring into the fold.
Yeah, well, if he worked for them at all, it's hard to believe that anyone would have ever plotted to put a man named Barack Obama in the presidency because before that actually happened, that would have just been impossible to imagine.
Right?
Yeah, particularly Barack Hussein Obama.
Exactly.
That would have been your 10,000 to one shot in terms of a seeding operation.
Yeah, that's for sure.
Well, now, as far as his morality, I don't know if he ever had any at all.
But I know that in Mike Swanson's new book, The War State, that's coming out soon, he talks about how if a president makes it really clear that there's going to be some serious changes in foreign policy here and military industrial complex, you can't stop me, that he can do it.
He's got to give a big speech and he's got to combine a lot of other interests in the country to support him.
But then he can do it.
And he cites Richard Nixon, actually, as really he and Kissinger face down the entire M.I.C. and made peace with China and opened up detente with the Soviet Union.
And it took a son of a bitch like Nixon to be able to do it because he was that powerful of a president for a time anyway.
But that any president who comes to power who doesn't immediately make it clear that, look, it's on and your policy is off and now we're doing this instead, that he is almost, you know, it takes no time at all for his entire presidency to be subsumed by the complex and all of its various interests.
And he's got no room to budge whatsoever.
Yeah, well, I think that's probably correct, actually.
Now, the problem with the president changing foreign policy or changing anything serious is that there are only so many hours in the day and they get consumed by crises like this situation right now, which whether it's fake or real, the fact is, you know, you know, it's tying them up with meetings and tying them up with how to deal with the media and how to do this and how to do that.
It makes it kind of difficult to shift the ground on issues of foreign policy, which most people don't care about anyway.
But the difference between Nixon and the present president is that basically Nixon was working from a different environment where, you know, he was able to do a lot more stuff in secret and he basically did have the consensus behind him to do what he wanted to do.
And Obama doesn't have any of those advantages, apart from anything else.
And I just don't think he's motivated to do it anymore.
I think he might have tried to shift foreign policy a little bit when he came into office, when he got the Nobel Peace Prize.
But the fact is that he's given up on that.
I think he just figures it's just not worth the game.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's even a brain in his head anymore at all or he's just a sock puppet now.
I mean, you look at, for example, back when he asked Brazil and Turkey to cut the deal with Iran and they did.
And then he rejected their acceptance of his offer because of the Israel lobby or whatever.
I mean, yeah, yeah, that's right.
That's a perfect example.
And also his Cairo speech where, you know, he promises all kinds of things.
I mean, I can't even watch the guy on television anymore because I know he's lying about everything.
Or he's so insincere about what he's saying that it amounts to a lie.
And it's just, you know, we really have come to expect the bare minimum for our presidents.
But, you know, I think George Bush was a more honest man, which I can't imagine I would have ever said anything like that ever.
But I think he was.
I think he was a more straightforward, honest man, which did not, of course, include Dick Cheney.
Well, it's like George Carlin said about Bill Clinton was he came straight out and said, I am totally and completely full of it.
And the American people said, at least he's honest.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I guess there's some truth to that.
But anyway.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is why the thought of Hillary Clinton as president absolutely terrifies me.
Think back about the level of mendacity of Bill Clinton.
I mean, this is a guy who would sell his mother.
Well, he did sell his mother.
You know, he exploited his mother all the time, just like Obama did in his fake book about being in his mother's bedside when she was dying.
All this stuff that was made up.
These people would sell their mothers down the river.
God, I don't know what more to say about them.
Well, that's why we call them our leaders, Phil.
They're the best of us.
Yeah, that may be true, unfortunately.
Hey, let me ask you this.
Can Israel's arms dealers be stopped?
Yeah, sure.
Congress can stop them.
The White House can stop them.
But they're not about to do it.
Basically, you referred to the article I wrote for the American Conservative.
Israeli arm dealers and arms merchants operate worldwide.
And basically in a lot of these hot spots where they advise the local mercenary armies of various dictators and things like that.
And they sell them weapons made in the USA frequently that are not supposed to be sold there.
They get away with all this stuff because nobody's willing to stand up and stop them.
Yeah, and, wow, I mean, they continue on, too.
You'll even see a story in the Washington Post.
Well, maybe not the Post, but there will be stories in mainstream media from time to time.
Well, the Israelis sold our very best missiles to the Chinese.
What the hell?
And then that's okay in the same paper in the next day, too.
They're our only best ally in the Middle East.
And we love them so much.
And they do so much for us that we can't name anything specifically that they've ever done for us.
But, boy, we love them a lot.
Yeah, well, I don't know if you noticed that there was an article.
I'm going to have a piece on anti-war on Thursday talking about this.
But there was an article by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post on, I think it was on Monday, it appeared.
And anyway, it was about the debate in the Senate over the Rand Paul proposal to cut aid to Egypt.
Apparently, John McCain and Lindsey Graham got up and were making fun of Rand Paul.
And they were holding up a fact sheet from AIPAC.
And they openly referred to it and said that this is what AIPAC says.
And McCain apparently said to Rand Paul, he said, holding the sheet out, saying, yeah, do you think you know what's good for Israel better than what Israel thinks?
And, of course, he's saying that Israel is AIPAC.
AIPAC is Israel.
And he's shameless enough to do this in the Senate on a vote.
I mean, it's just absolutely astonishing.
I couldn't believe it as I was reading it.
Well, what's funny is, you know, whatever voices in his head had not gotten their talking point straight by then, because he was also saying that, hey, this is a coup and we have to stop supporting them.
That's the law.
Yeah, that's right.
He's gone both ways.
So by the time he's condemned Rand Paul, he's already on the flop.
Yeah, well, AIPAC made him flip.
Amazing.
And then, you know, he was on CNN this morning.
I saw him giving the speech live from Cairo.
And this is so great.
He goes, well, you know, how can we expect Egypt to live up to their rule of law when we don't live up to our rule of law, which says that we can't support a country after there's been a coup, comma.
However, let's not dwell on the past.
Oh, God.
When is he going to get out of consent soon?
I mean, is there any hope for that?
I don't know.
Well, I mean, there's a recall effort against him now.
I'm sure not for any of this.
Yeah.
But, you know, I'm afraid I got to say he looks the picture of health every time I see him on TV, man.
He looks younger than he is.
That's a shame.
Yeah, it does.
It makes me sad.
Well, by the way, you were telling us back at the beginning of the year that you had sources telling you that CIA or, I guess, CIA sources were telling you that the Saudis were paying rent-a-mobs to foment violence, to turn peaceful protests in Cairo into violent ones in order to undermine Mohammed Morsi.
Can you tell us more about that?
Is that part of the same thing that just happened with this coup d'etat?
Yeah.
In fact, this is part and parcel to it.
The Gulf states and the Saudis were apparently throwing in lots and lots of money, like, you know, well in excess of a billion dollars, to create these rent-a-crowds to demonstrate and basically bring about a situation in which what they hoped was that it would be a situation in which the army would have to declare martial law.
It didn't quite go that way.
But, in fact, they got their result.
So they're quite happy with the new administration there in Cairo.
And this was basically fomented by, or it was funded in part at least, by other Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia.
So it's kind of an interesting story.
The last thing the Emirates and Saudi Arabia want is anybody pushing free elections.
Because that would be the end of their governments, or the end of their rule.
And so they saw this thing of the Muslim Brotherhood as an elected party in power as a serious threat to their own security.
Well, now, Eric Margoli's point of view is that the Egyptian military is just a part of the U.S. Army, and they do what they're told, and they don't do what they're not told, and that, therefore, it just must have been an American decision, thumbs up or thumbs down, on whether to go ahead and overthrow Morsi.
What do you think of that?
I don't believe that at all.
I think that's a misreading of the situation.
The Egyptian military has for a long time been ignoring advice from Washington, consistently for years now.
And the only case I think you can make that Washington is delighted by the military being in power at the moment is that, obviously, it makes the situation with Israel easier, which is only a concern for Washington.
But that's about it.
Yeah.
And now, when you say they've been disobeying for years, would that count for before Mubarak's overthrow or just since?
Yeah, even before Mubarak's overthrow.
If you talk to people who knew what was going on in the Egyptian government, they always kind of were somewhat difficult.
And to claim that they're really a function of the U.S. military is, I think, not accurate.
Okay.
Well, we've got to leave it right there.
We're all out of time.
Thanks so much for your time on the show again, Phil.
Okay, Scott.
Take care.
All right, everybody.
That is Phil Giraldi.
He is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
At councilforthenationalinterest.org, he writes for the American Conservative Magazine and antiwar.com.
He's, of course, a former CIA.
We'll be right back after this.
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