09/26/13 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
First up on the show today is Phil Giraldi.
He is a former CIA and DIA officer.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
And he writes for the American Conservative Magazine and AntiWar.com, both.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How the hell are you?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
A government answerable to no one.
But then the article is about America and Israel, and I can't figure out which one you're talking about is the least answerable to who.
Well, in a sense, you could argue that the United States government is answerable to Israel.
They are answerable to somebody, just not us.
Yeah.
The implication was that, what I meant by the title, was that the United States is not answerable to its own people.
Yeah, apparently not.
And of course, neither is the American media, either, I guess, or to their own ombudsman.
Well, tell us about this.
This is a huge story that came out of the Snowden leaks.
I don't know exactly how you rank it in hugeness to the other NSA stories, but I think it's almost without dispute, it's got to be the one that's gotten the least attention.
Yeah.
Yeah, it always gets the least attention when it's about Israel, unfortunately.
But this was a document that was published by The Guardian, which of course was one of the recipients of some of the Snowden leaks.
And it basically is a memorandum of understanding issued by the National Security Agency in 2009, discussing the rules or the parameters for giving raw information.
In other words, this is the information that the NSA collects in its sweeps of American telecommunications.
It apparently has been giving large quantities of this information in a raw form, including information which, because it's raw, includes information on lots of American citizens, and it's just been giving this stuff to Israel.
And now, are we talking about all the information that's in every one of the leaks that came out already?
So all our phone metadata and our Google searches and the information at rest and the information in transit and the information all over the place, the 215 and the 207 and everything?
That would seem to be the implication.
That's precisely what we're talking about here.
All the information that they basically suck up like a huge vacuum cleaner, they've been sharing with Israel.
It's not clear from the memo exactly how they select what huge chunk of info they're giving them or not giving them, but it is also clear from the memo that this does include considerable amounts of information on U.S. citizens, which is the purpose of the memo, basically saying to the Israelis, hey, we expect you to observe the same rules we observe about U.S. citizens, which, as we know, is virtually none.
So it's kind of a funny memo.
It says, yeah, we're going to give you all this stuff.
You can use it, but you've got to use it the same way we use it.
And by the way, we have no way of punishing you if you abuse that privilege.
Yeah.
Or any way of knowing really what you're doing with it.
And by the way, whatever you find out about our senators, please ignore it and never blackmail them or anything.
Yeah.
One of the funniest lines in it, of course, is the fact that anything relating to government officials the Israelis are supposed to destroy immediately.
But the fact is, of course, there is no way of checking that they're doing that.
I think on the contrary, if they have stuff related to government officials, particularly if it's blackmail type stuff, they're probably putting it in a special file.
This is so ridiculous.
You know, I don't know.
For years, we've talked about Bamford's book, The Shadow Factory, and how Norris and Verint were in these software programs that the NSA uses to surf all of our stuff, to sift it all.
That these were invented by Israeli companies and that there's every reason to suspect that the backdoors that they build in so they can update the software all the time are useful for stealing whatever they want and how the Australians figured that that's what had happened to them.
Of course, there's the Carl Cameron series and all the reporting about the FBI's concerns about their phones being tapped by the Israelis around the time of the 9-11 attacks, etc., and interfering with their investigation.
But apparently, no, the government just gives them everything.
They're not stealing it.
They've got permission.
It's like LBJ calling back the planes during the USS Liberty thing.
This is sanctioned from the very, very top.
Yeah, that's, to me, the most disturbing aspect of the story.
I mean, who's to blame?
The Israelis for taking what we're giving them, for God's sakes.
I mean, we're giving them the house.
We're giving them everything we have.
But who is the idiot at the top of the food chain?
I think his name is Obama, who basically approved this kind of stuff.
And why is it the American public up in arms about it?
Well, it's partly because the media didn't report it.
Why isn't the NSA being forced to answer questions about what exactly is going on here?
It's quite amazing.
Well, and just think, I mean, the imagination could just run wild on what dirt must they have on our congressmen, our federal judges, our senators.
I mean, these people, by definition, are powerful, ambitious, very self-interested type of people.
They're virtually all of them guilty of the kinds of things in their personal lives that regular people don't do.
I mean, they're ruthless personalities, most of them, right?
Like that LA Times story says, like, well, that's interesting.
The personality traits of psychopaths and politicians are actually very similar.
Yeah, well...
Sure.
It's kind of like the Jane Harman story, you know, where, you know, once they get something on you, they've got something on you.
And that's basically the way the whole system works.
And then, you know, but of course, our system of criminal justice means that we get a clown like Eric Holder, who is responsible for deciding if anybody, if any prosecution is going to go forward.
And all these people just walk even if something does come out.
And this is a particularly pernicious example of what's going on, because it involves a foreign country.
And it involves a foreign country that is a gross net recipient of American money and political support and everything else.
And here we're doing something that is not even necessarily in the Israeli interest.
I mean, you know, all right, so they're compiling a lot of dossiers on Americans that just shows how venal we are.
But the fact is that we're just giving them stuff.
And it's stuff like, you know, maybe this phone call we're having right now will be in the next dump.
I wouldn't be too surprised.
It's just astonishing.
It's like the civil liberties that we assumed we had a few years ago, we're discovering increasingly don't exist.
And nobody seems to care.
Well, and, you know, I mean, the question is raised, too, what use is this to the Israelis other than domestic politics?
It's not like there's a bunch of al-Qaeda plots being hatched in North America against Israel or Hezbollah ones, either.
Yeah, I mean, I guess the argument they would make is that, sure, there are Jewish and Israeli targets in the United States, but, you know, that's up to the FBI to take care of that.
It's up to the NSA to deal with the FBI and law enforcement in this country if there's a threat against Israeli or Jewish sites and that kind of thing.
So it's, yeah, it's a non-argument.
It's just that here are the Israelis, and they figure, OK, if they're going to give us this stuff, we're going to take it.
All right.
Now, so let's talk a little bit about your view of the CIA.
And obviously you're very critical of it and have been for a long, long time.
That's a pretty common view from inside the CIA, or at least with retired CIA guys.
You don't seem to like Israel all that much.
What is that about?
Well, because most CIA guys, either whether they were analysts or whether they were operations officers like myself, came into contact regularly with Israel, Israelis, or Israeli interests.
And most of us, being thinking human beings and not very political, realized that essentially the U.S. was getting screwed on this relationship on a regular basis.
That's why I think you see so many intelligence officers who surface and are critical of that relationship because they would be critical of a similar relationship if it were with China or with Russia or with anybody else.
But it's the question of the special relationship is with Israel.
Yeah.
I remember Christopher Ketchum wrote a piece for Counterpunch once that began, scratch a former intelligence officer, or maybe even says current or former American intelligence officer, and they will start talking about how much they hate Israel, basically, and start, you know, ticking off on their fingers all the different things that Israel did to screw America, that America just took it.
Yeah.
That's basically the truth.
I mean, when you get up to the policymaking level where you have the Director of Central Intelligence and people like that, yeah, sure, they're politicians essentially.
So what they say has nothing to do with what working people in the intelligence agencies think.
And I have never, I'll qualify that, I have met one working level CIA officer in my entire time who was extremely pro-Israeli.
And that's it, one.
And virtually every other one, where you open the Pandora's box and mention Israel, it comes out.
And they really are aware of the fact that this relationship has done terrible damage to the United States and continues to do so.
And you hear it.
And you hear it from foreign service officers, too, to be fair about it.
And many of them are just as concerned as intelligence officers.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny, I guess, kind of back to the New York Times thing.
It's funny, just the discrepancy, I guess, still to this day between the common narrative about Israel and the reality of the situation.
For example, since 1993 and the first World Trade Center bombing, the Bin Ladenites have been saying that one of the things that makes them want to attack America and Americans all the time is our support for Israel.
And whether that's right or wrong, it seems like that ought to be a matter of discussion.
And what is it about Israel that they're complaining about?
Its very existence?
Or is it more specific, like, say, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon and things like that?
And it's not a matter of, geez, guys, let's go negotiate with Zawahiri and give in to all of his demands or anything like that.
But, you know, it's like Michael Shoyer said, we ought to be able to have a debate about this where even if you say, you know what, whatever terrorist consequences come from our relationship with Israel, let's at least have an honest discussion about it, let the democracy decide, or whatever, you know?
Is this the kind of price we're willing to pay?
And yet, after all this time, still, they get away with pretending that, well, terrorists hate us because they're terrorists and they're terrorists and they're terrorists, and yay Israel!
As though these things have nothing to do with each other.
Yeah, that's the fundamental issue.
I think that most people who are a lot more knowledgeable of the Arab world than I am would say that there is hardly anyone that any more questions the existence of Israel.
And basically what we're talking about is Israeli policies, what Israel does, what it is seen nightly on television throughout the Arab world and the Muslim world in general, doing to the Palestinians, the stuff that's not reported in the U.S. media, and unfortunately not even reported very much on Al Jazeera America, I'm ashamed to say.
So you don't see this kind of stuff in America, but the rest of the world is seeing it, and they know perfectly well what the issues are.
So it's how Israel behaves, just as the criticism of the United States is about how the United States behaves.
And it's not our existence, or our freedoms, or the fact that Israel exists.
Yeah, I mean, and you think about how skewed all the coverage is.
I can't think of a single time where I've seen on cable news where they put up a map of Israel and Palestine and said, all right, the yellow area here is Israel proper, and then the other color here, whatever it is, that's the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip where the Palestinians live but don't have their own government, see?
That's never happened ever, right?
They don't ever even explain the basic 1-2-3 of the situation at all.
As far as their narrative sounds, anyway, to the uneducated ear, Palestine is the country next door, and those damn terrorists won't leave the poor Israelis alone, you know?
There is no occupation.
What occupation?
Yeah, I mean, there's certainly a perception that somehow Palestine is some kind of state with its own army and its own, you know, defense minister, yeah, terrorist army, and there is this perception on American television.
And instead, of course, what exists of Palestine is just a couple of enclaves that are kind of linked together a little bit, divided by Israeli roads, and essentially the rest of the West Bank stays under occupation, or stays under, as they put it, under Israeli security control, which is the same thing.
Yeah.
Well, and now General Mavis came out, and I forget now, he was the head of CENTCOM recently, right?
I forget now.
Right.
He was after Petraeus?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they both, the heads of CENTCOM, have both been on the record saying that American support for Israeli policy in general is a security risk to their soldiers, basically.
That's the way they think, is, you know, this puts my men at risk, right?
That's the way army guys talk.
Yeah, that's correct.
They both said that, and of course, Petraeus was forced to apologize when he spoke to the Senate after that, but, you know, that's normal.
Yeah.
You know, the question is, you know, is American 100% support of everything Israel does in our interest?
And of course it's not.
I mean, it's just that the question itself sounds stupid, but the fact is that's the way the Washington elite plays the game, as if that were true, that Israel and the United States have exactly the same interests and everything is in common.
And you're going to see this play out over the next few days, I think, with Iran, with the discussion about the Iranian nuclear program.
It's clear to me, and I'm not really particularly biased on the issue, that Iran wants a deal, and here's an opportunity to end, you know, 40 years of tension.
And I have a feeling that we're the ones that are going to choke, and it's going to be for the usual reason, that the Israel lobby does not want this.
And so we will make a huge, huge mistake.
Yeah, you know, that thing just kills me, too.
It seems like, you know, I don't know what parts of the American establishment, you've got to get on board for this deal.
Aren't they sick and tired of this?
Don't they have the ability, especially now, to tell the crystal lights to just shut up?
We don't care what you think, Bill, or anybody at Commentary Magazine.
And Netanyahu, you know what?
We know what's better for you.
We want peace with Iran.
That's going to be in Israel's best interest, not this constant conflict.
And 3.6% is fine.
Quit being whiny and quit being a baby about it and make a deal.
I mean, isn't anyone in the American establishment sick and tired of this nonsense and ready to really go ahead and make a deal?
How can they blow this?
It's such an obvious opportunity.
And you know, they were reduced, the War Party was reduced last week to saying, oh yeah, well, as long as he doesn't renounce the Holocaust, well, then we shouldn't make a nuclear deal with him.
Well, now he's even renounced, denounced the Holocaust, too.
So come on, let's shake hands here.
It'll be fun.
It'll be great.
Doesn't everyone at the Council on Foreign Relations agree with me, other than Elliott Abrams, or what the hell?
Well, the Council on Foreign Relations is kind of a neocon hangout anyway.
So I wouldn't look to them for any wisdom.
The fact is, a lot of people from the traditional foreign policy establishment and the intelligence community and the Pentagon, let's not leave them out, are basically in favor of a deal here.
The question will become, ultimately, whether Obama feels strong enough to take the political heat to cut a deal.
And my feeling is he won't, because he's basically demonstrated he's a coward on numerous other issues.
And I think that basically he's going to back down here, too.
It's a question of, he is thinking of, you and I might be thinking about peace in the world, but he is thinking about 2014.
So he's thinking about midterm elections.
He's thinking about, he doesn't need the media to be going after the Democratic Party for cutting a deal with a bunch of terrorists.
But he doesn't need that kind of subscript.
I think that's basically what the problem is.
It's a question of, they don't have the courage to make the right choice.
It's too bad.
I'm a broken record, but it's just so easy for me to imagine President Paul up there saying, I don't even have to make a deal with you, just all threats are canceled, forget it.
That's it.
That's right.
Or anyone with any kind of sense of anything.
It doesn't require a genius to do some of these things.
It's just that peace is better than war, and if there's any way to defuse this issue, you do it.
Right.
And politically, too, anybody ought to be able to spin peace well.
Oh, yeah.
You know, the other guys would have preferred we had a violent armed conflict.
Is that what you really want?
I solved it without bombing.
Come on, everybody.
Three cheers for me.
I think the American people are ready to hear a slogan like that.
It's the same kind of criticism I have about Rand Paul.
You know, Ron Paul said, hey, America had a foreign policy before 9-11.
Did you know that?
And Jennifer Rubin and everybody denounced him.
And Rand refused to stand up for him.
And by the way, Jennifer Rubin, you can find YouTube of Rand Paul saying the exact same thing if you look hard enough.
But anyway, Rand Paul refused to back up his dad that, you know what, actions have consequences.
Sorry.
But the truth is, if he would go ahead and be brave on the war and peace issue for real and not all, you know, wishy-washy about it, he would do better that way.
Instead of trying.
He has the same Obama policy of trying to kind of halfway it or or in some cases even outflank the war party on the right.
Yeah, that's the problem.
I think Rand is too clever by a half, as the English would put it.
He's always trying to kind of, you know, outsmart the opposition.
And it means that the positions he takes are essentially illogical and unsustainable.
This constant harping on cutting foreign aid for those who are burning our flag and, you know, calling death to America.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
It's a comment of an idiot.
And basically, you cut foreign aid because foreign aid basically doesn't work apart from anything else.
And you cut it for everybody.
And but, you know, Rand Paul, to me, has has yet to prove that he's anything but an empty suit.
Yeah.
I mean, the whole thing about voting for Rand's sanctions is just so he can say, well, I voted for the sanctions.
Come on.
You know, the sanctions were going to pass anyway, could have made a courageous stand against punishing civilians.
Yeah, that's right.
And we're not going to see much courage out of him, I don't think.
I mean, the people who are passionate about him, I think, believe that if he gets elected, suddenly he's going to be a different man when he gets in office.
But I don't think so.
He's going to be the same guy cutting the same kind of corners and looking over his shoulder to see, you know, who's going to be coming out against him.
And so, I mean, that's what they all do.
They're all basically, they're corrupt people.
If they weren't corrupt people, they wouldn't be in politics.
Mr. Smith goes to Washington, doesn't work anymore.
Yeah.
Well, hey, you know, the election of 2018 is coming up those midterms.
Very important.
So, yeah, well, they're always looking for the next election.
Exactly.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, and then so, Syria, give me your comment real quick on the deal.
I guess it's the U.N. Security Council version of it is still stalled, last I heard.
But on the ground, it seems to be working, correct?
The Russia deal?
Well, it seems that the Russians have worked out some motive for actually doing this stuff on the ground.
Now, the question is, to what extent the United States will be pushing for automatic military action of some kind if they're not happy with the result.
So I think that's why the resolution is stalled at the moment.
But again, the U.S. is looking for this option to start another war if that's what they seem to be appropriate.
And then would you agree with me that it makes sense for the Russians to really make sure to follow through with this?
They're very best that they can, because if they do, they're really erasing even the possibility of the red line.
And they're de facto getting an agreement from America to not remove Assad.
Am I reading that right?
Yeah.
I think basically the Russians see this as a way of, first of all, resolving the issue.
And secondly, it basically makes the Russians a much bigger player.
So they have a self-interest in it, too.
But I think it's in our interest, too.
There's no question it's in our interest also.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But of course, again, that's not what counts.
At least we've got Putin at bat for us.
We've got to rely on leaders of foreign empires to protect us from our own here, Phil.
That's right.
From our own bad judgment.
Ridiculous.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so but then how long do you think it'll take?
I guess we have very little time here, but are they really going to be able to just collect all these canisters, load them up on planes and ship them off to Russia in any reasonable period of time?
Well, it depends on how you define reasonable period of time.
A lot of this stuff is not located centrally, so they're going to have to go around and pick it up.
It'll take a while.
All right.
Anyway, we're out of time.
All right.
Thanks very much, Phil.
Good talk to you again.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Bye bye.
All right.
That's Phil Giraldi, the counsel for the national interest, counsel for the national interest.
Dot org.
The American Conservative Magazine and antiwar dot com.
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