09/29/15 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I got Phil Giraldi on the line.
Disclaimer, he's a former CIA guy, but he's all right now, man.
I detoxed.
Yeah, there you go.
He's been writing truth in us out of war instead of lying us into it for quite a few years now, a decade at least.
So he's got that going for him.
You can read him at unz.com.
That's U-N-Z, unz.com.
And at the American Conservative Magazine, the new one at UNZ is called The Government We Deserve.
And that depends on how you define we.
And then sometimes the answer is yes, of course.
And then also he's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
You need to know that.
All right, so, hey, let's start with this.
What's the John Hay Initiative, Phil?
John Hay Initiative is a little bit elusive.
If you do a Google and try to find out a lot about them, you won't find out much.
It's kind of a loose affiliation of a bunch of neocons out of the Bush administration.
Michael Chertoff is one of them, Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz.
It's called the John Hay Initiative because they meet at the John Hay Hotel in downtown Washington about once a month.
And that's what they do.
They apparently recently produced a book which outlines the entire neocon foreign policy agenda.
And I'm trying to track that book down.
I don't see it on Amazon yet, but it should be a real eye-opener for what the agenda is.
But the interesting thing is these are the guys that staff the positions of the Republican candidates.
These are the ones that are giving them advice on how to run a foreign policy.
So that's why it's important to make this connection.
They had a meeting yesterday at which Kevin McCarthy, the aspirant for the Speaker of the House position, made a speech.
And he basically, amidst a whole lot of misspokes and malapropisms, outlined a straight neocon foreign policy that he would pursue.
I read one thing about this where I think they said Donald Trump and maybe Rand Paul were the only ones who had not gone and done their little pilgrimage to face east and worship these guys.
It's sort of the new project for the new American century for the next generation, it sounds like.
Yeah, that's exactly what it sounds like.
It's the same people to a certain extent.
But it's more focused, I think, on actual Republican neocon officeholders from the previous administration.
So you see a lot of these characters coming up, and that's exactly what they're doing.
They're basically laying out the agenda since they essentially control foreign policy for the Republican Party in terms of what the parameters are.
And these are the guys doing it.
So this is a group I think we have to look at a lot harder and figure out exactly what they're up to.
This is funny, this article about this McCarthy, the Speaker of the House, coming in here.
Russia's hybrid warfare became high bread warfare.
Right, right.
And he spoke of the Beth path forward to safety and security, which, you know, I don't know, I screw up sometimes too, but this looks pretty bad.
Yeah, but he was reading it.
This was not an ad lib.
He was reading a script, apparently, and he was nevertheless making all these mistakes in words and everything like that.
I recommend the piece.
It was written by Dana Milbank at the Washington Post, whom I normally don't find terribly funny.
I didn't think he had any sense of humor at all.
This piece is quite hilarious, so your listeners, I think, would benefit from looking it up and reading it.
Yeah, you don't have to be a Milbank fan to appreciate the stupidity of these Republicans.
I mean, it's really something else.
And, you know, they have an incentive structure built into their whole ideology that says you've got to be stupid to believe this crap.
So there's really no reason for them to ever really check.
And then they get out here in the real world and, boy, I didn't realize they were going to actually have to apply themselves.
I thought we were just going to repeat what we heard on the radio or something, you know.
Well, I was alerted to some other stuff.
There was also an interview with Putin done by Charlie Rose.
I don't know if you saw that.
Yeah, I watched it this morning, yeah.
Yeah, but it's comic.
I mean, Putin is the great statesman, and Charlie Rose is the ignoramus.
He doesn't quite get anything that Putin is saying about, you know, you don't arm terrorists, you don't do this, you don't do that.
And Charlie Rose doesn't quite get it.
But, you know, I think it's something in the water or something, the fluoridation or something that has done this.
It's got to be something.
It's not rational.
I think it's a lack of drugs probably is the problem.
That's right.
But, yeah, no, I mean, the whole thing was ridiculous where Charlie Rose is saying, yeah, but, you know, Assad, he's killing his own people.
He's at war against his own people, and they're just trying to defend themselves from him.
And Putin says, well, but, you know, as you understand, 60% of the country is in the hands of these groups, the Al-Nusra Front and ISIS, and your government labels them as terrorist groups.
The United Nations labels them as terrorist groups.
They are terrorist groups.
So, Charlie, what do you mean he's at war against his own people?
He's defending his people from terrorist groups.
And Charlie Rose is like, well, let me ask you something entirely different.
What's that aftershave you're using?
Yeah, exactly.
Do you think that President Obama likes you or what?
Incredible.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, yeah, Charlie Rose is the perfect thermometer for Washington, D.C., in the way they think about this, because it is the perfect double thing, just like in 1984, where Charlie Rose does know this.
Putin called him out.
You know, Charlie Rose, who the enemies are here.
But then, you know, he just calls him out for having a separate part of his brain where he pretends that Assad is fighting only against civilians and not fighting against these groups that are trying to topple him.
You know?
And it's that perfect thing where you know that you know it's not true, but you go ahead and just stick with it anyway.
Yeah, that's right.
The bottom line assumption on all this stuff that's come out of the White House is true.
Of course, none of it is true.
I mean, you know, this is a White House that dissimulates on virtually everything.
And then we have that smooth-talking president of the United States who kind of gets up there and he's kind of a relaxing figure and, you know, and he talks to you and that kind of thing.
He's lying about everything he says.
Yeah.
He really does seem like he's not very bothered by anything.
He exudes that trust me kind of confidence that I guess he'll – just like I guess when Jeb or Trump or whoever comes will work on the other half of the people and works on half and then they switch.
Yeah, but, you know, Trump – did you see Trump's statement this morning?
No, I didn't.
About ISIS?
Well, oh, the one where he says that, you know, the rest of these Republicans want to have a third world war with Russia and I say let Russia kill ISIS?
Yeah, he's not willing to work with Russia and with Iran, which is a – Well, no, I'm against working with them.
Yeah, but I mean the point is, you know, the fact is that he's recognizing that these are the players that are important to at least have some kind of relationship with if you're serious about doing any of these things.
And, of course, the White House has a resistance against this.
It doesn't see that what everybody else sees that it's not a simple black and white type equation that's going on there.
It's much more complicated than that.
Well, and in fact, that's the perfect point to pick up and start talking about your article here, The Government We Deserve at UNS.com about the future of what's going to happen here in Syria.
And it seems to me – I read a thing, I don't know if you saw this, on Michael Shoyer's website called One Last Chance.
He says, to quote our enemies, God is great.
And here he's giving us such an out by getting the Russians involved in Syria.
It's the perfect time for the Americans to simply knock it off.
Forget aligning with them.
Just get the hell out of the way and let them make it their own problem and not ours.
That's right.
That's right.
That's exactly true.
The whole concept in the beginning that we were going to destroy these terrorist groups.
I mean we've been destroying al-Qaeda since 2001 and they're still around.
It doesn't make any sense.
And you're right.
If the Russians can stabilize the situation for the Syrian government, God bless everybody involved.
Or even if they lose, hell.
I mean as long as they provide cover for our exit, that's good enough for me.
That's right.
If they lose, it doesn't make any difference.
None of this makes any difference.
The only tiny threat against the United States that emerges from this whole pot of things, different things, is that ISIS, if it ever had the resources and everything, might try to stage some kind of terrorist attack in the United States.
They might.
But there's no evidence for that.
And the fact is that none of this is a threat to the United States.
Why we're involved in there is something that historians will never quite understand.
Well, of course, if they do wage an attack here, it's either one, just simple revenge, or two, more likely trying to bait us back into invading again.
Yeah.
Which is, in fact, I mean really this is, well, we're over the break now.
I want to pick this up on the other side of the break here because I want people to hear this, the live audience to hear this, too, about continuing to prove bin Laden's strategy right from this side.
But hang tight right there, Phil.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
And yeah, no, seriously, ten years later, it's ten years later.
It was 2005, Phil Giraldi reported in the American Conservative Magazine that Cheney was floating a plan and was working with the Air Force on it, that if there was a major terrorist attack in the United States, they were going to find a way to blame it on Iran and then maybe even nuke them.
Launch a full-scale aggressive war against them.
That was the first time I interviewed Phil Giraldi, and I bet you you can go back and find it at scotthorton.org in the archives there.
That very first interview, I asked Phil, so what do we do about the actual terrorism problem, never mind the fake one?
And he said, ramp this whole thing down.
That was the quote, I remember.
Ramp it down.
Just knock it off.
Quit making new enemies, and the old ones will fade away anyway.
And now here we are a decade later, Phil, having the exact same conversation, only now, hey, at least we got the Russians to take our place in the exact same fight.
So that maybe is the easy excuse to go ahead and call it quits.
What do you think?
Yeah, I think Putin is giving Obama a way out.
I agree with you.
All right, so now before the break, you were saying now that the only threat we face here is, you know, a possible terrorist attack by the Islamic State, or I guess maybe Al-Qaeda.
And then I was saying, and although still I think your point being that's nothing like an existential threat to the United States, and it's obviously likely to fade away faster the faster we quit intervening over there.
But then also I wanted to point out that the fight, the doctrinal fight, never mind the religious part of it, but the doctrinal fight in strategy between Zawahiri and the Islamic State guys is that Zawahiri and bin Laden always said, you got to keep fighting the Americans until they're all the way bankrupt and leave the Middle East entirely.
Because if you try to create a caliphate now, the Americans will come and bomb the hell out of it.
And they'll support all the local dictators in crushing it and that kind of thing.
So it sounds like actually, in a way, the Americans are still working on bin Laden's script or off of bin Laden's script and trying to prove him right that we're going to, you know, at some points, at least anyway, like we're working with the Iranians in Shia Iraq against the Islamic State.
We're working on proving them right and proving that they have to attack the United States in order to draw us back over there until the dollar finally really breaks, until the empire really breaks and has to go home.
And obviously these guys are in it for the long haul, whether this guy's the caliph or the next guy or the next guy.
And so, you know, it just seemed like if that is the terrorist threat, we've got to recognize why.
They're trying to get us to do the same stupid thing they already got us to do one time, which was fall for it, like the big dumb bull headed for the Red Cape, you know?
Well, I mean, even the Pentagon recognizes the fact that we're a recruiting poster for the terrorist groups and that it's because we're over there that they're basically picking on us in a sense as their primary target.
And what you're saying absolutely makes sense.
I mean, if you were an Afghan civilian or an Iraqi or a Syrian or a Lebanese and you're having your house bombed by the United States of America, are those exactly moves that are going to turn you friendly?
I mean, that's why these policies are so incredible.
They're incomprehensible.
They don't make any sense.
It's not like the bombing campaign is going to destroy ISIS or anything at all except a whole lot of Syrian houses and kill people.
A lot of them are civilians.
It's a question of we don't quite figure out what comes next.
See, when Obama says we've got to get rid of Assad, well, OK, if you want to get rid of Assad, Mr. Obama, what comes next?
And they can't seem to come up with an answer to any of this stuff.
Yeah, it's amazing.
And they just still keep going.
And the more cynical way to look at it is, you know, like David Wilmeser said, we want to expedite the chaotic collapse.
We don't want it.
And he was referring to Syria there.
They know that what comes next is the Muslim Brotherhood, if you're lucky, and probably a lot worse than that.
And that's exactly what they've got.
But, hey, good, because that means that Assad, I don't know, can devote fewer resources to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon or something.
So it's all worth it.
Yeah, to them it all fits together.
I mean, if you go back to the Clean Break document of 1996, the idea basically is to break all the Arab states surrounding Israel into their constituent bits.
And that means tribes in some cases.
It means along religious lines in some other cases and some other ethnic lines.
And that's the policy.
So if you have these fragmented Arab states surrounding Israel, they're not a threat to Israel, and that's the thinking.
But, of course, it's stupid, too, because these places then become breeding grounds for stuff that potentially is even worse.
And, you know, again, how do you figure this stuff out?
Obviously, with all these smart guys sitting in Washington on the National Security Council, why is it that they can't figure this out?
You and I could figure it out.
Yeah, it's simple.
Anybody listening to this show, you know, Chalmers Johnson used to say anybody who reads Antiwar.com or listens to this show on a regular basis understands this stuff way better than the people who are reading the CIA morning early bird newspaper that they give to the president and all the highest staff.
They're looking at it, as Robert Gates says, through a soda straw.
And, you know, I mean, hell, anybody just reading the news in 2002 and 2003, anybody outside the government out here in the country reading the news, knew better than to support that war.
There are a lot of people in Washington, D.C., who everybody they knew supported it.
You know, they had such a tight consensus, they couldn't get their head around why 150 million Americans said that they opposed it.
It was like half the country was all guilty of treason because we're all so pro-terrorist and pro-Saddam for knowing better than to do this.
But that's what the polls said, you know, before the war actually started.
It was 50-50 split against it.
That's 150 million Americans saying, I don't know, seems like Saddam is the guy in the beret and Osama's the guy in the robe, and isn't that different, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, I was at CIA headquarters in 2002, and I knew a lot of the analysts that were working on this issue from the Counterterrorism Center.
I used to go and talk to them, and they would say, you know, this stuff just doesn't fit.
It's just not right, and so on and so forth.
But the opinion of these guys, which was the real working-level guys, just never seemed to make it out up to the upper floors of the building.
And that's characteristic of the government.
It's like you were talking about the early morning report that the president sees.
That report is tailored to what the president wants to see.
And so they always throw in some things that are kind of controversial, but at the same time it's essentially a ratification of the things that he already believes to be true.
And the whole government works that way.
Yeah.
I don't know if it's true, but I believe in it.
In the Oliver Stone movie, W, when Brent Scowcroft writes, don't attack Saddam in the Wall Street Journal, and George W. Bush throws a big hissy fit about it and doesn't want to hear anything more, I don't want to hear any more from Brent Scowcroft, which everybody knows is his father's best friend, is speaking for his father on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal saying, son, don't listen to these guys, don't do it.
And W just gets mad and doubles down.
Yeah, well, I think that probably is true.
And the fact is these people are essentially locked into their own bubble, and the bubble doesn't really allow them to think outside it.
And you see it again and again.
I mean, this whole Syria situation, if we trace it back to when this started, I mean, this really started, what, about 2003 with the Syrian Accountability Act and a whole lot of pressure from Congress.
But it was all the same players cranking this thing up and doing it for reasons best known to themselves, but essentially not thinking in terms of what are the consequences of what they're doing.
They never do that.
All right, now, so I want to talk about this other important point that you bring up.
Well, there's a couple more.
I don't know if we have time for both of them, but kind of you can combine them, I guess, about the rules of engagement where journalists can be considered unlawful enemy combatants, which is on the same level of al-Qaeda, right?
No Geneva protections for you, that kind of thing.
And then the other one is about this law professor at West Point, and this is what Todd Pierce, the judge advocate general defense attorney at Guantanamo Bay, is always writing about, is this stab in the back theory.
It's common in Nazi Germany and it's common in post-Vietnam America where the military convinces themselves that Americans and media people who oppose their stupid evil wars, they're the reasons that the wars become failures.
And it's that stab in the back and that, you know, as Andrew Sullivan said, the opposition to the war, they're a fifth column inside the United States.
Well, nobody really cares that much when Andrew Sullivan says it, but when generals start saying it, that means, you know, that NDAA starts becoming less theoretical and more realistic, you know, that portion where they talk about putting us in military camps here.
And so then you get into this story of this West Point professor, William Bradford.
Can you explain the context of that?
Yeah, well, Bradford basically is, as you say, or was, a West Point professor of law.
And he has been advocating for a number of years that there is this fifth column of lawyers and others in the United States who are sympathetic to Islamic terrorism.
And he defines that basically as anybody who talks to people who are even on the fringes of these groups or has anything to do with them.
And he advocates, of course, charging them with treason.
And, of course, the penalty for treason in the Constitution is death.
And the other thing he advocates is basically declaring war on Islam and bombing the Islamic holy sites, which he admits would kill many, many tens of thousands of people, until the Muslims basically give up.
He says he wants them to give up jihad.
And, anyway, so this guy was on the faculty of West Point, and he recently was forced to resign, not because of what he was saying, but because he had faked his resume.
He faked a military declaration they didn't have, and he faked his academic credentials.
And West Point, first of all, didn't check this stuff out.
And, secondly, the other stuff apparently was acceptable.
So that's the Bradford story.
The other story we're talking about is how the Army has recently come out with a Rules of Engagement manual, and within the manual it defines journalists as potential terrorists and is alerting the troops to the fact that a guy can be a journalist, but, in fact, his sympathies might be with the terrorists.
So, in other words, it's turning these people, journalists, into potential targets of the U.S. military when the U.S. military is running an operation somewhere.
I mean, this kind of stuff is, if you wrote it in a comic book, nobody would believe it.
Yeah, boy, it's out of control.
I guess, you know, it's just, again, we're so far into this now.
We're that far down the slippery slope.
Where, you know, people can convince themselves these things.
I mean, you know, I'd like to think that all these guys, you know, in a Bill Clintonian way are saying, of course they hate us for bombing them and all that, you know?
But it sounds like more and more, you know, I don't know, anybody with, I don't care how many stars of a general, any general who really believes the war is with the Muslims, that they're going to have to, what?
We're going to nuke them until they all just lay down on their belly and say, yes, master, we'll never question a white North American again or something like that?
We're going to keep nuking them until they surrender to that degree?
I mean, that is, I mean, it's not just evil and horrible and imperial and whatever, but it's completely stupid.
I mean, what is this?
How is it that that's the discussion going on at that level of power?
Well, because for all of these guys in Washington, it's an abstraction.
See, these guys are essentially at the top of the food chain.
They really don't get their hands dirty.
When I wrote a piece last week about torture and everything, it's the guys who don't get their hands dirty that find it easy to say, oh, yeah, let's do this.
And they could probably talk to any Sergeant E-5 in the United States Army who's actually been in these pacification schemes in various countries and stuff like that who will tell them, you know, this stuff is insane.
But, of course, nobody's listening to that guy.
And it's the same thing with, you know, when you get up into the civilian ranks, the people who basically they have group things.
They talk to each other and there are certain things that are acceptable for them to say and certain things that are not acceptable.
And not acceptable is to question existing policies.
And unfortunately, the policies become crazier and crazier.
Yeah, well, but then when they get to, you know, self-justification, like a dirty snowball rolling downhill kind of thing, too, where, I mean, at least this guy, I think they wrote a thing saying we're embarrassed that we ran this article.
We shouldn't have ran it or something like that.
So he's maybe a little bit out in front of the rest of these guys.
But actually, again, they made this legal.
Obama signed it.
The Congress passed it in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 that actually, Phil, they could say we're sick and tired of UNS.com.
And, Phil, you're going to military to a camp, right?
We're not going to charge you.
We're just going to hold you until you're done talking or writing or whatever your problem is or until we feel like letting you go.
That's the law right now.
Sure.
That's like Major Todd Pierce has said.
I mean, he said, you know, the difference between the road we're going down and the point we're at and what happened in Nazi Germany is not that great.
And anybody that argues that it can't happen here I think is completely wrong.
It can happen here.
It is happening here.
And people have to wake up to this fact.
Yep.
And it certainly happened before.
All right.
Well, listen, I already kept you over time.
Thanks very much, Phil.
Have a great rest of your afternoon.
Appreciate it.
Okay, Scott.
Take care.
All right, Phil, that's Phil Giraldi.
He's at the Council for the National Interest, the American Conservative Magazine, and UNZ.com.
UNZ, UNZ.com.
Right back after this.
And hey, once you do, add me as a friend on there at scotthorton.liberty.me.
Be free.
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