I'd like to ask Jeff Goldberg to start out.
Rahm Emanuel.
Who is Rahm Emanuel?
Who is Rahm Emanuel?
Rahm Emanuel is, at least from what I can tell from talking to friends of mine on, let's just say, the anti-Israel side of the ledger, sort of a nightmare for people who were thinking that there's going to be some sort of sea change in the way this new administration approaches issues of Israeli-Palestinian peace.
You know, the interesting, remarkable thing about this moment is this, given everything that we know about what the debate in the Jewish community has been over the past several months, it's, you know, all throughout the discussion about what to do about the, what I call the Al-Taqaqa vote, if you had just been able to tell people in Palm Beach, don't worry, the guy who's going to run the White House for Barack Obama is essentially an Israeli.
I think that would have quieted some people down.
Obviously, he's a guy, and I've known him for a long time, and we've had dozens of discussions about the Middle East.
He's quite preoccupied with it.
Obviously, the Middle East is ultimately a minor part of his portfolio, but I have a feeling that he's going to be very engaged, and this is sort of more proof to me, if he does take the job, more proof that Obama is going to come out of the gate trying to work on this problem almost immediately.
He's obviously unyielding on Israel's defense and its right to exist.
He's emotionally tied to Israel in a way that very few politicians are.
All right, everybody, that's Jeffrey Goldberg from the New Yorker magazine last week discussing Obama's pick for Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel.
And our next guest is Philip Giraldi.
He writes Smoke and Mirrors at Antiwar.com.
He's a member of the American Conservative Defense Alliance, a senior contributing editor at the American Conservative magazine, also blogs at the Huffington Post.
And his new article, which will be up Tuesday on Antiwar.com, is called, For Rahm Emanuel, Israel Always Comes First.
Welcome to the show, Phil.
Hi, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
I hope you could hear that soundbite okay.
Yeah, I did.
I mean, that kind of said it all, I think.
Oh, well, we don't want to just wrap up the whole interview now.
Obviously, the operative soundbite there, in the words of, you know, the way Peter Jennings would phrase it, the operative soundbite is that the new Chief of Staff, the man who will be running the White House, is essentially an Israeli.
Is that your judgment as well?
Well, I don't really have a judgment on it, but all I can say is that the Israeli media, which I do follow fairly closely, refers to him consistently as an Israeli.
He was born in the United States, but his father was an Israeli and still lives there.
Rahm claims that he gave up his Israeli citizenship at age 18, but I haven't seen any confirmation of that in terms of the relevant documentation.
When he was 31 years old, he volunteered for the Israel to work as a civilian volunteer with the Israeli Army during the first Gulf War.
So one has to think in terms of where his loyalties might lie, at least use a pinch of salt.
Yeah, well, now, we wouldn't really care if he was from Mexico or Canada, would we?
What's the difference?
Yeah, I think I would.
Let me kind of backtrack a little bit.
I think there are two issues here about Rahm Emanuel.
The one issue is that his Israeli connection aside, he is a hawk, and he has been a supporter of the Iraq War.
He has been a fervent supporter of a very aggressive attitude towards Iran.
So he's a hawk, and you put that in the context of they're talking about Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, another hawk.
They're talking about Anthony Lake as National Security Advisor, another hawk.
They're talking about keeping Gates in at the Pentagon, a sensible guy, but basically another hawk.
So essentially, I'm having this horrible vision of an administration that was elected basically by people who want a peace candidate, and I think it appears now they're being betrayed.
Yeah, it sure does seem like it.
Well, I don't know.
I'd like to talk about Hillary and Lake and Gates, but I want to learn some more about this guy, Rahm Emanuel.
I mean, your article here is the most in-depth profile of him that I've seen anywhere, and I've been looking around.
If I missed something better, let me know, I guess.
But you really have gone through the history of this guy.
Apparently, in mass media, all the controversy is that he's sort of a tough S.O.
B.and that he once mailed a dead fish to some guy and this kind of thing.
But tough S.O.
B. in context of his political positions, I think, is what really counts here.
One thing I'll tell you, when I talked with Glenn Greenwald a couple of weeks ago, right after the pick, he said that Rahm Emanuel is responsible for every terrible thing going on in the House of Representatives right now.
If there's any saving grace here, it's perhaps that he's been taken out of the House of Representatives and won't be running it anymore.
Maybe Obama's got him in a weaker spot now.
Well, as gatekeeper to the White House, he certainly has a very strong position.
And to pick up on what we were talking about before, the Israeli connection to me is significant because, obviously, Israel is an important player in a part of the world where we have some serious interests.
But I would have the same concerns if, as you put it, he were a Mexican or a Canadian.
To me, to take someone whose fundamental loyalty is to another country and put them into a senior key position in the White House is just something I'd have a real serious problem with, no matter what that country was.
Right.
I guess I have trouble imagining somebody who was born in Canada but becomes an American citizen and gets a position in the government.
I have trouble imagining them being loyal to Canada first, really, at that point.
It doesn't seem to really work that way, the way it does with Israel.
Sure, but I guess if we had a Canadian in a senior position, at least you would expect him to recuse himself over things like lumber negotiations and that kind of thing.
But here we have a person who has a fundamental loyalty to another country and he intends, clearly, to insert himself aggressively and vigorously into this process on behalf of that other country.
So tell us some of the history of this guy, what you found out in researching him.
Well, as you already commented, as we mentioned, he was born in the United States, but his father is an Israeli citizen.
His father was, in fact, a member of the terrorist group Irgun, which operated in the 1940s, blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem under the British mandate, and also was responsible for a lot of ethnic cleansing of Arab villagers.
So his father is kind of a hard case, pro-Israeli in a very serious way.
And Rahm was brought up in this atmosphere.
He claims he renounced his U.S. citizenship, but at 31 we find him serving...
His Israeli citizenship.
Yeah, his Israeli, I'm sorry, Israeli citizenship.
And then at 31 we find him serving in the Israeli army.
He could have, he was 31 years old, he could have joined the American army if he felt strongly about what was going on in the Middle East, but he didn't.
So Rahm then somehow...
Well, let me stop you right there, because in your article you say, well, it's kind of unclear, because I guess the official story is what, he was rustproof in the breaks, but he was a civilian volunteer.
But you say that kind of rings like a cover story.
Well, to a certain extent it does.
I have no inside information on this, but there certainly have been questions raised about what he was doing.
His father is very well known in Israel, has very high status with conservatives in Israel, and it seems to many that it is inconceivable that the son in this family, who was volunteering for service in Israel, would be sent to rustproof breaks.
So a lot of people have suspected he actually had some intelligence function, which of course he's not talking about anymore.
Okay, and then, I'm sorry, go ahead, you're in the middle of another thought there.
Yeah, well, so anyway, to follow his biography, he came back to the United States, obviously he's a very political animal, became connected with the Clintons, and was very successful as a fundraiser in Clinton's first campaign with Jewish sources in the Midwest and elsewhere.
And he kind of rode this success to become a special advisor to Bill Clinton, left before the Clinton administration was ended, and obtained a position with a merchant bank in Chicago.
I would point out that at this connection, he had no experience in merchant banking, but he was expected to use his political connections to make money for the bank, which indeed he did.
It would be very long and tedious to go through all the connections that he exploited, but we actually had the Clinton White House and parts of the federal bureaucracy intervening on behalf of clients that he had, and as a result he made $19 million in two and a half years, which bankrolled his next move, which was to go into Congress.
Hey, that's a lot of money.
Yeah, sure is.
I wish I was corrupt, I could make some money like that, huh?
With the right connections, I guess.
That's right, the right connections always pay off, right?
All right, now this guy sat on the board of Freddie Mac, is that a joke?
Yeah, that is kind of a joke, isn't it?
Clinton also appointed him as a board member of Freddie Mac, for which he was paid $260,000, and the board that he sat on later was criticized for not having exercised any supervision at all of Freddie Mac to the detriment, ultimately, of the taxpayer.
Right, and, in fact, I read an article about that where they said that they were warned even.
There was some sort of, I don't know what kind, audit from somebody that specifically warned members of the board that there was something that needed to be taken care of here, and then they didn't follow through.
And they didn't follow up.
Yeah, that's right.
Obviously, they did not exercise any oversight, and they were criticized for it as a result of an audit.
That's correct.
Just incredible that Obama, well, incredible that there's no reaction, that the tie between him and Freddie Mac, that ought to be the biggest scandal of all, right?
In the middle of this giant housing crash and everything?
Well, you would think it's a serious issue, because obviously the issue that, at least in my mind, catapulted Obama into the White House has been the economic meltdown more than anything else.
And here's a guy who was an architect of the economic meltdown, is the first appointment at a senior-level position in the Cabinet.
Absolutely.
It is like Bizarro World.
I kind of resent Jussie Raimondo for writing that over and over again, because I used to say that on the radio way back in the day before I even read Raimondo.
But that is what it's like.
Superman's a bad guy, and the sun is red, and Obama appointed a guy from Freddie Mac and Israel to run his White House for him.
Yeah, well, I mean, if you were a novelist and you were making this up, nobody would believe you.
Yeah, no.
I mean, if Tom Clancy tried to do this, they would reject it.
Sorry, Tom.
No one's going to buy this one.
That's right.
I mean, wow, that's insane.
Okay, now here's the thing, too, is his role in the elections of 2006.
Like Glenn was mentioning, everything wrong with the House Democrats is because of this guy.
He runs the place, not Pelosi.
And you recount in here his support and the way he kind of rigged the Democratic Party's support toward all pro-war candidates in the primary elections.
Yeah, he positioned himself to become the person who was engineering the Democratic revival in 2006.
He controlled the funds.
He controlled the support.
And what he did, basically, was he, because of his own conservative beliefs about primarily the Middle East, let's face it, he engineered it so that virtually every candidate that was being supported by the Democratic Party was pro-war.
Out of 22 people, I've seen various analyses and breakdowns of this, but I think the safest one is that out of 22 people that he promoted and provided funding with, 20 of them were pro-war, which, of course, was completely contrary to what the Democratic Party base wanted.
And then, as I think probably Glenn Greenwald pointed out, he was not even very successful.
Out of the 22 people he was funding and giving direct support to, only 80 of them got elected, which was below the average of all Democrats across the board.
So he was both a failure and he was pushing an agenda that the rest of the party base, if they had known about, would have probably rebelled.
Basically, he's a pro-war Democrat who's very focused on the Middle East, very supportive of the Iraq War, and would be very supportive of another war with Iran.
Yeah, I mean, that really is, in itself, an incredible story, I think, that here he pushed all these pro-war guys in the primaries, and then, I guess, many of them won their primaries with the support of the Democratic Party, but virtually all, or almost all who did, ended up losing to the Republican because the War Party is going to vote Republican, and that's a safer bet for them, and they couldn't get the Democrats out of the House to vote for them because they were pro-war.
They've been complaining this whole time, well, we wanted to end the war, but we don't have the votes and all these things.
Well, whose fault is that?
They don't have the votes.
It's their own fault.
Yeah, and then the funny thing is, of course, after all this failure takes place, he's pushed upwards.
He was rewarded by making him the chairman of the Democratic caucus in the House after the 2006 elections.
So it's just like, you know, it gets crazier and crazier.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it gets into such detail of politics where it's in the kind of thing on the nightly news, it's not the kind of thing that people are really going to, and inside the House of Representatives, tell me again about the presidential campaign, you know?
I'm sorry, what are you asking?
Oh, I'm saying, I was just commenting that it's the kind of thing where, you know, here this guy who engineered this election and failed and then gets pushed upwards.
It's too inside baseball for the nightly news for the American people at large kind of a story.
You know, they would rather pay attention to the presidential elections and simpler topics.
Sure, but, you know, the thing is that a lot of what goes on in Congress has a major impact in terms of where we wind up at the end of the day.
And Emmanuel is just a consistent pro-Israeli hardliner who has manipulated the Democratic Party to make it a lot more pro-war than it actually is.
And, as I say, when you compound that with other people that seem to be on a fast track to get into this administration, like Hillary Clinton, like Jane Harman, who's being spoken of as the head of the Department of Homeland Security, these people are all hardliners.
And the hardliners have essentially squeezed the peaceniks out of the Democratic Party, even though that's how the Democratic Party won.
Yep, well, that's the deal.
You just got to split the war party in half a little bit for each of the political parties, and then they always stay the top dogs in each of the political parties, and the anti-war right and the anti-war left are left frustrated.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, to me, I mean, the one thing that people, that the mainstream media should be commenting on in terms of Rahm Emanuel is his hardliner history, because it would seem to me that that's something that he should be considered vulnerable on, and that the electorate has repudiated the Iraq War and has no desire to start a war against Iran.
And yet here we have a man who represents both those issues on the wrong side, I think, and he's not being criticized for it.
Yeah, well, you know, speaking of being a hawk, and I think this just really defines it, this is something that's talked about in the lobby by Mearsheimer and Walt, is that Bush actually, I guess under the guidance of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, at least toward the beginning of his administration, was trying to have something like an even-handed thing.
You know, it was a scandal in the 90s when the first lady said there ought to be a two-state solution.
Bush was the president, said there should, and I don't know how seriously he really meant it, but there were a few different times where the born-again Christians led by Tom DeLay and the House of Representatives and other members of the War Party basically smacked Bush down for being too even-handed in Palestine.
And in your article here, you talk about how Rahm Emanuel had signed on to one of these letters.
Yeah, he signed on to a couple of letters, actually, and one of them was basically when Bush and Rice had been critical of the Israeli policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders.
Oh, how dare they?
Exactly, that's what Emanuel said.
And also he had problems with any criticism at all that was leveled against the Israelis about the invasion of Lebanon.
He specifically went, as you probably recall, after the Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki because al-Maliki had said that it was aggression.
And so he basically was trying to censure al-Maliki and wanted to get him removed.
Well, al-Maliki was supposed to speak in front of Congress, during a session of Congress, and he wanted to have it canceled.
So there's no question about where Emanuel comes down on these issues.
There's no ambiguity.
There's no sense of he is defending American national interests.
There's none of that.
No, clearly not.
I mean, talking about undermining the puppet Vichy dictator of Iraq that Bush is trying so hard to prop up in power there.
I mean, come on.
You're Nouri al-Maliki.
Israel attacks Lebanon.
What are you supposed to say?
Go Israel and throw all your power away?
And then Emanuel attacks him for that?
I mean, come on.
Even if you think that Maliki is completely in your pocket, you've got to recognize he's got to say that.
Come on.
That's right.
It's astonishing that anyone would think that an Iraqi Prime Minister could do anything but condemn an Israeli attack on Lebanon.
But obviously Emanuel and Charles Schumer was the other one that was behind this.
We're both foaming at the mouth about this, as you say, our puppet coming up, appearing before Congress after he had the nerve to criticize Israel.
I mean, that's bad politics.
I don't know who's running these people.
It seems like Emanuel's chief of staff or somebody should have told him, Hey, look, man, it's Nouri al-Maliki.
You've got to give him a little bit of length on that leash or he's not going to be credible at all over there.
Come on.
Yeah, that's right.
And one of the other things that I really find astonishing is the, I'm sure, I don't know if you have much interest you had in the Democratic National Convention, but you might recall that Jimmy Carter was not allowed to speak.
Right.
It was an unprecedented snub for an existing president from a party to be at the National Party Convention and not be allowed to speak.
And he was not allowed to speak.
Emanuel was one of the people behind that.
They were down on Carter because Carter had written his book, Palestine, Peace, Not Apartheid, and they had been criticizing him and they didn't want Carter to have any role whatsoever in the Democratic Convention.
This was Rahm Emanuel yet again.
Yeah.
And, you know, I disagree with all presidents about all kinds of things and whatever, but to see officialdom attack Jimmy Carter the way he was attacked, as you said, this is a living, breathing ex-president.
And they went after him and basically, you know, tried to call him a Nazi.
That's right.
And then, as I say again, this is attributable to Emanuel.
And Emanuel has consistently, as far as I'm concerned, been on the wrong side of history on all these things.
And yet, in spite of that, here we have Barack Obama, the candidate who ran on the principle of being willing to speak to anyone and someone who wanted to avoid another war, suddenly he's finding himself gravitating to the hawks.
I wish I could explain it.
Yeah, let's not try to get into too much speculation about that.
Let's stick to some of these facts.
Everybody in the audience, grab the armrests of your chairs tightly and prepare for this one.
He advocates increasing the size of the U.S. Army by 100,000 more soldiers and creation of a domestic spying organization like Britain's MI5.
Yeah, he's advocated both of these issues in a book that he wrote.
And the book has a ludicrous title.
It's called The Plan, Big Ideas for America.
Oh, God.
Incredible.
That's pretty Soviet sounding, if you ask me.
Well, it must have been borrowed from David Frum or something.
Yeah.
But anyway, yeah.
And also, you know, there's this interesting idea that's getting floated around there in democratic circles now about creating sort of the equivalent of the 1930s civilian conservation corps.
You know, when they took all 18- and 20-year-olds and gave them jobs, you know, and basically it was a paramilitary kind of thing.
People lived in barracks.
You know, they were fed in mess halls.
And essentially, Emanuel has kind of floated that idea.
And also...
Well, that's all they talk about on Hardball, on MSNBC every day.
Well, I don't know if you saw the cover of Time magazine with him photoshopped as FDR.
And this is a whole new theme, the New New Deal, and how what we need now, instead of a recession, is to go deeper into debt and create even more money in order to create these massive civilian infrastructure projects.
They don't ever stop.
That Chris Matthews is on, you know, four hours a day, over and over and over again.
That's what we need.
Well, obviously, it's found an ear in the Democratic Party.
And they're talking about it.
They're talking about it not just going around like the CCC did and, you know, working in forests and building roads.
They're talking about people serving also in military and law enforcement-type functions.
So this is, to me, this is something that's astonishingly dangerous.
It's like creating a parallel military in the United States.
And nobody seems to be focusing on it very much, except, of course, the people hiding out in various places in Montana and Wyoming.
Right.
Well, and you know, you wrote this thing for the Huffington Post, what, I guess maybe a year ago, about this Jane Harman and the widespread dilution of the definition of the word terrorism to apply to anybody who doesn't like the government anywhere in America and homegrown, domestic, you know, like this country's just full of Timothy McVeighs, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
It's interesting, isn't it?
I mean, it's funny.
I mean, there are not a lot of statistics in the United States that tell you what the real terrorism story is.
But last week, you may have noticed on the BBC, there was a British report that was leaked about the status of terrorism in the United Kingdom.
And they were claiming there was something like 3,000 terrorists active in the United Kingdom organized in 200 cells.
And so on and so forth.
But then the interesting thing is, if you look at the statistics, since 2001, now that's, you know, seven years, more than seven years, there have only been about 1,000 arrests for terrorism charges in all of Britain.
And only about 45 of these people have actually been convicted on terrorism charges, which in many cases are very loosely interpreted.
Like having terrorist literature on your computer and that kind of thing.
A lot of these people like to give the impression that we're awash with terrorists.
We have terrorists coming, you know, under every bed.
But the statistics really don't bear it out.
No, certainly not.
And certainly not to the degree that what we need is a new League of Brownshirts outside any other chain of command.
I mean, they're not even tied.
This isn't even in the context of let's expand the Department of Homeland Security or something.
This is a whole new project.
Yeah, this is basically a paramilitary structure with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people swept up into it.
And a lot of them, the danger is, of course, a lot of them are not basically just doing something that's for the infrastructure or for the public wheel.
It's basically something that's being done to create like a security force.
And you know how they'll do it, too.
They'll say, well, it's not anything that's really like conscription or anything too militarized because you have a choice.
You can either work at the retirement home for five years or you can be in the military for two, that kind of thing.
That's right.
They create incentives, don't they?
Yeah.
Boy, I'll tell you.
I think the archive of the shows between Election Day and Inauguration Day and this one, this is going to be, I ought to make and sell CDs of all this, all the horrible things that we're all predicting that are going to come true.
I can see it now, all this stuff.
Yeah, well, the good thing is it gives us stuff to talk about.
Oh, well, yeah, there's plenty of that.
I've got supply.
As long as there's a demand.
Now, let's see, we can skip the Jack Murtha thing.
I guess that goes along with his warring against all the anti-war Democrats in the primaries of 2006.
Well, you know, I think I want to focus on this domestic police state thing some more.
This Jane Harman that you had written this blog entry about the homegrown let's set up commissions to study domestic terrorists bill or whatever that she passed, wasn't she under investigation by the FBI for going to the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee and trying to get them to get Nancy Pelosi to put her as the head of the House Intelligence Committee?
Yeah, she basically went to AIPAC and also went to Pelosi.
She very much wanted to head the Intelligence Committee.
And she cut a deal, or she thought she would cut a deal, whereby she would arrange for two AIPAC guys, were they Rosen and Weissman, who are still enduring the world's longest trial down in Alexandria, she was going to arrange for them to get acquitted.
And as the quid pro quo, she wanted to get the position in the committee.
Now, my understanding is that the FBI did an investigation.
They found out that all the allegations were true.
But the reason she didn't get to head the committee was because, I guess, Nancy Pelosi felt that she was a threat of some kind or had overstepped, had not shown proper deference to Pelosi.
So I think that came down to be the issue, why she didn't get it.
And some non-entity congressman from Florida did get it.
But the thing was, yeah, she was wheeling and dealing with AIPAC and getting people off that are being tried as a dealmaker to get her this position as the head of a committee.
And now they're talking about her to head the Department of Homeland Security.
Again, where did the buck ever stop?
Yeah, I don't know.
You've got to just laugh.
I mean, at some point, not only was she working a deal with AIPAC, but the deal she was working was that she was going to get Rosen and Weissman off.
Yeah, that's right.
Oh, my God.
Two guys that most people, looking at the evidence, would concede are felons.
Right.
And then the reason she didn't get it, and I think what you allude to there, is that she and Pelosi are kind of competitor congresswomen there in California.
They have political battles that have nothing to do with any of these most serious charges, you know?
Yeah, that's right.
It really had nothing to do with national security or anything like that.
But whether which of these two women, both of whom are wealthy, well-connected, which of them would be in a more competitive position?
Yeah.
Well, so I see all these terrible things, but I try not to be too alarmist on the immediacy of any of them, you know what I mean?
I kind of wonder whether we should really fear that there's going to be some kind of whole new domestic police force intelligence apparatus thing.
I saw one speech, one short YouTube clip of Barack Obama talking about creating some kind of security force as big and powerful as the DOD or something.
Yeah, well, that's basically what we've been talking about, this kind of civilian volunteer.
I mean, do you think they could really get away with that?
I mean, I know they control both houses of Congress and everything, but I don't know.
What about the governors and, you know, people, all those ambition used to check ambition and that kind of thing?
Well, I would like to believe it's kind of like the Hillary Clinton health care plan, which basically they controlled Congress at that time.
They had the White House.
They had the media backing them.
And yet somehow when these plans overstep a bit, a reaction starts to develop.
And I would like to believe that if they really try to do some of these totally crazy things, that there's going to be a rebellion against it and it won't happen.
And besides which, you know, Obama, whatever his ambitions are, and I'm not really clear what they are, he's got his hands tied by the economy.
And that's going to be a reality for the next couple years, I think, that a lot of these wannabes that would like to do this and would like to do that, would like to start another war, maybe they're going to find that they really don't have the resources to do any of this.
Yeah.
I've actually kind of been hoping for Great Depression because I think that's better than getting bombed off the face of the earth in retaliation by the rest of the world, which seems to be the path we've been heading down.
So, yeah, I prefer Great Depression to worse kinds of imperial collapse.
Back on more detailed inside baseball sort of stuff, can you tell me some more about this guy Anthony Lake?
I remember that there was such scandal about Clinton trying to make him the head of the CIA back in the 90s that he had to withdraw his nomination, right?
Yeah, you know, again, like you, I remember that he withdrew his nomination.
The issues that came up were he had made a lot of, I think, real screwball comments.
And I don't really remember precisely what they were, but he essentially was saying things that were quite contrary to the policy and quite contrary to what the intelligence community would have expected as a leader.
Maybe you remember better than I what exactly he said.
But, you know, it's funny.
Here was a guy that kind of got chopped down at the knees because he was saying things that were not acceptable to Clinton, of all people.
And suddenly he's resurfacing.
All of these Clinton people, I expect to see Sandy Berger up for something.
You know, put him in charge of counterterrorism.
Or in charge of stuffing documents down your trousers.
You know, where does it all end?
I mean, you have to, at a certain point, despair.
You say, look, where the U.S. public is two-thirds against continuing the Iraq war and is three-quarters against starting yet another war, how do these people keep surfacing again and again that want these things?
Right.
Yeah, you've got to wonder.
Wow, that really is crazy.
In fact, this is something that's been puzzling me lately.
Because, you know, it's all about think tanks now.
It used to, I guess, always just be the Council on Foreign Relations.
But now you've got the WINEP and the AEI, and you've got all the different heritage and Brookings and all these different things.
And yet there's this new one.
Is it new, the Center for a New American Security?
All of a sudden this thing's popping up everywhere, and it seems to be all Democratic leadership council-type war hawk Democrats.
Yeah, I think it's the Democratic version of the other thing, the Project for a New American Century that the neocons had launched.
And I think I wouldn't be surprised you find some of these kind of fringe figures that move between the neocons and Democratic Party are part of it.
And, yeah, I would expect to see a lot of this developing with the new administration, because they're going to be in many ways, at least to a certain extent, naive about some foreign policy issues.
And that's when these people kind of jump in with their alleged expertise.
Right.
Am I right that this is a new thing?
Because I've never heard of it before, say, I don't know, maybe a month or two ago, and then all of a sudden they're all over the place.
Yeah, I think from what I understand it is a new thing.
It was created, I think, back about three or four months ago.
And I'm not sure where the funding for it comes from.
Maybe George Soros.
I don't know.
That's so funny, man.
Somebody in the chat room is pointing out that it was like the official quote, right, of the Obama campaign was no retreads.
We are not going to fill this thing.
I forget if that was the day before the election or the day after it or something when they said that.
Yeah, well, the problem is that, you know, anything said before the actual election doesn't count.
Yeah, apparently not a single thing.
Well, except the hawkishness on Iran carries through.
Yeah, that seems to be a bipartisan effort.
Right.
None of the good things stay.
All the bad stuff can come along.
Yeah, and I assume you saw the report about two days ago that apparently the panic reports over the last three years about how Iranians are flooding weapons into Iraq, have turned out to be all, to basically be untrue, that very few Iranian weapons have been discovered in Iraq.
So, I mean, the fact is, you know, don't believe anything you hear and don't believe anything you read.
And essentially there are a lot of people out there who are spinning the record right now to make things look the way they want it to look.
I noted with some amusement Bill Kristol in the New York Times today saying that the Republicans really have to get their economic program in order.
And he specifically said in the piece, foreign policy and other issues like that are not really important.
Right.
Yeah, nobody cares about torture and wiretapping and all that.
That's not a winning issue.
That's right.
He apparently didn't notice that a lot of people that voted last time around were kind of opposed to the war.
Yeah.
Now, what did that have to do with anything?
Right.
All right.
Listen, we're all out of time.
I really appreciate yours on the show today, Phil.
Okay.
Take care, Scott.
Everybody, that's Philip Giraldi, former CIA counterterrorism officer from the American Conservative Magazine and from AntiWar.com.
You can read his new article about Rahm Emanuel on the website Tuesday.
