For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Well, let's go ahead and introduce our first guest on the show today.
It's Philip Giraldi.
He's a former DIA and CIA officer.
Worked in counterterrorism.
He's now a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine and, of course, writes for us every week at Antiwar.com.
The address for that is Original.
Antiwar.com slash Giraldi.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you.
All right.
So, there's a gigantic scandal brewing in Washington, D.C.
I don't know if you heard the interview the other day I did with Jeff Stein, but I'm sure you saw the article that he wrote for Congressional Quarterly.
A member of the House of Representatives from here in California by the name of Jane Harmon was working to try to get the job as head of the House Intelligence Committee and apparently made a deal that was overheard by the National Security Agency with an Israeli agent that they would work to pressure Nancy Pelosi to give her the job.
Nancy Pelosi, who would be the incoming House Speaker after the 2006 elections, that they would pressure Pelosi to give her the job as chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
If she would try to intervene with the White House or with the Justice Department, I'm not exactly sure.
It's been reported both ways.
To reduce the charges against Rosen and Weissman, two of the three men who were indicted.
The third man, Larry Franklin, obviously was convicted, pled guilty, and turned state's witness.
The other two apparently were his handlers from the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee.
She was going to intervene in that espionage case.
I don't know if I can even keep up with all the new developments and all the different reporting here, there, and everywhere, but it seems like the New York Times and I read here at the American Conservative Magazine, at your blog, that you have been, quote, reliably informed that the leaks of the content of the transcript of Jane Harman's phone conversation with an Israeli national are absolutely accurate.
Well, that brings up two questions.
I guess go ahead and tell us about that and what you've learned.
But secondly, is it with an Israeli national?
Because she insists, on one hand, that she doesn't know what anybody's talking about, and two, that she was talking to an American citizen, as she told NPR News the other day.
So I guess I'll just let you take it from there.
I guess start with your information.
Who's told you and confirmed, or I guess you can't say specifically, but what have you learned about the transcripts here?
Well, my source has seen a copy of the transcripts, and there are apparently a couple of copies floating around in various places.
And he's been able to confirm that what the New York Times and other sources have been reporting about some of the actual words used and some of the quotes that are alleged to have been made in this conversation are completely accurate.
He further goes on to suggest that, or rather indicated to me, that the leak of this information came from an official, the original leak came from an official at the Department of Justice, where of course these transcripts would be on file.
So that's kind of interesting in and of itself, because it raises the question of why is this happening right now, and how did this happen?
Is there some political motive behind it?
Well, you know, Jeff Stein did write a blog entry at CQ that said, Why now?
Because a lot of people ask that.
And he said he's actually had some of this information going back for a while, and he meant to work on it a long time ago, but he's been working on other things, and that there's really nothing about it.
It's sort of like living in the Clinton years again or something, where there's just a scandal every day.
And you can weave them all together if you want, because they're pretty much all interconnected anyway, but it seems like they all have to do with each other in the timing.
But there's just so much criminality to cover, and there's only 365 days in a year, you know?
Well, we need more prosecutors, I guess.
Jeff is a very honorable guy, and I think what he told you is basically his perception of the story.
And it is a fact, as I'm sure you know, that this story has, in a much milder form, been floating around ever since 2006.
So it's kind of something that's been out there.
But the specificity of it in terms of it dealing with an Israeli or a dual national, I'm not quite sure if we have the evidence one way or the other on that point, but dealing with someone who clearly was acting on behalf of Israeli intelligence, which I think is quite clear, and cutting this kind of deal over an office phone at the House Office Building is quite incredible.
And to me, there are a couple things to look at here.
I mean, the first thing to look at, of course, is what would have been the potential consequences of this.
And the potential consequences, you might have had someone who was essentially an Israeli agent either heading the House Permanent Intelligence Committee or heading the CIA, which was another job that Jane Harman had a shot at.
Well, a couple things here.
I guess let me start with that and suggest that what you say there is hyperbole.
I don't know, you're a former intelligence agent, a covert operative, right?
Not an analyst, but from the covert side of the CIA.
If you recruit someone in another country, that makes them an agent or that makes them your asset?
That makes them your asset because, see, the line you try to get a potential agent to cross is to do something illegal for you.
And once they've crossed that line, there's no going back because they will always have that skeleton in their closet and that skeleton is always going to be there.
And all you have to do is go back and tweak them and say, hey, you know, remember that conversation we had and the favor we did for you and the favor you did for us?
Well, you know, we've remembered that and we have another favor to ask you.
And that's the way it works.
That's how you recruit spies and that's how you run spies.
So if we can back up from all these details, which there's a whole lot of to cover here, but take the big picture, at least on the face of it, what you're saying is a foreign power almost had their asset agent, I'm kind of still fuzzy a little bit about that, as the head of the chair of the House Intelligence Committee and also that she was a runner-up for Director of Central Intelligence in the new, or I guess it's not called that anymore, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the new Obama administration.
That's right.
She could have conceivably had either position.
And indeed if the scheme that they had worked out where the Israeli lobby and the Israeli interests were going to weigh in with Nancy Pelosi to make sure that she got the job, well, it would have happened.
And there's no reason to assume it wouldn't have happened, except of course that both the Israeli and Jane Harman were not aware that she was being taped while this conversation was going on, and Nancy Pelosi was later briefed on the telephone call.
I see.
So I don't have a timeline here, but you're suggesting that Pelosi had been told, hey, there's an NSA tap of Jane Harman, you need to be aware of that.
And then it was after that that they came and threatened her with the campaign funds and what have you, so she was hit to it and didn't go along.
Well, we don't know, in fact, whether anybody ever followed through on the threat about the campaign funds.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, you didn't see.
Check it out.
This is at CQ Today, Jeff Stein, a follow-up on the blog here.
Source, wiretap caught Harman discussing Pelosi fundraising flap.
This is further transcripts discussed here, where she is discussing with the same Israeli agent, apparently, that it didn't work and that when Haim Saban went and threatened Pelosi that he would withhold the funds, that it just made her furious.
Pelosi went ballistic.
Yeah, I didn't see that.
Thank you very much.
I mean, that closes the loop on the story, pretty much.
Yeah, I didn't know that.
But the fact is that the idea was a sound one, that the Israeli lobby had enough influence, and certainly if you combine it with the money issue, to make sure that Harman got the job.
But the problem for Pelosi was once the investigation got opened by the FBI, this becomes, in a sense, a matter of public record, and Pelosi could not take the risk of appointing her to the job.
Well, I mean, that's a really good point.
I guess it is a fair speculation that if Pelosi hadn't had any idea or whatever, and this was the normal course of events, she probably would have gone along.
That's the normal course of business in that city.
Sure, because Jane Harman was mentioned as the likely candidate.
If you think back at that time, it was like a big surprise when Reyes got the job instead of her.
Right.
And everybody was wondering, well, what has happened here?
But now this kind of fills out the story.
Well, you know, Philip Weiss at his blog, Mondo Weiss, it's philipweiss.org, like you, 1L, and Philip, like Philip Drew, philipweiss.org.
And he made a whole blog entry out of my interview with Jeff Stein, where he picked up on something that completely escaped my attention, which I don't know if this is of any real relevance or not or what exactly this implies.
But Jeff Stein, in his interview with me, referred to Harman's conversations on the phone with a suspected Israeli double agent.
So what does that imply, that it is an American citizen who pretends he's working for one side but really is working for the other?
What does that mean, do you think?
Well, that can suggest any number of things.
The double agent means, yes, he's working for one side ostensibly and actually working for the other side.
So, I mean, that could raise the possibility that he was pretending to cooperate with the Israeli intelligence officer but actually was reporting to the FBI.
I guess that could be.
I don't know enough of the story at this point to say whether that's true or not.
Of course, it could cut the other way.
It could be someone who ostensibly is a loyal American working in a senior level position or something like that but who actually was working for the Israelis.
That is the other explanation.
Well, now, your source, I know you can't name names, but can you say whether this is a journalist friend of yours or a current or former intelligence agent or who this is that saw the transcript that you talked to?
It's a journalist who saw it.
It's a journalist who saw it.
And so I guess I'm going to understand that the name on the transcript other than Harman is blacked out or what?
How come we don't know of all the leaks all over the place about this, how come we still don't know the name of the alleged Israeli spy here?
Yeah, that's correct.
That's an interesting question.
And, in fact, the journalist I talked to, the transcript he saw did indeed have the name missing.
And that, of course, is often – now, this is interesting because that's often a deliberate way of handling a source that is cooperating with you.
So this might mean that the FBI, in fact, already had a hook into this guy.
All right.
Well, now, here's the thing – well, no, here's another thing.
There's a lot of things.
Gray male.
I guess my kind of vague understanding of what this means is somebody's in legal trouble for espionage of one level or another, and in order to try to get themselves acquitted or the charges dropped, they use basically the tactic of demanding that classified material be released in court.
Then that way the government won't want to do so and will let them off.
And this is something that has been talked about in the Rosen and Wiseman case a lot.
But is that the way you read Jane Harman's insistence, quite loud insistence in public, that all the transcripts be released, that everything that's in there, that they have to release everything?
Is she just bluffing?
Because it seemed to me like she must know, or maybe I'm just assuming wrongly or something, but it seems like that's the kind of thing that they won't release.
No, it's classified Israeli spy intelligence material and whatever, and they're not going to declassify it.
So she gets to look like she's a victim, loudly protesting for material to be – braided material to defend her that she knows that they can't release.
Well, I think you're right.
I think that's precisely what she's doing.
She's assuming that this is part of a much broader investigation of Israeli intelligence activities directed against the United States government, and she knows they're not going to release all that stuff.
So the more she demands to be released, the less likely it is that they'll release anything.
And this is precisely, as you pointed out, the same playing around that has been used in the Rosen and Wiseman case.
In the Rosen and Wiseman case, it required a judge to go along with this nonsense, which he did, or has at least up to a certain extent so far.
And maybe she's hoping for the same kind of thing to happen.
All right.
Now, somebody in the comments section on the Antiwar.com slash radio archive blog there at Antiwar.com mentioned that Jane Harman had done this major flip-flop, and there was a link to a YouTube video of the Armenian lobby group, a lot of young people protesting, quite loudly calling her a genocide denier.
Apparently she was a co-sponsor of the Armenian Genocide Recognition Resolution, or whatever it was, while at the same time it was discovered that she had written a letter to Tom Lantos to scotch the thing.
So that reminded me, of course, of Dennis Hastert, because I believe the story goes, according to Vanity Fair and Daniel Ellsberg, and people familiar with the Sabel Edmonds case, which I know you've written about, that this was something that Hastert got a direct cash payoff for, thousands of dollars, the former Speaker of the House, in order to thwart the Armenian Genocide Resolution, in order to protect America and apparently Israel's relationship with Turkey.
Can you expand on that?
Yeah, I think that you hit it right on the end there.
I think that what she was doing, obviously, she's a congressman, as you know, from Los Angeles.
Oh God, I wonder if I live in her district.
I don't even know.
I should Google that right now while you're talking.
District 34.
Oh Christ.
I don't want to know.
I'm going to just do the hear no evil, see no evil thing about that.
I don't even want to know who my congressman is.
She has apparently a strong constituency of Armenians who are wealthy and politically motivated, and so she was indeed one of the co-sponsors.
But the Israel lobby and Israel decided that they really didn't want this to go ahead for a couple reasons, the relationship with Turkey being the most important one.
And a lot of congressmen, as a result of the shift on the part of the Israeli interests, also shifted their votes.
So she was one of them.
Tom Lantos, of course, was involved in this too.
Nancy Pelosi did a shift on it, as you know.
So a lot of it goes back to Israel.
All right.
Now, I want to – well, I mean, there's so many issues to cover here, but I want to kind of really parse things and make sure to get to the truth.
On one hand, there's by – you know, all right is a legitimate lobby as far as, you know, having a government and the right to petition it and so forth, where people who care about Israel give money to groups because they want to influence congressmen to protect their interests and however they perceive them, which is basically the same right that, you know, any American has to do the same thing.
And then there's corrupt influence and covert operations.
And, you know, I know there's a lot of criticism of the Israel lobby itself, including on this show, of course, about how much influence over the congress there is and that kind of thing.
But I want to really focus on the distinction between, as you said, Israel's covert operations against the United States government.
And, you know, I think anybody tuning into this story and saying, wait a minute, a congresswoman being bought off by an Israeli spy to intervene in a trial of other Israeli spies, and what is going on here, it seems like this must not be taking place in a vacuum.
There's a bigger picture here to understand about the extent of, I don't know, Mossad or whatever influence inside the United States.
Can you tell us – you know, give us a reasonable picture of what we're looking at here?
Well, I think it's, you know, what the Greeks would call hubris, I guess, what the Israelis would call chutzpah.
It's a sense that the Israelis have, because of the power of their lobby, have basically come to the point of view that they can do anything and get away with it.
And essentially this point of view has been supported by reality.
You know, why should an Israeli intelligence officer or a surrogate of an Israeli intelligence officer be able to call up a congressman and even make one of these proposals in a credible way?
I mean, it's kind of astonishing.
You or I couldn't do it.
The Israelis, as you might think back or recall back to the article I wrote last year for the American Conservative about Israeli spying, the Israelis are among the most active spies against the United States.
And a big part of this espionage operation is what they call covert actions or influencing operations, where you influence the policies of the country that you're targeting.
And the objective of all of this is to do it, as the name implies, in a covert way so that your hand is not revealed.
And this is precisely what we're seeing in this phone call, where the Israeli intelligence officer is presumably using a surrogate to make the call, someone who has access to Jane Harman, and he makes his proposal.
And his proposal is an attractive one, and as I said a while ago, once you're on the hook for this, you're on the hook forever.
And once you're on the hook forever, whatever they ask you to do, within the realm of possibility, you have to do.
And that's basically how an intelligence operation of this sort works.
Well, and that is pretty outrageous.
It would seem like, I don't know, is it just crazy to think that somewhere in any intelligence agency they would think, wait a minute, I think maybe going for the chairman of their intelligence committee is a bit too high, this might be more trouble than it's worth, or something like that.
Would basically any covert operator try to rig a situation like that?
Well, you always go for what they call a risk versus gain assessment on any operation in intelligence.
But this one's a gold medal one.
You get the big star for catching the person at the top of the pile.
And certainly if she had this conversation with this person on the phone, clearly it was somebody she had been talking to before about things that kind of were maybe similar, because otherwise she would have probably been unwilling to even talk to them about these kinds of things.
So they kind of had a feeling that she would be inclined to look at this thing positively before they even made the proposal.
And then they threw very strong incentives into the opera.
They hit the money button in terms of money for the Democratic Party, and they also hit her own personal ambition in terms of turning her into the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Well, again, that's where we get really into bizarro world here where Superman's a bad guy and the sun is red and everything's upside down.
You have Larry Franklin, the case that's the start of all of this thing, the top Iran analyst in the policy shop at the Pentagon.
He wanted a promotion to the National Security Council.
So apparently the way he judged his risk benefit, the idea of going to Don Rumsfeld and asking for a recommendation was out of the picture.
He decided instead the best route to the White House was through Israeli spies.
And apparently this is the same way that Jane Harman assesses the balance sheet as well.
If I want a promotion, I need to get the government of Israel to intervene on my behalf?
I mean, that's really through the looking glass at this point, isn't it?
Well, it's not through the looking glass because obviously they felt that that was the way to go.
And, you know, there are a lot of other people that see the United States in the same way.
Now, for example, let's go back to our Turkish example.
Why are the Turks so cozy with the Israelis?
Do they have any real community of interest?
You know, they have some common enemies in the area and so on and so forth.
But the big reason is because being chummy with the Israelis is a big plus for the Turks vis-à-vis the United States.
So a lot of people have seen our foreign policy as having this kind of key in the door, which is the Israeli relationship, the Israeli connection.
And clearly this was very plausible that the Israelis would be able to make these things happen.
And even a canny operator in the political sphere like Jane Harman was convinced that it would work.
Well, I mean, I guess the lesson here is the American people are just not responsible enough to maintain a world empire because the incentive for the leaders of every other country to exert extraordinary influence in order to try to influence this empire, it apparently outmatches the American people every time.
Well, and our politicians are so corrupt and so motivated by their own interests that it makes it easy to manipulate them.
I suspect that's a big part of it, too.
But, you know, I mean, this whole Israeli thing has been going on for so long and they've been so successful at it that they just kind of feel at certain levels they're bulletproof and they can do what they want and they can manipulate the situation to satisfy their own needs.
And I think in this case, I think this story has real legs.
And I think this is something that maybe is not going to go away no matter how hard Fox News and some of the others try to make it go.
Now, let's rewind the story a bit back to the Rosen and Wiseman case, because they have been able to make that one go away.
And here you have an Israeli or pardon me, an Iranian analyst in the Pentagon who's pled guilty.
He's been sentenced to 12 years.
I guess they say he doesn't have to go to prison until after the trial.
But now, as you noted on the blog over there at the American Conservative, that the Washington Post is saying, perfect timing again, that they might not try Rosen and Wiseman after all.
Yeah, that's right.
There's been the Washington Post article, but there have been a lot of other indications that the prosecution has decided that going ahead with this case is just not going to work because the judge has allowed so many conditions, including possibly calling as witnesses former secretaries of state and secretaries of defense and people like that and also allowing classified information, that the prosecution has basically nowhere to go with it.
I see, because there's no way in hell they're going to have Don Rumsfeld or Connelisa Rice actually subpoenaed.
Right, exactly.
So, what about Ben Ami Kaddish?
You wrote an article not too long ago, I think it was Israel's get out of jail free card, where you said, whatever happened to this guy?
Wasn't there a big news story where an Israeli spy got arrested and then we never heard a word from him since?
Have you heard a word from him since then?
Well, I sort of have.
He was supposed to be sentenced one month after that news coverage that occurred at the time he was in court.
And that would have been back in February.
And I was quite mystified to see that nothing had happened.
And I called up the court and got the runaround a couple of times and finally kind of gave up on the issue.
But I was recently told that he's going to be in fact appearing in court tomorrow for sentencing, April 24th.
And the prediction is that he's going to be allowed to walk.
The get out of jail free card is still there.
Well, wait a minute.
He's going to be allowed to walk.
I think I remember something in the accusations, not that I was on the jury or anything, or not apparently that there's going to be one or whatever, but weren't the accusations that he stole nuclear secrets and jet fighter secrets and the kinds of things that any average American would be put up in front of a firing squad over?
Yeah, he stole nuclear technology information.
He stole information on missile technology.
And he passed all this stuff on to the same Israeli agent handler, spy handler, who was running Jonathan Pollard.
So yeah, he was guilty.
He's pleaded guilty.
He's old, admittedly.
But the fact is that it seems that everything that has to do with Israel in terms of our criminal justice system is judged by a different standard.
All right.
Now, let's see.
I want to get to the NSA thing because that connects to this story in a couple of important ways.
But I want to go back to well, and I guess the Kaddish and nuclear secrets cuts perhaps into this same thing.
I'm having trouble actually from this and figuring out exactly who's investigating what and under what authority.
But it seems like there's been sort of one big FBI counterintelligence operation against Israeli spying inside the United States since about 1998 or 1999.
And that this one investigation seems to interact on with all these different things, whether it's the leaking of secrets to Ahmed Chalabi and pass them on to Iran, or whether it's the Sabel Edmonds story talking about the Turkish lobby, the neocons or Israeli spies actually in the Pentagon or paying off people in the Pentagon to steal secrets for them.
It all sort of seems like perhaps even this Jane Harman investigation or would have been investigation that never happened is still kind of part of this one big counterintelligence operation.
Am I guessing anything close to right there?
What do you think is going on with that?
Well, I think the key here is that this is all part of one huge coordinated intelligence effort by the Israelis.
And once you make that assumption, you realize that what the FBI is doing is essentially they've been nibbling at the edges of this for a long time, and they've been discovering increasingly that a lot of the pieces come together.
And we really shouldn't be surprised at that.
I would also throw in a lot of the phony intelligence leading up to the Iraq war, a lot of the phony intelligence that we've seen more recently trying to blacken the Iranians.
This is all part of a scheme that basically is coordinated by Israeli intelligence, but has a lot of fellow travelers in the United States, particularly the people we were seeing up until recently at the Pentagon, that basically are part of this scheme.
And I think what the problem is for the investigators at the FBI is that they get a lot of names, they get a lot of information, but a lot of these people turn out to be Jane Harmons.
They turn out to be people that basically are in very sensitive positions in the government, and it becomes a political issue where to go with this kind of investigation.
And the result is that most of these investigations are, as in the case of the Jane Harmon investigation, they're squashed.
I mean, it really goes to show, I guess, that you can even understand their point of view, that to really make the change and say, for example, really let the FBI off their leash and try to bring cases and let the Justice Department try to bring cases against as much Israeli spying and corruption and that kind of thing as they can, this whole interconnected web of neocons and criminals, it would be horribly destabilizing in their words, right?
I mean, we'd be talking about taking, what, two-thirds of Washington D.C. and putting them in prison.
Well, yeah, that's one way to look at it.
The thing is that if the FBI and the Justice Department really ever went after all the people who gave classified information to Israel or who did things that amounted to malfeasance or criminal activity on behalf of Israel, there would be a lot of people running through the system, and you'd have people like Abe Foxman screaming anti-Semitism.
So, yeah, there's a political dimension to everything, but this is one kind of festering sore that's kind of been there for a long time, and to lance it now would be an enormous political problem for any administration, be it a Democratic or Republican.
Well, so now let's get to the NSA, because as mentioned previously, the Justice Department, even though the NSA told them, hey, guess what we heard on the wiretap?
They never did an investigation, and the reason they didn't is because, according to Jeff Stein in Congressional Quarterly, Alberto Gonzalez, the Attorney General of the United States at the time, intervened and said, we need Jane, because he was aware that the New York Times was on the verge of finally breaking the story, allowing the story to be broken in their pages that James Risen and Eric Lickblad put together about the illegal NSA spying.
And apparently, I guess there's no evidence so far that he had actually had a specific agreement with her along these lines, or I don't even know if it's known that she knew that he had intervened in her behalf at all, but the gamble certainly paid off there one way or another, and she became the biggest defender, really, of the illegal spying among the Democrats in the House of Representatives.
Yeah, it was essential for the Bush White House to have a leading Democrat to lead the charge against the New York Times, to convince them not to publish the article at that time.
At that time would have been shortly before the 2004 elections, and if the issue had resonated and taken off, it's conceivable that Bush would have lost.
So it's interesting that Harman, as you say, whether or not she knew there was a quid pro quo there, it's not clear, but it's interesting that Harman pitched in on behalf of the Bush administration on an issue which might have given her party control of the presidency.
So that's an interesting story.
The New York Times, as I'm sure you know, denies that she was the decisive influence in terms of delaying the story, but nevertheless it is true that it did delay the story.
Right, and nevertheless it's true she did intervene with the New York Times twice, or at least attempt to.
That's right.
All right, now the other thing here is that I'm kind of surprised, I guess, that the NSA could be tapping the Israelis, and the Israelis wouldn't know all about it and avoid those lines, since all the NSA software is apparently made by Israeli intelligence.
Well, I guess that's a sign of just how arrogant they were.
They didn't realize enough to stay off the phones.
Yeah, sure, as you know and I know, a lot of the hardware also that's used to tap phones in the United States is made by the Israelis, but the NSA does have its own proprietary equipment.
The stuff that the Israelis sell more so is used by law enforcement, including, I believe, the FBI.
Plus it's not 100% clear, I don't think, whether it was NSA or it was the FBI who was doing the tap on Harman.
It could have been either one.
Obviously sometimes the FBI, when it's a foreign intelligence case, will use the NSA as part of its coverage, but I'm not so sure that this was an NSA operation.
Yeah, you're right, they haven't really said yet, but it does seem more like a FBI investigation that apparently, I guess I read in a couple of places where they were also speculating that the NSA was basically helping for technical reasons rather than it was their investigation all along.
Sure, and the foreign aspect of it, the NSA would have been in on that.
But I think if it was a tap on a congressman's office in Washington, D.C., it probably would have been run by the FBI.
Oh, on the issue of Israeli software and hardware being used by American law enforcement and intelligence, this seems to me a scandal that outweighs the Harman revelations by a million to one.
In James Bamford's book, The Shadow Factory, and of course in Christopher Ketchum's recent reporting for Alternet, which you're cited in as well, they pretty much establish that, or at least there's no reason to believe otherwise, than that the Israelis have backdoors into all of these sophisticated computer networks, just as they were caught and admitted to having in Australia, where the Australian government got really mad at them.
So what do you mean you left deliberate loopholes and backdoors into our software open so you could get in there?
That wasn't part of the contract or whatever.
And yet there's been no outcry here, as there was there.
There's been no will to check and balance and find a new contractor or do anything, apparently.
Well, there was one story, as you know, I guess, on Fox News that was pulled within three days, and was not only pulled, it was pulled completely from the website, so it disappeared.
So efforts to come to grips with this story have been stifled, and of course none of the stuff that you and I are talking about has appeared anywhere in the mainstream media.
Everything has been, you know, in places like the American Conservative and Vanity Fair, and places where they are not considered by the New York Times to be serious news.
You know, yeah, but you're right, and it goes even beyond what you said.
The one manufacturer, Converse, that does the equipment, that does the tapping of phones and everything like that, they don't even let FBI or NSA or any U.S. government organization service their equipment.
They do all the servicing themselves, which they claim they do for quality control standards.
But the fact is that, you know, there's another explanation there, which is essentially you don't want people knowing what exactly you're doing or what your capabilities are.
Let's talk about heroin.
Sure.
Part of the Sabella Edmonds case is that, well, and again, it's this, as she calls it, I guess, this giant onion with all these different layers you can peel.
But she basically describes nuclear secrets being sold on the black market in the same one big market, basically, that includes basically the terrorist underground economy and money laundering, obviously, and heroin running from Central Asia through the Turkic countries and into Europe.
Now, you know, my basic assumption going into these matters has got to be that the CIA is running the whole thing, and, you know, I wouldn't know why anybody in America participating in such a thing would really be in a bad way if it's all given a wink-nod by the U.S. government anyway, but maybe I'm assuming too much.
What do you say?
Well, I have no evidence that the CIA is involved with these things.
I think a lot of this is private enterprise.
This is people who are, for example, a Turkish general or a retired CIA officer, of whom I could name a couple, but I won't, who are involved in, you know, let's call it commodities trading in Central Asia and the Middle East and getting stuff into Europe and into Russia and stuff like that, Russian generals, you know, warlords in Afghanistan, and Pakistani intelligence officers.
There's like a whole community of people out there, and they're all kind of involved in these same ventures, and once you set up a mechanism that is good for shipping drugs and getting it into a certain market, you can use the same mechanism in reverse to sell weapons.
So that's, I think, Sybil's probably the bottom line of what her story is, that there are just a whole lot of complex relationships that have been set up in the Middle East and in Central Asia.
Israelis are in the middle of a lot of these.
There are Turks involved, but there are Americans involved, too.
And now the bottom line of all this really comes down to the Pentagon empire, right?
About a trillion dollars a year by Robert Higgs numbers, which would seem to be most accurate.
He says whatever the government says, you double that.
And this is the biggest pile of money on Earth, right, for people to reach their hands into, and it's mostly, you know, obviously names of giant corporations start popping up in one's mind, such as Lockheed and Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, and, you know, we know all about how NATO expansion is just a cover for selling extra planes to the American people to give to these Eastern European nations and all that kind of thing.
And so I wonder just how many people do you think, or how high up is it, these relationships?
I mean, Jane Harman obviously is a prominent congresswoman and all that, but, you know, is it that the very elite of this society are involved in this criminality?
You know, I think we talked before about Brent Scowcroft and the American-Turkish Council and some of the prominent people who are members of that, which is obviously, you know, part of this network.
Well, I mean, Dennis Hastert is, you know, he was accused, as you pointed out earlier, of taking money from Turkish interests.
He's now working for a lobbying group in Washington that, strangely enough, has the Turkish account.
You know, this is one hand washing the other.
There is an elite in this country which goes across party lines, which essentially is ears deep into the trough of eating up this money and sucking up all these assets and things that we're talking about.
And they protect each other, and they have a very comfortable lifestyle.
There's no question about it, but that all this money, particularly since this horrific concept of the global war on terror was started, which was just, it's a spigot that's open that just keeps running.
And, you know, these people are all into it.
I know lots of ex-CIA officers who have really tapped into this.
They've set up their own little companies that work for the U.S. government that are in the middle of all these things, and they're not unique in that.
State Department people.
Mark Grossman, that Edmunds identified, is involved in this lobbying process.
There's the Cohen group.
You know, it just goes on and on and on and on and on.
So it's not even corruption anymore.
It's just the American system outright.
You know, when I talked to my new friend, the libertarian Salvik Chakravarti in India the other day, he said, you know, here in India, it's all real politic.
There's no, you know, BS about freedom and democracy and us and we and united we stand and all these things.
It's simply about stealing.
And that's really what it's come down to here.
It's not even corruption anymore.
This is what it means to be a congressman, to be a front man for a military industrial complex firm that's involved in criminality across the globe.
And you will be rewarded.
And that's what it's all about.
And, you know, they wrap it in the flag.
They wrap it in, you know, we're doing what's right for you and everything.
But, you know, it's not true.
The thing that disturbs me a lot is this myth of American exceptionalism, that somehow we wear the white hats and we're better than everybody else.
We're not.
We're like everybody else.
These people are crooks.
They've managed to, in a way, change their way of doing business as crooks, away from what the mafia used to do, into something where they've passed laws and they've created structures and everything that enable them to do it with a veneer of legalism.
But, you know, it's the same stuff.
All right, everybody, that's Philip Giraldi.
He's a former DIA and CIA officer.
He's a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine and, of course, writes for us at AntiWar.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Phil.
Thank you, Scott.
