05/05/10 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, next on the show is Phil Giraldi, he's a former CIA and BIA officer, he writes for Antiwar.com, for the American Conservative Magazine, for the Campaign for Liberty, the American Conservative Defense Alliance, and the Foreign Policy Project, and well, just Google him, there's a lot of good writings out there.
Hey Phil, how are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott, how about you?
I'm doing good, I appreciate you joining us today.
Sure.
Alright, now, I don't want to waste too much time with this, I think I have it queued up at just about the right spot here, I want to play a clip for you and for the audience here.
This is from the Dylan Rattigan show yesterday on MSNBC, he featured a guy that he said was a CIA agent, they had the shadow blackout kind of thing, and the man that's nasty voicebox disguise thing going on, and said his name was Reza Khalili, author of a new book called Time to Betray, and said he supposedly at least had infiltrated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
And now, here's just a short bit of what he told Dylan Rattigan on MSNBC yesterday.
They're in the 80s and 90s, now they've got missiles that could reach all US bases in the Middle East, part of Europe, and they're moving ahead with their missile delivery program to cover all of Europe, it's a parallel project, a nuclear bomb and a missile delivery system.
And how much of a variable in all of this is oil prices and China's purchase of oil from Iran?
There you have it, they have a secret parallel nuclear bomb program, no follow-up question whatsoever.
Just, oh yeah, well what about China, something, something.
So I've got a follow-up question, what do you know, former CIA guy Giraldi, about, first of all, this guy, and then second of all, this parallel secret nuclear weapons program the Iranians apparently have, according to his assertion?
Well, I mean, it's a secret, that's why I don't know about it.
Oh, I guess that's why I don't know about it either yet, huh?
I don't think he knows about it either.
Ah, but see, that's really the deal, right, is that if somebody says former CIA guy, we all know that there's not really such a thing as a former CIA guy.
Once you're a CIA guy, at the very least you know CIA guys the rest of your life, you have access to information, you drink with guys who know things that none of the rest of us ever get to hear.
So if I don't know about the secret nuclear weapons program, that's one thing, but if this guy does know about it, then you ought to know about it, isn't that right, Phil?
I guess that's true, I probably haven't been drinking enough with my former colleagues.
This guy, let's put this guy in context, first of all, he's the real thing, he was an agent.
Now bear in mind, an agent is not a CIA officer, an agent is the source.
You could have an agent who's a guy who stands on a street corner and watches the number of buses going by and is counting them for some reason.
You could have another guy who's stealing secrets from the Kremlin.
So agents come in all sizes, shapes, and colors.
This guy was actually an agent.
Stop right there, even before this guy, because I want to really parse this because this comes up over and over again about who's, you know, what degree, who's an asset, an agent.
I can't remember, I interviewed you just a couple of interviews ago, I can't remember if it was on the Sabella Edmonds story or what we were talking about, where we got hung up on this again about what exactly is an asset, an agent, an officer, and please draw these lines in thick black marker for us so we understand, Phil.
Okay, it's pretty simple actually.
Someone who works for the CIA as a staff officer and is in the business of recruiting spies is either referred to as an officer or a case officer, okay?
So that's the employee of the CIA, the American employee of the CIA.
The American employee of the CIA then goes out and recruits sources.
Now the sources could be referred to as an asset, but most commonly they're referred to as an agent.
This is an agent who is recruited and run by the CIA officer to provide information.
Now that's interesting to me because I think usually agent and officer are the terms that are conflated more, and the asset would be considered the guy who's not really part but has been recruited or whatever.
Right, when agent is used in that context, it's of a CIA officer, that's a misuse of the word.
CIA officers referred to running their agents or assets, but most often agents.
So when this guy goes on TV and they go, he's a CIA agent, it sounds like he had your kind of old job where you were running a station, you were station chief somewhere or something.
This guy's nobody.
Right, this guy is a source of information.
Now it is my understanding that he was indeed in the Revolutionary Guards but at a low level, he was a source that the agency was using to obtain background information and atmospherics about what was going on.
He would not have had access to any of the kind of information he's selling now.
He's basically selling a product and he's doing that with the aid and assistance of our usual neocon friends around Washington.
His first interview I believe was in Pajamas Media, which is an Israeli neocon website that promotes this kind of information.
So now he's going to be going to different places.
I believe he's also been at the American Enterprise Institute.
So this is a guy who's hawking his wares and his wares are basically that Iran is a major threat against the United States and against the world.
I mean its missiles and bombs can cover all of Europe already according to him.
But the fact is the guy does not have access to this kind of information, never had access to this kind of information and is basically selling a product.
It really was amazing watching that thing yesterday.
It was just like a time warp back to 2002 where like, you know, the liberal Democrat TV channel going, oh my God, look everybody, really frightening, scary stuff with no follow up questions.
And now on to the next topic.
I mean it really was, I was kind of surprised to hear honestly, I mean that guy Dylan Rattigan is a pretty bright guy.
He seems like a more or less honest guy, you know.
It didn't even occur to him to ask a follow up question, hey man, you want to provide any evidence for your radical assertion there that there's a separate secret nuclear weapons program inside Iran?
But instead it was like, you know, we'll just have a parade of Iraqi National Congress guys come up here and tell us whatever they want and we'll just all pretend like we know it's true.
Well yeah, the problem is that to a certain extent when somebody comes in and says they're a former CIA agent, that kind of is an intimidation factor where the questions are, it's not very clear what the line of questioning should be and it's not very clear what you can ask.
And I can see how they exploit that confusion, but in this case it's very clear this guy would not have had access to the information he claims.
I mean he made other claims too, didn't he?
Didn't he talk about Iran being involved with Lockerbie?
I mean the Libyans have confessed to that.
I'd like to know more about that one.
I guess the last I heard was it was the Syrians that did it, but Gaddafi took the blame or something, but I don't know enough about that one.
Yeah, I don't either, but that was one of the theories.
Well he blamed them for backing Al-Qaeda too.
Yeah, that's right, and he blamed them for providing weapons to Hezbollah.
These are all things that, you know, alright, this guy might have been in a position to get a whiff of something, but he was not a policy maker.
So for him to say this is what was being done and this was what was being carried out, it's just this guy, you know, he's promoting himself, promoting his book, he's seeing the golden door at the end of the hallway, and he's figured out this is the way to go after it.
Well now, I'm not one to be intimidated by federal agency names, so tell me this, Mr.supposedly former CIA agent, is this some kind of CIA plot and you're on a covert mission to try to stop this war for some nefarious reason?
Now, first of all, you called me a CIA agent after I explained to you that...
Oh, I'm sorry, see?
I've been brainwashed my whole life with these terms, I got it all wrong.
Former CIA officer, actual officer, are you part of a secret CIA plot to try to lie us out of war?
Well, I tell you, if I am, they've forgotten to pay me for the last ten years, so I'm going to have to check up on that one.
You know, sure, I mean, there are plenty of CIA officers out there, former officers who are willing to beat the drum for war, Dewey Claridge, who's been in the news lately, a guy I worked for when I was in Rome back many years ago, there are a lot of hardline CIA officers who are willing to spout the line and are complicit in kind of, you know, working with people at the American Enterprise Institute and some of the other places, but, you know, go by what we say and go by what we do.
There are people like Ray McGovern and myself who, I think our track record is pretty clear.
Yeah, and, you know, everybody's got a Bing or a Google or, do they still have Northern Lights?
I don't know.
You can Google up Phil Giroldi and see whether you think he's part of a nefarious government plot or not after you, I'd suggest, you know, read 10,000 words or so and get back to me.
For years now, I've been talking to you, Phil, and despite the fact that you're a former government employee and a CIA agent, officer at that, I can't see where you've ever steered me wrong.
You always seem like an honest source to me, so, you know, I know that everybody's happy to have you at antiwar.com.
And in fact, I mean, look at this last article, for example.
You say in this article, you confirm the rumors going around Newsweek and other places that there is political pressure right now on the, I don't know, the intelligence director, the CIA, who all, to rewrite the national intelligence estimate on Iran from 2007 and decide that actually, yeah, they must be making nuclear bombs somehow after all.
Well, you know, it's actually more subtle than that.
I think that if this report ever sees the light of day, which it may not, the report is still going to say that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.
But what it's going to do, it's going to emphasize the conjecture, the conjecture being that Iran could change this overnight, that the Iranian leadership is so autocratic and not subject to any controls over its behavior that it can immediately decide to switch over to a weapons program.
So the objective in criticizing Iran will shift from whether it's actually producing a weapon to whether it intends or could intend to produce a weapon.
So it's going to be kind of a, you know, a shell game where you're presenting one thing and then suddenly it disappears and something else is there.
And I think that's pretty much what the government wants to do on this.
They want to leave all options open and they want to be able to do that by having a report that has the kind of language that can be interpreted in a number of different ways.
Yeah, well, isn't that great?
So that's just basically accepting the Israeli view, which is that a breakout capability or even progress toward a so-called breakout capability is tantamount, is equivalent to them actually having a nuclear tip missile ready to go.
And this is what the Israelis call the red lines for war here, right?
Well, it's not only the Israelis, the U.S. government, certainly the Bush administration was not shy about taking that position, that they said that the ability to enrich uranium was equivalent to the ability to create a nuclear weapon.
Now, if you if you talk to anyone who actually knows about the engineering and and other issues involved, of course, that's not even close to true.
But that that was the Israeli position, which pretty much became the Bush position.
And presumably it's still the Obama position.
It's it has been quite verbalized in those ways, like the Bushes did.
But it seems to be the same position.
Yeah, Obama doesn't beat his chest about as much.
But when he's pushed, he says, yes, all options remain on the table.
In fact, there was that thing just two weeks ago, maybe last week, where Flournoy, Michelle Flournoy, who's the vice chair, the deputy secretary of defense for policy there at the Pentagon, was put in her place over this by saying, well, now we're not going to bomb Iran anytime soon or whatever.
We have this whole thing.
And she didn't say that we're not going to bomb them.
We were trying to work things out.
And then she was like countermanded or whatever.
They held a press conference immediately to say, oh, we we are too still thinking about it.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, and again, there's a lot of ways to look at that.
I mean, I certainly think one of the credible reasons why they might be talking as tough as they are is because they're trying to convince the Israelis that the U.S. is getting tough and in an attempt to forestall an Israeli attack.
You know, there are a lot of kinds of levels of deception going on here at the same time.
I, for one, do not believe that the Obama administration wants a new war with Iran and will do probably almost anything to avoid that.
But the fact is that the Obama administration is not the only player in this.
The Israelis can basically initiate a war that the United States would would get involved in.
So it's not as simple as that.
All right, well, now let me ask you seriously, you know, we've talked about this before, but it's brand new every time.
Might as well be.
You really believe that Benjamin Netanyahu is crazy or courageous or whatever it is enough to go ahead and defy Barack Obama and start a war with Iran that the U.S. will have to finish anyway?
I think that to accuse Netanyahu of being completely sane would be a mistake.
I think that this is a man who's who's blinded by hubris, is blinded by his sense of racial superiority over both Arabs and Americans, is blinded by his belief that he controls what goes on in the United States.
So I think that a decision by Bibi Netanyahu to attack Iran would not necessarily be rational and would, I believe, be motivated by a series of thought patterns that he has, which essentially will convince him that this is something that can and should be done.
Well, and they say that one of the other red lines here for Netanyahu is the Bushehr reactor, which I guess the Russians have not completed yet under American pressure.
They've kind of withheld getting that thing up and going, but it's supposed to be finished this year, although it was supposed to be finished last year and the year before that.
But that was supposedly one of the things that they absolutely will not tolerate, is that that facility going into operation, because once it's in operation, bombing it becomes a much more politically difficult thing because of the pollution and so forth, the aftermath.
Yeah, that's that's only one of the issues there.
There are a number of issues you have to think about in terms of the possibility of an Israeli attack.
And one of the things I would I would note to you is that this August, the United States transfers over to the Iraqi government control of Iraqi airspace.
And that means essentially that the United States might roll over on its back as Israeli jets fly over to attack Iran.
But the Iraqi government would almost certainly call on the United States to defend its airspace against the Israelis.
Now, you can imagine what kind of situation that would create.
So I think especially with the headline today that Mokhtar al-Sadr's nephew is looking like the compromise candidate over there.
That's right.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah.
So, you know, you can see the kind of situations that are developing and you can see how the the timeline kind of moves along.
I suspect the timeline for all this is a lot sooner than we think.
And that was really talking about this summer.
Geez.
Well, so what about this this asset, this nobody on TV yesterday and his his push for the total blockade that we have got to do these sanctions, got to get China on board for these sanctions, and we've got to force the Iranians to change their policy otherwise.
And you know what?
Nuclear weapons aside.
Otherwise, the ayatollahs basically, at least eventually here pretty soon, will control the super state that is Iran plus southern Iraq.
And they'll have control over so much of the resources, oil resources of the world and so forth that the West just cannot let that much power reside in the hands of these lunatic mullahs.
I mean, this is part of being a conservative and a former CIA officer, right, is you put American interests first above any of them.
Does he have a point there, Phil?
Well, you know, I'm not sure what the point is.
I mean, if if if Iran were to become some kind of first of all, Iran and Persia before it has never been an expansionistic state, at least has not been so for over 300 years.
And so the concept of it taking over other areas is a bit, I think, silly.
I mean, Iran will have relationships with its neighbors.
There's no sign that even the most pro-Iranian Iraqi politicians want to be controlled by Iran.
They just don't want it.
The Iraqi people don't want to be controlled by Iran, nor do the Lebanese, nor do the Syrians.
But these are relationships.
I mean, it's just like the United States has relationships.
But for Americans, I mean, there's only one real question.
And the question is, does this threaten the United States?
And I have to say, no matter how you look at it in relationship to Iran and Iran's relationships in that region, there is no threat to the United States.
So it doesn't make sense to be even talking about war.
Tell us the story again about these documents that surfaced in The London Times back in December, because, you know, I don't know.
I guess you indicated there you're not even sure whether this new NIE will even really be created.
But it seems like if anything has changed as far as the facts on the ground since 2007, the only real big stories I can think of are the comm facility and then the papers that were published in The London Times.
And yet both of those seem to be pretty hollow on further inspection.
Yeah, well, The London Times was basically a story that a middle was an Asian intelligence service, which they refused to identify, had provided The London Times with documents that they then had copied extracts from and translated.
And the documents demonstrated that Iran in 2007, I believe, was was developing a so-called nuclear trigger, which is the electronic device that is used to trigger a nuclear explosion.
And it's only usable in a weapon.
It's not usable for electricity or anything else.
But anyway, the basic my description of the story tells you what I think about it, that basically this was a story that was full of holes.
It came obviously from the Israeli intelligence service.
The documents themselves were not seen in their entirety.
Only fragments of them were seen.
And then they were translated with all the problems that come in doing a translation.
And then they were accepted by The London Times as being proof that this was true, that the Iranians were developing a nuclear trigger.
Lots of huge holes in it.
The story was never corroborated by any Western intelligence service.
And as far as I can tell, it it it really kind of went away after a couple of weeks after after myself and a few others went after it and exposed it.
Well, now, the way I remember the story was you had government sources, intelligence community sources.
I'm not I don't remember if it was as specific as CIA officers, but at least intelligence agency contacts who told you that they had already decided that they didn't believe that these documents were legitimate.
That's absolutely true.
There was a there was an actual U.S. government source in this case that confirmed to a colleague of mine.
It wasn't directly to me that this this whole thing was bogus.
Oh, good.
Well, as long as, you know, they're forging their way into war, try to stop and take notice every once in a while, you know, if we can.
And it's important here, I think, too, because you bring this up about this nuclear trigger and whatever.
Every time the London Times publishes a story about Iran figuring out how to set off a nuclear bomb, it's the kind of thing that, well, when I talk with Gordon Prather about it, he just laughs himself silly.
And he's got a great laugh, too.
Always makes me smile.
But, you know, they had this thing where, well, what they do is they take a sphere of highly enriched uranium, which they don't have, and then cut all these grooves in it and then put like prima cord, you know, quarry explosive detonation cord or something, wrap it all around there.
And then you just set that off.
And anyway, Gordon is explaining that if you're going to do an implosion bomb, it takes probably a year worth of tests with non fissionable uranium, usually, you know, 238 or some other heavy metal.
And then you take X-ray pictures of it with super duper high speed film and then you go back and you do it again and again and again and again and again and again until you can finally get all the different charges to to explode, causing the implosion in perfect timing, millisecond timing.
These different charges have to go off in order to cause an implosion nuclear bomb to to begin the fission chain reaction here.
But to hear the London Times tell it, you know, you throw a clod of uranium at somebody and it'll destroy your city.
Yeah, well, that's what I said before.
They they they tend to underestimate the technical problems in doing this stuff and also the technical problems in in even concentrating uranium to enriching it to the point where it's usable for a weapon.
It's not that easy.
And they seem to think that, you know, this is something you do on a weekend with an instruction manual that you download it from the Internet.
Yeah.
Or the CIA gave you like in James Risen's book.
Remember?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's right.
That's kind of a funny one.
Right.
All right.
Let's see.
I had more questions for you here, Phil.
By the way, it's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi from Antiwar.com, the American conservative magazine and so forth.
What do you think about Barack Obama and this Wall Street Journal article?
I'll just talk with Joe Lori about it, where the Obama administration is at least implying that there's such a thing as Israeli nuclear weapons and that one day we need to have a nuclear free Middle East.
Phil, that's a pretty big step forward from the Cheney years, wouldn't you say?
Yeah, if it's true, you know, nobody in the administration has explicitly said that that Israel has a nuclear arsenal, even though everybody knows it.
There was an interesting map in The New York Times yesterday.
I don't know if you saw it, where it was talking about NPT and about nuclear developing nuclear powers in the Middle East.
And it had this map and it showed Iran in black and Syria in black because they are developing, quote, developing nuclear weapons, even though there's no evidence whatsoever.
And Israel was not marked at all, which which has an arsenal.
So it was like, you know, everybody's kind of playing this 600 pound gorilla in the room.
That's not their game when it comes to Israel.
And I'm not convinced that the Obama administration is going to push for this nuclear free Middle East plan or that it will in some way implicitly or explicitly declare that Israel has a nuclear arsenal.
Obama, the closest Obama came to it was saying, yeah, he would like to see everybody in the NPT.
So, I mean, sure, that includes Israel, but that's not very explicit.
Right.
Well, and I guess when one of his little State Department weenies came out and said that, yeah, we'd like Israel to join the NPT.
She kind of had to back down from that.
And we never heard a bit of that again.
Joe Loria was saying that, you know, there are some Israelis who kind of imagine a future where they give up their nukes to that.
They sort of see this as not really the best policy for the long term.
And in fact, I guess he was even bringing he brought up John Mearsheimer speech about how Israel is turning very quickly into South Africa.
And when did South Africa give up their nukes?
Well, when the blacks took power, when the apartheid was over, they said, oh, geez, well, let's give up our nuclear weapons before the Americans take over.
The majority gets a hold of them.
And, you know, this will be how Israel gives up their nuclear weapons one day.
It's when Mahmoud Abbas or whoever is being elected Israeli prime minister.
Well, you know, I think that the point.
Yeah, I think the point Loria is probably making is that the Israelis really don't need nuclear weapons.
I mean, they they have total dominance in conventional terms over all their neighbors.
And in fact, over all their neighbors, pretty much combined.
So it's the whole point that they need nuclear weapons is kind of ridiculous.
And as long as none of their neighbors have nuclear weapons, there's no reason for Israel to have them.
And I think that is something that is so obvious.
But obviously, but clearly, it's not obvious to Israel's leadership or to the Israeli people at this point.
So it's yeah, it's the logical way to go.
I mean, there's there is absolutely no threat that nuclear weapons in a way results for Israel.
So they don't make any sense.
Yeah.
And, you know, you make a great point there about the conventional weapons, too, where the Israelis have all the best Lockheed products that American money can buy over there.
It's not like the Syrians can just drive a bunch of tank divisions down into Tel Aviv or something, then bomb the hell out of them with J-dams from the air before they get anywhere near the border.
That's right.
Israel's superiority is enormous compared to its neighbors.
And it's just some kind of myth that's being propagated that they need the nuclear weapons for defense.
But nuclear weapons actually don't provide you defense.
They provide you with Armageddon.
You know, and one of the things that scares me a lot about Netanyahu and all these creeps that are hanging around him is that these people might have a Mossad complex, which is that, hey, they have some vision of Israel going down before the Muslim hordes, and they're going to take down the rest of the world with them.
That's kind of a scary thing.
And there have been some commentators, including the historian Van Kreveld in Israel, who said, you know, this is kind of in the Israeli psyche.
That's a pretty scary thought.
Yeah.
Well, and especially when, you know, we're talking basically about a bunch of politicians believing their own BS.
You know, as though 67 borders means all the Jews pushed into the Mediterranean Sea and killed forever or something.
As though any day now, you know, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and everybody else is all going to join up into one big nationalist army and invade and destroy Israel.
There is no threat of that, except in the craziest people's imagination.
All anybody wants them to do is give up the freaking West Bank.
That's all.
Yeah.
Well, that's not about to happen, I'm afraid.
And, you know, they definitely have this kind of, you know, siege mentality.
And some of it is justified based on history.
But hey, the history was a long time ago.
And the problems that they're experiencing now are problems that pretty much they've generated by themselves.
They've had plenty of opportunities to work towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict with the Palestinians and with their neighbors.
And they always blame the Palestinians for not, you know, not taking advantage of opportunities.
The Israelis have never taken advantage of anything.
Well, now, here's my problem is, you know, I agree with you about you don't think Obama wants to have a war with Iran.
He's, you know, you say a lot of things about him, but he's not as dumb as George Bush.
And even George Bush knew better than that.
But it seems like we're on the path to war anyway, because we got this thing where the Iranians only understand one thing force.
Hillary Clinton told Julia yesterday she doesn't understand the way the Iranians think.
I guess she only understands one thing force, too.
And we have these new sanctions, which, as this CIA asset anonymous so-called alias guy on MSNBC yesterday, will not be successful, will not convince the Iranian government to give up their uranium enrichment program.
And I can't, you know, I can't imagine anything that would make them give up their weapons program short of a giant welfare payment and a security guarantee and and, you know, a 1994 North Korea agreed framework type deal or something to get them to give it up doesn't seem like any amount of threat sanctions or anything else is going to make them stop enriching uranium.
So, you know, it's like we're on a one way freeway with big walls on either side.
There's where's the exit here?
Well, that's a tough one.
The way I see it, the United States has absolutely absolutely at this point no leverage over Israel because the only two things they could do that the Israelis would take notice of would be to cut off funding, which Obama has already announced he will not do.
And Congress has already announced that if Obama tries to do it, they're going to overrule him.
And the other thing would be to cut off support of Israel and the United Nations and other places in the world.
And Obama has already announced he's not prepared to do that.
So there's no leverage over what Israel is going to do.
And to me, it seems that Israel attacking Iran is a win situation for them in that they they, you know, they start a war and essentially they start a war that the United States will have to finish and the United States will have to finish it by bombing the hell out of Iran.
And that's probably the way the Israeli leadership is looking at it.
And I don't know what the way out of this is short of Obama declaring publicly that in advance that the United States opposes any military action against Iran by Israel and that the United States will not get itself involved in such a conflict.
And the United States will take punitive action against Israel as a result.
Now, but Obama is not about to say that, not with midterm elections coming up.
And so I don't think Obama has a good card to play in this.
If you could think of one, I'd be happy if you would tell me what it is.
I just I've talked to a lot of people about this.
I just don't see where the United States can restrain Israel in this context.
Well, what about the generals, though, man?
I mean, the guys that run the Pentagon, they're not a bunch of Israel firsters.
I mean, the civilians, maybe there are some or whatever.
It's not nearly as bad as it was during the Bush years when you had, you know, the just straight at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and JINSA and and AEI and whatever just take over the place.
But what about Petraeus and Jim Jones, the national security advisor and all these guys?
I mean, we're talking about we're not just this.
This isn't like, you know, maybe we should do some airstrikes against Serbia or Angola or something.
We're talking about the risk of a war that could ultimately entail the American occupation of all the land between Jordan and India here.
All right.
All right.
Fine.
I mean, you're saying the generals won't like it, but what can they do to stop it?
I don't see what the answer is.
I mean, if it's a what is Petraeus going to do?
Is he is he going to refuse orders from Obama to to send American Marines into Bush here?
I guess I like to believe that when a goddamn bill, when the rubber meets the road, can't Obama send Petraeus to go and tell a who Barack?
Look, man, we're really serious this time, even without OK, we're going to withhold aid or or veto you in the Security Council or whatever.
I mean, well, like I heard the anecdote recently about Ronald Reagan calling up Menachem Begin and saying, hey, I'm watching the airstrikes against Beirut on TV right now, and it's pissing me off and I want it to stop.
And Begin called him back in five minutes and said, it's off.
I mean, at some point, can't a president put his president, the United States of America can't put his foot down and tell the prime minister of Israel to fall in line.
I don't think he can anymore.
I think back in 1982, when Reagan did what he did, there was it was a whole different world.
It was a whole different situation.
The the the dependency of Israel on the United States, you know, was at least questionable.
The United States could withdraw aid, could withdraw support in the United Nations, but that no longer seems to be an option.
So I don't see where the United where the United States president has the same triggers.
Mullen, for example, Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has given this message already to the Israelis and has told them that we do not want a war in the Middle East, a new war in the Middle East, and has told them, and we will also be watching to make sure you don't pull a USS Liberty trick on us.
Right.
So, you know, how much stronger can you get?
But nevertheless, the Israelis are still playing this game by look at this stuff.
Look at the story about the Scuds in in Lebanon.
This is a totally fabricated story coming out of the Israeli intelligence services.
There is no evidence whatsoever that there are any Scuds in Lebanon.
They're kind of big and they're they're awkward to move around.
They're kind of hard to hide.
And and yet the Israelis are pumping this story because they want why are they doing it?
Because the United States just recently, as I'm sure you're aware, upgraded its relationship with Syria by sending the ambassador back.
So, you know, the United States gets a little closer to one of these Arab countries.
The Israelis immediately make a move to distance the United States from from that country.
Oh, and thanks for bringing up that story.
I wish I had remembered to jot that down in my notes.
And that is an extremely important one.
In fact, let's go back over that one more time.
It was what, two weeks ago, this story came out.
And I'm trying to remember who published it first, but I think it was published in an American newspaper first.
But you're saying it started the the story originated with Israeli intelligence?
Yes.
And and the Scuds, of course, everybody remembers those are the basically the airborne station wagons that Saddam Hussein launched at Saudi Arabia and Israel back during the first Gulf War and that supposedly were all over the Iraqi Western Desert in 2003.
And and so now in this story, how many Scuds supposedly have been transferred to Syria?
And then what happened to this story that makes you so certain that it just wasn't true?
Well, basically, the story was that there had been a few Scuds that had been transferred from Syria to Lebanon and then given to Hezbollah.
And the implication was that Hezbollah would use these missiles, which are, you know, guided missiles.
They're very old technology, but they're nevertheless guided missiles that are more accurate than anything else that Hezbollah has and have a bigger payload, although the payload is not that big and longer range.
They can hit from Lebanon.
Yeah, yeah.
They could hit any target in Israel from southern Lebanon.
And anyway, the point was, this story suddenly appeared and there was immediately my contacts in the intelligence community was saying, you know, this doesn't pass the smell test because developments in southern Lebanon are watched continuously by, among others, United Nations troops that are stationed there and all kinds of inspectors and and Lebanese government sources and things like that.
And nobody else has picked up on these Scuds.
And they're kind of big.
They're heavy to move.
They're kind of awkward.
They're hard to fuel.
I gather they have solid fuel, but some of them have liquid fuel also, which is very complicated to play around with.
And anyway, so the whole story kind of smelled.
And but sure enough, the story was picked up in the United States and appeared in most of the standard media in the U.S.
And the implication was, aha, here are these Syrians arming Hezbollah and Hezbollah is preparing to attack Israel.
And then, of course, the kicker on the story was that why would Hezbollah attack Israel?
Well, Israel might attack Iran.
And since Iran is closely tied to Hezbollah, Hezbollah will be using these missiles against Israel.
Well, I would say, you know, that's tit for tat, isn't it?
If it were true.
But it appears that the whole story is itself a fabrication to blacken the Syrians and also to blacken the Iranians and to blacken Hezbollah.
Well, and, you know, I know people just absolutely hate history, but it was what, five years ago that George Bush insisted that the Syrian army leave southern Lebanon because, Phil, quote, you can't have a free and fair election under a foreign occupation.
No irony whatsoever from this guy while he's occupying Iraq right next door.
But then he says, so Syrian army out of southern Lebanon, which it was Kissinger, I think, invited him there in the first place in 91 in order to get their support during the first Gulf War.
And then, wow, Hezbollah filled the power vacuum in southern Lebanon, huh?
Well, you know, it's amazing how actions have consequences and how, you know, when things happen, sometimes it's because other things happened before that and things like that.
Nobody ever wants to talk about that, but that's the way the world works to my eyes, you know, cause and effect and stuff.
Yeah, but that would be tough on the American public because you'd have to think back at least a week.
And yeah, it's hard to remember that far.
I mean, especially when American Idol and and Dancing with the Stars are approaching a climax.
Yeah, well, and of course, everybody knows that history began last Christmas Eve.
Otherwise, we'd have to take responsibility for bombing Yemen.
And so history began last Christmas Eve.
And speaking of, well, terrorist blowback, I don't know what else call it.
You can call it whatever you want.
This just in eight arrested in New York bomb plot.
Tell me everything that you think about what happened in Times Square.
Well, you know, I have no special inside knowledge.
I would think that it is just what it seems to be that a disgruntled Pakistani American rented a car, filled it with fertilizer and gas and and parked in Times Square.
It hoped it would blow up.
I don't see anything more complicated than that.
This guy apparently has been in Pakistan recently.
So it's possible that somebody kind of wired him up and and told him how to do it.
Quite possible.
You might recall that the Pakistani Taliban claim credit for this right right immediately after it happened.
So it's plausible.
And again, what is the lesson here?
The lesson is we're over there messing around.
So inevitably, somebody comes over here and messes around.
I think that's the right way to look at it.
If there is a cell of terrorists that this guy was connected with, I'm sure the FBI will will find out about it if they haven't already.
And I don't encourage terrorism on our soil or indeed anywhere in the world.
And I hope these guys, if they're guilty, are convicted and go to jail for a long time.
Well, yeah, I mean, there's it bears repeating that there's a big difference between explaining the reasons that something happens and excusing it or explaining it away, which is an entirely different concept or it should be.
But, well, I don't know.
What has America ever done to anybody in Pakistan that might create some blowback?
These guys were probably friends of Osama from back before history began in 2000 or 2001, right?
Well, who knows?
I mean, maybe they are, maybe they aren't.
But the fact is, you know, I think they're you know, as you say, there are a couple ways to look at this.
And obviously, people who go out and try to blow up other people, they should be punished and they should be punished to the full extent of the law.
At the same time, you're kind of being ignorant about it.
If you if you ignore the fact that there are reasons why these things happen and your longer term policy should be to eliminate insofar as possible the reasons why other people seek to attack you.
And that's what a good government would be doing for its citizens.
So I'm not, as you well know, I'm not a big fan of root causes or anything like this.
But the fact is, you know, as you put it, I think better, it's cause and effect.
You do something and there's something that happens somewhere else.
And if you if you ignore that, then you're ignoring the reality of much of what goes on in the world.
Yeah, well, and it's really too bad, too, that even as recently as this attempted attack in Times Square, the myth that they hate us only for how good we are, Phil, continues on.
That's what Michael Bloomberg announced, you know, to the world.
And and of course, it's repeated and it's been repeated this whole time since the beginning of this century, really, that the better we are, the more these evil people hate us.
And, you know, there's a piece today on featured on antiwar dot com by Matthew Harwood and the Guardian where he goes through and just recounts the last few of these.
This guy, Najibullah Zazi, who apparently was, I don't know, the one terrorist arrested by the FBI in the last decade who wasn't set up by an informant, I guess.
And then you have Hassan and then you have Abdulmutlab, which that's a more complicated story, but at least on the surface here, we're bombing Yemen for about a month straight.
And then they put a guy on a plane to bomb us back.
That's at least the simplest version of that.
And he leaves out here the guy that bombed the CIA officers in Afghanistan.
And all of these guys were radicalized by American foreign policy since September 11.
They all said so.
The guy that killed the CIA agents, officers in Afghanistan, they his family says it was all about what Israel did in Gaza a year and a few months ago with with Hassan.
He took it out on guys who were just about to deploy off to Afghanistan.
And Zazi said, quote, I would sacrifice myself to bring attention to what the United States military is doing to civilians in Afghanistan by sacrificing my soul for the sake of saving other souls.
That doesn't mean he's right, but it means he thinks he's a hero.
He thinks that he's sticking up for helpless people.
Well, yeah, you know, I don't argue with any of that, as I say, it doesn't mitigate what these people are doing and the horror of what they're doing, attacking civilians and attacking anyone with car bombs and that sort of thing.
But the but the fact is, you know, American foreign policy is misguided, has been misguided for a long time and has been terribly misguided for the last nine or 10 years.
And certainly the consequences of what we do and what we allow the Israelis to do is coming home to roost.
And I just you know, it's a it's time at least for our government, which is which ostensibly by our Constitution exists to protect the American people and to and to encourage the American people to develop is to is to step in and begin to discuss at least this issue.
That maybe is what we're doing that's caused some of these problems.
As you recall, I'm sure when Ron Paul said something along those lines during the Republican presidential debates, he was he was hooted down and shouted at by Rudy Giuliani.
Yep, that's true.
But then, you know, there was blowback from that, which was the truth of the matter got through to the American people more than ever before.
All Giuliani did was say, hey, everybody, listen to this old man.
He knows what the hell he's talking about.
That's right.
And, you know, it's true that it's true now.
And so, you know, there's a fundamental disconnect here, which is that, you know, we abhor terrorism.
We we abhor people going out and carrying out mass killings and that sort of thing.
But we pursue policies that that in a way encourage people to to think in those terms, to think in that direction.
I mean, there was, you know, there were no suicide bombers.
There was no terrorism before the last 30 or 40 years.
And and suicide bombing in in the various countries that it has occurred has taken place because there is a foreign power that's in occupation.
And it's a simple equation.
You do that and you develop suicide bombers.
So I don't know if you've been watching or reading the news, but they busted the terrorism guy and giant Pakistani Al-Qaeda plots goes all or what's the deal?
What do you say?
Well, I don't know.
It looks to me, obviously, this guy is talking.
So I almost hate to guess what he's going to say.
He seems to be pretty much a loner.
Obviously, his training in terms of how to make a bomb was somewhat inadequate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, I think it's just, you know, we're going to find this is another guy like our Nigerian at Christmas who essentially is a loner that kind of hooked up with the wrong guys and and kind of decided to do something that he shouldn't have decided to do.
So I wouldn't I wouldn't read a whole lot more into it.
I think in terms of preventing terrorism from people like this, they're going through the usual exercise of critiquing the security, critiquing the don't fly list and critiquing this and critiquing that.
But, you know, they're they're always going to be people that creep creep through the system.
And I think he's just going to be one of those cases.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting to me that the narrative is it seems all just centered around how heroic all the cops were and like even when they say, yeah, it was a civilian street vendor at Times Square who noticed it when they finally admitted that after hours and hours and hours of saying it was hero cops, they still won't even talk about him without saying he was a Vietnam veteran.
He was a citizen.
And all this about, you know, like Lou pointed out on his blog, like the only thing good about this hero is his relationship to the state.
Somehow this is all about how the government saved the day, even though, as you said, no fly list.
He even got on the plane.
You know, they failed in many ways.
They certainly didn't stop his attempted attack and they almost let him get away.
Well, that's true.
And I think I think you're quite right.
I mean, every time there is one of these episodes, the media looks for a hero and likes to play a hero up in terms of our accepted narrative about all these things.
And yeah, sure.
I think the was the vendor a hero because he was standing there and he saw smoke coming out of the back of a SUV where the cops heroes when they didn't notice that.
And then later on, admittedly, went close to the vehicle when it might have exploded.
Yeah, so, you know, a lot of little stories here and subplots here.
But the problem is that this is not a question of heroism or anything else.
This is a question of some possibly deranged individual who was going to set off a bomb in New York City.
And we will know probably before too long what exactly his motives were, if there were any.
And Justin had a piece today where he was saying, you know, however you parse it, if we weren't over there, he probably wouldn't have done this.
Well, we don't know that.
But, you know, that's a reasonable kind of surmise, I think.
Yeah, well, they say he is originally from Pakistan and he'd been there lately.
Supposedly he's admitting to having trained with them and all that.
But, yeah, you know, Justin points out there in his first paragraph in his article on Antiwar.com today that it was just hours after Barack Obama made his joke about using predator drones to kill minors that a Pakistani guy tried to set off a bomb in Times Square.
How do you like that?
Yeah, well, you know, maybe it's too much of a stretch to say cause and effect here, but certainly there's a kind of a generic cause in terms of if the United States were not engaged in this pointless global war on terror, then we wouldn't probably be having any of these.
Certainly we would not have had the Nairobi bomber, the guy from Nairobi at Christmas.
And we probably would not have had this.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think it was probably the first time I ever interviewed you back in 2005.
I said, well, what do you do about the terror war then?
And you said then ramp this whole thing down.
Is that really the solution?
Yeah, I think the thing is the fact that we've turned it into this global war when it's really nothing more than criminal actions by a very small group of people has basically legitimized these people and has served as a recruiting tool.
I think terrorism, the whole terrorism issue would have probably pretty much gone away by now if we hadn't made it a sort of a poster boy for opposition to US policy.
And we did it.
The price we pay for empire.
Simple as that, huh?
Pretty much.
All right, everybody.
You heard it.
That's Phil Giraldi.
Everybody's got their CIA expert to talk about the latest terrorism attack.
So you're mine, Phil.
Thanks a lot.
Okay.
Thanks, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right.
You can read Phil at antiwar.com.
That's original.antiwar.com slash Giraldi.
You can find him at the American Conservative Magazine and at the Campaign for Liberty, the American Conservative Defense Alliance and always great stuff.