05/21/10 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, TX streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio every Tuesday through Friday, 11 to 1 Texas time.
And our next guest on the show is antiwar.com's Philip Giraldi, he also is a contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine, works with the American Conservative Defense Alliance, and is a former CIA and DIA officer.
If you don't read everything he writes at antiwar.com, I have a suggestion.
Start reading everything he writes for antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Phil, how are you doing?
Thank you, Scott, good to be back.
Wow, man, you know, of all the stupid lies in the whole world, Osama Bin Laden and the Ayatollahs in Iran are all working together to blow us up.
Does anybody believe this, or does it matter if they do?
Apparently the Associated Press does, it did a feature story that I reported on about how the Iranians are letting loose the Al-Qaeda men that they've had prisoners since shortly after 2001, and they're apparently releasing them to rejuvenate the Al-Qaeda organization.
Oh, to rejuvenate it, huh?
Yeah.
That's a very advertising term there, right?
Like some kind of toothpaste or something?
You know, it's funny, on British television they used to have a series called Dad's Army, I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it was about the Army Reservist, the old guys waiting for the Nazis to invade during the Second World War.
And I was reminded of that as I was reading this article, because I was thinking, yeah, here are these old guys, they've been in prison now for nine years, an Iranian prison, and they're coming out, and they're basically going to come out and take on the U.S. Army.
It's kind of a story that's so ridiculous that it's incredible that anybody could believe it.
Yeah, well, welcome to incredible.
These are incredible times where un-credible things seem credible to people.
Well, I've got an anecdote for you.
I saw an article that made me laugh my ass off one time, Phil, and it was about Ayman al-Zawahiri, put out in a podcast, complaining that the dogs in Iran, those heretic ayatollahs, they were behind the rumors that the Israelis and everybody but Al-Qaeda was behind the 9-11 attack, because they're trying to steal our glory and make it look like Sunnis can't fight and kill Americans and stuff, and we can too.
And I guess apparently one of the first stories that said that all the Jews were warned not to go to work on September 11th started in a Hezbollah paper in Lebanon.
So this was Zawahiri's thing saying, Iran is behind all of the 9-11 truth movement.
They're trying to take our glory.
Yeah, I've seen that story too, and there have been a few others that have tried to implicate Iran in various parts of 9-11.
And they usually originate, of course, in the neocon media, but it's kind of interesting when you see them fighting it out on the internet between Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.
You know, it's too simple, right?
To say, hey, look, the government of Iran is run by a bunch of Shiite ayatollahs, and Ahmad al-Zawahiri and his friends are a bunch of Salafist, crazy Sunni extremist types, and they could just never get along under any circumstances.
I mean, that might be overstating things, right?
They do have common enemies, namely us.
Yeah, well, that's the truth.
I mean, sure, I'm not discounting for a second that if Iran found it convenient to work with a radical Sunni group of any kind to kind of put the United States off balance, sure, I can understand that.
The fact is that we've been threatening Iran on a weekly basis ever since 2003, so they have reasons to be paranoid, and I can see how they would adopt the policy of my enemy's enemy.
But I just found the whole evidence in this story by the Associated Press kind of ridiculous, and then they quoted two former intelligence sources, one of whom works for Frank Gaffney, and the other one who works for the Haim Saban Institute at Brookings.
So, I mean, these people were not exactly impartial.
Oh, man, I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to laugh over you talking there, but I can't help but laugh out loud when I hear Frank Gaffney's name.
It's just – it's such a funny term, Frank Gaffney.
Who's Frank Gaffney for the people in the audience not familiar with Frank Gaffney, Phil?
Frank Gaffney was an undersecretary of defense under Ronald Reagan.
That was the apogee of his career.
Since Reagan has gone, he's been basically involved in one right-wing think tank after another.
He currently heads a think tank, the name of which escapes me.
It's the Center for Security Policy.
Yeah, Center for Security Policy, right.
And he's been involved with these kinds of groups, and they're distinguished by being very pro-Israeli and very anti-Muslim, very supportive of the global war on terror, and predictably kind of neocon right-wing.
Yeah, well, and also he's the guy that whenever you read the worst scaremongering nonsense propaganda at Newsmax.com, he's the one behind it a lot of times.
He's usually the one that's quoted, yeah, because – or one of his people.
Yeah, absolutely true.
Iran, they could set off one atom bomb over America and turn off all of our lights forever and ever.
90% of us would die of starvation in the cannibalism wars that are sure to break out as soon as this happens.
Yeah, that was an interesting story when that one was surfaced about how they could – it's a burst.
Isn't it an air burst or something?
Yeah, well, and I talked with Gordon Prather about this, and Gordon Prather, he knows.
And he says, look, when they set off hydrogen bombs in the tests over the Pacific, they realized that this electromagnetic pulse was enough to disrupt their circuits.
So the first thing they did was work on hardening all the military circuits, first of all.
And then they went to work on a weapon that would actually do this, and it was souped up to where it's extra radiation, I guess, minimize the blast – or not necessarily minimize the blast, but enhance.
That's the word I'm looking for, enhanced radiation devices, and we're talking in the tens of megaton thermonuclear weapons, the best stuff that America, Britain, and Russia have kind of thing.
So Russia, China probably could turn their lights out to some degree or another with hydrogen bombs.
But the idea that the Iranians are going to call together one uranium gun-type nuke, and then rather than shoot it at anyone, they're going to shoot it into the air over America so high up in the stratosphere that it – and then is somehow capable of using its radiation to screw up the ionosphere or whatever in order to accomplish this.
The whole thing just completely devolves into absolute fantasy.
Gordon Prather said, if a regular atom bomb, like a Hiroshima-type nuke, if it's close enough to you to turn out your lights, you're dust.
So don't worry about your electricity.
Well, it's as plausible as the other stories about Iran that are being quoted.
Yeah, well, and this is the part where I get frustrated.
I know you do as well, and the people have a right to be angry at the fact that the people who are lying us into war aren't even trying anymore.
Phil, they don't even care whether any of this makes sense at all or not.
Well, the sad thing, though, is that as ridiculous as their stories are, unfortunately these stories have obtained a certain currency in that most of the American public already believes that Iran has a nuclear weapon, and most of the public supports using military force to disarm them.
So in a sense, the neocons have won this one.
I mean, even though it's like you tell the big lie and you just tell it over and over again, and eventually people become convinced that it's the truth.
Yeah, so much for a mutually assured destruction.
The American people believe they already have nukes, and they still want to nuke them anyway.
Right.
And they've got to know that they've got hundreds of thousands of their troops in Iraq and Afghanistan next door to these guys.
I mean, we all know they don't have the missiles to deliver a nuclear weapon here if they had one, but...
Yeah, but they could do terrible damage to our troops right next door.
But for the neocons, you know, who are always boasting about how much they love the soldiers, actually, for them the soldiers are a real commodity that you can dispense at will and just get rid of.
No consequences there.
Nope.
And you're a former Army veteran, right?
Fought in Vietnam?
No, I was not in Vietnam, but I was in the Army during Vietnam.
I was in Army Intelligence in Europe.
Oh, I see.
But I guess you probably knew a lot of guys that died in that one, huh?
Quite a few of my training class got killed, yeah.
Well, I guess it's the same kind of attitude, right?
And, I mean, in a sense it's fair, right?
You join up the Army, that's your job is to die if you got to, but the thing is it's the whole you got to part.
Well, the problem was when I went in it was because you were getting drafted, so you didn't really have a choice.
But, you know, the thing is, it's in a sense it's the Vietnam syndrome all over again.
That, you know, we every 20 years or so decide that we can reshape the world by military force and it always turns out to be wrong.
You would think that there's a learning curve there, but I guess there isn't.
Nope, we just start over every new day like it's the first day and just go on again.
Just like Harry Brown used to say, you know, the world didn't begin on September 11th.
There was actually history that went down before that.
It just doesn't matter, that's all.
It's just like, I said this one yesterday to another guest in another context, but it's the same thing as bombing Yemen for three weeks straight and then the Yemenis put a guy on the plane to try to blow it up over Detroit and everybody acts so surprised.
Why would Yemen, you know, declare war on us like this?
What do we ever do to them?
Well, and then what comes after that is good too because then we immediately, there are calls from Joe Lieberman and others for us to attack Yemen and we don't do anything and then nothing happens.
So it's like, you know, who's writing the script here?
Right.
Well, maybe we just bombed them enough to make sure that they're mad enough that we'll have some more blowback coming down the line and then now they can just focus back on the Somalis and the Afghans and Pakistanis some more.
Yeah, that's right.
Wait until the next attack from Yemen takes place.
Yeah, we haven't attacked Somalia in a while, so I guess they're up.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And by the way, let me ask you something about that Detroit attack.
You know, I interviewed that guy Richard Haskell, the eyewitness, and he says strange people helped this kid get on the plane, Phil.
And, you know, ABC, Brian Ross, take that for what it's worth.
In this case, I would tend to put credibility behind it.
Confirmed that the feds, you know, basically were conceding that Haskell wasn't a liar and they were looking for these other guys and trying to identify them at some point.
And then the whole story just went away.
Well, I think this is, you know, this is why there are so many allegations going on about not still going on about 9-11, how it happened.
Because you can't really trust the government.
You can't really trust these inquiries.
And I suspect that if we ever, you know, even going back to the Warren Commission and the assassination of JFK, I think if we ever really knew the truth on these things or if we ever will learn the truth, we would be astonished by how much stuff was covered up.
But, you know, it's kind of tough for us not having access to the facts on these cases to figure out what it all means.
I basically am an agnostic on all these investigations.
I don't believe them necessarily.
I don't necessarily trust the process.
And at the end of the day, I say, well, you know, it could be.
But on the other hand, it could be that it's something quite different.
Yeah, you know, what really struck me about that, because, you know, I talked with this guy Haskell twice.
And, you know, I think his story was credible.
But, you know, Richard Wolff, who is one of these guys writing a book about Obama, who has all this ready access to the White House, went on the Keith Olbermann show and said that the White House was concerned that they were being set up by the intelligence agencies, that somebody had deliberately let this guy on the plane in order to make, I don't know, help Joe Lieberman pass his strip draw the other Citizenship Act or whatever it is.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's that's one theory.
And, of course, Dennis Blair, having been forced to step down yesterday as Director of National Intelligence, I mean, this could all be part of it.
I mean, does Obama seriously believe that the intelligence agencies are stabbing him in the back?
I mean, you know, and let's admit it, that's plausible, too.
They might be.
They've done it before at the present.
So I would say that, you know, the kind of twisted performances by all these people who are in power and want to stay in power is something to observe.
But it's not really amusing anymore because our country is paying the price.
Yeah.
Well, and as Glenn Greenwald pointed out, and they let him on the Sunday talk shows to talk about the Supreme Court lady or something, he said, you know, every time there's even an attempted attack, we've got to come up with 10 new freedoms that, you know, must be sacrificed.
But, you know, what happens when we're all total slaves and there's no freedom at all?
The Bill of Rights is gone and the attacks keep coming.
I guess he didn't have a chance to say that we all know that America started this bomb in the Middle East all the time, occupying the Middle East, supporting dictators that torture people to death.
This is what causes the blowback of September, what caused the blowback of September 11th.
More of the same is only creating more of the same.
It really seems like we could continue on this path where at least everybody in D.C. refuses to accept that history began before 9-11 and refuses to accept that even if our current policies in Pakistan, for example, might be creating some blowback, which they do kind of admit in major papers now, that still that stands alone, that doesn't have anything to do with, you know, there's no lesson to be learned about the entire terror war in general there or anything.
And so we just keep on.
I think Greenwald's right.
We're going to end up with no freedom at all and still terrorist attacks all the time.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, Ron Paul was the first one to go public with this argument.
And, of course, he was shouted down by no less than Rudy Giuliani.
And, well, sure, I mean, it's common sense that if you do things, if you push a button in one part of the world and you kill people and you and you support a repressive regime or you do various things, it's going to have a blowback.
And the blowback, if that group or that that that individual is capable of getting back into the United States and attacking you here, he's going to do it.
So, you know, it's so nonsensical to think that our our policies are so enlightened that nobody would would question them.
Our policies are not enlightened.
We're we're a hegemon that basically is heedless of of what's going on in a lot of parts of the world.
And we feel that we're the only ones who who matter.
I mean, that's I'm an American like you.
And I believe our country is is is the best in the world in many ways.
But that doesn't mean that we should establish a policy of interdiction everywhere else in the world.
In some some mindless pursuit of safety and security.
Well, you know, I was having a conversation the other day about Rand Paul's complete and utter failure to get Iran right at all.
And somebody brought up Bob Barr, the former libertarian candidate for president, and who was a real disappointment to a lot of people because he didn't really try to run like Ron.
He was less libertarian than Ron, the Republican, and angered a lot of people.
But somebody brought up the fact that Bob Barr is really good on Iran.
And why is that?
It's because his dad was stationed there and he grew up there for part of his childhood or whatever.
So Bob Barr has the, you know, exotic and singular experience of actually standing on dirt in Iran and looking around.
He's seen Iranians for the human beings that they are with his own eyes.
And apparently that's what it takes to get your average right winger to sort of, you know, have that different perspective.
Why is Bob Barr good on Iran?
Because he lived there.
You know, other than that, no comp, whatever.
Yeah, well, I, you know, I think there's a lot to say for that.
I think that the more people who have have traveled extensively around the world or or or even say in Mexico and places like that, they have a perception that even though people are different, that doesn't necessarily make them evil.
And the more ignorant you are of what the world is like and what the people in the world are like, the more likely you're going to be to say, yeah, we go over and kill them and that fixes it.
So I think, yeah, your Bob Barr analogy is probably a good one.
I think Bob Barr has had a very good position on interventionism and on wars of choice.
And I think I would like to see certainly other politicians emulate him, but I'm not optimistic.
All right.
Well, now here's something I'm really ignorant of.
And I imagine most of the audience is, too.
And that is the anatomy of the war party in Washington, D.C.
If, as is established every day on this radio show, there's no good reason to bomb Iran and doing so would be an absolute disaster.
Who is it that wants war with Iran?
Is it the entire American establishment is pushing for this thing?
Are there certain factions and think tanks, the Frank Gaffneys of the world, who want this thing?
And why would anybody listen to Frank Gaffney other than the Newsmax audience?
Well, that's a tough question to answer.
I would say if you're looking for one driving force for war with Iran, it would have to be the Israel lobby.
But the Israel lobby kind of works through a number of media to get its message out.
And obviously television, radio, newspapers, think tanks, they obviously work in a lot of ways.
They support a lot of groups, and they have people in a lot of these groups that are putting out the same message.
And the message is consistently, which is a false message, that Iran in some way threatens the United States.
Because that really should be the only reason why the United States should go to war with anyone.
And the fact is there's no rational way to demonstrate that Iran does threaten the United States.
I mean, this whole mythology about the nuclear weapon being handed off to terrorists, I mean, I'm not going to try to deconstruct that here on your show.
But it's just so illogical from so many points of view that it's just something that is like your enhanced radiation burst over the United States.
It's about as ridiculous.
And yet if you turn on Sunday morning television where they have the politicians on, meet the press and that sort of thing, you'll hear it again and again from everybody.
They won't have a Ron Paul on there.
They won't have me on there or you on there.
It's just going to be a bunch of people who see it exactly the same way because they believe that that war against Iran is in the U.S. national interest.
Well, you know, I met a guy the other day who said, oh, come on, of course they're making nuclear weapons.
And I said, no, they're not.
And he said, oh, yeah, of course they are, because, look, they're surrounded by nuclear powers.
And I think that the stance ought to be, of course, they're making nukes, but who cares?
And I said, well, look, that makes sense.
In fact, Garrett told me that this is the consensus inside the administration apparently is, look, if it was us, we'd be making nukes.
So therefore they are making nukes.
And so then, of course, you know me.
I went down my laundry list of all the reasons to not believe that they're making nukes at all, which are, you know, grounded in actual details and stuff like that.
And he went, oh, OK, well, maybe you're right.
But it seems like basically that's the standard of evidence is that it seems like they must be because people say it all the time.
And hell, if I were them, I'd be making nukes.
Yeah, well, that's that's a fact.
I mean, that's the way this argument has been been shaped and it's been shaped this way primarily by the media.
And the media has just fallen over itself to to argue this in this direction.
I, I don't get it.
I mean, if you look at all the evidence, as you clearly have done, you see that there is more evidence that they don't have any nuclear program than there is that to suggest that there is one.
And the people who suggest there is one just claim that it's a secret program and therefore we don't know about it.
Well, you know, that's one of those unknowables.
And to be even contemplating going to war and this would be a major war, this would not be like, you know, invading Afghanistan or attacking Iraq.
The Iranians have have great capabilities to strike back against this.
To be talking about war on based on no evidence whatsoever that there's a threat is is to me so ridiculous that I can't even understand how this idea has gotten out there.
But it has.
Yeah.
Well, it makes you wonder about what's going on in the Air Force, too, right?
Because they got to be thinking.
All right.
So our targets are a secret nuclear weapons program that we don't know exists.
All right.
How are we supposed to bomb that?
Well, you bomb the whole country, I guess.
Yeah, sure.
Just reduce Tehran to rubble.
Then you'll probably take most of the scientists that they needed with them or something.
Yeah.
Well, I guess that's the theory.
I mean, I don't know what the Air Force targeting is on this, but obviously they do have a targeting list.
I think Seymour Hersh reported that there were something like 500 targets that were identified that they would take out.
And that includes also military targets.
But, you know, it's just like, yeah, I guess we're just going to reduce the place to rubble and hope we we hit the thing that that we don't know about.
Incredible.
Well, so let me ask you about this.
Well, by the way, let me just a couple of minutes here.
It's Phil Durali from Antiwar dot com.
Shaping the story on Iran is the most recent column.
Before that, many voices singing one song and two two articles before that was papering the war against Iran.
And this was about pressure inside the intelligence community from the politicians to redo the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007.
Now, can you tell us whether that's actually happened or whether the intelligence community, Dennis Blair and them have been successful in refusing to do so?
Or, you know, can you update us on that at all?
Well, it's my understanding that the NIE is being worked on and has been worked on virtually for the whole time that Obama's been in office for over the past year.
And that essentially their problem is that they're not coming up with the kind of evidence to produce the kind of language that would give Obama a free hand pretty much in dealing with Iran.
So what they're kind of looking at now is they will probably or the evidence right now suggests that if they had to write it today, it's already been delayed twice.
But if they had to write it today, they would say that they support the judgments of the December 2007 NIE on Iran, which said that Iran has suspended its nuclear weapons program.
They would support that, but at the same time they would give much more emphasis to the fact that Iran has been making progress in its so-called peaceful nuclear program and is approaching what they would call a breakout point where it would have the technology and it would have the enriched uranium enough to go quickly into a weapons program.
So suddenly it's, you know, we're not talking about facts, we're talking about intentions and we're talking about possibility.
Right, we're not talking about a secret nuclear weapons program anymore.
Now we're talking about the one that's safeguarded by the IAEA, where every atom of 3.6% enriched far below weapons grade uranium is sitting there.
It's all counted and accounted for.
Yeah, but the intention C will be to say that, ha, those perfidious mullahs, I mean, they can turn on a dime, they can change their minds and they can decide tomorrow to start a nuclear program.
So the emphasis is to make them look guilty or to make them look culpable in this case is to look at their intentions and everything.
And so I would imagine if that's the way this report finally comes out, Obama's going to say, ah, look, I mean, here we have this potential danger from these people.
They can produce a nuclear weapon on the spur of the moment, which of course is not true anyway.
But I think that's the way it's going to play out.
They're looking for a way to give Obama a relatively free hand in dealing with Iran.
Check this out.
This is a friend sends the link here from December 2007.
Barack Obama, candidate for president.
Senator Obama says, quote, by reporting that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago because of international pressure, the new national intelligence estimate makes a compelling case for less saber rattling and more direct diplomacy.
The juxtaposition of this NIE with the president's suggestion of World War Three serves as an important reminder of what we learned with the 2002 national intelligence estimate on Iraq.
Members of Congress must carefully read the intelligence before giving the president any justification to use military force.
But, oh, well, I guess we have that.
We have that intelligence now.
We can read it very carefully.
The Ayatollah Khamenei is going to give a nuclear bomb that he either made with his safeguarded program or his secret one to Osama bin Laden, who's going to use it to New York.
And so we got to invade tomorrow.
Right.
I think that's the argument.
Yes.
Yeah.
Why is it that that they would push for a connection, the Al-Qaeda connection?
I mean, even this whole thing about the prison break.
OK, they are prison release thing.
They've had these Al-Qaeda guys under house arrest all this time and now they're releasing them.
OK, maybe.
But then they also came out with all this stuff about they tracked Osama bin Laden's pet falcons trajectory to Tehran and bin Laden himself as being kept safe by the Ayatollah there.
I mean, this is comic book nonsense, Phil.
How could they be even trying this on us?
Well, they know there are only there are two hot buttons relating to Iran.
And one of them is the nuclear weapons, which we've talked about.
And the other one is the links to terrorism.
And, all right, we know that that Iran has connections with Hezbollah and Hamas, whether or not one considers them to be genuine terrorist groups or not.
But what they're trying to do is pin the other tail on the donkey.
They did it with Saddam Hussein, where there were the allegations coming out of the Pentagon, out of Doug Feist's office, that Saddam Hussein was connected with Hatta and other people that were eventually involved with 9-11.
And this kind of stuff was just totally fabricated reports, fabricated intelligence.
And now they're doing the same thing with Iran to prove that Iran has connections with al-Qaeda, which is, as I pointed out, extremely improbable on many levels.
You know, there could be instances of my enemy's enemy where there's some collaboration.
But to suggest that Iran and al-Qaeda are working along hand in hand is totally ridiculous.
Yeah, well, and it's just amazing that the people would believe that when we just fought a war for Iran in Iraq against bin Laden's friends and won it.
And helped the Iranians take over Iraq while the people who liked bin Laden were getting shot by our guys and lost the war.
Oh, well, whatever.
I'll tell you what we'll do.
We'll just launch another one and we won't think critically at all.
That's about what's going to happen, I suspect.
Well, is it going to happen?
I mean, we've been talking about this for years.
We know they've been lying about what the Iranians are up to for years.
Are we nearing some kind of red line or something where somebody is going to do something stupid?
Well, I've suggested that when the United States hands over Iraqi airspace to the Iraqis in August, that would be kind of your red line moment.
Because the Israelis will have pretty much a free hand to stage an attack against Iran before that time.
But after the Iraqis control their own airspace, they would be in a position to call on the U.S. Air Force to intercept the Israeli planes.
And if the U.S. Air Force failed to comply, that would be a major problem for the U.S. in terms of its credibility throughout the Middle East.
So I would suggest that if we're looking for a near-term red line timetable, it would probably be by August.
Ah, geez.
All right.
Well, everybody call your senator.
Not like it'll do you any good.
Thanks, Phil.
Okay, Scott.
Appreciate it.
Everybody, that's Phil Giraldi.
He is a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine.
He writes a column for Antiwar.com at original.antiwar.com.
Giraldi's latest is called Shaping the Story on Iran.
He also writes for the Campaign for Liberty, the American Conservative Defense Alliance.
Did I already say that?
And we'll be right back with the other Scott Horton right after this.