10/01/10 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

I'm in Florida right now, and I've I literally put this right here in front of me, and I've I literally put this radio station together in the, I don't know, four minutes before I went on the air.
With help from Matthew Hampton and from Ian Freeman.
I appreciate it, both of you very much.
All right, so Phil Giroldi's on the line, and you all know Phil Giroldi.
He writes for AntiWar.com.
He's a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
He's part of the American Conservative Defense Alliance.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you, man?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Last I saw, Phil, I've been kind of out of the loop, but last I saw you, you had a piece at, your last piece, I believe it was, at AntiWar.com is about Obama's next wars in Yemen and Somalia.
So as I try to pull up this article here real quick, when you say Obama's next wars, are you talking about American ground forces invading?
You think that the Marine Corps is going to put a beachhead down in Yemen and or Somalia, Phil?
Well, actually, the article you're referring to was in the American Conservative.
Yeah, it was picked up by Andy Warren and a number of other places.
My most recent article on anti-war was about the Israel lobby.
Oh, right.
We can talk about that, too.
Okay.
But anyway, what I had basically been picking up was that the special ops-type groups and also CIA paramilitaries have been setting up shop, basically, in places like Yemen and in the front-line states that are confronting Somalia, like Ethiopia, Kenya, places like that.
What they're doing is they're setting up business covers.
And what business covers means is that you have people that are, if you think back, the scandal we had, some recent scandals we had, were business cover used by the CIA.
It's when you don't want to have a high profile as being a U.S. government official or, in this case, a military officer or anything like that.
So you set up business covers.
And these business covers are going to be used, basically, to put U.S. intelligence officers, both from CIA and from the military and also support officers of various types, into these countries to take action against the terrorist groups there without making it look like the military is present.
Right.
Well, you know, there was a story just a few days ago about a helicopter strike in Somalia that no one took any credit for, but it was an attempt to kill the leaders of the al-Shabaab militia there.
Do you think the United States was behind that?
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about.
But basically what they're doing is they're setting up an infrastructure and they're putting in their electronic sensors all over that region that are picking up when, you know, telephone calls, picking up when vehicles are approaching and that sort of thing.
They're putting the intelligence together to be able to strike in these areas, pretty much like they're doing in Pakistan, where they don't openly avow that they're doing it.
It's going to be the same kind of capability where it's like a war that's undeclared, but nevertheless is pretty much a real war in every sense, except that there won't be, you know, large concentrations of American ground troops in these countries.
Well, thank God for that, at least, right?
Well, I don't know anymore.
I mean, you know, this kind of stuff is getting so hazy.
It's like when, certainly the Founding Fathers, when they put the Constitution together, envisioned that war was something that you actually declared, something that you then had kind of an endgame to pursue.
But these wars are going on forever and they seem to be involving new countries all the time.
And I think it's essentially, I mean, I was a little bit nervous about actually writing the article because I didn't want to reveal anything that would hurt American government officials or soldiers or anything like that, but at the same time, we have another series of wars getting cranked up and nobody's ever voted on any of them.
The American public has never been asked whether it wants all this stuff or not.
And to me, it's almost becoming a public responsibility for places like anti-war to shine some light on this stuff.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you're certainly right that it's an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of thing.
I mean, if you say the word Yemen to somebody, if you're lucky, they'll picture vaguely the shape of the Arabian Peninsula or something.
But the average American, I don't think, can really conceive of Yemen as a place with people on it, you know, like where we live.
Yeah, well, that's part of the problem.
I mean, Americans don't envision anybody as being like them.
Everybody else has either a towel around their head or is in some way weird.
So, you know, when you kill Afghans or you kill Yemenis or something like that, it's not a matter of great concern.
I think that's unfortunate.
We've come into a mindset where we don't realize that all these people we're killing have long memories.
And, you know, they don't like when we go there and kill their cousins or attack wedding parties and that sort of thing.
And this is called blowback.
And it's basically we're going to have a lot of blowback for years to come.
Well, you know, I was at the tire shop yesterday and struck up a conversation with a nice old gentleman.
He seemed like he was probably about, I don't know, 65 or something.
No, it turned out he was 85 and fought in the Pacific in World War II on the anti-aircraft guns being targeted for, I think he said, 17 weeks straight by kamikaze attack.
This is a guy who went through real war for America.
You know, the war that defines America.
And, man, Phil, I've got to tell you, he was so upset about the empire now.
He was so upset about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terrorism in general.
And he just couldn't believe that this was what he fought for.
Well, that's the real tragedy.
I mean, people who actually experience war know just how nasty it is.
You know, we have this kind of video game vision of war, unfortunately, most people in the United States.
And they can't really associate war.
A piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago about we should think in terms of the soldiers that died, both men and women, as our sons and daughters.
They are.
And once you start thinking in those terms, you realize, is this worth it?
I mean, is it worth sending my son for whatever is going on in Afghanistan, my grandson?
And, you know, the answer should be no, hell no.
And once you come to that conclusion, you've got to figure out better ways to conduct foreign policy than sending in the 101st Airborne.
All right, everybody, this is Phil Giraldi.
He's a former DIA and CIA officer.
He writes for the American Conservative Magazine.
Our next wars, Yemen and Somalia, is one of the articles in question here.
And, of course, if you just click on his name, he's right there in the right-hand margin under Justin Armando there at antiwar.com.
That really was a great article, too, about the grandsons.
And I think you said a friend of your daughter's from high school had died and he had to go to his funeral and see his parents deal with that.
It's not just some soldier.
This is a man who never got to have his life.
Yeah, yeah.
His wife was taken away from him for nothing, you know, and that's true of every single soldier that's dying in these godforsaken places.
To me, we're at a moment in time where people like us and people that are even halfway thinking the way we do, you know, it's time to get really angry.
And it's time to really say this is enough.
And I'm totally mystified that the political and the progressive people on the left have sold out to this Obama vision.
Obama is worse than this.
That's a good place to pick this up.
Everybody, it's Phil Giraldi from antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
All right.
Well, and speaking of that, Phil Giraldi, you fought in Vietnam, right?
Well, I was in the Vietnam Army.
No, I actually served in Germany before the Vietnam War.
Oh, I see.
Okay.
Yeah.
I didn't kill anybody, Scott.
Oh, that's good.
Yeah, them poor Vietnamese, man.
They sure got the brunt end of the napalm there.
Exactly.
I want to ask you this, because if I remember the story right, you were, I guess, officially retired, but you were a contractor for the CIA when September 11th happened.
And I kind of wanted to build into picking up where we left off before the break about what Obama's doing is worse and see if I can kind of mix all these things together.
He told me before, the war on terror, we need to ramp this thing down.
We need to use a scalpel, not a mallet.
But that's what Obama says he's doing.
He's using a scalpel, not a mallet.
He's using drone strikes instead of full-scale invasions.
He's trying to take out the bad guys and get this thing over with somehow, apparently.
And then part of that question, too, I guess, is I guess I can go ahead and assume that one of the reasons you went ahead and left the CIA permanently was because they were taking the exact opposite strategy from ramping this whole thing down.
So there's a lot to go over there.
Why don't you talk about it?
Well, I mean, let me take the second part first.
The point is that when you're working for the CIA or you're working for the Defense Department, it's a business, and your business is to keep whatever is keeping you in employment and to keep you on an upward spiral in terms of more people working for you, bigger budgets and that sort of thing, is to heighten the threat and to make sure that you are responsive to that in the eyes of the policymakers.
So if you think of the Defense Department and you think of the CIA as a business, you understand a lot that goes on.
Basically, they're not interested in making threats go away.
They're interested in making threats look worse.
So that's what they do.
And essentially, you're never going to go to the CIA or to the Pentagon and get an honest assessment of anything, because their assessment is going to be based on what's in their own self-interest.
So I think that's the easiest way to answer that.
What was the other half of the question?
Well, it was partly why did you leave the CIA, and then, you know, I guess I was assuming it was really because you saw what Bush, you know, he declared war on 60 countries after 9-11, and that's exactly what you would have told him to not do, right?
Well, yeah.
Certainly there were a lot of people at CIA, in spite of what I just said, who felt that the policy was a bad one, that essentially we were creating more terrorists than we were killing, and there was no end in sight to this kind of policy.
And that's still the case at CIA.
There are a lot of people who are honest enough to say that when you kill someone in Afghanistan, you're creating, you know, enemies of all his relatives for the next 30 years.
And a lot of people do understand that.
But at the same time, the people who run the CIA, the people who run the Pentagon, are people that are not necessarily answerable to the guy that works at the bottom.
And the guy at the bottom very often sees things a lot more clearly.
Like, for example, you used to joke when I was in the Army that if you ever really wanted to find out what was going on in any Army unit, you had to talk to the private, not to the colonel, because the private knew a hell of a lot more about what was going on than the colonel ever did.
And if something was really going wrong, the private would be the one able to tell you.
So it was, you know, it's that kind of thinking.
And there are a lot of good people in government, but at the same time you don't shoot yourself in the foot.
And essentially, you know, it is a business, and it's a business that thrives on strife.
Yeah, well, so now what about Obama?
You say Obama's worse, but isn't he trying?
I mean, if you read the New York Times, they say he, you know, maybe he's not acting the way you would have him act, but he's talking like the kind of thing you would have him say, I think.
He wants to use a scalpel, not a mallet.
He wants to ramp this thing down somewhat, even as he's ramping it up.
Well, Scott, I don't doubt for a second that Obama feels real conflicted about what's going on, that he's a smart man, unlike his predecessor, and I think he really does understand that, you know, these things are kind of endless and there's no way out of these dilemmas once you get into them.
At the same time, he's a politician.
He wants to get through this election next month, and he wants to get through the election of himself in two years.
So he's going to be playing that game, too.
So he's going to make things look like what they aren't.
But let's judge him by what he's done.
He's basically not gotten us out of Iraq.
We're still there with 60,000 soldiers, and if you read the papers every other day, a couple of them are getting killed.
And also politically, Iraq is a mess, and just about every other way.
He's escalated in Afghanistan, and if you listen to basically what the generals are saying, we're going to be in Afghanistan for, what, 13 more years?
I think that's what the latest Marine general comment was, something to that effect.
So what Gates said, we're never leaving Afghanistan.
And it's right.
Gates said it in an anti-war today.
Gates said we're never going to leave Afghanistan.
So, you know, to me, and my report about how we're building up infrastructure to attack places like Yemen and Somalia, take it all together.
Where is the change?
And look at the Middle East.
I mean, basically Obama said the right things in Cairo back just after he was elected, or just after he went into office, and he's reneged on everything he said.
He's basically come down heavily on the side of Israel.
Israel has been intransigent in terms of making any substantive changes, continuing to steal Palestinian land, and Obama's quiet.
Because why?
Obama wants to have a smooth election next month, and he wants to have a smooth re-election as president in two years.
So what does Israel have to do with an election here?
I mean, it's not like, you know, China financing Bill Clinton's campaigns or anything, right?
Well, actually, we have Jewish donors that are closely tied to Israel or are a big part of the Democratic funds for running for office.
So there is a connection.
And, of course, but I think the bigger connection that people like Obama see is they don't want the media turning against them.
And the perception of picking on Israel is the quickest way to get the media to turn on you.
Yeah, it's amazing.
I saw this thing a few months back with Wolf Blitzer interviewing Paul Begala from the Democrat side and some hack from the Republican side.
And the question was, why does Barack Obama hate Israel so much?
And what's his problem anyway?
Of course, Wolf Blitzer used to write for the Jerusalem Post and Paul Begala was the editor of the APAC newsletter where he was the front man, APAC's PR man for years before he was a CNN anchor there.
He never was a journalist, really.
Well, maybe the last time he was a journalist was for the Jerusalem Post.
And then the whole conversation was the right-wing guy saying, yeah, he is anti-Israel.
And Paul Begala saying, no, no, no, he's not.
Israel is the most important thing in the world, far more important than America.
And Barack Obama knows that.
Believe me.
Well, he got that right, didn't he?
You know, it's all perceptions, it's all spin, and it's all basically a domestic lobby that undeniably is extremely powerful and these politicians tread very carefully around it.
But I think what I'm saying is in terms of foreign policy, and Israel, of course, is a big issue, Obama hasn't made any changes for the better.
I don't see any.
The language is better.
He speaks better.
He's more articulate than George Bush ever was.
He sounds more empathetic.
He doesn't quite go to the extent of Bill Clinton and start crying or anything like that.
But, you know, he makes all the right noises.
And then the problem is that the noises aren't really backed up by any deeds.
What about Nigeria?
Is America going to go to war in Nigeria?
Why would we go to war with Nigeria?
Well, there's oil there, and there's rebels who are sick and tired of all their oil being stolen by Shell.
And there was a great piece in Vanity Fair by Sebastian Younger back in 2007.
It was one of the first interviews I did on anti-war radio, actually.
And I've noticed, let's see, there was some DOD report or something that came out a couple of weeks ago that talked about, you know, future wars that they're considering or preparing for, and these are, you know, red, yellow, and orange for how, or, you know, one, two, and three for how likely they are.
And I've seen commercials for join the Navy, and they show, you know, the not-too-distant-future guys.
And where are they?
It's not the Mekong Delta, but they're in a jungle on a river somewhere armed to the teeth.
And, boy, it just looks like Nigeria to me.
I don't know.
It seems like these guys kind of, you know, they plan these things way out.
And, after all, they can always just point at Abdulmutallab, the underbomber, to justify it if they need to, right?
Well, you know, it's funny.
I mean, certainly I've seen reports that Nigeria is in a very fragile condition.
And, you know, it's ethically very divided.
And you're right, it has a major militant movement in the Niger Delta.
I have never heard of any specific plans for the U.S. to intervene there, but why not?
I mean, we've intervened everywhere else.
I mean, I'm not worried.
Do you have another can still, or do you got to go?
I have another can.
Okay.
All right.
We'll stop here.
Hang tight, everybody.
More Phil Giraldi on anti-war radio right after this.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the phone with Phil Giraldi, former CIA and DIA officer, executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation, member of the American Conservative Defense Alliance, contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine.
And now let's talk a little bit about Somalia here.
What kind of troubles we got in Somalia?
I heard that maybe some of the guys involved in the 1998 African Embassy bombings, Phil, might have been there.
And so that's why we've got to bomb those people, right?
Well, that's the narrative that the administration is pursuing.
You know, I don't know enough to say whether people that were involved in the bombing are there or not.
They claim that there are.
But, again, is this an issue that basically you're interested in starting yet another war about, or is it something that you use police and intelligence resources to try to find and catch these people and do what you can to neutralize them?
Do you spend a billion dollars in trying to track one guy down?
You know, I don't know.
The mathematics of all this escapes me.
The problem is that we're using, you know, as you were referring to earlier when we were talking, a scalpel or a sledgehammer.
We always seem to use the sledgehammer as the preferred solution.
And the thing is that the people who wind up paying the price for this are the American soldiers who don't have to die but are dying because we're fighting wars that are unnecessary, and the taxpayer who has to foot the bill for all this, and will be footing the bill for all this for 30 years to come.
It just doesn't make any sense to me.
The desire of the United States government to fix things overseas by a military option or a use of force is just something that doesn't seem to make much sense.
Well, you know, there's a large Somali-American population in Minnesota, and at least the federal pigs claim, I don't know whether it's true or not, that a lot of these guys, I don't know, a dozen or something, have traveled to Somalia to fight on the side of Al-Shabaab, which makes me wonder, what if they just went to the Mall of America and started killing people there instead?
What do you think would happen if we had, I don't know, what if that plane over Detroit had actually blown up on Christmas Day or the Times Square bomb had been successful?
What would happen to America?
The next red alert, Phil.
Well, you know, you're raising serious concerns.
I mean, I, for one, am not a person to deny that terrorism exists, but terrorism is a tool that's used asymmetrically against a stronger power by a weaker power, and it relies on staging surprise attacks against a defenseless population, and it's a horrible thing.
The United States is not going to be defeated or destroyed by somebody going to the Mall of America and blowing himself up.
It's not going to be destroyed by an SUV blowing up in Times Square, and even if that airliner had been damaged enough to go down, it still wouldn't destroy the United States.
The thing is, we can do that by overreacting to these threats, as was demonstrated both in Times Square and in the potential airline bomber.
Alert citizenry and security measures that are in place will stop 99.9% of these attempts, and there are always going to be people that try to do that.
I don't know the reality of these Somalis who allegedly are going back to Somalia and getting radicalized and potentially coming back, but to me it sounds like the usual scare story.
I kind of wonder, quite honestly, why we have a lot of Somalis living in Minneapolis, but, you know, that has more to do with immigration policy than it does with terrorism.
Well, it wouldn't be a problem if our government wasn't killing Somalis all day and pissing them off, you know?
Yeah, but the point is we're taking them in because we're killing them, you know?
We create an unstable situation in parts of the world, and suddenly we wind up with refugees living in the United States who are kind of pissed off.
So, you know, it's like it's a vicious circle in terms of how we do these things.
If we would just leave people alone, we'd probably all be a lot better off, that's my suspicion.
But, you know, if it's true that there are Somalis that are getting radicalized, well, it seems that the FBI has a pretty good idea who they are and is tracking them and so on and so forth, and let's leave that as it is.
I mean, it's not a case like last week there were a couple of announcements that Muslims in general now are seen as a subversive group in the United States, that the domestic terrorism problem is something we should all be worrying about.
Well, you know, you don't kind of identify a group of 11 or 12 million people and call them subversives unless you want that to happen.
And I think I made a comment in something I wrote that if it were true that there were 10 or 11 million really angry Muslims in the United States, there would be a terror bombing every day.
And we haven't had any.
So the fact is that, you know, there's some disconnect in terms of what's being said and what the reality must be.
Well, and back to the Israel lobby, because that is what this is all about, isn't it?
The neoconservatives and the Likud snicks in the United States are determined to make American people hate and fear all Muslims, because that happens to be who Israel's enemies are.
Well, I think that's exactly right.
I think there is a strain in neoconservative thinking, which is basically that the end objective is to one country at a time to fix the entire Muslim world.
And since there are about 56 majority Muslim countries, we still have a ways to go.
But I believe that is their thinking, that they're basically trying to demonize Muslims in the minds of the average American and that there will be a kind of a support for military action against these places.
And I do believe that is part of the philosophy.
Well, it's amazing to me that I'm sure you've seen that clip of Norman Podhoret saying, well, if we do attack Iran, which I hope and pray we will, it will unleash a wave of anti-Americanism around the world that will make our current situation look like a love fest.
And I think everyone understands, don't they, audience?
Don't you understand that the Atollahs in Iran are Osama Bin Laden's enemies, but they're also Israel's enemies.
And so, you know, we just continue to, our government continues to act in ways that are just, that couldn't be more counterproductive to what's actually in the interest of the American population here.
Well, I mean, true security for the United States is in the United States.
I mean, we should be defending the United States through our last drop of blood, but we shouldn't be killing other people preemptively in the mistaken belief that this is going to make us safer.
And that's unfortunately what we've been doing.
I mean, what does Obama, there was an astonishing headline in the Washington Post today.
It was something to the effect of worries about the stability of Pakistan.
And what does that headline mean, that we're worried about the stability of Pakistan?
We were the ones that destabilized Pakistan, and continuing to destabilize Pakistan, and interfering in our domestic politics and everything.
And so, you know, what an asinine headline that there were worries on the part of the State Department and the White House about the stability.
For Christ's sakes, I mean, you guys are to them.
And now you're pointing the finger at them as if it's kind of their fault, you know.
I just don't get it anymore.
As I get older, I begin to think that either I'm going to get senile early, or the whole system has just kind of self-destructed, and it's like the emperor's new clothes.
And is there anybody out there kind of pointing at them and saying, you know, he doesn't have any clothes on, Obama doesn't have any clothes on.
Yeah, well, it's just like Bill Hicks used to say, it's not you, Phil, it's them.
You're the one who's right here, man.
I like to believe that.
Yeah, I mean, come on, it's obvious, it's madness.
I mean, the Washington Post, reprinting Bob Woodward's book in pieces there, has Joe Biden saying we must secure Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
Does that sound like an invasion plan, the most risky invasion plan in the history of mankind right there, or what?
And they just drop it like it's obvious.
Well, you know, and the thing that kills me is that it would probably kill me and you, and Joe Biden would probably enjoy a comfortable retirement somewhere.
Honest to God, I mean, it's just like these people have no connection anymore with the people that they represent.
And they keep playing the charade about how they represent the people and how they're interested in helping the American public and everything like that.
The American public's out of work.
The American public is poor, infinitely poorer than they were 10 years ago.
We're facing all kinds of catastrophes around the world.
And the politicians are still smiling.
I don't get it.
Yeah, me either.
And like you said, too, you know, so much of the left or the progressives, I shouldn't say the left, because the real left, they don't believe in Democrats.
But the progressives and the liberals, they're just in the tank for Obama, and they're just going to stay that way as long as Sarah Bannon exists, I guess.
Yeah, I think that's true.
And Bannon is a moron who unfortunately is capturing the foreign policy or the security policy hearts of the teabaggers.
And so there's no hope anywhere.
Teabaggers basically have a lot of good things that they stand for, like smaller government, less intrusion by government in the lives of individual Americans.
But can't they see that the foreign policy issue, the terrorism issue, is what drives a lot of this growth in government and drives a lot of the abuses that they see?
And then they get an idiot like Sarah Bannon up talking about her son.
What's his funny name?
Track?
I can't remember.
They all have weird names.
And anyway, you know how proud she is that she's the mother of a combat soldier.
Give me a break.
We shouldn't be in combat.
I mean, you know, that's what she should be.
Okay, God, all right.