10/19/10 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

All right, Shell, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We're on ChaosRadioAustin.org, LRN.
FM, AnomalyRadio.org, and who knows who else?
All right.
Our next guest on the show is Phil Giraldi.
He's a regular contributor at AntiWar.com.
He's a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine.
The website there is amconmag.com, the American Conservative Magazine.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest as part of the American Conservative Defense Alliance, and is a former CIA and DIA officer.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us today.
And yeah, it's true, everybody.
I interview Phil all the time, but he's breaking news.
What am I going to do?
It's the most important subject in the whole wide world, I guess, other than relations between America and Russia, the two most hydrogen bomb armed countries.
But this is second place, the Iran report.
It's at original.antiwar.com/Giraldi.
And it's about something called a National Intelligence Estimate, which is put together by something called the National Intelligence Council.
Why don't you tell us all about it, Phil?
Well, the National Intelligence Estimate is considered to be the most important document that's produced by the intelligence community.
That's all, you know, 16, 17 intelligence agencies that are in the U.S. government sit down together, basically, and produce this document, which is considered to be their best judgment on a situation that is of national importance or actually international importance.
In this case, what we're talking about is the impending report, which has been impending now for about a year and a half, if not longer, on Iran and specifically on Iran's nuclear capabilities, its nuclear program.
The report has been hung up for a long time because there's been a, shall we say, a disagreement between the White House and the analysts at CIA and elsewhere that are actually writing the report.
OK, now, wait a minute.
This is live in October 2010.
This isn't a rerun from 2006, right?
Because I remember I actually wrote a blog entry called Release the Iran N.I.E. and Hoaxter Hoaxtra.
It was two separate stories, but the first part, Release the Iran N.I.E. was in reference to a piece that you'd done in the American Conservative Magazine about Dick Cheney suppressing the N.I.E. that wasn't released for more than another year.
Phil, it came out the end of November 2007.
And but you had a report that said, well, the good guys are trying to tell the truth and the bad guys are trying to stop them.
Well, that's what happened.
The previous N.I.E. came out at the end of 2007, and it indeed was subject to a lot of stress by the Bush administration, particularly Cheney, because Cheney wanted the report basically to say that Iran had a nuclear weapons program.
The analysts were saying, no, there's no evidence to suggest that.
And on the contrary, there's considerable evidence to suggest that they sort of had an exploratory program as of 2003, but that they had terminated it.
So that was basically what came out of that N.I.E.
And at the at that time when it came out, the neoconservatives and other people in the media immediately attacked it and saying, well, you know, it doesn't really show what Iran's intentions are.
And and Iran basically could have a secret program and so on and so forth.
So there was at that time a certain drive to to do a revision, to have another N.I.E.
And this started under the Bush administration, actually, but really, you know, kind of picked up momentum after Obama came into office and has been getting worked on continuously ever since.
But the same problem is surfacing, which is essentially that the analysts are looking at the information and the information, you know, there's some information that's interpretable one way or another.
But basically, there is no conclusive information suggesting that Iran either has a nuclear weapons program or has the intention to start one.
Well, so it seems to me like the CIA guys would be really pissed off because all the time, I mean, it's not like I believe or have ever believed that the CIA is a fountain of honesty or whatever.
But I guess part of their job is telling what they see as the truth to the political bosses who are really responsible so that they can make whatever horrible decisions they want based on good information or whatever.
But every time the politicians tell the CIA, listen, come up with lies for us right now or else they do it.
And then they're the ones who get hung out to dry.
And everybody says, oh, yeah, we got bad intelligence.
CIA totally screwed us over on Iraq, huh?
Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
The the analysts were badly burned on on the Iraq NIE that was done in 2002 that eventually led to war in 2003.
And then the politicians turned around and said, oh, well, we had bad intelligence.
That's why we made the decision to go to war, even though we all know that the decision to go to war was preordained and the pressure was on the analysts to come up with the right kind of report.
And there's a long history of this under Robert Gates when he was CIA director, actually, when he was CIA director of intelligence, head of the analysts.
Basically, they cook the books on on on Russia to show that Russia was a much bigger threat than it really was.
And so, you know, when the when the real heavy pressure comes down from politicians on the senior guys at CIA who are themselves very politically inclined in terms of their careers and everything, very often they fold.
But sometimes the analysts say, no, I mean, this is going too far.
And after getting blamed for Iraq, the CIA analysts are a little bit more defensive now and are not going to roll over quite as easily.
Well, you know, here's the thing, though, too, is that when the NIE of 2007 came out, they compromised in there and they said, yeah, there was a nuclear weapons program up until 2003.
But at least as far as all the journalism that I've ever heard of on the issue, that conclusion was based on the forged laptop.
We never really existed, that there never was a nuclear weapons program of any description, the the forged documents of the so-called smoking laptop.
The alleged studies are about a bench level experiment at a place that hadn't been built to do laser enrichment to tetrafluoride, something that's not good enough to use in a centrifuge anyway.
It's got to be hexafluoride gas.
And, you know, it was oh, here's, you know, supposedly plans for an implosion device and and are documenting work on some kind of implosion device.
But, you know, Gordon, Dr.
Gordon Prather, he laughed at that and said, you know, and I think the conclusion even in The Washington Post, wasn't it that, well, maybe this stuff isn't even all that legit anyway?
Yeah, that's certainly that was true in retrospect.
But at the time, it wasn't really completely clear that the documents on the laptop were were, you know, as as flimsy as they as they subsequently appear to be.
And also, of course, it was a possibility that some of that stuff was forged.
It could have been forged by the Israelis or by the U.S.
And so but the fact was, even at that time, it was clear to the analysts that that there was no nuclear weapons program.
Of course, none of us have actually seen the full text of the full NIE of December 2007 on Iran.
Right.
It was 90 pages or something like that.
We've only seen a redacted version, which actually comes to about two pages.
And so exactly what the analysts said and how they said it, we don't really know.
But the fact is, they were confident in their conclusion that if Iran did indeed have a nuclear weapons program, it had ended in 2003.
And that as of the end of 2007, no steps had been taken to to reconstitute it.
So, you know, it was a pretty definitive statement.
I mean, they they waffled then a little bit and said, well, you know, but we don't really know what their intentions are.
And they could possibly start up a program again.
But that that was as far as they went.
And obviously, the criticism from the neocons was that basically they don't trust the Iranians.
They believe that there's a hidden program and and that they want a pretext for going to war.
If that indeed is what comes about.
Now, the new article at antiwar.com is the Iran report.
It's original antiwar.com/Giraldi.
And you break in a first person here in paragraph three and you say, I have been advised that the new Iran and IE, which is still being negotiated, will likely reflect a compromise, giving everyone what they want.
Can you give us the, you know, whatever level of description of who your sources are on this?
Yeah, I'll tell you generally what my source is.
My source is someone who is very well plugged into both the Pentagon and CIA.
And he basically has been extremely reliable on providing this kind of information in the past.
And he said that essentially the document is going to lean towards the suspicions, saying essentially that the suspicions that Iran might be doing this or doing that are going to be emphasized.
And essentially, they're going to be able to say, well, you know, we can go hold it there.
I'm sorry.
So we've got to take this break here.
OK, we'll be right back.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi.
He's the CIA covert operative who infiltrated antiwar.com.
Original.antiwar.com/Giraldi.
And we're talking about the new Iran NIE.
And we're up against that hard break.
Phil, you were saying that you have a source inside or someone who's very close to people in the Pentagon and CIA who says that this new NIE is not going to be a relief like the NIE of 2007 that basically, you know, let some pressure toward war off and gave us a little bit of breathing room here.
This one is going to lean much more toward C, the 2007 one was wrong.
They really do mean to make nuclear weapons, those dastardly Iranians.
Yeah, as I said just before the commercial break, it's going to emphasize the suspicions.
It's not going to come out and say that Iran has a nuclear program because it doesn't have evidence to say that.
And it's, in fact, going to say that there is no evidence.
But at the same time, it's going to say that the fact that Iran has, for example, not fully cooperated with the UN, which is probably true, but, you know, kind of debatable in terms of the UN inspectors.
They're going to say because of these red flags, there's a strong suspicion that Iran does indeed have the intention of creating a nuclear weapon and does have a, shall we say, I don't know, a basic nuclear weapons program in place with a breakout capability.
Now, this breakout capability is something that's important because it's something that's been emphasized by the Israelis and the U.S. for the last couple of years.
What it means is that Iran is not to be allowed to even have the technologies in place to at some point decide to develop a nuclear weapon and then be able to develop it relatively rapidly.
So that's become the issue.
So, I mean, what it basically is, it's a shifting of the issue and it's a shifting in terms of what Iran has to prove to demonstrate that it's innocent of the charges.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, breakout capability is one of those terms like assault weapon.
It used to just mean fully automatic rifle.
That's what assault weapon meant.
But then it came to mean, you know, whichever scary looking gun frightened some Democrat in the Congress, and that's an assault weapon.
And it's sort of the same thing with breakout capability.
They say, well, if they have enough uranium enriched to 3.6 percent, then, you know, that could be turned into 90 percent, whatever.
But why not go ahead and say, well, they have enough uranium in the ground to enrich up to weapons grade, which means they're in a constant state of breakout capability.
It's still just setting the goalposts wherever you want.
Yeah, that's basically what it is.
It's like it's one of these arguments like when did you know when did you stop beating your wife?
The Iranians have to prove and essentially you can set this breakout wherever you want.
And there is kind of a generally accepted definition of breakout, which is the sense that you have enough of a technology base and enough of access to uranium and enough of of of of a knowledge base to be able to to to move towards a weapon.
But there, you know, there are a whole load of countries right there in the Middle East that have this capability.
Saudi Arabia has it.
So does probably Kuwait.
So does Egypt and probably other countries that if they wanted to move in that direction, they could.
So this this whole argument is kind of bogus.
It's it's it's basically making an argument that Iran shall have no nuclear capability whatsoever that is independent of outside sources of uranium or or constant and total inspection.
So it's a standard that Iran is being held to that nobody else is held to.
And most particularly that Israel has never been held to.
And of course, Israel's arsenal is probably the reason why if Iran ever develops a nuclear weapon, why it would do so.
Yeah, well, and according to Daniel Ellsberg, Mordecai, the new told him that they have more than 600 nuclear weapons, including hydrogen bombs and submarines to deliver them on second strike capability and all that, too.
That's right.
The Germans provided them with the submarines and there have been reports that the at least one of those subs went through the Suez Canal and is is stationed somewhere off the coast of Iran.
All right.
Well, and, you know, when you talk about the in a way, it's arguable that the Iranians are in defiance of the United Nations in a way to cause suspicions.
That still is not based on the safeguards agreement, the deal that they made under the nonproliferation treaty.
That's just a bunch of separate ad hoc, completely illegitimate U.N. resolutions pushed by John Bolton and Condoleezza Rice that say that they have to answer an endless list of questions about their wife beating.
They have to allow inspections of everybody's palace and everything else like they did to Saddam Hussein.
Complete free reign to inspect anything, anywhere, at any time, whether it has to do with missiles or things completely unrelated to the IAEA's role and that they must cease enriching uranium, which if I understand the way laws work and stuff like that, if America is a signatory to the nonproliferation treaty, that actually right there excludes makes illegal or illegitimate our refusal to recognize their right to enrich uranium and use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
We're bound to respect their right to do so by that treaty.
I think you're right in that.
The fact is the U.S. is a signatory.
Iran is a signatory.
In fact, everybody in the Middle East is a signatory except Israel.
And basically Iran has a right guaranteed by the nonproliferation treaty to have access to peaceful use of nuclear energy.
I mean, there's no debate about that.
And even George Bush conceded on several occasions that that was the case.
So it's a question of they keep moving the goalposts.
It's like the Israelis in particular, every six months or so, they say, well, Iran is one year away from having a nuclear weapon.
Well, they've been saying that for 10 years.
Yeah, maybe 20.
I mean, if you go back to the end of the Cold War, there was stuff like that.
Yeah.
And every time that you come up to that date, they move the date back another year.
So it's like you can't win with those kinds of arguments.
And the fact is that we keep saying that we're talking with negotiating with the Iranians or willing to negotiate with the Iranians, but absolutely nothing is happening.
I mean, there's not like the Iranians are partly responsible for that, too.
But the United States is making no effort for outreach to really try to resolve any of these issues.
And when you're not talking, nothing is going to happen.
Hey, can I keep you late?
One more segment here, because we're almost up to this next break.
Sure.
If you're if you're if your listenership can stand it.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
No, they need this.
The next subject really is about the politics I see here at the American Conservative Magazine on the blog there, Amcon Mag.com/blog.
You have a piece here about the removal of Jim Jones from the National Security Advisor spot and his replacement with this guy, Tom Danilian.
And I guess I guess sort of leading the question now, which is the reporting I'd seen just so far and I've kind of been out of town, but was that Jones was more hawkish than Obama on Afghanistan.
And that was his problem.
And that's why he's gone.
And yet you have a very different take here that he was more cautious on Iran.
And that's why he's gone.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's that's that's kind of what I'm hearing, which is essentially that the issue was not Afghanistan, where indeed General Jones was was more forward leaning than Obama, but the fact that he's been somewhat resistant to pressure to do anything about Iran.
Wonderful.
Well, we'll talk more about the politics in America and the negotiations with Iran with Phil Giraldi from the American Conservative and Antiwar dot com and the Council for the National Interest, too.
We'll be right back.
All right, so looking back to the show, it's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi from antiwar dot com, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Google them up.
And read all about it.
All right.
So now, Jim Jones, that's what we're talking about.
He was the National Security Advisor, and now he's stepping down.
I don't know if he's all the way gone yet, and he's being replaced.
And you're telling me that this has to do with Iran, Phil?
Well, I'm saying Iran is certainly one of the issues.
I think what we're seeing here is that politicians are more comfortable with other politicians or other people that have the same instincts.
And very often, these generals that wind up in some of these jobs and everything, particularly when they speak frankly about certain issues, which on occasion they do, they have a problem.
They have a problem.
And I think that it's been reported for quite some time that Jones had a communications problem with Obama, of course, who really doesn't know anything about national security or foreign policy.
And obviously, this has morphed into a serious enough problem where there has been talk over the last six months that Jones would sooner or later be walking the plank.
And he's been replaced by this other guy, Donald, Tom Donald.
And this guy is a lawyer.
Does that sound familiar?
He basically has worked in a number of jobs.
He was most recently involved with the Obama campaign.
Before that, he was at Fannie Mae as a lawyer.
Yeah, there you go.
And his wife is on the staff of Joe Biden.
His brother, I believe, or his cousin, I think it's his brother, is on the staff of Joe Biden.
So we have a pattern emerging here of comfort level more than expertise.
So what is a lawyer who has no degrees or no background in foreign policy?
What does he actually know about security and foreign policy?
Well, I would say he might be a quick study.
And he's been working with Jones at the National Security Council for some time.
So he's probably picked a lot of stuff up.
But he doesn't have any expertise in a very professional way, I don't think.
Yeah, and he doesn't sit around reading antiwar.com all night either.
Well, you know, he's probably been trying to call me up, but I haven't received the calls yet.
But anyway, you know, the point is, you know, if you're going to get people in government who have the professional credentials, then by all means do that.
But we see a pattern of this kind of thing where these people become uncomfortable with people who have the good, strong credentials, like how many generals were forced to resign under George Bush because they were telling him things he didn't want to hear.
And to me, this guy is possibly another Sandy Berger coming along, who was Bill Clinton's national security advisor.
Yeah, the guy that let Osama live.
Right.
Well, and also did a number of other things.
He was heavily involved in the bombing of Serbia.
And he later was arrested for stuffing classified documents from the National Archive into his trousers.
So this is a real class act, this guy.
He's still around, of course, and still occasionally appears on television.
Well, so wait a minute.
What about the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
And I see this guy, Hugh Shelton, who says, oh, man, Rumsfeld lied us into war and he marginalized the Joint Chiefs in violation of the Goldwater Act and used Tommy Franks to Buffalo everybody into this evil thing.
And yet he didn't say anything or do anything about it at the time.
He just sat there waiting to get promoted.
And I wonder, are these kooks, what are they telling Obama about airstrikes against Iran?
Are they saying, no, man, we don't want to do this?
Are they saying, yeah, we're the tough guys, we can do whatever we want?
Because that's basically the choice in their minds, apparently.
Well, you get different stories about what's going on in the Pentagon and defense policy in general.
It's pretty clear that Gates does not want, Bobby Gates, the Secretary of Defense, does not want another war at this time against Iran.
I think that's quite clear.
And I think it's also quite clear Obama doesn't want it either.
But you get idiots like the Air Force people who are, see, the Air Force is the service, I'm probably going to insult a lot of people when I say this, but the Air Force is the American fighting service that never does any fighting.
And it basically bombs people from 30,000 feet and blows up cities and things like that.
But no Air Force people get hurt as a result.
But they always want to get into the game.
And they see this as an opportunity to take on Iran and bomb the hell out of Iran.
So there are people in the Air Force, no doubt about it, that would like to attack Iran, because then they could use all those nice shiny airplanes they have.
But at the Pentagon itself, there's a great deal of apprehension in getting involved against Iran.
I think a lot of people know quite clearly that this is going to be something that is not going to be a cakewalk in any sense.
It's going to be a lot tougher than Iraq was and a lot tougher than Afghanistan.
Probably tougher than the two of them combined.
Well, it seems like, I mean, not that politicians would do even the reasonable thing for their own interest to say their own ass, it doesn't seem like.
But why don't they just go ahead and start telling a little bit of the truth about Iran and particularly about their nuclear program, maybe their role in Iraq, that kind of thing, and work things out.
If they really don't want a war, then why not make it easier for them to explain why they haven't started the war yet, once they've accepted all the false premises, which is that Persia's taking over the world if we don't stop them.
Well, I think the simple answer to that is there are a lot of other constituencies that want a war with Iran, or want at least a state of tension.
Let's put it that way.
Certainly the whole military-industrial complex and the long war advocates rely on a constant state of tension to keep the budgets going, to keep their livelihoods going.
And then, of course, there's the Israel lobby, which genuinely would like to have us attack Iran.
And they're extremely powerful in Congress and also with the White House.
And the oil guys like having the price of oil nice and high, too.
Well, I think the oil guys actually would like to get into Iran and cut a slice of it.
There are a lot of different ways to look at that.
But the oil guys, I think, have pretty consistently been against war in the Middle East.
And everybody says it's about oil.
Well, it's not necessarily about oil in a simplistic way.
It's about oil in that these places would be of no interest whatsoever if they didn't have oil.
Yeah.
I remember reading about Lloyd Benson, the former senator, telling Ronald Reagan, oh, no, telling George Bush, Sr., no, no, no, do not occupy Saudi Arabia.
Do not intervene there, man.
I've been there.
You know, he's an old Texas oil interest guy.
Right, right.
And he's saying, look, man, I'm from Aramco and I'm here to help you.
Don't do this.
That's right.
That's right.
So I don't know, man.
It seems to me, though, that with the politicians, the president's always crying wolf about Iran, but then still not doing anything about it makes them look worse than if they would just say, look at me.
I actually made the deal and relieve that tension, you know, and for their own selfish purposes.
But maybe I'm not good at electoral politics.
Well, you know, but what bothers me is that if they if they, you know, you remember the Gulf of Tonkin and you know how that happened.
Oh, yeah.
And I'm scared that there's going to be just some kind of incident that escalates into something and that suddenly is going to be rally around the flag again.
You know, those horrible Iranians, they hate women.
They do this.
They do that, you know, and it's going to be the same crap that we've heard so many times before.
And it's going to be basically people who have blinkers on.
They don't realize that there are consequences to all this stuff and that America is in a complete mess right now because we basically mismanaged our foreign policy for the last 10 years and we've mismanaged other things, too.
But but the foreign policy has driven a lot of this, the fear of terrorism, the fear of the unknown and that kind of thing.
And and you see this thing playing out again and again and again.
And nobody has the courage except Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich and a few others to stand up and say this is nonsense.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny.
I get emails sometimes that say, man, you're right.
There's not a I actually got one of these recently.
There's not an Islam of fascist caliphate, huh?
They're really the only independent from America, Muslim states in the world, majority Muslim states in the world, as you know, are Syria and Iran.
Basically, the rest of them are all run by American satraps, you know, so it's useful to point out like just, you know, ninth grade geography or third grade, hopefully, you know, that there is no power in Africa.
The Europeans are basically a NATO satellite.
You know, they're part of our empire in the West and whatever like that.
We're on much better terms anyway with the Russians and the Chinese and have been for decades now.
And there's no other power on Earth.
You know, that's it.
There are no threats to us.
It's not a dangerous planet after all.
Everything's fine.
If only people would just stop being afraid.
There's nobody who's against us, really.
Right.
So anyway, there you go.
You hear that?
I said that.
And then the CIA expert guy said that that's right.
Everybody there.
There's no danger.
That's right.
Yeah, you can sleep tonight.
There you go.
Thanks, Phil.
OK, Scott.