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3.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton and this is Anti-War Radio.
Hi Rachelle, welcome to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
Today is the first day of my new regular spot here on KPFK.
I've done some fill-in spots in the past for others on their shows and now this is my show, Anti-War Radio.
Every Friday at 6.30 here on KPFK, 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, 98.7 FM in Santa Barbara and of course streaming live around the world at kpfk.org.
Our guest on the show today is Philip Giraldi, he's a former CIA and DIA officer.
He's the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine and regular columnist for Anti-War.com.
You can find all his archives there at original.antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Phil, how are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott, how about you?
I'm doing great, I really appreciate you joining us on the show tonight.
Thanks.
And especially, I know it's late on the East Coast, so I really appreciate that.
Alright, so the subject at issue is what I think is the most important thing to cover on this show and that is Iran's nuclear program and most important because even as four or five wars rage, this is one that hasn't started yet, not in earnest anyway, and while there's still a chance to stop it, it seems like we ought to be doing our best to debunk the lies justifying it.
So Iran's nuclear program, if you watch TV, everybody says it's a nuclear weapons program and something's got to be done about it at some point, and you wrote an article recently for antiwar.com about the new National Intelligence Estimate being produced on Iran's nuclear program, and you point out in there that it's overdue, that it's taking some extended period of time for the National Intelligence Council to get this new National Intelligence Estimate produced.
So what's the holdup?
Well, Scott, as you know, but your audience may not, the National Intelligence Estimate is the ultimate document produced by the intelligence community in terms of giving a viewpoint on a major national or international issue, and in this case, the issue at question is the status of Iran's nuclear program.
Now we all know they have a nuclear program.
They claim it's for producing electricity.
There are a lot of people who suspect it's actually a cover for a program to produce a weapon.
Now why this document is getting hung up is basically the fact that the analysts who are looking at all the information about the nuclear program are not convinced that there is any definitive information that suggests that it actually is a weapons program, and the administration, on the other hand, would like to have a document come out of this that in essence is weasel-worded in its language so that the administration will be able to do whatever it wants in terms of a response.
So the analysts themselves are not willing to commit that there's any nuclear program in Iran other than the civilian safeguarded program that everybody already knows about.
Yeah, I think the fact is that anybody who looks at the information that's out there and clearly whatever information the intelligence community has, the information seems to suggest that there is no hard evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
Well, but now you say the administration wants it weasel-worded enough to justify whatever it is that they want to do, but certainly Bush and Cheney would have preferred that the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 left enough wiggle room for their lies to fit through.
Why would the CIA go ahead and go along with Barack Obama making the same demand that they refused that came from George Bush and Dick Cheney just three years ago?
Well, you know, the political situation has shifted since then, but I mean the fact was back in 2007 the intelligence community was responding to the fact that they had really messed up on the 2002 Iraq National Intelligence Estimate which led to a war.
So they were being very cautious in their estimates, and Dick Cheney reportedly was very, very angry with them at the result, and we see from I think George Bush's book, which I must admit I haven't read, but it appears that George Bush was not that eager to go to war against Iran either.
Well, and I wonder why not, since it was Dick Cheney's idea, and look at how well Iraq worked out for him.
He gets to take the blame for a policy he let somebody else decide, I guess.
Yeah, that's pretty much true.
I mean obviously Bush had been burned pretty severely in terms of what was going on in Iraq at that time, and the question becomes do we need another war, and Bush was actually someone who was pushing back against both the Israelis and against Dick Cheney.
Well, you mentioned the Israelis there.
What role do they have in the writing up of a National Intelligence Estimate?
Well, they don't really have any role except in terms of the political influence that they're exerting against the administration itself to come up with a document that would be something that could be used to justify a military option.
And in fact the administration keeps saying over and over again that all options are on the table with the implication that military is something that they're considering.
I don't seriously think that Barack Obama personally wants to enter into another war at this point, and I'm sure in fact he does not.
But the fact is many people in Washington believe that the White House to a certain extent is subject to other forces that means that the options that they can exercise are sort of limited.
Well, you know, I guess, geez, about a year ago Mark Hosenbaugh at Newsweek reported that the Israelis and the Germans were in a big fight with the CIA analysts about Iran's nuclear program and what it represented.
Can you give us any detail about what that fight was about?
I guess you're going to say that the CIA was right.
Well, not necessarily.
The fact was that the CIA was being cautious in terms of its assessments and was basically saying that the evidence that was being produced by the Israelis and Germans, some of which came from laptops and other sources that have since proven to be, shall we say, fabricated, the CIA was saying that the evidence was not solid.
And the Israelis have been saying for years and years and years, every time they turn around they say six more months and Iran will have a nuclear weapon.
Well, it's been about five years that they've been saying that, and I think the current estimates, even by the US intelligence community, are that any possible weapon, even if the Iranians step up their program, is many years down the road.
Well, it is interesting, isn't it, how the national intelligence estimate from three years ago that took all the wind out of Dick Cheney's sail, it did have as its premise that, well, they used to have a nuclear weapons program up until 2003, but then, as you say, that seems to all, well, I guess I should put this in the form of a question, do you know of any evidence that the CIA was relying on that, other than the alleged studies, the so-called smoking laptop documents?
Well, the CIA obviously had a number of sources that it was using to make the determination that the Iranians had abandoned their program.
The laptop was only one source, and that, as I say, proved to be a source that it appears was fabricated, but the fact was they had other, shall we say, human agents, which they referred to as human, that were corroborating the fact that the program had been abandoned.
Well, I guess what I was wondering about was the evidence that it ever existed.
Well, yeah, I think the evidence that it existed is somewhat sketchy, too, and I think, in fact, if you go back to the 2007 NIE, you'll see that basically what they were saying was that there was an exploratory program.
There never was really a program in terms of that really got off the ground.
All right, well, so now we come to the demands of the United States and the so-called international community, in other words, the United States, about what Iran is to do with their nuclear program, and it seems like the language is always very messy when you hear these diplomats on TV, even when the various secretaries of state, Condoleezza Rice or Hillary Clinton, the language is always kind of messy about what exactly it is that they're demanding.
They're supposed to prove that they're not making nuclear weapons.
Under the Bush years, it was assumed that that meant they may not enrich uranium.
There was a UN resolution that says you may not enrich uranium, but then Obama and Hillary Clinton have come in and they haven't done anything about that UN resolution, but they offered a deal to Iran last fall that basically implicitly, I think, accepted the fact of Iranian nuclear enrichment.
They just said, let's work out a deal so that you don't enrich any of your 3.6% U-235 up to 20% U-235.
We'll have the Russians and the French do that.
We can talk more about the wrangling over the diplomacy, but it does seem, doesn't it, that there was a time anyway, perhaps a year ago, maybe that's changed, that the Obama administration seemed to be, if not outright saying so, they were implicitly accepting the legitimacy of Iran enriching uranium at Natanz.
Well, the problem here is that they keep shifting the goalposts, and any country that is a signatory to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty is entitled to enrich uranium for production of electricity, and so Iran does have that right, and the Bush administration and the Obama administration have both conceded that.
Now, what they then do is they create other conditions, and the Israelis, for example, are insisting that Iran have no capability to enrich uranium because they believe that once you have that capability, you can go up to enrich it to weapons grade.
Now, that of course is not technically true, because there's a huge difference between 3.6 and the 90% that you need to produce a weapon.
So that's kind of one red herring type issue.
And the other issue that we've been hearing a lot lately is they don't want Iran to have what they call a breakout capability.
Now, breakout capability means that you have all of the technological capabilities and resources to produce a weapon if you decide to do so.
There are a bunch of countries in the Middle East that have breakout capability.
Turkey, for example, does.
Egypt does.
Saudi Arabia does.
And none of them are being subject to the same scrutiny as Iran, because Iran, obviously, we are looking at a political dimension that is coming into play.
Well, you know, I think from the point of view of just the average TV-informed American on this issue, they might not be aware that there is a regime of international inspection in Iran.
It's not just that, well, they admit there's a nuclear program and we're suspicious about it.
They have IAEA inspectors on site there as part of this safeguards agreement.
Can you explain how the safeguards work and what it is?
Does the IAEA say that they're making nuclear bombs over there?
Well, IAEA, because they're part of the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, is empowered with inspecting all of Iran's nuclear facilities.
Now, how the people who are critics of this program get around that, they say, well, of course, yeah, they are inspecting it, but there's a secret program.
But the fact is that a secret program is a little bit hard to believe, because to have a major nuclear program in a country like Iran with inspectors on the ground basically means that the secret program would be very difficult to manage, apart from anything else.
So the facilities in Iran are constantly being inspected.
The nuclear inspectors from the United Nations have noted in a number of cases where there have been omissions or there have been oversights in terms of how Iran has been reporting information.
But apart from that, there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon.
And I think, as Dr. Gordon Prather used to write at antiwar.com over and over, the key phrase in all of the IAEA's inspection is whether or not they have continued to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material.
Here's all the uranium we know they got.
Is it all still sitting there in the same pile or being used?
Does the math all add up?
Is the accounting all there?
Is the uranium all there?
And they keep verifying that, yeah, it's all there.
They have not diverted it to anything else.
We'd know if they did.
Yeah, but you would notice even in that argument, that gets turned on its head by the people who want to go to war with Iran.
They say, okay, but Iran has, what is it, I think, 3,000 kilograms of enriched uranium, which is enough to make a weapon, if they were to enrich it up to weapons grade.
So the point is, they're always capable of making something look like a worst-case scenario.
That, of course, is deliberately what they're trying to do.
Well, in a sense, it's also arbitrary, this breakout capability.
It seems like if they had a bunch of centrifuges that weren't working, they were just sitting there, and they had a bunch of uranium ore in the ground, and they had the ability, a factory where they could go through the process of making the uranium ore into hexafluoride gas for introduction into the centrifuges.
Well, that's breakout capability, too, with all the uranium sitting there in the ground still, unmined.
Why not?
That's right.
You can go back as far as you want to.
The point is, what we're seeing here, this is a political argument, and essentially that the people who are hostile to Iran for one reason or another, both in the United States and primarily in Israel, are capable of coming up with any kind of argument and shifting their arguments and coming up with an argument that works.
We've talked about this before, and you know that I'm not a particular friend of the Iranian regime or government in any way, but the fact is that if we expect to come to any kind of solution in any part of the world in terms of these problems, we have to deal with people in a reasonable way and assume that they are going to be presenting arguments that we can argue against and try to resolve the issues, but we're not doing that.
Well, you know, you talk about moving the goalposts around.
It seems like in that swap offer that Obama gave the Iranians last year, the way I remember it was he said, all right, you guys give your 3.6% enriched uranium to the Russians.
They'll enrich them up to 20% and then transport them to France, and they'll make them into fuel rods for you, and then we'll give you your uranium back.
And the Iranians said, hey, that sounds fine, except how about you give us the fuel rods at the same time we're giving you the uranium.
That way we're not trusting the French to give us back like in the promise, and that was the deal breaker.
Throw up our hands.
Oh, that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he just wants to blow up the world.
You just can't deal with him, and yet it seemed like a pretty reasonable offer, and in fact it was so reasonable that the Turks and the Brazilians a few months later came up with pretty much the same deal, right?
Yeah, that's absolutely correct.
The fact was that the Turks came up with the same deal, where they would provide the enrichment, and the Brazilians were going to be guarantors of the agreement, and it was turned down, and again, they came up with another argument.
The argument in this case was that, okay, you take this uranium, and you put it over there, and it gets enriched, and so on and so forth.
Well, uranium is a commodity.
It's fungible.
That means that if you take that uranium away, then you have other uranium that's still back in Iran that's available as a resource to turn into a weapon.
So it's like a no-win situation, like the old argument, when did you stop beating your wife?
The Iranians really can't win in terms of this argument, because the argument keeps shifting.
Well, and the other thing is too, right, is that regardless of whether one is a big fan of the Ayatollah Khomeini, it seems consensus throughout Iran that they want a nuclear program, and they are determined to keep it, and they're not giving up enrichment for the United States or anybody.
Well, it's an issue of national pride.
Both people on the left of the political equation in Iran, and on the right, agree that Iran has a right to this, and indeed they do, by international agreements.
Well, and so, I guess, where does that lead us?
It seems like if Obama and Hillary Clinton want the kudos for solving this problem, other than war, if they really don't want war, then why don't they just work it out?
Instead, we have this P5 plus 1 set of talks that are supposed to happen here pretty soon, and all the announcements in the papers are, this is never going to work, nobody at the State Department believes the Iranians can be dealt with, it's all a big joke, what are they waiting for?
Why not start dropping the bombs now then?
If they don't want to solve it diplomatically, and they don't want a war, then what are they doing, Phil?
Well, I suspect there is not a real policy in terms of the administration on how to deal with this issue.
I think they have a number of ideas, and they keep playing with the ideas, and I think the expectation is that this situation won't blow up on them.
And, of course, the joker in the deck is the Israelis.
I mean, the Israelis, if they decide that they want to escalate this situation into a conflict situation, they could stage an attack on Iran using the resources they have, with the expectation that the United States would be drawn into it.
So this is a very dangerous situation, a very dangerous way of playing the game.
I would like to see the Obama administration come out with a very flat statement saying that we believe in negotiations, and we're not going to allow the Israelis to stage an attack that would preempt negotiations.
But we haven't heard that, have we?
No, not at all.
In fact, when Netanyahu said last week, hey, to Joe Biden, he said, you guys need to explicitly threaten Iran militarily more often, and make them feel that and whatever, then Robert Gates gave a response and said, no, we believe in our own policy of using diplomacy to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program.
So there he is.
He puts the big lie of the proof of somehow the existence of this thing right in the same statement where he's saying, chill Netanyahu, we'll bomb them in a year or two or something.
Sure.
I mean, because Robert Gates acting for the administration could as easily have said, we will not support an Israeli military attack on Iran under current conditions.
But he didn't.
So the fact is that the White House, the administration, Congress, they run scared of the Israeli lobby on this issue, and they're afraid of taking a position which they know quite well would be much more servicing of the U.S. national interest.
Sorry, I keep forgetting to say, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi.
He's executive director of the Council for the National Interest, former CIA officer and a regular contributor to Antiwar.com.
And now something that you've been writing about for years and years, Phil, is the covert war against Iran.
There's been a lot of good journalism about this from a lot of different people, Andrew Coburn, Seymour Hersh, and others like that come to mind.
To what degree is the United States, either the CIA or the Joint Special Operations Command, active inside Iran, and what are they doing?
Well, I suspect the answer to how active they are inside Iran would be that they're active through surrogates.
And I think they have been supportive of Arab separatists in southern Iran and also the separatists along the border with Pakistan, the Jindala.
Basically, I guess the concept is that these are my enemies, enemies are my friends, and the United States and Special Operations Command certainly have been giving support to these groups.
And what are they doing?
Well, they're killing people.
They're going inside Iran.
They're setting off bombs.
I think there have been some recent bombings in mosques.
There have been some recent bombings against security forces, against the Revolutionary Guards.
These obviously are acts that are being carried out by the militants or the insurgents themselves, but the fact is I would suspect that the United States and Israel are providing intelligence and they're providing material support.
Well, isn't it funny sometimes when the Mujahideen Al-Qaq, which is still considered by the State Department to be a terrorist group on their official list of terrorist groups, their front men at the National Council for Resistance in Iran regularly give press conferences in Washington, D.C., leveling false accusations, usually disproven in a single day, but consistently accusing the Iranians of secretly developing nuclear weapons, these guys.
And taken seriously by Fox News the whole time.
Yeah, well these guys are not only taken seriously there, they also appear in think tanks in Washington like the American Enterprise Institute and they're featured speakers and so on and so forth.
This is very reminiscent of what happened in Iraq where basically you had Chalabi and his supporters feeding information into the U.S. system through their allies and through their associates and this information was very much used to make the case for war against Saddam Hussein.
So, you know, this is a tried and proven technique of introducing false information and the false information is then used to create a policy.
Well, you know, in all this talk I haven't really asked you the devil's advocate position here, never mind the bogus nuclear scam, but is Iran a threat to the United States at all?
Or what's the hubbub here?
Who in America wants a war with Iran?
Well, there are a lot of neoconservatives obviously, they're still quite prominent both in the resurgent Republican Party and also there are a lot of them that are quite influential with the Democrats.
And they certainly want it, the Israeli lobby wants it.
Most Americans who are poorly informed anyway probably think Iran is some kind of threat and probably think in some basic way that a military option to defeat them might not be a bad idea.
But I think anybody, the informed public doesn't believe really that Iran represents any kind of threat.
You know, I personally believe that Iran might have a nuclear weapons program, but the fact is that would an underground nuclear program producing a crude weapon maybe two or three years down the road be a threat against the United States?
Well, I don't think so.
I think threats are containable as was demonstrated during the Cold War, was demonstrated in dealing with China and demonstrated even now dealing with North Korea.
So the fact is I think this is, again, it comes down to a political equation.
The Israeli lobby and their supporters in the media and the U.S. government would like to see a war against Iran and they're kind of playing their cards on Iran being a threat.
I just don't see it.
Well, what about the Pentagon?
They're on the side of reason or not on this one?
Well, I think from what I've been hearing lately is the Pentagon is disinclined to any more of this kind of talk.
There are divisions in the Pentagon.
I have also heard the Air Force, for example, which would be the primary force attacking Iran, which has not played a major role in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
The generals over there want to get their game going, and so they're probably more inclined towards a war against Iran than the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be.
But the consensus within the Joint Chiefs is that this is just a bad idea.
It's a war that could easily escalate far beyond a limited conflict, and it could cause incredible damage to the United States.
So no, the Pentagon is, I think, pretty much against it.
Well, that's good.
There are still 50,000 combat forces in Iraq, more than 100,000, and far more than that if you include all of NATO and Afghanistan right there on either side of Iran.
It doesn't seem like they have the kind of Navy that could approach our coast, but they sure can fight American assets and forces inside their neighboring countries, couldn't they?
Yeah, and they have Chinese-made cruise missiles that are very effective.
I mean, it's not inconceivable that an American aircraft carrier could be hit and even sunk.
You know, war is not a zero-sum game.
Once you start it, nobody can say it's over.
And the Iranians would be very capable of engaging in warfare in various irregular ways, on various fronts, against American interests in Afghanistan.
How hard would it be to cut that supply line up through Pakistan if you really put some effort and time and money into it?
Well, and who even knows to what extent the Iranian intelligence services have infiltrated the government and say, Azerbaijan or something.
Who knows where they could have a coup d'état or undo American interests in the region where we're not even looking.
That's right, and they certainly have a great deal of influence inside Iraq.
And the supply line up from Kuwait to our remaining 50,000 or 60,000 troops in Iraq would be in peril.
I mean, they could really be cut off.
You know, there are a lot of things, and just think of oil prices, what would happen to oil prices if a couple of tankers were sunk in the Straits of Hormuz.
There are a lot of options that the Iranians have to make very serious trouble, and I think the Pentagon is aware of that.
Well, and it seems like Amin al-Zawahiri would have every Muslim believe that America's war is against Islam, that we don't discriminate, that we'll kill you as long as you're Muslim.
We'll either support your tortured dictator or we'll outright invade your country.
And it seems like a war against Iran would really prove that case, seeing how they're run by Shiite ayatollahs who themselves are enemies of Zawahiri.
It would just as much prove that he's right about us, I guess.
Well, that's right.
I mean, another war against another Muslim country would be a very convincing argument that the United States is out to do regime change, to do however you want to refer to it.
I mean, religion change, is that the objective here?
Who knows?
But it's very clear the United States is on very thin ice here, and there are other issues in the region.
You have a very unstable nuclear-armed Pakistan that has missiles that are capable of hitting targets from Western Europe all the way over to Far East Asia.
Well, let's take a stick and beat on that hornet's nest.
Maybe that'll be our next interview here, Phil.
Thanks.
Exactly.
Everybody, that's Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer, executive director of the Council for the National Interest, contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine, and columnist for AntiWar.com.
Thank you very much for your time, sir.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, everybody, Tom Morello and the Axis of Justice coming up next.
You can hear the entire Pacifica evening news at kpfa.org.
This has been AntiWar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Check out the website, antiwar.com.
See you next Friday at 6.30.
