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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Appreciate y'all joining us today.
Our next guest is Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer, contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine and regular contributor to antiwar.com.
He's also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How's things?
Everything's fine, Scott.
All right, that's good.
Well, so I got bad news for you.
I don't know if you saw it.
It's breaking brand new.
Landay and Strobel, along with Nancy Yousef from McClatchy Newspapers, U.S. dispatches aircraft carrier to waters near Libya.
Oh, man.
So I guess it's on, huh?
Well, I hope not.
You know, it's completely the wrong response.
The Libyans have announced that they want to do this job by themselves and they should be left to do it by themselves.
They have no reason to trust the United States.
And it's just going to make everything worse.
You know, I'm trying hard.
I'm using my imagination.
I'm trying to think of what's going on at the National Security Council meeting here.
I understand that they got to try to look like the good guy somehow.
You know, they just can't leave it alone entirely.
They've got to try to spin it like America's Superman, of course, or something.
But really, they want to get involved in North Africa.
I mean, come on.
What are they, smoking PCP up there?
Well, I think we have a weak president who has been accused by the Republicans of being a wimp on security and national defense type issues.
And he's going to do, you know, a Bill Clinton, do something stupid to show that it's not the case.
And I'm afraid that that's what we're going to see.
I think we'll see probably some kind of limited action from the air to to neutralize Gaddafi's helicopters and planes possibly or something like that.
But, you know, if if this thing has to be done, it has to be done in the context of the United Nations.
And it has to be done by by others than the United States in terms of providing the the hardware.
It's just another crazy, crazy thing.
It just never it never is.
They never seem to hit bottom on their capability to come up with idiotic ideas.
Meanwhile, I've been spending all morning here collecting different evidences from all around the interweb of the United States and the United Kingdom, hooking the Libyan regime up with weapons.
Since 2004, we've been trying our best to turn Gaddafi into a Mubarak.
So now the people of Libya are supposed to believe that we're on their side against Gaddafi.
Yeah, I think, you know, I was I was I was trying to go back in my own memory.
I think that when George W. Bush normalized relations with Gaddafi, one of the big questions that was raised very early on was, would Gaddafi be able to buy U.S. weapons?
And as I recall, the answer was yes.
Yeah, right.
What's in it for Lockheed?
That's always the question.
Yeah.
And I think there were some qualifications in terms of what he'd be able to buy.
I mean, probably the usual thing about nothing that would threaten Israel.
But, you know, it was it was generally conceded that, yes, he would be able to buy U.S. weapons.
I know in the British media, there's been a lot of coverage of the fact that Gaddafi has all kinds of British defense equipment and also equipment that was sold to his police forces.
So it's it's been covered in your in Europe, but not covered here.
Yeah.
And, you know, I mean, I'm I don't want anybody to get the sentiment wrong here.
I'm perfectly happy to have America, quote unquote, normalized relationships with any other country in the world.
We had a very antagonistic one and all sanctions and terrorist lists and all these things against Libya for a long time.
But just because you lift all that doesn't mean you have to now have the national government going around brokering arms deals in order to back up the dictator that just finished being, you know, the Hitler of North Africa for the last twenty five years.
Well, I mean, you know, Gaddafi has a funny hat and he has that dress that he wears and he has what that bodyguard of 40 women.
So he's a little bit of a strange guy.
And but you know what he has, he has a lot of oil and gas.
And, you know, Bush certainly was not shy about linking up with that kind of thing.
And and selling U.S. arms to a guy like Gaddafi probably was was a no brainer as far as he was concerned.
OK, now tell me that worst case scenario here.
They're still not sending in the Marines, right?
Maybe some airstrikes or something horrible like that.
I cannot imagine that they will put boots on the ground, as the expression goes, because it would once you put them on the ground, it would create a whole different chemistry.
And also it would be harder to get them out.
The British have sent in some of their special forces, as I believe the French have to to get some of their citizens out of the desert areas where they're engaged in energy mining.
And, you know, beyond that, I think it would be absolute insanity to put any kind of Western forces.
You know, it was I read a stupid article yesterday.
Somebody was saying, oh, well, the Turks are the naturals for this.
And, you know, the Turks were the imperial power controlling Libya before the Italians took over.
So there's a lot of blood, bad blood.
What you have to do is go and look at the movie Lawrence of Arabia to see how Turks and Arabs basically feel about each other.
And, you know, it's just people just come up with these ideas out of nowhere.
And they think just because it's an idea that nobody has has the sense to shoot down immediately, it must be a good idea.
Right.
Were you the one who told me about the proposal at the very beginning of the terror war to bring the Mongolians in to help in Afghanistan?
No, I didn't hear that one, but that's a good one.
Somebody brought that up on the show.
Again, there's no history there we need to be concerned about.
Would they be mounted on horses with compound bows or how would it work?
I have no idea.
No, they'd probably all be driving the latest in whatever Lockheed's putting out again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so, yeah, this this really worries me that, you know, as you say, it's all, you know, domestic politics.
The Democrats, as always, as Bill Chris Matthews says, the Republicans are the daddy party and the Democrats are the mommy party.
So Barack Obama being mommy has to, you know, try really hard to be tough sometimes.
And so he's got to move to the right on every single thing.
He couldn't possibly let North Africa go up and revolt without doing something, meaning kill somebody in order to prove what a tough guy he is.
Yeah, I think that's what we're going to see play out here.
I just hope that he has some adult supervision there in the National Security Council, although I don't actually see where it might be.
And the fact is, somebody should talk him out of this.
It's OK if you're going to put the if you're going to put this aircraft carrier anchored somewhere off of Volta or something like jet on a contingency basis.
Yeah, I can see that.
But the fact is that that he's saber rattling and there are constant comments coming out of both him and Hillary Clinton about how Gaddafi should step down, Gaddafi should do this and how, you know, so on and so forth should happen.
Why don't they keep their mouths shut once in a while and let let the Europeans take the lead on this?
Let the let the let the United Nations take the lead on this.
We don't have to be in the middle of this, particularly as nobody there trusts us.
Yeah, well, and hell, let the Libyans take the lead on it.
They're doing fine.
I mean, I'm sorry.
A couple of thousand of them have died and the guy's a monster.
Nobody's saying that.
But last I read, they've taken every town but Tripoli, including the next biggest town just outside of town.
And they've got a huge presence.
The rebels do inside Tripoli and Gaddafi's hours are numbered here.
They don't need us.
Yeah, that's that's the point.
And ultimately, any solution that's imposed from outside or that in any way is influenced from outside is going to be a bad solution.
The Libyans ultimately, just like the Egyptians and Tunisians, have to work out what kind of government they're going to have.
They have to work out what kind of political parties are going to have.
And if we start going in and imposing conditions, I read an interview with Madeleine Albright.
Madeleine Albright says that the National Endowment for Democracy is already at work in Egypt.
And she said this.
This interview was with who is that leftist woman, Rachel Maddow.
She told Rachel Maddow while Mubarak was still there, they hadn't even moved him out yet.
And she was saying, oh, yes, National Endowment for Democracy is already there working on this.
Oh, my God.
In Egypt or in Libya?
Egypt.
Ah.
Well, and this was after the revolt started or before that, after the revolt started, but before Mubarak actually left.
So here she's being interviewed by Rachel Maddow.
And she's saying, yes, I'm proud.
She's the head of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Democratic half of it.
And she was saying, yes, I'm proud of the fact that the National Endowment for Democracy is already there working on these issues of building democracy.
Amazing.
Well, you know, don't worry.
That quote will be next brought up by whoever the next dictator of Egypt is to prove that anyone opposed his dictatorship is on the payroll of the CIA and, you know, the American imperialists.
So good going there, Democrats.
Absolutely.
Justin Romano had a great article like that, the difference between the revolution in Egypt and Iran.
In Egypt, it's apparent they're overthrowing the American puppet.
In Iran, the tyrants can always point at the opposition and claim that they're CIA, credibly.
Whereas Mubarak tried that and everybody laughed in his face.
He's the one who's CIA and they all knew it.
Yeah, we'll be right back.
It's Phil Giraldi from antiwar.com.
All right, y'all, it's antiwar radio.
Welcome back to it.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi, former CIA officer, now an antiwar.com writer.
And we're talking about the dangerous prospect of the Democrats intervening in the heroic anti-government revolution going on against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
And yet there's huge news from all over the region.
Phil, you got major uprisings in Iraq that were put down with force on Friday.
A million something people in the streets all across the country of Yemen over the weekend as well.
And, of course, in Bahrain, the protests are still going strong.
The Egyptians are still coming out, pushing hard.
And it seems like there are a few kind of large conclusions we can come to so far.
One is the obviousness of the American empire's hypocrisy when it talks about all this democracy and self-determination is just so glaringly obvious to at least the other billions of people in the world, if not the American people on this one.
Also, it seems like al-Qaeda is being made for the whole world to see as a giant joke and not the future of anything.
They wanted revolutions, but they didn't want them like this at all.
I wondered if you could perhaps address that a little bit.
And then also, I think another major conclusion that hasn't been lost on pretty much anybody, even in the mainstream media, is that if the people of Egypt and the people of Libya can overthrow their governments, then Saudi Arabia very well could be next.
So I guess I'll just turn it over to you.
And you tell me what you think about those things.
Well, I'll start with the last one first.
The Saudi Arabia is probably, relatively speaking, pretty secure.
The government there has been taking a lot of steps.
They were reading the tea leaves about three, four years ago when they had a lot of internal problems.
And I think they've taken steps to, I hate to say democratize, but at least spread the plebiscite out a bit.
I think the other places you talk about, however, are all in danger.
I read, I saw today that Oman, in fact, was having demonstrations, which were suppressed.
Yeah, so it's, you know, this is very much a tsunami.
This is like what happened in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And we screwed that up royally by getting in there, again, with the National Endowment for Democracy and all these other NGOs to tell them how to set themselves up and how to run these things.
And what we did was we screwed everything up for 20 years, and they're only coming out of it now.
And the fact is, you know, this is going to be the same thing, and I bet you it's going to be the same scenario playing out.
And it's going to be, I think, a catastrophe in terms of U.S. policy.
We're just going to make all these places so confusing that nobody will know which way they're going, and nobody will be able to fix them.
You know, it seems to be, it's like a genetic defect that Americans have.
We have to meddle with these things, and we have to try to make them work in a way that we can comprehend.
But if you've ever traveled in these countries, you know perfectly well they don't work in the way that we can comprehend.
And we should just leave them be in terms of what they are.
Well, I guess the Saudi regime certainly has going for them the fact of all that oil.
And like we saw, you know, the King of Jordan, for example, he had a bunch of demonstrations.
He immediately sacked his government and made a bunch of promises, this kind of thing.
In Kuwait and in Saudi Arabia, they just raised everybody's welfare payment immediately.
In Bahrain, I guess they tried that, and it didn't really work.
But at least, you know, those countries have the ability, they have the kind of budget where they can just say, here, how many thousand dollars a month do y'all need to not overthrow us?
Because there's billions rolling in.
Yeah, that's true.
But, you know, the fact is the winds of change are going to blow there, too.
And it's just a question of when.
I was in Kuwait back a few years ago, and Kuwait is experimenting very much with the local deliberative councils and everything within Kuwait.
But of course, you know, basically these structures benefit the people who are already the insiders on the system.
And there are a lot of people who are perpetual outsiders, the way the Gulf states are structured in terms of their labor, in terms of the population, where people come from and how they work, and so on and so forth.
So there are a lot of issues.
These people are going to change, too.
But I think that we're going to see rapid change in a lot of these other places.
And quite frankly, I would welcome it.
Well, now, what about Ahmad al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden?
How do you think they're dealing with this?
Well, I think your assessment was correct.
I think that basically the radicalized small fringe of Muslims who were frustrated by what they were seeing in their own countries, marginalized to such a point that they were willing to become terrorists and support this kind of movement, are basically becoming fewer and fewer.
And there are a lot of reasons for that, partially because there's been a very effective police action against al-Qaeda in many countries, but also because, you know, there are perceptions that things are changing.
And I think when a lot of these countries change, then people who would be radicalized otherwise are going to be able to have another outlet, which is basically to work in politics in their own country.
Right.
I mean, after all, it is the 21st century.
Who wants to live like Osama wants to live?
Nobody.
They might be against the very same tortured dictatorship as him, but that doesn't mean they want to do it his way.
Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, as I suspect, I think I've told you before, I think he's dead anyway.
But I think his movement will lose its charisma as a result of of change sweeping the entire Arab world.
I did read something about, I mean, also, I hear he put out a piece basically trying to spin it like this was all what he was.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying, guys, or whatever.
And how it just rang so ridiculous.
You know what I mean?
It'd be like, you know, George Bush trying to take credit for the revolution in Egypt.
It's just laughable, you know, George Bush bring about the revolution in Egypt.
Well, I guess he kind of did, but I don't think he meant it to go like this.
Yeah, well, some of those neocons say, yeah, see, this is our democratic revolution, just like we want it.
Only just skipped the part about how this happened, how it's blowback against their favorite puppets, how these revolutions aren't in Syria and Iran, the countries where they wanted.
I want to see a picture of the two Kagan's, Kimberly and Robert, walking down the street in Cairo and figuring out how to bring them democracy.
That'll be that'll be the next step.
Well, and don't forget fat neck, Fred, either.
He's a real tough guy.
That's right.
All three of them.
Yeah.
All right.
Now tell me, I'm sorry, because we only got maybe a couple of minutes here, but can you tell me a little bit about this Raymond Davis thing?
What you know and what we got wrong in that interview last week?
Well, I you know, I knew right from the beginning that this guy what this guy was doing, because I was a CIA case officer for nearly an army case officer for nearly 20 years.
Case officers are people involved in meetings with agents are only armed when somebody is meeting an agent that is considered dangerous.
So this guy was either meeting an agent himself who was considered to be dangerous or potentially dangerous, or he was providing surveillance or providing protection for a meeting by someone else from the Pakistan station who was meeting an agent like that.
So that's I knew it right from the beginning as soon as I started reading the descriptions and about this van providing cover, you know, from a distance.
And so that's exactly how the CIA would structure that kind of meeting.
So this guy either was meeting an agent or he was he was covering a meeting where someone else was meeting an agent.
And the danger of this guy for the CIA, why they're screaming so hard to get him out of jail, is that this guy probably knows all about all the operations that the CIA is running in Pakistan, without the permission of the Pakistani Intelligence Service.
These are called unilateral operations.
So if this guy decides, hey, they're going to hang me, and starts telling the tale of everything he knows, it's going to be catastrophic.
They will never see the end of it.
And, you know, that's basically it.
And the guy does not have diplomatic cover.
I had that kind of cover, technical administrative, a couple times overseas.
And you only have very limited cover and very limited protection.
And the protection only applies if you're off doing consular business, which this guy would have a real tough time making a case for.
So, you know, it's he's not a diplomat.
If you're a diplomat in the country, you're accredited to the foreign ministry.
They put you on a diplomatic list.
And in an embassy of maybe 100 people, maybe there will be 10 diplomats.
Everybody else has a more limited role and has a more limited protection in terms of what's provided.
And so now there's this article in the Telegraph that says that he was basically the acting head of the CIA in Pakistan, that the station chief got recalled or something happened to him.
And so now this guy was the boss there.
Well, it's you know, that's possible, but I don't believe it.
I would believe I believe I'm correct in saying that Pakistan is a very large station.
And this guy is not a trained case officer.
He's a special ops guy.
So he would be involved in security.
He'd be involved in a lot of stuff.
And he could even be eating meeting agents and that kind of thing.
But the fact is, he's not a case officer.
So I don't believe that he could have been even acting as chief of station.
Right.
Although from the point of view of the NSC, he might as well be Obama for all the secrets he knows in their custody.
Absolutely.
I mean, the danger is that this guy knows a lot.
And the U.S. obviously has been acting fast and loose in Pakistan in terms of running operations without clearing these operations with the Pakistanis.
That's what you do in every country as a CIA.
So you try to run your own operation.
But the downside is, if you're caught, you're really burned.
You've burned yourself, you've burned the local station, and you've burned the whole cooperative relationship that you have with the local intelligence services.
Well, Dick Armitage told Musharraf, the dictator of Pakistan after 9-11, that you're going to do everything we say.
We're going to bomb you back to the Stone Age.
So it makes sense why they're saying, OK, fine, we'll wage the civil war for you.
Fine.
You can have your CIA and your Blackwater and your Joint Special Operations Command running around killing people with robots and whatever it is you do.
But there's got to be a limit to how much that they can take, you know, for their own domestic political sake.
Like, for example, were they to give up this guy, that would be real trouble.
And so in the case of this particular agent, you know, this could be the complete unraveling of the American and Pakistani relationship in this terror war, for good or ill.
Yeah, it's quite possible.
In fact, a lot of the Pakistani media are saying just that, that if this guy is not prosecuted and is not convicted, that basically the government's going to go down.
Well, all right.
Well, we'll have to leave it there.
Thanks very much for your time, Phil.
I really appreciate it.
OK, Scott.
Thank you.
All right, everybody.
That's Philip Giraldi, former CIA and DIA officer, contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine, contributing writer at Antiwar.com and executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
