For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio here on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
I'm Scott Horton.
Assistant Editor at Anti-War.com and host of the Anti-War Radio Project there.
Appreciate you joining us this evening.
Our guest is Philip Giraldi, regular writer for Anti-War.com and the American Conservative Magazine.
He's also the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation and a former CIA and DIA officer.
Welcome to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Bad news out of Norway.
They say some Islamist group is taking responsibility from a bombing that killed seven people and wounded a few others in Oslo, I guess, late afternoon their time today.
Do you know anything about the group that has supposedly taken responsibility for this thing yet?
Well, I think from the evidence that I saw, it was a Kashmiri group that was claiming credit.
That would be a Pakistani group that's active in Kashmir.
A lot of these groups have affiliates in Western Europe that are more or less legal.
It's tough to say really what their status is, but they have front groups in a lot of European countries.
From what I saw, that's what the group was that was claiming credit.
Why a Kashmiri group would carry out this sort of thing is not clear, and I suspect the claim might not be accurate.
Yeah, it seems suspicious to me.
Just the group Global Jihad or something, I'd never heard of them before at all.
It sounded made up, but you're saying the group exists.
It just doesn't seem likely that they'd be the ones who did this.
Right.
Whether the group really exists, I don't know.
But the fact is it's a group that, judging from the name, has an affiliation with Kashmir and would seem to be Pakistani in origin.
But again, who's to know?
A lot of these groups are to a large extent fictional.
They have a website.
They have an ability to get their message out.
That may not indicate that this group is for real.
We'll know a lot more in the next 24 hours.
Right.
Yeah, it is still just brand new, a breaking story.
And of course, with the mass shooting that went on at the same time, that brings up all other kinds of confusion as to whether these two things are connected, whether it was domestic or who knows what, right?
Well, I think it's clear that they are connected.
The Norwegian police are saying they are connected.
And the death toll, I think, is 17 right now, not 7.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, that at least 10 were killed out at where this youth political activity was going on at a summer camp type thing.
And they're expecting the casualty rate there to go even higher.
So it's a serious incident.
The guy who was arrested, the last wire service account I saw, he's Norwegian, whether he's a convert to Islam.
You know, these are the kinds of jumps that everybody's making to assume that this is an Islamic terrorist thing.
But I recall very distinctly back when Oklahoma City occurred, that was also the same jump that took place, because Oklahoma City had a large number of Muslims and it was assumed that it was a Muslim thing.
But it turned out to be domestic.
I mean, this could be a guy who was really angry about his taxes, or it could be a guy who has some domestic agenda.
There are a lot of, in northern Europe, there are a lot of nationalist groups that are anti-foreign, that have a lot of agendas of their own.
So I wouldn't jump to any conclusions yet.
Yeah.
Well, we saw in Austin, Texas, a crazy person tried to fly his plane into the IRS headquarters.
Yeah, I'd like to do that myself, but unfortunately I would get hurt doing it.
But yeah, I would support that.
All right.
Well, now, here's one thing that I noticed about this this morning watching CNN International.
And that was the lady, you know, everybody's basically assuming this must be an al-Qaeda attack or an attack by somebody like them or something.
And so going, you know, based on that premise, the questioner was asking, you know, the news reader, was asking terrorism expert after terrorism expert on the phone and in the studio, why Norway, could this have anything to do with those Danish cartoons?
And no mention, at least for the first, I don't know, four or five hours of CNN International coverage this morning, no mention whatsoever of Norway's role in the war in Afghanistan going on 10 years and counting now.
Their role in the bombing of Libya right now, which has been apparently a pretty major role in the NATO bombing there.
No mention whatsoever of Norwegian foreign policy.
But, you know, in Denmark, they had that guy who drew those nasty cartoons of Mohammed.
Perhaps that's the motivation for this.
And the conversation went on like that for literally three or four hours this morning, at least, on CNN International before I had to hit the mute button and start the other radio show.
Well, again, they're making the assumption that this is somehow Islamic.
And I would say it's far too early to make that suggestion.
And I think the evidence, if anything goes the other way, if this guy is a Norwegian, there are all kinds of reasons why people do these sorts of things.
And, you know, it's not to in any way mitigate just how awful these things are.
But the fact is that, you know, we're living in a world where people connect in lots of ways and they play with their grievances and they come to awful conclusions about what they can do and so on and so forth.
And it's difficult to get hold of explosives and to get hold of weapons in Norway and Scandinavian countries.
But it's not impossible by any means.
I mean, lots of people hunt there and lots of people do have weapons.
So it's, you know, I would say let's hold off on this.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, maybe it's Norway's foreign policy, but maybe it isn't.
And I would think that when push comes to shove here, we're going to find that it wasn't.
Yeah, well, I guess we'll see.
It just seemed as long as they were speculating out loud, they could add that one in there instead of going to Danish cartoons.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, I don't know by whose stretch of the imagination it could have anything to do with that.
Well, I'm waiting for Hillary Clinton to come out with a definitive comment on what this all means.
Yeah, or Eric Holder on what new law the Norwegians need to pass.
That's right.
We have to lock everyone up until they prove they're innocent.
Right.
Well, and that's really the thing here is no matter who is responsible for this, they can expect a further clamp down on, you know, whatever rights they have left since the war on terror began up there in Norway, right?
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, this is the automatic response of the authorities.
Every time that you have something like this happen, which, you know, this kind of thing happens in a society that's relatively free, where people can go close to a government building or people can, you know, have a weapon or something like that.
And so the solution is to shut down on the freedoms, to make it more difficult for people to do things.
And, you know, I think that's the wrong solution.
The solution is to look at these issues and say basically, you know, as we actually did after Oklahoma City, which was that this was a criminal act carried out by a couple of lunatics.
And basically they were caught.
They were tried in a civilian court.
They were convicted.
And one of them was executed.
I mean, you know, it's the whole tendency in our time is basically to look for quick solutions.
And law enforcement always says that we need more tools.
I mean, they have plenty of tools.
I mean, I'm sure they do in Norway also.
I mean, Norway probably is the Norwegian intelligence and police services are probably have a fairly free hand in terms of doing the things that we would find questionable like tapping phones and looking at mail and so on and so forth.
And yet these things happen.
Right.
All right.
Well, I'd rather change the subject to something now that, you know, we actually know something about and we don't have to just speculate like with this Norway attack today.
Maybe by this time next week we'll have, well, this time tomorrow, like you said, we'll have a lot more information to go off of there.
But let me ask you about the expansion, Phil, of the war on terrorism, as it's called, into Yemen and Somalia.
It's been about, I don't know, a year and a half or so since the New York Times and the Washington Post ran those stories about the covert wars expanding on three continents.
And this is, I guess, our new counterterrorism policy.
We go big into Afghanistan.
But elsewhere they said we're going to apply the scalpel instead of the sledgehammer.
And that's what they call using drones to attack people in Yemen and in Somalia, the scalpel.
And I just wonder whether you think that's a much better method of fighting the war on terrorism than, say, for example, marching into Iraq with 100,000 men, or whether you think it's necessary at all to use these drones to fight in Yemen and Somalia.
Well, you know, my viewpoint, I think, is that I don't think this sort of stuff is really necessary.
But, again, I'm not privy to the intelligence that they're using to justify the attacks.
And if I were, I might have a different viewpoint, but I don't think I would.
Certainly it's less devastating on the local populations to be doing this than to send in the 101st Airborne.
So I would say at least that is probably a better way of looking at it.
But the fact is, I think that the intelligence that they probably have, that they're using to make their attacks, is very often questionable.
And it's the kind of thing that if you go into one of these third-world cultures where everything is tribal and familial at a certain level, you're going to find that there are a lot of adversarial relationships that manifest themselves in terms of people informing on their neighbors if they have some grievance about a goat disappearing.
And this winds up as intelligence and goes to Washington, and suddenly we have a family or a group of terrorists hanging out in this house, which is then demolished by a predator drone.
I think that probably there are a lot of things wrong with doing things this way.
Even if the local governments are looking the other way and letting this kind of thing happen, I can't see where the result we're getting out of it is worth, quite frankly, the diminution of our Constitution in terms of what it requires to go to war and what it requires to do this sort of thing.
Well, they had the great loophole right in getting the puppet governments to invite us to wage war inside their country, sort of like paying off the Laotian princes so that Nixon could have a secret war in Vietnam, outside of Vietnam.
So in Yemen, in Somalia, unlike, say, Libya, but like Pakistan, we have our puppet saying, yeah, go ahead and bomb inside the country, and it seems like probably in the same thing it would have gone for Laos and Cambodia back in the 60s and 70s, is that the people in D.C. say, well, great, we have a carte blanche permission from our local puppet to go ahead and do what we want, and it just somehow completely nullifies the idea that there could be negative consequences from this, as long as we have that permission.
So like here in Yemen, they basically turned this al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from a group with, I don't know, 10 guys in it to a group with 20 in it by bombing them, right?
I mean, they did the cluster bomb attack back in 2009, killed that governor who was trying to basically destroy what was left of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula at the time, angered his son, and just recruited a bunch more people to their cause.
Am I missing something?
Well, the problem is when we go after these groups, we basically give them publicity.
I mean, no publicity is bad publicity, and we're turning them into people that are able to take on the great Satan and defy him.
And sure, we're serving as publicists for them, and they become poster boys of the war on terror, and then, you know, this is exactly what they want, and that's what bin Laden said, you know, in terms of turning himself and his group into the target of the United States actually was something that popularized them.
So yeah, I think it's the wrong policy.
To get the local government to go along is not that hard, especially when you're giving a lot of money.
But the fact is that even there, the local governments tend to sort of conceal the relationship and not openly advocate the attacks.
You know, it's just that I can't see where the gain is worth what the cost is, and it's very clear to me that the U.S. Constitution defines war, and these are acts of war, and we haven't had a legitimate war since, I guess, the Second World War.
You know, it's just like, when is this going to stop?
When are the people in Washington going to pay attention to what the Constitution says?
Well, that'll be the day.
I don't think we're going to wait on that and certainly not hold our breath till then, Phil.
It's Phil Giraldi from the American Conservative Magazine and AntiWar.com.
He's a former CIA and DIA counterterrorism officer.
And tell me, what do you make of the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula?
Is this a giant, massive force of death and destruction headed this way?
Do we need to preemptively nuke the Arabian Peninsula maybe and keep them away from us?
Well, I guess there are some people in Washington who would like to see that.
But I think it's like everything else.
The question has to be, to what extent does this group actually threaten the United States?
And the second question has to be, if this group is in some way threatening the United States, is that because we're over there and doing things to them?
And you have to answer those two questions.
I think that this group obviously may be linked to the shooting at Fort Hood.
And it may be linked to the underwear bomber.
But this is not a sustained effort that's going to bring down our republic or cause serious damage to the United States.
This is a local group.
They don't speak English and travel around in three-piece suits with computers and stuff like that.
And they're not exactly going to be able to get inside our system.
So the whole question becomes, how serious is the threat?
And is the threat only because we're there?
And I think the answer to both of those has to be the threat is not a serious one.
And that, insofar as it's a threat at all, is due to the fact that we're meddling in their politics.
Well, you know how it is, though.
Once we start it and we create an enemy, well, we've got to, even if you're right that we started it and we shouldn't be over there intervening, still we've got to finish killing off this enemy before we quit.
And yet here we are ten years later.
It seems like we're still making more enemies.
Is there any way to just get the last of the bad guys and then quit?
Or we've just got to quit now, and that's what will take care of the bad guys, is our quitting?
Well, I think history tells us that it won't, because, you know, we went into Iraq.
There were no terrorists in Iraq.
Now this is, what, eight years later, and we've spent a trillion dollars.
We've killed 5,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
And now we have a terrorist problem there.
And, you know, it just doesn't go away by doing this sort of thing.
These issues are the, what we call terrorists, are generated by social issues and political issues that are indigenous to that region.
They don't really have a whole lot to do with Washington.
And the more we pretend that we can fix it by sending in soldiers or sending in drones and killing a lot of people, I think in practice this doesn't work, and it's not working in Afghanistan either.
Well, and what about Somalia?
I've got to tell you, I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was surprised to read Jeremy Scahill's piece and talk with him about the extent of the intervention of the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA there running a secret prison in Mogadishu and, I guess, responsible for the payroll of the entire national security agency, they call it, the so-called Somali government, which I guess I was surprised to hear in there it controls an entire 30 square miles of Mogadishu there, but still that's the extent of their government's power there.
You know, did you think that it was already that much intervention going on in Somalia?
I sort of thought the whole thing was being fought by proxy through the African Union, that kind of thing.
Yeah, I was kind of surprised by how extensive this was because I had assumed that most of the CIA action and JSOC action was coming out of Djibouti and places like that, and also a lot of it was exercised by proxy with the African Union and with the rump government there.
But it seems we're propping up the entire structure, and we're propping up the entire structure so we can be fighting this war on terrorism again.
And it's, you know, again, I mean, how insane is this?
I mean, we're fighting people that basically, you know, in some senses were people that we created.
We created this problem.
And if the initial version of al-Shabaab had been in charge in Somalia, it probably would have been a lot better, and the people would have been a lot better off than creating the civil war.
Yes, Cahill really kind of broke down to me about how al-Shabaab was actually the smallest and weakest of the, I think he said, 12 or 13 different factions that had made up the Islamic Courts Union.
And now what we're trying to do is prop up the rest of those factions in the form of that transitional federal government.
That's actually the ICU that we're fighting to reinstall in power.
Oops.
But now the rebels are this one group that used to be down with them and now will not give up.
And it seems to me like even in the Pentagon, I mean, you got the entire war on terror writ small in five years, you know, five and a half years there in Somalia.
There's no way that they can ignore that that whole mess is their fault over there.
Well, they clearly can ignore it.
I mean, it's like everything else.
They figure that they never quite come to grips with the fact that there's always going to be consequences to whatever you do, and the consequences in a place like Somalia, which is basically probably ungovernable, is that essentially you're going to create enemies by supporting whoever you support.
And so the fact is that eventually you're going to wind up with a bad situation that's out of control that you really can't do anything to mitigate.
And that's what we're going to wind up with.
In fact, that's what we're going to wind up with everywhere.
Does anyone seriously suspect that five years down the road Afghanistan is going to be a nice, stable democracy and the people there are going to love the United States or that Iraq is going to be that way or Libya or anywhere else?
It really is hilarious when you put it that way.
Does anybody seriously think and then just give the basic government narrative as to what it is we're fighting for?
It's ridiculous on its face, isn't it?
I think it is.
I mean, it seems at a certain point you have to have a little common sense in all this and say just, you know, these interventions don't work.
And you can do it over and over and over again, and you can modify it a little bit because you think you've learned something from the last intervention that didn't work, but they still don't work.
Well, you know, here's part of it that's not funny to me, and that is the number of Somali-Americans who have gone to Somalia to fight in this job.
And I don't know if there's a particular couple of clerics over there who are really making the case for them or if they're just watching the news or reading the news, they certainly couldn't see America's intervention in Somalia on TV.
But anyway, if they're just deciding to do this themselves, exactly how this is coming about.
But it seems like at this point, now that we know the intervention is even more and worse than before due to scales reporting in the nation there, it seems like it's just a matter of time before a Somali-American angry young male blows up something up there in Minnesota or Wisconsin, or I think it's Minnesota where so many of them live.
Or, you know, I think at least one of these guys, maybe more than one, has actually become a suicide bomber, Phil, in Somalia.
And something like that happens here, and we got a red alert.
We have another 9-11 situation, we got Patriot Act to the 10th power, and probably, you know, I don't know, Petraeus sworn in as dear leader forever or something worse.
Well, you know, that's one side of it.
But I mean, I would probably go out and try to hang a bunch of congressmen who brought these Somalis over to Minneapolis in the first place.
I mean, what were people thinking when, you know, they created these lotteries for visas for the United States?
We didn't go through the old vetting process where people had to come in legally, people had to learn English, they had to have jobs, they had to, you know.
It's like, and then they wonder when they create these enclaves of people who have absolutely no connection with the United States in terms of loyalty or anything else, why they go back home and to become terrorists against them.
Don't even wonder why they're refugees in the first place.
Exactly.
I don't understand any of this stuff.
It's like there are so many people in Congress that just have no connection with reality in terms of, you know, what goes on and what they do and what the consequences are because they're isolated from the consequences of their actions.
And that's what's so bad about our legislative system and our White House also.
I mean, there's just no connection of the people with reality.
And, yeah, crazy.
Why did you bring a whole bunch of Somalis, wind up settling them in Minneapolis, and then, yeah, a lot of the young bucks decide they want to go back and they want to commit terrorist acts against the United States?
It's like, you know, the grapes of wrath.
I mean, why didn't somebody figure this out and why did you do it in the first place?
And, you know, I don't have an answer for any of that.
My wife and I were discussing this today, and I was saying, this is insanity.
Why do we do these things?
And, you know, the funny thing is in Norway and in Scandinavia, where, of course, they have a very permissive asylum policy, a lot of people are going to start questioning that too if it turns out that this terrorist incident was Islamic because, you know, why do you take people in that don't assimilate, that don't particularly want to become part of the culture, and you're doing it for all the wrong reasons, and then you're wondering why you have terrorists.
Yeah, then you go to war against their home country for no reason.
Exactly.
You know, I mean, the thing about Somalia that gets me, for some reason, even though Iraq and Afghanistan both are, you know, helpless third world countries in comparison to the United States, it just really, really bothers me that Somalia is the weakest little crappy place in the whole world.
Here's the most powerful empire ever, and we've been picking on them and picking on them and picking on them since 2002, and it just isn't fair.
You know, here they got, the sun is hot as hell this year, they got a major drought in the horn of Africa, the people of Somalia have a much less chance, the average guy in Somalia has got much less of a chance than somebody in Djibouti or in Kenya or in Ethiopia because their entire system of the division of labor and markets and exchange has been broken down in the last five years, six years of outright war brought to them by the USA.
And it's just mean, it's un-American, I think.
Yeah, well, we create the circumstances where these people are going to hate us, and then ironically we bring them over here as refugees.
I don't get it.
Well, you can see why the conspiracy theorists think it's on purpose, because they just can't imagine the policy is really that stupid, Phil.
Yes, that's true.
I can't imagine it's that stupid, but you're right, it is.
All right, well, we're all out of time.
I want to thank you very much for your time.
Okay, Scott, take care.
All right, everybody, that is Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA counterterrorism officer.
Writes regularly for us at antiwar.com, that's original.antiwar.com/Giraldi.
He's a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine and executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
That's it for Antiwar Radio for tonight.
We appreciate you all tuning in.
We're here every Friday from 630 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 in L.A.
I'm Scott Horton, and all my archives are at antiwar.com/radio.
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