All right, Shell, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Phil Giraldi.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation, the pro-America foreign policy lobby in DC.
And of course, he's a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine and a regular contributor at antiwar.com/Giraldi.
The latest one there is In the Land of the Blind, all about the cyber wars.
And I think it's the latest at the American Conservative here.
Certainly a very important one is called Torture and the CIA.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going, Phil?
Fine, Scott, how are you doing?
I'm doing good.
Good to have you back.
Good.
So before we get to either of these, I wanted to ask you what you think about all the heroin in Afghanistan and who all is running it and what all directions is it going?
And is there any, you know, real political agenda behind that kind of thing?
Who all's making money?
Well, obviously, you know, we have a situation where we've created a an extremely corrupt government and the corrupt government runs on drug money, apart from what it's getting from us in direct payments.
But the a lot of the Karzai family has been implicated in the drug trafficking and many other government ministers also.
So it's it's the usual situation where we've we've taken a country that had no drug problem.
The Taliban had basically stopped drug trafficking and we've we've restored free enterprise, as it were.
Mm hmm.
And now, do you know how many bazillion dollars a year this is, how much heroin this is?
Is this a supply for all of Russia and Europe or how does this work?
Really?
Well, it basically goes through Central Asia into Russia and from Russia.
It's the Russian mafia that's involved.
And the distribution from there goes to Western Europe and and less so to the United States.
Basically, heroin is is a much bigger problem in Russia and in Western Europe.
And so in terms of size, I mean, I've seen estimates as much as Afghanistan's real economy is about 20 billion dollars.
And I've seen estimates that the drug economy is about the same size.
Well, it's funny, you know, they talk all about the State Department reconstruction and how this is all going to complement the counterinsurgency doctrine is we're going to build them up a civilization because they just never did have one before or some kind of thing.
And yet our drug war, inflating the prices of heroin, makes it where in the price system, no other crop stands a chance.
Just have no ability to turn their what agriculture they can have with the security situation as it is.
And those kinds of long term investments, nobody's even going to waste their time selling food when they can, you know, get hard cash money for poppy crops.
Yeah, well, that's it.
This is the free enterprise solution that we've introduced.
We've made it so that the farmers can only survive by growing poppies.
Yeah.
And now what about Turkey?
Isn't that like the big hub where it all gets distributed from?
There have been a lot of allegations of that, usually by people who don't like the Turks.
But I think that actually most of the drug distribution goes through Russia or are former parts of the Soviet Union.
Turkey does indeed have a long tradition of being at the the European end of the the heroin route.
And they do have a significant share of it.
But I think most of it actually, I think most most people would agree that it goes through Russia.
All right, well, now, anyway, I want to talk about torture because you wrote this great thing for the American conservative called Torture and the CIA.
What agenda lies behind the latest defense of enhanced interrogation?
And this is about this guy, Jose Rodriguez.
And you say, you know him in here, huh?
Yeah, he was a classmate of mine at CIA.
So I've known him for since 1976.
Yeah, there you go.
And now he wrote this book, Hard Measures, How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9-11 Saved American Lives.
And it's basically just a big defense of the entire torture program.
You read the book, what'd you make of it?
Yeah, well, I read the book and I've read a number of reviews of it and I watched him.
He's appeared on television on Hannity, he's appeared on O'Reilly, he's appeared in the usual places that you would expect defending the book.
The fact is, you know, that the ultimate argument comes down to there are two arguments here.
Should a country like ours ever engage in torture under any circumstances on moral or ethical grounds?
And the second question, which is, of course, the question that the O'Reilly's of the world like to raise is, does it work?
And of course, essentially what what he's what they're all saying is that, well, there's no you know, we don't know about the ethical considerations, but we do have a judgment from the Justice Department of George W.
Bush telling us that all this stuff was OK.
So we figured it was legal.
And yes, indeed, it worked.
We got a number of terrorists to tell us all kinds of things after we torture them.
Both of those both those assumptions are are are, you know, the assumptions that can be challenged.
The the Justice Department memo doesn't doesn't necessarily cancel out the Geneva Conventions, the International Convention on Torture, all of these things the U.S. is signatory to.
And also people that are a lot more expert interrogations than I am would tell you that torture indeed does not work.
Right.
I mean, that's the whole thing is you cite Ali Soufan in here.
He was the FBI agent and his whole thing was, look, I'll give you a cookie or a sip of water.
I guess before they had taken back in the days when bin Laden was in Sudan, they had given his head money coordinator, accountant guy offered to give his wife surgery if he would flip.
And, you know, bin Laden wouldn't pay for something like that, but the American taxpayers sure would.
And so they just made a deal.
And this guy spilled all kinds of guts and gave up all kinds of secrets.
And that's the way you traditionally interrogate somebody.
I mean, I don't know how traditional it is, you know, pirates like this, but it seems like it makes sense the way Soufan describes what worked for him before the CIA took it over from him.
Yeah, I mean, the whole point is that I think everybody who has has been involved in interrogations would tell you that if you physically pressure somebody, they're going to tell you things.
But the things they'll tell you will be basically to to stop the pain, to stop the problem that they're having with you.
And it doesn't mean that they're going to tell you the truth.
And in fact, I think there is considerable evidence that a lot of these interrogations produced more this misdirection in terms of evidence that was being provided than actual evidence of anything.
So there's apparently a one of the reasons we think that Rodriguez's book has come out now is that apparently the Senate subcommittee that deals with these kinds of issues is going to issue a report very soon, which will conclude that, in fact, harsh interrogation methods were a failure.
Well, I guess it all depends on by whose measure, because if it's Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby, then it worked great because they got all kinds of lies about Iraq out of the tortured and that's what they were really after.
In fact, I'm trying to remember who did the best journalism on this, where they went and I think it was McClatchy newspapers.
Actually, it may have been John Landay and McClatchy newspapers that that show that it was all the highest incidents of torture was right when they needed the lies about Iraq the most right before the war and when they needed even more right after the war and they were under fire for not having weapons and they needed even more bogus intelligence come out about ties to al Qaeda.
And that was when they really put the screws to these guys.
Yeah, that's right.
I think I recall that report.
And of course, I mean, if you're being waterboarded one hundred and thirty seven times a year, you'd be willing to tell them anything about drones that can go across the Atlantic, about, you know, biological and chemical labs, about the plans to devise a nuclear weapon.
You'd be willing to say anything.
I certainly would be.
Well, if they keep saying, tell us about Saddam, it's not going to take you very long to figure out, hey, these guys really want to hear about Saddam, maybe I should make up some stuff about him.
Yeah, that's what it comes down to.
Sure.
Yeah, well, and I'm sure, too, that Dick Cheney knew exactly what he was doing and it worked just fine.
Thanks.
He was torturing lies that he needed out of people.
He couldn't just make it up.
He had to torture it out of somebody and say, see, he said it.
Yeah, well, Dick has never been proven wrong.
All right.
It's the radio show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking Phil Giraldi.
And when we get back, we're going to talk about his new article in The Land of the Blind about the cyber wars at home and abroad.
Very good one.
Very important stuff.
All right, then, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm on the line with Phil Giraldi here once again.
His latest piece at Antiwar.com is called In the Land of the Blind.
And you go through quite a few news stories, at least three or four news stories from just last week.
About major advances in cyber wars at home and abroad, it looks like, Phil, huh?
Yeah, I mean, obviously we have a government that's dedicated to to being prepared uniquely among any country in the world, cyber warfare, to have a whole Pentagon division and a secret plan.
They call it Plan X, which is how they're going to dominate the cyber sector in case of any kind of conflict.
And the interesting thing, of course, is that at the same time we get Hillary Clinton traveling around internationally and defending freedom of the Internet.
Now, the biggest offender against Internet freedom is the United States, which is basically has the ability to shut down the entire Internet.
And indeed, the president back in March signed this natural resources executive order, which says that he can declare a state of emergency and he can take over all natural resources in the country, which include the Internet.
And there's been talk about the government creating a kill switch, which would just turn it turn it straight off.
So you have a lot of funny things going on.
I mean, the government saying one thing out of one side of its mouth and another thing out of the other side of its mouth.
And then we learned last week also that the government has already been engaged in cyber warfare against Iran.
Right now, hold the Iran thing for just a second there.
On the just cyber war here at home thing, they've been whining and complaining about how at any time we're going to be cyber attacked in a cyber Pearl Harbor attack by some surprise enemy that we're not expecting it from for, I don't know, 15 years or more since the Internet was invented.
Oh, boo hoo.
The Pentagon needs another trillion dollars.
They can protect us from the cyber war.
But really, as you're saying, it's all going toward offense.
They just like, you know, with the Navy, they call it defense.
It's just it's not.
Yeah, right.
It's a you know, the problem is, you know, that the kind of language they use, they're acting like, oh, we're just we're just going to be defending ourselves.
But when you actually read what they're planning on doing, their defense consists of offense and they can they can offensively knock out every computer and every server and take control of everything.
And in the meanwhile, you know, develop these technologies that allow them to to basically monitor what people are doing and people are seeing.
It's just incredible.
Yeah.
And then, yeah, you're right about this national defense resources preparedness, this executive orders update of an old Bill Clinton executive order, and then I guess they really go back to Eisenhower or whatever.
But in any case, yeah.
And this newest one, I guess somewhere in there, I don't know the exact language of it, but it it says in there somewhere, actually, you know what?
It doesn't need to be an emergency after all.
The president could just do these kinds of things if he wants any national resource, meaning any airport, any highway, any seaport, any ship at any seaport, any plane at any airport, anything that they want, I guess, you know, your truck and my skateboard and everything.
Yeah, at the time, there was a lot of complaining because it even includes agricultural products that that the president could take over farms.
Right.
And can script outright, can script all doctors and scientists and other, you know, specialized, especially qualified professionals from different fields.
Yeah.
And nobody, nobody is even squeaking about it.
It's just amazing.
And, you know, you watch this kind of stuff going on and you wonder what's wrong with us.
I mean, we're we free American citizens are looking at these evolving situations which are are designed to take away our liberties and to and to give them to the government to decide what we can have.
And and nobody's saying anything.
Yeah.
What I wonder is, what are they waiting for?
You know, when I read Executive Order one two nine one nine, it was probably nineteen ninety six and I expected it to go down sometime soon or maybe as soon as the dotcom bubble crashes.
And then, you know, why wouldn't they create a totalitarian fascist dictatorship if they could seize every business, seize every resource and and, you know, walk around lording it over everybody, a boot on a human face forever and all that.
If power is not a means, it's the end.
Like I learned in my Orwell, what are they waiting for at this point?
Especially it's not like the American people are going to oppose them, especially if you give them a Republican president to do it.
You know, well, what they're doing is they're doing it incrementally.
So it doesn't look like it's happening.
And of course it is happening.
And some of the other articles I referred to in that piece were about what the FBI is doing in terms of its access to to Internet communications and to social networking and that sort of thing.
I mean, there's not going to be any any kind of realm of privacy for American citizens anywhere very soon.
Right.
Well, and part of it, too, is just the technology where, you know, they want to put some kind of RFID transponder chip in every product so you don't need one in your hand.
It's in your clothes, it's in your socks, you know, and just where all all physical things talk to each other in the new Internet of Things and where this is only I don't know how many years out, but not too far out.
And then it just comes down to the NSA hiring an Israeli company to write the software to make sense of it all, complete with a backdoor for them, of course.
And, you know, that's it's on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're certainly pushing for legislation that will give them a backdoor on all of this stuff.
And you're quite right.
The thing is that most modern technologies, even down to toasters and things like that, will have a chip in them and they will be things that can be picked up by access through the through the Internet server.
And if you have a backdoor to it, you've got, you know, they'll know what you do from the time you go to bed until the time you get up and what you do all day.
It's just amazing.
Well, yeah, and the thing of it is, too, in fact, I think you're one of the quoted sources in this piece that Christopher, Christopher Ketchum did for Counterpunch on the he called it a table of contents, really this thing main core that the Homeland Security has.
And basically it makes the FBI file obsolete in the sense that they just type in your name and they hit enter and it compiles your brand new file right there.
When you hit enter, it sucks up everything that every major private and every government database has about you.
And it assembles it all right there from all the different agencies all together.
And or at least it's supposed to.
That's how it's supposed to work.
And so at that point, you really have it where, you know, not just do they know what you're doing every moment of every day, but they actually have your record, your permanent file from kindergarten on, you know, and including everything, all of your medical, everything, all of anything in any kind of database about you anywhere, you know, that they successfully hacked into, which is pretty much all of them anyway.
Right.
And that's the real danger is that they don't even need, you know, Hoover's men snooping around, following you everywhere you go.
All you got to do is just hit a couple of keystrokes and it all just is assembled in front of them in an instant.
Yeah, this is this grew out of the Pentagon programs that were under under George Bush with Rumsfeld, where it was going to be, you know, all all surveillance all the time and collecting all available information on everybody in the United States.
And and I guess a good chunk of the rest of the world.
It was that that program was discredited at the time because of the invasion of privacy.
But now it's back.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They just moved it over to the NSA.
Right.
All right.
Now, talk to us about this cyber war against Iran.
You say in here in this article again, it's a Phil Giraldi in the land of the blind at antiwar dot com, antiwar.com/Giraldi.
You say in here, there's just no question.
This is an act of war.
What America has been doing to the Iranians with these computer worms and things.
Sure.
It's an act of war by the definition of the Pentagon.
I'm the Pentagon is saying that anybody coming into our country and messing around with our computer systems, it's an act of war and we're going to have cyber war against them.
And we're doing exactly the same thing with the Iranians without a declaration of war, without the Iranians having having seriously threatened us in any way.
This is absolutely astonishing.
And again, this story broke last week.
And now, of course, there's a big stink in Washington about who leaked it.
Right.
Yeah.
But the fact is that the story appears to be true and it's an act of war and nobody is saying anything.
Well, I mean, come on, who leaked it?
The president himself leaked it.
It's a David Sanger story.
This was not, you know, some hard hitting reporter found this out.
This guy receives leaks.
That's all he is, is a receiver of such stories from on high only, you know.
Yeah, but what I'm referring to is nobody that's saying anything is I know the White House is not going to say anything, but why isn't a single congressman, even a Ron Paul or someone saying this president needs to be impeached?
Yeah.
You know, well, I want to hear that.
Yeah, of course.
Well, he should be impeached for his actions.
His third day in power, he started a war with Pakistan.
So, you know, he should have been impeached right then and there.
Yes.
But yeah, I don't know if Ron Paul had a statement about the about the cyber war thing, but it is a big deal.
And of course, it's ironical that the president himself is the one who's again pushing the Iran and even making nuclear weapons line at the same time is coming out.
He's waging such a war against their program.
Yeah.
What a hypocrite, this guy.
All right.
Well, anyway, we're out of time.
Thanks so much for your time, Phil.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
That's Phil Giraldi, everybody.
He's the executive director at the Council for the National Interest Foundation and writes for the American Conservative Magazine and Antiwar.com.
