Well, folks, I think I'd really like to go ahead and continue that conversation where it left off with Gareth Porter with our next guest, Phil Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer, contributing editor to the American Conservative magazine, and writes Smoke and Mirrors for Antiwar.com.
You can also find him at the Huffington Post and The National Interest.
And Phil, welcome back to the show.
Hi, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
Now, Gareth was basically finishing up his point by saying this is a real victory for the guys in the intelligence community who have been looking for an opportunity to stand up to Dick Cheney ever since he basically coerced them into that most horrible NIE of October 2002, and that they've finally given him his comeuppance.
What do you say to that?
I think that's maybe a bit strong.
I think that in this case, the facts basically spoke for themselves, and I'm sure there are a lot of people in the intelligence community that are absolutely delighted at this outcome.
But again, if we walk too far down that road, we get down the conspiracy theory that the intelligence community was out to get the vice president and the president, and I don't think that's really relevant in this case.
I think this is a case where clear examination and analysis of information resulted in a product, which obviously Mr. Cheney is not going to like, but I think the product stands by itself.
So, in this case, the truth is Dick Cheney's worst enemy.
Well, the truth has probably always been Dick Cheney's worst enemy.
But in this case, it's something that I think we in the anti-war community have a lot to be proud about, because we kept the feet to the fire on this issue, and I think the facts in this case have derailed the war, which is really something to be happy about.
Well, now, you first reported in the American Conservative, in your deep background column, on the October 9th edition of the American Conservative magazine, October 9th of 2006, that a national intelligence estimate was basically ready and being suppressed by Dick Cheney more than a year ago.
And it's interesting, all this talk, I guess this is sort of an aside, all this talk in the media about when did Bush know, did he know right before the Annapolis Conference or right after it, or this and that, this national intelligence estimate has been ready for more than a year, saying that Iran didn't have an active nuclear weapons program, am I wrong?
Well, that's partially true.
I think the national intelligence estimate that we're seeing now has gone through a number of incarnations, and it's my understanding that this summer, significant new information that supported the view that Iran did not have a nuclear weapons program was developed.
And as a result, the current version we're seeing has more or less been on the table since the summer.
And it also would be clear to me that the White House would be in the loop on all this stuff.
And particularly Cheney was monitoring it through some of his staff people, and for the president to kind of be in denial on this is astonishing, particularly as even the Israeli sources are saying that he briefed the Israeli prime minister on it at a time before he's now claiming he knew anything about it.
Right, that's what Seymour Hersh said on TV the other day.
So that's one contradiction, and I cannot imagine that the president was not...
You know, this stuff doesn't occur in a vacuum.
The director of national intelligence is preparing a report that everybody's watching and waiting for, and the White House would have complete access to this process as it were going along.
So this kind of denial on the part of the president is rather difficult to understand.
Now this new information that came about this summer, this is all Brady material, or does any of this implicate them in formerly having a nuclear weapons program, because the best I can tell, the only evidence that they ever had a nuclear weapons program was all that bogus garbage about the smoking laptop and the green salt and all that.
Well, as far as I can tell, that laptop information did exist, but it was hypothetical, apparently, that they were looking at engineering options for the missiles that they had and they were looking at various different things.
Apparently the information on the laptop links up with a lot of other commentary that indicates that that was about the same time that they really decided they were going to give up the program.
So then is there any other information that you know of that says that they did actually have a weapons program?
Well, they had one at a hypothetical level.
I mean, they obviously had no capabilities back in 2003, but were thinking about heading in that direction.
Well, it's unfortunate, Phil, that this morning, because of timing and so forth, Dr. Prather's last.
He's coming on next after you.
And I know his position is, well, basically that the Iranians make sense when they say that the information in the smoking laptop that says that they were going to use this green salt, this UF6 or whatever it is to enrich uranium, that they produced tons of that stuff under IAEA inspection eyeballs and sensors out in the open, and that any idea that they would have some secret green salt program just doesn't really make any sense when they're doing it out in front of everybody.
Yeah, well, he's definitely the expert on technical aspects, but I believe also on the laptop there was information relating to the feasibility of mounting warheads.
And that, of course, would be something quite different.
But nevertheless, I mean, the fact is that these were all kinds of pie in the sky, conjectural type things, and there really was no capability, there was no program, as far as I can tell.
Well, see, that's very important, because the spin from this NIE is kind of half what you and I would try to make out of it, which is, see, they don't have a nuclear weapons program, they haven't had one for at least four years, et cetera, like that, and yet the other half of the spin that we're hearing, you know, especially from the war party and on TV and from the White House and so forth, is that, see, they had a nuclear weapons program, and Bush is saying what's to stop them from restarting their secret nuclear weapons program.
Yeah, well, see, that's the whole issue right now.
Obviously, they have no program, they have not had a program for a long time, but what Bush and the neocons are arguing at the moment is that they might have the intention to restart the program.
Well, you know, that's pretty weak stuff.
That is not a basis for going to war on, and I think that the neocons have realized that.
That's why they're actually also attacking the intelligence and the intelligence product on this, and I think they're wrong about that, because it, certainly from what I'm hearing in Washington, is that this product was very, very, very carefully analyzed and researched, and there was a strong consensus on the conclusions, and they're barking up the wrong tree on this one.
Now, you mentioned the conspiracy theory, and I suppose you're referring to the pages of Commentary magazine and the National Review where Norman Podhoretz and his look-alikes and wannabes are claiming that this is a CIA conspiracy to thwart the benevolent intentions of the vice president.
That's exactly what they're saying.
They're saying, this, of course, has been around since, oh, God, since John Bolton and others in some years, Porter Goss, too, before he became director of the agency, that the agency was, and the rest of the intelligence community, was out to get the president.
You know, that's a convenient line to trot out when you don't have anything else to argue.
Well, now, there have been reports about a lot of tensions between, you know, the kind of old permanent government, the typical government establishment, and the neocons.
I remember, I guess right after the war, there was an article in Salon by Anonymous called the State Department's Extreme Makeover.
Oh, my God, you wouldn't believe it.
David Woomser and John Bolton came in here and turned Foggy Bottom upside down, and, you know, it seems like that was kind of the first shots in the run-up to the Iraq War, the first shots being fired in this battle between the intelligence community and the State Department types and the neocons.
Is that not right?
Well, I think that a lot of that is quite true.
I mean, there's certainly many people in the government who have a strong antipathy towards what the Bush administration has been doing, and the neocons within the government have certainly tried to root these people out at State Department, at CIA, and in other places too.
But the bottom line on this is, is the product that we're seeing now, this National Intelligence Testament, a reliable and credible product, or is it not?
And even if people don't like the Bush administration, they can't fake the information.
And I'm not a neoconjugate at doing that, but, you know, other people are not.
And so the thing is that the information is what we should be looking at, not what the politics behind it, in a hypothetical sense, might be.
Well, and I really like Norman Pothorod's argument that the CIA was wrong about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction.
Why should we believe them?
Yeah, that's right.
That comes from a pretty credible source there.
The less said about that, the better.
Yeah, all right.
Well, hey, now, I know you speak a bunch of languages.
Are any of them Farsi?
No, I do not speak Farsi.
I have Turkish.
That's my one Middle Eastern language.
I see.
Because I want to get as many people to translate that vanish from the page of time quote as I can on the record here.
Yeah.
I think you should maybe, I know you've had Trita Parsi on your show already, and he has researched the matter very thoroughly.
And he says in his own kind of dry, humorous way that the actual quotation, when you track it down, had none of the elements that have been attributed to it.
Right, yeah, that's what Juan Cole says, too.
And in fact, he says, you know, there's no such idiom in Farsi as wiping something off a map.
That's American colloquialism.
Right, yes.
Kind of funny there.
Not just a misinterpretation, but an outright mistranslation is what that is.
Obviously.
I mean, all of this stuff is deliberate.
You go to places like Memory, where Mrs. Wormser works, heads, and you'll find that the information that's translated and how it's presented and all this stuff winds up on the desk of congressmen is very much, you know, suspect in a lot of ways.
It's as the neocons are so good at cherry-picked and kind of worked over to create a certain impression.
Well, you know, I think you just really hit a nail on the head there with winding up on the desk of congressmen.
This is really the problem.
You know, I was asking myself the hypothetical question of why was Ron Paul right about Iran all along, and, you know, he is a brilliant guy, but it's not because he's brilliant, it's because he reads antiwar.com.
And so he has access to all this great stuff, and yet the average congressman doesn't.
Do we need to move all to D.C. and just hassle these congressmen every day like the neocons do?
Well, the problem with congressmen is they have so much stuff coming across their desk that they don't read it.
And a lot of what they wind up looking at in a gisted version is stuff that their staffers have picked out or things that staffers want to bring to their attention.
So they're not really gluttons for information, and they don't get a lot of good information.
You get a lot of lobbying groups like AIPAC and others that are very, very active in making sure that this information gets to the congressmen, and that's why they've been, to a certain extent, why they've been so successful.
All right, now, I have here the deep background from the December 3rd issue of the American Conservative magazine, obviously this section written before the NIE came out, but you basically rehearse the fact that they're still fighting over what it's going to say, they've rejected three different drafts so far because the conclusions are not strong enough, and then you say, nevertheless, the White House continues to want a document that can be used to support military action should that become necessary.
A leading analyst working on the report believes that no matter what the outcome, the probability that there will be a war with Iran in the next nine months is 85%.
So now a couple of things there.
Is this Iran NIE close enough to the product that they wanted that they'll be able to use it anyway, or has the truth really won out?
And then secondly, this is someone who was working on the NIE that you talked to that puts chances at war at 85% no matter what?
Is that right?
Yeah, well, there are two different issues there.
First of all, it's clear that the intelligence community and the analysts stuck by their guns on this, and they didn't budge, and they didn't turn this into a document that's going to be actionable for the White House, so that's the first issue.
Now, the second issue is the analyst's comment that he felt that it was 85% likely that we would have a war with Iran.
He was making a political assessment.
He was saying, when I spoke to this gentleman, he was basically saying to me that in his mind, what he had been hearing from the White House and from White House people who had been monitoring this process was essentially that the political decision had pretty much been made that Iran would be confronted militarily.
So that's what he was basing his assessment on.
Now, see, this is the thing, too.
We always get to this point in the conversation where then I'm not really sure where to go.
How are you supposed to bomb Iran?
You can't have a regime change.
You can't invade and occupy the place.
Nobody's talking about invading and occupying the place.
You can't really justify a war based on their nuclear facilities or really even on bombs killing our guys in Iraq.
I guess you could try to start bombing them and hope it escalates, but then what?
I mean, what are these people even thinking?
Well, I think they're still thinking.
I mean, if I were a neocon, God knows I wouldn't want that, wish that on anyone, but if I were a neocon, I'd be thinking in terms of how to change the options on this debate.
And what they're going to try to do is to say that, well, the intelligence is faulty.
That's going to be their front line on this.
And they're basically going to say that the intelligence is flat out wrong and that Iran still represents a threat, and they are going to try to manipulate the situation that way.
And what they're hoping for probably at this point is for Iran to do something really stupid and to let an incident with our U.S. forces happen perhaps in the Persian Gulf, with the Navy, and allow that to be a casus belli that can be escalated into a much bigger conflict.
I think the neocons still believe that Iran has to be bombed back into a pre-technological social level to end the threat that it represents, and that's what they would like to see happen.
Well, and as you've said on this show before, once you start bombing them, it's only going to provoke retaliation.
The war is not going to be over in a week when we say, okay, we're done bombing you.
Do you think their plan ultimately is to go ahead and have a regional war where America eventually does end up attempting to occupy Persia?
I don't think that even they consider that the U.S. has the resources to do that.
I think basically, realistically, what the neocons would want is a directed bombing campaign that would set back the technological and economic abilities of Iran to undertake anything like a nuclear program, any kind of nuclear program.
They don't even want, as Pothart and others have made clear, they don't even want Iran to be enriching uranium, which Iran has a perfect right to do according to the United Nations.
So that's what they would like to see.
And the question of where a bombing campaign goes ultimately, of course, is the big question.
As you and I have discussed it, Iran doesn't have to stop when we say stop, and they can unleash their terrorism resources, their ability to interject oil supplies.
They can do a lot of things.
But the neocons don't think that far ahead.
They see a near-term objective, and that's what they want to do.
Now your most recent article for Antiwar.com is about the Annapolis Conference, and I think basically the gist of it is that this wasn't so much about any peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians as much as it was getting all the Sunni Arab states on board in a coalition against the Iranians.
Yeah, I think that basically the Bush administration and the Israelis would very much like to create a united front of Arab states that are legitimately concerned about Iranian intentions, about Iranian dominance in the area.
On a certain level, that makes a certain amount of sense.
And on other levels, the Arabs know very well that they have to live with their big neighbor, and they see it in a much more nuanced version than we see it.
Yeah, they've got to be thinking further ahead than Stephen Adler and the guys.
Yeah, that's right.
They don't have to live there.
That's exactly true.
It's interesting, you do know Iraq did not attend that conference in Annapolis.
Right.
And the Iranians weren't invited either, right?
They're a puppet state, the government of which we overthrew to bring it more in line with our views of where their foreign policy should be, and something like this where they exerted a tremendous amount of pressure to get all the Arabs lined up, the one country we're occupying.
We couldn't manage to do that.
Right, well, they're closest with the Iranians, something we were reminded of the other day when McTawd al-Sadr came out and said, George Bush, get the hell out of my country, and called out Dawah and the scary, and said, why are you signing a pact with the Americans inviting them to occupy our country forever, you Iranian bastards, you know?
Well, that shows you, I mean, you know, the dynamic of somebody who shares a border with somebody else is a whole lot different than looking at it from 4000 miles away.
Yeah.
And you know, what's so bad about this, too, is it's all so foreseeable.
I mean, if you go and Google Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution on antiwar.com, you can find articles going back to the 1990s about how there's this group scary that's tied to Iran that refuses American aid and can't wait for Saddam to be overthrown.
Yeah, that's right.
You know, the politics of the region are extremely convoluted, and it's something that we never understood and still don't understand.
And the people who are looking to the actual diminution of the level of violence in some parts of Iraq, because of the surge, and seeing that as an answer are just not looking at history.
Well, what do you think is the long term situation in Iraq, intended to be anyway, just retreat our troops because they can't keep these troop levels forever, they got to reduce the troop levels, put some guys back in the bases, and then are they planning on letting some sort of multi ethnic government work out?
Or are they just going to keep the Sunnis and the Shia Arabs fighting among each other as long as they can or what?
I would think that the policy is, and again, I'm not really an expert on this, and I'm not really that well wired into it, but I would think the only thing they're hoping for now is incremental change, where they can get, for example, they're pushing very hard to get an agreement on the oil resources, that's a national agreement, as opposed to a Kurdish region agreement.
And things like that.
So you're looking, I think, at incremental change, insofar as they can manage to make that happen.
On the military side, I don't see a long term solution.
Are we supposed to leave 130,000 US troops there forever?
I don't know.
My answer would be to, let's come home tomorrow.
Yeah, it seems like we're arming and backing the former Sunni insurgency, but even these guys seem to be pretty honest to the reporters when they talk to them and say, oh yeah, we're taking your money and your guns now, but we're just waiting for the day when the war with the Shia militia starts back up.
That's right, and the thing is, any time we back one group, we're alienating two other groups.
And so there are a lot of good reasons for not doing this sort of thing.
There's a short term gain, but the short term gain is something these people are picking up on for their own interests, not because of our interests.
Right, alright, well I sure appreciate your time today.
Jerry Philip Giraldi from Antiwar.com, The Huffington Post, and the American Conservative Magazine.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
