01/24/08 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Our guest today is Philip Giraldi.
He's a former CIA counterterrorism officer, a partner in Canestraro Associates, a contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine, a regular columnist for Antiwar.com.
His column is called Smoke and Mirrors, and he's also a blogger at the Huffington Post.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
Hello, Scott.
Good to have you on here, and if we can start the conversation with your recent blog entry for the Huffington Post, The Return of Dick Cheney.
You're basically telling us here in this article everything that we did not want to hear.
We've all been trying very hard to believe that since the CIA's national intelligence estimate on Iran's nuclear program came out at the end of November, that the idea of a war with Iran is certainly off the table, that Dick Cheney's been marginalized, and that we, you know, hopefully will not have an expansion of the war this year.
And now you're telling us in this article that that just really isn't the case, that Dick Cheney still is running things in the White House.
Is that right?
Well, yeah.
It seems that Dick Cheney has made a recovery and basically is the voice that the president is listening to at the present time, instead of Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates, as was the case earlier.
Okay.
Now, I know you have to be vague and can't really answer, but if you could tell us as specifically as you can who your sources are, what kind of levels of people you're talking to to get this information?
I basically talk to people that are at different levels in various places, including the intelligence community, the defense community, and also in the White House.
The people that I've been hearing from lately are all basically saying the same thing, which is essentially that Cheney has not given up on the idea of a war to disarm Iran and to change his government, and that he's looking for more stealth ways to do it.
Basically what they're saying is that he's basically going to try to use the Israelis to trigger some kind of engagement in which the United States would have to come in.
This was the idea that was shopped around by David Wilmser at AEI and so forth last spring.
That's right.
It's not a new idea, and it's obviously a way of going to war without having to go through any kind of process.
As we saw in the lead-up to Iraq, as pathetic as that was, the government felt compelled to go through a process of explaining its reasons for going to war.
Now, if you could have a war kind of starting by accident, you suddenly get rid of that procedure.
Yeah.
You know, something that just killed me in this article, you talked about how when the Washington Post ran that series about Dick Cheney last year, that that kind of embarrassed Bush and made him feel like, oh, jeez, Dick Cheney's coming off in the public as my boss, and that's not right.
I'm the boss of him, and then started marginalizing Cheney and listening more to Rice and Robert Gates at the State and Defense Departments.
And then when the NIE came out telling him that, hey, you made the right choice because Gates and Rice have the right tack, and Cheney wants to start a war over a nuclear weapons program that doesn't even exist, he took that as a slap in the face from the intelligence community and went back rushing into Cheney's office.
Yeah, that's right.
And, of course, this has been partly Cheney's engineering of this, too.
Cheney and his buddies over at the American Enterprise Institute and similar places have been basically promoting this theory that the intelligence and to a certain extent the defense communities have been stabbing the president in the back.
And apparently this is now a theme that the president himself has picked up when he was in the Middle East the week before last.
He basically told, well, he clearly told a number of foreign leaders that the United States intelligence establishment is somehow independent.
It doesn't work for the government.
And he was using that as a justification for saying that he didn't agree with the key judgments of the NIE.
Mm-hmm.
Along those lines, let me play for you a little bit of audio from George Bush's interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News the other day.
Do you believe in December there was an intelligence report that Iraq, that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program as of 2003?
Do you believe that?
Well, I mean, I believe that the intelligence professionals are very sincere in their analysis.
That should not say to people that Iran is not a threat.
In other words.
But you believe it.
I believe that.
I mean, that's not a threat.
I believe they're trying to.
I believe.
I believe they want a weapon.
And I believe that they're trying to gain the know-how as to how to make a weapon under the guise of a civilian nuclear program.
Basically what they're saying is we just want to learn to enrich in order to have civilian nuclear power.
The problem with that is knowledge can be transferred from a civilian program to a military program.
And what I've told people out here is if you had a military program once, you could easily start it up again.
See, a lot of people heard that NIE out here and said, well, George Bush and the Americans don't take the Iranian threat seriously.
And one of my missions out here is to make it clear to them I do take it seriously and so should they.
For example, Iran said they had a program.
They suspended the program.
But they have yet to admit they've had a program.
All right.
So there's the president's point of view on the national intelligence estimate.
It really doesn't mean anything.
Even if it says in there that this whole time, since 2003, as the administration has claimed over and over and over again that Iran is actively seeking nuclear weapons, even though we now know that that is just not true, whether they knew they were lying the whole time or not, that that has not been true this whole time, George Bush's position, Phil, is that that doesn't mean anything.
Well, that's clearly his position.
And he kind of interestingly refers to it as his belief, because it is a belief.
You know, the United States taxpayer pays $40 billion a year to have an intelligence system.
And the intelligence system, as I know you're aware of, goes through a very complicated process to come up with reports.
And the reports are based on the best available information, which doesn't mean it's infallible, but it means it's the best available information.
So here we have the intelligence community giving a report to the president, and the president is basically saying that he's free to ignore it.
And you know, if George Bush does have a virtue, it's his plainspokenness.
And you know, like the time he told Katie Couric, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect the occupation of Iraq to the war on terrorism, you know, that kind of thing.
And one of the things he said here about the Iran NIE, and I think he said this in Israel, Well, you know, the CIA, I guess he's referring to, they come to conclusions separate from what I may or may not want.
Yeah, that is what he said, yeah.
And he said a similar thing to the Saudis and to other leaders in the region.
Clearly he's sending the message that as far as he's concerned, Iran is a threat, and he has this messianic vision of uniting the entire Middle East, Jewish and Arab, together against the Persians.
And, you know, that kind of thing is nonsense, that kind of thinking is ridiculous, and every Arab state in the region, as you well know, I'm sure, is currently cutting its own deals with Iran.
Right, and now that was the purpose of his Middle East trip, was to try to bring them on board.
Was he trying to bring them on board for war, or just, you know, some kind of permanent Cold War alliance against them type thing, or what?
Well, I, you know, I've been skeptical from the beginning about the intention of that trip at all having anything to do with making peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, because he made no serious effort to do that.
I believe most of the trip had a regional objective, and the regional objective is certainly directed against Iran and Iran's surrogates.
Let's not leave them out.
Obviously, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Syria, that the President has tended to lump all together as the same enemy.
Now, you know, when you use the term messianic, I mean, what that really implies is reason goes out the window.
And now, I don't really know what's going on in the mind of Dick Cheney.
You write in your blog on the Huffington Post that National Security Council people briefed him on these are all the horrible things that are going to happen if we bomb Iran, and he dismissed them and said, yeah, no big deal, don't worry, we'll handle it.
But it's the messianic thing that really gets me.
I mean, I don't know whether that describes Dick Cheney so much as the President himself, but the idea that here in the last year of his administration that it's time to now usher in more absolutely dramatic changes in regional war, you know, Hamas and Hezbollah and Syria and Iran.
This is taking a really big bite off for his last year in power.
Well, I think the problem with Cheney is Cheney doesn't have any religious basis for his attitude.
I think he just believes in coal power.
And he believes that the United States has the power and has the ability to reshape any part of the world that desires to do so.
And of course, the fallacy of that has been seen in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
I think that Cheney basically, I have a piece coming out next week in the next American Conservative, which I'm sure will be interesting to you.
Cheney has told some of his associates that he is firmly convinced that something has to be done before President Hillary comes in, and President Hillary would not have the nerve to do what is necessary.
In the same discussion, Cheney referred to leading figures in the intelligence community and at the Department of Defense as traitors.
Really?
Yeah.
Well, you know, that's the same kind of language they were using in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
That General Zinni and Colin Powell were traitors.
That's what they called them in the Office of Special Plans.
Right.
Yeah.
Wow.
That's...
I wonder, you know, how crazy does a man have to be to really think that the, what, the head of CENTCOM, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that they're traitors to America?
Well, I think you have to have a very specific and fairly warped view of reality to get to those points, but I think Cheney has demonstrated over the past seven years that he qualifies for that.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Now, another thing, well, and this goes back to the neoconservatives' war against the National Intelligence Estimate, and George Bush's talking points, the NIE conceded that Iran had a nuclear weapons program.
And my question to you is, through all of your intelligence sources and so forth, as a former CIA agent, do you know of any indications of an Iranian nuclear weapons program that ever existed beyond just the smoking laptop?
Well, I'm not an expert on that, and I did not work as a CIA officer on that area, so I have no specific knowledge, I'd be the first to say.
I have followed the debate, and it seems to me that when they're talking about a weapons program, they're talking about a very laboratory-based or theoretical program of some kind.
And I believe that that is the case that they are trying to make.
It certainly never amounted to anything practical at any level or something that, within a certain finite period of time, would lead to something more dangerous.
And, of course, now it becomes irrelevant, because now George Bush says, oh, well, that doesn't matter.
I was, all this time, I've been talking about the declared IAEA-inspected civilian uranium enrichment program that everybody in the whole world knows about.
That's all I'm saying.
That might as well be a nuclear weapons program.
Well, and note also that they have shifted the terms of the debate.
It's no longer a question of Iran having a nuclear weapon or a nuclear weapon program.
It's having the knowledge to construct a nuclear weapon, which, of course, there are probably 130 countries in the world where that knowledge exists.
And, interestingly, they lowered that bar, Bush lowered that bar, officially, in the same speech where he threatened World War III over it.
That's right, yeah.
Yeah, basically, any kind of Iranian access to anything that he and Dick Cheney are suspicious about is clearly an act of war.
Okay, so what does it mean when, I guess, a guy who used to be your boss, right, Robert Gates, when he used to run the CIA, now the Secretary of Defense, he went on NPR News and said, and specifically, I'll give the example of, I'll give the example of the and specifically, I'll give the credit to the NPR reporter, followed up and said, you know, you refer to Iran as a challenge and not a threat.
Is there a specific reason you choose that word?
And Robert Gates said, yes, there is.
They're not a military threat to the United States of America.
Now, what am I to understand that means when Cheney and the President are saying threat, threat, threat, threat, threat, and the Secretary of Defense is saying, eh, well, you know, they're a challenge?
Well, I would listen to the Secretary of Defense because he knows what he's talking about.
The problem with the other two is that they're involved with a political spin process of achieving something which goes well beyond United States defense policy.
And that's called remaking the world.
And, you know, you either buy into that or you don't.
And I personally, of course, don't.
And I assume you don't either.
But there are a lot of people out there who kind of knuckle their foreheads and say, yeah, yeah, Dick Cheney's right.
We've got to kick those ARAPs.
Well, you know, the thing about this is Bush and Cheney are the ones who are elected.
And so maybe Robert Gates and these guys are traitors if they don't want to go along with what Bush and Cheney say.
Well, I guess from their point of view, you could make that argument, yeah.
I mean, believe me, I certainly don't want to see this war expand.
But I do kind of marvel, I guess, from being so far on the outside of things and watching the Secretary of Defense and the Vice President and even the head of Central Command fighting it out in the press with Dick Cheney.
Well, you know, that's one of the downsides of our democratic system, that when you go to an election, you know, the lowest possible common denominator can well come out of it.
I think we're seeing that in terms of both the Republican and Democratic candidates at the present time.
All right, well, so with the opposition that we know Gates holds and Admiral Fallon and I think reportedly Admiral Mullen, too, do you think that there's a pretty good chance they will be able to continue to restrain the crazies?
Or is Dick Cheney really going to get his way here?
I think what the situation is right now is that you will not get anyone who has a finger on the trigger who's going to pull the trigger.
And that includes George Bush.
The reason for that being the situation in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan, and the developing situation in Pakistan is so bad that the United States doesn't have the resources to take on another problem.
That said, I think what Cheney and some of the other people around him are hoping for is something in the way of the Gulf of Hormuz incident of a couple weeks ago, Straits of Hormuz incident a couple weeks ago, to escalate or to have the Israelis do something that escalates into a war.
And now, remembering back to the summer war between Israel and Lebanon in 2006, there were at least some reports, I guess Myra Wormser complained, David Wormser's wife complained, that we were trying to get you guys to expand the war to Syria.
We would have backed you up.
Why didn't you do it?
And so I guess all our hopes now are that the Israeli right will keep us out of war, Phil?
Well, I think the Israelis have a much clearer sense of their self-interest than Dick Cheney does.
And they are basically going to do things that they think are beneficial to them strategically, and they're not going to go beyond that.
That's why they didn't want to expand the war into Syria, even though Cheney and his group wanted them to do so.
So they have their own interest in this thing, and their interest is very clearly defined in their own minds.
If they decide that Iran really is a threat to them, which I think a lot of them recognize it isn't, they wouldn't possibly take military action.
The danger is that because of the closeness of the relationship between Israel and the United States that has been cranked up by Congress and any number of presidents, there are dangers for the United States in this kind of policy.
All right, now I want to ask you all about your new article in the American Conservative about Sabel Edmonds.
But if it's all right, I want to ask you a couple of questions about Al-Qaeda real quick in between, if that's okay.
Sure.
There's an article in the Washington Times, which the whole article is full of, oh yeah, we're kicking Al-Qaeda's butt up and down Iraq all over the place.
But right there in the first paragraph it says that they're not getting rid of Al-Qaeda in Iraq at all, and basically they're just playing whack-a-mole and chasing these guys around from one town to another and one region to another.
And apparently the American military, even in alliance with the concerned local citizens, the new bought-and-paid-for Sunni insurgency who are now our friends, are still unable to get rid of these guys.
So I just want to know how dangerous do you think Al-Qaeda in Iraq actually is, or what should be done about them, whether John McCain has, whether he may be right when he says we can't leave because Al-Qaeda in Iraq will take over the place.
Well, first of all, there's no danger of Al-Qaeda in Iraq taking over anything.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq is basically a creation of our own in that we created the dynamics that allowed them to flourish there.
And the reason that they were allowed to develop as they did was basically the fact that the Sunnis were fighting us and Al-Qaeda was in the fight on their side.
Now that we've, as you put it, bought and paid for the Sunnis by giving them weapons, giving them money, giving them political power, naturally they're on our side, but they're using us essentially.
And once the money stops or once the weapons stop, the other dynamics will again prevail.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq never was a threat to take over the country.
They've staged some rather spectacular killings inside Iraq.
They are in no danger of expanding into any other country.
The whole issue of Al-Qaeda has been much inflated in the United States as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, that is, much inflated as a political kind of tool.
Okay, now real Al-Qaeda hiding out in Waziristan, supposedly anyway.
How many real anti-American jihadists are there in the world, would you estimate, and what is to be done about them?
Well, the number I keep seeing is around 5,000, but that means nobody really knows what the number is.
They don't do a census, I believe.
The fact is that the whole jihadist movement, the Al-Qaeda movement, the Salafist movement has decentralized.
So you have a lot of little Al-Qaedas where once upon a time there was more or less one organization.
The central organization still provides, apparently, some financial assistance and training and other things, but it's not really a centralized organization anymore.
So in a sense, it's more dangerous.
All right, so if you were the National Security Advisor, and somehow Bush and Dick Cheney actually cared about doing the right thing here, what would you tell them would be the correct policy for dealing with the so-called incorrigibles?
The correct policy is to basically have a proactive policy with the countries that have terrorist groups indigenous in them.
And you use law enforcement techniques, you use intelligence to root these people out, to try them, and to put them in jail.
That's worked in Europe and other places where there have been terrorism problems that have appeared to be intractable and deeply rooted, but by persistent operation using these techniques within a democratic system, you can defeat terrorists.
The problem is the United States, by its heavy-handed policies in places like Iraq, is creating terrorists as fast as anybody can arrest them.
Now what do you do about Pakistan?
We can't invade, we can't send soldiers in there.
Apparently the Pakistani army can't even send soldiers in there.
Should we just leave Afghanistan and hope that the locals eventually get sick of bin Laden and marginalize him themselves?
I mean, he got away at Tora Bora.
What are we supposed to do now?
Well, I think obviously the issue of Pakistan is a unique issue, in that the inability of the Pakistani government to maintain law and order, and maintain a rule of law over several provinces, most particularly Waziristan, means that you have a different kind of problem.
That's an issue where military containment on both sides of the border would have a certain effect.
The fact that the United States and the NATO forces in Afghanistan don't have that kind of capability, because they don't have that many soldiers, and many of the soldiers, especially the NATO soldiers, are not able to use their weapons even except in self-defense, it means that you don't have the resources to try to contain the problem.
I would say more soldiers in Afghanistan might actually have a positive effect.
I heard today that 3,000 or more soldiers, U.S. Marines, will be going to Afghanistan in the next month.
Well, it seems like we need some kind of political situation where the Pashtun people can be brought into the government.
I don't know if there's a way to separate out the Taliban just from the Pashtuns, but we can't just continue a policy of nation-building without half the population involved.
Yeah, I agree.
The biggest problem in Afghanistan is the efforts to create some kind of economy there that would be an alternative for most of the people.
It would give us some future to look forward to.
We have failed, and failed dismally.
All these problems we call terrorism problems are much broader problems.
They have social bases.
They have tribal conflict bases.
They have a lot of things that drive them.
The fact that America has gone into these situations with total ignorance and has gone around like the bull in the china shop has not helped.
All right, everybody.
It's Philip Giraldi.
He writes Smoke and Mirrors for Antiwar.com and is a contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine.
His newest article is found in translation.
FBI whistleblower Sabelle Edmonds spills her secrets.
The website is amconmag.com, short for AmericanConservativeMagazine.com.
But just Google Giraldi and Sabelle Edmonds and you'll find it.
Now, you're a former CIA covert operative who was stationed in Turkey in the 1980s.
Is that right?
That's correct.
And so you have quite a bit of background in the area of the world in discussion in the Sabelle Edmonds case.
For those who aren't familiar, can you just give us the basic outline, I guess, of who Sabelle Edmonds was and what happened?
What's the big deal?
Sabelle Edmonds is a woman who was born in Iran of Turkic parents.
She was raised in Turkey, emigrated to the United States in the 1980s.
After 2001, she worked as a Turkish and Farsi language translator for the FBI.
While she was there, she handled a lot of documents that gave her cause for some concern.
She complained about some irregularities that were going on and the FBI's translation staff was eventually fired.
Went public with some of her claims to 60 Minutes and also to Congress, where she was found to be a very credible witness.
And her claims are basically involved with high-level U.S. government officials being involved in corruption that has resulted in U.S. nuclear secrets and other defense information and defense equipment being sold to the highest bidder with the collaboration of senior Turkish government officials and also Israeli government officials and with the collusion of people in the Pentagon who were linked to these organizations.
So that's the essence of her claims.
And now, one of the things that she says is that her story is basically the same story as the Larry Franklin case is at least related to the Valerie Plame case that basically all the scandals of the neoconservatives are all tied in with her same story.
Yeah, but basically what she's saying is that it's not necessarily the same story but the same people and the same people are involved in all these various subsets of money going here and there.
I wrote an article about her back well over a year ago in which I said that this is basically a neoconservative.
The neoconservatives don't have a 401K.
They have schemes like this that enable them to make a lot of money in short time and exploit these relationships.
So you have people who work at the Pentagon and State Department essentially who were collaborating with people who were selling American secrets.
Okay, now tell me about the American-Turkish Council.
American-Turkish Council was established I believe in the early 90s.
It was set up with the assistance of AIPAC.
And the reason why there's an AIPAC connection is because the Israelis and Turks have had a strong defense relationship since that time.
And many of the lobbying groups that support Israel have fostered the Turkish relationship.
And of course a lot of this is tied in with the arms manufacturers in this country because when our government quote-unquote gives military hardware to the Turks and the Israelis that's just cash in the pocket of Northrop Grumman and Lockheed So we see them populating the board of directors and so forth of this group, right?
Yeah, many of these groups and indeed the groups like the American Enterprise Institute, some of the neocon think tanks are heavily funded by defense contractors for obvious reasons.
Defense contractors do very well when you're fighting the whole world all the time.
And so there are a whole lot of interlocking relationships here.
And what Isabel is saying essentially is that these people are all the same people.
They're involved in Israel.
They're involved in Turkey.
They are exploiting corruptly their positions in the U.S. government to make all this happen.
And they're getting rich off it.
In the movie Kill the Messenger, you describe Richard Perle as an agent of influence for Israel.
What exactly is an agent of influence?
That's basically someone who works for a government but is working for the interest of another government through his U.S. government position.
So when Perle was at the Defense Department, which he has been intermittently at through the years, he exploited his position and his contacts on behalf of Israel.
That's not my assessment, incidentally.
That was an assessment made by the CIA.
There have been a number of other people in the government, particularly at the Defense Department, who have also been alleged to be agents of influence for Israel.
Wow.
And is that CIA assessment classified?
Can I get a copy of that?
I don't know how one would actually get a written copy of it, but it's been referred to in secondary texts a number of times.
If you do a Google, I think you'll find it.
So he's not exactly a spy where he's just outright getting paid and working for the Mossad or anything.
It's just that he puts the interests of Israel first, even though he works for the U.S. government, or worked.
Well, to a certain extent he is a spy.
Recall that Richard Perle was overheard in a restaurant in Washington quite some time ago giving classified information to somebody who was working for the Israeli embassy.
So it depends on how you define spy.
The allegation was, as I understand, dropped, which it always is in these cases, strangely enough.
But there have been similar cases with Doug Fythe and others also at the Pentagon.
And now, bringing up Doug Fythe, what's this International Advisors, Inc.?
He had a lobbying firm that represented Turkey in the 1990s?
Yeah, that's right.
He had a lobbying firm, and Richard Perle worked for him as one of his consultants.
So these people have had a long-term relationship, both with Israel and with Turkey, and obviously that's kind of the nexus.
And now we're discovering, if Sibel is correct in what she's been saying, that the glue holding this all together is the sale of U.S. nuclear and other military technology.
And for those who don't remember, Richard Perle was the chairman of the Defense Policy Board during the run-up to the Iraq War, and his buddy Douglas Fythe was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy.
That's correct, yeah.
So, yeah, that's quite a position to be in, I guess, if you're a foreign agent of influence.
Well, look, the Friends of Israel would argue that the strategic interests of Israel and the United States are absolutely identical.
Now, anyone who has half a brain knows that that's not true.
That could never be true in relationships between two countries.
And yet that's, I think, how they are able to sleep at night.
That's the fiction that they pursue.
Now, what exactly are Sibel Edmonds' accusations against Richard Perle and Douglas Fythe?
Well, the accusations against Perle and Fythe have never been spelled out.
She claims that high officials in the Pentagon were part of this process of the sale of nuclear and other military technology.
She has not named them.
What she has done is she has a website on which she has kind of a rogues' gallery of pictures.
And you go through the pictures and you find out basically who are the names.
I mean, this is my interpretation of what I'm saying.
You put the names onto the pictures and you assume that these are the people that, at least at this time, she doesn't feel comfortable enough to name.
And Richard Perle's picture is there, as is Doug Fythe's, as is Doug Fythe's replacement at the Pentagon who's currently there, and also a former ambassador to Turkey, Eric Adelman.
And now what about Larry Franklin?
Larry Franklin, according to her, is also involved in this process that APAC and the connections with APAC and with the Turks and everything.
But again, these are areas where she has revealed some things, but she hasn't been very explicit because she has a gag order.
Right, she's in prison.
Yeah, yeah.
The areas where she has been extremely explicit, and this was the point of my article in The American Conservative, there are very specific charges against one former senior State Department officer, Mark Grossman.
And she claims that he was taking money, that he was expediting people from Turkey and Israel getting into the U.S. defense establishment, and a number of charges like that.
One of the more interesting charges was that she says that she reviewed the transcript of a conversation in which Grossman warned the Turks that Brewster Jennings, the CIA cover company that Valerie Plain worked for, was government, a code word for agency.
And this apparently took place late in 2001, so it was way before Robert Novak outed Valerie Plain and her cover company.
And in this case, it went to the Turks, and then the FBI was listening in on the Turks when they called the Pakistanis and informed Pakistani intelligence about this.
Wow, so that's a felony, right?
Yeah, I believe it is.
And you kind of wonder why the U.S. government has been kind of reluctant to follow up on this.
Again, the point of my article is that we don't know whether all of the stuff that Sybil is saying is true, right?
We don't.
You haven't seen the papers.
I haven't seen the papers.
She claims to have seen papers.
Right.
And she claims there are FBI files that back up what she is claiming.
And in one case, a whistleblower, an anonymous whistleblower that appears to be an FBI officer, sent in a message that I got a copy of, which actually gives the file number that all of this information is contained in.
And so her claim is very specific of illegal, criminal, possibly treasonous activity.
And she is giving very specific information that she claims can be backed up from these files.
And my point of view is I don't know whether she's telling the truth or not, but she certainly deserves a hearing.
Right.
Well, and this is the latest Sunday Times article that came out after your article.
FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft.
And apparently they've been able to prove that the file does exist and that the FBI is lying when they say that no such file even exists.
That's right.
I've spoken to the journalist from the London Times, and he claims to have written evidence proving that that file exists, even though the FBI claims it doesn't.
I think what the FBI did was they took the file, and they might have shredded it, but more likely they just refiled it, refiled it under a different number.
So they're telling the truth when they say that file does not exist.
Right.
Yeah, they just spell all the key words wrong, so the search doesn't work.
Wow.
So, OK, now, in terms of the FBI, is this – I'm trying to figure out when you have all these disparate pieces.
You have the Larry Franklin investigation.
Again, he's the guy who's been convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison for passing secrets to Israel, who worked for Douglas Feith in the Pentagon.
You have the investigation about the Valerie Plame thing, which obviously that is a separate issue, the way that came up.
But when it comes to the Cybele Edmonds, the investigations that she was in on, into Pearl and Feith particularly and this group, is this all just one big investigation that goes back to 1996, and it just has its different branches?
It's hard to see because it's all within the DOJ where I can't really tell.
Yeah, but again, bear in mind, she has not named Feith and Pearl.
This is kind of – this is an assumption.
I want to be careful about what we're saying because there are things we know and there are things we don't know here.
And her – the thrust of what she said is, yes, this is all one big – basically, if you look at it, it's all part of – these are all parts of one big investigation that includes AIPAC, it includes the Turks, it includes the Israelis, it includes senior U.S. government officials both at State Department and at the Pentagon, and that the FBI basically was investigating all these people, sometimes coming at it separately, but in the end, it's kind of all the same players doing all the same things.
And now, on the issue of Sabella Edmonds' credibility, because as you say, we don't have the paper.
She has a gag order.
Congress won't do anything about it.
We really don't know.
There's been, I guess, quite a bit of criticism of Sabella Edmonds.
She's such a charismatic lady that people, I guess, tend to – it turns people off, and they think that she said so much for a lady with a gag order that she must be overreaching with some of this stuff.
These are such outrageous charges.
What do you make of the idea, for example, that she couldn't possibly know the things that she claims to know?
Well, that argument has a certain amount of credibility.
I mean, here she's a translator.
She was working with transcripts mostly, from what I gather, of telephone communications that were being intercepted by the FBI.
There are a couple of arguments that suggest that when she made connections, because she, as a translator, would have worked very closely with the FBI supervising officers to try to figure out what these transcripts meant.
So the argument that she only saw these bits is not really true.
She would have been very interactive in terms of the people running these operations, and she would have found out a lot more.
And other arguments that she's kind of jumping the gun and she's putting together – well, that might be true, but we won't know the truth of this stuff until somebody does a serious investigation on her charges.
And quite honestly, if I were Mark Grossman, who allegedly is now making $3 million a year working for the Cohen Group, I would be kind of concerned about my personal reputation where people were saying that I was taking money.
And I would want to straighten out the record.
I would want the FBI to produce a definitive statement about me.
And he hasn't demanded that.
He hasn't gone after that.
And none of the other people in this case have gone after that.
So I'm wondering why, if these people are innocent, they aren't making a more serious effort to demonstrate that they are.
Well, maybe it's just because it's a national security matter, state secrets privilege and all that.
They're not really in a position to be able to defend themselves.
Well, then they might be interested in saying that.
They're not saying that.
See, the point is that she's been gagged.
And she's been gagged.
And think of what the gag means.
The gag means that the government is trying to suppress classified information that she has.
That means that they believe that what she's saying is true.
Sounds right.
And the other argument that keeps getting trotted out, that Grossman and all these other people might have been part of some sting operation back in 2001, 2002.
Well, first of all, a sting operation back in 2001, 2002, that's been pretty much exposed in the media in the subsequent six years, is not something that you necessarily would have to hide.
You could say, look, they were involved in doing the finest, highest-level work for the U.S. government back, you know, they could say something like that to make this story go away, but they haven't done that.
And I assure you, as a CIA officer, that the agency would never have used the number three person at State Department as a person in a sting operation.
The State Department would never have permitted it, and the agency would have never even conceived of it.
So the whole argument that this was some kind of sophisticated scam to sting the AQCan network or something like that is ridiculous.
Well, now, what about the cover-up?
I mean, this is America, this isn't a banana republic, at least not yet.
What about separations of powers?
Obviously Congress is in that, but isn't there, you know, can't a Justice Department official make his name by convening a grand jury in this case and getting something done?
Isn't there supposed to be some sort of automatic checks and balances separation of power thing that kicks in here that keeps traitors out of the State Department?
Only if the Justice Department is being directed by the Attorney General to do precisely that.
Do you honestly believe that this Attorney General will do that?
Maybe if you waterboarded him.
Yes.
Well, yeah, I mean, see, this is the thing.
It's almost, it makes it seem like this treason, this crime ring of, you know, stealing and selling nuclear secrets to the Pakistanis through the Turks and all this criminality, it almost seems like it's just the government of the United States doing it, not just people who work for the government.
If the entire government kicks in to help cover it up...
Do you remember the scene in the movie The Godfather when Al Pacino is talking to his girlfriend, and she says, but, you know, congressmen and senators and people like that don't go out and have people killed like you mafia people do.
And Al Pacino's response is, now, who's being naive here?
Right.
Well, you know, corruption is as American as apple pie.
Hopefully that we have a strong enough democracy where we can fight it.
But I think in the last six years what we have seen is this whole terrorist threat and the way it's been hyped and the way it's been used, a lot of our fundamental liberties and our fundamental sense of what we are as a people has been eroded.
And this is precisely what I'm talking about.
You get Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, you get this guy Mulcahy, these guys are not going to do anything that's not in the interest of the Bush administration.
And, hey, if we get a President Hillary Clinton somewhere around the corner, or even more terribly, now this is the buzz in Washington right now, that we're looking at a McCain-Lieberman administration.
Oh!
Yeah.
Think about who's going to be investigating any of these things.
Nobody.
Wow, what a way to wrap up an interview.
There you go, everybody.
It's Philip Giraldi.
He writes Smoke and Mirrors for Antiwar.com.
He's a partner in Canistrar Associates, contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine, and you can find his blog entries also at the Huffington Post.
Thanks a lot, Phil.
Thanks, Scott.