08/20/14 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, I'm Scott.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
I'm on Liberty Radio Network and scotthorton.org.
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Now I was describing to you, I thought maybe I had the link here, I guess it's gone.
At the start of the show today, I was saying, yeah, Phil Giraldi is going to be on the show and he's going to be talking about his piece at unz.com, fascism in America.
And and then right as I was wrapping up that segment with that subject, I looked on my Twitter feed and there was a tweet.
And of course, Israel is a big part of the article as well, speaking of fascism.
And then right there in my Twitter feed was a tweet from the Washington Free Beacon with a big American flag.
And it said, Americans just want the good old days back again, straight out of the article.
It couldn't have fit better if Phil Giraldi and his CIA buddies had arranged it that way.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm OK, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Yeah.
He is former CIA and DIA officer.
Writes for the American conservative unz.com and Al Jazeera America sometimes, at least.
Right.
Still.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is there every every once in a while.
Yeah.
And then he's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest, which I guess you could say is the antidote, the opposite of the Israel lobby in Washington, D.C.
Council for the National Interest.
Or.
OK, so, yeah, fascism.
You know what?
You know, he calls everybody fascist all the time, left, right and everything else.
Fascist just means you disagree with me.
I think something like that, maybe.
So why don't we start with a real definition here, Phil?
Well, you know, there are a lot of definitions of fascism and a lot of aspects to it.
And in fact, if you look at the history of fascism, you can see that there were a lot of different explanations by the fascists themselves, what they represented.
And what I latched on to for this piece was essentially the the ultra-nationalist sense of fascism in a way, the racist sense, the sense that the fascist people, the fascist nations were superior people and had a right to dictate to others.
And if they if that meant going to war, then that was up to the fascists to decide.
And they would punish the the people that oppose them and so on.
So it's kind of a sense of ultra-nationalism.
I hate to say American exceptionalism, which we've been seeing surfacing for the last few years that I am basically defining as fascism.
So in other words, emotional drum beating in place of thought and planning for what's to be done.
Yeah.
And in a sense that, you know, we are basically exceptional in the sense that the rules don't apply to us.
That essentially was a fascist kind of principle, that if the Muslims wanted to invade Abyssinia, he would go ahead and do it.
If Hitler wanted to leave in Europe, he would attack Poland.
You know, there's this racial sense, there's this nationalist sense.
It's all combined in the same agenda.
Well, you know, maybe I have it wrong about the cart coming before the horse and all that.
But I had always thought that American exceptionalism at its base, what it really meant was we're exceptional because we really do have a consensus for freedom here and we mean to keep it.
And so the whole world wants to be like us because our system, at least we strive to always make it as best as we possibly can and and set an example for the rest of mankind that life doesn't have to be so nasty, brutish and short.
If only you're free like us.
But I don't know how the hell that got twisted into which means that we're so good that rules don't apply to us and moral laws don't apply to us and we all have a license to kill you.
That kind of thing.
That would seem like the complete opposite.
Yeah.
And with the same name, you know.
Yeah.
Well, the last crop of Republicans running for president, you probably recall they were they were quizzing each other on.
Do you believe in American exceptionalism?
And here we have people like Sarah Palin coming out with this kind of thing.
She doesn't have a clue what she's saying or what she means is that the United States basically could set its own rules.
And you're quite right.
You know, we are an exceptional country.
We are historically an exceptional country.
But so as so as every other country, every other country has its own his own history and its own beliefs and things like that.
We shouldn't feel that we necessarily are are forcing our values on others.
All right.
Now, I mean, we've all tangled in comment sections here, there or, you know, looked on in horror at them, too.
But you got a very particular story in this article about a friend of yours who wrote an article and the comment section that followed and the kind of consensus of the rabble about what she had written.
And it seems pretty informative there.
Can you give us a rundown of that part of it?
Yeah, this is a friend of mine.
I've known her for quite a few years.
She's a retired army lieutenant colonel.
She was an army lawyer involved with Guantanamo Bay prisoners, you know, both defense and in terms of resolving some of the issues involved with Guantanamo.
And she's very highly qualified.
She's a very strong Christian, evangelical Christian, in fact.
And she basically wrote a letter to the paper saying, you know, we've we've essentially lost our moral roots here in that we're seeing this slaughter of 2000 Palestinian, mostly civilians going on.
And our government is aiding and abetting it.
And nobody seems concerned.
So it was kind of a letter, OK, not everybody's going to agree with it.
But what was really shocking was the degree to which people wrote in not only criticizing what she said or what her viewpoint was, but criticizing her as a person in the most humiliating terms and and and also basically saying things like, you know, I really don't care if one one of the comments was something effective.
If four point five million Palestinians are killed in self-defense, I really don't care.
That's just fine with me.
That kind of thing.
So I basically pulled all these comments together and I put them together to show just how how we indeed have lost our moral footing in the world, if this is what people believe.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it just goes to show, you know, people believe whatever they hear repeated in their echo chamber and all that confirmation bias and basic, you know, social psychology, one on one sort of stuff.
Hey, we all think kill all the Arabs, right, everybody.
And if nobody is saying, absolutely not, what are you crazy, then, yeah, I guess that's what we all think.
In fact, I've seen, you know, rabid warmongers find out that a family member that they really respect thinks the exact opposite and then just on a dime, blam, drop every stupid thing that they were wrong about and instead defer to their respected authority, who is different, even though they're as rabid as could be a minute before.
So it's just people just go by, you know, the group they want to fit into, I guess more than anything else here, it seems like.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, the unfortunate thing is, you know, some of the some of the people who make comments where people should know better, they they were clearly military veterans and indeed military officers in some cases.
And there were some there were also some people who clearly were were believing Christians.
And you know, these people actually should have a better sense of that.
You don't advocate genocide and just kind of do it off the cuff and say this is something that's perfectly acceptable.
And yet that's what they were advocating.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it seems like what's going on in Ferguson could be something that is something we all see a lot more often in every state, assuming we have worse economic problems or another few major terrorist attacks or something like that.
Things get really bad here and it's really sad to see that whatever, you know, giant plurality or giant proportion of the population is ready to fall in line behind a military form of government, as Tommy Franks put it, and stay there.
They would prefer it that way.
Yeah.
It's you know, it's there's a there's I guess a feeling that you're safer that way.
Of course, you're not because you're you're subject to the whims of the military authorities.
Yeah.
And to me, you're right.
I mean, you're saying the right thing about Ferguson.
All right.
In my county here in Virginia, we've had two people killed by the police in the last year in situations where that kind of force was not did not have to be used.
And yet, you know, nothing has happened.
In fact, one of the cases is still, quote, under investigation.
All right.
I'm sorry we got to stop right there, but that's a good stop in place.
We'll be right back with Phil Giraldi on UNZ.com, UNZ.com.
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You know what?
For those of you who asked for the list of bumper music, I think I forgot this one.
It's Dresden 45, Swiss bank account.
I love this song.
It's great.
All right.
Anyway, I'm talking with Phil Giraldi and yeah, sorry about that, Phil.
Got interrupted by the commercial break like we always do there.
But we're talking about fascism, American support for you're saying in your local county, there are at least two questionable shootings already this year.
Is that right?
In the past year, there have been two shootings, two killings of people that were legal force was in no way required.
And yet nothing has happened.
There's a in here in Virginia when there's a killing by local police, it's investigated by the state police.
So you have the police investigating the other police when there's a killing.
So, you know, nothing is going to happen.
And anyway, what I'm saying about Ferguson, this to me, the scary thing is we still don't know really what happened there.
And we really don't.
But the fact is that what is frightening is a display of militarized police and the fact that our police first response is a military response.
And that's what everybody should be talking about.
Everybody should be thinking about.
I'm sure on your show you are, but there's not enough of that in the media because that really is the issue.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, pretty much poor black people in any ghetto in America already feel like they're occupied, even when the cops are wearing shirts and slacks and carrying pistols and and have felt like that.
But when you're talking literally about these guys being armed up more than the U.S. infantry in battle in Iraq and acting out the part against them, it's just completely out of control.
And at least, you know, it seems like this thing with Ferguson, maybe they push it too far and they're getting a reaction even from the center here that like, hey, wait a minute, how far down this road have we really gone?
Was this David Addington's dream or what?
Yeah, more like a nightmare, I think.
I mean, it's just the images were just were frightening.
You know, this is this is not police crowd control.
This is way, way beyond that.
This is a military response to what is a civil procedure, which is policing.
And it's just unbelievable to watch it.
But, you know, Phil, if we just use enough force, we could have the good old days back again.
That's right.
We can take over the sedated land, too.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, and so now here's the great segue between your two articles.
The other one, this one is fascism in America at Un's Review, and then the other is over at the American Conservative magazine, Israel's Information Ops.
And, of course, what they have in common is Israel.
And you talk quite a bit about sort of the very same right wing nationalism at play in Israeli society and in Israeli government policy as here.
And then also the propaganda, which, of course, is part and parcel of fascist regimes, too, is they got to lie all damn day to make any of this seem reasonable.
So, yeah, that's what the article talks about.
In terms of the recent killings in Gaza, obviously Israel has felt very, very wrong on the wrong side of the propaganda war or on the public affairs war.
And so they've unleashed their secret army, which is the people that appear on all the websites that we go to and make repeated comments in favor of Israel and what Israel is doing.
And they do this clandestinely.
They don't use their real names.
If they're Israelis, they don't say that they're Israelis.
This is a government program which organizes people to confuse other people and feed them propaganda on the Internet.
And as that, I mean, it goes far beyond anything that I know that is being done by any other government.
And, of course, Israel is at the same time a recipient of large amounts of U.S. money.
So this is a factor in terms of, you know, what kind of policy you're trying to influence.
So it's the U.S. taxpayer gets like a double whammy.
Yeah.
Well, and the thing of it, too, is as you put it in the article, it's usually pretty obvious who's the sock puppet.
But still, it's quite disruptive when people are trying to have a constructive conversation and you've got people chiming in with their nonsense all the time.
Yeah, yeah.
It's always it's always the same kind of boilerplate.
They actually get instructions from the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv telling them what the what the issues are that they should be addressing.
There is a there is a software that comes out of Israel's called Megaphone.
And the people who are on this megaphone system, there are allegedly 50,000 of them each get instructions in terms of what articles to focus on, to attack, what lines to use in making the attack and so on and so forth.
So it's a highly coordinated effort and it's government run.
Yeah.
And now there's this new article to Common Dreams today, the double identity of an anti-Semitic commenter.
And I don't know, I actually didn't get to the end of this article because I ran out of time here doing the show today, Phil.
But so I don't know if they trace this back to the Israeli government at all.
But certainly they have busted or I don't know.
Certainly they claim to have busted a Jewish Harvard graduate student or no, just graduate for being a sock puppet, but not saying not coming online everywhere and accusing everyone of being an anti-Semite and spitting out talking points about Israeli self-defense for their aggression, but instead pretending to be an anti-Semite and going completely crazy and trying to smear everybody's honest dissent to catch up everybody's honest dissent with his quite dishonest dissent there.
Yeah, that's that's exactly it.
This is kind of a reverse tactic where he was basically pretending to be an anti-Semite and making outrageous comments frequently.
He did over a thousand, I think the article said he did over a thousand comments in two years and they were all basically attacking this Web site because he didn't approve of the Web site being critical of Israel.
So he made a look like a fourteen hundred times, apparently.
And so he made it look like it was a haven for anti-Semites, which, of course, it wasn't.
And and as a result, the the organizers of the site, everything apparently suffered serious damage in terms of their reputation.
Yeah.
And then they claim they bust him by way of his IP address and all that, did their investigation and found him out.
But yeah, because, you know, people people don't use their true names on on comments and stuff like that very often just because there's no reason why you should have to.
But when you have people that are changing their identities frequently so as not to be seen as the same person, then that's that's something else that's I don't know if it's categorized as criminal behavior, but it's certainly it's certainly being extremely deceptive.
And that's what this guy was doing.
He kept changing his name and they finally figured out, yeah, he's changing his name, but it's all coming from the same computer.
Right.
Well, and yeah, you know, guilt by association is bad enough when somebody's just pointing their finger at somebody.
But when you get to make up who it is they're supposedly associated with in order to smear him, that's pretty damn bad.
And, you know, that brings up the question that these guys haven't seemed to ask themselves.
And maybe I shouldn't ask it and just let them go on.
But it seems all very counterproductive to me that like, wow, hey, you know, just on the kind of basic level for those who are new at this.
Hey, maybe the Israelis, maybe the reason they're lying all the time is because what they're doing is wrong.
I wonder if maybe that's what's going on here.
It just makes it more transparent when their lies are so blatant and they'd be better off just doing whatever bombing campaign against whatever, you know, babies they want to bomb, but just shut up about it instead of insulting my intelligence all day long at the same time and extra pissing me off.
Well, but the funny thing is, of course, if you link the two articles, the good people down there in Augusta, Georgia, obviously have bought into a lot of this stuff.
There is a lot of their comments repeated the same kind of boilerplate that the Hasbro, the Israeli government employees were using to justify what Israel was doing in Gaza, saying that Israel was was defending itself, that Israel did not initiate this war, that Hamas did.
You know, it was the same same arguments.
And these people down in Georgia seem to have bought into it.
O'Klean and Sinker.
Yep.
Yeah, it's just me.
This stuff works.
That's why they do it.
It works.
Sure, it works.
Yep.
And well, and I want to I want to emphasize how great this article is, because you really did do the work here and go back and show the different organizations and link to original sources and other secondary source journalism about it and that kind of thing.
So for people who really want to know a lot about how it is that Israel runs these sock puppets on the Internet to try to bog you down in your activism, it's Israel's information ops at the American conservative dot com.
And you can find out all about it there.
And well, we're about out of time anyway.
So thanks again, Phil, for your time on the show.
OK, Scott.
Always a pleasure.
All right.
So that's Phil Giraldi, former CIA and DIA officer, executive director of the Council for the National Interest and writer for the American conservative magazine at the American conservative dot com.
The UNS review at UNS dot com, UNZ, UNS dot com and for America dot Al Jazeera dot com.
See you tomorrow.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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