04/24/09 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest is Ray McGovern.
He, for 27 years, was an analyst at the CIA.
He used to do the presidential daily brief thing for George H.W. Bush when he was Vice President of the United States back in the 80s.
He's one of the co-founders of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
You can find his writings at the absolutely indispensable ConsortiumNews.com and also oftentimes at Antiwar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you, sir?
Thanks a lot, Scott.
I'm well.
I'm very glad to hear that.
Here's where I want to start this interview.
New York Times.
Divisions arose on rough tactics for Al-Qaeda figure by Scott Shane, April 17, 2009.
And now here's the paragraph and a half I want to share with you here, Ray.
Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case.
Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.
Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, quote, seeing the depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect.
So I guess I want to ask you, I don't know if there's a math problem that some game theorist or scientist, math genius, could come up for this kind of thing.
It seems like more a question of quality rather than quantity to me.
But if the CIA's torturers were heartbroken over what they had done to this man Zubaydah, then that means it's torture and they're felons.
And the people who had them do it are felons.
And there's no way in the whole world that you could be a Fox News pundit and sit up here and justify that somehow, oh, this is scaring them or just, you know, slamming them into a little bit of flexible plywood to get their attention.
And, you know, after all, a caterpillar is not poisonous.
These people cannot minimize this when their own torturers are crying about what they've done.
Right?
Right.
The arguments trying to, quote, justify, end quote, what was done are completely bankrupt, Scott.
I'm a little surprised that people are even trying.
You know, torture was banned by every civilized nation after World War II and when people saw the depths of degradation, including waterboarding by Japanese, and, you know, the whole civilized world.
It wasn't a matter of debate until just seven years ago when all of a sudden it became sort of okay to torture people.
That's really bizarre.
And what we have here is a situation where we have all kinds of laws against torture, international and domestic.
But, you know, listeners, please remember that torture is not wrong because there are laws against it.
There are laws against it because it's just plain wrong.
It's what we used to call intrinsic evil in philosophy, meaning, you know, in a category with rape, with slavery.
That's the category that torture belongs in.
And it's very clear, not only from the International Committee Red Cross report, but the Senate Committee, the Armed Forces Committee report, which is now out in total, all 232 pages of it.
It suffices to read the executive summary to read what was done and then, you know, to read the lawyers' opinions to see how they used contorted logic, like mafia-type lawyers, to just, again, quote, justify, end quote, this reprehensible series of crimes.
So the question is, how are we going to address this as a nation?
We have become a nation of torturers.
And there's no getting away from that.
You know, we are Americans.
We elected these people.
They appointed the others.
And our military and our intelligence services need to be held to account for these reprehensible evils that they have committed.
Well, see, here's the thing.
You know, even Darth Vader can be redeemed, but he's got to, well, basically be hung to do it.
But America, the country itself, I think even including the land and the people here, because of the government that we claim that we have this democracy that we're responsible for, we're going to be stuck with this.
If we do not prosecute and hold people to account, then that'll be it.
It'll be, you know, the producers of 24 will have one, and torture will be a permanent, normalized part of American society.
That's right.
You know, there are all kinds of things at our disposal now, not only the revelations.
The three I mentioned are key, of course.
The Senate report, the International Committee to Red Cross report.
After all, that International Committee to Red Cross is the executive agent for Geneva.
They are juridically compelled to report on the treatment of detainees, and they have, and it's a terrible chapter to read.
You can download it from the web.
And then, of course, the New York Times report this week, which, you know, better late than never, it talks about the psychologists, these faux psychologists that were hired to implement these aseer techniques, techniques that were used to train U.S. airmen primarily, how to resist efforts to get them to make false confessions, okay?
Let's be clear with her about torture can very readily produce false confessions, if that's what you want.
And, of course, we did have some of those, and we used them to the hilt in trying to establish a non-existent but tried to establish a real tie between al Qaeda and Iraq.
Now, one of the things that's really interesting, when you're immersed in this, Scott, you remember things, and I remember as I plowed through George Tenet's memoir, At the Center of the Storm.
I refer your readers to page 177, 178.
I'm going to read two sentences.
Quote, this is Tenet, speaking or writing, We were asking for and we were given as many authorities as CIA ever had.
Things could blow up.
People, me among them, could end up spending some of the worst days of our lives justifying before congressional overseers our new freedom to act.
Wow, you know?
Okay.
Now, I could tell, very cynically, I could tell George Tenet, George, don't worry about it.
Don't worry about it.
Right.
Even now, the fix is in, okay?
First, there are the Rockefellers of this world.
That would be John D. Rockefeller IV.
Yeah.
Now, he knew chapter and verse about torture.
He didn't say anything about it.
He didn't do anything about it.
And now he is complicit.
And so you try to get that Senate Intelligence Committee to do a real investigation, and you'll get the kind of investigation that Richard Nixon famously ordered, by a thorough investigation of my Watergate activities.
Right.
You're not going to get that.
Well, that's the news.
I mean, that's the way they're going.
Obama himself has come out and said, we're not going to have a commission.
Obviously, Eric Holder has got really cold feet about appointing any prosecutors to convene any grand juries or anything like that.
And all the news that I've seen, the latest I've seen at least, is that Feinstein and John D. Rockefeller, the Senator Feinstein from California and John D. IV from West Virginia, on the Senate Intelligence Committee, they're going to take care of this, and they'll have all their results by the end of the year.
Right, right.
Now let me give you a little bit of insight into this.
First of all, I don't rule out Eric Holder living up to his responsibilities.
I think that it's quite possible that he could.
And the President himself said that Eric Holder could, depending on the findings, appoint a special prosecutor, which obviously is what's called for here, among other things.
Now, the other thing is that, you know, Liam Panetta, the head of the CIA, when he was picked to be the CIA chief, in his testimony before he was confirmed, he famously said, I'm a creature of Congress.
And that just sent chills right up the back of my neck there, because so was George Tenet, so was Porter Goss.
The worst people in the world who have ever been head of the CIA are people who came from Congress.
Why?
Well, it's built into the woodwork in Congress.
You compromise, you dissemble, you shave the truth here and there.
That's the way things are done in Congress.
That's not the way things should be done in the intelligence or in the law community.
And so what do we have here?
Well, what's going to happen here, and this has not been really revealed in the press.
Six weeks ago, Scott, it was revealed that Liam Panetta had picked Warren Rudman, fixer par excellence, former senator from New Hampshire.
Now, wait a minute.
I know that name because he's the head of some commission that happened one time.
Yeah, let me run down his little CV for you.
All right.
He achieved initial fame as vice chairman of the Iran Contra Committee.
Okay.
Okay, now picked by, in a way, the Democrat.
Okay.
And guess who his opposite number was on the Republican side?
A congressman named Richard Cheney.
Okay.
And what did they successfully do?
They successfully prevented the Iran Contra investigation from going anywhere.
And the only people that were sort of indicted from all that were pardoned by George H.W. Bush I on Christmas Eve, right before he left office.
Okay, so that's 1987.
What else do we know about Warren Rudman?
Well, in 1991, when Robert Gates, a former director or actually was a former head of analysis of CIA, was asked by President George H.W. Bush to be head of the intelligence community, that is, director of central intelligence and head of the CIA, many of my best friends, I had already retired, but many of my best friends like Mel Goodman and others, there were a whole slew of people still working in the CIA who testified courageously before the Senate Committee saying, this guy cooks the books.
This guy was responsible for our missing the fall of the Soviet Union.
This is the guy who's appointed malleable managers, and so we don't tell what the truth is.
We tell what we think the president wants to hear.
Guess what?
Warren Goodman was the prime mover on that committee, and he accused – Rudman?
What's his name?
Rudman, R-U-D-M-A-N.
I'm sorry.
I thought you just said Goodman, maybe.
Well, I'm sorry.
Maybe I did.
But this is Warren Rudman, who put in the fix there and accused my friend Mel Goodman and others of being McCarthyites for coming forward courageously and telling the world that, hey, this guy Gates, he was a fixer for Bill Casey.
He was his protege.
What Casey said, no Soviets could ever be good, Gorbachev included.
Gates just said the same thing, and as a result, the biggest failure of the CIA ever, ever in its whole history was the missing of the fall of the Soviet Union.
That's a pretty nice resume so far.
Keep going.
So Rudman was the one that put the fix on that and got Gates approved.
Can you imagine having that on your tombstone or whatever?
The reason the CIA had no idea the Soviet Union was about to fall?
Well, that's a really proud achievement just right there.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
Go ahead.
Well, people need to know that the last thing on this, and that is despite all the fixing, despite even the chairman of that committee who was from Oklahoma, and his name I'll remember in a second, despite all that, when Gates went before the full Senate, 31 senators voted against him to be head of the CIA.
That is unprecedented.
It remains unprecedented.
And so that's okay.
So that's 91.
Now, this is the worst.
This is our current Secretary of Defense that Obama kept from the Bush administration, just to be clear.
Secretary of the, Robert Gates.
Gates.
Gates, yeah.
Now, the worst, and I watched this very closely, I wrote about this.
In the mid-90s, all kinds of U.S. service people were coming down with unexplained nervous system illnesses, everything from Lou Gehrig's disease to all kinds of chronic fatigue, to all kinds of worse things, okay?
And to this day, what most people don't know, and it's out there in the press, one-third, one out of every three of the 690,000 service people we sent to the Gulf area have complained and been approved for disability for what they suffered over there.
It's still not completely clear what it was, but it was clearly due to some chemical exposures.
In other words, sir, more than 200,000 U.S. veterans of the first Gulf War.
That's correct.
That was the glorious war where we only lost 61 people, right?
Right.
61 people got dead, but there are over 200,000 whose lives have been ruined.
Now, that's a matter of record.
Now, there was an investigation of that, and who was appointed the head of that investigation?
A fellow named Warren Rudman.
Nice.
That's the one I was thinking of, I think.
Who appointed him?
The Pentagon appointed him, and what did he do?
He covered that up masterfully.
So much so that some of the prominent scientists and other people who served with him on that commission criticized him strongly in public for putting the fix in.
Okay.
Now, how many atrocities in this guy's resume before we get to 2009, Ray?
Well, in my book, it's got three strikes, you should be out.
It seems like that counts for citizens here in California.
I don't know why not these politicians.
Anyway, go ahead.
Well, it looks like it.
When I saw his name, I couldn't believe it.
And, again, this has been given very, very little publicity.
But this fellow, Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA, who openly described himself first and foremost as a creature of Congress, who has he gone to to be liaison between the CIA people, very carefully looking into the torture documents, and Feinstein's committee, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Guess who?
A fellow named Warren Redman.
I tell you, man, the fix is in.
No, they should have just hired Henry Kissinger.
Well, I don't know if he's so much in it.
Well, I won't comment on Henry Kissinger.
Well, I mean, the joke is, of course, they tried to get him to chair the 9-11 Commission there at first, and everyone went, well, wait a minute, don't all the people who bankroll Al-Qaeda, aren't they all clients of this guy?
What are we doing?
He had to withdraw his name.
That's another thing about these commissions.
People say, oh, something like the 9-11 Commission.
Well, give me a break.
The record of achievement of commissions that have been handpicked for people like Kissinger initially on them, they can't get to the bottom of these things.
What you need is somebody really independent, and there are people in the judiciary.
There are people in academia.
There are a handful of people with integrity in this country who have a public name and would be able to lead a commission like this.
Not people like Warren Redman or people at that ilk.
So people should know.
It's up to us, I think, Scott.
I think what the president has done here, he said, look, there are limits to what I can do right now.
I'm focused on lots of other things, but what I'll do is I will release these incredibly damaging legal, in quotes, memos with justified chapter and verse, these torture techniques.
I'll just have to hope that Americans care, because if they care, they'll read this stuff, and they will be up in arms, and they will require me.
They will require me to do something more gutsy than simply say we're going to hold these people harmless.
When you look at it, Scott, look at those poor slobs.
I say slob in a kind of charitable way.
Look at those poor NCOs and privates at Abu Ghraib.
I don't defend what they did, but they're doing time, man.
Yeah, they're sitting in prison right now.
Now what distinguishes them from some contractor employed by the CIA that gives Abu Zubaydah the treatment after he's told everything that he knows?
What distinguishes them?
Well, Warren Goodman and the likes of him, that's what distinguishes him, and Leon Panetta, who appears to be not the person of integrity that I thought, but rather a creature of Congress, as he calls himself.
So what we have to do is be up in arms here and not let this happen.
We just can't let this happen.
And I think it's within the power of the American people to say, look, we are not a nation of torturers, and these people need to be held to account, beginning with the president, who most people forget, authorized the whole thing, authorized the ignoring of Geneva by memorandum dated February 7, 2002, downloaded from the web.
You'll see his signature, an inch and a half long felt tip scribbling, and that's what started it, folks.
And we go to the top, and we won't get there if we pay any attention to the Warren Rudd business of this world.
Well, and people ought to know, too.
It's really easy.
There's so much information that's been out for just years and years.
I mean, all you've got to do is just go to the Washington Post website and Google interrogation, and you'll find great articles.
Glenn Greenwald pointed out one from December 2002, where they talked about what was going on in Afghanistan.
And, of course, Seymour Hersh wrote a book called Chain of Command, which is four major articles out of the New Yorker magazine, The Gray Zone and Abu Ghraib, all about Copper Green and how Stephen Cambone and all those guys under Donald Rumsfeld implemented all the CIA tactics under the military and how they Gitmo-ized the process in Iraq, because supposedly it was working so well in Guantanamo they started rounding up Iraqis and torturing them.
And there's been, as you mentioned, the Senate committee report in two parts from the Armed Services Committee, the Red Cross report published at the New York Review of Books in its entirety there, and, of course, all the OLC memos available there at the New York Times.
There's The Dark Side by Jane Mayer, and on and on and on, Andy Worthington's work.
There's plenty of information out there already in the public domain, as you said, with George Bush's scribble right there at the bottom.
Yeah, you know, Scott, the task it seems to me is, you know, you and I know all this, but the vast majority of Americans don't know this.
We have to find a way to approach them and to say, look, we're trying to make our country the way it used to be, a nation of laws, a nation that did not torture.
And things like boom tidbits like Larry Wilkerson, who used to work for, he was the Chief of Staff for Colin Powell and the Secretary of State, he points out that the folks that were taken to Guantanamo were, by and large, completely innocent and known to be innocent by the top generals who were responsible.
That's right.
He said that on this show, and he said he'd be willing to testify against Dick Cheney.
Just hand him the paperwork and he'll show up.
Yeah, and what I didn't know is what Wilkerson has.
Little details like, you know, one of the detainees was a 13-year-old boy, and another was a man over 90.
Now, you know, there's a special place set up for the six children who were in Guantanamo, and this stuff should resonate with Americans saying, no, enough of that.
We're not only not going to do that anymore, but we're going to investigate, find out who did this, and hold them accountable.
You know, I've always been against capital punishment, Scott, but, you know, I'm really, really tempted to make certain exceptions here.
Oh, no, I'm all about it.
You know, I think Russell Kirk, one of the founding thinkers of modern American conservatism, if he can say that George H.W. Bush had been hung on the White House lawn for his war crimes in Iraq in 1991, then it ought to be no problem whatsoever for any of us right out at the top, you know, from the rooftop or the mountaintop, to say that Dick Cheney and everybody down to Michael Haines and all the lawyers and Connalisa Rice and these people ought to be in front of the firing squad, because it's already the law.
You don't have to be like George Bush and make up a bunch of new law in order to justify that.
That's what the law says.
You can get the death penalty for these things.
Yeah, I'm going to revert to my anti-capital punishment stance here and just say one of those big detention facilities that have been built in the inner parts of our land, I think that we should, of course, try to give them the right to an attorney or as many attorneys as they like just to shove the evidence at the judges or the jury and treat them as a rule of law would do, as we used to do in this country.
And, you know, it's really nice in the middle of Kansas in the summer, and they'll have air conditioning and just let them live the rest of their lives thinking about the kinds of things that they not only authorized but compelled, corrupted the youth of our country to do.
And I don't mean just the folks at Applegrave.
I mean the folks who applied these enhanced interrogation techniques about which you spoke very early on in this program, the ones that really have conscience problems now, the ones that really couldn't abide what they watched as these human beings were destroyed.
All right, everybody, that's Ray McGovern.
He's one of the veteran intelligence professionals for Sanity.
You can find him at ConsortiumNews.com and at AntiWar.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Ray.
You're most welcome, Scott.