11/18/09 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome back to the show Ray McGovern.
He's a former CIA analyst for 27 years.
He used to give the morning daily briefing to George Bush Sr. back when he was the Vice President.
He writes at Robert Perry's excellent site, Consortium News.
And we also feature much of what he writes at Antiwar.com slash McGovern.
And in fact, you might need to type in original.antiwar.com slash McGovern to get every bit of it there.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing real well.
That's great.
Thanks for joining us on the show today.
Really appreciate it.
Okay.
All right.
Now, so let's talk about this article, Shining a Light on the Roots of Terrorism.
Colleague Sheikh Mohammed is in the news, of course, because of the...
Well, I guess he hadn't been indicted yet.
They just assumed the indictment.
They're going to go ahead and try him in New York.
And maybe he has been indicted.
I don't know.
And so you took the opportunity to ask what I thought was the only important question, which was how did we get into this mess in the first place?
Why would people hijack planes full of American civilians and crash them into buildings full of American civilians in the first place?
And in a word, your answer is Israel and American support for Israel.
I guess that's more than one word.
Why don't you go ahead and give us the basic outline here of how you came to that conclusion?
Sure.
Just to clarify, that's not my word.
That's the word of the so-called mastermind of the 9-11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
And what people don't realize is that as the 9-11 commission people were drafting away and getting ready their report, all of a sudden they read in the Washington Post that the mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, had been apprehended.
And so they looked up everything they could about this fellow and found out that he had a degree in mechanical engineering from North Carolina ENT in Greensboro.
And the first impulse was to say, well, gosh, he must have had an affair of the heart there or somebody must have really called him a raghead or something.
That must be why.
Well, they looked into it.
They got the CIA to ask them these questions.
And the initial response was this.
And it was written down in the 9-11 report this way, this very odd way.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's animus toward the United States did not come from his experience at the university in Greensboro.
Rather, in his own words, he said it was due to his violent disagreement with the U.S. one-sided support for Israel.
Now, many of your listeners will be hearing that for the first time.
They shouldn't.
It's right there in the 9-11 Commission report at page 147 if you're interested in looking it up.
Then there's kind of a curious footnote.
It says, well, you know, this is what Ramzi Youssef, the fellow who tried to knock down the Twin Towers in 1993, this is what he said when he was sentenced to life in prison after he was apprehended.
And so I looked that up.
And, of course, that's what he said.
He said, you know, I was motivated by extreme violent hatred for what the U.S. is doing in support of Israel against my Palestinian brothers.
And then it turns out Ramzi Youssef not only is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew, but he was sort of his inspiration because, you know, he did such a great job in knocking down half or a little bit of the one tower there, killing six people and wandering a whole slew of others.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said, you know, that's my nephew.
Man, what a guy.
He's my man.
And that's when he decided he'd do something even more grandiose.
So bottom line here, when the trial starts, there are going to be a lot of embarrassing things come out.
A whole lot of embarrassing things, you know, about torture and about other aspects of his apprehension and his treatment in prison.
But one thing that will have difficulty coming out is the notion that the motive, why he did it, why these guys did it.
And it's not only he, you know, it's Osama bin Laden, it's everyone else saying that at least part of their motivation was to sort of wreak revenge or vengeance on the United States for how it enables the State of Israel to do the kinds of things it does, for example, in Gaza and the West Bank.
So that's going to come out, and it's going to be really interesting to see if The New York Times and The Washington Post can finesse that because they've, you know, they've excised sentences from middle of paragraphs.
They've done just about every art to disguise the fact that this is a real factor.
Do I think it's the only factor?
No.
And it's never only one factor, but it's a major one.
Well, it's the one that's left out more than any of the others.
That's exactly right.
I mean, even Bush acknowledged that there was a problem with the bases in Saudi Arabia, so he moved them to Qatar, which I think is a distinction without a difference to Osama bin Laden.
But, you know, it's funny, Ray, because I've heard over the years the argument made sort of preemptively, because, after all, it's you and me and Michael Shoyer and Ron Paul and very few others who ever even want to focus on this kind of thing in the first place.
And I've sort of heard an argument, a defense against an argument not being made that, oh, come on, it's not about Israel because, after all, Osama bin Laden is a Johnny-come-lately to the Israel issue, and that kind of thing.
And yet, if anyone just goes back and looks at when Peter Arnett and Peter Bergen interviewed him in 1997, or I forget the gentleman's name from ABC News, if you look at the fatwas of 96 and 98 on the website of PBS NewsHour, obviously, if you read Imperial Hubris by Michael Shoyer, the former head bin Laden analyst there at CIA at Alex Station, they say that, I mean, and it's in their own words in all those interviews dating all the way back to 1996 at least, that this is all about Israel.
And, you know, maybe Osama bin Laden was being hyperbolic in 2004 when he said, you know, I decided to knock down your towers when your battleships knocked down the towers in Beirut back in 1983.
But it still shows that, you know, it was part and parcel of his complaint.
In fact, in the fatwa of 1996, it's almost a third of it.
It's about the Kwana massacre.
And the Kwana massacre happened right at the time when bin Laden got Sudan to kick him out and he went to Afghanistan.
And then, so it was like two or three months later, and the whole fatwa was apparently inspired by Kwana.
And, in fact, that's the story of Mohammed Atta as well.
After the Kwana massacre in 96, he filled out his last will and testament like a kamikaze attending his own funeral and dedicated himself to killing Americans as revenge for what Israel had done in southern Lebanon.
Yeah, you know, Scott, it reached ridiculous proportions back when Don Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense, you know.
I remember him, you know, when he was the matinee idol, you know, standing up at the microphone there shaking his head, saying, you know, I just don't understand how anybody would commit suicide just to kill a whole bunch of other people.
You know, I just don't understand.
Well, if you took a moment, for example, to look at Al Jazeera, to look at some of the Arab stations and what they put out every night on their TV and, you know, there are 1.3 billion, I say again, billion Muslims out there in the world and most of them have TVs, OK?
What do they see?
They see U.S.
-built helicopter gunships, U.S.
-built fighter bombers, U.S.
-built tanks, U.S.
-built bulldozers in Peoria, Illinois, OK, knocking over Palestinian homes and striking Palestine, West Bank and Gaza from the air.
Now with a steady diet of that and with a clientele that comes out of that experience having lived two generations, sometimes three generations in, let's say, Gaza, which is an open-air concentration camp, you know, if people have no hope, that's what they do.
That's what they do if they have no hope.
And what you have to do is, you know, not like somebody said, well, you know, we need to apply the same methods that we use when we, you know, eliminate malaria.
Well, let me explain here.
The idea is, you know, you find where the mosquitoes are, you trace them back to where they breed, and then, of course, you station three platoons of sharpshooters around the swamp and you try to hit each mosquito as they leave the swamp.
Well, that's not how you do it, you know.
What you do is you find out the grievances that drive these so-called terrorists, you follow them back to that swamp of grievances, and you don't try to shoot them as they come out of the swamp.
What you try to do is drain the swamp of the grievances, and that and only that will be a long-term approach to this problem because, as I say, there are 1. billion out there, and they're very, very, very much disappointed and outraged at what they see going on in the West Bank and in Gaza, and particularly for those 22 atrocious days where 1,400 Palestinian civilians were killed in Gaza and eight Israelis lost their lives on the other side of the border.
So, you know, that disproportionate reality is very much alive in the minds and on the TVs of folks in the Middle East.
And, you know, just a final thought here, Scott.
When they watch the U.S. Congress criticize the very objective report by the jurist, very much respected in South Africa, his name is Goldstone.
Goldstone himself is a Jew.
He came down and he said, you know, there are war crimes committed on both sides.
Each side needs, that is Israel and Hamas, need to conduct an investigation, and if they don't, then the U.N. or the world court should.
Now, what does our U.S. Congress do?
Well, the very, very pro-Israeli congresspeople, I'm talking about De Leon and Will Slaton from Florida, you've got Howard Berman, head of the International Affairs Committee, you've got Steny Hoyer.
What do they say?
They say, and this is the height of irony, they say that report is biased.
It's biased.
Goldstone doesn't know what he's talking about.
And so they issue a resolution.
They get 233 congressmen to sign on it, and it says, Mr. President, this is a bogus report.
Don't pay any attention.
And what's the message to the Arabs?
The message is 1,400 Palestinians, they don't matter.
The only thing that matters are the handful of Israelis who were killed during those 22 years.
And, of course, they were killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So what needs to happen is these so-called friends of Israel, and I refer specifically to the likes of Leon and Will Slaton, they have to realize that they are contributing directly to the recruitment of more and more and more terrorists.
The more they stick their portfolio out to prevent any criticism at all of what is generally called our ally, the State of Israel.
And you probably heard me say this before, and people are shocked that I would say it.
The State of Israel is not our ally.
Go to your dictionary.
Look up ally.
Ally is somebody with whom you have a defense treaty, a mutual defense treaty.
There is none with Israel, and there's a reason why there's none with Israel.
You know what the reason is?
The Israelis were broached on this, you know, after the 1967 war.
We said, you know, maybe it would help if we formed an alliance, and then if the Arabs wanted to attack you, they would know they would be attacking us as well.
And what the Israelis said was, well, you know, it's very nice of you.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Why do you suppose, Scott?
The reason why is because international treaties require internationally recognized boundaries.
The Israelis were not interested in giving up the West Bank.
They weren't interested.
Yeah, it's the same problem with trying to bring Georgia into NATO, right?
Wow, you've got to settle your border disputes first.
We don't have that in Israel.
Exactly, and, you know, they've got a pretty good thing going with the U.S. Congress.
In any case, you know, who needs a treaty?
Treaties also bind each party to let the other know if they're going to attack another country, and Israel didn't want to be bound by that either.
So there are lots of things that if you look below the surface, and the next time you hear Ilyanov or Slitin or Howard Berman or Steny Hoyer, the next time you hear them say, well, we have to automatically protect Israel, our ally, ask them how it is that Israel is our ally any more than Egypt or Syria or even Iran is our ally.
None of them are allies because we have no defense treaty with them.
Well, now, I want to focus more on the blowback thesis here.
You know, you talk about how Americans somehow are unable to understand.
It's a simple concept, vengeance.
It seems like if there's one thing that Americans understand, it's vengeance.
I don't know why it's so hard for anybody to think that someone else might feel the same way.
And I'd like to refer here to this article in The Independent that Glenn Greenwald has highlighted on his blog this week, where Jonathan Hari has interviewed these former radical jihadist warrior types about what their problem is.
And their problem is Western foreign policy.
And the more Bush beat his chest and invaded more countries and killed more people, the more radical they got.
And what was the thing that kind of ameliorated that?
What was the mitigating thing that kept them from blowing themselves up somewhere or something?
It was when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London opposing the Iraq war.
When they saw on TV Americans protesting against the war.
When one of these guys, I think, was in jail in Egypt.
And it was Amnesty International or one of these groups came to his aid, even though he hated them.
They didn't hate him and they came, yeah, it was Amnesty, came to protect his rights.
And so he went, well, wait a minute now.
Maybe I need to stop being such a collectivist and stop seeing all people in the West as one and the enemy because it's more complicated than that, isn't it?
That's all we need Americans to do when we're talking about what's going on with the Arab world.
Bombing them every day is no different than when some of them did it September 11th against us.
Well, you know, that's absolutely correct, Scott.
You just do the numbers, you know.
Let's say 3,000 died, almost 3,000 died on 9-11.
Well, there have been U.S. Army interrogators at work in Iraq.
And what they tell me and what they've actually published is that when they asked the folks that came into Iraq to do jihad, well, what made you come in here to help the insurgents so-called in Iraq?
And they all say Abu Ghraib.
They all say Guantanamo.
They all say what you guys are doing to our co-religionists or our fellow Arabs or whatever.
So here you have far more than 3,000 already killed U.S. soldiers because of this reaction to what people doing jihad see when they watch those pictures, when they see the devastation that's happened not only in Iraq but now in Afghanistan.
So if you want to stop all that stuff, what you do is you stop the wheels of the juggernaut toward war.
And you say, look, there are some sane countries around here.
We need an international conference.
We want Iran included.
We want Pakistan, of course.
We want Russia.
We want China.
We want all the Arab countries.
We're going to meet in Geneva, bring the Taliban with you, and we'll figure this thing out.
That's the way to do things.
That's what we finally ended up doing on Vietnam.
You figure it out.
It's just feckless.
It's like the 30 Years War.
Well, I'd like to pick a fight with you there, Rick, because I disagree with that.
I think that what they need to do is just get on their C-130s and leave.
Because I talked with this lady, Malalai Joya, and she said, you know, now the compromise is to try to work things out and maybe end some of the fighting.
Do you want to cut a deal with Mullah Omar?
Oh, great.
You know what?
I'll tell you what.
Just stop helping us.
Just stop cleaning up your pottery barn mess and just get out.
We will fix it.
It's our responsibility, not yours.
We don't need you to make a deal with the Taliban for us, okay?
And I've got to respect that.
It's our country.
Our guys are simply trespassing.
Bring them home.
That's it.
No conference, no nothing.
Yeah, I'm all in favor of bringing folks home, but doing it responsibly.
Oh, come on.
That's what the Republicans said about Iraq.
It's still there.
To prevent the whole place from falling apart, to prevent the women from being put back to where they were in the Middle Ages, we need to feed on the collective interests of countries in that area to prevent unnecessary violence.
Now, there's going to be some violence when we pull out, but if you have an international regime, if you have maybe peacekeepers from the Arab countries or from Iran even, Iran doesn't want the Taliban to succeed.
Iran has a drug problem like you wouldn't believe because of what's going on in Afghanistan.
All I'm saying is there are common interests there that you can enlist if you pursue a sensible negotiation policy, which will allow you to leave with some semblance of an attempt to restore the kind of order that existed before we went in there.
It wasn't very good order, but at least there was a lot more peace and people were not being killed by drones and other things.
Yeah, well, I sort of look at it like if the Taliban occupied America and then they made sure to set us up good by fixing us up with some Republicans and Democrats on their way out.
Thanks a lot.
I mean, that's the best we talk about here is if the best we can do for them is cut a deal with the Taliban that they don't want any more than they want our quizzling government there.
Why not just leave it to them?
I mean, this lady, Malalai Joia, said, listen, just leave it to us.
We'll guarantee our own liberty.
We don't want your help because all your help is bad.
Your help doesn't help us.
You're not going to do the right thing by us.
Just stop.
Well, I agree.
I think the most influential phenomenon that causes terrorism is the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan.
That's always been the case.
So we disagree only in so far as I feel we have some kind of moral obligation in the process of leaving and first and foremost, of course, in the process of not reinforcing as the president is being pressured to do.
I have a reasonable degree of hope to stand up to those pressures.
I admire him for delaying a decision.
So in conjunction with not reinforcing and easing ourselves out, it seems to me the proper thing to do is to consult with the nations that have some of the same interests we do so that it doesn't become the kind of fascist religious state that it was under the Taliban and at the same time doesn't permit the kind of training and other exploitation that the Al Qaeda folks had before 9-11.
Well, I still got to wonder how that's supposed to work.
I mean, I don't think that the people of Afghanistan want China or India or Iran or Russia or anyone else around there to be the neighbors that do the deciding.
It's their country, right?
Well, let's just stop for a second and ask ourselves why we're in Afghanistan.
Good question.
I still don't know the answer.
Let me tell you what Antonio Yuhas says or people who know about oil or people know about national gas.
There is in Turkmenistan, just to the north of Afghanistan, rich natural gas deposits that are valued higher than all the oil under Iraq.
Wow, that's a lot.
Yeah, and there were plans and there still are plans to run a pipeline down through Afghanistan, through Pakistan, into actually into India and market that natural gas because everyone will be needing it.
There are oil deposits as well.
There are huge copper deposits right in Afghanistan.
So what we have here is the second resource war of the 21st century.
The first one being Iraq.
It's a lot more complicated than that, but it can be looked at that way, okay?
And unless we learn what kids learn in nursery school, namely that you have to share things, unless we learn that and get together with the Chinese and the Indians, both of whom are really strapped for oil and natural gas, and we figure out a way to share that thing in an equitable way, there will be continued wars because that's the strategic significance of Afghanistan.
It's not possible to say that in polite circles here in Washington.
But you look, you look.
You know, when George W. Bush was governor of Texas, Scott, he got a letter from Ken Lay, head of Enron, okay?
And guess what?
The idea was that the Afghan ambassador was going to visit the governor of Texas and going to outline the plans for this great pipeline.
Khalid Zard, our ambassador in Iraq and then Afghanistan, he was in on it.
He's a big oil person.
Well, how has bin Laden convinced the Taliban to go with, I think it's brightest, the Argentine company instead of with the Americans?
Yeah, so what you've got is a, I asked Khalid Zard, you know, he's a big neocon and he was ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq.
I asked him at a public forum.
I said, well, now, I hate to mention the elephant in the living room here, but what about that pipeline?
Does that have any, is it just a coincidence?
The U.S. troops are all deployed through Afghanistan along what the pipeline route is going to be?
And he looked at me and he said, well, well, we, it is too much.
There's too much chaos.
There's too much violence.
Now we, we can't do the pipeline now.
And so I'm thinking, whoa, so that's why we're there to end the violence.
Well, of course, there are some that say that we're there to make sure that there's more violence, because if we can't have a pipeline, we've got to make sure that the Chinese can't.
And as long as there's angry men with AK-47s between here, there and the other place, then nobody can have one.
Yeah, well, that may, you know, there may be some crazies that come at it that way.
But I think that there are enough statesmen around, even in Russia, even in China, even in Iran, if you could believe it, and Pakistan.
If you got them around the table and said, look, we've got a problem here.
The world has run out of oil.
There's a lot of natural gas up there in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Let's figure out how we share that.
That would, you know, that would be a sensible way of working out this thing.
And I think that Obama is really up to that once he gets out from under all these other crises that he's facing.
Well, I guess we'll see about that.
All right, listen, we're all out of time, but I really appreciate your time on the show today, Ray.
You're most welcome, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Ray McGovern from ConsortiumNews.com.
You can also find him at Original.
Antiwar.com.
Slash McGovern.