01/12/10 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm happy to welcome to the show Ray McGovern.
He is a former CIA analyst for 27 years and is the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
You can often find what he writes at ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Perry's great website.
Please support it.
And also, of course, at Antiwar.com, another great website that you should support.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thank you.
Doing well, Scott.
That's good.
All right.
So listen here.
I've got the audio here I want you to listen to before we get into your most recent article for Antiwar.com.
And I think I got it queued up about right here.
And what is the motivation?
I mean, you never hear what you find out from what.
Al-Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents.
What they have done over the past decade and a half, two decades, is to attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks.
He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive.
Unfortunately, Al-Qaeda has perverted Islam and has corrupted the concept of Islam so that he's able to attract these individuals.
But Al-Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.
And you're saying it's because of religion?
I'm saying it's because of an Al-Qaeda organization that uses the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.
This is a long issue, but Al-Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.
But you haven't explained why.
Can we clear up a couple of things, either one of you?
First of all, what was learned while the flight was underway?
Yeah, that's my favorite part where the next reporter just changes the subject entirely rather than following up what seems like a pretty reasonable question from Helen Thomas.
Why do they want to attack us in the first place?
And I'll go ahead and note here, Ray, so that you won't have to, that Helen Thomas is the lady that followed Jackie O. around reporting on her new shoes.
This is the lady who basically invented the bringing of National Enquirer-type celebrity hack journalism to Washington, D.C.'s press corps.
And now the rest of them are worse than her by about 100 times.
She might as well be the only person standing while the rest of them lay on their bellies, prone, just writing down whatever the White House says, Ray?
Yeah, they're excellent stenographers and repeat what they hear and ask very uninteresting questions so that they'll be invited back.
Helen, hats off to Helen, because she's not going to sit around and play that game.
She's 89.
She's going to have to be invited back into the press room since she's been there so long.
And these other hacks are really a disgrace to the journalist profession.
Yeah, I mean, she really makes the rest of them look bad.
I mean, hey, Ray McGovern, check it out.
It's you and me having the same conversation we've been having since 2003 or 2004 or something when I first got you on this show.
And you know what?
Let's go ahead and, as you did pretty well in your most recent article, Helen Asks Why, which people can find at original.antiwar.com slash McGovern.
Let's go ahead and, if we can, try and, I guess we got about 20 minutes or so left here, to go through really all the things that we know about why it is that they hate us, why it is that we're in this war on terrorism.
And I guess, if we can, could you maybe start back at the beginning of al-Qaeda's war against America, which really began before it was even al-Qaeda.
It was the Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and Abu Ulema and all the first generation of al-Qaeda terrorists in this country who killed Rabbi Kane, I think it's pronounced.
The rabid right-wing settler guy was assassinated by these guys in New York.
And then, of course, there was the first World Trade Center bombing.
It's never been a mystery who these guys are and what they have against America, is it?
It shouldn't be.
But with what I call the fawning corporate media in charge of what Americans are allowed to hear and read, it's a mystery to many Americans.
A lot of them don't want to hear that our policies might be responsible for a lot of this.
They'd much prefer to hear that these people hate our democracy or they hate our freedom and all that kind of thing.
One of the things that Brennan said, they're just, they're sort of hardwired to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents.
They have the agenda of, guess what, destruction and death.
It's sort of like a cartoon or a comic book, really.
And that's the mentality that they have here.
And when they use the homeland, that expression that came into vogue after 9-11, attacks on our homeland, well, that's a dead giveaway.
That's what the fascists in Germany used.
That's what the communists in Russia used.
They had more reason to use it since their homeland suffered 25 million dead in World War II.
But homeland is a kind of emotionally charged phrase.
And when someone like Helen Thomas asks, and curiously enough, you couldn't hear very well at the beginning of that little clip you played, nor does it appear on the White House website version of that press conference.
But she started out saying...
Are you kidding me?
I'm not kidding you.
This is something that used to happen when we watch Pravda or Izvestia in the Soviet Union.
But the first thing she starts out with is, why do they want to do us harm?
And when I looked at the transcript as any credible journalist or intelligence analyst would, that part was missing.
They started out with simply intentions.
What were the intentions?
So, you know, all this kind of thing.
So, when she says, why do they want to do us harm, well, I'm hopeful that at some point the American people will wake up to the fact that there's an answer to that.
And if they look, you don't have to be a crackerjack analyst to figure it out.
Look at what they say and look at what they do.
Both of these folks, now I'm referring to not only Abdul Muttalib, but also Balawi, the suicide bomber out there in eastern Afghanistan, both were radicalized and really went off the deep end when, exactly a year ago, when Israel attacked Gaza mercilessly, killing at least 1,300 Gazans, most of them civilians, as opposed to, I think there were 13 Israeli casualties.
Now, they watched that.
Balawi, the suicide bomber that hit the CIA site out there, he's a doctor, or he was a doctor, and he volunteered to go help the Gazans who had been injured and wounded.
And it was then that the Jordanian security service picked him up and tried to get him to work for them.
Well, he decided he'd be cleverer by half and he'd make look like he was going to work for them, and for the Americans, and of course, we know what he did, what he succeeded in doing.
Now, he was, as I say, he was radicalized a little bit by the invasion of Iraq, but his brother told us, you know, if the Gaza, that was it for him, that he'd had enough, he was going to go and extract vengeance.
Well, and if we go all the way back to 1989, I think it was, or 1990, when they assassinated the Rabbi Kaneh, or however you say that, in New York, he wasn't the world's biggest promoter of American freedom.
He was the world's biggest promoter of killing all the Palestinians and taking the West Bank for Israel.
Yeah, he was.
I mean, there's no mystery there.
He was not the champion of, I don't know, the Second Amendment or anything.
Well, he was about as extremist as you can imagine.
Now, let me put this into even wider context.
Most people don't realize that this is a very much a tit-for-tat thing.
And those who are aware of the most recent reportage know that Balawi was retaliating for the drone rocketing, the killing of Massoud, the head of the Pakistani Taliban.
The videotape that has now come to light shows him next to Massoud's successor.
And he says very clearly that the proximate cause, the reason, the direction that his radicalization took was when the Jordanians approached him to recruit him, and he let himself be, quote, recruited, end quote, and extracted vengeance that way.
So there's a tit-for-tat right there.
Predator drone aircraft missiles on Massoud, killing him.
And here we have Balawi avenging that.
So what I'm trying to say here is that there are cycles of violence here that most people don't go back to the first of that.
You mentioned Kahane.
Now, I'll mention something else.
Do you remember when those four Blackwater types made a wrong turn and ended up in Fallujah?
The people grabbed them, killed them, dragged them through the streets and hung some of them from a bridge.
Do you remember that?
That was March.
Yeah, sure.
That was the start of the real crackdown in Fallujah and then led to the major war in November of 04 there.
That's exactly right.
Okay.
So it was the start of that, but not really, because the real start was on March 21st, 2004.
And what happened then?
Israeli helicopter gunships made in the USA attacked a feeble, old, crippled Sheikh Yassin, who happened to be, you know, the head of a lot of Muslims there in Gaza, and killed him.
It was a targeted assassination.
Oh, that's funny, because, you know, Yassin just came up in conversation the other day with Juan Cole on the show about how Richard Sale reported in UPI that the Mossad worked with Yassin in order to create Hamas in the first place, so that they would be a religious right-wing alternative to the PLO.
Yeah, yeah.
Ironies of ironies, and tit for tat.
So wait a minute.
Now, you're saying it was the assassination of Yassin that led to the hanging and the desecration of the bodies of those Blackwater guys in Fallujah?
I am saying that, and I'm not using the old army intelligence swag factor, you know, as the scientific wild-ass guess here.
I'm not using that, okay?
I'm using placards.
I'm using posters that hung on the cars that dragged these folks to the streets, which said, The Avenging for Sheikh Yassin Brigade.
I'm thinking of the placards at all the storefronts, the huge pictures of Yassin, and I'm thinking of the AP reporter who was there and reported all that.
In other words, they were fit to be tied.
This was the very end of March, the 21st, that Yassin was assassinated, and once they get their hands on Americans, and there were four of them, and they didn't know where they were going, they grabbed them and expected vengeance.
So what you have there is a cycle which started with Yassin, then Fallujah with the killing of these four mercenaries, and I don't condone that, of course, and then you'll recall that the Marines were told, Go get Fallujah, and they started this offensive, and then they was called off.
Why?
Because it would take a while, April, May, June, after the election was coming, we'll take care of Fallujah after the election.
Oh, right.
You know, here's the thing, too, Dar Jamal is going to be on the show later this week on a different subject, but I've talked with him before, and we went through and traced the cause and effect where that second attack on Fallujah after the re-election of Bush in November 2004, the refugees from there had to go to Baghdad, most of them, and they displaced Shiites living in majority Sunni neighborhoods where they went to stay, and then those Shiites went to majority Shiite neighborhoods and displaced the minority Sunnis that lived there, and this was a major step, I mean, the second attack on Fallujah there was a real major turning point in the move toward a full-scale civil war between the Sunni resistance and the American and Iranian-supported Dawah Party government that we installed in power there, and a million people died in this thing.
Yeah, and you're not even mentioning the use of white phosphorus shells over Fallujah.
Oh, sure, yeah.
And the whole thing was...
And credible.
The depleted uranium and everything else.
Well, so what you're saying, then, is, the point here is that this is somebody else's cycle of violence, that's what Philip Weiss says.
This is the Israelis' cycle of violence, and somehow we've let it become ours.
Well, I'm afraid to say that's correct, because what's motivating these folks is largely what the Israelis are doing in Gaza and in other places, not to mention, also, the support we give to regimes such as the one in Saudi Arabia, just in order to make sure that we get our share, so to speak, of the oil, we're in support of so many repressive regimes there in that part of the world, and that would include Israel in my book, that it's not lost on the 1.3 billion, I'll repeat that, 1.3 billion, with a B, Muslims that watch TV every night and see all this going on.
And so if you're wondering what's recruiting jihadists or what's recruiting insurgents or militants, you know, well, there you go.
It's not like they're coming out of the woodwork because they hate our freedom.
Yeah.
Well, and now, here's the thing, too.
Glenn Greenwald pointed out on his blog the other day that, you know, to say that they hate us for our foreign policy is kind of, it's a separate argument still, and he didn't get into this argument.
He stayed out of this argument, and he identifies a separate argument as to whether or not we should have these foreign policies or not.
It's kind of what Michael Shoyer says, too, that, listen, all I'm saying is, it is what it is.
Let's talk about what's going on here.
What we have is, he says it's even wrong to call them terrorists because it makes people think of, like, the Red Brigades or whatever.
He says this is an Islamist insurgency against the United States.
But that's because the United States is a world empire in that part of the world.
To be an insurgency, you have to have something to insurge against, right?
And so if we get past the question of why they hate us and ask the question of whether we ought to continue these policies or not, it seems pretty clear to me that the simple answer is, of course not.
The NATO should have completely dissolved when the Warsaw Pact dissolved.
America shouldn't have troops in any country other than our own, and in fact, I'm for not having a standing army at all.
But still, that's my one-percenter point of view over here.
But we had no business occupying the entire Middle East.
It doesn't mean that if we had a Ron Paul foreign policy that that would be surrendering to these terrorists.
It would be doing what's right in the first place.
Our country's legacy is that we're the people who declared independence from the English Empire, which made us the envy of the entire world, which couldn't all get away with the same feat.
And for us to take up the mantle of their empire instead of living up to our own legacy of independence from it is a disgrace.
What we're doing is wrong.
And so the fact that it leads to all this blowback is a terrible unintended consequence, or maybe intended consequence, of our wrong policy.
We got no business propping up any dictatorships anywhere, do we?
Hold on now, hold on, Scott.
You want to pay six dollars and fifty cents a gallon?
Oh, come on.
We spend three times as much waging war on the world as we do on oil.
We'd all be saving money on oil.
If all the pipelines went through Russia first and then to us, it still doesn't matter.
Oil is a liquid in a global market.
We don't need to secure this oil.
It's all nonsense.
I'm provoking you in a good way here.
I know.
I'm going off, too.
I haven't had enough coffee yet.
No.
I think that Glenn and others are right on in saying that we need to debate these things.
But if they're subjects of debate, including the Israel factor, then they have to make sense.
And the only way they would make sense would be something that I regard as not quite moral.
And that is that we recognize that oil is a dwindling resource.
It's non-replenishable.
There's only a certain discrete amount of it in the world.
Most of it exists there in the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea area.
And we mean to get more than our share of that oil, just as we have gotten more of our share of everything since World War II.
So we have to keep the Chinese, and we have to keep the Indians, and we have to keep other nations that equally need or more need this oil away.
And we need to be able to control these things.
And so that's the strategic outlook here.
That's what people are thinking about.
Afghanistan sits in a strategic area.
If it goes under the influence of China, then the old think says we can't live with that.
The new think, and this is what I would propose, is that we start acting like the nursery school kids that I have as grandchildren now.
What they're taught in nursery school is that there's only a certain number of toys on the table, and they have to, guess what, share, okay?
Now, there's only a certain amount of oil in that area and natural gas.
Incidentally, most people don't know that the natural gas under Turkmenistan, which is immediately to the north of Afghanistan, is worth in money more than all the oil under the sands of Iraq.
That's fact.
Geologists know that.
That's why Chevron and others are in Turkmenistan.
I think they've just finished some pipelines to China, in fact.
This just goes to show how terrible the policy is.
I mean, here we go in with Marines, and the Chinese go in making deals with briefcases.
I'm not defending the policy.
I'm just trying to explain it.
No, I'm just saying, look how ridiculous this is.
Americans and people all over the world die as a result of this policy, and the policy doesn't even work for its intended purpose.
Well, it's not going to work for its intended purpose, and that's why all this stuff is feckless.
It's thrown out of Iraq, too.
Maliki's thrown our whole army out of Iraq, whole things for nothing.
One of the things that's so difficult to say, and this came up most recently when the seventh CIA case, well, the five CIA case officers and the two Blackwater types they hired when they were killed, you know, people say, well, they cannot have died in vain.
Well, I'm sorry, they did die in vain, okay, and it's our collective fault that they died in vain.
It's our collective fault that those three young children that belong to that mother who is running that base out there, they will grow up without a mother because of our failure and if we don't get off our rear ends and end this idiocy, we all have to be responsible for these kinds of atrocious things.
They will have died in vain, and it will be our fault to the degree we have any guts or influence on the body politic here.
Well, and you know, there's been all these reports coming out, too, about Pakistan and the drone strikes and how Obama's escalation of the drone strikes has led to, what, 91% deadly error rate.
I'm reading here, Michael S. Roseth at Lew Rockwell's blog, the Pakistan government reports that 39 out of 44 drone attacks killed nothing but civilians in 2009, and this is a war against a country that is an ally of ours officially.
We're not really fighting their state, we're killing people not tied to the state in provinces that they don't really control, I guess, so it's not quite a war against Pakistan, but the next report is that Pakistan, let's see, this is from Reuters, Pakistan seen becoming more Islamist, anti-U.S., well, I wonder if that's from killing people there all the time or I wonder if they just hate us because we let women vote in primary elections.
I mean, what the hell is going on here?
And how can Americans not see this after all this time?
Ray, it's January 2010 here, come on.
Well, they don't want to see it.
They don't want to be bothered.
Enough of us have problems meeting payroll or keeping our houses, and many are not quite educated well enough to know that they're not getting the news from Fox News when they watch it.
They're getting a poor substitute for entertainment and biased news.
So it's a tough problem, and so it's up to us, you know, we can't depend on our government, we can't even depend on our churches to speak out against things like torture or some of the other abuses, so it's up to us, and that's both good and bad, because when I look out at audiences, I get a lot of encouragement from the capable, dedicated people that I see trying to end this business.
Yeah, well, it's true, it's just that there's not enough of us is all.
But you're right, there are a lot of great anti-imperialists in this society.
Well, you know, Cesar Chavez used to always say, there are enough of us, what we need to do is stop writing articles, stop making speeches, without action, nothing is ever going to happen.
What does that mean?
That means what Cindy Sheehan is doing now, when she comes here to Washington this week, actually.
That means going and occupying congressmen and senators' offices, that means getting out in the street and pushing signs in people's faces that say, look, we are collectively responsible for this carnage, and we ought to stop it.
Now, can I guarantee success?
No, I can't guarantee success, but I have eight grandchildren, and I'm going to do my damnedest to make sure that they grow up in a country that's a lot better than the one we have right now.
Yeah, it sure seems like when majorities want people tortured, and congressmen can literally come right out in the open and say he wants to deport all the Iranians, even though they're all our friends who fled when our friend the Shah fell in 79.
People who hate the ayatollahs.
It sure seems, Ray, like it's almost an era of superstition or something, like the society itself is so disconnected from the very few things that we're supposed to all agree on, like the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights, and peace as a matter of course, and war the exception.
It hasn't taken that long to completely remove the American people from the very basic things that supposedly make us America, man.
I mean, torture as the American way, yeah, oh, the Detroit bomber, drown him almost to death over and over again until he talks.
Yeah, 183 times worked with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, you know, I don't know if you know this, but he confessed to being responsible for everything except global warming.
Yeah, well, I think that was in there too, you know.
Yeah, I mean, if you read, in fact, that's what's hilarious about this whole story, if there's anything humorous in it, it's that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed bragged to Yusuf Fahouda of Al Jazeera that you're damn right I did it, and here's why.
He and Ramzi bin al-Shibh both.
Then the Americans capture him, the FBI starts questioning him, he starts spilling his guts and bragging about what a great terrorist leader he is and all the things that he did.
Then the CIA grabs him, starts torturing him, and now, you know, as you say, he's responsible for every missing white girl in Aruba and for everything that ever happened bad to anybody.
Yeah, and he also laughs very hard at the fact that the FBI and CIA were sent in hot pursuit of all these, quote, leads, end quote, and, you know, when they said it should have been connecting dots, they were traveling all over the world following up all the, quote, leads, end quote, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave them.
You know, one thing that's lost sight of, Scott, and this I'd like to just include, because when they got Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9-11 commission report was just being drafted and I could just see the young drafters reading in the Washington Post, oh, they got the mastermind here, I got an idea, let's go ask him, yeah, we'll ask him why he did it.
Okay, and they did.
Yeah, imagine that!
They got the CIA to ask him why he did it, okay?
Now, meanwhile, they looked into his bio and all, oh, he studied at Greensboro, he studied at North Carolina A&T, he got a degree in electrical, not electrical, but mechanical engineering, ah, he must have had a really, somebody must have called him a raghead or he had an affair of the heart, yeah, but oh no, what they get back from the interrogators is responsible for this little paragraph that's on page 147 of the 9-11 commission report.
It reads as follows, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's limited and negative experience in the United States was not the cause for his antipathy, rather by his own words he said that my reasoning and my motivation was the factor of my extreme hatred of the one-sided US policy favoring Israel.
Now, most people that I tell that to, they hurry back and they look in their 9-11 commission report to see if that's really true.
It is really true.
Why haven't they heard about it?
Well, you and I know why they haven't heard about it.
It's been deleted from the record and if you want to get even worse, here is the Washington Post giving a revisionist view of that five years later, I'll quote, his stay in the United States included a brief jail stay because of unpaid bills and that almost certainly helped propel him on his path to becoming a terrorist.
He stated that his contacts with Americans, while minimal, confirmed his view that the United States was a debauched and racist country, end quote.
Oh, where did the Washington Post get that revisionist view?
Well, you know where they got it?
They got it from a, quote, intelligence summary.
Give me a break.
So what's going to be really interesting, what's going to be really, really interesting, Scott, is when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed goes on trial in New York, if he says these same things, it's going to be very, very difficult for the New York Times and the Washington Post to make believe he said something else.
Well, and you know, this is the thing, too.
Just for the record here, if you go through the history of this, you look at what Ramzi Youssef said, then his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, what he says, you look at Osama bin Laden's declarations of war against the United States, look at the statements to the judge made by Richard Reid, the shoe bomber.
You look at Michael Shoyer's work in Imperial Hubris, where he lists the six reasons, support for Israel, occupation of the Middle East, occupation of Saudi Arabia in order to bomb and blockade Iraq during the 1990s, obviously replaced on the list by the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan there.
Our support for Russia, China and India and their wars against Muslims, our support for dictatorships around the world are, you know, Houston's political control over the price of oil over there, whether low or high, as per their whim.
All these things.
Now, torture, obviously, is added to the list, as every interrogator out of Iraq says that the insurgency was basically born of the pictures of Guantanamo Bay and of Abu Ghraib prison.
That's what got the foreign jihadists in, almost to a person.
Yeah.
Well, and there was a study done, there were two studies done in 2005, one by the Israelis and one by the Saudis that came out at the same time, that said that virtually all, like 99.99% of the jihadists, foreigners who traveled to Iraq in order to fight in the resistance, were new.
That the only guys who were leftover veterans of the Afghan war against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 80s were, you know, maybe some of the people who actually, like, arranged the travel plans for them to go or whatever.
But virtually all of them, all of them, were young kids who were radicalized by the invasion of Iraq itself.
Simple as that.
And this whole thing, there's, I'm trying to find where there's room for any of this to be anything but a reaction to American foreign policy, and I just don't see it, Ray.
Well, it is reactive.
The problem is that if you say these things in the open media, and even if you're Michael Scheuer, who has some claim on expertise in this area, well, he shared on C-SPAN just last Monday, a week from yesterday, that he lost his job with the Jamestown Foundation because wealthy donors said, we can't have people saying this stuff about Israel, so get rid of Scheuer, and now he's looking for a job.
You know what he said?
And I said, you know, I'm proud of that, and I think that's a very instructive example of what happens to people who try to tell the truth on this issue.
Yep, indeed.
All right, well, listen, I sure appreciate all your efforts to keep telling the truth, Ray.
Well, and I yours, so keep at it, Scott.
All right, thanks a lot, everybody.
That's Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst for 27 years and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
We'll be right back after this.