07/14/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, so good.
We do have a guest today, and it's our good friend Ray McGovern.
He's a former CIA analyst for 27 years, even was the morning briefer for George H.W. Bush when he was the vice president in the Reagan years, and he's the cofounder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and he writes mostly for ConsortiumNews.com, ConsortiumNews.com, and you can also find his collective works and his TV and radio interviews and everything else at RayMcGovern.com.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Seth.
Doing well.
Good, good.
Very happy to talk to you again.
It occurred to me that something that the American people don't know but should know is that a lot of anti-American terrorism directed at the United States is based on American support for Israel, and to be more specific, not Israel's existence and being a nice guy and minding their own business all the time, but being Jewish and therefore the victims of anti-Semitism, that kind of thing, but Israel's crimes that they commit against the people of Palestine, the people of southern Lebanon especially, and how that blows back on us and why that blows back on us, and I know that this is something that you've written quite a bit about in the past, so I was just wondering if you could give us your take.
Well, it's a very timely question, Scott.
As you know, the U.S. is pretty much the only country, maybe by now, we're roped in Fiji and one or the other two island nations there in the Pacific, that supports Israel here, and the normal reaction is always, well, they have a right to defend themselves, as though there's an equivalence between Israeli power and the rockets that come from Gaza.
Key point being, no rocket, no rocket came from Gaza until after the Israelis started taking advantage of these three young people whom they knew were killed weeks, weeks before they admitted it, weeks before they told their parents so that they could whip up this anger, this hysteria in the meantime, and now they're wreaking, quote, vengeance, end quote, on Gaza.
Every three, five, seven years, it's Israeli policy to, quote, mow the grass in Gaza.
That's how they look at it.
Well, we're talking about other blowback, and we're talking about really important things.
Well, you know, 9-11 happened, I believe, mostly because of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden, and those people were fed up with us on two grounds.
One was our occupation, really, our true presence in the holy sites there in Saudi Arabia.
Another was our support for Israel, our one-sided support for Israel.
Now, when the young people were drafting this 9-11 mission report, I could just see how it happened.
I was thinking at the time, I saw in the Washington Post that they had captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind 9-11.
And so the thought occurred to me, as it did to those young people, they said, well, hey, let's see.
I mean, he's the mastermind.
Let's ask him why he did it, right?
Okay.
So they went to the CIA and said, can we ask him why he did it?
Yeah, we'll ask for you.
They came back.
And unless you're really careful in reading the commission report, you miss it.
It's one sentence, and it's on page 147 for anybody who's interested.
And it says, well, background is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has a degree in engineering at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro.
So these young people writing all this up said, well, he must have had an affair of the heart, or somebody must have called him a raghead.
He must have had a really bad experience here in the United States.
That's why he hates us.
Well, guess what?
That's not what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said.
What he said was, quote, well, this is what the report says.
By his own account, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was motivated not by any bad experience he had as a student in the United States, but by his own admission, he was motivated by his hatred for U.S. policy favoring Israel.
That's a direct quote.
I memorized the sentence.
Now, if the mastermind of 9-11 admitted that he was motivated mostly by his hatred for this one-sided support by the U.S. for Israel, that means something.
And you know what, Scott?
I think that's why we never hear anything more from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who sits in Guantanamo, incommunicado, and why he wasn't tried in New York.
Because he might be asked why he did it, and he might say the same thing, which is not publishable by the New York Times or anybody else.
Israel gets a free pass.
And these days, it's particularly intense.
There's a large reason why we suffer so many calamities from terrorists.
Now, one of the things that struck me just this week was Angela Merkel.
You know, she's really in an awkward position.
You know why?
Because she doesn't like being treated like a vessel, or like Thomas Drake called the BND, the German service, an appendage.
The German word is anhänger, okay?
Hanger on, okay?
She doesn't like to be treated like a hanger on since World War II, where she's a vessel of the United States.
But she says intelligence cooperation will not be harmed by these recent revelations to U.S. spies there.
Why?
Because we need each other so much.
We're enmeshed to such a degree that we need the U.S.
Why?
Because of the terrorists.
So let me give you an instant analysis here.
It's a great deal, Scott.
You fly all these drones, you do all this carnage, and you let the Israelis have it, you create all these terrorists, and then you get Germany bound to you.
I'm sorry, Ray.
We gotta go out to this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Ray McGovern in just a sec.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Ray McGovern's out riding around on a bus.
I think I'm just assuming it sounded like a Greyhound interstate travel sort of a bus, which means he must be out on a speaking tour telling people about why they ought to be peaceniks.
Is that right, Ray?
Well, actually, I'm headed down to Haley Farm in Clinton, Tennessee.
The Children's Defense Fund has me down there doing some speaking and just learning from people like James Lawson and other real famous people from the Southern Civil Rights Movement.
Hopefully, I'll learn something about nonviolent resistance, and we can apply it to the anti-war movement going on now.
Great.
Now, you're always up to something good.
I know that.
All right.
So we're talking about American support for Israel, American support for Israel's wrongs, and it's that motivation in the terrorists who attack us.
Now, Ray, I've got to say here that, well, I mean, I'm not for any entangling alliance with anybody, but if anybody picks a fight with me because I'm friends with somebody, then screw them.
Then I'll fight them, right?
But the problem is, if it's my friend that's in the wrong, that's picking the fight all the time, then I'm probably better off trying to just solve the problem rather than letting only my loyalty to my friend take over and go ahead and fight his battle for him kind of thing.
Of course, I'm not very much of a tough guy in the first place, so it's not a perfect analogy.
But I think what's going on here is people might say, well, what do you want to do, negotiate with terrorists?
So bin Laden doesn't like it if we support Israel.
Screw him.
I agree with that.
Whatever he wants doesn't matter to me.
It's just that all the, I don't know about the people, but all the governments of the region for a generation now have been willing to accept the existence of Israel.
It's just the occupation that they're against.
And in bin Laden's day in the 90s leading up to 9-11, it was the occupation of southern Lebanon as well.
So it's not that these are excuses for what they do, and it's not that I want to negotiate with evil and let them tell me what ought to be done or whatever.
It's just that we shouldn't be supporting Israel's criminality in the first place.
And that's exactly what it is.
If you look at Mohammed Atta and bin Laden, both focus on Operation Grapes of Wrath in southern Lebanon and the Kana massacre.
I guess bin Laden cited the Kana massacre.
They say that Atta filled out his last will and testament, which is like signing up for the army basically on their side a day or two before the Kana massacre, the first Kana massacre, the 96th one.
But this featured for both of them very important in bin Laden's declaration of war and Atta's decision to sign up to work with him.
So it seems like the American people deserve a chance to know this stuff, you know?
They do, and they don't get to know it because it's kept out of the press.
There are a couple of really vivid examples of things that Americans don't know.
One has to do with Fallujah, which is, in my view, the epitome of shame of America.
We know that in April, early April of 2004, four of those Blackwater folks took the wrong turn and ended up in Fallujah, where they were actually killed and dragged through the streets, and that led to a lot of grief on the part of the Marines that were sent in there unprepared and killed, and then they called it off because the election was coming in.
But when the election came in November, there were massive reprisal raids on Fallujah, and in Fallujah now, there's a very high incidence of infants, abnormalities, and all manner of other illnesses.
Well, how did it all start?
It all started in the late part of March, when Sheikh Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, was slain in Gaza by Israeli planes, okay?
Or a bomb, I forget exactly how.
Now, he was sort of, you know, a crippled, blind, old guy in a wheelchair, and they did him in.
Now, what happened next?
Well, those Blackwater people, two weeks later, went astray there in Fallujah, and what happens to them, I already told you.
Guess what the trucks that were pulling the bodies of these Blackwater types, guess what the signs on the trucks were?
I'll tell you.
The Sheikh Yassin Revenge Brigade.
There were placards in all the stores.
Do we know this?
Because some of the reporters there told us.
It didn't hit the news.
So, this was a direct reprisal, a direct revenge attack for the killing of Sheikh Yassin.
And as I say, what happened in Fallujah subsequently, the rain is going there in April, and then coming back in November.
It's shameful what happened there with the depleted uranium, with the white phosphorus, with the birth defects that are happening there now.
One other example which should be mentioned is General Petraeus.
Now, we know that he had presidential ambitions, and we know that some of the movers and shakers had approached him.
He gave a briefing to Congress, the House Armed Services Committee, and the briefing contained a paragraph in which it said, the inability to solve the Israeli-Arab dispute is a direct threat to American interests in the Middle East.
Now, that doesn't sound so damning, does it?
But everyone knows why there's an inability there, because Israel doesn't want such an agreement.
Well, guess what?
When he testified, he spoke from his prepared remarks, but he omitted that section.
But my friend James Morris out there in L.A. didn't know that he omitted the section, so he sent them an email saying, oh boy, way to go.
Finally, people are saying how important the Israeli factor is in all this.
Guess what?
Petraeus answers his email, but he leaves the thread, and the thread reveals that he was being criticized by the Israel lobby.
He wrote an email to Max Booth, who is Israel lobby par excellence.
Max Booth, now being up at the Council of Foreign Relations, used to be head of the Op-Ed Department of Wall Street Journal.
He says, look, Dave Petraeus, don't worry too much about it.
I'm writing an Op-Ed here, and the title is, David Petraeus is not anti-Semitic.
Petraeus comes back.
Oh, but is that enough?
I just had lunch with Elie Wiesel, and I'm going to be having dinner with some Holocaust survivors.
Maybe I should mention that.
Max Booth, no, relax, Dave.
It's going to be okay.
We can put this fire out.
Just don't talk about Israel making, indirectly at least, a strategic threat to the United States in the Middle East anymore.
So what happens?
Petraeus is not really good at email.
We know about that, email security.
He leaves the threat on, and so James Morris, my friend out there in L.A., gets the whole nine yards.
What does it show?
It shows incredible subservience.
It shows incredible, what's the word, slavery, really, to the notion that he can be criticized by simply saying that the failure to resolve the Israel-Arab dispute is a threat to U.S. strategic presence in that area.
If he's so afraid of that, that speaks volumes, because as we know, the Congress and the press are dominated by people who feel that they cannot criticize Israel, even when it's committing war crimes as it is as we speak now in Gaza.
Well, and you know, especially when, think of the context of this criticism, when he says, you pointed out the softness of the language as it's written there, but what he's saying is, you're getting my guys killed.
American Army guys are getting dead over there because of resentment that comes in part from this policy.
And so that's the issue that he's willing to stumble all over himself trying to take back and apologize for saying, when it's the horrible truth, and it's continuing to happen.
Yeah, it just is the horrible truth that cannot be spoken in polite circles in Congress or in the Washington Post or the New York Times.
You know, when I started to learn a little bit more about the Middle East, when we came out very strongly against the abuse of intelligence prior to the Iraq war, I started talking about neocons and their influence on what we were doing there in Iraq.
And I got criticized by some bloggers saying, ah, McGovern, yeah, McGovern, he's just using neocons as a code word for Jews.
And guess what?
I was really taken aback by that, naive as I was.
And so I made a list of all the neocons I knew.
And guess what percent were Jewish?
Eighty percent, okay?
So what am I saying here?
I'm saying that there's a disproportionate amount of people making up policies for the Middle East in the State Department, and I'm sad to say, in the CIA, who are either straight Zionists or related or Jewish extraction, and that's very, very sinister.
Here's a trade secret.
When I came into the CIA as an analyst in 1963, I dealt a lot with the Arab-Israeli branch, and guess what?
There were no Jewish people there.
And, you know, me being a liberal, you know, I said, really?
Why is that?
They said, well, it's by design.
And I said, well, that's not American.
You can't do that, you know?
And they looked at me and they said, look, would you want to be in the Irish branch and have to try to make an honest critique of the Irish Republican Army vis-a-vis the British authorities?
Would you like to be put in that position?
I said, no, hell no.
They said, well, we don't want to put any Jewish nationalists or Jewish Zionists in that position.
We think it's better not to have any folks that have grown up with tales of the Holocaust and all that kind of thing.
So that's how it was then.
Now, most of them are, well, there are Israeli flags in some of the branches.
Can you believe that?
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny, too, because I don't know, all the Jews that I know hate Israel and, you know, are completely sick and tired of some of America's best critics of Israeli policy are Jews.
And, you know, mostly liberals, but not all.
And so it's not all about that.
I mean, look at John Bolton.
He's a lifelong, you know, Goldwaterite type.
And it seems like more of a, you know, right wing nationalist consensus and a born again Christian consensus and a military industrial complex consensus.
But I mean, your point obviously is taken, too.
It is important that I think Jim Loeb explained to me that Paul Wolfowitz, his parents were killed or his grandparents and uncles were killed in the Holocaust, that kind of thing.
So, you know, obviously, that is very important.
And that could skew.
I mean, this is why Reagan and Bush senior kept these guys, you know, unfortunately, hacking little kids to death in El Salvador, but kept them away from Middle East policy.
They were the crazies in the basement.
Right.
And they weren't allowed to mess around with the Middle East back then until Junior came to power and put them in the highest position.
George H.W. Bush kept them.
He couldn't get rid of them because he would face an outcry from rightist Republicans.
But he kept them in positions where they could not do major damage.
Let me tell you just a little thing about my own personal experience.
In the mid 70s, there was real troubles in Northern Ireland.
And I was the deputy national intelligence officer, which is a community wide role, in charge of Western Europe.
I was deathly afraid that the director would come down and say, Ray, you know a lot about Ireland, you know a lot about Europe, and we want you to be the analyst for what's going on in Northern Ireland.
And I would have had to say, Scott, no way.
No way will I do that.
You don't want me to do that.
There's no way I can forget the tales that my grandmother told me about what she suffered from the English landlords and so forth.
I couldn't possibly, no way can I do that.
So this is why it's important.
You need objective folks, and there aren't many around.
The Martin Indics and all those folks, they have a pronounced pro-Israeli bias, and they're making our policy.
One thing that is sort of the proof in the pudding here, I don't think anybody in their right mind will suggest that, I guess it's up to 150 Gazans killed now, that's zero Israelis, that there's some sort of equivalence there.
But instead of decrying this, our Congress, as I understand it, on Friday, voted overwhelmingly to support the Israeli attacks on Gaza.
Now, there's no way to explain that other than to say that those congressmen and senators are deathly afraid that if they cross the Israel Abbey, they won't get elected next time around.
That is a terrible situation to be in, but that is reality, and that shows in a particularly poignant way, in a terribly, terribly poignant way, the strength of the Israel Abbey.
All right, thank you so much for your time, Ray.
I've already kept you over time, but I sure appreciate it.
Good talking to you.
Okay.
Bye now.
All right, y'all, that's the great Ray McGovern.
He's at ConsortiumNews.com and RayMcGovern.com, and we run pretty much all this stuff at AntiWar.com as well, and you can follow him on Twitter, at RayMcGovern, and we'll be right back in a sec.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast Peace Talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest, at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Help support CNI at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
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