All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, where it's snowing.
And I'm out here on the west coast of Babylon, living in fear and missing it all.
All right, our first guest on the show today is either Bob Perry or Ray McGovern.
Let's see.
Hello?
Hi, Scott.
This is Ray on the line here.
Hi, Ray.
Bob is behind the wheels of the Bob and Ray show.
It's appearing this evening in Charleston, West Virginia.
Oh, right on.
You guys are on the road teaching people about foreign policy.
Is that it?
We're trying to spread some truth around, Scott.
And it comes as a great shock to a lot of people.
Yeah, well, it's quite different than what they tell us.
So I could see why, you know, it would at least be a little surprising.
Hey, folks, you guys know Ray McGovern.
He was a CIA analyst for 27 years, and he's a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
He and the guy behind the wheel, Bob Perry, there, are from ConsortiumNews.com, which absolutely belongs in your daily bookmarks.
This article I'm looking at right here, Ray, New Grist for Hype on Iran.
We're running it, of course, at Original.
Antiwar.com slash McGovern, as well as it's sitting there on the front page of ConsortiumNews.com today.
And it starts out, here we go again, regarding the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the replacement for Mohamed ElBaradei, Yukiya Amano.
Did I pronounce that right?
And who's this guy, and what's the dang deal?
Well, as far as I know, you pronounced it right.
That's how we're pronouncing it.
Well, he's a new fellow on the block.
He took over from ElBaradei, the Egyptian fellow with all the guts.
ElBaradei won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, and what Americans might remember him best for was his saying in a very low-key way about those spurious reports that Iraq was trying to get uranium in Niger.
He cited those at a Security Council meeting, and said those reports were not authentic.
They were forgeries.
Yeah, well, and he found that out in 30 minutes, or verified it within 30 minutes, using Google.
Yeah, nobody thought to check Google until ElBaradei did.
It was crazy.
Anyhow, the U.S. hated him, and tried to prevent him from getting a third term, because he had spied, and they didn't succeed, so he just left on the 1st of December this past year.
This new fellow is sort of a non-entity.
He's either naive, which is kind of hard to believe since he's been around forever.
More likely, he's the more malleable, more willing to bend with the wind, and the wind is blowing very strongly in the direction of a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, either by Israel or by Israel with a wink from the U.S. administration.
It's very scary, Scott.
I never thought I'd be saying this more than a year into the Obama administration, but the signs are there.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, their editorial and their repertorial pages are beating the drums for war on Iran, whereas in reality, if you look at what the intelligence people are saying, they're saying that that bombshell, pardon the expression, that new finding back in November of 2007 is still valid, and some of your listeners will remember that that finding said that Iran had ceased work on the nuclear weapons-related part of its nuclear program at the end of, catch this, at the end of 2003, and had not resumed work on that.
Now, that was a high-confidence judgment, at least, that they had stopped, that they hadn't restarted was a medium-confidence judgment.
All we have now, Scott, is simply a situation where some ambiguous wording used by Omoto, who should know better, has given rise to the notion that, oh, maybe they kept working on the weapons-related part of their nuclear program, even though the head of U.S. intelligence, Admiral Blair, said as recently as the 2nd of February, no, we don't have any evidence of that.
We think that they're keeping their options open.
We don't see that they've decided yet to build a nuclear weapon.
So, you have two sides to the same story.
What is a simple American to believe?
Well, you know, as bad as some of the intelligence has been, I think at this point the intelligence community is standing up to the problem and sticking to its decision to tell the truth back at the end of 2007, despite what Cheney and Bush were both saying at that time.
All right, Ray.
So, well, let me just try to sum this up and see if I got this right.
Basically, what's going on here is you have the politicians at the Team Obama level basically are carrying the narrative on from Bush and Cheney that whatever the Iranians are doing with their nuclear program is this nefarious thing that must be stopped, while at the same time the U.S. intelligence agencies, apparently specifically the CIA, and I see more and more quotes from Admiral Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talking about how he would prefer to not have a war over there.
It seems like the kind of professional, built-in, permanent state would rather not do this, and yet the agenda, just like with Iraq, is being just pushed by the White House, not by the intelligence.
The intelligence guys are being basically pulled down the hall by their ear, like Bart Simpson or something, and being made to kind of go along with what Hillary Clinton would have them say, I guess.
Yeah, you got it, Scott.
That's exactly right.
The interesting thing about that National Intelligence Estimate at the end of 2007, the one that said that it stopped working on the nuclear weapons-related part at the end of 2003, so four years before that.
Now we get two more years.
The interesting thing about that one is that Admiral Blair, the National Intelligence Director, had let slip that this was not one they were going to publish.
This one was so secret that they had to keep this under wraps.
You know what happened?
Admiral Mullen and the senior military and some other forces that didn't want a war on Iran, who knew what a disaster that would be, not only to the military but to so many others, they insisted that that judgment be published.
And it was.
And it was a bombshell.
And it served a very useful purpose in preventing the juggernaut toward war with Iran.
I agree.
I mean, they successfully covered it up for a year.
Phil Giraldi announced that there was a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran in, I believe it was September of 2006, and it went along with the headline, Dick Cheney is suppressing it.
We had to wait more than a year for it to finally be released.
Yeah, that's true, except there is some extenuating circumstance there, and that is that new information was being received as the thing was being written.
I, too, felt that Cheney and others were putting the kibosh on the product.
But when it started to come out, I realized that the reason they didn't want the product out was because it took the wind right out of their sails.
So that's what was going on then.
Now, what's going on now?
Well, you know, it's worse now in one sense, and that is that Admiral Mullen, following General Jones, the National Security Advisor, who was just in Israel, following Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA, who was just in Israel, following Secretary Hillary Clinton, who was just in Israel, they've all been there within the last two months, okay?
And what does Mullen say to his military counterparts?
Oh, gosh, I don't think it'll be a good idea.
I don't think it's a good idea to strike.
No, yeah, they can close the Straits of Hormuz.
No, I don't think.
It's sort of like a plaintiff.
Gee, guys, do we really have to do this?
Now, in April, two years ago, Mullen went in like gangbusters.
And I think I remember talking to you about this, Scott.
One of the things he pulled out of his sleeve was something that no senior American statesman had done before.
What Mullen said was, look, we don't want a war against Iran.
We don't want you to drag us into one.
And, look, if you have any thought of perpetrating the kind of provocation that you did against the U.S.S.
Liberty on the 8th of June, 1960, well, you just forget it.
I'm a Navy man.
I know what happened then.
You just have to do that, understand?
Wow.
Yeah, you could have made a movie of the week out of that conversation.
They were made to understand.
Now, I don't get the same vibes.
I don't get the same tone from Mullen now.
He almost feels besieged, it seems to me.
And he's trying to make the right noises, but it's not he that's written things.
It's not he at all.
It's the fellows in the White House, Rahm Emanuel and others who, frankly, have great difficulty distinguishing between what they perceive as the strategic interest of Israel on the one part and the strategic interest of the United States on the other.
It's the same old, same old.
But this time, there's one overarching difference, and that is that Obama's been around for a whole year now.
And in Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, in his view, I'm convinced that he considers Obama a wuss, okay?
Obama says, please, no more settlements in the occupied territories.
Netanyahu puts his finger to his nose and gives him the high sign, okay?
And then Obama says, oh, gosh, year-end interview with Newsweek or Time, I guess it was.
He says, you know, I had such high hopes for the Arab-Israeli, and I have to confess that we haven't made any progress all year.
You know, $3 billion a year we American taxpayers are giving the Israelis, that doesn't translate into any leverage.
Give me a break.
Well, you're making me nostalgic for the wisdom and patience and, you know, calm deliberation of George W. Bush.
You know, like, I remember that story that came out about, well, there's a new book, and I guess there was an advance out of there about how Dick Cheney wanted to kill Russians in Georgia after Georgia started a war in August 2008 and tried to violently take back South Osetia and bombed Russian soldiers there and got the Russians to intervene across the mountains.
Cheney wanted to bomb the Russians in the tunnels and all this.
And it was Steve Hadley, Stephen Hadley, literally like the Lockheed lawyer, and George W. Bush, the calm, patient, wise old George W. Bush, who said, no, let's not actually get into a war with the Russians, please.
And, you know, apparently he had had enough of Dick Cheney's great advice or something.
And after all, George Bush, after all those years of you and I both turning our hair gray worrying about what he's going to do, he didn't ever bomb Iran.
And now it seems like this guy, Barack Obama, is more dangerous than Bush.
I mean, we could get into what sort of consequences from a war with Iran we could be looking at.
Far worse, obviously, on its face, far worse consequences than what we're already dealing with with the Iraq War, where we, for example, handed the country over to the Iranians, as we'll be talking about with Chris Floyd in the next half hour here.
Well, Scott, there have been several, several war games.
I participated in a war game, I will guess, two years ago.
These war games have sort of spun out a scenario.
What happens if, for example, the Israelis strike at the Iranian nuclear facilities?
It's Armageddon.
It's really, really bad.
Admiral Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, even he, when he was asked a couple of years ago, well, the Iranians could very easily steal off the Straits of Hormuz, couldn't they?
Now, your listeners probably know that through those straits comes through about 40 percent of the exported oil from that part of the world.
So that would make these economies crash even quicker.
So Mullen says, well, yeah, they do have that capability, but we could take it back.
Now, what does that mean?
Send the Marines up those cliffs?
What Marines?
Where are they?
There aren't any Marines to send.
So, you know, Mullen is just really tearing his hair out, as are the other senior military folks.
Well, go back to January 2007, when Joe Klein wrote in, I guess, his blog at Newsweek.com, is that it?
That Bush had had a meeting in the tank at the Pentagon with the Joint Chiefs.
And one, they told him not to surge into Iraq, which he ignored.
But two, they told him, don't bomb Iran.
And apparently he went ahead and went with that.
I guess the problem I'm having here is you seem to be saying that, you know, Admiral Mullen, for example, and the Joint Chiefs still feel the same way, only they don't have as much influence over Obama as they did with Bush.
Well, I'm hoping they do.
But the signs are that, you know, when George Bush finally was dissuaded from doing that against Iran, you know, when he made the point to Olmert, the then Israeli prime minister, Olmert was forced to believe him.
OK?
Bush didn't mess around.
Olmert knew he wanted to do that.
And now Bush is saying, no, we can't do that.
Sorry about that.
But that's the way it is.
Now, contrast that with this very weak-seeming Obama, who compromises at every turn and who has taken no steps to put leverage on the Israelis to do anything.
Take his advisors like Rahm Emanuel, like Axelrod, those folks, you know, if I were...
I'm of Irish extraction, you know, and if I were advising the president or asked to advise the president of Northern Ireland, I would have to say, no, I can't do that, because I have a certain bias.
These people shouldn't be in there, but they are.
Well, especially if you were a veteran of the Irish Republican Army, like Rahm Emanuel's a veteran of the IDF.
Well, now, I have to tell you, I mean, you may know this, Scott, but to his great credit, when the Gulf War, when the balloon went up, he joined the army again right away.
You know that, right?
Yeah, yeah.
The Israeli army.
Exactly.
So, you have this problem, and it's a real big one with Obama, as it was with George Bush.
I'm hoping common sense will prevail, but it is largely, in my view, out of Obama's control.
All right, enough politics.
Let's talk about science here.
Let's talk about the facts some more.
Give us the lowdown on the so-called negotiations about the 20% enriched uranium, and how, you know, the degree to which the Iranians were willing to work with us or not, and the American government's response, because everybody's seeing all these headlines everywhere, the Iranian nuclear threat, clearly they're making nuclear weapons, right?
So, give us the straight dope here, man.
Okay, the straight dope is that no one can prove they're making nuclear weapons.
They are progressing haltingly and with lots of problems on the Iranian enrichment, but all signs point to no resumption of work on the nuclear weapons-related part of it, the warhead and that kind of thing.
Now, the important thing to know is that when Obama came in, he did make that very conciliatory speech, even sort of apologized for the United States overthrowing the first democratically elected government in Iran in 1953, and he sent his emissaries to Geneva to talk directly with the Iranians.
Remember, Bush would never talk directly.
You don't talk with bad guys, just good guys.
Okay, so the emissary went, and they presented this proposal that Russia and France would help bring their low-enriched uranium up into high-enriched status, which would allow them to fuel their nuclear research reactors to give them stuff for medical purposes.
Okay, now, wonder of wonders, on the 1st of October, the Iranians said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea, we'll do that, okay?
And it was a conditional yes, it was, you know, at referendum, the main government decision, but I was shocked that the guy thought they could say, yeah, sounds like a good idea.
What happens next?
Well, most people forget that less than three weeks later, this group of real terrorists called Jundala in the east or the southeast part of Iran killed the deputy commander of the ground forces of the Revolutionary Guards and several others, and all of a sudden, the Iranians are saying, well, you know, can these guys be trusted?
I mean, we know that Jundala is one of the terrorist groups that's financed through the place where I used to work, the CIA, and also the Israelis, and so, you know, mirror image that.
Let's say we're on the verge of agreeing to a proposal from the Iranians, and then we find out that the deputy commander of our ground forces has been shot by a terrorist funded by the Iranians.
Short answer is that they changed their tune, and also Mousavi, not Mousavi, Mousavi, the guy who was in the opposition of Iran, he was criticizing Ahmadinejad from the right, saying, you know, you're cowtowing to the Europeans and the U.S. by sending our low-enriched uranium out of the country.
So that, in my view, and I can't pretend that lots of experts agree with me, because I can't get them to make a judgment on this.
That was the major event, it seems to me, that made the Revolutionary Guards more powerful, and so, if this came out of the $400 million funding for covert action in that part of the world, that Ty Hersh found out about, well then, Hillary Clinton can claim credit, you know?
She can claim credit for the Revolutionary Guards getting more powerful.
It's the same question as ever.
It's always the same.
Is it stupidity or the plan?
I mean, on one hand, the moderates are the enemies.
If you want a war, you want so-called moderates, the people who, for political reasons, the Americans could possibly deal with and get away with on TV or whatever.
If you want a war, you've got to marginalize them.
On the other hand, these people are the worst, so who knows what they're doing?
But it's certainly the case, I think, that, you know, all the polls said that this green movement is a pretty small minority.
The country is behind the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah, and behind the President, Ahmadinejad, and precisely because America and Israel threaten them every day.
Yeah, and Ahmadinejad, by the way, and take this to the bank, he won the election hand-down.
All this business about irregularities, well, you know, there weren't as many as there were in Florida way back when we remember.
Yeah, or in Afghanistan next door under American occupation.
Amen.
So, you know, what you're saying is that one can easily suspect, without being paranoid, that there are forces that wanted to put the kibosh on these negotiations, even though we would have gotten 75% of the low-enriched uranium that Iran has out of the country.
Can you imagine?
I couldn't believe that they would agree to that.
They were on the verge of agreeing to it, and it was sabotaged.
Sabotaged by whom?
Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State.
Yeah, by terrorists at the U.S. funds.
So those folks who do that sabotaging are working hand-in-glove with the Israeli service.
The Revolutionary Guards know that.
That's why Hillary Clinton is correct in this regard.
That's why the Revolutionary Guards are a more potent and influential factor within Tehran at this point, and not that they just all of a sudden got more power.
A lot of them got killed.
They're senior generals, and their weight increased to the extent they said, Hey, who says we can trust these Americans?
Who says we can't?
And so it's in limbo right now, but Obama, to his credit, I suppose, has not cut off all negotiations, so there's still a chance.
But all the same pundits, all the same newspapers, all the people who are wrong about Iraq are now spewing out venom against Iran, and that's a real indicator.
Yeah, well, and you know, if nothing else, even if a million people get killed in the next war or two here, this will be a great lesson in just how malleable the American people are and how much control the television has.
I mean, even Jon Stewart on The Bill O'Reilly Show has to concede that Iran is making nuclear weapons, because everybody knows that, because Jon Stewart doesn't read consortium news.
He doesn't read antiwar.com.
He watches TV.
That's where he gets the news, and he's a pretty smart guy, and he can see through a lot of illusions, but ultimately, has he ever sat and read Gordon Prather's archives?
Does he really want to know what it means to have a safeguarded nuclear facility or whatever?
That's a bridge too far for him, and it's the same goes for the rest of them.
There's a great clip of Ron Paul on the news where they were talking about, on CNBC, where they were saying, but they're making nuclear weapons, and he said, no, they're not, and they said, oh, you believe them that they're not?
Because as far as these news people know, there is no other way of ascertaining whether the Iranians are making nuclear bombs as to whether you believe them or you believe the other newscasters who also saw it on TV.
I mean, they are really, at least, I don't know if they're going to do it, Ray, but they certainly are proving that they could get away with launching another war against another helpless country that does not have a nuclear weapons program in the exact same manner as the Iraq war, with even more dangerous consequences facing us, and they'll have the vast majority, they'll have the supermajority, the American people with them.
If they say jump, we jump in this society.
That's it.
And people die.
That's exactly right, Scott, and that's where you come in.
That's where Consortium News comes in.
If we spread enough truth around and we expose the fact that the lies continue, and they continued right to the end of the Bush regime.
For example, do you remember, what was his name, the guy from ABC?
I'll remember in a second.
It was the exit interview on the 1st of December, okay?
And he says to the president, now, okay, we talked about Iraq, but tell me, Mr. President, why really did you think you had to go in to invade Iraq?
It was Gibson, the guy's name was Gibson, Charles Gibson.
Yeah, yeah, the Good Morning America guy.
Yeah, but now, okay, so he asked the president to invade Iraq, and he talks to him and he says, well, the son of a bitch wouldn't let the U.N. inspectors in.
What am I supposed to do?
Wait, wait, wait, Ray, you're breaking up, say it one more time.
Ah, he's gone.
Anyway, the point was, you know the point, Bush actually did get away with that.
He said Saddam wouldn't let the U.N. inspectors in, even though the U.N. inspectors had been in there for months, and Bush pulled them out in order to start his war, and then he skated right out of office.
That was his exit interview with the official ABC News, and he told the most outright lie in the whole wide world, and Charles Gibson let him get away with it, of course.
All right, y'all.
Here's the chumps for you chumps, and we'll be right back with Chris Floyd from Empire Burlesque right after this.
That was Ray McGovern.
Again, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and ConsortiumNews.com.
You can find him and the great Bob Perry there.
