09/29/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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Geez, I'm glad I forgot to call Ray McGovern until right now.
Boy, oh boy, all right y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And on the line, I got Ray McGovern.
Now Ray McGovern, he was a CIA analyst for 27 years and now he's a peacenik.
And back before the Iraq War, maybe right after 9-11, somewhere around there, he helped to create the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And so what that means is they write memos, oftentimes Ray writes them, but signed by many former intelligence professionals from the military, the intelligence agencies, the FBI, etc.
And then they recommend usually that government either stop doing something or please don't start doing the thing that you're planning on starting to do.
That's basically what it's about, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
You can find most of his essays at ConsortiumNews.com and his own website is RayMcGovern.com.
And we rerun virtually everything he writes at AntiWar.com as well.
That's Original.
AntiWar.com slash McGovern.
And now finally, welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
Alright, good times.
Good to have you back on.
So tell me about this lawsuit against Hillary Clinton's, was it against her or just against the U.S. State Department?
There's an article by Peter Van Buren at Dissenter.
Firedoglake.com all about how you had a victory in the courts.
Yeah, I didn't realize what a victory it was, but the lawyers that decided to take my case, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, tell me that this is quite an achievement.
What they did was pursue a FOIA, Freedom of Information Act request, and they found out when they finally got the material out of the State Department, that I had been put on a BOLO list, BOLO meaning be on the lookout for Ray McGovern.
If you see him, stop him, detain him, and question him because he has dissident views on what the U.S. government is doing and he's got a following because people think he knows something since he works for the CIA for 27 years.
That was pretty much it.
When the lawyers saw that, they said, my goodness, here's the State Department arresting or having arrested McGovern for simply standing up during a Hillary Clinton speech back in February of what, three years ago now, February of whatever that is, February 2011, and not saying anything, but simply standing there silently just to give her the notion that not everyone in that same auditorium thought that she was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I was beat up, put in prison, put in a jail for a while, several hours, and then these wonderful lawyers volunteered to help me out, and so they filed this FOIA.
Now, the litigation that followed the revelation by the State Department that they had put me on the ABOLO list, well, that was a painful process, but the victory lies in the fact that they admitted it, that the ABOLO was rescinded, that the State Department notified any other federal agency that might have been in receipt of this that it was rescinded, and that's victory number one in this case.
Number two comes when the people who beat me up are held accountable, and we hope that that will be within the next year or so.
Justice grinds very slow in Washington, D.C.
Well, I hope you have a framed copy of this wanted poster hanging on the wall in your office.
This is great.
I don't, but I really should.
I was looking to the post office to see if they were up in the wall, but I would spirit that.
Oh, no, that's too bad.
No, that would have been even better.
No, anyway, so yeah, no, I'm sure I interviewed you at the time.
I think I remember interviewing you at the time over this.
It's a good thing that you did, and it's really too bad the way that they put their hands on you, I guess, not worse than we would expect, but still pretty bad.
And then, of course, trying to pretend you're a criminal, trying to pretend that you're some kind of threat to her.
Come on.
Who do these guys think they're kidding?
You know, Scott, there's some good that comes out of all this stuff.
No bones were broken, just a whole bunch of bruises, contusions and stuff.
But what happened was this.
When my Veterans for Peace colleagues, I was wearing their shirt, so it was very prominent that I was a member of Veterans for Peace.
When they learned about this, they publicized the fact that I was 71 years old at the time.
And long story short, American people don't like old folks to get beat up that way.
Okay.
They don't care.
These young people, they have a comment to them.
But people with the color hair I have, and then they lay it out a little thick.
The Veterans for Peace said, well, you know, he's a cancer survivor too, which I was at the time, and I'm still, thank God.
So what happened was Hillary Clinton got thousands of telephone calls, emails.
It was quite a performance on the part of the American people.
Now, why do I mention that?
Because maybe some of your listeners have the same color, gray or white, that I do.
Please realize if you do, you have a big advantage.
You just let yourself be beat up a little bit, and American people will care about that.
So put yourself out there, get your body into it, and see what happens.
Because only we, I think, and this generation will realize the indignities that have been perpetrated on the Constitution and other things, only we can kind of get into the mix here and put ourselves on the line.
Well, and you know, it's one of those things where it teaches so much just in context.
They're like, hey, what are those nuns doing breaking into that Air Force base?
Okay, wait.
So I know I worship the Air Force as my first lord and savior in the world and everything, but nuns are nuns, and they pretty much are assumed to always be of benevolent motives.
So, hmm, oh, something nuclear they're protesting, huh?
And the judge is what?
Putting them in jail for how long?
And this is how people who are pretty apolitical and uninitiated get interested in these kinds of things and get their perspective changed a little bit when they come up against dissidents.
Like, well, geez, why is this old guy getting himself, no offense, getting himself arrested out in front of the White House?
Why is he wearing an orange jumpsuit and crying war crimes here?
This former CIA officer, why would he dare accuse his government of going so far?
And it's because they have gone so far.
Well, you know, Scott, Sister Megan, to whom you referred, she was the one that broke through the wire at the most maximum security port of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the actual plutonium is stored.
And she's a good friend of mine.
And it's an example like that that gives me the courage to do what little I can do when people like Hillary Clinton show up and everybody else thinks she's the cat's pajamas, as we used to say in the Bronx.
So, you know, what I recommend is get a model.
Get somebody who is just doing the good because it's good and think about them in prison and think about yourself outside like I am.
And that will give you a little bit more incentive, a little bit more courage to do what's required today.
And what I think is required is for us to put our bodies into it.
Yeah, well, it's a real good point.
And in fact, you know, I'm not very good at practicing what I preach about that at all.
I'm going to the protests, organizing and doing that kind of activism.
But I'm among the first to complain that where's the anti-war left in an era of Obama wars?
Where are the giant demonstrations to prove that there are people out here who really do care?
Because, again, even if it doesn't impress power, it's good for the kids in the neighborhood to see that, hey, there are some people out there who are saying that their government is as wrong as it could possibly be.
And they have to stop now.
If people don't see that example, it's not made.
Oh, man.
And now we got to go to break, right?
Because I talked all the way up to the music like I always do.
But when we get back, we're going to talk about wars.
We got Ray McGovern on the phone.
He's a veteran intelligence professional for sanity, which shouldn't be asking too much.
I don't know.
A little bit of sanity here.
There may be here, but not there.
We'll come from it.
Just a phone records, financial and location data.
Prism, Tempora, X-Key score, boundless informant.
Hey, I'll Scott Warren here for off now dot org.
Now, here's the deal.
Do the Snowden revelations.
We have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the national surveillance state.
Now, they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress and the courts.
They betrayed their sworn oaths to the Constitution and Bill of Rights again and again and can in no way be trusted to stop the abuses for us.
We've got to do it ourselves.
How we nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy.
The off now project of the 10th Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
I mean it.
There's real reason to be optimistic here.
They've gotten their model legislation introduced all over the place in state after state.
I've lost count more than a dozen.
You're always wondering, yeah, but what can we do?
Here's something, something important, something that can work if we do the work.
Get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
Go to off now dot org.
Hey, I'm Scott.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
I'm on the line with Ray McGovern, former CIA officer, now a peacenik.
He's been traveling all over the world.
Last time we talked to him, he was, I forget, were you still in Russia or you were in Germany on your way home?
Anyway, and he's been traveling all over America giving speeches.
He travels all around giving speeches.
Go to raymcgovern.com to find out details.
It's was it tell the word is the name of the organization, Ray, is that right?
That's right.
That's right, Scott.
Tell the word.
Tell the word.
And and you can find out how to invite Ray to come and speak to your group and teach him some things and why to put peace first, especially in all that.
So really great stuff, of course.
And so I almost don't know where to begin with the mess in the countries formerly known as Iraq and Syria and now the the new Islamic State, Ray, and the war against them.
But I guess I'll ask you about really even the premise that I don't know if you saw Obama's interview last night on 60 Minutes where he talked about how, you know, we got to build up the Iraqi army so that they can go and retake their soil, their land.
I think, yeah, their soil.
I wrote it in quotes in my notes.
So I think it was a quote.
When, in fact, the west and northwest of Iraq has declared independence, that's what their alliance, the tribal alliance with ISIS means, really.
And so isn't it true that all the president's saying is we're going to help the Bata Brigade dressed up in American uniforms, Shiite sectarian militias.
We're going to have them conquer and defeat the predominantly Sunni parts of the country that have declared independence.
So and then the second part of that question is, is that even possible when even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says that only half the army is any good and by that he must mean a third or a quarter?
Well, Scott, this would be funny if it weren't so serious.
Let me try to be a little funny and say, well, that worked in 2007.
That was the big surge.
Remember Bush and Cheney were going to lose a war on their watch.
And so they sent 30,000 more U.S. troops so that the Bata Brigades and all the Shia could change Baghdad by changing it into a predominantly Shia city after it's been a predominantly Sunni city.
That's called, what's it called?
That called population extermination or there's another call.
Sectarian cleansing would be the euphemism, but yeah, forced relocation, Trail of Tears, forced march, Andrew Jackson, pseudo half a genocide, something.
Yeah.
And of course, you know, after you do that, you sort of get the Sunnis a little ticked off at you.
And of course, Maliki was a disaster.
So it's not funny.
It is seven years later.
And what's happening now is a situation that Obama is behaving as though he doesn't know anything about Iraq and Afghanistan, much less Vietnam.
And I don't know about his advisors, you know, those really tough women, especially, you know, what do they know about war?
Now, I thought General Dempsey could be dependent upon to act in a sort of constitutional way.
He prevailed this time last year, if you'll recall, when Obama and Kerry were all set to launch the cruise missiles at Syria.
Finally, Dempsey said, look, you know, we don't have to do this today.
Tomorrow we do it next week.
And besides, you know, you probably should take a look at the constitution there because Article 1 reserves the right to make war to Congress, the representatives of the people.
Now that, together with some help from Vladimir Putin, that very, very, very bad person who sometimes has no shirt on and sometimes rides horse with no shirt on and invaded Ukraine and all that kind of stuff.
Putin bailed our president out this time last year.
And guess what?
Those Syrian chemical weapons have all been destroyed.
You won't find that in the New York Times, but that's the fact.
So what are we doing now?
Well, the interesting thing is that we have a new group that was invented in the Pentagon.
And I thought it was a rug, you know, Karastan rugs I know about, but this is Khorasan.
And nobody ever knew it, knew about it, not even in the intelligence community, until the Pentagon sort of dreamed it up.
Why did they want to dream it up?
Because to make some sort of halfway credible claim that there's an imminent threat to the United States, you have to be able to cite some sort of blog spot or some sort of statement by this terrible group that says they're going to kill Americans.
Now, unfortunately, al-Nusra and the other really radical groups there in Syria and Iraq, they're after Assad.
They're after other people that aren't after the United States.
And so nobody could find and nobody could even forge a statement that they made that they're trying to kill Americans.
But ha ha, get this Karastan, not Karastan, Khorasan group invented by the Pentagon.
And guess what?
They have made some statements threatening American lives.
And so what do we do?
We justified this new war by citing them.
Now, what's really bizarre about this?
Well, what's bizarre about this is that The Intercept, that wonderful new website, has identified this fellow named Ken Delanian, who works for the AP now, but he used to work for L.A. Times.
He surfaced this story and, you know, got everybody preaching from the same legend.
And then when James Comey and others said, well, you know, we're not really sure that it was imminent.
And what do you mean by imminent?
And in any way, we don't really...
Delanian is the same guy who backs off, see?
So what's the lesson there?
Very simple, Scott.
Whoever lies first wins.
Yeah, that's it.
And just like, you know, it's amazing and it shouldn't be amazing, but it is amazing that they lied just as well about the Yazidis on the mountain, too.
And then they admitted that they were lying or they didn't call it a lie, but they said, oh, yeah, you know what?
400,000 stranded by a bunch of and surrounded by a bunch of beheaders or whatever.
Yeah, nothing like that.
Everybody already ran away.
There never were 400,000.
There were a couple of tens of thousands and there's quite a few thousands left on the mountain, five or six thousand.
And they don't want to leave and they're not afraid.
And there's no ISIS trying to kill them.
And it wasn't even ISIS that killed any of them.
It was their neighbors who turned on them, who had no connection to ISIS whatsoever.
It was the next village over.
And yeah, that whole thing on Mount Sinjar was fake for the invasion of Iraq.
And then they do the same thing again in Syria, where they just make up a little thing like they're making movies.
Now, those of us who care about the Constitution and remember how Libya, the Libyan war was conducted and it was not really considered necessary to declare it a war.
It was just a kinetic action.
OK, well, after that, and this is a fellow you don't usually praise, but Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, I think, you know, he questioned Dempsey and then Secretary of Defense Panetta in a thing that's still on YouTube.
And after Panetta got explaining what he called the legal basis for what the Obama administration did in Libya and what it would feel very free to do in Syria, Sessions, and I looked at him, I think it was true, he confessed, he pronounced himself, quote, almost breathless.
Hang on one second.
Give me one more segment.
We'll be right back with Ray McGovern, everybody.
All right.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
Coming up this October 18th at Columbia University in New York, the Future Freedom Foundation is hosting a conference titled Stop the Wars on Drugs and Terrorism featuring Glenn Greenwald, Radley Balco, Jeremy Scahill, Eugene Jarecki, Jonathan Turley and others.
The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Just head over to FFF.org to sign up.
That's the Stop the Wars on Drugs and Terrorism conference, Saturday, October 18th, 2014 at Columbia University.
Sponsored by the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
I got Ray McGovern.
I coerced him into staying one more segment with us here.
Yeah, it's the Scott Horton Show where former CIA officers come on to debunk the latest war propaganda.
Corazon.
Phil Giraldi was on last week.
Corazon.
Let me tell you, there's a bunch of hype.
This is just the Al-Nusra Front.
They've been al-Qaeda this whole time and they ain't coming here anyway.
How are they supposed to get here?
Yeah, Ray McGovern's on.
And when we were interrupted by the break, Ray, you were talking about the outrageous pseudo-legality of the war in Libya and then how that applies to the current war breaking out in Iraq and Syria as well.
Yeah, Scott, it's a matter of considerable importance to those of us who took a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that not many legislators in the House or in the Senate seem to care about that very much and they're just happy to escape their duty to either authorize or not authorize the next war.
Now, the last time this came to a real head was back in March of 2012 after the debacle on Libya, which is a failed state now because of our intervention together with the French and the Italians that wanted that Libyan oil.
So what happened was there was a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting and Senator Sessions attended, Republican from Alabama, who was a lawyer, and he said, you know, hey, do you think you can do the same thing in Syria by pretending as you did in Libya that this wasn't a war?
And as I say, you know, let me just quote you the back and forth, just one sentence each from Sessions and then Secretary of Defense Panetta.
Sessions, I'm really baffled.
The only legal authority that's required to deploy the U.S. military in combat is Congress, not NATO, not coalitions of the willing, Congress and the president and the law and the Constitution, end quote.
Panetta.
Quote, let me just, for the record, be clear again, Senator, so there's no misunderstanding.
When it comes to national defense, the president has the authority under the Constitution to act to defend this country and we will, sir.
Talk about imperial hubris.
So here's a lawyer, Panetta, right?
San Diego or went to school out there in the West, and he's a big, big hero out there.
And he's saying, look, just for the record, the president has all the authority that Dick Cheney said Bush had and we can make war at will.
Why does this matter?
Well, and also he deliberately lied, but he did so in such a way that he was trying to everybody knows it.
It's just a figure of speech.
And damn it, you will accept his figure of speech, defend this country by doing whatever it is he wants, including launching aggressive wars against countries that have not attacked us.
Well, just like George Bush.
Yeah.
And if you want to just Google Panetta and Sessions and you'll come up with that seven minute video, you'll be left as Sessions said he was.
What did he say?
Almost breathless.
Now, what matters here is Dempsey.
Now, General Dempsey prevented a war last year.
He went to the president after John Kerry had said 35 times, and I counted them, we know that Bush on the left side has violated your red line there by perpetrating chemical attack.
We know, we know, we know.
And he said that on the afternoon of August 30th of last year, Dempsey got to the president that evening and said, Mr.
President, it will all do respect to your secretary of state.
He doesn't know.
Matter of fact, the intelligence people are telling me that the rebels have the capability of preparing a homemade kind of sarin.
And the English, the British tell me after having acquired a sample of that sarin, that it is not the kind of sarin that is in Syrian government troops arsenals.
Okay.
So, Mr.
President, you might want to think, you blame it on me.
Tell them tomorrow that I said you don't have to do this today, tomorrow, next day.
There's no time sensitivity.
And that's exactly what Obama said just 20 hours after Kerry made the case for war.
Now, why am I saying that?
Well, because this time Dempsey seems to be going along and that is really tragic.
He was a guy with some principles back then.
We wrote him a memo and said, if you're ordered to, well, actually, he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee saying, look, if I'm ordered to do a war, I'm going to have to think if Congress doesn't act because I owe Congress as much responsibility as I do the president.
And this year, this year, he seems to be going along.
We're about to send him a follow-up memo.
We hate to do this every year, but we're going to say, General Dempsey, remember what you told Carl Levin and the Senate Armed Services Committee about the Constitution and how you're sworn to abide by that?
Well, do it again, General Dempsey.
Cut out this crazy stuff.
This is a quagmire.
And even the president has admitted two, three more years.
End it now and stop sending poverty draft people from towns in this country of less than 50,000 and from the inner city.
We call it a volunteer army.
Well, it's a poverty draft.
You know it.
And you're responsible for leading us back to safe, safe land.
And that safe land is Article One of the Constitution of the United States.
Yeah, it's amazing the way that they're doing this when, of course, they can get a resolution through Congress.
No problem right now.
And they're just choosing not to.
In a very Dick Cheney, David Addington, let's go ahead and torture him and see if anybody tries to stop us kind of a way.
That's it, you know.
And as I say, in a letter, a formal letter to Carl Levin last year at this time, Dempsey said, quote, the decision to use force is not one that any of us takes lightly.
It's an act of war.
OK, end quote.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, that means that if it's an act of war, the Constitution requires that the Congress authorize it.
We've come a long way from that.
But those of us who took an oath to the Constitution, we feel strongly about this, just as we feel strongly about the fudging of of the Fifth Amendment, which says, well, you know, on this, the thing is, really, once they conceded the principle that all they got to do is authorize it and not actually take the responsibility themselves and declare war, that once they concede the principle is just a matter of time before the entire thing was gone, because really an authorization, the way Hillary Clinton spun it, not that it was good enough to acquit her, but she was technically right, that all she did was give the authority to Bush to decide.
She thought he needed that authority like a gun in his holster so that he wouldn't have to pull it out and wouldn't have to actually commit to violence.
He just needed the authority to intimidate Hussein into going along, whatever, whatever.
But it was Bush's decision to go to war, not hers, even though she voted yes.
But and Ron Paul was saying, in fact, Henry Hyde, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Ron Paul, oh, come on, the Constitution, that part of the Constitution is an anachronism.
We don't go by that anymore.
Scott, I hate to call you too, too soft on anyone.
You're usually not, but you're far too soft on Hillary.
She knew, she knew chapter and verse about how the intelligence was not mistaken, but it was fraudulent.
Oh, yeah, no, no, no, I don't mean that.
Oh, she's guilty as hell.
Put it right on the gallows.
I'll pull the trapdoor.
All I'm saying is, all I'm saying is, technically speaking, all she did was authorize the president to decide rather than actually declare war in, in a sense, like in the name of the Senate.
You know what I mean?
Well, you know, voting for the bill, allowing the president to have that kind of capability is tantamount to voting for war.
She did that because she knew she had to be really tough and then she would win the president presidency the next time around.
And the height of irony is, of course, that it, uh, it contributed greatly to her defeat for the nomination because Obama had said that he was against Iraq.
So, yeah, all I'm saying is that I feel very close to this because Scott Ritter, who was a good friend of mine, tried to get to see Hillary Clinton, who he was a constituent of, okay?
He knew chapter and verse about how all the WMD had been destroyed.
She wouldn't let him in the front, in the front door and she just didn't want to hear about it.
So she was married to the last president.
She knew and Bill knew and they all knew, as Scott said, they knew from 1995 that they hadn't manufactured a single bit of chemical, anything since 91 when they got busted trying to hide a little bit.
And that was the end of that.
They knew from 95 on clean bill of health.
Give me a break.
Sure.
And how they get away with this, of course, is that they're trying to get away with it as Scott is the rest of the story.
And in every interview, every speech I make, I always point out that in 51 years here in Washington, you see a lot of change, but there's no change more consequential than the fact that we no longer have in any real sense a free media.
The fourth estate is dead.
The good news is that there's a fifth estate.
That's what we're doing.
You and I right now.
And there's great hope in that because as I go around the colleges, I see nobody reads The Washington Post, The New York Times.
They're all online.
All we need to do is make sure that they get onto the best websites.
And one of those, of course, is antiwar.com.
Yeah, well, thanks for saying so.
And I'm sorry now.
Really sorry that I got in a dumb fight completely off topic.
It was really a one sided fight with Robert Perry where he wrote something I didn't like and I wrote some rude thing to him.
So now I can't interview him anymore.
I guess I need to just say sorry.
But, you know, he's so big.
So he writes about one article a day.
So he doesn't really give interviews to very many people.
And he's so good.
I mean, on Ukraine, he's there's you and there's him and there's very, very, very few others who are nearly as good on that topic.
And I've really sacrificed this entire year.
Robert Perry interviews over, you know, I mean, what he wrote was really dumb about how mean libertarians are.
But I shouldn't I shouldn't have responded at all.
Who cares?
That's not what his specialty or whatever.
I should have just ignored it.
But I picked the fight and burned a bridge where I shouldn't have stupid.
Well, I don't think it's really burnt.
I do still read him every day.
Yeah.
Well, the thing is, you know, he's the quintessential investigative journalist.
And if anyone were reading Consortium News dot com 10 days ago, they already knew that a deal had been worked out with Damascus, with Bashar al-Assad, evil incarnate.
Please don't shoot our planes down if we start targeting your enemy, ISIL or ISIS or whatever you want to call it.
And lo and behold, a week later, we have strikes on Syria and the Syrians are crowing about the pre coordination of these strikes with the US.
So, you know, that's where we cover that on this show.
And it was a single source story.
And I said at the time, but you know what?
It may be a single source, but it's Robert Perry's judgment, too.
And I think you can put a lot on that.
And I think we'll see this play out to be true, although it doesn't really still answer the question.
And I wonder whether you would try to answer the question.
Do you know yet of whether they've really decided to switch back to Assad?
You know, like Jonathan Landay, for example, thinks, oh, come on, regime change against Assad.
That's two years ago.
They know now that that's over and that ISIS is the threat.
And so maybe they'll get back to dealing with Assad some other time.
But certainly for now, you know, whatever.
And then on the other side, there are still quite a few commentators who think that in a way, intervention against ISIS amounts to just a pretext for eventually getting into a fight with Assad.
As long as we're bombing in Syria.
How long before a Qatari jet hits an Assad target or, you know, something happens and it ends up being a full regime change.
Well, that's what the neocons want, of course.
And that's what the Israelis want.
And so to the degree that they're still running our policy, I'd have to say that will probably happen.
The important thing is to put yourself in Bashar al-Assad's seat there.
Now, if I were Bashar al-Assad, I would have great, great qualms about creating a precedent where the United States or anybody else can target places in my country.
I'm sure, I'm virtually sure that Bashar al-Assad fully expects that once ISIL is done away with, he'll be the next target.
Only problem is he knows that ISIL is not going to be done away with anytime, probably in his lifetime, because ISIL is a factor, is a result of U.S. policy, pure and simple.
U.S. policy is so dumb that it'll keep on bombing and creating longer, longer lines at the recruitment centers for ISIL, for ISIS, for al-Nusra, and if there is such a thing, for Khorasan as well.
Yeah, and whoever comes next, I saw a tweet yesterday in all caps that said, What if ISIS are the moderates?
Meaning, you know, who knows what comes next?
Zarqawi, as brutal as he was, he could never get his act together the way that this guy, Bakr Baghdadi, has, so who does know what comes after him, you know?
Well, you know, the moderates, I repeated for you the sequence of events at late August, early September of last year, when Obama, thank goodness, changed his mind.
Kerry wouldn't stop.
He appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and they voted 10 to 8 for war on Syria.
Kerry said, We have to get him, we have to get him, we have to get him, and besides, the good guys in Syria, the moderates, are gaining the upper hand.
Now, there wasn't anyone in the U.S. government that believed that.
I don't think Kerry believed it either.
Well, and that was the point where he and Kerry, pardon me, he and McCain agreed that, Oh, yeah, no, the vast majority of them are secular and moderate.
And that was where Putin called him a liar.
And everyone said, Oh, my God, what a breach of protocol for him to use the L word.
But they didn't focus on what was the dispute.
And the dispute was, Come on, everybody knew that this war had belonged to al-Nusra from the very beginning.
The vast majority of the rebels were secular moderates.
I mean, come on.
Did Kerry even believe that?
I guess so.
I mean, if he was just being briefed by Elizabeth O.
Baggy and whoever else, you know, Fred and Kimberly Kagan send over.
I don't know.
Well, I think, Scott, the trick is in the pastel ties.
If you have 10 pastel ties that you can kind of rotate, this gives you a certain savoir faire and a certain what the Germans call format.
And you can begin to believe your lies if you look in the mirror.
Now, what happened there was you're right.
Putin called this guy a liar.
And what he actually said was, quote, It is very sad seeing the secretary of state tell lies because he knows he is lying.
And this is particularly sad.
End quote.
As you say, Scott, that's the well, in my experience, that's the only time I've seen a Russian president or a premier or a first party secretary called the U.S. foreign or U.S. secretary of state a liar.
And it was because he was a liar and because he's lying about moderates.
And he was also lying about chemical weapons, which he attributed to Bashar al-Assad, in which I'm convinced, partly due to the good work, detective work of Bob Perry, that it was the it was the moderate rebels, the ones that could make sarin all by themselves.
And that explains why the sarin was not the same as was in Syrian government stocks.
Well, it was al-Nusra, I think, was what what Perry agreed with Hearst, that it was al-Nusra who I don't know.
I don't know if they count as the moderates now or not, but those are the guys who are sworn in allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri.
And they do suicide attacks and prisoner beheadings and are damn near as bad as ISIS in their methods, if not exactly.
I don't think that they said it was the FSA, but I guess, you know, they do work together.
You know, that's the whole thing is it's they're all basically jihadists over there fighting.
I don't think there is an FSA.
And I think it's run out of Langley and a couple of people may be in in Paris running the thing.
But, yeah, the interesting thing is that they get away with all this stuff.
And, you know, when when people in college say to me, all right, McGovern, you're so smart.
How are you going to defeat terrorists?
And, you know, I give them that malaria analogy, which I think I've said on your show before, that you drain the swamp, you drain the swamp of legitimate grievances that all these people who are oppressed by dictators we support and who are oppressed by Israelis without whom who without us could not do the kinds they think in Gaza.
That's going to continue forever unless we change our policy.
It's getting worse, not better.
Anybody can see that.
So unless you subscribe, and I'm beginning to think maybe this is right.
If you ask Cui Bono, you know, who profits from this endless supply of terrorists?
Well, the people that make the weapons, people sell the weapons, people profiteer in the weapons.
Look what happened.
We armed four, count them, four Iraqi divisions with the latest arms, tanks and everything else.
And when ISIS and the Peshmerga, when they when they started to shoot at them in northern Iraq, they ran away.
And so what happened?
Oh, they left the tanks and all those self-propelled artillery.
They left them behind.
So what did the U.S. have to do?
Oh, have to destroy the weapons so that ISIL can't get the weapons.
Great, great cycle here.
We destroy the missiles.
Then we sort of sell more weapons.
And man, is this a great country or not for the arms merchants, for the people that Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex?
Now it's the military-industrial-congressional complex.
And we have to get out in the street and make sure that we make a statement saying, look, we've had enough of this stuff.
Stop creating terrorists.
Who needs them?
And stop deceiving us in thinking that these people come out of the womb hardwired to hate Americans.
They hate Americans because of our policies.
The sooner we recognize that, the better off we'll be.
We'll be able to change the policies, diminish our support for Israel and have a fair chance of being welcomed rather than hated in that part of the world.
All right.
Thanks very much, Ray.
I've kept you way over time here.
I really do appreciate it.
You're most welcome, Scott.
Thanks again.
That's Ray McGovern, everybody.
He's a former CIA analyst, a veteran intelligence professional for sanity rights at Consortium News and raymcgovern.com.
You can read about him at antiwar.com slash blog right now.
Ray McGovern triumphs over State Department.
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My email address is scott at scotthorton.org.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, I'm 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.
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