10/31/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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Again, and can in no way be trusted to stop the abuses for us.
All right, that's for offnow.org, if you want to hear more about that.
All right, on the line, I got him.
It's Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst for 27 years.
He used to be the morning CIA briefer for Vice President George H.W. Bush in the 1980s.
And he's one of the co-founders of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
You name your foreign policy disaster and he told you so.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Ray?
Scott, I'm doing all right under the circumstances.
Yeah, well, so let's talk a little bit about those circumstances.
You went to see St.
David Petraeus, the most successful general in American history, give a talk in New York last night.
Is that right?
Yeah.
And I was afraid he was going to advertise that.
And I noticed there was a Q&A.
So I thought I might try to unadvertise it by simply asking a poignant question like, well, General Petraeus, you indicated many years ago.
Please tell me how this war ends in Iraq.
And now, you know, don't you?
All those crackerjack troops that you trained up so well and the equipment you gave them and so forth.
Well, they certainly performed well when a couple of the ISIL guys started shooting AK-47s at them.
The officers all got on their helicopters and went to other places and the troops receded to the point where artillery and the rest of it was left for ISIL.
And the U.S. was left in the incredibly ironic and sad position of having to attack its own armaments, the Iraqi government, lest they fall completely into the hands of ISIL.
So we equipped them, we trained them real well.
They ran away, literally, four divisions up there.
These are the ones that Petraeus bragged about having trained.
And then we were reduced to the ridiculous position of having to destroy our own weaponry.
But, you know, no problem.
That's real good for the military-industrial complex.
So we'll just build more weapons and we'll sell them to this new crowd of these Iraqi trained people that are there at the hands of General Allen.
And one of the things I was thinking of asking Petraeus was, hey, are they going to give you a mulligan here?
Are you going to get a second try?
I mean, is there no new crew of Iraqis?
Now, how do they expect a different result this time?
So anyhow, there were questions that I didn't think the nice crowd at 92nd Street Y would ask.
I thought that it would be good for someone to ask an intelligent question, a question that might hold this guy accountable for, well, for the untold suffering, untold killing in the hundreds of thousands, including the various surges in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A question that would bring the crowd back to reality that he would have to answer in a similar way as the questions I asked Rumsfeld when I had that unique opportunity to debate him for four minutes in Atlanta back in 2006.
Maybe it was that example that persuaded Petraeus and or the 92nd Street Y to make sure if McGovern was spotted on the steps trying to get in, don't let him in because they don't let Petraeus ask any real questions.
And so I wasn't deceptive, and the cops were called, and I was actually nursing a really bruised left shoulder, and when they tried to put the cuffs on me behind my back, well, suffice it to say, it was excruciating pain.
I screamed like bloody murder because it hurt that much.
And so they ended up putting a chain, mind you, a chain of handcuffs on me because there's no way that they can make my left wrist meet my right in the setting of one handcuff.
Hang on, let me ask you about that.
You're saying that they didn't handcuff your hands behind your back, or they finally relented and they let you have a longer term?
No, you know the rules.
They had us follow the rules.
What I'm saying is that they could not possibly connect my left wrist to my right with just one set of handcuffs.
They ended up doing a chain of them so that linked together, both wrists could be immobilized, but an acknowledgment there simply that there was no way to get the left shoulder to bend far enough without me screaming my head off to get both wrists in one handcuff.
So that's in their records, of course.
That's a slight mercy in the midst of a giant outrage, and of course they ended up hurting you anyway, as you said.
And it's reported that you were crying out in pain on the scene and later at the jail as well.
Well, at the jail, let's see.
Well, I took to the hospital there, NYU Cornell Hospital, and x-rayed the left shoulder.
Luckily there are no breaks or fractures, but the rotator cuff and all that stuff can be really, really painful, and that's what it was.
It's got a sling on it now.
Ende gut, alles gut, as the Germans say.
All's well that ends well.
And, you know, when I think over something like this, a major action that I really didn't expect, I have this notion that something might come out of this, and maybe this is part of it, because Petraeus should not be allowed to hide behind his medals and his Boy Scout ribbons and his merit badges, ten rows of them, you remember them, and he should be exposed for what crime he was.
You know, one of the things in just preparing what I knew about Petraeus...
Very quickly.
Sure.
Well, it was the fact that he went out after the Elbow Graves scandal, after General Taguba had made his investigation.
In June of 2004, with instructions from Donald Rumsfeld, if the Iraqis are torturing one another, that's no problem.
You don't have to report that.
Just tell the Americans, please knock off the torture.
Hey, by the way, Ray, would it be okay if I interviewed you for half an hour tomorrow?
We could go over all of Petraeus' legacy, the real point here, and talk a little about your shoulder, too.
Yeah, it would have to be more than half an hour.
We're going to have to both talk really fast.
All right, we'll be right back, everybody, with Antonio Buehler in just a sec.
Thanks, Ray.
Great.
Hey, all, Scott Horton here.
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