07/23/15 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back, everybody.
I got Ray McGovern on the line.
I don't choose the onion clips around here, dude.
Ray McGovern, he was a CIA analyst for 27 years, a Kremlinologist, and now he is the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
His website is raymcgovern.com.
He also writes regularly for consortiumnews.com.
He gives anti-war speeches.
Tell the Word is the name of the organization.
You can find out all about it at raymcgovern.com if you want to have him out to give a speech.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Ray?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
You got a great article.
Very happy to see this.
Published in the Baltimore Sun.
Is the military option on Iran off the table?
Is it?
Well, I'm happy to tell you, Scott, the answer to that is yes.
It's really hard for many people in Washington and the rest of the country to reconcile themselves to that.
But there's been a deal, okay?
And it's not just a deal between the U.S. and Iran, it's a deal between the five Security Council members, plus Germany, with Iran.
And it looks like the President has a Congress that, even though it will vote against it, will not be able to overturn the veto which he has promised to deliver.
So in my view, this is very, very good news.
And the more so since this option, so-called this military option, has been on the table now for over a decade.
Now, people really need to realize what we're talking about here, okay?
Going back in 1648 at the Treaty of Bastaria, okay?
After the Europeans had killed off about a half of the population, they decided, you know, there's probably a better way to do this kind of thing, a better way to resolve this.
And they concluded the Treaty of Bastaria, which was supposed to prevent this from happening because it would be clearly defined boundaries against countries, and no sovereign country was entitled to attack another.
Now, that was just the first.
Then we had the Tel Aviv-Riyadh Treaty of 1928, which was supposed to do the same thing.
Of course it didn't.
We got World War II.
But after World War II, this happened in a very tribunal, and they defined what kind of war that was prohibited, a war of aggression, a war which is not undertaken because of an immediate threat against a country, but a war like Germany fought.
And they defined a war of aggression as the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes, only in as much as it contained the accumulated evil of the whole.
Accumulated evil, well, things kidnapping, torture, blackfeet, the whole nine yards.
And that's what inevitably happens when you wage a war of aggression.
Okay, well, that's what happened in World War II.
Then we had the UN Charter, which specifically prohibits people, any country, from undertaking a military action against another country without specific UN Security Council approval, except when the threat is immediate.
There is no way, no way, that you can say there was an immediate threat from Iraq.
And similarly, fast forward to today, there is no way that you can say that there's an immediate threat from Iran, the United States, or even to Israel, which, let's remember, has 250 bombs ready to explode.
So, what am I saying here?
I'm saying that this rhetorical advice, if Iran doesn't comply, or if we find it cheating, all options on the table, including the military option, well, you know, that's really nice rhetoric, but it's against every manner of international agreement going back three and a half decades, okay?
But they still say it.
But you know what?
When the President got up before the press conference, what's today?
Today's Thursday.
Well, it was a week ago, and it was Wednesday, right?
So, what did he say?
Well, he said every manner of thing, but what he avoided saying was, the military option is still on the table, or all options are on the table.
There were several junctures.
You know, I was leaning forward with my feet there watching the boob tube.
I said, oh, here it comes.
It didn't come.
He didn't say it.
And so, you know, as an old criminologist, I look for things that are missing, as well as things that are said.
This was highly significant.
It's going to go through.
The military option is finally off the table, because this time the U.S. is in favor of that.
Now, people will say, well, wait a second now.
There are all kinds of games that can be played by the International Atomic Energy Agency out there.
You haven't heard of them before.
They've gotten this computer laptop and all that from the Israelis, and that shows that the Iranians were cheating on this and that and the other thing.
Well, yeah, that's worked for the Israelis up until now, but that's worked largely because the IAEA, a guy named Amano, a Japanese diplomat, is in the U.S. pocket.
And we know that from WikiLeaks graphics, okay?
We know that from people from Vienna, that when Amano was picked to replace Baradai, who was a really good director general of the IAEA, he thanked the U.S. profusely for putting him in power and said, and I need a little bit more money for the Drakes.
I'd like to pick up this office a little bit more.
So Amano is in our pocket.
What does that mean?
Well, this time, Amano's going to listen to us and not the Israelis, because we differ from the Israelis on this, and that's the big news here.
We're going to see this thing through, and I guess I have to confess, I have to confess to being surprised by this, because I had new doubts as to whether, well, how we say this, whether Obama would have the guts to see this through.
I'm delighted that he has had the guts, and this may push some more guts on other issues.
I think that this is a new milestone in U.S.-Israeli relations in the first instance, because they are dead set against it.
Why?
Because they feel a threat from Iran?
No, because they want the sanctions to continue, and that keeps Iran in a supportive position.
So this is historic.
It's probably described as historic.
Kerry, Secretary Kerry, their partner state guy, he fulfilled the instructions of Obama, and this is all for the good.
The Russians felt that.
That's one thing that hasn't come through, but the President himself said, in effect, we should not really have done this without a lot of Russian help.
So there are great possibilities here, and I don't usually sound like Pollyanna.
I hope I don't sound like that now, but this is real, this is good, and I have to say, on this one, Obama made good.
Well, that's pretty much my feeling on it.
Now, I want to go back a little bit to what you say about all the threats of aggression being against international law, that it's important to point out, as I think you mentioned, but I want to emphasize that this is the world law that's been foisted on the world by the United States, that the United States is the self-declared enforcer of, and yet we're going around acting completely immune from it, like a local murderer deputy sheriff in your neighborhood who can do what he wants in the name of enforcing the law and is never under the authority of it himself.
So I'm actually against the entire theory of collective security and the United Nations Security Council or anyone else being able to authorize aggressive wars, and I wonder, really just for argument's sake, whether there are any laws in America, the ratification of the Kellogg-Briand Pact or anything else, where it's the actual, or something, no, something separate from that, something that's just a domestic federal law that bans government officials making threats of aggressive war.
Do you know if there's any like that?
I mean, certainly it's immoral, certainly we should all oppose it regardless, but I wonder if it's domestically a federal crime rather than just under international law, too.
Well, I guess, Scott, I would go back to the Constitution and the supremacy law, which says that every treaty agreed to by the Senate is in so facto the law of the moment.
But the U.N. Charter's not a treaty, though.
It was ratified by both houses that bear majorities rather than by the Senate.
That's right.
So it is a treaty.
If you're asking me whether we blithely go around violating it, well, Scott, I would remind you that we are the sole indispensable country in the world.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah, you see?
So, you know, if you're the sole indispensable country in the world and you actually promulgate that, as Obama has done many, many times, well, then the Americans get the idea, well, you know, we can do what we want, whether there's a law against it or not.
And I go back to 9-11 itself and the account given by Richard Clark, who is in the bunker with the president and a few other aides that evening after the president spoke to the nation.
And when somebody said, well, now we can go after Iraq, somebody else said, well, you know, that would be Iraq had nothing to do with what happened this morning.
That would be against international law.
Richard Clark quotes the president as saying, quote, I don't give a damn what the international lawyers say.
We're going to kick some ass.
Now, did anyone demur?
Did anyone say, well, Mr. President, you know, there's such a thing as a war of aggression, and that's exactly what we would be committing.
And, you know, our prosecutor there at Nuremberg said that the people sitting in judgment here are just as susceptible to having this law, this tribunal invoked against them as the folks who happen to lose this particular war, the Germans.
So nobody said that.
Everybody said, yes, or 9-11, 9-11, fear, fear.
Let's get it.
Let's get Iraq, even though.
So what I'm saying, Scott, is that there are laws on the books.
There is the supremacy clause.
But if you have the precedent of a president like George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney and then his successor, a fellow named by the name of Obama, who in some respects has gone even further in violating our law, witness the Fifth Amendment, right?
OK, no one, no one shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process.
OK, that's still there.
It's for the last time I check.
Well, how about our lucky?
How about other American citizens that have been deprived of their life without any due process?
What does the president say about that?
Well, he has this cohort there, that fellow who just resigned from being attorney general, Eric Holder.
He goes out to this fancy law school and he says, oh, I read the Constitution.
It says due process.
It doesn't say judicial process.
Well, you know, I mean, wow.
It's always meant judicial process.
Yes.
Stephen Colbert said Stephen Colbert said, no, it just means there's a process that you do.
Yeah, right.
So all I'm saying is that you're quite right in pointing out that that we are bound by any manner of international and and national laws and the Constitution and the Supremacy Clause, but it takes a constitutional observer, I think, from a constitutional lawyer to make that good and to have us behave as a law-abiding country and not as the sole remaining, well, the sole remaining indispensable country in the world.
You know, I think I may have mentioned this before, but I have some fun when I talk to universities, colleges, and they don't do much English grammar anymore, but they usually know what a synonym is.
So I say, you know what a synonym is?
Oh, yeah, that's something that sounds, you know, sort of similar.
So what's an antonym?
Well, usually at least one, you know, that's the opposite.
I say, okay, good.
We are the sole indispensable country of the world.
What's the opposite of indispensable?
And, you know, I scratch their head, they want to say, well, I guess it would be dispensable.
I said, right.
So by definition, all other countries are what?
And they grudgingly say, oh, I guess dispensable.
I said, well, yeah, right.
So it's kind of you insane psychopaths.
Thank you for it's fun.
It's fun when they're confronted with their dissonance, you know, in plain English for a moment, huh?
Yeah, well, you know, when the kids can get onto it, they do sort of reassess the daily diet of propaganda that they get from the mainstream media.
Those who tune in, you know, one of the hopeful signs is that they don't read the newspapers and they get a lot of stuff from from Colbert and and John, what's his name?
Stewart, I guess.
And they know who's the web.
So if you tell them about this show, if you tell them about Amy Goodman, you give them a chance to if they're responsible enough to want to know what the truth is, they can find it and they can find it a lot easier than people my age who have trouble with computers.
Well, yeah, no, certainly those things are changing very quickly.
All right now.
So and you know what?
It's we're talking technicalities anyway.
I was just wondering if there's any kind of federal law that really just makes that a crime for government officials to threaten aggressive war, you know, specifically in that way.
But it doesn't matter.
It's still obviously criminal anyway and has been all along the way that they, you know, aside from legalities, it's certainly it should be intolerable to all Americans that, you know, virtually every politician in D.C. will jump at the chance to repeat that refrain, that all options remain on the table, all seemingly including, in fact, even according to Obama's nuclear posture.
Right.
All includes nuclear weapons.
When he when he announced that America's former policy was we reserve the right of nuclear first strike against any country in the world at any time.
And then he changed it to against nuclear countries or Iran.
You know, well, happily, that may become academic as this thing works out.
Now, it's going to take I'm not saying it's going to be easy.
It's going to take a lot of rhetoric and a lot of opposition and so forth.
And it's going to take a lot of months before, for example, the sanctions are lifted.
But unless there is a well, what I worry about still.
Is a false flag incident.
We know, for example, from Cyrus's reporting that Cheney ordered the building of PT boats or patrol boats, torpedo boats that look like they were painted in Iranian colors.
And there was a tentative plan to have one of those things shoot up the U.S. ship in the Gulf, the Persian Gulf.
Now, that's not made up.
That was on the drawing board.
They drew the line there.
They said we wouldn't do that.
What's to prevent the Israelis from doing something like that now?
Bear in mind, and this year listeners may not recall, but Obama came into office pledging to talk directly with Iran, right?
Well, it took him, what, eight months on the first of nine months on the first of October 2009, Bill Burns, one of his top diplomats, met with the top Iranian in Geneva.
Now, what did Burns have under his coat?
He had a proposal to which the U.S. and everyone else was convinced that the Iranians had turned down coal, but because it involved taking the low-enriched uranium that they had in-country, two-thirds to three-quarters of it, and shipping it abroad, out of their control, to be refined into a more refined state so that they could use it to power their nuclear medicine reactor, so he gives this to the Iranian delegate, and the Iranian delegate, on the first of October 2009 says, well, this looks good to me.
We agree in principle.
I'll go back, and I'll tell this to the guy that told us, and let's meet in Vienna on the 21st of this month.
Let's not waste a lot of time about this.
Three weeks from now, can you do it?
And Bill Burns recovers, and he says, well, really?
Yeah, okay, we can do it.
Well, what happens on the 19th of October?
On the 19th of October, a terrorist group, and this is a real terrorist group, named Jumbola, okay, traditionally funded by the Israelis and the United States, has access to incredibly precise information about a meeting involving five Revolutionary Guard generals, okay, general officers, together with their minions, in a place in Iran, and guess what happens?
Car bombs, big explosions, five Revolutionary Guard generals are blown up and killed, two days before negotiations were to resume in Vienna.
Well, who leads the Revolutionary Guard?
The Supreme Leader does, okay, Khamenei.
There's no, you know, you don't have to be a crack attack analyst to know what happens next.
The head of the Revolutionary Guard says, how the hell can you possibly trust these people?
Look what happens.
The U.S. advertises the notion that no daylight between Israel and the U.S. We don't know whether it was either or both, but how can you negotiate with these people?
Now, they did go, they sent fellow officials to Vienna, but they backtracked on some of the agreements.
The next year, 2007, the Turks and the Brazilians were given express encouragement by the President of the United States, Barack Obama, to work out a deal with the Iranians, resembling what Bill Burns had presented the year before.
Guess what happened?
They succeeded!
This time, it was two-thirds or half of the lower-interest uranium.
Now, you have to realize, the audience needs to know, that the way you get high-interest uranium, of course, is you start with the lower-interest uranium, and if Iran is going to agree to ship two-thirds of it, or three-quarters of it, the first one, or now half of it, that's a big deal, okay?
Now, they agreed to do that, the Turks and the Brazilians, and, my goodness, George Edwards, were slapping each other on the back, before the fact, Hillary Clinton put the kibosh on it.
She said, we're not going to do that, we're going to do sanctions, she said.
Now, the Brazilian, da Silva, who was in politics, he wrote a letter to the President, saying, wait a second, wait a second, who's in charge here?
Here's the letter, I'm going to give it to the Brazilian President.
You asked us to work out this deal, and now Hillary Clinton says, no, we're going to do sanctions?
So, there were two times, in recent history, 1939 and 2010, when the saboteurs were able to undermine an agreement that was very promising.
Every bit as promising as the one we just had.
So, don't rule it out, but if something like this happens, we have a false-flag sort of thing, you can expect people who don't want this agreement, who want to sabotage it, to climb from the rooftops if you just can't crush those Iranians.
Remember what we heard at first.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting, man, because it was not very long ago that there was a ridiculously fake attack that I racked up six of you former CIA officers to debunk it within the space of a couple of days, the so-called Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador, that kind of thing.
They could certainly arrange some farce like that, or like you're saying, a real attack by way of Jandala or somebody else inside Iran, maybe, if it comes to something like that.
Except, this is such a big deal compared to what was happening with the President so four square behind it compared to what was going on in October 2009, where it still was like a little kind of trial balloony, kind of let's feel this out sort of a tempo to it or whatever.
So where now it seems like if there's one reason for the Israelis to not do something like that, it's that everybody would know that they did.
It would be so obvious and half of American politics would have reason to want to believe that and argue it.
You know what I mean?
Or at least a major part of the Democratic Party and supporters of the President are going to be, you know, if it's...
I mean, because how are they going to do something like that without it being obvious?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, you make a good point there.
I mean, the Israeli government, they're crazy, so they might try it.
I'm not saying they would definitely not try it or something.
It seems like they're going to get caught if they do.
Yeah.
See, what I was trying to do is draw a distinction between what we might expect and that is this kind of false flag attack.
But what we can no longer fear expecting, and that is that the IAEA will be given some ostensible evidence by the Israelis.
And the Israelis will come to us and say, hey, we've given the IAEA this.
Tell Amano to put the tabash on this thing.
Tell Amano to say...
Amano is the head of the IAEA.
Tell him to say that the Iranians are already cheating.
We found something else, okay?
This time, that ain't going to work because Amano is in our pocket.
He's going to do what Obama says, not what Netanyahu says.
And, you know, I don't like anybody being in anybody else's pocket, but this time we'll accept it.
And it's good news.
The IAEA has a big role to play here.
And so if they continue to take money, which they have, Amano himself, and direct it from the U.S. this time, it's a good thing.
These are ironical things, but, you know, life is full of ironies.
Yeah.
Well, now, so obviously the president has made this his priority, but how do you break down the American establishment about this thing?
And I know there are a lot of different power factions involved and different kinds of think tanks and whatever, but is it just the Likud, Nick Wright, you know, the Charles Krauthammers of the world who are opposed and everybody else supports it?
Or is it, you know, more just left and right split?
Or how do you measure it?
Yeah, it's deeper than that, Scott.
You know, I used to avoid saying things like the military industrial complex seems so hackneyed, you know.
But, you know, at 76 years old, I'm learning.
Now, it's axiomatic.
Peace, a lack of tension, bad for business, very bad for business.
War, tensions, good for business.
Look what's happening with the arms industries now with the increase in tensions over Ukraine.
I'll give you a small sort of example.
There's an arms manufacturing firm in Germany, Mafai, okay?
They have a French counterpart.
Now, their big project was the common European battle tank, okay?
And there were billions already invested in this thing, and they had to sell it to everybody against, well, they needed an enemy, all right?
As soon as the Ukraine thing went up in tension, the stock rose, Mafai and his French counterpart, they're making all kinds of dough.
And guess what?
There's going to be a common European battle tank.
And guess what?
It's going to be so vulnerable to the latest high-tech weaponry, that it's not going to be worth it, darn it, except for lining the pockets of the arms manufacturers.
Works the same way in our country, of course.
I mean, it's a wonderful cycle, isn't it?
Well, you know, I talked with the journalist Mark Perry, and he was talking about some arms dealers in America who are lining up behind the deal because they want to sell weapons to Iran.
That way, they can sell weapons to America to threaten Iran with.
But we can also sell weapons, I guess, parts for their F-14s and whatever else, for them to defend themselves from America against.
Yeah, bad language, but you understand what I mean.
Well, you know, that's just the name of the game.
I was talking at a preview of a documentary on Iran, specifically about 1979, the hostage-taking.
And a little bit of history I introduced about the Shah.
And the Shah, of course, when he joined that cartel after 1973 and had such a profound influence on the price of oil, well, Kissinger gave explicit instructions, you sell the Shah everything you want, everything he asks for, except nuclear weapons.
And, of course, there were two things there.
Number one, to keep the Shah beholden to us to the degree we could, whereas he had all the leverage.
But number two, a lot of people make a lot of dough on that.
Now, a little footnote here, all right?
Westinghouse and GE decided, hey, Henry, hey, Jerry Ford, you know, we think we ought to sell him a full-cycle nuclear development program as well.
And you know what?
They persuaded Jerry Ford, even though he had great hesitation.
But we're talking about the same full-cycle nuclear development facility that we objected so strongly to for the last decade or more, OK?
Now, Jerry Ford said, well, you know, I don't really think that's a good idea.
But he signed on to it.
And it happened.
And the whole thing became academic.
But the pressure to sell people this stuff is incredible.
And that explains largely why Ukraine is such a fertile soil to plow for the arms manufacturers, why Iraq, why Syria is the same way.
There are two things at play here.
Look at what happened a year ago.
Now, we had given the Iraqis $5 billion worth of weaponry and great training from my friend General Petraeus.
Oh, they were a crackerjack troops.
What happened?
The ISIL, ISIS, or whatever you want to call it, fires a couple of AP-47s in their direction.
And what do they do?
They run away.
Now, I exaggerate.
They didn't all run away.
The Iraqi army, the helicopters out of the area.
But they went away.
Now, what did they do?
They left all the artillery, all the tanks, all the Humvees and everything behind them.
2,000-plus Humvees.
So, what do we do?
Well, you can't leave those things here.
ISIS hands can you?
So we destroyed them by air power.
And how are we doing?
We're selling $5 billion worth of stuff.
I mean, is this a great country or what?
What happens is a slice of those profits, of course, go to the people running for Congress.
They appropriate the money to the arms manufacturers.
They make a bundle of money, slice off a little bit of money to the congressional folks if they get reelected.
I mean, is this a great country or what, Scott?
It's as simple as that, the economics and politics.
That's what Obi-Wan Kenobi calls it.
Perfect.
And, of course, it's the best game in town when it comes to investing money in buying a lobbyist to buy off a couple of congressmen.
The bang that you get for that buck compared to any other investment in America, especially when it comes to Pentagon spending, there's just really no comparison.
So for any businessman who just has a bottom line and no morals about it, it's all about that government contract.
And if you're big enough to afford the lobbyist to get you more government contracts, you'll never have a real job again in your life.
Here's what I want to do when I set up a contracting firm here is see how much money we can make.
I think we're in a wrong booth.
I guess so.
The thing is, you've got to stop truthing us out of war and start lying us into it, and then the checks will start flowing.
Now, hey, wiggle your phone or stick your head out the window or something because your audio just got even worse on us again there.
We've been making do pretty well.
All right.
So give me some comments on these subjects here.
It turns out the Israeli politicians are all, of course, coming out against it.
But according to the Jewish Daily Forward this morning, and actually Jim Loeb's blog had a piece about this, all of the retired security professionals, the former heads of Shin Bet and the former heads of Mossad are all coming out, or I don't know all, but many of them, a dozen or so, I think, or 10 or 12 or so, have come out in favor of the deal.
And I wonder if you could comment on that, as well as if you could comment on the Israel lobby's efforts in Washington, D.C., to scotch the thing.
I mean, as you said, it doesn't look like they have the votes to override the veto.
The Democrats are going to stick with the president on this, and what are they going to do about it?
So that's the question.
What are they going to do about it?
Well, they're going to see bloody murder, and they're going to make this deal out to be a support for terrorism.
This is what they say.
When you release billions of dollars that are properly begun, they are certainly not going to invest in economic development.
No, what they're going to do is give us the terrorists.
That sounds familiar.
You don't give WFP to terrorists, but you give a lot of money.
Well, that's a lot of hoopla.
That's what we'll hear.
The reason that Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government, mind you, the reason it's such a potent political force is not because of its little terrorist wing.
It's because it set up medical facilities, health facilities, other educational facilities in Lebanon, the kind that Hamas has done in Gaza.
That's what contributed to the electoral victories of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
We didn't expect Hamas to beat the old corrupt people that were under Yasser Arafat, but they beat them handily.
If we had known that the election would be free and that Hamas would win, we would have sponsored it.
After the election, we tried to remove these guys by a coup.
It didn't work.
That's why Israel has put a boycott on goods to be delivered to Hamas.
That's why they have this quarantine where you can't even get the freedom-focused voters of the kind I was on four years ago into Gaza.
It's to show a lesson to these folks that you can't really do this kind of thing, even if it's a freely elected government.
People need to know why these people are popular.
It's not because they shoot unguided rockets at the southern Israel.
It's because they did things for the Palestinians and for those people in southern Lebanon that the old Baqa people, the Yasser Arafat people, corrupt as they were, did not do.
These things need to be faced.
They need to be called by name.
A little truth needs to be spread around.
And people need to be known, need to be called.
That, for example, with respect to Gaza, every few years, Israel does what it calls mowing the grass in Gaza.
Last time, 2,200 mostly civilian Palestinians killed, okay?
And they do that kind of thing because they have the support of the United States.
Now, support of the United States?
Well, we give them $3 billion a year, let's face it.
And now they're asking for more as sort of a compensation for living with the Iran deal.
So people need to know that.
And most important, of course, is people need to know that terrorists, so-called, or Palestinians, people don't come out of the womb, you know, Islamists.
They don't come out of the womb screaming, I hate America!
I hate America!
They don't hate us because of our freedom or democracy.
They hate us because of our very close identification, not only with dictators such as those in Saudi Arabia, but with Israel.
When we say there's no daylight between Israel and the United States, when they check the policy, that is the kiss of death because that gives people no hope that the United States will withdraw its support for Israel.
And when you have no hope, you do terrible things.
And that's called terrorism.
All right, now, so what about the Israel lobby and AIPAC creating this new group to oppose it and all their efforts in D.C.?
Do you think that's going to be counterproductive for the lobby in the long term?
Yeah, it's the agents of a foreign power who are most against this when you live in a country of 300 million.
Well, Scott, I think that may be gilded in a little bit.
You know, with the predominant lobby influence in what we call the mainstream media, the media have the ability to deprive most of our fellow citizens of the real scoop on these things.
So even if Netanyahu and his crowd lose this one, and it's a big one for them, they can rest in the assurance that the whole thing was bogus to begin with.
A friend of mine said, you know, a radiologist wrote an article that says, victory, Iran has agreed not to work on the nuclear weapon that they haven't been working on since at least 2003.
Most people don't know.
Nobody refers to the National Intelligence Estimate.
Okay, that's the highest genre of intelligence analysis produced in 2007, which said, unanimously, with high confidence, all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies signing on, quote, Iran has stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003 and has not resumed work on a nuclear weapon.
That judgment was reaffirmed every year since.
So what do you really have?
You have people disappointed that now it's written in black and white that not only are they not doing it, but they're prohibited from doing it.
Now, I included in that Baltimore Sun thing something that your listeners might be interested in, and that is that when that estimate came out, it was really startling.
What had happened, long story short, was they got an honest manager of intelligence named Tom Finger in from the State Department and asked him to do an honest estimate on Iran, given the debacle that had happened a couple of years before in Iraq.
And he did so.
He was favored with a little extra evidence that came in during 2007, but in November of 2007, he issued this National Intelligence Estimate, having kept it pretty secret from everybody, apparently, because of Bush.
Now, I don't suggest that your listeners go out and buy his memoir.
It's called Decision Points.
If you have to, you can go to the library and look it up.
But I want to quote something, okay?
This is what he says.
I wrote the page when I initially read the book.
You have to read these books if you're an analyst, okay?
This is what he said.
The NIE, quote, tied my hands on the military side.
After the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country that the intelligence community says has no active nuclear weapons program?
End quote.
Well, bummer.
Now, if Bush and Cheney were really, if the Israelis were really afraid that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon, what would have been the expected reaction of the NIE that says, no, they stopped doing that four years earlier?
Well, you know, hey, wow, are you sure?
You double-tricked us?
Call the Israelis.
What a wonderful move.
Iran's not working on a nuclear weapon.
No, no.
That's what Bush does.
Bush says, bummer.
He called it eye-popping, and it deprived him of the military option.
There you go again.
The military option was on the table, regardless of international commitments, and this deprived him of that.
So, you know, this has a long history, and, you know, I am so delighted to be able to tell you, and I'm surprised to be able to tell you, that in my book, this really is a historic agreement, even though what it does in essence is to say, now, Iran, which has not been working on a nuclear weapon since at least 2003, is obliged by law not to work on a nuclear weapon.
The other thing, of course, is that there's a fatwa.
Now, some of us Catholics, you know, we know about papal encyclicals, and, you know, we take them or leave them, maybe, okay?
But fatwas?
Those are Muslim edicts which are taken very, very seriously.
Why do I mention that?
It's because the Iranian ayatollahs have a fatwa against developing weapons of mass destruction.
Now, most Americans say, oh, right, well, that's great.
You know, it's like an encyclical.
You listen to it or not.
Not so, folks.
During the war between Iraq and Iran, 1981 to 1989, the precursor chemicals that we had made available to Iraq had been worked into nuclear weapons.
They were using them, as most people know, against the Iranians.
The Iranians had these mass assaults.
They were decimated by chemical weapons.
Now, the Iranians also had the capability.
They didn't develop them.
They didn't use them, despite the provocation.
Well, you know, that says something to me.
People can dismiss promulgations and encyclicals and fatwas.
This one is not so readily dismissed.
They take this seriously.
So should we.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I agree with that, and it is, as you say, it's the kind of thing where, yeah, yeah, politicians say lots of things, and, you know what, holy men say lots of things too.
But, of course, yeah, no, in context, he was forbidding his government from retaliating against Ronald Reagan-backed U.S., you know, Iraqi attacks against them.
In fact, you must have been briefing the vice president about how successful Saddam's chemical weapons attacks were at the time.
Right?
Fill us in, man.
Well, I was briefing Secretary Weinberger, who on that great big table that he has in his office used to keep track of what was going on, like a World War I general or minister of defense.
And, yeah, there was great interest in all this.
And the sad thing, of course, is they knew exactly what was going on and did nothing to prevent it.
I mean, this is serious.
I mean, you don't have to go back to World War I to realize the horror of using these kind of weapons again.
And yet the Iraqis did.
They knew they were doing it, so they didn't even say boo.
Why?
Well, they were fighting the Iranians, and we didn't like the Iranians even more, so we ended up just like Saddam Hussein.
Well, you know, Matthew Aide's work at Foreign Policy says that you guys were helping them with the targeting and everything, not just turning a blind eye, but here's the satellite information that you need.
You can ask the Defense Intelligence Agency about that.
My information is that's absolutely correct.
And it's a sad chapter, but it's there.
So, you know, you cruise your bedfellows, you cruise your enemies.
It all has to do with who's in power, Reagan, then Obama, now.
And the distinction now seems to be that Obama has refound some facts.
You know, what I said a long time ago, you know, we had such expectations and hopes.
We had hopes for change, right, for Obama.
Well, Colonel Moe Morris, who was the chief prosecutor in Guantanamo at the time, he was Colonel up there, and he had great hopes for Obama, too.
And somebody asked him when he was ordered to continue prosecuting people in Guantanamo and disregard the torture, people said, well, how do you account for your expectations for Obama and what he's doing here?
He's not closing Guantanamo.
He's bowing to the CIA and everybody else, the DOD.
And what Colonel Morris says is, well, you know, I hate to – the best analogy I can think is that on inauguration day, somewhere between the Capitol and the White House, Obama's testicles must have fallen off on the road.
And that's the way it's been until now.
And, you know, I'm allowing myself to have just a modicum of hope now that this guy will rise to the occasion on other things besides this historic deal on Iran.
Yeah, yeah, well, don't get too far ahead of yourself here, Ray.
No, I agree with you.
You know, Gordon Prather said back when Obama first took office, he wrote an article called Obama the Great, and it said all he has to do is just give a speech where he says, I promise as long as I'm president, we will never bomb any IAEA-safeguarded facilities.
And that would be the end of that.
And that would take the entire war against Iran off the table as long as they stay within their agreement.
As you said, they were already not making nukes.
They were already still within their agreement.
So he finally got around to being Obama the Great on this issue, but he's absolutely horrible on every other thing.
And you can ask all the rotting corpses in Yemen and Libya about that, except they can't answer you because they're dead because he killed them.
But I think it's a guaranteed fact that Jeb's going to be worse, and the Republicans could walk right in here.
They're all swearing to God right now they're going to undo this deal the first chance they get, and I don't doubt it.
Well, we'll have to see what happens.
I remain skeptically hopeful that this deal, number one, will go through, and number two, that whoever succeeds Obama will not be able to derail it because, as I said at the outset here, it's not just Iran, Israel, and the United States now.
It's France.
It's Germany.
It's Russia.
It's China.
It's Britain.
And this deal is deliberately constructed that way, and I have to give credit where it's due.
Obama and John Kerry made it work.
Well, and in fact, we've seen how the Republicans in the junior years deliberately forced, kind of bullied North Korea until they finally quit the treaty and kicked the inspectors out and decided to start making nukes, and they kept trying to do that to Iran, and it wouldn't work.
Remember now?
I've forgotten for a few years now, but, Ray, I just remembered there's that great clip of John Bolton explaining that's what we're trying to do is get them to go ahead and quit the treaty.
If we won't abide by our end of it, maybe they'll just throw their hands up and then that would provide us with a better excuse to bomb them.
But the Iranians never fell for that trick.
They kept their hands up the other way, hands up surrender the whole time, their books wide open, and their safeguards agreement in effect, and said don't shoot, and now it finally paid off for them six years into the next administration.
So it seems like, you know, I guess Jeb could step it up, but they already know better than to fall for that scam.
You know, they obviously prefer to remain within the NPT and try to deprive us of that excuse to bomb them.
Yeah, and again, the IAEA has a central role here.
If the White House has inordinate influence with them, which it does, and if the White House is no longer going to support and spout the Israeli line on this, that's good news and it's an important factor to consider.
All right, Ray, well I've kept you way over time here.
Thanks so much for coming back on the show.
It's great to talk to you as always.
Hey, most welcome.
All right, Joe, that's the great Ray McGovern.
He's from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and he's got the spotlight today on Antiwar.com.
It's this piece in the Baltimore Sun about Iran, and then he's also got one at the Antiwar blog and ConsortiumNews.com, which is not just him, it's the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, quite a few other former CIA officers, etc., who have signed on to this memo to the President saying that they ought to release all the information about the shoot-down of MH17.
So you'll definitely want to take a look at that.
Sorry I didn't get a chance to ask him about that, even in an hour-long interview, but anyway.
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