11/19/16 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, to you guys, Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
Full archives at ScottHorton.org, but check out all the new stuff over at LibertarianInstitute.org slash ScottHortonShow.
Alright, introducing our friend Ray McGovern.
He is the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity because he is a veteran intelligence professional.
For 27 years, he was a CIA analyst and was at one time even the chief of the USSR Division back in the days of the Cold War.
He now works for Tell the Word and goes around giving speeches to people explaining why they should be anti-war.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Ray?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing well.
Good deal.
Appreciate you joining me this morning.
So, lots going on here.
I guess, you know, first and foremost, Donald Trump is the president-elect right now.
And, you know, sorry to ask you to predict the future, but I guess I wonder what you think the difference is or what difference it might make, especially in terms of Middle East and Russia policy, as we always focus on on this show with you.
Well, I've been abroad for almost, well, for more than two weeks.
And when I came back, I asked my wife, Hey, anything new here in Washington?
Actually, I can speak from my long sojourn in Germany, about almost two weeks there.
People were very interested, of course, in how to read Trump.
And I was there when the election took place.
You asked about Russia.
Well, you know, it's not too difficult to find a silver lining in Trump.
If you segregate out all his domestic issues, his nativism, his racism, and all that terrible stuff, at least with respect to Russia, he has a much more sensible policy, or at least professed policy, than would have been the case with Hillary Clinton.
In other words, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the prospect of a hot war with Russia has declined with the decline of Hillary Clinton's good riddance.
Now, that's based largely on what Trump has said.
And granted, he says one thing one day and another thing the other day, but it does seem as though he's reaching out to Russia in a way that is not circumscribed by any fear of the mainstream media.
I mean, he met the mainstream media, and he won.
He was fearless even during the campaign in saying, why not talk with Russia?
Why not?
And Hillary, of course, decided to blame Russia for everything.
A friend of mine was late for work the other day.
He says, well, that's all right.
You just blamed it on Russia.
So anyhow, what I'm saying here is that Trump has made it clear that he thinks that you can talk to Russia, that you can negotiate with Russia, and you can.
And the ball actually is now in his court, and this has been sort of neglected in the reportage.
But Putin has said, look, hey, the first thing we should do is withdraw those armed forces on the border with Russia, the East European countries, Poland and Baltic states, and those divisions or those brigades that we're putting on the border.
Withdraw them.
Now, there's a sensible suggestion.
There's no need for them there.
The threat from Russia has been magnified beyond all proportions.
And so we'll see.
We'll see how Trump reacts.
Of course, a lot will depend on whether he picks John Bolton or somebody like that to be one of his advisers, in which case all bets are off.
But long story short, I think Trump is a smart guy.
I think he does think he can do deals with the Russians.
And I do believe, without being a Putin apologist, that that is not only possible but desirable from Putin's point of view.
And the place to start, of course, is Syria.
Now, people say, oh, do you think he should blast the hell out of ISIS, get the Russians to join him?
Well, no, no, no.
What he should do first is say to Putin, look, I know that our own air force scuttled the ceasefire worked out painfully by John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov back in September.
That's not going to happen again.
When I come in, I'm going to tell the air force that, look, I'm commander in chief.
Now, let's go back to the ceasefire that had begun and that was only five days old when the U.S. Air Force took it into its head to bomb fixed Syrian positions on the top of Three Hills, positions that had been there for months and months and months.
They scuttled that ceasefire.
And after that, and this is important, Putin told his minister of defense, get your spokesman up, and this is what I want him to say.
Quote, we have military capabilities in Syria now, including anti-aircraft systems.
Any unidentified object, whether it be an aircraft or a missile or whatever, a kite, we're going to shoot it down.
Now, let's not have any surprises because we can also shoot down stealth aircraft.
And the final thing that this defense ministry spokesman said was this, unfortunately, we are not going to have time to identify the origin of this aircraft.
So be warned, be advised.
Now, result there?
There is a no-flying zone in Syria and Russia runs it.
So thanks be to God that Hillary's not going to challenge that.
Will Trump do that?
I don't think so.
I think Trump will say, well, let's talk about this.
And I think he'll tell the Air Force, hold down for a while, man, hold down and see what we can work out.
The makings of a ceasefire are there.
Next step, next step is clearly to gather the stakeholders around, like we used to do in the old days.
You get people who are interested in what happens in this area, you get them around the table, you have a ceasefire, and you hash it out.
You get the Saudis and the Turks and the Qataris, and you say, look, knock it off.
Knock off your supply for ISIS.
And then you don't have to bomb the hell out of them.
You deprive them of supplies.
You have a situation that gravitates slowly toward a resolution with, at least temporarily, Assad still in power.
Now, the Israelis don't like that.
And I have to keep telling Americans that you can't possibly understand U.S. policy toward that area, and specifically toward Syria, without understanding the incredibly important role that Israel plays in this calculus.
We have the bureau chief in the New York Times, three years ago, Jodi Rudin, she approached Israeli officials, including the former consul general in New York, Alan Pincus, and she said, now, what's your preferred outcome in Syria?
And Pincus said, well, Jodi, this doesn't sound very humanitarian, but our preferred outcome is no outcome.
And Rudin said, no outcome?
I said, yeah, as I said, it doesn't sound really good, but it's like a playoff game.
This is, again, Alan Pincus.
It's like a playoff game.
We don't want either side to win, but we don't want either side to lose either.
As long as the Sunni and Shia are at each other's throats in Syria, quote, Israel has nothing to fear from Syria, period, unquote.
Now, if you don't understand that, if you don't understand how chaos in Syria really helps Israel from its point of view, because it's hard to resupply Hezbollah through Syria from Iran if there's chaos there.
So on the ground, that's the immediate objective.
And in a more important sense, Shia and Sunni, let them fight it out.
Israel, quote, has nothing to fear from Syria.
Why does Assad have to go?
Does he pose a threat to the United States?
Give me a break.
That was five, six years ago.
Why did the president, why did Secretary Clinton say that he had to go?
Well, if you don't understand the Israeli role and the role of neocons like the bunch of them that remain over after Hillary left, then you don't understand anything about our policy towards Syria.
All right, now, yeah, there's one more like that that just ran recently.
It's by Alon Ben David, who is, I don't know, he's some kind of former at least Army officer or something, but he's currently the senior defense correspondent for Israel's Channel 10, and he wrote a piece for the Jerusalem Post just in September on the 27th.
May it never end, the uncomfortable truth about the war in Syria.
And by the way, anyone who wants to find that New York Times article that you mentioned there, Ray, just Google New York Times, Syria, and hemorrhage, because that's the quote.
We want to see both sides continue to hemorrhage to death, because bleed isn't good enough.
Yeah, I'm sort of a soft-spoken, understated kind of guy.
Yeah, me and my search terms, you know.
Yeah, so, okay, a lot to go over there.
Now, first of all, I'm with you that Trump, you know, he's an empty vessel on a lot of things.
But when it comes to, hey, let's stop backing the terrorists in Syria and let's back off Russia and start getting along with Russia, I'm totally in agreement with you.
It seems like these are really firm opinions of his, and he's very likely to get his way on this to degrees anyway.
I mean, he still has a whole powerful permanent government to deal with there.
And, you know, you mentioned this thing about the Air Force strike on the Syrian Army forces that ruined the ceasefire, the second ceasefire that Kerry and Lavrov had worked out there a few weeks back, what, six weeks ago now or something.
And now, you know, it's been speculated by a lot of very credible people like yourself, other former CIA officers and journalists that, hey, this very well may have been deliberate sabotage and no mistake.
And, you know, I don't know.
I kind of want to dwell on that for a minute.
And I know it's kind of hard because we don't really have definitive proof.
But that would be, Ray, I think, a level of insubordination on the level of, you know, at least the theories about the Gary Powers shoot down, that the CIA got their own pilot shot down in order to prevent Ike Eisenhower from ending the Cold War back in, what, 1960 or?
61.
61, yeah.
No, 60, you're right.
Yeah, 60.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there's nobody that I know that knows anything about military engagement that can believe that that was a, quote, mistake, end quote.
But, you know, it doesn't matter what McGovern believes or what Horton believes.
It matters what Trump believes.
And he has said, and, you know, you don't see these things unless you read them.
He has said virtually, here's a quote, saying, look, we conclude these agreements, my foreign minister and Secretary of State Kerry, we approve them, Obama and I, and then the first thing you know, they're undermined and dissipated by forces in Washington that don't want them.
So how am I to deal with President Obama in these circumstances?
He said that.
And Lavrov has said, you know, my good friend John Kerry works out these things with me painfully, painstakingly, and then as soon as he goes back to Washington, it falls apart.
How am I going to deal with this guy?
It was after that that Putin told his defense ministry to get that spokesman up and say, look, this is it.
And threaten to shoot down our planes.
Yeah.
And, you know, you can expect Putin and their military to do everything possible in these next six, seven, whatever, weeks before the 20th of January to fortify their position in Syria and along, you know, in Ukraine and anywhere else.
Hey, Ray, in your life, has there ever been a president as weak and pathetic as Barack Obama that he would just let the military do nothing but walk all over him and the CIA too for eight years straight like this?
It's just incredible.
How hard would it be for him to go on TV and say, today I've asked for Ashton Carter's resignation because he's a really lousy defense secretary.
Beat it, chump.
He's the president, Ray.
Well, you know, you ought to write him a letter and tell him that because he doesn't seem to be up to it.
You know, it is very sad.
You know, there was one previous president, and I was alive during this time.
His name was Truman, okay?
Everybody thought he was a haberdasher from Missouri, for God's sake.
He had no guts or anything.
But when Douglas MacArthur started to go after China in a big way and wanted to nuke them, Truman immediately said, get out of here.
You're finished.
Get out of here.
And he fired him.
And everybody was shocked.
And MacArthur, he was like David Petraeus times 100, right?
He was the biggest personality in America at the time.
He was, you know, the conqueror of Japan and the rest of Asia as far as he was concerned.
So, yeah, your point is well taken.
I've been saying, as you know, about Obama that he's got no guts.
My friend Colonel Morris, who used to run the prosecution in Guantanamo, I think he put it the best way.
He said, you know, I really had high expectations for Obama and his courage, but somewhere between Capitol Hill and the White House on Inauguration Day, his testicles seem to have fallen off.
Well, he'll take a chance and start a war against Libya, and he'll sign a finding to tell the CIA, yeah, go ahead and back al-Qaeda in Syria, but he's not man enough to tell them no.
No, that's it.
And, you know, he wants a comfortable retirement, and he wants high-paid speeches, and he wants to be a respected person.
And he can do that because of the state of the corporate media.
They will applaud him.
They will say, oh, he did as good a job as he could, and the military, industrial, press, media, deep state complex will thrive.
So he knows which side his bread is buttered on, and he's not going to do anything between now and then to screw himself with the powers that be and reluctantly, as I am to admit this, the powers that be are the Pentagon and the CIA, and Obama's afraid of them.
All right, so now let me ask you this, Mr. Criminologist.
The Washington Post said about two days, maybe three days after the election, they said, hey, guess what?
Barack Obama has decided that now there's a counterterrorism mission in Syria that far outweighs any plan for regime change, and it didn't really address whether he's ordering the CIA to abandon the mythical moderates, which we all know is just a stand-in for al-Qaeda, the arms and money procurement branch of al-Qaeda in Syria there, but it did say that he's ordered the military, the Joint Special Operations Command, top-tier special forces, to go ahead and start targeting the al-Nusra Front and killing them.
And it even says in there in the Post article that the administration refuses to accept any mythology about them changing their name and breaking from al-Qaeda.
They're just as much as al-Qaeda as they ever were, which is actually correct.
They never denounced Zawahiri or al-Qaeda at all in their big name change announcement.
But so, you know, Gareth and I were talking about, well, was this a move by Obama to try to thwart Hillary Clinton and her evil plans, or was this Obama gave this order right after the election, wiping sweat from his brow and saying, OK, now we're going to go ahead and do basically what he already pretty much, I think, agreed with, which is more the Trump policy, to go ahead and, you know, backstab, Bay of Pigs-style our Contra fighters here and tilt back toward the dictator there.
But I just wonder what you think about all that, whether the CIA had a say in that.
And we've had CIA-backed groups and JSOC-backed groups on the ground killing each other in Syria.
I wonder whether the war is going to get worse.
Are we going to have actual, like, SEALs versus CIA paramilitaries in pitch battles?
That's what I want to see.
I know I'm repeating myself, audience, but...
No, nothing's going to happen for the next seven or eight weeks, whatever it is, before the inauguration.
Now, those moderate rebels, in quotes, which Bashar al-Assad has called as difficult to find as unicorns, I think he's right about that, Kerry bragged, Secretary of State Kerry bragged about having refined technical ways to separate them from al-Nusra and the bad terrorists, the immoderate terrorists, OK?
Like a Bugs Bunny hook that just comes and pulls them off stage?
No, he couldn't do it.
Whether he was told he could do it or not, he couldn't do it.
And that's one of the main reasons, of course, that the ceasefire broke down and the fact that no one can resupply those poor souls in East Aleppo.
That has to do with these moderate so-called rebels and the way they were shelling Western Aleppo and the way they're preventing the delivery of relief supplies.
That was all set up.
That was all part of the ceasefire.
And it fell apart.
So nothing's going to happen between now and then.
And even then, you're going to have the CIA, now under Pompeo, jousting with Carter or whoever is named to be defense chief to see whose moderates or whose sponsored elements of this moderate opposition are to be supported, if any.
And I suspect that you're right, that no matter how hard the CIA will fight for keeping their hand in this business, that just like the Kurds, just like the pawns of history that they have always been, the folks that we have supported in Syria will have to kind of fold themselves into the woodwork.
That's really bad for the CIA because that loses a lot of face and a lot of power.
And next time they try to do a little war like this, that's on the record.
People can't trust the CIA to stay in the battle, even when it's not totally the CIA's fault.
It's the feckless nature of the, quote, moderate opposition, end quote.
Yeah, so now here's the thing.
If Trump really goes ahead, and I guess we're going to have to talk about the contradictions of him and all of his top men and the degree to which they hate Iran and how that puts a big wrinkle in all of this.
But, I mean, on the face of it, they're going to basically abandon the jihadis and go ahead and tilt back toward Assad.
You know, Seymour Hersh reported a couple of years ago even now that the military had been passing info to Assad all along through the Germans and that they've been insubordinate in a good way, actually.
Well, relatively good way, you know, compared to backing Al-Qaeda anyway.
But so here's the thing of it.
Because we've got, what, I don't know, a couple of few tens of thousands of these guys if you count al-Nusra and Islamic State and their allied militias.
And now if the USA tilts right back toward Assad and his, you know, Iranian Quds Force and Hezbollah and Russian allies to beat these jihadis, then what kind of reaction is that going to provoke?
Not just from all the terrorists that the USA has just built up here, but from all of their sponsors, all of America's allies in the Persian Gulf.
We tilt this far toward the Shia.
That's what created Al-Qaeda in Iraq in the first place.
And, you know, Bush and then Obama both have taken this Sunni turn to try to make up for Iraq War II and empowering the Shia and the Iranians there.
Now we're going to tilt back toward the Shia and the Iranians again, which I guess we're already doing in Iraq.
The Shiites fight for Mosul right now.
But in other words, we can just see already, right, the next steps and the next steps, the next generations of blowback and consequences flowing from this policy.
It just keeps going back and forth, back and forth.
And it seems like you take their caliphate away.
What you really do is you prove Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri right, that you've got to get rid of the Americans first, the far enemy, and only then will you be able to create your caliphate.
Just turn all these guys toward us even more than before.
Yeah, Scott, I think a whole lot is going to depend on the signals that Trump puts out, even before he's inaugurated.
The thing is, it's a viper's nest.
And people are beginning to realize that our so-called moderate opposition is a really weak reed to lean on.
And so there is the makings of a deal, but the big deal has to be bracing the Saudis, telling the Turks, going to Qatar and saying, look, you guys, knock it off.
Now, the big reason we haven't done that with the Saudis, which are the main supporter of all this and which the likes of Joe Biden has inadvertently admitted, is, well, you know, is the arms trade.
Now, I don't agree with everything the Pope says, right?
But when Francis came here in September of last year and stood before Congress and he said, the main problem is the blood-soaked arms traders.
Whoa.
My God.
These congressmen all applauded, and then they looked in their back pocket to make sure that the cash that they just got from Lockheed and Rea is right still there, you know?
So what it is, is this reluctance to fool around with the Saudis, to whom, get this, $115 billion.
With a B, lesson, boy.
Arms deliveries have been approved since Obama became president.
$115 billion.
Now, people say, Ray, for God's sake, don't exaggerate.
Only $50 billion has been put in train.
And I say to them, you know, I don't know whether only is an adjective or an adverb there, but I don't think it has any place before $50 billion.
That's the nub of it, you know?
These people are making hand over fist, money, money, money.
And the people who are running our policy have been subservient to them, creatures of them.
And what really remains to be seen is whether Trump will be his own man, whether his inclinations after talking with Putin is, hey, let's reign these crazy people in or not.
And, again, I'll check back in three months and we'll see how that looks.
Yeah.
All right, now, so back to Eastern Europe here for a minute.
You mentioned the divisions.
I think it's, what, it's like 700 troops in Lithuania, something like this, just enough to pick a fight but not enough to protect the Lithuanians if they actually pick a fight, right?
What are they even doing there?
Well, you know, I was talking to Basavich about this.
He's of Lithuanian stock.
And he was recently there and he says, you know, they're really afraid.
They're really afraid and they're really afraid.
And I'm saying, look, it's, you know, what are they afraid of?
Oh, well, you know, there are a lot of Russians there and you know what the Russians did in Crimea and Ukraine.
Look, Andy, the history in Central Europe begins not on the 23rd of February 2014, but on the 22nd.
The 22nd was the coup, what George Friedman called the most blatant coup in the history of mankind, advertised two weeks ahead on YouTube, for God's sake.
The coup in Kiev.
People say, oh, yeah, that's right.
Kiev is, Ukraine is Russia's backyard.
Well, it's not Russia's backyard.
It's Russia's front yard.
That's where the Nazis, that's where the Napoleon, for God's sake, that's where the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Hanseatic League, that's where they all went into Russia, okay?
So if anyone in Washington thought that they could do a coup in Kiev and have the first guy out to say, hey, I think maybe we ought to join NATO and not have Putin react in a very forceful way, then they're crazy, you know?
What would happen if they did that in Canada or Mexico or the Russians did?
And so when people start as actually our ambassador to NATO, he actually said that the modern history of Europe begins on the 23rd of February.
They must have got that from the Washington Post or the New York Times.
That's where they all start.
What they forget, and what most Americans don't even know, is that we, Western Intelligence Services, mounted a coup in Kiev despite Russian warnings for eight years before not to do that.
Net means net is what Lavrov told our ambassador.
Hey, you know what?
As long as we're at it, Ray, and we're recording slow on a Saturday morning here, let's go ahead back in time to 2004.
It's the same president they overthrew with the Orange Revolution there.
And then there's a whole intermediate period, too, with the gas princess changing sides back and forth and going to prison.
I mean, we don't have to tell that whole story, but it seems important that the guy that they prevented from his due election in 2004 is the same guy that they overthrew when he eventually did become the president in 2010.
Then they overthrew him in 2014.
And in the meantime, he had even passed a bill.
Well, there's the whole thing with the EU and the trade deal and all that that precipitated the coup.
But he had also signed a thing saying, we forswear any previous intention to join NATO.
That must have really been the final straw right there before the EU all-or-nothing trade deal.
Well, that's true.
And you have Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state, brag publicly in December of 2013 that we, the United States, had invested $5 billion, again, billion with a B, dollars to satisfy Ukraine's aspirations to join the West.
Where'd that money go?
It wasn't all spent in 2013.
No, there were 65 projects of the National Endowment for Democracy in Ukraine when the coup took place.
What were they doing there?
Well, as most people know, the National Endowment for Democracy used to be called the CIA Covert Action Staff, for God's sake.
They're the experts on regime change and overthrowing governments.
So it was no secret to the Russians what might have been prepared, but they warned us explicitly.
One of the best WikiLeaks revelations came in an embassy cable from Moscow dated the 1st of February 2008.
Now, it's worth going back there.
Now, if I've seen one embassy Moscow cable, I've seen about 3,000.
This is genuine.
It wasn't touched, as Assange never messes with the content of this stuff.
And what it said was this.
The foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, new in the job, called Bill Burns, our ambassador in, to talk about rumors that Ukraine and Georgia were slated to join NATO at the next summit in Bucharest in early April.
1st of February, what does he say?
He says, Mr. Burns, do you know what nyet means?
Burns, oh, yeah.
Well, nyet means nyet.
These rumors that you are going to have Ukraine and Georgia in NATO, that's not going to happen.
That's nyet, okay?
Because if it does happen, we will have a civil war, and then we will have to choose how deeply to be involved because we're going to not let Ukraine become part of NATO.
Tell your Secretary of State that.
Will you please?
Now, the cable, Bill Burns played it straight.
The title of the cable is nyet means nyet.
Russia's red line on Ukraine joining NATO.
How do you like that?
Burns doing his duty for once.
Hey, I think this is important enough.
I better tell the boss exactly what happened just now.
Well, yeah.
I mean, he's so dope.
So that's the 1st of February, 2008.
On the 3rd of April, in Bucharest, at a summit, NATO summit, the declaration said, and I quote, Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO, period, end quote.
Now, what we have here, Scott, is the old think that people like Wolfowitz and the others all saying, ah-ha, you know, we can do what we want, quote, the Russians can't stop us, period, end quote.
That's what Wolfowitz told General Wesley Clark right after the 1st Gulf War.
The main lesson was we could do these things, end quote, the Russians won't stop us, period, end quote.
Now that we have that from Wesley Clark.
So what I'm saying here is that 91, 2003, when we invaded Iraq, the Russians wouldn't stop us.
In Ukraine, on the 23rd of February, 2014, right after the coup, the Russians decided to stop us.
It was in their backyard, their front yard, really, and they did stop us.
Now take Syria.
The Russians can stop us.
They have stopped us.
And the question is whether Trump will be realistic enough to say, hey, this is their sphere of influence.
Everyone has their own national interests.
Why don't we back off and cooperate?
And that is my fervent hope that he will be smart enough to say, look, if we cool down things with Russia and we tell NATO, look, pony up with more money, or if you're not willing to do that, then take a look at how much of it that you really think the Russians are, okay?
I mean, are they really a big threat?
Are you just going to build the common European battle tank or sell more planes and stuff?
So the prospect for real movement in Central Europe and in NATO is real, and it will largely depend on whether Trump is the clever businessman and the negotiator that he espouses himself to be, because I think he'll find a willing partner.
Vladimir Putin, who has been demonized here in the West but does not really deserve that demonization in my view.
Yeah.
All right, Charles Scott Horton here, and I got a great deal for you.
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All right, now, major problem.
These people are all a bunch of kooks, and most of them seem pretty damn ignorant too.
I mean, this guy Stephen Miller that works for Sessions, he seems to be pretty sharp and kind of a right-wing anti-war guy in a way that, you know, I don't know exactly how much influence he has, but it's nice to know that he has a voice up there.
I saw him soundly defeat Mark Thiessen on TV, on YouTube, fighting over NATO in Eastern Europe, and you really want to have a war with Russia over Ukraine?
Yeah, I didn't think so, pal.
And that kind of thing really smacked him down, and attitude follows behavior, so the more he fights evil neocons on this issue, the better he gets kind of thing, so there's that.
But the rest of these guys, I mean, Mike Flynn, when there's an ISIS attack somewhere, Mike Flynn, there was one, I think it was San Diego, or maybe it was Orlando or one of these, where he demanded that Iran, I demand that Iran denounce ISIS.
I defy you, Ayatollah, to denounce the Islamic State, when this is McChrystal's right-hand man at JSOC.
How can this man not know that he was fighting for the Safavids against the al-Qaeda guys the whole damn time he was in Iraq?
And what the hell is he talking about?
Well, I know Flynn.
He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, okay?
He's also a panderer.
His attitude toward Iran is just despicable.
He testified in June of last year before House committees, and he said Iran is irrevocably bent, determined to get a nuclear weapon.
Now, so that's 2015, right?
Now, does Flynn, can Flynn possibly have forgotten that eight years earlier, the National Intelligence Estimate issued with full approval by all 16 intelligence agencies and the judgment cast with full confidence that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003?
I'll say that again, that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003, and every year since, even James Clapper, who doesn't always tell the truth, reaffirmed, reasserted that judgment that Iran was not working on a nuclear weapon.
So here comes Flynn.
He says, oh, hell-bent and determined to get a weapon.
Then later in his speech, he says, well, when they decide to get a weapon, you know, the guy is, well, you know, he's, as I say, he's not the sharpest blade in the drawer.
Well, but wait a minute.
When the National Intelligence Council meets, that includes the DIA.
They're one of the 17 intelligence agencies that we know about that meets there at the National Intelligence Council, and he was the leader of it starting in July of 2012.
Well, so I don't know if they actually agreed on his watch, but they certainly agreed only months before he took power.
At the end of 2011, beginning of 2012, they put out basically an update saying we stand by our previous conclusion here.
That's right.
So what I'm saying is he's a charlatan, and the noxious part of all this is that his extreme anti-Iranian behavior dovetails with many of the others that you see nominated now.
And Trump has been more careful than these crazies.
He's not said he'd immediately revoke the painstakingly worked out agreement with Iran on their nuclear capability, but again, it will depend on whether he's his own man or whether he bows to all these people who are largely, largely conditioned and influenced by the Israeli lobby to hit out against Iran, and that would be disastrous.
Hopefully, well, I know that Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rejoiced when the intelligence community came out telling the truth about Iran not working on a nuclear weapon.
General Dunford, whatever, he's not the smartest guy in the world either, but hopefully if he cares about his troops, if he cares about getting involved in yet another quagmire in a very, very large state, three times the size of Iraq, with an army and an air force, my God, it's crazy.
And so I'm hoping that the professional military, even just for their own narrow interests, will put the brakes on these neocons like Flynn, who really have it out for Iran.
Well, you know, I mean, forget, you know, any kind of non-interventionism.
Is it really too much to ask to just have sort of coherence here?
Either we're fighting on al-Qaeda's and Saudis' side in their eternal war against the Shia that, well, Bush gave the Shia Baghdad, so that's what they're going to fight to reverse for the rest of our lifetimes, or we're on the Shiite, Russian side, and we're going to go ahead and help them crush these al-Qaeda terrorists, because after all, those sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri are the ones what knocked our towers down, so at least that would sort of make sense on the face of it.
But it sounds like, no, what we're going to get is we're going to keep fighting on both sides of this war for the next eight years.
Well, you know, you have to ask Cuy Bono, why is it that people like General, Marine General John Allen, who marched into the Democratic National Convention in cadence with a bunch of veterans, some of them as old as I was, you know, with canes and stuff, why is it that he speaks sort of, in sort of a matter of passing, he says, you know, looks like we'll have a 30 years war.
Petraeus says, yeah, have they no sense, have they no feel for history?
There was a 30 years war, right?
Protestants and Catholics kill each other off, and finally they said it was failure.
Yeah, the victors lost, that's what happened.
Maybe there's a better way to handle these things, you know?
So who benefits from this?
Well, the people like Allen and Flynn get a new star.
The people who manufacture the weapons and sell them to others get more money, and the congressmen get part of the proceeds.
It's totally corrupt, Scott.
And the question is whether Trump will be inclined to address that or whether, like everybody else, he'll be too afraid to do that.
Well, and this is the old saying, and, you know, I'd really like to hear your insight on this because, unfortunately, my best insight on this is reading a bunch of horrifying Bob Woodward books.
I mean, a lot of other books, too, but Woodward's books are always the gossip between the principals, the deputies, the chiefs, and all these people and how they all, you know, talk about each other behind their backs and that kind of thing, which is kind of fun to see just what children they all are, first of all, and how much policy is made based on, well, I don't like the deputy national security advisor anymore, so now I'm going to be mean to him and nice to the other guy who favors the other policy that's going to get 10,000 people killed, right?
But it's all over an insult over what color shirt he's wearing or whatever.
Well, you know, Scott, but before I forget, you know, Bob Woodward is the personification of what has happened to our media in the last few decades.
Oh, no, let's not go down that whole tangent.
We all know what a horrible reporter he is and everything.
Yeah, but he measured up, you know, together with Bernstein on Watergate.
What I'm saying here is that, you know, aside from these little things that people share with him so that he can get back at other people, I have in mind specifically Kundalisa Rice telling Bob Woodward, hey, Bob, guess what?
There are no weapons of mass destruction.
But you know what that guy Tenet did and his deputy, that fawning guy, John McLaughlin, you know, they briefed the president.
I was there December 16th, 2002, and the briefing was pathetic.
McLaughlin gave it.
And so my boss, President Bush said, is that all you got?
My God, that's not going to persuade anybody.
And Tenet got off the couch and he yelled, it's a slam dunk, Mr. President.
It's a slam dunk.
That was Kundalisa Rice getting back at Tenet or blaming Tenet for all the things.
You know, it was she that advertised the mushroom cloud if we didn't expect you right there.
Yeah, she's the national security advisor.
She was the one to tell the president what's right and wrong at the end of the chamber.
I take your take.
I agree with your take on Bob Woodward, but I do see him as...
All I'm saying, yeah, yeah, and you know, I don't trust any of his facts and I don't trust any of his gossip necessarily, but it's the overall picture of what kind of people run the national security state and the balance of power between the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs and the secretaries and the deputies and this and that.
That part, it's sort of...
It's like reading a novel about it, basically.
Just kind of getting a picture of how those different forces interact and then leading to the point that we're stuck with a bunch of Republicans.
And, you know, I've actually been trying a little bit and I know some people have been trying real hard to push some really good guys from Cato who count as right-wing and anti-war that maybe they could be up there, somebody like Doug Bandow could be in there to give some good advice, but we're going to be...
I mean, if we're just flipping coins here, throwing darts, chances are we're stuck with a bunch of Mike Flins who are going to be giving Trump nothing but bad advice.
Personnel's policy or not?
I mean, you used to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush, so you spent time in the White House and know about all these things.
To what...
I mean, especially when you're dealing with a guy like Trump who really is out of his element here when it comes to even knowing the shape of the map, probably, much less, really, who's who and whose side they're on.
I don't know.
How powerful is the Deputy National Security Advisor position in a government like this?
Very.
Very, very, very, very.
See, that's why I want Bandow in there, but I don't know how the hell to make it happen because I don't know black magic or white magic or anything.
Yeah.
Well, you know, when all is said and done, the first reaction I had when I heard that Flynn was in like Flynn was it could have been a lot worse.
I mean, Flynn has been around for a while.
He does know the military side of things.
Even though he's kind of an ideologue and an anti-Iranian fanatic, it could have been worse.
It could have been, God, there are a whole bunch of people in line for that kind of position, and it could have been worse.
Let's see what Trump does with the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State.
I had chills going up my back this morning when I heard that Petraeus is back in the running.
My God, have Petraeus the Secretary of State?
You know, it's possible.
Trump probably doesn't know any better, so we have to keep our loins girded, so to speak, and our heads on.
I hadn't even heard that.
I don't know why I hadn't anticipated that already, but boy, yeah, he'd be easy to rehabilitate.
He was Jesus before he got in a little bit of trouble for leaking to his girlfriend, which is no big deal.
It doesn't matter that he lost two wars, right?
So he can be forgiven, no problem, and put right back in place.
And it doesn't matter that he brought out instructions from Rumsfeld that torture could continue in Iraq just so long as we didn't do it.
You recall that Order 242 that he went out to Iraq with, Rumsfeld gave him that order, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Peter Pace, Marine General, was completely unaware of it.
So much so that about 12 months later at a Washington press conference with Rumsfeld and Pace, a woman asked a question.
She said, look, we're hearing these reports about torture in Iraqi jails.
What are your orders to your troops in that case?
And Pace says, our orders are to stop torture on the spot.
Our troops must do everything possible to stop it on the spot.
Rumsfeld, well, General, I don't think that's really the case.
I think they need to report it.
They just need to report it.
They don't need to.
Pace, no, sir.
My orders are they need to stop all terrorist or torture on the spot, whether it's Iraqi or whatever.
When he even said, that's the law.
I had never seen a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I remember watching that live when it happened.
Yeah.
It was really something.
So what's the lesson there?
The lesson was that Rumsfeld gave these orders to Petraeus when he went out 12 months earlier, and nobody told Peter Pace.
And Pace presumably objected to that, and so he didn't get renewed.
He was cashiered after his first term.
So that's how bad Petraeus is.
I mean, he goes around everybody's back.
Well, and you know what, too, Ray, when you talk about this, torture is a euphemism for what the Bata Brigade was doing to the Sunnis in their custody, murdering them with power drills to the skull, through the eyeball and this kind of thing.
And, you know, they even made a Clint Eastwood movie about it where it's the bad guys who use the power drills, and the Americans are the heroes saving the people who are the victims of the power drills.
But that's not the history of Iraq War II.
Yeah, you got it.
Yeah, it's a sad situation.
Of course, now we have a torture aficionado coming in as head of the CIA, Pompeo from Kansas.
Yeah, tell us all about him.
I admit I'd never even heard of the man before they announced that he was going to be the Director of Central Intelligence.
Oh, which, that's a separate question.
There's even rumors they're going to abolish the National Intelligence Director position and put it back to the old way with the DCI.
But anyway.
Yeah, I saw that, but that's not possible.
That's legislation.
They have to change the law, and that would be a long slog.
But this guy Pompeo, you know, if there was any doubt that Trump was going to follow through with this, you know, quote, waterboarding and much worse, end quote, well, those doubts have been forgotten because Pompeo is the guy, he's the enforcer to come in there.
Now, I say in this article I just am publishing today, I say that, you know, Pompeo is the object example of how you can get all A's, right, and you can graduate first-year class from West Point and still flunk the Constitution.
He just, you know, he got out of the Army as soon as he could, right, four years.
Did they even teach the Constitution at all, Ray?
What's that?
Did they even teach the Constitution at all, or they just assume you heard it, you know, you memorize the preamble in fifth grade and that's good enough?
Well, I was at the Naval Academy teaching a class, actually, the only chance I ever got about ten years ago, and there were constitutional issues that I raised at the second-year people there at Annapolis.
Didn't know the answer to, so, you know, so your question is well stated.
The idea, though, that Pompeo would come in here and say, yeah, you know, I think that those CIA torturers got a bum rap.
They're heroes.
They shouldn't be prevented from doing what they need to do.
I mean, it's incredible.
You know, my vision was yesterday of champagne corks being popped throughout the seven floors of the CIA headquarters building in Langley.
Everybody said, wow, all right.
Now, we were lucky with Obama who didn't have the guts to look back as well as forward.
Now we have Pompeo.
Get those torturers in line again.
Let them go to the cafeteria like everybody else.
We're going to be back in business.
This is awful.
It couldn't be worse.
So the irony was that earlier this week, the International Criminal Court, one of the spokespersons there said, you know, we're thinking about going after the torture that was done by U.S. troops and CIA members in Afghanistan very early on and all these troubles.
So we're thinking about doing that.
Now, it was just sort of a hint, but you could see the beads of sweat beginning on the cheek or on the brow of George Tenet, who openly advocated this extraordinary rendition, which, of course, is kidnapping people for torture, and who was on the routing for the torture memos.
As I say in my piece, you don't get on the routing for sensitive issues like this unless you have a, quote, need to know, end quote.
So everyone from Tenet, who is now the CIA director, most people, not Tenet, but Brennan, all the way down to the folks that they've got under the protection system there, witness protection system, so that they don't spill the beans to whoever might be interested.
They're all breathing big sighs of relief.
I think the champagne is still flowing up there in Langley.
Yeah.
Well, it's really too bad.
I don't know if you saw this, but they have one in McClatchy today that has his position on NSA spying, on torture, on all kinds of things.
And it's just an absolute nightmare to think this is going to be the new head of the CIA.
And although there's one thing, well, two things to add to this, too.
One is that there's a YouTube of him in September of 2013 trying to push Obama, agreeing with the Israel lobby, and trying to push Obama to bomb Syria and complaining to, I guess, Tucker Carlson.
Yeah.
And then they say that we just want to do kind of a shot across the bow and a pinprick strike.
And what the hell kind of a war is that?
We got to really go in there and bomb him, right?
But then Glenn Miller at the Washington Post published a piece that said that on the House Intelligence Committee, it was very vague.
It didn't go into any detail, really, but said that he has been a real critic of the CIA program to back the moderates on the ground in Syria.
And I tried to ask Miller on Twitter, so which is it?
Or did he change his mind?
Or he always was for bombing them but not for backing the terrorists on the ground?
Or can you please, you know, elaborate?
And he never answered me.
But anyway, I wonder what you think about that, the possibility that maybe that's how he got the job was that Trump said to him, look, man, I'm not for backing a bunch of CADA in Syria, and that he had said, yeah, no, me either.
I think that would be Pollyannish, given his record.
I mean, I do have him on video for the war in 2013 that you and I were trying so hard to stop at the time, Ray, so there's that.
Yeah, I guess that in my view, it's a weak read to lean on.
Talk about the Fourth Amendment.
My God, he's approved and blessed everything that NSA has ever done.
Talk about torture, the same thing.
So this guy is a Tea Party functionary who looks at the world in a way very different from the way I do.
And the fact that Trump picked him is very, very disturbing to me and should be disturbing to everyone who's against torture.
I mean, I thought we had sort of exposed the fact that torture doesn't work.
But as you and I know, the vast majority of Americans do believe that torture works because Jack Bauer makes it work.
And because our media, Hollywood as well as the corporate media, gives that impression.
And so we're back to the times when maybe Trump was serious when he said, you know, we're going to do waterboarding, quote, and much worse.
And hopefully you and I will not be the objects of that, at least not right away, Scott.
Man, you know, I hereby offer a million dollar reward for one of these mainstream liberal Obama loving reporters to ask him to his face on camera with microphones.
Isn't it isn't the coming Trump torture regime all your fault for ordering your Justice Department to not prosecute George W. Bush and his torture cabinet?
Their deputies and their lawyers who we all know are guilty of torture and conspiracy to torture, which are all felonies.
You know, yeah, I second you on that, but I would go back a few more years as I see it.
When the Democrats finally won majorities in Congress, OK, and Nancy Pelosi was in a position of telling John Conyers, the head of the Judiciary Committee, OK, John, you did it for Nixon.
You got to do it now.
If if anyone should be impeached, it should be George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for starting what Nuremberg called a war of aggression.
So go to it, John.
This is the only way we can clean house here and regain our reputation.
Now, that's not what happened, is it?
Cindy Sheehan and I saw Conyers personally during this period, and we thought we might be able to persuade him to impeach Bush and Cheney.
And so we said that.
And he had these three or four lawyers and anything else for pacing up in this room there.
And and he looks at me, he says, well, look, look, Mr. CIA, there's nothing in the Constitution that says John Conyers has to impeach George Bush.
And so I said, well, Congressman Conyers, are you not head of the Judiciary Committee?
Yes.
Well, isn't that where impeachment starts?
Yes.
But Nancy Pelosi has decided that if we appear divisive, we won't win as big in the next election.
So impeachment is off the table.
I couldn't believe it.
That's what he said.
Cindy can corroborate that for me.
Here's a guy who had some guts under Nixon, who who approved the three articles of impeachment against Nixon, and one of which was the same as Bush had been guilty of already, the illegal eavesdropping.
And no, they're not going to do that.
Why?
Because Nancy says we won't win big enough in the next election.
The hell with the Constitution.
The hell with the fact that our founders were prescient enough to realize, as they put it, that every generation or so, you're going to get a president starts to act like a king and you got to impeach him.
So in my view, that's the golden opportunity that a constitutional government like ours missed because of crass, crass political preferences and cowardice.
And what year was that?
What year was that?
That was 2007, right after the surge and all that kind of stuff, when Rumsfeld himself was going wobbly on the war in Iraq.
So, yeah, it was right after the Democrats came in and then they had these charades, you know, that they would they would try to vote against funding the war, knowing they were going to lose.
And then they have these big assemblies outside on the grass there outside the Senate.
I remember being there when Nancy Pelosi and the speaker, the guy of the Senate there from Nevada.
Reid.
Yeah.
So they come and they make these nice speeches and I'm yelling.
It was really amazing.
I'm yelling impeach, impeach.
And it was very disruptive.
I have a few colleagues there from Code Pink.
We're yelling impeach.
And guess what?
Progressives came down from from some of the I won't mention the organizations.
Great.
Great.
Please, please.
We want to listen to Nancy Pelosi.
And they didn't just start chanting USA, USA in your face.
So, you know, there was even, quote, you know, with a move on guys.
It was the move on guys came down.
I knew some of them.
Great.
Great.
Come on.
These are Democrats.
It was so awful.
I had a flashback the other night.
I couldn't go back to sleep.
Well, I'm sure you must have thought of that, too, at the Democratic Convention when John Allen was given his crazed warmonger speech.
And the antiwar forces started chanting no more war.
And all the Hillary Clinton nights and the whole Democratic Party shouted them down with chants of USA like it was a Sarah Palin rally.
Or Nuremberg rally.
Yeah.
Well, it's going to get better, I hope, but maybe not right away.
Yeah, well, we'll see how it goes.
I'm glad I got you to come and help me call the score on the thing.
Well, it was good talking to you, Scott.
And look for my article.
It will be on Consortium Newsletter today and then on my website, RayMcGovern.com.
All right.
Thanks again, Ray.
I appreciate it.
You're most welcome.
Bye now.
All right, y'all.
Again, that's Ray McGovern.
VIPS, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
He's the co-founder, and they put out a lot of great memos to all different presidents now.
And his latest at Consortium News is Trump Picks Torture Fan to Head the CIA.
That's Bob Perry's site, ConsortiumNews.com.
And by the way, while you're there, there's a lot of really great writing going on at ConsortiumNews.com.
Got to say.
Okay, that's it for The Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, y'all, for listening.
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