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Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
But we ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, and say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing our good friend, Ray McGovern.
For 27 years, he was an analyst at the CIA, and in fact, was even in charge of the Soviet Analyst Division there for a while.
He was the morning briefer for Vice President H.W. Bush during the Reagan years.
He is the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, who they like to write memos to the likes of Bush, Obama, and now Trump about what they should not be doing.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you, man?
Thank you, Scott.
Doing well.
Good, very happy to have you here.
Before I turn the floor over to you to talk about the latest in the Russia-Gazi hoax, not to prejudice the issue or anything, I was wondering if you'd like to take a minute to talk about Robert Perry and his legacy there.
I would indeed, yeah.
Robert Perry is one of the blessings that I received in my life unexpectedly.
It was about 10, 12 years ago when he asked me to write for ConsortiumNews.com.
I had been writing for Truthout and for TomPain.com, and he said, look, we have a pretty high-class establishment here and would like you to write, and we pay people.
And I said, you pay people?
He says, yeah.
I think that when people write substantive articles and they're original, they should be paid.
Now, I hasten to add it wasn't very much, but the notion that somebody appreciated people putting in the effort that we do spoke volumes.
Let me just repeat one vignette that occurred to me when Bob died.
I was with Bob the night before he died at hospice.
He had had three strokes, and then they found out that he had pancreatic cancer as well, so he hadn't eaten for several days, but he was sort of semi-conscious.
And I was thinking, wow, what story did he told me that he was too modest to tell anyone else that I should kind of make part of his legacy?
And it was this one.
So he's made his name as uncovering the Iran-Contra affair.
AP lauded him.
He got the Pulp Prize, lots of other awards.
He fingered Oliver North as being a key figure there, Bill Casey and all this business, and he did other really good original investigative reporting.
So Newsweek says, hey, why don't you come work for us?
Okay, so this is the middle of the 80s, so that's a big, big jump, of course, and so Bob says, sure, I'll come.
Then he finds out that he's having a little trouble pursuing these delicate issues that the White House kind of was itsy-bitsy about, right?
So in the midst of all of this, the head of Newsweek says, Bob, Bob, we have corporate coming down from New York, and we got some really big people coming, just about 12 people, and would I get to come?
So Bob says, of course, so they go out to this real fancy house, right?
And there they are, like the 12 apostles, all sitting around, you know?
There was a young representative from Wyoming, I think his, yeah, yeah, that's what his last name was, Cheney, Dick Cheney, that's the guy, okay?
And then Brent Scowcroft, who had been a national security advisor and had just given up that job for Admiral Poindexter, his successor.
So as Bob related it, he's having this really good shrimp cocktail of the likes that he doesn't usually get in South Arlington, and Brent Scowcroft, general, former security advisor, national security advisor, says, well, now, next week on Tuesday, my successor, Admiral Poindexter, is going up to testify before Congress, and if I were advising him, I would tell him to tell Congress that we never told President Reagan anything about Iran-Contra.
Now, Bob is not used to this sort of thing, right?
So he drops his shrimp cocktail fork into the crystal holder, and it shatters, and then he looks at Scowcroft without thinking, and he says, General Scowcroft, do I understand correctly that you would advise your successor to perjure himself before Congress?
Now, as Bob described it, there was a pall of silence for, he says, felt like a minute, but it was probably about 20 seconds, and then, here's the payoff.
And then this week, puts his arm around Bob, and he says, now, Bob, sometimes, sometimes you have to do what's best for the country.
You'll learn, Bob.
Then there was this gentleman, well, it was male, they were all males, all male laughter, saying, yeah, we know what's best for the country, Bob, for God's sake, learn this lesson, okay?
Well, thanks be to God, Bob never learned that lesson, all right?
And very soon thereafter, where Newsweek wouldn't let him pursue these stories, he quit on principle.
How many people do that?
And he set up his own website, and that was 22 years ago.
It's called consortiumnews.com.
I think it's the best website around, not just because I write for it.
And his son, Nat Perry, is keeping it going, pending the appointment of a new editor-in-chief.
I urge people to keep tuning in, because there's some really good stuff coming up there on consortiumnews.com.
That's my favorite story, at least today, about Bob Perry.
There are lots of others.
Yeah.
Well, I just want to mention here, because a lot of people have brought up his groundbreaking work on Iran-Contra and all that back in the day.
And I guess, you know, I know you know that me and him had had a falling out back in, I don't know, 2012 or something like that.
There's about 25 or so interviews of Robert Perry in the archives, if people want to check.
But it was really after that, that he did what I think was really his most important work.
And that was on the coup and the aftermath of the coup in Ukraine, the proxy war and American support for jihadists in Syria, beginning, again, at least, in 2011.
And then, lately, all this Russia-Gazi hoax about the election of 2016.
I mean, there's just, if anybody asks me, what is the deal with Ukraine?
I just send them a link to the Google search result for the site only, ConsortiumNews.com, Perry, Russia.
And that's all you need to know to catch up right there, so.
And it really is, it's an incredible legacy.
And I've saw, you know, where people have written kind of obituaries and said, oh, he was so good on this, this, and that, without mentioning these three most important topics of our current time here in these crises, so.
And of course, he was good on Iraq and Afghanistan and everything else in the Bush years and Obama years, too.
So anyway, listen, we've only got, like, 50 minutes now, and we gotta talk about Russia, Russia, Russia.
What do you know about it?
What do I know about Russia, Russia, Russia?
Yeah, well, it's what the British call rubbish.
It's what the Russians call yerinda, what the Bavarians call kvatch.
It is a hoax.
I mean, you know, everything else about Trump I disagree with.
Matter of fact, I keep saying he's the worst president the United States has ever had.
I care about poor people.
I care about whether my nine grandchildren and counting are gonna have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink when they get to be my age.
I care about really important things, okay?
Now, this business about Russiagate, well, if you look at Mueller's last thing this farm out there in St. Petersburg that's on the net and that's sort of trying to interfere with our election, well, you know, the only thing that Mueller proves, in my view, is that age 70 should be the age of statutory senility.
I say that in jest, of course.
My dad was a lawyer, and he saw these people just hanging on and hanging on and hanging on, and he finally said, you know, there should be an age of statutory senility.
And in those days, it was 60 or 65.
Now it's 70.
Mueller is a couple of years past that.
So am I, but I don't pretend.
I don't pretend to be running a fair investigation and coming up with ludicrous, ludicrous evidence showing that the Russians, number one- Well, and let's just, for the record here, the burden of proof is on Mueller, not you.
Okay.
Sorry, go ahead.
Well, you know, this, I mean, the whole notion, if you have to take three steps back, okay, and you look at Vladimir Putin, and he's in the Kremlin, and he's watching this spectacle, which we call an election campaign in 2006, and he's got his advisors around, and he says, you know, this guy Trump, my God, oh, he's something, isn't he?
I mean, he not only is unpredictable, he's proud of it, he advertises that, and, you know, if somebody lashes out, or he lashes out at some real or perceived grievance, well, he just, you know, he reacts in an impulsive, I mean, oh, this is gonna be really fun if he wins.
It's just the guy I wanna have with his fingers on the nuclear codes there, and you know, give me a break.
You know, I know something about Russian leaders.
I've followed them for 55 years, okay?
I've reported on them, and if there's anything they detest, or they fear more than anything else, it's unpredictability, and an American president with his fingers on the nuclear codes, so that's number one, okay?
Number two, here's Putin looking on, and he's reading all the polls, and, you know, as close to the election as maybe 10 days, if memory serves, New York Times saying 83% chance that he's gonna win, you know, 83% chance, okay, so that was the conventional wisdom.
Hillary was a shoo-in, okay?
So what is the percentage of Putin organizing or commissioning an effort to hack into the Democratic National Committee, probably be caught at it, and inflaming even more hatred on the part of the shoo-in, Hillary Clinton?
Not much, despite, and aside from the fact that you can't hack into U.S. elections.
Look at the way the election machines are orchestrated around the various states, and most of them are not even connected to the internet, so there's number two, and number three, if you look at closely, as my friend Gil Ductorow has, Russian programs, Russian TV, and Russian people who are close to Putin, and Putin himself, it's very clear that, you know, they didn't give a rat's patootie who won in terms of who would be worse.
They were both, you know, the Germans talk about, it was, which means it was a choice between plague and cholera, and I'm sure that's the way I looked at it, and I'm sure that's the way, I'm not sure, but I'm 90% sure that's the way Putin looked at it.
So the whole rationale, you know, the major premise sort of evaporates, and then, of course, there's this business about Russians seeing profit in causing discontent and political controversy in the United States.
I mean, that's sort of assumed as another premise.
Now, you know, no one has explained to me how the Russians feel that they profit from discord or sowing more dissension in the United States.
Now, that may have been true when I was watching the Soviet Union.
Of course, there was a big ideological struggle, and if they could show that democracy was hollow, well, so much the better, but, you know, have they not woken up?
Do people really believe what the National Intelligence Director James Clapper said about Russians being, quote, almost genetically driven to be deceitful?
It's their animal spirits, because we can't come up with a compelling narrative, so we're just gonna make up some ridiculous thing.
But now, so Clapper, this is an important point.
Now, Clapper's the guy that said that he was the head of the satellite office that said, sure thing, slam dunk, Baas Saddam's full of weapons of mass destruction, and then he's the one who later claimed that, oh, well, you know why you can't find him is because he sent them all to Syria, and then he's the same guy who lied under oath on TV, in fact, in front of the U.S. Senate, and said that the NSA wasn't spying on the American people.
So we know he can take his word, we can take his word for it, and the entire liberal consensus is, Ray, that, and so, you know, maybe this isn't fair, but in the scheme of things, the burden is on you, because, what, do you disbelieve all the American intelligence agencies who say that the Russia, Russia, Russians have been attacking us cybernetically since 2013, or whatever the narrative is now?
Well, you know, Scott, the good news is we've seen this movie before.
It's exactly 15 years ago that four other former CIA analysts and I banded together and formed Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, because, precisely because, The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street, everybody, everybody was singing the tune about these aluminum tubes and about this yellow-cake uranium, and it was a sure thing not only that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, but that he had these subversive ties, Colin Powell called it a sinister nexus, with Al-Qaeda, in other words, not only did Saddam Hussein have nuclear weapons or chemical and biological weapons, but he was likely to give them to Osama Bin Laden, you know, so it was a crock to begin with, and we knew the guys who did this, and we were, you know, that's the hardest thing that I've experienced over the last 15 years.
I knew these guys.
It was not a mistake.
This was fraud, okay?
Fraud to precipitate a war of aggression condemned by Nuremberg as the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes only in as much as it contains the accumulated evil of the whole.
Think torture.
Think kidnapping.
Think black prisons.
Think infringements on our civil liberties.
Yeah, the accumulated evil of the whole.
That's what we got here.
So all I'm saying here is that this is a terrible flashback for me because yeah, yeah, the burden of proof is on us who do honest analysis and are not captivated by this, what I call the HWHW syndrome, which really hit bad.
Bad virus right on the 9th of November, 2016.
HWHW is for Hillary would have won, okay?
It could not possibly be that Hillary was a terrible candidate and nobody trusted, and she didn't go to the right states, right?
No, no, that couldn't be.
It must have been, ah, yeah.
It must have been something else.
Some extraneous factor that put Trump in office.
Now, what could be the worst accusation you could make about anybody than to put Trump in office?
I agree, that's a pretty horrendous accusation, but there's zero proof of it.
We have proved, that is, veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, thanks to the fact that we have two former technical directors from NSA in our midst, we have proved that the celebrated hack that people say happened on July 5th, 2016 was not a hack at all by Russia or by anybody else.
It was downloaded onto a thumb drive at a speed that was three times the capacity of the internet at the time, and it was exactly the same speed that a thumb drive could tolerate.
Now, people say, oh, that's too technical.
It's not too technical.
Let me just, if you'll indulge me.
Well, let me just say here, instead of the story, let me just say that I don't know how to measure the technical accuracy of thumb drives versus broadband speeds in whichever town and all that, and I'm not sure if my computer genius guys that I know really know the answer to that, but I'll tell you that part of the, and it may well be correct, but the part of what William Binney said that really impressed me, Ray, was when he said that, you know, look, regardless of the speed, if the Russians had done it, then the NSA would have a record of that because the NSA has a record of everything.
They're tapping the whole damn world, and if it was the GRU that had broken in to the Democrats' computers and stolen their files, the NSA would judge with high confidence.
That was the case, and in fact, out of the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, it was the NSA that judged with medium confidence.
In other words, eh, they're taking the other agency's word for it, if they're sure, or something like that, but they weren't taking the lead and saying, oh, yes, no, this is a documented fact, and we're the ones who documented it, which, according to Binney, quite believably, I think, they ought to be able to do if their claims are correct.
Well, that's right, Scott, and Bill, of course, is the real deal.
I mean, he speaks truth to power or anyone who'll listen.
Well, for people not familiar, he was, I don't know his exact title, but he really helped to create the architecture of the National Security Agency's eavesdropping infrastructure over this planet.
That's right.
Maybe a war criminal himself, in a way, but anyway.
Well, he feels badly because what they dropped were the protections for American citizens.
He had built into the, see, the problem was- Yeah, he was the hero of the thin thread versus stellar wind story, if people remember that.
Yeah, so he had built in these protections, and then all of a sudden, they dropped them out, and he quit.
Now, the thing about Bill is that since the 1st of August, a year and a half ago, okay, he's been saying what you just said.
If there was any hack, NSA would ipso facto know about it.
Now, I said to Bill, come on, Bill, for God's sake.
Yeah, nothing.
Look, great.
Trust me.
I know the system.
He told me the same thing.
They're still using it, okay?
Now, the problem with that, to the degree problem is the right word, is that's a negative, you know?
In other words, so like Rumsfeld sticks them.
You don't know what you don't know or whatever.
So what was really important is that in the summer of last year, we found out that forensic investigators had gotten access to what they call metadata, the kind of data that shows the speed with which things are downloaded from the internet or simply copied onto a thumb drive.
And what I was about to say, I think it'd probably be useful to use this analogy.
I've found people understanding things better.
We bought this house 51 years ago, and it's at the bottom of a hill.
And the first thing we were shown by our neighbors was our house flooded on both sides by what looked like small rivers, okay?
The problem was it was at the bottom of a creek, and the storm sewer was only 36-inch capacity.
Now, Arlington County says, hey, we can build a bigger storm, a better one.
And luckily, our neighbor was working for the Bureau of Public Roads, and he said, insist, Ray, insist that they put in a 48-inch capacity pipe.
Don't settle for anything less, okay?
So we did.
51 years, no more rivers around our house.
Now, why do I say that?
I say that because the internet is like a pipe, okay?
It has a certain capacity.
You can drive a certain amount of data through that internet, and we knew what that capacity was on July 5, 2016.
We know from the metadata of this download on July 5 that the rate at which this stream of bits or bytes went through the internet was three times, count them, three times the capacity of that pipe, okay?
And the rate with which they were copied onto a thumb drive was exactly the same rate that a thumb drive can not only tolerate but is ideal for a thumb drive.
So here we had the principles of physics.
Here we had something called fluid dynamics, okay?
This is science, okay?
So we not only had the absence of evidence on the part of Bill Binney, having said for a year and a half that NSA would know about it, now we had forensic evidence, and we published that, and what did we get?
Whoa!
The Nation magazine did a really good article on it, and Katrina Vanden Heuvel was besieged by all the Hillary people in her little editorial shop and her donors and everybody, they can't be true, it can't be true!
And so we had a little dispute on that.
People don't wanna believe that this Russian hack thing is a hoax.
You'll notice that a lot of the Democrats now are easing up on the hack business because it has been disproven.
Now they're talking about Facebook, now they're talking about Twitter and other outlandish things that were meant to be.
Oh yeah, now even they've dropped the narrative that this is all about helping Trump win.
Now it's just, they move the goalposts over the horizon to, well, they're just trying to sow chaos to undermine our democracy.
Our democracy?
What the hell are these people talking about?
This is the most corrupt power on Earth, the USA.
You know, destabilize and put chaos into our democracy is the most laughable thing in the world.
But we're not supposed to notice that they changed it from stealing Hillary Clinton's rightful throne away from her to some nonsense, you know?
Yeah, before blacks and whites were getting along fine and before the AR-15 owners and the people who want to ban them were all just going to church together on Sunday morning getting along great and there was no problems till the dang Russians told us to not like each other anymore.
Personally, I loved Hillary Clinton.
I was willing to overlook the Waco massacre and the war in Kosovo and her wars in Iraq and Libya and helping McChrystal roll Obama into Afghanistan.
But I thought, you know, she's just so great because, I don't know, something.
But then the Russians, yeah, they put a meme on Facebook and told me to remember that I don't like her again.
Oh yeah.
Well, you know, Scott, the supreme irony here is that this Mueller investigation was set up by James Comey, right?
Now, how did he do that?
Well, he talked about Trump asking him to go easy on General Flynn, investigating him.
He went out into his car by his account and he quickly typed the memcon, a memorandum of conversation with Trump and then he gave it to a friend of his to leak to the New York Times.
This is not McGovern making this up.
This is Comey, okay?
People ask, you know, Director Comey, well, why did you do that?
And Comey said, well, I wanted a special, special counsel appointed immediately to look into that.
And what happened the next day?
Thank you, Jesus.
Not only was a special counsel appointed, but it was my best friend forever, Bob Mueller.
I mean, you couldn't believe this stuff if he wrote a novel about that's what happened.
Now, what's the supreme irony?
Well, Bob Mueller is guilty of what the Greek tragic heroes always were guilty of, and that's the flaw of hubris, overweening arrogance and pride.
And so what does he do?
He recruits Hillary associates, some of whom worked for Hillary as lawyers, and this guy, Dumbstruck, no, not Dumbstruck, I forget his first name, but Struck is his name, and he was the head of counterintelligence and had this conversation, all these conversations with his lover, who was a high-level lawyer also in the FBI and Department of Justice.
So what we have here is Comey going into all this stuff with a heavy-laden prejudice, not only on his own part and not only on Comey's part, but on the part of all the people, not all probably, but most of the people working for him are known to have given to the Democratic National Committee.
And then you have Peter Dumbstruck, yeah, Peter, that's his name, Peter Struck and Page, Lisa Page, communicating their plan that, you know, hey, well, first off, Lisa says, now, Peter, are you sure?
Are you sure that this is a secure way of doing it?
When we talk about Hillary on this line, it's their, you know, their texting, right?
So Peter's like, yeah, no problem.
Now, here's a guy, he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, that's for sure.
He's head of counterintelligence, right, or deputy at that point, and he says, ah, no problem, no, they can't get this stuff.
And that's why we have this incredible array of conversations.
Here's one, okay?
Lisa says, wow, that was quite a session there with the deputy director at the time, McCabe.
Andy, yeah, that's quite a session with Andy.
And Peter Struck says, well, yeah, you know, I wanna believe what you said, Lisa, about that Trump could never win.
I wanna believe that.
But, you know, we need to have an insurance policy.
And it's not like, you know, you're 40 years old, you're not gonna die, but you need an insurance policy.
And so that's what we're gonna do.
And Lisa says, you're no better person to do it than you, Peter.
Okay, now, what is the insurance policy?
Well, it's called the dossier.
It's called the steel dossier, plus this ringing very, a lot of changes on the theme of Russian hacking, other Russian interference.
That's the insurance policy.
Now, why is it the supreme irony?
Because there's one honest guy in that Department of Justice.
He happens to be the inspector general.
And when, I think this is the way it happened, one of his minions let slip to somebody in Congress that there were these text messages showing incredible bias by this guy, Strzok, who not only did this stuff with the insurance policy, but also changed the wording to exonerate Hillary Clinton for the extra server she had that was non-secure.
So what happened was, at IG, whether he did it on his own, or whether he was forced to do it because Congress learned, he released these conversations.
Now, the conversations show that Comey's investigation was peopled by the very people who let Hillary off and were out to get Trump, make sure he never went in the first place, and once he won, to make sure that he was disabled, that he was pretty much made a eunuch in terms of the foreign policy that he wanted to pursue vis-a-vis Russia.
And there are great, great problems there because Russia has the ability to destroy us as we do them.
And it's really, that's where the danger comes in because these naive people that are trying to run policy in Washington, McMaster, if General McMaster is the best the US Army has to offer, I mean, as an army officer myself, I feel if that's the best, and if these three Marine generals, Ramrod Strait, the Secretary of Defense Mattis, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dunford, the head of the White House staff, Kelly, if they're running our policy, and I'm Vladimir Putin sitting in the Kremlin, I'm saying, my God, we have an erratic, we have an unpredictable president.
Last time he started a war, nobody really noticed.
He got great acclaim for it.
He shot 59 cruise missiles into Syria, okay?
And we were involved there and they gave us two hours warning, but he did it for no reason, and on a trumped up reason, pardon the pun.
And what happened shortly thereafter?
Well, instead of McMaster, instead of Mattis sort of calling him on it because there was no intelligence to support what he claimed, they fabricated, they fabricated a, not an intelligence estimate, but a rather White House assessment, which said, oh yeah, there was a sarin gas attack.
Now we know that that did not happen, but my point here is that these guys are gonna salute no matter what Trump tells them to do, even if he does it without their prior knowledge or their intelligence support, they're gonna salute, because that's what they're trained to do for their entire adult lives, okay?
Now, I'm Vladimir Putin and I'm looking at this and I'm saying, my God, you know, I'm gonna be discreetly quiet about this, but I'm gonna make sure that Trump knows that my guys are on a higher alert, given the fact that we can't really predict, we can't really depend on a sensible president.
Yes.
Well, look, I mean, as far as policy goes, not that anybody's really keeping track of this, but they brought Montenegro into NATO, he sent more troops and weapons to the Baltics and, you know, he continues to have, you know, the Navy's making provocative moves in the Baltic Sea and all this kind of stuff.
So it's, and in fact, they've sent weapons, which Obama refused to do, he sent some trucks and some equipment, but now Trump is sending Lockheed brand Javelin missiles over there to Ukraine to possibly, you know, worsen, I guess it's still going on, the conflict in the East there, but to escalate that.
So, you know, and I'm just looking right now on Twitter, it's Paul Begala, who used to work for Bill Clinton, of course.
And, you know, it's a Twitter conversation about how, yeah, we all wonder, what does Russia have on Trump?
As though, which of course, on one hand, they're saying wonder, because this is all still just made up nonsense.
But then the point is, they act as though everything he does, you know, he was a little bit hesitant to implement some sanctions for a minute or something.
And then, and just ignore everything else I just said, or all the other things that he's doing that I was talking about there.
And let's just pretend as though, because why not?
It's politics, right, for the Democrats.
And we'll just pretend that obviously, everything this guy does only reinforces the fact that he is Putin's puppet.
That he's a Manchurian candidate, that he's a usurper of Hillary Clinton's rightful position as our leader, et cetera, et cetera, like this.
Because I guess they figure they have nothing to lose in this.
It sure sounds great.
And plenty of confirmation bias for most of them too.
You know, going along with this.
But I don't know what my question is, other than, I don't know, I sort of feel like the Democrats are never gonna be able to climb down from this.
How are they?
You know, it took, the Republicans still never said they were sorry.
None of them.
None of them ever admitted that, yeah, I used to be wrong on this.
But it took them like 10 years or more for them to finally sort of somewhat grudgingly admit that yeah, Iraq War II was a bad idea.
Not that they were wrong to support it and denounce all their family members who knew better and all the horrible things they did in support of it.
Supporting torture and the rest.
Oh yeah, it turns out, gee, if we didn't have to have a war in Iraq, maybe we didn't have to torture Iraqis either, huh?
But they still never like really climbed down and admitted it and had any sort of, you know, come up and serve or accountability or anything.
That's the same thing with these Democrats on this Russia thing.
We're gonna be having this conversation in 20 years about the Democrats, or assuming we live that long, about the Democrats and their crazed obsession with Russia and their interference in American politics.
Even if it's this isolated incident, which it won't be, they're never gonna climb down from this thing.
It's a matter of religious faith.
Well, you know, that's really a crucial point, Scott.
The media is going to determine whether Representative Nunes, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, has a prayer of holding the deep state, and I'm talking about the dumpster, then Peter Strux and Lisa Pages and the Mullers and everybody else, Comey, to hold them to account.
Now, one last thing on this hack.
People probably remember, I hope, that when the Democratic National Committee announced it had been, quote, hacked, end quote, and John McCain started saying, oh, this is an act of war by Russia.
What did the head of the FBI, James Comey, do?
Nothing.
Now, what should he have done?
Hello, he should have seized those computers and made sure he did the original forensics on those computers to make sure it was the Russians.
What did he do?
Nothing.
Now, he was a little embarrassed when he was asked during testimony before the Senate, now, why did you not seize the computers or at least get access to them?
He said, well, you're right, you're right.
That would have been a best practice, of course, but we depended on this CrowdStrike firm that the DNC had hired.
They were top quality.
Well, BS, like top quality at all.
They're terrible and they were in the employ of, well, just by way of saying that Comey did not even look at these computers.
Now, let's go back to some of the things that you said before.
Montenegro, well, Montenegro is part of NATO.
Well, as Stephen Cohen, who's the best historian on all this, points out that when it became clear through the release of official documents that we promised, that is, that Bill Clinton, that George H.W. Bush and James Baker, the Secretary of State, promised, promised is the word, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze back in early 1990, that NATO would not move one inch eastward from Germany if the Russians allowed a reunited Germany and took all their 20 divisions plus out of East Germany.
Not one inch was the word.
Now, people disputed that, but now we'd have the evidence, okay?
Black and white, the correspondence.
Did the New York Times tell that story?
No, they didn't.
So that's just the background here about how Russia looks at NATO expansion eastward.
We know that Putin decided to react on Ukraine because their only warm water port, their only warm water naval base is Sevastopol there.
In Crimea, they weren't about to give that up to NATO, okay?
Now, how about Montenegro?
Well, Rand Paul, Senator Rand Paul had the temerity to ask from the Senate floor.
I don't see why, I don't see why including Montenegro and NATO is adding to US security.
What did John McCain call him?
A Putin puppet is what he called him.
So that's how bad it is.
Now, you know, when you talk about Syria and when you talk about Ukraine, these are really important possible flashpoints.
You can have Russian and US armed forces engaging each other in both places, okay?
Now, what's more important even to Putin?
It's the so-called anti-ballistic missile business where you have anti-ballistic missile systems going up around Russia's entire periphery.
You may have seen that that jocular map, which shows all these bases around Russia's periphery.
And then the title of the caption says, what blatant attitude Russia has in putting its country right in the middle of all our military bases, okay?
Well, this is no joke.
It must be under the control of the Ayatollah.
No, I'm sorry, go ahead.
This is no joke because, you know, the ABM Treaty, which I had the privilege of being in Moscow, watching Nixon and Kissinger sign that thing.
Yeah, they go with Kosygin and Brezhnev, okay?
That was 1972.
Now, nobody likes a balance of terror, but it's hell of a lot better than no balance at all.
As most people remember, George W. Bush got out of that treaty the first year he was in office.
There is no balance of terror now because if I'm in Moscow looking at this encirclement, and we're talking about Poland, Romania, Black Sea, Baltic Sea, we're talking about these missiles out there opposite the Far East, okay?
If my military, I'm Putin, okay?
And my military told me, Mr. President, we military intelligence types, we have to look at capabilities, not intentions.
You can leave to your other guys their intentions.
If the Pentagon gets to thinking or believes under these guys like McMaster that they can disarm us in a first strike from these missile bases in Eastern Europe, for example, we have to prepare for that, Mr. President.
And that means we can't have 30 minutes anymore.
We have to launch on warning.
You remember what that is, launch on warning?
That means as soon as something goes up, since it only has five, seven, eight minutes before it impacts on our strategic weaponry, we have to get rid of them by firing them back.
Now, that's serious.
And Putin has literally torn his hair out over this.
He had a session with Western journalists, not recently, about two years ago.
And he said, how can I get this through your heads?
Why can't you take this seriously?
This is a real danger, and it can't be justified by any other reason than, well, he didn't say this, but the military industrial complex makes one hell of a lot of money on this.
Inval Dye, the discussion club, two years ago now, our former ambassador to the Soviet Union and at the beginning of the Russian Federation, Jack Matlock, great guy, consummate diplomat, but a little bit old, okay?
A little bit past the age of statutory senility.
He's at Val Dye.
He's on the dais with Putin.
And Putin says, Mr. Ambassador, how do you feel about the U.S. getting out of the ABM Treaty, Jack Matlock?
Well, I think that was a mistake.
I was against that, but please, Mr. President, please realize that it's not designed, this ABM system is not designed against Russia.
It's basically a jobs program.
He said that.
There was a lot of laughter in the hall and Putin suppressed the laughing.
He says, Mr. Ambassador, I'm very impressed by your diplomatic language, but tell me, does the United States of America have no better use for the billions and billions and billions of dollars invested in this very destabilizing program than a jobs program?
Now, Jack immediately regretted what he had said.
And it's not even a jobs program because very few workers get paid in these systems.
These are high-tech, high-tech people, the CEOs of which are making literally hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
Raytheon, Lockheed, they're all in it.
And so this destabilizing stuff and this military-industrial-congressional-intelligence media complex is running things in this town.
And people need to realize that before they make any judgments with respect to Russiagate or anything else, you need tension with Russia to, well, to have these kinds of justifications, if that's the right word, for these expenditures.
A little vignette, there was trouble.
There was trouble in this defense industry in Germany and France.
Maffei was the German corporation, I forget what the name of the French one was, but they were commissioned to build a common European battle tank, okay?
Whoa, wow, okay, what happened?
Well, it ran into real problems because people started asking, well, what do you need that for?
Are the Russians going to invade?
Come on, what do you?
And so guess what happened?
Right after, right after we, that is the West, mounted a coup in Ukraine, right after we blamed the Russians for the way they reacted to it, oh, Maffei and his French counterpart, you want to invest in them today, they are going ahead with this common European battle tank, even though it's a sitting duck for much of the Russian weaponry that now exists.
So you get the picture here.
There are people like McCain and other people in Congress who are profiting by getting part of the proceeds from these weapons manufacturers and sales.
And the only thing I'll add to this is that, Pope Francis, who everybody loves and who says nice things, appeared before Congress two and a half years ago and he said, you know, the main problem are the blood-drenched arms traders.
Now, if you look at Congress, they all stand up and they're clapping in a way, you know, in my mind's eye, I saw them looking into their vest pocket to see if the most recent envelope from Lockheed was here and the one from Reagan over here.
It was, you know, giving hypocrisy a bad name.
So that's the main problem.
And, you know, the fact that it's enriching folks, but it's also enhancing a capability that the Pentagon might think would be a reliable way to enable a first strike with nuclear weaponry and prevent retaliation to the degree that mischievous notion takes shape.
Well, the Russians are gonna have to be on trigger alert and that's bad for the whole world.
Hey, I'll check it out.
On Saturday the 3rd, I'm giving a speech to the Pennsylvania Libertarian Party State Convention and C-SPAN is going to cover it for Book TV.
So it's gonna be all about the book.
So that's happening on Saturday and then Sunday, I'm back in Washington, D.C. and I'm giving two talks.
One is at Middle East Books and More.
That's the bookstore of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Wormia.
They're good guys.
And so that's gonna be about some things.
And then I'm gonna give another talk at the Tenleytown Library.
So let's see, that's 11 in the morning at Middle East Books and More and then it's three in the afternoon Eastern time there at the Tenleytown Library.
That's this coming Sunday, March the 4th.
Okay, see you guys there, thanks.
So wait, let me ask you this though, because if I'm a Democrat listening to this, I'm saying, yeah, but what about Paul Manafort?
I mean, this guy is a criminal, right?
He's an international gangster of some kind.
He has a PR firm that represents the worst kind of governments in the world and he must be the secret controller go-between between Putin and Trump.
No, is he have, what is his role?
He's got a superseding indictment.
That's pretty thick there, buddy.
Says something.
You know, he's a crook.
I mean, let's face it, there are a lot of crooks.
Offshore stuff, avoiding taxes.
I mean, hello, it's a way of life among these guys.
Trump is a crook.
You gotta look at these guys who have profiteered on various machinations and various tax loopholes and so forth.
So, sure he's a crook.
What the heck does that have to do with the Russians trying to help Trump win the election?
Zero.
Well, in fact, the anecdote, and I don't know all the proof of this, but it's pretty well reported, I think, that when it came to the big controversy in Ukraine about whether they were gonna sign the deal with the EU and or the Russians and decided to sign the deal with the Russians in the fall of 2013, precipitating the coup there, that Manafort was urging the Poroshenko government to sign the deal with the West.
So, if he's Putin's puppet, he wasn't doing a very good job of it.
Yeah, it was Yanukovych at the time.
Oh, I'm sorry.
They're all kind of- I screwed up and switched their names around.
Yanukovych, and what's his name?
I just said as the guy that replaced him.
Yeah, Poroshenko.
Yeah, no problem.
I mean, there are all kinds of inconsistencies here, and when you say widely reported, yeah, it's widely reported, just like the weapons of mass destruction.
And, you know, the same journalists.
I mean, this guy, David Sanger.
You know, I looked up his record before the war on Iraq.
Oh, yeah, he's the worst guy, for sure, at the New York Times.
He's worse than Michael Gordon, I think.
Yeah, well, it's kind of hard to compare the two, but, you know, the Sanger fella, one article I picked out July of 2002, just when they're really getting the drums for war going, yeah, one article where he co-authored, and there were seven mentions of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as flat fact, you know?
So these people are still writing about this stuff.
I mean, I cite that one, because it's at least against their narrative, you know, of Manafort's role here, that when he was advising the Ukrainian government, he was advising them to do what Obama wanted them to do, not to do what Putin wanted as, you know, supposedly the opposite, so.
Yeah, well, that's why I take it.
I take it a little bit more seriously.
It's like when Risen writes an article in the New York Times about, well, I don't know, man, I found some CIA guys who aren't so sure about this Iraqi WMD stuff.
I take that more seriously, even though it's in the Times, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Depends on who's byline and whether it's against the interests of the, received narrative.
And you make a good point, but as I say, inconsistencies abound here, and the prevalent drumming in of American people is really unprecedented, except for what we all went through exactly 15 years ago.
Let me add a little- You know what confuses people, though, too, though, is that Trump isn't Bush leading this parade.
This whole thing is targeted against him while he's the president.
So that's what confuses the issue from Iraq War II and the obviousness of, you know, Scooter Libby going to CIA headquarters and saying, give me something, you know, and all this stuff.
So that's, people have it like, oh, good, the government is protecting us from the elected president.
Because after all, he's the scum of the earth.
As you said, you could take one look right at him.
First of all, your honor, just look at him.
He's a bad person, you know?
And that's why he's no good at defending himself from this either, because if he was decent at all, he wouldn't really have a problem.
He would just turn it right around and sign a nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia and say, how do you like that, Democrats?
But he doesn't have the wherewithal.
Yeah, well, he's afraid.
I mean, look, maybe we ought to end on this note here, but there is such a thing as the deep state.
And as I talked about the supreme irony before, it is the fact that this investigation by Mueller and the people he picked to do it, and the one honest person that I know of in the Department of Justice, the Inspector General, has uncovered a plot by the deep state.
Now, you can call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but sometimes there are real conspiracies, and they are revealed in the exchange of these email, and not emails, but texts and other, yeah, emails as well, okay?
Well, wait, so hold the details for a second there.
So you're the former chief of the CIA, Soviet analysts back then in the Cold War days.
So obviously, you know a thing or two about the intelligence community.
We can all give you that.
But what exactly is the deep state?
How do you mean that?
Is this just, you just mean the fourth branch of government, the presidency, the executive, the permanent employees?
Is that it?
Pretty much in the security services.
Now, take the FBI, take the CIA, take NSA, and lamentably, DOJ, the Department of Justice, put them all together.
And you can see through documentary evidence that they were out to prevent Trump from ever becoming president.
And once he did become president, to disable him, to sort of make him a eunuch, unable to achieve his aims, especially those vis-a-vis Russia, where he very sensibly advocated for a more sensible policy.
Now, what happened?
Well, these folks have now been uncovered.
How?
Because a very courageous, in my view, representative from California named Devin Nunes, head of the House Intelligence Committee, has got them.
Has he got them?
He got the documents.
Did he get them right away?
No, they took three months to give him to Nunes, but now he's got them.
What of them?
Okay, what of the documents?
The documents show that FISA, that is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act courts, were deliberately misled to approve surveillance, intrusive surveillance, on this fellow Page, okay?
Now, why Page?
Well, Page is connected.
He was with the Trump campaign, and they have a lot of dirt on Page from this dossier compiled by a Democrat firm to compile dirt on Trump.
So what you have here is a flagrant abuse of the FISA statute, which specifically prohibits misleading justification for these warrants that allow intrusive surveillance, not only of the target.
And this is an important thing.
When you surveil Carter Page, you surveil anybody he's talking to.
Now, does that mean that Trump is correct in saying that he was wiretapped?
No, wiretapped is an old, archaic kind of term.
Does it mean that he was surveilled?
Well, I would submit that at least in the second instance, if Carter Page is talking to Trump, they've got the conversation, okay?
So this is really, really heinous, and it's provable, okay?
That's the real point here.
We intelligence analysts like detectives or like responsible investigative reporters, we look for evidence, we look for documents, and there is a document.
It's called the Application for a FISA Warrant to do this kind of surveillance.
That exists.
It's out there.
Why is it?
Why is it that you have the Democrats say this, the publicans say this, he said, she said, why is it that the FISA application has not been publicized?
It's not sensitive, for God's sake.
Everybody knows what is alleged to be in it.
Why don't they publicize it?
Who has the authority to do that?
President Trump.
And see, this is the thing, right?
And I know it's just a devil's advocate kind of thing, but it's important, right, that people who lean left here, and I hear this on Twitter all the time, you sound just like them.
Ray McGovern now has turned into a right-winger because he's saying a thing that's just like what some of the right-wingers said or something like that and get this confused.
But I think, you know, the partisanship and also the character of this particular president too, they really obscure the fact that just from 100 miles up, this is a pretty severe intervention in the electoral process by the intelligence and police entities there in D.C.
And so there's a lot of question begging going on by the liberals where they figure that their reasonable suspicion is the proof of the guilt at the end or whatever.
So it's all justified somehow by their assumptions.
And yet, without those assumptions of their conspiracy theory being true here, wow, they were doing this to a presidential candidate.
These aren't liberals, these are Hillary would have won people.
Well, yeah, the Democrats.
When I say liberals, I mean Democrats.
If you're to the left of them, then you're a progressive or a socialist, I guess, but that's the way I think of it.
No, there's still a- Liberal and Democrat then meaning completely principle less partisan shills.
On this issue, that's correct.
But the point I was trying to make is that this application for the FISA warrant, it was either incomplete and misleading or it was not.
Republicans say it was incomplete and misleading.
Democrats say it was not.
Why does Trump not release that application?
Why?
Simple, he's afraid.
He's afraid of the deep state.
Now, the word is blackmail.
And this fellow, Christopher Wray, sweet as he looks, is not above doing what Comey tried to do.
Comey, you'll remember, on the 6th of January this year, stayed behind.
He told Brennan and Clapper to go.
He said, I had something sensitive to show the president.
And what did he show him?
He showed him at least part of the dossier, which said that he was on a bed with prostitutes there in the Kremlin and so forth.
So here's Trump.
I'm the President Trump.
And I see Comey, the head of the FBI, showing me this stuff.
And I say, why are you showing me that stuff?
Oh, Mr. President-elect, it was still a couple weeks.
Mr. President, we just wanna let you know, we just wanna let you know we have this.
And it may come in the press.
They do this to every incoming president, folks.
Yeah, welcome to DC.
That's like Bill Hicks' joke, that they take you in the back room as soon as you're sworn in, they show you footage of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before.
Any questions?
I wish it were a joke.
There's lots that Trump cannot be proud of.
There's lots they have on him.
Well, and that's the thing here, right, is the opportunity cost, from the point of view of the American people, not the deep state, but if there wasn't this whole ridiculous Russia conspiracy thing to bring him down for this nonsense that's contrary to the interests of the empire, as we were talking about with our relationship with Russia, it could very well be all this energy being used by newly, again, anti-war left and liberal movement, like back in the Bush years, to oppose him for the things that he's actually doing with his power, like escalate the wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and now here, and this is a subject for your last question here, I guess, too, and you can talk about that if you want, the lost wind here, misdirected energy, but also, when it comes to Syria, it seems like there's a real problem, where Trump said just a few days ago that, no, listen, our only interest in Syria is fighting ISIS, full stop, period, something like that, but this is absolutely contrary to what Rex Tillerson has said, about how we have to be there to check the power of Iran and Hezbollah and Russia and make sure, to this day, still, to figure out some transition to get Assad out of power and create a new government there, and you're saying that there's a lot of saluting going on, but I wonder if the president is even being told what's going on in the world whatsoever, you know?
Well, yeah, presidents also salute, as Obama saluted to the head of the Defense Department.
They had a ceasefire agreement in Syria.
Secretary Carter said, BS, we're gonna send the Air Force to put the kibosh on that, and he did.
John Kerry said, well, you know, we couldn't get agreement from everybody in Washington, so, again, here I am, Putin, I'm looking at all this, and I'm saying, who's running this country?
Wait, wait, slow down, I'm sorry.
That's such an important anecdote.
When Kerry said that, he was saying, the Secretary of State was saying that, yeah, well, me and the president wanted to do the deal, but we couldn't get agreement from the others, and then what he's referring to is the Secretary of War going ahead unilaterally and bombing a Syrian army position in order to scotch the deal that the president and the Secretary of State were working out, as though the DOD is itself its own separate co-equal branch of government.
That's true, and that's what Kerry- Okay, just wanted to clarify there for people who had missed that one.
Sorry, go ahead.
And this is not reported.
This is what Kerry told the Boston Globe when they asked him about all this stuff.
So, yeah, it's very real.
The president does salute, and Putin is painfully aware of that because he said just two weeks later at Valdai at the discussion club, you know, we work these things out at the highest level.
I talk to the president, we work out a ceasefire, and then not everyone agrees in Washington.
I just don't know who I should deal with in Washington, says President Vladimir Putin in Russia.
So, this is really very, what the Germans would call labil, very, very tentative, very, very itsy-kitsy because when you don't know who's in charge and when you see three Marine generals running the show with one Lieutenant General from the army who, as I say, is not the sharpest blade in the drawer, you gotta be on high alert.
And the Russians, you know, the thing that- Well, you got an oil guy who's completely in bed with Saudi and the GCC.
And so, look at how far to the right are one civilian up there, the Secretary of State is on these issues.
What people don't- On Iran and on Syria.
What people don't realize is that Putin is different from the ones that went before.
There's no bluster, okay?
There's no warnings, there's no overt, I say, warnings, public warnings.
I'm sure he's telling people in Washington what he believes, but without that bluster, people have no, they have no idea of how close we are or how labil, how delicate the situation is.
And I've been watching this situation 55 years.
It's more perilous, it's more perilous, it's more dangerous now than at any time in those past 55 years, at least since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
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Man, and so, okay, now, and by that, is it because, I mean, obviously, the problems are the problems we've been going over at NATO Expansion and all of these things.
Obviously, that has a lot to do with it, the geographical position of NATO forces in comparison to Moscow now and all that.
But I guess it seems to me like maybe the most dangerous part of all of this is just what complete BS it is.
And that, and you have, there's so many people in a emperor-wears-no-clothes kind of way who are just so invested in pretending that they believe this and never raising questions about it and going along with the consensus that, you know, the party propaganda, it just goes without saying.
I mean, everybody knows Russia, Russia, Russia.
We have to move more tanks into the Baltics to check Russian aggression in Eastern Europe.
And it just, even though you and I look at that like it's just a cynical excuse and a lie because how ridiculous is that?
You know, I take it that a lot of these people sort of mean what they say about it, just like they talk themselves into believing that we have to go save the world from Saddam Hussein or whatever crap, is that once that's the rationale, they go for it.
And I know that during the Cold War, there were a lot of, you know, false assumptions and conclusions and bases for arguments, the domino theory and all these different things.
When it turned out it was America's war in Vietnam that enthroned Pol Pot in Cambodia, not the Soviets or the Chinese.
But anyway, so, but is that your problem?
Is that everything, it's just chaotic because it's all nonsense and there's no one really in charge and this kind of thing?
Because it seems like when the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe, right?
And when Ronald Reagan, hell, even Jimmy Carter, but then especially Reagan abandoned detente and went back to brinksmanship in the early 80s there, you would say this is a more perilous time than that?
Yes.
And it's because of the nonsense or that's just?
No, because of the instability, the unpredictability of the rashness of the commander in chief.
There's no telling what he will do.
Now, this is what people said about Reagan, but you're saying this is the propaganda about Reagan then is true about Trump now?
Well, Reagan had certain stability in terms of the advisors that he had.
They were, Scowcroft and that group, even Powell in those days were moderate compared to what we have now.
What this president, what Trump has around him are, as I say, three Marine generals, Rembrandt, Strait, who salute, and he's got, that is, Trump has real serious political problems now.
Wagging the dog, would Trump allow Israel to get us into a war with Iran?
Well, you know, things got really, really hard for him politically here.
That's an increasing chance, and it doesn't matter what McGovern thinks about that.
If Putin thinks about that, well, he's on high alert.
And listen, I mean, people would rally around that.
I mean, listeners may not understand that straight, but when you said earlier about how kind of nobody noticed when he launched a little war there against Syria, somebody noticed, and the media really praised him for that.
Trump noticed that.
The only time they've ever liked him, even for a day, is when he's bombing Syria.
Yeah, he was acting presidential, remember?
And taking on, you know, Israel's enemies, the Shiite crescent.
The U.S. public has been prepared for war now against Russia.
I would, my informal survey would indicate that 80% of the American people have been snookered into this story about Russiagate.
Now, there's a very small step between that and preparing them for some sort of reaction, so to speak, to a perceived Russian step in Syria or Ukraine, or even with respect to the Iranian thing.
False flag attacks, they can start wars.
So, you know, what needs to happen- So do you think if we got into it with, say, Iranian special forces groups inside Syria, or if the Israelis started something in the Persian Gulf with Iran, that that would necessarily, or there's a very good likelihood that that would escalate into a conflict with Russia itself, too?
Because they might sit back and let us fight Iran.
They're not really allies with Iran.
I mean, they're kind of stuck with them, but.
Well, you know, look at it this way.
Here we are back in 1775 in this country, okay?
And we're trying to rid ourselves of the British.
And we have a pocket of people called moderate insurgents in Boston, okay?
They're loyal to the British crown, and they're being armed by the British, and they're fighting a hell of a battle against what will become our central government.
Now, does that justify George Washington and his folks moving very strongly against those people in Boston?
I think it does.
Bashar al-Assad has not given the United States, Israel or Saudi Arabia permission, or even Turkey permission to be in their country.
They are in the country.
And the Russians haven't given permission.
So if you look at, in terms of international law, or even in terms of a country trying to persuade, to defend itself from outside invaders, well, that's the way it should be looked at, because that's what international law would stipulate.
And so when the Russians are accused of bombing the hell out of East Ghouta, or the Syrian army is, well, what's East Ghouta?
Well, that's where these so-called moderate terrorists, which are really not moderate at all, are holding sway.
And there is no, no responsible Western reporting coming out of Syria.
And that's the big thing.
We're relying completely, completely on people like the White Helmets, who are financed by NATO and other Western intelligence organizations.
We are completely at the behest of people who are reporting in a very tangential way from Syria.
So what does that mean?
Well, that means that the American people don't have a prayer.
Even the so-called alternative media, okay?
Take Democracy Now, for example.
My God, all they do is read from CNN.
The White Helmets, who have been thoroughly discredited, are now cited as good sources.
They have the line that repeats what the New York Times and the CNN says.
So if you don't tune into little programs like your own, Scott, or ConsortiumNews.com, and there are a minority of people that do that, well, then you're prepared in a kind of very mischievous way to believe the worst of what the Russians are doing or what the Iranians are doing.
And what I'm afraid of right now is that when, I wanted to say Errol Sharon, but it's not Sharon anymore.
It's Netanyahu, his doppelganger.
When he comes to Washington next week, he's gonna try to prevail on our president to maybe give a wink to an Israeli provocation against Iran, whether it's in Syria or whether it's in Iran itself.
And that's why we veteran intelligence professionals for sanity spent last weekend doing a memo for President Trump saying, look, President Trump, you're being fed bad scoop, okay?
Number one, Iran is not the primary promoter of terrorism around the world anymore.
Actually, we don't say this, but actually it's you, Mr. Trump, you and your CIA guys, okay?
Number two, the nuclear agreement has really put the kibosh, has really thwarted the nuclear program in Iran.
That's the most interesting part of stability here.
And number three, if there's a false flag attack or if Israel starts to move against Iran and gets you involved militarily, it's gonna make the war in Iraq look like a volleyball game between St. Mary's Academy and Mount St. Ursula, girls' high schools, okay?
Iran has 80 million people, they're not gonna sit back and let what happened to them, what happened to Iraq happen to Iran.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you, man, back in 2007, when it looked like they were gonna go ahead and strike, they sort of dropped the nuclear issue for a minute and started blaming Iran for everything going wrong in Iraq, wrong in Iraq, and it looked like they were going to strike.
There was this former State Department official named Wayne White who came on the show and wrote a couple of articles.
He said, you know, there was once a guy who thought that a war with Iran would be easy.
His name was Saddam Hussein.
And yeah, he killed 500,000 of them, but he lost 500,000 of his own guys trying.
And then it ended up 10 years later in a stalemate, got nowhere.
Hey, by the way, you must know everything about that if you were George H.W. Bush's briefer during that whole time.
So go ahead and tell me about that time that you sold chemical weapons to Saddam.
Ray, CIA officer of the 1980s.
Well, you know, all kidding aside, I can tell you some stories about briefing not only George H.W. Bush, but Secretary Weinberger and Secretary Shultz.
You know what?
I got time.
But I don't do that.
Oh.
You know, there are certain things that are sacrosanct.
All right, well, talk to me about the Iran-Iraq war then.
Tell me something about that I need to know.
Well, we knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iran.
We knew that the Iranians were not returning tit for tat, that the Ayatollah said that was against the Quran, that they would not retaliate with chemical weapons.
And we know that with these mass attacks that the Iranians would perpetrate on Iraq, most of them got killed, if not by bullets, by gas, okay?
We know all that.
We know that when, quote, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on his own people, end quote, that was because these own people were dissidents cooperating with Iran, and it was part of the war.
In other words, in that sense, it was a bum rap.
It's not as though he woke up one morning, said, oh, I'm gonna use chemical weapons.
No, no, these people were cooperating completely, actually, very closely with the Iranians, and so it was just part and parcel of Saddam Hussein's use of gas against the Iranians, as well as, in this particular case, people who lived in Iraq.
So the chemical thing is very explosive because it has a resonance in open discourse, and that's why it's being used now, most recently by the British, by people who wanna blacken the Bashar al-Assad regime, and I'll give you a little preview here.
There's one scientist whose name is Ted Postal.
He worked in the Defense Department.
He is probably the preeminent specialist on chemical warfare.
He's a professor in MIT, used to be in MIT.
He's a Mary Jo Snow.
Anyhow, he's looked at the April 4 incident in Idlib province there in Syria, and he's found out by the principles of physics, okay, that it could not have happened as General McMaster ex post facto assessed it as having happened.
It was quite something different, and he's got a memo out there for peer review now among other reputable scientists.
We'll know the whole story about that particular incident that made our current president look, quote, presidential, end quote, and will tempt him to do other sorts of things unless Ted's scientists can get some media coverage.
So, you know, it's really kind of, it's a situation where Trump feels hemmed in, and if he's gonna feel like Obama did, that if he moves out, they'll either castrate him or kill him, then there's not much hope for our democracy.
If, on the other hand, he looks at this fellow, Devin Nunes, and he says, you know, I'm with you.
What I'm gonna do now is declassify the FISA application, and we'll see who's right, the Republicans or the Democrats.
Let it be released.
Okay, now what's gonna happen?
Well, the FBI's not gonna be very happy.
DOJ's not gonna be very happy.
CIA and NSA, so what will they do?
Well, I won't predict what they'll do, but fear of what they could do is what is preventing Trump from doing this obvious thing.
Big dispute?
Let the paper speak for itself, for God's sake.
Yeah, well, that's what I'm saying.
As soon as this goes away, then we can focus on impeaching or removing Trump for war crimes in Yemen and Afghanistan.
Yeah, I mean, the sooner the better.
If they don't have enough to impeach Trump for what he's already done, without trying to impeach him for a lie, then, you know, there's no hope for our founders, who are very provident in thinking that once every generation, is what they thought, there would be a president who would start acting like a king, okay?
And that's why they put into this very basic document, which we call the U.S. Constitution, an orderly legal provision to remove that kind of person.
You know what, though?
It's just like you said in that Robert Perry anecdote at the beginning there, about, well, you know, but the good of the country.
That's why Nixon didn't dispute it when Kennedy stole the election in 1960, and that's why LBJ didn't dispute it when Nixon committed high treason against him in 1968 to undermine the peace talks in Vietnam, as Robert Perry has shown that that's the real key to Watergate there.
And, hell, that's why Al Gore went home after they stole Florida from him, which he was trying to steal it too, so don't get me wrong, like I'm really arguing his side there, but that's the whole thing.
Hey, good of the country.
You gotta just go ahead and let that go on.
That's why Nixon, oh, this is what I meant to say, that's why Nixon, and I noticed this when I was really young, got impeached for some hush money to some burglars at some low-level thing when, meanwhile, he had started secret wars in Laos and Cambodia and butchered a million people on no legal authority whatsoever, and that wasn't one of the charges.
Nobody cared about that because that was his job.
Paying hush money to burglars, that's sort of like off-the-clock breaking character, but as far as actually issuing military orders, it'd be like a prosecutor going to jail for falsely prosecuting someone.
It's just unheard of.
We don't do that.
Judges and prosecutors can do what they want, so can presidents, as long as they're on the clock and it's within the purview of their office.
Yeah, and there were a lot of people making a lot of money, a lot of profiteering from those wars, lots of material, lots of transportation, lots of everything, so you have behind all this what is properly called a military-industrial-congressional-media-intelligence complex, much more dangerous than Ike ever imagined when he coined that phrase, what, 55 years or so ago, and unless people stand up, and what's really amazed me is Devin Nunes, Republican from Central California, the valley there.
I've been there.
I know Nunes, and let me tell you how I know him.
He is the only congressman, the only congressman, to recognize a member of the USS Liberty crew for valor.
Now, USS Liberty, I hope your listeners know that this was a US intelligence ship that the Israeli Navy and Air Force deliberately tried to sink during the war in 1967.
We know we have the intercepts.
We know it was deliberate.
Now, why is it they couldn't sink it?
The answer is a fellow named Terry Halbarzye from Central Texas.
What did he do?
Well, after the Israelis had napalmed the whole thing, had shot out all the radars that they knew of, Terry said, Captain, there's one radar we hadn't been able to get up, but I think if you let me connect these cables here, I think we can get an SOS out, or else they're gonna kill us all.
And Captain McGonigal said, look at that deck, Terry.
For God's sake, what, are you gonna swim across that napalm?
Is that a lot to try, sir?
Permission granted.
Terry Halbarzye slid across that deck, connected those cables, got an SOS out.
As soon as the Israelis intercepted the SOS, they got the heck out of the area, okay?
Those were torpedo boats.
Those were aircraft, okay?
Now, Terry Halbarzye was working with Congressman Devin Nunes in Visalia, California, about seven, eight years ago, okay?
Now, Devin Nunes heard what Terry Halbarzye had done, and he decided to give him the second highest military award, the Silver Star, okay?
He had a little trouble getting it through the Defense Department, but enough time had elapsed, and enough coverup had succeeded.
He says, okay, all right, give him the Silver.
Now, when I heard that, I got on the next plane and went out to, well, the Bay Area, rented a car, got down to Visalia at 10 o'clock.
The ceremony was at 12 o'clock.
There were six, seven of the other crew members there.
Devin Nunes, without much fanfare, a couple of local newspapers there put the Silver Star on Terry Halbarzye.
Now, why do I say that?
Well, I say that because he's the only congressman, the only person of any official importance in Washington or in California or elsewhere who has acknowledged what the Israelis tried to do, and the fact that one hero, a circumspect, a nondescript guy who could tie bailing wire together and plug in the radars, Terry Halbarzye, Mitch, you know, just a sailor, saved the rest of the crew.
For people who don't realize, the U.S. Navy lost 32, no, 37 soldiers there, and 171 were badly wounded, okay?
So what I'm saying here is that in that instance, Devin Nunes has shown uncommon respect for the sacrifices that go on in this country.
I'm hopeful that can translate to this other bit.
As you probably recognize, I have been reluctant to tell that whole story because the last thing that Devin Nunes needs is to have the Israel lobby out against him as well as everybody else.
So we'll have to see how this plays out.
Yeah, no, they don't wanna fight about the USS Liberty Ray.
I think you're pretty much safe on that one.
Yeah.
No, I'm glad that you told that story.
You actually told us that before here on the show, and I'm glad that you did again.
And it certainly speaks for him in some way.
I don't know what it means about the rest of him, but.
Well, he said most recently, he said, look, these people, these FBI and DOJ people could be put in trial.
And if evidence is such that they deliberately violated the law in providing incomplete or erroneous information to the FISA court, it's in fact a felony.
And that will, yeah, they should face trial for that.
Yeah, except that the House Intelligence Committee doesn't get to indict people.
He ought to stick to releasing information and being indictment proof himself for doing so since he's a privileged member of Congress.
No other House Intelligence Committee chairman has ever so much as suggested that some of the intelligence community might be brought to trial for what they've done.
So he's thrown down the gauntlet here.
He's way out on a limb.
And if he doesn't have the support of the president himself and key people, well, where is Sessions these days?
If he doesn't have that support, and then the deep state will win as they usually do.
Yeah.
All right, listen, we better call this short at an hour and a half here, Ray, but I love you, man.
Thanks very much.
Great interview.
You're most welcome.
Appreciate it.
That's the great Ray McGovern, everybody.
He used to be a CIA analyst, and now he's at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
He's the co-founder there.
His website is raymcgovern.com, and he keeps all his stuff there.
He writes regularly at consortiumnews.com, and we republish all the VIPS memos at antiwar.com as well.
So check it out, raymcgovern.com.
And you guys know me, foolsaron.us for the book, scothorton.org for the show, and iTunes and Stitcher.
And the whole archive is up on YouTube now, youtube.com slash scothortonshow, 4,600 something interviews if you guys wanna hear them there, scothorton.org, yeah, YouTube.
And then antiwar.com, libertarianinstitute.org, and twitter.com slash scothortonshow.
Thanks.
Thank you.
