All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm joined on the phone by Ray McGovern from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and Consortium News, home of the writings of the great Robert Perry as well.
And now I'm looking at a news release at the Institute for Public Accuracy.
Ex-intelligence officers, others see pluses in WikiLeaks disclosures.
The following statement was released today, signed by Daniel Ellsberg, Frank Greville, Catherine Gunn, David McMichael, Ray McGovern, Craig Murray, Colleen Rowley, and Larry Wilkerson.
All are associated with Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.
But I'm not going to read it to you.
I'm going to have Ray tell us all about it.
Welcome to the show, Ray.
Thank you, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
So, former CIA analyst, someone who at least at one time respected the classification and secrecy of government documents, coming out on the side of WikiLeaks.
You traitor.
It's on the side of truth, man.
You know, I've been telling people, especially in the last couple of days, that in all the things, in all the change that I've witnessed here in Washington over the last 48 years, there's one that dwarfs all others in significance.
And that change is that we no longer have, in any real sense, a free media.
That is big.
There is no overestimating or no overemphasizing that.
That's really big.
And that's why the issue is now joined, because we all know about the fourth estate, right?
That's what Edmund Burke, the British statesman, called the press.
In those days, it was all newspapers.
But he looked at the rest of the houses in Commons, and he said, look, he said, you know, I see three estates here, but by far the most important estate is those gentlemen, and in those days, they were all gentlemen, of course, those gentlemen in the balcony, because it's they that protect the hard-won liberties that started at Runnymede, the Magna Carta, and will continue through this day.
Without them, we would be free to do whatever we want.
So that's the fourth estate.
Now, the big change that I've witnessed is there is no fourth estate anymore.
Now it's the fourth branch of the state.
Yeah, well, you could say it that way.
In other words, it's controlled pretty much by the government and by the corporations who are making lots of money on these wars.
It's controlled by the advertisers and by the military-industrial complex and by the intelligence apparatus, which has doubled in size since 9-11.
So the fourth estate is dead.
I'll say that again.
The fourth estate is defunct, is dead.
And so where does that leave us?
Well, that leaves our liberties in great jeopardy.
I mean, you don't have to go farther than Jefferson, Madison, and the others that said, well, Jefferson actually said, the choices between having a government and having a newspaper, I'll choose the newspaper any time, because that's the only way people can be informed enough to make sensible decisions.
So what's the good news?
Well, there's no overstressing the good news either, because the good news is that there's a fifth estate, and that fifth estate exists in a medium that is not susceptible of government control or control by the corporations or the advertisers or anyone else.
It's the ether, okay?
And that's what WikiLeaks is using.
I compare it to, you know, David and Goliath.
Goliath has been stretching its muscles, has persuaded the British to put Assange in jail and so forth, but what about David?
Well, WikiLeaks is to Goliath as David was.
In other words, instead of a slingshot, he's got a computer, okay?
And instead of a stone, a nicely polished stone, he's got these airwaves or whatever you call them, the things that bring this stuff down into our computers.
And that is big, and that is an incredible threat to a government and empire that prefers very much, thank you, just very much, to exist in utter secrecy so nobody knows what's going on, so they can start wars without any accountability.
They can finish, and they can torture people, and no one will know the difference.
And those countries, like Germany, you know, like Spain, who got out of line and thought, well, you know, those citizens that got kidnapped and tortured by the U.S. security services, you know, we have to let them have some redress, and so judicial proceedings began in both countries.
In Spain, it began against those corrupt lawyers, and what did the U.S. do?
Well, we know from the WikiLeaks documents now that they leaned all over these guys, all over the Germans, all over the Spanish, and what they said in effect, well, not in effect, this is literally what they said, if you proceed to have judicial proceedings against the CIA agents, and we all know who they were, for what they did to X, Y, and Z, your citizens, the torture that they were eventually subjected to, then our bilateral relationship will suffer severe damage.
Now, I would have thought that Germany, at least, is sort of a grown-up state now, you know, it's the old Europe again.
I would have thought that Angela Merkel, or somebody in Germany, would say, you know, we take seriously the rule of law, and when laws have been violated, we do the appropriate thing, so thanks very much for your intervention here, but we don't need it anymore, we're proceeding ahead.
Instead of that, they thought, gosh, it's really amazing, and said, okay, all right, we don't want any harm to our bilateral relationship.
I suppose it has to do with economics, it has to do with finance, it also has to do with sharing of intelligence, and all that kind of stuff.
So, bottom line, the U.S. is able to scare people like the Germans, and the Spaniards.
The Spaniards said that these suits going against Gonzalez, Addington, John Yoo, the whole, you know, the mafia lawyers that said torture, well, it must be okay, because George Bush wants to do it, they stopped those proceedings, they fired the judge.
It's just awful to see how the empire stretches out its tentacles, and upstanding people like judiciary officials and judges in places like Spain and Germany fold their tents like the Arabs and silently steal away.
Well, I wanted to add to that, when you mentioned X, Y, and Z in your summary of what all those shenanigans are about, one of those X's was people tortured, Spaniards tortured in Guantanamo Bay.
Another was the extraordinary rendition, they call it export for torture, of an innocent grocer named El Masri, who was taken in a case of mistaken identity.
You know, these are war crimes, these are serious crimes, these are the kinds of things that this same government would put any American citizen in prison for doing to anybody else, kidnapping them and torturing them.
You know, just wanted to point that out, that's why they went to such lengths to suppress all this information, is because it's horrible.
I mean, the way you describe it sounds like you're talking about the actions of a totalitarian government somewhere, but it's our own.
Yeah, one would expect that our own government, given the depths to which it has descended, would do everything in its power to prevent these kinds of judicial proceedings.
I guess maybe I was naive, I didn't think that the German judiciary or the Spanish judiciary would run so scared and just violate every tenet of equality under the law and say, oh, okay, we don't want any damage to our bilateral relationships.
Oh, sure, okay, we won't.
We know those 15 guys in Berlin that work with your CIA station, but we'll blot all that out, we'll take a razor and get their names out of all the cables.
You know, it's really quite amazing that the U.S. has been able to do that so far, but you know what?
I think the tenor of the cables suggests to me that we have a kind of an expiring empire here.
There are a lot of people who don't really know quite what to do, and there are just as many cases of U.S. influence falling short of the mark as there are the...
All right, well, we're talking with Ray McGovern.
He's an intelligence professional for Sanity for 27 years, a CIA analyst, and we're talking about the WikiLeaks.
I'm going to ask him more about what's in these WikiLeaks and to illustrate how important they are as far as journalism.
Really, that's wikileaks.ch.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Wrapping up anti-war radio for the day with Ray McGovern.
For 27 years, he was an analyst at the CIA, and I'm not trying to just say, oh, okay, so he's an expert, listen to him.
Here's the thing about it.
I've been interviewing him, and I've been reading what he wrote for at least, what, seven, eight years now, minimum, and he's been right about everything.
If you go to antiwar.com/radio or scotthortonshow.com and search Ray McGovern and listen to those interviews going back years, years, years, he's right about everything.
He's earned his credibility here, even though he's a former CIA guy.
Always rubs me wrong how I like you CIA guys, Ray, but...
Hey, Scott.
Could you tell my wife that, that I was always right about everything?
Oh, well, I don't know about all that.
He's right here.
I'm just talking about the empire, man.
Torture and murder and spying and the destruction of the rule of law and the things that we all believe made America, America, basic fairness.
And here we torture people to death now.
And here's the thing, too, is you've been right about Afghanistan.
There's been a lot that's come out about Afghanistan in these WikiLeaks.
And again, if people go to WikiLeaks.antiwar.com, we will forward you right on to the most robust, most recently updated WikiLeaks mirror site where you can get all that Iraq, Afghan war logs and State Department documents as they're posted.
But, so, tell them about Afghanistan, Ray, in general and what you've learned from these WikiLeaks.
Well, it's a fool's errand.
Always has been.
Always will be.
You know, it's not a new insight.
You go back 2,350 years and this fellow Alexander the Great found that out.
Matter of fact, that's why he's great.
You know, he took his troops.
He wanted to go into China because he heard there's a lot of good stuff there.
And he got into this pesky country and these people didn't want invaders there.
I mean, they're very unreasonable people.
And they took shots at his flanks and he was losing a lot of men.
So he called the Council of War and he said, you know, what's going on here?
These people are not friendly at all.
They can't be bribed.
And look at those mountains up there.
And to their great credit, Scott, his advisor says, you know, Alex, it doesn't sound like a very good idea to us.
I don't think we're going to make it to China.
And that's why he decided to change his mind and go back to Asia Minor where he knew what he was doing.
And that, I think, is why we call him great today.
He knew the limits of his extension, okay?
Now, since then, we've had the Persians, we've had the Indians, we've had the Mongols, we've had the British.
We've had the British and then the British again and then the Russians.
And now we're going to give me a break, you know.
Anybody with a rudimentary reading of history knows that this is not only another Vietnam.
It's worse than Vietnam.
And I don't know how long it's going to take for people to get Obama to recognize that this is a really, really big mistake.
And the sooner he reverses course and gets out of Afghanistan and Iraq, not abruptly, but leaving behind some modicum of help for the people that we have done such damage to.
Ah, come on.
Why not abruptly, Ray?
Well, what I'm saying here is that you've got a lot of infrastructure there.
You've got some, well, billions of our taxpayer money has been invested there.
What we need to do is negotiate with the Taliban and with other people and say, look, you know, it's to everybody's advantage that we not leave chaos behind us.
I think as long as the Taliban know we're leaving, that we're really leaving, and not, you know, in 2014, they'll say, all right, sure, yeah, hey, we'd really like these projects to succeed.
We won't destroy them, and we won't hinder your getting out of our country.
Bear in mind that with 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, it's going to be an awful, awful chore to get them out safely.
There's only two ways they can get out, really, and that's why it's, you know, it's a feckless exercise because you can't get equipment in without going through the Khyber Pass, and you can't get people out unless you have some friendly folks that will say, all right, you leave, you leave something behind you, and we'll let you out, and we won't destroy you like they destroyed the British way back two centuries ago.
Well, it sounds like a perfect opportunity to make peace with Iran, so we can build a little railroad to get our guys to the ocean there.
Why not?
I mean, Iran, that's another thing that comes out of these WikiLeaks things.
You know, the New York Times had the WikiLeaks documents, these things that were made available to them, for several weeks, okay?
Now, that in itself is really a clever thing on the part of WikiLeaks because by kind of co-opting the New York Times and simultaneously giving it to the Guardian in London, Le Monde, El Pais, and Der Spiegel, you guarantee that the New York Times will be shamed into running some stories on it.
But you give them three weeks, and the stories all come out.
What a terrible threat Iran is.
Yeah, unless you actually read the documents, in which case you say, oh, boy, David Sanger sure does lie a lot.
Do you ever wonder, Ray, whether David Sanger is a foreign spy pretending to be a New York Times journalist?
Well, you don't have to be a foreign spy, you just have to be a neocon.
And the definition, in my view, of a neocon is someone who really can't distinguish adequately between what he or she perceives to be the strategic interests of Israel on the one hand and the strategic interests of the United States on the other.
Now, I don't, you know...
But, you know, you look at William J. Broad.
When he writes an article with David Sanger, it comes out terrible.
When he writes an article with Mark Mazzetti, it contradicts whatever Sanger's saying.
You know what I mean?
It ain't Broad.
We did a controlled experiment here.
It ain't Broad.
It's Sanger.
And it's never true.
Never.
Well, you know, Sanger has big shoes to fill.
We have Michael Gordon and other people who helped us to get into a war with Iraq.
So the New York Times keeps these people around.
And, you know, people need to blow the whistle, as you have.
Sanger is a menace.
He's been proven wrong on so many things.
He does write as though some of his talking points come right out of the Jerusalem Post.
Right.
Well, and, you know, Gordon Prather, who's retired now but wrote a thousand articles for WorldNetDaily and then AntiWar.com.
I should.
And...
He knows a lot about...
Oh, he said he...
He told me he saw Sanger on the Charlie Rose show and he recommended I go back and watch it.
I haven't yet.
But he said there wasn't a single thing that was correct.
Every single thing.
And, you know, Gordon Prather is a real master at this.
He says every word out of this guy's mouth was some outrage.
Yeah.
Well, don't be picky now, Scott.
You don't have to be correct these days.
All you have to do is be able to repeat things ten times.
And then most Americans, like 80%, will believe it to be correct simply because it's been repeated ten times.
Iran is a threat.
Iran is a threat.
Iran...
How many is that?
Three times?
Everybody believes Iran is a threat, whereas nobody refers to what the intelligence community has decided.
And that is that three years ago, during the last bottom-up assessment of Iran's nuclear program, 16 U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously said with, in their words, high confidence, end quote, that Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon in the fall of 2003, okay, so four years before the estimate of 07, and had not resumed work on a nuclear weapon.
Now, if you want to know something, if you want to look at George Bush's book, don't buy it.
Go to the library and go to pages 412 or around there, and this is what George Bush says about all that.
He says, I was horrified.
It was a bombshell.
It was a lightning bolt.
And so I went over to Israel, and I apologized.
I said, I don't agree with this.
And then I went to Saudi Arabia, and I said, this is a direct quote, I sat down with the king, and before he started, I said, now, your majesty, would it be okay if I start this meeting?
Because I know that people around this table will think that I was responsible for that estimate because I didn't want to get into a war with Iran.
But that's not true.
It was a surprise to me.
I'm just as outraged as you are.
Sometimes these intelligence people just go off and independently do what they want to do.
You know, I don't know why the intelligence people decided this.
You've got to be kidding.
He really, really wrote this stuff, so I think he really.
Is there anything about him complaining about Admiral Fallon in there?
No, not at all.
But he says, you know, what was I to do?
And then the kicker sentence is, you know, how could I possibly use our military?
Isn't that an interesting phrase?
He kind of uses our military.
How could I possibly use our military to destroy the nuclear program facilities of a country that the intelligence community has decided doesn't have any active nuclear weapons program?
Rats.
In plain English.
All right, I'm sorry.
I want to make it very clear that Gordon Prather is just fine.
He's just retired.
I didn't mean to sound like he was too bad.
Thank you very much for your time.
Ray McGovern, everybody, veteran intelligence professional for Sanity.
Most welcome, Scott.
Consortiumnews.org.com.
Consortium News.
