All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got our good friend Ray McGovern, the great Ray McGovern.
For 27 years, he was a CIA analyst, head of the Soviet Division during the Cold War, briefer to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the 80s, but this whole century long, he's been doing everything he can to oppose the wars, well, and to tell the truth about them, which is the same thing.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Ray?
I'm doing well.
Scott, how are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us here today.
And I should have said that you are co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for sanity and regularly at raymcgovern.com, consortiumnews.com, and of course, antiwar.com.
So very happy to tell everybody about that and including, and especially here, two important pieces for consortiumnews.com, one, destroying the eminently destroyable Colin Powell, and the other one, presumptuous Pompeo pushes preposterous Peking policy.
Total alliteration from the great Ray McGovern there at consortiumnews.com.
But let's start with Colin Powell and his song of himself in the New York Times Magazine here.
I have to say, to start this off, Ray, that when I argue the war on terrorism was unnecessary, didn't have to be this way, etc., etc., I like to say, forget Al Gore or any of that.
Just if George Bush had listened to Colin Powell, which is what the American people thought they were electing Colin Powell to run the foreign policy, they trusted him.
And if only it had not been Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, Stephen Hadley, and Abram Shulsky, and Douglas Feith, and the neoconservative cabal, if Bush had just listened to Powell, none of this would have happened.
I mean, they would have still had a terrible war in Afghanistan.
But all of the rest of Iraq, and then therefore Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the whole dang special ops war across Africa, drone wars in Pakistan, never would have happened.
Didn't have to be this way at all.
And so I'm giving the guy credit there, that he really did tell Bush, you should not do this.
But then what'd he do, Ray?
He clicked his heels.
He went out there and lied the American people and the world into the case for launching Iraq War II.
And now here he is, 20 years later, 17, wants to tell the New York Times and the author of this new book, Robert Draper, wrote this new book to start a war coming out, that, you know, it's not my fault.
And geez, don't write, lied us into war on my tombstone, right?
Sort of tried to stop it a little bit.
What do you think?
Well, I think I've got it mostly right, as usual, Scott.
The question is how forcibly he argued his case.
He caved, well, he caved as soon as he puts it in the quotation from the book, because the president said so, and the president said so, hey, the president ordered it, right?
Well, this betrays a kind of military mind that forgets, and I have personal experience of this, forgets that the oath we all take as officers or as troops to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, is the Constitution.
It's not the president that we swear fealty to.
Now, my personal experience of this is, oh, it must be about 15 years ago, I was lecturing at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.
I had a friendly professor there who invited me to speak.
And as I watched, well, first of all, the cafeteria TVs were all set on Fox, and I kind of detected kind of a loyalist to the president flavor from the questions they were asking.
But then I finally asked him, I said, okay, so you all swore a solemn oath before you became cadets here or midshipmen.
What was that oath?
And one guy said, well, it's the president.
And the other guy said, did you all think it's for the president?
Well, yeah, it's for the president.
I said, my God, that's wrong.
And they all looked at me like I had two heads.
And somebody said, oh, that's right, yeah, it's the Constitution.
Well, you know, that's why we're in this business.
That's why I came in this business, and that's why we're still trying to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
And that may sound quaint, and it may sound obsolete to a guy like John Yoo or Alberto Gonzalez, but it's the truth.
And the fact that these were, I don't know what they call them, juniors, okay, they were third year people, midshipmen in Annapolis, and they automatically said, I swear a solemn oath to the president.
So maybe Powell gleaned that in his long career in the president, in the ranks of the Army.
But I think it's also a factor of who Colin Powell is.
I know Colin Powell.
I grew up about a mile from him in the Bronx.
He was a year ahead of me.
He at the City College, I at Fordham.
He was ROTC, as I was.
He was a distinguished military graduate, as I was, but he went into the regular Army, and he learned that as long as you salute smartly, man, your career is made, the more so if you have certain advantages like him.
He was smart, and he was also a minority, and that helped as well.
So when you have that kind of background, you're going to salute, and you're going to lie, and you're going to cheat, and you're going to steal, if I can paraphrase someone else.
Pompeo, who graduated first in his class from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
So all I'm saying is that he was kind of, he was used to, used to just doing what the president said, and yes, he's on the record as having thought that this was a bad idea.
But as soon as push came to shove, I hate to say it, but he caved.
And the title given this New York Times Magazine article, Colin Powell still wants answers.
Well, you know, I'm sorry.
He had the answers.
He knew the answers then.
He knew the real answers, and he told us a bunch of lies.
The only consolation I get is that I kind of sensed this, and as our first issuance, our first memo to the president, you see, we still, even we, still thought that there was a chance that Bush was being deceived, that he was being railroaded into this by all those gentlemen, and I use the term loosely, that you just mentioned, and especially Cheney and Rumsfeld, of course.
So as long as there was a chance that it needed some truth, well, we sat down, watched the thing, we, the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, watched his presentation, did a quick and dirty memo that same afternoon, and got it out on the AFP wire and in other means at 5.30 that afternoon.
So we told the president, look, we give Colin Powell a C for content.
We think you really better widen your circle of advisors, Mr. President, beyond those clearly focused on a war for which we see no compelling reason, and from which, and these were words, and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic, period.
And I remember, I wrote that last paragraph, and I remember thinking, you know, I hope you're wrong, McGovern.
I hope, you know, I hope you're just kind of hyper here.
But it wasn't wrong.
Our colleagues weren't wrong.
And again, that wasn't just you and some friends, that was the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, virtually all at that time, I think, former CIA officers saying, look, we know this isn't right.
That's correct.
And, you know, people would say, well, how do you know?
You're retired.
You don't have any access to classified information.
Well, you know, it was a lie too, Scott.
That's right.
In fact, let me just say real quick, and I'm not saying just bragging for myself or whatever, but I'm speaking for all the cab drivers and all the bartenders and for that matter, all the drunks in Austin, Texas.
I mean, the Professional Wednesday drunks in Austin, Texas in the year 2003.
I was painting a house with my friend Adam, listening to Colin Powell's speech on NPR on my truck's radio, and I debunked every bit of it in real time to my buddy Adam as he was talking.
So I don't know about this Zarqawi guy, but I'm sure that's BS too.
But the rest of it, the mobile biological weapons labs and the aluminum tubes and all of this stuff, we already knew for a fact those things weren't true.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm recalling, not a favorite person of mine, but the fellow whose name's Bill Casey, and he headed up the CIA, he was the director.
And Barbara Honecker, who was there when the Reagan cabinet in 1981, it was early February, when the cabinet assembled and each of the cabinet officers were asked to say what they're trying to do and what their mission is.
And Bill Casey said, you know, our mission will be complete when everything we tell the American people is a lie and they believe it.
No, I didn't make that up.
Barbara Honecker was there.
Did she report it contemporaneously?
She did.
Yeah.
But the other thing I want to mention about this is Casey also said, you know, the biggest surprise I got taking over the CIA was that, you know, about 85, 90 percent of the material they use comes out of open sources, for Pete's sake.
Can you imagine?
Now, here's Casey, you know, an old spymaster from World War II, nothing counted unless you had some informant telling you something that he or she said was really golden.
And here he is realizing for the first time that you can glean important conclusions just by looking at the reportage, just not by knowing who's reporting what for The New York Times.
And as you painting that house with Adam and the cab drivers in Austin, Texas, you know, it's not hard.
It's not hard if you have an open mind.
But if you're thinking of maybe conquering country, removing a dictator, Saddam Hussein, and maybe getting a real in on the oil there and maybe, you know, permanent military bases there.
Well, you know, you don't give a rat's patootie about what's true or not.
You advertise this and they picked Colin Powell.
You know, it was clear why they picked him.
He knew better than anybody.
He had immense respect at that point.
He could have run for president.
And Dick Cheney, of all people, says, Colin, you have the best face here.
You had the best record.
You're the guy to do it.
Now put that into play.
So I know how the whole thing went down.
It was really pretty bad.
There are lessons for today because when the vice president, Scooter Libby, and these guys collected all this trash, and I, you know, trash is a mild word here, about A, weapons of mass destruction, and B, ties between, so-called ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and put it all in a draft and said, OK, here, Colonel Wilkerson, who was putting this piece together, here's what you need to say.
And Larry says, my God, you know, it took me three hours to get through the first three pages.
It was all cockamamie stuff.
And I said to my boss, Colin Powell, we can't go with this.
And he looked at it, he said, well, you know, we only have five days.
Can we start from scratch?
And just then on the scene appears the master deceiver, a fellow named George Tenet, who is the epitome of somebody who caves to whatever the president says.
And he said, oh, no problem.
We have a national intelligence estimate, the ACME of intelligence analysis.
It's subscribed to all 16 intelligence agencies.
And we know that that says weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction, and also says that there's a nexus between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
Most people believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11.
Remember now, this is 2002.
OK, that's a year, not even a year later.
And so we'll go with the we'll go with the estimate.
Now, Colin Powell knew damn well that the estimate was garbage.
How do you know that?
Because his own intelligence people told him that.
They took copious footnotes.
Well, now, wait a minute.
Explain for a second.
What does that mean, his own intelligence people at the State Department?
People don't know about that.
Good.
Yeah, that's important to know.
There's a intelligence unit.
It's called INR, the Bureau for Intelligence and Research, and it's been with the State Department forever.
It has an incredibly good reputation, small as it is, maybe smaller is better.
But meaning that he wasn't dependent on the military or the CIA.
He had his own guys and loyal to him, too, right?
Honest to him.
Yeah.
So he knew where his own people stood.
Now, here's the question.
Why didn't he have the head of INR or the deputy head of INR, both of whom were pretty stalwart, honest people?
Why didn't he have them help out Larry Wilkerson?
Well, maybe Larry didn't ask him.
False.
Maybe Larry did ask him.
He said, I'm not going to go up there at the CIA and be subjected to the blandishments of George Tenet and John McLaughlin alone, for God's sake, let me have your head of intelligence call forward, or failing that, the deputy, Tom Finger.
Both of those guys are really golden, okay?
And Colin Powell says, no.
Why the hell would he say no?
Because those men have integrity.
Simple as that.
Yeah, he justified it by telling Larry, look, you know, I know what they feel.
I can call them any time.
Well, as I reconstruct this now, and just this morning it occurred to me, Colin Powell was probably told by the vice president or someone like that in Rumsfeld, we don't want any of these dissident INR State Department intelligence guys around.
They're just going to prolong the process.
They're going to raise all kinds of questions.
So, have Carl Ford or Tom Finger with you.
I think that's the way it went down.
In any case, Larry Wilkerson was left to deal with what he had.
And instead of starting tabula rasa, you know, it's five days before the speech, right?
Speech was February 5th, 2003.
Do the math.
The invasion happened about six weeks later.
Okay.
Yeah, five days.
And then George Tenet appears and he says, oh, hey, we have this great intelligence, national intelligence estimate.
Let's use that as the basis.
So you know the expression, Scott, garbage in, garbage out.
They did use that and enhanced it a little bit better.
They even add a little phrase saying there is a sinister nexus, sinister nexus between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.
Now at that point, over 60% of the American people believed, and they believed this because of the propaganda, that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11.
Of course he didn't.
That he had ties with Al-Qaeda.
Of course he didn't.
They hated each other.
But there it was right in the speech.
So it's really kind of hard for me to see a title for an article, big article in the New York Times Magazine saying Colin Powell still wants answers when he's got all the answers.
And so the question arises, and this also occurred to me this morning.
He knows that he was deliberately deceived by George Tenet, then head of the whole intelligence community as well as the CIA.
Why doesn't he call him out?
Why does he, why does he, why does he write a real book saying, look, this is exactly how it went down at the CIA those five days when we were putting this together.
Well that's the joke, right?
The same moral cowardice that let the scenario play out the way it did in the first place.
That's why.
Well, yeah, but it's a little bit more than that.
When you take on the professional CIA, it's dangerous, okay?
You don't get invited on to any talk shows anymore, and it's even more dangerous because other people have experienced some physical problems, okay?
Yeah, but we're talking about Colin Powell here.
He is one of the most respected men in America even now, even after all of this.
Well, I mean- He could come out, he has the stature to come out and say, let me tell you the truth about this, all right?
And you could ask my pal Dick Armitage, he'll tell you too.
Which by the way, there's another guy who always gets to skate as like, yeah, him and Powell were against it.
He was also one of the ones who did everything he could to lie us into that war too.
I remember him on San Antonio AM radio 550, Carl Wigglesworth and all those guys.
They were against the war.
They knew better than this crap.
They were friends with David Hackworth and stuff.
They knew the difference between the mustache and the beard here, you know?
And I remember Dick Armitage going on there and saying, we have to do this.
Trust me, Carl, we got to do it.
People of San Antonio, Saddam Hussein is going to attack us if we don't.
Sorry, just had to add that in there.
Okay, that's, that's all true.
And all I'm adding is a little codicil, a little corollary to all that.
And that is, I just hearkened back to the 3rd of January 2017, okay?
When president elect Trump was being briefed on all this kind of thing.
What happened on the 3rd of January?
You know, maybe your audience doesn't remember, but Rachel Maddow invited Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, to be on her show that night.
And she said, Chuck, you have something important you said you still want to share with the people.
What is it?
And Chuck said, well, you know, Rachel, I, I thought the president elect was a pretty smart guy, you know, a clever businessman, and he would know what kind of quarrels to pick.
But he's done something really, really dumb.
Oh, well, what would that be, Chuck?
Well he's picked a fight with the intelligence community, and they have six ways to Sunday to get you.
So he's done something really, really stupid.
I really am surprised.
That was the 3rd of January 2017.
Trump was still president elect.
Two days later, they all got together.
That is, I don't think Rachel was included, except by BCC, okay?
They all got together in the White House and plotted what to do about the president elect.
Too late.
We can't prevent him from being elected.
He is.
What do we do now?
And that's when the fateful decision, a couple of decisions were made, one about Mike Flynn, but the more important one was, should we blackmail the president?
Now, they didn't say it that way, probably, but that's what it meant.
Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
We have this dossier, which shows that- I hear you.
And look, any major politician since the 1960s knows that if you take on the national security state, they might shoot you in the face in Dallas.
But if you had that kind of power and influence, then you'd do the right thing anyway, right?
Yeah, well that's why I say it's a carousel.
Cowardice is the main quality.
The ingrained saluting to the chief is another one.
But you know, there's a real disincentive, that's what I'm trying to make here.
I hear you.
No, I hear you.
But then again, look at you.
You spent the last 20 years telling the whole world the truth, no matter what.
Yeah, but you know, I had little to risk.
I was retired.
When people asked my former colleagues, what about McGovern?
They said, oh, you know what they used to say?
They would say, oh, he doesn't have access to classified information anymore, so how can he know anything?
I go back to Casey saying 85% of what you need to know is in open sources.
And I would say, seriously though, you know what, Colin Powell, he's pretty much untouchable.
In fact, look at even Donald Trump.
They didn't dare shoot him in the face.
I mean, they did frame him for high treason, and that's pretty bad.
But they didn't dare kill him, and they wouldn't dare kill Colin Powell.
You know, they might leak a sex tape or whatever, try to embarrass him or some kind of thing.
But if Colin freaking Powell said, you know what, I'm spilling my guts, here's the whole truth, and it obviously was the truth, he would win.
You know, he'd be fine.
And he has a hell of a lot bigger cushion.
You might have nothing to lose, but even if he loses one mansion, he has a second, right?
Like, he'll be fine.
Look, Scott, there are other things besides being shot in the face.
It's being deprived of interviews.
It's being not allowed to give speeches on Memorial Day.
Well he'd have to go big.
And look who we're talking about.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I believe in this.
I'm just saying, I don't think it's so insurmountable.
I just think it's a matter of he's a coward.
That's all.
If he had any more courage whatsoever, he'd be perfect.
And he's in his 70s anyway, right?
Like, he could die of a heart attack at any time.
Go ahead and tell the truth for God's sake.
Especially for a black man, life expectancy is like 68 or something, right?
Well, I'm trying to tell you that, yeah, you're right.
But the real question is why he didn't.
And it's not only cowardice, it's fear of consequences.
Yeah, fear of other men like him.
Let's finish January 2017.
Okay, you've got Chuck Schumer telling Rachel Maddow, intelligence community should not be crossed.
They have six ways to send you to get back at you.
That's the third.
The fifth, they get together at the White House, and Comey is given a blessing to lurk behind the next day when they brief Trump and say, gentlemen, Brennan and Clapper and the others, would you leave the president and me alone?
I have something very, very delicate to tell him.
And then he tells him about the dossier, okay?
He tells him, you know, really, it's not verified, Mr. President, it's very, very scurrilous.
But they have you cavorting with prostitutes in Moscow.
And you know, it's out there.
It's going to be published probably next couple of days.
Just so you know, Mr. President.
Just so you know.
Now, here's a new guy in town, okay?
Trump.
He's got a whole different experience, life experience.
And he doesn't know enough to say what I would have said or what you would have said, Scott.
Look, Mr. Comey, thank you very much.
Please go back immediately to your desk and clean it out, because you're out of here.
As soon as I become president, I know what you're doing.
This is J. Edgar Hoover on space.
You're trying to blackmail me.
Get the hell out of here.
That's what he should have said.
Instead, he tried to cajole like a real estate broker.
He tried to get Comey on his side when Comey had done everything to prevent him from being elected.
And now he's trying to do everything to undermine his presidency.
So Trump just didn't get it.
Now, why do I say all that?
I say all that because we now know that on the 24th, 25th, and 26th of that same month, the FBI people finally interviewed this source, subsource, but he was really the real source for Christopher Steele's dossier and found him out to be a cockamamie young guy who had worked at the Brookings, I guess.
And, you know, he said none of it's true.
Great article by Paul Sperry this week about that, by the way, people go ahead.
So just to finish this up, why did Comey get authorization from the whole retinue there under Obama to try to blackmail Trump, warn him about, use this dossier in this way on the 6th, on the 6th of January 2017, when the FBI already had arranged to interview the subsource already holding their nose at what they were afraid to get?
Why couldn't he have waited just a couple of weeks?
Well, the reason, I guess, is because Obama wasn't around anymore after the 20th of January.
And you know, they wouldn't be protected if they had started, if they had done it earlier.
The point is, what's it, 24 minus 6 is what, 18?
They couldn't have waited 18 days to verify this stuff before they used it as blackmail for the president.
You know, even Trump, who's not the brightest guy in the world, he's far from the brightest guy in the world.
Even Trump realized later, he says, you know, I think they were trying to blackmail me.
Yeah, I think that's what they were trying to do.
So what I'm saying here is this is a really intricate stuff.
There are really bad guys involved here.
And of course, these guys are the ones that inherited the mantle from people like George Tenet, who deceived Colin Powell and promoted all these sycophants to become the leaders of the intelligence community, did a meretricious national intelligence estimate.
And they were off and running when they had nothing better to use to help Colin Powell make his speech.
Sorry to take on, to take so long, but, you know, I'm still- And I'm sorry for interrupting, because I didn't realize you were really going somewhere with that.
I just know you love talking about Russiagate so much.
But since you did tie it back, let's go ahead and clarify that James Clapper was the head of the surveillance division, the reconnaissance office, and he was the one saying, oh yeah, that pig trough, that's a pathway to a mustard gas stockpile or whatever, essentially verifying all the claims, all the completely false claims of the Iraqi National Congress that, well, see right there, now that's a roof.
Now we judge with high confidence that under that roof is a bunch of banned stuff.
And this is the same guy that framed Trump for treason, or certainly was in on it.
He sure was.
Hold on just one second, be right back.
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You know, there's a little history here that's very relevant.
There was always a contest between the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, and their Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA.
Now in George Tenet's day, he was over both of them.
He was head of the whole intelligence community.
And so, you know, he had a lot to do with who was appointed to do this kind of stuff and who was not.
And so, you know, it's really, really hard to go back and dissect all of this stuff that went happen.
Yeah.
Scott, let me say a word about James Clapper.
Now, there was always a contest between defense and the CIA as to who would run intelligence.
The CIA had the charter, the CIA's head was also head of the whole intelligence community.
So when a fellow named John Deutch, in the middle of the 90s, became briefly the head of the CIA, he made no, he did not disguise his wish to become head of defense.
His good friend, Perry, was the defense secretary.
He wanted to take his place, but he left.
So what did he do?
What can I do to help?
What can I do to establish my bona fides that I really like the Pentagon more than I like my own CIA?
Well, here's something.
I have this intelligence analysis unit that analyzes imagery.
Now, most people think, oh, those are photographs.
No, it's not.
Yeah, it's photographs, but it's multispectral.
It's radar that can see through roofs.
It's multispectral.
It's all kinds of imagery.
That was part of this unit called the National Photographic Interpretation Center that found the missiles in Cuba that couldn't be corrupted.
They were good on verifying, trustworthy verifying.
They were great.
So what did Deutch do?
To ingratiate himself with the Pentagon, he gave that unit, 950 strong, with decades of experience, he gave it to the Pentagon.
And he said, okay, now, Pentagon, you can not only run the satellites, but now you can run the analysis.
That happened in 1996.
So here comes Clapper, who was a favorite of Bobby Gates and also a favorite of Tenet, and he comes and becomes Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and then he becomes head of the National Intelligence, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which was the successor to the National Photographic Interpretation Center, no longer under CIA, under the Department of Defense.
Now, what was his job?
Why did Rumsfeld say, oh, this is the guy I want, looking at the satellite photos?
Bigsos, Clapper would, well, the term of art used is lean forward.
He would lean forward.
Like on MSNBC.
Yeah, go ahead.
He would do what was necessary to make sure that no sergeant or a lieutenant or a captain or anybody underneath him in that military agency now would say, hey, you know, Chalabi says that there's a chemical weapons manufacturing thing here and that these coordinates, you know what it is?
It's actually a chicken farm.
It's a chicken farm.
Well, that would never get up and out because Clapper was the guy running this.
And then he had, you know, he's not the brightest star in the constellation either.
He wrote a book and he said, you know, I have to give, this is almost the exact quote, I have to give credit, I have to give blame where it's due.
It was not only the policymakers that were plumbing for this war against Iraq.
It was the intelligence people, including me, who, and this is a quote, who found things that weren't there, end quote, who found things that weren't there.
Maybe that's what Jay Rockefeller, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee was referring to when you talk about non-existent intelligence as being part of the menu they used to justify the war.
So here's Clapper.
He's got a good record, right?
He successfully suppressed any information and threw any doubt about the weapons of mass destruction.
You know, Rumsfeld, who went to Princeton, by the way, and learned lots of things like, one of his axioms was the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
And that was in direct response to a question, what's the proof that Saddam is an ally of Osama bin Laden?
Yeah.
And he went, well, you know, here's a riddle.
So the answer to that, of course, is the absence of evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction didn't mean they weren't there, even though we're spending billions and billions and billions on these sophisticated satellite systems.
And now it didn't matter because Clapper was head of analysis and Clapper wouldn't let the truth come out.
So he was the same guy, of course, who perjured himself before the Senate and the American people under oath and said that they weren't spying on the American people, collecting our emails and our phone calls and location data and the rest, which, of course, he knew was false at the time.
How does he get to be director of national intelligence?
The job that Tenet had back in the day, when there was a dual hat, head of the CIA.
So how'd he get that job?
Well...
Reward for lying us into a rack?
Oh, yeah.
Well, Obama asked for, you know, Obama didn't know what's up.
He asked his friend Brennan and he asked his secretary of defense at the time, Bobby Gates, who I'd be a good guy to head up the whole intelligence community.
And they said, as with as if with one voice, James Clapper, he's just the guy.
And so Obama appoints Clapper as head of the whole intelligence community.
Let me...
A million dead Iraqis can't be wrong because they're dead.
Yeah.
Let me finish with this little vignette, because it's true.
When I lived in Washington, I used to make a habit of going to these conferences where people like James Clapper would be holding forth.
Now, it was very hard to find such conferences or to get in.
But this time he was hawking his book, the same book that bragged about finding things that weren't there.
Wow.
So I got there 15 minutes early, bought the book, which was hard to do, but I bought it $35.
And then I quickly looked at it and found this quote.
So I asked him about that, and I was like, like one of the questioners, Mr. Clapper, now you admit that as head of intelligence, imagery intelligence, you leaned forward to support Bush and Cheney and quote, as you say in your book here, found things that weren't there.
Now, Mr. Clapper, let me, let me ask you, fast forward.
Now you're working for a different administration, the Obama administration.
And they're, they're really, really intent on proving that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee.
And we know there's no proof of that.
Is this, is this one of those cases where you were leaning forward, where, where you actually found things that weren't there?
Well, this was at Carnegie, right?
And the skunk at the picnic again, right?
Well, his answer speaks volumes.
He says, Oh no, no, no, we don't know.
He said the forensics were incredible.
Well, somebody needs to ask Clapper, if the forensics were incredible, and the only people that did the forensics was a DNC paid outfit named CrowdStrike, and they had a CrowdStrike on the 7th of December, 2017 said, and I quote, there is no concrete evidence that the DNC emails were exfiltrated, exfiltrated, 35 cent word for hacked, okay?
They weren't exfiltrated, but we have no proof that they're exfiltrated by Russia or by anybody else.
And usually we can tell, but this time we can't tell.
That was the 7th of December, 2017.
All those House Intelligence Committee members knew that.
And it wasn't until May 7th, 2020, like, well, do the math.
Hey, that's three months ago.
Do your listeners know that the head of CrowdStrike has disavowed any evidence that the Russians or anybody else- Oh, my listeners know.
There are a lot, many, I'll tell you what, MSNBC's viewers and CNN's viewers don't know.
And here's the thing too, if the FBI has any other evidence, well, they can go ahead and release that and put up or shut up then.
But now wait a minute, because I just got to let you know here that we're still not quite done trashing Colin Powell, I don't think, and we only have 15 minutes and we still need to leave you an opportunity to trash Mike Pompeo and the current danger, which is picking a fight with China.
So you do what you want, Ray, but I'm just saying, budget your time carefully.
Yeah.
Well, let's see, do we need to finish up on this other stuff?
I guess we do, just to say that it's going to be really interesting these next three months.
Clapper, Brennan, Comey, they were so sure that Hillary was going to win that they didn't even hide their tracks when they tried to make sure she won.
And when they, after she lost, they tried to derail everything Trump wanted to do.
Now, bear in mind, I hold no grief for Trump.
I think he's the worst president we ever had.
But you know, there is something called the Constitution, and my oath to support and defend the Constitution does not expire, okay?
So it's going to be interesting to see if Bill Barr and Donald Trump, who talk a good game, who name names like Clapper and Brennan and Comey, whether they tell their special prosecutor, oh, it's a little dangerous, they have six ways to send her to get back, send that guy to jail that defalsified that one email, but let the others off with a slap on the wrist.
I am fearful that that's going to happen.
And then we'll have the deep state briefing the new president in the same way that Comey briefed Donald Trump.
So that's the current issue here.
And Clapper and Comey and Brennan still have a lot of support, not only by MSNBC and CNN and a lot of stuff, but by operatives who are involved or were involved and owe their careers to these guys.
So just to finish up on that, well, here's Pompeo, Pompous Pompeo.
Hey, here's a tie in, wait, wait, hang on on China.
Here's a tie in back to Colin Powell.
And this sounds so stupid that I am sure people must think that I'm the kook when I bring this up.
And I swear to God, I was on the front page of the New York Times.
They covered it repeatedly.
You can find it all over the place that the Clinton people were behind this, too.
They were avowedly behind it.
They wanted the acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell, to brief the electoral college that Vladimir Putin had stolen the election from Hillary Clinton and that they should vote for Hillary Clinton.
And if they wouldn't do that, then they should at least decide to hang the jury and send it to the House of Representatives so that the House of Representatives can appoint a good Republican like Paul Ryan or Colin Powell to be the president.
That's a nice.
And then someone informed them that these electors come from the states.
If you think that they're going to turn on Donald Trump, you're smoking crack.
It's just never going to happen.
So you might as well forget it.
And they did drop it.
Yeah.
Well, this was a last ditched effort.
You know, they had lost on every score.
So you're right.
And nobody knows this.
They asked Powell, hey, if you put your, if you let your name be in Oregon or something like that, then the rules would allow you to be president if we could, if we could rig it this way.
Will you do it?
And Colin Powell would say, oh no, no, on principle, I wouldn't do it.
No, he saluted smartly and said, yes, sir.
Of course.
Put my name in there.
So yeah.
Amazing.
Just amazing.
You know, Mr. Speaking of constitutional oaths and everything, oh, what, we're going to do a coup d'etat.
Yeah.
You guys can count on me.
Says the guy that lied us into Iraq War II.
And now wait a minute, because this really goes to his guilt too.
I think it's really important.
You include the clip in your great piece at Consortium News.
It's very short.
It's just Colin Powell from the beginning of 2001, the first couple of months, the spring, long before the September 11th attack, the very beginning of the George W. Bush first term there.
And it's Colin Powell explaining that he knows good and well that Iraq is helpless before American might here and poses no threat to us whatsoever.
But there was no threat from Saddam Hussein.
He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction.
He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.
All right.
There you go.
That's not him in the 90s, you know, musing on a Sunday morning TV show or something.
That was when he was the sitting secretary of state a couple of months, two or three months into the government.
So he had been presumably briefed by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research on exactly what Hussein's capabilities were.
And there he was telling the truth, that we have him in a box, as Condoleezza Rice said.
He has no capability to do a thing.
And that's why we're not worried about changing the status quo right now.
That's right.
Now, Colin Powell said that on the 22nd of February, 2001.
Early, but still, you know, a month into, still time to be briefed.
You know, he wasn't reading this in the paper as a month into his job as secretary of state.
I was just trying to point out that it was Condoleezza Rice in July of 2001.
So just two months before 9-11.
So it was as if we were being asked to believe that whereas Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction in July 2001, all of a sudden, right after 9-11, weapons of mass destruction descended from the heavens like manna for a soft landing on the sands of Iraq where God made that big mistake of putting our oil.
Right.
I mean, was that blatant?
I said, you know what?
That was John Pilger you heard first.
That was from a Breaking the Silence documentary.
He interviewed me for that, OK?
And the reason I mentioned that is that he was convinced that, of course, this was all cockamamie stuff, and this was right after the invasion.
And I said, John, you sent me this advanced copy.
It's great.
Where did you find that footage on Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice?
And he said, Ray, you know, I'm a, I'm an investigative reporter.
And so I got all the tapes from everything these guys said in that period of time.
And I went into a booth and people feared for my sanity, but I listened and I watched and I found them.
That's what investigative reporters do, Ray.
So why was it not in the media?
Well, because, of course, it was struck out in the media when they wanted to find the weapons of mass destruction that James Clapper leaned forward to the extent of, quote, finding things that were not there.
And so, yeah, that's how bad it was.
And, you know, I'd say one more thing about Colin Powell.
This is sort of a personal thing.
I used to, I know him.
I used to brief him when I, I carried the president's daily briefs to his boss, a fellow named Weinberger, who was a secretary of defense.
And I used to sit down with Colin 10 minutes before, try to reassure him that I wasn't telling his boss anything that he needed to know or, or at least try to, you know, assuage his concern in that score.
And I know him.
He came, as I say, from a neighborhood one mile away from me in the Bronx.
But you know what?
When he came in, we're all immigrants, right?
I'm from Ireland and, or my parents or grandparents from Ireland and his from Jamaica.
Now, I had the good luck of having my Irish grandmother live with us, right?
And she repeated again and again, Raymond, be truthful and honest and they won't give a damn what anyone says about you.
Okay.
That was drilled into my head.
Colin Powell had no grandmother living with him.
He had just people who were trying to make it.
People who were so proud of him having that uniform and being promoted and promoted and promoted.
And that speaks volumes.
You need somebody to ground you.
Okay.
And I had that.
And Colin Powell didn't.
And in that respect, I feel sorry for him.
Yeah, well, geez, think of all the people without grandmothers who don't kill a million people.
Hey, um, so here's this article in the New York Times Magazine that your article is about here and I really regret that I did not have the time to go back and reread it and take notes because it is absolutely outrageous.
Some of the garbage in there and all the self-serving self-servingness.
It's really terrible.
And I hope people will read it.
And I'm really looking forward to reading this book, too.
I already ordered it to start a war, how the Bush administration took America into Iraq.
And I feel bad because I just, you know, wrote about half a chapter about that and then threw it out because I was getting too deep into the details.
I was trying to write a briefer thing.
So I'll publish that someday and it probably won't be as good as this guy's book.
But anyway, it's very important.
It's a story of how they lied us into Iraq War II and his culpability in it all.
So with that, can I get a good seven minutes on what you think about Pompeo and the not so new Cold War with China here?
Yeah.
Well, if I had a word on Iraq, a very brief one.
We did a trilogy two weekends ago.
When I say we, I mean Scott Ritter, who knew chapter and verse about the fact that this war in Iraq was not about weapons of mass destruction.
It was about regime change, and he could prove it.
And Joe Lauria, who was at the U.N. the day that he was a correspondent at the U.N. at the time.
He was there when Colin Powell gave his speech, and he bumped into the British ambassador in the elevator and he said, what the hell's going on here?
And the British ambassador said, well, the United States wants to make a war, and of course we're going to help them make a war.
So if you want the whole trilogy, Lauria, Scott Ritter, and me, you can go to my website.
I have them all grouped together.
The website is RayMcGovern.com, and it's easily searchable.
And people can also look up, just type in Scott Ritter in Tokyo, and you'll get a great article about him and his real time reaction in a speech he gave in Tokyo, Japan, right after Colin Powell's speech, debunking every bit of it in real time.
See, he had tried to, he had tried to persuade Joe Biden, who was then head of the Senate and Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, to let him speak and tell them that there were no weapons and he could verify it.
But Biden said, no, no, you can't speak.
Anyhow, OK, Pompeo.
Pompeo's speech on China is unhinged.
It's something like we used to see back in the worst days of the Cold War.
It says that we need to change China.
I mean, that's our job.
And Nixon, for all his wisdom and cleverness in opening China up to us, and the way he used that as leverage with the Russians, that was good.
But what Richard Nixon really wanted was to change China, to change the regime, to make them more like us.
And that's our mission now.
That's our mission now.
And besides, please don't forget, all communists lie.
All communists lie.
And you know what they're, all communists lie, they're really bad.
This is from the guy who says, you know, when I was at the military academy, we had this ethics code, moral honor code, you don't lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate anybody who does.
But then I became the CIA director and we lied and we cheated and we steal.
We had courses on that.
How about that for the great American experiment, period, end quote.
Is Pompeo pompously now getting up and saying, ah, look, you know, all these communists lie, they always lie.
So what's he, what's he after here?
Well, the bottom line is the mickey mat.
Now we used to call it the MIC, the military industrial complex.
Now we, that is McGovern's editorial, we, the military industrial congressional intelligence media academia think tank complex, mickey mat.
Why do I say media?
Because media is the cornerstone, it's the sine qua non, none of it would work unless you could portray China and Russia as threats to us so that we could justify the huge defense expenditures that take 60 cents now out of every dollar we contribute in our taxes.
And leave what?
Leave what for COVID-19?
Leave what?
Leave very little.
So that's the name of the game here.
They're trying to assuage the military industrial complex, mickey mat, they're all making mickey mat tears.
You know, there was proof of this.
In December, when China started becoming a great threat all of a sudden, General Dynamics was given a unprecedented $22.2 billion, billion with a B as in boy, contract to build nine or 10 submarines that will be online maybe seven years from now.
And it was all justified by what?
By the threat from China.
And that courageous captain out there, the Teddy Roosevelt, the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier out near Guam wanted to hermetically seal his crew, the ones that were starting to get COVID.
And he said, no, you can't do that.
And he said, why not?
Because of the threat from China.
Well, there is no threat from China unless we start sailing in Chinese waters.
And you know what's going to happen then?
You know what's going to happen then?
The Chinese are going to take a shot at us before very long.
And then we're going to have a two front problem because relations between Russia and China are so close now that I would not rule out the fact that there would be disturbances about Ukraine or Syria or even elsewhere in Europe, just so that the Russians and Chinese would remind the world and especially the United States, look, we're together now, far from being exploited in this triangular relationship, you're the one, you're the one that's disadvantaged now.
And if you start trouble 7,000 miles away from your own shores in the South China Sea, you know, not only do you have to worry about retaliation there, but you know, you might face a two front problem.
Be aware of that.
We're together now.
And you know, Pompeo is oblivious to all this.
Nobody's going to tell him this.
And so he prances and he, well, you know, it was a really bad performance.
I watched it.
I could hardly, well, I wrote that article.
It's worth reading, I think.
And you know, what happened was, after that happened, Richard Haass, whose distinction was running policy planning staff under Bush right before the Iraq war, so he was complicit in that, he wrote an article that was pretty not so bad for him.
And then Chess Freeman, who is a U.S. ambassador to various places, but also was Nixon's interpreter when Nixon went to Beijing in February of 2000, February 1972, he chimed in.
So we had a sort of colloquium.
And the article that emerged was something that I wrote, but I quoted Chess extensively.
And I included background from my own experience, because I was CIA's analyst referent for Sino-Soviet relations back in the 60s, mind you, and early 70s.
And I could speak of how things evolved from that very, very bitter relationship.
We thought that they would hate each other forever.
We thought, to paraphrase James Clapper, that they were almost genetically driven to hate each other forever.
Well, we were wrong.
It was just a decade later where there was a big thaw in Sino-Soviet relations.
And now, well, trade is over $100 billion, whereas back in the day, I'm talking the 60s, it was $200 million.
Big difference.
Yeah.
So Pompeo doesn't know what he's talking about.
He's playing to the audience that he thinks will get him elected president in five years.
And you know, he's- And back to Colin Powell here to wrap up too.
He was the guy who tamped everything down back when the spy plane got shot down in 2001.
Because instead of just serving the military industries, he was thinking about all the other industries, as you're talking about, who are so dependent on investment and trade, with China, and who must have peace at all costs.
And thank God for that.
Instead, you have guys like Pompeo who's like, well, I don't know.
I know some shipbuilders who like my policy, and that's good enough for him.
Well, it's against the interests of all of the rest of the American people, including all the rest of big business.
Yeah.
And it was Eisenhower himself that said, every bullet that is produced, every weapon that's made deprives the people of the United States of the basic necessities of life.
And man, we have that on steroids right now, don't we?
I mean, what more is needed to prove that our investment in this so-called offense, which is really offense, is really just a reward for people who have a lot of money and who want to invest still more money in what I call the military industrial congressional intelligence media, academia, think tank complex.
They're all in it together.
And most Americans are deceived because they listen to the media.
Yep.
You're totally right.
As George Carlin said, there's a big club.
You're not in it.
And I'm pretty sure that's what he was talking about.
We can look in the mirror in the morning, Scott, and we say, we're not in it.
No, we're definitely not.
All right.
Now, listen, I got to run because I got to interview Gareth Porter about the Hezbollah getting framed over the Argentina bombing of 1994.
So that should be fun.
Yep.
Good man, Gareth Porter.
Oh, of course.
The best of the best.
That's why he's on next after you.
Thanks very much, Ray.
Appreciate it.
Love talking to you.
I know.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Ray McGovern.
Of course, he's at ConsortiumNews.com, RayMcGovern.com, and AntiWar.com.
Look at this one.
Presumptuous Pompeo pushes preposterous Peking policy.
And then, of course, before that, Powell is the worst person in the world.
