All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio here on chaos radio, Austin and Liberty radio network.
Our next guest is Ray McGovern.
He was a CIA analyst for 27 years.
He's a co-founder and is on the steering group of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity VIPs.
And of course he writes for the heroic Robert Perry's website consortium news.
Dot com.
And he's available for hire to give a speech to people in your community.
Welcome back to the show.
Ray, how are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Doing well.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
I'm really hope I'm really glad that you're safe and sound here back from your adventure on the audacity of hope.
No less glad than I am.
Scott, I mean, seriously, I was worried about you, but, um, I guess, you know, uh, ironically in a way, I'm glad they kept you important.
You didn't get sunk by the IDF out there on the high seas.
Well, frankly, I have mixed emotions about that.
Uh, the gladness swimmer though.
Right.
Yeah, actually I do swim.
All right.
Um, but I'm thinking of those young folks that were, uh, on our fabulous group of 37 passengers.
Uh, you know, I, I looked at myself pretty carefully in those days before I decided to join the, the, uh, us cooking boat to Gaza and I figured, Hey, 71, really good years.
Uh, you know, uh, why not?
Uh, and then I looked as I get on the boat to these young folks in their twenties and thirties.
And I said, wow, now that is courage.
That is the audacity of hope.
And, uh, so for this, this thing more than mine, I'm, I'm glad that, uh, we didn't come to the tender mercies of the Israeli defense forces, but there is a certain, uh, disappointment that we were unable to, uh, to challenge that and perhaps even get through.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, now let's rewind a little bit and tell the story from the beginning for the people not familiar.
What's this flotilla about?
What were you doing there and what exactly happened to you guys?
Yeah, well, um, I think I'd like to start, uh, simply by quoting, uh, Menachem Begin, uh, the former, uh, prime minister of Israel who admitted something very, very important and very neglected.
It was in the New York times and, uh, it was 1982 and Begin had made a speech.
And in that speech, he admitted that the 1967 war that Israel started was a carefully pre-planned war of aggression.
I quote in June, 1967, we had a choice.
So they can renew quote, the Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that NASA was really about to attack us.
We must be honest with ourselves.
We decided to attack him and quote, that's a matter of record.
Okay.
So all this justification that the Israelis had to do what they did in 1967 to broaden their borders, to include Gaza, the Golan Heights, the West bank, um, that, that all is poppycock.
We have that from the Israeli prime minister.
So what's happened in the interim, fast forwarding to, uh, what happened in, uh, 2006, 2007, 2008 was that for some reason, uh, George Bush, uh, decided that he wanted to have a, uh, an election in the Palestinian territories.
And, uh, so he forced the issue and guess what?
Hamas one, uh, Hamas is called a terrorist organization by the United States and the Europeans, and there are indeed some terrorists in Hamas, but Hamas won the election because it's a bunch of terrorists in it, but because it, uh, had the reputation of setting up hospitals, uh, social service agencies in, in a word of caring for the people in the Palestinian territories, both in Gaza and the West bank.
And they won handily their main flow, having been entirely discredited by the corruption that was so evident, evident that it turned the Palestinian stomachs.
Okay.
Well, not only that, but the Israelis collect all the Palestinians, uh, toll taxes and all those things, and they withheld all that money from Arafat.
So he couldn't buy up votes from his factions that he was used to bribing and they did their bribes.
So they voted for Hamas too.
That too.
And so now this was not the result that Condoleezza Rice or, or, uh, I don't know, I don't know who, you know, when you talk to George Bush, you don't want to cross him, right?
At least the sycophants that are working for him.
And Condoleezza Rice, when Bush said, we need an election, uh, well, we have an election and Condoleezza, well, we could do it in Gaza.
Now, Rice, I don't know if she, she consulted anybody who knew something about the area, but she confessed after the election to have been appalled and shocked at the fact that, that Hamas won and make a long story short.
Uh, they did everything they could to, uh, deprive Hamas of the kind of economic, uh, help that they needed.
Uh, they even started a coup, uh, enlisting some, uh, some.
Disgusted or just, just the disgruntled types from Thicke.
Uh, it's very much in the news.
Vanity Fair had an excellent article on this.
It all has to do with training and giving weapons to a faction of Thicke, which was going to face down Hamas and eliminate it.
And guess what happened?
Hamas learned about it beforehand, preempted the move and took sole control of Gaza.
So that's the background to all this.
Then what happened?
Well, then we had the blockade.
Then we have, uh, Israeli officials openly stating that we are going to put, uh, Hamas and the Gazans on a very strict diet.
Uh, in other words, uh, we'll keep them just above the subsistence level so that no one can accuse us Israelis of, of, um, the genocide, but we're going to make it really, really tough for these Gazans.
And so the blockade comes in.
Now, who thinks that the blockade is legal?
No one, no one except Israel.
How do I know that?
Because the state department spokesperson, a woman three Fridays ago was asked that question twice face out.
She was faced up to it and she said, well, you know, uh, is it legal or illegal?
Well, I'm not an expert on the law of the sea.
Uh, you know, I'm, I won't, well, hello, you're the state department spokesman.
The issue is whether the, the Israeli blockade of Gaza is legal or not.
And the position in the United States, she pointed.
And so not even the United States government is willing to say that the blockade of Gaza is legal.
You gotta like that answer.
I don't know.
Yeah, I love, I'm not an expert on law of the sea.
Well, what do you stand in there for?
Do you have any experts in the state department on law of the sea?
Well, I'm sorry.
No, no, it's a, you know, it's really a, it's, we had Hillary Clinton, whereas we're sitting in Athens, ready to put out and to see, uh, she's accusing us of wanting to go into Israeli waters and warning us that we would suffer the consequences.
This is the United States secretary of state warning a group of American civilians who went to sail into Gaza, uh, that will be going into Israeli waters.
Well, you know, there's no question.
These are not Israeli waters.
These are Gaza waters under any and every international law interpretation.
We were selling right out of Greece into Gaza and waters from the high seas.
Now, guess what?
Um, the U S government and Israel brought such pressure to bear on the poor Greeks.
I say the poor Greeks, cause they are really hurting economically and need yet another bailout from the European.
Hold on one second before you get to the Greece.
Cause that's a very important point.
Now I want to let you finish that, but on the question of Hillary Clinton's statement about, uh, uh, you guys, I believe I could paraphrase the most important parts of it pretty accurately that, uh, she doesn't support any flotillas over there, going over there and provoking the Israelis in Israeli waters and putting them in a situation where they have to defend themselves.
And when I read that, um, I thought that that amounted to a license to kill you guys, granted from the secretary of state to the government of Israel.
Is that just, you know, my, uh, overactive imagination, right?
Did you take that the same way that she was saying that anything that they do to you guys is okay.
Permission before the fact.
Well, all 37 of us and all five of our crew and just as important, Scott, all 12 of the mainstream media that we had, and not only taking photos of us and interviewing us before we got on the boat, but having agreed to join us on the boat.
Okay.
So these are gutsy people and, you know, this mainstream New York times, a whole bunch of folks.
And I suppose we can go back to that one.
I mean, yeah, yeah.
I'm sorry.
We have to hold it right here.
It's Ray McGovern, everybody from consortium news.com.
Just back from Greece.
He was trying to sail to Gaza with humanitarian supplies.
Didn't quite work out.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and on the line is Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst turned peace activist and speech giver.
He writes for consortium news.com.
We reprint, I'm pretty sure every bit of it at original.antiwar.com/McGovern and the last two of them.
In fact, the last three of them are about this topic, uh, the Gaza flotilla, which he, uh, participated in to the degree that he got to participate.
What was the deal, right?
What was the deal, Ray?
You guys got, uh, 50 yards out of port and then they turned you around or what?
No, actually it was incredibly exhilarating.
We got 10 nautical miles out to sea.
Oh, that's pretty good.
Yeah.
We could see the open seas and, uh, uh, some of us, uh, were deluded into thinking, wow, we might actually make it.
And then the, uh, Greek coast guard boats came up and, uh, and intercepted us.
And our captain to his Greek credit, uh, held his, uh, held us for two hours as we confronted these, uh, Greek coast guard folks.
And then next came the ninja turtle cops, the, the same kinds of uniforms and accessories worn by the, um, Israeli defense forces as they rappelled down into, uh, the Mafia Marmara a short year ago, appointing their automatic weapons at us, a lot of us on the web, rather than hit the decks, we engaged in the conversations, they put down their weapons, but our captain finally realized that we're not going to get any farther.
So we headed back to port and were impounded or that is the boat was impounded at a Greek coast guard thing.
And the interesting thing, uh, Scott, when the Greeks were embarrassed, they were apologetic, they were on our side and they were holding their noses at the, uh, at the obeisance of their government to, uh, to the pressure from Israel and from the United States realizing all the while that Papandreou didn't have much, uh, uh, didn't have much leeway.
Uh, he needs another economic bailout.
And this was the price that he paid.
I don't, I don't condone it, but, uh, it's understandable, I suppose.
But nevertheless, the coast guard, the Greek coast guard guys, and the Greek, uh, the Athens police who arrested us and detained us twice, uh, in the days following, uh, were really, really embarrassed and treated us, uh, uh, one time with kids gloves, another time, not so harshly giving us water and, uh, really sort of shame, basically booking us and taking our data and all that kind of stuff.
So the Greeks themselves, you know, a lot of them don't have much, uh, much love for the state of Israel because they know what it has come to represent.
And, uh, even though the Greek president today is in, uh, Tel Aviv and, uh, uh, the Israeli president is thanking him profusely for preventing all the boats of the Fortilla from sailing.
It's going to read down to the Greek government's, uh, uh, it's going to be bad for the Greek government because the Greeks are smart enough to know, uh, what's been happening here.
And if they get through the economic crisis, which they almost surely will, there'll be a residue of shame, of shame at having to, to tuck tail and take the dictates of Israel and the United States for a country that is a seafaring nation that has always been out for the freedom of the seas and was quite willing to let us go had not the U S and Israel intervened.
And now I heard, uh, but I never did follow up.
I guess I should have Googled it myself, Ray, but, uh, wasn't it right that one of the French boats did get away and was on its way there or something?
Yeah.
They intercepted that one too.
Um, as far as I know, uh, all 10 of the boats now are, are impounded either in, uh, in Greece or in Turkey or in Crete, which part of Greece, of course.
And, uh, the order of the minister of civilian protection or whatever it's called in, in Athens has said that no, no ship or boat abound for guys that will be able to leave the Greek waters.
So what we have really in effect is that the, the 12 mile territorial limit of Israeli waters has now been extended westward to include the Aegean and, uh, the waters of Athens and Piraeus, which is quite a commentary.
Some of our more imaginative passengers created these banners.
One of which said, uh, who rules the Aegean Poseidon or Netanyahu?
So it was very, very sad, but, uh, you know, I think that over the medium term, not know so much as well, the longterm as well, but, uh, people will see this, uh, people like, uh, people, some of our passengers, Kathy Kelly, for example, many, many people know to be a strong pacifist and always, uh, we're, we're, people are being oppressed, whether it's Afghanistan or Gaza, um, for the Israelis to charge as they did, uh, that people like Kathy Kelly had in her knapsack, some sulfuric acid that she was about to put into pour on Israeli defense forces as they boarded our boats or that she and others had, had pledged to draw blood from Israeli forces.
I mean, even, even some of the Greek, uh, minister, not Greek, but the Israeli ministers were embarrassed enough to say, well, you know, this is going a little too far.
Who's, who says this?
And it turned out to be the propagandists in Netanyahu's little cabinet there.
So, uh, I think over a longer run, if, uh, what I call the fawning corporate media, uh, present company accepted, of course, uh, in this country, in the United States, um, if they play enough of the footage of what happened to us and see how our, how our own leaders, you know, before I left, uh, I was aware that I wasn't able to count much on any support from my old friends in, in intelligence or in the white house or the national security council.
But I was really, uh, I was amazed when I heard from a very good source who had a close relationship with a very senior member of the national security council.
They said, you know, that, uh, not only, not only should you expect no protection from the United States, uh, but that white house officials, and this is a quote, quote, would be happy if something happened to us in quote, uh, they were, I was reliably told quote, perfectly willing to have cold corpses of activists shown on American TV period and quote.
Now I thought that pretty extreme, but I know the sources here.
And so I put it in this article, Craig Murray, the UK ambassador, one time ambassador, who was Becky Stein, who was a very strong justice person and a good friend of mine saw what I wrote.
And he wrote a little blog and he said, you know, I know McGovern and generally he's pretty, well, generally he's very reliable, but this seemed to be off the charts.
And so I checked with my own sources in the foreign office, who in turn have very good contacts with the state department, not the NSC, not the white house this time, but senior officials at the state department.
And they confirmed in almost as many words, what McGovern had been told by his source.
It really, it really is quite amazing.
And, uh, and commenting on this, you know, I couldn't, I couldn't resist, uh, especially on the 4th of July, looking back at, at the people that founded our country, I couldn't resist remembering what George Washington himself warned in his farewell address.
And I'll just read a sentence or two, cause I have it in these notes, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.
Sympathy for the favorite nation facilitates, facilitates the illusion of an imaginary, imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists.
It infuses into one, the enmities of the other and betrays the former into participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.
It also gives to ambitious corrupted or deluded citizens who devote themselves to the favorite nation facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country.
George Washington, 215 years ago, he of course was thinking about France at the time.
Uh, we're thinking now about Israel and the sooner our country faces up to this and realizes that what even the divine portrayal has, has acknowledged, and that is our close identification with Israel and its policies and its oppression of the Palestinians is not only a threat to our national security, it has been, it has accounted for innumerable deaths of our own soldiers because this is why they hate us.
It's not that they hate our democracy or our freedoms.
They hate our policies and they hate our very close identification with the policies of Israel.
Yeah.
You know, George Washington, he could have been, uh, you know, a time traveler something, uh, that statement couldn't be more apt when it comes to America's relationship with Israel and, you know, turning a blind eye to the murders a year ago on the Mavi Mamara and refute, you know, Hillary Clinton refusing to say a thing about it.
Obama refusing to say a thing about it or do anything about it.
That's one thing.
But, uh, to give carte blanche, to give a license to kill like this, and then to even, uh, you know, let you know that they actually would be happy if something bad happened to you guys.
Um, that is the white house is saying, what does that mean?
Dennis Ross.
Did you ask who said that or what they were exactly?
They were talking about.
Yeah.
I think I know the guy who said it.
It wasn't Ross, but, uh, you know, we have very high senior counterterrorism officials and, you know, Kathy Kelly and I were both real terrorists there.
I shouldn't ask a question when the music's already playing.
We'll be right back.
It's Ray McGovern, everybody.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, now peace activist, rights for consortium, news.com.
And, uh, we republish all of it at anti-war.com that's original dot anti-war.com/McGovern.
And, um, where we left off, uh, before the break, we were talking about how, uh, Ray, you were saying that, uh, you were told, well, here's how it reads in the article before leaving the United States.
I was cautioned by a source with access to very senior staffers at the national security council that not only does the white house plan to do absolutely nothing to protect our boat from Israeli attack or illegal boarding, but that white house, white house officials quote, would be happy if something happened to us.
They are, I am reliably told perfectly willing to have the cold corpses of activists shown on American TV.
And then, and quote, and then Ray, you say you went and talked to another source at the state department who agreed that this is the consensus at the white house is let the Israelis do what they like to American and, and other humanitarian peace activists from all over the world on their way, trying to deliver humanitarian aid to the civilians of the Gaza strip.
That's right, Scott.
With one exception, I didn't have any real sources at high levels in the state department, but a friend of mine, a former UK ambassador, Craig Murray did.
And through his own foreign office sources, he checked on me.
He told me he found a little extreme Ray.
Have you gone off the deep end here?
Did they, they really say that it is kind of hard to believe in it.
Anyhow, he, uh, he checked with his own sources, uh, uh, whom I know and they're very senior, uh, foreign office folks at the UN and Washington.
And, uh, he wrote, uh, in his own blog, Craig did that, uh, that's what they said as well, it was almost exactly in the same words.
And so this shows, you know, that the, not only is Hillary Clinton quite contempt to see me beaten up, right?
12, 12 yards in front of her.
Uh, but, uh, because of, uh, it's really sensitivity.
She's quite willing to have worse happened to me and to my fellow lady.
Can you, you know, she, I understand she bakes good chocolate cakes.
So, uh, you know, uh, my grandma always said that if he can't say something good about somebody, uh, that don't say anything.
So I have to add that she does, uh, reportedly bake good chocolate cakes.
Yeah.
Well, I would be surprised if that doesn't just mean that, that her taxpayer funded chef makes good chocolate cake.
Well, it has to try to keep some semblance of humor and all this stuff because it's, it's pretty grim when you come right down to it.
But I see justice moving here.
I really do.
I see a new sensitivity to what's really going on.
And you know, if you take five steps back, Scott, you have to look at Israel as feeling itself in a very, very, uh, a much worse strategic situation this year than this time last.
Look what's happened because of the attack on the Mavi Marmara killing nine passengers, including one us citizen, as well as the Turkish citizens, uh, their relationship with Turkey, which used to be very, very close has deteriorated.
And that's one reason, incidentally, why they've cultivated contacts with Greece to counterbalance that, to have some sort of friend in the Aegean.
More important, of course, is that 70 million count them 70 million people to their Southern border in a place called Egypt.
Uh, they no longer can count on a co-opted fellow named Mubarak to do their bidding, to act as their sort of, uh, uh, sort of, uh, you know, subordinate.
In other words, uh, Mubarak was paid off by the United States given half as much as Israel was given every year.
And that amounts to 3 billion for Israel.
And if my math is right, 1.5 billion for Mubarak, he's gone.
And guess what?
Those 70 million people in Israel care about the Palestinians.
One of the first things they did was try to open at least their side of the border, the land border, the passenger border and Rafa.
So here's Israel looking out of the world and the same, wow.
Uh, Turkey has gone as an ally.
The same with Mubarak and on the anniversary of the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their own Palestine to make way for the Israeli state in 1948.
Guess what happened?
All kinds of Palestinians congregated on the borders of Israel from Syria, from, from Lebanon and other places, even from Egypt.
And some of them got across peacefully, you know, not shooting their way across.
Some of them did get shot.
But, you know, this is a real, real threat to Israel.
And instead, instead of coming to their senses and saying, look, uh, the only way we're going to survive over the medium, much less the longterm is by making the kinds of concessions that will permit some sort of equitable situation instead of them saying, wow, how are we going to, how are we going to deal with this new threat, which is a nonviolent protest of, of great proportions, not only from our borders, but from our, from the Southern border of Egypt, instead of doing all that, what are they doing?
They're striking out, getting people like Hillary Clinton to disavow her own citizens, uh, let's say threatened, threatened, uh, threatened, uh, Gaza, you know, with, with letters from constituents.
That's another thing.
We, we were afraid to bring band-aids or packages or anything.
You know why?
Because there's a law that could have put us in jail.
You know what the law is?
It has to do with giving material assistance to terrorism and Hamas is classified as a terrorist organization.
And so we were reluctant on the face of it to bring anything other than letters of support.
And we had thousands of them.
Now, uh, I come from a long tradition of letter carriers.
My Irish grandfathers were both letter carriers.
And so I felt, you know, Hey, this is not only consistent with my feelings about justice, uh, consistent with my feeling about, uh, about biblical justice, where I, you know, I think my theology is all about who God is and how God feels when little people get kicked around.
I think that's the whole thing for me.
Uh, it's also consistent with my Irish heritage, where my forebears who left Ireland after the potato famine and where they were cooped up, just like the cousins came in and they became letter carriers.
And so to be a letter carrier felt really, really good.
Felt consistent with my heritage.
That's cool, man.
Got a chance to honor your ancestors while you were at it over there.
Well, now here's the thing about this is, you know, you say that the change, and this is the change that we need, right.
Is even just the change in the narrative and how easy it is to convince people that the poor Israelis are occupied all these years by those evil Palestinians who just won't leave them alone and whatever.
And, you know, I wonder how much that's really beginning to change.
Um, it seems like efforts like this are really, you know, it's not anywhere in the world where people have it confused other than the United States, where it really counts, you know, and maybe in Israel.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the reason I think that, uh, there is a ample cause for optimism is because before we got on that boat and, you know, we had solicited, uh, all kinds of help from mainstream media outlets and the incredibly gifted people, mostly in New York, but in California as well, um, mostly, uh, people of Jewish extraction from New York, people who feel really strongly, uh, about justice for everyone, not just Jewish people, people that I grew up with in the Bronx for 22 years, I was just so comfortable in their presence and so edified by their, uh, by their intelligence and where they're willing to, to, to make this thing work.
Now we got, so by virtue of their, uh, by their flexibility and their, their context, they got two reporters from the New York times, two reporters from Reuters, two from CBS, Al Jazeera, uh, said Reuters already, uh, democracy now, and a couple others on our boat.
Now, this doesn't mean taking pictures of us.
It means this means facing the same vicissitudes, the same dangers that Hillary Clinton and others warned us about at the hands of the Israeli defense forces.
We sail forth with these folks.
That's why there's such good video.
We had upstream right there.
Right.
Like in 2008, they had a CNN reporter who was on the boat with them.
And yeah, so this was what these roads had done.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this, this is going to help because the New York times guy did a really good report, but that's not the end of the story.
Right.
Well, we'll have to continue in next time.
Thanks Ray.
Most welcome.
It's Ray McGovern, everybody.
Consortium news.com original.antiwar.com/McGovern.
