For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
And this is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm honored to welcome back to the show, Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and current Crusader against the American Warfare State.
Welcome back, Ray.
When you retired, who you used to work for and what you knew and what you did and that sort of thing.
Sure.
I came on with the CIA after I did my two years of military service as an intelligence and infantry officer.
And that was during John Kennedy's presidency.
I worked there all the way up through the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush.
Initially, I was a Soviet specialist, but my responsibilities grew.
And toward the end of my career, I was doing the daily briefings of the president's daily brief one on one every other morning with the vice president, the secretary of state defense and two other folks.
I also had the privilege of chairing national intelligence estimates.
I mentioned both of those duties because they were very responsible positions.
And they are very much in the news these days with the intelligence estimates on Iraq and so forth.
And the president daily briefings, which were the way that the president communicates with his intelligence folks.
And it's the way that George Tenet did or did not tell him things.
And now when you say you briefed the vice president every other day, that was Vice President George H.W. Bush in the 1980s.
That's right.
These national intelligence estimates, let me understand this.
If I get it right, I think that the NIEs are not just by the CIA, but they're from the National Intelligence Council, which is representatives of all the different intelligence agencies have to agree and write the NIE altogether.
You chaired that.
Is that correct?
That's correct.
I used to chair those.
You're right in describing it that way.
It is the most authoritative communication between the director of central intelligence in those days, now, of course, is the director of national intelligence and the president.
The it's so formal that the director has to sign the front cover.
And that, of course, is the experience of less of the October 2002 national intelligence estimate, which was the primary vehicle for cooking the books and deceiving our our members of Congress and then the Senate out of their constitutional prerogative to declare or otherwise authorize war.
Now, you didn't share that one, right?
No, I didn't share that one.
I was long gone.
But just watching that all happen was very painful for those of us who know how the system is supposed to work and who know that the real name of the game is speaking truth to power.
Watching our former colleagues be done into submission by Vice President Cheney, who, in a typically preemptive mode, preempted the whole intelligence setup by making a major announcement.
By making a major speech on the 26th of August.
That was the first major pronouncement saying that Saddam Hussein was very close to a nuclear weapon, that he had all manner of chemical and biological weapons.
And that, by the way, folks, UN inspections aren't worth a darn.
So don't go down that road.
That will just give you a false sense of security.
So that laid out the policy.
Interestingly enough, we know from George Tenet's book and from other people infessing up that that speech was not shared with anyone, not the intelligence community, not anyone.
Vice President did it while everyone was on vacation, 26th of August.
So when they came back after Labor Day in 2002, the immediate problem was, well, okay, we've decided on this war.
How do we get Congress to approve it?
And the obvious solution was to write an estimate, which said untrue things, deliberately said untrue things about the presence of weapons of mass destruction, about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and all manner of other things that, in retrospect, are showing up.
And in retrospect, are shown to be not only wrong, but ludicrous on their face.
Now, they say that Cheney is the leader of a cabal, the Cheney cabal.
That's what they called it in the Financial Times.
I guess that was Colin Powell's aide Larry Wilkerson called it that.
And I believe you told me before a couple of years back that this group that makes up the Cheney cabal now with Vice President Dick is a group of people that when you were in the CIA back in the 1980s, and maybe even in the early 1990s, that George Bush and Brent Scowcroft and those guys called these cabal members the crazies, and they were to be kept in the basement.
Well, you're right, except the basement isn't quite right, Scott.
What we had were the likes of Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, who were the ones referred to as, quote, the crazies, end quote.
And I can tell you from my experience that this was not only at lower levels like analysts, but at the very highest levels of government.
What Baker and Scowcroft told President George H.W. Bush was simply this.
You've got some real loonies.
We call them the crazies.
They're at fairly senior positions in the Defense Department, but they can't really make the policy and they can't really get us into real trouble where they are.
So, number one, you can't get rid of them because the right wing of our party would go AP on the Hershey Highway.
They'd really get to be in a high dudgeon.
So you can't get rid of them.
You've got to let them stay around.
But for Pete's sake, don't let them into any position where they're making policy and can get this country into serious trouble.
Now, that's the 1980s.
Fast forward to 2001.
In comes George W. Bush, and who does he bring in with him but the crazies.
And those of us who were around earlier who were aghast, not only are they back, but now they're making the policy and we've seen the result.
And we see some of them still around.
Elliott Abrams is running the Middle East policy out of the White House.
He was certainly one of the crazies.
And not only that, an indicted felon who was pardoned by the first George W. Bush.
So, yeah, you've got quite a crew back in town here running our policy.
And if further proof were needed, just look at the results of this crazy policy.
Well, you know, there's been so much talk over the last few years about the neocons are down, but they may not be out.
Oh, here they come back again.
Oh, no, they're down again.
Rice is in charge.
And now, I guess I'm certain you've seen it's making the rounds.
The Washington note, Steve Clemons is reporting, I guess beginning last night or yesterday afternoon, that basically the Cheney cabal is sort of publicly, in a way, going around D.C. making it clear that Cheney has decided that Bush is not up to deciding American policy toward Iran and that if he has to, he'll get Israel to start the war and force Bush to have a war with Iran.
I have seen that report.
Steve Clemons is nobody's fool and he has this from several sources.
The comment in one of the reports I saw was that Cheney is being insubordinate.
But if you look at the real relationship of power in this government, and this question about who is the subordinate, whether it's Cheney or Bush, matters like these, I see Cheney is running them.
So it's hardly not only kind, but it's hardly appropriate to call him insubordinate when indeed he is running the policy.
Well, but what about George W. Bush, though?
Doesn't he believe to himself that he's the man in the chair and that if he says we do it Rice's way, that that's the way it's supposed to be?
Well, my notion of George W. Bush is that by now he realizes that when he is in a position of responsibility, he makes a mess of things.
It's a consistent theme throughout his adult life.
And he's relied on this kind Uncle Cheney to make his decisions for him.
And this is the fly in the ointment.
I described this recently as the mother of all caveats.
And what do I mean by that?
I mean this.
Despite all the signs that more sensible people are coming forward, like Admiral Fallon, who is reliably reported to have said, no war on Iran on my watch, like the Jewish leaders in New York City who are against what AIPAC and others are pounding the drums for, they see a real danger of blowback.
If we get involved in a war with Iran, young men and women from the United States are getting killed for what?
Why with Iran?
Well, Iran poses no problem to us, no threat to the United States.
To whom does Iran pose a fugitive threat?
Well, the answer is clear.
And the Jewish leaders in this country are finally waking up and saying, you know, not only is it not to their advantage, it is not to the advantage of the Israeli people or the American people to start another war that we cannot frankly win.
So that's another factor.
And then, of course, the Condoleezza Rice, you know, when it was decided to reverse policy and start talking to Iranians, this is a major change.
I mean, everything up until then was we don't talk to these bad guys because that's given them some sort of reward.
Bizarre, but that was the policy.
Well, Cheney goes off to Australia, and guess what?
We know that the way to influence this president is to be the last one to brief him orally on any given day.
And my notion, I don't have any proof of this, but my imagination says the Condoleezza Rice called up Henry Kissinger and said, Henry, can you come down?
And Henry told the president, Mr. President, it's not really possible to avoid talking to Iran.
Even the people in Congress say we need to do it, so let's do it.
And, you know, it being late in the day to push this sounds good to me.
And so what we have is talks with Iran.
Now, Cheney comes back.
Before he comes back, he gets that very bellicose speech from the aircraft carrier surrounded by fighter bombers.
And then now he's back, and he's sending his minions around saying, you know, we've got to find out some way to save the president on this.
And, you know, Iran is a terrible threat, so maybe we ought to have the Israelis sit to a provocation and get this warrant away.
So all bets are off, and all those three indicators, the three I mentioned, are still in place, but Cheney can upset this apple cart very easily.
And if he orders or has the president order Admiral Fallon and whomever else to take off after Iran and bomb them and cruise missile them and so forth, a lot of shock and awe.
Despite their misgivings, my reading is they will do what they're told, they always do, they will always salute, and we will be in a world war before the year is out.
Now, I don't expect that that's going to happen in the next couple of months, particularly when we're talking to Iran.
It's a little awkward even for this crowd to start bombing a country with whom we're in negotiation.
But, as I say, if Cheney gets to the president and has to sign a weird hold on him, not only Cheney, but the Israeli leaders, witness the fact that the same General Scowcroft, whom we referred before, who in this administration was chair of the president's foreign intelligence advisory board, this Scowcroft had the temerity to say, while he was in that position, that Ariel Sharon has our president mesmerized.
Ariel Sharon has our president wrapped around his little finger.
Scowcroft sought out the Financial Times to tell them that.
Scowcroft, the super discrete functionary who knows darn well what that kind of report will do.
So, why did he say that?
He wanted us to know.
It's a very important thing.
He wanted us to know the inordinate influence that, at that point, Ariel Sharon put the other right wing.
Now, I'm not talking about all the Israelis.
I'm talking about the right wing Israeli government, now with an approval rating of something like 3%.
What kind of a hold that has over our president?
Because it's extremely relevant and extremely noxious.
If you put that together with Vice President Cheney, you've got a situation where Cheney, on the very day of the inauguration in 2005, he's interviewed by Imus in the morning.
And Imus says, about this business of war with Iran, people are suspecting that maybe the Israelis will start it off the way they did bombing Iraq back in 1981.
You know what Cheney says?
He says, yeah, yeah, they might do that.
And they'd be leaving us to pick up the pieces.
What kind of reaction is that?
I mean, it was almost as though he's saying, well, yeah, sure, the Israelis might do it.
And we wouldn't dissuade them or even try to persuade them against it.
And, you know, that's two years ago now.
So this has been percolating a long time.
My colleagues and I and veteran intelligence professionals for sanity do believe that there's an equal chance, a 50-50 chance, that before this president leaves office, that Cheney will persuade him to take care of Iran, so to speak, and get us into a major, major war.
We have our doubts as to whether any of that's going to happen in the next couple of months, because we see these other dynamics in place, the opposition of our uniformed military, especially Admiral Fallon, the Jewish leaders in this country counteracting some of the influence from AIPAC, and the fact that we are negotiating with the Iranians now.
Now, when you say that this could lead to a world war, are you talking about spreading it to Russia and China and that kind of thing, or are you talking about just America will own all the real estate between Israel and India, and that's bad enough?
Yeah.
Well, that's not possible, Scott, in my view.
You see, the Chinese have longstanding agreements with the Iranians for lots and lots of oil.
That's the name of the game, you know?
The most important factoid of this 21st century is that the world is running out of oil, okay?
Well, but James Baker and Brent Scowcroft are against this policy.
Zbigniew Brzezinski is against this policy.
Why is it just Cheney and the Israel lobby?
Well, you know, Cheney has sort of evolved since the first Gulf War.
I remember him saying in Seattle in September of 1992, someone said to him, well, Mr. Cheney, why didn't you go finish the job?
I mean, why didn't you get Saddam and pursue him?
And you know what he said?
He said, you know, we talked a lot about that, but we asked ourselves, this was a very fortunate war.
We only lost 138 or whatever it was.
And sure, that's bad for those 138 families, but the fact that there weren't more was really a good thing.
And we asked ourselves, you know, how many American servicemen's lives is it worth to get Saddam Hussein?
And the answer came through loud and clear, not very many.
Okay, now that's September 1992.
In 1998, as CEO of Halliburton, which has a lot to do with oil, he makes another speech, Cheney does, and he complains.
Because people are denigrating us for not finding new sources of oil.
And the problem is that the actual prize, that was the word he used, the prize lies in the Middle East.
And the problem there is that most of that oil is controlled by governments that are not friendly to us and won't do what we want.
In 1998, two years later, he's the Vice President, and the first thing he does is set up an energy task force composed mostly of oil people, and they carve up, they get out the maps of Iraq, carve up the districts for the various oil companies, and they were off and running.
They thought they could get away with it because Iraq had no real armed force that could withstand ours.
So we would be, as Cheney said, welcomed as liberators, and we'd be sitting on top of all that oil, which builds permanent military bases, would make, not incidentally, that part of the world safer for Israel.
And then who's going to come behind and say, you know, yeah, but you did it on the basis of forgeries and half-truths and a bunch of lies.
Nobody's going to be in that position.
We'll be sitting pretty, and everything's going to turn out all right.
That was their calculation.
So you'd say this is basically James Baker's policy, only devoid of reason as practiced by Dick Cheney then?
Well, I'm not sure what you mean by James Baker's policy.
Well, he's the lawyer for every oil company in the world.
Yeah, you know, that's okay, in a sense.
I mean, even represents Halliburton.
Baker Botts represents Halliburton.
It represents the Saudis.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that's the real world.
But the difference here is that this president decided that it was okay to start a war of aggression to gain control over those oil resources.
And, you know, James Baker can do all the lawyering he wants, but I don't think you can really accurately describe him as a war criminal, as I would accurately describe George W. Bush, and demonstrably so.
Yeah, I guess I just can't figure out why Dick Cheney is not just going along, and basically why he doesn't have the same opinion as the rest of the establishment, which is, you did a great Henry Kissinger imitation, we gotta talk to Iran.
Well, I think part of it is the hold that Israel has not only on the president, but on the vice president.
His affection for preemptive strikes, most people don't realize this, but when Israel went after Osirak in 1981, the little nuclear facility that Iraq was building, when the Israelis went and destroyed that with their fighter bombers, the UN voted unanimously, the Security Council did, to condemn the Israeli act.
Now, that was one of the few times where the United States joined the majority, and as I say, it was unanimous.
Why was it unanimous?
Well, because in those days we were carrying favor with Iraq, okay?
Now, were we honest about that?
Hell no, we weren't.
How do you think those Israeli planes got to where they did and back out unscathed?
They had lots of help, folks, they had lots of help, but the first major statesman or public figure in the United States who openly said that that was a great idea was Dick Cheney in that speech that I mentioned before, August 26, 2002, where he spoke approvingly for the first time, approvingly, openly, about the Israeli strike on Osirak.
Not only that, but while Cheney was Defense Minister here, Secretary of Defense, he got an aerial photo of the destroyed facility of Osirak in Iraq, and he put his little signature on the bottom and wrote a little note to the Chief of the Israeli Air Force, who was responsible for that destruction, saying, good job on the Iraqi nuclear program, signed Dick Cheney.
And it's there with the Israelis now, and Cheney, in his own office, unless he's changed it, had a big prominent aerial photograph of the destroyed Iraqi nuclear reactor.
Now, part of the myth of Cheney's paranoia, I believe, is that after the end of the Gulf War, when the inspectors first hit the ground in Iraq, that they discovered that Saddam had, after Osirak, rebuilt his nuclear weapons program, and although he wasn't really close to getting a nuclear weapon, he was actually much further along than they thought, and that's when Cheney decided that he could never trust the CIA, that if the neocon told him Iraq had more weapons than the CIA did, that he would always believe the neocon over the CIA from here on out.
Yeah, that was probably the birth of the Cheney dictum, that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and I misquoted to Cheney, that's Rumsfeld, you know, Rumsfeld's famous thing.
Same difference.
If you don't have any evidence, that doesn't mean anything, that just means that they're hiding it.
And, you know, one of the greatest lines in Tennant's book, and I'm just going through it again more closely, is he says, after all this business about lack of finding or inability to find weapons of mass destruction, he says, with the benefit of hindsight, we should have stopped and asked ourselves, maybe the reason we can't find anything is because it's not there, end quote.
Can you believe it?
Yeah, as though Scott Ritter wasn't saying that all along in the run-up to the war.
Many of us were, but for him to say, well, you know, that would have been an insight that we should add, well, hello.
Yeah, the director of central intelligence, this guy.
Oh, man.
Okay, well, let me spend the last ten minutes of this interview with you, Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst who used to brief Vice President George Bush every morning in the 1980s.
By asking you all about terrorism, I'm sure that you know about the controversy surrounding the argument that Dr. Ron Paul and America's mayor, Rudy Giuliani, got into at the second Republican debate when Ron Paul said that September 11th represented blowback, that American foreign policy was a contributing factor to the attacks of September 11th.
Rudy Giuliani said that was absurd.
He'd never heard such an absurd thing before and demanded Paul retract, and Paul refused.
This caused all kinds of controversy.
Apparently TV wanted to give the debate to Giuliani just because of the way he trounced Ron Paul, but it seems like the more information we get in the weeks after, everybody's agreeing with Ron Paul, except for Giuliani himself.
So you're a former CIA analyst, and you've been paying attention to Middle East policy for a long, long time.
Tell me, Ray, why do they hate us?
Well, that is the $64 question, and I'm happy to address it.
I'm really edified by Ron Paul stepping up and saying what he believes to be the case.
If you believe that they hate us for our democracy or for our freedoms, well, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn that I'd really like to sell you at a cut rate, you know.
I'll get my checkbook.
They hate us for our policies, and that's what Ron Paul was saying.
Now, does that mean that you're a partisan of the terrorists and you're excusing their behavior and America deserved it?
That means that we should pay no attention at all to Rudy Giuliani, who is simply a demagogue and who has ties with the netherworld and tried to foist on us a criminal as head of the Department of Homeland Security.
The guy is, well, he showed his true colors there as a demagogue, and what bothered me most was the appreciation that was shown by his audience, that and for the concept of torture.
But in a word, we're addressing the symptoms of terrorism here, and what I'm fond of doing is drawing an analogy.
You defeat terrorism the same way you defeat malaria.
Now, as is well known, with malaria you find the mosquitoes, you track them back to where they breed, where they multiply, and you find the swamp.
And, of course, what you do is you station a platoon of sharpshooters around the swamp and then you try to shoot the mosquitoes, and each of them got about 100 k to shoot the mosquitoes as they leave the swamp.
That's not the way you defeat malaria.
You drain the swamp.
Now, with terrorism, you find out where these terrorists are breeding.
The swamp of grievances, long-standing grievances, you drain back decades, three generations of people, living in the equivalent of concentration camps in the West Bank and Gaza, dictatorial regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and other places.
You look at those grievances, and instead of trying to shoot the terrorists as they leave that swamp, you drain that swamp by addressing those grievances and giving these people some reason to hope for a better future.
When Don Rumsfeld used to sort of wring his hands at the Pentagon press briefing, he'd say, I don't know.
I just can't understand why anybody would strap some Plastique around his belt and blow himself up just to kill others.
I don't understand that.
Well, all he needs to do is look at Al Jazeera just one night, just one night, and what will he see?
He will see U.S.
-built tanks, U.S.
-built helicopter gunships, U.S.
-built bulldozers wreaking havoc in the West Bank and in Gaza.
That gets around, and there are 1.3 billion, I repeat, billion Muslims in the world.
They don't like it, and that's one reason why it's so easy to recruit them to go against our young people in Iraq.
So the way you defeat terrorism is you go at the basic needs that these terrorists have unredressed.
You realize that only a very desperate person will strap that Plastique on his belt.
And it reminds me of 1968 here in the city of Washington when there was bedlam after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, okay?
And one young little 11-year-old African-American boy had this big rock in his hand, and Marian Wright Edelman, now head of the Children's Defense League, was down there trying to tamp down the violence.
She grabbed his arm and she said, Son, don't throw that rock through that window.
And he looked at her and he says, Why not?
And she said, Well, think of your future.
He looked at her and he said, Ma'am, I ain't got no future.
I didn't want that rock through that window.
When you ain't got no future, that's the kind of thing you do.
There's a book called Perfect Soldiers by Terry McDermott, a reporter for the L.A.
Times, and basically it's a biography of the ringleaders of the 9-11 plot, not the 15 muscle from Saudi Arabia, but the guys who were known as the Hamburg Cell, basically, Ramzi Ben Alshid, Mohammed Atta, and their guys.
And according to Terry McDermott, they would sit around in their apartment after mosque or what have you in the afternoon, and all they would talk about is, Did you hear what Israel did today?
Man, some Americans have to die for that.
Well, you know, Osama bin Laden, this is one of the things that Ron Paul was saying, read their statements, read Osama bin Laden.
There will be no peace in the Middle East until the Palestinians are given their due.
Now, people come back and say, Now, Ray, for God's sake, Osama bin Laden doesn't give a darn about the Palestinians.
Well, that doesn't matter whether he does or he doesn't.
He knows the resonance that that kind of appeal has.
And, you know, one of the other things that I cite on occasion is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, okay?
Now, picture yourself as one of the young people drafting this 9-11 report from the commission, you know, and in the midst of your drafting, you've already identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind behind 9-11.
He was the guy that got the idea.
He was the guy that sold it to Osama bin Laden and implemented it, okay?
And you read in Washington, Hey, we captured him.
We got him.
I got an idea.
Yeah, yeah, let's go ask him why he did it.
Well, that idea got approved and they asked him.
And what did he say?
Well, everyone knows what he says, right?
No one knows what he said because it's buried, one sentence on page 149, no, I'm sorry, 147 of that 9-11 commission cover up.
And what does it say?
Well, it's curious because Khalid Sheikh Mohammed spent some time at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro and so the initials thought among the young analysts there was, you know, maybe he had a bad love affair there or he flunked out or maybe people were mean to him in Greensboro.
So the sentence reads this way, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was motivated not by any antipathy resulting from his stay in the United States but by his profound hatred for US policy toward Israel favoring Israel one-sidedly.
That's the sentence.
Now, you go down to the bottom of the paragraph, you just get a little footnote and you go to the back of the book and you put on your really strong glasses and the footnote says, these are practically the exact words of what Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew, used in bragging about his pride in being condemned to 140 years in federal penitentiary for trying to knock down one of the twin towers back in 1993.
Well, that didn't help much so I googled Ramzi Yousef and sure enough that's exactly what he said.
I am proud because of my intense hatred for the effects on my Palestinian brothers and sisters of Israeli policies.
I am proud to be condemned to 140 years in federal penitentiary.
That's the depth of the hatred there.
It never finds its way into the media and actually, Lee Hamilton, one of the chairs of this commission, was asked why just that one sentence was in there and why when you finally get back to addressing the causes for terrorism, the sentence, I remember the sentence, it reads, U.S. policy has some effect on the terrorists and if the effects of U.S. policy toward Israel and toward totalitarian governments in Arab states plays a key role in, you could complete that sentence, but the way the sentence is completed is in becoming a staple of Arab propaganda against the United States.
Well, Lee Hamilton was asked about that sentence.
Why didn't you just say our policy toward Israel is a major factor in the growth of terrorism?
He said, well, we had a knock down and drag out fight on the other.
A lot of people didn't want to mention Israel and so we did mention Israel, but we finally agreed on a compromise in that sentence.
So the bottom line for me is that this issue needs to be addressed.
It needs to be addressed frontally.
Ron Paul got near it and he made the main points because Israel is just one facet of this, although a major facet, but even Ron Paul didn't explicitly mention Israel and I suppose you have to be like me, not running for anything.
Having some experience, it gives me the confidence to say these things and also not needing any money.
So I can say these things like we used to do in the CIA, telling it like we think it is.
Well, and Ron Paul is an honest guy, but was under a lot of pressure and a very short time limit there.
He's discussed our policy towards Israel being a contributing factor in this thing in the past and certainly he will, I'm sure, in the campaign.
But I just wanted to add a little bit to what you say there about Ramsey Youssef, the President of the United States on Wednesday.
And I guess again, or no, it was yesterday.
I'm sorry, there's two different speeches.
It was yesterday.
George Bush gave his own attempt at rebutting Ron Paul.
It wasn't part of the question, but he said, well, this concept about maybe if we just leave him alone, they'll be all right is naive.
These people attacked us before we were in Iraq.
They viciously attacked us before we were in Iraq and they've been attacking us ever since.
They threatened the reporter who had asked him the questions, the lives of that reporter's children.
But a reader at antiwar.com, I posted this up on the blog, a reader sent me this quote from Ramsey Youssef from his trial.
Of course, we all know that America began occupying Saudi Arabia and began killing Iraqis with high velocity explosives and began occupying in 1990 and began killing them in 1991 and kept doing so ever since then.
But this is the quote that he sent me from Ramsey Youssef's sentencing.
Now you have invented new ways to kill innocent people.
You have so-called economic embargo, which kills nobody other than children and elderly people and which other than Iraq you've been placing the economic embargo on Cuba and other countries for over 35 years.
So Ramsey Youssef, as you say, the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the guy who, with Abdul-Hakim Arad, originally came up with the airplane's attack plan, the man who bombed the World Trade Center the first time in 1993, there he is saying outright the exact reason enforcing the blockade against Iraq.
A new way to kill people that America had invented, he said.
Well, you know, over a half million young children did die because of the sanctions.
And this is what Madeleine Albright, then Secretary of State, famously said, well, it was worth it.
Well, you know, when you have the fact and then you have comments like that, Al Jazeera doesn't need to do anything other than to report the facts and the comments, and it enrages people.
Now, one of the factoids here is that Iraq has incredibly porous borders, and as long as that's the case, and it will always be the case since there's so long, many of these 1.3 billion Muslims are going to find it their patriotic duty to go help get rid of U.S. forces and the U.S. occupation in Iraq.
And so to watch more money being voted to allow the president, just so that he can obviate the possibility of having the definitive defeat in Iraq during his watch.
See, the whole name of the game here is give me 19 months.
That's why it's urgent.
And how cynical that is and how cowardly, how utterly cowardly it was on the part of the Democrats, many of whom were voted to oppose this war.
They did allow 2,000 extra U.S. young men and women to be killed between now and the next election because they're afraid that somebody might call them soft on defense.
Give me a break.
That was a very, very sad day for the United States of America.
Well, what are we supposed to do now?
The American people, we sent the Democrats, well, I didn't send the Democrats, the people sent the Democrats to Congress, kicked the Republicans out to end this war, and now Pelosi and Reid, as you say, have completely capitulated to the president.
Now what are we supposed to do?
Wait till September to find out if the surge is working?
Well, you know what my view is?
It's the same as the last written words of Molly Ivins.
That's two sentences.
Let me read them.
We are the people that run this country.
We are the deciders.
And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.
Raise hell.
Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous.
Make our troops know we're for them and are trying to get them out of there.
Hit the streets to protest Bush's accelerated surge.
We need people in the streets banging pots and pans and demanding, stop it now.
That's my view.
And I've been out in the streets, and we're going to do a lot of street stuff in the next couple of months.
We need to show these weak-kneed Democrats as well as the others that we will not stand for more and more of our children being killed just so the Cheney and Bush can leave office without not having, quote, lost the war, end quote.
The war is lost.
It's been lost for three years.
Well, the Democrats have the votes to end the war right now, don't they?
All they have to do is say, Mr. President, spend the money you have, withdraw the troops.
We're done with this.
But they won't do it.
Now, you know, I feel the same way, Scott.
But I also have a great deal of respect for people like Dave Obie, who really was largely responsible for getting us out of Vietnam.
And so I temper my anger with the experience I've had in watching him operate.
And I think we need to be aware that when the votes aren't there and we're frustrated because they're not there, well, he's equally frustrated, but he's got to work to try to get them there next time around, and there will be other opportunities now with other bills coming up.
And, of course, September will be an interesting denouement to this whole thing, I hope.
So I'm disappointed, but I give people like Dave Obie, who managed this thing and ended up voting against it, by the way, and speaking out very clearly against it, I have to give them the edge because I don't understand how Congress works and the degree they do.
Okay.
Well, I don't know David Obie, and he doesn't seem like a very likable guy to me, but if you know history of him that balances your opinion, then that's acceptable.
Well, he's not a likable guy.
He's a feisty guy.
But let me just give you one little instance.
Well, I like feisty if I think he's on my side.
Well, during the Ron Contras, Obie was chair of the committee that had to do with the Export-Import Act, which was violated by the shenanigans by the likes of Elliott Abrams.
And toward the end of it, after about three years of this stuff, George Shultz, the secretary of state, was brought up before Obie's subcommittee.
And he made the mistake of saying, Obie, now, Mr. Obie, I think the country is kind of tired of all this Ron Contra.
And Obie looked at him and he said, Mr. Secretary, I didn't swear to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States until I got tired.
Now, that's the kind of guy he is, and I'm thankful that he's trying to do his best.
I think he did the gutsy thing yesterday in voting against it, and I think we have to give him and even Pelosi some sort of slack here and just kind of certainly keep the heat on, but at least I realize that I don't know the art of the possible.
It's politics as well as they do.
As long as we keep the heat on them, I hope that we'll have a better outcome next time around.
All right.
Well, I sure appreciate your insight today.
Well, thank you, Scott.
It's always good to be with you.
Everybody, Ray McGovern, he's a former CIA analyst for 27 years.
He's a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Where can people read what you write?
We reprint a lot of your stuff at antiwar.com, but I know you write for, what, Tom Paine and Truthout, is that right?
Yeah, and Common Dreams.
I think if you Google me, you're pretty assured of picking up- A bunch of wisdom, a bunch of really important knowledge and insight.
Well, thank you, Scott, and as I say, it's always good to be with you.
Great.
Take care.
Bye.
All right, folks, this is Antiwar Radio, and let's go ahead and play that clip of Madeleine Albright that Ray McGovern was referring to there.
We have heard that half a million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.
And, you know, is the price worth it?
I think this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.
