Hey, I'm Scott.
It's anti-war radio first guest on the show.
Today's Ray McGovern.
He's a former CIA analyst and co-founder of the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity.
He's now taking refuge over there, uh, in the real world at, uh, the website of, uh, the heroic Robert Perry.
And that of course is consortium news.com.
By the way, they're holding the fundraiser right now.
And if you value real journalism, Hey, if you value Ray McGovern and Robert Perry, which I don't know if you're a consumer of what's going on in the world.
Uh, I don't know how you could, uh, not be then, uh, Hey, kick down just a little bit, a lot of people, a little bit, and it'll work out, right?
That's how it goes.
Uh, welcome back to the show.
Ray, how are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Doing well.
Uh, well, good.
I'm very happy to hear that.
Happy holidays and all those things.
Thanks.
Same back at you.
Hey, listen, um, I really appreciate the fact that you're sticking up for Bradley Manning.
I wonder why are you sticking up for Bradley Manning?
Well, there are a whole host of reasons, uh, that, uh, many people, others, others are juiced for doing that.
I have to say that I have a kind of personal, uh, personal reason for this.
And the short answer, Scott, is that, uh, that Bradley Manning did, um, what I failed to do when I had the opportunity to do precisely what he did during Vietnam.
Um, kind of a long story, but I came by knowledge of a secret, uh, uh, four eyes only cable from the high command in Saigon, which said, um, we can't accept the higher figures, uh, higher figures on enemy combatants, enemy forces, communist forces under arms.
Uh, the higher figures who agreed to everyone in the intelligence community, except for the U S army, because Westmoreland forbade them to accept the figures, the figures was 600,000.
Okay.
Sam Adams, my associate who had come up with these estimates, went over to Saigon and found out that general Westmoreland, who was running McPhee at the time would only, uh, put a ceiling on the number of enemy there could be.
The ceiling was 299,000.
Okay.
Hold it, hold it just a sec.
Okay.
So you're telling me this is in 1967, 68, again, right?
What?
Yeah, that's right.
Uh, and now you're, you're a CIA analyst at this point, or you're a soldier over there.
No, I'm CIA analyst in Washington.
My responsibilities were facility foreign policy toward, uh, Vietnam, China, and the far East.
Sam Adams was an associate of mine.
We both went into training together, uh, in April of 63.
Uh, so we had been on board a couple of years.
And when he says enemy combatants, that's the NVA and the VC.
It's all mine is within South Vietnam.
Okay.
So it included what was traditionally wrapped up in these assessments of what we call enemy order of battle.
And Sam was the one picked, uh, because he was a crackerjack analyst, uh, picked to do this assessment.
And it was the first assessment by the CIA.
And it came up with 600,000 communists under arms in South Vietnam.
Now, pretty much all of Washington knew those were the accurate figures, but Westmoreland is running a war.
Okay.
And he's, uh, he's giving these casualty figures every week to that inept group of politician type, uh, correspondence in Saigon and saying, Oh, we killed 300 this week, 200 the last week.
And you know, Westmoreland knew that even though these correspondents were not terribly bright, they probably could do arithmetic.
Okay.
And so he was unwilling to admit that whereas he had been saying, we have been attriting the enemy, attriting at the enemy, uh, that the enemy had grown from the figures that he had given the press from 299,000 to 600,000.
Now, Sam Adams, my colleague who did all this work went over to Saigon to find out what was going on.
And he couldn't believe it.
He'd have a regiment of 1500 men and the army was there.
No, no, they're only 700.
And you have a battalion of maybe 200 men.
No, no, no.
It was only a hundred.
And the arbitrarily were subtracting a factor of 50%.
And he didn't know what was going on until in a bar one night, one of these sergeants came over there.
Okay.
Now, Mr.
Adam, you should know, uh, you should know you're not going to win this argument because the general, the general can't, can't allow us to put any more than two or 99,000 troops.
So you might as well just go home.
So Sam, you know, I had this firsthand view of what was going on, came back to Washington and, uh, we used to have lunch.
We were all buddies.
Okay.
So, uh, in late August, and this is again, 1967, not even halfway through the war, I'm having lunch with Sam and I said, Sam, what possible incentive could the commander of our troops in Vietnam have for making the enemy seem to be less than the enemy actually is?
And Sam says, look, great.
I'll tell you a short answer is I just got a cable.
It's a, one of these, uh, very close hold eyes only cables.
It comes from general Abrams who is a Westmoreland's deputy and what he says, and I'll read it to you.
And actually I have it here.
Let's see if I can dig that out here because I don't want to misquote it.
Uh, he says, I'll read it to you, Ray.
And this is what Sam read.
Abrams wrote that the new higher numbers, again, the numbers to which everyone in Washington agreed, reflecting the, the, the Sam Adams count, my friend, um, uh, the new, he said, quote, the new higher numbers were in sharp contrast to the current overall strength figure of about 299,000 that we and McAfee give to the press.
Continuing the quote, we have been projecting an image of success over recent months and all available caveats and explanations will not prevent the press from drawing an erroneous and gloomy conclusion if we release the real figures.
Wow.
Black and white, a cable from Saigon from the deputy head of McAfee.
Now the rest of the story is not something I'm very proud of.
Um, I couldn't finish my dessert and I kept thinking, you know, McGovern, if you have any guts, I knew Sam wouldn't do it because he was such a straight shooter.
If you have any guts, McGovern, you'd ask Sam for a copy of this thing.
You'd walk down or drive down to the New York times, uh, Washington bureau and blow the whistle on all this stuff.
This is unconscionable.
Uh, and so I knew that I wouldn't know.
I think Sam probably would have given me a copy ostensibly just for me to read.
Uh, but then I thought of what would be, what would the consequences be?
Well, next polygraph test, they would find out for sure.
Uh, I'd be out of there.
I really liked the analytical work.
I had a mortgage.
I had five children to know just three children at the time to educate.
Uh, you know, uh, maybe, maybe yes.
And Ray wait until you become more senior.
And the gravitas that you will, that will, you will have gathered by that time.
Next time there's a, there's a scandal like this.
Then next time somebody would take you seriously.
Well, suffice it to say that there are, you know, innumerable numbers of, of, uh, excuses you could use not to face up to make the right moral decision.
And I used them and I said nothing.
What happened?
Well, we know what happened.
We're talking August 20, 1967.
The date of the general Abrams cable in January and February, 1968, there was the countrywide communist defensive at the Tet holiday, the lunar new year, which in which every city Hamlet village, every, every population point in South Vietnam was attacked, and that was the turning point in the war, but not the turning point in the casualties, only half the casualties that we had suffered and the Vietnamese had suffered had occurred by then the wardrobe dragged on, as we know.
And Sam Adams went to his death at age 50, 55, I believe it was a sudden heart attack, no forewarning.
He was grieving.
He was grieving over the fact that, that he let himself be diddled.
He did go to the inspector's generals and all this stuff, but he got kept being put off.
He let himself be diddled.
And if he had released that information, or if I had, then there's a good chance for those of you who know the Vietnam, Washington, there's a good chance that no left wing on that memorial, because there'd be no names to chisel it.
Oh man.
All right.
Hold it right there.
It's not all your fault, Ray.
All right.
We'll be back.
Everybody is Ray McGovern.
Consortiumnews.com.
All right, y'all welcome back.
It's anti-war radio and dang man, Ray McGovern has given us his guilt trip over very important document.
He could have leaked back in 1967 that it sounds like he got a reasonable argument, Ray, that it could have perhaps contributed to a different course for the war.
After that, of course, millions died, 60,000 Americans, hundreds of thousands wounded, I guess, millions of dead on the other side.
But, you know, it's funny too, that your story almost exactly parallels that of Daniel Ellsberg as told in his book secrets that he knew as early as 1961.
I think while still in the Marines over there that this wasn't going to work.
And then he went back for as a civilian working for the DOD, I think, and did a quick survey of, you know, towns in South Vietnam or whatever, and just knew flat out that it couldn't work as early as 1961.
And, you know, he's felt really guilty about the fact that he too could have ratted out his bosses basically to the American people.
And for the exact same reasons you describe, hey, I could get more power and influence if I just worked my way up on the inside and whatever.
He didn't do it.
He didn't end up leaking the Pentagon Papers, of course, until much, much later.
And he described the whole mindset of what it's like to have that security clearance and go, you know what?
Those guys at Antiwar.com can talk whatever smack they want all day long.
They don't know what we know.
We got secrets that they don't know about.
So we make our judgments based on, you know, this so-called superior intelligence and therefore wisdom that those dummies out there in the in the regular world don't get to have.
And that keeping that access and keeping that hope alive that one day maybe even I could talk to the president and tell him what I think or whatever will keep people in this web of silence.
They will like they will by the thousands of employees of the DOD, for example, will lie about the Gulf of Tonkin until the documents are released 10 years later.
Right.
Well, yeah, Scott, a couple of things there.
First off, you know, I I've been accused of megalomania in thinking that my release of that one cable could have changed things.
But you have to realize your younger listeners especially, you know, I can just hear them scoffing.
Oh, yeah, right.
You take that to the New York Times.
What a lot, a lot, a lot.
The Times will take it over to the Oval Office and say, oh, is it OK?
Well, you have to realize that back then in 67, the New York Times was an independent newspaper and they would publish all manner of things, especially classified things if they bore on the progress of the war in Vietnam.
And they would do that even though Sulzberger, their high guru, was very much in favor of the war.
So this is sort of a microcosmic insight into how the what I call a fawning corporate media has changed.
So please don't dismiss the possibility we could have changed the course of history in 1967.
We had an in into the New York Times.
Well, there was so much fewer different sources of media, the networks, the few major papers.
There wasn't 10 million little niche sources, you know, of 250 TV channels of crap to choose from.
Pretty much everybody was paying attention to the same thing.
If the New York Times broke a story like that, that might very well have, you know, like if 60 Minutes would do a story.
You know, I remember even in the 1980s, 60 Minutes did a story that meant laws were changing, congressmen were being arrested and things were going to happen now.
That was then and Frontline the same way.
Now, Bob Perry, my publisher at that Consortium News dot com, did some pieces for Frontline and then he was precluded from pursuing the truth any deeper.
Same at Newsweek, same at AP.
And to his great credit, he said, I'm out of here.
I can't abide by this.
I'm not going to self-censor myself.
Interestingly, the folks at Newswork said, look, Newsweek, if you keep doing this, Bob, you're going to get, quote, controversialized, end quote.
You know what that means?
That's the kiss of death in Washington.
If you're a pundit or a reporter, you don't let yourself get controversialized.
Now, you mentioned Dan Ellsberg, and I'd like to, you know, Dan is up there at the Bradley Manning trial right now as we speak.
The guy is golden.
He has a conscience and he feels just as deeply as I do that Bradley Manning is deserving of all manner of respect.
But Dan sort of is a self-effacing guy.
And even though he's a hero in many of our eyes, he doesn't admit the good that he did do.
Now, he laments that he waited till 71 to release the Pentagon Papers, but he did something at the beginning of 68, the time period we were talking about before, that was very gutsy.
And guess what it was?
He learned about Sam Adams' figures.
And he went down to the New York Times, and this was the first and only time he released classified information in this way.
And the New York Times published Sam's figures on the enemy strength in South Vietnam.
The Times ran it on March 19, 1968.
Now, this was a time when Dan knew that Westmoreland had asked Johnson to give him 206,000 more troops to widen the war into Cambodia and into Laos.
OK, that's why Sam did this.
Guess what happened?
March 19th, New York Times runs it on the front page.
March 25th, Johnson complained to a small gathering, quote, The leaks to the New York Times hurt us.
We no longer have support for the war.
I would have given Westy the 206,000 men, end quote.
Six days later, on the 31st of March, Johnson, of course, says he's not going to run for re-election.
This is history.
And Dan had a major role in that particular revelation.
These very documents, basically, that you could have leaked those years before.
That's right.
And you won't find this out except if you read Dan's memoir, which is called Secrets.
And they're all a matter of good things that Dan did before the Pentagon Papers released.
And of course, as I say, he's doing them even now up there at Fort Meade.
The other thing I'll say is this, that Sam Adams.
Again, that's one of your colleagues at CIA back in the late 1960s you're talking about.
He was the one, the astute analyst that came up with the figure of 600,000 Vietnamese communists under under arms.
Now, as we know, Westmoreland was saying it couldn't get over 299,000 enemy.
OK, so what happens?
Well, Ellsberg releases the Pentagon Papers and they're going to put him on trial, right?
And he's on trial in 1973 for releasing for releasing information on enemy strength.
So, so Sam Adams says to me, what do you mean?
You mean all fake numbers?
Imagine he's hanging a man for leaking fake numbers.
And you know what he did?
Sam Adams hustled off to testify on Dan Ellsberg's behalf.
Now, as we know, Nixon had his minions invade Dan Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, and that was enough to quash the whole lawsuit.
But just to finish this up here, what happens later here is that Sam Adams is honored by those of us who put a lot of store in integrity and intelligence.
There is an annual Sam Adams Award for Integrity and Intelligence.
We just gave out the 10th award this year.
And the ninth award was given to a fellow named Julian Assange.
OK, and when Julian Assange accepted that award given to him personally by Dan Ellsberg in London, he said, I accept this award only with the proviso that I accept it on behalf of my sources.
Wow.
Right on.
I guess I'll try to wedge in here since, again, you mentioned secrets as well, that great memoir of Dan Ellsberg's.
And chapter one, if you if you search, you know, for a few minutes, you can find chapter one somewhere posted online of that.
And it's about his first day on a job at his new job as assistant deputy secretary of something or other at DoD.
And that day, in come the cables from the ships out in the Gulf of Tonkin and how by within two, three hours, everyone in the chain of command knew that false alarm.
It was the new guy was listening to his own propeller.
And when when the experienced sonar man was woken up, we figured out that this is ridiculous.
And then they all lied in or kept the secret and went ahead and used that to escalate the war.
That's the first chapter of that book.
It's incredible.
I highly recommend it to everybody.
And also Consortium News Dotcom, the great Ray McGovern and Robert Perry writing over there.
We'll be right back with how the truth can save lives after this.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio, I'm Scott Horton, and we're talking with Ray McGovern here about, well, secrecy.
And war.
Ray made the case that he had a real chance in 1967 to leak the truth about enemy troop strength to the American people in a way that really could have made a major difference in the war.
And then we're going to talk about Bradley Manning here in a second.
But Ray, you had something to follow up about the Gulf of Tonkin there.
Yes, Scott, I was really interested and happy that you mentioned the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
I think you referred to it in connection with it being featured in the first chapter of Dan Ellsberg's memoir, Secrets.
Right.
It's his first day on the job.
All the cables are coming in, the printer spitting out all this stuff.
And it's clear within an hour, hour and a half or something all the way up and down the chain of command that this was all a big nothing.
It didn't really happen.
Don't worry about it.
Only then did Johnson go on TV and go, oh, yeah, them commies just aggressed against us in their gulf.
Yeah, what I like to do is fill in the inside picture.
You had mentioned how you can't really rely on power hungry or people intent on keeping their government positions.
You can't depend on them to tell the truth.
Well, what happened at where I was working in the analytic rank ranks of CIA, NSA was the person that was the institution receipt of all these critic messages.
And they were in doubt from the very start that there was any incident at all on the 4th of August.
Now, there was something on the 2nd of August, but the 4th was the one that Johnson seized upon.
They were very doubtful about that.
And we, as was our tradition, wrote up a piece for the next morning publications, namely the morning of August the 5th, saying there's extreme doubt as to whether there was any firing at all in the Gulf of Tonkin last night.
Well, what happens?
The head of the analytic unit at the CIA comes down for the first time ever into the bowels of our analytic shop, and he says that piece has not gone anywhere.
And we say, well, what do you mean?
He said, well, the White House has already decided to retaliate.
But they didn't retaliate for what, sir?
Well, they just decided to retaliate.
And we don't want to wear out our welcome at the White House.
Wow.
That was that was against everything we came to work for in terms of telling the truth.
Now, that's what happened where I work.
Yeah, well, and that kind of thing, correct me if I'm wrong, because I was only born in the 70s, but that was kind of a crazy conspiracy theory that only lunatics were said to believe by mainstream media sources and things until the Pentagon Papers came out and proved it as absolute fact.
Yeah, well, they knew better.
Yeah.
Pentagon Papers, of course.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess I think we both kind of skipped over the fact like it goes without saying, but it doesn't necessarily for the whole audience.
The Gulf of Tonkin resolution in the Congress was the blank check for Johnson to escalate the war as much as he wanted from 64 on.
Right.
And that's the other thing I wanted to address.
After McNamara issued his famous memoir, which said we were wrong, we were terribly wrong.
Well, it wasn't so much they were wrong.
It was that they lied through their teeth.
Now, when when that came out, that book, McNeil and Lehrer had McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser to Johnson, around the table.
And they said, what happened there the next morning after the August 4th?
And Max says, well, LBJ came in, you know, he's a pretty big guy.
And he looked at me and he said, well, all right, Mac, we have all we need now.
And I said, Mr. President, there's real doubt as to whether anything at all happened yesterday in the Gulf of Tonkin.
And the president looked at me, he said, Mac, are you going up on a hill to sell that bill, that resolution, or are you not?
McNeil, what did you do?
I went up and I saw the resolution.
Now, here's a guy, dean of Harvard College.
He's not going to be out on the street.
He's not going to be homeless.
He will lose his job.
Why was he not able to say, Mr.
Mr. President, big as you are, loud as you are, powerful as you are, I'm not going to lie to justify an unjustifiable war.
He didn't have that courage.
So all I'm saying here is that people knew that these were lies.
And just go down to today and you'll see people like Petraeus, you know, the thing that got me about Petraeus is the time he accused, he accused Afghan parents for burning their own children to discredit the U.S. and saying that they were burnt in the, you know, well, hello, how bad can it get?
So we can get off the subject now.
But I wanted to say there's a straight line between what Ellsberg saw in McNaughton's office in the Pentagon, what I saw in the bowels of the CIA and what happened actually in the White House the next morning.
It really is unconscionable.
And Bradley Manning is the type of person that will reveal that.
And Bradley Manning, I think, revealed that early enough to make a difference.
The only problem is that only you and I and Bob Perry and others are the ones that are exposing this.
We need to find more imaginative ways to get this story out and about.
Yeah, well, and why don't you go ahead and address, you know, what is I guess we can take for granted as, you know, I don't think fabrications, if anything, there are major omissions in them.
But the transcripts of his chats with the rat Adrian Lamo, he really describes his own thoughts in pure whistleblower terms.
Right.
I mean, there's really nothing.
I think the rat even says, hey, why don't you try to sell it to the North Koreans or the Russians or something?
And he's saying, no, no, no, this is all about enlightening the people of the world so that they can do the right thing later.
That's exactly right.
You know, the key to this is that without personal experience of innocent human suffering, you really don't have the emotional impact necessary to give you the courage to do what Beverly Manning has.
Now, what do I mean?
I mean that he saw these young people his age.
He was 22 at the time.
Right.
He saw these young university students having written a thesis or a term paper critical of the Maliki government, wrapped up, thrown into Baghdad jails where he knew the worst kinds of torment and torture were being carried out.
He goes to his superiors and he says, you know, this is not America.
This one and that's pretty.
Shut up, finish your tour, go home and keep your mouth shut.
So he goes back to his barracks.
I wasn't there, of course, but, you know, some people have a conscience still.
And Bradley Manning did.
And he decided, wow, I need to do something about this.
And so that's what touched it off, the personal exposure to human suffering.
And then he saw that WikiLeaks, he he saw the before WikiLeaks, of course, released it to Bradley Manning was apparently the guy who gave it to them.
The so-called collateral damage, collateral murder, they called it.
I don't that murder.
Right.
It was a gun barrel photography with sound.
You can hear the Apache gunners in the US Apache helicopter gunning down 12 innocent unarmed civilians and wounding badly two young children.
Now, people have been known about that.
But what I want to do is make sure that, you know, that there's a 12 minute segment of that thing with commentary.
And it's available if you just Google shooters walk free.
OK, shooters walk free.
If you do that, you'll come upon a German panorama segment, which has been undubbed from German back into English.
It has commentary from Ethan Accord, the sergeant who carried the little children to safety.
It has comment from the UN rapporteur on torture and others.
It's a golden 12 minutes.
Don't miss it.
Just Google.
Yeah.
Shooters walk free.
Yeah, it came right up for me.
First result for you and you two here.
Now, in answer to your question, you know, we know from the from the correspondence that has now been released and has been actually vouched for as authentic by the government.
And normally I don't I don't place a lot of store by that.
But in this case, I think we can assume Lamo and Manny were having this conversation.
And after watching the Iraqi police abuses and US authorities doing nothing and then reading about all these other incidents, including the collateral murder one, Bradley Manning says, quote, I want people to see the truth because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.
And then he added that he hoped to provoke worldwide discussion, debate and reform.
Well, you know, there are other peoples that have said that sort of thing, the importance of people knowing what's going on in democracy.
All people like Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, prominent statesmen all around.
You can't have a democracy if the people are kept from knowing what's going on.
And so when when his disclosures became very clear over a year ago now, we had Fox News, people like Huckabee, people like Representative Rogers from Michigan, who's head of the House Intelligence Committee, calling for Bradley Manning to be executed.
Can you imagine we had Joe Biden calling Manning a quote or Assange, both of them high tech terrorists.
All right.
Well, that really pains me.
I mean, I'm Irish and that really makes me angry because Biden, nobody seems to remember this.
But Biden is as responsible for the Iraq war as anybody else, George Bush included, because Biden was head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a time when people like Scott Ritter and me and like all kinds of people were saying this is bogus.
This is bogus information.
It's invented.
And when he held hearings, that is, Senator Biden and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as chair, who did he pick?
He picked all these zealots, all the neocons, all the people who would say, oh, yeah, yeah, Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons or he's getting them.
And he's got ties with Al Qaeda.
All that stuff could have been prevented if Biden acted like William Fulbright did during Vietnam, even though Fulbright was a little late in doing it.
So all this kind of hoopla about what a terrible guy Bradley Manning is and the fact that he's gay and the fact that he was kind of erratic.
Well, that's that's all meant to detract from the contribution that he did make.
And maybe a word about that is indicated here.
You know, when he specifics are important.
When I read what the U.S. ambassador in Tunis reported about a wonderful party, he had been on the beach front there in this really the palace, he said, and they had all manner of food and they had actually had little cages with tigers and lions and just like just like Saddam Hussein's sons was to have it.
Oh, yeah.
The ice cream they flew in from Nice.
Oh, it was really actually is really over the top.
And as my wife and I drove away, we said, wow, I wonder what would happen if the common Tunisian citizens were to learn about all this, you know, they're impoverished.
Oh, boy.
Guess what?
They learned about it through WikiLeaks, through the cables released, the diplomatic cable.
You know, it is real paradoxical in it that on one hand they say, oh, the damage was terrible and we need that.
They even admit this.
It's quoted in one of the antiwar.com pieces.
I forget if it was yours or not, that what we need to, yeah, build up this case against Manning.
So we have to talk about just how terrible the damage is.
Then on the other hand, they go, well, you know, really nobody got killed over.
There's no real sources and methods.
After all, it's only secret and confidential level stuff, not top, top secret.
And so really it's embarrassing somewhat, but it doesn't really it didn't really hurt us when in fact, just look at it.
It cost the American empire, the Middle East.
I mean, it cost us Iraq where you had the WikiLeaks coming out about the civilian family massacre, cost us Tunisia and Egypt and I guess maybe benefited the empire in Libya.
And we'll see about Syria so far.
But pretty much the Americans are losing their Middle Eastern empire in great part with the WikiLeaks papers fueling the fire for it all.
Yeah, it wasn't the so that makes manning a hero, not a traitor.
But still, that seems like some pretty severe results of what he did.
You know what I mean?
Exactly right.
That's one of the reasons they're so ticked off about the whole thing.
You know, you make one point about the classification and this is something that probably should be widely known.
These were only secret and class and secret and confidential classificated classified documents.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, that means that, you know, for example, the ambassador's report from the party on the beachfront at Tunis that was only confidential.
It didn't even deserve that label, but it was embarrassing.
They wanted to keep it out of circulation.
But the real stuff, the real stuff, the embarrassing stuff, the stuff that shows real war crimes, that's all top secret.
That's all code word.
That's all no dissemination or limited dissemination.
And it is also in how shall I say this in the communications traffic of other government agencies.
So Bradley Manning had no access to any of that stuff.
And that's why this stuff is pretty pale, pretty, pretty main, except for the wider political, political ramifications.
I want to quote my old buddy, Robert Gates, who worked for me at one point because he told the truth for once when he was asked to comment on the diplomatic cables released.
He said, you know, the reaction is, is, quote, significantly overwrought, overwrought.
OK, but I mean, exaggerated, not not necessary.
He said the damage was very, very marginal, if any.
Now that that despite the guy working for Mike Mullen, the head of the Joint Chiefs, had said, ah, Bradley Manning is blood on his hands.
He got blood on his hands.
Well, Senator Carl Levin, the head of the armed services in the Senate, said, well, you know, give me a memo on that.
Gates and Gates gave a memo and said, well, actually, Mullen was overwrought, too.
We can't identify one person who was killed or wounded or even spat upon as a result of the release of these cables about Afghanistan or Iraq.
And now, of course, the diplomatic cable.
So the damage in that point of view was was minimal to nonexistent.
The damage to the U.S. position in the Middle East, as you rightly point out, was historic.
Right.
And they have to pretend that they're on the side of people power in the Middle East.
So they can't rightly just come right out and say, yes, we really lament losing so many of our local torture dictatorships over there.
We'll have to try harder to be more like the British and kill more to make them submit.
You know, they can't quite say it like that.
They got to pretend they're on the side of the peaceful protesters in the square where in whichever country.
So, yeah, when their rhetoric boxes them in as far as, you know, how they categorize the change in the Middle East is whether it's a plus or a minus form.
And yeah, my heart counts for against Manning.
The thing that we need to kind of emphasize here is that for the first time, in my view, there is great hope that this is slipped over into our own body politic.
That's Ray McGovern, everybody, Consortium News dot com.
They're raising funds right now.
Him and Bob Perry and I don't know if others, but Consortium News dot com.
Antiwar.com/McGovern.
Thanks again, Ray.
Great interview.
