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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
First guest today is Ray McGovern.
RayMcGovern.com is his website.
And here's one at Consortium News and at Common Dreams.
John Brennan's tenant-like testimony about John O. Brennan.
I guess he dropped the O. I don't know.
John Brennan, the about-to-be-confirmed new director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Welcome to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Doing well.
Good.
Oh, I forgot to tell people that you were a CIA analyst for 27 years and that you're the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And as you mentioned in your article 10 years ago, you were saying, wait, no, don't invade Iraq.
That's going to be really bad for our terrorism problem.
But see, you just weren't farsighted enough, Ray.
If you'd really thought about it, then you could have said, you know, 10 years from now you could use our al-Qaeda in Iraq opposition to help overthrow Assad in Syria.
And so this might work out great, as long as that's your plan.
Well, I don't even think they had that idiotic a plan.
There's not much of a plan at all.
And, you know, I laugh now and we veteran intelligence professionals take, well, not pride, but some satisfaction in having been right.
But my God, what a catastrophe it was.
And it wasn't only we, it was people like Scott Ritter and others who knew from the bottom up that there were no weapons of mass destruction.
Well, hey, I like telling the story that a friend and I were painting a house that day and which is, you know, I like bringing that up because it's basically the very lowest rung on the economic ladder in America, you know, caulking and painting the outside of a house for very little money.
And we're listening to the Colin Powell speech on NPR radio on my truck speakers with the door open.
And I was sitting there debunking everything he said to my buddy Adam throughout the entire thing.
The only thing I didn't know for sure about was the Zarqawi thing, but I was explaining why I was pretty sure it wasn't right.
Well, good you didn't fall off the ladder, Scott.
I would have.
It was just, you know, looking back, I work for a nonprofit, right?
And I'm working downtown and we have a big board meeting.
We only have two a year and it was for 10 o'clock on February 5th, 2003.
So I went up to the chair of the board.
I said, you know, this is a little awkward because I can't report today.
I have to watch Colin Powell on TV.
And, you know, he said, if that's what you got to do, you go ahead and do it.
And so I did.
And that's where we get started.
And by 515 that afternoon, we had it out and it was on the AFP wire almost immediately.
But it found no resonance in what we call the mainstream press.
Surprise, surprise.
Right.
Well, you know, in fact, as long as we're on this subject, hang on one second, because actually, never mind.
Let's go ahead.
There's a little bit of retelling of that part of the story at this article at CommonDreams.org, John Brennan's Tenet-like testimony.
So I'll encourage people to go and take a look at that.
And in fact, if they want, go ahead and go back to 2003 and look at what the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity were doing and saying at that time.
And, you know, look for the people who were doing the debunking in real time, because you're right.
It was, you know, it wasn't just you and Scott Ritter.
There were a lot of people around who weren't quite buying it, if you knew where to look anyway.
And in fact, our next guest is going to be on all about the disaster that was the Iraq war.
But so let's talk about this guy, John Brennan, who lied us into the Iraq war.
In fact, first of all, wasn't he?
I don't think this is in your article, but I kind of gleaned it from your article.
This guy was John Brennan was the deputy executive director of the CIA on September 11th.
So that was all his fault, right?
Or is no one responsible for the worst thing ever happening on their watch?
There are a lot of things that he's more demonstrably blameworthy for than that.
He was in a very tough position.
In other words, at first he was executive assistant to his patron, George Tenet.
And then Tenet said, hey, you know, I'd prefer you to be in the line here ruling over the whole agency.
Why don't you become deputy executive director?
Now, the executive director, Buzzy Krongaard, and your readers, your listeners can read up on him if you want.
That that kind of runs the agency.
OK.
And Tenet.
And I'm sorry, Brennan was his deputy.
And as one of the senators pointed out at the Thursday's hearing on his nomination to become head of CIA, he said, now, Mr. Brennan, you were you were on at least 50 so far of memos on the torture and rendition and the black holes and all that.
So how can you say you are against it?
He says, well, no, I was just cc'd on those.
You know, I had what he's called.
I had visibility.
I had some visibility and some awareness of what was going on.
Well, folks, take it from an old intelligence folk here.
You don't get cc'd on matters of such high sensitivity, actually such high criminality unless you're involved.
OK.
We have a principle and it's called the need to know.
And his his appearance on all these addressee lines is proof positive that as one one senator said, he was there at the at the planning, the execution, and then the cover up of all these criminal activities, torture, black holes, black prisons, rendition.
Then he bragged about rendition.
And he also said on PBS, you know, torture, you know, these torture, these enhanced interrogation techniques.
The sobriquet for them now is EITs.
The senators couldn't believe couldn't bring themselves to say enhanced interrogation techniques.
Everybody knows it's torture.
No, the EITs now.
OK.
One of the senators said, look, you were involved in all that.
And his his appearance on those addressee lines proves it.
So what would he say?
Well, you know, I would I objected to some of the things like nudity and waterboarding.
And and they said, well, we talked to Buzzy Krongard, your boss, and he doesn't recall you ever saying anything.
Oh, no.
It's just it's just a couple of my colleagues.
I shared my misgivings about.
Well, why didn't you speak out?
Well, I wasn't in I wasn't in the the line of command here.
Chain of command.
Well, that's that's an adulterated boat.
The executive director and his deputy are at the peak of the chain of command.
It was not done in another part of the agency.
They are overseeing the whole agency.
So in a word, he knew chapter and verse.
Not only didn't do anything about it, but bragged about it on PBS, both the the extraordinary rendition and the torture.
And now he's to sort of back it off, say, well, you know, you know what he actually said?
He said, you know, that's about saving lives that these EITs save lives.
Well, that's what he told me, you know.
And and now that I've read most of the six thousand word, six hundred page Senate report on this, I'm aghast.
I have to look.
I have to see how that squares with with what they told me, because they didn't tell me.
So what he's doing here is, if you look closely, he's indicting his his mentor, George Tenet, Porter Goss that.
Well, I won't use any adjectives for Porter Goss and Michael Hayden, who's a big, big favorite of not only illegal eavesdropping when he was at NSA, but also these EITs.
He's an EIT.
But that would tell you.
You're saying by really it's bizarre.
It was very bizarre.
You're saying that Brennan said in the Senate testimony that now that he's he has access to the six thousand page Senate Intelligence Committee report that we don't have access to.
And he's saying now that he's reading it, he's astounded to find out all this other stuff that he didn't know.
And as you're saying, thereby indicting the rest of the guys.
Yeah.
And Jay Rockefeller says, you know, he's such a mild mannered fellow in the Bronx.
We call such types of a wuss.
OK, here's Jay Rockefeller.
Yeah.
Jay Rockefeller's never been to the Bronx.
That's it.
That much is clout.
OK, so he's asking Brennan.
He says, now, John, it seems terribly ironic that our report done over several years with 18000 footnotes and six six thousand pages that we had to get that for ourselves because the people in the agency wouldn't tell us any of that stuff.
So that's really ironic, John, don't you think?
Yes, indeed.
That makes me think that we need to look into this.
OK, so, you know, it was just on the torture edition.
Black.
Well, if it was.
But there's another aspect that I would like to bring to the conversation, and that is looking very closely at his prepared testimony.
I found something very shocking and perhaps we could get to that in due course.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you want to talk about the Iran nukes thing, right?
But hang on a second, because I wanted to point out that the torture was not to even try to save lives.
As we all know, the torture centered around getting the victims to implicate Saddam Hussein in being partners with Osama bin Laden because they wanted a war in Iraq.
And Jonathan Landay went and and I think he did the single best report on this.
There are a lot of different ones, too.
But if you look at McClatchy newspapers, you can find, you know, the most important footnote you need there is that most of the torture came in these two clusters right before the war and right after it.
When they needed guys to say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Saddam Hussein taught us how to make and use chemical weapons.
Saddam Hussein taught us how to hijack airplanes.
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are the very same guy.
Can't you tell that the beard is fake and whatever?
No.
And that was what it was about.
And also coming up with bogus orange alerts to scare everybody's mom into thinking Saddam was about to nuke them in their jammies in the middle of the night if we didn't hurry up and preempt this thing.
Yeah.
And Brennan was head of that counterterrorism center that issued all those bogus alerts.
So there's a direct tie there.
And they were so ridiculous, too.
I mean, remember back people and audience members.
Remember, hey, there's a threat against a school somewhere in Texas.
OK, they beat that out of somebody somewhere.
But who is who is that helpful for when there are 70,000 schools in Texas?
I mean, what are you talking about?
There's an Al Qaeda threat to a school in Texas.
Now, they couldn't just make that stuff up whole cloth.
They had to put those words in the mouth of someone they were torturing and say, is there a threat to a school in Texas?
And then turn the screws on them.
And then they would go, yeah, yeah, Texas, a school, a school.
And then they would go, OK, go and put that out on the air.
Well, it it was that bad.
And what what your listeners need to remember, as you so well reminded them, is that number one, torture does not work if you want reliable information.
The head of Army Intelligence said exactly that on the morning of the day when George W.
Bush went out with his EITs, his enhanced enhanced interrogation techniques, which he called an alternative set of procedures, end quote.
And what John Kimmons, Lieutenant General Kimmons, head of Army Intelligence, said was, quote, no good intelligence has ever come from abusive interrogation techniques.
History shows that.
And the history of the last five years, hard years also shows that that was 2006, minus five, 2001.
That's that's how long the CIA contractors were doing these kinds of things and coming up with not reliable information.
But as you pointed out, Scott, it's really important to realize that there are circumstances in which torture works like a charm, and that is if you want unreliable information.
And that's what they got for the first six months after 9-11.
We have the EEIs, the essential information intelligence things, which went to the interrogators.
Make sure you find out whether they know about close ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
And the sorrowful thing is because of the mass media and because of this very deceptive campaign, 69 percent of the American people believed before the attack on Iraq 10 years ago, not only that Al Qaeda had ties with Saddam Hussein, but they believed that Saddam Hussein bore some responsibility for 9-11.
And that greased the skids for a war of aggression.
It's a very sorrowful episode in our country's history.
All right.
Now, before we move on to the statement about Iran and their pretended nuclear weapons program, I wanted to mention Michael Scheuer here.
He wrote this thing for Foreign Policy Journal, which I'm actually trying to find it so I can tell you the name of it.
I'm not sure if you saw, but Michael Scheuer, of course, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit.
And apparently, you know, to read this thing, John Brennan has no respect inside the CIA at all because everyone sees him as simply a politician and a political brown noser.
He talks about how no one has a picture of the back of George Tenet because they can't ever get John Brennan's nose out of there to get the picture taken.
That's what everyone at Langley, Virginia thinks of John Brennan is that apparently he's pathetic.
So I wonder if you had anything to say about that.
Well, that confirms everything I've heard from former colleagues and for people still there.
There's an interesting Web site called No Quarter.
And I would refer your your listeners to that to find out how one person who's intimately involved with Brennan thinks about him.
It squares with what you just said.
He also sure really accuses Brennan of being an obstruction for Alex station and their various attempts to kill bin Laden.
And to to press the Saudis for intelligence when the Saudis are going along with the Israelis and Louis free when they're trying to pretend the Khobar Towers attack was Saudi Hezbollah, which means Iran instead of obviously it was Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that did it and the rest of that kind of thing.
Well, sure.
Has a real insight here.
And if Brennan acted that way and I think he admitted pretty much to the questioning of some senators on that score, that was because he sniffed the winds at the highest level of the agency in the White House and found out, don't press the Saudis.
There are friends.
Don't mess with the Saudis.
Just, you know, just go along.
And of course, Brennan spent three years as chief station CIA in in Saudi Arabia.
So, you know, the the Saudi links are very much explorable, should be explored.
But this rubber stamp congressional oversight committee is just that rubber stamp.
And they will not they will not do anything that could make them liable to charges that they're anything but one hundred and fifty percent in favor of anything anybody does against the terrorists.
OK, we used to be communists in my day.
Now it's terrorists and congressional people and senators are allergic to even holding a hearing.
You know, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said that explicitly.
So who's going to hold a hearing on whether the administration is doing too much against terrorism?
I'll tell you, no one is.
That's why Congress is a W.O.
L., end quote.
For those of you listeners who don't know what a W.L. is, it's absent without leave.
So there it is out in the open.
Lindsey Graham, who doesn't sit on the Intelligence Committee, but does does sit on the Armed Forces Committee, namely having jurisdiction over the special operations folks of our government.
So Congress is going to let this thing get through because it's just not possible for any congressman or senator, in their view, to be honest about the hyped up threat and to question whether these kinds of things not only are counterproductive, but very corrosive of our civil liberties.
All right.
Now, I think we can skip over the fact because everyone in my audience already knows well that the Iranians aren't making nukes.
And that's the official position of all 16 intelligence agencies or 17 or however many when they come together as the National Intelligence Council.
Everybody knows that they were lying this whole time.
They'd have had a thousand nukes by now, man, if any of these lies had ever been true.
Right.
But so the point really is John Brennan is willing to sit there and pretend that the Iranians are trying to make nuclear bombs.
What the hell?
That's right.
A lot of blood has been spilled over this.
Luckily for all of us, a person with great integrity named Tom Finger came in and ran the estimate, the national intelligence estimate on Iran.
And at the end of 2007, found out that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003.
That was released to the public and it stopped the war.
Pure and simple.
Stopped the war.
It's the first and only time I can ever say that the national intelligence estimate played that huge a role in stopping a war.
So this is this is still disputed between the neocons and those who do a job full of integrity in the in the intelligence apparatus.
And so people have been a little bit more careful, you know, like the New York Times always says, Iran has to give up its ambition to have a nuclear weapon ambition.
OK, there's no evidence.
OK, so here's here's Brennan saying in his prepared testimony, wasn't off the cuff sort of thing.
He says Iran is, quote, bent on pursuing nuclear weapons, end quote.
Well, hello.
Six days before his testimony on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd tried to trap Leon Panetta, our defense secretary, into saying the same thing.
And if we have one more minute, I'd like to just read a little bit from this dialogue.
This speaks volumes.
OK.
Chuck Todd, you don't believe that the Iranians are pursuing a nuclear weapon?
That they are pursuing the capabilities of nuclear energy, but not weapons?
Are you confident that they're not pursuing a nuclear weapon?
Panetta?
Right.
And what I've said, they have not made a decision to pursue a nuclear weapon.
They're developing and enriching uranium.
Why do you believe they're doing that, says Todd.
Panetta?
I think I think to develop their own energy source, but to enrich uranium because that's dangerous and it violates international laws.
That's a lie.
It does not.
They're part of the nonproliferation regime.
OK, Chuck Todd.
So you believe you do believe that they're probably pursuing a weapon, but you don't.
The intelligence doesn't know that.
Time out.
Cross talk between JCS Chairman Morton Dempsey, who's there with Panetta and Panetta.
Cross talk over, Panetta.
I know I can't tell you because I can't tell you they're in fact pursuing a weapon because that's not what the intelligence says.
What the intelligence says, we are what they're doing right now.
End of quote.
Well, here's Panetta manfully for once standing up for the truth six days before Brennan goes on.
And Brennan says that they're pursuing that they're bent on pursuing a nuclear weapon.
This is about the most important foreign policy dilemma that his boss, Obama, faces.
There are still a lot of people in the Washington Post and New York Times and elsewhere that really would like to see an attack on Iran.
And I just looked at the Washington Post lead article today, Monday, February 11th.
Iran is building militias in Syria.
Wow.
So Iran gets top billing even when there's no news to to to build.
But Syria, of course, is where the where the crucible is now.
And if they can blacken Iran into saying Iran is interfering with Syria, and then it's going to be really hard for Obama to hold the line on people like Dempsey and Panetta, who openly said they favored arming the Syrian rebels and were overruled by the president.
So here we have, you know, the media involved in this whole thing, blacken Iran, make sure that the Hezbollah and Hamas are made out to be the devils that are perceived by the neocons.
And it's just a short step before it happens that Brennan, if he wants to, has the authority now to bend the intelligence back to the crooked way it used to be and have a redux of what happened on Iraq under his mentor, George Tenet.
And all of a sudden he's saying in his prepared remarks, again, I stress, that Iran is benched on pursuing nuclear weapons.
It ain't so.
No matter how many times he says it, it ain't going to be so.
But that would put the kibosh on attempts to work out a sensible arrangement with Iran, which the neocons are now sabotaging.
All right, now, I'm sorry, because I really want to talk more about the Iran thing with you, maybe again soon, but let me ask you one thing real quick now, Ray, about the drone strikes.
So John Brennan, as head of counterterrorism working in the White House directly for the president there, has been in charge of, I guess he doesn't have, I don't know what control he has of any drone strikes going on in Afghanistan.
But anyway, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and apparently now they're putting a drone base into Niger.
But I guess this guy's really been in charge of the disposition, matrix, kill list, whatever the hell.
He's the guy who, he's the senior administration official who's been deputized the power to assassinate Americans to death, if he feels like it, in the white paper and all that.
And yet at the same time, through the Washington Post and I think the New York Times too, certainly the Washington Post has run a piece that's widely cited that Brennan is actually a very reluctant drone warrior.
And even though he's the guy who's the drone warrior, he's the guy who has been kind of restraining the CIA when they wanted to kill this guy, that guy, and the other one too, that he had sort of wanted them to slow down and cool it a little bit and that kind of thing.
He's putting that story out.
And I just wonder what you make of any of that or all of it.
He can put these stories out and the mainstream media will play them and Americans will be deceived.
In reality, he is in charge of this program.
I mean, it's hard to even visualize.
You remember that novel, Tuesdays with Maury?
Well, here's Tuesdays with Obama.
Brennan comes in with a legal-sized pad.
He says, okay, Mr. President, we need your initial offer.
These are the 13 that we're going to kill with the drones this week.
And Obama takes the pad.
He goes, oh, John, didn't you tell me last week that number three has three small kids?
Yes, sir, but we've seen him have lunch with two more suspected militants over the last week.
So he's a suspect.
He's a real suspect.
The president, well, John, let's take him off the list this week.
We'll talk about him next week.
Let's just move four or five up and we'll just do a dozen this week.
And he goes and he has lunch with Michelle.
My God.
My God, that's happening in the White House?
That reminds me of Condoleezza Rice running these demonstrations of torture techniques.
The very top national security officials of our government.
I keep thinking of the pilot from Airplane going, do you like gladiator movies?
Because there's the Roman emperor up there.
Deciding thumbs up or thumbs down on an individual basis.
Throwing Christians to the lions, you know?
It's funny you mention that, Scott, because even the emperor needed sort of a priest to consult, right?
He wouldn't murder a whole bunch of people in the stadium or whatever.
The state has God in this country, Ray.
And Brennan is being made out to be it.
Mikulski says to him, now, John, we know that you once thought you studied to be a priest.
And we know that you've got a Jesuit education.
And that really hurts, because I don't know what he heard from the Jesuits.
It's not the same thing I heard, okay?
And so, John, I'm asking you to promise.
So on your honor, would you please tell us what's going on, all this stuff?
Well, the New York Times article, it talked about the killers.
It all says that Brennan is just the most, you know, ethical guy.
And the last guy that Obama sees before he decides who to kill, including Americans.
And, you know, the lawyers at state and the NSC all say, you know, it gives us a lot of confidence to know that this priest-like figure is the last one that Obama sees.
All right.
I know.
You know what?
I'm just like you.
I've had enough.
It's just unreal.
I'm sorry.
We've got to go, Ray.
Thank you for your time, as always.
It's great to talk to you again.
Enjoyed it.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Ray McGovern, veteran intelligence professional for Sanity.
Look at his website, raymcgovern.com.
And we'll be right back after this.
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