01/28/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott here.
Anti-imperialism is at the center of libertarianism, as long as we keep it that way.
So if you're part of a libertarian group, how about having me out to give a talk on the wars?
I work cheap and I'm good on everything.
I've even been known to change a mind or two with some of these things.
Check out some examples at scotthorton.org slash speeches and email scott at scotthorton.org for more information.
By the way, this February 15th, the Future Freedom Foundation is having John Glaser and I give a talk at the International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington.
Come on out and say hi.
Hey y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
The website is scotthorton.org.
Here on Liberty Express Radio.
And our first guest on the show today is our friend Ray McGovern.
He used to be a CIA analyst, but he's a good guy now.
He was an analyst there for 27 years.
And he's one of the co-founders of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity who tried to truth us out of war back in 2002.
He's a great anti-war activist on a great many topics.
You can find his articles at, well, raymcgovern.com, but also at consortiumnews.com.
And he's got a huge archive at antiwar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
I appreciate you joining us today.
And so I wonder, who's Robert Gates?
Robert Gates.
Go ahead.
Well, first I have to sort of put a little link on your introduction.
The CIA analysts are good guys.
Now, they were corrupted by Bobby Gates.
But since then, and since kind of justifying an unjustifiable war under George Tenet and George Bush, since then they've prevented a war with Iran and with Syria.
And probably I should start out with that, because not many people know the role that honest people in CIA, the analysis division, played.
When Bush and Cheney were going to hit Iran right before they went off and rode off into the sunset, that was on the schedule for 2008, and I can prove it.
Long story short, the analysis group of the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community got an honest guy in there named Tom Finger from the State Department.
He ran an estimate which concluded in November of 2007 that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003 and had not resumed work.
Now, Bush's own memoir says that deprived me of the military option.
It was an eyestopper.
How could I order our forces to attack a country that the intelligence community says has no active nuclear weapons program?
Quote, unquote, bummer.
So that did stop the juggernaut off to war.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff helped because they didn't want a war with Iran either.
That was the end of 2007, early 2008.
In the more recent, I mentioned Syria.
Not many people know that there are enough honest people in the intelligence apparatus, not only in CIA, but in DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, that when John Kerry got up on the 30th of August and said, We know.
We know that Bashar al-Assad arranged those chemical attacks outside of Damascus.
We know.
You know, I converted it to a Word document, Scott, and I found out that he said, We know, 35 times, justifying Shakespeare's remark.
He thinks he does protest too much.
Long story short, they didn't know.
As a matter of fact, my former colleagues knew that the rebels had sarin, that the range of the missiles that were said to come from the government-controlled areas were not long enough to reach the impact zones, and so it was equally likely, if not more likely, by the logic of the situation, that it was the rebels that did those things to provoke the U.S. into the war.
My colleagues made that point to everyone that would listen, and I think the President knew that he had an insurrection on his time because they weren't going to do the same job that he did on Iraq, and that's one reason, one major reason, why within, well, within 20 hours, if Kerry said 35 times, We know that Bashar al-Assad did it, and that the President has to move now because he drew that red line, within 20 hours, Obama got up in the Rose Garden and said, No, we're ready to attack Syria, but the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has told me we could do that today, we could do it tomorrow, we could do it next week, or next month.
There's no, quote, time sensitivity, end quote, to this, so I'm going to go to Congress to seek authorization.
Wow, we've blown out of our minds.
Now, why did he do that?
There are a whole bunch of reasons.
But one of the main reasons was that the honest, substantive analysts within the CIA were going to raise one holy hell, unlike their silence before Iraq.
So I just wanted to clarify that because they're good guys and they're bad guys.
There's the other CIA that does the torture and the kidnapping and all that other stuff.
That's not the CIA I belong to.
Yeah, although nowadays, I mean, the analysts mostly just sit around plotting to assassinate people with robots and stuff, right?
Oh, no, what I just said is that there are some honest ones there that are not afraid to speak out when the Secretary of State lies 35 times.
Yeah, no, I know.
I mean, hey, Phil Trolley reported that they were going to resign over it.
You know, the White House had to resort to putting out a fake intelligence assessment that sort of pretended, sort of kind of pretended to be a CIA assessment, and then Phil later reported at the American Conservative that there was a real revolt.
Not just they refused, but they said, we'll all quit.
You won't be able to hide that.
Yeah, when you say a fake intelligence assessment, that's the correct adjective.
It was fake, but they didn't even try.
That is, the White House didn't even try to represent it as an intelligence assessment.
It was a unique animal.
I'd never seen a, quote, government assessment, unquote, that purported to be an intelligence assessment.
That's how careful they were.
And, you know, I have to put my—take my hat off to Martin Dempsey.
For once we have a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who has some courage and some integrity.
He didn't want this during the war, and he told the President that.
Matter of fact, he told Congress that Article I of the Constitution requires a declaration of war by the Congress, and that he wasn't going to participate in anything less than that.
Now, when push came to shove, and it looked like Kerry was going to prevail, one of the things that I believe happened, and I can't prove this one, but I believe it happened, Dempsey went to Obama that evening and said, look, Mr. President, with all due respect, we, the Joint Chiefs, know that you really favor those young Turks there in the White House, the tough guy, those tough women that you got at the U.N. and at Susan Rice.
We know all that.
But, you know, Mr. President, how do I say this?
They don't know diddly about war, and we do, okay?
Neither does John Kerry know diddly about it.
Driving boats up the Mekong does not qualify you as a strategic thinker, Mr. President, and there's no such thing as, as Kerry described it, and, quote, unbelievably small war if we attack Syria.
There's no such thing as that.
So, Mr. President, if you order us to use our armed forces to start a war with Syria, you know, another thing that's going to happen is the reporters, you know, they all beat me up.
They come and they say, now, General Dempsey, why cringe your way two or three days Well, U.N. inspectors came back from in and around Damascus and reported on who may have done what those chemical attacks were like.
Why couldn't you wait two or three days?
And, you know, Mr. President, we're going to have to say, I'm going to have to say, beat the hell out of me, go ask the President.
So, here we had, like Iran, like the situation with respect to attacking Iran at the end of 2007, here we had a very, very similar situation where the Joint Chiefs were in no part of getting involved with a widened war, including Syria, and they had the support of honest intelligence analysts.
So, if I seem a little sensitive to, you know, to saying that both sides of this twin-eagled agency are equally culpable of the miscreants that's been going on, please understand that there's been some good work done.
And I've been around for 50 years, Scott, and I've never, never before been able to say that, for example, that the Iran estimate, that any national intelligence estimate actually played a huge role in preventing a war.
But I can say that, I can say that about this one on this estimate from November 2007.
Well, and they've stuck by it this whole time, too, for five years.
Yeah, that's the wonder.
Now, tomorrow, tomorrow, liar-in-chief James Clapper is going before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Every year they have this orchestrated worldwide threat briefing, okay?
So, Clapper gets up there, John Brennan will be there from the CIA.
They have a couple military types.
Now, it will be really interesting if in Clapper's testimony he weakens on this Iran thing.
So far, wonder of wonders.
And I think it's because the analysts have sort of kept a tight rein on him, saying, look, General Clapper, we know that you like to say things that aren't quite true.
Don't say things that aren't quite true about Iran, okay?
Because you've got a resurrection on your hands.
So, I don't anticipate that he'll back off.
I don't anticipate that he'll say, no, Iran is working on a nuclear weapon again.
But if he does, watch out.
Yeah, well, I guess, yeah, he could still screw it up.
He's been fighting for it pretty hard so far, but we'll see how it goes.
All right, now, here's the problem.
We're almost at our break, and then we're only going to have like 10 minutes to talk about Robert Gates.
And it seems like there's an entire discussion about back when you knew him and how the end of the Cold War happened on his watch, and he had no idea and how hilarious all of that is.
But then also, then there's an entire new era of Robert Gates and his career under Bush and Obama, two major failures, two major losses at war on his watch that somehow are spun as victories.
So, I wonder if you're going to be willing to stay for another segment past the top of the hour news now that we've talked about how great the CIA analysts are for the whole first segment here.
I was going to say I'd be happy to do that.
Let's just say I'd be willing to do that.
Okay, good.
They'll settle for willing, everybody.
I'll settle for willing.
That's great.
All right, so now tell me about, very briefly, tell me about when you first met Robert Gates, and we'll do his real history when we get back from this break.
Yeah.
Well, he was working as a Soviet analyst on the Middle East when I came back short of tour from Europe.
The branch chief had died, and I was asked to take over his role.
It was an incredibly bright branch, the best in the agency, Mel Goodman, several others were in that branch.
And what I learned about Bobby Gates was that the second day he was an analyst, he started inquiring around some of the older folks, you know, how long did it take the area chief to become an area chief, and how long did it take the division chief, and then, you know.
So his ambition was so transparent that everyone sort of watched him meander around up the line, and it was a very divisive, divisive influence on the branch.
And I told him so in writing in the first fitness report I did on him.
That did not impede me to him, but it certainly made me feel better as I watched his career unfold.
Yeah, it's always, you can't really fault him as, you know, as far as his priorities.
He gets it done, right?
That's how you become the secretary of defense.
Well, he lets himself be used by Brzezinski or by, you know, Casey, as long as it means an upward swing for Bobby Gates, and the worst.
All right, well, I'll hold it there.
I'm sorry, we've got to go.
Hang on, it's Ray McGovern, everybody.
We're going to take this short break.
We'll be back talking about Robert Gates and the Cold War after this.
What was the only interest group in D.C. pushing war with Syria last summer?
AIPAC and the Israel Lobby.
What's the only interest group in D.C. pushing to sabotage the nuclear deal with Iran right now?
AIPAC and the Israel Lobby.
Why doesn't the president force an end to the occupation of Palestine, a leading cause of terrorist attacks against the United States?
AIPAC and the Israel Lobby.
The Council for the National Interest is pushing back, putting America first and educating the people about what's really at stake in the Middle East.
Help support their important work at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, now peace activist, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which shouldn't be too much to ask, you know?
But anyway.
So, yeah.
Contrary to that, go ahead and tell us about Robert Gates and how it really works over there.
You know, Sanity was a niche industry here in Washington when we started it up in January of 2003.
Our first memo was on the same day as Colin Powell's speech.
Suffice it to say, we gave him a C- for contract.
No, no, no.
Let's go back.
Let's talk about Robert Gates.
We all know about how good you are on Iraq.
But let's talk about how bad Robert Gates is on the USSR.
Because he went from, he was under you, and you were filing bad reports on him for being so ambitious, but very quickly he became the deputy director.
How's that?
Well, it's almost a funny story if you aren't so tragic.
He schmoozed with all my superiors, right?
And they didn't heed my warnings.
And long story short, ten years later, everybody, everybody, my superiors, young and old, of all grades and rank, they're all talking about Bobby Gates.
Why?
Because he ingratiated himself with Bill Casey, the troglodyte who came in with Ronald Reagan to run the CIA, the fellow who saw a Soviet under every rock in Nicaragua, okay?
Now, Bobby Gates was able to see three Soviets under every rock in Nicaragua, and so he got to be head of analysis.
And, you know, that's symbolic or a metaphor, I suppose, but it's not far from the truth.
Now, what did he do then?
Well, when he cashiered the people who know things about the Soviet Union, Mel Goodman, Mel Goodman was asked to shepherd an estimate.
Were the Soviets behind all terrorism in the world?
And Mel came up with the estimate.
He says, no.
As a matter of fact, they discourage Communist Party.
He said, they don't, terrorism is not a good thing for the Russians.
They don't see it as something they promote.
Well, Mel Goodman had to leave, or he quit, and discussed when Casey arranged to have some other folks write the correct answer.
So what happened there, and why it's important, Scott, is that Casey and Gates really kind of drained the academic intelligence and analysis ranks of all the smart people on the Soviet Union and put in people like John McLaughlin, who bubbled up to be the deputy director, Doug McKicken, and they just hewed to the Gates line that, ah, he's just a clever commie.
I don't believe it.
The Soviet Party, the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, forget about it.
They'll stay in power forever.
And so as a result, the institution missed the fall of the Soviet Union, their most important target since World War II.
Well, that remains a big untold part of this story, because you'll see reference all the time if you watch Discovery Channel-type versions of the way things go, that sort of thing, and they'll always talk about how, well, they won't always talk about it, they'll sometimes mention, I guess is the better way to say it, they'll sometimes mention that, yeah, the CIA and the American intelligence community were caught by surprise by this, but they never say it's because they had such a political interest in building up an imaginary Soviet Union into being 12 feet tall that they couldn't help but miss what was really happening in front of them that they were paying no attention to whatsoever.
Yeah, you know, it's worse than that, Scott.
Let me explain.
You know, people talk about the intelligence before the Iraq War as being mistaken.
It wasn't.
It was fraud.
It was fraudulent.
So, too, with the intelligence on the Soviet Union, it was fraudulent.
These were people much more interested in their career progression than the truth.
They knew.
They knew that the Soviet Union was falling apart, but they wouldn't get promoted if they said so.
So there were very few people like Mel Goodman that said, that's enough, I didn't come here to tell lies, I'm getting out of here.
Very, very few.
And so when it all happened, the institution fell on its face.
But there are lots of Soviet analysts, actually, the truth be told.
I knew who they were.
I was one of them myself.
And in my one-on-ones with Secretary Shultz and the Vice President, Bush was his name, George H.W. Bush, I told him the real deal.
I was just about to ask you that.
You talked to Bush.
You were his morning briefer, basically, right?
Yeah, and when Shultz, later in his memoirs, he says, I came to distrust everything I was being told by Gates and Casey.
I know that I was giving him the straight scoop.
And when, for example, Tass announced, as I'm walking in Shultz's store, that Gorbachev had invited Shultz to come to the Soviet Union, well, you know, the school solution was, no, no, don't get, he's a clever commie.
And I told Shultz, he's the real deal, because I know the guys that really know about the Soviet Union tell me, and I trust them, and I know enough about it myself to say, you ought to try him out, Mr. Shultz.
Don't be misled by these tendentious careerists that know better, but can't say better because they want their next promotion.
So it was a mixed story.
The top guys were getting the truth, but it was just an accident of history that the guys that I knew would tell the truth, and my own experience allowed me to feed Shultz and Weinberger even, and George H.W. Bush, what we considered to be Gorbachev, the real deal.
As a matter of fact, one of the fun things was that George H.W. Bush said, Well, hey, hey, when people say Gorbachev, all that stuff, you know.
I used to teach versions of that, but I said, Well, I thought I'd spare him the orthography, you know, Mr. Bush, after good, cool, high, shy, you know.
So I didn't do any of that.
I said, Look, just say Gorbachev, Gorbachev, Gorbachev, and then say off, and accent the off.
Okay, Gorbachev.
That's it.
Oh, you got it.
He was the first one to get it.
So they're all kinds of neat little things, funny, some of them, but the real deal was that we knew what was going on there, and Casey and Gates also knew, okay, they were mistaken.
They just wanted to build these missile systems and everything else.
Yeah.
Well, now, when George H.W. Bush was the director of the CIA, he was the one who commissioned the Team B study, where they really started the ball rolling on heating the Cold War back up after detente and the dawn of the Reagan era and all that buildup, right?
Yeah, right.
Yeah, that was his major sin as CIA director, and he lasted just one year at the helm.
I didn't realize that at the time.
I enjoyed working for him, and I enjoyed briefing him, but the more I learned about George H.W. Bush from Bob Perry and people who really looked into it at the time, the more I considered him a total waste, not only as past president, but as head of the CIA because he did.
Now, see, that sounds kind of crazy to somebody like me listening to you going, hey, I'm the CIA briefer who's talking to the vice president of the United States every morning, but now that I'm reading Bob Perry going back, now I really understand what was going on.
It seems like you were the one informing Bob Perry what's really going on.
Well, you know, this speaks volumes for Bob Perry, but the real deal here is this.
I had no idea that the vice president and Don Gregg, his assistant, and others were knee-deep or neck-deep in the big money, and the big money, of course, was Iran-Contra, okay?
I had no idea about that because the substantive analysis was kept off against these illegal and constitutional activities, so that's what I'm talking about.
In other words, I could tell about the Soviet Union or what's going on elsewhere in the world, but I had no idea of his deep immersion with Ali North and all those other people, so I learned that from Bob Perry, and I'm very grateful for being able to do that.
Yeah.
That's interesting about the compartmentalization there, where you're the CIA morning briefer, and he knows that much more to you about CIA operations going on, which I know wasn't entirely a CIA op or anything, but the enterprise and all that.
There was such secrecy surrounding this, of course, since it was so damn illegal, that I'm not surprised I didn't know.
Every now and then I spoke up when the substantive question came up, like there was one time when they were grousing about Mary McGorry saying that every one of the Contra directorates, well, ex-Samosistas, you know, was the secret police for Samosa.
And I said, well, actually, that happens to be the case.
Oh, no, come on, come on, Ray.
That's like saying all the Bundeswehr and Nazis.
I said, no, no, no, no.
It's like saying the SS, because the secret police of the Samosa was the SS, was the Gestapo, and every single member of that Contra director used to be in that Gestapo.
Well, you better give me a memo on that.
But, you know, they didn't care.
They had other priorities, and the less they knew about that, the better.
So that was my one major fling.
I'm straight on that, and I knew it darn well that they weren't interested in the real answer.
All right.
Well, and so now, back to Gates on this.
How deep was he in the Iran-Contra thing?
Because he was not the deputy director.
He was the deputy director of CIA at the time.
He was eyeballs deep, okay?
He was eyeballs deep.
And the proof of it is— He completely skated, though, right?
Go back to the 80s.
He didn't get in trouble at all when everybody else around him fell.
Is that right?
That's right.
He lied, of course, and even the prosecutor or the investigators said he lied.
He escaped indictment just barely by the skin of his teeth.
But the real lesson here is that in 1991, when he was up for being cleared or nominated and approved as director of the CIA, Bush, George H. W. Bush, expended all manner of political capital to get him in there.
There were 31 senators that voted against him at the end.
Why did he do that?
Because Gates knew where the bodies were buried.
If Gates went into the CIA, he could destroy all those things and George H. W. Bush could kill.
Now, Ray, we've got to go to the top of the hour news.
When we get back, we're going to talk all about the surges and Gates' two failed wars and all of that as secretary of defense.
So we'll be back at 6 after.
You can go ahead and take a break if you want.
Come back.
It's Ray McGovern.
RayMcGovern.com.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Appreciate you tuning in.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern.
He's got this new piece at ConsortiumNews.com.
I can't find the damn thing.
I got it here.
Oh, I know.
Nope, that's not it.
Oh, here.
No tears for the real Robert Gates.
That's at ConsortiumNews.com.
We're talking about the real legacy of the former secretary of defense.
He's got a big PR campaign and selling his book and all of that going on right now.
And it's funny, like, how can you be the secretary of war and lose two wars and then parade around like you're a big hero in your neck brace and everybody goes, wow, you're such a great guy.
We can learn so much from you, like how to lose two wars.
But nobody even asked him that.
Everybody acts like he's, you know, Caesar.
He's come home from his triumphant conquests.
Well, Scott, the narrative is not that he lost two wars, but that he saved two wars that were going south.
I don't remember that happening, though.
When did that happen?
I was watching, too.
I mean, from Texas, but still as close as I can.
You have to look at things from the Bush and Cheney perspective on Iraq.
You see, at the end of 2006, there was bedlam in Iraq.
Nothing was going well.
It looked very clear that there was a fool's errand and we had to get out of there.
And so one of the congressmen who had some guts encouraged the establishment of what they called the Iraq Study Group.
Who did they get to head that up?
Bush loyalists, James Baker.
Yeah, they had Sandra Day O'Connor and Vernon Jordan.
Yeah.
The establishment.
The old guys.
Yeah, but even they, that's the story.
Even they said, it's a fool's errand, we've got to get out of there.
The sooner the better.
The worst thing to do would be prolong the agony.
Now, simultaneously, the generals, Abizade, Hadassan Khan, Casey, head of the ground forces out there in Iraq, they came to Congress in September of 2006 and said, please, Senator Levin, please, no more troops, okay?
No, please.
The last thing we need is more troops because then the Iraqi government will get it and then they'll get it to its head.
It has to work out a deal, Sunni and Shiite.
So, please.
One thing, please, don't throw me in the dryer patch, but this is for real, okay?
No troops.
What happens?
Well, Bush and Cheney go to their NAOCON advisors and say, what does that mean?
No troops.
And the NAOCON advisors at the American Enterprise Institute go to them and say, well, Mr. President, that means you lose a war on your watch.
And so President says, well, wait a second, I don't want to do that.
How can I avoid that?
The word was surge.
Surge 30,000 troops into Iraq.
Make sure that you can tamp down the violence by ethnic cleansing.
And I use that word advisedly.
Ethnic cleansing the capital of Iraq, Baghdad, from a predominantly Shia, a predominantly Sunni city into a predominantly Shia city.
And that's what we could watch in satellite photography.
The lights go out, okay, in those neighborhoods.
Now, that was the surge, okay?
Now, what did it do?
It bought Cheney and Bush enough time so they could ride out into the western sunset not having lost a war.
What did it cost?
$1,000.
U.S. troops, what did it achieve?
Zilch.
Look at Iraq now.
Last Sunday, last time I checked the figures, 70 people killed, more than that injured.
The place is falling apart.
The country is destroyed.
The only good that's come out of any of this has been from the perspective of Israel, which very much wanted us to destroy Iraq, remove Saddam Hussein, and so we did.
And they looked on that in a very myopic way as progress.
So it was a disaster.
Now, what happened with respect to Afghanistan when some used it?
Now, wait a minute.
I mean, that's not entirely fair because I think that Iran and al-Qaeda benefited a lot from that war, too, not just Israel.
Okay.
I stand corrected.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
Now go ahead, Afghanistan.
Okay.
So surge is a really good word in Washington because, well, I mean, people like Sarah Palin, two years later, Sarah Palin saying, look what we need to do.
She's a strategic thinker of great repute, of course.
She says what we need to do here, here it is.
She tells Katie Couric, quote, a surge in Afghanistan will also lead us to victory there as it has proven to have done in Iraq.
Now, that sounds good to Bobby Gates.
Now, I should probably finish the Iraq part of this because I hadn't noted that Donald Rumsfeld himself was going real wobbly on the war in Iraq.
So you had the Iraq study group.
At the end of 06.
At the end of 06, yeah, and actually when Bush and Cheney realized that if they cut back there, they would lose the war on their watch and decided to surge.
Rumsfeld, I suppose, to his credit, says, well, you know, I think the military's right.
I don't think it's a good idea.
So they canned him.
Now, who are they going to get to be defense secretary?
Well, Bobby Gates comes out to Crawford and Bush says, no, look, this is what's going to happen.
We're going to do a surge and you're not going to have to do anything.
We have this really pretty guy with a 12 hours of medals.
His name is Petraeus.
He's got all the merit badges from his Boy Scout days.
And you know all about that.
He's going to do all the dirty work.
All you have to do is go to Tampa and cashier.
I'll be saying, well, to Iraq, tell Casey he can have a sinecure in the Joint Chiefs and we'll do the surge.
And Gates says, well, does that mean, I mean, are you saying like I can be secretary of defense?
And yeah, yeah, that's the deal.
Oh, I'll let you do that.
Now, Gates had been on the Iraq study group.
He knew what the deal was.
He knew it was effective, but he didn't want to be secretary of defense.
So that's Iraq.
Now, two years later, some idiot persuades Obama to hire Bobby Gates back on or, you know, let him stay as secretary of defense.
Now, Afghanistan is in the same shape.
It's going down the tubes.
What are they going to do?
Well, Obama didn't have the guts to say, look, this is a fool's errand just like Iraq.
We need to downsize, get out of there.
Instead of that, surge.
That's what Bobby Gates pushed.
Surge.
Again, 30,000 folks.
Now look at Afghanistan today.
It's a basket case.
We're going to be driven out of there with our tail between our legs, just like we were out of Iraq, having killed another 2,000, 3,000 U.S. troops, not to mention Afghan soup.
Last time I checked the Bible there, they're people too.
And it's just a destroyed society.
So, you know, this surge business, you know, it makes no sense at all.
And for the pundits at the establishment in Washington, official Washington be singing the praises of the surges still.
Well, it's the only thing that Bobby Gates can trade on.
And that's why I wrote the book now.
Okay?
Because next year it's going to be clear that both were disasters.
So he gets the book out now, gets on all the TV programs.
The guy is a Teflon-coated charlatan, and you can quote me on it.
I saw that the first time I supervised him.
Yeah.
Hey, and we can end on this note about your CIA analyst you love so much.
According to, I'm sorry, I don't know how to pronounce his name, so it's really hard to memorize, but it's Little America is the book, and he's a Washington Post reporter, and they serialized it in the Washington Post, or parts of it.
And one of the things that he talks about in there is that the CIA analyst came up with a report in 2009 that told Obama, this would have been the fall of 2009, that told him that the initial surge that had already taken place, I believe it was 30 in the spring and then another 30,000 in the summer, the CIA report said, nah, it's made a negligible difference.
It's not going to make a difference in the long-term outcome of the war if you give them another 30 or 60 now, so you might as well not even bother.
And how Obama, you know, I guess had heard what was in the report, or he knew what was in it, and so refused to read it, because he knew it was telling him to not bother surging.
But he went ahead with his political advice, which was you can't end two wars, or the Republicans will call you a sissy.
So he said, oh no, I'd rather get tens of thousands more people killed than be called a sissy, and so.
Yeah, I've checked with the doctors at George Washington University Hospital for how far along they are on a backbone implant, thinking that, you know, we get one in Obama in the next year or two, we have some hope.
But they're five years away from that, and unless he gets testosterone treatment or something like that, that the guy is from hunger.
The thing is, it was the right gamble politically.
He got reelected, he did not have a controversy over leaving Afghanistan, which he would have had, and it may have made the difference.
And so from his point of view, more power for him, it worked, you know?
You're not suggesting that politics trumps everything, even getting people killed, are you, Scott?
Yeah, well, this is why I don't think there should be a government at all.
Starting with the CIA, no offense.
Well, you know, I think there's some good things happening.
We prevented the war in Syria, and that was largely the American people, even the British people.
There's a big backlash about the NSA right now, too.
I'm sorry, we gotta go, but you're right, thanks for ending on a positive note right there.
We did stop the war in Syria, and they helped, and that is a big deal.
Thanks very much.
Ray McGovern, everybody.
The heroic Ray McGovern, ConsortiumNews.com.
No tears for the real Robert Gates.
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Hey, Al Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org slash subscribe.
Since 1989, FFF has been pushing an uncompromising moral and economic case for peace, individual liberty, and free markets.
Sign up now for the Future of Freedom, featuring founder and president Jacob Horenberger, as well as Sheldon Richmond, James Bovard, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, and many more.
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That's fff.org slash subscribe.
And tell them Scott sent you.
Don't worry about things you can't control.
Isn't that what they always say?
But it's about impossible to avoid worrying about what's going on these days.
The government has used the war on guns, the war on drugs, and the war on terrorism to tear our Bill of Rights to shreds.
But you can fight back.
The Tenth Amendment Center has proven it, racking up major victories.
For example, when the U.S. government claimed authority in the NDAA to have the military kidnap and detain Americans without trial, the nullifiers got a law passed in California, declaring the state's refusal to ever participate in any such thing.
Their latest project is offnow.org, nullifying the National Security Agency.
They've already gotten model legislation introduced in California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas, meant to limit the power of the NSA to spy on Americans in those states.
We'd be fools to wait around for the U.S. Congress or courts to roll back, big brother.
Our best chance is nullification and interposition on the state level.
Go to offnow.org, print out that model legislation, and get to work nullifying the NSA.
The hero Edward Snowden has risked everything to give us this chance.
Let's take it.offnow.org.
Thanks for watching.