11/02/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, November 2nd, 2014, I'm Scott Horton, this is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show, it is Anti-War Radio here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
I'm your host Scott Horton, my website is scotthorton.org.
You can check out all my archives, more than 3,500 interviews now going back to 2003.
And sign up for the podcast feed there if you want for the archives of this and my other radio shows there at scotthorton.org.
And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
And now introducing this morning's guest, it's our friend Ray McGovern.
For 27 years he was an analyst at the CIA.
Then he became the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
He's really a full-time peacenik now, writer for consortiumnews.com.
He's got his own website at raymcgovern.com.
And we feature pretty much everything he writes at antiwar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show Ray, how are you doing?
Thank you Scott, doing well.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
And I'm kind of sorry about the circumstances.
First of all, I had you on the show, on my other radio show yesterday.
But we only had a short 10-minute segment and the audio wasn't that good.
So I wanted to really follow up and then get more into the heart of the matter actually as well.
But first of all, can you please tell the story of what happened to you on Thursday in New York City?
Well yes, sure.
I was up in New York, my hometown, where I spent my first 22 years before going into the military.
And I was teaching a course at Manhattan College up in Riverdale in the Bronx and also at Fordham, my alma mater.
Talking about justice, talking about peace, talking about the fact that peace is nothing more than simply the experience of justice.
And that sometimes we have to put our bodies into it if we're going to change things.
Little did I know that I was going to be offered the opportunity to put my body into it just later that evening.
I had bought a ticket to hear General David Petraeus speak at the 92nd Street Y, which a lot of people in New York consider a really tough fight place to hear important people.
So Petraeus and one of his minions, a fellow named Nagel, and Max Busch, supreme neocon, were going to be holding forth no doubt about their successes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Don't laugh please.
And I thought, hey, you know, it might be kind of good to get a ticket to see that.
And since I'm in town anyway, I'd do that.
And maybe I'd even participate in the question and answer period, as I had the luck to do with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld way back in May of 2006, which ended up in a wonderful opportunity to have a four minute debate with him.
So whether or not that would happen, at least maybe I'd get a question in and maybe he wouldn't turn out to be Saint David Petraeus as he has been portrayed or chief strategist and that kind of thing.
So long story short, I thought, Scott, I was clever enough not to order the ticket through my own email system.
So I asked a friend up there, can you get me a ticket?
And she said, sure.
So she got me a ticket.
I shelled out the 50 bucks.
And as I got to the ticket taker, all of a sudden I hear this booming voice.
Ray, you're not welcome here.
You're not going to get in.
You're going to turn around and go away.
We're not letting you in.
This rather portly bouncer, who turns out to be the head of security for the 92nd Street Y, says, I told you not to come back here.
I looked at him and said, what do you mean?
You disrupted the proceedings last time.
I said, wait a second, wait a second.
What he was referring to was when Donald Rumsfeld, my favorite debate partner, showed up at the 92nd Street Y about three years ago when I was also, by chance actually, in town.
And I went to see what he and a bunch of neocons were going to say.
And all I did on that occasion was stand up on the far right of the auditorium in the first row where no one could actually notice me.
But security noticed me and NYPD noticed me.
And I got 30 seconds worth of standing up there silently before they rather violently threw me out of the premise.
And the guy, I remember the guy saying, don't come back.
Well, you know, I don't know about don't come back.
When you buy a ticket, you should be able to get in.
So on the strength of the fact that Petraeus was coming, I decided I'd like to go.
And when I remonstrated and said, look, you know, I have this ticket.
They said, well, we have the right to refuse you to come in.
I said, well, no, that doesn't sound right.
I have this constitution here, which I always carry around with me.
The First Amendment says, you know, freedom of speech and assembly.
And, you know, that doesn't square.
Well, before I knew it, the New York City cops were all over me.
And what really hurt literally was that I had earlier in the week fallen down and hurt my left shoulder rather badly, as well as my left eyebrow where I have eight stitches still in there.
And the rotator cuff had been really, really severely damaged.
And what they were trying to do is get my arms together behind my back the way they usually do into one set of handcuffs.
Well, the pain was excruciating.
And finally, they kind of gave up and they strung a couple of pairs of handcuffs together so that my left wrist, which was not physically capable of coming together with my right wrist with one pair of handcuffs.
Anyhow, long story short, they immobilized me as the as the procedures call for, put me into the back of a police car, took me off to the 19th precinct where I was gone through the procedures of the 18 hand, little fingerprints and photos.
And then I insisted on going to New York University, Cornell.
Well, I just insisted on seeing a doctor because I was afraid this time the thing had been broken, my left shoulder.
So they x-rayed me, said, no, no, no fracture.
Just a heck of a lot of pain.
Here, take this ibuprofen, which I did.
Ended up in the holding center of the New York City jail way downtown in the way down in the tip of Manhattan, which was an experience that I'll tell you about some other time.
But, you know, being subjected to those conditions in the very bottom of this mammoth building and seeing, well, seeing how how people are forced to.
Innocent people really are forced to endure suffering above and beyond the call of any civilized society.
All I could remember was what Dostoevsky has famously said, and that is, if you want to see the the level of sophistication or humaneness of a society, go look at the prisons.
Well, I got a good look at night.
There was no place to sleep.
I was in a holding area with six others.
There was a stainless steel bench about two feet wide.
I tried to sleep on that.
Actually, I was so tired I did sleep for about half an hour.
Then I was arraigned about 1030 and they accused me of, let's see, resisting arrest because of the pain that I had and the pain they had in putting the cuffs on me.
And with something like criminal trespass.
I don't know how that figures.
You know, here I was with the ticket.
So long story short, a young, wonderful pro bono lawyer from my Catholic worker community who helps people out like me defended me adroitly, pointed out to the judge the fact that they had to put multiple sets of handcuffs on the guy shows something, doesn't it?
And I have to go to court on early December for phase two.
But there are lots of facets of this incredible adventure, not least of which is my experience actually in the jail, which we can save for another time.
Because these kinds of, well, all I'll just say right now is that the personal experience with innocent suffering is the scenic one on catalyst for understanding.
Understanding what injustice is.
And very seldom do we white people, we people of great privilege have a chance to be with people who are enduring this kind of thing.
The white cops kept saying, well, you don't belong here, you don't belong here.
And I said, I do belong here.
These are my brothers.
I do belong here.
And so again, that's for another session.
But it was really very depressing how people are treated in our prison system.
Getting back to this specific event here, Ray, it's curious to me, I guess it's understandable to me that they know who you are.
I mean, you're a pretty Googled bull guy and they threw you out before, they did a lot of research to figure out what was the big deal with you and whatever.
But then what I read at Firedog Lake was that they greeted everybody by their first name.
A bunch of people who, maybe they're political activists, but still it's rather strange when they call you Ray and then she's Susie and he's Bob and they're acting like everybody's old friends here.
This is NYPD sophisticated intelligence launched against a small group of Code Pink types?
Well, it's the 92nd Street Y plus the NYPD plus, I believe, the federal agencies with whom the NYPD has been in bed literally at least since 9-11.
That is a matter of record.
It was weird.
Hey, Ray, you're not welcome here, Ray.
I said, who are you?
And then I recognized that, you know, it looked like the guy, he says, yeah, you're not welcome here.
I said, look, you know, this is out of order.
I bought a ticket.
Oh, the ticket didn't matter.
And then Mike, I said, hey, Mike, you can't come in here either.
So somehow, somehow they knew that we were coming even though we were careful, Scott, to not to buy, I didn't buy the ticket myself.
I asked a friend in New York to buy it for me.
I wonder if it was facial recognition working in real time, you know, somebody in the earbud has, you know, files being pulled out.
I've consulted the experts on this, Scott, and it's very simple.
You know, for those who still worry or still think that they can't really intercept emails or that they only collect metadata or that they can't really handle all these telephone calls, millions every day.
Well, I guess I'm forced to conclude.
Sure they can.
Sure they can.
And, you know, when the people say, well, you know, I don't have anything to worry about.
I, you know, I have a clean life.
I have nothing to hide.
Well, the first thing I think about, Scott, is that old Stasi guy, the old East German security services guy who, after Edward Snowden unburdened himself and told us what's going on with NSA intercept activity, he was asked, how do you address this question when people say we have nothing to hide?
His name was stereotypical, but the real name was Wolfgang Schmidt, and this is what he said.
This is incredibly naive to say that you are not being prosecuted by the government.
This is why the government does these things.
The only way to prevent it from happening is to prevent the government from collecting the information in the first place.
And there it is, you know.
So, you know, how did they know we were coming?
It's pretty darn clear.
Now, do we have something to hide?
Well, I guess if it's a crime to want to go in and ask David Petraeus a decent question.
Yeah, you did have something to hide.
Your secret covert mission to try to get the bravest man in the world to have to face up to answering a question about his failure, his loss of two wars.
Yeah, well, I mean, that would have been embarrassing, and, you know, the poor guy.
But, you know, the height of my irony here is that poor little David Petraeus was subjected to the same kind of intrusion into his emails, which did him in.
Oh, yeah, that's true.
That's funny.
You know, of course, I forget if you had reported this, but I know Giraldi was saying, Phil Giraldi, another former CIA officer, was saying that, I think he wrote this as really kind of a coup d'etat against Petraeus by the CIA.
That they had their buddies in the FBI get rid of this guy for them because they couldn't stand him anymore.
Well, actually, it was more the FBI and NSA because Petraeus, of course, was part of the CIA at the time, the director.
But what happened?
Well, no, I mean, yeah, like the lower guys said, hey, you know, went to their buddies in the other agencies and said we're not going to instruct it.
Petraeus was, well, you know about his affair with Paula Broadwell.
Well, Petraeus was getting too big for his britches.
And I don't mean, you know, I don't mean especially with respect to Broadwell.
I mean, metaphorically, he was really kind of sounding off in a way that Obama didn't much care for.
Obama had already been kind of mousetrapped by number two, the one into Afghanistan, which turned out to come a cropper.
And Petraeus was, you know, clearly had presidential aspirations and could not be depended on to do an honest job even in the CIA.
So what happens?
The president calls or the White House calls General Hayden, or I'm sorry, General Alexander now, who's head of the NSA, and Robert Mueller.
He's the head of the FBI.
And Mueller let the cat out of the bag because three years ago in testimony to Congress, Mueller talked about setting up the NSA database, which could be queried to catch just about anyone.
And in those days, people were talking metadata.
Forget about metadata.
We're talking content.
So when they wanted to get Petraeus, they put in his name into this database and they got all these scurrilous little emails and so forth.
And they got it on General Allen as well, calling this broad and I'm sorry, calling this woman in Tampa sweetie, sweetie, sweetie.
And worse than that, worse than that, they got Eliot Spitzer in the same way.
Now, Eliot Spitzer, for those who don't remember, was an incredible attorney general and I guess get this now was holding the banks and the corporations and all the people with all the money.
What my grandmother called she was Irish.
She called them the the upper crust, which she defined as a bunch of crumbs held together with a lot of dough.
OK, well, the upper crust was being infringed upon by Eliot Spitzer.
And so how did they get him?
Well, they called Alexander from the NSA.
They called Muta from the FBI and said, we've got to get this guy.
And of course, they found out he was visiting a prostitute when he came to the Mayflower Hotel and they did him in.
Now, that's not the end of the story.
The end of the story so far is who's Alexander?
Keith Alexander, four star general head of, you know, intelligence and NSA and the command that has cybercom under it.
What is he doing now in retirement?
Oh, he's got a cybersecurity thing to protect to protect whom?
The banks and who has joined that same firm making a million dollars a month?
Bob Mueller.
Oh, wow.
Is this a great country or what?
For them.
I know.
I know contracting officers that have worked for the U.S. government.
And, you know, they've taken these courses.
And what's really drummed into them, at least when I was around, is that you have to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest in the appearance.
The appearance, much less the reality.
Well, if this is a, you know, face down a conflict of interest where Alexander had a better say.
Mueller, the head of the FBI, now have this really well healed computer security company working for the banks for payback because the banks didn't like Elliot Spitzer doing what he was doing.
Elliot is out of the equation now.
But Caden and Bob Mueller are making lots of money.
You know, I have to ask myself, what do you do with your second million or your third million?
You know, do they have no shame?
And this is not the appearance of a conflict of interest.
Trace it back for God's sake.
My middle school granddaughter can figure it out.
This is this is corruption.
This is corruption by highly touted, well-respected people that congressional people call all kinds of accolade type names.
Yeah.
Well, now again, it's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton talking with Ray McGovern, the peacenik, former CIA analyst.
And Ray, you're back at your house in Virginia now, which means that that's the first time that anyone has used the phrase conflict of interest in that proximity to Washington, D.C. and probably 30 years.
So that's right.
Way, way back.
I see some police outside my front door.
Do you think I answer it?
I think you should put the dresser in front of the thing.
Give me another five minutes here.
I can't ask you all about how Petraeus lost two wars because we just don't have the time.
But I did laugh out loud at the part where he said not to laugh.
I just luckily had my mic muted.
So you were able to keep going.
It didn't disrupt the show too bad at the time.
But talk to me a little bit as your friend Robert Perry writes about in his most recent piece here at Consortium News dot com.
It's called Petraeus spared Ray McGovern's question about training up the Iraqi army and all.
But he brings up the old story of David Petraeus and Max Boot and the accidental email forward that, you know, shine a little light through a window into David Petraeus, this most powerful at that time, I believe the head of CENTCOM or maybe he was the head of the Afghan war at that time.
I forget if that was before or after McChrystal was forced out.
But anyway, extremely powerful general supposedly have won the Iraq war at the time and all that and yet got himself in some big trouble.
Could you please tell that story real quick?
Sure.
Well, he won the Iraq war and then he won the war in Afghanistan.
At least that's what he was pretending on the 16th of March 2010.
Now, he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
OK.
And somebody wrote into his testimony.
Maybe it was he himself without thinking very clearly.
They wrote in a question that was very sensitive.
An issue.
And what they said was, I quote, the Israel-Palestine conflict foments anti-American sentiment due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel.
The conflict gives Iran influence.
And it also Al-Qaeda and other military groups can exploit that anger to mobilize support.
Whoa.
Now, that's a factual statement.
Right.
But it sort of casts suspensions on Israeli intransigence in not solving or not moving at all on the Palestinian issue.
So what does he do?
What happens is the press takes this and says, my God, Petraeus is seeing the real problem here.
And all kinds of accolades are being accolades from progressive people like my friend James Morris out there in California.
And he writes a little attaboy little cable to Petraeus.
Way to go.
Really good.
And Petraeus sends him back.
Well, FYI.
And what he tacks on is an op-ed that Max Boot had just written, which says, Petraeus is not anti-Semitic.
And Petraeus and he engaged in this dialogue by email.
And guess what?
Petraeus forgets, forgets to delete the thread of the email.
And so you can see the email given to my friend Jim Morris, which says, Petraeus says, do it.
What do I need to do now?
Should I tell the folks that I that I had Elie Wiesel and his wife over to dinner or I'm going to celebrate the Holocaust next week?
And Max Boot says, no, no, don't worry.
You're covered.
I just wrote an op-ed.
Nobody's going to call you anti-Semitic.
And Petraeus, are you sure?
So.
So here you talk.
You talk about a guy who Admiral Fallon, his boss at the time, called a chicken.
You know, here's a guy who still had presidential aspirations.
It was six or seven months before Hayden.
I'm sorry.
Before Alexander and Mueller at the behest of the White House did amendments.
It was six or seven months before Hayden at the behest of the White House did amend.
And he was trying to make sure that he covered his base with all the people who don't want to acknowledge that it is indeed Israeli intransigent that that accounts for a great deal of our problems in the Middle East.
And I'll just tack on one thought.
If you have the 9-11 Commission report, go to page 147.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is asked why he did it.
He was the excited brains behind the Operation 9-11.
He says, I did it out of my extreme hatred for U.S. policy, one sided supporting Israel.
Now, that's not the only reason they did it.
But why would he say that if he didn't feel that way?
So this is the same thing his nephew said back in 1995 when he was convicted from conspiracy in the first world truce.
Exactly the same thing when he was condemned to 105 years at Sing Sing.
So so these are real problems.
And Petraeus is just such a well, you know, he's going to be speaking again, Scott, in New York and elsewhere.
And I'm hopeful that that people may be energized once it's revealed, you know, what he's really like, how he condoned torture by the by the Iraqis on one another, how he's supposed to have trained up these troops, which as soon as ISIL used an AK-47 or two turned around and ran away.
You know, how all that came out.
People need to know that.
And hopefully through places like your own anti-war and your own program here, people can not only learn this stuff, but get out in the streets and make sure that other people are aware that we have a bunch of charlatans that have been given undue honors and they should be held accountable.
I feel very strongly about that.
Perhaps that comes through.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you know what?
One of my favorite writers on the issue of the failures of the surge, they both surges, they achieved PR wins in both cases, but they did not win the war in either case.
And Kelly B.
Vallejos from the American Conservative Magazine and Antiwar.com has done such a great job.
And this speech that you weren't allowed to, this farce you were not allowed to go and participate in there, Ray, in New York, featured this guy, John Nagel, as well.
He was the head of the Center for a New American Security and wrote the book on coin eating soup with a knife and was one of the big champions of this counterinsurgency strategy and has a new book out pretending that, yeah, it all worked out as long as you don't look at the newspaper today.
In the case of either war, everything was great.
And she has a brand new one at the American Conservative Magazine absolutely destroying him, which deserves to be done, too.
So and his failure is McChrystal's failure, is Petraeus's failure.
These guys, I mean, I don't know, Ray, you you're a much better historian than me.
Has there ever been an American general who lost two wars and yet went down in history as a war winning hero anyway?
Or I mean, is this something else or what?
Well, I think I can give a definitive no to that.
And, you know, this whole counterinsurgency thing in the early 60s when I was a young second and then first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Infantry.
And we studied the real experts, Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, people who knew something about how you handle insurgencies and counterinsurgencies.
This book by by Petraeus and his minions, they had nothing to the discussion except it got him a Ph.
D.from Princeton.
Give me a break.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry that we're all out of time, but I'm so glad that we got to spend it with you this week.
Appreciate it, Ray.
Oh, thank you, Scott.
All right.
So that is the heroic Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst turned peacenik.
He will come and give a speech to your group.
He writes at consortiumnews.com and he is safe and sound out of jail now.
So rest assured.
That's it for Anti-War Radio for this morning.
Thanks very much, everybody, for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm back here next Sunday at 830.
You can find all my archives, more than 3,500 interviews now going back to 2003.
And sign up for the podcast feed there at scotthorton.org.
And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
See you next week.