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All right.
Our next guest today is the great Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst turned peacenik, and his website is RayMcGovern.com.
Welcome back to the show.
Ray, how are you doing?
Doing okay, Scott.
Good to be back with you.
Very happy to have you here, and well, I can't wait to hear what you have to say about the recent talks, and the almost deal, and what you expect to come from the upcoming negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, and Israeli influence and interference here, there, wherever.
Whatever you want to say.
Open floor.
Well, we're back where we were the last two times.
We tried to work out a sensible agreement with the Iranians.
One of the rubs is the misguidance that we're getting from the fawning corporate media.
New York Times, for example, keeps referring to Iran's right to enrich uranium, and it puts right in between quotation marks.
This is kind of an old kind of trick, where you disparage people.
Take the Cubans, for example.
There were Cuban, quote, doctors, end quote, going to Angola and other places in Africa.
Well, they were doctors.
Soviet made, quote, farm equipment, end quote, in Portugal, when they threw out Salazar.
Well, it was farm equipment.
In this case, it's similar.
Iran's right to enrich uranium.
It is a right.
It's a right that concretized in the nonproliferation treaty, which Iran signed, and of course Israel has not signed.
So the rub comes when people fear that Iran will enrich its uranium far beyond its needs for electricity, and then move toward a nuclear weapon.
Now, what most people don't realize, because it's never in the Washington Post or the New York Times, is that the intelligence community redeemed itself after the debacle on Iraq.
And how they did that was they got an honest person in to run the estimate on how soon Iran could get a nuclear weapon.
Tom Finger was his name.
He was an assistant secretary of state.
He ran the State Department of Intelligence.
And after the terrible experience in Iraq, and Tom Finger and the state took a lot of footnotes from that terrible estimate, saying that Saddam Hussein ought all manner of weapons of mass destruction, and ties with al-Qaeda, yada, yada, yada.
So they asked Tom, would you come in and do an honest one on Iran?
Because it's very clear that the president and vice president Bush and Cheney have Iran in their sights now, and they've got a whole year left before they leave office.
It looks like we're going to go it again.
And so Tom Finger said, well, no, I won't do that.
I've been through that process.
And they pleaded with him.
They said, look, you know, you're the best guy, and you were right pretty much on Iraq.
So he said, all right, look, here's the deal.
I'll bring in three or four real experts, objective experts from the State Department.
If you let me do that, and you give me enough time, and you don't bother me to come up with premature conclusions, I'll do it.
Agreed.
So all during 2007, Tom Finger and his experts worked from the bottom up.
They threw out the earlier estimates on how soon Iran could get a nuclear weapon.
It was sort of embarrassing, because as they reviewed the record, starting at about 1995, each estimate about three years of court said, we think Iran could get a nuclear weapon in about, oh, five years.
In 1998, we think probably about five years.
2001, we think they're five years away from it.
It was getting embarrassing.
And so what they did was throw all that stuff out, did a bottom up assessment.
They had a piece of luck in the midst of this, because they got some new information.
And they decided, they decided in early November 2007, that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon way back at the end of 2003, and had not resumed work on a nuclear weapon.
That was a bombshell.
How do I know that?
Because George W. Bush says so in his memoirs.
It is really incredible.
We analysts have to read all manner of things, including things like the turgid prose in George Bush's memoir.
But I went through it.
And around about page 470-something, he must have written these pages himself, Scott.
Because what he said was this.
When that estimate came in, it was eye-popping.
Quote, I don't know why they said this, end quote.
Well, you know, could it have occurred to him that, you know, because it was true?
This of course was that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003.
Another quote, this deprived me of the military option, says Bush.
And then my favorite, the whole paragraph, quote, for how could I authorize a military strike on a country that the intelligence community says has no active nuclear weapons program?
Question mark, close quotes.
Bummer.
Out of the mouths of babes, right?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, you were thinking, well- Innocent, doe-eyed George Bush.
Well, it would be the normal reaction if you're really afraid of an Iranian nuclear capability and your intelligence community, by the way, unanimously, all 16 agencies, expressing themselves, quote, with high confidence, end quote, all decide that, hey, they stopped back in 03.
That's 10 years now.
You know, what would you expect the normal reaction would be?
Wow, really?
Oh, go tell the Israelis.
Oh, hey, wow.
Are you sure?
Isn't that great?
I remember at the time, talking to you and every other Iran expert, hooray, the new NIE is out.
Rejoice.
High confidence, they say.
Don't worry about it, they say.
Right.
Right.
So instead of that, what Bush does is toddle off to Tel Aviv in January, okay?
We're talking November, December goes to January.
He apologizes.
He apologizes to the Israelis for the estimate.
He says he disagrees.
He doesn't agree with his intelligence agencies.
But the cow is out of the bag.
The Israelis were very upset.
But you know what?
Sometimes the back play here, how this all worked, is really interesting, at least for me.
Stop me if I'm going into too much weeds here.
But how Tom Finger, the Assistant Secretary of State, was able to do this without alerting and getting beaten up by the White House is really quite a feat.
He swore everyone to secrecy.
He wouldn't let anybody talk to anybody, including all colleagues in the state and elsewhere.
And it wasn't until the very end of October after, one week after, George Bush at a big press conference had warned about the imminent nature of the nuclear weapon that Iran was building, and it was just about to get it.
And one of the journalists says, well, Mr. President, why do you say that?
And Bush says, well, what do you want?
What do you want?
World War II?
World War III?
Is that what you want?
Is that what you want?
And he's way out there on a limb, and all of a sudden, this estimate comes in.
Now, estimates can be kept secret.
Not this one.
This one had been requested by Congress, and so it was available to some Congress people.
Now, what I think next happened, and this is conjecture.
Well, in fact, let me interrupt you for just a sec to say that a year before it came out, I remember writing a blog entry, I think Phil Giroli had written, in the American Conservative Magazine, there's a new NIE in Dick Cheney's office.
It's fighting like mad over it.
And it didn't come out for another year after that.
And so my blog entry was, release the NIE, because I think we already knew that the CIA guys didn't want to take the rap for the next one, and so they were going to tell the truth this time.
Yeah, it was clear earlier on that there had been great delay with this estimate.
And I talked to Tom Finger about this.
He, incidentally, was the awardee.
He won the Sam Adams Award for Integrity and Intelligence back in January of this year.
It was presented to him in Oxford.
I talked to him about this, and he said, no, Ray, you know, we just, we got some really good information halfway through.
We, it wasn't really pressure for, well, yeah, there was a lot of pressure for us to pronounce ourselves prematurely, but we're glad we didn't.
And that was the terms on which he agreed to do it.
So he stuck to the terms.
To his great credit, he hung around long enough after the estimate to protect the objective, the honest analysts who had prepared it from retribution, because the neocons, Sir John Bolton and the others, were high-dutching.
They were just up in arms about this.
This prevented their favorite war, see?
So Finger hung around long enough to protect those who were involved, and then he went off.
He's a professor at Stanford now.
But the interesting thing that I want to explain here, how did this estimate become public at a time when, you know, the juggernaut was just about to roll down the path to war?
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and we're talking about Mike Mullen now, but before we had Admiral Fallon, who was the head of CENTCOM, the Central Command.
And he was the fellow who said, we're not going to do Iran on my watch.
And of course, he was cashiered.
But he was still around then.
And there were a bunch of military with some spunk, okay?
And when they heard, when they learned of this estimate, I'm sure that they went to Bush and said, now, Mr. President, this is going to leak.
Wink, wink.
This is sure to leak.
So we need to get out in front of this so that we can put our own spin on it, you know?
And Bush said, yeah, I suppose so.
Now, Scott, how are you going to spin this?
How are you going to spin the President saying that Iran is just about to get a nuclear weapon, and the intelligence community saying two weeks later, no, no, they stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003?
You can't spin it.
But the military wanted that judgment out so the pressure would be off.
So what they did, I think, was force the President to have a sanitized version prepared.
This time, it was an accurate sanitized version, unlike the one on Iraq.
And there it was, right?
If you want to see something funny, I mean, funny, I guess I have a weird sense of humor, watch Stephen Hadley.
He was the national security assistant to Bush at the time.
Watch him splain all this away the next day at the White House press conference he ran.
There was no splaining it away.
Iran was not working on a nuclear weapon.
Now, the thing to remember is that every year since, so 2007, 2008, up to March of this year, the Director of National Intelligence has revalidated, reaffirmed, restated that same judgment.
In other words, it's the official position of the U.S. government intelligence agencies, all of them combined together, agree unanimously that the Iranians aren't making nukes and that the whole controversy here is actually an invalid controversy from the first place.
It's been now six years and, as you said, revalidated every year since.
That that's been the official position of the U.S. government.
And it's, in fact, even the official position of the Israeli Mossad, too.
And when they talked to Haaretz a year and a half ago, spring of 2012, they used the exact language of the Americans about high confidence this and haven't made the political decision to begin to try that.
And so that's what they think, too.
Not their politicians, but their spies.
That's what they say as well.
Yeah, you're right.
You're right about that, Scott.
And, you know, what was really sticks in my craw is when Secretary of Defense Panetta was going over to try to persuade the Israelis not to attack Iran before the election last year.
That was January of last year.
And before he arrived, his, well, not his counterpart, but it was actually General Dempsey who was going over there to see his counterpart.
Anyhow, Ehud Barak, who then was the defense minister in Israel, went on IDF, Israeli Defense Forces, radio the day before Dempsey was to arrive.
So the question was, quote, Is it Israel's judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?
Barak, yes.
Next question.
How long will it take from the moment Iran decides to turn it into effective weapons until it has a nuclear warhead?
Ehud Barak.
I don't know.
Some say a year.
Some say 18 months.
But you know what?
It doesn't matter.
To do that, they would have to announce it's leaving the inspection regime.
They'd have to throw out the inspectors.
When they throw out the inspectors, come back and ask me, and I'll give you an educated guess.
Right now, the inspectors are crawling all over that country.
It doesn't matter right now.
That's the Israeli position, except for Netanyahu, and occasionally, except for people like Hillary Clinton or even our president, Barack Obama, who is very, very loose in referring to Iran's plan to build a nuclear weapon.
They know what the score is.
It's an artificial issue.
Here's the thing, Ray.
This problem has spread, really, because of the president more than anything else.
He just said his loose language.
This has spread even to the people arguing for substantive talks and a deal here, where they accept the fake premise that it's either this or an Iranian bomb that then we'll have to go to war to prevent.
So it's really important to undermine that false premise.
Before we move on to the talks, was there anything else you want to say to wrap up on the subject of Iran's lack of a nuclear weapons program that needs to be dealt with in the first place?
Well, I think very briefly, Scott, we need to address if it's a red herring, if it's a canard, then why has Israel almost forced Obama and Bush before him to attack Iran or to be complicit in an attack on Iran?
And the answer is really pretty simple, and it's twofold.
One is the Israelis would very much like us to do to Iran what we did to Iraq.
I mean, hello, Iran is seen as Israel's main enemy or rival in the area.
If they could get the United States to take out Iran the way we did Iraq, it's no longer the threat that it used to be.
The second part has to do with Israel's close-in threats, Hamas, Hezbollah, the people that Iran supports.
You know, once you devastate Iran, well, there's not much more support than can be given to those folks in Lebanon and Syria and elsewhere that the Israelis see as threatening their near frontier.
So it's really very simple.
And it's even written down in that wonderful, you know, New Strategy for Securing the Realm prepared by our neocons in 1996 for, guess who, Benjamin Netanyahu.
So for us to be taken in with the help of the New York Times and the Washington Post into thinking that Israel really thinks that this is a threat, well, you know, that does a disservice to all of us who are trying to figure out what's going on here.
The more so, the more so since Iran, since that first year of the Obama administration, 2009, offered incredible concessions, shipping out, in one case, three-quarters of its low-enriched uranium outside its control to France or Russia or to somewhere else to be reprocessed into the kind of more richly defined uranium necessary to run their medical reactors.
So the history is very clear.
Every time we've come close to a deal like this, the Israelis have put the kibosh on it, first by murdering five Revolutionary Guards generals in October of 2009, and then secondly, after Turkey and Brazil, at the behest of a fellow named Barack Obama, worked out a deal whereby half of the low-enriched uranium would be shipped out of Iranian control.
Then that one was sabotaged by a lady named Hillary Clinton, who got up immediately and said, no, no, I've worked out this deal.
We're going to do sanctions here.
We're not going to do anything other than sanctions.
Now, the Brazilian leader, da Silva, and Erdogan, the fellow in Turkey, they were in high dungeon.
They said, what's going on here?
The president writes us a letter, tells us to work out this deal.
We do.
We come home, and the next thing we know, the Secretary of State is putting the kibosh on it.
So there have been at least two, well, there have been these two real key junctures at which the Israelis were able, in the first instance, by their own Bajandala rebel group that they funded and operated, as well as with our cooperation in the interlands of Iran.
They killed, as I say, five, no fewer than five Revolutionary Guards generals the day before the negotiators were to go back to Vienna to work out this three-quarters diversion of oil and uranium out of Iran and to be reprocessed elsewhere.
And then the second one I mentioned, it was really quite a thing when Hillary Clinton said, this is our answer to the Turkish-Brazilian deal sanctions.
That's our answer.
And finally, we have the Russians and the Chinese to go along with them.
And it's been sanctioned ever since.
So it's really important to understand what the real reasons are.
And of course, the lobby is so strong and Kerry is so weak that we'll just have to see whether it works out this time.
I have a feeling I'm more optimistic that it will this time because I think that Netanyahu has overplayed his hand.
But I've thought that before.
I could be wrong again.
You know, his partisans on Capitol Hill, it seems like quite a few of them have decided.
I guess if anything, more than anything, this is probably an indication of Obama and Kerry's seriousness if they've convinced Dianne Feinstein and even John McCain to back down from the threat of new sanctions for now anyway.
Apparently, you know, they're trying pretty hard like, hey, really, we want to do this and you're really going to screw us up and we really don't want you to.
It must have taken something like that to get them to stop, right?
I think you're right, yeah.
That's what gives me more confidence or a little bit more optimism this time around.
I mean, they could have told the French to go to hell last week.
They could have signed a deal without the French.
Why do they need the French?
They can sign whatever they want.
Well, I'll tell you why.
Because John Kerry, number one, is a wuss.
And number two, consciously or subconsciously, was thinking of some way to get the Israelis off the hook without him looking responsible.
He didn't have to cave into that, and he did.
He signed the French as they surrender to the Israelis.
Okay, pretty tough of him.
Fighting for that legacy there.
The French have these very lucrative arms sales with the Saudis.
I mean, this is not all politics.
This is hard economic facts.
This is a major factor in what the French are trying to do because the Saudis, of course, are equally opposed to letting Iran get back into the good graces of anyone.
So the French are playing a duplicitous role here.
But I think that the momentum is such now, and what you just cited as the evidence in Congress, I think that if Kerry can grow a backbone, or if Obama says, as he did on Syria, Look, John, you represent us, not the Israelis.
Then I think we'll be alright.
They should send me over there.
I'll get it done real quick.
Oh, wait.
Hang on one second, y'all.
We'll be right back with Ray McGovern.
More on Iran, Israel, Palestine, Syria.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org is my website.
I'm on Liberty Express Radio, and No Agenda Radio, and Anomaly Radio, and Daily Paul Radio, and Radio This, and Radio That, and Radio all kind of things, man.
You can find the full interview archive at ScottHorton.org more than 3,000 of them now going back to 2003.
And etc. like that.
Anyway, we're in the middle of talking with the great Ray McGovern.
We're talking about the prospects for a deal with the Iranians.
A couple of things I noticed here was, well, the French, I think it was the president, or it could have been the foreign minister, said, well, we have these conditions, and his conditions are already met.
Put your nuclear facilities under supervision.
That's already done.
Suspend enrichment 20%.
That's already offered.
And reduce the existing stock.
They've already agreed to that much.
And then he adds, halt construction of the Iraq heavy water plant.
And I guess he could have added, drop your supposed demand.
I don't know if it's confirmed they ever made this demand, but drop your supposed demand anyway that we should put in writing that you have the right to enrich uranium at all.
But anyway, the Iranians have now, I'm not sure if you've seen this, I think this is just brand new out late last night or something, that the Iranians have said, oh, we don't care if you put it in writing or not.
We'll take an implicit recognition of our right to enrich up to 3.6%.
And the Iraq facility, oh yeah, we'll go ahead and freeze construction on that if that's what you're hung up on.
They're really doing everything they can to leave the war party out on a limb here where they're out of excuses now, it seems like to me.
The question is whether we'll take yes for an answer.
Even John Kerry's going to have a lot of trouble dancing around this one.
It's already in writing.
The Nonproliferation Treaty specifically says that those who sign, those who are not nuclear powers, have the right to enrich uranium for energy purposes.
That's already in writing.
So the Iranians can simply say, well, you know, just recognize what's already there in writing.
Does it sound to you like the Iranians are hiding a lot of things?
Not to me.
They're willing to go the last mile here.
So the question will be whether they will make it so obvious that they want an agreement here that the West, so to speak, the U.S. and Israel, will find it impossible to back down and to sabotage the deal again.
And after all, this was something Obama promised before he ever took office.
He said, I would talk directly with the Iranians, okay?
And it took him, let's see, from January to October 1, 2009 to do that.
But then when they started and they proffered this deal with the Iranians, which they thought they'd never accept, the Iranians said, well, yeah, we agree in principle.
We'll meet back and we'll talk about this in our government, and we'll meet again in Vienna on the 19th of October.
This was 2009.
Well, what happened?
Well, on the 18th of October, this rebel group Jandala, which has been financed and equipped by Israel, the United States, Pakistan, you name it, they find out.
I don't know where they got this intelligence, Scott, but they find out and pinpointed the existence of the big meeting, and they killed five Revolutionary Guard generals.
And, you know, they don't like that kind of thing, these hardliners in Tehran.
So they went to the Ayatollah and said, you're going to negotiate with these guys.
You're going to send out three-quarters of our low-enriched.
Give me a break.
And so the fellow who was supposed to go to Vienna didn't.
A lower official went, and they went back on some of their acceptance.
So that's October of 2009.
Now, just a few months later, May 2010, is when the Turkish president and the Turkish prime minister and the Brazilian president worked out this deal for just half of the low-enriched Ukrainian people out of the stocks there in Iran.
And I told you already what Hillary Clinton did.
So the question really is whether Obama will be able to see that he needs to have a little backbone here, that if he can't trust Kerry, and if you look at Syria closely, you'll see that Obama chose to go behind Kerry's back and work out that deal with Putin.
Here Kerry is up and saying, well, you know, the one thing we could do, of course, is ask the Syrians to destroy the chemical stockpile, but they're never going to do that.
That's impossible.
They'll never do that.
And the spokesperson back in the State Department says, that was just a kind of rhetorical flourish.
Well, Obama had told them to work that out with Lavrov, and he didn't.
So Obama went around to Putin and said, can we still do that?
Two hours later, two hours after Kerry says that, they'll never do that, Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, gets up and says, yeah, we think we can get the Syrians to destroy all their chemical weapons.
Two hours after that, the Syrian foreign minister said, yeah, we'll do that.
And the crisis is averted.
So what I'm saying here is that Kerry cannot be trusted, pure and simple.
He cannot be trusted.
And he is working as much for Tel Aviv as he is for Washington.
So it may be that Obama will have to go around him again and work out a deal with the Iranians that Kerry will have to work out.
I say that with a great deal of circumspection, because I've watched Kerry, and I've seen how he has to, you know, how he, for example, on the 30th of August, you remember he got up before the State Department press, and he said 35 times, Scott, 35 times, we know that Bashar al-Assad had done these chemical attacks there outside of Damascus.
We know 35 times.
Guess what?
He didn't know.
And they still don't know.
And it's still highly disputed as to whether the government or the rebels did those attacks.
And we have contacts within the intelligence community that say that the intelligence senior officials, the ones that know which end is up, refuse to sign on to the kind of government statement that came out about that, because they didn't agree, and they all, not all, but most of them threatened to resign, loudly.
Okay?
So that's very much up for grabs.
But Kerry was saying, yeah, yeah, for sure, Bashar al-Assad did this.
Now, what happened?
This is interesting.
At the end of that day, on the 30th of August, which is a Friday, Obama took a walk around the White House with his chief of staff.
But not only that, he also was approached by General Dempsey.
Now, Dempsey has got his head screwed on right.
He cares about getting involved in wars.
That's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Right.
So Dempsey says to the president, and this is, I don't have a report on this, but I'll show you how I get at this.
He says, look, Mr. President, I know that John Kerry and those young Turks you've got in the White House, and those really hard-nosed women that you have working for you, they really want to do this, quote, unbelievably small, end quote, attack on Syria.
Mr. President, let me just tell you, they don't know anything about war.
We do.
We've seen it.
We've done that.
There is no such thing as an unbelievably small attack in the Middle East, okay?
That's number one.
You don't become a strategic analyst by running Navy boats up and down the Mekong like your secretary of state did.
We know what war is like.
We think you ought to think about this seriously.
Number two, Mr. President, if the press comes to me, General Dempsey, as they inevitably will, and say, why do you have to do this now?
I think you wait at least for five days until the U.N. inspectors get back and report on what they found in Syria.
I'm going to have to say, Mr. President, beat the heck out of me.
Go ask the president.
Really?
Wait a minute now, Ray.
You're breaking that story here or what?
Because I never read that one.
No, I'm saying that.
This is my, let me tell you how I reason to this.
The very thing he says to the president, look, Mr. President, we don't have to do this now.
We can do it next week.
We can do it next month.
We don't have to do it now.
So it's going to be really hard for me to answer these questions now.
Why do I say that that changed the president's mind?
Hey, that's, well, now wait a minute.
Let's talk about that for a second.
I mean, that's really severe, right?
Whether he's for a war or against a war or for or against any policy, for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to tell a president, yeah, and that's what I'll have to say to the reporters too, boss.
That's a pretty severe kind of a threatening thing, isn't it?
Right.
Let me tell you why I say that.
The next day, the president gets up.
I'm out in front of the White House with about a thousand, thousand other people expecting the worst, right?
We all expected the president to get up and say, even as I now speak, cruise missiles from the U.S.S. from the way around Damascus, but the pinpoint, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Instead, he gets up.
And if you look at what he said, it's this.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs has advised me that we are ready to strike.
But we don't have to do it today.
We could do it tomorrow.
We could do it next week.
We could do it next month.
There is, quote, no time sensitivity to this end quote.
Oh, I see.
I didn't realize that the president himself had paraphrased the chairman of the Joint Chiefs like that.
That's exactly what he said.
Then he said, so I'm going to seek congressional authorization.
Okay.
Now, if you need further proof, the next day, John McCain and Lindsey Graham descend on the White House in great anger.
Okay.
In high dungeon.
Half hour later, they come out.
They're interviewed in the driveway there.
And the first thing they say is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs staff doesn't know what he's doing.
He put the kibosh on this whole thing.
It's going to be terrible now because we're going to have our war and so forth and so on.
So, you know, what stopped it?
I believe it was General Dempsey.
And we have other reasons with our contacts in Washington to persuade us that it was he in the military that spoke out and said, look, you know, it's really great to have really tough ladies there at the U.N. and Susan Rice there in the White House, but they don't know diddly about war.
We do.
And I'm not going to be able to explain it, why you have to do this now rather than wait.
So this is really important stuff.
One other thing about Dempsey, and you may remember this, Scott, because I remember us talking about it exactly, exactly a year before, namely August 30 of last year, 2012.
Dempsey prevented Mitch and Yahoo!
from getting the idea that he could provoke or start a little war with Iran before our election.
Okay, now how did he do that?
Well, you'll recall that all during last year, Obama sent Panetta, his defense secretary.
He sent his chief of staff.
He sent his intelligence, national intelligence.
He sent Hillary Clinton.
He sent everybody and his brother over to Tel Aviv to say, please, BB, please, please, Netanyahu, please, not before the election.
Please don't start something that we'd have to get embroiled in before the election.
Don't start it with Iran, okay?
And I kept thinking, my God, what kind of impression does Netanyahu get from that?
You know, speak for yourself, John.
So what happens?
Dempsey, all of a sudden, on the 30th of October last year, gets up in London, and he says, I don't want to be complicit if the Israelis attack Iran, end quote.
Whoa!
So what did he do?
I don't think he did that without the president's permission, but I'm pretty sure he would have said, Mr. President, look, I know you've got political problems.
I know you can't say this out loud, but I can, and that's what I'm going to do unless you tell me not to.
And that took the heat off, if you'll recall.
All during September and October, we were pretty relaxed about the Israelis doing something untoward vis-a-vis Iran.
So what I'm saying here is that for once, for once we've got a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who has the best interests not only of the country but of his armed forces and the president himself foremost in mind, and we haven't had that in a really long time.
Certainly we didn't have that in Vietnam.
We haven't had it very often since, but this I think is something that we can depend on, and I'm sure that Dempsey and his people are advising the president, look, for God's sake, don't say no to a deal that you can't say no to.
If the Iranians are bending over backwards to accommodate each and every demand that we make, how are we going to dance away from that?
And if Kerry is a fly in the ointment, well, let somebody else do it.
Well, you know, the Israelis got a story out, and I think it's the Times of Israel, where they say that Valerie Jarrett, the White House adviser, has been running back-channel secret negotiations with the Iranians for a year, setting all this up.
And I thought, well, it doesn't sound like a true story.
They're just trying to make the president look bad by having someone who's not an expert with a really big, fancy title do the talking.
I mean, I don't really care about that.
Just show me the results.
But I just figured that it probably wasn't even really true.
But now you've got me wondering whether Obama really would go so far as to just cut Kerry out and keep him out front and flying around for the cameras and that kind of thing, but really have his close advisers that he actually trusts doing things that are important like this.
Because after all, if it was you, would you trust John Kerry to get the job done for you, assuming the president really wants to get it done?
You know, when he came in as Secretary of State, I had some really bad opinions about him.
And people would say, well, give him a chance, for God's sake.
No, don't prejudge him.
You can grow in this position.
But I'll tell you, I have really great, great doubts about him, and they were exacerbated by his role vis-a-vis Syria.
You know, we haven't said this, but your listeners should be reminded that the Syrian thing had as much to do with Iran as anything else.
I mean, the whole idea was to deprive Iran of its only reliable ally in that part of the world, Syria.
And that's why Hillary Clinton came out three years ago, I think now, and said Assad has to go.
Well, that's not how you fix anything by saying the country's got to go from the beginning.
You don't do it that way.
And of course, Obama said the same thing a year later.
Now, what was afoot there was to try to obliterate Syria, and in the process, deprive Hezbollah and Hamas and the other people that Iran supports in that area from their base of operations.
And not only that, but to kind of remove this whole thing, as the document from way back in 1996 said, you know, Israel can shape its strategic environment in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria, okay?
We've got to foil Syria's ambitions, and then we go to Syria's ally, Iran.
So besides keeping the Sunni and the Shia at each other's throats, which of course is only to Israel's advantage, not only in Syria, mind you, but in that whole region, the whole regional area with Iraq is a mess right now.
Not only is that to Israel's advantage and to nobody else's advantage, but they see this whole thing about Syria, if they get rid of Assad, then Iran is deprived of its major ally in it.
So that needs to be mentioned, and Kerry's role in this whole thing, especially with respect to the Syria thing, is really not a commendable one, and one that we're still pursuing, Scott, and we have a lot of people telling us now, that there was almost a rebellion in the intelligence community when Kerry said he wanted to say that it was unequivocally true, as he and the President later did say, that Assad was behind these chemical attacks.
That ain't necessarily so.
Lavrov says just the opposite.
Well now, let's clarify that point for a second, because Phil Giroldi talked about this on the show, but he also wrote it up for the American Conservative Magazine, if people want to look at this.
Fellow veteran intelligence professional for sanity with you there.
And he's got this write-up, as you mentioned, where people, if you're regular listeners, you probably remember Gareth Porter and others, probably Ray too at the time, talking about how, wow, so this is a White House report, this is a political report from Obama's office, that is sort of dressed up to sound and to read like it's an intelligence report by the CIA, something like a National Intelligence Estimate or something like that, but it's no such thing, it's just posing as one.
So now then, the recent development is apparently, I think in your words, some senior level CIA analysts were prepared to resign, rather than sign on to something like this report, claiming they were certain that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons.
That's right.
The name of this assessment was sui generis.
I'd never seen it before.
It's a government assessment.
Always before, it would be the assessment of the Director of National Intelligence or the Director of Central Intelligence.
So I smelled a rat right from the beginning.
Gareth and I spent a Saturday afternoon trying to figure out what that really meant.
Now we know.
The people who didn't want to do another Iraq, right?
The people who now have a conscience and say, you know, we didn't stand up last time.
You don't want to take the rap for another Iraq anyway, which I'll settle for that.
Yeah.
Because, you know, the history, if people aren't familiar, ten years ago what happened was the CIA kind of lied us into war, but the Pentagon really lied us into war, and then the CIA took the entire blame, when obviously the whole thing was led by Bush and Cheney from the top anyway.
But they took the entire rap for the WMD thing, and so they held a grudge about that against every other agency in the government, I guess, that that's not going to happen to them again.
Well, that's only partially true from my perspective.
Scott, we have to be real honest here.
George Tenet, who ran the CIA as well as the intelligence community at the time, told his subordinates that if the president, President Bush, wants to make a war in Iraq, it's our job to drum up, to conjure up, to forge evidence to support it.
So the Pentagon was very helpful, of course, in doing all that, but the blame is equally spread all around.
And after a five-year study, the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Jay Rockefeller at the time, that came out with a finding, and Rockefeller said, look, quote, the pre-war intelligence on Iraq was unsubstantiated, comma, contradicted, comma, or even nonexistent, period, end quote.
I ask you what nonexistent intelligence looks like.
Forgery, that kind of stuff.
So it was really, really bad.
And that's why...
Well, of course, yeah, Colin Powell and his aides had thrown out the Scooter Libby, neocon, Pentagon speech, and gave a George Tenet speech.
So I'm sorry, I didn't mean to play down the guilt of the CIA that much, but I can tell that they really resented that everybody blamed them, because, you know, in the run-up to the war, the whole thing was, listen, our intelligence guys are magic.
They're flawless.
They're so high-tech, Hollywood hadn't even dreamed of how badass they are.
And if we tell you that there's weapons in Iraq, you can just take that to the bank.
Forget it.
So the White House themselves have played up that narrative so bad that, I'm not really saying it was unfair to the CIA, screw them, but I am saying that they thought it was unfair the way they got stuck with the blame, you know?
No, I agree on that.
Yeah, there's one little footnote here which is very, very relevant.
There's a fellow named James Clapper.
He's a known prevaricator.
We in Washington here don't say liar.
But when he was asked in March whether, actually Senator Wyden said, and I quote, does NSA collect any information at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
James Clapper said, no, sir.
Now, he knew that was wrong.
He knew that Senator Wyden was going to ask him that in open testimony, and he lied.
He came back a couple months later and said, I don't know what became of me, but what I told you was, quote, clearly erroneous, end quote, and I'm really sorry.
He's still the director of national intelligence.
Keith Alexander, the head of NSA, said we thwarted 54 terrorist events.
By the time Pat Leahy got finished with them and the Judiciary Committee was down to one, and that one was a Saudi taxi driver sending $8,000 to Somali dissidents.
What I'm saying here is you've got corruption right up to the very top.
Clapper was the guy in charge of imagery before and during Iraq.
Imagery, that's what you needed to find weapons of mass destruction.
And what do you suppose they found?
Zero, okay?
And was it possible for any sergeant or lieutenant or major to report that these reports from the defectors or refugees from Iraq were just that, just completely spurious?
What this fellow says is that these coordinates is a chicken farm, right?
Well, they weren't able to do that.
So Clapper was one of the ones that participated manfully or cowardly in this whole deception.
And when none were found, get this, when no weapons of mass destruction were found, Clapper said, oh, there were some reports that they were moved into Syria.
I think that's what happened to them.
Waka, waka, waka.
A bunch of corruption right at the top here.
All right, now, Ray, I'm sorry, because listen, we're almost out of time, and I got us diverted way off on this track about 10 years ago and all this, and it's all great.
But we're almost out of time, and I wanted to ask you real quick about the Iranians.
We talked before about just how high they're holding their hands up this time and bellowing, hands up, don't shoot, kind of a thing, willing to give up, damn near everything here.
And I wonder how long do you think that the current leadership can get away with that inside Iran?
Like, if they don't pull off the deal this time, you think they'll have one or two more chances after that?
Or they're going to start feeling a lot of backlash from the right wing in Iran, and you've got virtually no time to answer in a minute or so.
That's a really good question.
It's a really good question, Scott.
What I worry about is a terrorist attack of the kind that happened on October 18, 2009, to put the kibosh on this whole thing.
Well, you know, there have been a couple of jandala attacks on the border guards.
I don't think they got any generals this time, but there have been a couple, I guess, like a couple of weeks ago now.
So this is not, you know, this is, I would say, a 50-50 chance.
And if that happens, and even Khamenei, the ayatollah, is not going to be able to face down, you know, the pressure from the Revolutionary Guards to say, look, you can't deal with these people.
They're untrustworthy.
They're going to shoot us at every pass.
And the whole thing about the Stuxnet, of course, is in the background.
We know from the Snowden documents that it was Israel and the U.S. that developed this virus, and that's the first shot in the kind of war that I'm afraid we're all in for, for the next couple of decades, cyber war.
All right, well, Ray, thanks so much for coming on the show.
I'm so sorry we did not get to talk all about the Israeli PR push.
They're pushing so hard, Naftali Bennett and all of this, Netanyahu pushing so hard against the American government's unique efforts for change.
But maybe we'll pick that one up next time.
Certainly the rest of the week we'll be talking about it.
Thanks so much for your time again on the show, Ray.
You're most welcome.
That's Ray McGovern, everybody.
RayMcGovern.com.
Oh, man, I'm late.
Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner.
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my...
Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of Rights?
That's right.
It's just a harmless, stainless steel business card-sized copy of the Bill of Rights from securityedition.com, therefore exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty-destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
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Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
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