All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Ray McGovern, and he used to be a CIA analyst, Russia expert, and all that, and he's been about as antiwar as can be for the last 20 years or so, thank God for that.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Ray?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
I should have mentioned you're the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and I know that you can probably stand by every single one of the memos that you guys have put out over the last 20 years trying to stop these wars.
Also a regular writer at consortiumnews.com, and we reprint it all at antiwar.com, of course, and raymcgovern.com, too, for whatever happens to be on your mind if people want to look that up.
Okay, so this one is about Michael Morrell, why Michael Morrell cannot be CIA director, and as soon as I saw that headline, I thought immediately of the story that we didn't know it was Morrell back then.
We only came to find out later that it was Morrell, who was Bush's briefer on August the 6th, 2001, said bin Laden determined to strike inside the United States, and Bush told him, okay, you've covered your ass, get out of here.
At least that's the version of the story Morrell apparently told to Ron Susskind, which Bush I don't think ever challenged, but anyway, what else do we not like about Michael Morrell, Ray?
Well, he played the role of kind of defender of various schemes like killing a lot of Russians as well as Syrians.
He was Charlie Rose's, well, it seemed like it was his godson or nephew or something because Charlie had him on every other month, and Morrell famously talked about what we need to do in Syria is just kill a couple of Russians and kill a couple of Syrians, and it got so bad that Charlie Rose was prompted or required to have Morrell back for a mulligan, so to speak, and Morrell repeated, what we ought to do is kill a ...
Now, Morrell was playing to his audience.
Well, now, wait a minute, slow down a little bit there.
Brought him back for a mulligan, to be specific, you're saying Charlie Rose brought him back and said, now, you didn't really mean to say that, right?
You meant to say something more subtle, and he said, no, you heard me, right?
There's something very much along those lines.
Yeah, so he's playing to his audience in the operations part of the agency.
They had been glowing and citing his praise.
Charlie wants to be a tough guy.
When several of the operators were accused of participating in torture, he very, very angrily said, you can't say that about my officers.
My officers were just doing what the Department of Justice said we could do.
All those techniques were approved by the Department of Justice, John Yoo and all those nice fellows, those nice lawyers.
So don't criticize my officers, his officers, for God's sake.
So he's playing to an audience that would be susceptible to that kind of pressure, that kind of acknowledgment that what we need to do now is be really tough with the Russians, kill a couple of them in Syria.
And just think, just think, Scott, here's Vladimir Putin and leadership in Moscow looking at all this and saying, my God, you know, what has really become of these people?
They're out of their gourd.
And if Mike Morrell makes it to be CIA director, well, that's going to be real problems.
That's going to be even more problems than some of the others.
I'll tell you what, does anybody, I mean, a guy, his rank has got to know that the Russians have H-bombs, right?
Yeah.
One would hope so.
Because I've seen that on the Learning Channel or something, you know, they got thousands and thousands of H-bombs and could kill us all.
It seems like the highest priority of all the leaders of our national security force would be to tamp down tensions with the Russians at all cost so as to better preserve our lives.
One would think, yeah.
But you know, the Mickey Matt, the Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academia think tank complex, remember it, Mickey Matt, it rhymes with Mickey Mouse, OK?
This is the military industrial complex as it has evolved over the last 55 years after Eisenhower coined the phrase.
Now they need an enemy, for God's sake, you know.
When Al-Qaeda and ISIS were sort of defeated, well, you know, what's going to justify $740 billion, billion with a B, expenditures on arms every year?
Well, let's make the Russians and the Chinese the main enemy again.
Now that happened overnight.
George W. Bush, for God's sake, said, you know, the Russians are becoming pretty civilized.
We don't have to worry about them anymore, pretty much.
And he didn't say diddly about the Chinese.
So what happened between George W. Bush and all of a sudden changing our strategic concept to say that, well, it's got to be the Russians and the Chinese that are enemies?
Well, they need to build anti-ballistic missile systems.
They need to build F-35s and all this business, which, as you know, Scott, takes about 55 percent, 55 percent of the revenue that comes in through our taxes, our discretionary budget.
So it's pretty obvious.
And, you know, it's really, really lamentable when you look at the COVID residue, what we can we can expect at the turn of the year with people out of jobs, people getting people being hungry, for God's sake, and a record setting budget in peacetime.
Well, how how will that be justified?
That has to be opposed.
It has to be opposed in the streets.
It has to be opposed at the front doors of these profiteers from the defense industry.
Yeah.
You know, it's really amazing the way that this has been able to work for all of this time.
I mean, you know, back then I understand that at least there was such a thing as the Soviet Empire that you could point at a globe and say, look, a big part of it is red.
You know, in this case, we just spent, you know, 20 years fighting an Islamo-fascist caliphate that didn't exist except in Bush and Osama bin Laden's imagination until, you know, Obama built it for them in 2013 and 14 there.
But then he destroyed it again.
There's all nation states taking up the spot where this Islamist terrorist empire supposedly sits.
But then and then when you look at a map of Russia, it sure ain't what it used to be, Mr. Soviet expert.
I'm pretty sure they're really I mean, I don't know, I guess people can point at Putin and say this is a strong man.
Right.
And so it's not like George W. Bush has been in power for 20 years.
Right.
So therefore, then you can fill in the blank with all of the rest of his bad motives and call him a dictator and call him a madman and call him a serious threat that America must help Europe defend itself from.
And if he hasn't invaded Eastern Europe, it's only because we're standing there on the wall facing him down and keeping him back.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, the burden of proof would be on those who say that the Russians want to invade Eastern Europe.
For those who claim that the annexation of Crimea was unprovoked, for those who claim that there was no coup mounted by the U.S. and NATO in Kiev in February of 2014.
All those things happened.
Now let me give you a little insight into a special little piece of information that I came by.
I was talking with Oliver Stone.
Now, several of your audience will know that he's interviewed Vladimir Putin a couple of times and has good relationship with him and, you know, tells it like it is.
And Putin tells it like it is from his perspective.
Well, during one conversation, Oliver told me that Putin was, he's really exasperated by what was going on.
And he said something along the lines of, now we Russians are thought of like Jews before World War II.
Whoa.
Wow.
That's, that's a kind of a light, well, you know, the Russians lost 26 million people during World War II.
The Russians take this kind of thing seriously.
And if you look at the, if you look at the epithets hurled at Putin, uh, by the likes of James Clapper, who famously said, you know, you have to know about the Russians.
They are almost genetically driven to co-op, to deceive, to, uh, to gain favor, to do all manner of terrible things.
That is a typical Russian trait.
It's almost genetic.
Well, I read about that in the protocols of the elders of, uh, Vladimir Putin's government.
Well, you know, all these things that are being hurled at Putin, you know, um, I have to say once again, that sang-froid, you know, a kind of a, a statesman like, uh, ability to just let this stuff fall right off you is the hallmark of this gentleman.
And if people think that any successor to him is likely to be more malleable or more, more suited to our objectives, they got that completely wrong.
Right.
Because you know what?
I think that's such an important point here that people say that he's a sociopathic throat slitting murderer.
And I say, I mean, okay, if that's what it is that makes him so calm and dispassionate all the time, then cool.
You know what I mean?
If that, if the same thing that has him throw dissidents out windows is the same thing that makes him obsessively refer to the United States as his American partners, who he loves and respects and enjoys working with so much, then great.
You know what?
Here's a guy who has no emotions and therefore does not react emotionally to the negative, to American provocations.
You know, I'll take it.
I will take cold as ice in this circumstance.
And you're right that what are the chances that the guy that comes after him is such a cool customer?
Well, nobody thinks about that.
And one of the points I tried to make in this piece about Morell is that were he to be appointed, he would be joining a whole bunch of other whiz kids, all the best and the brightest of Vietnam, none of whom, zero of whom have any, any experience in the military.
None of them served, not one, zero.
So you have the, the assistant to the secretary, the assistant to the president for national security affairs, this Jake Sullivan, he never served.
Now that's the person to whom the CIA director reports.
He doesn't go right to the president often.
He goes through the national security.
So you have him, you have others.
The only person with some military experience is this General Austin.
And ironically enough, it seems like General Austin is the sensible one here since he does have that experience and his record is rather good compared with other generals that Biden might have chosen.
By the way, just a parentheses here, I'm about to interview Mark Perry later today about him and apparently he refuses to get upset about the so-called rise of China that everybody's on the bandwagon to contain and is not so much impressed by those arguments.
So that's probably the best thing anybody could say about a secretary of defense if you ask me.
That's exactly right.
I mean, if you look at Taiwan, for example, you're not old enough to remember back in the fifties when there was a great big dispute as to whether we should go to war with China, mainland China, over Kimoi and Matsu.
Now your audience is wondering, wait a second, who is Kimoi and who's Matsu?
Well, there are piles of rocks off the China coast that were claimed by Taiwan and the whole deal was would China seize those?
And this is what's important, would the U.S. go to war over that?
Now, not much has changed.
Things evolve.
And right now there's a question about whether the U.S. would go to war to prevent China from seizing Taiwan.
The correlation of forces, to use an old Soviet expression, is very different from the one it was from when it was just a couple of decades ago.
Well, you know, Biden just said that our war guarantee to Japan extends to the Senkaku Islands.
So forget Taiwan.
We're willing to go to H-bomb war over a couple of rocks, like literal rocks, uninhabited rocks in the ocean.
Now that's, you know, that's the main cause, right now, in my view.
Why is China picked to be the bet here?
Why is China the main enemy even now before Russia?
Well, it's all made up stuff.
Now, you can say that the U.S. has suffered some casualties from the, quote, war with China, end quote.
Now, what do I mean by that?
I mean by that, that that very courageous Navy captain, head of the, or captain of the Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier, when he was asked, when he asked for permission to let these COVID-infected crew off in Guam, he was told, no, you can't do that.
Why?
Because of the threat from China.
And so many of these young sailors perished.
Others were really stricken with COVID-19.
Now, so there's a casualty in the war with China.
What war?
How does China threaten us?
It doesn't.
It's building little things in the South China Sea.
Well, you know, as long as they don't hinder our navigation rights, what threat, what kind of threat is that to us?
So this is outreach.
This is the need and the pressing need in terms of Navy objectives to make sure that their budget is built up.
And this person, Michel Fronoy, who was supposed to be the Secretary of Defense, has said, we need to be able to have a naval capacity that can decimate the Chinese fleet in a day or two.
So it's, it's very clear that the military, if you got a pencil here, a military industrial congressional media, academia, think tank complex is in charge here.
And when I say media, of course, I'm talking about the lynchpin.
I'm talking about the sine qua non.
Without the media, without the media that is in turn controlled by this Mickey Matt, you know, you wouldn't be able to make this stick.
But most people believe the New York Times.
And that's really ironic these days when the real story about Russia's threat and Russia's interference and all that kind of thing is kept from the American people because they still believe, would you believe it?
They still believe that the New York Times prints all the news that's fit to print.
And that's a lie.
Yeah.
Well, in fact, you know, I saw a survey that said that actually liberals read the New York Times and the entire right half of America just does not at all anymore.
That it is just not the newspaper of record the way it was.
And a huge part of that, of course, is going along with the FBI, counterintelligence divisions, COINTELPRO, Russiagate hoax against Trump, just such an obvious lie.
They're sitting there giving themselves Pulitzer Prizes over this stuff.
The entire right half of America just tuned out and forever more over that.
But you know, it's important.
You keep mentioning the Mickey Matt here.
I like that.
Although I don't know if you're going to be able to really coin that and get it to catch on right.
But the military, industrial, everything complex is still just a trillion a year.
So on one hand, OK, yeah, that's the biggest honeypot in world history, as William S. Lynn put it.
Right.
If you don't have the ability to reach your hand into that till, then hell, yeah.
You know, on the other hand, that's, you know, you know, in a way it's barely a distortion in the overall economy.
And if I dream a genie just blinked the entire thing away immediately, we'd only be better off.
I mean, maybe we'd have one year of of, you know, a little bit of a recession in some areas as the adjustment is made.
But still, a trillion a year, that's nothing.
This is a 20 trillion dollar economy, at least during a bubble it is, you know.
And so it's, you know, I learned in high school, I had a leftist history teacher taught us, well, you see, it's a wartime economy.
That's why, you know, this military industrial complex stuff.
I learned this then.
The economy is so distorted around the industrialization of the war machine and everything that you can't turn it off.
But really, that's not right, right?
Really, the economy is not so intertwined around the manufacture of these weapons.
It's just that the manufacturers of these weapons have enough at stake that they can spend what amounts to chump change on continuing the policy by controlling the media, controlling the Congress and keeping the whole thing going.
But meanwhile, we could do without them in the blink of an eye and it'd be just fine.
Well, that's if you have a realistic view toward how the Russians and the Chinese threaten us.
So you do have a realistic view.
They don't threaten us.
And you know, I had thought that when Trump started beating on NATO and saying, I have to spend more, I have to spend more.
Well, the NATO countries would kind of look at, what for?
Why do we have to spend more?
Are the Russians threatening us?
And they didn't stand up.
And here it is, you know, going on 80 years after the war, and they're still susceptible to all kinds of pressure from Washington and from their own Mickey Mats, of course.
You know, I'd like to talk a little bit about how the liberals and the other folks that still read the New York Times, how they get, well, as Romney said, the first Romney, how they get brainwashed.
Here's an example.
There's a fellow named David Sanger.
He was second only to Judy Miller in emphasizing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction before we attacked Iraq in March of 2003.
Here's an example.
We know that on the 20th of July, 2002, as they were starting to beat the war drums, Tony Blair, the prime minister of Britain, sent his intelligence chief, Dearlove was his name, no really, his name was Dearlove, and he went to Washington and he talked with George Tenet, head of the CIA.
That was July the 20th.
And we know what he told, we know what Tenet told him.
He said, look, the decision has been made for war against Iraq.
It's going to be justified by the conjunction of weapons of mass destruction and terrorists.
So we're going to say that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and he's likely to give them to those terrorists that just knocked down the World Trade Center.
That's what we're going to do.
Now, when Dearlove said, well, hang on to that, Tenet said, well, the intelligence and facts are going to be fixed around the policy.
That was the 20th of July, 2002.
I'm sorry, I got to interrupt here just because it's so much fun that, I don't know if you remember this, Ray, but this is when you and I first met and became friends.
The first time I ever interviewed you was over your article about the Downing Street memo.
And then I wrote an article about the Downing Street memo and the interview called, I'm here for my bill of goods for antiwar.com.
And that was in 2004.
Yeah.
Well, it was disclosed in the London Times, the minutes of a meeting at the prime minister's office of Downing Street in London, three days after Tenet told Dearlove that we're going to have war and the intelligence and facts are going to be fixed around the policy.
So how do we know that he said that?
Well, we have the transcript.
We have the minutes of that meeting.
They were not really revealed until a year later or so, but now we have them.
Nobody's disavowed their authenticity.
And that's what went on on the 23rd of July, 2002.
Now how does David Sanger fit into this?
Well, just a couple of days later, on the 29th of July, 2002, he wrote an article together with Tom Shanker, another beater for war.
And it said, you know, weapons of mass destruction are in Iraq and said that not once, but it said that seven times as flat fact.
The date, July 29, 2002.
So what's that?
Nine days after Tenet told Dearlove that, and of course that was leaked to Sanger.
Now what has Sanger done more recently?
Well, we know that the Russians reported on, well, the Russians reported knowing that Hillary Clinton had decided to beat the Russian drum to distract attention away from the emails that were divulged by WikiLeaks.
We know that she did that on the 26th of July, 2016.
Okay, so that's more recent, 2016.
What did our friend David Sanger do?
He wrote an article the same day saying Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia.
And if you don't believe me, Russia, Russia, Russia, the same day, July 26, 2016.
So he was in receipt of the same press, press clips that the CIA gave, gave to somebody who gave it to the Russians.
I'm sorry, I have to add here too, that he is absolutely the single worst guy at the New York Times on Iran and their nuclear program for the last 20 years too.
And if you just, if you ever look at New York Times and Iran's nuclear weapons program stated, as your old friend Bob Perry would say, as a flat fact, as existing in the world, it's always David Sanger.
And when he's with Broad, he's even worse.
Yeah.
You know, I was at a law school, Fordham University Law School about five years ago and Sanger was there in person and he was bragging about the Stuxnet virus.
The way he explained it, it was really quite amazing.
And all these young lawyers, budding lawyers listening, he said, you know, the Israelis were threatening to attack Iran.
And our military was too chicken to face the consequences of that.
So we had, there was a big kerfuffle in Washington and the eventual decision was, well, look, we can buy the Israelis off by giving them and developing with them this technology called Stuxnet, which actually will destroy some of their centrifuges.
So please, please don't attack Iran.
We'll do it this way.
Gibney, I forget his first name, the film director, Alex Gibney, right?
Okay.
Now, Gibney was there as well.
And Gibney is sort of scratching his head as if to say, oh my God, is this the propaganda thing that I was enlisted in?
And he probably never even thought of it that way.
But there's Stuxnet.
Now, as you all know- And they reveal in that film, by the way, that the Israelis kept tinkering with it and tinkering with it and tinkering with it until it escaped.
You know, like they had it where it worked right, quote unquote, for its horrible purpose.
But then it was the Israelis messing with the code that ended up causing it to get out to the world and infect all these other things, I think.
Well, that's true.
Yeah.
And, you know, so it was quite remarkable being there in person.
I got to ask a question, but he fluffed it off.
So what about today?
What about this week?
Well, you have David Sanger saying, oh, the Russians, the Russians are hacking and hacking and hacking.
They're hacking commerce.
They're hacking treasury.
They're, oh, they're hacking homeland security for God's sake, oh, they're hacking.
There's not a shred of evidence for that, but not a shred, OK?
And he was, by the way, to be specific, I'm sorry I keep interrupting you, Ray, but I just saw a tweet that Greenwald had retweeted yesterday where I'm almost certain it was a guy from the Wall Street Journal followed up with Sanger, it was one of these reporters, followed up with Sanger and said, by the way, just like not in a combative way, but it was like one of his peers saying, what exactly is the evidence again?
And then Sanger stipulates that, well, it looks like it has all the hallmarks.
And as far as he can tell, everyone in intelligence agrees that this must be what it is.
And he doesn't know of anybody who doesn't.
That was the evidence was that what I'm hearing is people think so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, good enough for Charlie Savage.
Good enough for David Sanger.
Good enough for The New York Times.
Hey, there's big bucks there, you know, and it's a job and it's the only way you can make big bucks.
You and I are making big bucks.
I tell you, there's a really bizarre story in The New York Times that actually is very helpful.
It wasn't, didn't grab a lot of attention, but it has to do with why pandas, now bear with me, why pandas in China are accustomed to finding very fresh horse manure and then roll around and cover themselves with it.
And there are actually films, there are videos in this New York Times article.
And the conclusion of scientists is that it takes to chill off, that really, you know, to roll around in this horse manure, it takes to chill off when they're in the forest there with these, these horses.
Now that's great metaphor for being a writer for The New York Times, I guess, huh?
It took the horse right out of my mouth.
What a terrific metaphor.
You cover yourself with this horse manure and you maybe not get so cold in thinking that maybe the oceans aren't so bad after all.
And so, you know, I wish The New York Times readers a happy holidays and stay nice and warm if you keep reading this stuff for The New York Times.
It sucks because we're stuck with them.
I mean, the reality is if you go back to try to study history, there's nothing you could do without The New York Times and The Washington Post.
There's so much stuff that is at least somewhat true that the government gives to those reporters that those papers still are the most important papers in the country, them and The Wall Street Journal.
You can't do without them.
I mean, we're stuck with them like a bad tattoo or something, right?
It's just, what are you going to do?
You have to hate them while you read them, but you have to read them.
Well, yeah.
I asked an old colleague of mine who was really taken up with Russiagate and said that I was in Putin's pocket for being a little bit more objective in my view.
What do you know, Mr. Former Head of the Soviet Analyst Division of the CIA?
You and your cranky theories.
This is a guy who used to work for me, actually.
So I'm not sure.
Well, I don't know what his excuse is then.
Jesus Christ.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
I said, what do you read?
He said, I read The New York Times and Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
What do you read?
Antiwar.com, man.
I read those too, but I also read Antiwar.com.
I also write for and read ConsortiumNews.com.
And he sort of belittled that.
I said, what do you guys know?
Well, what we know is that you're not getting the full truth from The New York Times.
Not to belabor this, but the other prime offender here, in my view, is this woman named Ellen Nakashima who flacks for The Washington Post.
Now, a very interesting set of circumstances happened in March of 2017 when it became clear from a leak, not a hack, but a leak inside the CIA, apparently, to WikiLeaks, that they had this whole bevy of offensive cyber tools that they employed willy-nilly around the world.
Now, a couple of those were taking control of your car and making it go 110 miles an hour and getting you killed.
Another one was monitoring your bedroom when you think your TV is off.
No, it's on.
But then at the end of March, on the 31st of March, to be precise, WikiLeaks revealed that a program named Marble allowed the CIA to hack into a computer or server system to disguise who hacked in and to attribute it to, oh, a foreign actor like, oh, maybe, there were five of them they worked with, Chinese, Korean, Persian, Arabic, and Russian.
Whoa!
You don't say.
Ellen Nakashima was first off the blocks, and she published an article saying recent disclosures expose extensive CIA cyber offensive warfare plan or something like that.
Oh, wait a second.
She didn't get the memo.
The New York Times never published on that.
Nobody published on that.
And so Ellen Nakashima has been doing penance for not getting the memo or not reading the memo on time.
And now she's sort of trying to make up for it by beating the drums for Russian hacking.
And it's as though, you know, they have established that Russian hacked the DNC emails and gave them to WikiLeaks.
And so they can always return to that and say, well, we established that and now they're doing it again.
It's not again, and they're not even doing it.
They didn't do it back then, which we proved.
Now, most people, well, how would you know that on December 12th, 2016, right after the election, VIPS, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, put together a memorandum which showed that the so-called hack of the DNC could not have been a hack.
It was, it was sure to be a leak.
Now, how could we have proved that?
Well, we had two former, we had two former technical directors of the National Security Agency in our group, plus another very high level worker at NSA.
We had the principles of physics at our disposal, and we had the work of Ed Snowden.
We had the charts that showed exactly how every email is charted through the system, where the trace routes are.
And so Bill Binney included in this VIPS memorandum no fewer than eight charts, five of them from Snowden, showing exactly how NSA would have known and would have been able to say without divulging any big secrets that no, no, this couldn't have been a hack because there's no evidence there of a hack.
Okay.
Now, we did that four, four years and what?
Four years and six days ago.
And it turns out that when you rely on the experts and you have the principles of physics at your disposal, and then not least the, the information that Ed Snowden so courageously brought out into Hong Kong, and you put that all together, you have a pretty solid case.
And now it took us, it took us almost four years to prove that.
But now we have the head of CrowdStrike, which was the cyber firm that Jim Comey decided to defer to, a cyber firm paid by the Democrats, and they were singing the song about the Russian hack all the way until their head testified that there was no sign of exfiltration of data from the DNC.
Exfiltration?
75 cent word for a hack.
Now when did he do that?
He testified under oath before Adam Schiff's committee, the House, the House Intelligence Committee on December 5th, 2017.
Whoa, what's that?
Three years ago?
Three years ago.
It was kept secret until May 7th, 2020, so 2020.
So that's what?
Well, last time I calculated, it's about seven and a half months ago.
So the head of the cyber firm hired to find out the Russian hack said there was no Russian hack, there was no hack of any kind, there was nothing seen as exfiltrated hack from the DNC.
Whoa.
Now has the New York Times reported on that?
No, I guess they missed it.
Washington?
No, I guess they missed it too.
Wall Street?
This is really amazing.
They're going for Adam Schiff's record of three years now, and they're only seven and a half months into it.
So, you know, just to sum this up, here are all my friends that read the New York Times in New York and they say, Ray, how could you say this kind of thing?
How can you?
Well, if you can't show it to them in the New York Times, it didn't happen.
It doesn't exist.
And that's how bad it is.
That's how bad it still is.
You're right.
You're right, Scott, that you can't really do a lot of research without reference to the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
But these days, my God, you can't find out what's going on if you depend on those sources.
Yeah.
I mean, you definitely have to be biased against them, and you should be biased against stuff that agrees with you too, right?
Everybody who agrees with you is also a liar.
You can't trust things, but if you're reading critically, yeah, I mean, we are stuck with it.
Because, you know what?
Even when it's a complete fraud, when the CIA tells Charlie Savage to run an article accusing Russians of paying bounties for Americans to be murdered in Afghanistan, and stenographer Savage goes and jots it all down for them and puts it out, that itself is a news story, right?
That shapes the world that we live in.
In this case, of course, it led to a riot on cable TV news and in the Democratic Party where Nancy Pelosi then had her people work together on a bill with an amendment with Liz Cheney to prevent, I love this, to prevent the spending of funds on the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
So presidents can start a war, no problem, but they can't end one without congressional approval now is where we are here.
And they used Charlie Savage's lie.
So if anybody went back and actually read those articles carefully, they don't even pretend to say that we know that the Russians did this, as Charlie Savage defended himself to me.
I never said that it happened.
I just said that there's a CIA report that says that it might have happened.
And that is a fact.
So that's good enough for him to go ahead and put the story out there.
And then that's good enough for the bad guys to use to prevent Trump from any kind of early withdrawal, which was one thing he was at least considering doing as a stunt, you know, before the election.
And they canceled it with that.
So if anybody went back and read that article and wanted to cite it as like, yeah, this is the history of the world that took place.
The story is not that the Russians paid these bounties.
The story is the way the CIA used Charlie Savage and the Democrats to prevent Trump from ending a war.
Yeah.
And what a pity it is, Scott.
Charlie used to be not bad, you know.
He was one of the least worst of them.
I agree.
That's why I hate him the most now.
He deserves it so bad.
I mean, he told me, Ray, that you have overlearned the lessons of Iraq.
He told you that I had?
That I had.
Overlearned.
I have overlearned them.
And if they didn't just print what the CIA told them to print, then we'd have no national security news at all, dude.
The idea that he should have to somehow verify that the Russians actually did this before he ran with the story.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, the name of the game now, of course, is to make it impossible for Joe Biden to do something really sensible with respect to creating a more decent atmosphere vis-a-vis Russia.
Well, I'm back to Morrell.
I mean, is he going to be the new DCI?
I guess I don't call him the DCI anymore.
Is he going to be the new director of the CIA?
Well, hopefully not.
I made sure, you know, Ron Wyden, the senator from Oregon, who's one of the senior members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said no way would he vote for Morrell, given how he defended torture and exaggerated the effect, well, not exaggerated, but falsified the effectiveness of torture.
Well, that's just one thing that Morrell did.
And I have friends in Oregon, two of them, and both have made sure that my piece got to Senator Wyden.
If any of your listeners have friends in Oregon, please, please make sure they get the real scoop on Morrell.
This is a piece I wrote, what, a week ago, 10 days ago.
It's why Morrell should not be CIA director.
I hope that this will be enough, not that my thing will be enough, but it's bad enough that Morrell might become CIA director.
But the person that he's reporting to, Avril Haines, who's the National Intelligence Director designee, has a record of, well, let's just say she was picked by Brennan to be deputy director of the CIA, and she worked in the lawyers, she's a lawyer, in the Office of Counsel in the White House and proved the drone strikes and so forth.
I wonder if she was in on framing Trump for treason, if she worked for John Brennan.
Well, why not?
The other thing that I can say about Avril Haines is that when the Senate Intelligence Committee, to its great credit, did a really comprehensive look at CIA torture, whether it was effective, whether they lied about its effectiveness, and the answer was it wasn't effective, and they did lie, lie through their teeth about the effectiveness of it, Dianne Feinstein, when she was still in full possession of her faculties, rose to the occasion and defended her staffers and said, no, we're going to print what we found.
Now, during that period, Brennan authorized the hacking into Senate Intelligence Committee computers that were supposed to be sacrosanct and not hackable by anybody, including the CIA.
He lied about it, then had to confess to it, and he appointed a review board to see if anybody should be held accountable.
Who was head of the review board?
Avril Haines.
And what'd she say?
Oh, no, it was all right.
No problem.
Okay.
So this is the person to whom the CIA director will be ostensibly subordinate to.
The real thing is that Jake Sullivan, who knows nothing about war, will be the national security assistant.
He doesn't need any confirmation.
And so between the two of these higher ranking people, the CIA director will have to pander, will have to sort of do what the liberal establishment wants.
And you know, I use liberal because of what it's become.
I'm a progressive, okay?
I'm not a liberal anymore.
I don't want to be tainted by the Bidens of this world.
But Biden has already been set up to buy into the Russian hacking of the DNC in 2016.
He's already been set up to accuse the Russians of paying bounties for the deaths of US soldiers in Afghanistan.
So they've got him on record on these things, even though that latter thing is disavowed by the commander of our forces in Afghanistan.
And so they're trying to make sure that Biden's handcuffed here, that if he tries something, something that might make Putin look out, look to be less of a demon, if, for example, he rejoins the, the Iran nuclear deal, you know, that could start some sort of reconciliation.
Well, you know, they got the START treaty is up for expiration almost immediately, what, just a few weeks after inauguration day.
And Putin has said that, hey, let's, let's re-up this thing right now.
I want to do it.
We don't even need to negotiate it.
Let's just re-sign it.
You want to negotiate changes to it?
We'll just do that later.
But let's go ahead and keep this thing going.
And Biden has said that he wants to do that too.
So yeah.
And this has been something that was actually kind of funny, like even during the height of Russiagate, that you had Feinstein and a couple of other of the longer serving Democrats in the Senate were saying, well, geez, I mean, we still want these nuclear weapons treaties, right?
Even though we're pretending that Russia is attacking us and it's just like Kristallnacht and 9-11 and Pearl Harbor combined when they did not hack the election or do anything at all in 2016.
Some of those more responsible type Democrats were saying, geez, I don't know.
And I think Biden probably is with them on the let's keep our nuclear weapons treaties with Russia caucus.
And in fact, you know, the new START treaty is the last major treaty standing preventing, you know, with a cap on nuclear weapons arsenals.
So it seems like that's a big opportunity.
I don't know, man.
Maybe with that and the nuclear deal, maybe we'll be right back where we were after Putin helped Obama stay out of war in Syria and helped him do the nuclear deal with Iran back in 2015.
Which actually raises the question, oh no, what are the neocons going to do then?
Well, it's not only the neocons.
Yeah.
The rest of the hawks do.
You know, take these liberals like Dick Durbin.
OK.
Now, I heard, I would, I asked Dick Durbin, well, way back in January of 2017, right after the transition, I said, well, what's your evidence for the notion that the Russians hacked into the DNC?
We had already pronounced, we VIPS, that there was no evidence of a hack, that it was a leak.
And he said, are you against investigating this?
Are you against investigating this?
I said, no, of course not.
But what evidence do you have now to investigate it?
He said, oh, you can't be against investigating this.
Well, that was Durbin then.
That's bad enough.
Now, what's Durbin saying about these, quote, Russian hacks of commerce, of treasury, of the Homeland Security Agency?
It's an act of war.
That's exactly the term that John McCain used back in the original charges of Russian hacking.
So what I'm saying here is even what the erstwhile, let's say, moderate, the erstwhile sensible politicians are still playing this Russian thing.
So it's a question that I have as to whether Biden will have the gumption to face down these people and say, OK, Iran, we're back in without preconditions, because what others are pushing for now are adding preconditions and so that we can keep the sanctions on for a while.
Sullivan said that.
Sullivan said, yeah, we'll get right back in the deal as soon as they agree to new negotiations over adding other things to it.
Yeah.
So is Biden in charge?
Well, if he's got Sullivan as right hand, if he's got Avril Haines, head of the National Intelligence, set up, if he's got other people like who else?
Who else am I thinking?
Oh, yeah.
The head of Blinken, Winken, Blinken and Nod, Blinken, the fellow.
Are you old enough to remember that nursery thing, Winken, Blinken and Nod?
It's got him surprised.
Anyhow, we have Tony, Antony Blinken running the State Department.
Now, you know, he's probably a very fine guy.
But let me tell you a little story here.
In the mid 70s, I had a pretty high position as a national intelligence officer for Western Europe after I had done my Soviet stuff.
And there was all hell breaking out in Ireland, OK?
And I was deathly afraid that Mr. Casey, Bill Casey, would come down and say, all right, McGovern, you know something about Ireland, you're Irish, all that trouble there in Derry and we want you to take the helm here and do an estimate on Ireland.
And I would have had to say, I'm sorry, Mr. Casey, I cannot do that.
I am hopefully prejudiced against the British.
I grew up at my grandmother's knee.
She told me what happened to her and her relatives and her farm and her cattle.
And I can't do that.
I'm sorry.
OK, now, what's the point of that?
Blinken is a descendant of people who were involved in the Holocaust.
OK, now, involved in it, victims of it, victims of the Holocaust.
Right.
So, you know, it's very clear that he grew up in the same kind of atmosphere that I grew up.
And, you know, he's he's just as much inclined to one side of things as I would have been inclined to one side in Northern Ireland.
So he's going to be running the Middle East policy.
And that is really dangerous because, you know, what people don't know.
He can't be worse than Mike Pompeo.
Well, you know, I don't know if he'd be worse than an old fatso, but he's pretty bad in terms of looking dispassionately about Palestine.
No question about it.
No question about it.
It's just the key.
The Russians said just yesterday, look, Iran is not the problem in the Middle East.
Palestine is.
Palestine and Israel.
And, you know, if we escape a last minute Netanyahu false flag attack in the next couple of weeks before Trump exits, we'll be lucky because they want to do everything they can to make sure that they mousetrap Trump into doing something really bad on Iran.
The possibility of that is receding, thank God.
But it's not it's not to be dismissed.
You know what?
If I don't know how to say old, reliable in Hebrew or anything, but if Joe Biden's nickname is anything but that in Tel Aviv, I would be amazed.
I mean, this guy was always the single worst Zionist in Washington, D.C. until Donald Trump arrived and beat him.
You know, he said, I'm a big Zionist, didn't he?
We're your best.
He's also said explicitly already before he's even sworn in.
I swear it feels like he's been in office for two years already.
I'm just already exhausted by this.
But he said that.
Oh, yeah.
No, we're not pulling the embassy out of Tel Aviv.
And oh, yeah.
No, we're not D recognizing Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights.
And I don't know if he's responded specifically about the so-called deal of the century and all that.
But he's not.
Oh, and or even the, you know, Pompeo's official recognition of the settlements as no longer considered illegal by the United States.
Ted's not going to undo any of that.
He's Netanyahu's old friend.
Remember when he was on his way over there to insist on a settlement freeze and they announced new settlements while he was in the air on his way over there?
And then what was Netanyahu's punishment is he waited an hour in his plane and then showed up late to dinner and then went home with his tail between his legs.
Like who's the boss here anyway?
So I don't know why they would have anything to fear.
If Netanyahu wants Joe Biden to add a bunch of new stipulations, I don't think he needs Blinken and Sullivan to screw over Biden in order to get Biden to do the wrong thing.
He's Joe Biden.
Wrong thing is his middle name.
Hey, I'll check it out.
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I don't know.
Oh yeah, and buy my books, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Great Ron Paul, The Scott Horton Show Interviews, 2004-2019.
And thanks.
You know, something you won't find in the New York Times is a little quote that appears on page 147 of the 9-11 report, and it has to do with the real prospects of being afraid of terrorists.
It has to do with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11, and he was captured while the 9-11 report was being written, and I know some of the people were writing it, and oh, they were ecstatic.
Let's ask him.
I mean, who was the mastermind?
Let's ask him why he did it.
And so the CIA operatives went and asked him why he did it.
Now, the analysts were all prepared to say, ah, so he's got a PhD in electronic, or no, mechanical engineering from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
He must have had people call him a towelhead, or he had a romantic affair that went bad.
That must be why he hates us, right?
Well, no, that wasn't it.
Here's what appeared on page 147, quote, By his own account, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experience there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.
Then there's a little footnote, and it says, whoops, the commission found that his nephew, Ramzi Yusuf, who tried to down the Twin Towers before that, when he was convicted, he said, you know, I did it because of U.S. policy toward Israel.
The other thing that doesn't appear in the New York Times is the only sensible thing coming out of a quasi-government institute, which was the U.S. Defense Science Board, which on September 23, 2004, said this, Muslims do not hate our freedom.
They hate our policies.
The overwhelming majority voiced their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, ever-increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states, end quote.
All right.
So, that's what cultivates terrorists, and guess what?
The New York Times sat on that report for about three months, and then when they published it, they took out the sentence talking about one-sided support for Israel.
It was not a shortening.
It was not an editing error.
It was deliberate because the sentence before and the sentence after it stood.
So, this is the live wire, and this is where the U.S. is going to get in real trouble because the U.S. cannot work its will anymore in the Middle East.
The Russians are there in Syria, and the Russians are going to stop us, unlike their inability to stop us during the first Gulf War in 1991.
That was a biggie.
After that was over, General Wesley Clark went to Paul Wolfowitz, one of the authors bragging about this great success in Gulf War I, 1991, and he said, Paul, what do you take as your greatest lesson from that wonderful war?
And Wolfowitz said, and I quote, we learned that the Russians can't stop us from doing these things.
That was 1991, end quote.
That was 1991.
Now, the Russians have stopped us in Ukraine, they've stopped us in Syria, they're going to stop us in Iran if we do something really stupid, and then the flag will go up.
Then we will have to worry about Russia's reaction.
These people are crazy, man.
I'm sure you noticed that, or at least they're very bad at their job.
But you know, this brings up a really important point, though, about what's next in Syria, because Trump's, and Pompeo's, you know, greatest accomplishment of his life was as CIA director canceling support for al-Qaeda in Syria.
And they have stolen the east of the country in cooperation with the Kurds there.
They're occupying the wheat fields and the oil fields to keep them out of the hands of the Assad regime, which is completely criminal as it is.
But it's only about a tenth as criminal as the policy that Trump inherited from Barack Obama, which was the highest treason that makes Benedict Arnold look like George Washington.
Give me a break, what they did there.
But so now, Kamala Harris has indicated that they're going back to the bad old days in Syria, that, you know what, the people there deserve a democratic voice.
Yeah.
In other words, we're going to start shoveling billions of dollars back to Abu Mohammed al-Jolani's suicide bomber brigades.
Yeah, you know, the question really is, why?
How does Syria threaten us?
It's because Israel hates Iran, and Iran uses Syria to, as a transit point for weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
That's what it's been about since 1996, and that's what it's still about to this day.
The land bridge, Ray, everywhere else in the world, a land bridge is called a road.
But when it's a link between Iran, you know, Tehran and Beirut, it's a land bridge and America has to stay there, even though it was at Israel's behest that America moved Baghdad to the Iranian column and made this thing possible in the first place.
Okay.
Now, Scott Horton and Ray McGovern, you can be believed or not believed.
What we really need is an Israeli source to confirm this.
And guess what?
I have one.
This is interesting.
This is highly interesting.
Now, when things went up and Obama, the flag went up, and Obama was under great pressure to zap the Syrians overtly with U.S. military forces, the head of the New York Times bureau in Jerusalem, her name was Rudarin, she, to her credit, went and talked to Israeli senior officials.
One of them had been the previous consul general in New York.
And she said, what is Israel's preferred outcome in Syria?
And Alon Pincus, the fellow I just mentioned, previous consul general, said, now, Jody, it's a little embarrassing to say this, but our preferred outcome in Syria is no outcome.
And she said, no outcome?
And Pincus said, yeah, it doesn't sound very humanitarian, but it's sort of like a playoff game where we don't want either team to win.
As long as there's chaos in Syria, there's no threat to Israel at all.
As a matter of fact, the transit of military stuff is impeded to Hezbollah.
And, you know, it's like, let them hemorrhage, let there be no outcome, because as long as there's no outcome, Israel has nothing to fear from Syria, end quote.
There it is.
OK, now let them both continue to hemorrhage to death.
Yeah.
Which he could have just said bleed, but hemorrhage, that's pretty bad, you know, picture blood just spurting out everywhere.
Now, guess what?
Guess what?
It was Labor Day weekend and Jody Ruderman, to her credit, filed that report.
And all the muckety-mucks, as my Irish grandmother would call them, were out in the Hamptons finishing off their martinis.
And it got on the front page as the lead article on September 6th, 2013.
OK, read it there.
It's the lead item.
She recounts it chapter and verse.
And nobody took note of it, of course, except you and me.
And there it is in a nutshell.
It's all about Israel's interests in Syria and Iran and the rest of the Middle East.
And you know, to have the tail wagging the dog to this extent, as bad as Pompeo was, if we have Biden following that kind of example, well, we're not going to get away with it much longer.
Because if the Israelis try something against Iran, Iran has some pretty potent allies now in China and in Russia.
And the correlation of forces is very different from what it was in 1991.
You have a virtual alliance, a virtual military alliance between Russia and China.
Putin was asked a few weeks ago, would your relationship proceed to a defense treaty?
And he said, no, we don't need one.
What's the point?
We could discuss that, but we are close enough now.
So what I'm saying here is that if there are hostilities, let's say in the Middle East or in Europe between some flyboys from our Air Force and Russian Air Force, you could expect a little trouble or maybe a lot of trouble in the South China Sea.
And the U.S. military is not prepared to handle that kind of two front dust up.
So the sooner Biden and others voice up to this, the better.
The prospects are not very good, given the fact that the people advising him on these things are either prejudiced or ignoramuses, some of them both.
Yeah.
And just outright liars, these guys.
And we're over an hour.
But I got to ask you about one last thing.
It's in your article and it's on the subject of Michael Morell, who is very high in the running to be named the new director of the CIA, at least.
For all I know, he'll be named by the time this interview comes out.
But that is what you mentioned here about Sabri and Habush.
And this is such an important story.
It's almost like a new scoop.
This is in my new book, too, but I don't mind bringing it up here.
And it's only a new scoop in the sense that anybody who ever knew about it forgot about it by now.
But it's sort of kind of really important, I think, in terms of showing just how unnecessary all this has been and that it just didn't have to be this way at all.
You know, people look at history so much as all just a series of inevitabilities.
I know I learned when I was a kid in elementary school that, well, because it's a democracy, then that means that whatever the government does is what the people wanted it to do.
And if the majority of the adults of the society wanted it to do something, then it must have been the right thing or they wouldn't have agreed on it.
So essentially, the entire evolution of the United States as it's existed is all very deliberate by people you can trust.
And it's supposed to be this way.
But this is one of those things that goes to show that, yeah, actually, no, they could have made completely different decisions than the ones that have, you know, taken this turn, taken this whole century on this turn into darkness unnecessarily.
Yeah, Scott, we probably should explain that Sabri was the foreign minister of Iraq and Bush was the chief intelligence officer.
My colleagues on the operational side had turned them.
In other words, they were working for us, not for Saddam Hussein.
And they reported months before the invasion that there were no weapons of mass destruction left in Iraq.
OK.
Or ties to al-Qaeda either.
Ties to al-Qaeda, yeah.
So the whole, you know, fixing the intelligence to indicate that there were weapons of mass destruction and that they would be given to al-Qaeda was shown to be false on its face.
But the White House reaction was, don't tell us any more about this.
Don't tell us any more about this.
We're fixing the intelligence to suit the policy.
We're going to invade Iraq in March.
And don't don't tell us any more about this.
And now what about Michael Morell?
Because that was his job, was telling them, right?
Well, he was he was the personal briefer of George Bush, George W. Bush, during 2001.
And now 2002, he's even more indictable because George Tenet, his boss, the head of the CIA, says that Morell was in charge of preparing the speech for Colin Powell.
Now, meaning the CIA input into the speech for Colin Powell before the U.N. when he lied to his teeth.
I'm sure we could get Wilkerson to confirm that or not.
Well, Wilkerson, he may have already written about that.
Now, Wilkerson tells me that, yeah, Morell was in the background, but he never showed his face to me.
It was Tenet dealing directly with Powell and McLachlan, Tenet's deputy, McLachlan and Tenet, both weaving a bunch of lies.
Larry, as you know, says that the last, that's the worst day of his whole life.
Colin Powell was largely deceived by these guys, although, you know, McGovern thinks, wait a second, I grew up a couple of blocks from Colin Powell in the Bronx.
You don't spend your youth in the Bronx and get so easily deceived.
I think Colin Powell is just playing the role of, quote, soldier, end quote, and thinking that this, this invasion of Iraq was going to be a, quote, cakewalk, as one of their high neocons had said.
So yeah, what's the harm in lying us into war when it's going to be easy anyway?
Who cares?
They're going to meet us with, you know, chocolates and, you know, it's going to be just great.
And then they're going to recognize Israel.
We had that promise and so forth.
So these guys were out of their gourd and people who tried to talk sense into them either quit or kind of, kind of acquiesced because after all, it's a job and you're not, we're not ready to retire just yet.
And you certainly won't blow the whistle because these are all your good friends.
And so they're lying a little bit.
That's what intelligence is.
That's not what we used to do in substantive intelligence analysis.
It's really very regrettable and very, very painful for me to look back at that.
Yeah.
All right, you guys, that's the great Ray McGovern.
This piece is at antiwar.com and at raymcgovern.com and at consortiumnews.com.
Share it with all of your friends.
It's called Why Michael Morrell Cannot Be CIA Director.
And it probably could be called Why Michael Morrell Probably Will Be CIA Director because of the very same horrible reasons in here.
Thank you very much for your time again, Ray.
You're most welcome.
