12/02/16 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, again, twice in a week, happy to welcome back to the show our friend Ray McGovern.
For 27 years, he was a CIA intelligence analyst, and now he is the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
He regularly gives speeches, also calling for sanity, and he writes articles at RayMcGovern.com, and especially at ConsortiumNews.com, and boy is he in good company over there at ConsortiumNews.com as well.
We reprint virtually all of it at AntiWar.com as well.
The latest is Trump Ponders Petraeus for Senior Job.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you?
Good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing real good.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show as always here.
And I know the audience loves you as much as I do, so that's good.
Now, this guy Petraeus...
That's not the case here in this town of Washington.
Maybe I should move down to Texas.
What do you think?
You might be very welcome here.
Well, at least in Austin.
I don't know how they'd like you if you go north, south, east, or west of here, but here in the capital city, I'm sure that you would absolutely be the toast of the town, no doubt about it.
So yeah, this whole... especially now that the Republicans are coming back in power, right?
Now there's nothing to resent about you anymore on the part of these liberals undercutting their hero.
Now it's the good old days again.
Republicans in power, anti-war liberals back in gear where they belong.
So this guy Petraeus, Trump ponders Petraeus for Senior Job.
The leak was that they're talking about maybe putting him in the State Department.
Now I'm hearing that that actually ain't going to happen, and maybe we're already in the clear.
On the other hand, they have not named who is going to be the Secretary of State as of this recording anyway, so there still is a major danger there.
And well, or at least I should say, there's still a possibility that Petraeus will get the job at the State Department.
And I think it's fair to say that the entire consensus in America, especially in D.C. and New York, and all the people who matter and know and know each other and have power and influence, they all think that this guy is just great.
Worst thing he ever did was, yeah, embarrassingly, he shared a couple of secrets with his mistress.
But after all, she was writing a nice hagiography of him.
And anyway, that's no real big deal.
It's not like he gave secrets to the enemy or anything like that or to the American people like Bradley Manning did.
So that's his only scandal, is mostly perceived as like kind of a half-baked little scandal.
And otherwise, he's the greatest general of his generation, something like that.
Everybody knows that.
I wonder if you think something else.
Well, he's been a disaster as a general.
What he's excelled at, as his former supervisor, Admiral Fallon, head of CENTCOM, said, was that he was really good at buttering up to people.
I can't use the words that Fallon used.
He's an old Navy salt.
But he said, you know, I hate people like that.
The way they throw flowery accolades at their superior officers sickens me.
So Petraeus is the quintessential model of a modern major general.
If you want to go back to Gilbert and Sullivan, he knows how to move himself ahead.
And even when he was disgraced by, you know, I think we can all sympathize with a guy who's getting old and some beautiful young lady comes along and she wants not only to write a book about him, but do other things for him.
And so, but, you know, there's no fool like an old fool.
And it wasn't just a few secrets.
These were notebooks full of top secret information, including the names of CIA and Defense Department agents.
And, you know, what was really, what's really pitiable about the way he did it, he was named to be head of the CIA, right?
And he knew that after the Labor Day weekend, he'd be surrounded by security people from CIA.
And he wouldn't be able to, you know, as much as steal out for beer at night without them knowing.
So before that, he stalled out to where Paula Broadwell was living and delivered these notebooks and said, you know, these are really, really secret, so be careful with them.
And I'll have to have them back.
And he went back and picked them up just before the CIA security detail descended around his house and protected him.
So, you know, it was sort of childish.
You would expect that maybe of a sophomore in high school.
But that's the way that happened.
The way it went down, of course, is FBI interrogated him or at least questioned him and he lied to them.
Now, in the old days, they called me old fashioned, but lying to the FBI was a felony.
Like automatisch, automatic felony.
Well, not for people like Petraeus.
So he's got very high level protectors, including John McCain and people who like to have wars and like to have Polish generals with 10, count them, 10 rows of ribbons.
I think there are a few merit badges in there from the Boy Scouts on his left lapel.
And he just, you know, looks the part and there's something out of central casting.
You know, when I think back, Eisenhower.
I can't remember.
I can't remember one medal on his lapel.
Maybe there was one.
General Marshall.
Those people didn't need their medals and they didn't need 10 rows of them.
So Petraeus is an interesting study.
It's a pitiable study, particularly if he gets rewarded for his past, not only indiscretions, but major mistakes in military strategy by a position in the Trump government.
All right.
Now, before we get to too much of his military record and all that, as long as we're talking about this pseudo red herring, which, as you've explained, is no red herring at all, but in fact, it's absolutely serious.
The notebooks full of top secret documents and also, as you say, lying to the FBI, which even someone as rich and famous as Martha Stewart went to the penitentiary for lying to the FBI, the underlying crime.
Forget it.
You know, this is why you shouldn't talk to the FBI.
You should have them talk to your lawyer, because if you tell them that you think today is Tuesday, you know, they can get you for that.
They can get you for anything.
So but again, as you said, no, not if you're General Petraeus.
But there's a point of fact I wanted to nail down here and make sure that I'm right about this.
I believe that I have read, sir, that some of what he gave to his mistress, Paul Broadwell, included what is considered and I'm not exactly certain how this works.
I'm hoping you can explain.
But things that are considered to be above top secret, which is actually not an official name of a category, but top secret is as high as the categories go.
But there is stuff that is eyes only, whatever exactly you call it, that is above top secret and that in this case included deliberations between this at that time head of the Afghan war and the president of the United States himself, which would be considered the very highest level of classification on the continent.
Is that correct?
Well, all I've seen, of course, is not the information itself, but the reports which come out of Petraeus friendly sources like the Washington Post.
And so, you know, it's it's possible to believe that these notebooks mean, after all, his whole purpose there was not only to ingratiate himself with this rather good looking woman, but to get her to write what you call the hagiography.
And if I remember my Greek correctly, that means a pretty flattering book.
Either about him or about Al Haig.
But that's right.
So you get all this juicy detail, including compartmented information like the names of secret agents.
I mean, that's beyond the pale.
Those were said to be included.
And as you pointed out, discussions, strategy discussions with the president of the United States.
Well, they were all in there.
I'm pretty convinced.
I don't think that the Washington Post would make that kind of thing up, unflattering as it is to Petraeus.
And so that's what Paula, Paula got.
Now, what Paula wants, Paula got.
Now, the question has never been resolved in my mind.
She was deliberately in receipt of highly classified information.
That's a crime.
That's a crime.
That's a crime if you like it or you want it and you're going to use it.
Maybe she gave it back.
Well, maybe she maybe I'm suspicious she could have sold it to some Israeli friends or some Iranian friends.
I mean, she had it for several days, but that was never looked into.
So and as did you question.
Yeah, this was the this was the acme of classified information.
I think this exceeded even the stuff on Hillary Clinton's personal server.
Oh, yeah.
Which even that included satellite photos of North Korean nuclear facilities and stuff.
So they try to play that down.
But that was pretty important, too.
OK, but now.
So let me let me backtrack that one last point there.
You are a former CIA analyst.
I know you weren't a throat cutting spy out there in the world and all of that stuff.
But I wonder, you know, and it is, in a sense, speculation, although not completely idle speculation.
But if if you were to judge, would you give it low confidence or medium confidence or high confidence or some kind of percent chance that you think that Paula Broadwell possibly even deliberately was sent to to get these secrets from David Petraeus or failing that at least that once she got them, that she may have actually turned around and given them to somebody else?
Is there really any indication of that?
Or or do you think just the fact that she was in that position means that maybe it's pretty likely that somebody put her in that position?
You know, Scott, I don't think any of that is likely to be true, even though he had these secret liaisons with her in in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He was surrounded all the time by security folks.
I'm sure they looked into her background.
There's no no indication I have that she did anything other than use them to write the most flattering book she possibly could.
But, you know, security types and I was not, you know, a gumshoe security type.
I mean, they have to assume.
Right.
That's why you have classifications.
Unauthorized people get this information for a reason.
Now, the benign explanation here is that, you know, David had it, you know, had this thing for for Paula and and the thing for his public record.
But there are several alternate interpretations or explanations.
And that's what security people would have to look into.
My my guess is that they did look into that from the very beginning and there was nothing obviously detrimental about her character.
Well, this is why adultery is a crime in the military.
Right.
Is because you could get blackmailed.
You could get infiltrated in honey trapped.
Well, yeah.
In the old days.
I mean, now it's sort of a badge of honor.
I guess so.
It used to be against the universal code.
Oh, is it not even is it not even against the military law anymore?
I thought it was.
So I think it is.
But, you know, it's not enforced.
Who cares about law anymore?
That's that's where we are.
Yeah.
Well, and now so let me ask you this, too.
It's a complicated story how all this came about with General John Allen and this lady, the socialite down there in Tampa, Florida.
I forget her name and and how she was hitting on.
I think when the story she thought that Broadwell was a plant and was trying to portray to protect Petraeus from her, something like this.
And then to throw one more thing into the mix was, I believe, as Phil Giraldi wrote it at the American Conservative Magazine, was that that this was really a CIA coup, that the guys at the CIA hated Petraeus, you know, basically as much as you do and that they got rid of him.
And they're the ones who gave the story to the FBI and had the FBI go after him anyway, because they didn't want to take orders from the general no more.
You know, well, these socialites in Tampa looking back at it months later, it seemed to me that was the cover story.
Petraeus was too big for his britches.
Obama was finally pretty much pretty fed up with being forced to do things that Petraeus wanted.
Obama didn't like the second surge, the one into Afghanistan, and they wanted to get rid of him, wanted to get him out of Afghanistan.
So what did they do?
Well, it's very simple, Scott.
NSA has all the emails.
NSA has all the telephone calls.
So what Obama did, I think, or what his chief of staff did, was call the head of NSA and say, no, look, what we got on Petraeus?
What we got on John Allen?
Let's see what we can do here.
And right after that midterm election, or was it the, I guess it was his second election, they called Petraeus in or at least Obama had his director of national intelligence call him in and say, well, you know, this is really beyond the pale.
We're going to have to remove you.
This is too much.
And, you know, I think it was just set up because they wanted to get rid of the guy and the guy had no recourse once they showed him the email.
So you think it wasn't even that the CIA got rid of him?
You think it was Obama that set this in motion?
Well, yeah, I think the administration was fed up with this guy.
The CIA didn't like him either, but, you know, the guys who do these kinds of things in the CIA, they had their head with Petraeus.
I mean, after all, he was shipping bootlegging guns all over the place from Libya to Syria.
And they enjoy that kind of stuff.
So the analysts might not have liked him because he cut them out of just about everything.
He knew all the answers.
But I think it was rather the government that said, look, Petraeus has outlived his usefulness.
He's actually a potential challenge for our political future.
Let's embarrass him and get rid of him once and for all.
Little do they know that guys like Petraeus have nine lives.
Yeah, he won't stay gone.
You know, I got to think, though, I mean, Trump, I mean, I do think he's a dummy.
But if there's something that he's got a talent at, it's got to be recognizing when somebody else is trying to be alpha male in his spot and that kind of thing.
And that's one thing that for whatever reason that TV news people swoon over David Petraeus, it seems like if you're a president, then like if you're Obama, for example, or even Trump, that you can tell that this guy is too ambitious for your own good.
You can't keep around a guy like that.
As you alluded to there, and I'd like for you to talk about it, he's basically insubordinate in 2009.
He was acting almost as an agent for the gone, the late and not lamented or late and lamented, not lamented that they're gone Cheney regime in basically forcing Obama to launch a war.
And so I'm thinking, I mean, you know, the surge in Afghanistan, I'm thinking Trump must just take one look at this guy and say, yeah, right.
Like I can trust him.
He has disloyalty written all over his face.
Don't he?
Yeah.
Loyalty to Petraeus.
Well, you know, it really it's hard to judge Trump.
Now, you know, he did the the apprentice thing, you know, so you think that he could spot a phony.
On the other hand, everybody says, you know, he's very, very susceptible of blandishments and flattery.
And there's nobody better than that.
Yeah.
And Petraeus.
So Petraeus did this, you know, It seems like, you know, Mattis is like, look, I'm Mad Dog Mattis and I'm a tough guy and I'm this and I'm that at your service, sir.
And that Trump can trust that, that Mattis doesn't want to be president one day.
Petraeus does.
Petraeus is only, you know, ask him.
He's middle aged and just getting started.
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Well, if Petraeus is not selected for anything, I think your reasoning will be, will have been proven true.
You know, the question arises, why did Trump see him in any case?
And as soon as Petraeus got down to the lobby, he started talking about what a great mind this guy Trump has.
And, you know, he took us around the world.
And, man, he had a question, but he had a lot of suggestions too, man.
This guy.
So if Trump is very, you know, impressionable and, you know, humble and likes to have a guy like this, maybe he'll be flattered and to hire him.
I hope not.
But when you look at the other candidates, my God, it's small solace that Petraeus may not be selected.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's talk about these words that he escalated and lost anyway.
You started with the second one first there, the Afghan surge and the incoming Obama administration in 2009.
Would you tell that story to the people who don't know?
Yeah, sure.
It was a combination of Petraeus and Hillary Clinton and McChrystal and all those highfalutin generals that forced Obama's hand by leaking to the press that they needed 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan in addition to the already incremental increase that he had done early in his tenure, like in March, I think, of 2009.
So Obama actually told, now I'm thinking he told Goldberg, his unofficial biographer, that he felt pressured.
He felt the Washington playbook was really doing a job on him and he didn't much care for it, but he gave in.
So that was the background of the Afghan surge.
I have to confess to having been surprised when Obama came in.
He had talked about Iraq being a terrible mistake, but he had said, well, the Afghan war, that was a good war.
I was sure.
I was pretty sure.
As soon as he got a briefing on Afghanistan, and you could go back to Alexander the Great, for God's sake, on Afghanistan, and he'd be told what a foolish thing this is.
What a fool's errand.
Well, maybe he was told, but he felt pressured by these generals and by Hillary Clinton, and he didn't face into them.
So another 1,000 U.S. troops died in a surge, just as happened in Iraq 2007, again under Petraeus.
There were great successes, right?
Well, look at those countries now.
They weren't successes at all.
So what I'd suggest, if I may, people can read my article easy enough and talk about the things that, the surges and so forth, but that was when he got his fourth star.
When Bush and Cheney realized that they were losing the war in Iraq, and I will say a couple more words about that, this was 2006.
The Sunni-Shia at each other's throats.
What were they going to do?
Well, the generals came back from Iraq.
General Abizade was at CENTCOM.
He came back from Tampa.
General Casey, who was the head of the troops there in Iraq, and they said, now look, what we don't need is any more troops.
They went before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
There's McCain, right?
And he says, we'll send you some more troops.
We'll send you some more troops.
And they said, we really appreciate the thought, but whatever you do, no more troops, please.
This is September, October, November 2006.
Now, McCain, they were- When you got the Iraq Study Group, right?
James Baker and all them came forward, the CFR guys, and said, let's get out.
And Abizade, the ambassador in Iraq, was saying, hey, let me work out a deal.
This just isn't working.
What most people don't realize is that Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, responsible for most of this, was going wobbly.
Wrote a memo to the president the day before the election.
We've got to change our policy there.
We can't succeed here.
My generals say, give more troops.
The Sunni and Shia will never get it through their heads that they have to cooperate with each other.
We'll be there forever, okay?
So what happens?
Bush and Cheney go to their conservative friends in the American Enterprise Institute and so forth and say, what happens?
What happens if we do what the generals say?
No more troops, and we withdraw.
The answer came back loud and clear.
Well, sir, you lose a war on your watch.
And so Bush and Cheney said, well, how can we prevent that?
Surge, Mr. President, surge.
And the next question, of course, is who are we going to get to surge?
Enter from the wings, 10 rows of medals on his left breast, General David Petraeus.
Now, that would be good, but what are they going to do for Rumsfeld?
I mean, he's not going to be...
Oh, enter from the other wing, Robert M. Gates.
Gates will do it if you make him Secretary of Defense, and sure enough, Gates is invited to Crawford, Texas, and Bush talks to him and says, now, look, we have a little difficult situation there in Baghdad, and we've decided to surge, and you won't have to do any military stuff because this very fancy general that's leading the battle, Mr. Petraeus is going to do that, but we need somebody to go out and fire the generals.
I'll be Zaid in Tampa and Casey out there in Baghdad, and that has to be a Secretary of Defense.
And so I know Bobby Gates, he used to work for me, so I could just see him saying, well, you mean like, I mean, you mean like I'd be Secretary of Defense?
And Bush says, oh, yeah, that's the idea, that's why I brought you here.
I could do it, sir, yes.
Excellent idea, excellent idea.
So for 2007, you have Gates going out, firing these generals who said, please, no more troops, and Petraeus going out, and what happened in the surge, in a word, is that the Shia were protected under a cordon sanitaire of 30,000 American troops, and they did ethnic cleansing in the capital city of Baghdad, churning it from a predominantly Sunni city into a predominantly Shia city.
The satellite photography that UCLA was running showed the lights literally going off in the Sunni neighborhoods, and you wonder why the Sunni don't like this now?
You wonder why the Sunni are populating ISIS and causing all that trouble?
Well, it had its roots there.
It had its roots in the awakening that Petraeus bragged about.
What that meant was he gave them lots of money, and with that money, they fended off Al-Qaeda, such it was then, and then they were promised to have a role in the new Baghdad government, and as soon as the new government was installed by the U.S., Petraeus and everybody else forgot that promise.
The Sunni awakening people never got paid out there in western Iraq, and they formed the core of ISIS now.
So it's a terribly, terribly...
Well, it's understandable in terms of political ambition because it was correct that the general idea of getting Sunni and Shia to cooperate with each other was correct.
Now, the way you don't do that was what our generals worried about or warned against, and that is you don't send 30,000 more U.S. troops on one side of the equation.
That's not the way you do it.
But the general objective, the political objective in which Gates, Petraeus, and all the people in the American enterprise, to realize was the whole idea that Sunni and Bush go off into the sunset without having lost the war.
Then they pinned it on Obama.
I mean, Obama was so...
The Democrats are so stupid about all that that they deserve to be blamed about that when it all went down after Bush had made the deals with the Iraqis and then when Obama was left to implement them.
Well, look at Iraq now.
It's Bedlam again.
So is Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is still waiting in the wings, and there's a report, I'm sure it's true, that a fellow named Robert M. Gates in a trench coat was seen in the elevator going up...
Oh, no!
Oh, God.
Could you not?
Now, you know, my God, it's...
Well, he was already the secretary of defense.
What's he gonna be now?
Not the secretary...
Oh, well, they already named Mattis, so...
He's the businessman of all this.
Are they gonna put Gates at stake?
What's that?
Well, I don't know.
I'd rather think that, you know, he's almost as old as I am.
Yeah, maybe he's just giving advice up there that here's who you should go with, that kind of thing.
Yeah, I think that's probably the case.
I want to get to what you're saying there about Iraq here real quick, because I think that this is something that people don't understand, but they could, you know, just reiterate a little bit what you just said.
Rumsfeld, the guy what created the mess, said, you know what?
As long as we keep fighting for the Shiite side, basically, we're making it less and less likely that they're going to ever reach any kind of compromise with the Sunnis and have any kind of coalition government going forward here.
So, as he would put it, you know, very patronizingly, they're going to have to figure this out.
But then, for political reasons, you're saying, to make Bush and Cheney look good, the priority was extending the war and not calling it quits.
So, even though the claim of the goal of the surge was to achieve these benchmarks of reconciliation, the means to that end was sending even more troops, 30,000 more, to help the Shiite side in the civil war win outright and completely finish cleansing the capital city and take it for themselves.
In other words, depriving them of their last incentive to need to compromise and deal with the Sunnis.
Instead, they didn't even want Abu Ghraib and Fallujah just to the west of Baghdad.
They said, we got Shiite stand, and that's it.
And screw you guys, we got all the oil Kurds up in the north, and so, all you former Baathists and Jihadis and whoever, and Sunni tribal leaders, left them to rot out in the sun, and as you said then, all of Petraeus' promises that the Sunnis would then be integrated into the Iraqi government, and that they would find these compromises, because of the means chosen to achieve that, actually was a proven failure.
It never happened at all.
And then that's what led to the rise of ISIS.
I'm just saying the same thing you just said again, but just to kind of drive that point home, that this was the supposed brilliant success of the Iraqi surge that then became the precedent for let's do it again in Afghanistan.
Even though all they ever did was help their enemies, the Iranians, and their factions that they favored in Iraq win against their allies among the Sunni-Saudi allies.
And it's no exaggeration, as you point out, or as you reiterate, that the whole idea was to make sure that Bush and Cheney didn't ostensibly lose this war on their watch.
It wasn't a mistake.
It wasn't that anyone thought that sending more troops would actually facilitate a reconciliation.
They knew.
How did they know?
Rumsfeld told them.
Ambassador Abizid, Ambassador Khalilzad told them.
And this is what Abizid said.
Now, this is November 15, 2006, so two months before the surge.
He's testifying to Senator John McCain, who is pressing vigorously for 20,000 more troops to Iraq.
Quote, here's Abizid, Senator McCain, I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the Corps commander, General Dempsey.
We all talked together, and I said, in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does this add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq?
And they all said, no.
And this, and the reason is, says Abizid, continuing, because we want the Iraqis to do more.
It's easy for the Iraqis to rely upon us to do this work.
I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, prevent them from taking more responsibility for their own future.
Now, that is November 15, 2006, so it's ten years ago.
Now, those were the experts.
They were the people on the ground.
They were telling Rumsfeld, who finally became a believer in what they said.
The ambassador agreed.
The Iraq study group run by James Baker and Lee Hamilton also agreed.
Everybody agreed, but Bush and Cheney wanted to find a different way out where they wouldn't be caught with the albatross around their shoulders or their neck, and so we have ten more years since then of war and the springing up of ISIL or ISIS or Daesh as the inevitable result of our pardon the expression screwing the Sunni.
Well, you know what, too?
I want to accuse Barack Obama here, too, because before he did the pullout, really, at the end of 2011, like he said he would, he finally did, but before that, in the spring of 2010, they held an election and Alawi, Alawi of all people, who was the former Baathist, former CIA agent, former terrorist, truck bomber, former first sock puppet American backed dictator of Iraq after the invasion to replace Saddam and cold-blooded murderer, he actually won the election.
Him and his party had the right to try to form the first government under the Constitution, and he was unique in that he was a Shiite and a Baathist, so he could sort of, kind of, maybe bridge the gap and help to work.
It was at least the best chance they had, and his group won the election, but America, Obama, and the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, they worked out a deal that, no, let's just keep Bush's guy Maliki instead, and the Dawah party guy instead, and by backing Maliki in basically facing down Ayatollah Khomeini's group, that was the last gasp, last possible opportunity for reconciliation right there, and it was Obama who made that decision.
Yeah, he was relying on a coterie of State Department quote, experts, ambassadors that had been there for a while, who sold him a bill of goods.
Obama had no real guidance.
He had a bunch of freshmen and sophomores in the White House.
They relied on the residue that was left over from before, and the people, the neocons that Hillary Clinton brought in.
Don't these people read Gareth Porter and Patrick Coburn and Ray McGovern?
I don't know.
I don't have any trouble with this stuff, because I talk to you guys, so it seems like if you're the President, you could at least read Patrick Coburn, for Christ's sake.
You don't have to interview him, but at least read him, you know?
They don't, actually, and that's part of the problem.
You know, we were talking about the surge where Petraeus came in from the wings, and Robert Gates as well.
Petraeus got his fourth star, right?
And that was a big deal.
I'd like to say just a word about when he got his third star.
Now, this is important, because it was right after the revelations about Abu Ghraib, the torture and so forth in Iraq, 2004.
Now, just parenthetically, when there was a deluge of jihadists coming in 2004, 2005, 2006, and they were interrogated by Matthew Alexander, Air Force Major and others, and they were asked, you know, what are you doing here in Iraq?
95% of them said, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
So, torturing people is not really a good idea, especially if you want to put down insurgencies and defeat jihadis.
Now, the reason I mention that is because it was exactly in June 2004 that General Petraeus, with three stars, went out at Rumsfeld's orders to Baghdad.
Now, June 2004, April was when they had the big revelations about Abu Ghraib, and so Rumsfeld's instructions were, look, it's probably not a good idea for U.S. troops to be torturing folks anymore, but if the Iraqis want to do that, if the Sunni want to succumb to the Shia doing that, or vice versa, you know, it would probably be good for us if that happened, okay?
Now, what happened?
There was a fragmentary order in the military, we call it a frago, a Frago 242 June 2004 sent out with General Petraeus.
It went into effect immediately, and what it said was that, well, you might encourage the Shia to torture suspected Sunni militants to get good information, you know?
Yeah, go ahead and do that.
So if you see the prisons filled with people torturing Sunni, well, you know, you don't have to worry about that.
Well, what's the big deal there?
That's June 2004.
November 2005, some of the reporters in Baghdad got into those prisons and saw what was going on.
And one of the reporters asked then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace Marine, Ramrod Marine, together with Rumsfeld at the Defense Department, they were giving a briefing and said, General Pace, what are your orders when you see, when your troops witness torture in Baghdad and surrounding areas?
And Pace, without batting an eyelash, said, my orders are they are to stop it on the spot.
If they see anything like that and they personally observe that, they stop it on the spot.
Rumsfeld Oh, I don't think so, General Pace.
I think it's to report it.
Pace, no, sir.
It's to stop it right on the spot.
Now, what's the big deal here?
Pace was cut out of this fragmentary Order 242 which said precisely what Rumsfeld was saying.
No, you just, you could report that the Iraqis were doing this, but you didn't have to do diddly about it.
Okay?
Pace, the old school soldier, like me and others who've been around a while, realized torture is just the worst thing you can do.
Not only morally, but you know, it doesn't work.
And he had been cut out of this whole thing.
So, Petraeus was working directly for Rumsfeld from June 2004 until November 2005 and probably thereafter discharging his dictum where he could look away from torture as long as it was the Iraqis.
Ah, Freudian slip.
So, there you go.
So, that's the kind of guy that Petraeus is.
And Peter Pace, the Ramrod Marine General, he ended up not getting a second tour as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and I'm sure that Rumsfeld made very clear to him why.
Yeah.
Well, now, you told that story six days ago, but I'll let you do it again because it's such an important one and it just goes to show exactly the nature of the Bush Administration for, you know, a lot of people listening were too young then.
They didn't know this stuff.
They were just in school at the time and missed all this kind of thing.
And we're not talking about, hey, just some enhanced interrogation here.
We're talking about the Bata Brigade torturing people to death in the most heinous medieval kind of ways.
And, as you say, all with the blessing and, I guess, the vicarious thrill of Donald Rumsfeld.
And really, you know, part of that was just keeping up with the Joneses over at the CIA that if they get to torture people well then I get to torture people too or else that's not fair and this kind of thing.
That's how they ran that administration.
So, you know, definitely important to point that out.
And also, you know, a big part of the whole surge is coin and the brilliance of the counter-insurgency strategy, which, get this, it says that when you invade territory and take it then you should stay there and leave soldiers standing around on street corners, you know, boots on the ground, to actually hold that territory.
And then that way, because instead if you leave then the bad guys might come back again, right?
So they came up with this brilliant strategy that said when you take territory then stay there for a little while.
But then again, it was supposed to lead to build and transfer and compromise and create the space for factions to come to political solutions to their formerly violent military differences and this kind of thing.
But none of that ever happened.
And it seems kind of contrary to the idea of winning hearts and minds and clearing and holding, I mean, this whole counter-insurgency thing is supposed to win over the population so that they prefer the foreign occupying army to their local neighborhood insurgents and yet at the same time this includes grabbing their men in the middle of the night and torturing them, including to death with power drills and this kind of thing.
So it's sort of contrary to the whole, I mean it was really it was like a subset of the entire idea that, well, we're invading this country to help these people to free them and liberate them and protect them from tyranny and protect them from terrorism and build a democracy for them and then the coin thing is basically that on the neighborhood level, that like, yeah, we're going to really win these people over by caring for them so well and yes, and that does include yeah, we torture their fathers and brothers.
Well, you know Scott, I go back a ways and counter-insurgency really came into its own in the early 60s when John Kennedy was captivated by it General Taylor and the others and at Army Infantry Officers School in Fort Benning, we studied Che Guevara we studied Mao and we realized that the indigenous, as they were called, were really important people.
You needed to swim with the indigenous you needed to cultivate favor with them, you know.
You needed to win their hearts and minds.
So now, Petraeus was a school boy at the time, a high school college, and by the time he got out of West Point the only thing learned about Vietnam was erroneous.
He never learned anything so, long story short you can write a PhD dissertation for a prestigious in quotes, university like Princeton get a PhD in counter-insurgency and then crib from that and write a manual on counter-insurgency and not understand or, if you understand anything about it, not implement it in any way other than surging, torturing and doing all the kinds of things that are counter-productive except for your career you can get a fourth star by temporarily reducing the violence and the way the violence became reduced momentarily that is, just for a few months in Baghdad was that the Sunni and Shia had been separated so hermetically from one another that they couldn't they couldn't kill each other anymore for a little while, okay?
So that's all you got, a temporary respite but during that time Bush and Cheney were on their horses into the western sunset from their point of view look at it now We talked about Afghanistan a bit and we all know what a complete disaster that has been and will continue to be but the last thing I want to talk about with you here before I let you go if you still have time I don't mean to assume that Let me say one thing about Afghanistan Yeah, yeah People have looked at this and I've looked at it a little bit about ancient history and most people don't realize why Alexander the Great is called the Great Now, the real reason is that when he took his troops into Afghanistan they heard about this great stuff in China get a portion of that they started to take real casualties on their flanks from these very weird people that didn't like people invading their country and he called the Council of War with his generals and he said, you know, you're getting hit pretty bad and they said, yeah, yeah and then he said, well look at that and they looked up at the mountains between Afghanistan and China and they said, you know Alexander said, you know, I think maybe we ought to go back to where we know what the hell we're doing back in Asia Minor and they all went back and that's why Alexander deserves the word great he saw what the challenges were in Afghanistan he was the first one and only one to turn back before they got bloody after him were the Persians were the Indians were the British were the Russians were the Americans and the French so when you look at Afghanistan and after all that had happened already that's why, maybe I was naive and they said, hey look Mr. Obama, you know Alexander the Great was right about all this, the others are all wrong let's cut our losses now and get the hell out and either they didn't or he found it politically impossible with Petraeus and Clinton and the others all saying you're a weakling if you don't reinforce and so he sent 50,000, 60,000 more troops in there, look what that got us just another 1,000 US dead and countless thousands Afghans dead My favorite thing about responsibility is that it's a quality and not a quantity so we can divvy it up pretty much however we like so I think that the fact that Petraeus and Gates and Mullen and all these thugs rolled Obama and jammed him and all these things the way he put it I think all that's true and that it's still all his fault because it's so easy to see I'm sure you and I were having this exact conversation in 2009 right at this time, the very beginning of December we would be just a couple of days out from Obama's big West Point speech and lamenting the fact that he is such a coward that here this guy is afraid that they will say that he's weak and so he rolls over for them instead of saying look man, I won the election because the American people didn't want John McCain to make these decisions they wanted me to and so you know what, Robert Gates and David Petraeus, if you guys want to resign, fine and if you want to go sign up for Blackwater and go fight Afghan war on your own dime, go ahead but we're not doing this anymore that would have been the courageous tough guy thing to do and he could have done that and after all Ray he is the guy in the chair, not them him it's all the worse I mean the guy has no guts let's face it, but it was all the worse because the ambassador in Kabul previous general Lieutenant General Eikenberry who had been responsible for coalition troops in Afghanistan and had also been responsible for trying to train them to do our bidding he sent two cables in November of 2009 saying Mr. President this would be a terrible mistake, number one Karzai is not a reliable partner number two the supply lines are incredible and number three, four five and six, it was all in cables that were leaked to the New York Times and to their credit in those days they published both of the cables, so Obama had the opportunity to say, well look, I'm going to go with what my ambassador in Kabul suggests and instead he goes with all these other guys Eikenberry comes back and this is the supreme indignity here Eikenberry stands with the rest of them claps the hardest and says right on, you're absolutely outstanding Mr. President and then he goes on the hill and he sells the surge of 30,000 troops even though his cables show that he was directly opposed to it so my lesson here the professional military cover for themselves what's more important is the reputation and the next star for the military even when they retire as Eikenberry has they remain loyal sort of like the policeman the blue loyalty and where's Eikenberry now?
He's got a prestigious position out at Stanford University they all end up on their feet and they all have Eikenberry didn't have any more guts than Obama had so what you do when you get up to that level is you compromise yourself so much that even when you empower yourself to tell the President the truth as Eikenberry did in November of 2009 from Kabul then when the President says, well now I'm going to go with these other guys instead of quitting I'm saying, look American people this is a fool's errand, more people are going to get killed I quit, instead of doing that well, you stay with the herd and you end up as a big guy at Stanford University Yeah, well and you know it's in Woodward's book too, Obama's Wars that Obama himself talked with his closest political people and said what he really wanted to do was just send 10,000 trainers and tell the whole coin crew to go to hell but they were afraid that Robert Gates would resign, and so he backed down instead of telling them, see ya pal, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out The lesson there is that when Gates' primary supervisor in the early 70's at CIA says that this guy's overpowering ambition is going to lead to disaster for our country you should believe him I happen to be that supervisor I love you Ray, I always did I hear your warnings loud and clear alright now, the one last thing, we gotta talk about this too, because I think it's real important here is David Petraeus and Max Boot and what happened with the whole funny email incident of what year was it, 2010 or 11 well this is really embarrassing because Petraeus came back to the United States to give testimony to one of the committees in Congress, the Senate Armed Services Committee so in his prepared testimony, that is in his written testimony he said a couple of things that he didn't want to say orally because they reflected badly on Palestine and Israel I'm looking for the direct quote here, it's in my article but I think I'd like to read that rather than paraphrase it here he is groveling before Max Boot, the arch neocon you see Petraeus had put in this formal testimony to the Congressional Committee that Palestinian hostility Israeli-Palestinian hostility rather, presents distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests, end quote and that quote this conflict foments anti-American sentiment due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel, end quote well when my friend James Morris out there in LA saw that, he said my god he is admitting that Israeli intransigence on the Palestinian issue is hurting our troops, is fostering anti-American sentiment and presenting more distinct challenges, my god so what does James Morris do?he sends an attaboy email to Petraeus and he says way to go, finally, you're telling it like it is he gets back an answer from Petraeus well now, Mr. Morris I didn't say that in my oral testimony, it was just in my written testimony and actually I don't want that to get around very much because it's being misinterpreted and so thank you very much for your encomium here, but the less said about this the better, okay what Petraeus gets to do is to delete the thread the thread of his correspondence on this with Max Boot and in a long story short here, what Petraeus he writes to Max Boot, he says the press is saying I'm anti-Semitic the press is saying that I'm criticizing Israel, how can I meet this challenge, should I tell them that I had dinner with Elie Wiesel and his wife last week or that I'm going to meet Rabbi so and so next week, what can I do Max?
and Max writes back and he says, relax David, it's okay, it's alright I've already written an article, it says the title of it is David Petraeus is not anti-Semitic and I adduce all the reasons why you're not anti-Semitic and that this was just one of your staff writing this in them, and you didn't say it at all, so relax and Petraeus says, are you sure, are you sure Max?and Max says, yeah David just relax, and David says, ah thank you Max and then he finishes with a little smile face okay it sounds like a lie it's so good, you could make it like the scene in a movie, you know he forgot to delete all that thread, okay, so James Morris shares it with Mundo Weiss, he shared it with me, and Bob Parry wrote it up so, you know, here it is this guy was so damn ambitious that he couldn't even tolerate the notion that something that said Israeli-Palestinian hostility presents distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the Middle East it's a pretty nice way of saying it too, really talk about, you know, mealy mouth so, that just shows what a sniveling little guy he is now, I suppose truth in advertising should have me say that Petraeus had me beat up pretty bad and put in what New Yorkers know as the tombs beneath the criminal justice building there at lower Manhattan simply for wanting to come to a lecture he was giving with a ticket, mind you but the 92nd Street Y was all primed not to let me in and when I remonstrated the NYPD was right there, they beat me up pretty bad I had to go to the emergency room on the way to the tombs but I want to tell you that all these things work for the good and unless you've spent one night in the tombs you have no idea of what Dostoevsky meant when he said if you want to see the level of a country's civilization you must first visit their prisons.
The way I was treated the way people were treated there was something that one has to experience to appreciate and I appreciate that because I experienced it Well, that's a good disclosure and important to say for its own reason and all that but I happen to know your record and that you were a critic of Gates and Petraeus and all these wars and all the rest of it before he ever had you beaten up and so it's not really a disclaimer It's a full disclosure but it's not like it's really prejudiced your view which already existed and in fact the records prove it at antiwar.com and at scotthorton.org too So you're saying it's my own fault, Scott?
No, I'm just saying that you don't need an excuse that you have a personal problem with Petraeus for saying what you say All of the very valuable and obviously third person criticisms of what he's done to the Iraqis to the Afghans to all the other people, to Obama although nobody feels sorry for him His record speaks for itself and including what he did to you but not because of what he did to you I guess, Scott, I just would like to point out that what hurts just as much as anything else is that I took my commission as an army officer very seriously and my oath to the Constitution of the United States and in those days duty, honor, country meant something and I'm not talking just about transgressions like infidelities and things like that I meant lying I mean overweening ambition which leads to lying and all kinds of other things that gets your troops killed That's what bothers me most about guys like Petraeus and they're all around the place and I just hope I hope against hope that Trump is smart enough to keep these people at some distance Yeah Well, you know, Colonel David Hackworth used to call them the perfumed princes That was what he called Wesley Clark the perfumed prince and I'm certain that he would have that exact same kind of contempt for Petraeus Yeah, he stinks alright Alright, well listen you're a really great guy Ray, I appreciate you coming on the show Glad to be with you, Scott Alright y'all, that's the great Ray McGovern Check him out at RayMcGovern.com and especially at ConsortiumNews.com and we run all his archives also at AntiWar.com as well This one is called Trump Ponders Petraeus for Senior Job Very important one there about the possible Secretary of State and that's the Scott Horton Show Thanks y'all very much for listening Check out the archives at LibertarianInstitute.org and at ScottHorton.org for the full archive and also help support It's our big end of the year fund drive You can write it off on your taxes because we're a non-profit organization and all of that It's LibertarianInstitute.org for our great new project there if you want to partake Get this great new book by Michael Swanson The War State Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
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