03/11/15 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
All right, our first guest on the show today is our friend Ray McGovern of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Welcome back to the show.
Ray, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
I'm glad to hear that.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
So you guys put out a thing here.
We reposted it on the Antiwar.com blog, US Intel Vets Oppose Brennan's CIA Plan.
This is a memorandum for the president, who I'm sure reads Antiwar.com every day, from VIPS, the VIPS, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And in fact, well, let me click on this thing here, Ray, so I can mention a few of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals who have signed this letter with you here.
Got some pretty kind of household names, Larry Johnson, former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, fresh out of prison, where he was locked up for doing the right thing there.
Colleen Rowley, FBI whistleblower and Peter Van Buren from the State Department, Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former right-hand man, and Ann Wright, the former diplomat who resigned over the Iraq War.
So those are some Veteran Intelligence Professionals, that's for sure.
And so what's the big deal about Brennan's CIA plan?
Wait, what's Brennan's CIA plan and what's the big deal about it?
Well, Scott, he wants to sound the death knell for what Truman had in mind when he created the CIA way back in 1947.
All right.
Well, three cheers for him then, right?
What's wrong with that?
That's what we all want, right?
Well, yeah.
The problem is whether you throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Let me explain.
Truman wanted nothing more nor less than an analysis group which would have access to all the information on a given subject, given country or issue, therefore central, okay, and would be answerable only to him, would be able to tell the truth without fear or favor and, as I enjoyed for almost my entire career of 27 years, and have professional protection, career protection for telling the truth.
There's many a four-star general whose nose I knocked out of joint and he would come to my superiors, you got to get rid of McGovern, and they would say to their credit, no, we think he's right.
We think your bombing of Vietnam is not going to work, okay, that kind of thing.
Now, that's all Truman had in mind, and when covert action started, and this was really an accident of the post-war period, what happened was the very brave and very imaginative members of the Office of Strategic Services, the fabled OSS, when they came back from the war, I'm talking about World War II, all right, they came back and they said, well, thanks for all the applause, and it was well-deserved applause.
Now, do you want us to hang around here, or should we go back to our corporations, our law firms, our universities, what do you want us to do?
Okay, we're talking 1946, 1947, the Russians had just taken over Eastern Europe, the KGB is running all over the world overthrowing governments, our guys, OSS people, are really good at overthrowing governments, so the question answered itself, yeah, we need you guys, sure, yeah, hang around, don't go back to your law firms or your corporations or academe, stay with us, okay.
Then the question became, where do we put these guys?
Now, there's where the structural fault was introduced.
Someone said, hey, we're creating this analysis group called the CIA, and they're going to have to be secret, because some of the methods they will use to collect, I emphasize, collect information that the analysts need, they'll have to be spies and stuff, so they're going to be all secret, so let's put these guys in with all the analysts, big, big mistake, because you can't have people doing covert action, people running wars, and have the analysts expect to have any credence or credibility at all in Congress or anywhere else.
If you have the same chief running the war, and you have analysts underneath that chief, I'm thinking Bill Casey under Reagan, for example, running the war in Nicaragua, now how is an analyst whose career depends on Bill Casey, how is he going to go up to Congress and Congress says, so what do you think about this prospect, the Russians are going to come through Nicaragua, through Mexico, up into Texas, what do you think of that?
The analysts would have to laugh and say, well, I don't know where you get that, well, I guess I do know where you get that, but that's a fool's errand, it's never going to happen.
Well, how is he going to say that if his boss is running the war?
So that's just one example.
Another one, which we adduce in this memo, which not many people know, has to do with curveball.
Now, hopefully most of your listeners know about curveball.
He was this pretend scientist out of Iraq that appeared to the German service, and the German service debriefed him, and he had this tale about mobile biological weapons laboratories in Iraq.
Could he show us where they were?
No.
Do we have any images or pictures?
No, we don't.
But we had a really neat story, which Colin Powell and the others said, hey, you know, this will be really, really, really persuasive.
Let's do this at the UN.
We don't need images.
We can get our graphics people to do artists' renderings of these trailers.
And all the while, only one, only one member of the intelligence community in this country had a chance to talk to curveball and decided that he was a loony.
They didn't know what he was talking about, and he wasn't who he pretended to be.
So that's all by introduction.
I just want to read you two sentences or so about this fellow who found out, oh, Colin Powell, I just read a draft of his speech.
He's going to use that oddball curveball to justify information about mobile biological weapons trailers.
So this is what he says to his boss, and bear in mind that his boss is involved in operations as well as intelligence.
And so he's not got a clear tell it like it is kind of purview.
So the analyst says to his superior, hey, I just found out about this curveball stuff.
This is crazy.
You know, Colin Powell is going to say that there's no question about, quote, the validity of the information.
So he writes that to his deputy chief of the CIA Iraqi task force.
Again, bear in mind there are operatives involved here as well as analysts.
This is the answer he gets back.
Very brief, but I hope you all listen.
Quote, let's keep in mind the fact that this war is going to happen regardless of what curveball said or didn't say, and that the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether curveball knows what he's talking about or not, period, end quote.
So there's the deputy chief of the Iraq task force who knows that the president and the suborned director of central intelligence, George Tenet, and John McLaughlin, his deputy, have all been enlisted in this attempt to fabricate.
It wasn't a mistake, this intelligence.
It was fraud.
To fabricate intelligence to, quote, justify, end quote, a war of aggression, which of course Nuremberg defined as the most despicable war crime differing from other war crimes only insofar as it contains the cumulative evil of the whole.
Think torture.
Think kidnapping.
Think of all the other indignities that our troops and our CIA people were ordered to do.
All right.
That's almost the whole segment.
So when we get back, I'm going to argue with you a bit about some of this stuff.
But right now, I'll remind everybody that the article is U.S.
Intel Vets Oppose Brennan's CIA Plan.
It's by Ray McGovern and the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and you can find it at antiwar.com slash blog.
And it's about John Brennan's plan to mix up the covert ops side with the analyst side and into, I guess, one big series of joint task forces, which is causing a major upset here.
So hang on one second.
Things will get worse.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
On Liberty Radio Network, I'm talking with Ray McGovern, veteran intelligence professional for Sanity.
For 27 years, he was an analyst at the CIA, and he's been an anti-war guy this whole century, at least.
Now, so Ray, part of what you're talking about, I totally understand what you're saying here, that you take a joint task force of analysts and operatives on a question like Iraq, and they are going to be more willing to fix the facts around the policy than a bunch of analysts in a room who, like in mythical old days when you worked there, would really be protected by their boss for really saying what they think is the truth no matter what and no matter who likes it and that kind of thing.
But here's my thing about that, is the lies that Colin Powell told at the UN, almost entirely, I believe, excluded the Scooter Libby, Douglas Fyfe list of completely ridiculous talking points from the CIA's trash.
It was instead what the CIA would vouch for, which was a lot of lies.
And it was the CIA who, you know, on one hand, you can see, wow, they were under a lot of pressure when Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby and Newt Gingrich, representing Richard Pearl and the Defense Policy Board over there at the Pentagon, made, well, at least 14 trips between Cheney and Libby.
I'm not sure how many times Gingrich went over there to pressure these guys to come up with fake Iraq intel, as you said, oh, he got weapons of mass destruction like manna from heaven, huh?
Because back before, he didn't have any anymore.
And now all of a sudden, he's got some.
And the CIA went along with that.
Instead of saying, you know what?
The vice president is trying to make me lie.
And that makes me fold my arms crossed and get all upset and makes me, you know, extra determined to not lie about this.
Instead, they lied.
They went right along.
And, you know, I read Paul Pilar all the time, and I like the way he writes a lot of anti-war stuff.
But Paul Pilar's signature is at the bottom of that Iraq NIE from 2002 that says, oh, yeah, warehouse is full of mustard and sarin and VX.
That wasn't all, you know, the task force.
That was the analysts.
And they were apparently, if not perfectly happy, they were pretty damn happy to lie us into war almost as bad as the guys in the Office of Special Plans.
Right or wrong?
It's complicated.
Paul Pilar has pretty much done penance.
He feels very bad about having been dragooned into the rest of the exercise there and actually being supervisor of the declassified summary of the National Intelligence Estimate, which quote, justified and quote, the intelligence for the war and even eliminated some of the qualifiers.
So that was done.
Now, why was it done?
It was done because there was no integrity at the very top of the CIA.
George Tenet, John McLaughlin, his deputy, lied.
They lied because the president told them to lie.
Now, how do I know that?
Well, there's lots of ways I know that.
But perhaps something your listeners don't know is that when Mike Isikoff was writing his book, which he called Hubris.
That's a Newsweek reporter, everybody.
That's right.
Yeah, he he wrote he he's very, very bright.
He was the one that actually divulged the Bill Clinton escapade with that young woman.
Anyhow, he's a very good reporter.
And he asked Carl Ford, who then was the head of the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence, OK, and said, Carl, what do you think about all this stuff about the not mistaken, but fraudulent intelligence?
And Carl Ford said, George Tenet and John McLaughlin lied.
They knew they were lying.
They should be shot, period, end quote.
Now, I'm against I'm against capital punishment.
But, you know, I might I might make an exception for these two.
They lied through their teeth.
And what Ford was referring to was their last gasp effort to save curveball.
They found some trailers in Iraq.
And that evening, Tenet and McLaughlin themselves drafted a memo to the president who happened to be in Poland and said, we found them.
We found the bio trailers.
Now, they called a fellow up in the Defense Intelligence Agency who they knew they couldn't dragoon into coordinating, end quote, this.
And so they represented it as an interagency memo.
The president got up in Krakow and he said, we found the weapons of mass destruction.
They're there.
Guess what happens?
Colin Powell comes into the office the next morning.
Larry Wilkerson says there's this cockamamie report that Tenet and McLaughlin did last night without checking with our analysts.
And of course, it's wrong.
These things have nothing to do with biological weapons development.
Colin Powell goes goes crazy.
He sends Carl Ford out to the CIA.
He had already been asked to come out there by Tenet and McLaughlin to read the riot act to him for for telling Colin Powell that this was all a crock.
So he gets on the carpet there, literally in the director's conference room.
And Tenet has at him.
And Carl Ford says, look, you guys, that is the worst piece of intelligence analysis that I've run into in my long career.
You guys did it.
I'm not I'm not taking back anything.
I've told Colin Powell this was a crock and that's what it is.
Now, it was that it was that vignette that caused Carl Ford to be very, very undiplomatic and State Department type.
Well, and the State Department's intelligence agency, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research had debunked the aluminum tubes along with the Department of Energy as well, which the CIA was sticking with.
Yeah.
And Scott, that leads to another important point that Tom Finger, who is Carl Ford's deputy and who became head, that is, assistant secretary of state for intelligence.
He was enlisted to come in a couple of years later after the debacle on Iraq.
They asked him to do an honest estimate on Iran.
Right.
The 07 NIE.
Yeah.
He said, no, no way will I do that.
And they said, oh, you got to do that.
You're the only.
All right.
Now, time is short.
Let me get this thing back on track here.
The CIA and their lies are bad enough, whether it's George Tenet or Robert Gates or David Petraeus, but you're arguing that this new reorganization is going to make it that much worse where the analysts, never mind that all the analysts are nothing but drone targeters now anyway, they're going to be even more just beholden to the operations officers and the policymakers and coming up with whatever lies to justify is going on.
That's going to be even further institutionalized.
The dishonesty of the CIA is going to be even further institutionalized by this.
It sounds like is what you're saying.
But so is there much of a counterargument to that even worth bothering with?
Or should we move on to Ukraine here in our last couple of minutes?
Well, let's do two things very quickly.
Yes, this is your diagnosis.
And I put it another way and say it's going to be harder, much harder for a guy like Tom Finger to come in and do an honest estimate, which prevented a war against Iran during the last year of the Bush regime.
That is really important.
Now, this first, you mentioned drones.
OK, well, who's going to sit back and say, aren't drones creating more terrorists?
Nobody.
Everybody's targeting the drones.
Nobody's analyzing the situation to find out why they hate us, why they're permitted, why they commit suicide to do us in.
Nobody.
Now, Ukraine.
So let me ask you about Ukraine real quick.
Sure.
The Americans.
Well, the NATO is leaking again these fake accusations debunked by the Germans that the Russians are invading again.
They're sending their infantry across, which is, of course, not true and debunked in Der Spiegel.
But then.
So the question is, why are is Barack Obama or is Barack Obama's government anyway trying to destroy Minsk to and undermine the peace deal that the Germans and French have worked out with the Russians here?
Very quickly, please.
They're trying to.
Yeah.
But the good news is that the Germans finally, you know, 70 years after World War Two are coming out of their adolescence into manhood or womanhood into adulthood.
And they're seeing that their interests are not the same as the United States interest.
They wanted to prevent the arming of Ukraine by the US.
And they, I think, have successfully done that.
There's never been a more significant rift in the Atlantic Alliance since George Bush decided to do a war of aggression against Iraq.
Well, so that's a very good thing.
But now, I mean, and they have actually announced that they're withholding the trainers for a short time, but the UK is still sending some.
Is it the US and the UK versus the French and the Germans here?
And will they be able to screw this up?
Because they have a lot of influence in Kiev still, right?
Yeah, they can screw it up.
And they've got Nazis and proto-fascists to help them do it.
I think what Poroshenko was told by Putin and by Angela Merkel, and perhaps by Hollande, who was just there for window dressing, but he was told, look, you know, it's not going to happen.
The Russians aren't going to back down.
And we're not going to help you anymore.
Let the US try to wage this war so many thousands of miles away from its shore.
We're not going to do it.
We're going to put the kibosh on the neocons who, you know, have disrespect for us in any case.
I think that's what happened.
I think Poroshenko has the message.
The neocons will still make their tries.
But I think this time Minsk, too, is much more likely to hold than the initial Minsk agreement.
Great.
Thank you so much for your time on the show, Ray.
Appreciate it.
You're welcome.
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