For Pacifica Radio, April 12th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and I wrote the book Fool's Errand.
End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
In fact, going back to this day, April the 12th, 2003, just three days after the fall of Baghdad, and my first interview with the great Alan Bach on my old weekend interview show on Chaos Radio in Austin.
And today, I'm happy to celebrate that anniversary with the great Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst for 27 years, and yet has spent this whole century speaking the truth and trying to prevent war.
He's a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and he writes regularly at consortiumnews.com and at antiwar.com, where his new one that'll be running on Monday is called What If Ignored COVID-19 Warnings Had Been Leaked to WikiLeaks?
Welcome back to the show.
Ray, how are you, sir?
Doing fine.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And I really appreciate this piece about Julian Assange.
The first sentence begins, the British court system continues to mock the Magna Carta.
Is that so?
Well, yeah, you know, it's 800 years ago, and they forget about it.
They had some what I call good nobles in those days.
It wasn't the peasants.
It was the nobles.
It was the educated people that wrested the civil rights, such as they were in those days, including habeas corpus, from King John, the tyrant.
And to think that here, more than 800 years later, the inheritors of those rights are playing fast and loose with them whenever they get a diktat from Washington.
It's just, you know, it's outrageous how they scrape and bow, bow and scrape, and do whatever Washington tells them to do.
It's a charade what's going on now in a sort of prison court at the hearing on Julian Assange's extradition.
As most people know, the United States wants to get Julian Assange back in our country and then put him in prison for the rest of his life on phony charges of having plotted with Chelsea Manning to expose U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So it couldn't be worse, in my view, in my personal view, because I am a friend of Julian Assange.
I count it an honor to be a friend of his.
It's about the worst thing, the worst personal thing that's happened over the past year.
Yesterday, the 11th, being the anniversary of the way he was unceremoniously dragged out of the Ecuador embassy, where he had every right to political asylum.
But the U.S. felt differently, leaned all over the Ecuadorians and the British.
And long story short, yet another year behind bars, now in terribly contagious conditions, in that President Juan has already died from the new virus, the coronavirus.
And well, somebody said two.
But it's a petri dish, all prisons are, and all efforts to remove Julian have fallen short because the magistrate or the judge, queen of hearts type, off with his head judge, has denied every motion.
Even the prosecutors have joined with the defense in saying, for example, you know, Julian really should be able to be out of that cage in the back of the courtroom.
We should be able to communicate it more.
His lawyers, the defense lawyers, should be able, and she's denied every.
So it's really, I mean, it's really not so much an obscene scene there.
What it is is a patent effort to intimidate anyone, any publisher or any website that would dare to publish incriminating evidence against the U.S. from the very start, from a year ago, from from the 11th of March last year.
The way he was dragged out of that embassy is all a big lesson to people who want to publish the truth.
Don't even try it, because we're going to put you in jail for the rest of your life.
All right.
Now, it's also, you point out, it's the one year anniversary of the disgraceful turnover of Assange to the British by the Ecuadorian government there.
But it's 10 years now since the release of the video, Collateral Murder, showing Apache helicopters machine gunning civilians in the streets of East Baghdad, where they had no business whatsoever fighting against the very people they were fighting the war for at the time.
But anyway, and then followed that were the Iraq war logs.
And it was clear then that they had it in for this guy.
Later came, of course, in 2010, the Afghanistan war logs and the State Department cables.
And then I think it was in 2011 that they put out the Guantanamo files.
All of these, as you mentioned, heroically liberated by the great Chelsea Manning, who only herself was released from jail a few weeks ago, right after being held for a year in contempt for refusing to testify against Assange on these trumped up charges of espionage.
And now you do talk a bit about the law in here and how they're perverting it and what his role is as a journalist, as opposed to a spy, a private intelligence agency, as Mike Pompeo put it.
So what's the distinction and what is it that people who don't know about this case need to know about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and the case against him here?
Well, Pompeo famously called WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence agency, as you just alluded to.
I don't know what that is, a non-state hostile intelligence agency.
Actually, if you look at it, it translates to a free press.
I mean, hello, that's what a free press does.
When you look at just a little bit of history, go back to the late 18th century, where you had the British acknowledging that there needed to be a fourth estate.
There were three estates in Parliament at the time, two in Commons, one in Lords.
And they said, well, look, we need a fourth estate, and that would be the press and the gentleman up there in the gallery.
They actually are more important than the three estates down here in Commons and Lords.
Wow.
We've come a long way from there, haven't we?
There's been no fourth estate worth mentioning.
Goes back even farther than Bill Casey, who headed the CIA for part of the time that I was there.
You know, what most people don't realize is that at his very first meeting with the Cabinet — now, one big mistake is to make the head of the CIA a Cabinet member.
He has no business making policy.
Anyhow, he was.
And when Reagan had them into the White House in early February of 1981, it would have been, the first thing Casey said was, look, my shtick is this.
We'll know we've been successful when the American people believe whatever we tell them to believe, quote, unquote.
Now, a friend of mine was there.
She recorded it.
She reported it contemporaneously.
That's what he said.
Well, wow.
They've been amazingly successful.
That was, what, 81, I said, right?
Fast forward.
The mainstream media, the media that's controlled by the corporations that profiteer on war, I mean, it's not very complicated.
This is what's running the roost here.
And just as an example, all the things I point out in my article that appeared yesterday in Consortium News and will be in antiwar.com, all the things I point out, those things have been happening for a long time.
And unacknowledged by the mainstream media.
I just checked Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, not one mention of all the things, all the indignities that Assange has suffered over the past three weeks.
Not one mention.
So people who think that they're educated or informed by reading all the news that are fit to print by the New York Times, look, give me a break.
I go up in New York.
They don't know anything about this stuff.
They think I have two heads when I tell them what's going on.
So that's the main rub here.
And that's why a website like WikiLeaks regarded as such a danger to the system.
And I was looking at what Judge Bereitsa, the functionary who is acting and so demanding away of Assange at these hearings, and I figured, you know, she's really just a cog in the system.
She's sort of like, I was thinking this week, of course, about the scriptures and thinking about this high priest Caiaphas, you know, the fellow who who said, you know, hey, look, this guy, Jesus, he's a real troublemaker.
He's telling all the downtrodden people what's really going on and how we we benefit from all this stuff.
We got to get rid of this guy.
And what he said, I guess, was, look, it's far better for the system that one man die that we risk all the privileges that we enjoy collaborating with the empire.
And that those days, of course, the Russian, the Russian, the Roman Empire.
OK, so here she is doing the same kind of thing, just saying, well, you know, we've been getting rid of this one guy as if he were Thomas Moore.
And we're talking about Henry the second saying, well, will somebody deliver me from this troublesome priest?
Well, that's what the honorable Trump and the honorable Boris Johnson and the not so honorable Hillary Clinton.
That's what they're saying.
Well, will the British system, so-called legal system, deliver us from this from this troublesome publisher in this case?
Now, of course, it's a tragedy for for Julian.
I'm guessing he'll probably die in prison of this virus, but it's a tragedy for the free press as well, because if people are so intimidated that when they get information leaked to them as WikiLeaks got from Chelsea Manning, as they got from insiders in the CIA for the Vault 7 program, if those people are so intimidated that they won't even try to give this information to WikiLeaks, which is still up and running, by the way, or to some other website, then we know we will know even less about what's going on than before WikiLeaks existed.
So I used several examples in this piece saying it grew like topsy, but I think it's interesting.
The one question would be, well, you know, what if WikiLeaks existed around 2000, 2001?
Could 9-11 have been prevented?
Whoa.
Now, you know, that's a speculative question, but there are people who know the answer to that.
And those are the people in the FBI and elsewhere, the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, that knew something was coming.
They couldn't get their bosses in Washington to act on it.
And when I talk about the FBI, I talk about the Minneapolis division there where Moussaoui, one of the terrorists, was training to, he was training to steer a plane, not so much take off or landing.
He didn't care much about that.
He was training to steer a plane.
And finally, the FBI guys got a hold of him.
They got a hold of him on the 16th of August, 2001.
And they said, look, this guy is really paying cash.
He says he's just an ego trip.
He just was.
We got it.
We got to look into his computer.
The guys in FBI headquarters said, no, no, no, you can't do that.
So they didn't even let them look into his personal effects.
There was one supervisor there that a week later called him up and said, look, we're only trying to, and these were his words, we're just trying to prevent somebody from flying a plane into one of the Twin Towers in New York, period, end quote.
He was that explicit.
And they rebuffed him.
That's one thing, one story we tell.
We ask those people, do you think that after all this rebuffing and, you know, you're dissed at right and left, would you have gone to WikiLeaks if it was up and running at the time?
The answer is, well, yeah.
Even more telling.
There's a fellow named Bogdan Zakavich who worked for the Federal Aviation Administration.
He ran the red team.
OK.
Now, the red team was composed of, Bogdan was the leader, but he had two Vietnam veterans, one a SEAL team leader and another was an intelligence officer.
They were both like, like colonels, adept at law enforcement.
So the three of them, their task was to see if they could get onto airports, get onto airplanes with bogus bombs.
And guess what?
They succeeded nine out of ten times.
OK.
Now, they reported this to their superiors and their superiors said, well, that's not a problem.
Well, they got so frustrated, they went first through the chain of command, then they went to Congress.
They went to the press.
They got two small stories.
And we asked Bogdan and the two named members of his team just this past week, what would you have done?
Would you have gone to WikiLeaks?
And the answer they said in unison, hell yes.
We know what was coming.
We know how vulnerable these airports were.
We know about Logan, for God's sake.
Hell yes.
OK.
So what am I saying here?
Well, the other example we use is the one before, before Iraq.
Now, you know, there were, I would dare say- Wait, wait, hold it right there for just one second.
Scott Horton, Antiwar Radio, talking with the great Ray McGovern.
Go ahead, Ray, tell them about Karen Katowski.
Yeah.
Well, I'm talking about Iraq now and that it was well known to, well, I would guess a hundred intelligence analysts.
How Cheney was playing fast and loose with the intelligence.
How he got George Tenet and John McLaughlin, the heads of the CIA, to play along.
How they had falsified the intelligence with the help of James Clapper, who was head of imagery intelligence.
And there were no WMD, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
OK.
There also were no ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, as everybody who knew anything about either organization would know.
What happened?
None of them.
None of them spoke out.
The evidence was manufactured, a five year study, a bipartisan consensus was simply that, yeah, the evidence used, a lot of it was non-existent, well, non-existent intelligence.
What would that be?
Who created this non-existent intelligence out of nothing?
OK.
Well, we know John McLaughlin, Tenet and the others and Cheney, of course.
So now, if that were the case, and it was, and I know some people who actually knew about this, why didn't anybody think maybe they'd let the rest of the country know that this was a war of aggression?
There was no reason for it.
Well, question arises again.
If WikiLeaks were around in those days, would these people have gone to WikiLeaks to maybe prevent this calamity, prevent the chaos and death and destruction that has ensued in the Middle East?
Well, I have to think that there would be one out of that hundred that would have the guts to do that.
Well, implied in here, what you're saying is that these people knew they could talk to Knight Ritter and not really make a big impact, or they could try to put the truth in the New York Times or the Washington Post, but they know that they can't trust the New York Times and the Washington Post, that they wouldn't have printed this truth.
They'd be just as likely to turn them over to their CIA handlers, and they're afraid.
They could go to prison.
But with WikiLeaks, they know that they can upload it, and Assange is going to verify the document himself and doesn't need to even know who he got it from.
And they have a secure dump.
You could log on at the sandwich shop and upload your document and be done and get away with it, not have to know that you're probably going to do life in prison like Manning was facing, like Daniel Ellsberg faced.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, Manning made that crucial mistake of trusting an intellectual email friend and was turned in by him.
Otherwise, he would, he might have, she might have escaped.
But you're right.
Now, if you compare the situation now with, let's take the New York Times, for example, you know, Dan Ellsberg, 1971, he had Xeroxed and Xeroxed and Xeroxed, his sons, his kids were Xeroxing all night, the Pentagon Papers.
Now, he was a pretty clever guy, still is, one of the brightest guys I've ever known, good friend of mine, Dan Ellsberg.
So what did he do?
He said, well, now, we've got to get the New York Times to publish this.
How do we do that?
Well, it's not going to be enough just to give them the stuff because they're chicken as hell.
What I'll do is give it to eight other newspapers at the same time, or I'll give portions of it and let the New York Times, let it be known that your competitors have these things as well.
Even so, the Times was really, really scared by Mitchell, the attorney general at the time.
They were just really scared.
But they had one lawyer here who was there.
Their lawyer had the guts and had a constitutional background to say, look, there's a First Amendment.
We go ahead and do it.
So combination of factors, the thought that the competitors might go first, and the fact that this one lawyer said the Constitution still applies.
They did it.
OK, now, fast forward to Chelsea Manning.
She didn't have to use a Xerox machine at all.
My God, that's very, very different.
Right.
And she had reasonable assurance after she tried to give it to The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Most people don't know that she tried both of those.
And Politico, too.
And Politico.
Yeah.
So.
So what happens now is you can do it automatically.
Now, if she had gone to The New York Times, we know what they do now.
We knew that back in 2004, and this is a story, short one, worth repeating.
OK, James Risen, star investigative reporter from The New York Times, finds through his sources that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their corrupt administration, especially NSA, was monitoring all conversations by American people, American citizens.
Violation, stark violation of Fourth Amendment.
OK, now, when does Risen find this out?
Well, he finds this out about July or August of 2004.
Wow.
So he goes to his bettors there in The Times and he says, look, this is a great story.
And they say, oh, well, I mean, there's an election coming up in July, the elections in November.
Right.
I don't think so.
So they said, no, we won't publish it.
Wow.
OK, what happens?
Over a year later, namely in December of 2005, Risen's got a book.
He didn't say anything.
Right.
He could have been a whistleblower himself, but he didn't.
So he's got a book now.
And he says to his bettors at The Times, look, you know, I got this book coming out and it's got this whole story in it.
So it's going to be a little awkward if you guys don't run a story on it.
And so finally, they go to the White House, they talk to Bush, and he says, no, you can't do it.
You can't publish this business that we're monitoring all telephone calls, emails.
No, you can't do it.
It's a national security, national security.
And the head of the Times, Sulzberger, says, well, you know, I know we've postponed this now for 15, 16 months for God's sake, give us give us a break.
We got it.
He's got the book.
The book's in Galilee.
Well, Bush, I don't agree.
Well, he went ahead finally in the New York Times.
So that's how it works now.
They vet it.
They vet it with The Times or The Post and The Post goes to the CIA or goes to the administration and says, can we, can we, is it OK to publish this?
Is it all right?
And the administration likely says no.
And what do they do?
They scrape.
They bow and scrape.
And they don't publish it.
And there are many, many manifestations of this, including some of the stuff that's been revealed about the so-called chemical attacks in Syria.
Well, the U.N. has shown, whistleblowers, they have shown that they're bogus.
And the New York Times and the other mainstream media haven't said a word about the falsification of intelligence to justify bombing places in Syria.
And on and on it goes to include, you know, this latest stuff about Covid, the virus.
Now, one of the points of my trying to wrap up all this information was to remind people that there was a chance to avoid these really calamitous events.
That's, you know, you can use that word for these things.
9-11, invasion of Iraq.
What about the virus?
Now, we know, we know two things.
You can't trust the press.
I mean, ABC had a story just this, well, five days ago that said, aha, now we know that the National Center for Medical Intelligence had a memo that they briefed to the White House and to the Pentagon.
And it said, in November of last year, it said everything you need to know about this virus.
Oh, wow.
Well, I looked at that and I thought, my God, is that true?
What about, where is that memo?
Well, it was less than three hours later, the head of the National Center for Medical Intelligence got up and said, this is bogus.
I don't know how to say this, but those reports are inaccurate.
There is no such memo.
There is no such study.
There is no such findings by our, by our center.
Well, so there's a warning.
There are political agendas in a lot of this reporting.
But nevertheless, there is evidence that, well, there's lots of evidence that the administration was warned months ahead.
And that needs to be divulged.
And so the question arises one more time.
What if?
Well, the point is that the New York Times is divulging now in nearly the middle of April that Peter Navarro had a memo that had projections of trillions lost and hundreds of thousands dead and a serious crisis.
They have a new story today about the leaders of these epidemiologists, news groups and whatever, emailing each other and saying, we've got to close the colleges and the schools right now in January.
And there's the CDC and the FDA and everybody, everybody apparently was more interested in protecting their little fiefdom for the short term than worrying about the consequences for us in the long term.
Just like the FBI and the CIA and the NSA in the run up to 9-11, just like the CIA lying us into war with Iraq and trying to lie us into war in Syria and all of this over and over again.
They don't really care about us at all.
They only care about themselves.
But the point is, the few on the inside who do care, you know, I guess I'm talking about the institutions mostly, but the people too that make them up, but there's always somebody who knows and somebody who's a Colleen Rowley or a Karen Katowski or a Chelsea Manning who will say no way and upload the document.
And so back and we got to wrap up here.
We only have a couple minutes, but back to Julian Assange, this most heroic journalist on the planet right now who has been completely forsaken by his peers in the press, all of whom are willing to use his work to write their stories.
And if people just Google the WikiLeaks show, WikiLeaks documents reveal, the State Department cables confirm, you will get tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of results of important news stories based on WikiLeaks documents all around the world, all of them in the public interest, all of them secrets the government had no right to keep to cover up crimes they had no right to commit.
And now this guy's got a lung disease and they've got him locked in solitary confinement like he's already been convicted of killing somebody or something.
And the whole thing is a hoax.
And they know, as you said, it's almost a safe bet.
This guy's going to get the COVID and die, which would be good for the government of Britain, good for the government of the United States who don't have to go through with this sham of an espionage trial against a journalist for doing journalism.
So where does that leave us then, Ray?
Well, it leaves us in two positions.
One is about Julian himself.
I was thinking, what's this like?
And I was remembering, remember Death of a Salesman?
At one point, Willie Lowman's wife screams out.
She says, and I quote, he's a human being.
And a terrible thing is happening to him.
So attention must be paid.
He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog.
Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.
Well, that's at the personal level.
Julian has certainly suffered enough.
If he dies of this virus, then the merciless empire will have proven what they can do to people who tell the truth.
On a broader level, you have the epitome of an example of how the mainstream press is no longer the fourth estate.
They're doing everything they can to strangle the fifth estate.
And people in The New York Times know this.
Two years ago, one of their lawyers said, you know, this would be this would be suicide for the for the media if we let that happen to Julian Assange.
Whoops.
A year later, The New York Times changed its tune.
And now they're sort of rooting for the demise of Julian Assange.
So it couldn't be more evil or more just, you know, uncompassionate, let's say.
So what do we do?
Well, that's the thing.
People don't know any of this.
Then it's hard to do anything.
But there are a few of us who do.
And there are a few of us who can make a difference.
And we have to try.
And, you know, if I like Andy Diller, my my favorite theologian, she said, you know, there's only us.
There never has been any other.
So we have to keep, as you're doing, Scott, letting people in on what's going on and not lose hope.
I have Stone said famously, look, look, you've got to realize going into this, you've got to keep some balance because you're going to lose and then you're going to lose and then you're going to lose again.
But one fine day, someone who thinks about the way you do and thinks it gives high priority to the truth, he's going to she or she is going to win.
And you can rejoice in the prospect of that happening.
And meanwhile, try to keep your sense of humor, try to keep your balance.
It's a struggle, but that's what I'm trying to do.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for your time again, Ray.
And please do stay in good health, my friend.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
That is the heroic Ray McGovern, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, regular writer at ConsortiumNews.com and Antiwar.com.
His latest will be running tomorrow on Antiwar.com.
What if ignored COVID-19 warnings had been leaked to WikiLeaks?
And that's it for Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Find my last 17 years worth of interviews, more than 5,000 of them going back to 2003 for you at ScottHorton.org.
See you next week.
