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Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
If you don't see anything like this, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Introducing Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, head of the Soviet Union division over there.
Former briefer for Vice President Bush during the Reagan years.
And of course, now he's a peace activist.
He's the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And sometimes he goes to jail for protesting horrible things like torture.
And most recently, you've seen him on Twitter getting the beat down from, I think, five cops for protesting at the confirmation hearing for Gina Haspel to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you?
Thank you, Scott.
Much better than it was yesterday.
I'm glad you're out of jail.
When did you get out?
I got out yesterday.
Well, I had to appear before court.
And then I got out about 5.15 after being in detention in a pretty tough place since about 2 o'clock the previous day.
So I was glad to be out and recovering.
And I just had to give a urine sample of all things.
I don't know why, but the guys in there had seen me on TV yesterday.
You know what they said?
All of them.
Keep doing what you're doing, buddy.
Keep doing what you're doing.
We know what torture's like.
Well, I tell you, that's worth it right there.
Yeah, that's good.
Well, listen, so I want to ask you if you're OK, but you shouldn't answer that because lawyers, you should keep your mouth shut as far as any of those details.
I don't want to get you in trouble one way or the other or prejudice your case one way or the other or anything like that.
We all can see with our own eyes.
It's on the blog at antiwar.com, and of course, it's all over Twitter, the video.
You want to tell us what you yelled, what you said when you stood up to protest?
Gina Haspel there?
Yeah, actually, that's important, and thanks for asking.
You are the first, the first, Scott, to ask me any of these questions, and I'm delighted to talk first to you, but it's a sad commentary that, well, progressive media have been all over this, but there hasn't been a word so far as I can see in any of the, well, in any of the newspapers that my friends up in New York read, like the New York Times.
Anyhow, to start out here, it's important to know that I was shocked when, not only when the Code Pink people were thrown out of the hearing, even though they had been assured that before the gavel came down, they would be able to show their signs.
I guess they were a little tricked because as soon as they showed their signs, these same cops came down and ejected them.
The next thing that's noteworthy here was another sort of shocking thing, and that was that Richard Burr.
Now, Richard Burr is a senator from South, from North Carolina, okay?
He's been in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for 12 years.
Before that, he was on the HPSC, the House Special, the House Select Committee on Intelligence.
Now, he's been around, right?
And so he made it very clear from the start.
This is what he said.
Now, this is going to be an open session and a closed session.
If any of you feel you have to speak out, do it fast, do it quickly, and be gone.
And everybody, oh, yeah, I know.
Well, I've never heard a chair openly invite the senators to do it fast, do it quickly, and be gone.
So I said, whoa!
As soon as that policeman or policewoman who's standing between me and Haskell goes to the bathroom, I'm going to go up there and take advantage of that invitation.
Now, with respect to the substance, it was really travesty what happened.
When Ron Wyden, the senator from Oregon, who's a pretty straight guy, now, he asked her a couple of questions, but she did what she could to filibuster.
And then he asked her a last question.
He said, now, Ms. Haskell, you were chief of the base there in Thailand where al-Nusayri was, correct?
The waterboard, right?
And she said, Senator, I have to tell you that we need to – that's classified and that we have to talk in closed session about that.
Now, to his credit, Ron asked the question.
He ran out of time.
But to his supreme discredit, the chair let it go.
And the chair could easily have said, now, Ms. Haskell, we have all kinds of documents that answer that question, and I don't see why you can't personally classify information that is incriminating to you.
So, would you please just answer, Senator Wyden, you were in charge of the waterboarding of al-Nusayri, were you not?
Guess what?
Guess what Richard Burden did?
He didn't say any of that.
So, that prompted me to just make it very substantive.
When I got up, I said, now, I think Senator Wyden is the right answer to this question.
I know the answer.
So do you guys.
The answer is yes.
He was in charge of the waterboarding of al-Nusayri.
Period.
And that's provable in many ways, just in the open record.
So, the notion that he would make that classified to protect the innocent, protect them from being guilty, and that the so-august body of the Senate would settle for that and move to closed session, which I guess they did when I was in jail, it's just a travesty in the whole thing.
The last thing I'll add here is that Richard Burr was the ranking Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chiefly goes by the Senate Intelligence Committee, okay?
When it came to the end of the investigation, four years plus, based on CIA original documents showing the heinous, showing the unspeakable.
I mean, rectal treating?
Never recommended by any doctor.
Rectal hydration?
Well, in a rare case where that's indicated.
But, my God, that was just part of it.
You know, the little boxes they put in them, foot locker type boxes, and then those who had allergies or fear of insects, they picked out those insects and put them in there with them.
The waterboarding and the slamming on the walls and the separation of seats, all this stuff is addressed in this very gutsy, very comprehensive Senate Select Committee on Intelligence document released in early December of 2014, okay?
It's on the record.
Now, what did they do?
Well, they did their best to keep that from being published.
They were playing a waiting game.
Why?
Because the Senate had changed hands.
Dianne Feinstein was not going to be in charge come January, and so John Brennan, the head of the CIA, in cooperation with a fellow named Obama, with co-cooperation from a fellow named Obama, who sent his chief of staff, McDonough, to every one of the declassification or sanitizing sessions and was an incredible obstacle to the release of the report, they fought it tooth and nail.
What Dianne Feinstein did was to appeal to Harry Reid, right?
She's the head of the Senate, to please call Obama and say, this thing has been redacted to a fairly well.
It still meets against the American people.
Would you please call the President and tell him that?
Now, according to Harry Reid, he did call the President and listen to the President make these made-up excuses.
Not even the redacted summary could be.
The redacted summary came to about 500 pages.
The whole thing was over 7,000.
Why it could not be released.
And what Harry Reid said to him was, Mr. President, I just wish you could hear yourself, what you're saying here.
We're going to go forward with this Senate report.
Now, what happened?
Well, it came down to the wire.
Was Dianne Feinstein sexy enough to put the report out on her own recognizance or whatever that word is?
Well, I don't know.
But what happened was Mark Udall, Senator from Colorado, lost his re-election bid.
And he was, with Wigand, one of the supreme opposers, of course.
I don't know this from documents, but it became very clear from watching the play-by-play that Udall went to Feinstein and he said, look, Dianne, this is really important.
The American people get to know at least what's in the executive summary.
Look, you've got to tell the President that I'm prepared to read the executive summary from the Florida Senate.
I have protection for doing that.
And I've lost my re-election bid.
There's nothing to lose at all.
So you tell him, you've got a choice.
Udall, read this from the Senate floor, or you release the redacted version.
So what happened?
Obama called.
Well, I don't know this for sure, but it seems clear.
Obama called Stan Brennan.
He said, oh, Dianne, I've got a bit of news for you.
Udall said, nothing to lose.
You've got to read it from the Senate.
I guess I definitely have to do the redacted version.
He released the redacted version.
I'm sure Stan Brennan said, no, no, no, no.
And Obama, of course, had really no choice.
He released it.
So who was coming in to be the chair?
Oh, a fellow named Richard Byrd, a senator from North Carolina who was a ranking Republican.
And when did he take office?
Well, in January, when the Senate turned into a Republican majority.
Now, does anyone remember the first thing that Richard Byrd did?
Well, I'll tell you.
He recalled all copies, all copies of the Senate investigation report, which, and this is very worth emphasizing, relied specifically on original CIA tables, original CIA documents.
Finally, it was all original CIA stuff.
And what Richard Byrd did was recalled all the copies of that study.
He said, look, that study belongs to me.
I'm the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee now.
I recall all copies.
Now, do you think, I wish this were funny, do you think Regina Haspel would resist that?
Do you think that she would say, oh, no, we have to keep one for our inspector general?
No, no, she wouldn't.
I'll bet that if she had any reaction to this, she'd say, yeah, sure, here it is.
Well, I'll hand deliver it to you, OK?
So has that Senate Intelligence Committee report evaporated?
Well, there is said to be one at the Obama Library.
Now, I hate to speculate on what the conditions are under which it could be revealed to the public, but if past is precedent here, it's probably got a five or ten, maybe even 25-year delay in how it can be released.
So we're deprived of knowing the details of how CIA specifically did all these heinous things on the pretense that they were authorized to do that by these crooked lawyers in the Department of Justice.
And now, of course, we're learning how many crooked lawyers there are there.
Suffice it to say that this can be said with certainty.
Border boarding is torture.
Border boarding is a crime.
We prosecuted and put long sentence terms behind Japanese soldiers and officers who did that.
And even in our own country, we have convicted.
People have done that in our own prisons.
And in Vietnam, when one of our soldiers was photoed at border boarding, he was brought up on charges and put a long sentence in a note so he could himself.
Border boarding is illegal.
And the last thing I'll say here is that, you know, these things are not wrong because they're illegal.
That's the wrong way to look at it.
They're illegal because they're just wrong.
I mean, human beings don't do those kinds of things to other human beings.
Whether they work or not, they don't.
You just don't do those things.
And when I was in college, I went to Fordham University, a Jesuit university.
We did a lot of theology, a lot of philosophy, and there was a course on ethics.
And a category of evil was described in very, very specific terms.
We called it intrinsic evil.
All was wrong.
All was wrong.
No exceptions.
And into that category, I remember distinctly, were three.
One was slavery.
One was rape.
And the third one was torture.
Now, where are the religious leaders today?
Where are they?
I was told that a lot of the religious leaders are reluctant to speak against Trump's nominees, quote, because we'll have to deal with them in the future, end quote.
Give me a break.
So, you know, the religious authority, the people that other people would tend to look up to for moral guidance on this kind of thing, have done exactly what the bishops did.
And the Catholic bishops did from starting in 1933 until the end.
They didn't want to oppose anything because they wanted to keep the churches open.
Well, you know, that's the wrong way to do it.
And there's a vignette that maybe is so appropriate I'll include it.
Albert Camus, the French philosopher, writer, he was, of course, right there during the war.
When I say war, I mean World War II.
And after World War II, a Dominican priory, to its great credit, asked Camus to come and talk to them about what he saw with respect to the behavior of the religious authorities, both Catholic during the war and before the war.
And this is what he said.
He said, you will find this surprising because I am not a believer.
But I kept waiting for the voice from Rome.
Why the voice from Rome?
Because there had to be a moral voice speaking out against these terrible things, including torture.
Now, we heard no voice.
But later, when I inquired, I was told, oh, but there was a voice.
It was a voice from Rome, and it came in the form of an encyclical.
And so I, Camus, said, what's an encyclical?
And I was told it's the supreme voice of the Vatican on matters of moral ethics.
And so I asked, and I said, you know, if I didn't know that, and if none of my friends heard what was in the encyclical, whose fault is that, okay?
So all I'm saying is that churches, synagogues, even, you know, their mosques can speak really flowery words about these things and condemn torture, even though the Catholic bishops have not, even though there's no coordinated number of bishops or anyone that has spoken out on this.
But they can.
But if they do it in a sort of a philosophical treatise, usually over 100 pages, called an encyclical, well, that's almost deliberately depriving the person in the street from knowing what the answer is.
The answer is torture is wrong.
It's not wrong because there's a lot of things against it.
There are laws against it, of course.
But there are laws against it because it's wrong.
It fits into the category of intrinsic evil, and when colleges like my own, let it slip out of that category.
It pained me to know that when John Brennan, arch-promoter of Gina Haspel and also a fully cognizant and a defender of kidnapping, otherwise known as rendition, and torture from friendly services, when he was named a commencement speaker at Fordham University and given, look at this, an honorary doctorate in humane letters, I mean, it's almost like a travesty.
When seniors who were graduating that year went to the president of Fordham and said, look, this is beyond the pale.
We can't have a torture advocate giving the commencement address.
You shouldn't give him an honorary degree.
And the president of Fordham said, well, wait a second now.
Torture is a gray area.
Now, that pains me greatly because if torture is a gray area at Fordham or at other Jesuit universities, the seven grandchildren that still haven't chosen a college are my seven leaders and my seven grandchildren.
I can't recommend that they go to find their alma mater.
That pains me greatly because I learned a heck of a lot of good things there.
First and foremost, a moral compass that not only allows me but compels me to speak out now.
So, Ray, what did you say when you stood up in protest at the hearing?
Yeah, thanks for asking.
What I said was this.
Senator Wyden is entitled to a straight answer to his question as to whether the nominee was in charge of the waterboarding of Alma Shiri.
Now, it's an open secret that she was there in Thailand during this.
There's lots of other evidence that she was supervising these two psychotic psychiatrists or psychologists that they had hired on to do the reverse engineering from the seer.
That's another question.
Anyhow, she was in charge of all that.
The cable traffic indicates it.
It's in the Senate report.
And so I said, look, she was there.
She was responsible.
So, deprive the American people of a straight answer here by saying, oh, no, we're going to go to executive session on this.
Who says we have to go to executive session?
Gina Haspel.
Why?
Because it was classified.
Who classified it?
Gina Haspel.
I mean, my God.
Talk about catch 22.
But the chairman, of course, this same Senator Richard Burr, was intent on depriving the American people at this open hearing of the fact that she was in charge of the waterboarding of Alma Shiri.
And she was responsible for destroying videotapes that showed interrogation, if you want to call it that, really torture underwater boarding.
So I made that point.
And then on the way out to the city, I said, you know, torture is never illegal.
No, no corrupt lawyer or president or vice president, Mike Bush, Cheney or knew and can make torture illegal.
So then I couldn't say much more because I was incapacitated.
So I won't talk much about that.
But it was really a shock going back very briefly to where it started.
Yeah.
When when he said, you know, this Richard Burr, you know, sort of smirking.
You know, the thing was that he didn't know I was there.
I sort of sat a couple of rows behind what he said.
And this is an open and closed hearing.
Now, if you feel you need to protest or say something, do it fast.
Do it quickly and be gone.
OK, well, I did it fast.
I did it quickly.
But the Capitol Police were under other instructions.
And it's pretty obvious what happened given the videotapes that thankfully somebody did.
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I just put out a tweet that said you're more or less okay.
I don't want to quote you exactly or whatever.
I hope that you have upcoming civil proceedings against them for what happened coming up.
But is that all right, that I put out that tweet letting people know that at least you didn't, you know, get your head cracked all the way open or anything?
Yeah.
Thankfully, I hit the floor with the other than my head.
Of course, even my thick Irish head probably wouldn't make any difference.
Anyhow, yeah, my glasses, I can't bend them back into shape.
So the notion that I, you know, the notion that I was...
I was in shock.
And if you see the video tape, you can see that I'm not under my own power, but it's just my imagination.
I mean, the important thing for the audience is to know that you're not in the hospital now, that you're, you know, up and walking around.
So, all right, you know, overall.
They should also know that I was required to give a urine sample, which I just delivered here at the courthouse.
Yeah, well, I won't talk with you about how you should have not given into that, but I'll save that for your lawyer.
So now you wrote this article.
It's at Consortium News, of course, and we ran it on Antiwar.com as well as we do everything you write.
And it's called, Will a Torturer Become CIA Director?
And you may have referred to this a minute ago, or in one of those minutes ago, about torture working.
And this is always kind of the debate within the index card of allowable opinion, as Tom Woods puts it.
Where torture works, torture doesn't work.
Getting good intelligence is sort of baked in, usually, to the argument and just taken for granted that, well, that's the only reason the CIA would ever want to torture anybody, right?
But that's really not the case, is it?
No, it isn't.
First, on whether torture works, I like to, I was an army intelligence officer, right?
So I was in the front lines.
I know a lot about what we're allowed to do and what we're not allowed to do.
And back in the day, we followed a policy elucidated by General John Timmons, who I have great respect for, and who was head of army intelligence back in the early, well, in the 1980s.
No, I'm sorry, around 2006, I know.
So why do I mention that?
Well, things had leaked about these black prisons.
Things had leaked about what went on in these black prisons and what went on in Abu Ghraib and, of course, Guantanamo.
And so it came time for Dick Cheney to tell George Bush, well, George, you've got to get up.
And we got some nice terminology here.
We call them enhanced interrogation techniques.
You get up there on the 6th of July, 2006, and just tell them how good these are, how much information we've got at them, and how good they are.
So word got around that he was going to do this.
Of course, the head of army intelligence was informed.
So what did John Timmons do?
It was great credit.
He got up at a Pentagon press conference one hour before we knew Bush, on the other side of Potomac, was going to extol the virtues of what he called, quote, an alternate set of procedures, end quote, for interrogation.
It later became known as enhanced interrogation techniques.
So what did Timmons say?
He said, and I quote, no good intelligence has ever come from harsh interrogation.
History shows that.
And the history and the experience of the last five years, comma, hard years, comma, also show that period, end quote.
Okay.
Now, the head of army intelligence, who spent a lot of his career working on interrogation, I just have to say that I think he's a little bit more aware of whether torture works than Dick Cheney or George Bush or some of those phony lawyers that said, you know, it doesn't matter if it works if it's legal.
Okay.
So that's the starting point.
If you want accurate information, you're not going to get it from torture.
That just makes sense.
Why do most people believe that?
Very simple.
Television, radio, TV, Hollywood, all these things, partly financed by the CIA, by the way.
The big division in CIA now are TV and radio.
Okay.
It wasn't there in my day.
Anyhow, most Americans believe that torture works.
Now, why is that?
Well, there have been a lot of polls about whether torture works.
And I have to say that some polls have faced people, people who say they believe in God.
And, you know, it disappoints me greatly to see that Catholics, head of Protestants and others, say, well, yeah, torture is good.
Why is that?
Well, because they're brainwashed by the media, helped by the CIA, and they have no moral leadership.
And that's where I get mad here.
Where are the torturers?
Where are the moral leaders to speak out about these things?
Where were the white collars?
The Roman collars to come and do what I did yesterday.
So that's bad news, but it's also good news because it reminds me once again of what my favorite theologian Annie Billard says, and what she says is, look, it's up to us.
It always has been up to us.
It isn't anybody else.
We are it.
So I'm just hopeful that the Catholic school will be useful in getting people consciously aware that you can do these things.
It may get you beat up, as it did me.
But, you know, it didn't work out like that.
As I sat in that prison over, you know, for almost 30 plus hours all alone, you know, it struck me that as dismal as that was with the cockroaches all over the place and no cushions or anything, just a kind of a stainless steel thing to try to lie on, it struck me that at least I'm not being tortured.
And then I looked at all my new colleagues and that struck me really bad.
Yeah.
Well, so what about torture?
What about torture, Ray, for achieving for deliberately getting false information or, like, say, blackmailing someone, say, if you don't do what we want, we're going to torture this family member of yours.
That kind of thing.
That's CIA business, right?
Just let me finish this thought.
I looked at all my new colleagues there.
They were all much darker of complexion than I am.
Let me put it this way.
I drove home how they were treated and how I was treated.
Racism is at the bottom of this.
If you look at what Bush and Cheney did, if you look at what goes on now, these people are made the other, and when you make people the other, you dehumanize them.
They drop bombs on them, they torture them, and so forth.
So I recommend one evening or one 36-hour period in that kind of situation where you see how dehumanized people are treated because you're one of them.
Now, getting to your question about whether it works, there is, you know, I say to people, you know, I have to make an exception there because there is one set of circumstances where torture works like a charm.
I say, yeah, if you want inaccurate information.
And they sort of scratch their head and say, what do you mean?
Well, let's say you want to prove, in quotes, that Saddam Hussein had direct ties with Al-Qaeda as part of, you know, with the weapons of mass destruction, part of the reason to attack them.
You know, torture worked, and it did work like a charm then.
What did they do?
They got this Libyan terrorist named al-Libi, and they kidnapped him and sent him off to the Egyptian service.
We call them friendly services, right?
And Egyptians have even more experience in torturing people than we do.
And so they said, now, we know that he has entree through information, travel information about how Al-Qaeda people were sent up to Baghdad to be trained in weapons like chemical weapons and bombs and stuff.
So if you get that out of them, well, that's what we need to get out of them.
All right?
Now, the Egyptian services are paid through the nose by our tax money via the CIA, so they know what side of the bread they're buttered on.
And so they say, well, now, Al-Libi, you know, we'll step up for you if you could just remember about how you sent up all these operatives from Al-Qaeda to Baghdad to be trained by Saddam Hussein's guys.
Can you remember that?
And finally he said, oh, yeah, of course, how could I forget?
That report was given back to Washington.
The Defense Intelligence Agency immediately bigoted it, put it out of circulation, because they found out exactly how it was obtained under torture, which the Defense Intelligence Agency at least was able to say, look, this can't be used in any real sense.
But George Tenet, the head of the CIA, when Colin Powell was preparing his remarks before the U.N. on the 5th of February 2003, he was in receipt together with his colleague, Colonel Larry Wilkerson.
He was in receipt of all kinds of spurious reports, reports unverified that there were ties between Al-Qaeda and Iraq.
And finally, he said, Larry, we have to talk about this.
And they go off into this separate room.
Now, I don't know, Colin Powell must be the most naïve guy in the world, but he thought that he could conduct a confidential conversation with his chief of staff in a room right off the director's conference room that wasn't barred.
Well, Colin Powell is more naïve than I thought.
Anyhow, they had this conversation.
I was praying it would all focus.
So they come back in the room, and Powell announced to George Tenet what they decided.
We're not going to include any spurious reporting about ties between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, because what you have served up is trash, OK?
Oh, guess what?
In comes a messenger with a new table from the field characterized as a new table.
And guess what it was?
It was Al-Habeeb's report, already discredited by BIA.
And George Tenet says, now, look, yes, yes, we are.
By great luck here, we have this new report.
Now, again, whether Colin Powell was so naïve as to say, oh, no, darn it, OK, so we'll do it.
Whether he really believed that or not, by what the city suggested, he was really deceived by George Tenet on this.
In any event, the final words were, there is a, quote, sinister nexus, unquote, between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
That's the way Powell said it in his speech, together with the other trash.
It was an insult to people's credibility.
It was just kind of a beyond the pale presentation, prone to be wrong in every respect.
But we put about, as the last word of the final indictment of Saddam Hussein, we really need to destroy all those ties between Al-Qaeda and the weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist.
And we have to do it now.
And we have the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, singing the same song, singing the same song now, about Iran and about Russia.
I can't believe that memories are so short.
It's only 15 years ago.
Can I throw in here, too, for those who were too young or were on the wrong side of this back then, don't remember exactly, in some context that, you know, one thing, Zubaydah also made up lies about Iraq under torture.
But more importantly, Zubaydah, I guess Libby, too, but Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed made up dozens of lies about plots that were used as basically a gigantic psychological warfare campaign against the American people all throughout 2002.
Orange Alert, Orange Alert, banks are threatened.
I remember listening to AM radio, top of the hour news.
Al-Qaeda, intelligence sources say Al-Qaeda may target a school somewhere in Texas, right, where there's about 50,000 schools.
So everyone be on high alert.
And this was all about just keeping everybody's mom afraid in the run-up to the Iraq War, even though it had nothing to do with Iraq specifically.
It was just pretending that there was some gigantic Islamo-fascist caliphate out there that was coming for us.
You know, it not only did all that, but it sent FBI, Homeland Security, CIA researchers off on 1,100 wild goose chases.
Right.
It was just so spurious.
And so deliberate, so deliberate that they did that, too.
It was a war against the people of the United States so that they could get away with this invasion of Iraq.
That's correct, and they did.
That's the big thing.
They did, and the people responsible for keeping the truth from the American people are still in place.
The head of the op-ed pages of The Washington Post, Fred Hyatt, you know what he said after it all came down?
He said, well, you know, we reported that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that's a fact.
And if there weren't, then we probably shouldn't have reported that there were.
Oh, my God!
One would say, well, maybe he should step aside and go teach English or whatever.
No, no, we're still running that op-ed page.
But let me just say another word here.
The 9-11 experience, of course, was at the core of all this, because literally and truly the expression you've heard 100 times after 9-11, everything changed, is true.
And as I watch some of my old CIA colleagues, people I worked with on the President's daily brief, people who I respected in those days and respected me appearing in defense of Gina Haspel, that cuts to the quick.
I mean, that's a personal thing, saying, my God, Charlie Allen?
It would be no harder work than Charlie Allen.
I'm talking back in the 70s and the 80s.
What's going on here?
But what I want to say here before I forget is that during the 9-11 Commission proceedings, there was a bunch of these staffers trying to find out why they did it.
And they had already identified how to take Muhammad as the mastermind.
In the middle of their investigation, before they did their final report, they read in the Washington Post.
The CIA didn't tell them.
So what did he do?
Well, he said, hey, here's the mastermind.
Can we go talk to him?
Can we find out why he said he did this?
And the CIA said, what, are you kidding?
Dark source.
If you want to give us some questions to ask him, yeah, we'll do that.
But no, we're not going to let you or anybody else in here.
Okay, so what happened?
They give them some questions.
They say, why did you do it?
And the answer comes back.
Now, these young staffers knew that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was no dummy, that he had earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
And so, you know, being an analyst, they said, oh, maybe you had an affair of the heart there.
Maybe people in North Carolina call him a cowhider.
Maybe that's the reason for his animus.
Give me a break.
But that's what they thought, okay?
So what appears at the top of page 147 of the final 9-11 report?
Okay, here's a sentence, and I have it committed to memory.
Khalid Sheikh Muhammad's animus toward the United States does not result from any experience he had during his student days in North Carolina, but by his own admission, comes from what he calls his extreme hatred for the totally unbalanced U.S. policy in favor of Israel, period, end quote.
Now, there's a little footnote there.
You go down to the bottom of the page, and it says, this is exactly what Khalid Sheikh Muhammad's nephew said, Ramzi Youssef.
When he was sentenced to 135 years in a federal prison, he said, I'm glad I did it, and I did it precisely because of unbalanced U.S. support for the terrorism of Israel, okay?
So there you have the real story.
Why is it buried on page 147 in a little footnote?
Well, you can tell me the answer to that.
I could tell you, too, but we're probably running out of time, Scott.
Yeah, we really are.
We feel the price is worth it, right?
That's the slogan of the Democrats, the Republicans, and Al-Qaeda, too.
Yeah, well.
Well, listen, man, I'm sorry.
I do have to go.
I have another interview.
I already bumped 15 minutes, and I have to move on, too.
But thank you so much.
I'm glad that you're not in the hospital, that you are more or less okay, and I do hope that you soothe him, and I do hope that you know that you're a hero to me and to a lot of other people who are all very interested and care a lot and really look up to you for all your efforts in writing and in your personal protests and putting your neck on the line the way you do.
Yeah, please don't call me hero.
Well, you are a former CIA guy, so.
I'm a CIA who said don't dismiss me so readily.
Once somebody calls you a hero, people say, well, I couldn't do that because I'm not a hero.
I'm not a hero.
I just defend my oath to the Constitution of the United States to protect that Constitution against all enemies.
A lot of us do that, and certainly I'm not the only one out there risking.
All right.
Well, you do brave work, and I sure appreciate it, and so do a lot of other people.
So thank you again, Ray.
Thank you, Scott.
Bye now.
Take care.
All right, you guys, that's Ray McGovern.
Thank you, Scott Horton for his everything.
And also read all he writes at ConsortiumNews.com and at Antiwar.com.
It's Original.
Antiwar.com slash McGovern.
The latest is Will a Torturer Become CIA Director?
All right.
You guys know the deal.
FoolsErin.us for the book, ScottHorton.org and YouTube.com slash ScottHortonShow for all the interviews, 4,500 of them now going back to 2003 for you there.
Read what I want you to read at Antiwar.com and at LibertarianInstitute.org, and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
