Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax 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, we're killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright, so you guys, introducing our good friend, Ray McGovern.
For 27 years, he was an analyst at the CIA.
At one time, he was the head of the Soviet division, on the analyst side there.
Not a covert operator.
He was the briefer to Vice President H.W. Bush in the Reagan years.
And the former boss of Robert Gates.
There's a tangent.
Well, he's been right about everything since 2002 at least, I don't know.
Welcome back to the show, how you doing Ray?
Thanks Scott, doing well.
Usually the CIA is lying us into war, your thing is you try to truth us out of war all the time, so I appreciate that.
It's a good role, an important role that you play.
Ray is the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which is asking a lot, but they try.
And listen, he writes at RayMcGovern.com and at ConsortiumNews.com and we reprint just about everything, I think, at AntiWar.com as well.
Ray, you can find his name in the right hand margin there at AntiWar.com.
Okay, so ConsortiumNews.com ran this here first.
With Bolton's old enforcer Fred Flights as NSC Chief of Staff, odds increase on war with Iran.
Welcome back to the show Ray, how are you sir?
Thanks Scott, doing well.
Very happy to have you here.
You know, I don't know, to some people maybe it seems pedantic to have to try to learn who's the Chief of Staff of the National Security Council, who's the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, who's the Chief of Staff to the Vice President.
What difference does it make Ray?
Well, it makes a huge difference.
So when we're talking about the National Security Advisor, this is the funnel through which intelligence and even policy recommendations come.
So you had people like Kissinger, you had people like Brzezinski, you had a whole slew of people, some of them ended up in jail under Reagan.
But the CIA, the rest of the intelligence community are at the mercy of the National Security Advisor as to what the President sees or what he's told.
Famously, Condoleezza Rice, who is Bush's National Security Advisor for his first term, didn't let a lot of the information come into Bush with respect to what might happen on 9-11.
Now, they didn't know there was going to be 9-11, although they might have known just the week before.
But the evidence was out there, and as we learned later, people's hair was on fire in the intelligence community because they were being denied access to the President.
Now, the other side of that, of course, is that if George Tenet, the head of the CIA at the time, and also the head of the intelligence community at the time, if he had any courage at all, he would have used his personal access to Bush and to Cheney and told him what was going on.
He was afraid of Cheney, he was just slightly less afraid of Bush, so he went through the National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and he complained later that, you know, I told her, why should I tell the President?
Well, they're all afraid of Cheney, and that's why it went down the way it did, so this is a very, very key position.
Bolton, with his accomplice here, a fellow named Frederick Fleitz, is in a position to deny, for example, Trump information about, whoa, the UN inspectors say that Iran is in total compliance with the Iran deal made during the Obama administration.
Whoa, the intelligence community said in 2007, unanimously, all 16 agencies, end quote, with high confidence, end quote, that Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003, again, at the end of 2003, and had not resumed working on a nuclear weapon.
Now, nuclear power, sure, but not a nuclear weapon.
Now, that judgment, this is more than just a tangent here, that judgment in November of 2007 prevented Bush and Cheney from starting a war with Iran.
Now, I do not say that capriciously.
I've watched national intelligence estimates since 1963.
This is the only one, the very only one, that I can say with reasonable confidence that this prevented the plan, that prevented the juggernaut rolling down the hill toward war with Iran during the last year, 2008, of the Bush-Cheney administration.
And, you know, you have to believe me, read Bush's memoir.
What he says there, what he says there is, this was an eye-popping estimate, end quote.
It deprived me of the military option, end quote.
And here's another quote, for how could I possibly authorize a military strike on a country that the intelligence community says has no active nuclear weapons program, end quote.
Bummer.
OK, so you get the picture, right?
This was a jolt.
This was an honest estimate.
Sadly, it may be the last honest estimate on record that the CIA did.
It had that effect.
It did help.
It played a huge role in stopping that war.
Now what do we have?
Now, instead of an honest estimate, we have a totally politicized CIA oriented toward operations and things like torture under their new leader, Gina Haspel.
And also, even if there were some honest people in analysis on Iran who wanted to tell the president, look, Mr. President, Iran is no threat to us.
Hey, Mr. President, you know, Iran was the prime terrorist promoter throughout the world.
But that was 40 years ago, Mr. President, 40 years ago.
They no longer are.
If you're interested, we can tell you who are.
And that's Saudi Arabia.
That's Israel.
That's actually what we're doing.
But Iran is not.
That's a bum rap, Mr. President.
It's a bum rap.
Now, who's going to tell John Bolton and Fred Flights to tell the president that?
Well, we're the big fix.
And Flights just makes it worse.
Well, and it doesn't help.
I forget.
One of my Twitter friends put it perfectly when he said, you know, and I forget whether we're talking about Iran or Korea or what it was.
He says, it doesn't help that the president is a big dummy.
And that's about all he is.
I mean, I don't know if he's quite as arrogant as George W. Bush, maybe.
But he's dumber, I think, than George W. Bush.
I don't know.
He's pretty damn dumb.
And so, you know, somebody who's just a critical reader of the news, they might be able to come up with, well, I don't know.
I mean, Hezbollah is on the opposite side than Al-Qaeda, right?
But somebody like Trump, he could never come up with that on his own.
If someone's not telling him exactly what you just said, it ain't Iran, dude.
It's us and Saudi and Israel.
Al-Qaeda are the American people's enemies, not the Iranians.
Hezbollah didn't do anything to us, right?
Nobody talks to him that way.
Nobody.
And then, like you're saying, of course, Fred Flights and John Bolton are here to make sure that no one ever gets a chance to.
Well, that's the problem.
And of course, nobody tells him about Israel's role here.
You know, if I were president, I would be really interested in why we got involved in Syria, for example, and why we're about to get involved, God forbid, in Iran.
And, you know, if I asked honest analysts, they would say, well, Mr. President, with respect to Syria, there are really two answers.
They're both countries.
And one is Israel and the other one is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia, for obvious reasons, all the oil and all that kind of stuff.
But Israel, well, that's not so obvious.
But, you know, what I like to do is cite real sources.
And there's one that sort of says it all.
Back in September, early September 2013, when the flag was up in Syria and Obama was threatening to go to war and he finally turned to Congress and said, no, I'll ask Congress first.
Well, there was a there was a reporter in Jerusalem, the chief of the New York Times Bureau there, and she said her name was Jodi Rudarin.
And to his credit, to her credit, she said, you know, I probably should go talk to the top Israeli officials and find out what their take is on the war in Syria.
So she did.
And she talked to a whole whole slew of people, including the former consul general in New York.
And they said, now, Jodi, this doesn't sound very well, doesn't sound very humane.
But our preferred option, our preferred outcome in Syria is no outcome.
You see, we look at it as sort of like a playoff game where you don't want either team to win, but you don't want either team to lose either.
Let the blood flow.
As long as Sunni and Shia are at each other's throats in Syria, as long as there's Bedlam there, quote, we have nothing to fear here in Israel from Syria.
Now, she put that in The New York Times.
Did it get on the front page?
It was the lead item.
Why?
Because all the sensors were out in East Hampton sipping martinis over the Labor Day weekend.
Look for it.
6 September 2013.
Now, the headline I have here, Ray, it's Israel backs limited strike against Syria.
And, you know, here's the good Google term.
The unique Google term here is hemorrhage.
So say Reuter in Israel, Syria, hemorrhage, and you'll find it.
Let them both bleed hemorrhage to death.
That's the strategic thinking here.
As long as this lingers, there's no real threat from Syria.
When, of course, Israel could have made peace with Assad any day of the week.
Of course.
Yeah.
And so what's the deal here?
Even holding on to the Golan Heights too, right?
I mean, what was he going to do about it?
They could have made a deal where, you know, keep half or something.
They could have had peace.
In fact, remember, I think you and I talked about this at the time.
Ehud Olmert actually was trying to make a deal with Assad and Bush and Rice intervened and stopped him back in 2007.
Yeah.
The Likudniks were worse, worse even than earlier governments.
And you have you have Hezbollah.
Now, Hezbollah is actually part of the actually majority part now of the government in Lebanon.
Whoa.
The Israelis don't like that at all.
Okay.
Now, how does Hezbollah get so well armed and supplied?
Well, he used to be from ships from Iran or elsewhere and sending those weapons across Syria.
Now, if there's chaos in Syria, if there's bedlam there, it's really, really hard to get those weapons to Hezbollah.
Now, there are other ways to do it from from the east, actually.
But that was part of the motivation.
So as long as there's bedlam in Syria, there's no threat from Syria, as Jody Rudin learned from these guys.
And besides that, you're preventing the resupply, the easy resupply, the way it used to be done across Syria to Hezbollah.
Hezbollah has thousands of rockets, thousands of missiles now, and that's a deterrent already for Israel.
But they want to make sure that, you know, as much damage is done to Assad and they have the Saudis in this really unholy alliance.
The Sunni Saudis hand in glove with the Israelis.
Well, their common purpose, of course, is to make sure that Assad doesn't last very long.
And they've not succeeded in that.
Most people are surprised at that.
But, you know, Russia came in and helped turn the tide and Obama kind of cooperated in a meek sort of way.
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All right, thanks.
So now tell me a little bit more about Fred Flights then.
Well, you know, Fred was a CIA analyst.
And, you know, there's a...
So he's not really a neocon.
He's not a former Trotskyite turned Reaganite.
He's just friends with them like Bolton.
No, not that we knew of.
I mean, Bolton too is not a neocon, although you could mistake him for one, right?
He is certainly part of the AEI set, but is a lifelong Goldwaterite, not a former Trotsky con.
Well, the interesting thing is that he was a CIA staffer and he was seconded to John Bolton at state when John Bolton was the undersecretary of state for arms control.
Now, in that capacity, Flights was his enforcer and he no longer remained an intelligence officer.
He was his job was to bend the intelligence to suit what Bolton wanted to say.
There's a specific example which is worth adducing here.
In February 2002, Bolton wanted to accuse Cuba of developing a biological weapons program.
There's no evidence for that, but he had it in a big speech.
Now, under the old procedures, you used to have to clear a speech like that with the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, part of the State Department.
And this gutsy young analyst, Christian Westerman, said, look, he can't say that.
It's not true.
And Flights said, wait a second.
We get to say what's true here.
We get to analyze the intelligence.
You just give us the facts.
You just give us the intelligence and we analyze it.
And it's John Bolton's decision as to how to interpret it.
Wow.
Well, to their credit, Westerman's bosses went on the mat for him.
Colin Powell was nominally in charge of the State Department at the time.
But all I know is that his immediate subordinates read the riot act to John Bolton and Flights lived to fight another day.
But he was defeated in this one.
Bolton was not able to accuse Cuba of doing biological weapons.
The real, the real terrible thing that happened when Bolton was undersecretary for arms control was in 2001, when he persuaded George W. Bush and Dick Cheney helped, hey, this ABM treaty, this anti-ballistic missile treaty, that's for the birds to get out of that.
And that will free up lots of research.
And we'll get lots of money from Raytheon and others.
And, you know, we don't need that treaty anymore.
Now, that treaty was the basis for strategic stability since 1972.
They needed six months to get out of it.
So in 2002, they were out of it.
OK, so 72 to 30 years of strategic stability.
Why?
Because it prohibited the deployment of more than one ABM system, making it inevitable that if one side defendants decided to do a first strike on the other, there would be no defense against the retaliatory strike.
It's not hard to understand.
It was a balance of terror, but it was a balance.
Now, what happened?
Well, they got it.
The United States got out of it.
Who was responsible for that?
Cheney and Bolton.
And now we have a very light, a very tense and very unstable situation where not only anti-ballistic missile systems, but short, short term or short range missiles are going into Central Europe and the Far East.
And the Russians are justifiably concerned about all this, witness the fact that they themselves have developed weaponry now that they say at least can defeat any ABM system.
This will not stop the building of ABM systems.
This is the largest corporate welfare program ever devised by man.
And it's not it's not going down to the workers.
It's going to the corporate heads and the technicians that work on these systems that no one, no one really except Edmund, Edward Teller, who persuaded Reagan that they would work.
No scientist or engineer ever has made a plausible case that ABM systems could not be circumvented and defeated.who worked on ABM systems who said that, no, yeah, you really can shoot down a rocket.
The question is, how much are you really willing?
Really, at the end of the day, how much are you willing to spend per missile you're trying to shoot down?
Maybe, potentially, and that it can be done, but at such a cost.
And in other words, enough missiles to take care of all the dummies and any H-bombs, too, and redundancy to make sure that all the times that you miss that secondary missiles do hit and etc, etc, etc.
So, if you want to spend the entire GDP on it, basically, you can get it done.
And I want to bring up something else here, which is so important, which is, I'm probably sure where you're going with this anyway, which is that the Russians looked at this and said that they have to bet that the Americans are going to make a major breakthrough here if they're going to spend all this new money on all this new research in anti-ballistic missile systems.
And so, they have to react.
And they have to turn right around, just as I'm sure you said they would at the time, just as many of us have predicted and seen all this time since then.
They're going to have to do something about that.
Recently, they had a real big announcement.
Putin, in his big State of the Union-type speech he gave.
But previously, we'd already heard about this Satan rocket that can carry enough H-bombs to kill every major city in Texas with one rocket that they now say is able to fly around the Earth from the South and attack the U.S. from the South, where we have no defense currently, etc.
And then all these supersonic cruise missiles, and where they say a nuclear-powered cruise missile with a virtually unlimited range, in other words, could fly around the whole world and go wherever it wants, kind of thing.
This is all reaction.
Their response to George Bush saying, we're just going to do whatever we want, and they're just going to sit there and take it.
That's true, Scott.
And, you know, when you look at some of the panels that Putin, Vladimir Putin, spoke on, or some of his speeches, he virtually was pleading for the U.S. to take note of the fact that they needed to listen to one another.
That the Russians would not reply in kind, they would not build their own anti-ballistic missile systems that don't work, but they would be forced to devise countermeasures.
Now, that's what they've done.
The real question that I have is that by all indications, the U.S. intelligence community has been so interested in finding evidence of Russian hacking of the DNC computers, or finding sites where people can be drone struck in Afghanistan, that no one noticed, apparently.
And this is, you know, this is as bad as failing to predict the end of the Soviet Union.
No one seemed to notice that the Russians are working these incredibly sophisticated systems, six of which were divulged in a speech by Vladimir Putin on the 1st of March of this year.
Now, what happened?
Well, he said, look, you won't listen to us.
Okay, now you got to listen.
And I invite you to talk about this.
Well, what happens?
A couple of weeks later, he's reelected for six more years, right?
What does Trump do?
Trump composes a congratulatory telegram.
I mean, that's de rigueur.
I mean, that's common practice.
You don't have to like the guy to congratulate him.
So he says, congratulations on your reelection.
We need to get together to talk about arms control sooner rather than later, because this is getting out of hand.
I kid you not, that's what Trump said in his message.
You won't find that very much in the mainstream media.
Now, all of a sudden, Trump is kind of bollocked in and not allowed to pursue these things.
And even though he expresses a wish to do this, the mainstream media jump all over him.
Well, and I don't know what happened inside the White House, but it must have been something you could make at least a TV movie of the week out of or something, because that went away really fast.
He invited Putin to D.C.
And that went away immediately, which that's the first thing he should have done the moment he was sworn in.
He should have invited Putin to D.C. and just shut this whole Russiagate thing down the hard way, sign a nuclear reduction pact right then and there.
But anyway, that just went away.
So the media, what they did was, McMaster told him not to congratulate Putin.
Boo hoo.
He congratulated him anyway.
And you and I are supposed to be emotional about that.
I don't know how they figured that that was...
But that was basically the kind of public cover for something really happened in the White House where somebody read the President, the Riot Act and said, we're not doing that.
Right?
That's something that's called the Military Industrial Congressional Media Deep State Complex.
It's big and Trump is not in control of it.
That's the main takeaway from all that.
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to give the guy too much credit.
I know you don't either.
But the fact is, there's a couple of things that he has good instincts on.
Like, wait, why do we prefer Al-Qaeda to Assad again?
And wait, why do we prefer nuclear holocaust to permanent peaceful coexistence?
You know, you don't have to be a genius to know better than those two things, right?
But you've got to not be a damn Democrat.
But there are unanswered questions here.
You know, somebody pressured Trump into taking John Bolton as his national security advisor.
Trump, I think, you know, you talk a lot about dummies.
You're talking about dummy missiles.
Well, there are dummies all over the White House and in the Pentagon.
And maybe he was just not smart enough to realize what Bolton would do.
What is the first thing Bolton did?
He tried to screw up the summit with Korea, with North Korea.
And he almost succeeded.
He and Pence raised impossible conditions and compared the situation in North Korea to the one in Libya, where we did persuade Gaddafi to get rid of his nuclear weapons.
And then what happened to him?
Well, a couple of years later, we attacked him and he met a very gruesome death.
So what he's contending with here is a Bolton that almost screwed up the Korea thing.
Now, what's the lesson that could be learned from that?
Well, the good lesson is that he overruled Bolton, that under under pressure from the new from Mike Pompeo, the new secretary of state, he said, look, for God's sake, Bolton's crazy, just like we all said he was.
Don't let him even talk to the Koreans.
And so when Trump talked to the emissary from Korea, from North Korea, he didn't even let Bolton in the room.
So there's hope there.
Trump even publicly said, well, I wouldn't have used the Libya thing, something like he he specifically kind of overruled on that.
And it's such an obvious sabotage.
We all know what happened to Gaddafi.
Yeah.
So the hope is, at least my hope is, that once Trump learned what damage Bolton can do, continuing damage with respect to South Korea and North Korea.
And when he kind of looks at Iran and he sees, well, whose interest is it for me to get involved in hostilities with Iran?
Well, Israel, Saudi Arabia, is that is that going to be good for me?
You know, so maybe he'll get rid of Bolton.
And if Bolton goes, of course, Freddie Flights will be soon after and they go back to their think tanks and and write, write Church and prose about how Iran is so bad.
Well, you know what?
I'll tell you, man, somebody I won't say who, but somebody who knows things told me that that was what was happening here was that he had to put Bolton in there to placate Adelson and that but it would only be temporary and he'll be gone by the end of the summer.
So, I mean, I'm not one to predict the future very strongly.
But, you know, that was apparently there was talk about, you know, in the first place, this is just temporary to get Adelson off our back kind of thing.
Hopefully they'll keep him from doing too.
And in fact, this source told me that he made Bolton promise not to.
Oh, no, that wasn't this source.
That was in the newspaper.
They made Bolton promise not to start any wars.
And you know what?
So so listen, here's the deal.
You're quite a bit older than me.
No offense.
And I'm pretty old.
But, you know, the Iraq War is ancient history.
Iraq War II is ancient history to a big part of our audience, like Vietnam was to me almost.
Well, no, Vietnam was before I was born, but just barely.
But anyway, there's a big part of our audience that doesn't know the story here.
You talked about Colin Powell.
You said he was nominally in charge of the State Department.
Well, he was Colin friggin' Powell, the former National Security Advisor himself, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a four-star general, the big giant hero of Iraq War I, supposedly, and was set to be the most powerful Secretary of State in history, people thought as he came in.
And later, he complained, and this is something that we already know about from a thousand other sources, but from the horse's mouth himself, Colin Powell told Bob Woodward of the Washington Post that Dick Cheney created a separate government.
And part of it, he referred to, was Feith's Gestapo office at the Pentagon.
That was Colin Powell's words.
Feith's Gestapo office.
That was the Office of Special Plans under the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, where they laundered the Iraqi National Congress's lies about weapons of mass destruction, etc.
But anyway, this network he was talking about was Cheney and the neocons.
Cheney and Hannah and Rhode and Libby in the Vice President's office.
Libby had two hats.
He was Special Advisor to the President, and also Hadley on the National Security Council, on the President's staff.
And then Bolton and Wormser in the State Department.
And then, of course, the whole group of them.
Pearl and Wolfowitz and Feith and Elliott Abrams and Abram Shulsky and Michael Rubin and his whole group, Michael Maloof, and all of these guys in the Office of Special Plans and what have you in the Pentagon.
These were the guys who lied us into war.
And they came in.
I don't know if it's really criminal.
Bush was the, at least, quote-unquote, elected President of the United States, so he does get to put his staff where he wants them.
And the bureaucracies are supposed to go along with his policies.
But at the very least, it was, assuming they're legal, which Iraq War II wasn't, but anyway, the point of it is that it was probably the most effective use by a newly elected government of staff to really take control of the bureaucracies and have their way over the deep state, when the deep state was a little bit reluctant to go to Iraq War II.
And really led into it by the President and the Vice President and the neocon group, which is different, kind of, than usual.
Trump is a hawk on al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist types, but other than that, it seems like on Korea, well, maybe on Iran, too, but on Korea and Russia and these other things, the centrist establishment in the deep state is much worse than him.
But anyway, I just think it's an important story to tell.
When we talk about Fred Flights and John Bolton, that's who these guys are.
They're part of that Cheney-ite network that Powell was so frustrated about that he was the Secretary of State and couldn't even control his own department.
Well, that's true.
You know, it's a very sad story, actually.
Yeah, because they got a million people killed.
Sorry.
Maybe two million now.
It's that, of course.
But on a human level, I know Colin Powell.
I used to brief him every other morning before I saw his superior, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.
I used to go there as a courtesy, just to let Colin Powell know that I wasn't going to tell Weinberger anything that Powell didn't need to know.
Now, I couldn't tell Powell everything, of course, but I tried to reassure him.
He comes across as a very decent guy.
He challenged me once on the top of a hotel in San Francisco when I was briefing Weinberger.
I came out of the elevator.
He says, I'll take that.
I said, no, you won't.
I was not going to give him the president's daily brief.
We knocked on the door.
Weinberger recognized me.
He said, come on in, Ray.
Now, what about Powell?
Well, he got where he was by saluting more crisply than anyone else.
I know him.
He grew up in the Bronx, about a mile from where I grew up.
He went to City College.
I went to Fordham.
He went to the Army ROTC.
So did I. He became Colonel of Cadets.
Well, how did he get there?
By saluting smartly.
Why did he cover up the My Lai Massacre when he got to Vietnam?
Because he wanted to salute smartly.
Why did he violate the law in Iran-Contra, shipping their weapons to Iran?
Because Weinberger told him to.
And he got to be Secretary of State.
Now, that's how you get to be Secretary of State, particularly if you look like Colin Powell.
There are people in the Bronx, in the People's Republic of the Bronx, which we refer to affectionately, who would like to rescind Powell's citizenship of the People's Republic of the Bronx, together with Eric Holder and other people who didn't turn out to be faithful to our ethos.
Now, what am I really saying here?
Well, he knew that he wasn't in charge of the State Department, that Cheney was.
He didn't say diddly.
He knew that Bolton was running circles around him, violating all manner of procedures.
He didn't say diddly.
And when it came, when push came to shove, and Colin Powell still enjoyed this reputation of being a straight arrow.
And George Bush said to him, look, Colin, we want to sell this war with Iraq.
We need you to do it because you people have, you have more credibility.
People, we want you to sell that to the UN.
Will you do it?
Colin Powell saluted smartly and said, yes, I'll do it.
Now, here's what happened.
And I have this from Larry Wilkerson, his chief of staff, who was preparing his speech at the UN.
Colin Powell is really, really angry, because the first draft was given to him by Dick Cheney's people, right?
So it was really, really tough to undo that.
Finally, all this business comes in these spurious reports about ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
Okay, what they want to say, they want to say that al-Qaeda was working with Saddam Hussein.
That's why 9-11 happened.
That's why we have to get Saddam Hussein.
So what happens?
Powell and Larry Wilkerson go off to a side room off the director of Central Intelligence Office, and they say, look, this is a crock.
We're not going to do this, right?
Yeah, okay, we'll go back in.
Next thing you know, George Tenet, the head of CIA, comes, oh, we got a new report.
We got a new report from this fellow al-Libi.
He's been debriefed, and he says that he, a travel agent, sent all manner of al-Qaeda operatives up to Saddam Hussein to get him trained in explosives and chemical warfare.
Here it is.
Now, these guys weren't born yesterday, right?
But Colin Powell decided, okay, and he ended up inserting into his speech that there was a, quote, sinister nexus between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
End quote.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
So that's Colin Powell.
Now, people let themselves be used.
And that's why I say it's a very sad story, because I know him.
He's a decent guy.
But he learned that once he's saluted, he keeps saluting.
And by the time he even becomes Secretary of State, you're constitutionally, that is, personally, not only unwilling, but you're kind of unable to say, no, no, no, no, I'm not going to tell any more lies.
This could get a million people killed.
And of course, it did.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, he, just like Cheney, was on the team in the Bush senior years, when they very deliberately did not go all the way to Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
And in fact, when they encouraged the Shiite and Kurdish uprising against Saddam, they panicked and changed their minds and left them high and dry, and stabbed in the back and let Saddam massacre them all, as soon as they realized that Iranians were coming across the border, and Iraqis who'd been living in Iran since the Iran-Iraq war broke out, were coming, the Baader Brigade, really, were coming to lead the uprising, and that they were importing the Iranian revolution, that it was going to lead to a major conflict throughout the region.
Cheney himself said, and people can Google this, too, it's on YouTube, no problem, C-SPAN Cheney, 1994, Iraq, that's all you need.
And there, he's at AEI, and he's answering the criticism, Mr. former Secretary of Defense, why didn't we go all the way to Baghdad?
And he says, well, because the Iranians would have got the south and the east, you'd have had an alliance between the Sunnis and the west, with the Syrians, and then you'd have had the Kurds maybe breaking off and causing a problem for the Turks.
And yeah, in other words, you're going to cause a regional war, and it's straight out of Dick Cheney's mouth.
Yeah, Scott, he also said that it wasn't worth the life of one American soldier.
That was Cheney, back in the mid-90s.
Now, what happened?
Well, he became an oil man, right?
Well, what happened was, he became a failed oil services construction company CEO.
And so, he owed them a bunch of money, because he'd run their company in the ground, but the reason they hired him in the first place was because he had government connections.
So, he figured, don't worry, once I'm the vice president, I'll get you a fat army contract and make up for it.
Because what happened was, I'm 99% sure it was Ingersoll Rand, he had Halliburton buy it about two weeks before they were found liable for a bazillion dollars worth of asbestos claims.
And it was the dumbest damn move ever.
And that was just one move.
But he was no businessman.
He didn't know how to run a business.
He's a politician.
And so, he owed them big.
That's the thing.
It wasn't just that they were all friends and making money.
It was that he had been a really bad CEO and had to make it up to them by putting them on the dole.
Scott, I'm trying to think of something nice to say about Dick Cheney.
Maybe I can tell you this.
A very devout friend of mine prays a lot.
And she told me a couple of years ago that she prays very hard every time Dick Cheney goes into the hospital.
But she's not quite sure that God listens to her prayers because he always gets better.
Yeah, he keeps coming out again.
Man.
Yeah, so things that didn't have to be this way, you know?
Alright, so now let's talk about Iran.
It does seem kind of crazy, doesn't it?
The president, he's such a shallow guy.
He needs a win, so he's willing to do a deal with Korea.
And you know what he did say during the campaign?
Like, hey, why not have a deal with Korea?
I don't know.
I think he does, in a sort of crusty old right-wing way, resent all the freeloaders on the American empire.
Sheldon Richman wrote a great article about the myth of the aggrieved superpower.
And this is Trump's narrative, that all our allies do nothing but take advantage of us, where they have tariffs on our goods, but we don't have tariffs on theirs.
But he neglects the part of the trade-off that is, that they then cede their military forces over to the command of the world empire in D.C. and allow us to dominate their foreign policies.
And that's the real trade-off.
And Trump has said, eh, you know, it costs too much.
Why don't the South Koreans pick up their own tab?
Which is good enough, you know, as a basic starting point of a point of view there, I guess.
And then it makes sense that, domestically speaking, he wants to stick it to the Democrats and be like, haha, I made peace in Korea when you couldn't, and this kind of thing, which is fine by me.
Those kind of political incentives, when they work the right way, you know?
But so, here's a guy, too, where, and, you know, we talked about Sheldon Adelson and the Israelis and whatever, but couldn't he have just as easily gone to Tehran, made a deal with the Ayatollah, and just said, enough of this?
How can he ruin this Iran deal, which was such an accomplishment, in terms of taking, it was a fake, it cost his belly, but it was, they pretended that the safeguarded nuclear program in Iran was a weapons threat, and they can no longer pretend that with the JCPOA.
And Trump has destroyed that, as the same time he's, you know, hopefully, and really, it's Moon who's driving the car, anyway, in Korea, but Trump's going along with it, to make peace in Korea, here.
So, what do you think's going to happen?
You said earlier, at the start of the show, that you're really worried, God forbid you said, that they really are going to get us into a war with Iran, one that George W. Bush wouldn't follow through on.
That you think Trump will really do it, but, so what's the point, man?
Just to please the Likud?
Because the American military doesn't really want that, right?
Well, yeah, and that's a good thing.
Now, you know, you can say that Mad Dog Mattis is proud of his moniker there, but, you know, not even Marines want to get involved in wars that they can't win.
And Mattis is smart enough, and I think even Dunford is smart enough to realize, they get involved in a war with Iran, it will make the war in Iraq, make it look like a volleyball game between Mount St. Ursula and St. Helena's high schools, okay?
So, this is really serious.
Now, what's the answer?
I give you an acronym, ISA, Israel, Saudi Arabia.
They're driving U.S. policy toward Iran, pure and simple, just as always.
And there's no estimate to tell, and there's no honest, intelligent people to tell, or even if there were, they wouldn't get through John Bolton and Freddie Flights to tell the president, hey, it's all bogus.
Number one, they're not working on a nuclear weapon.
Number two, they were the prime sponsor of terrorism, but that was 40 years ago, four decades, count them, Mr. President.
So, look, unless you want to just let Israel and Saudi Arabia drive your policy, and that's partly what you want to do, this is bogus, and you're going to get a whole lot of people killed.
Now, when Mike Mullen was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Israelis were threatening to start hostilities with Iran, he went over there and he read them the riot act.
He said, don't even think of it, okay?
And if you're thinking of a false flag attack to try to draw us into this, forget about it.
We remember the USS Liberty, and we don't like remembering it.
Whoa.
Now, that was the only time since 1967 when that happened, when the Israelis tried to sink and kill all the crew of the USS Liberty on June 8th, 1960.
The only time that any prominent U.S. spokesman did that and did it publicly, okay?
So, the Israelis were called off.
I'm sorry, remind me again, right?
Because that's such a huge thing.
Remind me again, the year, and that was Mullen or Blair?
It was Mullen who went over there, and that was, you know, Derry Bush's, let's see, was it?
No, it was Obama, 2012, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it was the height of the threats of 2012.
And think about that, I mean, especially for people who don't know the USS Liberty, that's when the Israelis tried to sink an American naval ship in 1967, and LBJ helped cover it up.
And so, for Admiral Mullen to say to the Israelis, yeah, and we remember the Liberty, and we're not going to have any of that, right, when they're talking about pushing us into war with Iran, you know, how's that for no daylight, huh, you know, about, oh, yeah, America's interests and Israel's interests are always exactly the same thing, don't worry about it.
Cy Hirsch reported around that time, that one of Dick Cheney's projects was constructing and painting in Iranian colors, PT boats, or these little speed boats that would be put into the Persian Gulf and sink a US warship, a Kasusbelli, that would allow us, like the Gulf of Tonkin to get involved in hostilities with Iran.
Now, Mullen knew which side was up, okay, he was a naval officer, but of course, the Marines come under the Navy.
And he looked at those cliffs at the Strait of Hormuz.
And, you know, the thought of sending Marines up those cliffs, or Marines into a heavily guarded Iran was a little bit too much.
And so when they asked him, he got back, he said, well, could the Iranians close the straits?
And he said, yeah.
And then immediately said, yeah, but yeah, they could.
So he was aware.
Now, the question is, is Mattis, not only is Mattis smart enough, I think he is, but does he have enough power when he faces into Bolton?
And people like Mike Pompeo, who was just a tanker, sat on his tank, sat on his rear end in a tank and killed a whole bunch of Iraqis within range of his tank, with them not in range of ours.
Anyhow, are they going to be persuasive with Trump and let the Israelis get us into something really, really bad or not?
I think we will not be able.
I think that Mattis and the other people will be able to dissuade Obama, Trump.
And what I'm trying to say here is that these realities really should become available even to dummies, as we talked about before in the White House and in the Defense Department.
It's really important that they do.
And if they don't, we're in trouble deep.
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So here's the thing, man.
Screw the Ayatollah.
He's a bad guy.
His government is run by a bunch of criminals.
And of course, we can make all our arguments in the world about how, well, the sanctions just help them and all that, because that's true.
There's no denying that these guys are a bunch of violent killers.
I guess all governments are, except maybe in Iceland or something.
I don't know.
And then, in reality, they are guilty of taking full advantage of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.
They've backed the Hazaras in Afghanistan, as well, and have benefited from the overthrow of the Taliban, which, whatever.
But they have absolutely exploited the war against Iraq, World War II, to the nth degree, and are almost as bad as the Americans in terms of causing and perpetuating the civil war that killed a million people and destroyed their society.
And they're guilty as hell of taking full advantage of Assad needing their help to defend Syria from CIA-backed al-Qaeda suicide bomber terrorists.
And so, now, they have increased their power and influence on the ground in Syria.
And I still haven't been shown a shred of evidence that the Iranians are doing anything for the Houthis at all, other than giving them a nice pat on the back over the phone or something.
But, politically speaking, they're taking great advantage and are making great gains from, at least supposedly, quote-unquote, backing the Houthis.
Nasser Arabi says that American and Saudi accusations against Iran and their activities in Yemen do much more for accentuating Iranian power in Yemen than anything the Iranians have actually done.
And that certainly seems right to me, for all the hype.
But, anyway, so they're guilty of taking full advantage of every horrible thing the American government does for them in attempting to spite them.
And so, now, it's the future.
And here we are.
It's 2018.
And you have a bunch of, well, evil lunatic warmongers like John Bolton looking at the Middle East that they have made.
And they're saying to themselves, holy crap.
This is intolerable.
We have to back al-Qaeda more.
We have to do more to stop Iran.
We have to, whatever it is, we have to figure out a way.
And I guess Bolton's position, right, was, eh, forget Assad and even forget the Bata Brigade.
If we get regime change in Tehran, it won't matter that Iran has influence in Iraq or Syria.
This kind of attitude.
Yeah, the swaggering neo-cons back in the day used to say, real men go to Tehran, not Baghdad.
Well, now they have, at that point, I mean, just from their point of view, from the empire's point of view, Iran is whatever, huge, X percent more powerful in the region now because of what they've done.
So, if they had a causeless belly then, think of the panic that they're in now.
And they don't like to mention, they talk about the Shiite crescent, they always leave out Iraq because they don't want to have to admit that, obviously, because of them, Iraq is part of that Shiite crescent now, too.
Yeah, you took those words right out of my mouth.
I mean, look what's happened in Iraq.
Sadr, al-Sadr, the fellow that 1,000 U.S. troops died trying to oppose his folks there at the celebrated surge there, you know, he's back, back in the catbird seat there.
What I'd like to do is just kind of, for your, your audience here, step back just for a second and talk about how the Israelis have been able to use the so-called threat from Iran and the need to do something about it to justify what the U.S. has helped them do.
Stuxnet.
Now, a lot of people don't realize that this virus that attacked not only the electronics but attacked the physical centrifuges in Iran destroyed them, OK?
That was developed by the U.S. and by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, to placate the Israelis.
What the Israelis said is, oh, we're going to attack Iran.
We're going to attack Iran.
You're going to have to help us.
And so they said, how can we buy the Israelis off?
I know what we could do.
We'll develop this Stuxnet.
It will never, never get out beyond where we want it to be.
It will destroy the centrifuges.
And then the Israelis could breathe some relief.
And that's what happened then.
So when we get back to motivation here, with respect to the attack on Iraq, I used to say there was an acronym, OIL, O for oil, I for Israel, L for logistics, namely the permanent military bases that we coveted in Iraq, in equal proportion.
You know, people say, no, no, it's all oil.
No, no, it's all oil.
No, no, things are more complicated.
It was all three.
Now, this one on Iran, it's not oil.
It's Israel.
And it's Saudi Arabia.
I mean, it's very, very clear that this is what's driving Trump.
And unless Trump can come to a census, unless he can say to his son-in-law, look, I know you're really good buddies with this guy in Saudi Arabia, but we have our own interests to think of.
And I'm not going to go to war in Iran.
Look what Mattis is telling you.
So unless that happens, and I think the chances of that happening are enhanced to the degree that Bolton is marginalized, that he's shown to be the warmonger that he is, and that he's released from duty, lest he screw up not only Iran, but South Korea.
Now that something, something good is going to happen, we hope, on the 12th of June.
And so it's, you know, unless we can name Israel as the prime mover behind this kind of policy with respect to Iran, people don't understand it.
And the people who read the New York Times, ipso facto, don't understand it because of the influence of Israel and pro-Israeli people on the New York Times and on major media.
Let that be said.
All right.
Now, so here's the thing, though, too, is Iran is just a fake threat to Israel, too.
I mean, I know they back Hezbollah, but they don't even back Hamas anymore.
And they told, you know, it was Netanyahu and Barack when Barack, the former prime minister, was then the defense minister under Netanyahu and his first coalition that came in in 2008 or 9 there, 8, I guess, right before Obama was elected.
And they told Jeffrey Goldberg that, look, we know that even if Iran did have a whole pile of nukes, that they wouldn't attack us with them because we could hit them back.
But we're worried that it would possibly limit our freedom of action in the region.
In other words, if they want to be able to attack Hezbollah, or if they want to be able to ethnically cleanse in another Nakba the Palestinians out of the West Bank or something like that, that if Iran had nukes, then they might not be free to begin acts of aggression at their whim.
I mean, they're that clear about it.
And their other, not even half-assed excuse was, well, you know, they're afraid that Israeli Jews will feel a little uncomfortable and move farther away and go to America to pursue their futures rather than stay in Israel.
And that would lead to a brain drain.
That was the words of Ehud Barak.
And this is supposed to be the existential threat to Israel that we're so concerned about.
I mean, this country, I think, has one battleship and a bunch of fiberglass speedboats, the ones that you mentioned earlier.
Any other fiberglass speedboat can be dressed up to look like here.
This is a country that basically serves as a great distraction from Israeli crimes in the occupied territories.
It's like outlawing abortion for Republicans.
It's just some completely ridiculous red herring for their voters that they're never actually going to do anything about.
Right?
They're not going to attack Iran.
They're not going to outlaw abortion or else why would you support them, you idiots?
You know?
And so every time somebody says, why are you murdering these women and children in the Gaza Strip?
They go, well, Iran.
And they don't have any ability to really start and win a war with Iran.
And they don't actually have any real reason to fear Iran.
As we've already discussed a zillion times, they were never even making nukes in the first place.
So why is there even really a threat of this?
Because it must be, I don't mean to say that I know that they're very responsible Likudniks over there or whatever.
But when Netanyahu is meeting with his war cabinet, I mean, they really don't have anything like the slightest excuse to plunge humanity into this chaos.
It's all smoke and mirrors.
So what's the point?
Other than smoke and mirrors.
The point is to enlist the U.S. into what George Washington called a passionate alliance, a passionate attachment to the interests of Israel.
Worst case, let's say you're an Israeli whose parents or grandparents perished in the Holocaust.
OK?
Worst case would be, and there might be some sense in this, if Iran got a nuclear weapon, Well, Iran just might say, look, we feel strongly about our ally Syria.
The next time, next time you send your fighter bombers over to blast the hell out of their sites.
Well, think twice about that.
OK.
Now, that's possible.
That would be a sort of rational Israeli reaction to that.
But what I'd like to say here is, is this, that we are at a what's called a liminal stage here.
A liminal stage.
The U.S. has decided to get out of the JCPOA, the Joint Plan of Action, the Iran deal concluded by Obama with great help from Vladimir Putin and the other people who are involved.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, that means that it's a threshold event with respect to Western Europe and Eastern Europe.
What's Europe going to do?
Are they going to act like vassals, like in the past?
Well, the smart money says, of course they will because of economic ties and all.
I'm not so sure about that.
Now, does Trump realize that he's not only dealing with Russia in this calculus, but he's dealing with a new alliance?
And I use that word advisedly.
There is a de facto military alliance between Russia and China.
If there's trouble, let's say in Syria, between U.S. and Russian troops, you can bet, remember where you heard it first, you can bet there'll be trouble in the South China Sea.
There'll be trouble in the Taiwan Straits.
There's a de facto alliance here where one country is going to come to the aid of the other.
And if Mattis is not smart enough to realize that, well, he's going to find out the hard way.
Now, is he going to get involved in hostilities in the South China Sea as well as in Syria or maybe Ukraine?
I don't think so.
The Chinese have made it very clear that they support Soviet, I'm sorry, they support Russian policy in Syria and in Ukraine, which is quite remarkable given Chinese history.
And what's the first thing that the new, the new reelected Chinese leader did?
He sent his defense minister to Moscow.
When they asked him in Moscow why he was there, he said, I am here to express solidarity to our Russian compatriots, full solidarity, military solidarity.
So what I'm saying here is that this is an entirely new phenomenon.
It's been gradual over the last couple of years, but the U.S. can no longer think of getting involved in even minor hostilities in places like the Middle East or even in Ukraine without having China come to the aid of Russia, because there is, and mark my words, there is a de facto military alliance that changes things.
When I was first CIA analyst, my, my portfolio included what was called the Sino-Soviet dispute.
They were shooting each other against the border.
There were 15 Soviet divisions on the Chinese border.
They hated each other.
We thought, I thought they would hate each other forever.
Forget about it.
Nothing is forever.
They are now de facto allies.
All right, well, listen, we better cut this off here, Ray, because I got to go.
I'm late, but I love talking with you so much.
And I'm glad kind of to leave it there because that means we can continue this conversation next time.
Okay.
Thanks very much, sir.
Appreciate it.
Most welcome.
The great Ray McGovern, everybody, formerly a CIA guy, now a great anti-war hero.
And of course, you know, as you know from the news, when they do cover it sometimes, a guy who's willing to go to jail to do the right thing, to protest in that civil disobedience kind of way, such as we saw at the Haspel hearing recently, which that was the previous interview if you want to go back in the archives and check.
And of course, all of his actions against drone slaughter, against torture and all the rest of this, he'll come and speak to your group too.
He works with a group called Tell the Word.
And so especially if you're on the East Coast over there, he's a Virginia guy, I think.
All right, there you go.
That's how an Iran war was averted is this old one rerun at Consortium News about Frederick Flights here, now the chief of staff for John Bolton helping run the National Security Council.
All right.
So you guys know the deal, foolserun.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 scotthortonshow.
Thanks.
