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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the White's Museum again and get the finger that 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 killed.
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 killing them.
We be on CNN like say our names.
Say it.
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.
Introducing a very important guest this morning.
It's Ray McGovern.
For 27 years, he was an analyst at the CIA, including heading up the Soviet division back in the 1970s and I think in the 80s.
And he spent this entire century trying to stop the wars.
The Afghan war, the Iraq war, all the different threats of war with Iran and with Syria and Libya and every other thing.
You probably know him well.
He gives speeches all the time.
He does actions with Code Pink and other anti-war groups against drones, against nukes, against everything.
He's the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which really goes to show it's not just that he's a peace activist, but he is a great debunker of the lies that the war party uses to manipulate the American people into foreign conflict.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you, sir?
I'm fine.
Thank you.
How are you?
Very happy to have you on the show here.
And we got some important stuff to talk about, but I want to emphasize the point I just made mentioning Code Pink there.
Based on what you're going to have to say here, people are going to want to jump to conclusions.
So I want to inoculate them against those false conclusions they might jump to right now.
I know already, I'm not even asking, I know that you would like to see Donald Trump held accountable for a great many things, but not for his relationship with Vladimir Putin and the nation of Russia.
Why is that?
Well, Scott, even a broken clock is right two times a day, if memory serves.
Trump is right about relations with Russia.
There is no reason on God's earth, except for the profiteering of the arms merchants, that we shouldn't have a decent relationship with Russia.
And since that's the case, it's really awkward to be pointing out that, my God, you mean Trump is right about something?
Many people have drunk the Kool-Aid to the extent that they can't possibly believe that Trump could be right about anything.
And so they're susceptible to what I call the magnificent distraction of Russiagate.
Now they don't even look at the evidence.
If they looked at what's going on and what did go on in the FBI and the Department of Justice, for God's sake, not to mention the CIA before the election and then after the election, they would see concrete evidence, documentary evidence that the deep state, and I use that term advisedly, I'm talking about what is always the FBI, the CIA, NSA, but in this case included the Department of Justice, Loretta Lynch and her whole crew.
What they tried to do was to make sure that Trump did win the election.
That's provable.
That's in cold fact.
Okay.
And then after he was elected, they tried to get him, you know, sully him, get him impeached.
But most importantly for them, uh, make sure that he didn't succeed in developing a mutually good relationship with Russia.
Now I've been watching Russia.
I hate to tell you, I majored in Russian and Russian studies and I taught Russian back in the fifties.
Can you believe it?
And I've been in Washington 55 years now.
It needs to be said that, well, when you're 55 years here, you're not only old and that's kind of a disadvantage, I guess, but, but you've been around, you've seen a lot.
And so you see a lot of change.
And the biggest change that I've, that I've seen in these 55 years is the fact that we no longer have in any real sense, a free media.
You can't get the news.
You can't get the straight story from the TV.
You can't get it from the newspapers to the degree people still buy newspapers.
You can't get the fourth estate so-called is dead.
Okay.
Now what does that mean?
It means that while I was still on active duty, so to speak, not, not with the army this time, but, but with the CIA, when I was pretty much at the prime of my career, uh, when I was briefing, uh, secretaries of state, secretaries of defense assistance to the president for national security affairs.
And if Ronald Reagan woke up in time, Ronald Reagan, while this was going on, Bill Casey, who was Reagan's head of the CIA, came in, adopted Bobby Gates as his fair haired boy to make sure we didn't say anything good about Gorbachev or anybody like that.
And what the first thing Bill Casey said at the very first cabinet meeting, February 1981, that would be, was this, quote, we'll know when our disinformation program is complete, when everything the American public believes is false, period, end quote.
So it's complete now is what you're saying.
I would not like to do hyperbole here.
I'd say it's only 85% complete because there are people like you and me and people who listen to your program who, who have been around a long enough to say, my God, you know, here's, here's what I remembered about this past week.
Okay.
I remember the first headline after the summit in Helsinki, New York Times, Trump at Putin's side throws doubt on US intelligence.
My God, it's treason.
We all know that US intelligence cannot be doubted.
They're never wrong.
Like, you know, they certainly got it right on weapons of mass destruction before Iraq.
And man, were they cool in saying there were operational ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda?
They always get it right.
How can you throw doubt on that?
So full circle here, here's Bill Casey smiling down, hopefully he's in heaven, but you know, there's some doubt about that.
He's looking at all this and says, my God, this has exceeded beyond all my expectations.
I was, I was guilty of hyperbole in saying everything the American public believes is false.
There's still people like Scott Horton and McGovern, you know, they'll never get around, they'll never get it.
Okay.
But it's virtually complete.
Now I cite some of my own colleagues, crackerjack analysts, people who are free to get on places like counterpunch now and common dreams.
And as long as they point out how evil Putin is, how evil the whole Russian system is, how, as director of national intelligence, Sam's Clapper said, the Russians are almost genetically driven to be deceitful to, as long as they believe that or they profess to believe it, they get on the evening news and even on formerly progressive websites like counterpunch, like common dreams, and even sad to say on Amy Goodman.
Now I will say this, Amy Goodman is the best, the very best on domestic developments.
I admire her greatly, but man, you know, if she buys the white helmets, if she buys all this stuff about Russiagate, well, I have to say without knowing, of course, that there are far too many people that succumb to the HWHW virus on the 9th of November at 2016 and have not recovered, HWHW Hillary would have won.
It couldn't be that she was a terrible candidate.
It couldn't be that nobody trusted her.
It couldn't be that the emails released by WikiLeaks, not by the Russians, but by WikiLeaks showed that she had stolen the nomination from Bernie Sanders.
It couldn't be any of that.
It had to be something else.
It had to be the Russians.
And therefore, we get Russiagate.
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All right.
Well, so tell me how impressed you are or not by the recent indictment of 12 members of the Russian GRU.
Mueller seems to say that he knows that the Russians did this.
He knows they gave the leak to WikiLeaks.
Yeah.
Well, Scott, pardon me for laughing because it's not really funny.
Um, the indictments rely primarily on a persona named Guccifer 2.0.
Now we say persona because sort of like a persona on the internet.
We don't know if it's a he or a she.
So we have to use non-sexist language describing Guccifer.
So he or she is a fraud.
Now, how could I say that?
McGovern doesn't know much about technical things like Bill Binney does.
Bill Binney was former technical director of NSA.
And so was Ed Loomis, also a former technical director of NSA.
NSA, of course, is the National Security Agency.
And they've looked at all the metadata that's available on Guccifer.
And most recently over the last couple of months, Bill has dug out more forensic proof.
And I use that word.
It's documentary proof that Guccifer manipulated data on two occasions, the 5th of July and the 1st of September 2016, is a provable prevaricator, a fraud.
So to the degree that the indictments rely on Guccifer 2.0, and they do largely rely on him or her or the persona, they're just as fraudulent as Guccifer 2.0 is himself.
Now, a year ago, Scott, on the 24th of July 2017, we, veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, after two weeks of really hard work, published a memorandum for the president saying, we don't know who Guccifer 2.0 is.
You may wish to ask the FBI.
No, we still don't know who he is or she is, but we know it's a fraud.
And to the degree they're relying on that, and to the degree this sacrosanct intelligence community assessment given to President-elect Trump on the 6th of January 2017, to the degree that was based on Guccifer, and it was, the whole thing is a charade.
Let me say one thing about that intelligence community assessment.
Jack Matlock, whom I used to work with when he was director of Soviet affairs at the State Department, and I was chief of the Soviet foreign policy branch, and who was responsible for getting me to Moscow for the signing of the ABM Treaty in 1972, and who was ambassador to Moscow and knows more about Russia than virtually anybody else that's still alive, he wrote a piece and said, I find out that it wasn't the intelligence community that said that there was a Russian interference.
It was NSA, FBI, CIA.
No, actually, it wasn't those either.
It was just handpicked analysts from those three agencies, only one of which has a substantive analytical capability, the CIA.
Why was the State Department cut out?
Why was the Defense Intelligence Agency, which knows more about the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service than anybody else, why were they not included in this?
Why was it only three agencies, and indeed, not three agencies, but three handpicked analysts from three agencies?
Why is it that they were excluded?
Why is it not, in any real sense, despite what the New York Times says every day, a community assessment?
It was not, and so that's a big deal.
So why was it composed?
Well, it's James Clapper that tells us that we had about 20 handpicked analysts.
Now, who handpicked them?
Oh, James Clapper.
Now, who's James Clapper?
Well, he's the guy that said proudly that he knows that the Russians are almost genetically driven to be deceitful, to lie, steal.
Hello?
So is he going to handpick analysts and say, well, you know, direct that Clapper.
We find that not only a little off the walls, but it's a little racist here.
Well, and this is a guy who lied us into Iraq War II when he was the head of the National Reconnaissance Office and pretended that the satellite intelligence verified that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when it wasn't true at all.
And then when he got caught lying, he tried to blame it all on Syria and said that Putin helped Saddam move all the chemical weapons to Syria, which was also a lie.
And he's more famous for lying under oath, perjuring himself before Congress and saying the NSA wasn't spying on every single one of us, which they were.
But I would say that two million dead Iraqis and Syrians from the aftermath of Iraq War II would be a worse scandal for Clapper.
For him to call anyone dishonest.
And then you got John Brennan, who backed al-Qaeda in Syria for five years, throwing around the T word.
These guys.
Well, yeah, Scott, for your for your listeners here, you can tell from John Brennan's rhetoric and actually clamber clappers as well.
They getting paid big bucks to be on TV in the evening, but they're running scared.
Well, look, even if all of their accusations were true, all this stuff happened on their watch.
Where was the FBI counterintelligence division when the redheaded Russian lady was hanging around with the NRA and getting favors from Republicans or whatever it was she supposedly accused of doing?
Where was the CIA and the FBI when this whole thing was happening?
So even if it was true, then their spin is is simply just CYA, right?
Well, it wasn't true.
So it's a kind of fool's errand to go further.
I will point out that I took myself to the hearing for a woman who was accused of espionage.
Now, from what I've seen, the FBI desperately needs some kind of success.
I've met this woman.
She's some low hanging fruit.
You can tell she's she's supposedly a deep cover spy, but she's sending all her messages to her handler by way of Twitter direct message.
I mean, come on, you took the words right out of my mouth.
And you know what?
I got another one, too.
Phil Giraldi wrote a piece, another former CIA officer, where he was talking about the indictment here and how it's just absolutely impossible to believe that the GRU ran this op the way it's described in that if if the GRU, in fact, was behind it, they would have been using standalone computers.
They'd have been using cutouts.
They'd have been doing everything by covert operation 101 in order to keep the thing deniable.
You know, the way that they portray it, like these guys are all just sitting around at GRU headquarters doing all this hacking and getting themselves caught is just nonsense.
He said it couldn't possibly be right.
Yeah, let's I think I need to say this to put perspective on all this.
I'm not saying or pretending or Phil Giraldi certainly isn't that the Russians don't hack.
They hack to a fairly well.
So do the Chinese.
After all, the Chinese got what, three, four million records of security procedures, security occurrences in all of us.
And we know the building in Shanghai where that was hacked from.
I mean, sometimes you can trace.
Well, you can always trace these things if they go over the network, if they go over the Internet.
OK, that's one lacuna in the Russian story.
There is no traceable stuff because there is no stuff.
OK, now, just to be clear, we are focused on the publication, the posting of the Democratic National Committee emails that Julian said he had.
He announced he had them on June 12th, 2016.
OK, and he said he was about to publish them.
Now, that's where the Russiagate story comes in, because two days later, this CrowdStrike operation, the cyber firm hired by Hillary Clinton, said, oh, there's been Russian hacking.
It's been Russian hacking.
We can prove it.
There's some Cyrillic here.
And the next day, Guccifer 2.0 arises out of nowhere and says CrowdStrike is exactly right because we did it.
We did it.
We're Guccifer 2.0.
OK, now what happened?
Not only is there no proof of that, but not even Barack Obama, the president of the United States until 20 January of 2017, two days before he left town.
OK, so on the 18th, he's at a press conference.
You know what he says?
He says, Russian hacking, Russian hacking, Russian hacking, because that's what he's trained to say.
But he also says, you know, quote, the conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to how Russian hacking got to WikiLeaks are inconclusive, period, end quote.
Whoa, you see a little gap there, Scott?
Oh, a little gap?
Inconclusive conclusions, OK?
Now, this is the 18th.
That's what?
Do the math.
On the 6th, a couple of weeks before, the CIA and everybody else told Obama, oh, no, no, no, this is our memo.
This is our intelligence community assessment, so-called, that they were conclusive.
So here's Obama protecting his rear end.
He's a lawyer.
He doesn't want to be entangled in any more of this stuff.
He's going out of town.
He says, well, I have to admit that the conclusions that were given to me on the 6th of January are inconclusive.
That's the big thing.
The big thing is how WikiLeaks got the emails from the Democratic National Committee.
And we know, we're convinced that this was done offline through a copy onto a external storage device like a thumb drive and gotten into the Ecuadorian embassy or one of Julian's partners discreetly.
And he worked over them and published them three days before the Democratic National Committee.
That's when the furor started about how to deflect attention from the content of those emails, which showed, please know this, which showed that Hillary stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders, pure and simple, to deflect attention from that by getting the mainstream press, all of them say, why did the Russians do this?
Why did the Russians do this?
Why did the Russians do it?
So once again, the metadata that we examine having to do with Guccifer 2.0 has nothing to do, nothing to do with how Julian Assange actually got those emails and published them on WikiLeaks.
They have everything to do with the false legend that Russia was hacking and secured those same emails.
Did Russia hack?
Of course they hacked it.
If the Russians didn't hack, the GRU boss should be sent to Siberia for God's sake.
Of course they hacked.
The question is whether the Russians were responsible for getting those DNC emails, those terribly indicting, I think they probably did have some effect on the election to WikiLeaks.
And the answer to that is, if they did, we would know about it.
Why?
Because NSA would have that.
NSA.
Let me add a point here, a couple of points.
First of all, Craig Murray, who I've interviewed and told me, and the Daily Mail got this wrong.
I think you and I have spoken about this before.
The Daily Mail said that he claimed to receive the leak personally, but that's not true.
But he did tell me that he met the person who did the leak and that this person is no way a Russian or a cutout for the Russians or anything like that.
And he also has written on his blog, as a former British ambassador, Craig Murray, has written on his blog this week that he still hasn't been questioned by the FBI.
No one has asked him anything about it.
I don't know that he'd say, but he has absolutely assured me 100% that he knows who the leaker is and the leaker ain't got a thing to do with Russia whatsoever.
And then I also wanted to point out a point that Scott Ritter made this week, which is that if you look at the Reality Winner document that she leaked to The Intercept, it's a color coded kind of PowerPoint slide.
And it shows where they actually accuse a GRU officer by name and the GRU.
The color coded line is, I guess, yellow.
And it goes back to the reference that this is an analyst's judgment, as opposed to this is a scientific fact that we can prove with ones and zeros, which would have got a green line, which would have been, you know, based on, in other words, NSA intercepts that prove the fact, right?
Like you said, if it went over the network, the NSA can rewind it and tell you whatever happened anywhere.
But that's apparently not where they got the conclusion that the GRU was behind this at all.
It was the best guess of an analyst.
And that was the way that they put it themselves in that document that supposedly was to prove all of this.
It doesn't prove it at all.
Scott Ritter, as usual, is right.
Now, it's important to know that NSA does not have the charter to do analysis.
That's CIA's job.
NSA is supposed to report the raw facts.
If there's a comment on the provenance of the facts or something else, not on the content, not how it should be interpreted.
So when you have an analyst opinion, that's not a not only kind of out of order, but it's also certainly not anything to hang your hat on.
So again, Scott Ritter is exactly right.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I want to give you a chance to talk about Daniel Ellsberg.
You mentioned to me that you just finished his new book, The Doomsday Machine.
But let me just real quick set up for that.
And you and I have spoken about this before.
People can check the archives and you can correct me if I'm wrong.
But all of this is America's fault.
Because H.W. Bush, when the Soviet Union dissolved itself without a shot being fired, promised that he would not expand NATO east of Germany.
And then Bill Clinton came and said, meh, I don't care.
I don't know what you're talking about.
And he started incorporating all of the former Warsaw Pact states and even tried to get, as far as the actual Soviet republics, to join NATO.
Including all the way to Russia's border in the Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
So Bill Clinton started that.
George Bush doubled down, expanded it even worse.
And then Barack Obama, of course, also expanded NATO during his time.
Trump continues this.
He's added two countries, Montenegro and Macedonia so far.
And then, of course, America picked this fight in Ukraine.
Overthrew the government of Ukraine twice in ten years.
In 2004 and in 2014.
And in 2014, they literally used Nazis to do it.
And the equivalent here would be if the Russians overthrew the government of Canada twice in ten years.
And then the second time, they used Nazis to do it.
But then, when the Quebeckers refused to recognize the new coup d'etat junta, they launch a war on terrorism and invade and attack and bomb and kill thousands of Quebeckers.
If Russia did that in Canada, we would nuke and kill every last Russian, period.
Barack Obama, Donald Trump, any American president would go to nuclear war before they let Russia screw around in Canada the way the USA has been screwing around in Ukraine and in the rest of Eastern Europe.
And you know what?
I'm a Texan.
I'm from here, not there.
But this is all Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama's fault.
I'm tired of them pretending that the Russians are the aggressors here when they're lying.
They're the aggressors.
Now, Scott, I read the New York Times every day, cover to cover, the Washington Post also.
How can you say those things?
I don't see any even hint of that in the New York Times.
Matter of fact, I heard that the National Security Archives had published the documents showing that we that we tricked Gorbachev and Szymon Nadze out of, well, we tricked them by saying that NATO would not process one inch east of the reunited Germany.
You know, what I'm saying here, being sarcastic, of course, in the beginning, is that even when the documents were published by the National Security Archive about a half year ago, the New York Times completely avoided mentioning them.
So everything you say is quite right.
The analogy you draw is not bad.
That's how we would have reacted to what they tried to do there.
So it's all a construct.
And once MH17 was down, and that was exactly four years ago, two days ago, four days ago, then the U.S. was able to pressure the Europeans to impose really, really harsh sanctions on the evidence, end quote, never made available to anyone that the Russians shot that plane down.
So it has a long history.
People who read the New York Times know very little of this.
And this is very serious.
When I go up to New York, talk to my old friends, they say, Ray, where do you get this stuff?
We don't see it in the New York Times.
So what I'm saying here is that the headline, instead of New York Times the day after the summit saying Trump sitting next to Putin throws doubt on U.S. intelligence, the headline should have been, whew, the doomsday clock has now been moved back from two minutes to midnight, five minutes to midnight.
And all I can say is that I have never read a more important book than Ellsberg's last, The Doomsday Machine.
And if you want to get a sense, it reads well.
If you want to get a sense of what all this really means and why people are out to put to kibosh on the sensible notion of talking to the Russians about this hair trigger alert that we're both on, which just by grace of God or pure dumb luck, we've escaped blowing up the planet, then they need to read this book and see how it reflects on what just went on in Helsinki and how if we don't talk to the Russians about these things, we're making it still worse.
And it's the people who see benefit, who profiteer on tension, who profiteer on a really bad, bad Putin, bad, bad Russia, who are putting to kibosh on this.
And so we have to be kind of balanced in looking at all this.
Is Trump a liar?
Of course he is.
But on this one count, he's being thwarted and he's right.
And the stakes, the stakes, if I have to mention this again, are the highest, the highest indeed for the preservation of the planet and the likelihood that my nine grandchildren will be able to live on this planet when they get to be my age.
All right, you guys, that is the great Ray McGovern.
He used to be the chief analyst of the CIA's Soviet division back in the day.
He was an analyst there for 27 years.
He's the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
He writes constantly at ConsortiumNews.com and AntiWar.com and his own website, RayMcGovern.com.
Thank you so much for your time again, sir.
Most welcome, Scott.
All right, y'all, that's it for the show.
Check me out at LibertarianInstitute.org, ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, Twitter.com, slash Scott Horton Show.
Appreciate it.
And buy my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
