I'm not a tool guide anymore, as if I ever was before.
I took a look at all the signs, then rolled it over in my mind.
A thesis I could not believe.
Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
What was I thinking of?
Alright, and now look, the truth is that Ray McGovern is a former CIA guy.
But I like him anyway.
He's an honest guy, and he was an analyst.
He was never one of the throat-slitting, hunter-killer guys.
And he's an honest guy, and he's the co-founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
He's a writer at ConsortiumNews.com with the great Robert Perry.
Which, hey, if Robert Perry likes him, that's another count for him in my book.
And, of course, we feature much of what he writes at Original.
AntiWar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you?
Thank you, and thank you for the good references.
Well, you know, I've been talking to you for years and years on this show, and I don't necessarily always agree with everything you say, but certainly I'm sure it would be even more true the other way around there.
But, of course, you've always proven yourself to be an honest guy, an honest analyst, and a hell of a piece, Nick, too.
And I appreciate it.
This honesty thing and Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which I helped found, is a real niche cottage industry here in Washington.
We've got the thing cornered.
There's no real challenge to us.
As long as we tell it like it is, we're the only show in town.
So it's kind of invigorating, but by the same token, it's a little bit daunting.
Yeah.
Well, as George Bush used to like to say, it's hard work, but we're making progress.
And I think in that case, in our case, it's true, Ray, that we're making progress.
I like to believe that, for example, this latest document dump from WikiLeaks is going to help to solidify opinion in America that Ray McGovern's been right all along, that this war is a corrupt and already failed project, and it's time to call it off, post-haste.
What do you think?
Well, I sure hope so.
It's going to take a missing link here.
Let me explain what I think I mean here.
You probably would agree with me when I say that the fourth estate, the media in this country, is defunct.
We saw a recent manifestation of that when all those stenographers who pretend to be White House press took down notes from Gibbs and then the next morning put up on all the headlines, nothing new, nothing new from WikiLeaks.
We know all that stuff, and don't get excited about it.
We'll tell you it's nothing new.
It's just really amazing.
Anyhow, that's the fourth estate.
It's defunct.
But the good news, the good news is that there's a fifth estate.
It's called the Ether.
It's not susceptible of control by governments or corporations.
There's no advertising.
It's free.
All you need to know is how to put in your URL the right words.
For example, collateral murder.
Put it up there, folks.
See what comes down.
A WikiLeaks gun barrel video showing a turkey shoot, young U.S. soldiers in an Apache helicopter gunship having a turkey shoot with Iraqi civilians in Baghdad during the famous surge on the 12th of July, 2007.
Killed 12 people.
Wounded severely, two small children.
And their comment was, well, you shouldn't bring children into the zone of fire.
It's the middle of Baghdad, for Pete's sake.
Anyhow, that's what WikiLeaks can do.
And, of course, this dump of incredible volume of things has already informed the conversation in a way that could not have been done otherwise.
They did it in a very clever way.
They sort of co-opted the New York Times and the Guardian in London and Der Spiegel.
And, of course, you know, it's interesting, the New York Times dutifully went to the White House and said, oh, gosh, you know, we have all this stuff.
And, you know, we ordinarily wouldn't go near it.
But Spiegel has it and the Guardian has it.
And I'm sure that the guy, Julian Osanji, will tell the world that he gave it to us, too.
And we repressed it.
So, please.
And before you go any further with that, I actually have a piece by Michael Calderon here in front of me, which I don't know.
It's reprinted at Yahoo News.
I'm not exactly sure which news service it came from originally.
But it does have a quote here from Baquette.
And then it's also talking about Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmidt.
I don't know Baquette's first name.
Anyway, he's one of these New York Times guys.
Dean Baquette, New York Times Washington bureau chief, Dean Baquette.
And then also Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmidt, it says, went to the White House last week to discuss what they planned on publishing.
And then it says, quote, I did in fact go to the White House and lay out for them what we had, Baquette said.
We did it to give them the opportunity to comment and react.
They did.
They also praised us for the way we handled it, for giving them a chance to discuss it and for handling the information with care and for being responsible.
Boy, if that doesn't reveal the degree to which the major media and especially the New York Times defers their judgment on every issue to the people they're supposed to be critically covering, Ray, I just don't know what would.
Yeah, the folks from The Guardian made it very clear that the White House was pushing on an open door there.
The Guardian and The Times and Spiegel all agreed that they would take out names, take out anything on their own initiative, take out anything that would have the remotest chance of endangering troops or anybody else.
And so here's The Times pushing on that open door and they go in.
I'm not so down on Mazzetti and those folks for doing that.
If it had to do with names, would this really prejudice this fellow's future in the agency or something like that?
But it's part of a syndrome.
And the worst, the most egregious example of that was James Risen.
And when he found out through his great contacts in this town that NSA had reversed its first commandment, which had always been since 1975, thou shalt not eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant.
When he found out that Michael Hayden over there at the NSA said, yes, sir, when Bush told him to eavesdrop on all of us without a court warrant, The New York Times went to the White House.
This was in the early fall, September of 2004.
And guess what?
They agreed, The New York Times did, to suppress that information, even though, well, ostensibly because there was an election coming up in November 2004.
And so that was suppressed.
Now, a year later, in December 2005, Risen's book is in galleys.
It's about to be on the bookstand.
And he tells his superiors there in the Times, you know, it's going to be a little embarrassing.
I work for you guys.
And if you don't put up a story about this, it's going to be highly embarrassing.
And so all of a sudden, Sulzberger and a couple of the other guys go down to the White House and say, you know, sorry, Mr. Bush, but we've got to do this.
And Bush says, no, you can't do that.
And then they say, well, we're sorry, but we held it for 14 months, 15 months.
We can't do it anymore.
And they published it.
Now, a little side story there.
Before they published it, like the day after they decided they'd have to publish it, Rush Holt, the representative from around Princeton, goes to NSA and interviews General Alexander.
OK, Keith Alexander.
Now, who is he?
Well, he was the head of NSA at the time.
Now he's head of all this cyber warfare, offensive, defensive.
Anyhow, he must have made really quite an impression, right?
Rush Holt sits on the House Intelligence Committee.
OK.
His purview was to oversee the activity of NSA.
He says to General Alexander, you fellows are not monitoring the conversations of American citizens without a court warrant, are you?
And Alexander says, oh, please, Congressman Holt.
Of course not.
Well, what Alexander didn't know, the White House looked at the Kellerman Times.
It says the White House had already been told that the New York Times was going to break this story in just a week, which they did.
Holt was up in arms, but there was very little he could do about it.
He placed his superior there, the House Intelligence Chairman.
He just didn't want to get involved.
All right.
Hold it right there, Ray.
We've got to go after the break, man.
We'll be right back after this, y'all.
It's Ray McGovern from ConsortiumNews.com.
You're listening to the best Liberty-oriented audio streamed around the clock, on the air and online.
This is the Liberty Radio Network at LRN.fm.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, ConsortiumNews.com and AntiWar.com.
Now, Ray, you make a great comparison or you cite a great example of the New York Times deference to whatever administration is in power.
I think that's actually a direct quote from one of the Washington Post guys.
We're a mouthpiece for whoever's in power.
But this is no less of an example here with this.
You're right.
I mean, the New York Times guys, from their point of view, had no choice but to run with this because it was going to be in the Guardian or Spiegel anyway.
But we all see what they did, and they led the way for the entire rest of the American media.
And they said, oh, we did learn something new here, and that is that no matter the fact that we're on the side of the angels and everything that our wonderful generals and their enlisted men below them do in Afghanistan is pure and good and true and wonderful.
Those dastardly Pakistanis have stabbed us in the back, and those Iranians, you know they're supplying the landmines that are killing our guys, and they must be behind Hekmatyar, our old friend, and everybody else we have a problem with over there.
It's all because of these neighbors.
Can you imagine foreigners intervening in Afghan affairs?
That's who's responsible for our failure in Afghanistan.
What do you make of that?
Well, it's half true.
The Iranian part is not true, but the Pakistani part is true, and you're right, Scott.
We have to give a little credit to the New York Times because of all the things they could have featured out of this voluminous data.
They picked the real story, and that is that Pakistan does not share our interest in defeating the Taliban.
As a matter of fact, Pakistan, to whom we give a billion dollars a year, uses some of that money to arm, equip, and lead the Taliban in struggles against our forces.
This comes through in black and white in all these authoritative, actually real army records.
They're not sanitized or anything like that.
What comes through...
Well, I wouldn't say they're really all that authoritative.
I mean, in volume, I'm not saying I dispute the larger narrative there, but these are all basically...many of these things are kind of second-hand reports from the field.
You know, Osama bin Laden is in Quetta every month, giving money to suicide bombers and whatever.
Well, some of it, a good deal of it, is first-hand.
And one of the main conclusions is that the most important accomplice of the Taliban is the Pakistani intelligence service.
And, small wonder, they created the Taliban.
Now, why would they want to be running the Taliban for purposes of U.S. policy?
They don't want the Indians to surround them.
Yeah.
So, you know, for Hillary Clinton to go running to Islamabad or to Kabul and say, you know, you Pakistanis, don't be afraid of the Indians.
The Indians are very nice.
I just came from New Delhi.
They're very nice people.
Don't worry about the Indians.
Worry about the terrorists, you know.
Well, the whole game in Afghanistan for the Pakistanis, and specifically for their intelligence service, is to make sure that they don't let India get an overwhelming influence in Afghanistan, as India has enjoyed in the past.
And how do they do that?
They support the Taliban.
What do they use?
They use the money that we give them every year, and they use their intelligence service to not only be present, and this comes through in the material, not only be present when insurgent commanders, so-called, hold war councils, but giving specific orders to carry out suicide bombings, assassinations.
There's one report that one of these Pakistani intelligence folks was there advocating an attempt on the life of Hamid Karzai.
Now, that's about as direct as you want to get in terms of directing and influencing the insurgents, so-called, that they were supposed to be fighting against.
So if there were any doubt ever that we might be able to prevail or win or whatever those things mean in Afghanistan, this is not going to be possible.
Well, Ray, I mean, the thing is this.
You know, listeners to this show are already familiar with this narrative and have been for years about Pakistani intervention on behalf of the Afghan Taliban, just like we're talking about.
What's really the news here is that the New York Times is finally making an issue out of it, and I guess I don't mind if the lesson is what you just said, that, okay, look, we're in a situation we can't win here.
Our puppet government in Pakistan cannot help but work against us in Afghanistan because that's how different our interests are in this way and that, and so maybe it's a failed project and we need to give up.
On the other hand, if all it means is everything we do is right but it's all Pakistan's fault, then that to me means that we're moving closer toward the Robert Kagan, Michael O'Hanlon view of the world, which is that, you know what, we need to just go ahead and invade Pakistan, seize their nuclear weapons and spread this war further.
Yeah.
Well, they've done a lot of or advocated a lot of crazy things, Scott.
I think their priority would be Iran rather than Pakistan.
Well, and as Chris Floyd points out in his blog, there's just as much propaganda about Iran in here.
That's a major part of this document dump is that it's everything the guys at FrontPageMag ever wanted to dig through and point fingers at whoever they like.
Well, that's precisely what I'm saying.
When you know that Washington is interested in any little snippet of information that Iran is doing dastardly things anywhere, particularly in Afghanistan, you're going to serve that up as a lieutenant or whatever and get audits for it.
The reason I try to contrast Pakistan and Iran is that Pakistan is not going to be invaded or conquered in any way.
Pakistan has, if you put the population of Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq altogether, you come up 40 million short of the population in Pakistan.
Not only that, as you've already mentioned, they have a nuclear weapon.
So the question really is, does our policy make sense in terms of the overwhelming need to tamp down terrorism in Pakistan instead of goading it on, instead of creating more terrorists?
In that sense, the whole policy is counterproductive.
Each drone that shoots up a Pakistani family, you've got 10 families that are going to come after us.
And one of them ended up in Times Square, as is well known.
Well, now, I do have a story from the New York Times here, and one of many about these war logs, Ray.
It's called, View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan.
And I just wanted to point out a couple of things here real quick.
About a third of the way down, quarter of the way down, there are fleeting, even taunting reminders of how the war began, and occasional references to Osama bin Laden, which I just think that's funny.
But then here's the not funny part, but it's exactly my point and yours part, I know.
And this is the New York Times talking, I think it's from today.
Nope, from two days ago, actually, the 26th.
It says, the reports portray a resilient, canny insurgency that has bled American forces through a war of small cuts.
The insurgents set the war's pace, usually fighting on ground of their own choosing, and then slipping away.
And then, you know, you or I or whoever can finish up with, and all they have to do is not cease to exist, and they win.
Well, that's right.
You know, it's amazing how, well, I suppose, you know, Petraeus was in high school during Vietnam, so was McChrystal.
It's amazing that they think they can learn out of books what most of us learn, some of us at least, in Vietnam.
There was a famous colonel that went to Hanoi to negotiate the final removal of the rest of the U.S. troops, and he famously said to his North Vietnamese colonel counterpart, he says, well, you have to admit, you have to admit that you never beat us in a pitched battle.
And the colonel looked at him and he said, well, he said, you know, that may be true.
It is also irrelevant.
And that's the case here.
We had Bobby Gates saying something like that two years ago.
Oh, they never beat us in a direct engagement.
They don't have to.
They will be flitting away from places like Barsha and Kandahar if, God forbid, we decide to, quote, conquer that part of Afghanistan.
And they'll slip away and they'll come back.
And everybody knows that we're leaving.
Maybe not next year, the year after, we will be leaving.
And that is the overarching reality against which these native Afghans who don't like foreigners in their country plan.
Well, now, so what's it like there in D.C.?
You know, the Pentagon Papers comparison comes out everywhere and everybody talks about why it is like the Pentagon Papers or why it's not like the Pentagon Papers.
And I guess the real narrative of the Pentagon Papers that I understand, which happened before I was born, forgive me, but I read Dan Ellsberg's book, Secrets.
Everybody go out and get it.
It's great.
Basically, I think the lesson was that the critics' point of view finally became solidified among the American people as a whole.
That is, that Lyndon Johnson had been dishonest all along, that the war was basically a lost cause, that the South Vietnamese government didn't have the legitimacy to stand, etc.
And that basically it became more true to the general population.
And as Dan Ellsberg said earlier on the show today, you know, Nixon really blew it when he tried to stop the New York Times and the Washington Post from printing the Pentagon Papers.
It just gave them all that much more prominence.
But so I wonder what is going to be the effect of this thing in D.C. or even in terms of the general public?
Do you think that this is going to help push us to some kind of turning point here, Ray?
Not unless people like you and I beat the drums and make sure that we find some ways to get this out to the American people at large.
Here in official Washington, there's great denial.
We heard it yesterday, the day before.
Nothing new in here.
We knew all that stuff before the president decided in December.
And besides, this is a new set of months here, and we're going to prevail.
So the problem is the stenographers there, the Washington Press, repeat that kind of stuff.
And we have to make sure that the good news, namely the availability of the WikiLeaks and the incredible material that they make available to all of us, that we take advantage of the differences there between now and when Dan Ellsberg had to spend months and months and months Xeroxing the Pentagon Papers.
Now all you've got to do is push a button, and it's out there.
And not only that, but the New York Times, the Guardian, and Spiegel will have no alternative but to report this because it will be so easily accessible.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that back during Ellsberg's time, we had a free press.
We had the Watergate practice.
We had people who could see the reality, and people who had skin in the game.
We had congressmen, senators who served in Vietnam, or whose sons did, or whose uncles.
So we had some personal involvement.
Now with this volunteer army and what amounts to a poverty draft, you have young people who can't find a job, economic opportunity, or an education in the inner city or in towns of less than 50,000 around our country.
And those are the people we're sending to these places for cannon fodder.
And nobody that I talk to in the more posh parts of the suburbs here in Washington knows anybody, much less has anybody, in the battle there.
So that's the uphill part of this thing.
That's the bad news.
But the good news, and I think it overshadows all of this, is that there's a fifth estate.
It's called the Ether, and it's not controllable by government, corporations, or anybody else.
And I applaud Julian Assange for being enterprising enough to find clever ways to get it out there.
All we need to do is tell people how to plug in.
All right, everybody.
That's Ray McGovern.
And he uses that Ether very effectively himself at original.antiwar.com, slash McGovern, and of course at consortiumnews.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show again, Ray.
You're welcome, Scott.
I sure appreciate it.
And thank you also to Chaos Radio Austin, Liberty Radio Network, and antiwar.com, and my producer Angela Keaton for putting together this show and helping get it out there for people to hear.
