All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio, and I'm happy to welcome back Ray McGovern.
He's a former CIA analyst for 27 years, co-founder of American, nope, sorry.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
I think they're all Americans and that goes without saying in there.
Anyway, he also writes for Robert Perry's consortiumnews.com.
Here's one at commondreams.org called General Keene, keen on attacking Iran.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Let me interject for a second and point out that Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity has a number of, I guess you would call them coalition analysts from Australia, from the UK, of course, and from Denmark.
So we're represented internationally and we have a pretty good collegium going there of former intelligence officers who are rather upset at what our intelligence profession has become.
Well, you know, speaking of which, when I talked with Seymour Hersh last week, he said that even he included the Germans, that all of our allies agree with the National Intelligence Council, which is apparently now 17 American intelligence agencies in their conclusion in the update to the Iran Nuclear NIE this year, that there is no secret nuclear weapons program in Iran, only the safeguarded civilian nuclear program that everybody knows about.
And I guess that's, you know, in some small part, at least due to efforts of groups like the VIPS and being willing and able to consistently contradict the war party over the years, I think you probably, Ray, are providing some cover for some people inside the intelligence community, don't you think?
Well, actually, we have been very encouraged by that small coterie of honest analysts who were responsible for that bottom up assessment throughout 2007, they struggled and finally came out with that estimate, which said, quote, Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon in mid 2003, end quote.
Now, that's that's the judgment.
Right.
Well, now, after four years of searching, and as Hersh writes, with JSOC running around with radiation detectors hidden in bricks and street signs and and using, I don't know, lasers or something to measure the weight of trucks driving to and fro to see if they're excavating and these kinds of things, they've got bupkis, nothing, zilch.
Yeah.
Sai has done a wonderful service here to us all, pointing out chapter and verse of the extraordinary efforts made to determine that there was some sort of secret nuclear program on the overt side.
But most people have missed because surprise, surprise, the New York Times and the Washington Post have not given it any reporting.
The head of the National Intelligence Framework, the National Intelligence Director, James Clapper, testified formally to Congress in March of this year, saying there's been no appreciable change in our judgment of November 2007 that Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon in mid 2003 and has not resumed.
Now, you wouldn't know that from listening to the people like General Keene, who I had the pleasure, is probably not the word.
I had the duty to go listen to him at my 50th reunion from Fordham College over the weekend.
I was appalled, although not terribly surprised.
And that's why I put pen to paper, so to speak, and put that article out on various websites, starting with Consortium News dot com.
All right.
Now, Jack Keene, he's the guy that came up with the whole let's surge into Iraq.
And originally they made it seem like Fred Kagan over there at the AEI had come up with it.
But really, I guess it was Bob Woodward that said not was General Jack Keene, who was the guy that said rather than go with the Baker Commission establishment report saying, let's start withdrawing from Iraq back then, that they at the end of 2006, that they would instead double down.
That's exactly right.
There was an emerging consensus at the end of 2006 when things were really bad in Iraq.
And General Casey, commander of our ground troops there, and General Abizade, head of CENTCOM, again testified formally before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
And they said the situation is pretty bad, but please, please, there's one thing we don't need is more troops, because if you send us more troops, the Iraqi politicians will never, ever get it through their head that they have to work things out for themselves.
So thanks very much for all the support, but please, no troops.
At the same time, and this isn't, again, something that really hasn't been given much publicity, who other than Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, he was going wobbly on the war.
He was listening to his field commanders.
And before the midterm election in 2006, wrote a memo, we have a memo, to the president saying, you know, it's not working.
What we're doing in Iraq is not working.
We've got to do something completely different.
Listen to the generals.
Now, at that time, as you rightly point out, James Baker, I mean, he's sort of a member of the Bush family, for Pete's sake.
He was he was Secretary of State and National Security Advisor.
He's the lawyer for every oil company in the world.
Yeah.
And, you know, he probably pretty much got the election for George W.
Bush by going down to Florida and doing all those shenanigans.
Anyhow, he comes in as part of this very celebrated, very senior, very wise man sort of Iraq study group co-headed by the Democrat Lee Hamilton, who's always trotted out for such things.
And their conclusion was, for Pete's sake, worst thing you can do, send more troops.
Now, you've got to make sure the Iraqis know this is it.
We've given it enough support.
They have to get their own house in order.
No, no, I meant all that.
OK, but now I wasn't in the White House anymore, but I can just see how the discussion goes.
Here's Bush and Cheney.
Oh, God, you know, if we don't send any more troops, we're going to lose this war on our watch.
There's got to be some way that we can avoid that.
So what do they do?
They go to the American Enterprise Institute and they find the willing Jack Keane, who had been deputy chief of army staff, and they find all the Kagan's.
So Keane writes a memo with Francis Kagan saying, there's a way to have victory in Iraq.
All we have to do is send in 30,000 more troops.
Now, I mean, this is, by the way, right at the time when the Sunni insurgency had basically lost the civil war because the Bata Brigade and the Saudis had won it with our help.
And they then turned on the al-Qaeda in Iraq guys on a dime, turn them off like a light switch and were bribed by Petraeus into no longer fighting the Americans anymore.
Then they had no one to fight.
So they picked a fight with Muqtada al-Saudi, who they just won the civil war for, and they fought the Saudis for most of a year for no good reason whatsoever, except to get a bunch of people killed.
He's the kingmaker there right now.
That's not overstated, actually.
Anyhow, getting back to the situation that Bush and Cheney faced, they got this, quote, expert, end quote, advice from Jack Keane, who said, look, you put 30,000 more troops in there, we'll call it a surge.
We'll get rid of Rumsfeld and General Casey and General Abusaid, and we'll just diss the Baker-Hamilton report, put those guys in, and what will happen?
Well, what we can do is put most of them in Baghdad.
We need to separate the Shiites from the Sunni.
And the bottom line here, Scott, is that Baghdad went, within 2007, from a predominantly Sunni city into an overwhelmingly Shia city.
That's called ethnic cleansing, and that's what the bulk of our 30,000 troops enabled.
So if we're proud of that, if that's why, if the violence went down a little bit because there were no more mixed neighborhoods, there had always been mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad where Sunnis and Shia had earlier been able to get along with one another.
If there's no more violence because the lights went off, and we know that literally from satellite photography, Scott, the lights went off in the Shia neighborhood, in the Sunni neighborhoods, the Sunnis were dispersed to the four winds, the Shias took over.
That's ethnic cleansing.
I'll hold it right there, Ray.
I'm sorry, but we have to go out and take this break, Ray, but we'll be right back after this with Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, ConsortiumNews.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Ray McGovern, veteran intelligence professional for sanity, which is a lot to ask, obviously, in this day and age.
He writes for ConsortiumNews.com.
We're talking about how they got rid of Rumsfeld because he wanted out of the Iraq war and the Baker Commission report and all that, and how it was General Jack Keane and fat-necked Fred Kagan over at the American Enterprise Institute came up with a surge plan to finish so-called cleansing the Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad and win the total victory for the majority Shia and their forces, primarily the Bata Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council, the old Hakeem clan, and the Saudi army.
And I can't help but go over and over this point, that David Finkel wrote a book about it, Ray.
It's called The Good Soldiers, and it's all about, and these are the guys from the collateral murder video.
This is the brigade over there, Ethan McCord and Joshua Stieber, both of whom have been on the show.
Their group was fighting the Saudis in east Baghdad throughout the surge.
That was a big deal.
That was their job.
Meanwhile, in the rest of Baghdad, the rest of the U.S. army was fighting for the Saudis, helping them win the civil war against what was left of the Sunni population of that city.
And the guys in The Good Soldiers, including their war criminal boss, Colonel Kozlarich, who ordered, and I got two sworn witnesses on this show, both Stieber and McCord, both say he ordered them to kill the Saudis.
Both Stieber and McCord both say he ordered them 360 degree fire on innocents if a bomb goes off, if a roadside bomb goes off anywhere.
They both say they shot low or high and refused to obey that order, as did a lot of people.
But anyway, Kozlarich, all the way up to him, and the entire group in that book, including I think the Washington Post reporter, I think he kind of got it, David Finkel, they didn't even get it.
They didn't even really understand that they were fighting a war in east Baghdad against the people that the rest of the army was fighting a war for.
I mean, you look who's in charge of Iraq now.
It's Muqtada al-Sadr is the power behind Nouri al-Maliki.
Yeah, he's back.
And this is David Petraeus' great victory that was the basis of deploying the whole counterinsurgency strategy nonsense in Afghanistan and escalating that war and sustaining that war.
Sure.
Most people forget that this sainted person, Petraeus, I call him Petraeus Ex Machina after an old Latin expression.
In any case, they forget that he was waiting in the wings to take the place of all these generals, General Casey, General Abizaid, the Baker and Hamilton Report, Rumsfeld himself.
He was waiting in the wings with his nine rows of medals.
He's since given himself another row to go in there and do the bidding of Bush and Cheney for this so-called surge.
Now, they needed another person.
With Rumsfeld going wobbly on the war, this was bad news.
And so what Bush did was invite a fellow named Bobby Gates.
I know him well.
He used to work for me in the 70s.
Bush invited him to Crawford, Texas and said, Look, Bobby, everybody's gone wobbly on this war.
It's terrible.
But we have this guy, Petraeus.
He is a handsome guy.
He's got nine rows of medals.
He's going to do the work for you.
All you need to do is go out to Baghdad and cashier, well, not cashier, tell Casey he can have a sinecure as, well, look like an army chief of staff.
But you do need to go down to Tampa to tell, obviously, he's out of there.
He's got to retire.
That's all you have to do.
And then you can become secretary of defense.
And Bobby Gates stroked his chin, and I could just see him.
I said, I could be secretary of defense.
Yeah, you can.
He said, it's a deal.
And so he sent Petraeus out on his merry way.
Gates went to Baghdad, cashiered, brought Casey home to be army chief of staff, cashiered, obviated.
And what was the final outcome of all this?
The surge lasted from February 15, 2007, until July 2008.
During 2007 alone, more than 900 U.S. troops were killed.
That was more than any other month in recent memory.
During 2008, it continued.
How about Iraqis?
Well, we don't count Iraqis, okay?
Tens of thousands.
Now, what was the upshot of the whole thing?
Well, great success.
Bush and Cheney rode it off into the western sunset, not having lost the war.
What's the situation now?
Muqtada al-Sadr is back, okay?
He's back with a vengeance.
And the rest of the situation in Iraq is falling apart.
Witness the fact that, sadly, just yesterday, we lost five more U.S. troops to a rocket attack on a well-fortified U.S. Army base.
It's getting bad again.
And we will, indeed, pull most of our troops out.
But there will be bedlam in the wake of that.
And we're doing all we can.
That is, Bobby Gates and the rest of them, you know, Admiral Mullen.
I mean, how pitiable.
Every three weeks, he issues a statement saying to the Iraqi military, look, now, if you want us to stay past the deadline at the end of the year, you've got to tell us soon, because it costs a lot of money to move all the tanks out and then have to move them back in.
So, could we hear soon, if you want us to stay?
I mean, the whole deal is the permanent military bases there and the influence that gives, and, of course, the control of whatever oil resources can be opened to the West.
Well, now, a couple of things here.
First of all, we're pretty short on time.
We've got about four or five minutes.
I want to get you to talk about the current narrative about Iran here that you heard from General Keane the other day, who's, of course, central to that surge narrative.
And I forgot the other thing.
So, why don't you go ahead and address that?
Well, the most important thing is Iran.
It's back on the front burner.
And Keane is a good indication of what's afoot.
When I called him on his lies about Iran developing a nuclear weapon, he said, well, you know what, Ray?
He said, there's evidence that was even available before the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007.
There's evidence that they are indeed working on a nuclear weapon.
And I looked at him, and I lost it.
You know, I don't usually lose it, Scott, as you know, but I said, that's a lie.
And it is a lie, but it's the kind of lie that gets a whole bunch more people killed.
And you can see now, even the head of the Israeli External Intelligence Agency has seen critical public saying, look, there are crazies here in Tel Aviv that would like to divert attention from everything else that's going on in the Middle East by starting a war with Iran, with the full thought that President Obama will be in like Flynn because he can't face up to the Jewish lobby.
And so, it's getting pretty dicey.
Will it happen?
I think the chances are less than even, but that will be no thanks to people like General Jack Keane, I'm sorry to say, an alumnus of Fordham University.
Well, and you know, here's the thing about all of this Iran nuclear narrative.
You know, you and I are just obviously right for the fact that we're still having this discussion in 2011.
If the war party was right about Iran, they'd have had nukes in 2003, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and all the way through here.
They're always on the verge of having nukes.
And the IAEA continues to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material.
The National Intelligence Council, the unanimous opinion of the spooks up there, keeps coming out with updates to their conclusion that, yep, they still aren't making nukes.
We have no evidence of any secret program.
Their open program is for electricity only and not a weapons danger, and on and on.
And the other side, all they have is slogans and rhetoric and assertions with no evidence.
No explanation, no details, just a bunch of everybody-knows-that, like idiocracy.
Yeah, you know, Scott, let me introduce an element that isn't often discussed here.
And that is, you know, we talk about these mullahs, we talk about these Islamists, and we say, aw, they take their religion very seriously.
Well, if that's the case, and some of them, of course, do, especially at the high reaches of the mullahdom, whatever you call that, if that's true, they have issued official proclamations that it is anti-Islamic to use or develop a nuclear weapon.
Now, everybody says, aw, that's just propaganda.
But you know what?
They had a chance to use weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological, when the Iraqis, with our help, used such weapons against them.
And guess what?
They didn't.
Okay?
So the proof is in the pudding.
You can't just dismiss this aspect that the mullahs have said that it's anti-Islamic to use weapons of mass destruction and then negate the fact or avoid the reality that even when they had them, they didn't use them because of that stricture.
And so there's that additional element that if you're going to say they're serious about their ideological stance, then you have to take that into account as well.
It's another reason why, despite how hard we've looked for evidence of a nuclear weapons program, as distinct from a nuclear power program, we've come up a cropper and Cy Hersh has done a wonderful job in showing that chapter in verse.
Right, absolutely.
All right, well, we're all out of time.
We'll have to leave it right there.
It's Ray McGovern, veteran intelligence professional for Sanity.
You can find him at ConsortiumNews.com.
Thanks, Ray.
You're most welcome.
