All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
It's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas.
We're here every Monday through Friday from 11 to 1 Texas time for Antiwar Radio.
Our first guest today is Ray McGovern.
He's a regular over at Antiwar.com slash McGovern.
You can also read what he writes at Consortium News.
For 27 years, he was an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, provided the morning briefings to Vice President Bush back in the Reagan years, and is the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which is asking a lot these days, I think.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
Thanks, Scott.
I've got to tell you, your phone sounds so good.
Did a radio show host buy you a phone and send it to you over the FedEx there?
No, but I took your advice, and I'm using a handset, no less, from the kitchen.
There you go.
Your kitchen phone is awesome.
I'm glad it works better.
Yes, yes.
Sounds good.
All right, so let's get right to important stuff here.
You have this article here, President Elects Queries to Briefers.
This is about, I guess, what somebody brought up to the idea that, hey, what if it was your job to do the President's daily brief for Barack Obama?
What would you tell him?
I thought, well, that's a pretty good breaking off point, Ray.
At least, if you can't give us the whole rundown and all the details right off the bat here, at least try to tell us your order of importance, the top issues that you think Barack Obama needs to know about, and what he needs to know about them, to some degree.
When I was asked to do that, I felt really enthused and thought I would do my own little worldwide briefing, but on second thought, it seemed to me that not only would that be a little bit ambitious, but that what people need to know is that these morning briefings are a two-way street.
Not only were they used to inform the President, or President Elect in this case, but they were also used to give the President or President Elect a chance to ask his own questions and do his own tasking.
That particular day, as I was writing, the New York Times finally fessed up and in their lead story said, in effect, that, hey, we're all wrong.
It was really the Georgians that started that war.
Isn't that funny?
I read articles, other articles in other places, I forget if it was Businessweek or something that said, how did the West entirely get the whole Georgia story wrong?
I just thought, wow, do these people really not read Antiwar.com?
How do you do your job trying to run the New York Times if you don't check Antiwar.com for what the truth is?
You don't even know how to lie correctly.
Yeah, well, that's professional naivete.
Yeah, I guess so.
Gosh, how could we have gotten it so wrong?
Well, no surprise that they got it so wrong, but it was a surprise and frankly a happy one to see them kind of correct the story and have it lead off the paper.
They usually bury it on, you know, page 17.
So that was one thing I suggested that Obama would like to say to the briefer, look, tell me the story.
Who started this war and why?
And that would be a very enlightening story.
I think I know most of the answers to that.
It would be very interesting to see if you could get the straight scoop from the briefer.
And then that could really serve as an excuse, I guess they would call it, a decent reason that he could back off some of his heated rhetoric against Russia during the campaign.
Oh, wow.
I just found out in the New York Times.
Exactly.
And, you know, the Russians are watching all this very closely.
And this is very important.
I mean, they I know the Russians pretty well.
It was when my graduate degree was in and when I started out with the agency analyzing the Soviet Union, they care a lot about what happens on their southern border, their soft underbelly and what was happening there with the with the encouragement of some people in the White House.
I won't tell you who, but it's initials are Dick Cheney and the fellow who worked for McCain, Randy Sherman.
They were telling us, Sakhishvili, yeah, go ahead, tweak, tweak the nose of the Russian bear.
We'll be right behind you.
You know, Sakhishvili didn't know how far behind it'd be.
And so he did it, dumb, dumb fellow that he is.
And of course, the Russians reacted in an entirely predictable way.
McCain, interestingly enough, thought that to be a plus, because then he could stand up and say, hey, you know, this is terrible.
The Russian bear is getting getting aggressive again, and I'm the guy to handle that.
Well, in fact, it did help him for a few days at least.
So it was a calculation.
But the Russians, you know, you look at it from the Russian point of view.
That was it.
And what was really interesting is they came down very hard, not only on us, but on the Israelis.
And that was the seventh, eighth of August when Sakhishvili sent his rockets and everything on to that city.
And starting on the 9th of August, if you look at the public statements, the public statements from Israel and from the United States on the dangers of Iran getting a nuclear weapon and on the Iranian interference in Iraq, they almost disappeared.
And you know, we analysts would look at these things.
Clearly, what happened is the Russians said, look, don't even think don't even think, number one, of using Georgian airfields to attack Iran.
And number two, just don't even think of attacking Iran in any case, because, you know, it's right.
It's right in our neighborhood.
We're not going to sit still for it.
And finally, finally, they scared the Israelis and they scared us as well.
It's really ironic to be thinking of the deterrent effect of what used to be the Soviet Union on our own reckless actions.
But I am grateful for the fact that they finally woke up and said, look, enough of this stuff.
No attack on Iran.
So that was a biggie.
And that was really, really important.
And so it was important to get the story about Georgia correct.
Now, let me understand this right.
I had read Arnaud de Burgrave wrote that thing in the U.P.
I.
Israel of the Caucuses, where he talked about how Israel had, I guess, been given or had created some airstrips there and that they were thinking of attacking Iran from Georgia.
But you're saying that you think that was part of the Russians decision making in deciding to go ahead and cross the mountains and defend South Ossetia, was that that would be kind of a game changer, a deal breaker in regards to an attack on Iran?
Well, it's a little more subtle the way I'm trying to explain it here.
All right.
The Israelis and we were training Georgian troops up to the hills.
The Israelis were selling them all kinds of advanced weaponry.
There were also these airfields that were in question as to whether the Israelis might want to use those in an attack on Iran.
I don't know about that.
There are a lot of things that militate against that interpretation.
What I do know is that when Saakashvili started to attack South Ossetia, that was it for the Russians.
They didn't want Georgia to even be thinking about joining NATO.
They didn't want Ukraine to be thinking about that.
They were upset by the missiles in Poland and Czech Republic.
They were irate at our recognition of Kosovo.
They had all these grievances bound up and finally Putin told Medvedev, look, that's it.
We're going to throw down the gauntlet here on the Americans and the Israelis.
And it was that that I think put a possible attack on Iran off the table.
That plus a couple of other factors like the financial disaster, the opposition of senior U.S. military figures, and not least the grassroots support of an offensive which, and this is remarkable, defeated an AIPAC-drafted resolution in both houses of Congress, which would have amounted to a recommendation that the president blockade Iran.
Both of those things were defeated.
First time in recent memory that I can remember an AIPAC-drafted resolution being defeated, but clearly grassroots people told those congressmen and senators, look, two years from now, you want to be in a position like Hillary Clinton of defending your vote for an expanded war?
Think about that, folks.
And some of those sponsors, some of those sponsors actually withdrew their sponsorship.
So there was a whole set of things that came into play here.
But the big, in my view, the big thing was Russia saying that's it, no more of this stuff and don't even think, don't even think about attacking Iran.
And of course the person that was made happiest by that was the chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, who has been saying and complaining for the last five months, please, no third front in that part of the world.
Now what do you think that the implication is?
How would Russia respond if we attacked Iran?
They'd move in and start occupying more countries than the Cox's, move into Azerbaijan or something?
Well, you know, Iran is right hard by the Soviet, the Russian border.
We have a supply line that, you know, won't quit and not only problems defending our troops in Iraq now and Afghanistan, but it would be a nightmare to try to sustain an air offensive or we're still a marine invasion of Iran.
Why do I say marine invasion?
Well, because as you probably know from what Scott Ritter has written, you know, they could close the Straits of Hormuz and we would need marines to go in there and reopen them because of the territory there that dominates the straits.
So, you know, it's just really crazy for the U.S. to be thinking about this.
But Cheney and some others were.
So what the Russians are saying is, look, you know, we can't depend on sanity anymore.
We have people like Randy Sherman and the vice president and Elliott Abrams running the policy toward the Middle East.
Just be aware that if you try something like this, we're going to, A, resupply the air defensive equipment that were given to Iran.
And we're going to just not stand still.
We can make trouble in other areas.
And coincident with this, you may recall, Scott, they sent long range bombers down to Venezuela.
Yep.
And they're doing joint naval maneuvers with Venezuela this month.
Yeah, they say something about they're going to put a refueling base in Cuba.
Oh, God.
And this is all stuff that, you know, JFK and other presidents would have resisted bitedly.
You know, there used to be something called the Monroe Doctrine, which is supposed to prevent this kind of thing.
And because of all the distractions, particularly a financial mess, you haven't heard a word from the White House about the Russians going into territories that have been in before.
Now, I'm not suggesting they're a big threat.
What I am suggesting is that people like the guy in Caracas will be able to play the Russians off against us and be able to buy all sorts of Russian made weapons in return for a lot of oil that they can market on the free market.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
We don't want to divert this whole conversation into tallying up the disastrous legacy of George W. Bush.
But let's go ahead and everybody make a mental note.
The Russians are back in the Western Hemisphere at the end of the Bush presidency.
Wonderful.
And and there's no question this is really goes to why he didn't say anything.
There's no question that this was the tat for his tit.
He started this thing in 10 ways.
I mean, in in NATO expansion all throughout Eastern Europe, obviously the, you know, Cheney talking with Saakashvili and encouraging this madness in Georgia, all they were doing was saying, fine, two can play at that game.
And that was obvious enough, probably even to the American people, it would have rang hollow for Bush to try to accuse the Russians of being aggressive in, you know, in going down to Venezuela.
Yeah, I guess it was disingenuous enough for Bush and Rice and those other folks to be castigating the Russians for invading another country.
Just imagine invading another country.
That's a war crime.
Unless we do it, that's OK.
Yes.
Yeah, it's different.
Well, because our flag is a cooler flag than theirs and shining city on a hill or something.
Anyway.
So now here's another thing about Iran.
Well, there's a couple of things about Iran.
When you talk about Admiral Mullen's opposition to this, it reminds me of this article that came out in The Guardian not too long ago, where supposedly anyway, according to these sources, Bush had told the Israelis, no, that there was final all the straws in the last one, whether it was Russia or whatever it was, had broken the camel's back.
And the idea that America was going to give Israel carte blanche to start a war or the idea that we were going to George Bush was going to start one for them, basically forget about it.
And the primary reason cited there was the danger to American forces inside Iraq, since they their mission there has been to install the Supreme Islamic Council and their barter corps in power.
They would be surrounded by enemies or people who would become their enemies in one moment if and when we attacked Iran.
And that was the one thing that Bush, I guess, refuses to have on his legacy is tens of thousands of Americans killed in a week in a giant rout on the ground in Iraq.
This was clear from the beginning, though, Scott, people like Pat Lang and I have been saying for four years now that the Iranians had the capability of breaking our supply lines between Kuwait and Baghdad and taking, you know, not 53 hostages this time at the embassy, but rather 53,000 U.S. soldiers hostage.
William S. Lind wrote an article called How to Lose an Army.
And it starts off, he goes, oh, yeah, no, we're the most powerful army in the world.
We can't lose an army.
He goes, yeah, we'll tell that to this and that.
And he names 15 generals from throughout history who lost their armies.
And he says, this is how you do it.
Dig into Iraq, surge into Iraq, and then attack Iran and you will lose the U.S. army there.
Yeah.
Well, a lot of people, including some very, very well-respected general officers, suggest that we're just on the point of having lost our army.
In any case, the way it's dispersed and made pretty ineffective in both Iran and Afghanistan.
But what I would say, Scott, in answer to your question, the new element here was until the, you know, until the attack, the Georgian attack on South Ossetia, the new element was Admiral Mullen.
And, you know, I have to say my hat's off to the Navy admirals.
As an army officer, I never thought I'd be saying this, but he had Admiral Fallon, who was head of CENTCOM, who told my friend, Pat Lang, we're not going to do Iran on my watch.
OK.
And Pat said, can I tell people that?
Yeah, you could tell people that.
And he got himself in a peck of trouble.
And so it was Lang that was the source for that Gareth Porter article in the April of 07.
Yeah.
And so he got himself, you know, in a position where they either have a fire room or have to contend with his strong opposition to this folly of attacking Iran.
Now, after he left, then we had General Mike Mullen.
Now, this is a gutsy guy.
And I think the best evidence of that is when he went to the Israelis to read them the riot act.
See, his concern and mine and the concern of others was that the Israelis would provoke the kind of reaction on the part of Iran, which would have us as loyal allies of Israel, as the president would put it, immediately and automatically in on Israel's side.
So Mullen goes to the Israelis in June and he says, look, you know, don't even think of a USS Liberty type incident.
Now, as most of your listeners probably know, the USS Liberty was a U.S. ship deliberately attacked by Israel on the 8th of June, 1967, 34 U.S. service people killed, 174 wounded.
It's been suppressed by the administration, by the press, by the Congress, and even by the U.S. Navy until now when people are talking about it.
But the thing is, Scott, no U.S. statesman or military figure had the guts to go to the Israelis and say, in effect, we know what you did on the 8th of June in 1967.
We're not going to tolerate that thing, that kind of thing again.
And the Israelis know that we know that Mullen knew exactly what happened.
And I think that was that that probably set them aback and said, look, you know, all these little PT boats that we have painted with Iranian colors, they were ready to do in a destroyer escort the U.S. in the Persian Gulf.
We better put those in mothballs.
I have no evidence that they actually had done that far.
But Mullen certainly shot a, as the Navy would say, shot a, put a shot across their bow.
And I think that pretty sealed it in terms of the Israelis realizing, look, even if we did get the kind of provocation, even if we did provoke Iran into striking us, it's not at all clear that Mullen and his senior military folks would obey a Cheney order to get involved in what would be a terrible kind of escalation of war in that part of the world.
Well, and for those who that sounds so far fetched, the idea even that they would paint up boats to look like Iranian ones, according to Seymour Hersh, this was something that the New Yorker editors excluded from his, I guess, his latest article because they decided not to do it.
So they didn't think it ought to be included in the article.
But it was something that Hersh talked about at some public event where he said that one of the things discussed in the vice president's office or at the National Security Council was using American special forces, never mind the Israelis doing it, using American special forces to pretend to be Iranians and attack American ships in the Gulf as a pretext for war.
You know, Scott, you've got an incredible memory.
And if you want to switch careers, you'd make an excellent intelligence analyst.
No, thank you.
I will never work for a government ever.
That was the vice president in the vice president's office.
And it was, you know, it's suggested that just as you say, that there would be boats painted and whether it would be done in conjunction with the Israelis or not, it was clear that we were prepared to do that ourselves.
It was one of the options discussed.
It was rejected, probably because Mullen put the kibosh on it.
But yeah, when we talk about veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, well, there hasn't been a lot of sanity in Washington lately, and we're just dearly hoping that there will be more injected come this January.
Well, you know, a big test of that is going to be whether Barack Obama continues to pretend to believe that the Iranians are making nuclear bombs.
And you know, darn it, I'm so sick and tired of this.
I've been reading Gordon Pratham for years now.
He's our in-house nuclear physicist at answerthewar.com, for those in the audience not familiar.
And he's just walked through baby steps over and over and over again, exactly what it means to have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA and exactly what all the reports from the IAEA have said.
And just, you know, at answerthewar.com, we've kept up with this over the years and years and years.
And now we're at the point where from, especially from Gareth Porter's work last week in The Raw Story, where even the idea that they ever had a nuclear weapons program to abandon back in 2003 was based on a laptop forged by the Israelis.
There is no nuclear weapons program in Iran.
There never was, apparently.
You know, maybe some moves toward that direction for some day, perhaps, or whatever.
They never did anything.
They certainly don't have one now, according to our own intelligence agencies.
And yet Obama continues to go out there and say, we will prevent the Iranians from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Yeah, Scott, people have asked me lots of times to analyze that kind of thing, and I would refuse to do so because rhetoric during a campaign really isn't worth analyzing.
Now he's president-elect and he's still saying this kind of thing.
And that's why I suggested that the second question that he asked is briefer, OK?
And you know, well, we'll talk a little bit more about his briefer in a second, but the second question would be this.
You're aware that the National Intelligence Estimate produced last November, so exactly a year ago, concluded that Iran's work on nuclear weapons, part of its nuclear development program, was suspended in mid-2003, 08 minus three, five years ago, OK?
National Intelligence Council Director Tom Finger repeated that judgment publicly in a speech he made on September 4th, 2008.
And so here's Obama, briefer, I want to know how that squares, or doesn't square, with the claim of Norman Podhoretz, just hours after the NIA's key judges made public that Iran is, quote, hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons, end quote.
You know, of course, that's the exact phrase that Robert Gates uses, too.
You got it again, yeah, exact phrase, that they're hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons.
So I have to say, you know, there's a hell of a way to go about it by suspending the nuclear weapons aspects of your program.
Now, the question that the President-elect needs to ask his briefer is this.
I want a memo.
I want a memo updating the judgments of the NIE, the National Intelligence Estimate of last year.
It's a year old.
You guys know how to do that.
You don't have to do a full-blown estimate, just tell me what's changed since then, OK?
Well, I know from people that I talk to that nothing has changed.
There is no evidence that Iran has restarted the nuclear weapons-related parts of its program, and that he needs to know.
If he wants to do the rhetoric still, that's up to him.
He's going to be the President, but he needs to know this cold turkey, we need to tell it like it is, like we used to do during the time, during the 27 years that I spent as an analyst at the CIA.
Right, I mean, this is the thing.
If you're going to be a liar and a murderer, hey, you're a President, that's your job.
But still, it really bothers me when these people seem to believe their own BS.
I start wondering, is their policy based on the truth, or is their policy based on the lie that they use to justify what they're doing anyway?
Yeah.
Well, this is where a whistleblower would come in really handy, you know?
We've had precious few on the American side.
There was one in Australia, who was actually a VIPS member, and Catherine Gunn, also a VIPS member, in person blew the whistle before the war, okay?
What we need is somebody to come out of the intelligence arena and say, look, this is cockamamie stuff.
There is no evidence still that they've re-embarked on, that is, the Iranians have re-embarked on their nuclear weapons program, and you should know that.
And I know, because I worked for so-and-so, and I prepared the estimate, and what they're doing is just telling you a bunch of things like they told you before the war in Iraq.
That would be real public service.
Am I suggesting that?
Yes, I am.
What about the secrecy oath?
Well, in addition to a secrecy oath, I took a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America when I was an army officer.
Civilian employees take a similar oath.
In my view, that latter oath supersedes, transcends any piece of paper that's signed saying, look, you know, I won't tell anything about anything that I learned during my employment.
If you want to stop a war, if you want to stop a misguided policy, you still have a conscience, and you don't forfeit that conscience by signing a piece of paper.
So if people within the intelligence community know that the situation this year is exactly the same as last, and if the President-Elect or President Obama keeps harping on this hell-bent on developing a nuclear weapon, then somebody needs to come out and say, well, Mr. President, you know, that's not quite right, and I know because I'm a nuclear physicist, and this is what we really think.
That would be such a service.
Now, let me just mention the thing about Robert Gates here, if I may.
I know Robert Gates pretty well, since he worked for me when he first came into the intelligence community as a CIA analyst in the early 70s, and I've been watching him, and I've been trying mightily to give him the benefit of the doubt here, despite things like saying the Iranians are hell-bent on developing a nuclear weapon, parroting what Horat said.
What I've come to realize, and the fellow that I work with on ConsortiumNews.com, Bob Perry, who in my view is the best investigative reporter in the States, together with Cy Hersh, he's done a lot of research on this, as usual.
He's got a memory just as good as yours, Scott, and he's pointed out here, and I'm going to do an article on this today, that, well, in effect, as I'm going to title this thing, that Gates is worse than Rumsfeld.
Well, Bob Perry is actually the guy who, from the very beginning, picked up on the point and stayed on the point that the reason that they ditched Rumsfeld is because Rumsfeld was sick and tired of the war and he wanted out, and they brought in Gates so that they could keep Iraq.
Exactly.
Yeah, that's the short story.
So what happened, of course, at the end of 2006, we're talking two years ago now, you may recall that the commanding officer out there, General Casey and General Abizade, who is the CENTCOM commander, they both testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee saying, please, no more troops, you know, please, whatever you do, please don't send any more troops to Iraq.
And why did they say that?
Well, because if you do that, the Iraqi politicians will never get the message that they have to get their act together, they have to make the kinds of compromises that will allow us to leave, and if we send more troops, there'll be just the opposite effect.
So that was something that Rumsfeld finally came to believe, not only that, but the Iraq Study Group, upon which Robert Gates served, came to that very same conclusion that we need to draw down, it's got to be something different.
Well, that's typical, Ray, if I can just interrupt you for just a second, that's typical Republican thinking, and in fact, in this case, I think, correct, if you apply it to any other situation, if you pay single mothers to be single mothers, they will be single mothers, and if you stop paying them to be single mothers, they'll be more likely to find a partner to help raise that kid with.
It's the same thing as the incentive logic of any government intervention in the economy, it's the same thing.
Sure, yeah, and these people in Baghdad, of course, were not taking it seriously, and the graft, and the corruption with the money that we were sending there, it's just unimaginable.
Now, just picking up from this here, if you look back, and you see that Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum on November 6, so the day before the midterm election in 2006, and he said, you know, we're not doing it right, it's time for a major adjustment, you know what we need to do?
We need to draw down U.S. bases, it should be down to five bases by July 2007, we need to withdraw U.S. forces from cities and patrolling, we need to readjust to another course, if necessary, and therefore not lose, not lose, okay?
So there was the thing, you know, we need to do all these things, go minimalist, and then at the bottom, he says, bottom line, less attractive options, number one, continue on the current path, set a firm, move a large fraction of all U.S. forces into Baghdad, okay?
Now those were the things that the president wanted to do, why?
Because he and Cheney did not want to lose this war, so to speak, they didn't want to withdraw until after they were out of office.
Now who could they get to do their bidding?
Well, they looked around, and they found Bobby Gates.
And so the president invited him to Crawford just before the election and said, look, Rummy is going wobbly on us here, we need somebody who will do what everyone doesn't expect.
Everyone thinks we want to withdraw, everyone thinks we're going to draw down, what we're really going to do is what this General Jack Keane and a couple people at the American Enterprise Institute have come up with, it's going to be a surge, we're going to put 30,000 troops in there, and what you have to do is go out to Baghdad and cashier.
You have to tell General Casey, look, you're finished, come on home, we'll give you a Senecure, you could be Army Chief of Staff, you've got to go down to Tampa, tell General Abizaid, that's it, you retire early.
And we had this wonderful fellow, this terrific, good-looking guy, General Petraeus, he's going to do whatever we tell him, and he's going to cooperate with you, he'll go in there with 30,000 troops and stave off what otherwise would be a loss.
And the President himself admitted that he thought we were losing at the end of 2006.
Now what does that buy us?
That buys us 1,100 U.S. service people killed from the start of the surge until the end of the surge.
If we had followed what Rumsfeld says in his memo, we'd be out of there now.
And so that's Bobby Gates for you, okay?
Bobby Gates will do what he's told.
Well, and the surge covered the final ethnic cleansing, so-called, it's not really ethnic cleansing, but religious sword fighting, and the Shiite militia's expulsion of the Sunnis from Baghdad almost completely.
That was the surge, was the one-side-won-the-civil-war, as Patrick Coburn explained on the show the other day.
Yeah, it's remarkable that, I don't know what nitwit advised Obama to say, oh, the surge succeeded beyond all expectations.
Well, give me a break.
You sent 30,000 U.S. forces in there to act as sort of a guard so that the Shiites can go into Baghdad and sectarian-cleanse that area.
I don't say ethnic, because they're all the same, ethnic.
But what happened was, in simplest terms, Baghdad used to be a predominantly Sunni city.
And there were millions and millions, I forget, 8 million people in Baghdad.
Now they're predominantly Shia.
Now what does that mean?
Well, among other things, it means that there are 2.5 million refugees inside Iraq looking for a place to live, and there are 2,000, I'm sorry, 2 million outside Iraq in places like Syria and Turkey and Jordan looking for a place to live there.
That's 4.5 million out of a population before the war that was 26 million.
That's a surge, and that's what the surge produced.
And sure, it succeeded for the purpose for which it was instituted, namely, to let Bush and Cheney leave office without having, quote, lost this war.
But Bobby Gates, for him to cooperate with that, either he had to be dumb, which he isn't, or he had to be so, so covetous of being a Secretary of Defense that he'd do anything to get it.
And it was the letter that he did it, and, you know, how did he know better?
Well, he served with the Iraq Study Group, for God's sake, and there's no indication from anyone on that group or on their staff that he felt that a surge might have been the answer.
Yeah, and I've got to tell you, too, from the point of view of, say, like, I don't know, a Republican radio show host or something, wouldn't they say that this guy Obama is outright admitting to us that he's not up to running foreign policy?
In fact, he can't find any Democrats to run his foreign policy.
First of all, he's got to put the Clintons, who did nothing but denounce him as naive and dangerous and ridiculous and all these things throughout the campaign, put them in charge of the State Department.
He wants to keep Gates at the DOD.
What else does that mean, other than I can't find a Democrat to do it, I'm not up to it, I need to keep George Bush as Secretary of War?
Well, I'm hopeful that we can put the Bush on that.
I think that, you know, the poor fellow must be so engrossed in the financial collapse here and in other things that he's leaving this to other people.
Yeah, he's made promises to people.
I don't know who or why exactly, but there's nothing that bothers me most about the intelligence scene is that the people that he has running the transition in intelligence are the very people who did George Tenet's bidding in corrupting the intelligence process.
The people who knew about the torture, knew about the illegal wiretapping, it did nothing, actually rooted for it, John Brennan, Jamie Missick, all these folks are accomplices with Tenet.
So my voice, my advice to Obama would be to say, look, nobody, nobody who was in a position of any responsibility prior to Iraq and was associated with how the intelligence process was prostituted, and that's the right word, has any place anywhere in my administration, let them go to the Library of Congress and catalog books, okay?
Don't fire them, give them that kind of job.
That's what needs to happen.
Unless you can demonstrate that you actively oppose this course of action and chose to remain within in terms of trying to change it, unless you can demonstrate that, you're out of here.
And what he should have said to his briefer, this fellow named Mike Morrell, is, look, Mike, sorry about this, but I understand that you are a really close associate of George Tenet.
Is that correct?
Yeah, that's correct.
Well, you know, I have to tell you that I'm offended that your superiors would send you here to brief me now, because if you were the briefer of George W. Bush, as Tenet says in his book, you were, well, did you know that the intelligence was being, quote, fixed, end quote?
Did you know that the intelligence was being warped when you, Mike Morrell, coordinated the CIA review of Colin Powell's speech at the U.N. on 5 February 2003?
Did you know that?
And if you didn't know that, what kind of an intelligence analyst are you?
Thanks very much, Mike.
Nice meeting you.
But you go back and tell your superiors that I want somebody who is not associated with George Tenet and, you know, the consummate fixing that he was involved in and no hard feelings.
If I don't see you again, good luck.
But I want somebody different.
I want somebody who was not involved in this kind of thing.
Somebody who has no experience in corrupting the intelligence process.
That's what he should have said to Mike Morrell.
I'm sure he didn't.
I'm not sure he ever read my eloquent little thing on Consortium News, but this is the kind of thing that needs to happen.
He needs to move boldly.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think you and I would know if we were going to get some change and we'd see somebody like Thomas Fingar, somebody who's really stood up to power within the intelligence community.
I mean, if you were Obama's, if he'd already picked you for national security advisor, wouldn't you be picking Fingar for national intelligence director?
I sure would.
I sure would.
I mean, I'd pick him for head of the assessments board.
I'd pick somebody who has some managerial experience, somebody from outside the government, somebody who knows how to run a huge, huge operation, which spends over $50 billion a year.
Somebody who has some managerial experience, would not had that as head of the intelligence community in a very long time and go back to John McCone under JFK.
And that's what you need.
You need somebody who knows how to make things work, who knows how to hold people's feet to the fire.
And then a substantive guy like Tom Fingar, who can be given free reign to do exactly what he did this time last year.
And this was a near miracle that he was able to bring this off.
After the president and Cheney kept harping on how intent Iran was to get a nuclear weapon, he signed and issued a national intelligence estimate saying that they had stopped that work last year, it was four years ago, okay?
And then Admiral Mullen and others to their great credit insisted that that judgment be made public.
And what a firestorm that caused.
Our president and vice president said, well, we don't believe that, we don't accept that view.
Well, it's hard to dismiss the unanimous view of 16 intelligence agencies of the United States government, but they did.
Yeah.
Well, and thanks for pointing out that they tried to bury it for about a year.
I remember Phil Giroldi wrote in 2006, there's an Iran NIE and Dick Cheney suppressing it.
And it was at the same time that Pete Hoekstra had put out that hoax about, isn't that funny that hoax is right in his name, to, I forgot whether they were trying to frame up Iran or Iraq with some uranium or some crap.
No, they were trying to save the candidacy of that Santorum fellow there in Pennsylvania.
He needed some last minute boost and they found some old weapons from predating the 91 war.
And they said, oh, he found the weapons of mass destruction after all.
Some old shells in the desert.
Some of the ingredients are so nerdy, you'd probably brush your teeth with them now.
And this was the head of the intelligence oversight committee, so to speak, in the house.
Yeah.
See, now this kind of leads in my great little segue kind of way into my final question for you, which is, isn't all this kind of a lot of inside baseball that sort of, you know, ultimately is irrelevant.
I mean, this guy, Obama has inherited the most powerful executive position that mankind has ever created.
And there's no indication whatsoever.
Is there really, Ray, that he means to roll back this empire whatsoever?
I mean, what we're talking about is they switched off from, you know, wow, one party to the other and a bunch of people are letting themselves be impressed by it.
But we shouldn't be, should we?
Well, we can't be just yet, but I think that one has to be really careful about campaign rhetoric and distinguishing that from the instincts of a very bright guy.
And I think a very well-meaning guy like Barack Obama, the evidence is not there yet, particularly.
And then some of the people he appointed, like Rahm Emanuel and the people I mentioned just doing the intelligence stuff.
But I think that, you know, what would be a good indicator in my view, Scott, is what he does about torture.
And I'm not satisfied with what he said last night on 60 Minutes about torture.
Well, you know, I haven't seen that clip yet.
What exactly did he say?
Well, he says that, you know, the United States doesn't torture and he's going to make sure that we don't torture.
Well, that's what Bush says.
You know, what Obama needs to say is, I am outraged at the disregard for international law and the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996.
As soon as I come in on January 20th, we're going to close those black sites.
The permission, so to speak, that the CIA has to torture people is ended.
And we're going to move very quickly to close Guantanamo.
And you know, that's the kind of thing you need to do.
He doesn't need to parrot what the president himself has said.
You know, we don't torture.
And you know, one of the most interesting things, and this will just take a minute here, we just got word that the Human Rights Center of the University of California has done a massive report on Guantanamo and its aftermath.
The interesting thing is the forward written by Judge Patricia Waltz.
Now, she's no wild-eyed liberal.
She was one of the people that Bush himself appointed to look at the intelligence before the war.
She also put her appointment as federal appellate judge to become what?
To become a war crimes tribunal judge for Yugoslavia.
And what does she say about this?
The casualties in Guantanamo are etched on the minds and bodies of these folks.
The mental abuse, including intimidation, trespass positions, reminds me of the abuse inflicted on Bosnian Muslim prisoners in Serbian camps when I sat as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal.
The officials and the guards in charge of those prison camps and the civilian leaders who sanctioned their establishment were prosecuted, often by former U.S. government and military lawyers serving on the tribunal for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and extreme cases, genocide.
That's what has to happen now.
And if we let these guys get off, including the people who knew about all this and are now on the transition team for the intelligence community, if we let those people get off, our respect around the world will never be regained at any time soon.
Well and the entire theory that this country is ruled by law and not a cabal of scheming imperialist men with their willpower will be dead forever.
I mean, the whole point of this thing, in fact, someone told me quite approvingly that on Barack Obama's website, it has the Constitution at the top of the flow chart and then comes the three branches and whatever.
That's a nice change, rhetorically at least, from the Cheney Imperium and so forth.
You know, this is, you're right, this is the test and yet, Ray, let's be honest, has any government ever prosecuted the prior government and aren't they all worried that if they really set that precedent that somebody's going to prosecute them when they're out of power?
The law is for you and me to apply to us by them and not the other way around.
Come on.
Well, it depends on character, you know.
We used to say character counts, integrity counts.
And the jury's out.
You know, the jury's really out.
Is Obama the kind of guy that will not fear for the results of what he does as chief executive, will not involve himself in war crimes or other crimes?
If he's that kind of person, and I dearly hope he is, then there is some hope that he'll move against these war criminals because the evidence is so, so clear.
And you know, if we are to restore our international respect, the factual basis exists to charge officials of the Bush administration with these crimes and it's got to be done.
And depending on who he picks for attorney general, it can be done and, you know, by legal requirements.
In my view, it must be done.
All right, everybody.
That's Ray McGovern from Consortium News, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
You can find what he writes at antiwar.com slash McGovern.
Thanks very much for your time today, Ray.
Thank you, Scott.
Take care.
