Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, we're on ChaosRadioAustin.org and LRN.
FM, 9 to noon Pacific time.
It's time to go to our first guest.
It's Ray McGovern.
He was an analyst at the CIA for 27 years.
Well, I guess it's just CIA, not THE CIA.
I learned that from some stupid movie.
And he is a member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, as well as writes for ConsortiumNews.com, the heroic Robert Perry's website over there at ConsortiumNews.com.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Doing well.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
So, I was hoping really we could spend this time trying to go back over the last year or so of the administration's Iran policy.
The agreement that Obama had made with, I don't know, Israel or somebody, was that the Iranians would have until December 31st, 2009 to accept all of his conditions, and they weren't met.
And so, he said.
And so then, for the last year, we've just had basically, as far as I can tell, no real progress in talks, but plenty of new layers of sanctions and so forth.
And, you know, anyway, this is, according to the War Party, still the biggest, most unresolved problem, the war that's still waiting to be fought from their point of view.
It seems like the issue deserves beating like a dead horse here.
So, I was wondering, first of all, if you could talk about what were the conditions that the Iranians were supposed to have met by December 31, 2009, and how far short did they fall?
Well, Scott, I think we need to go back just a tad earlier, because what we had in 2009 was a very interesting set of circumstances which suggested that there would be some kind of meeting of the minds.
They agreed to meet in Vienna after agreeing in Geneva to talk about nuclear weapons.
And the meeting date, I think, was something like the 20th of October, 2009.
And what happened on the 19th?
Well, a terrorist group, actually considered a terrorist group by most people, if not the United States government, attacked Iranian high-level generals and other officials in an outlying part of Iran and killed five generals.
Five generals, right?
Now, this group is called Jundala, and it has been supported in the past by the CIA, by the Pakistanis, by the Israelis.
And, you know, I don't know where they got this excellent intelligence.
I don't know how they were able to pinpoint the presence of these generals, but they did, and they want them, okay?
There were something like 35 dead altogether.
Now, that was the day before the negotiations were to resume.
And everything looked pretty good up until that time, except for one other element, and that was that the politicians in Iran, who the U.S. government felt more friendly than Ahmadinejad, they were protesting that Iran would go to Vienna and give up the kitchen sink, give up the idea of developing weapons.
So where were these two factors going?
Well, as soon as these generals were killed, and I should have mentioned they were Revolutionary Guards generals, and those are the ones that rule that country, really, under the Ayatollahs, they clearly went to Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, and said, hey, what's going on here?
You're going to go negotiate with the United States and other people who have just killed five of our generals?
Give us a break.
No dice.
Now, wait a minute, Ray.
Now, I don't know if you have any evidence one way or the other, but you're a former CIA analyst for 27 years.
Would you conclude or at least suspect that this was the CIA that had Jandala do this in order to disrupt the upcoming talks?
That's what I'm suggesting.
Now, the CIA doesn't usually do this kind of thing itself.
It's much better prepared to ask the Israelis to do this kind of dirty work for us because they're specialists at what the Soviets used to call mokri yad yalah, which is wet affairs, things like shooting, assassination, and in this case, assassinating five generals.
Wet as in blood everywhere.
Exactly.
And so this was the temporal coincidence of this.
Of course, the mainstream media missed it, shall we say.
The temporal significance here, the timing, was really bizarre.
What Ahmadinejad and the Aryan Caliphs decided to do was not to rebuff, not to send nobody to Vienna, but they sent a less senior official and they backtracked on some of the earlier commitments.
The idea was that Iran was going to ship out two-thirds, I repeat, two-thirds of the low-enriched uranium that it had to be further processed so that it could feed their medical reactor in Tehran.
Now, what does that mean?
As you have pointed out many times, Scott, you need low-enriched uranium to make high-enriched uranium.
Okay?
Oh, well, duh.
Now, here's the Iranian government agreeing in principle in Geneva to ship out two-thirds of its low-enriched uranium to be processed in a place not one they control in Russia, in France, and be given back in a form that could not possibly be used for a weapon and put in their medical reactor, you know, where they do the stuff for the C-scans and the CAT scans and PET scans, all that kind of stuff.
So, would you think that when they agreed to that, that anybody who was really, like, genuinely afraid of an Iranian nuclear weapon, wouldn't they be dancing up and down, clapping their hands and saying, hey, let's take this deal right away, because this lessens the chance that Iran could have a nuclear weapon anytime soon, because they're giving up two-thirds of their low-enriched uranium.
Well, instead of that, we have this terrorist attack on the Revolutionary Guards generals, and we have the incitement of these opposition politicians in Iran saying, ah, you're giving away the kitchen sink, you're giving away the kitchen sink.
And so what happened was, they retracted a little bit, but they said, let's continue the negotiations.
But that was the pretext that the West needed to say, ah, no, they're being uncooperative again, we're going to do sanctions, we're going to do worse, everything's on the table, and you can't talk to these people.
Well, and you know, despite whatever hawkish pressure they had whooped up with their Jandala bombing there, they still only, you know, Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, they still only backed off just a little bit.
They said, look, we'll do your exact same deal, but we want to swap uranium for uranium, instead of giving up our uranium first and then we trust the French, which Hilary Mann Leverett pointed out on the show that the French had actually ripped off the Iranians on a uranium deal back in the 70s, so they have a specific bad memory there.
They said, we'll just swap it, we'll give you our 3.6%, at the same time you're giving us some 20% fuel rods for our medical isotope reactor.
That was the only difference, that was the only backpedaling from Obama's offer, it was really a perfectly reasonable clarification, assuming that Obama was honest from his end, that he didn't mean to rip them off all along.
Well, thanks for clarifying that, because that's exactly what happened.
So the negotiations continued.
The people in our government who are really interested in solving this problem, negotiated many times with the Iranians, trying to get this thing restarted.
And wonder of wonders, they got to Obama, the guy who's pretending to be our president, and they said, hey, Mr. President, we think we can work this deal out if we go through the Brazilians and the Turks, because they have offered their good offices with the Iranians, and why don't we encourage them to do that?
Obama said, that sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
And so that happened.
Need to go to break now?
We sure do.
Everybody, it's Ray McGovern, he's from ConsortiumNews.com.
We're also the heroic Robert Perry writes things.
Please check him out, 27-year analyst at the CIA.
And we're talking about Obama's non-negotiations, pretended negotiations with the Iranians over the last year and where we stand now.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, it is ChaosRadioAustin.org, also LRN.
FM.
We're talking with Ray McGovern.
He is a former CIA analyst, co-founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and journalist as well at ConsortiumNews.com, columnist.
You can find his archive also at AntiWar.com, of course.
And you know what, Ray, I've got to ask you, back in the 1980s when he used to be the morning briefer for Vice President George Bush Sr., did he just drink the blood of little children all day, or what was that guy about?
No, no, no.
No, actually, he was the most congenial person to brief in those days.
He had a really good sense of humor, actually.
And he didn't take things very seriously like the others, like Weinberger and Schultz and all those guys.
I didn't know at the time how deeply he was involved in Iran-Contra, and I chalk it up to his acting ability that he kept that all from me.
But people have to realize that I came from the analysis side of the house at CIA.
All this stuff was being worked by Bill Casey through the operations people and through the NSC, Ali North, and those folks.
So I guess I shouldn't have been included in all that because we were kept hermetically sealed from it.
But as far as George Bush is concerned, I used to look forward to not only to briefing him on the weekdays, but his place up there in the Vice President's House Observatory Circle was really nice because he had a great chef and he had terrific doughnuts on a Saturday morning.
Yeah, you national government parasites, man, sucking down all our tax dollars.
All right, well, I appreciate that you're doing your redemption thing with us here, Ray, and have been for many years opposing these wars, trying to promote sanity among American intelligence and policy.
Well, you know, Scott, people have said that kiddingly or not kiddingly, but it's a straight line, really.
The 27 years that I spent working as a CIA analyst, and again, I stress there are two CIAs.
The one that Truman set up, that was the analysis part, and the operational part, which Truman disavowed before he died.
He said, I didn't intend this at all.
So people do the torturing and make the wars and all that kind of stuff.
We were hermetically sealed offing as those.
That was a good thing in one respect because we could tell it like it is.
We could say that, for example, this war in Nicaragua ain't going to go nowhere, that the countries are very much in the drug trafficking stuff and all that kind of thing.
So what I'm saying here is that it's a straight line.
When you see your profession, as I saw mine, being prostituted, being corrupted by the people that Bobby Gates, who used to work for me, he's now, I think, the Secretary of Defense or something like that.
The people that he put in position as managers were people that would do what Bobby Gates and Bill Casey said.
So if they wanted to paint the Soviet Union up to 10 feet tall, never, never would the Communist Party Soviet Union ever, ever weaken.
Then those are the guys that he put in those places.
So make a long story short, when George Tenet, who was of the same stripe, comes along, and the President and Vice President say, look, we want to make a war in Iraq, and we need your help.
Can you cook up some evidence?
They saluted smartly, and then the 20 or so people around that table in the Director's Conference Room were all these careerists who cared a lot more about their career than the truth.
And that's how he got the worst possible estimate, which talked about all those WMD in Iraq and ties between Saddam Hussein and all that kind of stuff.
Now, that's background.
What happened since then is much more important, and that is that there was a purge, okay?
All those no-gooders were sort of let go.
Well, not all of them, but some of them.
And a guy from the State Department named Tom Finger was brought in to run the National Intelligence Council.
Right.
First thing on the drawing board was an Iran estimate.
How close is Iran to getting a nuclear weapon?
Well, he looked at what had been done, and he said, throw all that stuff out.
I want a bottom-up assessment, which they did.
And in November 2007, they came to the startling conclusion that Iran had stopped working on the nuclear weapons parts of its program in the fall of 2003 and had not resumed.
Now, what's interesting about that, Scott, is this.
If you look at George Bush's book, okay, there's one part that he apparently wrote himself.
No, no, I'm not kidding.
He apparently wrote this himself, because it's really, really interesting, the candor with which he explains his chagrin when he learned of the unanimous judgment of the intelligence community, 16 agencies, Scott, okay?
The unanimous judgment expressed with, quote, high confidence, end quote, no less, that Iran had not been working on a nuclear weapon since late 2003.
So what did he do?
Well, he tooled off to Israel, apologized for the estimate, and then in his book, Decision Points, he complains bitterly that the NIE, quote, tied my hands on the military side, end quote.
He notes that the estimate opened with this, quote, eye-popping, end quote, finding of the intelligence community, quote, we judge with high confidence that in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.
Wow.
Now, getting back to, you know, when they were willing later to give up two-thirds of their low-enriched uranium, wouldn't you expect that the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Israel would jump up and down the wall?
It's great.
They stopped.
So now we just have to kind of work out some more safeguards so they don't resume.
Well, no.
He says, and this is a direct quote from his book, the NIE's conclusion was so stunning that I felt it would immediately leak to the press.
Well, he was right about that because the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in order to prevent himself from being ordered to attack Iran, was quite willing to leak it to the press himself.
Right.
Now, what he actually says here, and it really is the mind boggler, just kind of the backlash he talks about, he talks about how could I possibly authorize an attack on the nuclear facilities of a country that 16 agencies of our government said had no active nuclear weapons program?
I couldn't do it anymore.
Right.
Well, you know, Phil Giraldi is saying that another former CIA officer, although he's from the other side there, he says that he still knows people in government who are telling him that the new national intelligence estimate on Iran is going to be much more compromised in favor of the war party, that basically they're not going to change any of their factual conclusions, but they're going to have a lot more language in there about how suspicious this all is and so forth.
Well, if that happens, I have it on good authority that the people who have drafted already, and the draft has been in existence for 10 months, the people who have drafted an honest update of that November 2007 estimate have said, no sweat, no change, no good evidence that Iran is again working on a nuclear weapon, which they ceased doing in November 2003.
So what will happen?
What will happen if this guy, General Clapper, he's the new director of national intelligence, he salutes and says, you know, we need to curry favor with the Israel lobby, they're real hot on this, so we need to change that thing, and let's make it more alarmist, as some of your sources are saying.
Now, what happens then?
I asked the managing editor of the New York Times at a session where Dan Ellsberg was vetted, and in public I said, Jill Abramson, what should I advise an analyst in the CIA who comes to me and says, this is unconscionable, the world needs to know that this is, again, corrupting our intelligence to justify a necessary war?
And then she said, you've given my number!
Should I go to the New York Times or should I go to WikiLeaks?
You know what?
She danced all around it.
She reported to Dan Ellsberg, Dan, you're an analyst, you answer that.
And you know what?
The inevitable conclusion, as I pointed out at the time, is if this person, whoever he or she is, the analyst, the honest analyst, if he or she goes to the New York Times, you know what will happen?
If they ever publish it, it will be 14 months later, as they did with James Risen's findings about the illegal, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.
That's where WikiLeaks is the way to go.
WikiLeaks exists there, and all I can say is that we desperately need what I call a fifth estate.
It's a hopeful development, and I dare say this analyst would as likely do that as not, and sacrifice the kind of career that they had been expecting.
Right.
Well, hey, look, just think if the real NIE from 2002, with all its footnotes, had been leaked back in October.
Perhaps that war could have been stopped.
Anyway, hang tight, Ray.
Long break through the news here.
We'll be back, everybody, with Ray McGovern.
We're talking Iran and American intelligence.
It's Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio here on ChaosRadioAustin.org, LRN.
FM.
Appreciate y'all listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern.
He writes for ConsortiumNews.com.
He spent 27 years as an analyst for the CIA, and we're talking about, well, Iran, their nuclear program, the American negotiations, so-called, with Iran.
Ray, would you agree with Hilary Mann Leverett, what she said on the show a couple of weeks ago, which was that all these negotiations, so-called, basically are just laying the groundwork for war, that this is part of the thing about aggressive war is you have to, I guess, one, pretend there's some kind of threat, but, two, you have to pretend that you've done everything to try to work it out.
But, geez, you know, Saddam just won't let the inspectors in or whatever and make it seem as though talks are going nowhere, these people can't be dealt with, so we have no other choice, really, than to go to war.
Is that why they even have these pretended talks in the first place?
I think she's absolutely right, and I'm humbled to associate myself with Hilary because she knows 18 times as much about this subject than do I.
I think we have to take five steps back here, Scott, and say, you know, what's the objective here?
You know, what's the objective?
Now, you don't have to be a rocket scientist simply to read the resolutions that come out of our Congress that say we want regime change in Tehran.
Right.
That's what we want, regime change.
Now, does that sound familiar?
That's what we wanted in Iraq.
In many ways, the Iranian situation is a carbon copy of Iraq.
It happened within the last decade, right?
Right.
What do we have?
We have a nuclear threat, nonexistent, as far as the U.S. intelligence community is concerned, which is being honest this time, at least so far.
And we have ties with terrorists.
Of course, there are terrorists in Hezbollah and Hamas and all that.
Good reason there are terrorists there, okay?
You know what it is?
It's the Branch Davidian model.
This is what they did to the Branch Davidians.
They said they have illegal weapons, they're bad to their own people, they're crazy, and therefore cannot be negotiated with, and so we're going to send the Delta Force to kill them.
Yeah.
There are similarities there, but the stakes are much bigger here.
And one has to always ask in this kind of situation, cui bono?
You know, who profits from all this?
Remember an old Code Pink sign that said, who lied, who died, and who profited?
Now, the only country, the only entity that would profit from the consequences of an attack on Iran is the state of Israel, and they are driving this policy.
They are driving our president.
They're not driving him nuts.
He seems all too willing to be led by the likes of Netanyahu.
And so you have to call a spade a spade here.
If there's an attack on Iran, it's going to be a catastrophe, an economic and other catastrophe for the whole world, because the streets will be sealed and there'll be no oil coming out of the Persian Gulf.
That's a given, okay?
And there's no winning this war, and that's why Admiral Mullen insisted that the earlier NIE be revealed and why he's resisted so strongly, I am convinced, in having the new NIE, the update, which says no change, having that not prostituted as other estimates earlier on during George Tenet were.
So we don't have an estimate.
We don't have an update on the estimate of November 2007.
And oddly, I would say that that's a good thing.
You know why?
Because the honest people in the CIA are refusing to have their conclusions prostituted to justify, in quotes, another unnecessary war.
Well, for all those guys, keep it up, and thanks, because there are people out here that it matters to, like you just said, the whole world.
You know, I'm sure you're very familiar, Ray, with Norman Podhoretz's statement that he hopes and he prays that we have a war with Iran, but he recognizes full well that it would unleash a wave of anti-Americanism around the world that would make our current situation look like a love fest, he said.
And the current situation is that the entire world is sick and tired of the U.S. and our hegemony, our benevolent, as we may call it.
Well, it's hardly benevolent in the eyes of the folks in the Middle East who have lost upwards of a million people in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And many of those people in the Middle East, you know, see our total identification with the policies and the tactics and the actions of Israel as making us equally complicit.
And, you know, when you come right down to it, Israel depends on us totally for, what, $3 billion a year in all manner of weaponry and political support.
So I think that people have to wake up.
The Israelis, first and foremost, this can't last.
They're not going to be able to survive unless they turn away from this might-makes-right policy.
What they need to do is negotiate a fitting end to the war of 1967, whereby their aggression, they occupy these territories, where the U.N., in a resolution of November 1967, unanimously, yes, including the United States, called for them to withdraw from occupied territories.
So what you have is an Israel that is in occupation of Arab territories for longer, mind you, longer than the Soviet Union was in occupation of Eastern Europe.
That's a big deal, and that means a lot.
And unless we come to our senses, unless we're able to call spades spades in the public media, it's just going to continue to get worse, and we are going to feel the effects of that right back home here because that's what creates terrorists.
Right.
Well, and, you know, there's a reporter named Terry McDermott, who I believe is a Los Angeles Times reporter or was, and he did this book called Perfect Soldiers, which is mostly the biography of the Hamburg South, the leaders of the 9-11 hijacking ring, the pilots, basically.
Atta and Ramzi bin al-Sheib and Marwan al-Sheihy and those guys, and he apparently spent quite a bit of time in Germany interviewing people and, you know, doing real research, real journalism on these guys and who they were.
And part of the book is how they would, I guess, in the afternoon they'd come home from work or the mosque or wherever, and they would sit in the living room and they would watch TV, the news, about what Israel was doing in Palestine, and they would say the Americans must pay for this.
And that was before they even went to Afghanistan to meet with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
They would sit there in Germany and say Americans must die because of what they're watching on TV, what the Israelis are doing in Lebanon.
You know?
Well, Scott, you know.
And then, you know, the Israelis from September 12th on have said, you know, your war is our war, and terrorism is terrorism, and radical Islam is radical Islam, and al-Qaeda and the Taliban and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Hamas and Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood and everybody we don't like in the world is all one big Islamo-fascist caliphate you have to fight.
That's where this entire policy comes from, Iraq and Iran too.
Yeah, and if you magnify that, Scott, if you point out to people that there are 1.3 billion, I say again, billion Muslims in the world, and let's say only 1 billion of them have TV sets, huh?
That's what they watch.
That's what they watch every night.
So when Don Rumsfeld, you know, rubs his hands and, you know, I just don't understand why somebody would strap a plastique on their stomach and blow themselves up just to kill somebody.
I don't understand.
Well, you ought to watch television.
You ought to watch television one of those nights and tune into something.
Oh, yeah, CNN isn't going to cut it either.
Well, yeah, I was on CNN recently, as you may know, and they started to light a song, as you know.
Oh, yeah.
Is he a pariah, Mr. McGovern?
He's a pariah?
He's a journalist.
He's doing the job you guys should be doing.
So every now and then, every three and a half years, just by my calculation, I get on CNN Domestic, International more frequently.
Yeah, it really is.
There's another great example.
That clip is actually really good.
I think it might be on my Facebook page if you want to look for it.
And there's also a great one of Glenn Greenwald on there with Fran Townsend and the CNN lady just completely and totally on the side of Fran Townsend the whole time and just the perfect illustration, I think as he called it, of the media and the state.
Yeah.
But now, you know what?
Let me keep another 15 minutes because I want to wrap up some of this Iran stuff.
Okay.
I think there's more to go over here, and specifically, I guess, about Hamas and Hezbollah.
I want to explore some of that.
All right, everybody, it's Ray McGovern, ConsortiumNews.com, Antiwar Radio.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I kept Ray McGovern online because there's still some more of this Iran news and analysis that I want to go over here.
First of all, there's this piece in the UPI.
Most in the U.S. think Iran has a nuke program.
Seventy percent of U.S. residents believe Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
But only 24 percent would use force to stop it.
Huh.
All right, well, whatever.
But I guess it still goes to show that the American people are not through yet, and they can be made to believe any war propaganda.
And I think, Ray, probably that 24 percent in favor of strikes could be made to believe or could be increased when the rest of that 70 percent is made to believe that that nuclear weapons program is an imminent threat to them, as Gordon Prater used to say, they tell you that these people are going to nuke you in your jammies in the middle of the night, and that's how they get you on board for this war.
But that's kind of the backdrop, really, for what I want to focus on now, and that is, as you were illustrating there, Israel's interest in all of this, because it's really not about the American empire versus Iran, although I guess that's part of it.
Since they declared independence from us, I think that probably sticks in a lot of people's craws up there in D.C.
But the real problem is the Likud party in Israel.
They're the ones pushing this.
And Larissa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane at Ross Story did a piece in August, pardon me, about WikiLeaks, State Department cable, from August of 2007, which would have been just, what, three months before that NIE came out.
And, of course, we all knew that that NIE of 2007 on Iran's nuclear program was coming out anyway.
We'd known for a year, and we knew it was going to be a good one, too, or at least had plenty of reason to believe that.
And this is really the worst, I think I should also say, this is right after the worst danger of war with Iran breaking out, I think, looking back on it, was the first half of 2007, the surge and all the propaganda about Iran and Iraq and all that.
Now, so that had just passed, I guess, and the NIE was about to come out, and so it's August of 2007, and Mayor Dagan, the head of Mossad, tells our Nicholas Burns, the Undersecretary of State, that, look, we know that your assessment of Iran's nuclear program is different than ours, but we don't care about that.
We have our timeline, and if you don't start the war, we will.
And that seemed to be just, frankly, nothing more than blackmail because, as Nicholas Burns certainly understands, if Israel does start a war with Iran over there, we will be involved immediately on the first day.
America will be, as you saw, we're hip-deep in everything Israel does.
There's no way around the fact that our forces in the Middle East would be immediately attacked by the Iranians in response, and America would be drawn into the war.
And I just wondered, you know, whether you think that the Israelis are just, you know, talking tough because, again, you know, this is all a phantom.
They know as well as you and I do that they're not really making nuclear weapons over there.
So do you think that Netanyahu or any of these guys really have the chutzpah to start a war with Iran and drag the Americans in, kicking and screaming like that?
Well, Scott, a bunch of us...
Sorry for the gigantic, long-winded question there.
Well, in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, we were so worried about this this summer that in August, no, in July, I believe, we put out a paper, a memorandum to the president in which we warned that the governing factor here is going to be Netanyahu's assessment of whether Barack Obama has any backbone.
Consider the situation here.
Let's say Netanyahu thinks that Obama, since he backed down at every turn, doesn't have any vertebrae or backbone.
What's to prevent him from sending Israeli fighter bombers to the edge of Iraq?
That's the best way to get to Iran.
And calling the president up in the middle of the night, that famous 3 o'clock in the morning call and saying, Now, Mr. President, I just wanted to let you know that our fighter bombers are about to enter airspace that your Air Force controls.
And so, of course, we would like you to tell Admiral Mullen to make sure that none of them are shot down, of course, because we're on our way to Iran because we just discovered this past week that they do have a nuclear weapon.
Okay, now, the smart people in Washington that I talked to, well, let's put it this way.
I talked to about 20, and not one of them thought that Barack Obama would have either the guts or the foresight to say, Wait a second, Netanyahu, under no circumstances will you do that.
If you do that, we're going to shoot down your plane, so knock it off.
Nobody thought Obama would do that.
Now, what am I saying?
What I'm saying is this.
If that's Netanyahu's assessment, what's to prevent him from doing that other than Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, telling his opposite members, Look, if you start a war with Iran, we're going to do everything possible to avoid being ordered to help you.
So it's a very, very difficult situation.
It's very complicated.
What I'd like to just get onto is you mentioned Hamas before and the black eye that the United States gets for supporting Israel and its actions against the duly elected government in Gaza, because that's where Hamas, of course, is supposed to be in charge, and what that does to terrorism.
What I'd like to say is this.
Remember that attack on the CIA outpost in eastern Afghanistan by al-Badali?
Right, yep.
Well, he was interviewed after that, and they asked him, Why'd you do it?
And you recall that he was a doctor.
Wait, the suicide bomber was interviewed after he did the suicide bombing?
Yeah, yeah.
They released the video, right.
Good call.
No, his widow was interviewed and some of his friends, and his widow said that her husband started to change after the American-led invasion of Iraq, and his brother, Al-Balawi is his name, changed during the three-week-long Israeli offensive in Gaza at the turn of last year, which killed about 1,300 Palestinians.
Well, you know, another place where Hamas ties in there as well, well, Hamas and Hezbollah both, I guess, is Jeffrey Goldberg's piece in The Atlantic a few months back, I guess then last summer.
He had Netanyahu saying that he wasn't afraid of a nuclear first strike from Iran, even if they did have nukes.
He knows better than that.
They got hydrogen bombs by the hundreds, the Israelis do.
But he said he thought that if Iran had nukes, then Hezbollah and Hamas could be emboldened.
That was the reason we needed to have a war.
That's one of the main reasons, yeah.
And what I'm trying to say here is that Balawi, he was a medical doctor.
He wanted to go to Gaza, okay?
He wanted to help out.
He was a Palestinian.
He lived in Jordan.
And the Jordanian intelligence service was too clever by half.
They, quote, recruited him, end quote, to go and talk to these high-level al-Qaeda guys, and he did do that.
He was sympathetic to them.
The answer was the bombing and killing of how many CIA operatives.
Now, the thing is, Hamas won the election, right?
And what the U.S., through the CIA and the Israelis, tried to do with the full cooperation of the PLO, the Palestinians and the West Bank, they tried to displace Hamas, okay?
And they started it, and Hamas prevailed.
Right.
At first, they were going to have to have a coalition government between the two of them, and then America supported some kind of attempted civil war, which the PLO promptly lost.
That's exactly right.
And the elections were called by Connelisa Rice in the first place.
Let's not forget that, sorry.
Oh, and they wouldn't let the PLO collect their border taxes so that they could buy up all their votes, like in the deal.
So Hamas was left to fill that vacuum as well.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, it's just unconscionable the way that thing happened.
Oh, and Israel created Hamas in the first place to be a right-wing religious counter to the PLO.
Okay, I'm sorry, now go ahead.
No, but what I'm saying here is really interesting, because I think it's interesting.
When you do things like that to Hamas, when you applaud, for example, when Hamas helicopter gunship bullets kill the Islamic cleric who heads up the religious folks in Gaza, that happened right before the Blackwater operatives were rounded up in Fallujah, okay?
Now, nobody knows the connection there, but I'll tell you what the connection was.
As they dragged these poor fellows through the street and hung them from the bridge, on the sides of these station wagons and in all the storefronts were signs saying, this is retaliation for Yassin.
Right, and Yassin, he was the guy that Mossad had recruited to create Hamas back in the first place.
He was the old man in the wheelchair that they killed in that missile striker.
Just two weeks before.
Yeah, but I read Richard Sale at UPI all about that, if you want.
So there you have a situation where you have a direct tie between Israeli terrorism against this blind, crippled cleric and terrorism, real terrorism, against these four Blackwater guys, which led, in turn, to an attempt to level Fallujah, but then it was too close to the 2004 election, and so the week after the election, they did level Fallujah with depleted uranium, with white phosphorus shells.
Which led to the exodus from Fallujah, which helped precipitate the civil war, which helped the Iranians take control of the whole damn country.
Yeah.
And I'm sorry, but Ray, we're over time, and I've got to get Ivan Ehlen on the horn here, but it's great, as always, to talk to you.
Great analysis, as always.
And I think that the bottom line is pretty apparent here, right?
That the first decade of the 21st century, the American policy has been determined by the worst right-wing nationalists in Israel, and that's why everything is such a disaster, and that's why we're in such danger of it getting that much worse.
It'll be bad for all of us, not only us, but for the Israeli citizens themselves, if they don't wise up and realize there's a different way.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, thanks so much, everybody.
That is Ray McGovern, ConsortiumNews.com, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and, of course, Antiwar.com/McGovern for his writings there.
Thanks, Ray.
