07/11/12 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Website is ScottHortonShow.com.
Have all the archives going back to 2003.
More than 2,500 interviews there now at ScottHortonShow.com.
Also check out my blog, Stress, at TheStressBlog.com.
And I'm on Facebook.
Even though you can't be my friend because I already got 5,000, you can subscribe to me, which is, I think, the same thing, really.
And that's Facebook.com/AntiwarRadio.
Our next guest is Ray McGovern.
Oftentimes, nowadays, writing for ConsortiumNews.com and, of course, has his own website at RayMcGovern.com.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So I wanted to talk with you about this thing, how Iran might see the threats.
And so you say, basically, you know, you're playing the role of what if you were Iranian intelligence and you were reporting back home about what's the Americans' position, all that kind of thing.
And, well, hell, I guess I'll just let you tell the story as you wrote it here.
Go ahead.
Well, in short, it appears that the Iranians have finally figured out that it's not about the nuclear issue.
It's about regime change, what in my day in intelligence we used to call regime overthrow, overthrowing governments, and that this is reflected in the West's, quote, negotiating position, end quote, which is the maximalist demands from the Israeli leadership, namely, do not enrich any uranium, Iran, and, you know, dismantle what you already have.
And in the meantime, blow up that provocation, you know, that big provocation that the Iranians did in building this reprocessing center under a mountain.
I mean, there's a cause for war right there, because once they do that, Israel can't obliterate it anymore.
So Iran's got to do all these things, and then we can talk, and maybe we'll lift the sanctions.
It's really unconscionable, the attitude that has been taken.
And, of course, it all has to do with the United States election here for president and Obama's determination not to seem any less than 110% behind the state of Israel.
All right, so basically, to sum up, the nuclear issue, as always, just a red herring.
Everybody knows it's a civilian nuclear program, not a nuclear weapons program.
That's not what it's about.
And the reason that you can tell is because America has adopted Israel's completely ridiculous demands that they cease all enrichment, even though we're so far so many years past that all enrichment to 20%.
And that they actually close down that Fordow facility, which are demands basically an offer that the Iranians can't possibly accept.
And then of course, they top it off with and no matter whether you capitulate to all of our ridiculous and obviously, you know, made to refuse demands or not, we still will never lift the sanctions against you because we hate you so much.
That's the official position of the American negotiators.
And so now, in your fictitious report back home to the Iranian government here is, you know, the fiction you're playing out in this article, you're recommending them recommending to them what that they take what position in response to this?
Well, I say in my last little point here that I would draw on some common American expressions, maybe I'll take a step back here, Scott, and explain what an art wolf is.
Yeah, this is a think piece.
Okay, art wolf is simply a clever name given to it by a chief of station, a CIA chief of station many years ago.
In other words, you're not committing treason here and writing an Intel briefing for the ayatollah.
You're just playing red team.
Yeah, but it's very instructive to do this.
Because you know, the CIA station chief does this from Kabul.
And he says, Hey, folks, this is a fool's errand will never prevail in Afghanistan.
And that gets high level dissemination.
And the chief of station in Kabul gets removed.
Okay.
So there are gutsy chiefs of station that do these kinds of things.
And I'm sure that if you reverse roles here and pretend to be the chief of station that Iran has at its let's say it's UN representation in New York, they are probably asking him to report back you give it to a straight whether you what the Americans really up to answer to that is what what Israel wants.
And number two, what does Israel want?
And I come up with five points on that.
Number one, the overthrow of the Islamic Republic government shades of 1953.
Number two, create in Iran, the kind of hardship, devastation, degradation that would degrade its ability to support the Palestinians.
That's really key.
A key part of Israel's strategy is to deplete the resources of supporters of Hezbollah and Hamas and shut down their support systems.
Okay, so now that's very unlike 1953, right?
We don't want a strong nationalist fascist dictator who's going to do what we tell him to do.
We want a Persia at war with itself from now on.
Yeah, what we want is to degrade, you know, look at Iraq, for example, that was a catastrophe, right?
There didn't used to be any suicide bombers in Iraq.
Now it's running, it's teeming with them.
So Israel is a little bit more at peril.
On the other hand, because of what's happened in Iraq, they're not in any position to stoke up resentment or stoke up violence against the Israelis.
They've got a decade yet to get their house back in order.
So if you can, can dismember these places or make them unable to to support Hamas and Hezbollah, the Israelis consider that to be a major point.
The other thing, of course, is by focusing on Iran and getting all the US media, virtually all of it, and all the US politicians, Romney and Obama included, focusing on this nebulous, well, this fraudulent threat from Iran, well, that diverts attention from the stymied talks with the Palestinians, as Israeli settlers can continue to, you know, how they put it is create facts on the ground, where you have hundreds and thousands, hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers, stealing Palestinian land in the West Bank.
Nobody takes much note of that.
Because, you know, Iran's the big problem.
So in the process, if they can attack Iran, they will set back the Iranian enrichment program a few years.
And, and again, what's key here is the window of opportunity that the Israelis may see with the presidential election.
What all comes down to Scott, and this is the key, it seems to me, the key is how Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, their defense minister, how they perceive our president.
And I would have to say that they perceive him correctly, if, as I suspect, they think he's what in the Bronx, we call a wuss, okay, a wuss, who really will have no, no option other than to spring very quickly to Israel's defense, if it starts hostilities with Iran, that's controlling.
Now, if the Israelis do that before the election, as all kinds of people now are speculating, they're held and determined to do, it will work out well for them from their point of view.
Number one, Obama will have to jump in.
Now, let's say there's a 10, 10, 15% chance that he'll say, hey, we told you guys not to do this, count us out.
What happens then?
He would lose the election in Israeli perspective.
So you know, it's a it's a lose lose situation for Obama.
If there are hostilities, and the US jumps in, the price of oil zooms threefold, and the world economy goes down, who wins the election then?
Well, I think they would think Romney may.
So it's a very, very delicate calculus.
And in my view, Israel is really very much on the defensive.
They've had their what I what I call their, their worst bad hair year in the history of the state of Israel, Egyptian on the on the to the south, the Turks are angry with them in the north.
And there are a string of recent things that we can perhaps discuss.
When we come back here, recent, very peculiar things that would make the Israelis even more anxious, and willing perhaps to do something drastic.
All right, we will pick that up on the other side of this break.
It's Ray McGovern from consortium news.com or ray mcgovern.com.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, Scott Horton show calm, keep all the archives of the interviews there.
And stop by the stress blog.com if you want to.
All right, we're talking with Ray McGovern, veteran intelligence professional for sanity.
He was a CIA analyst for 27 years.
And he opposed all the wars since at least the new millennium, maybe before that.
And, and what we're talking about here is, well, basically him pretending for the sake of literary explication of things, to be an Iranian intelligence analyst reporting back home about what's the Israeli/American position on Iran.
And before the break, really, Ray, you're getting to your thinking that because of the situation that Israel finds itself in with losing their friend Mubarak there in Egypt, with chaos, not sure what's going to happen next up there in Syria, that they may just really be thinking that now is the time to go ahead and strike Iran because we're talking about Benjamin Netanyahu here, not they write him and him and a hood, Barack, the former prime minister, current defense minister, they may just decide, let's go ahead and do this now, during the election season, because this is the time where we have Obama in a box the most where he'll absolutely have to come to our aid to continue the bombing.
That's right, Scott, I'd like to know what kind of likelihood are you doing that?
Because I know the CIA national intelligence estimates, at least when they release the declassified summaries or whatever, they always say, well, we judge with high confidence, or we judge with medium confidence.
So give me some kind of percentage, some kind of value on how risky you think this is?
Are we talking about spring of 2007 level risk or worse or not so bad?
Well, the spring of 2007 risk, at least now, what happened in 2007, your listeners may remember, is that there was an honest national intelligence estimate done, published in November, which said, Iran has stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003, and has not resumed work on a nuclear weapon.
That judgment stands, it was unanimous, all 16 agencies involved in intelligence in our government said that with substantial confidence, and to their credit, the heads of the intelligence agencies have stuck by so so that, you know, what you start out with, although that spring that NIE was suppressed, and there was a real push for maybe we will just see, you know, this is the time when Cheney was deliberately leaking by way of David Wumser, his Middle East policy advisor, that they wanted to work a deal with a hood Allmer where they would go ahead and start the war and force Bush into it, because Cheney didn't trust Bush to do the right thing and do this war.
That's right.
And they almost succeeded in doing that in early 2007.
And then later, in late, late 2008, right before they went out of office.
But what I'm trying to say here is that National Intelligence estimates stopped the war.
They kept it secret.
They kept it even secret from the White House, as far as I can tell, and it was a blockbuster.
And if you want confirmation of that, look what George W. Bush says it is memoirs.
Well, one minor point there people can find where I blogged it at anti war.com.
I don't know if it's still at the website, or if it was only in the magazine, the American conservative, but Phil Giraldi had wrote had written a deep background piece in the fall of Oh, six.
My thing on the anti war.com blog, I think was called release the Iran and I eat.
And it was more than a year, it was like a year and a month or a year and two months before they finally released it.
And Giraldi had the leak that there is one and that it says what we would have it say what we know it ought to say the truth in it and Cheney's fighting it and suppressing it.
So it was already ready already in the fall of Oh, six.
Well, that's Scott, that's how it looked to us at the time.
Now we know that the honest people running this estimate rebuffed Cheney's efforts, and awaited and collected new information, which confirmed the fact that these that the Iranians have stopped working on an open weapon at the end of 2003.
And when all 16 agencies came together after to be sure after an ovary over a year process, they could agree unanimously that they had stopped and that's when they put it out.
And that's when Bush was flummoxed.
He just didn't know what to do.
He says in his memoirs, this is a bombshell.
Why didn't they?
I don't know why they said these things.
I didn't agree with it.
And then this famous sentence, how could I possibly authorize a military strike on a country who the intelligence agency says has no active nuclear weapons program?
And quote, well, bummer, you know, so yeah, so anyhow, what I'm saying here is that that was a it was pretty likely then it decreased in likelihood in early 2008 months after the weapons, but they still made a big try for it.
At least Cheney did.
And he admits having done this in late 2008 before they went out of office.
What's happened now is the Arab Spring, Israel has lost a dependable ally to itself, Egypt, with, gosh, what is it 770 million people to Israel seven, that's a lot.
Syria is in turmoil.
Turkey has been lost as a dependent dependable ally of Israel.
They had very, very close military and intelligence terms.
They've lost out in the UN to a degree.
And now we have these other reports here.
Arafat.
Well, if there were any doubt that Arafat was done in by Israeli intelligence, I think almost everybody will believe now that it was polonium that did it.
And as soon as they find polonium on Arafat's body, when they exhume him, that'll be exact proof that that happened.
That's, that's not going to be can go over well for the Israelis.
There's a book out now just out an Israeli book, which talks about the Mossad being behind the killing of Iranian scientists.
We have confirmation now from FBI files, that Netanyahu was involved.
Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, was involved in the nuclear smuggling ring, which allowed Israel to circumvent all prohibitions against acquiring a nuclear weapon.
And worst of all, we have a report from a very, very reputable, reputable defense reporter in Israel.
His name is Alon Ben David.
And he writes for Haaretz.
And he's not a you know, he's not a pundit.
He's a pro.
Okay.
And what he says is that Netanyahu and Barack have made a decision, Barack, not Barack Obama, but Ehud Barak, have made a decision to strike between August and October to strike Iran.
Now, why would they do that?
Well, Israel needs some way to demonstrate that the sole remaining superpower in the world is behind it not only rhetorically, but in a real real politic way to the extent of committing US forces to help Israel, when inevitably, it suffers retaliation from Iran.
This is big stuff so big that the Israelis are trying to sort of batten down the hatches by by making making something patently illegal legal.
And this came out yesterday, where a former Israeli Supreme Court type said, Hey, those settlements, everyone used to say they're illegal.
Well, guess what?
No, they're legal.
We think they're legal.
It's not really an occupation there in the West Bank.
It's something different.
And so we're going to go ahead and build many, many more settlements.
Shimon Peres, who's the President of Israel said, bad idea.
More West Bank settlements are a threat to Israel.
And guess what?
Shimon Peres is right.
Because Israel cannot continue on this course, without without risking the destruction of Israel, whether it comes by starting a war with Iran, or whether it comes from these awful legal maneuvers, which justify or make legal the illegal under all in international law.
Israel is isolated in a way that hasn't been since it's since its founding in 1948.
And the question is, how this will enter into the calculations of a fellow named Netanyahu, who thinks our president can't stand up to what he, you know, whatever Netanyahu wants to do, he counts on Barack Obama to do exactly what a hood Barack does, namely salute.
Well, now, Ray, would you agree, I think the leverage position, I'll probably, you know, criminally oversimplified or something.
But they're basically saying, I think Gareth Porter saying that, well, they're trying to do these negotiations, not to actually negotiate anything at all, but just to keep them going for now to put off any Israeli strike till at least after the election to make it too hard for Israel to do anything, as long as they have an agreement to at least have another meeting where they can agree to at least have another meeting.
Is that what's going on?
And is that not going to work?
Well, it depends on Netanyahu.
That is a good observation.
Gareth and the leverets are the best there are.
And this is a delaying tactic.
And Obama hopes dearly that if he can keep some experts talking to to the Iranians, that the Israelis will not attempt this kind of thing.
What I'm trying to say is that Obama has very little influence over Netanyahu.
Of course, Netanyahu is going to do whatever you're doing.
Well, please, I'm sorry, we got to go Ray.
Okay, Ray McGovern, everybody, ConsortiumNews.com, RayMcGovern.com and check out ScottHortonShow.com and support, hit that donate button up at the top and keep this thing going if you want.