Victor Thorn
Interview with ex-CIA Agent Ray McGovern
Thu Aug 7 01:07:16 2003
64.140.158.140

The Victor Thorn Show interview with ex-CIA Agent Ray McGovern
by Victor Thorn and Lisa Guliani
http://www.babelmagazine.com/issue112/nwox112.html

NOTE: The Victor Thorn show airs every Monday night – 9:00 pm eastern standard time – on the Reality Radio Network – www.realityradionetwork.com . This interview was broadcast on July 21, 2003.

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Victor Thorn: We’d like to welcome Mr. Raymond McGovern, a 27 year veteran of the CIA to the Victor Thorn Show. He was an analyst from 1964 to 1990, and served seven presidents from John Kennedy to George Bush, Sr. His job was as a senior foreign policy analyst, and he regularly reported to the Vice President and also to senior policy makers on the President’s daily briefs from 1981 to 1985. We’ll be joined by Ray in a few minutes to talk about the biggest buzz in the political world right now: weapons of mass destruction and the forgery that is going on with the supposed uranium that Iraq was going to buy from Niger. It’s all over talk-radio, it’s all over the Internet, and Ray has written quite extensively about this. He was interviewed Sunday night on the CBS News with Dan Rather, and he’s also made quite a few appearances on FOX News to let them know his side of the story. He says that many people in the Bush administration knew that this was a faulty premise, that the information was forged, and they used it anyway to take our country into war against Iraq. The biggest thing right now is, the more people that find out about this, the more they know that we’ve been getting conned. They realize that this administration knew they were lying about this information to get us into war – and even more importantly, they knew that it would take time before anybody uncovered this evidence. And they went ahead anyway and used it. George Bush used it in his State of the Union Address. And as this debacle in Iraq keeps unfolding, as more and more of our troops die everyday, people are going to wake up and say, “What are we doing over there? Why are we in Iraq? This information you gave us is a lie. You said there were chemical weapons and biological weapons over there. You said there were weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq was actually developing nuclear weapons”. Now it’s all a lie.

Lisa Guliani: Yes, that was the basis for selling this war to the American people and to the Congress.

Victor Thorn: Now, when we see our sons and daughters dying every day, people are going to ask, “Why? Why are we over there?” We are going to ask Ray directly what are we doing in Iraq and what this administration knew beforehand?

Lisa Guliani: We’d especially like to ask him about the Niger documents that were forged and peddled to Congress and the American public, especially now that it’s out in the open that they are forgeries. So, we basically went to war under a false pretense – which many activists and political writers have been saying all along.

Victor Thorn: Exactly. And if we start uncovering lies about this matter, what if we go back nearly two years to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. There’s already voluminous amounts of information that this administration isn’t telling us everything they knew about it. And the more we look into it, the more we see that there are ties between this matter, 9/11, and it actually goes back to the Afghanistan war with Russia where our CIA essentially created Osama bin Laden and these terrorists that are surrounding him right now.

Lisa Guliani: I guess what compelled me to contact Ray McGovern was watching him on mainstream news shows – how he was subjected to censorship and had a very limited time to speak - basically the same old song & dance that the mainstream media does to anybody who has something anti-status quo to say. So we decided to give him as much time as he wants to say what he couldn’t say on TV.

Victor Thorn: The first time we saw Ray on FOX News, I looked at Lisa and said, “How did this guy get on there?” He was actually speaking the truth! It was so refreshing to see somebody saying something that wasn’t propaganda or the same old party-line. So, right now we’d like to welcome Ray McGovern. How are you doing tonight?

Ray McGovern: Hello! I’m doing all right!

Victor Thorn: Ray, we already gave an intro about your career in the CIA.

Ray McGovern: Okay.

Victor Thorn: It’s very impressive. You served seven presidents from John Kennedy to George Bush, Sr., and were a CIA analyst for 27 years. So, let’s start right off. I know there are a lot of people listening tonight. The most important and clear-cut scandal facing the Bush administration right now is the forged nuclear documents from Niger. They were presented not only to Congress, but to the American public to justify our war with Iraq because supposedly they were developing a nuclear program. So, I’m going to start off asking you point blank: is George Bush lying to the American public about what he actually knew in regard to this matter?

Ray McGovern: Well, it’s very difficult to say what George Bush himself knew, but what his advisors knew is quite clear. You picked the right thing to start with, Victor, because this forgery is something that I have not known in my experience that the U.S. government has used in so cynical a way before. You know, when you get a body of evidence, we intelligence analysts can look at it and two of us can have honest disagreements with respect to how we interpret that body of evidence. But a forgery – well, a forgery is a forgery. It was known that this information was bogus, and yet it was the only thing they had to make out a specter of Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons in his hands. The first smoking gun, the president painlessly said, would be a mushroom cloud - and this kind of frightening prospect frankly scared our congressmen and senators into voting for war the way the administration wanted them to on October 11th. So, it was a difference in kind of anything I’ve witnessed in the 40 years that I’ve been in Washington and intimately watching these kinds of things. It was a very pre-planned orchestrated deception which really goes to the heart of separation of powers in our constitutional system because if our elected representatives cannot get the straight scoop from the Executive branch, how can they know when or when not to vote for war?

Lisa Guliani: I would like to ask you, what was the motivation for President Bush and his administration to present forged documents to the people and perpetuate terror among the citizens of this country?

Ray McGovern: Well, their primary objective, of course, was to get Congress to give their permission to wage war against Iraq. The American people are genuinely confused, and with good reason. They say these days, well, if there are no weapons of mass destruction there, and if there’s no real evidence of a tie with Al Quaeda, then why? Why the war with Iraq? And it’s a good question. They’re not going to find the answer from watching FOX News. But they will find the answer by going on the World Wide Web and searching for “A Project for a New American Century”. There they will find the ideological, strategic underpinnings for the vision that the neo-conservatives in power in the Pentagon and the White House have in mind. It has to do with our preeminence, our sole possession of the superpower status, our ability to throw our weight around, and the new policy instituted by this administration to try to dominate all important parts of the world. And the Middle East of course, with all that oil, is one of those very important parts. Not coincidentally, Israel’s strategic objectives dovetail very nicely with ours and Israel is bound and determined to remain the regional super power in the Middle East. So this was killing two birds with one stone – unfortunately, the stone had to be war and our own men and women are now paying the price for that.

Victor Thorn: Ray, we’re going to look very extensively into not only Dick Cheney’s position at the center of all this, but also the neo-cons and how they fit into the equation. But first I want to tell you something. I was listening to talk-radio today - The Mike Gallagher Show – and author Ann Coulter was sitting in for him. She went into a mantra where she said at least a dozen times in the first two hours, “Why should we even care what the CIA has to say any more?” She said that this was a group that couldn’t even come up with valid information to prevent 9/11 from happening, so she was definitely taking a stance in taking shots at the CIA. I want to know why certain groups are doing that and how the CIA feels about being the scapegoat.

Ray McGovern: Well, the mantra is not new, Victor. It’s a mantra that was started by Richard Perle, one of the ideologues that inhabit the Pentagon and now is on the Defense Council. He said very early that “CIA analysis is not worth the paper it’s written on.” Now why would he say such a thing? Well, he would say such a thing because the CIA regularly comes up with answers that are not to Richard Perle’s liking. For example, the ties between Iraq and Osama bin Laden or Al Quaeda; or the ties between Iraq and 9/11 aren’t there. There ARE no ties. And that’s the wrong answer as far as Richard Perle is concerned. And as you probably know, Rumsfeld, Perle and Wolfowitz went to extraordinary lengths in creating their own little intelligence agency in the bowels of the Pentagon to come up with the RIGHT answers.

Victor Thorn: Since you mention it, I think the name that’s been given to them is “Rumsfeld’s Cabal”. There’s Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feif, Richard Perle, who they call the “Prince of Darkness,” and John Bolton. How much more in control of this situation are they than George Bush; or what is their position in relation to George Bush?

Ray McGovern: Well, it’s interesting that you should phrase it that way, Victor, because they have quite a hold on this George Bush. But these fellows were around under the first George Bush as well. And I know that from firsthand knowledge. The first George Bush kept these fellows at arm’s length. He and General Scowcroft, who was his National Security assistant, and Jim Baker, the Secretary of State, kept these folks in relatively medium positions in the Pentagon and elsewhere – and when they stepped out of line, they threw their product in the garbage. And I have a specific product in mind here. Wolfowitz, when Cheney was still Secretary of Defense, composed the Defense Posture Statement in 1991. And guess what? It bore all the earmarks of the policy that has now been introduced and actually implemented with the war in Iraq. It was so outlandish that someone leaked it to the Pentagon, and as soon as it hit the press, the first George Bush (with the advice of General Scowcroft and Jim Baker), called Cheney on the carpet and said, “Look, I don’t know about this Wolfowitz fellow, but make sure he destroys all copies.” Now isn’t it the height of irony that his son not only becomes captivated by these folks, but his son is actually instrumental in implementing the policies that they advocated, the policies which earned them the name “the crazies” – which is the name at which they were known at the highest policy levels.

Lisa Guliani: We’ve been talking with people over the last couple of years about how a cabal of international bankers, heads of multi-national corporations, and members of secret societies have infiltrated the American government and basically call the shots and how presidents are merely implementers of the public policy. What are your views on this?

Ray McGovern: Well, I think if you look at one aspect of that Lisa, if you look at the energy policy, I notice that Judicial Watch just came out with the results of the court order which ordered Cheney to turn over some of those documents – you’ll see that there’s a lot of truth in that. These folks were hatching plans to map out the oil resources of the Middle East well BEFORE 9/11. And if you look carefully through the “Project for a New American Century” documents, you’ll see echoes of these kinds of things as well.
FULL STORY:
http://www.babelmagazine.com/issue112/nwox112.html