Ray McGovern Interviewed by Lee Camp on RT (09/07/2017)

Supplemental document for: "Theory that Roger Stone's back channel to Wikileaks was Randy Credico", link: https://wakelet.com/wake/2d352ae9-febe-44a1-a7bb-51674a2e4bf5

Ray McGovern interviewed by Lee Camp, broadcast date: September 7, 2017. Excerpt runs from 1:32 to 21:37.

File link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASeiY-jnxIQ

LEE CAMP
Ray, thanks for being here.

RAY MCGOVERN
Welcome.

CAMP
So, since even before the presidential election, we are already seeing our media push this Russia Russia Russia storyline, and narrative, new Cold War narrative, that they've been pushing. You and your colleagues with VIPS recently put out an extensive memo showing that the DNC was not hacked, that it was almost definitely a leak instead of a hack. Can you go through some of the ways you know that?

MCGOVERN
Well, we've been saying for a whole year now, when I say "we", this is really out of my technical expertise, when I was a national intelligence officer, working for the head of the CIA, in his community role, I had to call on expertise from all over the place. From the scientists, from the engineers, from anyone, okay? And that's the way you work in this milieu. And so, when all the hacking came up, I looked at our little roster of specialists, and I said, "My god," we've got two former technical directors of NSA-

CAMP
Right.

MCGOVERN
-we've got people who've worked there cumulatively for over a hundred years at the NSA in very senior positions. Wow, this is great.

CAMP
My god.

MCGOVERN
So you pick those guys. Well, that's Bill Binney, who is the most experienced, who actually contrived or even set up many of the collection systems NSA still uses. I said, "Bill, tell me about this." He said, "The most important thing you need to know, Ray, is the difference between a leak and a hack. Now, a hack has to go across the network, has to go across the internet. We cover the internet-" Because NSA says "iron bound", iron bound - they get everything.

CAMP
The NSA gets everything.

MCGOVERN
And so I said "C'mon. Everything? Millions? Billions? Trillions?" He says, "Ray, I'm sorry - yeah. Now I can talk about it. Because Ed Snowden has shown exactly how you do it. The trace routes within the system, he mapped them out, I know where they- So, yeah. Trust me, Ray."

CAMP
Yeah.

MCGOVERN
The NSA had this kind of thing. They would certainly acknowledge it by now, or-

CAMP
Have evidence of an internet hack.

MCGOVERN
[Binney:] "And so what this was, surely, Ray, was a copy off a computer, thumb drive, something like that, external storage device, and that doesn't go over the network...and so NSA can't get that." Now, that's the kind of negative evidence we've had for a whole year, okay? I mean, like, we can always have a Rumsfeld who can say, "Come on, guys, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

CAMP
Right.

MCGOVERN
Okay?

CAMP
Right.

MCGOVERN
In Princeton, you learn that kind of thing. In other words, if there's no evidence of WMDs, Weapons of Mass Destruction, that doesn't mean they're not there. So you always have people who say that...now, about six weeks ago, we learned that independent forensic scientists - like us - with no axe to grind, just said, you know, this really smells. Let's go into the metadata. Let's go into the forensics of this celebrated hack of July 5 last year [the hack did not take place on that date; have no idea why this date is referred to]. And let's see if can find out more about it, and they did! And reports started coming in, about six weeks ago, five weeks ago, and the first thing we do is jump on them, and I quizzed all our specialists. I said, "Bill" - Bill Binney - "What do you think?" He said, "Well, this is what we're waiting for, Ray. Q.E.D." Now, for those of you who haven't had geometry in the last- If you didn't have geometry fifty years ago, you don't know. That means the theorem, or the theory, is proved. Quod Erat Demonstrandum. That which is to be proved, is proved. Wow. This is a story. He says, "Yeah, sure it's a story." And we crafted a story, we vetted it with our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, for two weeks, which is an unusually long period of time. And those who signed on were very happy with it. And then The Nation took interest in it, and we said, "Wow!", now a nation-wide magazine is interested, and we co-operated with Patrick Lawrence, who, you know, was a little annoying, because he kept asking questions and questions and questions-

CAMP
Oh, how terrible. Of a journalist.

MCGOVERN
We're not used to that! So, he did a real good job, and now of course the Nation is under great pressure because this is so counter-intuitive.

CAMP
This is The Nation magazine.

MCGOVERN
The Nation magazine, yeah. It's uh, you know, it's kinda...so, so much against the Kool-Aid that's been drunk for a whole year now. Russia [inaudible] Russia [inaudible]-

CAMP
You've put out many many memos, starting back with WMD [sic]. And so I'm sure you're used to this kind of pushback, going against the national narrative being pushed by the mainstream media. Did you see it back then, with WMD?

MCGOVERN
Oh, of course. Even then we were on active duty, so to speak, as intelligence analysts. When we said the Russians aren't ten feet tall, - "Aw man, Pentagon!"

CAMP
Lightning out of their arse.

MCGOVERN
So, you know, we're used to this. The neat thing about this, we have no axe to grind. We're looking for the truth.

CAMP
Right.

MCGOVERN
And on a matter of this significance, if, as I suspect, having done my personal poll, eighty percent of Americans believe that we have that clown in the White House-

CAMP
Yeah.

MCGOVERN
Thanks to Vladimir Putin- [CAMP laughs] That's pretty bad.

CAMP
Right.

MCGOVERN
Now, I hasten to add, that we run into all kinds of, what I'd call "cognitive dissonance", because people say, "Oh! They're trying to get- They're trying to let Trump off the hook." Now, why would anyone- [laughing] There are so many reasons to impeach Trump-

CAMP
That are legitimate. To go after him. Yeah.

MCGOVERN
I mean, like, my grandchildren are not gonna have pure air to breathe-

CAMP
Right.

MCGOVERN
Clean water. Is that not enough-

CAMP
There's legitimate reasons to go after Trump, and instead, we're focused on this bogeyman, it seems. Well, I'm gonna play the role of Al Franken here, "Why did seventeen intelligence agencies say it was Russia?"

MCGOVERN
Well, number one, there aren't seventeen intelligence agencies, there are only sixteen. And there's the superimposed superstructure Director of National Intelligence who's supposed to co-ordinate all this. But be that, I'll say seventeen. It wasn't seventeen. But Hillary Clinton immediately said seventeen. Everybody said it was seventeen. New York Times said seventeen. And then: wonder of wonders, James Clapper and John Brennan, two gentleman, and I use the word loosely, not very well known for their, their credibility...

CAMP
Yeah.

MCGOVERN
Said "No, uh, I know people said it was seventeen, but it really wasn't seventeen-" "How many were-" Al Franken: "How many were there? Four?" "No, uh, three."

CAMP
Three.

MCGOVERN
"Three, actually, not even three-" because these were hand-picked analysts. Now, we know from our intelligence experience, that when you use hand-picked analysts, and you have a conclusion that you are trying to reach...well, obviously, you pick the right analysts, whether they're careerists, or whether they actually believe what you wanna...so, the whole thing is pretty transparent. The memo that they came up with is, and I've said before, is a disgrace to the intelligence professional- profession, because it gives no evidence to support this. We assess- we assess- and we assess a little bit more. And we assess. What does assess mean? It means, we are guessing. We don't have any evidence.

CAMP
Right. Some of these terms, to people who aren't in these communities, they hear "assess", and that means they came out with an analysis that showed- but inside the community, assess just means, it's kinda our idea.

MCGOVERN
Yeah, but then they say "high confidence". High confidence. Well, we had "high confidence" there were weapons of mass destruction-

CAMP
Right.

MCGOVERN
-in Iraq. The sorrowful thing for us, is that so many people in the agencies, in the intelligence agencies, all seventeen...so many people know what kind of fraud this has been, perpetrated on the American people. And not one - as with weapons of mass destruction, hundreds may die. Hundreds. Not one - has come forth, and blown the whistle. Now, with weapons of mass destruction we had three foreign service officers, one in Athens, one in Mongolia, one in Washington. This is it. That's fraud. We quit, you know?

CAMP
Right.

MCGOVERN
Short of tour, and short of career, in some respects. But this time, nothing. And that's kinda...maybe we'll get something, maybe somebody will be watching here and say, "You know, this is really important, Russia's not a really big country, we should do what we can to right this  ship."

CAMP
It's so important and it's actually very dangerous for- we're pushing the world toward nuclear war, nuclear scientists say we're two and a half minutes from midnight, or whatever.

MCGOVERN
Yeah, it's also unnecessary. There are people that are very interested in having a tense relationship with Russia-

CAMP
Right.

MCGOVERN
Those, of course, are what Pope Francis called "the blood soaked arms traders". I mean - hello? - there's a lot of money in tensions with Russia, and it's really very sad to watch those people, what an inordinate influence they have over policy-making. Witness the fact that fifty four cents of every dollar we pay in taxes goes to the military.

CAMP
Um, and you actually confronted Representative Adam Schiff about this, you had a moment with him, where you know- and he's the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, and if anyone's going to know, it's him, I mean-

[plays clip of McGovern confronting Schiff on January 25, 2017, at a Center for American Progress Action Fund event, transcript is here: https://pastebin.com/3HaMNYMt ]

MCGOVERN
Let me just give a quick thing, so your audience can-

CAMP
Yeah.

MCGOVERN
When this discotheque in Berlin, I think it was in the eighties, K? It was bombed, okay? We lost two soldiers, seventy nine soldiers gravely wounded. We knew it was the Libyans. How'd we know? Because we had an intercepted, encrypted Libyan message from their security services. It worked. We did it. And we escaped complete detection. Quite ironic, right? So, what does Ronald Reagan do? Well, he bombs the hell out of Qaddafi's compound. And kills one of his adopted little daughters, you know? And the world was saying - "How did you know it was the Libyans?" So, Reagan comes to us and says, "Give me that message." So, we give it to him, and he says, "We gotta release this message." *imitates noise of multiple people yelling in uproar* "You can't do that!" "The Libyans don't know we can intercept and they don't know we can decrypt it, so we'll lose it!" [Reagan:] "Give it to the media." So we did.

CAMP
Wow.

MCGOVERN
And within two days, the whole world calmed down. And I said, "My god, there it is." They know we did it at 1:30 in the morning, and nobody knows about it, and it was legitimate. But my point is simply: there are times when it's a matter of state, it just makes an awful lot of sense to blow a source. Now, did we suffer for that? Well, we missed that source for a little while, but we have other sources...[inaudible rambling off] This is important enough so that Adam Schiff should be able to say, "Look, I've seen the sources, and they're very persuasive," and give them to us, or he should just keep his mouth shut, and say, "Well, that's what the seventeen, I mean, four, no, I mean, three intelligence agencies tell me."

CAMP
Since this memo came out, and these are very significant claims from very significant people like yourself, what is the government response been, to the fact that this basically seems to not be a hack, and is a leak, and is therefore not Russian?

MCGOVERN
Well, we've been used to this response ever since we started making a lot of trouble on weapons of mass destruction, fifteen years ago. Nothing. See, they can do that. Because they control the media. Now, people say, "Aw, McGovern. You're exaggerating." But, you know, if you look at the New York Times, to whom everybody looks for what they can say, you can see that they suppress information that is thoroughly important and to put things together. You want to connect the dots? Well, there are dots there, that the New York Times doesn't feel is fit to print. Why? Because they check with the White House [sic].

[commercial break]

MCGOVERN
Back in 2004, three months before the election, you know, Bush...James Risen of the New York Times found out that NSA was scooping up all our telephone calls and all our emails. Three months before, he went to his people at the New York Times, and he said, "We gotta get this out." [NYT editor:] "Nah nah nah, you can't do that." [Risen:] "Why?" [editors:] "It's too close to the election." He said, "Whaaaa-" Well, he acquiesced in that, right? He should have blown the whistle.

CAMP
Yeah.

MCGOVERN
But he acquiesced. Okay. So, what happened? A year and three months later, okay? December of 2005, now, Risen goes to his superiors, and says, "You know, this is a little embarrassing, a little awkward, you're paying me big bucks, I've written this book on the side, that's going to be really awkward when this book appears, it's in galley, two weeks you got, and they'll say, how come you didn't put any of that in the New York Times? It has to do with NSA scooping up all our emails and telephone calls, in direct violation of Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States." [laughs] So, what happens? The mucketymucks, of the New York Times, go down, and they say, "Mr. Bush, we have to publish this." [Bush:] "No, you can't do that!" They're in the Oval Office, okay?

CAMP
Yeah.

MCGOVERN
The head of the Sulzberger- and this guy who is their head of the Washington office. And they said, "We have to do that. I hope you-" [Bush:] "Well, I don't understand!" [Sulzberger, or whoever from the NYT:] "Come on, Mr. President, we put this off for a year and three months, for god's sakes, you know-" So they went and published it, in December 15th. Now, it made a big big impact. But it was a year and three months too late. And the New York Times is so proud of having done the exposé, and Risen is the greatest guy, the best - one of the best - investigative reporters, but he didn't have the- Well, maybe it's too much to ask, but, if he blew the whistle, we wouldn't have had four more years of Bush-

CAMP
Wow.

MCGOVERN
That's my view.

CAMP
Wow. Was there- To go back a little, was there a moment that you decided you had to go from active CIA to becoming a bit of an activist, for sanity?

MCGOVERN
Mmm hmm. Well, I was- For sanity, thanks. There wasn't much sanity going on around in the early years of the Bush administration. I had been retired for a few years, and I never thought I'd be back on active duty, so to speak-

CAMP
Different kind of active duty.

MCGOVERN
But when I saw our former colleagues...really being corrupted-

CAMP
Mmmhmmm.

MCGOVERN
Because Bush said I want to make a war on Iraq, and it's your job to get me the evidence. It was very clear to us what was going on. It took till 2008, until the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report saying that pre-war intelligence on Iraq was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. Those are the words of the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even, non-existent. Now, I ask you, what does non-existent intelligence look like? [CAMP laughs] We knew that was going on, okay? And we've tried to blow the whistle before the war...we wrote three memos to the president, before the war, none of them were acknowledged. Only one, got any play, and that was because we happened to find a sympathetic Agence France Press, AFP, reporter who put it out on the wire, that was when Poland [inaudible because of CAMP speaking over it]

CAMP
Speaking of being published overseas, for this last question, I want to ask you about someone you and your colleagues are giving an award to, Seymour Hersh, put out a recent article, and he was forced to put it out overseas again, but about how the Syrian chemical attack, which Trump used as the reason to begin, you know, direct bombing of Syria, you know, he [Hersh] put forward very clear evidence that it was likely a regular traditional bombing that had hit a store of chlorine and other things, and...his incredible reporting doesn't seem to have gotten much play on our mainstream media despite this being such a crucial issue [the reporting by Hersh was deeply flawed, and relied entirely on off-the-record sources. Dissection of the Hersh piece can be found here: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2017/06/25/will-get-fooled-seymour-hersh-welt-khan-sheikhoun-chemical-attack/ ]. So, talk a little bit about that.

MCGOVERN
It got zero play.

CAMP
Yeah.

MCGOVERN
Zero!

CAMP
Yeah.

MCGOVERN
Now, uh, he usually publishes- he used to be able to publish in the New Yorker. The New Yorker has gone with the Kool-Aid. New York Review of Books, same way- London Review of Books [McGovern means the LRB when he first refers to the NYRB - Hersh worked a long time ago for the Times, not the NYRB]. They [the LRB] paid him to write this thing. And he was all set, and then they said, "We can't do that, because it'll make it look like we're supporting Trump and the Russ-" Not Trump, but- "We're supporting the Russians here!" So he says, "Yeah, well, but it's the-" [LRB:] "Well, here, here are your five thousand dollars-"

CAMP
It's not the truth we want.

MCGOVERN
So he had a friend in Germany, Die Welt, is a pretty big, pretty broadsheet. And to their credit, they said, "Well, it makes sense to us, it's been checked and double checked. You [Hersh] have quite a reputation. We'll publish it." And they put out immediately an English version. But it didn't get anywhere. So this thing where the President of the United States is attacking a foreign country, without so much as saying hello to Congress - and without as much as saying hello to the intelligence people. That's how bad it was! He saw some pictures of these babies, and he said, "Wow! They're doing it!" And who covers up for him? "Mad Dog" Mattis, the Defense Secretary, and these other generals around, that they have. So - that's [inaudible], my god, you know? I mean, you have the Russians looking on at that, and they say, my god, not even the generals could rein him in.

CAMP
And watching our media celebrate this move, this one thing all of our media loves Trump for, anytime he bombs, or sells weapons to another country, they're big fans.

MCGOVERN
It's quite remarkable, all of a sudden, from being the really terrible person - he became presidential.

CAMP
Presidential! Finally.

MCGOVERN
You shoot off fifty nine cruise missiles from those ships out there in Med- [Mediterranean] and you become presidential.

CAMP
Suddenly it's a magical formula. Suddenly, you're presidential.

MCGOVERN
The problem is that could happen again.

CAMP
Yeah. It's very scary. Uh- But thank you for raising the alarm and for all your great work, and people can go to Ray McGovern dot com to learn about everything you're doing. Thanks so much.

MCGOVERN
Thank you, Lee.