Ray McGovern Interviewed by Scott Horton (01/23/2017)

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 on "The Scott Horton Show". Broadcast date: January 23, 2017. Full transcript.

File link: https://scotthorton.org/interviews/12317-ray-mcgovern-on-obamas-admission-that-theres-no-proof-russian-hackers-gave-dnc-emails-to-wikileaks/

SCOTT HORTON
On the line, we've got the great Ray McGovern, he was a CIA analyst for 27 years, specialty in the Soviet Union back then, he's the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which has been pushing for peace since at least 2002, somewhere around there. Maybe 2001. And he's a regular writer at Consortiumnews dot com, and he gives speeches...he tours around, giving talks with an organization called "Tell The Word", in Washington, D.C. Welcome back to the show, how are you doing, Ray?

RAY MCGOVERN
Thanks Scott, doing well.

HORTON
I'm very happy to have you back on the show here. Interesting article. "Obama Admits Gap in Russia Hack Case" [link: http://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2017/01/22/obama-admits-gap-in-russian-hack-case/ ], ex-president Obama, that is, now. He had one last statement about the CIA's big Russia conspiracy theory, on the way out the door there, is that it?

MCGOVERN
That's correct. Yeah.

HORTON
And he admitted a gap, Ray?

MCGOVERN
[laughs] Well, you know, we always considered insufficient evidence, to be nice about it, and to quote what we used to say in the Bronx, say, it was a crock to begin with. But now, Obama himself said something that, curiously, has been missed by the mainstream press. The mainstream press, of course, is beating the drums for tensions, and perhaps even a little battle with Russia. K? And accusing Russia of being responsible for us getting Donald Trump. It could not have been Hillary Clinton's defective campaign, and character, it had to be somebody else, and the Russians were a good place to lay the blame. Now, what Obama said, and this just, you know, this is just, January 18, so, what's that, about ten days ago? Right? He says quote- well, in effect, what he says is that the conclusions of the intelligence community were inconclusive. [laughs] Okay? Here's the quote: "The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to Russian hacking...were not conclusive. As to whether Wikileaks was willing- was witting or not, in being the conduit, through which we heard about the DNC emails, that were hacked-"

HORTON
Now now, stop you befuddled old man. You must be confusing that quote with something that Bill Clinton said in 1998, or something. What?

MCGOVERN
Yeah, it depends on what your definition of "is", or, in this case, what your definition of, in this case, "conclusive" is. Now Obama gave us all the impression before he went off to Hawaii that he had conclusive evidence, so much so, that a few days later, sanctions were imposed. Thirty five Russian diplomats were thrown out of the country. You know, and then he said, let's do a comprehensive investigation to see what really happened. Well, apparently, they've done some investigation, and what comes up here is that there's a missing link. Okay? Now, when I say missing link, I mean, the all important link, between Wikileaks, that put out this very damaging to Hillary Clinton, email collection, just two days before the Democratic National Convention, the link between Wikileaks, and these "Russian hackers". So, what we have is Russian hacking. Now, let me just go back a sec. Does Russia hack? Of course Russia hacks. If I were head of the Russian intelligence service, and I didn't allow my people to hack [laughs], I should be fired. Everyone hacks. We hack. [laughs] Everyone who can, hacks. So, that's not at issue here. The issue is, whether the Wikileaks disclosures that showed that Hillary Clinton stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders, pure and simple, that's what the content showed. Whether they had anything to do with _Russian hacking_...and what Obama's saying here, on his way out, "Well, it's inconclusive. We can't show any link between Wikileaks and the Russian hackers." Now, that's critical. Because if there's no link, then there's no proof, and inconclusive is exactly the right word.

Now...last thing I'll say here is, as William Binney, who is part of our group, has said time and time again, were there to have been anything that went into Julian Assange or all those people who work with him, over the internet, on the network, they would, ipso facto, have been collected by NSA, the National Security Agency. Now, when you tell me that, the normal reaction most people have, it boggles the mind. How can [laughs] they collect everything? Well, the answer is, they do collect everything. Partly because they have the technology that Bill Binney devised as chief technical director of NSA before he retired. Also, we know they do that, we know how they do that, by the slides that Ed Snowden revealed after he went out in 2013. So, they do do that. Now, do they pay special attention to Julian Assange? Well, HELLO?! [laughs] The NSA people have an expression, or an adjective they use, "cast iron". That's the coverage that they give to people like Julian Assange. Cast iron coverage. Now, you can imagine what that is. Telephones. Emails. All kinds of listening devices at that embassy, the Ecuadorian embassy in London. And, it's well known, many of the people who helped Julian, they would also receive this cast iron coverage.

So: what's the bottom line here? The bottom line here, is that people have conflated the fact that Russia hacks, everybody hacks, with the surfacing of these emails, that Julian Assange said did not come from Russia, or any other state entity. And that one of his chief associates, a good friend of mine, ambassador Craig Murray, says, it was not a hack, it was a leak, and he has been in touch personally with at least one of the people associated with that leak. Now, what Murray says, we're talking about two leaks. One leak from the Clinton, or from the DNC and Clinton emails, and the other from John Podesta's emails. What's the common thread here? Well, Craig Murray says that when, you know, bright eyed bushy tailed young people working for the Democratic National Committee...when they saw...when they saw what dirty tricks were played on Bernie Sanders, whom many of them supported initially, I guess, and Craig Murray guesses, that the world needs to know this. How are we going to do this? We're not going to send a message [laughs] to Julian Assange, we're going to take a little thumb drive, right? And we're going to put it in our computer, and we're going to download this stuff just the way Chelsea Manning did, just the way Ed Snowden did, and we'll get it to Julian one way or the other. That, I am ninety five percent sure, is what happened. And so, if that's what happened, and Craig Murray, and Julian Assange have a much better reputation for veracity than any of these clowns like John Brennan or James Clapper...I believe them. And, so, if that's the case, then this whole charade, this whole charade that the Russians hacked into these emails, in order to help give Donald Trump a special boost, to become president, and sotto voce, therefore he's an illegitimate president, therefore he's a Russian puppet, therefore if he wants to calm tensions with Russia, _beware_, this fellow is dangerous. You know, I've never seen anything quite like this, because the whole mainstream media is aboard on this campaign. It's even worse, and that's saying something, it's even worse than 2002, when they all beat the drums for an unnecessary war against Iraq.

HORTON
Even worse. Alright, so, hang on, we're going to get to even worse in the Cold War [sic], and all this spin against Trump, and the new Russia policy in a minute, but...I wanna go back to a couple of points of fact here. First of all, I've talked with Murray and with Binney. And so, if anyone wants to check the archives, those interviews are there. And I will note that Murray...he more or less, you know, kind of confirmed that the Podesta leak came from the intelligence community, whereas the DNC leak came from the DNC, as you're saying there. But I would say, and the Daily Mail is a variable here...could be that they mis-reported it, but the way he told it to me, the meeting in the Washington Park was not to receive the leak. But the way the Daily Mail reported it, was that that was when he got the leak. But-

MCGOVERN
I've talked to him-

HORTON
There's a pretty good discrepancy there, and I would also note that [Phil] Giraldi, another former CIA officer, friend of yours and mine, of course, said, "Hey, look, you know, the Russians can use a cut-out. So that even Assange wouldn't know that it came from them," I mean that's good intelligence work. But: there's no evidence of that. So, you know, you can make suppositions all you want, there's no reason to believe that. It does seem to me that if anybody else said so, it doesn't mean as much if William Binney says that, "No, I'm telling you - if the dog didn't bark, then that means this did not happen." You know, because, I mean, that can still fall in the realm of induction, and speculation, from others...then again, that's how the CIA's thinking on all this, obviously too. But from Binney, he seems to be the authoritative source on that. That listen, if the NSA is not claiming that they can prove that this happened, then that's because they can't, and if they can't, that's because it didn't happen. Syllogism closed.

MCGOVERN
Well, you know, you're right about many of those things, and, you know, the bottom line here, is that it is really really hard to prove a negative. [laughs] We learned that from the Rumsfeldian dictum, that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and so there must be weapons of mass destruction there, in Iraq, even though all our imagery analysts, under James Clapper, couldn't find one. Now, why didn't we know about that? Because James Clapper, who just recently retired from being National Intelligence Director, kept a lid on all the imagery reporting that said, "You know, Chalabi tells us this is a suspected chemical weapons site, at these co-ordiantes, but we looked at it, and it's a chicken coop. So, you know, please don't believe Chalabi anymore." Now, Clapper's job, as head of the imagery analysis during those days, put in there by Rumsfeld by the way, put a lid on all that stuff. And so Chalabi was believed, why? Because the absence of evidence doesn't mean evidence of absence. And besides, Clapper kept a lid on. So, getting back to other things here, you talked about the Daily Mail. I talked to Craig Murray, after the Daily Mail came out, about the same time you talked to him, I suppose, or maybe it was later, because he said-

HORTON
It was a few days later.

MCGOVERN
-they got it wrong. He said, "They misquoted me, I never said that I got the evidence, I have said, that all that material was already in Wikileaks's possession, well before I went in late September to Washington."

HORTON
Hey, good, thank you for clarifying that, because, you know, I did say from the beginning, I pointed out that discrepancy on the show as soon as I heard it, but I believe also from the beginning, I noted that we are talking about the Daily Mail here, so...it could be they're the ones who messed it up. So...

MCGOVERN
Yeah, they sexed it up, and, like you-

HORTON
Or they just misunderstood, I mean, to be fair, they probably are, whoever wrote this, may not know anything about this kind of thing at all, you know.

MCGOVERN
Yeah, but they're selling newspapers, Scott, this is deliberate. Craig was really offended by it, but not surprised. The BBC won't talk to him. None of the establishment channels will talk to him. So, the Daily Mail calls, if they're the only one, he'll talk to him, but he knows they're gonna get it screwed up.

HORTON
On my show, you can hear him in his own words.

MCGOVERN
Yeah, yeah. The other thing is, you know, did the Russians get it and then give it to Wikileaks? Well, I know that's possible. I mean, who can rule that kind of thing out? But in that case it probably also have had to gone over the internet, and Bill Binney is quite right, I think, we would know about it. So, it's-

HORTON
Or even then, FBI counter-intelligence or NSA or CIA or whoever, working together, oughta be able to piece together who did it, and prove after the fact, even if they couldn't have intercepted it at the time. They oughta be able to show after the fact which Russian agent used a cut-out, you know? Right? Or not?

MCGOVERN
Well, that's exactly right. When push came to shove, and they had to put out this, well, it's an embarrassment to the intelligence profession, actually - this memo, Clapper and the guy from- Comey, from FBI, and Brennan - of recent memory. What they put out claiming that they had high confidence that Russia was behind all this stuff, NSA took the equivalent of a footnote - now, NSA is the one that would know these things, CIA simply defers to NSA on all this technical intelligence having to do with communications and other intercepts, so NSA only could muster "moderate confidence." Okay? So what does that tell you? That tells you that enough people at NSA were so appalled by this...prostitution of the intelligence process, that they wouldn't go along, and they told their leaders, look, you can sign up the high confidence, if you like, but you know, everybody can leak. Everybody can leak. And this is the news, here, Scott, I want to point that out to your listeners: that leaks can be effective, in a, well, I would call it a pre-emptive, potential way. [laughs] And that's why, for example, James Comey, just a few days before the election, decided he had to tell the congress, that he had new information, from Huma Abedin's husband, Weiner, from his thing, and they had to look at it real quick. Why did he do that? That was crazy. He did that because, in my view, his detectives, his FBI investigators told him, look, this is really important, we need to get into this, and if you don't do the right thing here, we're gonna leak. After all, you promised to re-authorize the investigation if new information came to light, here it is, we oughta look at it. So, he did that, in my view, because of the pre-emptive, potential that comes from a threatened leak. So leaks don't even have to occur anymore. So, this is a new force at work, relatively new, in Washington. It's very salutary, in my view, because the people at the top need to realize that if they don't tell the truth, or, in this case, with respect to NSA, if the head of NSA would have said, "Oh yeah, we have high confidence," and NSA has _zero_ evidence, he would be afraid, that some of his NSA people would have enough integrity to put another little thumb drive in their computer-

HORTON
Yeah.

MCGOVERN
-and say, give it to Julian Assange.

HORTON
Well, I'll tell you what, too, I mean, I'm sure you're aware of this, but the audience should know there's a great kind of manifesto that Julian Assange wrote ["State and Terrorist Conspiracies" link: http://iq.org/conspiracies.pdf ], I don't know, what, ten years or more now, whatever it was, where he says, "This is the whole thing," these giant nation-states, are basically conspiracies, with all their secrecy, and all their plans for violence against each other, and this kind of thing, and their own people as well. And so, the deal is, when you create another kind of regime, a regime of leaks, around the world, a regime of transparency, and that means these conspiracies, these national governments, must completely clamp down on secrecy within their systems in such a way that it clogs up the system. And makes them much less capable of carrying out the terrible conspiracies against us that they have been doing. And I don't mean that in a skull and bones way [reference to Skull and Bones, the highly select and secretive Yale fraternity, which counts various heads of the CIA and elite businessmen among its members], I just mean in terms of the Justice Department going to work in the morning, kind of a way. That, and the CIA going to work in the morning. That, the kinds of stuff they get away with, we have to make it where they can't get away with it, and the way to do it, is through things like Wikileaks. From the get go. So, what you're saying is, it's working.

MCGOVERN
Well, it's working to an extent. And we can only hope, we can only hope, there are enough honest people left around to act in a responsible way. You know, the CIA is really in deep, deep kimche, as we used to say in South Korea. You know, they're missing their leaders, Brennan and his deputy...Brennan had a certain hold over our president. Now, you say, well, McGovern, you're exaggerating again. But, you know, I've looked back, and Brennan joined the Obama campaign, in June of 2008, at a time when Obama was saying, "I detest these violations of the 4th Amendment, this snooping on Americans, and I will never vote to hold these giant telecoms and NSA harmless for what they've done." Now, Brennan joins the campaign, in the 1st of July, Obama says: "You know...I think I've changed my mind. I think, I think I won't vote against it. I think it's a good idea to hold the telecoms harmless and NSA's just trying to protect the country, so I think, I won't vote against that." I said to myself, wooooooah. Something's happening to this guy, or maybe: maybe he's a fraud from the beginning. And I wrote about it at the time, I said, "Count me out, Mr. President, as an intelligence veteran, for the following reasons," you can see it on the web. So, now, that was before he became president. Now, when he became president, he tried to get Brennan in as the CIA director, he [Brennan] was too tarnished by torture and lying and other things, so he couldn't be confirmed, so he made him his National Security Assistant for Counter-terrorism.

Fast forward: this is when, of course, a lot of the torture was coming to light, and where he was shown to have been involved, he's on the emails, and on the internal correspondence at CIA records of having been fully informed of these terrible- heinous, heinous techniques, like...rectal hydration, and all the stuff that's not medically necessary or approved, and yet, when Brennan gets a chance to become CIA Director, Obama lets him do that. Now: what happens next? Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to her credit, issues a- well, orders an investigation of CIA torture. Now, how is she able to get that through the Republicans? It was right after the torture tapes had been destroyed. The White House said, don't destroy those tapes, there are about ninety seven tapes, done mostly in Thailand, they showed, you know, vividly, torture, they were destroyed despite them being evidence. The Senate Intelligence Committee said "Well, this is really too much," and they approved this investigation. Now, Panetta, who is head of the CIA at one point, [laughs] made a big mistake. He thought that he could say, "Oh yeah, you can look at the CIA cables, you can look at our internal correspondence, sure, we have nothing to hide," well, they had plenty to hide. And they gave those cables, and I'm talking original cables, between headquarters and overseas stations, and so forth, to these investigators. These young people. Who worked assiduously to piece them all together. Even though they were heavily redacted. Okay, now: you come to 2014. Right? And these young investigators got their act together, and they got the report together. And who is against issuing a report? Well, obviously, John Brennan, he has already redacted the hell out of it. And he says it can't possibly be released. But who is his major protector here? Well, the fellow's first name is Barack. And the last name is Obama.

And to his credit, Spencer Ackerman, for the Guardian, has written a four part series ["Inside the fight to reveal the CIA's torture secrets" link: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/09/cia-insider-daniel-jones-senate-torture-investigation ], that appeared nowhere else other than in the Guardian, and in part three he shows, by talking to the lead investigator - whose name is Jones, okay? - that at various junctures, Obama sent his deputy, or his satrap, McCullough, to do battle with the Senate, and say, no no, you can't release that, you can't release that. Long story short: there was a battle royale. Now, number one, Dianne Feinstein became a little emotionally committed here. Not only because these young people had slaved for four years, and not only because she had these grandmotherly instincts, but because the CIA hacked into Senate Intelligence Committee computers, which they swore they would never do. Brennan was asked about it, "Hacking? Oh, don't be ridiculous, we'd never do that!" Three weeks later, he's "Yeah, we did do that." Not only that, but the CIA lawyer, who's named about 170 times in this torture report, does a crimes report on Jones, the lead investigator. Now, crimes report is something that you refer to the Department of Justice, you believe a crime has been committed, have to look at this fellow, because he stole stuff from the CIA. Well, they didn't steal the Panetta stuff, the Panetta stuff was given to them. So, anyhow, long story short, coming down to the end, okay, because Dianne Feinstein has lost her position on the Senate Intelligence Committee, because of the, election went the way it did, in 2014, and so, what is she going to do? Well, she talks with Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader. Harry calls the president, and he says, "Hey Barack, you know, you got- Dianne Feinstein's people did a bang-up job here, and we need to release that thing, and I'm asking you personally to release it." [laughs] Obama gives him this song and dance about "Oh no, we can't, we need to protect the CIA," and Reid says to him, "Mr. President, I wish that you could just hear what you just told me."

Now, Reid became a very very strong supporter of Dianne Feinstein. He comes down to the crunch, okay? November. One of the main, progressive, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Udall, of Colorado, _loses_ - okay? - why is that important? Well, because he had nothing to lose, literally. He could read the executive summary of the whole report. Into the record. And escape any kind of prosecution, because of Congressional immunity. Oh, okay, so the issue is joined here. Dianne Feinstein goes to the president, and she says, "Look, by all rights, you should release this report, release the executive summary of it, which has already been redacted, but reveals enough of what happened, you should do that on its merits. But I can tell you, Mr. President, that there's this senator on my committee, his name is Mark Udall, and he feels really strongly about this, and he tells me he's going to read it into the record. If you don't do the right thing." [laughs] So, Obama says, "Oh, damn," and he must have called John Brennan, and he says, "Oh, John, the jig is up. The report's going to go out." That report is the most heinous report I've ever read, out of any congressional committee, and it's based on authentic, genuine documents, from the CIA. Everyone should have access not only to the executive summary, but to the whole report. Last thing I'll say is: that when the Senate did change hands, and this guy, Aaron Burr- no, it's not Aaron, his name is Burr [Richard Burr], anyway, from North Carolina, he takes over the chairmanship of the Senate Intelligence Committee, first thing he does is, call in, _call in_, all copies of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture. Wooh! Wow. Well, why would he wanna do that? [laughs] It all belongs to us. It belongs to us.

HORTON
And then he called them in from the Department of Justice, or whatever, State Department or whatever, [inaudible] other agencies had copies in their safe?

MCGOVERN
Yeah, probably about five, maybe a handful of places where it would have been. Now, the announcement at the time, would have been the CIA Inspector General kept his own copy, but then there was a report, and I'm not up on this, about a year ago, that the Inspector General of the CIA, lost his. So, the investigators know what was in there, the investigators did a really courageous job, facing into incredible opposition from some real high rollers, namely Brennan and James Clapper, and a fella named Barack Obama, who, for whatever reason, _whom_ for whatever reason, John Brennan had a hold on. He- Why would- I can understand a cowardly president not wanting to prosecute torturers, I mean, I can understand, I don't condone it. But why would he continue to want to cover up these things and hold John Brennan harmless, just like he did with the bill that was going to hold harmless, all the telecoms, harmless? So: this is a major story. Because, why did Brennan lash out in every kind of way against Trump and try to actually do a little soft coup, and I can prove that. And this dossier [Steele dossier] which is totally a crock. Why did he do all those things? Because Obama's gone. Brennan knew he would be gone. Brennan was afraid he'd be thrown under the bus, because he's guilty of all manner of prosecutable things, and, you know, he's really put Trump's nose out of joint. So, he wanted to get his licks in, delegitimize this president if he could, and with Barack Obama away and not really concerned, Brennan could be thrown under the bus, that's why we see him, and he was behind all this-

HORTON
I don't know, Ray, you're the professional Kremlinologist here, but it seems to me like- All these guys have a license to kill. No CIA Director is going to be prosecuted for torturing somebody. Even the low level guys who tortured people to death were cleared by the Department of Justice. And that was under the Obama government. And there's no way in the world that Trump is going to actually try to enforce the law against something like that, and in fact, that was going to be one of my next questions, was, did you see what Trump did on his first day in office, on a Sunday, he went, crawled on his knees to Langley, to go worship at their church, and to go make up.

MCGOVERN
[said while HORTON is finishing] Let me- let me finish.

HORTON
You know?

MCGOVERN
Now Brennan wants to go on vacation, or he wants to go see his relatives in Ireland. He can't do that.

HORTON
Oh, so you're saying he- [cross talk] wants to- You say, he wants to help him in that situation?

MCGOVERN
Well, they hoped to sabotage the access, the accession to power of Trump. You know, if he were able to persuade Obama, and Obama was not about to go _this_ far, to get permission to brief every single member of the Electoral College, which they still could have done, three days before they voted, that could have, conceivably, or at least, Brennan might have thought it could have, turned thirty seven vital people into voting against Trump.

HORTON
Well, you know the Clinton campaign was co-operating with that, instead of saying "No no no, stop," they were saying, "Yeah, go ahead, stay in contact, let us know what you find out."

MCGOVERN
-person who did a dossier, you know? It was classic stuff. He did all this stuff, and it was mostly out of fear he'd lose his rabbi, his protector. And now he is in jeopardy, because you know, he can, hope that [inaudible] remains as corrupt as it has been for the last twelve years, but there's always a chance that some, some judge with integrity will look at the evidence, the evidence is there, Brennan blessed all manner of things, including drone killings of U.S. citizens, you know, Obama did too, but, you know, this thing was an unholy alliance. So, universal jurisdiction is why Donald Rumsfeld seven years ago, when he was in Paris, he had to escape [through] the back door of the embassy, get a special limousine to Charles De Gaulle airport, and fly right home. They were about to arrest him! Okay? It's the same reason why George W. Bush couldn't go to Geneva to give a big speech, and get an award. And when-

HORTON
Okay, but if Hillary was the president, and what, you're saying she'd just keep him on and he'd have a license to travel around under diplomatic immunity for another few years? Before he's in the same situation? I thought all this was about Russia policy. Or that this was about undermining, hemming in, Donald Trump, stopping him, and making him look as illegitimate as possible, and especially on the issue of getting along with Russia. But I actually don't think that is going to work, because they tried that for months before the election and he won anyway. And the American people aren't scared of Russians, cuz...give me a break. All that was a long time ago, right? They all collectively shrugged.

MCGOVERN
Well, you grasp at straws in this situation. Now, the reason Russia became the real real bete noir here, is because it was very convenient to blame Trump's win on Russia, and that's exactly what the New York Times and the Washington Post did. They said if it weren't for Trump [sic, he means Putin] meddling, or interfering, however they said it, in our election process, we would have Hillary Clinton as U.S. president. So, it's very muddled, but it's hard to distinguish the need of the military industrial congressional security state complex to have a degree of tension with Russia, that's a reality here, the other thing is, the people who are leaving, you know, maybe Brennan will get a nice soft spot on the Council of Foreign Relations, or he'll get an honorary position as lecturer at Fordham University, his alma mater, and mine. There's no, there's nothing that these institutions won't do for a little more prestige and a little more money, but he's still liable. And he didn't want to go out, without making a last gasp effort to derail Trump. Now, the Wall Street Journal, complained bitterly, they said, "All these reports coming from these anonymous CIA sources- It's all Brennan, and Brennan won't talk to us, he only talks to the New York Times!" [laughs] You know, tearfully said this, the Wall Street Journal. And this has happened before. Bill Colby, who as director, under whom I served personally, in the seventies, said "We control ninety percent of the important people in the media," Bill Casey, when he came in, in 1981, and I know somebody who was there when he said this, "When we have succeeded in deceiving all the American people into thinking what we want them to think, then we will have achieved our mission."

HORTON
Oh, that's a famous quote. You know someone who was firsthand for that, huh?

MCGOVERN
I do. Yeah. It's a woman who's a good friend of mine. [Barbara Honegger, who has been given to many unhinged conspiracy theories over the years, and who is the only source for this quote. Among other things, she is a 9/11 truther, as can be seen in the video, "Barbara Honegger: 9/11 truth on what Happened at the Pentagon" link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFlHrGxtP24 ] So, this is all very true. And it came out, I was up in New York, at a forum [a screening of Alex Gibney's "Zero Days" on January 5, 2017, and a transcript of McGovern's appearance at the event is here: https://pastebin.com/xRMABcUq ] which David Sanger [longtime journalist for the New York Times], one of the chief offenders here, chief rooters for weapons of mass destruction in the New York Times back in 2002, he was pronouncing on the Russian hack, that gave Trump the election. [laughs] And everybody was sortof taking the Russian hack as flat fact, right? So I spoke up. I'd done a little research, and I said, "Now, David...tell me, on the 29th of July, 2002, when the drums are being beat for the war against Iraq, you wrote a piece for the New York Times, which said seven times that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As flat fact.  [this is another instance of McGovern engaging in brazen deception. The cited piece, "U.S. Exploring Baghdad Strike As Iraq Option" reports on an Iraq war plan which anticipates the use of such weapons - and makes no claims to the existence of such weapons. link: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/29/world/us-exploring-baghdad-strike-as-iraq-option.html ] That was nine days after George Tenet, the head of the CIA, had told his British counterpart, [laughs] "Weapons of mass destruction? That's a crock. We're fixing the intelligence around the policy. So: did George Tenet tell you [Sanger] something different, from what he told the head of British intelligence? Apparently so. Because you believed him, or believed someone like him. And asserted as flat fact, as your colleague Judy Miller did, as everyone else in the New York Times did, for the months preceding an unnecessary attack on Iraq. So, why are you doing it again? Where do you get these flat facts about Russia interfering with the election? What's the link that exists between Russia hacking and Wikileaks?" Well, he didn't like that, and neither did everybody else [laughs], so, I was the skunk at the picnic again. But I had a chance to expose this guy for the kinda guy he is. [IMHO, Sanger conducts himself at the screening, giving a precise and detailed answer with regard to the basis of the Russian hacking allegations, while McGovern comes across as a self-satisfied loon. The article Sanger cites, which raised McGovern's ire, is "The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S." https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html ]

HORTON
Is there video of that? [Yes. Video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd8I6bIXelk ]

MCGOVERN
[inaudible] Pardon?

HORTON
Is there video of that?

MCGOVERN
There probably is. If you go to Fordham Law School, and you can get that.

HORTON
Yeah, let's find that. Write it down for later, so I don't forget.

MCGOVERN
[inaudible] -sortof, in my typical shellshock, after I challenged Rumsfeld, it was as though-

HORTON
Listen, people don't really realize what a villain David Sanger is. But for one complaint, and I think the most severe thing he ever did wrong, is at least dozens and dozens of times, in the New York Times, he's simply flatly asserted that Iran had an illicit nuclear weapons program. Just over and over and over again. It's the basis for all of his reporting about Iran's very safeguarded civilian nuclear program, and that was not a weapons program, at all, not illicit at all. And he just got away with that for years on end. And that coulda led to a war. For real. As we covered at the time, in fact.

MCGOVERN
You know, that was, that was the main topic at this panel meeting [sic, question and answer session before a screening of _Zero Days_]. Alex Gibney was there, and everyone was crowing about this wonderful film on Stuxnet. Okay? It's called Zero something. And I forget the title.

HORTON
_Zero Days_.

MCGOVERN
Yeah, right, the film was shown after. What does the film show? Picking up on your point, Scott. It shows that David Sanger, and others, were hellbent on destroying whatever the Iranians were working on. Centrifuges or whatever. K? Now, we're talking 2009...in 2007, maybe the last one, there was an honest National Intelligence Estimate which concluded that Iran has stopped working on a nuclear weapon...at the end of 2003 - K? Do the math - and had not re-instituted their program for a nuclear weapon. Now, that judgment was re-instated every year since then, since 2007, by the head of the National Intelligence Committee. K? Now, so, that's 2007. Now, we're talking 2009. And the film and David Sanger make it quite obvious that the reason they developed this new mode of warfare, Stuxnet, putting a computer bugs into things like centrifuges, and blowing them up, it's not like, you know, it's not like derailing your email or something. Blowing up, physically, and in the process, blowing up at least five Iranian nuclear scientists, well, Sanger was just glowing about that. And why? Here's the reason, here's the payoff. Because Israel said, "We don't believe your intelligence. We think the Iranians are just on the verge of a nuclear weapon, and so we're going to have at it. We're going to attack them." And what did Obama do? Instead of saying, "the hell you are, if you do that, you're on your own," he was all, whatarewegoingtodowhatarewegoingtodo, and all his advisors were, "Let's find some way to buy off the Israelis, so they don't attack Iran - I know what we'll do, we got lots of money, we got computer people, we'll develop a virus together with the Israelis, and we'll stick it in Iranian centrifuge mechanisms, and we'll blow them up. And we'll blow up some of the scientists too." That's what they did. Bad enough on its own merits; but in so doing, they unleashed a whole new category of warfare. And, as you probably know, the Stuxnet went a little bit farther than anyone wanted to, and it caused all manner of problems getting it stuck back into the bottle. Well, it's out of the bottle now. And if anyone complains in future years, about starting a whole new theater, a whole kind of genre of warfare techniques, it was first done in conjunction with the Israelis and the United States. And the reason was, the reason Obama went along with it, with the help of people like David Sanger, is because he was told, "Oh! If you don't do this, if we don't find some other way to show the Israelis that we're behind them, they're gonna attack and it'll be worse for us." So, that's how bad it is, and I'm glad you mentioned that, because David Sanger is notable, not only for his meretricious reporting on Iraq, but on Iran as well, and now...now, he's out in front with this Russians gave the election to Trump by hacking canard. And I was able to expose that before this audience. Maybe you can get the tape. They're pretty- [laughs] I've done this before, I haven't been able to get the tape, maybe you can, it would be worth watching.

HORTON
Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I'll at least give it a shot. Maybe on their website or something, who knows, why not. But- So listen...how much of this really is about the Cold War, because- well- So he went there on Sunday, to give a speech, you know, he didn't just have a couple of them over to his house, he went to Langeley, which is pretty obsequious, I think, for the new president, went over there, and said, "What! I never had a beef with CIA. The media made that up!" Which, of course, it was the CIA that made that up, and put it in the media. Because it was true. Right? Anyway. Who knows what he really understands about the world he lives in, or not, I dunno, but it seemed like he was going over there to make up with them, but now they're leaking to the CBS News that, which, this is probably true and hilarious, but I'm not sure what it means that they're leaking it and complaining about it. That he brought cheerleaders with them to lead the crowd in hooraying for him, as he gave his little talk there. In other words, they still hate him. And they think that they're the boss.

MCGOVERN
Yeah. Scott, in my view, you can't say "they". Okay? My insight into the rank and file is that they hated John Brennan, just as much as a lot of other people did. So, when you look at what happened, with the campaign against Trump, that was John Brennan and his very top lieutenants, some of whom are already gone, most of whom will be trashed. The rank and file, well, there are still some honest people around there. They're dwindling in numbers, but there are people who can do, and would like to be able to do the same thing that those analysts did in 2007. When they had an honest supervisor who said, "Look! Tell it like it is!" And they came up with that judgment. That Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon, with high confidence, they expressed that. All sixteen agencies! Unanimous! Stopped in 2003, and had not resumed on a nuclear weapon. So there are still guys around, and it's, I think a mistake to say, "Well, they all hate him." They'll hate him if he starts to do the kinds of things to analysis that George [W.] Bush, Dick Cheney did, and that Obama and Petraeus and all those people do, you know, suit the intelligence to meet the policy. I think you'll see people leaving, and I'm afraid they'll be the good people, unless: unless they can get Trump aside and say, look, you know, before twelve years ago, it was our tradition to tell you the truth. Still wanna know the truth? Because Truman thought that was really a neat thing to do, to have somebody reporting directly to him, and telling him the truth. And to have career protection.

HORTON
Well, I mean, the thing is, I know that's your career experience and everything, but to most of the world, CIA means the president's private army. That has no law, and goes around doing whatever the hell they want for the American empire, including, cut people's ears off or whatever.

MCGOVERN
Well, you know-

HORTON
Take care of business.

MCGOVERN
That's more of the truth here than-

HORTON
That's why I always predicted he'd have good relations with them, actually. That he'd say, "Alright guys, whatever you want to do, just keep me in the loop, and you'll do the things that I want you to do, sometimes too." I mean, that's basically the agreement between CIA and the president, right?

MCGOVERN
Well, it is, but there are a couple of things that should be pointed out here. General [Mike] Flynn. [pause] Now, he's gonna be the National Security Assistant [sic, he means Advisor], of course, or he is, now. And he is the guy the CIA really reports to. Okay? They don't usually report directly to the president, unless Trump decides to re-institute the morning briefings, or the President's Daily Brief, which I used to deliver in person. Now, Flynn knows which end is up. I'll give you an example: Flynn was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency when there were those sarin chemical attacks, outside of Damascus, in August of 2013. And when John Kerry and John Brennan and everybody else wanted to blame that on Bashar Assad, Flynn would not go along. Because he knew...that it was a false flag attack, meant to trap Obama into enforcing _the red line_ against chemical weapons use in Syria, that he had been mousetrapped into putting down a year before. Okay, so what- how'd this play out? [laughs] Well, Flynn won. Okay? Flynn told the president, and he told his boss, General uh uh, I'll remember his name in a second, [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General [Martin] Dempsey, he said, "Look, this is a crock, okay? It's gonna be blamed on Bashar Assad, it is already, but we know that those precursors came down through Turkey, they came from Europe, they were assembled by rebels, supported by _guess who_...some of the more moderate rebels, supported by _guess who_, not only Saudi Arabia, not only Turkey, but, you know, our old friends in the CIA, okay? So, look Mr. President, you should know this." And besides, as General Dempsey told him, "My opposite number, in Great Britain, has just told me that they have a sample of this sarin gas that was used inside Damascus on the 21st of August, 2013, and _it is homemade sarin_. It is not the same sarin that we know to be in Syrian army stocks. So Mr. President, you might wanna think about taking your finger off the button, they want you to start an overt war, because Bashar Assad is starting to win, okay? That's why they want to mousetrap you, you might wanna stop that."

Now, Flynn was in on all of that. What happened to Flynn? He got fired! Now everything else I know about Flynn is [laughs] not good, okay? But I do know that about Flynn, and nobody else knows that about Flynn, except the people who told me, and they were in a position to know. So, what I'm saying here is that Flynn will be able to exert, if he wants to, a moderating influence on what the CIA proposes. And this is one-

HORTON
See, I gotta kind of a skewed view of that same thing there. You know, he co-authored his book with [Michael] Ledeen [notorious neo-conservative, who has long wanted America to get into a hot war with Iran], and he has all this ridiculous stuff that he thought Iran must be behind the Benghazi attack, and Libya, and this kind of thing, and once you believe in "radical Islam", you can't differentiate between the two major sides of the sectarian war there anymore. And you have people like Pamela Geller, and Frank Gaffney, who are horrible neo-cons, horrible right-wingers, who just hate and fear all Muslims, and more to the point, hate and fear any organization with the word "Islam" in it, and so, even though you have some neo-cons who want to go ahead and overthrow Qaddafi, and overthrow Assad, to these guys, they hate Muslims so much, they keep their eye on the ball. And they say, "No no no," - rightly, that the alternative to Assad in this case is a bunch of Bin Ladenites, "You must be crazy." And so, they're too far to the right of the party line to go ahead and smash Syria, because they're looking ahead at the consequences, in a sense, the same way that you and I do. So, in other words, broken clock, right twice a day. But otherwise, completely nuts, and believes that the Ayatollah Khamenei is behind every damn thing in the world.

MCGOVERN
Well, you've paraphrased what I said, at the end there, that everything else I know about Flynn is beyond the pale-

HORTON
Yeah. I'm just saying, him even being good on this, is part of him being horrible overall, in that sense. You know what I mean?

MCGOVERN
No, I don't know what you mean there. But I will say this: Ledeen wrote this book. Flynn didn't write the book. Flynn wanted to have a versilimitude of some intellectual capacity, and so he signed onto the book. That's not to excuse it. The book is crazy. Question is, whether Flynn will be as crazy as everyone thinks he will be. Now the other side of this, and this is the worst side, is what Trump told the CIA on Sunday, was, look, people haven't had your back. "Oh yeah, I'm gonna have your back, I'm gonna have your back to the degree that you won't even want you to have your back to the degree that I'm gonna have it, so you don't-" Now who's he talking to there? He's talking to the paramilitary types who run little wars, here and there, not the CIA function that Truman had in mind, and it reminded me of George Tenet, when he wrote his book, after being CIA Director for seven years. He wrote a book about the after 9/11 [sic] and what he said, and this is a virtual quote: "You know, after 9/11, we CIA people were given so many authorities [sic - so much authority] that my worst dream was that we would have to face congressional investigations later on, to hold us accountable for the kinds of things we were asked to do." Woooooah. And he went on to say, "I don't know if the CIA should be running drones and shooting people up. You know, that's usually the air force. I understand that the air force can't do that over Pakistan because we're not at war [inaudible] I still have some misgivings about whether we should-" So, Tenet himself, in his own memoir, is saying, "My god, they've given us so many authorities [sic], will this come back to bite us, when they find out what we've done?" Now, why do I imagine that now? Well, it seems to me, that Trump is pretty explicitly saying to the people he thinks are the people that dominate CIA, and I have to admit, they have, the last several years...he's saying, I'm gonna give you authorities [sic] that you won't believe! So don't worry about it, I got your back!" Now, if that translates into action, and Flynn and others can't restrain Trump, then we've got more problems than we- Well, I- Not more than Brennan, because Brennan had a hold on the president. In this case, we'll see what Pompeo will do. The jury is out, as to what will happen there. But I would hold out some hope, number one, that there are enough integrity people there, to put a brake on these things, and number two, that Flynn is not a hundred percent wrong, that in the case of Syria, he acted courageously, and lost his job because of it.

HORTON
Yeah. Well...you know, certainly...thwarting the attempted war there in 2013 was absolutely a huge thing. So, you're right about that. For sure. Now, so, Trump has said that he wants to knock the hell out of ISIS, quick. He wants a thirty day plan from Mattis, to go in there and get rid of them. And I wonder what you think that means.

MCGOVERN
Well, I think if Trump is smart, he'll talk to the Russians. And he'll say, "Look, we know that there was a ceasefire agreement, agreed upon on the 9th of September. We know that it went into effect on the 12th of September, and that it was sabotaged by our own air force, on the 17th, when they deliberately attacked known Syrian army positions on hilltops that had been there for months." Okay? "We're sorry about that, we know it was deliberate now, let's get back to...not square one, let's get back to September 9th. We were able to co-operate. There was an agreement that we would share intelligence. The air force generals say we don't wanna do that. And this is after Putin and Obama had agreed [laughs, inaudible] agreements. So, let's restrain our generals, let's get together, and figure out how we do this ISIS thing together, or at least without bumping into each other." That's the more sensible way, and that would open the door for a more reasonable approach, in Russian eyes, of a president who says, "[inaudible] There's not really a lot of reason why we can't talk with the Russians." You know what it reminds me of, Scott? It reminds me, when Obama was running, and he said, "You know, I wanna talk to the Iranians." And McCasin's all "[inaudible] You can't!" Even Hillary, "No, you can't!" Well, he did talk to the Iranians. Now, it took him a while, right? But they got a deal. And the deal has insured, in my view, that Iran can't possibly get a nuclear weapon without us discovering it. Pronto. For the next ten, twelve years. So, you can do deals. And you can monitor these deals, and that's where CIA monitoring comes in, they can make sure that the Iranians in this case, or the Russians, live up to these deals. That was one of our major functions that nobody knows about. So, there is kindof some hope here, and I think, if Trump is serious, about talking to Vladimir Putin, that he will have a willing partner in trying to work some of these things out.

HORTON
Now, in Afghanistan, I'm sure you noticed they announced, they sent three hundred Marines to the Helmand province, down there, to try to keep the Taliban from taking over Lashkargah, apparently they're right up against the wall there...they announced this - what? - three days, I think, four days, before Trump was sworn in, and I had to wonder, Ray, when I saw that, whether Obama was even informed, or whether they went ahead and did this. Because you talk about how they pressured Obama back then, well, you certainly saw how they pressured him on Afghanistan, and basically, as he put it, later, whining to Jeffrey Goldberg, they jammed him into the escalation in Afghanistan, and yet the war's no more won now than it was even in 2008, 2009, when he's coming into power. So...and we got Mike Flynn who is [Stanley] McChrystal's [former head of JSOC] right hand man, and we got James Mattis, who is also implicated in the failure there, he was part of the original invasion force, at least...and, so anyway, I wondered whether you think that region is going to see an entire re-play of COIN [Counter Insurgency strategy] and the Afghan surge again, or is Trump going to call it quits? Even a chance?

MCGOVERN
Well...we have to realize that whoever becomes Secretary of State is going to be important, but "Mad Dog" Mattis is head of Defense now. Ashton Carter is gone. Mattis has spent his entire life as a Marine, since the age of nineteen, except for the last three years, when he made millions of dollars on the boards of Lockheed and places like that. Mattis only knows to take orders. So, if Trump orders Mattis to do this kind of thing, Mattis is going to say, you know, "Three thousand Marines. Hey, Mr. President. Are you serious? You really want to win this thing? Or are you going to withdraw three thousand Marines six months from now? I'm not going to commit my men to a fool's errand. We're gonna win this thing, or we're not." And then I hope, some people who know something about Afghanistan will tell the president, "Look, this is a fool's errand, I mean, Alexander the Great couldn't get through Afghanistan for god's sake. So, you're not going to do it either. Get out of Afghanistan." I think, coming in new, Trump will have that option to be able to say, "Obama called this the good war. It's just as feckless as Iraq. We've lost three thousand men. Let's get the hell out."

HORTON
Yeah. Well. It's interesting, you know, it seems like, if Trump had the vision to say that he's right wing enough to do, you know, Nixon goes to China and shake hands with Mao, only - over and over again, just go ahead and, not an apology tour, but a "Let's Make A Deal" tour, put a right wing spin on it, and go to Tehran, go to Pyongang, go to Moscow, go to Beijing...work out a thing, I dunno about Damacus, but he could call them. And just say- And- And have "Mad Dog" Mattis standing on his right flank, to keep all the pressure off, and say, "Don't worry, Mr. McCain, I've vetted the policy, and we're doing this. And protect him in that sense. He could do it, right?" A Democrat could never do that, even if Obama had really wanted to do that, he couldn't have done that. It's just too much.

MCGOVERN
Yeah, and I think that's not only wishful thinking, you know? We have to be careful about that, but I think there's a lot of truth in what you say, and if you look at what worries the Russians most, is the abrogation of the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty in 2001, as soon as George W. Bush came into office. This was _the_ guarantee of a nuclear balance, a guarantee that no side would think they would get a leg up against the other side, by anti ballistic missile systems. Now, when Obama was running for a second term, he was in Seoul, South Korea, at one of these summits. And Medvedev, who was president at the time, Russian president, and he [Obama] were talking. And their conversation was picked up by an ABC microphone. This is the way it went. Medvedev: "Vladimir Putin is very, very worried about your insistence on putting ABM systems all around the periphery of our country, and he wants to talk about this." Obama: "Look, I know that's a concern. Just...I'm focused on the election. Let me deal with the election. And then we'll talk. And please tell Vladimir that." Medvedev says "OK." [this, like much of what MCGOVERN says is a very distorted reproduction of what was said; a transcript can be found at ABC News, "President Obama Asks Medvedev for 'Space' on Missile Defense - 'After My Election I Have More Flexibility'" link: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/03/president-obama-asks-medvedev-for-space-on-missile-defense-after-my-election-i-have-more-flexibility/ ]

Now, the election came...did Obama so much as lift a finger, to discuss this very neuralgic issue, with Putin or Medvedev? No, he didn't. Now, what are the Russians thinking about this? Well, at Valdai, this big conference they have of academics and the press and everyone else, down in, near Sochi...[Partial transcript at link: http://valdaiclub.com/events/posts/articles/vladimir-putin-meets-with-members-of-the-valdai-discussion-club-transcript-of-the-final-plenary-sess/ ] Putin was on the dais, on the panel, with our former ambassador, Jack Matlock. Jack is a terrific guy, he was the ambassador when the Soviet Union fell, and he went into the new regime there, he knows an awful lot about Russia. He knows something about America too, because when Putin said, "How do you feel about the abrogation of the ABM treaty? You know, Mr. Matlock, you worked so hard on that" - and, parenthetically, so did I, Scott, we were the verification thing, okay, we were the ones that worked out, if Nixon signed this thing, this is 1972, whether we could verify if the Russians weren't cheating. Did they cheat? Yes, they cheated. Did we catch them? Yes, we caught them. Did they destroy- Yup, they did. I happened to be in Moscow at the time, and it was one of the thrills of my life- To see that abrogated! Well. We'll go ahead here. So, we're at Valdai. And Putin says, "Mr. Matlock! How do you feel about abrogation? About the ABM treaty?" Matlock says, "Well, I was against it. I didn't think-[inaudible]." So, Putin says, "Well, why do you do this? Why do you threaten us this way?" And Matlock says, I'm sure he regrets it, he says, "Well, Mr. President, look, the system is really not- is not really designed or aimed at Russia. It's basically a jobs program." [laughs] And Putin looks at him, and he says, "Oh, Mr. Matlock, have you no other needs in your country? Infrastructure, or anything else? You couldn't put these billions of dollars into something else? [inaudible] jobs program?" And, of course, Matlock is embarrassed to hell. But, you know, when you look at the billions of dollars that have been invested in Star Wars, and other concepts like this, it's deservedly called the biggest corporate welfare system ever devised by mankind. One footnote, on the ABM systems, and this is sortof important. They don't work! K? They don't work. Even the missiles that were shot up there to be intercepted, they miss! Okay? So, the Russians, they know because their engineers and scientists know, that any quasi-sophisticated ABM system, can be penetrated by a million decoys, or whatever. So: that's the reality. But: it's a really good, lucrative program. So, here's- Put yourself in Putin's place. We're sitting around the table, he's got all his generals around, and- "Mr. Putin, they're building ABM system in Romania, now in Poland, they have it in Black Sea, Baltic Sea. What can you do?" I would suggest that it isn't an option for Mr. Putin to say, "Doooon't worry about it. It'll never work."

HORTON
Right. [MCGOVERN laughs] Yeah, although the truth of this, well, we'll get back to this in a second, the jobs program. So, I have an anecdote for you, Ray, that seems worth bringing up. It's something that you may well know, but it's somewhat obscure source material, and it's about eleven years old. And that is Andrew Cockburn's book, _Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy_. In there, Cockburn explains, that Dan Coates was the original pick to be Secretary of Defense. But the reason Donald Rumsfeld got it instead, was because in Coates' job interview, he said, "Oh, come on, all this missile defense is a bunch of crap. We shouldn't scrap the ABM treaty, just for a bogus missile defense system that'll never work." And then they said, "Okay, Dan Coates, well, thanks a lot, but don't call us, we'll call you," kind of thing, bye! And then they got Rumsfeld instead, and there was another anecdote there, that Cheney said, "You know your father hates him?" And Bush said, "Oh! Really! Cool!" And that's how Rumsfeld got the job. Dan Coates is the new pick to be Director of National Intelligence. And I don't know if that's meaningful or not. I don't know whether his opposition to withdrawing from the treaty was based on any firm conviction, or just on common sense. Whether that's really a position of his, or not. But it seems fitting, since I hadn't heard his name since then.

MCGOVERN
Either way, it's a hopeful sign, I'm glad you pointed that out, I had missed that, in Cockburn's book. Yeah...there's lots of little strings of hope out there, and the trick is, to try to get to Trump and his people. We Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity have made ourselves available to anyone, and we're hoping that people will notice we're around, and we can give some straight advice, the way Truman maybe envisaged the whole CIA analytic division. Telling the truth, without fear or favor. We're hopeful that somebody will put us on the radar, and we can at least share what we know, whether it be accepted or not is another issue, but flying blind, like Obama has, with people who knew nothing about Russia, even the Russians in the last week of Obama, have criticized really, really strongly, in a way they never have before, Obama for, as Medevedev himself said, two days ago, "destroying relations between Russia and the U.S." That's important, and that's why when the Russians looked at this new opportunity, they said, "Well, we didn't expect this..." I mean, those who claim that Vladimir Putin looked into his crystal ball and said, "You know...despite the polls, I have a hunch, I have a hunch that Trump is going to win. So, I'm gonna hack into Hillary's emails, and I'm gonna give them to Wikileaks, and I'm gonna raise all kinds of hell, [coughs] because I think he's going to win." Now, all the evidence, and I just wrote a piece about this...the big pundits on Russian television, which is pretty much state controlled still, and much of- Everybody who's among the cognoscenti there, in Russia, fully, fully expected Hillary to win. They even had prepared programs to show her win was illegitimate. [laughs] Okay? We know that now. So, the notion that Putin would know something special that everybody else didn't know, is ridiculous. Now, if that's ridiculous, and Putin, like everybody else on this planet, expected Hillary to win, what percentage would it have been for him to do the kinds of things he's accused of, to hacking into Hillary's stuff, and all this stuff...you know, it doesn't make sense to a common sense person. If he thinks this person is gonna win, and there's already a lot of antipathy between him and her, she having called him "Hitler", okay? Doesn't make much sense that instruct your [sic] intelligence people to hack the hell out of the DNC, and Hillary's emails, and give them to Wikileaks. I'm not saying that's impossible, but I would give the chances of that, one percent.

HORTON
Well, you know, I read a thing which said, "Hey, you know, I'm a game theorist, and I'm Vladimir Putin, I'd rather deal with Hillary Clinton. Because, yeah, she's a hawk, but also, she's pretty predictable. She ain't gonna do nothing. Tough guy Hillary, you know?" Whereas Donald Trump, he's kindof a mess. And you know what, he might wake up on the wrong side of the bed one day, and, for that matter, if he [Putin] was going to intervene in such a hamhanded way, to implicate himself like this, you know, one pretty obvious interpretation was, he's trying to provoke a reaction against Donald Trump. And make Hillary Clinton look like she was the American patriot standing up to the foreign intervention in our election. Why would he think- Because this went on for months, these accusations, why would it be the Russian position that, "Oh yeah, the American people won't mind when the media tells them that the Russians have been trying to elect the Republican over the Democrat this time." It certainly doesn't sound like a safe bet to me.

MCGOVERN
Now, that's true. One really has to go back to the beginning, when Assange had all these emails from the DNC, he took the time to go over them, to order them in a way that would be searchable, and picked what he thought would be the best time to release them, two days before the Democratic National Convention. And all hell broke loose. People don't realize, or don't remember, that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and all of her- four of her top people, they all quit. Now, what does that tell you? K? Now, number two: they were befuddled. What are they going to do? Two days before the Democratic National Convention, when the content, and I say again, the content of these emails show that they performed every trick in the book to deprive Bernie Sanders of the nomination. So, what are they gonna do? Well, I can see them sitting around a table, at their war room. "I know what we'll do! Russians!" And someone else said, "Well, yeah, but it wasn't the Russians, it was Julian Assan-" "Oh, that's okay! We'll say Julian Assange was working with the Russians!" "And okay, but what's the rationale?" And here's getting to your point, Scott. "Oh clearly, the Russians wanted Trump to win! You know?" Well, I agree with you. If I were Vladimir Putin, and I was looking at a guy who brags about being unpredictable, you know? A guy who takes extreme action in reaction to any offense, real or just perceived, and, like you said, if you got up on the wrong side of the bed, and had the button near his bed table, you know, if I were Vladimir Putin, I would have serious reservations about trying to help this guy win. As much as I might have reservations about Hillary. So, I think that Putin had the same attitude...I was in Germany at the time of the election, and my friends were saying, well it's "eine wahl zwischen pest und cholera," which means, hey, these two candidates, it's a choice between plague and cholera. Which would you choose [laughs].

HORTON
This is what all seven billion people in the world thought, including all the people who voted for Hillary, and voted for Trump. Or probably super-majorities of both of those groups anyway. That the other person's worse, gotta stop her, gotta stop him.

MCGOVERN
Well, I was very pleased to have someone I could enthusiastically support and vote for, and that was Jill Stein, and when she asked me to actually, officially, endorse her...I was in Berlin, but I did it on Skype, and I said, "Look, to me, it has to do with my nine grandchildren. Either they die a slow death, through climate change, not having clean water or clean air, or they could have, maybe a slightly less painful death, by immediate destruction, being destroyed by a nuclear exchange, which I think Hillary is much closer to provoking than Trump. So, you take your choice. I vote for Jill Stein, she's really good on the environment, she's good on foreign policy, and I'm proud to have voted for her, and I still support her efforts to look into how elections are done, and the results of what she's been able to accomplish."

HORTON
Yeah. Well, when I interviewed her, she was solid on pretty much everything, I just took her on a tour round the world, what do you think about American intervention here, there, and the other place? And she didn't just say "No, I'm against it," she said, you know, solid answers, explanations, and all this stuff. So. I certainly admire her on her foreign policy. Although, I guess I saw her tweeting some nonsense about Syria. But anyway.

MCGOVERN
Let me just add a little thing. I was with her on Saturday, she was down for the women's march, and I did a little interview, and she was telling me, she was thanking me- We had given, VIPS [Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity] had given her some support, which we would have given to any candidate. She said, you know, when I was interviewed by the New York Times, and they were saying "What about Russia? What about the invasion of Crimea? What about the invasion of Ukraine?" I told them, I said, "You know, you're not talking about the coup, in Kiev, on the 22nd of February, on 2014, which George Friedman, the head of Stratfor, called the most blatant coup in history, why didn't you mention that? What the Russians did was mostly in reaction to that. And you know what they said to me, Ray?" I said, no, [Stein said:] "'What coup? We don't know anything about any coup. A coup in Kiev?'" This is the editorial board of the New York Times! Maybe they were being disingenuous, but if they didn't know about this coup, or weren't, at least, prepared to engage Jill Stein in discussion about the aftermath of that coup, you know, Jill is very good, and she has repeated many times there is not one scintilla of evidence that Vladimir Putin or any of his advisors had it in their minds to do anything with respect to Crimea before the coup, on the 22nd of February, 2014.

HORTON
Absolutely the right answer. Of all the different things to say about it, [Putin] sure seemed happy with the status quo, ever since he's been in power in the year 2000, sure never seized Crimea before. You know?

MCGOVERN
Yeah.

HORTON
That's what I'm saying.

MCGOVERN
We were- I was with a little citizens delegation in Crimea [video title: "Russia: US Center for Citizen Initiatives undertakes fact-finding mission to Crimea" link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEZAfGpq7Po ], gosh when was it, June. And the Crimean people...we were the first American delegation, unofficial though we were, to visit Crimea, and were just greeted with such enthusiasm. And we tried to find somebody who voted, who voted against the plebiscite...and you know, we were sure we could find somebody [laughs], they say ninety percent or more voted to rejoin Russia. We said, come on, dig us up somebody who voted against it-

HORTON
You know what they say, Ray, is well, the ethnic Russians sure, but what about the poor Tatars?

MCGOVERN
Well, there's a point there. Yeah. We talked with some of those...Tatars, yeah, they had mixed emotions, they've been a pawn of history forever. But the vast majority of the Crimeans were, of course, delighted, that they didn't have to submit to this coup regime, led by, well, some of the key cabinet posts were led by proto-fascists. And they're still in power.

HORTON
You're saying, the Tatars, they'd rather not have gone to Russia? Or they actually were still for joining Russia anyway?

MCGOVERN
Well, you know, they've had such a bad history with Russia, they didn't know exactly what they thought, [laughs] another "wahl zwischen pest und cholera," you know, choice between plague and cholera, for them, unfortunately, it's a lot like the Kurds, the eternal pawn of history where Great Powers just play with them, and-

HORTON
Yeah. Doesn't Ukraine, in the translation, "stuck between a rock and a hard place"? In the original slavic, something like that?

MCGOVERN
Yeah, yeah.

HORTON
That's pretty much-

MCGOVERN
But you know, Trump can, what most people don't know, is that the ball is in Trump's court. Okay? What do I mean by that...and this was not widely reported. Surprise, surprise. About a month ago, Putin sent his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, to attend a chess match in New York. The ostensible reason. As soon as Peskov gets off the plane, he goes to AP [Associated Press], and he says, "You know, there's no reason for this increased tension in Central Europe...what we suggest, is that NATO instead of building up troops on the Polish-Russian border, that they withdraw these plans to fortify a border, that is not threatened by us." ["AP Interview: Aide says Putin hopeful about Trump" link: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/85f74153a7be48a8b0c951452c82d909/ap-interview-aide-says-putin-hopeful-about-trump ] So, AP reported that, and one little dispatch...now, the Washington Post, New York Times usually pick up what AP says. They forgot to do it this time. So. But the ball is in Trump's court. And there's nothing to prevent Trump from going to Reykjavik, or going somewhere, meeting with Putin, and deciding, or even before, saying "You know, we don't agree that it makes a lot of sense to stoke tensions in Central Europe. The Russians and we are going to have a mutual, emphasis mutual, withdrawal of the units that we have near the border with NATO, and we think that's a sensible solution, we don't really see any indication that Russia is going to invade the Baltic states. Now, I know the Baltic people have lots of reasons to distrust the Russians, but they also have no intelligence that Russia wanted to invade the Baltic states, so let's put this red herring, literally, red herring, back in the box, let's talk to each other, let's have a mutual withdrawal, and I think that's where it could easily start. Then we could talk about ABMs, then we could talk about Syria, there are lots of things where our interests coincide, and that has all been obscured by the people that Obama had hired, to make him hate the Russians."

HORTON
Yeah. Well, you know, when it comes to Donald Trump, I do not expect great things on the Asia pivot, on the Special Forces in Africa, the perpetual war in [sic] Al-Qaida and ISIS, I expect all that to go on for eight years. But at least he's good on Russia. And I think he seems to, at least so far, to believe in it enough, that he's gonna have his way. As you said. He's gonna figure out- Mattis must have already decided he's either gonna click his heels and obey, or he's just going to be insubordinate on this issue, you know, all along, seems like probably more likely the former, right? So, at least there's that. You know?

MCGOVERN
Yeah, and the important thing in my view, is not to prejudice the outcome. In other words, Bob Parry, for whom I have great respect, has an article on Consortium News yesterday ["Making Russia ‘The Enemy’" link: https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/15/making-russia-the-enemy/ ], which goes into some detail how the Democrats, the progressives, and everybody else are so viscerally against Trump, that they can't even see this one silver lining. Which is not a little silver lining. It's _big_. If he's willing to deal with Russia, in a mutually acceptable way, that is big, and that's lost in all this stuff, and that has to do with that campaign about the hacking and all this other stuff, and the continuing effort to show "that Trump owes his presidency to the bete noir, Vladimir Putin."

HORTON
Alright, we better wrap this up, I sure appreciate you coming on the show, Ray. Always great work at consortium news dot com, and always great talking to you on the show.

MCGOVERN
Well, Scott, I had to turn down CBS, ABC, and NBSC [sic] to be with you...they're all really interested, ah, I wish. So. That's a sick joke.

HORTON
Haha, I'm glad I was here for you to settle for.

MCGOVERN
Thanks Scott.