Ray McGovern on Flashpoints (03/14/2017)

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 "Flashpoints", hosted by Dennis Bernstein. Broadcast date: March 14, 2017.

File link: https://kpfa.org/episode/flashpoints-march-14-2017/

Transcript runs from 0:54 to 13:46.

DENNIS BERNSTEIN
I think I'm a little tongue-tied, because one of my favorite people is in the studio. And we are delighted to have in the Flashpoints studio here, in Berkley, down the block from the University of California, Ray McGovern. Who spent, oh I don't know, some twenty five years briefing various presidents from John F. Kennedy to George H.W. Bush, that's right. And he's been getting arrested ever since. Ray McGovern, welcome back to Flashpoints, good to have you in the studio.

RAY MCGOVERN
Thank you, Dennis, good to be here.

BERNSTEIN
Well, there's a lot to talk about. You know we had Bob Parry on...last night, talking about the fake "Russia did it" story. And he's been doing some pretty incredible work at Consortium News...you work with a whole bunch of intelligence veterans, and you've been trying to keep an eye on this story. And you all have been very active. What's coming through that door? And give us just a bit of background in terms of what you and the intelligence folks, former intelligence folks, have been trying to do, and say a little bit about that. And then we can talk about the actual content of the stories.

MCGOVERN
Sure. Well, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity was set up three months before the war in Iraq, when we saw that the intelligence, so to speak, was being adduced to justify the war was not mistaken, it was fraud. Out and out fraud. We couldn't believe it. These were our former colleagues. Okay? So. A group of us got together and decided, well, maybe we can, you know, get in the media and point out this is fraud, there's no need for any war, there are no weapons of mass destruction, and to think there are ties between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda is really frivolous, okay? Well, we didn't get into the media. But we did do three memos for the president, before. Before the war. First one was on the day of Colin Powell's speech at the U.N., where we warned the president that intelligence was being distorted, and we finished up, I remember this sentence very well, "Mr. President, we strongly advise you to widen the circle of your advisers, beyond those clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason, and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic." Now, we don't take- we don't rejoice or take any pleasure in the fact that we were right on that. There were other people who were right, as well. Some people working for McClatchy at the time, but, that's when we started, and we're still doing...we're into our fifty-fourth, fifty-fifth VIPS memo, and if you count the years, that's only three a year. More recently, since we're kindof a bizarre phenomenon in Washington, now, that is, we try to find evidence, before we make conclusions, can you imagine that? Well, you know...most people in Washington are operating on the Rumsfeld dictum, that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Now I guess he learned that at Princeton or something. That's really a compelling article, right? So, if there's no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, that doesn't mean they're not there. And similarly, if there's no evidence that the Russians hacked into our election process, and gave the election to Trump, well, that doesn't mean they didn't do it! And that's how Washington is doing this right now. It's really crazy. I've never seen...I think someone put something into the water here in Washington, the Democrats...when the Democrats ally with the likes of McCain and Lindsay Graham, we know we're in trouble.

BERNSTEIN
Alright, and um, now, the...the facts of this matter, because you can't...it's quite amazing...we talked a little bit about this last night with Bob. But you can't turn on one of these news broadcasts, Rachel Maddow, CNN, Fox, whatever...but- but, you can't hear a broadcast that doesn't assume at one point there isn't a story about how we- Russia did it, Trump did it, let's take it from there. [MCGOVERN Mmmmhmms] And there is...no...evidence.

MCGOVERN
Matter of fact-

BERNSTEIN
What happened?

MCGOVERN
-there's evidence to prove the opposite now.

BERNSTEIN
Right.

MCGOVERN
[laughs] A week ago, Wikileaks released its most telling disclosures, with this treasure trove of cyber tools. That have been developed by the CIA. Not the NSA, whose charter it is to do this. But the CIA. Now these tools include ways to take over the computer system of a car, make it go 110 miles an hour, instead of 60 miles an hour. But they also include ways to make it appear that a given hack was done by someone other than actually the person who's done it. So I think the evidence, and I'll go out on a limb here, if there is any evidence, the evidence lies in these tools, which make it very clear that this highly professional Russian spy agency really is...stretches credulity beyond the breaking point to think that they would mistakenly leave Cyrillic alphabet language there, that they would leave in the name of Felix Edmundovich, which is the first name and patronymic of Dzerzhinsky, the guy who set up the KGB in the beginning. So...you know, these telltale signs, that were cited by John Brennan, and all those folks, well, they are telltale signs, but in my view, they tell the tale that it was Brennan, not Putin, that did this hacking, or this ostensible hacking. What the president himself, President Obama, people don't know this, though they probably watched the press conference. Two days before he left office, he said, the "conclusions" of the intelligence community with respect to Russian hacking to benefit Trump are "inconclusive" with respect to how this information got to Wikileaks [laughs]. Now, if you look at that closely, all this hack- everybody hacks, of course, but what the president is saying, is we don't know how, and we should know if we have complete domain over the networks here, we don't know how the Russians gave this stuff to Wikileaks. And the reason they don't know how that happens is that's not the way it happened. It happened from leaks. Not from hacks. And these leaks came from the Democratic National Committee, and from the folks who knew about Podesta's emails. He was registered as a foreign agent for Saudi Arabia, NSA had every single email that he composed and received. So we're talking about leaks, not hacks. The best part of all this, as far as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity is, Dennis, is that we work like a real intelligence community seeking the truth. And so when a technical issue like this comes up, we go to the best person. And this happened to be William Binney...who's the technical director of NSA, before he quit several years ago. Now what'd he do? Well he devised these systems. And, so- He knows these systems better than anyone else. What else? Well. Ed Snowden gave us the slides! The NSA top secret codeword slides that show exactly how these trace mechanisms exist, where they exist, and so Bill just said to me, "Look, it's pretty simple. If this was a hack, it would've had to go over this network. Okay? And NSA would know about it. Now. They don't know about it, apparently, and what happens here is that everything is monitored, and I know, because I devised the system and Ed Snowden has given me the privilege of talking about this in detail now, because these top secret slides have been declassified." So, we went to Bill Binney, he did the initial draft, and we put out two VIPS memoranda showing that, you know, this was a leak, not a hack, of course, we got very little circulation, or very little notice-

BERNSTEIN
And who were you saying leaked it? And what's the bottom line of that?

MCGOVERN
Well, you know, it's- Nobody talks about this, but I'm gonna talk about it, because it's so clear to me. After...well, I think it was the 6th or the 10th of July, okay? There was a young fellow who worked for the Democratic National Committee, Seth Rich was his name. He was murdered. About three o'clock in the morning, in an ostensible robbery on the streets of Washington, D.C. Now, I say "ostensible" because the robbers forgot to take his wallet or anything else from him. He was just shot dead. Okay? Now, a week later, Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks, appears on a Dutch TV network, filmed of course in the Ecuadorian embassy, and what he says is this: "Seth Rich, that's a good example of the risks one takes when one decides to be a whistleblower." And then he said, "We, Wikileaks, offer $20,000 dollar reward for information leading up to the arrest of whoever it was that killed Seth Rich." Now, [laughs] I was mindboggled, because Julian never even comes close to identifying his sources. I said to myself, "Well, he's dead. Right? Maybe this is an exception. Maybe Julian's going to be a little bit more forthright." The other thing happened with Criag Murray, who's an ex-ambassador, a UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, also a honoree by the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, and he came in September, to help us award that year's award to John Kiriakou, at American University, Key Chapel. Now, why do I say all that? Well, [laughs] Craig Murray came from London to help us emcee that ceremony, it went beautifully, and Craig is not one to pass up a nice drink or a nice dinner, and so we said, "Alright, now we all go down to the Tavern Inn," there in Washington, and he said, "Well, uh, I-" and he backed up, and uncharacteristically, he disappeared over a little hillock, and never showed. Now, we didn't know until several weeks later, that he was meeting someone connected with one of these leaks. Now there's a lot of misinformation out there, he told me that he wasn't receiving material...the material had already been given to Wikileaks. But he was doing something with people who perhaps knew Seth Rich, or people who perhaps knew how the John Podesta emails were being, were being stolen. Or gotten. So, what I'm saying here is that I know Craig Murray, and I know Julian Assange. I'm privileged to call them, both of them, good friends. And, so when, when the spokesman for Trump says, "Ah, Julian has got no integrity," well, I was just delighted to see that Julian came right back- He won an award for integrity in his work, from the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity. And so that was 2010, there have been rewardees since then, including Bill Binney from NSA, including Chelsea Manning. Including, uh, of course, Assange, and most especially, Ed Snowden. So we don't shrink away from honoring people who face up to the risks of what they do just to get the truth out.