By Ray McGovern
Picking up from his Sputniknews interview yesterday, Ray expanded his thoughts a bit and did some more digging. Here is the Consortiumnews.com version, with embedded links, a photo or two, and a light but good edit.
Mike Morell: Travels With Charlie (Rose)
Sputniknews (radio) asked Ray to comment on the childish comments of former Acting Director of the CIA, Michael Morell, who told Charlie Rose on August 8 he (Morell) wanted to “make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. … make the Russians pay a price in Syria.” I am not making this up. Here’s how that segment went:
Rose: “We make them pay the price by killing Russians?”
Morell: “Yeah.”
Rose: “And killing Iranians?”
Morell: “Yes … You don’t tell the world about it. … But you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran.”
Here is Ray’s interview: (5 minutes)
http://sputniknews.com/us/20160811/1044149451/cia-comment-on-russia.html
What excellent adventure earned Morell his latest appearance with Charlie Rose? An August 5 NY Times op-ed titled “I ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton.”
Peabody award winner Rose having made no secret of how much he admires the glib, smooth-talking Morell, performed true to form. Indeed, he has interviewed him every other month, on average, over the past two years. This interview, though, is a must for those interested in gauging the caliber of bureaucrats that have bubbled to the top of CIA since the disastrous tenure of George Tenet (sorry, the interview goes on and on for 46 minutes).
https://charlierose.com/videos/28568?autoplay=true
A Heavy Duty
Such interviews are a burden for unreconstructed, fact-based analysts of the old school. In a word, they are required to watch them, just as they must plow through the turgid prose of “tell-it-all” memoirs. But due diligence can sometimes harvest an occasional grain of wheat among the chaff.
For example, George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, included a passage the former president seems to have written himself. Was Bush relieved to learn, just 15 months before he left office, the “high-confidence,” unanimous judgment of the U.S. intelligence community that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon in 2003 and had not resumed work on such weapons? No way! In his memoir he complains bitterly that this judgment in that key 2007 National Intelligence Estimate “tied my hands on the military side. … After the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?” No, I am not making this up. He wrote that.
In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, CIA Director George Tenet described Michael Morell, whom he picked to be CIA’s briefer of President George W. Bush, in these terms: “Wiry, youthful looking, and extremely bright, Mike speaks in staccato-like bursts that get to the bottom line very quickly. He and George Bush hit it off almost immediately. Mike was the perfect guy for us to have by the commander-in-chief’s side.”
Wonder what Morell was telling Bush about those “weapons of mass destruction in Iraq” and the alleged ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Was Morell winking at Bush the same way Tenet winked at the head of British intelligence on July 20, 2002, telling him that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of invading Iraq?
Tenet High on Morell – Just One Little Problem
Not surprisingly, Tenet speaks well of his protégé and former executive assistant Morell. But he also reveals that Morell “coordinated the CIA review” of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s infamous Feb. 5, 2003 – a dubious distinction if there ever was one. So Morell reviewed the “intelligence” that went into Powell’s thoroughly deceptive account of the Iraqi threat! Powell later called it a “blot” on his record. Morell even apologized to Powell in 2015.
It is sad to have to remind folks almost 14 years later that the “intelligence” was not “mistaken;” it was fraudulent from the get-go. Announcing on June 5, 2008, the bipartisan conclusions from a five-year study by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller described the intelligence conjured up to “justify” war on Iraq as “uncorroborated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”
It strains credulity beyond the breaking point to think that Michael Morell was unaware of the fraudulent nature of the WMD propaganda campaign. Yet, like all too many others, he kept quiet and got promoted.
A Deus-ex-Machina Escape
And, for services performed, Tenet rescued Morell from the center of the storm, so to speak, sending him to a plum posting to London, leaving the hapless Stu Cohen holding the bag. Cohen had been acting director of the National Intelligence Council and nominal manager of the infamous Oct. 1, 2002 National Intelligence Estimate warning about Iraq’s [non-existent] WMD.
Cohen made a valiant attempt to defend the indefensible in late November 2003, and was still holding out some hope that WMD would be found.
He noted, however, “If we eventually are proved wrong — that is, that there were no weapons of mass destruction and the WMD programs were dormant or abandoned – the American people will be told the truth …” And then Stu disappeared into the woodwork.
In October, the 1,200-member “Iraq Survey Group” commissioned by Tenet to find those elusive WMD in Iraq had already reported that six months of intensive work had turned up no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. By then, the US-sponsored search for WMD had already cost $300 million, with the final bill expected to top $1 billion.
In Morell’s own memoir, The Great War of Our Time, Morell writes, “In the summer of 2003 I became CIA’s senior focal point for liaison with the analytic community in the United Kingdom.” He notes that one of the “dominant” issues, until he left the UK in early 2006, was “Iraq, namely our failure to find weapons of mass destruction …” (It was a PR problem; Prime Minister Tony Blair and Morell’s opposite numbers in British intelligence were fully complicit in the “dodgy-dossier” type of intelligence.)
Landing on His Feet
When the storm subsided, Morell came back from London to bigger and better things. He was appointed the CIA’s first associate deputy director from 2006 to 2008, and then director for intelligence until moving up to become CIA’s deputy director (and twice acting director) from 2010 until 2013.
Reading his book and watching him respond to those softball pitches from Charlie Rose Monday, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that glibness, vacuousness, and ambition can get you to the very top of U.S. intelligence in the 21st century – and can also make you a devoted fan of whoever is likely to be the next President.
Wisdom on China
For those who did not make it to the very end in watching the most recent Michael-and-Charlie show, here is an example of what Morell and Rose both seem to consider trenchant analysis. Addressing the issue of U.S. relations with China, Morell described the following as a main “negative:”
“We both have large militaries in the same place on the planet, the Pacific. What does that mean? It means you have to plan for war against each other, and we both do; it means you have to equip yourself with weapons systems for war against each other, which both of us do; and it means you have to exercise those forces for war against each other, and both of us do. And both sides see all of three of those things. That leads to a natural tension and pulls you apart. …”
Those who got to the end of Morell’s book had already been able to assimilate that wisdom on page 325:
“The negative side [regarding relations with China] includes the fact that … each country needs to prepare for war against each other (because our militaries are in close proximity to each other). Each plans for such a war, each trains for it, and each must equip its forces with the modern weaponry to fight it [leading] to tension in the relationship. …
Well, Morell is at least consistent. More telling, this gibberish is music to the ears of those whom Pope Francis, speaking to Congress last September, referred to as the “blood-drenched” arms traders. Morell seems to be counting on his deep insights being music to the ears of Hillary Clinton, as well.
Finally, it was not hard to see all this coming, as Morell rose higher and higher in a system that rewards deserving sycophants. Ray addressed this five years ago in the “Rise of Another CIA Yes Man.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2011/08/29/rise-of-another-cia-yes-man/
That piece elicited many interesting comments from senior intelligence officers who knew Morell personally; sine of those comments are tucked into the end of the article.
Hillary Clinton’s Turn to McCarthyism
By Robert Parry
“The Hillary Clinton campaign might recall the calumnies hurled at Bill Clinton, as well as how things ended for Sen. Joe McCarthy after he questioned the loyalty of a young Army lawyer.
“The bullying senator was famously rebuked by Joseph Welch, the Army’s chief legal representative: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” (McCarthy was ultimately censured by the Senate and died in disgrace.)”
Generals Strutting onto Convention Stage Sharply Criticized by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey
Dempsey insists, correctly, “generals have an obligation to uphold our apolitical traditions. They have just made the task of their successors — who continue to serve in uniform and are accountable for our security — more complicated. It was a mistake for them to participate as they did. It was a mistake for our presidential candidates to ask them to do so.”
Dempsey is the only four-star in recent memory that helped a president (Obama) avoid being mousetrapped into a feckless, unnecessary war (Syria, the neocon target in September 2013). Moreover, he did not have his orderly plaster ten rows of medals, ribbons, and merit badges on his left breast – like the preening “warrior/scholar” David Petraeus. And Dempsey avoided barking, like Gen. John Allen (see next posting).
The Petraeuses and Allens of this world bring to mind one of Sid Caesar’s best roles as a preening, schpitt-und-polish German General. His orderly, performing what appear to be some of the spiffing-up functions of Paula Broadwell, offers an equally memorable performance. Enjoy!
(8 minutes)
(UPDATED) Gen. John Allen speaks at DNC; shades of Berlin 80 years ago
Pride/Hubris before the fall: USA! USA! “Indispensable, Transformational Power;” The Bad Guys “will fear us!” – and not only they.
Parental guidance advised
http://reason.com/blog/2016/07/31/readwatch-the-scariest-speech-from-both
(8 minutes)
UPDATE: In addition, all are invited to watch the scary introductory 3-minutes not included in the above link. Don’t miss the “spit-and-polish” cadenced march-in by military retirees endorsing Clinton, and Congressman Ted Lieu’s introduction. (Part of the introduction struck me at first as super-weird. Lieu: “When you ignore the facts people will die.” For a moment I thought, Wow, he’s alluding to how Gen. Allen and his fellow “four-stars” have been ignoring the facts and getting thousands killed. But, alas.)
Again, parental guidance advised. But adults should go to the link below to watch Gen. Allen impersonate another “Marine”—“You-can’t-handle-the-truth” Jack Nicholson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYuH5fKUn_0
(11 minutes)
Trump Probably Makes Russia Nervous
http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160802/1043849062/trump-russia-crimea.html
Interview of Ray by Sputnik (excerpts below)
Ray has taken another admittedly risky step from the contemporary mainstream, by drawing on some ancient wisdom he picked up in a college course named “Logic.” Double-checking what he remembered from that course a half-century ago, he confirmed that the arcane procedure called a syllogism can still be applied without prejudice or opprobrium. A far more recent scholarly book said it was still acceptable to distinguish logic from rhetoric – and even to apply, logically, a major and a minor premise to reach a conclusion. The book noted, though, that “in everyday life, few of us bother” with premises or conclusions. Well that much is clear, thought Ray – and sadly true.
Here’s the syllogism in question:
Major premise: Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Donald Trump to win the election.
Minor premise: The publication of documentary (email) proof that Hillary Clinton stole the Democratic nomination was aimed at helping Trump defeat Clinton.
Conclusion: Putin did it.
Anyone want to look up “fallacy?” Again, if memory serves, in Logic a fallacy is a mistaken belief or conclusion based on faulty or misleading reasoning. It is a fallacy, for example, to conclude that the sun moves round the earth, even though we can SEE the sun moving, right? And we are equally certain that Putin prefers Trump because we can SEE everyone saying that on TV, right?
Alas, if the rules for logical reasoning have not been suspended, then when a major premise is not sound, you really want to have a hard look at the conclusion. (Ray apologizes for the pedantry and his requirement for rigor in reasoning. Chalk it up to his training at the hands of the Jesuits.)
Trump Probably Makes Russia Nervous (from above; excerpts)
WASHINGTON (from the Sputnik wire), August 2, 2016
“Former CIA analyst Raymond McGovern told Sputnik that despite widespread speculation that the billionaire businessman has become President Vladimir Putin’s favored candidate, the president unlikely wants him to win. ‘I know a little bit about Russian and Soviet leaders,’ McGovern added. ‘The last thing they want is somebody who is proud of being unpredictable and who gets irate at the slightest slight.’ That Putin, McGovern added, would want Trump to have his finger on the nuclear button ‘is a leap of faith that I cannot possibly make and remain sane.’ …
“Unfortunately, McGovern suggested, the idea that Putin supports Trump has wormed its way into a narrative being spun by Democrats and major US media outlets that back Clinton. If the media says Putin wants Trump to win 50 times, then 95 percent of the American people will believe that to be true, McGovern added.”
So how and why did the Trump-Loves-Putin-and-vice-versa idea “worm its way” into the narrative. Well, Ray’s main point was edited into a Part Two of the same interview (Part Two is not on the Sputnik wire – not yet, at least). Here’s the edited piece Sputnik had prepared.
US Democrats Use Russia to Distract From Clinton Stealing Nomination – Ex-CIA Analyst
WASHINGTON, August 2, 2016 (full text)
“‘US Democrats have pulled off a masterful slight-of-hand by shifting the focus from documentary proof that Senator Bernie Sanders was robbed of the party’s nomination to charges that Russia leaked the documents to influence the US election,’ former CIA analyst Raymond McGovern told Sputnik.
“‘It is a classic diversion from the fact that those emails show beyond any doubt in documents, in documentary evidence, that Hillary Clinton and her pals in the Democratic National Committee stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders,’ McGovern said on Monday.
“The former CIA analyst was referring to a trove of documents provided by WikiLeaks that exposed secret efforts to exploit Sanders’ ethnic Jewish background and presumption that Sanders is an atheist, to weaken his support.
“‘Hillary and all her minions are doing their best to blacken Trump by associating him with the other bête noir, Putin, and it’s all ludicrous on its face,’ McGovern explained.
“In a weekend interview with Fox News, Clinton claimed that Russian intelligence services stole the documents, raising serious issues about Russian interference in the US election.”
And Chuck the Toady Todd (see posting directly above on pimping the “red line” on Syria) comes through for Hillary again, giving sycophancy a bad name. Aiming for White House press secretary, Chuck?
Quo usque tandem abutere sycophanti patientia nostra?!
For Summer Viewing: video interview #3
(27 minutes)
Puzzled by U.S. Policy on Ukraine and Russia? Think neocons. (Also, to add context, you are invited to skim through “Background: From Syria to Ukraine” below, before viewing.)
In this final installment, Ray talks with Regis Tremblay about what has been called “the most blatant coup in history” – the West-orchestrated Putsch in Kiev on February 22, 2014. The neocons were determined to put Putin in his place after he helped spoil their plans for war on Syria six months before. So it was partly payback.
Ray discusses the strategic importance of Crimea, and how it should have been a no-brainer how the Kremlin would react to its possible loss to NATO. The tension created by the coup d’état in Kiev, just six months after a brief Obama-Putin partnership helped prevent war on Syria, torpedoed further progress toward a good working relationship between Washington and Russia. There is good reason, in fact, to believe that this was the main aim of the coup; in any case, the hapless Obama let it happen.
While holding out some hope that Moscow’s help on Syria might encourage a more cooperative spirit in Washington, Putin suggested that in order to cultivate healthy bilateral relations based on mutual interest, Washington might consider abandoning the notion that the U.S. is more equal, so to speak, than other nations. Ray quotes part of a highly unusual Putin op-ed published by the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2013 – before the neocons launched their payback. Putin reportedly drafted the final paragraph himself. It is worth citing in full:
“My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”
Background: From Syria to Ukraine
Our last installment (video interview #2 posted yesterday) addressed the fact that pro-Israeli neocons are running U.S. policy on Syria. Ray noted – in part from his own personal experience – how distraught the neocons were when Obama stepped back from attacking Syria in Sept. 2013. (Normally clay in then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s hands, Obama was given some backbone by JCS Chair Gen. Martin Dempsey and – amazingly – by the British Parliament which voted against war on Syria.)
If it had not dawned on him before, surely Obama and the sophomores he has working for him in the White House could then see how close the neocons and Israel had come to mousetrapping the President into another war of aggression. The first step was the artful setting of a “red line” against Syria using, or even merely moving, its chemical weapons
At the end of a press conference on Aug. 20, 2012, Chuck Todd, apparently responding to a request originating with Hillary, fed the mousetrap some cheese by asking leading questions that Obama showed himself primed to answer, setting the scene for the “red line.” (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
You owe it to yourself to have a look at Obama’s well-rehearsed discourse on the new “red line” he establishes. Note: there is some sort of glitch in the YouTube video that obscures Toad’s follow-up question: “So you’re confident it’s somehow under — it’s safe?” ( See:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/
It is a safe assumption that this pas de deux was set up by State Department neocons. The Washington Post account of the press conference suggests that White House staffers had been blindsided and were trying to put the best face on it. ( See:
The sarin gas attack outside Damascus came a year later – on August 21, 2013 – the attack that Hillary’s successor, John Kerry, did all he could to make into a casus belli by blaming on the Assad government. Since then, accumulating evidence has pointed to rebels in Syria as the culprit, who were getting sarin precursors shipped from Europe through Turkey into Syria. It was, as the British told Gen. Dempsey, homemade sarin.
Chuck Toad, though, knows which side his bread is buttered on. Pimping the “red-line” question could, after all, get you placed at the top of Meet the Press. And recently leaked emails show he was highly sensitive to complaints by former Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz that some pundits were being too hard on Hillary. (Subject line of one Schultz-to-Todd email: “Chuck, this must stop.”)
No, “Toad” was not a typo.
The point of including this in introducing the Tremblay/Ray interview on Ukraine is not so much to show how toady the likes of Todd can be, but how the best made plans of mousetraps and neocons can go awry. Did they take it out on Obama? We saw that in installment #2. But it was Russian President Vladimir Putin, by getting Assad to agree to have his chemical weapons destroyed, who made it possible for Obama to emerge with some considerable grace from his having “chickened out” on doing shock and awe to Syria.
And the two are continuing to “plot” sensible solutions to stop the carnage in Syria, with the neocons, the Pentagon, et al. doing their best to put the kibosh on anything short of driving Assad out of Damascus. And why? (Please see installment #2.)
So, if you are still wondering why the neocons have made Putin into the devil incarnate, think about his sin of pulling Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire in Sept. 2013. They would make Putin pay for that grievous sin by moving into high gear plans for a coup d’etat in Ukraine six months later (February 22, 2014), as most attention in Russia was focused on the winding down of the Winter Olympics in Sochi.
UKRAINE: In other words, the U.S. provocation on Moscow’s doorstep was, in some degree, neocon payback. And – better still in the neocon view – Putin’s altogether predicable reaction in annexing Crimea became icing on the cake. Putin = bête noire par excellence. (And now cavorting with Trump! That’s a two-for.)
If one listens only to Western politicians and the corporate media, recent history in Ukraine begins on Feb. 23, 2014 – not by accident. A particularly blatant example of this came on June 30, when U.S. Ambassador to NATO Douglas Lute spoke at a pre-Warsaw summit press briefing: (See: https://nato.usmission.gov/
“… beginning in 2014 and still to this day, we’re moving into a new period in NATO’s long history. Why do I say that? Here’s the evidence I cite. So the first thing that happened in 2014 that marks this change is a newly aggressive, newly assertive Russia under Vladimir Putin. So in late February, early March of 2014, the seizing, the occupying of Crimea followed quickly by the illegal political annexation of Crimea. … Well, any notion of strategic partnership came to an abrupt halt in the first months of 2014.” (Emphasis added)
For Summer Viewing: video interview #2
Puzzled by U.S. policy on Syria? Think Israel.
Ray talks with Regis Tremblay about Obama’s “red line” and the chemical attack outside Damascus on August 21, 2013; how Obama now brags about singlehandedly thwarting the (pretty obvious) attempt to mousetrap him into launching “shock and awe” on Syria; and how the outraged neocons, cheated out of the war for which they had been lusting, moved quickly to administer “payback” to Putin for pulling Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire. Payback? Think the coup in Kiev just six months later.
Ukraine is the subject of installment #3 of Summer Viewing. Please check back tomorrow.
The stream of events of late August – early Sept. 2013 remains among the most bizarre that Ray has witnessed in over 50 years in Washington. He relates how, on one key occasion, he witnessed some of it personally.
Sadly, very few folks are aware of how it all went down (the culprit, as usual, the corporate media). But the result – like no new war of aggression AND the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons – is one of the very few things that came out (relatively) well. Odd that Obama chooses to brag to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg about the President’s having to face down ALL his advisers (except, as is clear, Vladimir Putin!). And you are wondering, maybe, why the neocons hate Putin so much?
(32 minutes)
For Summer Viewing: 3 recent video interviews of Ray
Two weeks before bussing up to the Bronx for his 55th college reunion, and then from JFK to Germany and Russia for the rest of June, Ray gave a series of interviews to Regis Tremblay, a colleague from Veterans For Peace and an accomplished documentary maker.
Regis has broken his footage down into three segments: (1) on the media; (2) on Israel’s influence on (otherwise un-understandable) U.S. policy on Syria; and (3) Ukraine.
Below is the link to the first, which runs for 12 minutes. (We will post the other two links in the coming days.) In the first segment, Ray talks about the regrettable but undeniable demise of the Fourth Estate and the happy emergence of a Fifth Estate. To put some flesh on his remarks, he includes a painful personal experience with some longtime friends and classmates from the New York area, who still think that by reading the New York Times they know what’s going on – like in the old days.
Ray had been looking forward to the next five-year reunion with classmates, just two weeks after the interviews with Regis Tremblay. This seems to be what prompted him to describe an earlier experience confronting distinguished Fordham alumnus (now Fordham Trustee) Gen. Jack Keane, at Ray’s 50th reunion of Fordham College five years ago.
In 2011 Keane was celebrating his 45th from Fordham’s Business School and had been asked to give a lecture to our Jubilee class of 1961 and others celebrating another five years away from Fordham (and still alive). All dolled up in Fox News attire and calculating (correctly) that his audience would be malnourished on accurate information, Keane gave an unconscionably alarmist account of the danger posed by Iran, which he claimed was about to get a nuclear weapon. Discomforting as it was to experience his classmates’ reaction to Ray’s speaking truth to power (something not very much encouraged at Fordham back in the day), Ray found the vignette worth telling – as a chilling illustration of the effects of the death of the Fourth Estate on otherwise well educated people. The more so, since Jack Keane played a key role in thwarting a sensible change in the U.S. role in Iraq ten years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
(12 minutes)
Is it true, as Hillary Clinton has charged, that Donald Trump is chums with “dictators?” It’s the proverbial case of the pot calling the kettle black, Ray tells RT. He adds that Hillary gets a two-for by identifying Trump with Russian President Vladimir Putin – double-demonization for the price of one.
Ray predicts that Putin will be blamed next for global warming. (Remember where you heard it first.)
Ray’s brief comments come at minute 2:13 of this 3-minute news segment on July 26.