Ex-CIA McGovern on Victor Thorn Radioshow

McGovern does not want to challenge official 9/11 version!

BabelMagazine -Transcript from July 21, 2003

Photo: Ray McGovern with Dennis Kucinich

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

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

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

Ray McGovern: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victor Thorn: One of the good things about this show’s format is that unlike the Nightly News where they only have two or three minute sound bytes or segments, we have an entire hour, so I want to look in depth at what went on with these forged Niger documents. It seems like Dick Cheney is at the center of it all. So first of all, tell us about how he sent a man named Joseph Wilson, who is a former U.S. ambassador, over to Niger to see if Iraq was actually trying to get uranium.

Ray McGovern: Yeah, I think you’re right, Victor. I think Cheney is what we used to call the “fellow behind the scenes”. It’s very clear that at the end of 2001, when the first information about the report that Iraq was said to be seeking uranium in Niger surfaced, that this really piqued the Vice President’s curiosity.

After all, if there was an inclination to go after Iraq - and of course we know there was – that was very clear on the day of 9/11 – then what was better than to be able to suggest or even to prove that the Iraqis were reconstituting their nuclear weapons program which had been destroyed earlier by the UN inspection teams.

So here’s a piece of evidence (or so-called) that suggested it had to do with Iraq, had to do with uranium, Iraq’s efforts to get it – so Cheney made it be known to the CIA that he was interested in having a follow-up on this. Get more details about this information. This is potentially very, very useful indeed. Well, the CIA looked at what they had, and frankly, the CIA has cut back so much on operations overseas that it didn’t have much in Africa.

They knew of this one retired ambassador named Joe Wilson who had actually served in Niger, and who knew a good bit about such things and enjoyed wide respect all over the place. So they asked Joe, “Would you go down and talk to your old friends in Niger and look into this – see if you can get to the bottom of it?” Well, he went down (I guess they bought his ticket) and he talked to the various folks in the capitol of Nigerand - to the ambassador - and the ambassador had already sent in a report saying that the information she had was bogus. It didn’t take Joe very long to reach the same conclusion.

As a matter of fact, when Joe came back and reported to the Vice President’s office, the CIA, and the State Department on March 9th of last year (2002), one of the major points he made was: even if Iraq were seeking uranium in Niger, and even if the government of Niger for whatever reason would wish to provide uranium to Iraq, it was impossible.

Why? Because the government of Niger does not control uranium in Iraq. Who does? An international consortium led by France. That consortium controls every ounce of uranium and it’s duly recorded, and you can’t steal or secrete away any portion of that uranium without it being known to the consortium. So, on the face of it – this is really important – on the face of it, this report didn’t make any sense. Never mind the sourcing, never mind that it was a forgery, never mind any of that. So all this stuff these days about “who knew it was a forgery” and all this business – look at the information! It made no sense. It should have been put in a circular file and never seen again.

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Lisa Guliani: Ray, a growing consensus among Americans is that the official version of events of 9/11 is false. We’d like to know which aspect of the official story on 9/11 – if any - do you find to be the most questionable and deserving of further investigation?

Ray McGovern: Well, I have a certain respect for conspiracy theories, but I never espouse any until I’ve really studied them and had a chance to go through chapter and verse of what they involve. From what I’ve seen, and I have looked at a lot of the information – and I have written five or six Op-Eds on this subject – from what I’ve seen, well I’ll put it this way – I don’t subscribe to any of the conspiracy theories. I take the charitable interpretation, and that what’s involved here was gross incompetence on the part of the President and his chief adviser Condoleezza Rice, who had absolutely no experience in the field of terrorism and didn’t really take the trouble to open the file that Sandy Berger told her would be the most important file EVER for her to know about - namely, the file on terrorism.
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