Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern : How Dangerous Is MICIMATT?

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

Ray McGovern : How Dangerous Is MICIMATT?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Ray McGovern is here now. I know everybody wants to know what Mickey Mott is, M-I-C-A-M-A-T-T. We're going to wait before Ray tells us what he meant by that acronym that he developed and which a lot of us now use. But before we get to that, before we get to what the intelligence community is doing on the ground in Ukraine, what CIA and MI6 are reporting back to their bosses, I want to unleash Ray for a little bit on Scott Ritter, whom he has known and admired even longer than I've known him, although our level of admiration is probably comparable. Have you ever heard of the State Department stealing an American's passport in America as the American was about to take a

commercial flight with a visa, with a ticket paid for, with no known law enforcement issue involved whatsoever? Not my experience, Judge. No, that's completely new to me. Whether it was the State Department or a combination of the deep State Department, so to speak, is another matter. But they used the State Department as the villain, as the excuse, and I haven't seen that before. Yeah, the actual police who were heavily armed and wearing body armor were Border Patrol, the people you often see at international airports. But they claimed when Scott asked them what's going on and who sent you

here, that they were dispatched by the State Department. There's no authority at all to do this without a warrant. There certainly is no authority to do it, and it's a violation of procedure so them not to identify themselves by name and badge number and not to give them a receipt. As I said earlier today, even when they break down your door in the middle of the night pursuant to an arrest warrant or a search warrant that authorizes them to do that, believe it or not, they're required to give you a receipt for what they take. Tell us about your experience with Scott, his personal courage, his willing to speak truth to power like very few people have done. It's been a real pleasure getting to know Scott and having him in our coterie of truth tellers.

He goes back a long way, mostly as chief weapons inspector for Iraq. He verified that all WMD, weapons of mass destruction, were destroyed in 1995. He knew that because they interviewed Saddam Hussein Saddallah. And when they interviewed him, they said, well, how do you know it was all destroyed? And his name was Saddam Kamel, okay, Hussein Kamel. And he said, well, I mean, I was in charge of the program. So I ordered them destroyed. And then the interrogators, British, American, and UN said, well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Did they destroy? How do you know? Did you check? And he said, well, I don't know how it works in your country, but when I'm in charge of the thing, I destroy the destroyer. Yeah, I checked. Are you trying to tell me that they weren't? Are you trying to get me to say they weren't destroyed?

So that's how this interrogation went. And it's all a matter of record because it was a debriefing written up by the UN, which meant that it was not classified. That's the background for this. Because when Bush and Cheney wanted to make war in Iraq, they, of course, made up stories about weapons of mass destruction still there. like Hillary Clinton and a fellow named Biden, who is head of foreign relations there in the Senate, they wouldn't give Scott the time of day. Clinton was his senator. He lives in Albany. She wouldn't let him in the door. So what he did before, in extremis, and get this, this is something I learned just a couple of years ago when I asked Scott about it.

He took that UN debriefing and went to CNN. This is six weeks before the war started, right? And he said, look, here, you've got to do this. You have to program on this. And they made a program. And they were just about to run it the next night when the CIA called and said, no, you will be endangering sources and methods. Destroy that program. It's not going to run. Whoa, that was CNN. So what does Scott do? Is he the kind of guy who gives up? No, you know that. So he went to Newsweek and he said, look, here's documentary

evidence that all those weapons were destroyed. Hussein Kamel was in charge of them. He verified and you don't see any, do you? Have you found any? Hans Blix says, you know, it's really curious that you are 100% certain that they are weapons of mass destruction, and you are zero certain as to where they are. You know, it was crazy. So what's Scott doing with the Newsweek? On the 24th of February, so a month, almost exactly a month before the invasion of Iraq. What year are we now, Ray? This is 2003, in the prelude to the war in Iraq. He goes to Newsweek, and Newsweek looks at this thing,

and a fellow named John Barry, who was pretty conventional establishment type, was confronted with, what do I do with this? So he put it in their online version, okay? That was the 24th of February. And then it appeared on their printed version on the 3rd of March. And this is what it said. Hussein Khamel, the highest ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Saddam Hussein's inner circle, told CIA and British and UN officers in the summer of 1995 that after the Gulf War, Iraq had destroyed all chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. Kamel had direct knowledge of what he claimed. For 10

years, he had run Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile programs." That's in Newsweek, right? So what happens? What do the pundits, what do the writers in Washington do? They say, oh my God, this is, we better go check this out. So where do they go? They go to the PR guy for the CIA.

What the hell did the PR guy at the CIA to say? Can you spell propaganda? Well, this guy, Bill Barlow, is a piece of piece of work. He says, look, don't don't don't even think that this is true. This is incorrect, bogus, wrong, and untrue. And the journalist said, Bill, thank you so much. We were worried that we might have to write a story on this. So say that again, Bill.

Incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue. And so that's how the media handled this bombshell, the documentary bombshell that Scott put in their laps. Now, I didn't know any of this. I knew that had been done, but I didn't know who gave it to them. And I'm talking with Scott about two years ago, and I say, Scott, you know, I've always wondered, the gutsy guy that gave that unclassified, because it was a UN report, that unclassified debriefing of Hussein Khamel, do you know who that was? He looked at me, he said, yeah, it was me. And so many times when things got out of hand and things needed to, somebody with integrity had to speak up, that was left to Scott. I'll give you one more example. During the desert storm, okay, 1991, Scott is in the headquarters of Schwarzkopf, right? And he's looking at aerial photography.

General Schwarzkopf was the commanding four-star. Right, yeah. I keep forgetting that we're so far detached from that. Yeah, Schwarzkopf was a pretty tough guy, okay? So when Scott was looking at these photographs, because the main problem, Judge, was scud missiles. They could hit Israel. And we had this coalition all formed with Arab countries.

And once Israel came into the fray, we would lose our coalition. So there was a real premium on making sure that Scud missiles didn't hit Israel in a major way. Some of them got through, but they couldn't find where the Scud missiles were. Then one fine day, there was a report that said, oh, there are five of them there. So we put that out. And Scott said, no, I don't think there are five of them there. I don't see any of them there. So they put it out, and Scott says, oh, I don't think there are five of them. I don't see any of them there. So they put it out and Scott says, oh, I quit. I guess I'm the analyst here. I said, well, you don't have to quit. You're fired. Now, what happened? The next day, the camera people from

CNN and others went to this place where it was said that six or seven Scud missile launchers were zapped by the U.S. Air Force, okay? And guess what? They were oil tankers. Scott knew they were oil tankers. So how did I know this in the beginning? It's in Colin Powell's memoir, okay? What he says is he's in the White House, okay? And Schwarzkopf is saying, we got him. We got seven marchers, okay? And Scott Ritter said, no, they didn't. Word gets to Powell that the real analysts here disagree. So he says to, hey, General Selkirk, I understand some of your people don't agree. Well, a torrent of invective and really dirty words comes from Schwarzman. He said, you're going to let me win this war or not.

And Powell relents. Who was his intelligence guy? A guy named McConnell. So McConnell was willing to go with these falsified figures that Scott said he wouldn't abide by. McConnell later became the director of national intelligence, just like James Clapper became director of national intelligence. So, Scott Ritter, you become a captain or a major, but you have your integrity, okay? And these guys, they might get to be, well, take Clapper. One more thing about Clapper. They put him in charge of.

James Clapper, who was the director of national intelligence under Obama. Correct. Yeah. So he's, during Bush and Cheney, he's in charge of imagery. So all that imagery that comes down from the satellites and from other sources, not only photography, but infrared and radar, multispectral, he's in charge of all of it, okay? And he writes in his memoir that he was under great pressure

from Dick Cheney to find weapons of mass destruction. And so he admits, this is a quote, everyone was kind of to blame, including me, all our intelligence officers, because we decided to find things that weren't really there. Find things that weren't really there. So that's just the kind of... So this was the weapons of mass destruction

in Iraq. And so what happened to Jim Clapper? He became director of the National Intelligence. What happened to the rest of us? They said this is a bunch of hooey. Well, we relished in our integrity. There are real benefits in telling the truth. And Scott is the paragon of a guy who always told the truth, even if people didn't want it to be heard. Before we jump over to Ukraine and Russia today, wasn't Phil Giraldi involved in telling Bush, George W., that there were no weapons of mass destruction,

and Bush more or less said, get out of here? Could be. I'm not familiar with that. But Phil, of course, is also a truth teller. So if he had the chance, I suppose he could have said that. I'm not sure he was in the kind of position that would have put him in contact with Bush. But a lot of us, you know, pretty much told the powers that be that this stuff was all made up by Rumsfeld and that coterie of analysts whose job it was to justify a war of aggression. What is the intelligence community, whether it's CIA, MI6, a combination of both, telling the Biden administration about the state of Ukraine, the stability of the government, the endurability of the military?

Well, that's the $64 question, Judge. They have not been honest up till now. When the Russians are pushing all the way to the Dnieper River, and they can do that rather quickly, if Putin chooses to do that, they're going to have to come clean. Now, the stakes are so high that my fear is that they will try to find some way to avoid a definitive defeat in Ukraine before the election. They lose the war in Ukraine, they lose the election, and as I've said before, these people are vulnerable to losing their freedom. This fellow who could come in, they could put him in jail because he's got the book on him, their court records showing the bribery and everything else. Not just Hunter, but Daddy

and Blinken and Sullivan. So what happens? Well, you know, it's not unprecedented in history that for the narrowest of personal motives, people widen wars, people even think about, well, what's the only way we can prevail? And maybe just a little mini nuke, just a low yield sort of, that'll show the Russians. And that's what I think the Russians are afraid of. And these people are on the ropes. What they will do could be very desperate. And what the Russians are trying to tell them,

look, we're gonna retaliate if you let your weapons be used to strike in our heartland. We'll have to see how that works out, but I'm sure that the Russians are not bluffing. They will retaliate. They won't use nuclear weapons, at least at first, but they have all kinds of sophisticated missillery and weapons, hypersonic ones that can do a lot of damage that the U.S. doesn't have, don't have that kind of capability. And there's lots they can do to end this thing rather quickly, unless they get some sort of sensible attitude in Washington where some people say,

all right, well, let's talk about this thing. Let's see if we can come to some sort of modus vivendi before November. Sonia, let's play cut number one. This is Foreign Minister Lavrov two days ago responding to the announcement by Secretary Blinken that President Biden had authorized the Ukrainians to use American offensive weaponry to attack inside Ukraine. And the French, the Germans, the British and the Swedes, depending upon the nature and extent of what they have there,

basically said the same thing. We have shown that we will not put up with this and that we will not allow Ukraine to be used as a direct threat to our security, as an instrument for the destruction of everything Russian on historical Russian lands. They did this for more than two decades, or even 30 years, immediately after the disappearance of the Soviet Union. Their goal was to destroy everything Russian, from the language to the government in this territory, which they wanted to take for themselves.

And they were counting on it. But as always happens, if they wake up the Russian bear, then our people have united like never before. These are not empty words. We saw this during the Russian presidential elections. The Nazi regime continues to use Western weapons to attack civilian targets, towns, and cities. I assure you that they will not be able to cross this line unnoticed. Poke the Russian bear and you will not be able to cross this line unnoticed. Do the Russians mean what they say when they threaten like that? They do, Judge. You know, it would be a supreme folly to think that they're bluffing, to say, well, let's try it, see what happens. Because there are all kinds of things that the Russians can do. They have the upper hand,

of course, in that area of the world, and they will do them if they're provoked. I witnessed the fact that they went into Ukraine because it was provoked. It was not unprovoked, as all the pundits have been saying. It was directly provoked, and the Russians did that to defend themselves against the NATO encroachment that would have made Ukraine a bulwark of NATO against Russia. So yeah, the stakes are very high. And what complicates things is the election in November and the fact that the Russians are riding really high now. They have these people, the BRICS countries, the Shanghai Corporation institution, they have people that are lined up to join them in confronting whatever odd things the US and NATO choose to do. It's a situation that is more tentative and more dangerous than any I have seen,

and I've been watching these things for about a half a century. Isn't this, in essence, the United States attacking Russia, paying for providing the equipment? According to Ritter, a lot of this equipment receives signals from drones and satellites. In order to trigger those signals, you have to communicate with the drones and satellite, and that communication, which is a code, is top secret. Therefore, we know it's being done by an American. That's right, Judge. As a matter of fact, Putin himself has said that. He said that, look, these weapons, they work because they're guided by the sophisticated collection methods and targeting systems. And those are the things that the U.S. has and has allowed themselves to be co-belligerents in effect. So yeah, he's been very clear on that. And yeah,

I worry that these sophomores that advise Biden, that they think they can get away with things that they're not going to get away with. And Zelensky, well, the Russians are calling him illegal now with good cause. He's not president anymore under the rules of the Constitution. So I don't know what the Russians are going to do, but they have all kinds of options now that they didn't have before Zelensky became no longer a legal president of Ukraine. And I think the next couple of weeks are going to be critical.

And I think that it will depend a lot on how much restraint Putin can exercise, given the fact that he's way out on a limb now, threatening reprisals. And let's face it, his military are breathing down his neck and saying, Vladimir Vladimirovich, for Pete's sake, you're going to give in this time? You know, when are you going to stand up to these guys? So he's under a lot of pressure. He's been able to resist the pressure to do something stupid. But for how long, it's anybody's guess. Here's one of his last public warnings.

Sonia, President Putin on the NATO warning, May 28th. Representatives of NATO countries, especially in Europe, especially in small countries, they should be aware of what they are playing with before talking about striking Russian territory. In general, this constant escalation can lead to serious consequences. I guess he's talking about Poland, which is where this equipment is stored and where it's configured and where it's repaired. That becomes a lawful target, never mind an emotional target, because of the long-standing animosity between Poles and Russians, but a lawful target. Yeah, so far, of course, the Russians have avoided hitting any NATO country,

any territory that is clearly a NATO country. It's problematical here. He went on to say in this particular interview that the smaller NATO states, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Yes, at one point you named them. Yeah, they should realize, look, you know, you guys are really small. Your population is so concentrated. You are more vulnerable in this respect than your allies. So why don't you come to your senses?

Now, that's an indirect way of saying, you know, a small tactical nuke can knock out your city or most of it. So, you know, I haven't seen the Russians acting and guided by U.S. satellites hit our frontier or hit our important facilities, we're going to retaliate. We can pick how we retaliate. There's not going to be a nuclear strike by Russia. They don't need to. They're winning, okay? But they have all kinds of ways to retaliate, and they will. And the fact that you have U.S. generals like, what's his name, Ben Hodges, and they go, oh, no, no, we can't be afraid of this. We've got to face right into them. Well, you know, it's just a sad commentary on the quality of the U.S. generals such as they have been for the last two decades.

Does Russia have missiles that can reach the United States, which we cannot interdict? The answer to that is almost certainly yes. This ABM system that we tried to create, we knew from the outset. We told Reagan, that is the honest people told Reagan, that Star Wars was a pipe dream. You can't have an airtight defense no matter how. It can always be defeated. Decoys, any kind of thing, it can always defeat this airtight. So, yes, Russian missiles can also strike anywhere in the United States.

God help us. It doesn't come to that. But you know what, Judge? Nobody knows that North Korean missiles can do the same. And Putin gave North Korea not their most sophisticated ICBM, intercontinental ballistic missile, but they're next to the most sophisticated ICBM. It's been tested. It needs some more testing, but it can reach all of the United States, and you can't find it because it's solid fuel. They put it under a tree or something. You can't see it, okay? So this is an escalation that no one has noticed, even though people brought it to Anthony, to Sullivan at the NSC

and said, what about this? Well, our intelligence people are looking into this. Well, I don't know. I was surprised that Putin gave North Korea this kind of missile, but he did. And there's no denying it. And so they're building up their forces not only to confront us directly, but the Chinese, the North Koreans, and Belarus, they're joined all together in this new alliance. And our policymakers don't seem to get it. The game is over for hegemony by the U.S. That note will end, Ray. Thank you very much.

Thanks for your time, as always. We're hoping to put together the Intelligence Community Roundtable at the usual time on Friday. It depends where we find Larry. Somewhere in some facility in St. Petersburg. But he's looking forward to it as well. Thanks, Judge. Thank you. All the best, my friend. A long and happy and fruitful day here today at Judging Freedom.

Tomorrow at 11 o'clock in the morning, our intrepid reporter on the ground, Patrick Lancaster, and at three in the afternoon, our senior CIA, former CIA official, Phil Giraldi. Patrick Lancaster, 11 in the morning, Phil Giraldi, three in the afternoon, both times Eastern U.S. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.