Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern: The Lost Interview - New York to CIA HQ, Ray's Journey!

Episode Date: November 30, 2024

Ray McGovern: The Lost Interview - New York to CIA HQ, Ray's Journey!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. My name is Ray McGovern. I grew up in New York, but came down here after John Kennedy suggested that we might ask what we might do for our country rather than what our country might do for us. I was one of those who came down in the early 60s. I did two years as an army officer in intelligence in the infantry. And then when I heard that the Central Intelligence Agency had a need for people with my background, which included a graduate degree in Russian studies, I said, well, that sounds interesting. Tell me more. And when they told me what I'd be assigned to do, I just got

very enthusiastic that I would be in a position of analyzing things that might get to the President of the United States. It was hard for me to believe at first, but it turned out to be true. And that was a very enlivening career for 27 years. So now I work in the inner city as co-director of the Servant Leadership School, which trains people to become involved with people on the margins, to help them be helped by them, and to be able to sustain that work, which is quite a trick. If you get involved in that work, you very often burn out unless you know certain basic things like the need for community support and that kind of thing. That's great. Tell me a little bit about what a CIA analyst would do with the information that's coming in.

Well, I worked in the Directorate of Intelligence, which was the analytic branch of the CIA. And we were really pretty much tasked with doing the most important tasks of the CIA, which are two, really. One is to sit host to the... Oh, second, okay. Back on nice. Since it's really loud. Was that a plane? Yeah.

I just might want to wait for it to go by. We should have plugged in with Homeland Security to get this all quarantined off today. Yeah. Yeah, I was an all-source analyst, and that meant that I would come in in the morning and in my inbox would be data information from open sources, from spies, from liaison services, from intercepts, from overhead photography, from attache or embassy reports. The whole spiel on my area of interest, which was Soviet foreign

policy, will be right there in my inbox. It will be my task to make some sense out of it. And when I refer to the main tasks of the CIA when it was established at 47, the overriding need was one central place. They had been through Pearl Harbor. There were little snippets lying out there, but no central place where one person has all the information that's possible to have before one draws up conclusions. And so that's one. The other aspect that's very important is that we'd be a place where you can speak the truth without fear or favor, where we don't have to worry about what the State Department is saying, what Defense Department is saying, that we could really look at this information, come up with our conclusions based solely on the merits of the case, and ensure that that gets to the president, there's one place created by Congress not to have a political agenda. There's sort of the general reaction is eyes water over, you know, and the shoulders shrug

and there are sort of just feelings of disbelief that that could be possible. And the closer you work with Congress, of course, the harder it is to believe that it's possible. And the closer you work with Congress, of course, the harder it is to believe that it's possible. And the supreme irony and the terrible damage that has been done is that this administration has made it well nigh impossible to speak without fear of favor. So talk a little bit about the buildup to the war when you were tracking the news and following the news and kind of draw some analogies about how you would use kind of the mosaic theory of analysis where you're taking information from a lot of different sources and kind of piecing together a big picture of what was going on. Yeah, I guess I had a terrific advantage because I cut my teeth in intelligence analysis on the Soviet Union.

And the information on the Soviet Union in those days was 90% open source information. Actually, there's a sub-discipline of political science called media analysis, which are people starting in 1941 after Pearl Harbor, monitoring Japanese broadcasts. There are people refined to a real science. And anyone watching the Soviet Union, anyone analyzing the Soviet Union, would have to become a master at that science. It was almost like you got an MS in that before you could do anything useful. And so it came to me naturally.

And so when I watched, oh, starting 18 months ago, when I watched the administration banging the drums for regime change in Iraq and thought that rather odd, you know, we hadn't been in the business of, you know, invading countries to cause regime change before. And I started looking at the evidence very, very closely. And my colleagues as well, some of the alumni that I respect very much that I worked with for 27 years, were also watching this closely. And we would compare notes when we wrote an op-ed or another

kind of article, and we'd give each other sanity checks. Because some of the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty strange, you know, with respect to what this administration was trying to do. And so in January, we decided that those of us who had been giving each other these sanity checks, perhaps we could form a movement that would be perhaps bigger than the sum of its parts. And so we did. Five of us formed the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. And the sanity comes from those sanity checks and also from the fact that there wasn't a

lot of sanity going on here in this town at the time. I mean, the people who were running our Iraq policy were well known in the 80s as the crazies. When you said, oh, the crazies did this, everyone knew exactly who was meant. Who was Wolfowitz, who was Feith, who was Wormser, who was Bolton, who am I leaving out? Sometimes it was Cheney, Rumsfeld, they were known as the far-out folks that really had to be kept far out. And so the president's father, for example, when one of the crazies, Wolfowitz, came up with a document for the Pentagon

called the Defense Posture Statement in early 1992, it was so outrageous that someone leaked it to the New York Times and President Bush the first was faced with the decision how do I handle this? So he called in Brent Scowcroft as National Security Advisor and Jim Baker as Secretary of State. I thought we were able to contain these crazies. Who wrote this? It was Wolfowitz in defense. Oh, God. Well, what do we do with it?

Throw it in a circular file is what we do with it, and we disavow it right away, which he did. He called Cheney, who was then Secretary of Defense, and said, look, no more of this stuff from Wolfowitz. Let's be a little bit more sensible. Now, the supreme irony is that we watch these crazies come back into town with President Bush's son. And they weren't at middle levels of the Pentagon anymore. They were running our policy toward the Middle East and still are. And so that's really the really major problem there. Yeah, that's fine. I wanted to ask you about kind of a sense of history that the media will sometimes forget to incorporate and put things into context. On September 15th,

the Sydney Herald in Scotland broke the link between Priority for a New American Century connecting it with Iraq, and that was the first time anyone had made that connection. And then it showed up in England and Australia, all these foreign countries. So talk a little bit about if it's appearing in the open press overseas, how is that being interpreted by their intelligence agencies and how is that a document like that incorporated to their decisions? Well I think the most interesting indication of how the foreign press and foreign intelligence services

found it a little easier to get it right was the example of Andrew Wilkie in Australia. He was a senior intelligence officer. He had already had a career in the military, retired as an army colonel. There aren't all that many army colonels in the Australian army. And went into intelligence and in his testimony, he quit eight days before the war because he couldn't abide the deceit that was going into justifying the war. He testified before a joint committee of their parliament that we have our own little unit that analyzes US foreign policy. Now in the trade we say there is

no such thing as a friendly intelligence service, okay. We all monitor, we all analyze the policies of one another's government. That's just the way it is, that's the way it has to be. Well, his analysts of American foreign policy, the ones in the Office of National Assessments, which is Australia's opposite number to CIA, had come up with the real reasons for this war. And it didn't have anything to do with WMD, weapons of mass destruction, didn't have anything to do with the non-existent ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, had everything to do with the documents and the thinking incorporated in the Project for a New American Century documents.

Those documents were written by the crazies, and these same crazies were working also for the Israeli government and wrote similar documents for Prime Minister Netanyahu, for example. And so those were the documents that made it clear to people like Andrew Wilkie and his colleagues in the Australian Intelligence Service that it was a much different case. There was a much different U.S. objective than what they were saying rhetorically. And so Andrew Wilkie made this known in his testimony and said, look, don't pretend to have been deceived by this. We told you. We told you exactly what the Americans were doing. And all it took was a familiarity with the web and just typing in project for a new American century dot com or whatever it is.

It is the Mein Kampf of the neocons. Mein Kampf was what Hitler used, the strategic ideological justification for what he did. So too is this strategic ideological vision, the justification, if you will, for what they call a preemptive war. But since there was nothing to preempt, it can only be called a war of aggression. Okay. I'm going to move to kind of the overview picture of the propaganda campaign and what we know now, kind of maybe a quick overview of the different main points,

trying to establish that the premise that there was an orchestrated, coordinated PR campaign, a propaganda campaign to sell the war, and then move on to kind of the timeline and leading up to the war. So why don't you talk a little bit about the propaganda campaign from your perspective? Well, the propaganda campaign went hand in glove with the political campaign to get permission or to get approval from the U.S. public and from the Congress for this war. The decision was made in spring of 2002 to have this war.

Andy Card, the Chief of Staff of the White House, made that famous remark, well, you don't market a new product in August. And so we were all waiting for some dramatic announcement in August. So while the Secretary of State Powell was sunning himself in East Hampton and while the president was still down in Texas, Cheney got up before the microphones and and set the tone by saying Saddam Hussein is embarked on a search for nuclear weapons he could have one soon and UN inspectors. So that's a feckless exercise, never achieved anything, never will, so don't go down that road at all. Really extreme positions.

Everybody else out of town, this was the new policy. So when they came in from out of town after Labor Day, they sat around and they said, well, okay, now, what do we need to do? Well, we need to, somebody said, well, there's this constitution. And bummer, it says that Congress has the power to declare war. So I guess we ought to bring Congress into this and get them to approve it. Well, how are we going to do that? Well, how about the Cheney speech? Well, they're not going to be persuaded by Cheney's speech.

How about that brand new national security strategic document that we just issued last week? A lot of them don't like this idea of preemption. So we've got to give them something substantive to hang on to. What could that be? Well, how about the ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda? Tie that with 9-11, that's going to work. Damn, we can't do that. Why not? Well, those wimps over there in the CIA, they still can't find any good evidence. They say,

you know, Chalabi and those fellows, they can find it. They'll give us whatever that should be paid for. But those guys, so if we make it on that rationale those fellas from the analysts from the cia will come behind us and pull a rug right out from under us so we can't do that well okay how about i know um biological chemical weapons we know they had them you know bam bummer the defense intelligence agency has just rid of written a formal memo which says that we we don't know that they have these biological kembal weapons and we certainly don't know whether they're producing them so again if we go to congress with this rationale we'll get shot in the foot by these wimps over there, Defense Intelligence Agency. What are we gonna do? Oh, I know. What we really need to do is make a case for this nuclear thing. I mean, that's what Vice President Cheney did so well. He did a great job, Dick. Now we

have to make that stick. Now what do we have in terms of evidence? Aluminum tubes. Condoleezza, remember you did a great job on the radio there last Sunday about saying those aluminum tubes could only be used for nuclear application centrifuges. That'll do it. Well, I'm sorry, but I have touched base with the experts now at the Department of Energy and they kind of dismissed that possibility. They say that these aluminum tubes could never be used in an application. Or if they did, they say pretty much that if Saddam Hussein thinks he can use that,

have him order as many as he wants and, you know, unpay as much as he wants, because it'll never work. So we can't use that either. Bummer. Well, we... Ah, somebody says, how about that report that Iraq was seeking uranium from the African country there? What was it? Niger, yeah. That'll do it, you know.

Uranium, they only can use uranium. That's what we can use. If George Tenet was there, he would have had to say, well, yeah, we looked into that. It's false on its face. I mean, the government of Niger doesn't have the power to sell or give uranium to Iraq. All the uranium mined in Niger is controlled by an international consortium run by the French. Every ounce that's mined there is controlled. It couldn't happen on the face of it.

And besides, we just found out the original report's based on a forgery, so it's sort of like a false lie, you know? So we can't use that. Why can't we use that? Well, who knows about this stuff? Who knows that it's based on a forgery? Who knows that it's false in its face? Well, nobody else. The UN has been banging on our door. They heard about this, they want to access, but we haven't let them have access to this. Well, how long can we put the UN off? Oh, I imagine a couple more months. Ha! So what's your problem? We'll use this Iraqi search for uranium in Niger has evidence, tangible evidence, of an Iraqi nuclear program and will raise the specter of a mushroom cloud.

That'll do it with the Congressman. Who wants to take a risk that the first evidence might be a mushroom cloud? So let's do that. We'll persuade the House and the Senate to vote for the war. We'll have a war and we'll win handily. I mean, the Iraqi forces are on their back. We know that from all the sanctions and everything else. We'll win it in a couple weeks. And then the people will welcome us with open arms and cut flowers and then who's going to care i mean they ask you who's going to care if the original rationale the original cell job was based on forgery or based on something that was false sympathy yeah who's going to give

at that that point and so they went home besides call rovers in these discussions call them besides you know we got an election coming up in about six weeks. Just think how hard it's going to be for Democrats to vote, to endanger this country to a mushroom cloud. And I think we can really play this for all it's worth. Those who vote against it, they're going to be in real trouble, maybe. And so we might even make gains in this midterm election. So yeah, this seems like a really good idea. And that's exactly what they did. It's the most crass, the most cynical, the most deceitful campaign that I've ever seen in terms of any country justifying a decision to make war. It's my own country. It gives me no joy to say that. But in retrospect, it's even clearer

with the absence of weapons of mass destruction, with the president himself now admitting that there were no ties between Saddam Hussein and 9-11. With these ex post facto, these retroactive explanations that we really want to just get rid of Saddam Hussein. No, no, what we really want to do is democracy in Iraq. We're going to impose democracy on Iraq, whether they like it or not. And we'll make sure that we hang in there with our forces and maybe with our four military bases. And it would be nice to sit on top of all that oil. So it just was quite remarkable.

Now, we saw this coming, and the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, starting with Secretary Powell's speech on the 5th of February this year, we documented all this. We sent four memoranda to the president himself, made no secret of it, put it on the websites, some of it was published, mostly in the foreign press, interestingly enough, not in the U.S. press. But we could see it coming. As a matter of fact, this famous State of the Union address where the president was

fed information that was patently false, we had an article in the Birmingham News that day in the morning which warned the president, please check this out with your intelligence experts. Don't let your political folks have you shooting yourself in the foot with hyperbole. In retrospect, that one really looks like we were right on the mark. So it's not as though this was a big secret to anybody who was paying attention. And of course, our allies, who are feeding off precisely the same intelligence base, came to their own conclusions.

The French and the Germans, for example, with whom we share virtually everything, could see that this was all contrived, could see that some of their sources, which they had reported with great caveats, saying, well, we don't know about this fellow. He says he's in touch. We are not sure he has this right access or whether he's telling the truth. He has an unproven record. Well, they see Colin Powell starting his speech,

citing the information from those same sources saying this is absolutely solid intelligence. So they know what the game was. They could also read the Project for a New American Century documents. So on March 14th, there was an AP story by John Lumpkin who was talking about your plea for intelligence professionals to leak information or to get information out there. The spokesman for the CIA, Mark Mansfield, said, you know, well, Ray, he's been retired for 10 years. He doesn't really have any way to denote any of this information.

What's your response to that? Well, I would just simply say, where are the weapons of mass destruction? Ray was saying there weren't any, or if there are some, they're certainly not there in the quantity that would, by any stretch of the imagination, justify a war. And so where

are they? It's interesting that the press spokesman for the agency would dismiss us with such kid gloves. I mean, they could do other things like they did to Valerie Lane and so forth. But they all know that we sort of graduated with honors, so to speak. They all know that we have copious encomia from the president's father.

And they all know that we have our own reputation among the analysts and the CIA. So they have to be careful with respect to how far out they go in impugning our integrity or impugning our knowledge. It's a no-brainer. Any political scientist worth his or her salt who knows at least a bit about media analysis could have seen, just as we did, what was going to happen. We were still shocked that nobody blew the whistle on it. Just Andrew Wilkie in Australia, we were still shocked that there was no one that followed the example of Daniel Ellsberg, who admits that he did it too late, you know. We were shocked that there were so many good people with integrity that we left behind us in the intelligence apparatus that didn't see what was coming and speak out beforehand.

Now I do have hope that those hundreds, and there are literally hundreds who know about the lies, that as they retire perhaps, and as they pay off their mortgages or their kids graduate from college, that they'll feel a little freer to say, yeah, this is what happened. At any point during the eight months in the buildup, were you in contact with anyone that was still working with the CIA? Was all your information directly from open source? No, it was sort of like the 90% ratio again, 90% from sharing with one another and from the open sources,

but a very vital 10%, not from clandestine sources, but from sources within the intelligence community, people who are still there, whose morale has been really shot, but who are hanging in there trying to hope against hope that they'll live to fight another day when a leadership comes in that will allow them to do the job that they're paid to do, and that is to assemble all the information and then convey it analytically without fear or favor, with no policy agendas or axes to grind. On February 24th, Newsweek broke the Hussein Kamal story, and then it was kind of ignored for a few days.

But immediately Bill Harlow, the CIA, denounced it and said it's totally untrue. What do you say about it? Do you really think that he was telling the truth or was he protecting the agency in that case? What do you make of that situation and kind of recap that. Well, the objective or the job of the CIA spokesman or woman is to protect the agency. That's the job. And so when Hussein Kamel, when it became known that Hussein Kamel, whom everyone from the president on down had touted as the epitome of how much of a defector can really help in contributing to our knowledge

base when it turned out that he also said, in addition to the information he gave about chemical and biological warfare, he also said that all those chemical and biological weapons and resources were destroyed at his order when he told us that in 1995. That somehow never got out. And it took a very enterprising person from Cambridge, Glenn Wigwala, to go over to Vienna and find the debriefing report and then to report that. Now, there's a big story. How big a story? How can you get a bigger story than the head of the chemical, biological, nuclear and strategic

missile program in Iraq? Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, who was in charge of all that, tells us when he defected in 95 that those weapons, there were no nuclear weapons, but the others were all destroyed at his order, okay? Everything else he told us panned out pretty well. The president, everybody else says he's a great source, but nobody acknowledged that he also said that. And so Newsweek gets this story, where do they put it? Periscope, you know a little blurb there in the beginning. Most people just don't buy that, you know. And nobody takes much notice of it. We took notice of it. I mean, that seemed to be the answer. Why were they having such trouble? Why couldn't they

give evidence of where these things were to the UN inspectors? Well, the answer could be, could it not, that Kamal Hussein was telling the truth in this respect as well. Of course, it turns out that he did tell the truth, and these weapons were destroyed then. Hans Blix has an interesting way of putting it. He was the chief UN weapons inspector. He said, you know, it was really remarkable that the U.S. government had 100% certainty that their weapons of mass destruction and 100% uncertainty about where they were. Yeah, it's kind of hard to conceive that you would be so certain that these weapons existed if you didn't have any evidence where they were. What was the evidence?

These defective reports that the Defense Department was paying through the nose for Chalabi and his emigres to manufacture. Why were they not dismissed out of hand? Well, I'll tell you one reason that hasn't really come out very much. It used to be the Central Intelligence Agency had a crackerjack outfit called the

National Photographic Interpretation Center. It was their job to analyze all imagery that came down from the skies. Not to collect it, that was always the Pentagon, but to analyze it and to drive the collection, to inform what needed to be collected. These were the folks that discovered the missiles in Cuba. These were the folks that discovered the missiles in Cuba. These are the folks that made it possible for us to tell President Reagan, yes, we can verify arms control agreements. So it's just a very, very essential function that they would perform. These were the folks that were able to say no. They don't have 3,000 SS-25s, they only have 20, and these are the photos that can prove that, you know. So this body of some

600, 700 well-experienced analysts was given to the Pentagon, taken off, lopped out, lopped off from the CIA and given to the Pentagon in 1996 by John Deutch, who was then director of the CIA and who had made no disguise of his pretensions to become Secretary of Defense. Well, why do I mention that? I mention that for this reason. In the old days, if we had a defective report that said a chemical facility is under construction, these coordinates, the first thing an analyst would do would be target the photography, get a picture of it, and compare that with previous pictures, and say yes or no. Well, now, who controls the imagery analysis? Donald Rumsfeld.

Now he's got a favorite defector saying there are three chemical facilities here. You get the photography, it's going to take a very courageous young analyst to say, nah, they're talking through their nose. And even if he has that courage, the major that he works for is going to say, oh, they're going to tell the colonel this? And the colonel, if it gets that far, the colonel is going to tell the general? And is the general going to tell Rumsfeld that these favorite sources of his don't know what they're talking about? I don't think so. And so the function of the Central Intelligence Agency, which is to tell it like it is without fear of favor, has been not only corrupted with what they're still doing, but this whole unit was locked off.

And so it's if so facto, no longer able to speak objectively, it reports to the Secretary of Defense. And so why was it that all these reports were given the credibility that they didn't deserve? Well, there's no check on them. Or if there was a check, people were too intimidated to speak out and say, hey, Mr. Rumsfeld, your emperor has no clothes on, neither does Chalabi. I'm going to go through kind of a lightning round here.

And I'm going to give you the timeline and then think about whether or not the uh there was enough information that the media could have followed up on or if it was uh you know they did their best job okay excuse me while i just go to men's room for a second okay retrace and kind of put yourself back as if it was, you know, you don't know any information other than what you know up to that point. It may be a little tricky, but just think. I'll try to run through it in order so you can build up. Okay. Let me know if I'm not getting it right, you know. Okay. yeah, and if it's something that's off point, I'll just stop and go.

Okay, so what were your thoughts when you heard Cheney's speech on August 26th? I said, my god, it's still August. I thought this marketing campaign was going to be rolled out, you know, in September. It was very, very curious because it was of a tone and a degree and a vehemence that had not been present in any of the other speeches, including Rumsfeld and the president. And so it was really clearly a preemptive attack here, so to speak. And that what happened before they all go back to Washington seemed to me transparent.

And yet I saw none of this in the press. I mean, where were the journalists who could take a look at this and say, hmm, this is strange. It wasn't supposed to be until, it wasn't supposed to be in August, number one. And is the vice president speaking for everyone? And let's see, um, okay. Uh, the, uh, the links to Al Qaeda, which, uh, I guess, well, let's do, September 8th is when they kind of kicked off the aluminum tubes. And when I say this, try to just recap the event.

Cheney Powell, Rumsfeld Rice, and Dick Myers were all on the Sunday Talk shows talking about the aluminum tubes. Yeah, the aluminum tubes was a really interesting episode. It was very clearly coordinated with the British and with the New York Times and the Washington Post and so forth. And the point of it all, of course, was to have some tangible proof that what Cheney had just said was correct, namely that the Iraqis were seeking nuclear weapons. Condoleezza Rice went the furthest and she said, well, these aluminum tubes could only be used in a nuclear application. And this, of course, was before she checked with the Department of Energy experts, and these are the experts there, and they laughed themselves silly. You know, if Saddam Hussein thinks he can use these in a nuclear application, you know,

have him buy as many, sell him as many as you want. You know, he's in for a sorrowful surprise because they can't be used that way. They're not sort of, they're for rockets. And of course, they turn out to be right. So, but, you know, the cynicism here is that the administration knew that they would turn out to be false, but all they were working with was a time frame of a couple of weeks where they needed to persuade Congress that there was evidence that the first sign, as they put it, the first sign that Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons would appear in the form of a, you know what, a mushroom cloud.

The president said that on the 7th of October. Condoleezza Rice said that on the 8th of October. Victoria Clark of the Pentagon said that on the 9th of October. And on the 10th and the 11th, Congress voted to cede their power to declare war to the President of the United States. Incredible. Never in my 40 years in this town, never in my knowledge of the history of our country, has one branch of government so deliberately, so crassly and cynically, deceived another branch of government, persuading that other branch to cede its constitutional duty and its right to

declare war. And so there is a constitutional crisis here. Pity the fact that our founding fathers never perceived there would be a situation where there would be two main parties. And so when they wrote the impeachment articles, they were counting on being able to rely on reasonable men. And unfortunately, they were all men in those days, reasonable men being able to decipher what a high crime misdemeanor is. They never foresaw a situation where people would be so constrained by party affiliation that, as is now the case with both houses of Congress and the White House being controlled by the same political party, that the majority of these party members will feel unable to speak out and say, yes, I suppose deceiving us into a decision to wage an unprovoked war, I guess that probably qualifies as at least a misdemeanor, wouldn't you say?

Instead of that, the Republican majority is able to rein in their people to the point where the impeachment provisions of the Constitution cannot be implemented. This is not to say that they should not be, that that kind of legislation should not be introduced, but it just is very important to note that even this egregious deception of one branch by the other has not been addressed here and the press Press is sort of yawned and just reported Jessica Lynch things like that and that missed missed the constitutional issue here Okay, maybe have you scoot back a little bit? Sure. Is that better?

Okay. Yeah, okay. And so in your judgment, looking at the media in this time period, do you think that they did the best job they could? Oh, no. Okay, hold on. I'm sorry. I think the media had a miserable performance here. I just should have known, I suppose. Two years

ago we had a big reunion of those of us who were involved in Vietnam back in the early 70s when the Pentagon Papers were published by the New York Times and the Washington Post, 71, I believe that was. So it was 30 years. And Daniel Ellsberg and others were all there, some of the correspondents. But all the people who were at middle levels then, like Rick Smith from the Times, no longer with the Times, and other people, some of the lawyers who were involved, they were all so proud. And Dan Ellberg made a speech. everyone was patting themselves on the back. You know, we really faced up to Richard Nixon.

He did for the first and only time in our history issue of restraining order, pre-publication restraining order. We went ahead anyway. And were we courageous and did we do the right thing? We thought we'd all end up in jail maybe, but we did the right thing. And a lady raised her hand and said, tell me, I suppose there was a similar situation today. I suppose there was a Pentagon Papers today that needed to be published. There must have been, seemed like five minutes, there must have been about 45 seconds of complete silence.

Finally, Rick Smith, previously of the New York Times, spoke up and he cleared his throat and he said, Well, I wouldn't count on it today. I wouldn't count on the fact that our papers would publish today. And the next person said, Yeah, probably not today. By the time they went down the line, the consensus was, forget about it today. And I said to myself, wow, wow, there it is. There it is right there. These are the people still employed by these wonderful exemplars of the Fourth Estate. And they're saying that the Pentagon Papers, that their management, wouldn't publish them today. There's a sea change. And so when I watch the the cheerleading for the war...

And maybe if I could have you recap, you know, the history, or just you know, maybe in four or five sentences, the Pentagon Papers and them not being published today. Okay. Yeah. We've got a lot of police around here. Yeah, okay. When, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, this was two years ago, we had a little gathering of those who were involved there. And there was great pride exhibited in the fact that they went ahead and published them. And someone asked, well, would that happen today? And the answer was, well, the answer was long and coming, like a whole minute of absolute silence.

And then the people still with the New York Times and the Washington Post conceded that don't count on it, probably wouldn't happen today. No, wouldn't happen today. So there's a sea change there, a real sea change in how our press operates. And instead of that kind of thing, what we observed in the lead up to the war was a whole bunch of cheerleading, a whole bunch of simply accepting at face value the propaganda that was being emitted. It reminded me of the Gulf War I, where that little Kuwaiti girl made that story about the incubators and the Iraqi soldiers coming in and throwing

the babies on the floor and all that stuff. And that was, it worked. It was the same sort of thing. It worked for the time it needed to work. And we later found out that it was made out of whole cloth and she was the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter, but it was enough to persuade not only Congress, but the UN to say, well, these Iraqis are really terrible.

We have to give President Bush I the power, the permission to wage war. So it's this pattern of being able to maintain the deception long enough to get what you want. And then when it comes out later, you know, who's going to care? Or, you know, they'll put it on page A28 and we'll escape, we'll achieve our aim. It's really, I suppose I should no longer be surprised by it, but as an American I really am. There's one other point about this.

My colleagues and I were really baffled by these weapons of mass destruction claims. There were so many disconnects there. Why didn't they share that information with the UN? Why was it that every time they sent the UN out, it was a wild goose chase? They didn't find anything. Why was it that people came out from Congress when they were briefed by Rumsfeld and Cheney, sort of shaking their heads and saying, well, you know, that wasn't very persuasive.

And so that was always kind of a real conundrum for us. And we proceed pretty collegially. So when someone drafts something, we kind of get everybody to, you know, we don't reduce it to the lowest common denominator, but we're sharply engaged. And I wanted to say there aren't any weapons of mass destruction. And I listen to my colleagues who are a little bit more restrained, and I respect them very much.

And the consensus was that the President of the United States has said that there were, about ten times in the last month, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the Assistant for National Security. And they're not saying probably. They're saying they are there. So they must have something. They must have something they're not sharing with anybody. And the President of the United States, you know, should deserve the benefit of the doubt, you know. Okay, well, you know, I relented and said, okay, you know, it really is strange that they would be saying this so baldly and so often and so definitively.

Maybe my friends are right. Now it turns out that our trust was misplaced, that this president does put out information that is wrong, boldly, numerous times, definitively, with great rhetorical emphasis. And so the question now is, what should the presumption be when the president is talking about something important? That he's telling the truth, or that he's not telling the truth? And I have to say that

not only in this area, but in domestic policy and other things, my presumption, and I hate to say this because I'm a loyal American, is that we have to look very closely at what the President is saying, and we can no longer give very closely at what the President is saying. And we can no longer give him the benefit of the doubt that he's telling the truth, because on this key issue, clearly he was not telling the truth about weapons of mass destruction. He was not telling the truth about ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq. And those were the two reasons, ostensible reasons, given for waging an unprovoked war. What are some of the leads that the press could have followed up on that you remember?

Little nuggets that you heard of, like a big red flag would go up and say, oh, hey, that's interesting, I would like to see some follow-up on that. Yeah, well, there were some administration spokesmen, senior administration officials who would be quoted by this or that journalist saying, there may not be many weapons of mass destruction. If you're looking for a big stockpile, there may not be any there. Well, why didn't they go after those people? Say, what do you mean there may not be any?

Instead, it was sort of the bottom of a story. Pat Roberts, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I remember him coming out of a meeting by Rumsfeld and Cheney. He came out and one of the reporters said, well, what does it look like? How is the evidence of weapons of mass destruction? And Senator Roberts said, oh, it's compelling, compelling. And the journalist said, well, can you give me an example you see how here's it here's an example he said photography has shown a truck a going

under shed B where a process C is believed to occur and that's how the reporter says a senator you find that compelling oh yes very compelling they've cut this down to a real science. The reporter just left scratching his head. Now, that should have been a major story. If that was as compelling as the evidence got, you know, then we were in trouble, and we were. Okay. And let's see. And so in this whole process, it seemed like there's a whole slew of alternative competing

hypotheses that were not even explored. So can you talk about the process that could have happened by the press to get into those? Or to even think about it in terms of other alternatives. You mean on weapons of mass destruction? Yeah. Yeah. Well, the press played an awful game on these weapons of mass destruction. You recall that after the invasion of Iraq started, they were not found immediately,

except there was a report that some were found. That report that some were found we get on page one of the Washington Post, New York Times. Then three days later, oh, they turned out not to be weapons of mass destruction. That would get on page 828, okay? And there were, oh, there were at least ten of those instances. This Judith Miller, who's a spokesman for Jollibee and others, she got front-page treatment for a lot of these things. And her sourcing was on the face of it, dubious.

And yet front page, New York Times, this weapons of mass destruction found. Three days later, page 28, no, they weren't. So they should have smelled the rat right away. And then the answers given by the Pentagon. Why have there been no weapons of mass destruction found? Well, we've got more important things to do. We're fighting an enemy. We're waging a war.

Well, I was in the Army. I was an Army officer. And if I had any suspicion at all that there were weapons of mass destruction to be used against my troops. That would be priority number one, I'll tell you. I would have found whatever chemical and biological weapons were out there. That would be the first step that I would use in fighting this war. It's just inconceivable to me that the press would take that as a kind of an okay explanation, you know. Four minutes, okay.

Okay, so let's see. Why don't you talk a little bit about what kind of thoughts are going through your head, maybe in a minute or two, when on March 7th, you heard about the Nigeria forgeries for the first time officially from IAEA. This is from El Baradei? Yeah. I was watching the Security Council session there on that day. I was home in the morning, and I was open-mouthed in astonishment when ElBaradei said in most diplomatic terms

that that information on Iraq seeking uranium in Niger was, as he put it, not authentic. Not authentic? Not authentic? What do you mean? You never say not authentic diplomatically unless it was a forgery or something like that. So it came out that it was a forgery or something like that. And so it came out that it was a forgery. I said, God, this report that was false on its face, now we know it was based on a forgery? How are we gonna deal with this one? You know how we dealt with that one? Colin Powell grew up in the same part of the Bronx that I did. He was here ahead of me in school. We lived about a mile away from each other, didn't know each other at the time. But I know the lingo in the Bronx.

And when you're really caught like this, as he was with one of the Sunday talk shows, they said, what do you make of this? This exposing of this is not authentic. He said, well, if that was not right, fine. Well, that kind of tone would always have been accompanied by an obscene gesture where I grew up and where he grew up. At least he spared us the obscene gesture. But the attitude was just incredibly arrogant. That is sort of the hallmark of the folks that he associates with now. Okay. And maybe to finish up the links with Iraq and Al Qaeda, give maybe a few minutes

summary of that. Well, it was very clear that we could smell a rat on that from day one, because at 9-11, of course, we know that Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were already saying, let's go get Iraq now. But the most telling thing for me came out later, and it was Wesley Clark going on TV that same day and getting a call from the White House saying blame it on Iraq. Now Wesley Clark... I just want to interrupt. That was after... I'm talking about the time frame of just, if you can remember, stuff that was

leaking out from reports. Yeah. Well, it was very clear that there was a propaganda campaign here and so those of us who know about such things were always distrustful that this had any real substance to it. The ties between 9-11 and Al-Qaeda were pretty clear. promised a white paper on that, which he never delivered. And now it's clear why that happened. It wasn't that there wasn't enough evidence, it was that there was too much evidence and people would have said, well, why didn't you do something about it if you knew about that? But what a stretch it would be to link that to Iraq. Iraq and Osama bin Laden were enemies. Iraq was... Saddam Hussein was accused of being an infidel by Osama bin Laden. So, you know, it just didn't close.

Those of us who've been around the world could see that it didn't close. The wonder was, the real miracle was, that our press couldn't see that for what it was. Okay. I think that's it.