Victor Thorn: We’d like to welcome Mr. Raymond McGovern, a 27 year veteran of the CIA to the Victor Thorn Show. He was an analyst from 1964 to 1990, and served seven presidents from John Kennedy to George Bush, Sr. His job was as a senior foreign policy analyst, and he regularly reported to the Vice President and also to senior policy makers on the President’s daily briefs from 1981 to 1985. We’ll be joined by Ray in a few minutes to talk about the biggest buzz in the political world right now: weapons of mass destruction and the forgery that is going on with the supposed uranium that Iraq was going to buy from Niger. It’s all over talk-radio, it’s all over the Internet, and Ray has written quite extensively about this. He was interviewed Sunday night on the CBS News with Dan Rather, and he’s also made quite a few appearances on FOX News to let them know his side of the story. He says that many people in the Bush administration knew that this was a faulty premise, that the information was forged, and they used it anyway to take our country into war against Iraq. The biggest thing right now is, the more people that find out about this, the more they know that we’ve been getting conned. They realize that this administration knew they were lying about this information to get us into war – and even more importantly, they knew that it would take time before anybody uncovered this evidence. And they went ahead anyway and used it. George Bush used it in his State of the Union Address. And as this debacle in Iraq keeps unfolding, as more and more of our troops die everyday, people are going to wake up and say, “What are we doing over there? Why are we in Iraq? This information you gave us is a lie. You said there were chemical weapons and biological weapons over there. You said there were weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq was actually developing nuclear weapons”. Now it’s all a lie.

Lisa Guliani: Yes, that was the basis for selling this war to the American people and to the Congress.

Victor Thorn: Now, when we see our sons and daughters dying every day, people are going to ask, “Why? Why are we over there?” We are going to ask Ray directly what are we doing in Iraq and what this administration knew beforehand?

Lisa Guliani: We’d especially like to ask him about the Niger documents that were forged and peddled to Congress and the American public, especially now that it’s out in the open that they are forgeries. So, we basically went to war under a false pretense – which many activists and political writers have been saying all along.

Victor Thorn: Exactly. And if we start uncovering lies about this matter, what if we go back nearly two years to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. There’s already voluminous amounts of information that this administration isn’t telling us everything they knew about it. And the more we look into it, the more we see that there are ties between this matter, 9/11, and it actually goes back to the Afghanistan war with Russia where our CIA essentially created Osama bin Laden and these terrorists that are surrounding him right now.

Lisa Guliani: I guess what compelled me to contact Ray McGovern was watching him on mainstream news shows – how he was subjected to censorship and had a very limited time to speak - basically the same old song & dance that the mainstream media does to anybody who has something anti-status quo to say. So we decided to give him as much time as he wants to say what he couldn’t say on TV.

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.

Victor Thorn: I think it’s important to reiterate that when Joseph Wilson did come back, he said that this information was worthless. He told not only the CIA, the State Department, the National Security Council, but also the Vice President. So he didn’t just come back and stay silent about this. It was very well-known in Washington circles that this was bogus.

Ray McGovern: Yes, but when you mention “bogus” we’re getting some pretty bogus stuff out of the administration, too. Cheney’s office is pretending that he was never told the results of this trip. George Tenet was careful to say (being head of the CIA), “I never told the President or Dick Cheney.” And so there’s a studied effort to exempt Cheney from any knowledge of this, which really reaches ludicrous proportions. It was really funny when Ari Fleischer was asked on the 7th of July about Joe Wilson’s mission, the first thing he thought to say was, “Well, there’s not much new there. Besides, the President – the Vice President – didn’t know anything about it.” But let’s talk about the report. He says, “Let me assure you, the Vice President didn’t know anything about it.” Talk about protesting too much…

Victor Thorn: All the press would have to say, though, is say that it’s National Security Council protocol that they MUST respond to all questions raised by these groups, and since it was at Cheney’s request to send Joe Wilson down there, it’s inconceivable that he didn’t know about it. Inconceivable.

Ray McGovern: That’s exactly right, and actually “inconceivable” is the adjective that Joe Wilson himself uses. Joe is the consummate diplomat, but he’s very, very angry. He allowed himself to be quoted by the Washington Post as saying, “You know, after I’ve watched this charade, it begs the question of what else they’re lying about.” Diplomats don’t say the word “lie,” but for Joe, it’s very clear that the time for diplomatic language is past and he’s going to call a spade a spade. And I admire him greatly for that.

Victor Thorn: In that editorial, he said if we went to war under false pretenses, what else is this administration lying about? You also said on the CBS Nightly News (July 20, 2003), “Never before in my 40 years of experience in this town has intelligence been used in so cynical and so orchestrated a way. The agency analysts we are in touch with are disheartened, dispirited, and angry. They’re outraged.” So, what is the feeling right now at the CIA?

Ray McGovern: Well Victor, it’s almost hard to convey the depth to which we subscribe to the ethic that’s chiseled on the marble at the entrance to the CIA headquarters. It was a verse from scripture that says, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” That’s what attracted a lot of us to that work. We were the one place in town that had no big agenda. We were the one place in town that didn’t have to defend any policy, we didn’t have to make the Russians or the Iraqis up to be ten feet tall – we could tell it like it is. And wonder of wonders, we had career protection for doing that. I was sat down on more than one occasion by Director Bill Colby to do battle with Henry Kissinger! Here I was, a GS-15, which is a senior middle-level bureaucrat, and I’m leaving the office and Colby says, “Look Ray, don’t vote my stock cheap!” So I go down there, I do battle with Kissinger, I get all bloodied up, and I come back and I tell Colby the results and he said, “All right. You did exactly what I wanted.” A little footnote to that: Colby, of course, was fired by Kissinger – and that’s really an important thing to mention because to be a good Director of Central Intelligence, you have to not need the job. You have to be a self-made person and you have to be ready to quit or to be fired if you insist on telling the truth to power. And that’s exactly what happened to Colby.

Victor Thorn: One of the big questions I have here – and it’s the same question many people are asking – is why is George Tenet falling on the sword for this administration?

Ray McGovern: You know, I have to chuckle at that because if he’s falling on a sword, it’s the kind of sword my grandson just got for Christmas – you know, one of those plastic things (laughing). What he really said in that big apology was – I come from New York, and in the Bronx we had this little expression in such circumstances – “I confess! She did it.” And that’s really what he’s saying: I confess to being a lousy proofreader. I didn’t exercise due diligence getting all the way to the end of this speech and finding out that somebody on your staff had put bad information in it. And so I confess, and I’m really sorry about that. But talking about begging the question, who was it that put that stuff in the speech? That, of course, was Condoleezza Rice, and she’s being very disingenuous about this. I guess she figures we were all born yesterday and don’t understand how things work in the White House.

Victor Thorn: One quick question: Any time a president falls on the wrong side of the CIA and makes them a scapegoat – if you look at John Kennedy, Nixon, even Lyndon Johnson – every time they make the CIA a scapegoat or fall on their wrong side, they don’t seem to fare very well. So, now that Bush is using them, or falling on the CIA’s wrong side, where does he stand in relation to them and what do you see happening?

Ray McGovern: Oh, under these specific circumstances today, I don’t think that George Bush has anything to fear from the CIA. George Tenet has no position of influence or power whatsoever other than what is derivative from his masters Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and those folks that he serves. He does what he’s told. He falls on the rubber sword when he needs to. He’s just too useful to them. And besides, he knows just about everything there is to know about what President Bush was told prior to 9/11. In that sense, he is a very dangerous fellow to alienate because there’s always the fear that he has a little computer disk that includes all the warnings that he gave the President – chapter and verse – including the President’s daily brief of August 6th, 2001, the title of which was “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the United States” and the body of which talked about hijacking. I know that only because it got leaked to the New York Times. I don’t know any more about what was in that thing , but I would suggest that the title is evocative, and knowing what I know about that publication – I wrote, edited and briefed it for five years – that kind of item would not bear that kind of title if there were not some rather specific information in there.

Victor Thorn: That speaks volumes right there.

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.

Lisa Guliani: Ray, did a plane REALLY hit the Pentagon?

Ray McGovern: Did a plane hit the Pentagon? Oh sure.

Victor Thorn: Regarding Cheney: You speak about the unprecedented number of times he visited the CIA within the last two years, and that he actually got into the operational side of intelligence. You said that in your career at the CIA you’ve never seen a Vice President come down there in such a way and become so involved in what was going on. What really struck you the most about what he was doing down there?

Ray McGovern: One needs to have a good feel for how things are done to appreciate how unprecedented it was for the Vice President to be paying multiple visits to the CIA. You see, it’s really important for us (the CIA analysts) to get a really good feel for what the requirements are, what’s uppermost on policy makers’ minds, from the President down to the Secretaries of State, Defense and so forth. Now, since the Reagan administration, we have had a wonderful opportunity to find that out – a unique opportunity because my colleagues and I would be down there every morning six days a week briefing these people and getting their reactions and getting their further requirements and learning very well what was on their minds. So we would come back and relay that to the experts and have them get the appropriate papers and estimates written. When there was a big issue such as Iraq, we would have an estimate written and we would know what the questions were, we would address them by ourselves and with other substantive analysts and we would serve up our conclusions by taking them down to the President and the Vice President, to the Secretaries of State and Defense and so forth, and say here’s our judgments based on all the evidence that we have. And we are, after all, the Central Intelligence Agency, so if the system is working, we HAVE all the evidence - and here’s what we think. Now, never – never – is it appropriate in the midst of that process for a policymaker to wander into the CIA and say, “Well, how are you guys doing on that estimate? Can I give you a hand? Let me ask you a couple of questions about Iraq. Are you sure you’re paying enough attention to this aspect or the other??” When none other than the Vice President of the Untied States asks those questions of a middle-level analyst, there’s a certain intimidation factor that is lost on no one. Lost on NO ONE. And that’s exactly what Cheney had in mind, and the proof – if you look at how he conducted himself starting in late August of last year, how far out in front of everyone else he was in accusing Iraq of having a nuclear development program and capabilities – then you can understand why he was so interested in the uranium from Niger story and why he visited the CIA so frequently and why he was so prominent in other things having to do with this issue.

Victor Thorn: You’re exactly right in saying that he was at the forefront because on August 26th of last year he gave his infamous speech and said that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons. So this was really the moment when the ball started rolling toward our invasion of Iraq. What I want to ask you, Ray is: you’re not the only one coming out now with this kind of information. There are guys like Greg Thielman, Mark Gwozdecky, and Rand Beers coming out. There’s also a lot of opposition from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the nuclear engineers in the Department of Energy, and also the Defense Intelligence Agency. So why now all of a sudden? Are people inside so fed up that they want to get this information out now?

Ray McGovern: Victor, it’s a combination of things, but it’s mostly the fact that the press has woken up. After doing all their cheerleading for the war, lo and behold after a few months it became clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction. And that seemed a little odd. So the press began to ask, “Do you suppose? No, no. Do you suppose maybe we were lied to?” Now, I talk to my friends in the press and by golly, they don’t like to be lied to. Before the discovery of no weapons of mass destruction, before it was clear that they weren’t discovering any of those – well, then it wasn’t so clear that they were lied to. Now, it’s crystal clear that they were lied to. And they don’t like it! Now add that to the fact that a few American soldiers – men and women – are being killed every week. For what? If my son were killed, I would be banging on the White House door saying, “Mr. President, tell me again why my son was killed? Weapons of mass destruction and there aren’t any? Tell me again, Mr. President, why my son had to die?” Now you multiply that by about two hundred, three hundred, or God forbid a thousand, you’re gonna get a groundswell in this country because people don’t like to be lied to if young people are sent to their deaths.

Lisa Guliani: You said you like to get a feel for what the policy is with respect to each government official – yet, analysis should remain separate from policy. How much does policy influence analysis nowadays?

Ray McGovern: Ideally, it influences analysis by posing the requirements. What are the things that need to be addressed? Let’s take North Korea. What is the status of their program? What can we say of their intentions? And what would they do under contingency A, B, and C? Those would be the questions, and it would be up to the analysts to gather all the information available on those subjects and put together a cogent piece with judgments. Once that piece is served up to policymakers, then it’s in a different arena. Policymakers are free to disregard those conclusions, they’re free to send it back and ask for another look, they’re free to take the conclusions and form a sound policy based on those conclusions. But what happens to it then, it is ipso facto, sort of by definition politicized because it is then in the political arena. And the problem is that often presidents and secretaries of state have tried to politicize the product before it gets to them. That’s exactly what happened in the fall of last year with the celebrated National Intelligence Estimate which was prepared under the direction of the CIA, and signed by the director of the CIA. The director of Central Intelligence wears two hats: that means he is head of all the intelligence agencies – and he gave these reports to the President in September or October of last year just before the vote in Congress. That estimate was just beginning to be drafted when Dick Cheney gave everyone the answer. Dick Cheney said Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons development program. So the analysts were faced with the situation: “Do we come up with the same answer or do we not?” In the old days, we would relish a situation like that because we were so – what’s the word – so bound and determined to have integrity on these things that we’d almost take a perverse delight if we came up with a different conclusion with honest analysis and we’d serve that up and say, “Mr. Vice President, that’s not the way we see it.” In this case, just the opposite happened. Not only was the estimate skewed, not only was the estimate falsified to make it dovetail with what the Vice President had said – but the estimate was made to include what we have already discussed - information known to be bogus, information from that forgery. And that was included in a National Intelligence Estimate even though the information was known to be very bad. And that is inexcusable, that is beyond the pale; that is prostitution of the intelligence process.

Lisa Guliani: How significant is the role of Israel; and the Likkud in particular, in influencing the thinking of the OSP (Office of Special Planning), and is the OSP more influential on intelligence matters in the Bush administration than the CIA?

Ray McGovern: Okay, first question first. The answer is VERY. If you look at the folks that are in the office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of Special Planning, you have a number of individuals who, in effect, have dual citizenship - individuals who have worked for the Israeli government in one capacity or another. Some suggest that they are STILL working in those capacities. These are people who have written opposition papers for [Benjamin] Netanyahou, for example. These are people who do not disguise their close affinity with Israel and ensure that intelligence information from Israel gets directly into the White House without even going through the CIA on many occasions. So that’s what’s going on, and that is very much a part and parcel of why our policy was developed and how we see our interests served by conquering Iraq because we have removed the chief eventual threat to Israel, as the Israelis saw it.

Regarding the second question, I have to chuckle about the Office of Special Plans. You know, it’s a joke. It’s a bunch of young folks who work on congressional staffs on the Hill, a sprinkling of lawyers, a sprinkling of PR people – their function, pure and simple, is to come up with the right answers based on the bogus information that the head of the Iraqi National Congress was serving up out of his plush quarters in London. The Defense Department was paying these agents, and these agents were telling the Defense Department exactly what they were paid for. Now that information was exactly what Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz wanted. That information was what they told the President. The President seemed to be pre-inclined to buy that package, and George Tenet, whether he stood up strongly and said, “You know, I don’t think our fellows or our men and women agree with that” – whether he did that or not is sort of a feckless exercise because in terms of stature and influence George Tenet is “George”. Don Rumsfeld is “Mr. Secretary”. Just look at how they address one another. You’ll see the difference in clout.

Victor Thorn: One of the people running cover the most is Condoleezza Rice. I don’t know who she thinks she’s snowballing, but when she was asked about Joe Wilson’s trip to Africa, she said she didn’t even find out about it until June 8th of 2003, when he went in February of 2002. She’s trying to make people believe that this whole year and a half elapsed and she didn’t even know anything about it when there were articles in The New York Times and Washington Post and he [Wilson] came back and reported to all these departments. What’s the story with her?

Ray McGovern: I don’t know, Victor. It’s really kind of hard to make a judgment on that. I think disingenuous is about the nicest adjective that I can come up with there. If we’re talking about a coup in Liberia or something like that, that might be off her radar scope, but look, we’re talking about Iraq. We’re talking about nuclear materials. That stuff is going to go directly to her. So there’s no way at all when Joe Wilson reported on the findings of his trip back on March 9th 2002, that that information on its way back to Vice President Cheney didn’t have a copy dropped off with Condoleezza Rice. Now, even if you say maybe she was on vacation and maybe somebody forgot to tell her, okay. Well, as you pointed out, a full month before - on May 6th - The New York Times had a major article breaking new ground which was the first revelation of Joe Wilson’s trip, with chapter and verse about what he found and how he reported it. It was a big buzz in Washington for the next two weeks. And to think that Condoleezza Rice was not told about that, well, that strains credulity well beyond the breaking point for me.

Victor Thorn: Maybe they forgot to deliver her copy that day!

Ray McGovern: Maybe. There’s always a simple explanation, Victor.

Victor Thorn: The funny thing is that from everything you’ve talked about tonight and other people have written revolving around this matter, we have names, we have dates, we have an entire chronology that shows that this administration is lying. They’re not being true to the American public. And before the show ends, I’d like to ask you about a piece you wrote where you have recommendations about what you think should happen. In the first one, you call for Dick Cheney’s immediate resignation. Why don’t you talk about that and some of your other recommendations?

Ray McGovern: Well, I think we’ve covered most of what I see Cheney being responsible for. a) the very cynical use of forged material that he knew was forged; b) exerting inordinate and inappropriate intimidation tactics by visiting CIA headquarters multiple times; and c) being way, way out on the rhetorical end of things – much farther than Secretary Powell or anyone else in claiming that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program with absolutely NO, ZIPPO, NADA – absolutely NO evidence to support that. And right up until three days before the war onMeet the Press, he said, “I believe and CIA agrees with me that Iraq has reconstituted its nuclear weapons.” Now, the proof is in the pudding. Dick, show us where these weapons are, show us where the program was. Nothing has been found there in Iraq, so that is demonstrably false. If there were information they based it on, that would be something else. But such information is known to be derivative from a known forgery.

Victor Thorn: Ray, this is going to be a tough question. I’m the author of a book called The New World Order Exposed which we’re going to send you a copy of tomorrow, and there is a lot of information about the CIA’s involvement in drug running over the years starting in Vietnam and the Golden Triangle. There’s reports that the biggest opium crop – the biggest bumper crop ever in history came out of Afghanistan last year when we have control of that country now . So, is the CIA involved in drugs? How did they get involved in it, and what’s their position now with it?

Ray McGovern: Well Victor, I don’t think anybody has control of Afghanistan now. That situation has deteriorated to the point where literally no one is in control and we are losing ground in Afghanistan and Al Quaeda is gaining ground. Now, as far as the general proposition about the condoning or assisting of drug runners, you know you have to put yourself back in the mindset of the Cold War. And I’m sure this is … first off, I have to foreswear any direct knowledge of this because we in the analytic ranks of the agency were hermetically sealed off from operations in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia – the Golden Triangle out there. If people were anti-communist, if people were being counted on to support in whatever way the battle against the communists in Vietnam, other considerations tended to be sublimated to that crusade, okay? The same was true of Central America. If drugs were brought back on those planes that were supplying the Contras, well, the important thing was we were supplying the Contras so that the Soviets wouldn’t be able to march with the Nicaraguan army up into Texas. Sounds ludicrous now, doesn’t it? Sounded ludicrous then, too, but that was the policy.

Lisa Guliani: Ray, President Clinton had some serious issues with credibility in part due to his adulterous sexual relationship with an intern. We found out he lied. People were outraged. Based on the lies that are coming out now in regard to this administration, how can people look to President Bush with any modicum of respect – doesn’t he also have credibility issues as well? Shouldn’t we (the people) be furious?

Ray McGovern: Well Lisa, I have a dubious distinction here. I lost a lot of my friends who were on the liberal side of things because I was very much in favor of Bill Clinton not only being impeached, but being removed from office. And the reason for that was, it’s not acceptable to me for someone lying under oath, and if that someone is the President of the United States, it’s even more unacceptable. The answer was, “Oh, don’t you know Ray, the Republicans are out to get us? Don’t you know that this is all political?” YEAH, I know all that stuff, but when you lie under oath, that’s an impeachable offense. So I feel like I can comment freely on this other business that you raised, Lisa. If you compare the sins committed, so to speak, sexual activity in the White House or with Nixon lying about a third-rate burglary – if you compare those with what is now known – and that is the deliberate use of forged information, knowing it was forged, to trick our elected representatives to vote for an unprovoked war, well I would suggest that the comparison speaks for itself. And if one is impeachable, then I believe the other should be as well.

Lisa Guliani: We agree.

Victor Thorn: Very well said. Ray, some people may call for another congressional inquiry and you say, “What a load of bull this is” because there’s this guy Pat Roberts (Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee) and he was presented with this information and they requested that he go to the FBI and have them look into it, and he said, “We can’t do that. We can’t look into this matter because it’s inappropriate.” So basically, these congressional inquiries are like a dog & pony show. What do you think we should do beyond that to really get to the answers and bring them out in a big way?

Ray McGovern: Well, you’re right about Pat Roberts and the rest of them. I don’t hold much hope that the Congress can do much, although I noticed that Waxman and others are now appealing for open hearings. If there were open hearings and the cold light of day was shining on these folks, there could be – it could make a difference. But what we’re missing in this town now is what we had under Watergate. There’s no Sam Irvin, there’s no Woodward, there’s no Bernstein, there’s no Washington Post like there used to be. What’s needed here is someone who has an unassailable reputation for honesty. And ironically, such exists within the administration, and his name is General Brent Scowcroft. He happens to be chair of a board that is called The President’s Foreign Advisory Board. Now that is precisely the board that other presidents have used to look into things like this. So it would be very, very natural for President Bush to say, “General Scowcroft, would you please look into this matter and give me an objective view of what’s happened here in the intelligence community?” The problem is that Brent Scowcroft is a man of great integrity. Now how could that be a problem? Well, it could be a problem because he does not parrot what the Bush administration would like to hear. For example, when he was asked to comment about six months ago on the evidence regarding the ties between Iraq and Al Quaeda, he sort of coughed and said, “Well, let me say that that evidence is … scant.” Okay? So he does not fall in with the party line and he cannot be controlled like Pat Roberts and Porter Goss of the Senate and House respectively. So, I think that the President probably will not take up our suggestion that we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity made last Monday, namely that he should simply turn to General Scowcroft, who is already in place and say, “General Scowcroft, please look into this in an objective way.” I would love to see him do that, but I doubt that he will. So, what are we left with? We’re left with an election coming up in November of next year, and this is where we vote and really make a difference by being engaged in the political process and deciding what kind of president we want because it is, after all, the President that sets the tone for all this.

Victor Thorn: Ray, where is George, Sr. fitting into the picture now?

Ray McGovern: I know he prefers to stay very much in the background. He has made it very clear that he doesn’t see any useful role for him to say or do anything to eclipse his son. At one point, I had hoped he could act as a moderating influence on his son. I had hoped that he would take his son aside and say, “Son, let me tell you what we used to call those folks that you have running the Defense Department. We used to call them ‘The Crazies.’ Let me tell you why. And let me tell you why I kept them at arm’s length.” But I don’t know that he’s done that. Maybe it’s not too late.

Victor Thorn: What about his involvement with the Carlyle Group and how they have become one of the biggest defense contractors in the country and how they’re profiting enormously now from this war machine?

Ray McGovern: Yeah, that’s something I don’t understand, Victor. You know, doesn’t he have enough money? Don’t all these folks have enough money? It just boggles my mind – how much is enough?

Victor Thorn: Ray, we’ve only got about a minute left, so if you had a crystal ball and could predict what would happen in the next six months or a year, what do you think is going to happen to this country and this administration?

Ray McGovern: I think the most important thing is that we will be bogged down in Iraq just the way we are today, but it will be clearer to the American people that this was a huge mistake. That it was fought on false pretenses for a dubious aim and nobody wants us in there and that we’re left with a terrible predicament. I think the American people will realize that this war is sucking out the funds that are necessary to help our schools, to help those who are shoved off to the margins of our society, and that we as American people care about such things. We don’t like such things to happen. I think as we look at the deficit and we look at the prospects for Social Security and other things, we’ll realize that this was a horrendous mistake. And I think that the American people will start to hold people accountable and it will be very, very interesting when the campaign begins in earnest after Labor Day of next year.

Lisa Guliani: Ray, quickly: Are you taking any risks in coming out and speaking as you are?

Ray McGovern: Lots of people have asked me that, and my secretary’s husband has told her never to put herself between me and a window. But I don’t think so. I’ll say two things: under the Patriot Act, I run a great risk because they could do all manner of things to me and they’re legal. Number two, they could do the things to me as they have started doing in the Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, impugning my character, saying I’m a “leftie fanatic,” that I encourage people in the Central Intelligence Agency to release classified information – which I have not. But in the final analysis, I keep telling everyone, including my closest friends, that I have a wonderful wife, I have five great children, five wonderful grandchildren, and I’m not feeling depressed – so if they find me by the bank of a river with a knife and some painkillers and my wrists slit, please look into it further because I’m not of that frame of mind.

Victor Thorn: Ray, do you think that the final analysis of this is that the Bush administration knew these documents were forged and they figured that if they could convince the American people, convince Congress, and get this war rolling before we found out about it, by the time we did find out – we’ll already be in.

Ray McGovern: That about sums it up. That’s exactly it, yeah.

Victor Thorn: Well Ray, thank you very much. We have to go. I wish we had more people like you out there.

Ray McGovern: I enjoyed it. Thanks very much.