Ray McGovern, July 22nd, 2005

(Moderators, this is a homemade transcript from public domain material, AFAIK. Posting the whole thing. -r.)

Unofficial transcript of Ray McGovern’s statement at the July 22nd Congressional Briefing: The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later: A Citizens’ Response – Did They Get It Right?

(This statement immediately follows Mel Goodman’s.)

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I believe it’s been about 20 years since we worked together, Mel? We didn’t always agree on everything on substance back then, but I find myself agreeing with everything you just said, and I want to publicly associate myself with that.

I also want to say that those were the best of times, and it became the worst of times. I’m sitting next to two colleagues (David MacMichael, Mel Goodman) here who are good examples to everyone because of the courage and because of the integrity they have.

Mel would not abide the prostitution of intelligence, he failed to see Russians under every rock, as Bill Casey did, and he wouldn’t recognize Russians under every rock, he said they were Libyans, he said they were Vietnamese, they were not all Russians.

And for that he paid a heavy price, and he quit. Not only that, but he testified very manfully, very courageously against Robert Gates, the arch-Deacon of institutional politicization, to try to prevent him from becoming the DCIA. And 31 senators voted against Gates, which is unprecedented in this town.

And Dave MacMichael, well he came on to work on Latin America same day Bill Casey became Director. And when he saw the charade going on with respect to Central America he went down there to see what the situation was himself, and when he found out the real case, he quit, and went public, including, at the Hague.

So I’m sitting next to two very, very courageous folks, and I feel honored to be here, because I think we’re all in the same business, we’re all trying to spread a little truth around the way we used to do – I hate to say it – “in the old days”.

Let me say a word about Congressional oversight. Streamlining the Committees… nice idea given the power structures around here probably not possible, but you have to realize what the implications of this are.

Witness the John Bolton affair… because the Senate Intelligence Committee is the conduit through which things like NSA intercepts would have to go… (Senator) Roberts, supreme regime loyalist, was able to sandbag that whole process. So however much (Senator) Lugar, however much (Senator) Biden would beg their colleague Pat Roberts, he’d say, ‘No, you’re not cleared for this, I’m not going to show you those intercepts…’ and so they don’t know who it was that Bolton wanted to snoop on among his colleagues.

Or, think about Rep. Hoekstra, it was his predecessor who asked for the Inspector General report… the one which talked about CIA performance on 9/11, it was finished in June of last year (2004) so, over a year ago, it was ready, and to his credit, Hoekstra wrote a letter and said, ‘May we pretty please have a copy of that now? You know, the one we asked for? We understand it’s finished…’ the White House said, ‘No don’t give it to them’ so to this day, even though people have been named in there, even though it would be incredibly helpful to this kind of session, it’s not available.

So, what we have is the fox in charge of the chicken-coop here. What we have is ‘oversight’ in the other sense of the word.

Now, why is this important? Well, think about this, Sen. Pat Roberts, Republican from Kansas, has admitted publicly that if the Senators and Representatives knew, in October of 2002 that the intelligence was bogus, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, no ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, it would have very doubtful that they would have voted for this war.

Then he finds out particulars about the forgery, the forgery my friends has to do with the fable that Iran was seeking uranium from the African country of Niger. And we knew that was a forgery before the war started. Rep. Waxman wrote a very bitter letter to the President on the 17th of March, 2003 saying, ‘Look, we’ve been briefed on this intelligence, turns out it’s based on a forgery, I voted for this war based on “uranium from Niger” how can this happen?’

Now we have the whole affair with Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. We have an incredible example of White House neuralgia! What kind of a response this has been when Joe Wilson told the truth.

Why was that? Well, with all this ‘who shot John’ type of reportage, we forget.

This had to do with the biggest lie justifying the war.

What was that lie based on? It was based my friends, on a forgery.

Who did the forgery?

Jay Rockefeller, ranking member of the Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said ‘Let’s ask the FBI to look into that.’

What did Pat Roberts say? ‘No I don’t think that would be appropriate.’

So, the FBI’s not looking into it… why do you suppose everybody’s so ‘exercised’ about this?

Because they’re afraid that if you peel the layers down, if you go a little deeper, and you ask yourself, ‘Well, who did the forgery?’

You might find out that that forgery was made in the USA, folks.

You might find out that that forgery was concocted, or fabricated, by the same folks that gave us Iran/Contra.

There are a lot of our fellow alumni running around out there, not from the Intelligence Directorate mind you, that are just pleased as punch to hire themselves on to do these kinds of things, and I think we’re getting closer and closer to finding out who that is.

About the new DNI, well, what can I say. Mel has said it… I would also emphasize what Mel said this morning, it’s not the way you draw the lines in the diagrams, it’s the people.

Character counts.

Integrity counts.

Doing your job counts.

Being promoted on the basis of doing your job and telling the truth… counts.

Accountability? It’s dropped out of the dictionaries in this town. You can’t find it.

Now, I served under 9 DCI’s. And 4 at very close remove. And I can tell you that what Mel said about Admiral Turner is exactly right. He said to the President, ‘Look, I’m supposed to be head of this whole community, and I don’t have the authority. I’m a military man, and I’m very reluctant to accept responsibility without having this authority.’

And Jimmy Carter said, ‘No problem, I’ll do an executive order for you.’ He did.

Stan Turner was not loathe to knock noses around, so if the FBI was not sharing information with him, he’d go to the Oval Office and say, ‘Mr. President, would you please call the Director of the FBI and have him show me what I need, or else I can’t be your Principal Intelligence Advisor’.

So I’ve seen the system work. And more relevant to today’s proceedings, I had the good fortune to be with Stan Turner… about 11 months ago because it was about the 9/11 Commission Report, on the Lehrer Report, and as we were waiting to go on I said to Stan, ‘Why didn’t you tell the Commission that you made the system work?’

And he said, ‘Oh, Ray, I didn’t tell them.’

I said, ‘Well, Stan, you’re no “shrinking violet”, why didn’t you?’

He said, ‘No, no, Ray, you don’t understand, they didn’t want to talk to me.’

‘They didn’t want to talk to me.’ Here’s a very vigorous alumnus of this DCI post, who was around, who made the system work, and no one, staff or members of that commission saw fit to check with Stansfield Turner. It’s jus… quite remarkable.

So when I hear yesterday on the radio as I’m driving around this new head of the National – Terrorist – Information Center – what’s it called, the NCCC?

Yeah, he’s going through his confirmation proceedings and (Senator) Barbara Mikolski says, ‘Well you know, seems to me you all create a ‘Center’ whenever there’s a problem you create a new ‘Center’, it’s a ‘Center’ centered environment you all live in.’

And he didn’t handle that really well because her following question was, ‘Well how does this relate to the National Terrorist Center and the CIA? How does it relate to the FBI?’

And he said, ‘Well, we’re gonna work that out.’

Let me point out that there are people around that have the experience to comment on these things. And sometimes they do it beside themselves, and sometimes they just instinctively react, and Tom Ridge was such a person.

Of all people, Tom Ridge.

When he heard about this plan to have a National Intelligence Director (DNI) sit on top of all these 15 agencies and bureaucracy, on top of the DCIA, he said very quickly, ‘You know, I don’t think you need a czar,’ he told FOX News, ‘We already have one level of bureaucracy that we don’t need.’

Now, who better to comment on that, than Tom Ridge, who has been given 180,000 people from 32 separate government agencies to sit on top of as a ‘czar’.

So he spoke Truth, despite himself.

So did Slade Gordon… he was a member of the 9/11 Commission. And exactly a year ago, after the issuance of their report, I had been asked by BBC to go to their studios and talk on their TV, as I’m coming out who’s coming in but Slade Gordon and Jamie Gorelick.

And I said, ‘Hi’ and Jamie went right into the studio, but I had a chance to talk with former Senator Gordon. And I took him aside and I said, ‘Senator Gordon, do you know that the DCI already has all the authorities that he needs under the National Security Act of 1947, all he has to do is have the President back him up, he can do the job!’

You know what? He took me, he put his arm around me, he said, ‘Yeah, I know, but this one won’t use the power, won’t use those authorities…’

And then Slade Gordon got invited into the BBC thing.

What?

So we’re gonna create a whole new Superstructure because one fellow wouldn’t use the authorities that were easily available to him given the necessary Presidential backing.

Perhaps the best comment came from Bill Odom… he was about as high as you could go in the Army Intelligence, he headed up Army Intelligence, and then he headed up the NSA. He’s a Ph. D., Soviet specialist… very well respected around town.

He wrote a little Op Ed in the Washington Post, August 1, last year (2004), just 10 days after the release of the 9/11 Report, and what he said was, ‘No organizational design can hope to compensate for incompetent incumbence.’

Well, yeah, you can add sycophantic incumbence to incompetence, and that’s a sad story to tell.

Let me just briefly mention that on June 23rd, 1972, Bob Haldeman and Richard Nixon are talking, on tape, and what they’re doing is they’re talking about getting the CIA to obstruct the FBI’s investigation of Watergate… that was 6 days after Watergate… they were already at it.

Now, as some of you will remember, they got Dick Walters, the Deputy Director for CIA down there and they told him that, ‘You know, we can make believe McCord really still works for the CIA, you know, you gotta help us out here, we can finesse this thing.’

So Dick Walters went back and talked to Richard Helms, long story short, Helms says, ‘No, I don’t think we’re gonna do that.’

Now, Helms was motivated mostly by his all-consuming determination to ‘protect the Agency’ – and sometimes that worked not so well for the country – but in this case, it did work well for the country.

And the reason I mention this is, what would happen now?

What would happen now? Where would the President go? He would go to Negroponte.

What’s different about Negroponte? Well he’s got no institution to protect or defend, Negroponte’s whole record is one of being an obedient bureaucrat who will carry out any policy that he’s told to do.

Even if he decides, or even if he must realize, that it’s not only illegal, Iran/Contra, I mean, but immoral, Death Squads, I mean.

So you’ve got a real problem now folks, because you don’t even have a person like Dick Helms, who placed some premium on loyalty.

One last thing, it wasn’t only Helms. When John McCord, (he was one of the Watergate burglars, I assume too much because not all of you have hair as gray as me), John McCord was wondering what to do and his lawyer approached him in 1973 and said, ‘You know, I think we can fix it so that you could be re-hired by the CIA, and you could pretend that you were doing it on their say-so, that would make everyone feel pretty good around here, what do you say?’

What did McCord say, ‘Helms would never buy that. Helms would never agree to that.’

And you know what the fancy lawyer did? Threw down the Boston Globe, ‘Take a look at this.’ HEADLINE: “JIM SCHLESINGER NAMED NEW DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE”

Lawyer says to McCord, ‘I think this person will cooperate.’

Helms had been fired, he was given a sinecure, the Ambassador to Iran, where he did one bang-up job, the point being, it’s pretty cynical stuff out there, and when Jim Schlesinger came on board as the DCI, he convened the senior managers, I was not yet a senior manager, but I remember when they came back sort of ashen faced, and told us on staff, first thing Schlesinger said, ‘Look you guys, I don’t want you to misunderstand why I’m here, I’m here to see that you don’t screw Richard Nixon. And I don’t report to Henry Kissinger as my predecessors would have… I report to Bob Haldeman. Now you think about that, go back, and we’ll see if we can work together.’

So politicization my friends, is not new, it depends on the person who is either willing or unwilling to politicize.

We do have some good models, but with the new structure that has been invented here, all I can say again is, Mel is exactly right, it’s gonna be easier and easier to politicize intelligence judgments and intelligence operations with this new unnecessary structure.

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Also from the July 22nd, 2005 briefing;

Mel Goodman - (morning remarks)
http://www.gnn.tv/B10410

Mel Goodman – (afternoon remarks)
http://www.gnn.tv/B11620

Cynthia McKinney – July 22nd, 2005
http://www.nowpublic.com/node/16470

Lorie Van Auken – July 22nd, 2005
http://www.nowpublic.com/node/16472

Anne Norton – July 22nd, 2005
http://www.nowpublic.com/node/16484

Peter Dale Scott – July 22nd, 2005
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=SCO20050729&articleId=759

Paul Thompson - July 22nd, 2005
http://www.gnn.tv/B10677

Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed - July 22nd, 2005
http://www.gnn.tv/B10710

John Newman, Former Military Intelligence, July 22nd, 2005
http://www.gnn.tv/B10734

other statements. Laurie Van Auken's is awsome.

As long as they aren't used commercially in some sort of publication I don't have a problem with it, and I doubt the speakers would either.

Some day an edited transcript will be available online from the Congressional library, and I've heard that some people involved with McKinney's office are preparing a book of some sort. I'll definitely buy one if that comes to pass. Even a rumor of a DVD down the pipe, but for now all that's available is the C-SPAN broadcast if you were lucky enough to record it, and some random MP3s.

Van Auken and the Jersey Girls have done a great service to this country. She revealed stuff in her statement that was news to me.

Between McGovern and Goodman, there is enough information there to make you think twice about enacting any of the recommendations put forth by the Commission, considering Zelikow's history and the historical failure of 'Terrorism Centers'.

This was a really great briefing, all but ignored by the Corporate Press and even to a large extent by most 9/11 researchers.