AFP PODCAST & ARTICLE: Ray McGovern on CIA Head John Brennan
AFP PODCAST
On March 8, 2013, John Owen Brennan Assumed the office of Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (D/CIA),
after a contested United States Senate confirmation hearing, where
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul began a talking filibuster and 34 senators
voted against him.
In order
to get a fuller understanding of why Brennan’s confirmation process was
so hotly contested, AMERICAN FREE PRESS conducted an exclusive interview
with Raymond L. McGovern, former U.S. Army infantry/intelligence
officer and 27-year CIA analyst from the administration of John F.
Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Mr. McGovern’s “duties included
chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s
Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s
most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985.”
McGovern
has written extensively on the danger of a Brennan appointment and he
explained why and provided first-hand insight into our new D/CIA in this
informative interview (37:44).
Dave Gahary, a former submariner in the U.S. Navy, is the host of AFP’s ‘Underground Interview’ series.
Be sure to check out all of AFP’s free podcasts. You’ll find them on the HOME PAGE, in the ARCHIVES & in the PODCAST section.
Neocons Back in Control of CIA
• John Brennan’s past troubling for those who want peace
On March 8, 2013, John Owen Brennan Assumed the office of Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (D/CIA),
after a contested United States Senate confirmation hearing, where
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul began a talking filibuster and 34 senators
voted against him.
In order
to get a fuller understanding of why Brennan’s confirmation process was
so hotly contested, AMERICAN FREE PRESS conducted an exclusive interview
with Raymond L. McGovern,
former U.S. Army infantry/intelligence officer and 27-year CIA analyst
from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush.
Mr. McGovern’s “duties included chairing National Intelligence
Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed
one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s most senior national security
advisers from 1981 to 1985.”
McGovern
has written extensively on the danger of a Brennan appointment and he
explained why and provided first-hand insight into our new DCI.
“I’ve
written an awful lot about Brennan because I know the guy,” he said. “He
was a young analyst, an inexperienced journeyman analyst, on the Middle
East, when I was still working at the CIA. I’ve talked to a supervisor
since, and they described him as a failed analyst who really couldn’t
write very well [and his] analyzing was mediocre.”
“But what
he did was what so many others do,” explained McGovern, “what Bobby
Gates (who worked for Ray as a young analyst of Soviet affairs) did. He
insinuated himself into the White House, briefing third tier folks.
Among them was George Tenet, who later became the head of the CIA. He
impressed Tenet and he had begun to rely on John Brennan for whatever he
needed done, and he ended up appointing him Chief of Station Saudi
Arabia on the strength of zero experience in operations and a claim to
be able to speak Arabic. He came back and he became Tenet’s Chief of
Staff, and then he became Deputy Executive Director, so that he could be
promoted even higher.”
McGovern
explained that when the CIA used fraudulent means to wage war against
Iraq in 2003, “John Brennan sat right in the midst of that.”
Now, McGovern fears, Brennan and his neocon allies may be planning the same for Iran.
“When he
was testifying (February 7, 2013) before the Senate Intelligence
Committee…he said…Iran was bent on obtaining nuclear weapons and
intercontinental ballistic missile delivery systems, to deliver them,”
said McGovern. “You might see that in The New York Times, you might see that in The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal.
You will never see that in any intelligence document, because after the
debacle in Iraq, after the fraudulent National Intelligence Estimate on
Iraq, we got some honest blood into the intelligence community in the
form of a fellow named Tom Fingar from the State Department. He was head
of their State Department intelligence, and they asked him to do an
honest job, not a fraudulent job but an honest job, on Iran, that we all
knew was in the crosshairs of the Bush/Cheney administration. In
November of 2007…the 16 intelligence agencies of the U.S. government
unanimously expressed, with ‘high confidence,’ concluded that Iran had
stopped working on a nuclear weapon in 2003. And every year since it’s
been revalidated, reiterated by the…Director of National Intelligence.
So Brennan has to know that, or else he’s guilty of misfeasance. That
estimate stopped the war.”
“If
Brennan comes in and fools around with the considered judgment of 16
intelligence agencies, and says to the president what he said to Dianne
Feinstein’s committee, mainly, Iran is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons
and ICBMs, if he does that, it’s just a very short step, because
Congress would just love to give Iran a bloody nose,” said McGovern. “It
won’t be a bloody nose. A war with Iran would make a war with Iraq look
like a volleyball game. It would be a disaster. And so if Brennan comes
in, and starts to curry favor with the neocons, and how else do you
explain what he said before the Feinstein committee, there’s real
trouble here.”
McGovern explained Brennan’s fondness for drones and targeted assassinations.
“It was revealed that The New York Times
knew many months ago that Brennan had been instrumental in setting up a
base for these drones in…Saudi Arabia. And actually, the hit on the
American citizen Awlaki was made from that base. Brennan is starting the
whole process again with U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia,” said
McGovern. “Why would he be intent on following this policy of drone
warfare, targeted killings, [and] assassinations? Either he’s really
dumb or he recognizes the ultimate effectiveness, which is to create
still more terrorists, and have fallen in with…the guys who make the
drones, the guys who make the Hellfire missiles, the guys who build the
other weapons that get destroyed and they have to replenish them, the
military-industrial complex aided and abetted by Congress, who’s in
their employ, and by the mainstream media.”
“When [Brennan] was asked on Lehrer (now called PBS NewsHour)
if he thought extraordinary rendition, (what the rest of us call
kidnapping), is a vital tool to combat terrorism, he relied that it was
“an absolutely vital tool. All I can say is that it’s produced
intelligence that has saved lives.” He later recounted this testimony.
“So this guy’s poison,” said McGovern. “Both from an operational point of view [and] from a substantive point of view.”
AFP asked why Obama appointed him.
“Brennan
knows where the bodies are buried. Obama believes that Brennan owes him
the kind of loyalty that he has come to depend on from other advisors,
and that no matter what happens in the CIA, he’ll tell the president
about it, and if there’s a plot in the CIA to do him in, his loyalty
will be to the White House, not like what happened before John Kennedy
was assassinated. Not like what happened before Martin Luther King, Jr.
was assassinated. No, this time, he’s got Brennan in place. Anything
like that, Brennan will tell him about before it happens.”
McGovern explained why he believes this scenario.
Three
years ago at a dinner with maybe 12 progressives, “they were pressing
[Obama]” to do more on the progressive side, “and finally he threw up
his hands and he said, ‘Because I remember what happened to Dr. King,
that’s why.’”
“If the
president of the United States is afraid of the CIA, then, you can maybe
understand a little better, why he would pick a person with this kind
of background, this kind of reputation. Thinking that his thug would
prevent other thugs from doing him in.”
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