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Instead of starting out a recent article with a story about how his grandmother warned against saying anything but nice things about people, maybe veteran CIA analyst and vociferous Bush administration critic Ray McGovern should have quoted Washington icon Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

“If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody,” Teddy's daughter once remarked, “sit next to me.”

That's because McGovern, perhaps best known for calling former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a liar on TV last year, had precious few “nice” things to say about Bush, “thugs like Vice President Cheney and [Rumsfeld],” or former CIA Chief George Tenet, who was the subject of the article for truthout.org.

After dispensing with a few pleasantries, McGovern ripped into Tenet, who at the time had just published a book on his role in the run-up to war, “In the Center of the Storm.” While Tenet was making the TV news rounds plugging his book, McGovern was publicly railing against the country's former top spy for disgracing himself and the agency by helping the administration initiate an unjustifiable and unforgivable war.

But while the war in the minds of McGovern and a majority of Americans can no longer be justified or tolerated, what gets his Irish blood boiling most is both the use of torture by the administration and Tenet's own Nazi-esque denials of employing tactics that ultimately prompted McGovern to return the Intelligence Commendation Award that he was presented with by Bush's father.

“Hewing to the George W. Bush dictum of ‘catapulting the propaganda' by endlessly repeating the same claim (the formula used so successfully by Joseph Goebbels), Tenet manages to tell ‘60 Minutes' five times in five consecutive sentences: ‘We don't torture people.' Like President Bush, however, he then goes on to show why it has been absolutely necessary to torture people. What do they take us for, fools? And Tenet's claims of success in extracting information via torture are no more worthy of credulity than the rest of what he says,” wrote McGovern, who along with other former CIA employees founded the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, VIPS, a group dedicated to exposing the mishandling of war-related intelligence.

“His own credibility aside,” continued the 68-year-old McGovern, who worked under seven presidents during 27 years of service, “Tenet has succeeded in destroying the asset without which an intelligence community cannot be effective. And that is serious. He seems blissfully oblivious to the damage he has done — aware only of the damage others have done to his ‘personal honor.'"

A separate letter to Tenet penned by McGovern and former CIA agents Phil Giraldi, Larry Johnson, Jim Marcinkowski, Vince Cannistraro and David MacMichael is even more damning.

“Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obligations to the people of the United States,” the agents wrote. “Instead of resigning in protest, when it could have made a difference in the public debate, you remained silent and allowed the Bush administration to cite your participation in these deliberations to justify their decision to go to war. Your silence contributed to the willingness of the public to support the disastrous war in Iraq, which has killed more than 3,300 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.”

But McGovern's concerns don't stop with Tenet. He believes the US government under Bush is the real terrorist organization, and may even be preparing to declare martial law – the end of democratic rule – in the wake of another terrorist attack.

We caught up with McGovern by phone Tuesday morning, a few hours before he was set to speak to a meeting of South Pasadena Neighbors for Peace and Justice at Burger Continental Restaurant on South Lake Avenue.

— Kevin Uhrich

Pasadena Weekly: You raise images of Nazis when you refer to the administration. Are these people really that sinister?

Ray McGovern: I think that the main charge against the Nazis at Nuremburg was perpetrating what the Nuremburg tribunal called a war of aggression and a war of aggression is to perpetrate the worst international crime, differing from other war crimes only in so far as the war of aggression contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. As you compare the two, one would be World War II and next would be the attack on Iraq.

Both were very equally wars of aggression. And the people were equally seduced by a propaganda machine, in the first case led by Joseph Goebbels, and in the second case George Tenet and several others. So yes, it is an apt comparison. … I would just point out, as we talked about the accumulated evil of the whole … we have torture, we have kidnapping, we have keeping people in black holes without even telling their wives and children. We have illegal wiretapping. We don't have time to list them all. So the accumulated evil is part and parcel of war of aggression. The definition applies to both.

You've been very outspoken about your views on the war and the administration. If not for their stated purposes, why do you believe Bush and company invaded Iraq?

I've been saying it for three years now, using the acronym OIL. It's probably too cute, but the O stands for oil. I don't think there are many people who would disagree that if there were no oil under the sands of Iraq we would be anywhere near Iraq. So O is oil. I is for Israel. The people running our foreign policy at the time, the neo-cons, many of them have actually worked for the Israeli government, think tanks and so forth. They have great difficulty separating the strategic interests of Israel and the strategic interests of the United States. …Far from making Israel secure, the entire invasion and occupation of Iraq has led to a situation in which there are thousands of terrorists, most of them hating Israel as much as they hate us, and being trained to perpetrate terrorist acts. Before we invaded, there were very, very few terrorists in Iraq. Now it's teeming with terrorists. And so is Lebanon. And the L is for logistics. We really mean to create permanent military bases … with which to dominate that part of the world and have something to say about the oil. We are not allowed to say permanent military bases anymore. The Pentagon has changed the adjective. It's not permanent; it's enduring. The interesting thing is the president is now mentioning Korea, as many of his chief aides are. Of course, there is no comparison, there is no real analogy with Iraq, save one, and that is the impression this administration wants to create, and that is it's OK to have permanent military bases for 50, 60 years. It's OK because, look, we did it in Korea. It's inept and deceitful, and besides that, it will never work.

You often refer to members of the administration as terrorists. Do you believe they were responsible in some way for orchestrating 9/11? Do you believe such a thing is possible?

You asked me if I believe that. I can't answer that because I don't do faith-based [analysis]. If you asked me if I believe, Cheney, for example, the author of the torture [policy], would he capable of allowing something like to happen, I would have to say yes. But I don't base my judgments on belief. I base my judgments on fact. For every theory that explains 9/11 in a sinister way, there are five more questions that arise. So I have to keep my feelings about what Dick Cheney is capable of doing hermetically sealed off from the facts.

The bottom line for me is there has to be an independent investigation because the 9/11 Commission report is flagrantly a cover up. The question is: What is being covered up?

How do you believe we will begin hostilities with Iran?

My colleagues at VIPS have been saying for over a year now that there is a 50-50 chance that Bush will strike Iran from the air ... before he leaves office. But that is really atrocious when you look at it, because that would be World War IV, easy and simple. The government is very much divided. The big question was: Should we talk to Iran? … For the longest time we did not talk to Iran, for all kinds of reasons. But what happened two months ago? Cheney goes to Australia, [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice goes into the Oval Office and persuades the president that it is untenable policy not to talk to Iran. So she calls Henry [Kissinger] in New York. And he goes [at this point McGovern breaks into a pretty good Kissinger] “Mr. President, it may have been good policy until now, but everybody, even your colleagues in Congress, believe we need to talk to Iran.” And they are the last people to talk to Bush on any given afternoon, and he does what he always does; he's persuaded by the last people he talks to. And he says, ‘sounds like a good idea to me,' and the next thing you know, we have a major change in our foreign policy and we are going to talk to Iran. Well, what does Dick Cheney do? He 's out of town and the first thing he does is make a big menacing gesture to Iran right over his back there, in the Persian Gulf, and now he's home. Now, will we keep talking to Iran? That's 50-50, because if Cheney prevails, as I suspect he will, we'll stop talking to Iran. It's hard to bomb guys you are talking to.

Do you foresee a situation in which martial law could be declared?

I've been worried about this for a long time. I have been worried about the resilience of our democracy and whether there are enough principled people in Congress and the judiciary and the armed services to prevent that, because all three swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not the president of the United States. Gosh, it gives me chills on the back of my neck to think that the president, if push came to shove, would act in such a reckless way. … It scares me to no end to think that the president may be preparing to do this kind of thing. Of course, we had that recent executive order that gives him ostensibly full power in the event of a major terrorist attack. And who describes it as a terrorist attack? The president himself. So, yes, I think there is a real danger here.

Labels: Bush, Cheney, CIA, Iran Iraq, McGovern, politics, Tenet