Ray McGovern joins the show to talk about Colin Powell and Mike Pompeo: two credentialed, respected members of the foreign policy establishment that have both been hugely damaging to American interests. McGovern first responds to the claim that Powell unwaveringly and heroically stood against the Bush administration’s desire to invade Iraq, succumbing only at the last minute due to new, more persuasive intelligence and the pressures of being overwhelmingly outnumbered. In reality, says McGovern, Powell not only should have known the whole time that Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction—even after the final intelligence report, which was doubted at the time by his closest associates—but also didn’t ever resist the idea of the invasion very hard, being pretty much willing at the time to go along with Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz and the other neocons in the administration. Only more recently has he tried to depict himself as the man many Americans wanted him to be: a principled iconoclast who only relented in his steadfastness at the very last moment. In the current administration, Mike Pompeo presents dangers of a different kind in the form of a fervid quest to gin up hostilities between the U.S. and China. McGovern reminds us how disastrous the consequences of that war could be, and how much both countries benefit by a peaceful, cooperative relationship.
Discussed on the show:
- “RAY McGOVERN: Powell & Iraq—The Uses and Abuses of National Intelligence Estimates” (Consortium News)
- “Presumptuous Pompeo Pushes Preposterous ‘Peking’ Policy” (Consortium News)
- “Colin Powell Still Wants Answers” (The New York Times)
- “‘To Start a War’ Robert Draper: Bad intelligence led Bush into Iraq” (Business Insider)
- “CIA Director Mike Pompeo “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” – Texas A M University April 2019″ (YouTube)
- “Schumer to Trump: Intel officials have ways to strike back” (Washington Examiner)
- “Meet the Steele Dossier’s ‘Primary Subsource’: Fabulist Russian From Democrat Think Tank Whose Boozy Past the FBI Ignored” (Real Clear Investigations)
- “Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror” (YouTube)
- “Scott Ritter in Tokyo” (CounterPunch)
Ray McGovern is the co-creator of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and the former chief of the CIA’s Soviet analysts division. Read all of his work at his website: raymcgovern.com.
This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; Listen and Think Audio; TheBumperSticker.com; and LibertyStickers.com.
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Scott Horton is director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles, California and podcasts the Scott Horton Show from this website. He’s the author of the 2017 book, Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. Visit https://scotthorton.org