Can We Wade Out of the Big Muddy and Get Back to Some Moral High Ground, Iowa City, Iowa, September 29, 2015

- [Sue Dulek] I also want to acknowledge our university and community sponsors and supporters. University of Iowa international programs and the University of Iowa's honors program. They contribute vital time, talent, and logistics to our organization. I also want to thank the Stanley UI Foundation Support Organization for their financial support and today's special financial sponsors, Burns Weston and Nancy Hauserman. Our programs are made possible by the financial support of these sponsors. Now I am very, very pleased to introduce Ray McGovern and Coleen Rowley. Ray McGovern was an army officer in the early 1960s and then became a CIA analyst in the John Kennedy administration. He prepared the president's daily brief for Nixon, Ford, and Reagan and also chaired the National Intelligence Estimates. In March of 2006, in protest of CIA torture, he returned the Intelligence Commendation Medallion awarded to him. He co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professional for Sanity. He also helped establish the Sam Adams Award for integrity in intelligence. The winner of the first award is our other speaker, Coleen Rowley. Coleen Rowley is a native Iowan, a 1980 graduate of the University of Iowa College of Law. She joined the FBI and served as a division legal council in the Minnesota FBI office at the time of 9/11. She wrote a whistleblower memo in May of 2002 in conjunction with the Congressional Joint Inquiry about the FBI's failures. This served to launch a Department of Justice Inspector General's investigation. Along with two other women, she was named Time's Persons of the Year. She retired in 2004 and continues to speak on ethics and law, especially regarding September 11 wars and war crimes. Please join me in welcoming both Ray and Coleen. - [Coleen Rowley] Well it's great to see so many people interested in foreign affairs. In other places we've been, Waterloo and Dubuque and Quad Cities, we're trying to explain why some of these questions on the back of the postcard matter to Iowans in the middle of the country who might be more concerned about road infrastructure and college tuition and farm policy. And sometimes it's a bit hard. And the candidates are sensing the same thing, that people are not really that interested in foreign affairs. And even the wars, one after another, even when you get to the point where they announce publicly, many officials have announced that we're in, sometimes they call it a long war, sometimes they even say perpetual war. And I can tell you, if it's anything like the War on Drugs or the War on Crime or the War on Poverty, the War on Terrorism will be an endless war. Many people were worried about that to start with. I worry about these things from the legal perspective because the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and even treaty law goes away in times of war. It's called, sometimes it's called martial law. If you remember back to the Civil War period, Lincoln actually had editors jailed for criticizing him and the Union. So you get the roundup of the Japanese during World War II. And the other term here is law of war. But that's a bit of an oxymoron because it's the antithesis of war. As Cicero said, in times of war, the law grows silent. And I believe that these principles, longstanding ethical and legal principles that have guided society and humanity and have evolved, but the ones like Magna Carta, due process that's lasted for 800 years, or at least began and it's evolved for 800 years, can't just a day after a traumatizing event say we can't really worry about that old Constitution. We don't want to be bound by a suicide pact. I mean, the Constitution was called the suicide pact. And sure enough, those secret Office of Legal Counsel memos that now have been made public, no excuse for not knowing every one of 'em. And I will admit I haven't read 'em all, but they are, you should look at them. It is pretty incredible what they set up. Very few have been rescinded. Only as far as I know, the very worst one, which was John Yoo's extremely shoddy memo under pressure to legalize torture because Condi Rice had already ordered it the month before. And so and then the CIA, this is in the book, John Rizzo's book, then he got worried that their CIA folks would later be in trouble. And so then he said hey, we've got to have a better memo than the prior one, which was the one in January of that year that said the Geneva Conventions no longer necessarily apply. That was written in January of 2002. That's been partially overturned by a Supreme Court case, but just the habeas corpus part of it. The law professor, John Yoo was the main author, but the other law professor that is up in the Twin Cities, he still claims that it's good law, that the Geneva Conventions, and when we challenge him on this, they write books and they still believe in the imperial war presidency. And again, you go back to a martial law type theory. So another one of the memos after 9/11, maybe three weeks, two to three weeks written, said that the First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, press, association, will also have to take a backseat. They will not be necessarily the definitive guide here. That is written in a memo three weeks after 9/11. Now that we're in a war, the exigencies of war. Now everyone should realize that war then not only creates all kinds of trouble and destabilization and increasing terrorism in the world. If you heard me, I think I said this last night, but how many people were there last evening? Okay, well good, I can repeat myself a little bit. Terrorism by some different research and accounts, I mean it's probably somewhere, who knows, it could be up or down from this, but some accounts have it at up 6500% from 9/11. Okay, so if you think that this is working, these secret policies, these very illegal things like launching an illegal unjustified war on Iraq that had nothing to do because of ginned up intelligence, which is what we've been talking about a lot, using tactics like torture, like massive surveillance. This has actually increased the hatred. Along with the increased terrorism, which is the really serious radicalization, we have just plain old hatred. And the polls now in the rest of the world, which if you're concerned about foreign policy, you have to be concerned about the polls when they show that America is the country that poses the greatest threat to world peace. And that's a world poll right now. Of course, Americans, we're in this exceptional, indispensable nation, don't recognize this. We're kind of like fish in the water and we don't realize we're in the water. But the rest of the world is seeing it. And by the way, we're winning that by a large margin, that poll, that contest. So these are things that I, Ray and I wrote this article that's in the Date Press-Citizen. Foreign policy is neck-deep in the big muddy. How do we return to the moral high ground? I hope you can take a chance to dig it out of your trash and read it. It's got a little picture from Vietnam when they were wading in the Mekong Delta or something. And so this is this old Pete Seeger song that in 1968 got censored on the Smothers Brothers. People will have to be a little older to remember this, but Smothers Brothers didn't like it, but they had to censor Pete Seeger. Because the point is, as you get into something, when you make wrong decisions initially, so the song is that the captain says let's just try to forge this river right here and people said is this the right place? I thought it was further down. No no, it's right here, we'll make it. And so they're knee-deep and then they're waist-deep. And then the sergeant says, with all these packs on our back, we're going to drown. And he says, captain says, you're a nervous Nellie, forge on, men! No, the captain says, the refrain is, and the big fool said to push on. So that's probably the line that made people mad and they censored it. But I think we're in that same thing. Many of us see the problems, many of us see the dangers and the risks. The latest risk is a confrontation where the doomsday clock has actually been moved a couple more minutes closer to midnight. I don't know how close this thing can get, 'cause they always keep saying it moves closer. But I think people have forgotten the old Cold War where we had to hide under our desks and practice these drills. And I'm more worried even about accidents now with this new ratcheting up of tensions in Ukraine and Syria. And I was greatly hoping that maybe Putin and Obama yesterday would do the same thing they did with the Iran agreement and even with the elimination of chemical weapons in Syria. I was hoping that they would use some diplomacy and talk instead of this reckless war is the answer. And it has not proven effective or pragmatic at this point. It's proven disastrous. And I think we're about neck-deep. So I'm going to cede a little time here to Ray because I think he can talk a little longer. The solution to this, if anybody had this on their question, you can tear it up. People always talk about all the problems. So here's the terrible situation and you hate to leave it that way. These solutions are actually really simple. It is a return to the universal principles that have stood the test of time. One is due process. Do not round up people that are innocent and claim they're terrorists and put 'em in Guantanamo. No, you have to have reasonable suspicion. Then you have to have probable cause. Then that person actually gets to see the evidence against them, they get to hire a defense attorney. This was my life in the FBI. And then the defense attorney gets to grill you and you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. And then even after all of that cumbersome stuff, they get a chance at appeal. The only successful cases that I'm aware of in prosecuting terrorists so far, not the law of war, all of that has been innocent people tortured, rounded up, detained, and now can't even be prosecuted very easily. There's all kinds of problems in even prosecuting the real suspects. The only ones I'm aware of was the guy in Minnesota. The guy in Minnesota was prosecuted in court. It had some irregularities, but it wasn't perfect. However, he was convicted and he's like the only one. So I think we need to return to the rule of law. And the rule of ethics in law. We've abandoned a lot of this. And we've done it based on these lies that there's a quick and easy shortcut. And we've had other things, democracy and human rights, the humanitarian war. I'm sorry, that just goes back to Vietnam. You can't bomb the village to save it. If you want to help elevate human rights and democracy, great. But you are not going to do it through war. You have to think of some other more creative ways. And again, this has just proven disastrous. Ah, I'm trying to end on a high note. Return to rule, okay, the other thing, I know, it's hard. The other thing is to reduce, just so we can get the debate going, a civil honest debate, which means the right of dissent, the right of people. Ray McGovern was one of the first people in this country that knew what was up when they started to gin up the war in Iraq. He wrote a piece, he started writing about this in the summer about the same time as the Downing street memos. He already knew this was in the agenda, okay? So you've got to listen to people and you've got to allow them, you can't prosecute whistleblowers, you can't prosecute whistleblowers who are telling you the truth, and you've got to reduce this classification system. You think that's protecting you? Millions of documents and secret things like the OLC memos, is that protecting us? I mean, to be honest, you look around, Snowden said this last night by the way, but the massive surveillance, illegal massive surveillance, another thing that eradicated the Fourth Amendment and now even threatening the First Amendment, that hasn't prevented one single terrorist act. It's cost like a trillion dollars, the National Security Surveillance, little brother to the military industrial complex. We've spent about a trillion dollars on it and these Keith Alexander and Michael Hayden and all of these figures who originally lied about this, lied a couple of times, were actually forced to admit, the two committees found the same thing, hasn't prevented any act of terrorism. Okay, so if we know how ineffective and how ridiculously stupid these things are, and it's going to take educated people. I'm really glad to have this opportunity to talk to people who are interested in foreign policy. It's going to take people pushing, I know people say what can we do with our elected politicians? Half the time they don't care. They listen to their advisers telling them stuff. Okay, it's going to take, the answer is us. It is not putting your hope and faith in any politician. Oh, they know everything. No, learn yourself, read a lot, read those foreign policy articles, read a lot, and then we need to ask the hard questions and then we need to, even if we elect somebody that you like, you're going to have to, afterwards, make them do it. 'Cause otherwise they'll go back on their promises. Okay, democracy everyone! - [Ray McGovern] Thank you again for inviting us. When Cicero was telling people how to begin a speech, he said you have to take active steps to render your audience benevolent, attentive, and docile. Thanks, Coleen. This is the easy part. Now I want to refer back to, wow, 2005, gosh, 10 years ago, when the Downing Street memo came out and said that the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The Downing Street memo was the minutes of a session at which Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was briefed by the head of British intelligence. He had just come back from talking to George Tenet, the head of the CIA on the 20th of July. And on the 23rd, he gave his presentation. And he said simply, the decision has been made. George Tenet has told me that George Bush has decided to invade Iraq for regime change. The invasion will be justified by the conjunction of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Translation from the British, we're going to say Saddam Hussein has all manner of weapons of mass destruction and we're going to say that he's going to give them to... - [Audience] Al-Qaeda. - [Ray McGovern] Yeah, Al-Qaeda, to terrorists. Terror, you heard terrorists, you've got to be afraid of the terrorists, be afraid, very afraid of terrorists. Okay? Well the last sentence said, but the intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy. This was the minutes written by a participant in that meeting who either he, or maybe his wife, decided this was too important to conceal and he gave it to The London Times. No left-wing regs, The London Times, okay? And there it is verbatim. The intelligence is being fixed around the policy. Now Fox News was very quick off the blocks and said now wait a second, please don't misunderstand. Fixed has a special meaning in British usage, right? Those, I guess I'm remembering, I said this last night. So I checked that out and my friend Harry in London said oh grief, you fix a horse race, you fix an election, fixed is fixed, all right? Well this was sort of a long-winded way of getting into a very courageous hearing. Actually, it wasn't a hearing because John Conyers was not the head of the judiciary committee in the House, he was the ranking member. So he appealed to his Republican colleagues for a room at which he could have a discussion of this Downing Street memo and they wouldn't give him a room. So we met in the equivalent of a big closet, which was about, all told, half of this room with cameras all over the place. And there were only enough, about eight seats for Congresspeople to come in, so they kind of rotated, they were all Democrats. And we were talking about the Downing Street memo, what it meant. And finally one Congressman said well hello, thanks for telling us all this, but if there were no weapons of mass destruction, why did we invade Iraq? And I looked at Joe Wilson and Cindy Shi and the other person. They didn't seem to be terribly interested in answering, so I raised my hand and I said well, I'll just tell you what I've been telling colleges and universities, and that is I use an acronym. O-I-L. No, it's really, John Stewart had a lot of trouble with that. I mean, it was really good fun. He put O-I-L in front of, did any of you see that thing? He says McGovern, that McGovern is violating the rules for acronyms. He can't have O, he can't say the acronym that you mean by the. But no, it was oil, Israel, and logistics, okay? Logistics meaning the permanent military bases that we coveted in Iraq because we were getting thrown out of Saudi Arabia, the holy sites and so forth, okay? It was pretty much that sum. Now there was a great dispute as to which was the most important or no, it wasn't oil. Those who say it wasn't oil, I just, you know, hello. Oil, they all played a part. But the Israel factor was something, well quite frankly, you're not supposed to say it in Congress. I mean, as a matter of fact, it took two hours after I said that that I was branded an antisemite by all the Congressional representatives in the New York area. Howard Dean had to come back in and issue a statement on behalf of the Democratic party saying that McGovern is not speaking for us. What he said was antisemitic. And all I said was that Israel played a huge role in this. Not the only role, but that Israel and the United States were clearly bent on dominating that part of the world. Anybody who doubts that, please raise their hand? Well that's not allowed to be said. And so I looked at these folks, and they were starting to shake a little. These are Democratic representatives. And so I said, well McGovern, you're not running for office. You don't need any contributions. You're an intelligence analyst. You're trained and you're sworn to tell the truth. So I went a step further and I said now you all have been talking about Israel being our ally. That's wrong. Look at it in the dictionary. To be an ally, you have to have a mutual defense treaty with the other country. Is there one? No. Did we offer Israel one? Yes. When the Arabs did attack Israel in '73, Henry Kissinger went over and he said now, maybe this would be the correct way to prevent them from doing this again. We have a mutual defense treaty, and the Israelis said thanks very much, that's really sweet. But we don't need one. Now what country in the world would turn down a mutual defense treaty with the sole remaining superpower in the world? Why'd they do it? Anybody got any guesses? - [Audience Member] 200 nukes. - [Ray McGovern] Say again? - [Audience Member] 200 nukes. - [Ray McGovern] Okay, they have 200 nukes, which is quite a revelation to some folks. But the reason they turned down, two reasons that I can deduce. One is that to have a mutual defense treaty internationally recognized, you have to have clearly defined boundaries, right? Israel is not inclined to give up the territories that they conquered in the war, 1967. So they didn't want to get into that at all. The second one is that if you have this kind of agreement with another country, then if you're going to invade or you're going to bomb a third country, it's sort of etiquette to say oh, by the way, we're going to bomb Syria next week or we're going to take out Lebanon the following or oh we're going to. And the Israelis didn't want to do that. So they turned us down. People who made fun of this kind of thing, one of them said to me, you know, at the time, we were thinking of making Israel the 51st state. But that was turned down because then they would only have two senators. This is funny, but it's not really funny. Last time I was out this way, I was in Wichita, Kansas. I was going to talk at the local county Democratic luncheon. Every two weeks they would meet and I was going to be the major speaker. And I was disinvited, disinvited, because somebody told the little district chairman that I might say something about Israel that was not palatable and people wouldn't like. So I was disinvited from that, I was shocked. The other charge against me was that I'm not in favor of all of Obama's policies. That's a true charge. Antisemitism, no, that's no. I grew up in The Bronx for Pete's sake, you know? My father has an honorary degree from Yeshiva University in Manhattan. I mean, you know. Well, let me not dwell on that. So, now is it only a small fry like me that has to worry about these things? No, no. President of the United States at his first press conference, this is a fellow named Barack Obama. You may recall, if you watched it. It was a pretty interesting press conference and they kept foisting, they kept marginalizing Helen Thomas, the dean of all White House correspondents, until the end. And finally, I guess she got up right in his face, he says oh yes, Helen. And do you remember what Helen said? Mr. President, do you know of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons? And he said, I beg your pardon? And she said Mr. President, do you know of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons? And he said, well I don't want to speculate. 200 nuclear weapons, that's what most people think. And most people where we have been speaking, that's news to them, mostly because of the control of press in this country. You don't see that mentioned very often. Let me say something about a report by the Defense Science Board. This was about, this was shortly after the invasion of Iraq. And they addressed, to their great credit, now these people are sort of high level advisers. They don't report directly to Rumsfeld except only in an advisory capacity. And they said, you know why they hate us? It's not our democracy and it's not our freedom, they hate us for our policies, okay? And one of the things they hate us for is our very close identification with the policies of Israel. And of course since then, we've had the attacks on Gaza. Where just as Barack Obama was coming into office, the last three weeks of George Bush's administration, the Israelis bombed the hell out of Gaza, killing 1400 Palestinians, losing 14 of their own people. The ratio speaks for itself. Last year, it was twice as bad. 2200 Palestinians killed, this time there were about 54, 60 Israelis killed. So when politicians, and this is something to ask your candidates when you get a chance, and this we really hope you do, when they say that there's no daylight, I have to close my fingers here, no daylight between the policies of Israel on one hand and policies of the United States, that is a terrific cost to the United States. Because in many respects, it's true. We give them $3 billion every year. We sell them arms. Arms manufacturers make a lot of money. They profiteer on this tension, okay? And now we're going to give them even more. So how does this translate, or what's the background for all of this? Well there's a lot of background, but most of you probably know that there's something that we could easily call the manifesto of the neo-conservatives. Now how do I define a neo-conservative? It's pretty easy for me. A neo-conservatism is someone who has great difficulty distinguishing between the strategic needs of Israel on the one hand and the strategic needs of the United States of America on the other. Now do I fault people for that? No, everybody's entitled to their own opinion. I just don't think they should be running US policy, which they have been, okay? The State Department is packed with them. Every now and then, Obama can face it to them, as he did, to his great credit, on the Iran deal. But mostly, mostly there's a deference to them. Now what I'd like to raise is their manifesto and it's called A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Written in 1996, so almost 20 years ago when Netanyahu came into power the first time. By whom was it written? Six out of the seven were American neo-cons led by Richard Perle. Who, after the invasion of Iraq, when the head of the UN said this was illegal to international law, he said well sometimes you have to do illegal things to achieve good objectives. So there's no bashfulness about him or his folks. Now this is what the Clean Break said. Netanyahu's government coming in, so this is 1997, with a new set of ideas to make a clean break based on strategic initiative. All right, now what does that mean? That means peace through strength, not land for peace. Syria, we have to secure the Northern border. Syria challenges Israel. An effective approach, and one with which Americans can sympathize, would be if Israel sees the strategic initiative along its Northern borders by engaging Hezbollah, Syria, and also Iran as the principle agents of aggression. Okay, so. Given the nature of the regime in Damascus, it is both natural and moral that Israel abandon the slogan of comprehensive peace and move to contain Syria, drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction. Hear that? Be afraid, Syria apparently has weapons of mass destruction in 1996. And rejecting land for peace, especially on the Golan Heights. And finally, we need to weaken, contain, and even roll back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right. I'm quoting here. As a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions. So, major premise. There is no daylight between the foreign policy of the United States of America and that of Israel. Minor premise. Therefore, when Israel is hellbent and determined to exert its influence, expand its influence, and proceed along the lines of this manifesto, as it has on Iraq and Iran and in Syria, of course, then we see that we're in trouble deep, folks. We're in the deep muddy big time, okay? Now I'm going to give you one more specific example. This goes back 19 years. 19 years. It's amazing, isn't it? What has happened in 19 years. A lot of these things have been implemented. Who was Richard Perle? He was head of the defense, not the Science Board, but head of the premier advisory board of the Defense Department under Donald Rumsfeld. And the other signers, Douglas Feith, for example. The Wurmsers, one of them worked for Dick Cheney, the other one worked for the State Department. And so you have six out of the seven who are Americans writing for Netanyahu in his first year in office. Now where are we today on Syria? You may recall that it was just two years ago, a little bit more, that there was an accusation that Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons outside Damascus. John Kerry got up on the 30th of August and said no fewer than 35 times, Bashar al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad's government was responsible for these despicable chemical attacks. Now why was that so important? Because someone had advised Obama a year before to draw a red line and say look, we're not going to bother about Syria unless it uses its chemical weapons. So what was happening? Obama was being mousetrapped. Mousetrapped, okay? It wasn't the chemical sarin from Syrian government army stocks, it was homemade sarin made by some rebels in some little laboratory and they blamed it on Bashar al-Assad. Now we knew that because the British got a sample of this stuff, ran it through their biological laboratory, and said to our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, look, you know, it's not the government army sarin. And they told Obama that on the 31st of August, 2013. And he got up in the Rose Garden and he said, to the surprise of everyone and the dismay of the neo-conservatives who really wanted this war, the Chairman of the Joint, this is a quote, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has told me that his ships are in position to strike Syria at any time, but that there's no time urgency to this. And so what I'm going to do is go to Congress for appropriate authorization for this. Wow. Go to Congress to ask them for authorization. Well I thought the article one section eight of the Constitution was sort of moribund if not dead, but here's Obama goin to do that. What's the point here? The point here is that the neo-cons were incredibly angry at being cheated out of their war. What was happening? Bashar al-Assad during 2013 was making gains, okay? He was displacing the rebels, even the moderate rebels, out of the places they had conquered. Now why was it necessary to meet that? Well because, well let me just quote The New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem, Jodi Rudoren. She interviewed some senior Israeli officials at the time. And she said what's your preferred outcome in Syria? And one of them was previously Consul General in New York. He said that, well Jodi, it's a little awkward to say this, but given the humanitarian concerns, but our preferred outcome is no outcome. Rudoren says, no outcome? And they explain. Yeah, as long as the Sunni and Shia are at each other's throats and they're killing each other off, we'll let them bleed to death. Security has come to Israel, we face no threat from Israel. His words. Now I don't know, I guess the editors were taking the weekend off that week, but that got into The New York Times, okay? And if you're kind of dismayed and you're trying to figure out what is US policy towards Syria up until now? Well that's it, folks. It's the same as Israel's. What Obama was about to be mousetrapped into doing is sending overt US forces into Syria to tilt the balance back. Now the bad guys are not going to lose, the people that threaten Israel are not going to lose as long as you have overt US military involvement, right? That's what they wanted. The last thing I'll say is I was on top of the CNN. It's a palatial building in Washington. Some of you probably have been there. And BBC had asked me to do a little, no, it's CNN International. So I did a little piece, 10 minutes or so, and I opened the door to this booth that I was in and I almost knocked over this little guy. And I said oh my god, that's Paul Wolfowitz! And it was. I won't share with you how much I wished I had opened the door a little faster. I won't say that. And then I looked across the hall, there was Joe Lieberman. Now suffice it to say, they both looked like their mothers had just been run over by a Mack truck. They had been deprived of their war. Lieberman got on after I did, and I watched him on the tube, and he said this is a cowardly president. There's nothing, nothing that prevents a president from making war. So what I did, I always carry a copy of the Constitution with me. And I went to article one and I tore out the page which includes section eight, so only Congress can authorize war. I met them in the elevator shaft and I said Joe, Paul. Now if you know how things are in Washington, if somebody might be important, you can never say oh, who are you? So I said, Ray McGovern! They said oh, hi Ray. I said oh, Paul, I'd like to talk to you. But Joe, first, how long have you been in Congress? Well, over 22 years. Well Joe, here's the article one section eight. I've underlined it for you. You really should take that and read it at home. Read it at home. And then the six foot beautiful woman who escorts real VIPs appeared on the scene. And she saw what was happening and she said oh gentlemen, I'm so sorry. And I looked at her and I said you know, I'm really sorry too. Where do you get these clowns on CNN from? They don't even know what the Constitution is. So on that note, I'll end because I think we're 15 minutes away and we'd be happy to take your questions. Thank you. - [Sue Dulek] Okay, first question is to Coleen. Gitmo JAG officers have resigned in protest. Why haven't we heard from them? And a follow-up or related question, are there any civilian life counterparts? - [Coleen Rowley] Are they any what? - [Sue Dulek] Civilian, civilian as opposed to JAG officers. - [Coleen Rowley] Yes, okay. Some have resigned and some haven't. I think they actually all have to sign, they all have top secret clearance. And even though some of these JAGs and civilian attorneys have top secret clearance, it's very, actually relatively few people that can get that. That's why if you are charged with terrorism, it's quite hard to defend yourself. Because you have to first find an attorney that has that clearance and very few have it. Now so they can't divulge, they're in the same restrictions as even retirees, are never to divulge anything that they learned on the job. Despite the fact that they have the top secret clearances, there's lot of articles out there now that they are being even spied on. Because of course they can talk to their own clients, that's all supposed to be Sixth Amendment right. And there's a lot of monitoring that goes on with those attorneys. And so even though they have the top secret clearance, we actually have a colleague in our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, his name is Todd Pierce, he's a retired major who defended two or three of these detainees. One, successfully. He's gotten up to the Supreme Court and actually they won a case, Bahlul case, recently. He writes all the time. And so if you're interested in this issue, read Todd Pierce, usually at Consortiumnews or there's other places that he posts at. But he's got some very interesting articles about the law of war and what's going on right now with Guantanamo. - [Ray McGovern] Just wanted to add a very brief thing here. There was one colonel who was in charge of the prosecutors. His name is Morris, Colonel Morris, Air Force. And when he was given orders to violate professional ethics, he quit. And he commented in a most profound way about his high expectations for Obama when he came in and his deep disappointment at his cowardice. And the way he described it was that somewhere on inauguration day, somewhere between the Capitol and the White House, Barack Obama's testicles fell off. - [Sue Dulek] A question follow-up to your comments on Israel. But why, that is why do the neo-cons identify so closely with Israel? Who is profiting from it and what is their appeal or influence on the neo-cons? - [Ray McGovern] Well you know, it's a real problem because it has historic roots. When there were great troubles in Northern Ireland in the mid-70s, I was deathly afraid that the head of analysis would come down and say Ray, you know about Ireland. I want you to write this and I want you to be the analyst. And I would have had to say I can't do it. I can't do it. With all the stories my Irish grandmother told me about what happened to her and her family, I just can't do an unbiased job. This is a little secret. When I came into the Agency in 1962, I noticed that in the Arab-Israeli branch, there were no people of Jewish extraction. And I said to myself, wow, this is un-American. And I looked into it, and finally I was told, well yeah. It's un-American, but we really feel that we have to be unbiased here and that we don't want to have anybody burdened with a real challenge to their authenticity or to their justice outlook, and so we try to get people from other, we don't have any Arabs either. We try to get people who are expert in the Middle East. Now you can't do that anymore. And I have to tell you now, that the branch is not only full of people of Jewish heritage, but full of Zionists. And they have been justifying a lot of what's been going on. That's a real sad story. But it's a long story, and of course has to do with the stuff we were told in religion, that God sort of promised the land to these guys. It has to do with a guilty conscience because we didn't do what we should have done when we knew about the concentration camps. It has to do with a lot of stuff. But the Israeli government plays on that. And I was warned when I was in Germany just a couple of weeks ago, don't criticize Israel. Because the Germans really have this worse than we do, have this ethos where they just can't face up to that. - [Sue Dulek] Question, I think probably for Coleen. But what progress has been made with inter-agency sharing of intelligence information? - [Coleen Rowley] Well you know, the failures of 9/11 did not have anything to do with launching wars, nor starting torture, nor turning on the monitors for massive surveillance. They had all the information. They called them dots. And it was the conclusion, right conclusion, that it was a failure to connect the dots. And so sharing information, I've written about this many times, is the answer. Less secrecy, because it's secrecy inside of agencies which they call compartmentalization. Well in Minnesota, we called it blocking. So it gets, the information goes up so high, it doesn't go up any higher. And that's inside one agency. It doesn't get shared, the CIA didn't tell the FBI that they had been trailing two terrorists and they were in California. They didn't tell 'em until a week or two before 9/11. And to this day, we don't know why. That's incredible, all these years later, we don't even know why this wasn't shared. And then the last one, most importantly, 9/11 Commission said the failure to share information with the public. Now we've got this myth that the public shouldn't know these things. And actually, you find that the terrorist attacks that are prevented are because of public. It's because of the passengers on the shoe bomber, it's the fellow passengers on the underwear bomber, it's the vendors in New York City that spot the smoke coming out, and I can go on. A whole bunch of things have been stopped by the public, not by the FBI, the CIA, the NSA. So sharing information is key. Unfortunately, after 9/11, this lesson actually, there was a moment of time, just a few years when the report came out, that they did internally start to share more information. That's actually why Bradley Manning, Chelsea Manning was privy to some of these cables, State Department cables. Because they were doing more sharing then. Well guess what's happened after this fear now of whistleblowers? This fear of whistleblowers, they've launched an insider threat, more compartmentalization and less sharing. My guess, of course I'm long retired since 2004, but from what I'm sensing, is it's gone back to probably even worse than it was before 9/11. And this is, the sharing of information even inside of government, let alone with the public. - [Sue Dulek] So a question, back to your earlier career, Ray. How would you describe or how were the presidents that you served for receptive to the briefs that you provided them? - [Ray McGovern] Well as you can imagine, I don't speak about these things in any detail. All I can say is that we didn't really have direct entry to the president really until President Ford. What we used to do before that was just send the beautifully published president's daily brief down to folks like Kissinger and Brzezinski. And since they knew all the answers, they would tear out this rubbish and write marginally, if they gave the president anything. So with Reagan, we jumped in early. We started briefing him when he was President Elect, he really liked it, okay, one-on-one, okay? So when he comes into Washington, George Bush is Vice President, says now how would you like, what time would you like the CIA briefer to come? And he said well, now that we're in Washington, how about you guys get briefed? Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, my Assistant for National Security, and you, of course, George. But then you can come to me at 11 o'clock and tell me what I should be thinking. The President decided to sleep in and we didn't usually have direct access to him. But we did brief, and this was almost better in a way, we briefed George Bush, the Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and the Assistants for National Security Affairs one-on-one and then we added the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because we thought that he should be briefed as well and we got the White House permission to do that. So it was unique access to the policy-makers before anybody in Washington was waking up, really. And it was really good duty. Because up until then, we could tell it like it is. And we did. - [Sue Dulek] Coleen, professionally if you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently? - [Coleen Rowley] Okay. There is, the one thing of course, and this is not the whistleblowing. I have a lot of regrets before 9/11 because I knew the agents were tearing their hair out. There were a couple of things they didn't know. I didn't know my boss, everybody thought my one boss had made calls to go up the chain, okay? So in the hierarchy, you were not supposed, I had testified to the Senate Judiciary about this. I actually, I think I got asked by Feinstein about this. And I said, well there's a pecking order. I remember I said, there's a pecking order and you are not supposed to pick up the phone and call maybe at the most one rung above your rank. It's kind of like the military. You're not supposed to go around a block and call up to like an assistant director or somebody high level. And that's my regret. I should, you know, I wasn't brave enough. It turns out that my boss hadn't been brave enough either. So nobody had made that call up. Again, you're not supposed to do this. And that's one of my regrets. The other regret is in my memo, 13-page memo, I have one footnote that probably went a little too far. And it's the one the media picked up on, because I wrote in there that people in our headquarters were almost like moles. They were doing and saying things that they were almost like, we thought they were a foreign agent. Of course, the FBI had that Robert Hanssen. We had two or three Russian agents. So maybe that's what occurred to me. And it did seem that way. We were talking, you would not believe the story. I mean, it's incredible. You call up the day of 9/11, the buildings are hit and I have a guy saying don't do anything, it's just a coincidence. Yeah, so I mean, not yeah, just about this case we had. Because we knew right away, the case was the whatever. So that's the kind of thing. And it does make you like, what, am I in the Twilight Zone? So I wrote that little footnote. And really, it wasn't right. There were reasons for all of these convoluted strange reasons that nobody can understand now. - [Sue Dulek] We have time for one more question. And if no daylight exists between Israel and US policies, how do you explain, Ray, the Obama support for the joint agreement on Iran? - [Ray McGovern] Courage. Colonel Morris was right up until now. I am astounded, I am completely surprised that Obama has summoned the courage to do the right thing on Iran. Now it's not only Obama, it's the P5+1, right? It's our closest allies. So they hammered out this thing. But Obama needs to be given adequate credit for this, because he decided that this was important enough to conclude. Now what you should realize is that the whole thing was rather surrealistic. Why do I say that? Because the intelligence community unanimously, that means 16 intelligence agencies, decided quote, with high confidence, in 2007, folks, that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003 and had not renewed work on a nuclear weapon. Now, that judgment was reaffirmed and reestablished every year in the interim from 2007 up 'til this year. So what we have, really, is a deal that has a lot more tight controls, but essentially what we're very proud of is we have prevented Iran from working on the nuclear weapon that we knew they stopped working on at the end of 2003. No, if that's what it takes, that's fine. But realize how much pressure the President was under. And I say that I give him great credit for that. I'm surprised as hell that he brought it off. - [Sue Dulek] Well we now conclude the program. Certainly on behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, I want to give a big thanks to Ray McGovern and Coleen Rowley for their presentation. We certainly want to also thank our sponsors, the University of Iowa's international programs, University of Iowa honors program, and the Stanley UI Foundation Support Organizations for their generous support, including the financial sponsors today, professors Burns Weston and Nancy Hauserman. And last but not least, Coleen and Ray, as a small token of our appreciation for you spending your time and sharing with us your thoughts, expertise, and history on these important issues, one of our highly, highly coveted mugs. - [Ray McGovern] Whoa - [Coleen Rowley] Whoa, thank you very much. - [Ray McGovern] Thank you. - [Sue Dulek] Thanks again.