an intelligence prefer for president reagan where he was in charge of pairing daily security brief for the president vice president the joint chiefs of staff the national security adviser and the cabinet he was also one of several cia analysts who paired the president's daily brief during the first bush administration he is co founder of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity and leads speaking truth to power a section of tell the word an expression of the ecumenical church of the savior in inner city washington d c ray thank you very much  on european leaders including for instance chancellor angela merkel since at least two thousand and three what's your take on the significance of this latest development the spying on foreign leaders comes as little surprise each thread of it and the incoherence of it what i say does surprise me there doesn't seem to be any adult supervision left  technology is dragging us if you can't if you can intercept or guide or eavesdrop on angela merkel's telephone will why not do it nobody seems to be in place to say well does this make good so again no adults are in charge the spying on foreign people is something that intelligence services do not have them do it on this scale or with this capability so there is a difference in kind here not just degree and you know i'm the last as an intelligence officer just to say that you can't get really lucrative information from this source now it's often not determinative but i can tell you that from my own experience you know when ronald reagan said we're going to conclude arms control agreements with the soviet union but it's going to be trust but verify well we would the verif in other words we could go to the president say mr president if the soviets shia this we promise you we guarantee they will let you know within a week we could were that good we could do there now i've had to do with overhead imagery of course but a lot of it also could be ascribed to this very sensitive it's a septic capability so is it is it a necessary part of intelligence gathering you know sure it is sure to be done with some sense of  portion you know i mean you you know have well you go back to the old greeks you know over the temple of delphi was made in argon greek for nothing in excess ok romans in medio rez virtues in the middle you know too much of it is no good to little is no good you be sensible you be proportional and that's what's got out the window here with this capel sweep up everything good everything about everybody well stored in this great be haystack and then we'll  fancy really imaginative ways to retrieve what we need well hollo you know think about that for a second the boston fellows up there that during the boston marathon the russians had warned us about them twice but you could these eavesdropping techniques this very intrusive eavesdropping could they have prevented both america by me not a chance i mean it's sort of like you know whatever you say about window you got let me if you got if he's in a bank right they did help to prevent bank robbery i think so you know maybe the rare instance well that's the way it is with collecting all this stuff on everybody everybody puts their email put in there it's not good there it's not going to stop terrorists it might help fight a terrorist after the fact although they have video and used it that way very very successfully so it doesn't work now i have to say  general alexander who is a is a we don't say in washington with washington d c at least we don't say lie or we say he's an untruthful person or or he takes liberties with the truth well this is not the first time he did so but when he claimed that there were fifty four terrorists events that he is eavesdropping this vacuum cleaner approach to conversations and e mail played no role here or very marginal role so when he got before pet leahy's committee said as you to sherry committee leases will know how many how many those fifty four had to do with something that was about to happen in america says well thirteen and he said well how many were actually thwarted one and clapper another prevaricator the head of national intelligence chimes in with not i think maybe two as if to add a fifty four out of fifty and you know what that one was some somali taxi driver in l a said the eight thousand dollars back to al  public to think that all this money sed sunk into these things is helpful in preventing terrorist attacks rather it diverts attention away from the try to trust it ways detective work intelligence work police work you know how deeply you complicit in this i think this is so important that it probably just use one or two more examples of how diversion from the normal painstaking intelligence work that's what really is one of these long haired guys hiding in the mountains of was nearest on so he gets radicalized mostly because of what the israelis did in gaza and what we help those who are in gaza one of the times when when the israelis killed fourteen hundred palestinians as opposed to fourteen israelis dead so he goes off the deep end and his father notices that and his father says goes to the u s embassy and he says my son  know he's over detroit in a plane with two hundred other people with a little bomb is an underwear in his underwear what prevented it so very courageous co passengers you know sat on the bar you know so did this eavesdropping think help that no way did it help what about the times square bomber pakistani goes back to his village in the north northeast front northwest frontier where they're doing all the drone strikes finds out that a lot of his friends are decimated comes back guess what radicalized you know now the smart people says say well he was self radicalized a hollow you know use he was radicalized by what happened to his family his friends his back and he's go blow up times square now each should keep kept track of people that go to pakistan and go up into that that area whether they're benign or you know believing that you know you keep trying to go into that either so there's a whole series of these things that we escaped just barely in the time square think it was a street vendor that has some funny about the sky that's how they stop that so all this attention to these eavesdropping techniques are not effective no worse than that mike and this is my major beef you know as an army officer and i was thinking back to this fifty years ago now that when i was commissioned i took a solemn oath to say to support a defend the constitution the united states against all enemies foreign and domestic i took that oath seriously we all did in those days i found out recently that there's no expiration on that date on that no expiration date  from unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrant shall issue except the pond probable cause probable cause including defining the particulars of the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized in court now ok so nothing's going to happen without a court warrant that is based on probable cause ok now you don't look like a terrorist to me but this means that you're a suspected terrorist because your stuff has been picked up just like by mike ok now how about probable cause including defining the particulars complicit just as the heads of the intelligence committees and never see the like of it you've got all three three branches of our government complicit in gross violations of the fourth amendment  know drone strikes against u s citizens hall or the first amendment you know it's happening there but the fourth is where this one comes in and you know i have this is an exaggeration but i would say that i don't care much about what we do in terms of getting foreign intelligence so the n s a and cia on world leaders you know my beef there is you know let's be adult about it you know just because we have the capabilities and we do everything but i do have a real beef about the constitution and so did much intellectual slim for him bright to see is what makes a guy give up everything and risk his own life to do it did you answer simple the who might be mike you might be on a list mike i think i am you know and once martial law is the court declared or they can even do it absent martial law now with the national defense authorization act you turn the key and you've got something approximate this and so i started to examine my own conscience and i realize not only is this really endangering our country and its citizens it's not the kind of atmosphere i want to live in where every where there's no privacy but i'm part of it without my expertise to the expertise of technical people like me they couldn't do it now wow you know what is i do then well most people say well you know x and what mo whom i am one person how can i and i know i can't go through channels because i know what happens tom drake from an essay i know what happened to bradley or chelsea manning from so  well this guy has a common sense to figure out how he can reveal this so american citizens can know what's being done to them and so he figures out well how could he get to a safe place and how do i get this not and as for laptops that was people who know this you know know that you don't store a lot of stuff on laptops out of stuff these days but you use other ways other media and that's how he did it he told us that we were together thought beyond that so it was really true when he said you know i spect them to get me but not until after of done this and what i need to do is get it done not like people who couldn't get it done because they try to go through channels but enterprising enterprise actually sarah harrison one of julia's songes lieutenants i happen to be in australia and she was suggested it was suggested that she go to hong kong and help edward snowden out and she arrived just in the nick of time because they were breathing heavily down on his back the chinese authorities i don't know if the cia found out where he was yet so she she went to the russian consulate i think this ever here from the him from this incredibly parlous situation the chinese premier was meeting with the our president so there was you know the president could have easily said hey get those konkani guys you know get savvy here we need this guy back say instead of that they take his passport away ok well he's on way to to cuba via moscow and so is john kerry who gets up and says in his imperious putin i know there is no extradition treaty between the united states and russia but you must you must we have these charges against him you must and you know him but that was part of it you know the whole attitude this imperiously you have to do this even though we have no no law that requires you to do it and so long story short here because he has no passport because kerry has made him stateless speak you know stateless he spent the next five weeks in cheated me out of an airport there in moscow trying to figure a way around or through  is the safest place for him it's by far the safest place for him on the face of the globe why well we met with him on the ninth of october on the third of october there establishment meeting in washington you know kind of thing run by the washington post it was on cyber cyber warfare several reprimands so the dignitaries were there including general michael hayden who mike rogers head of the intelligence committee immediately chimes in saying you know i can help you know night now bear in mind this was not a meeting of the mafia ok these were the well heeled folks of washington under the auspices of the washington post and the previous director the cia and n s a is suggesting that snowden be put on this list for assassination which our president approves every tuesday morning before he goes into have a nice lunch with mashal ok that's bizarre but that happens ok and we're still the head of the house intelligence who this is not a former this is the guy actually it turns out to be a failed f b i agent yeah i know that and the shoulder as if to say my god you know what well you know come to a little footnote on that even though this meeting was run by the washington post have you read about it anywhere a post post forgot to report it and so did everyone else almost everyone else if you don't know where to look on the internet you missed it ok but just to finish up this whole segment here  snowden is is smiling broadly at the irony that he happens to be in a safe place now where no drone warrior is going to push a console button and zap him in russia even if they find out where he is and nobody's going to send in seal team six to shoot him in the head a couple times like they did to osama bin laden so i think  time he has a whole year they're down seven months left i guess or eight so things can change in the year and you know i remember daniel ellsberg when he first released the pentagon papers oh he was he was given every adjective that nother thing so so that's the that's the deal on on snowden and the bizarre stuff that's going on in washington wanting to put him on an assassination list so it  question of who is driving the bus if obama says he didn't know about merkel's phone being tapped or the european leaders you were at the cia for close to three decades or all the the previous directors there and or at the n s a as aggressive as they are currently well they weren't actually i should they they took the law pretty seriously  and particularly after the law or forbade them expressly from doing the kinds of things that hayden acquiesced and when dick cheney said now i really should make sure that your listeners know that this who would be willing to be he didn't say accomplices i guess but that's what he meant and charlie haden saluted and that's what happened to their credit one major telecom qwest refused to cooperate they said no this violates the fourth amendment which it clearly does and did and their c e o and that up in prison on some charges about securities fraud or something i don't know the value of the charges but i have to tell you that it was that everybody that cooperated here qwest would not cooperate in this again is before nine eleven so when when michael hayden decided to do this and it came out that he was doing  this is equally interesting when you talk about the media james rice and found out that this was going on and you found out that about three months before the election in november two thousand and four james resident new york times right he said correspond are journalists from new york times also a pulitzer prize winner and writes books as well what he found out was that this eavesdropping was occurring without the necessary court warrant a court of the fourth amendment to you and he said well you know wow this is really a story and so we wrote it all up and gave it to us supervised editors there at the new york times and they said oh my oh well let's before the election so we we will we don't want to publish anything so explosive before the election some three or four months for three i insults burgas of ok they held that story until december of the following year pretty much assuring george bush's return to the office and what happened in december of if if we don't carry a story on at so the sulzberger gets in touch with bush george w bush and a subsidiary we have to publish this story bush takes him into the oval office ok with the head of the washington and so that was the fifth through december ok two thousand and five now why do i mention the fifth of december well because the article was published on the sixteenth of december and the new york times the big one about you know the biggest bosa thing but on the sixth of december in other words one day after the salzburg or bush meeting there in the white house rush holt congressman from new jersey goes on one of these parish calls to general alexander out at the national security agency ok parrish calls he's a member of the house intelligence committee and his purview includes had to say and he's heard these weird rumors that  that n s a has trashed that first amendment about not spying on americans without a court warrant and so alexander welcomes rush holt pretty much his supervisor his oversight person and the congress ok and the this guy is never going to get a fifth a fourth star if i'm around wow took five more years but then you know fourth star and then you've got no other command so he ends up being not only head of n s a but head of the cyber command at the pentagon he's probably well he's not probably he is one of the most important and influential and powerful men in our government alexander is not to be trusted he's same fellow i talked about the fifty four terrorists that they thwarted you know what so he doesn't tell the truth a lot of times ok he didn't tell the truth to rush holt and that's a felony because a member of congress he reports to congress under the oversight committee provisions so that's a felony lying to congress ok james clapper now he's a former air force general he's head of national intelligence now he's a there's a super structure now over all the others built after nine eleven because congress likes to rearrange the deck chairs and ed levels ok so james clapper is asked in march by senator wyden of oregon clapper and does the national security agency collect any kind of information at all on millions or hundreds of millions of americans clapper no sir and wait and says i sure and clapper says well not wittingly now clapper had been alerted to the fact that wyden was going to ask him that question he lied anyway and a couple months later because of the revelations of it snowden it comes out that he did lie he goes back to congress or i'm really sorry he apologized apologized because what i said was quote clearly tell the the least the least false thing or the most least one truthful thing i think is that well hello that guy is still head of national intelligence  so was that's a lot of things what bothers me most is what it says about the president i think he's afraid of these guys i think it's clear reason for eight of them and you know if he's going to be afraid of the of the military officers like hayden and alexander or clapper if was going to be afraid of the the cia to the point where he would not prosecute clear torturers both obama and attorney general holder have said that waterboarding is torture torture happened we know who did it but the president prefers to look to the future rather than look to the past i tried that on the five i got stopped for speeding i said look let's just look to the here's what they are the upper crust is a bunch of crumbs held together by a lot of dough you know now you know when you look at the top military and how they become general officers or admirals the system itself bespeaks favoritism for people who don't make any waves people who will always salute people  deputy that they didn't really equip themselves as honorable gentleman they lied and a court of law shows that they lied particularly about how many enemy they were facing i remember there was whether our analysis my friend sam adams and everybody in washington whether they were right in thinking it there were between five hundred and six hundred thousand vietnamese under arms in the south well whether  cable and and abrams says we can't possibly go with the higher figures and this is a direct quote because we have been projecting it image of success in this and gloomy conclusion period in court when i heard about that cable i asked my friend sam adams he put that in black and white yes it was yes it occurred to me that it should be given to the new york times i knew sam adams wouldn't do it and i didn't have the guts to do it it's one reason i feel so strongly about people have that guts namely that snowden most recently so anyhow that was the kind of corruption that existed then it's a matter of fact george ball who was deputy secretary of state during this period of time described this the joint chiefs of staff as a sewer of deceit rumsfeld and for bush ok now bush started the torture with an official executive order that date was february seventh two thousand and two and it said we will not abide by the geneva conventions pure and simple we will treat prisoners was the word carefully to the extent it's possible stages as authorizing this kind of thing so i did chance to ask general myers about this a member of the harvard business school i'm lying and he came to push his book before a little group of us in washington and i said to gen marine four star general little bit yeah he he was the real deal you know he came up the same kind of training i did about interrogations and all that kind of stuff and because he was  investigation of ob there were seventeen more that rumsfeld commission but to cuba said you've heard about these rotten apples you know at the bottom of the barrel i'll tell you how they got rotten it seeped down from the from the drip from the very top now he that's not his prose but that's exactly what he found out and he had the guts to issue those fine is ok so that's the next month that's may now june  him do it dick cheney and don rumsfeld know what it say torture try to discourage our troops from doing it but if the iraqis want to do it anybody else do it no problem  you might want to think about reporting it to the superior officer of the rockies or or or someone else but put you have to do that forget about it now apparent that  set bradley manning off he saw it he saw these young people twenty two years of age his age getting wrapped up for writing a term paper critical of the molokai government being put in these prisons where he knew they'd be tortured ok that's what that's before you have a saw the video about the collateral murder here would be ok so so that's a june of two thousand and four so what was happening in iraq and these prisoner  about it and these instructions were fake out about it you might want to report it to the iraqi commander right you know but forget about it now guess who didn't know about that well let me fast forward with june two thousand  that this incredible torture was happening in these iraqi prisons and so one of the journalists a woman said now general pace what are your instructions to american american officers and soldiers if they if they see torture he didn't blink he said my instructions are what they always have been stop it on the spot rumsfeld oh carol pace i think you mean to say they should guy who dick cheney went and really started this whole n s a stuff he was the head of it i say and he knew what his duty was a matter of well he just you know when when this all became big news there are a lot of questions as to how he had conducted himself and all of a sudden he switched out of it as say and he's given the job of deputy national intelligence director the superstructure chop and then both of a sudden it becomes clear what what did happen as a result of the rise in book an other revelations about torture and so forth and so they want to put this very malleable guy hayden a well spoken you know tough appearance you know they want to put him in as head of the c mn anointed priest of the intelligence military hierarchy everybody popular on both sides of the aisle you know he's stitching university of texas now but he was head of n s a when the  public meeting new york public library on the eighth of may two thousand and six and i'm saying wow this is great had i learned about it steve clements has a blog washington note he was there who else was there james rice and ok at and there were a couple of dignitaries there but no reporting ok but i know about it because a read that as you know so when when we fast forward now from the eighth until the seventeenth of may and who rushes into the room the blue room i'm waiting to go in with lou dobbs but bobby ray inman and he doesn't had to tie on and it's don't get me tie couldn't pick a better guy just terrific highly qualified i don't personally couldn't pick up a guy the nomination was the confirmation proceedings went even the best of them cover up for one another and they justify one of the other and when hayden the last thing i'll say about this and he's the guy he's the c n n go to guy and i want to listen it's not as though he's not implicated in the whole thing but when he was going the next day on the on the eighteenth of may two thousand and six confirmation hearings he was given all kinds of softball questions by republican senators one was from blount i think from missouri he says it was all rehearsed he said our general hayden when the president asked you to do it you did with the eavesdropping and so forth did you hesitate for a moment to make those instructions now the scripted that but in the end i decided that i that he could not not do it next question should have been well true made ways you have to think more and more about that like maybe the fourth amendment but they just didn't ask him that and it was just such a telling thing i mean the guy you know he knows a little bit about moral training and he knows about the first amendment at n s a the first commandment is about the father so so he was being unusually candid in saying well it was so easy i'm and the president asked me to buy it the constitution i had to stack up people die for this kind to too should the founders of our country who wrote it who live lived near where i live now in northern virginia well when they said that they would risk their lives their fortunes in their sacred honor for this for this enterprise it was far more likely that they would end up you know at the end of a rope than they would as as how load founders of our country and so least we can do now is to get out there and defend these things that they fought for fourth amendment you know the british were were really intrusive in the way they come into your home and take your personal effects and you know there were no telephones then but the fourth amendment was designed specifically against  well designed to protect people from a reasonable searches and seizures because those guys knew what that was like so for our congress people and i have to say dianne feinstein in the senate and mike rogers in the house they're complicit in all this they are violating their constitutional oath and for them to call it snowden a traitor or you know call him a somebody who's violated the law or the constitution no it's the other way around you know they can't make laws you can't make was that file a the constitution and that's what they've tried to do hitler i'm not supposed to say hadleigh ok but hitler during the thirty's it everything by the law it just so happened that the laws violated what existed then german constitution which was very much pattern after ours patterned after ours so you could obey all these newfangled laws like the patriot act and the national defense authorization act but if they're unconstitutional which they will be proven to be eventually then you know not only should you not obey them he should get out in the streets and make sure that o b l surveys him either we are talking with ray mcgovern he is a twenty seven year veteran of the cia and a co founder of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity and you have a website people can get more of your work yes mike it's really easy ray mcgovern dot com all one word right and you're also the it's sold out but you are the keynote speaker at today's fifth anniversary celebration of coffee strong that's happening at the daybreak star indian cultural center here in seattle yeah i felt so honored to be asked to do that i mean these people are doing the doing the work you know tending and trying to pick up the pieces of lives that have been shattered by these these wars based on what we don't see lies based on deception and based on other means and they then they advertised them as so just you know being here near lois mccord and just knowing well the tragedy that's happened here it's really terrific to have a group like coffee coffee strong and doing what they can to help  not only who are from the battle but before the battle all right and even though it's sold out people can still make donations to coffee strong in honor of the fifth anniversary of the work they do at their web site coffee strong dot argy so with that we are pretty much out of time i want to thank you very much for coming in and spending time with us th again ray mcgovern twenty seven year veteran with the cia and co founder of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity and you can find out more about his work at his website ray mcgovern dot com