03/04/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And now on Saturday night, I interviewed Ray McGovern.
He was gracious enough to loan me some time on his Saturday night and then it turned out I didn't have a KPFK show on Sunday morning after all.
They extended their fund drive, unfortunately, but necessarily.
And so, in fact, that interview will be playing on KPFK 90.7 FM sometime today.
Maybe it already has, I don't know.
But it is getting its air time.
But anyway, I want to get Ray McGovern back on here because I want to know what about Ukraine and Ray knows all about it.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing well.
Good times.
And thanks again for doing the show on Saturday and for joining us today.
So geez, I'm not even sure where to start.
There's so much to go over here.
But I guess first of all and first and foremost and most important is, I guess, the status of Russian forces in Crimea right now.
Can you give us the lowdown, your latest as far as you know, about the situation on the ground there?
Sure.
For your listeners, the Crimea is a historically, historic part of Russia.
Catherine the Great actually extended the border down that far south.
It was given back to the Ukraine when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union by Khrushchev, who was a Ukrainian back in 1954.
It is the seat of the Black Sea, the Russian Black Sea Fleet, which is a pretty prestigious, pretty prodigious fleet there coming from the Bosporus and so forth.
And Sevastopol is the base that they have there.
They have lots of other facilities and it's primarily Russian-speaking, Russian ethnic origin, about 60 percent.
So when Putin says that he wanted to reinforce the area around there, particularly when one of the Ukrainian leaders said, you know, we ought to take over, we ought to take over the Crimea there, we don't need those Russians around.
It was an understandable move, not only on his merits, but because Putin wanted to throw down the gauntlet and say, look, you know, you guys have been playing a lot of games with our former allies and even our former constituent republics.
No more.
We draw the line at the Ukraine.
We drew the line at Georgia a couple years ago.
You didn't get the lesson.
Don't mess around with Ukraine.
This is our soft underbelly.
We're not going to let you wean Ukraine away into Western Europe and make it part of NATO.
That's beyond the pale.
We have the high cards.
Forget about it.
That's what Putin is sending as a message here.
He does have the high cards.
And when people say, oh, what's he going to do now, he doesn't have to do anything now.
He secured his bases out there in the Crimea, and he's stopped the exercises that were threatening along the borders.
Those were too much exercises to show what the Russians could do.
But now all you need to do is kind of sit back and let the Ukrainians do their own juice.
I feel sorry for the Ukrainian citizens.
They're torn between the Western Ukrainians and the Eastern Ukrainians.
The Western Ukrainians want to, and they have, overthrown the government.
They want to be part of the Eastern, of the economic community there in Europe.
And some of them even care as much about becoming part of NATO.
That's not going to happen.
And Putin is there to see that it doesn't happen.
And the people that have been installed in the new government, surprise, surprise, what luck!
They're the same people that Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, got the exact same people that she told the ambassador should be in there.
What luck!
So what we have is an intercepted phone call, an enclave, in other words, they didn't even encrypt the phone call.
And it's up there for the whole world to see how Victoria Nuland, the NAOCON extraordinaire, and Jeffrey Pyatt.
Now, I have a couple of words to say about Pyatt, but he is currently our ambassador in Kiev.
But his role in Vienna just about five or six years ago is something that bears comment on.
Anyhow, they are caught plotting the new arrival of the new interim prime minister, and his name is Yatsenyuk.
And you can hear Victoria Nuland saying, Yats, yeah, Yats, Yats has got a lot to offer us.
He's our guy.
The devil you know is better than the guy you don't know.
And besides, he used to be head of the Central Bank, and so he's already a great business historian as a piece of austerity measures.
So when we get the IMF in there, we'll speak at the bank, you know, it's going to be, it's going to be good once we get Yats in there.
And then, of course, four weeks later, who becomes the interim prime minister?
You guessed it, Scott.
It's Yats, Yats, Yats.
You know, you've got a really good impression of Victoria Nuland.
You sound just like her.
Hey, listen, no, so wait a minute, no, luck is funny, but, and you know what, I screwed up.
I knew I forgot something.
I screwed up your introduction.
I didn't tell everybody that you're a former CIA analyst, and your specialty was the USSR back when there was a USSR.
And of course, you're a great peace activist from Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and you write great essays at Consortium News and at RaymondGovern.com.
But, you know, importantly, important is your professional status as an expert here, as a big part of it.
So take us through exactly, because, of course, this is the major lie by omission, maybe of this decade so far, is that history began on Saturday when the aggressor Putin moved into Crimea, and that's all you need to know.
So jokes about luck aside, prove it, that America did this coup to whatever degree you assert that they actually, whatever degree you are asserting that they did it.
Well, Scott, back in the 80s, when it became no longer the vogue for CIA to go around overthrowing governments, it became quite possible to do this overtly through something called the National Endowment for Democracy at the tune of $100 million a year.
Now, my colleague, Bob Perry, checked into that and found out last week that no fewer than 65, count them, 65 projects of the National Endowment for Democracy happen to be in the Ukraine.
Gosh, what great attention the Ukraine is getting.
Now, when a popular demonstration started of the kind you had in Bahrain, which has been put down, of the kind you had in Syria, which of course is captured by the so-called rebels, these folks, the folks that wanted to take advantage of this, succeeded in doing that.
Who are these folks?
These are folks that are educated or prompted or run by the National Endowment for Democracy.
They're the ones that want to lean Ukraine away from the heartland of what used to be Kiev and Rus, Russia, and want to make a part of NATO, pure and simple.
And those are the ones that had violent demonstrations and so forth, and in a word, about three weeks ago, overturned the duly elected, the constitutionally elected government of Ukraine, and put in these folks that New London and Pyatt brag about as being, you know, people we can work with, our people, people you know, and, you know, bankers and the people who do the austerity measures.
So unbeknownst to the Ukrainian people, what we have here is a cabal that's not going to suffer from austerity measures, but will end up making the Ukrainians' economic basket case worse than they already are, like the Greeks and like the others that are forced to accept these measures, so that they qualify for what the IMF demands and what Wall Street demands and so forth.
It's the old story.
Now, the strategic aspect of this is what is most interesting, and of course, it's something that I can speak to from some experience.
After the Soviet Union imploded, which, by the way, was a great blow to me, it's awful to be an expert on a country that no longer exists, you know.
You had to find a real job opposing global hegemony for a change, all right.
Yeah, right.
But anyhow, you know, 1991, Gorbachev, finally, we all were convinced it's the real deal, right?
Now, he's dealing from a position of some weakness, since everything had fallen down around him, but he's still got, you know, 20 divisions in East Germany.
Wow, that's a lot of divisions.
So Jim Baker goes over there on behalf of his master, George H.W. Bush, and said, okay, Gorbachev, how are you going to do this?
Gorbachev says, well, look, now, neither you nor we wanted to have a reunified Germany.
It still scares the heck out of me, says Gorbachev, and Baker says, yeah, me too, but, you know, we can't support these 20 divisions, and we're going to pull them out, but please, could you please, you know, if they have to become part of Germany and NATO, will you please to make a bargain here that you're not going to sweep in Poland and Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania?
Please, please, you know, we don't need a wider NATO, okay?
They can spend their Warsaw Pact to fall apart, but let's let it go at that.
So Baker says, oh, sure, okay.
Now, Scott, my dad's a lawyer, and he always says, Ray, get it in writing, get it in writing, right?
Gorbachev, for whatever reason, didn't get it in writing, okay?
And that promise lasted, what, three or four months or something?
Yeah, before you know it, we've got all these cats into NATO, and not only they, but look at the ones up there in the Baltic, Estonia, Latvia, you know, Slovenia, all of a sudden they're part of the EC and part of NATO.
And of course, we tried with Georgia out there with the Caucasus, and that's where the Russians put their foot down, saying, no, no, that's a soft underbelly, that's too strategic, you're not going to have Georgia.
And Ukraine, well, it's Georgia in spades, they have made it very clear.
We draw the line there.
Ukraine has historically been part of the Russian sphere.
As a matter of fact, most people don't realize that, you know, the Russians are sort of behind us, the Slavs were, and until the 8th century, actually the 9th century, they had no written language.
No language.
And so a couple of Greek priests went up there to Kiev and composed a language.
They used letters from Greek, from Latin, from Hebrew, and then they made up some, okay?
And they gave them a language.
And so by 988 or so, they're able to say their prayers and write them down, and before you know it, you have a Slavic civilization.
That was Kiev.
That was Kiev in Rus', that's where it all started, and everybody knows that.
All Slavs know that, and especially the Russians.
So the notion that you can break away the cradle of their Slavic civilization with that historic, you know, legacy is beyond our comprehension, but it's very real, a very real fact.
All right, now hold it right there, we gotta stop and take this break.
That's the deal, they give me money, I gotta play their spots.
It's Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst on deep background on the Ukraine crisis.
We'll be right back, scotthorton.org, libertyexpressradio.com.
On March 7th, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Council for the National Interest is co-hosting the first-ever National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship.
Confirmed speakers include Walt Scheuer, Geraldine McGovern, Kutowsky, Porter, McConnell, Weiss, Raimondo, USS Liberty survivor Ernie Gallo, as well as co-sponsors Alison Ware of If Americans Knew, and the great Grant Smith of the Institute for Research, Middle East Policy.
That's the National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship, Friday, March 7th, all day at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., natsummit.org.
All right, Charles, Ray McGovern, peace activist, former CIA analyst.
He writes at consortiumnews.com and at raymcgovern.com.
He gives out the Sam Adam Award for heroic whistleblowers, and he's an all-around great guy and speech giver.
You can hire him to come and talk to your group, especially if you live in the Northeast somewhere, I bet.
Anyway, well, Virginia's the Northeast to me, Ray.
Sorry, I know it doesn't count to you, but I'm a Texan.
So we're on deep background here.
What's the story?
Why does Russia care so much about Ukraine, and what is it that the American empire has done so clumsily to provoke this response, which I think it goes without saying that probably no one thinks that it was absolutely necessary for Russia to do what they did.
Apparently, they haven't killed anybody yet in invading Crimea, but we're trying to get an understanding of what's really going on here and why, at least, it is that they've done what they've done.
Right at the break, you were explaining how Kiev and that region of Western Ukraine is the cradle of Slavic civilization, and the Russians don't take that lightly.
We saw their very nationalist response to the war over Kosovo in 1999 as well, so there's no doubt where their loyalties lie as far as ethnic relations go there.
Yeah, Scott, let me just interject one other thought, which most people don't realize.
The Russians have a very large inferiority complex, and that really comes of their history.
When we were coming out of the Dark Ages in Western Europe, they were for almost two and a half centuries under what they call the Tatarskaya Ego, which means the Tatar rule.
The Mongol hordes were ruling most of Russia.
Two whole centuries, 14th, 15th.
Finally, when they came out, they were invaded by the Lithuanians and the Poles and then the Germans.
Their history has been pretty tragic, and it wasn't until around Peter the Great and then Catherine the Great, they got it all together.
The net effect of all that is when you say, scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tatar, well, in one sense that's true, but in a more profound sense, they really, really, really resent that, because it means, it's a reminder that they're two centuries behind Western Europe, and ever since Peter the Great, around 1700, they've been trying to catch up.
And so when they see people taking advantage of them, when they see people who have a relative position of weakness, in this case, the Victoria Newlins and the Piazza of this world, and they realize that they just have to put their foot down, they're happy to do that.
And there's a no-win situation for Obama here, because all Putin has to do is sit back and say, all right, Ukrainians, we're going to give you the market price for natural gas now.
We'll no longer give you the 30% discount.
As far as you West Europeans are concerned, all those lines go through Ukraine, so you'd better watch yourselves.
And, you know, we're not going to give you the $15 billion that we told people we'd give them.
We'll let you see how generous these folks in Wall Street and the IMF really are, stewing their own juice for a while.
Putin really doesn't have an awful lot to worry about.
Now, in one of Robert Perry's pieces, he points out that, well, I think he kind of favors the president a lot here, and I think there probably really is something to focusing on the war hawk, neocon cabal, you know, and sort of separating them out from the rest of the American establishment in a way.
And he's pointing out, of course, Victoria Newlin being Robert Kagan's wife and all that kind of thing.
And he's saying, look, who are we dealing with when we're talking about Robert Kagan and the neocons?
These guys' priority is Iran, always, and if they can bring up Ukraine or Lithuania or China or anything else in the world that they can do to somehow split, cause chaos on the UN Security Council and bad will between the Americans and the Russians before the final Iran nuclear deal is done, then all the better for their chances of ruining the whole damn thing.
What do you think about that?
I mean, it's sort of oversimplifying it, but then again, we're talking about the Kagan's, you know, they're bad people, Fat Nick Fred, the brother and his warmonger wife and all of them.
They're quite a lot, aren't they?
Well, you know, Bob has his own sources, you know, there's no better investigative reporter than Bob Perry.
And he's got a good line on this.
In other words, if you look at the empirical evidence, you've got John Kerry way, way out there on the Kagan kind of wing.
Think about Syria.
Now, Iran, thank goodness, seems to be still on its tracks, but Syria, we almost got involved in a war in Syria, which John Kerry had called, quote, an unbelievably small, end quote, war.
Now, thank goodness for General Dempsey, the head chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Thank goodness for my former colleague from the CIA, who said, look, Mr. President, it's not at all clear, it's not at all clear that it was Bashar al-Assad and the government that did those chemical attacks in August around Damascus.
It's not at all clear.
And when John Kerry says 35 times, we know, we know, we know, well, John Kerry is protesting too much, because we don't know, and he's 35 times lying.
That's the situation, Mr. President.
And wow, when we find out since, absolutely right.
We still don't know, but we do know that the evidence, the physical evidence, it used to say that it was the government that shot the sarin gas, it's wrong, can't happen.
And we know that the rebels had the sarin gas.
So what am I saying here?
I'm saying here that Obama, to his great credit, went around Kerry.
You recall, Kerry said in London, well, the only way the Syrians can avoid being a cruise missile is if they give up all their chemical weapons, but that's not going to happen, they're not going to do that.
Well, guess what?
Later that day, Lavrov, Soviet, the Russian foreign minister, got up and said the Syrians are going to do precisely that.
Syrian foreign minister got up and said, yeah, we're going to do that.
This was Putin and Obama working around Kerry to do this deal, avoid the war, get the chemicals past Syria, an incredible boon for everyone.
Now, who did that?
It was Putin.
He picked our testlets out of the fire.
Now, who resents that?
The people who wanted us in on a war in Syria, the Victoria Nulands and the Kagans and the other neocons.
Why?
Well, you know, it's an old story.
It's hard in a neocon's mind to separate out what he or she believes to be the best interest of Israel on the one hand, and the best interest of the United States on the other.
Some of the Israeli leaders have been very candid, and they were asked, you know, what's the preferred outcome of that struggle in Syria, all that brutality, all those killings?
What's the preferred outcome?
And the answer is, no outcome.
As long as Shia and Sunni are killing each other off, not only in Syria, but in the whole area, no outcome.
Keep them going.
And it was when the government started winning.
That's when the Israelis wanted Kerry and the rest of them, and Kerry was visiting with Netanyahu almost every month there for that period of time last year.
They just wanted the U.S. to come in so that the U.S. would be involved in the war, and that that would guarantee that the rebels wouldn't lose.
So, you know, you have somebody guaranteeing the rebels are not going to lose.
You know that they have Sarin as well, and the government, you know, if it makes, the Syrian government, if it makes advances, well, you've still got a stalemate, and no outcome is the preferred outcome.
So that's how the neocons looked at it, and the Russians, of course, were also helpful on the nuclear issue, the nuclear program in Iran.
They'd like to put the kibosh on that, too.
But what Bob Perry is saying, and what I agree with, is that Obama, he made some really bad mistakes with this team of rivals and putting Kerry in there.
It's ridiculous he has to work around these people, but that's the kind of guy he is.
Well, you know, this morning on CNN, Ray, I'm not sure if you saw it, in fact, I think when I talked to you, it was right after this, and you were out on the road, but they actually, and there may not be anything behind the scenes to this, really, other than a scheduling conflict, I don't know, but they interrupted Kerry on CNN, who was spouting off with his finger in the air, and they played instead Barack Obama saying the same thing, but in much softer language.
Kerry was being a bully, saying, oh, look, we don't want conflict, but you better do this, that, and the other thing, and we'll call that negotiations, where Obama was a bit more conciliatory, you know, in his tone of voice.
I guess he just has a softer voice than Kerry anyway, but that sort of goes to show along the same lines of what you mean there, what you're talking about.
I hate to give the President too much credit, but it seemed like something, I don't know.
Well, you know, yeah, it's a matter of, I hate to say the lesser of two evils, but here's Kerry, you know, he's saying, you know, on Sunday, the 19th century act, this Russian intervention in a 20th century well.
Senator Kerry, 2002, voting with the Republicans to authorize an illegal invasion of Iraq on false pretenses.
You know?
You know what, hang on, everybody in the whole world's laughing at that, but we're almost out of time, and I wanted to make sure and have a chance, if I could, to ask you this, Ray, is, because seriously, the whole world's laughing their ass off about John Kerry's hypocrisy on all that, but the deniability of the Russians, Putin in his statement, and John Kerry laughed at this this morning when Andrea Mitchell told him about it, that, oh, those aren't our guys, we didn't invade Crimea, that's just a local pro-Russian militia, seems like he told everybody, rip your insignia off, and that way, it's deniability, you know, I don't know why Kerry's laughing about it, it seemed like it was a way for Putin thought ahead that he could take his troops back out again, because it seems pretty obvious they are Russian troops, but he can take them back out again and say, no, those weren't even my guys, all I did was ask the local pro-Russian militia to stand down, and then that way it makes it easy for him to sort of make his statement, as you say, this is language, diplomatic language, putting his soldiers in Crimea for a while, but he doesn't have to keep them there, he doesn't have to, you know, provoke all the worst of the sanctions and everything coming from the West as a response, right, is that the way you read that?
Yeah, I think you're right on that, you know, if the Russians do more than that, if they invade with some real military forces, they have a rationale they can use, they were asked to do that by the duly elected president of the Ukraine, so you're right about that, that's I think what's happened in the Crimea.
All right, well, we're going to keep talking about this and hope it doesn't get worse and hope that it does get better and quick, as all the talk of sanctions and economic consequences and UN meetings and NATO meetings and stuff continue to unfold here, but thank you so much for your time and your wisdom on the show today, Ray, I really do appreciate it a lot.
Most welcome, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's the Rogue Ray McGovern, see you tomorrow, thanks for listening.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here.
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Isn't that what they always say?
But it's about impossible to avoid worrying about what's going on these days.
The government has used the war on guns, the war on drugs, and the war on terrorism to tear our Bill of Rights to shreds.
But you can fight back.
The Tenth Amendment Center has proven it, racking up major victories.
For example, when the U.S. government claimed authority in the NDAA to have the military kidnap and detain Americans without trial, the nullifiers got a law passed in California declaring the state's refusal to ever participate in any such thing.
Their latest project is offnow.org, nullifying the National Security Agency.
They've already gotten model legislation introduced in California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas, meant to limit the power of the NSA to spy on Americans in those states.
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Our best chance is nullification and interposition on the state level.
Go to offnow.org, print out that model legislation, and get to work nullifying the NSA.
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