03/27/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to The Thing here, I'm Scott Horton, this is my show.
Next up is the great Ray McGovern.
For 27 years he was an analyst at the CIA and he was the morning briefer for Vice President H.W. Bush in the 1980s.
And he's the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which is asking a lot.
Sorry I've worn that one out.
And let's see, he also speaks and writes.
He writes at ConsortiumNews.com and at RayMcGovern.com and he's got a whole gigantic archive going back for years and years at AntiWar.com and a lot of other places as well.
And right now he's actually, I believe, in the middle of going around and doing a speaking tour, promoting peace and freedom in one way or another over there.
So welcome back to the show, Ray.
Thanks for joining us today.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Yeah, I'm just promoting a little bit of truth.
I'm trying to give truth a chance here.
And I'm in Missouri, Kansas and Arkansas and really glad to be in the heartland here because it's quite different from being in the beltway.
Yeah, good times.
I'm sure you're learning them well.
So here, learn me some stuff.
Let's talk about Ukraine.
This Barbara Starr, here she is.
She's on CNN International right now.
If a war were to happen, it would fundamentally change the calculus entirely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, calculus.
God, I hate that calculus.
I wish somebody would tell them to stop saying calculus.
God, it's the worst thing in the world.
But anyway, what she's really saying is that Putin's getting ready to invade East Ukraine.
Is that true, Ray?
What do you think?
I don't think so, Scott.
I flunked calculus, but nothing I know about Putin would suggest he's going to East Ukraine.
That's the one I hate even more than calculus is optics.
Just say how this looks, okay?
Just how this looks is fine.
All right, well, let me just cite one of my favorite columnists who happens to be George Will.
I make a joke, of course, today in the Washington Post.
We know what that F stands for.
Well, I'm not going to say that.
But George Will today in the Washington Post, which of course is the neoconservative Pravda, says something really interesting.
What he says is this.
He says, Putin says that he doesn't need to go into Eastern Ukraine.
And you know, that's really suspicious.
Because that shows that he arrogates to himself the right to go into Eastern Ukraine, and you better watch out.
Now, what Putin said happens to be the fact.
He doesn't need to go into Eastern Ukraine.
And as he watches 17 billion bucks going into the Western Ukraine, so much the better.
You know, let them have all the money they want from the West.
Ukraine is not going to be going into NATO any time soon.
As a matter of fact, if sensible people come to their senses, Ukraine will find a status very much like Finland, where they can prosper.
They have all manner of natural resources there, the black earth.
That's why Monsanto is very much interested in getting in there.
In any case, there is a solution here, but it requires adult people to sit around a table, and it will probably be another few weeks, if not months, before Obama is able to get the adults around and say, Okay, we're not going to dislodge Putin from the Crimea, which apparently he said today.
Now, let's see what we can do.
I'm not so worried about the Russian troops.
I am worried about you.
You know what I'm going to say here, you Islamic terrorists.
And so Obama has already started trying to distance himself from the more crazy people.
Well, so that's good.
And I guess, you know, John Kerry.
Well, how significant is this that John Kerry had agreed with Lavrov that, yeah, maybe we do need to rewrite the Ukrainian constitution to have some more federalism and some less centralism and that kind of thing?
Are they really going to do that?
Or is just that rhetorically means uncle?
Well, you know, I mean, I shouldn't point out, well, I shouldn't have to point out, as you know well, Ukrainians have to be involved in this process, obviously, and other stakeholders in that area.
But it does make sense.
You know, it does make sense to sit down and say, Okay, look, there are various interests here.
There are big divisions in Ukraine.
And let's come to a settlement where Russia doesn't feel threatened, where the West can back off gracefully, because it's not the schoolyard of the West here.
And they should have known that to begin with.
And that kind of a situation, very much like Finland, could obtain.
There's nothing sending in the way of that.
It would be to the benefit of everyone, first and foremost, the Ukrainians.
Hey, Ray.
Sorry to interrupt you, but you keep hitting a button there.
Okay, I got it on a different ear now.
Sorry.
Okay, good.
Yeah, you're beeping on us.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, no, I'm just saying that this is not an intractable situation here.
It all needs to happen is for the neoconservatives to say, Well, okay, we tried.
We tried to reach even more eastward with NATO.
And it didn't work.
We should take solace in the fact that we caused a lot of poison in the relationship between Russia and the United States.
That's all to our good.
Because maybe Russia won't be so helpful to the United States anymore in preventing things that we want, like US military strike on Syria.
So that's the bottom line here.
What Victoria Nuland in passing out those chocolate chip cookies on Independence Square in Kiev, what she was really trying to do was incite what happened, namely, the overthrow of the duly elected government, however corrupt it was, it was elected.
Yanukovych had to leave.
And then of course, with that incredible intercepted telephone conversation, where she tells our US ambassador in Kiev, look, we want Yats, Yats is our guy, you know, by all reasonable experience, and I've been around Washington for 50 years now, I confess.
When an intercepted conversation like that goes forward, indicating that the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs is plotting a coup against the duly elected government, this time in Ukraine, one would have thought that by any decent standards or respect for the opinions of mankind, that they wouldn't pick the same guy to be the interim prime minister.
But what do you find?
Yikes!
It's Yats!
Yats Yanukovych comes in as the interim prime minister, and Nuland has already said, well, he's our guy, because, you know, he used to be head of the Central Bank, he knows what the IMF needs, and he'll kind of wean Ukraine into the western orbit so that the Ukrainian workers can suffer the same fate as the ones in Greece right now.
They pay back all their loans with lots of austerity, and sure enough, what Yats Yanukovych said, the first thing he got up, he said, you know, I'm prepared to commit political suicide.
Everybody goes, what do you mean?
I'm prepared to commit political suicide because the austerity measures that I'm going to insist on are going to make it impossible for me to have a political career here.
Whoa!
So, what's afoot here is very transparent.
Nuland, you know, she's overdone herself, and I think Obama is beginning to realize that these people really don't have U.S. interests at heart, or the U.S. interests in Ukraine, other than giving Russia a bloody nose.
And why do anybody want to make, or any people want to make a bloody nose in Moscow?
Well, so the Russians won't cooperate with us on issues of more concern to the neoconservatives, and that is Syria.
What they would like to see is U.S. military involvement in Syria to prevent Bashar al-Assad from continuing to win.
Wait, wait, wait.
I'm so interested in that topic.
But, before we go that direction with it, are you sure that Ukraine itself, and maybe somehow bringing them into NATO, I mean, rewind a few weeks back before Putin checkmated their sorry asses and everything, but just, is it possible their plan really was that, oh no, we're going to do another Orange Revolution, only it's going to stick this time, and we're really going to separate Ukraine from Russia, and maybe even eventually deny them their base in Crimea, or they just wanted Putin to think that so that he would freak out and cause a crisis, and that then would lead to the theory you're talking about, that they just wanted to cause a crisis more than they wanted to actually win that influence in Ukraine.
Is that what you're saying?
Do I have that?
Well, I'm saying, Scott, that it's not an either-or thing.
It's a win-win situation.
If, by some quirk of fate, Putin says, well, Ukraine really isn't all that important to me, yeah, it can join NATO, well, they win.
If he says no, if in response to some threats from the new Ukrainian leaders saying that, you know, maybe we'll kick the Russians out of Crimea, Putin does what everyone might expect him to do, take back Crimea, well, they still win, because then there's a poisoned relationship between not only Moscow and Washington, but Moscow and the rest of the Western world.
It's not going to last very long, as long as people realize.
Now, one thing I'll point out is that there are a couple of European statesmen left in the world, and one of them's name is Helmut Schmidt.
He was the Bundeskanzler, the head of Germany, at a time when Bush wanted to have a coalition of the willing to start a war of aggression against Iraq, and Helmut Schmidt put Bush's nose out of joint by saying, you may have a coalition of the willing, but I am unwilling.
Now, what did Schmidt say to Die Zeit yesterday, one of the major German newspapers?
He said, you know, what Putin did was, in his words, durchaus verständlich, okay?
Verständlich means understandable, durchaus means thoroughly, and anybody who would have thought that Putin would have acted any differently would have to have his head examined.
All right, now, we'll have to hold it right there and take this dumb break here, but we'll be right back with the great Ray McGovern from RayMcGovern.com right after this.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
I'm on the line with Ray McGovern, and we're talking about what's going on in Ukraine.
America picked this fight, and Ray, where we got interrupted by the break, you were talking about how the former chancellor of Germany was saying, come on, man, what do you expect Putin to do?
Only in German.
Yeah, he said that in German, in German English, he said this is in, durchaus means thoroughly, verständlich, thoroughly understandable.
What he's saying is anyone who would have thought that Putin would stand by and let this happen, and particularly would let threats be made to the new leadership, so to speak, in Ukraine to take over the Crimea or to drive the Russians out of it.
You know, the Crimea has been Russia since, well, since the Articles of Confederation in this country.
It was Cassander Great at the end of the 18th century who consolidated Russian rule over that entire area, the Ukraine and Crimea, and that's where the Russian Black Sea Fleet started during her reign.
And that's the only really ice-free port that they have, and they can work their influence through the Mediterranean pretty far away from their bases in the Black Sea there at Sevastopol.
So, it is, you know, Helmut Schmidt is an experienced politician and statesman, and what he said is what we need is zusammenarbeit, okay?
Zusammen is together.
Arbeit, we know, means work.
We've got to work together.
We've got to zusammensetzen, okay?
We've got to sit down together and work this thing out.
And, you know, he's speaking for a major ally there in Germany, and I think he's kind of showing up, Angela Merkel, who is doing this kind of puppet act where Obama says jump, and she jumps as far as she thinks she wants.
And this is running pretty thin in Germany.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung, which is the best newspaper, in my view, in Europe, much less in Germany, it's in Munich and it does a terrific job.
It said about two months ago, ist der Präsident verrückt?
Now, for those of your audience who know what verrückt is, it means crazy, but it means crazy in an incredibly deeper, more pernicious way.
If you say, du bist verrückt, that is the supreme insult, and if you give a little sign, it's a finger to the head, not the middle finger, but the index finger, on the Autobahn, that is a criminal offense, because it means, du bist verrückt, and it's something you can bring to court and say, this guy called me crazy.
So, for the establishment paper, the establishment paper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, to pose the question, ist der Präsident, and they mean Obama, of course, verrückt, that's a sea change in West German, or German now, attitudes toward the United States.
And for the President to continue to rail about sanctions and all this kind of thing, well, Helmut Schmidt said, look, we shouldn't be making threats, we shouldn't be saying sanctions, we should sit down and work this thing out, and again, I think the Finland example is exactly what would fit here.
Nobody would lose, and especially the Ukrainians would have a decent chance at a new life.
The problem with the Ukrainians, of course, is that they never had a chance at democracy, they never had a chance to cultivate real leaders, and so when they broke away from the Soviet Union, it was the oligarchs, it was the smart people who made the money, and were cultivated by U.S. smart people with lots of money, and the corruption was rife.
But the West got in there big time.
This time, Monsanto better give up its idea of selling its corrupt seeds to corrupt people to cultivate the black earth, which is the breadbasket of that part of Europe, because it ain't gonna happen, and Putin's gonna make sure it doesn't happen.
What needs to happen is for an accommodation to be worked out, and this is not a difficult one.
It's simply that the neocons overreached themselves, as I said in my first article on this, this was one regime change too far, and they better just sit down and work it out.
Alright, now, but, okay, couple things.
Well, three things.
First of all, is that going to happen here?
Is the Obama administration actually going to negotiate anything, or have the U.N. intervene for the negotiator, or call Joe Biden, or whatever it is?
And then secondly, what about the Nazis?
What about the Nazis?
How big of a deal is this, really?
And then thirdly, we still gotta talk about, before the top of the hour, Dianne Feinstein and the Senate Intelligence Committee versus the CIA.
I gotta hear what you have to say about that.
So, talk about it.
Well, it will be worked out.
We have the President already backing off, you know.
He's saying, I'm less concerned about Russian troops than I am about a nuke going off in Manhattan.
Well, you know, that's the byword here.
Terrorism is what we're concerned about, not the Russian troops in Ukraine, although, you know, the pundits and the strong anti-Russian people continue to beat the drums.
So, he's also said, and it was today, that we're not thinking about more damaging sanctions right now, unless he goes further, unless he goes into the eastern Ukraine, or that kind of thing.
So, I think it will be worked out.
It's just going to take a lot of time, and it's going to create a lot of temporary damage between the capitals, the Moscow and Washington.
And that, of course, is part of the aim of the people like Primadonna, Naokana, Victoria, and so on.
Alright, and then, so now, I can't find the tweet.
I thought I had retweeted it, but I did have a link here to a massive right sector protest, where they're demanding, it looked like a pretty big protest there, where they're demanding the resignation of one minister or another.
And then, there's this article running at antiwar.com today about how the right sector guys, who are, you know, people have called them the brown shirts, they're the police of Kiev.
They have seized the city of Kiev.
This one is, it centers on the story of a Swede, who's also a Nazi, who's traveled to help chip in with these guys.
And they've gotten from, what, five to eight high-level positions in the new government.
And so, what about all of that?
Well, that's a real and present danger.
And it's partly due to the messing with the internal affairs there by our celebrated National Endowment for Democracy, which is really the successor to the covert action staff of the CIA.
There are neo-Nazis there.
And there's incredibly bitter feeling between Russians and those neo-Nazis, because they remember, they remember Bandera and the rest of them, that when the Germans came into the Soviet Union in 1941, who cooperated, who actually rounded up not only Jews, but Ukrainians and others, and sent them off to Auschwitz and other places like that.
So, there's great, great, there's terrific bad feeling there.
And why Victoria Nuland and other people thought that they could work with this crowd.
You know, the enemy of the enemy is my friend.
Give me a break, I don't want friends like these.
Not always, guys.
Just maybe, could be, in some circumstances.
What the hell kind of rule of thumb is that?
And now, real quickly here.
You're a former CIA officer, so certainly you're taking their side against the evil Senate committee, trying to stop, trying to tell the truth about their torture program, right?
Provocateur, provocateur.
Not at all.
You know, this is very serious business.
This is the torture.
This is something that the US never descended to before.
John Brennan and the people at CIA are still in control, and they are equally guilty of being part of all this.
And so, small wonder that they would not want to share the real deal, the real information on all this.
And so, what they've done is spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee and withdrawn some of the incredibly damaging revelations about waterboarding and so forth.
It's no surprise to do that.
What's surprising is that all of a sudden, all of a sudden, Dianne Feinstein, who's been first and foremost a supporter, not only of NSA, but of the CIA.
All of a sudden, she gets in high-duty and she gets up without warning and says, hey, they're spying on me.
They're accusing my young people who did this wonderful study of perpetrating a crime.
Now, how do you explain that?
Well, you know, some people say, well, some people see the light all too late, but then they finally see it.
But I think it's more a matter of emotion here.
She's got these young people working for her, right?
They're grandchildren, really, for her age.
And all of a sudden, they're accused of a crime that sort of ticks her off.
Now, who's going to win on this?
She's not going to win.
Obama is much more afraid of John Brennan and his coterie of torturers over there than he is of Grandma Feinstein.
So what I predict, this will end up in not a beer summit, because Feinstein's from California, of course.
It'll be a wine summit.
And she'll get together with John Brennan and they'll have some wine and it will all be papered over.
Doesn't that show where we are, though, where the CIA thinks they're more than equal to the U.S. Senate?
Well, that's a sad commentary on all this, isn't it?
But that's what we have.
We have security services.
We have the media.
We have the corporations.
That's very close to the definition of fascism.
That's Ray McGovern, everybody.
RayMcGovern.com and ConsortiumNews.com.
Thanks very much, Ray.
Appreciate it.
You're most welcome, Scott.
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