05/27/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show on the Liberty Radio Network, LRN.
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And our next guest up, surprise guest, is our good friend, Ray McGovern.
Mostly, he writes for ConsortiumNews.com.
You can also find him at RayMcGovern.com, his own website there.
And he gives speeches.
What's the name of the church that you work with there that sends you around, giving speeches, talking about peace, Ray?
Yeah, it's an unusual church, Scott.
It's called the Ecumenical Church of the Savior.
It's based here in Washington.
They think that what I'm doing is also what church should be doing.
And they give me some modest support so that I can actually travel around.
Well, that's absolutely great.
And I know for a fact you're a great speaker, not just from interviewing you a hundred times, but from seeing you speak as well.
So I highly recommend that service to anyone who's interested in having you out.
But anyway, so also what you need to know about Ray McGovern is that he was CIA.
Not a throat-slitting coup d'etat maniac, but he was just an analyst there at CIA.
Not just.
He was a great analyst there at CIA for 27 years.
And now he is a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And he's really good on everything.
And this one is called Washington Post Seeks U.S. Patrolled Safe Zone in Syria.
Oh, say it ain't so, Ray.
Well, it is so.
I mean, we have a responsibility to protect everybody that Israel wants protected.
Scott, let's face it.
This really goes to the core of the question here.
When you ask what interest, you know, what interest does the United States have in trying to depose Bashar al-Assad, as we have been for the last three years, and keep that terrible struggle going in Syria?
Well, we have a very marginal interest, unless you appreciate that the people who are running this policy, the so-called neocons, are the same people who have difficulty distinguishing between what they perceive to be the national or the security interests of Israel on the one hand and the security interests of America on the other.
Now, let me be clear, as the president always says, I don't dispute their right to their opinion.
Everyone has the right to their own opinions.
I just don't think that they should be running U.S. policy, which they have been in Syria and in places like Iraq and even Afghanistan to an extent.
That's not right.
So what we have here is a situation where we were about to attack Syria last August.
Actually, the Israelis had been warned the attack was coming within 24 hours.
That was on the 30th of August.
And the French had their fire bombers on the tarmac.
OK, warming up.
OK, and what happened?
Well, finally, somebody got to President Obama and we know that it was a combination of my former colleagues, to their credit, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dempsey.
And they said, hey, Mr. President, you've been fed a line here about those chemical attacks outside Damascus.
We don't know.
No matter how many times Secretary Kerry says we do know, we don't know that the Syrian government was responsible for those.
As a matter of fact, we have more evidence there was probably the rebels for obvious reasons.
They wanted to mousetrap you into attacking on their behalf.
They wanted to cross the red line, so to speak, and blame it on the Syrian government.
So these are the people, and Kerry is among them, that got us inches away from what Kerry called a, quote, unbelievably short, small war, end quote.
And we know from Cy Hersh's reporting that it was anything but.
It was shock and awe, part two.
The stealth bombers and everybody else was going to be thrown at Syria and there was going to be no unbelievably short war.
I think that's what Dempsey told the president.
And finally, the president came to his senses.
Now, the sequel to that is what's relevant here.
Who bailed the president out?
I mean, everybody, everybody was down in the mouth from the NAOCON side.
I was I was at the top of the CNN building the Monday after.
And Paul Wolfowitz and Joe Lieberman are virtually crying.
They weren't going to get their war, OK?
So how is the president going to protect himself from the likes of them and John McCain?
Well, guess who helped out?
Vladimir Putin, president of Russia.
He said, you know, let's work out a deal where we get the Syrians to destroy all their chemical weapons.
And they did.
Now, was John Kerry in on that?
No, they went around his back because the Monday before he said that will never happen.
That's never going to happen.
So the point here is that the NAOCONs hate, hate Putin, as we used to say in the Bronx about Gene Autry, you know, and the Iroquois Indians, you know, they hate him yet from another picture.
They hate him yet from Syria.
And they also hate him for the hope that he's given our president with respect to getting the Iranian nuclear problem resolved.
So what do they do?
Right after all the Syrian stuff went down, they decided, well, let's do Ukraine.
And in case your listeners don't know this already, the U.S., NATO and our National Endowment for Democracy mounted a coup using neo-fascists, neo-Nazis and other right-wing folks, a violent coup on the 22nd of February, ousting the duly elected government, however corrupt it was, of Yanukovych and imposing this new regime.
Now, that's that's why they do that.
Well, they want to give Russia a bloody nose.
They may have thought they might wean Ukraine away from the Russian domination part of the world there and then get it into first into the EU on a temporary basis and then into NATO.
That just was not going to happen.
So whether the neocons realized that or not, it was a no-lose situation for them because if they got a bloody nose, they could blame it on Obama and the atmosphere and relations between Putin and Obama would be destroyed, which it has been.
Now, I have some hope that in the next week or so, there are reports that Obama is going to meet with Putin in connection with the D-Day celebrations on June 6th.
I have some hope that Putin, having been very restrained in this whole imbroglio, has persuaded Obama that, you know, they can deal with this new situation, with the new president elected in Ukraine, act like adults, sit around the table, satisfy the interests of the various nations represented there, not only Russia and the U.S., but of course, first and foremost, Ukraine and the various parts of the Ukraine, and they work things out.
So I have more hope in the wake of this election.
But I have to say that those folks out there in the eastern Ukraine, I can see why they would want to seize that airfield and I can see why the Ukrainian army would drive them away.
So that stuff has to cease and we'll have to see if the new president has guts enough to tell his army, look, hold your fire here, we're going to work a deal out.
Right.
Well, and that's an important question, whether the recent attacks are the old regime or the new one.
But I guess we'll see.
Yeah.
You know, it's eminently sensible to suggest that everyone sit around a table.
The Russians have been suggesting that for four weeks now.
And finally, with this new president who says he's willing to talk to the folks in the east.
Now, please understand there are a lot of crazies out there in the east, as there are in places like Odessa.
I mean, there are people, there are forces loosed here that are very much akin to the ones that were loosed by the, by the Nazi invasion of Ukraine back in the early 40s.
So these people have to be, you know, marginalized.
They have to be seen for who they really are and who they really are, are people who gained not more than one percent, you know, not more than one percent of the vote on last Sunday.
So I think the die is cast.
I have always been optimistic that, number one, Putin would act in an adult way, in a restrained way.
And the fact that he agreed to accept the results of the election, you know, even while saying, you know, remember that the...
Let's wrap this point up real quick here.
We've got to take this break.
Okay.
Or not.
We'll pick it up on the other side of this break here with Russia's promise to respect the results of the vote and hopes for the new president of Ukraine.
And then we'll get back in to the war in Syria, Israel's interests and Al-Qaeda and the rest with the great Ray McGovern.
Just a minute.
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All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Scott Horton.
Scott Horton Show.
I'm on the line with Ray McGovern.
And listen, I mean, you guys understand how it is, right?
This isn't even a matter of opinion.
It's an objective, scientific, mathematical fact that the single most important thing in the whole wide world is the relationship between the U.S. state and the Russian one.
Because H-bombs.
Enough to kill us all.
Enough to destroy civilization for hundreds and hundreds of years.
And maybe to destroy all of mankind.
So, can't have that.
Gotta get along with them no matter what.
Even if Putin's killing little kids with his bare hands live on TV, our government and their government still have to get along.
And so, Ray is talking about the prospects for peace here in Ukraine, which could be a horrible flashpoint.
Doesn't take much imagination to run a couple thought experiments and see how a real civil war in Ukraine could turn into a much greater conflict with the West, between the West and Russia, or the U.S. and Russia.
So, anyway, but the problem is, well, you know, people aren't willing to really talk with each other.
I mean, they had an agreement that didn't include the people of the East.
And so they didn't feel bound by it.
So they went ahead and had their little referendum anyway.
And now they've had this presidential election and the people of the East seem to have a lot of reason to feel like they're frozen out.
Basically like the Sunnis who didn't even really get a chance to win in Iraq in 05.
Something like that.
So that could just make matters this much worse.
And, Ray, before the break you were saying what we need is a table big enough for both and all factions, as many factions as possible, in Ukraine for the Americans, the Russians, the new president, the newly elected president of Ukraine, and to see if we can find some kind of compromise here.
Because the all or nothing has brought us nothing but trouble.
That's exactly right, Scott.
And when you talk about the necessity for the U.S. and Russia to get along, that's less pressing, that's less evident to people now.
I mean, I went into the Army the week after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I was down at Fort Benning and we had no weapons to train with.
You know why?
Because they were all in Key West.
And our Joint Chiefs of Staff were just really plumbing for a war on Russia because we could destroy them when we got to get those commies now, and we'd only suffer maybe 20 million casualties, but they would suffer 60 million.
That was the thought at the time.
And a responsible adult came onto the scene.
His name was John Kennedy.
He realized how close he had come, and so did Nikita Khrushchev.
They worked this thing out, but my point is that they were under the impact of how close they had come to incinerating at least half of the world.
Now today, people have forgotten that.
These younger people have no sense of history.
The Cold War, much less World War II, where people forget Russia and we were allies.
So this needs to be worked out.
It can be worked out.
But to do that, the President's got to face down the people who have been running the show there, the Victoria Newlands, the Samantha Powers, the Susan Rices, the very, very tough guy women we have in the White House and the UN.
He's got to face them down and say, look, there's a reality here that I just learned about.
There was this Cold War.
There was a Cuban Missile Crisis, and we don't need this kind of thing because our national interests are not involved.
Ukraine and Russia's are.
Now, I'd like to just pick up one other point here.
When I, exactly 50 years ago, when I came on as an analyst of Soviet foreign policy, my portfolio was China.
And in those days, there was an enmity between China and that Soviet Union you could cut with a knife.
They hated each other.
And we became so used to the fact that they were going to hate each other forever and ever and ever that we really were slow to see the signs of rapprochement coming just 20 years later.
And now, what now?
Now an incredible economic deal between Russia and China.
What's my point?
My point is that the Russians no longer have to curry favor with the U.S. so that they can make sure the U.S. doesn't steal a march vis-a-vis China.
In this triangular relationship, all important is the fact that the Russians have seen an ally now rather than an implacable enemy in China.
And they've signed this deal.
It's the biggest economic deal in world history.
And it looks like the Russians and the Chinese are going to be economically and politically tied in a way that they had never been before.
Now, did the Ukraine have something to do with this?
Well, yes, but it's not a direct result of that.
I see the Ukraine crisis developed by the U.S. and the EU as the catalyst here.
We've had 25 years since the Berlin Wall fell, and the Russians have been looking at us and see if we're able to keep our promises not to move NATO east, and they found out they can't trust us.
Meanwhile, they've been developing this relationship with China, and that's the sea change.
That's what's 180 degrees different from the way it was in the 60s and the early 70s when Kissinger and Nixon very adroitly played this triangular relationship and had the Russians coming to agreements with us that they would not otherwise have done.
Now the game has completely changed, and when you look at it from a 50-year perspective, for example, annual trade between the Soviet Union and China in the mid-60s was $200 million.
You know what it is now?
$95 billion.
It's a big difference there.
Meanwhile, as the U.S. has shown itself intent on moving NATO to the east, and the Russians have said, no farther, forget about the Ukraine.
That was one regime change too far.
Meanwhile, Putin and the others have developed this very cozy relationship with China, which desperately needs the natural gas that is now going to be financed, the exploration and the production, not only by Russia but by the Chinese themselves.
So this is a very big deal, and it should not be left off as, well, something that is kind of incidental to the Ukraine.
Ukraine is in large measure the final proof that Putin and Lavrov have come to the realization that Obama, he might have good thoughts or he might want to direct policy in a different way, but whether he does or whether he's completely complicit with these NATO cons, the effect is the same.
We're going to develop a relationship with China.
And, you know, talk about the end of the empire.
Well, this is one benchmark, Scott.
This is one benchmark where the empire is falling apart, and, you know, it's just going to be a matter of, well, my grandchildren are going to college.
It could be a very, very different world, and I've suggested that half of them study Russian and the other half study Chinese.
Well, as a non-American imperialist, I'm perfectly happy seeing Russia and China getting along.
After all, that's objectively, scientifically, mathematically the second most important relationship in the whole wide world, because H-bombs, you know, same difference.
So I'm happy to see peace and commerce breaking out between everybody in the world.
That's the good part of globalism is the private, you know, business relationships and trade.
It's all the government and their alliances like NATO.
You keep mentioning NATO.
That's the military alliance we're threatening them with.
These are the things, these are the tripwires that lead to wars and even world wars, those kinds of obligations.
And, you know, hopefully you can stay and give me one more segment, because I've got to get back to Syria and Israel here.
Sure.
Happy to do that.
Thank you.
See you there.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And I'm in the middle of talking with Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and now hardcore peacenik, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which I don't know how they let you even live in D.C.
Seems like that'd be against the rules, Ray.
Insanity?
What's that got to do with anything here?
Sorry, go ahead.
No, actually, when we set up our organization back in January of 2003, three months before the war in Iraq, there wasn't a lot of sanity going on here in Washington.
I thought you were going to say the zoning commission came and kicked our asses right into Virginia.
Anyway, we're talking about how wouldn't it be nice if we had some sanity here, which brings us back to Syria, which has got to be the most confounded, whatever the heck it is for your verbs and things there.
You talk about in your article, you provide two pretty severe evidences of Israeli influence on America's foreign policy of supporting the rebels in Syria here.
This was brought up originally in the context of one of the reasons, and this is in your article again, Washington Post seeks a U.S. patrolled safe zone in Syria.
One of the big deals that the neocons, one of the reasons that the neocons pushed the Ukraine crisis to the degree they did is your thesis and Robert Perry's, is that they were just trying to do anything they could and this was something to help disrupt America, specifically Obama's burgeoning relationship with Putin and them working together on the Iran nuclear issue and on perhaps coming to some kind of agreement in the case of Syria.
And you say here that no, the Israelis don't want that and therefore the neoconservatives, and that would include Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan's wife, don't want that.
And so what makes you say that, Ray?
Well, if you look at, you know, if you ask the question, why Washington should care so much about sponsoring more regime change in Syria, well, the answer is pretty simple.
It's because Israel cares about preventing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from prevailing, whatever that means.
Now, about this time last year, he started prevailing.
He was kicking the rebels out of the very big strongholds they had in Syria and it looked like the rebels might just take it on the chin and that Assad would win a definitive victory, not in all of Syria but most of it.
And so there was a need, a felt need on the part of Israel to prevent that from happening.
How's the best way to prevent that from happening?
Get the U.S. involved militarily.
How can you do that?
Well, someone told Obama to draw a red line if the chemical weapons were used, then the U.S. would have to change its calculus and do something drastic like get involved militarily.
So how do you do that?
Well, you cause a chemical event.
Now, John Kerry said 35 times from the State Department podium on 30 August that we know it was Bashar al-Assad that did that.
He was not telling the truth.
He didn't know.
No one knew.
We do know now, at least to my satisfaction as an intelligence analyst, it was not Bashar al-Assad's government.
It was a combination of the rebels, Turkey, and others that could easily make the sarin that was used.
The sarin that was used, the British found out, is not the sarin that is in Syrian government stocks or used to be.
So what do we have here?
Who profits from turmoil in Syria?
And who would profit from the prospect of getting the U.S. involved militarily?
Well, of course, you've got the various groups, the rebel groups.
But what's been really clear over the last couple of years is that the Netanyahu government in Israel has powerful incentive to keep Washington engaged in yet another area, another regime change.
The Israeli priority is also driven by its view of Iran as Syria's primary protector.
Now, this came through in all places.
Of all places, in the New York Times, the same day that we, veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, wrote a memo to the president saying, look, our colleagues still on active duty in the agency are telling us that it's not true that it was Bashar al-Assad that was responsible for those chemical attacks.
Rather, it was the rebels.
Now, on that same day, there was a New York Times report, coincidence.
Judy Rudoran, writing from Jerusalem, she addressed this thinking from Israel, and she said, for Jerusalem, the status quo in Syria, horrific as it may be, this is a direct quote, seems preferable to either a victory by Mr. Assad's government or a strengthening of the rebel groups.
This is a quote from a former Israeli consul general in New York, according to Rudoran in the Washington Times and the New York Times.
Quote, this is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don't want one to win.
We'll settle for a tie.
And he continues, let them both bleed hemorrhage to death.
That's the strategic thinking here.
As long as this lingers, there's no real threat from Syria.
Well, from an Israeli perspective, if you look at it in those blunt terms, as long as Sunni and Shia are shooting each other, killing each other, not only in Syria, mind you, but in the whole area now, well, Israel feels relatively safe.
So they wanted the U.S. in.
They tried to mousetrap Obama.
They came within one day of successfully doing that.
And our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and some of my old colleagues at CIA told the president, look, there's no such thing.
There's no such thing as an unbelievably short, small war in the Middle East.
Kerry doesn't know what he's talking about.
Either he's been deceived or he's deliberately lying and saying he's sure that it was Assad's government that did this.
Kerry is not a strategic thinker.
We give him due for driving boats up the Mekong, but that does not make you a strategic thinker.
We know what war is like, Mr. President.
Those real, real tough gals you have in the White House and at the U.N. and elsewhere, they don't know diddly about war.
This is going to be a real, real second Iraq.
And the president, to his credit, changed his mind within 22 hours.
I remember after Kerry spoke, we all thought, well, the strike from those cruise missile ships in the eastern Mediterranean is inevitable.
And we're out in the White House the next day, and the president goes out to the Rose Garden at 2 o'clock, and he says, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has told me that we're in position.
We're in position to shoot these cruise missiles at Syria, but we don't have to do it today or tomorrow or next week or next month.
And so I'm going to go to Congress to get appropriate authorization.
We were delirious.
We could hardly believe what we heard him say.
The French, they were up in a high dungeon.
Isn't that great?
It's still unbelievable.
You can't even talk about that without taking me back to the time that, look, look, the president is backing down.
It's absolutely unreal.
Sorry, I just get so excited again.
Well, you know, he did the right thing.
And the question is, you know, this didn't stop the NATO guys.
As a matter of fact, it gave them more incentive.
They had been working on Ukraine for a long time.
I mean, Newland, Victoria Newland, says $5 billion had been invested in what she calls the Ukrainian aspirations toward the West, end quote.
Well, that means covert action.
That means the National Endowment for Democracy.
That means they were in place.
They had 65 projects, which my colleague Bob Perry dug out of somewhere, 65 projects from the National Endowment for Democracy in Ukraine alone.
So the coup on 22 February was well planned in advance, but the impetus came after Syria and after the, you know, when the Sochi Olympics were going on with Putin distracted.
All that kind of stuff happened right under his nose.
He could hardly believe this.
And he just made it very clear that if you're thinking of enfolding Ukraine, including our only warm water naval base in Crimea into NATO, forget about it.
Forget about it.
They've had the naval base in Crimea since the time of Catherine the Great, for God's sake.
That's the time of our own revolution.
They weren't about to let that be endangered by coup plotters or coup succeeders in Kiev.
It was a no-brainer for me that Putin would go in and protect that part of Ukraine that, after all, had been given to the Ukraine as a sort of accident of history by Khrushchev, an Ukrainian, who thought that would bolster his position when he took over from Stalin.
It did bolster his position in those days.
It didn't matter, of course, because they were all part of the Soviet Union.
Now it mattered all of a sudden.
And Putin wasn't going to sit.
People don't follow his speeches.
I read his major speech at the time.
You know what he said?
He said, you know, we think that the NATO sailors are really good guys.
But we don't think that we should be in a position of visiting them in their naval base in the Crimea.
We'd much rather them come visit us.
That's a pretty nice way of putting it.
You're not getting my navy base.
Right.
So what's happened was totally predictable.
As I say, it doesn't faze the neo-cons at all.
And what's going to be really interesting, Scott, is tomorrow when the president speaks at West Point.
What kind of attack he's going to take, not only on Ukraine, but on Syria.
Because if he repeats these unfounded rumors that Kerry and some others have put about there, that the Syrians are still using chemical weapons.
And guess what?
Chlorine, like World War II chlorine.
Which even our secretary, the secretary of the Pentagon, the secretary of war, Hegel, says he's seen no evidence of that.
So that throws cold water on Kerry and his co-conspirator theorists.
Yeah.
Well, you know, right after Hegel says, I don't see any evidence of that, Kerry gets up.
And this is what he said.
This is worth quoting.
Quote, on the issue of evidence, I suspect I haven't talked with Hegel about what it was in mind.
And he was referring to something that I don't know.
I have seen evidence.
I don't know how verified it is.
It's not verified.
It hasn't been confirmed.
But I've seen the raw data and suggest that there may have been, as France has suggested, a number of instances in which chlorine had been used in the conduct of war, end quote.
Yeah.
George Bush found some weapons of mass destruction related program activities in Iraq, too.
Yeah.
And he was more articulate than Kerry.
Unbelievable.
So, you know, if the president, I mean, I'm serious now.
If the president repeats these rumors, which nobody says has been confirmed, there have been no victims lying around.
It's even worse, worse a charade than the one on 21 August.
If he does that, hold on to your hats, because that means he's caved completely into the neocons and he's going to give shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons to the Syrian rebels.
And God knows what's going to happen after that.
It will be a repeat of giving such weapons to the Afghan rebels back in the 90s.
Yeah.
Well, I hope the Israelis are happy when they look north and see guys flying the al-Qaeda flag there in the Golan Heights or just on the other side of the border there from the occupied Golan Heights.
So, I guess make your bed and lie in it, folks.
They wouldn't tolerate that, of course, Scott.
And that's what I talk about when I mean a wider war in the Middle East.
The Israelis themselves should realize there are limits to which they should press these things.
But, you know, the neocons, they— Well, in fact, wait a minute.
Now, let me interrupt you here for a sec.
Sorry, but Eric Margulies, I put this to him before and said, well, now, hey, come on, now, from the Israeli point of view, wouldn't they prefer to have Bashar al-Assad, who might as well be Mossad, I like to say, just how docile he's been in his relationship with Israel his entire time in power.
I mean, yeah, he still backs Hezbollah and this and that.
But here's a guy that they can negotiate with.
In fact, Bush even stopped them from negotiating with Assad a few times back under Omer.
And how in the world could they prefer a bunch of bin Laden knights to ol' reliable, you know?
And Margulies said, hey, al-Qaeda's still just pinprick nothing compared to an actual state.
And so they would prefer chaos and outlaw suicide bomber crazies running around everywhere for as long as it lasts to having a state with a real army and attack space and nothing else to do except look south at them.
Yeah, I'd put a—I agree in large part, but I put a little different wrinkle on that.
What I'm saying here is that the Israelis prefer no solution.
When this guy was asked, what's your preferred outcome in Syria, he said no outcome.
Keep them fighting each other as long as the Bashar government is doing okay, but we don't want it to win.
So how do we get it not to win?
We get the U.S. involved militarily.
Now, if the U.S. starts providing these weapons to the rebels, whatever rebels they find there, this is going to be a notch up in this war.
And, my God, it's just going to be getting out of hand because some of these rebels will shoot down an Israeli plane, and the Israelis will retaliate and we'll be off and running.
Well, remember, though, like you were saying before, it was revealed in Hersh's bit there that the campaign that they had put together was going to be humongous and very well could have been a real regime change type of a war.
You know, like in Libya, I mean, there were some special forces and spies and whatever, but for the most part, the Libya war was fought from the air.
And it seems like if you really break out the B-52s, you can bring down Damascus, right?
Well, yes and no.
You know, I'm an infantry officer, okay?
There are very, very strict limits as to what bombing can do.
Look what we did over North Vietnam.
No regime has ever in all of history given up solely under bombing.
You need to send the infantry in, and, my God, if Obama doesn't realize that, somebody ought to tell him right quick because bombing is not going to do it, even to a regime like Assad's.
And, you know, it just will ratchet up the whole situation.
The Russians will not stand by idly.
They're interested in that part of the world as well they should be.
And so I just hope that tomorrow at West Point the president takes a more responsible, more adult line on Syria and on Ukraine, and it's going to be really interesting to see what he tells those cadets.
By the way, you'll be the first to hear this, but you ought to see, you really ought to see Medea Benjamin in her new West Point uniform and look for her in the third row at the speech tomorrow.
Don't tell anybody.
Hey, thanks for the pro tip there, Ray.
Appreciate it.
And thanks for your time again.
You're always very generous.
You're most welcome.
Take care.
Appreciate it.
Great Ray McGovern, everybody.
He's writing at ConsortiumNews.com with Robert Perry.
He's also done a hell of a lot of really great work on Ukraine, too.
I urge you to read everything at ConsortiumNews.com.
And you can find him at RayMcGovern.com.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast Peace Talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Help support CNI at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
Phone records, financial and location data, PRISM, Tempora, X-Key Score, Boundless Informant.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for OffNow.org.
Now, here's the deal.
Due to the Snowden revelations, we have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the national surveillance state.
Now, they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress.
And the courts, they betrayed their sworn oaths to the Constitution and Bill of Rights again and again, and can in no way be trusted to stop the abuses for us.
We've got to do it ourselves.
How?
We nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy.
The OffNow project of the Tenth Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
I mean it.
There's real reason to be optimistic here.
They've gotten their model legislation introduced all over the place in state after state.
I've lost count.
More than a dozen.
You're always wondering, yeah, but what can we do?
Here's something.
Something important.
Something that can work if we do the work.
Get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
Go to OffNow.org.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
Some stock market investors are making money hand over fist, while others sit on the sidelines afraid of the dangers.
Are you looking for answers?
Before you invest one dollar, I'd like you to take the time to watch this new video from Martin Weiss at MoneyInMarkets.com.
The video names the seven riskiest and four safest major stocks in America.
Learn from the experts and invest wisely.
Go to Crisis16.com.
That's Crisis16.com.