07/18/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
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Okay, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Raymond Govern's on the line, former CIA analyst, Soviet expert.
So he still counts as a Russia expert, I think.
He's a veteran intelligence professional for Sanity.
That means he's the co-founder, a co-founder of that group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And he writes all the time for Consortium News and for antiwar.com, and he goes around giving speeches to people about why they ought to be peaceniks and other subjects along those lines.
And now he's got a brand new one that will be out very soon here for Consortium News, and then we'll have it on antiwar.com either over the weekend or on Monday for you.
It's, I guess, the working title.
No title yet, but KAL007, we'll call it.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
Appreciate you making time for us.
So before we get into the article here, can we just go over what's known and what's important but yet unknown about the crash of the Malaysian flight, the 777 that went down on the eastern border of Ukraine yesterday?
Sure.
Okay, the plane was downed by a missile.
Nobody is disputing that.
The source of the missile, of course, is still in dispute.
The U.S., particularly Samantha Powers at the UN, is saying that they have a preliminary judgment that it was the anti-coup separatists, so-called, out there in the eastern Ukraine, often called pro-Russian, but their main beef is the coup that happened on February 22nd.
Anyhow, she is pointing the finger at them.
Obama is being statesmanlike so far on this.
He has just made a speech which said two things of note.
One is he calls for immediate ceasefire.
That's big.
That's what the leaders of Russia, Germany, and France were on the phone with Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, for two hours on Sunday evening, or Sunday, I think it was the evening, Sunday anyway, the 30th of June.
They played it with him.
They begged him.
They gave him all kinds of inducements and incitements.
He thumbed his nose at them, checked with Washington, and launched this major offensive out of the east Ukraine the very next day.
So why do I mention that?
Well, because the fly in the ointment has been an immediate ceasefire.
The Germans feel so strongly about this that their foreign minister invited his Russian and French colleagues, also foreign ministers, but not the United States or Britain to an immediate meeting in Berlin two weeks ago.
They again called for immediate ceasefire.
The U.S., of course, says the same thing it says about Israeli aggression.
Everybody's entitled to defend their own country, the Israelis and the Ukrainians.
So the Ukrainians are really a puppet in this play.
And for Obama to join, in effect, the Russians, French, and Germans in calling for an immediate ceasefire in the wake of this incident is big.
He's also called for an international investigation, and he has the support of Russia.
He has the support of Germany and France and even some of the rebels.
It's hard to know who speaks for whom, but some of the rebels have said, yes, that's okay with us, and we'll guarantee safe passage for inspectors or for people who want to look at the wreckage.
So that's the way the situation stands now.
It's not at all clear who did it or why they did it.
And as my piece says, it's going to be weeks, in my view, based on past precedent, weeks before we know for sure who did it.
The real problem of this, Scott, is that over weeks, you can have an awful lot of fiddling around with evidence, especially the electronic kind of evidence that is so often used in these cases.
And you can also stir up a lot of anti-Russian sentiment, which Fox News started doing yesterday.
I fully expected more of an offensive today, but apparently Fox got the news, got the guidance from the White House this morning to stand down, await further guidance.
And as I say, the president was almost statesmanlike when he made his speech just an hour ago, saying, look, let's have an international investigation and let's have an immediate ceasefire.
So that puts Russia in a difficult position.
I read it completely the other way.
I thought that he said, we're calling for ceasefire just as much as we always have been, which was a disingenuous kind of way of saying that we don't want a ceasefire, just like he talked about when on June the 30th, he told them, nah, keep fighting, don't cease fire, even though that's what the Europeans are fighting for.
And then, well, I guess on the investigation thing, I wouldn't disagree with that, except the whole context was, we don't know, but everybody knows it was the rebels and because the Russians helped train them to be able to do it and it's all their fault.
So how did you and I see dear leader's statement so differently?
Well, because I didn't see it.
I was watching on TV.
You were listening on the radio like a Kennedy.
No, I wasn't.
I wasn't even listening.
All I've had is some a little bit of press reporting here on my cell phone.
It's the only connection I have.
So, yeah, if he didn't act well.
I mean, you're right, though, on the major point that he did say we're calling for a ceasefire.
I guess I just wasn't I didn't take it quite as seriously as you seem to.
Maybe I should have.
Yeah.
Well, that being the bone of contention over the last three weeks, in my view, it is vague.
And as I was starting to say, Poroshenko is going to have to either say yay or well, he's got no alternative.
He'll have to say yay.
Whether he follows through on it or it's just another issue, he tends to lie a lot.
And, you know, he can't be expected, even if he promises to initiate a ceasefire, he can't be expected to automatically do that within the next day or so.
So these next couple of days are going to be very important.
And last night I was thinking through some scenarios that are very much like this.
Shootdowns of aircraft like KL 007 back in 83.
Actually, actually, wait a minute.
We're about to have to take a break in a couple of minutes.
And I'd like to go ahead and let you expand upon, you know, tell that story and talk about the relevance of it, because that is very interesting stuff.
But in the short time we have before this break, let me ask you, just go ahead and speculate, because that's the least important thing here.
It seemed to me like probably the most likely explanation was that the rebels had done it, probably accidentally thinking they were hitting a military flight.
What's your guess?
If I were forced to guess right now, I would say it was probably the rebels.
But, you know, that's, you know, that's, there's no certainty at all, because all three, the Ukrainian armed forces, the Russians, of course, and the rebels all have this same weapon, you know, this book, this SS 11.
So it's really, really hard to say.
But in terms of logic, the Russians control these things pretty damn well.
The Ukrainians not so much.
So if indeed, the missile is determined to have come from their rebel head territory, then, you know, maybe Samantha Powers is telling the truth.
Well, you know, I guess the silver lining would be if they really can get a ceasefire out of it.
I wonder, Ray, whether anybody is thinking about 1914, and how wrong these things can go sometimes, and how maybe it really is time for cooler heads to prevail here.
What do you think?
Well, that's, that's my, my concern.
John Kerry doesn't seem to be aware of the dangers here.
He's very blithely dismissed the prospect of war with Russia.
That can't, that cannot increase feelings of sobriety in Moscow.
So.
All right, now hold it right there.
We got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the great Ray McGovern, former CIA, now a peacenik.
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Hey, I'm Scott.
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Talking with Ray McGovern, former, I was going to say from and former at the same time.
It came out from.
That's terrible.
Like David from.
Really terrible.
No, he is a former CIA guy.
Now he is from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and consortiumnews.com, where he writes a lot of things.
And so we're sitting here talking about the shoot down, apparent shoot down of this jumbo jet, a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine yesterday.
And yet nobody knows exactly who did it.
Let me ask you this, Ray.
Had you even heard, first of all, about this Spanish air traffic controller who at least supposedly was at an airport in Ukraine and was saying that he knew that it was Ukrainian fighter jets that shot the thing down and that the Ukrainian military then came and seized the control tower and tried to intimidate everybody and all this kind of thing.
Had you heard about that at all?
And then, I guess, do you give it any credibility?
It sounds like you're saying it's not disputed that it was a missile.
It's not even disputed that it was a surface to air missile.
Is that correct?
Well, it's mostly correct.
There is one other report I've seen this morning, which already indicates that he accuses two Ukrainian fighter jets for downing or shadowing and then downing the commercial airliner.
I don't give much credence to either.
The source was suspect.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is just some Twitter feed.
I mean, it certainly wasn't verified.
There's going to be a lot of that kind of stuff today and in the next few days.
You know, what I like to point to here is there were a lot of statements yesterday, but there's one that, in my view, a few people can quibble with, and that is when Putin, the Russian president, got up and claimed that, as he put it, quote, the tragedy would not have happened if military action had not been renewed in southeast Ukraine.
Now, the reason I mention that is because there are two big supporters of that that they can count on.
One is named Merkel of Germany.
The other one is Hollande, the head of France.
And today, the Russian diplomat Lavrov accused the U.S. of being one man out on this, and said explicitly that it was the U.S. that encouraged Poroshenko not to renew the ceasefire, despite any commitment he may have made to the three other top leaders that he might do so.
I see, yeah.
If you're still hearing me, I can tell you a little bit about the precedent that I was actually, well, I was head of front seat for, let's put it that way, back in 1983, when the Russian air defense fighter shot down KAL, Korean Airlines, flight 007, which they mistook for a U.S. reconnaissance flight, or Air Force.
The parallel is striking, because the White House now has two options.
Number one, whatever the truth of the matter, what happened yesterday, there's ample red meat, so to speak, to supply to Fox News and to State Department spokespeople, to show how bad the Russians are.
Puchin, Puchin, very bad.
Puchin, Puchin, shooting down civilian airlines and all that kind of stuff, okay?
Even if they lean toward blaming the Puchin supported rebels, okay?
That's one way they can go.
And that's why I was sort of gratified that it didn't seem that Barack Obama had decided to do that just yet, but give them time, because he'd be under a lot of pressure to do precisely that.
What happened with the KAL 007?
Well, Secretary Schultz, the Defense Secretary Weinberger, they were really out to give Moscow a bloody nose.
So even though the evidence was pretty clear, A, that the Russians didn't know that it was a commercial airline, airliner, the accusation was, quote, the Russians have deliberately shot down a Korean Airlines airliner, okay?
That was only half true.
It was deliberate.
The airliner did not respond to any of the warnings sent by the pilot.
And the intercepted communications indicated that the pilot never knew, and ground control also didn't know that it was a Boeing 707 resembling the kind of aircraft that the NSA and the Air Force drive around those parts of the world.
So what I'm saying here is that there's abundant propaganda material if people really want to stir up trouble with Russia.
We have to wait and see if Obama will be statesmanlike enough to fend off these neoconservatives and to say, look, you know, this is an unfortunate incident.
But let's face it, it's an accident, okay?
It was an accident, not deliberate.
And that makes a big difference.
Because in 83, that soured the atmosphere for two years until General Trusk came along and made it amply clear that he wanted to deal with the United States.
Right.
All right.
Well, I sure appreciate it.
I'm sorry, we have to stop right there.
But I sure hope, or I sure agree with you and hope this can be turned into an opportunity for peace, since it's already a tragedy, rather than everybody making things worse out of it.
Thank you so much for your time, as always, Ray, you're great.
Okay, welcome.
Ray McGovern, everybody, ConsortiumNews.com.
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