07/29/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is our friend Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst.
Now peace, Nick.
He's co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and he writes most often for consortiumnews.com.
And very soon you'll be able to find this on the blog over at antiwar.com.
It is the newest memo for the president from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Doing well.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
So now a lot of this we've gone over, because I've been interviewing you a lot about Ukraine over the past couple of weeks here, and now you've got it all in memo to the president form.
I'll let you go back over as much of the argument as you feel is necessary here.
But the bottom line here is you're warning the president that the Secretary of State's talking points are way out ahead of the information here.
And I guess most importantly, you're saying that you're hearing from people inside the U.S. intelligence community that that is the case.
Can you please elaborate?
That's right, Scott.
You know, it's very unsettling to see John Kerry and others run off and all but indict and convict the Russians for supplying so-called separatists down in eastern Ukraine with the missile that shot down that Malaysian aircraft, flight number 17.
The evidence that has been deduced, well, let me put it this way.
The pope or the Dalai Lama would have real trouble gaining credibility for the case that's been made by these fuzzy photos, by twittering from our U.S. ambassador in Kiev, and by social media sort of things.
I mean, the whole thing is embarrassing to a professional intelligence officer, and that's what we tell the president.
You know, if you don't have any better than this, any evidence better than this, more conclusive of any kind, if you're unwilling to ask your $75 billion operation called U.S. intelligence to serve up, after 12 days, a coordinated interagency assessment of what the evidence is, then we don't say it this way, but he ought to put up or shut up, and that goes for Kerry especially.
All right, well, so what about this, though?
I mean, it could be interpreted, I guess, let me pretend I'm CNN here for a second.
The burden is on you with your wacky, extraordinary claims here.
Everybody knows that the most likely thing here is that the rebels did it accidentally, thinking they were shooting at a Kiev coup government military plane, and they killed all these people, and now they're trying to get away with it.
And so what's your alternative narrative, then, Mr. former intelligence professional?
Well, Wolf Blitzer, let me comment on that.
Everybody knows, that may be true, but that's only because everybody listens to Wolf Blitzer and others, CNN, and some of, regretfully, some of my former colleagues who are getting paid big bucks to be, quote, experts on this.
It's very, very unsettling.
So what we have here is a situation where if the United States knows that the so-called separatists, I call them federalists, you know, I'm a separatist.
I mean, we were all separatists when we were ruled by dictators, not in Kiev, but in London.
So these separatists, you know, if they got these weapons, where's the beef?
Where's the meat?
Why can't you show something conclusive?
Now they're not even hiding behind sources and methods.
They're not saying we have something tangible, but we can't tell you because that would blow our source.
No, they're just showing fuzzy photographs and repeating this line, giving it to the David Gregories of this world and the Wolf Blitzers.
And that's why, Wolf, everybody thinks that it's a done deal.
It's a flat fact that, sure, the Russians are responsible because they gave these missiles to the Ukrainians.
We have no photos.
We have no imagery.
Does Washington know what happened?
Yes.
Washington knows what happened.
Does Washington have evidence about what happened?
Yes.
Washington has that evidence.
There's no way you can persuade me that after 12 days of this, our intelligence assets, including overhead satellites and everything else, weren't lined up to discover what happened then and since.
So if we don't have anything better to serve up, then Twitter's from the U.S. ambassador in Kiev and fuzzy photographs given out to the Washington Post and others last week here in Washington.
Well, you know, if I were anti-American, I might suspect that they ain't got no conclusive evidence or, and or, they know that it was the Ukrainians who shot that plane down.
I still think probably by mistake, but the Ukrainians, of course, have these missiles.
We know that.
We also know that at least according to the Russians, the Ukrainians had a big radar trained on that flight.
And we know that they had some Buk, they had some of these SA-11 missile emplacements within range of the aircraft, according, again, according to the Russians.
Now, you have to take that with a grain of salt, too, but at least the Russians have provided some tangible evidence.
We have not.
And that's what we're appealing to the president.
We're saying, look, Mr. President, the nine of us signed this memo have a cumulative total of 260 years in intelligence related fields, various parts of the intelligence community.
We've been there, done that.
We've seen instances like this in the past.
The KAL-0071 is the direct parallel.
That happened in 1983.
Obama was 21.
I don't know how closely he followed that or how closely he's been briefed.
Ray, I'm sorry, but just because we're short on time and we did talk about that one before in the last interview.
Did we?
Okay.
If we could, if we could get back to the specifics on this one here about what you were just saying about how the Russians have showed satellite pictures and said, here, the Ukrainian government has these missiles and the Americans, if I heard it right, if I remember right, they have said that they have satellite pictures of missiles in the hands of the rebels.
They just haven't shown it to anybody.
Is that right?
I don't know that they have in an official way said that they have that kind of evidence.
If they do, my point is, if they do, they should release it.
And if they don't have it, then that would suggest to me the explanation as to why they don't release it.
You can't release it if you don't have it.
Well, and wouldn't they, if they did have it, they would absolutely use it to contradict the Russians.
If the Russians are pulling an Adelaide Stevenson and breaking out their satellite pictures, then the Americans have to trump that if they have a card to play.
Right.
They can't just let that slide unless they have to.
Unless they don't have it.
Yeah.
That's the suspicion.
You know, in the past, we had used in this memo the example of when the Libyans bombed that disco discotheque in Berlin back in 88, I think it was, we had the goods on them.
We had intercepted messages.
They bragged about it.
Okay.
Ronald Reagan creamed, creamed Qaddafi's complex, killed one of his little daughters.
Okay.
Now the world was in high doubts, you know, what, how can that happen?
How do you know there was a Libyans?
And Reagan came to us and he said, we've got to release that intercepted message.
And we said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can't, sources of meth, no, no, you'll blow our source.
The Libyans don't know, A, that we're intercepting their communications, and B, that we can, you know, can decipher it.
Okay.
So we can't do that.
Reagan says, do it.
We did it.
And we blew the source.
But the whole world was able to see, now, now, hastened head, I don't justify killing little children, but the whole world was able to see that at least Ronald Reagan was not lying when he said we had the goods on, did this, who bombed this discotheque in, um, in Berlin.
All right.
So give me 45 seconds or 30, maybe, uh, real quick, um, how it would be like under what theory?
Well, I guess we'll have to wait.
When we get back from this break, I'm going to ask Ray McGovern about, uh, the theory if Kiev did it accidentally, uh, you know, what's the missing piece there?
Because if the rebels did it, then you could see how maybe they thought they were defending themselves from a Kievian jet, right?
Uh, from a Western, uh, Ukrainian government jet.
But, uh, if the Kiev government did it, who did they think they were shooting at?
Who, you know, was, who they were directing, who they knew was a civilian flight and was flying from West to East and all the rest of this anyway.
Uh, but that's on the other side of this break with Ray McGovern, veteran intelligence professional for sanity, which of course is asking a lot, but we're trying here.
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All right guys, welcome back.
And I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton show talking with Ray McGovern.
Where can we read the memo asks M strong in the chat room.
It will be on the anti-war blog very soon.
I think because I sent it, I emailed it to Eric and then I sent him an instant message saying I had emailed it to him.
So sorry, that is actually not good enough to make it happen yet.
But very soon, I promise at anti-war.com slash blog.
And then I'm sure what Ray, it'll go up at consortium news and where else do you know for sure it'll be on consortium news.com and then of course anti-war.com be on my website, which is Ray McGovern.com.
So it'll be around as soon as we get common dreams, we'll probably run it right.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Good deal.
So yeah, Ray McGovern for 27 years, he was a CIA analyst.
Now he's a peacenik and tried to truth us out of the last few wars to no avail.
Well, actually, I don't know.
He might've helped truth us out of the Iran war a couple of times there, Ray.
I appreciate that.
And sure.
As opposed to lying us into war, which seems to be the CIA's usual task.
And it seems like actually speaking of Iraq and all that last few wars, the CIA and they were a lot of individuals there.
And as an institution, they really did help the neocons in the administration lie us into war with Iraq.
But they took all the blame for it.
And that really pissed a lot of them off.
And they've been pushing back against Iran propaganda, Syria propaganda, now Ukraine propaganda ever since.
Isn't that about right?
Some are.
Yeah.
I don't feel any sympathy for those of my colleagues on the analysis end of things who let themselves be suborned into manufacturing evidence to deceive our congresspeople out of their constitutional prerogative to declare or otherwise authorize war.
That was the worst of it.
Since then, that was Iraq, of course.
Since then, some honest analysts have performed admirably on Iran in deciding back in 2007 that Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon in 2003.
That helped to prevent a war in Iran.
And then on Syria, late last August, as you'll recall, Obama had his guided missile destroyers, four of them, right in the eastern Mediterranean, ready to strike Syria, when finally General Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, jumped in together with some of my former colleagues who said, look, we're not going to do Iraq number two.
We don't have the evidence.
What you're hearing from John Kerry is not true.
He doesn't know that it was the Bashar al-Assad government that perpetrated the chemical attacks.
And indeed, largely because of folks like you and other people who stirred up the congresspeople and the people who were, congresspeople were at home, you know, it was August.
So people got to them.
The British even voted against war with Syria.
And finally Obama relented and he said, all right, General Dempsey, what do you suggest?
And Dempsey said, well, two things.
Number one, we have samples of that sarin gas and it's not the same as is in Syrian government stockpiles.
You might mention that.
And number two, we think that when push comes to shove, you could just say, look, we're ready to destroy Syria.
You want to, you want to say destroy, we're ready to strike Syria, but we don't have to do it today.
We could do it tomorrow or next week or next month.
And that indeed is what, what the president said in the Rose Garden on the 31st of August, less than 24 hours after John Kerry had pleaded for war on Syria, saying 35 times, I counted them, we know, we know, we know Bashar al-Assad perpetrated those chemical attacks.
In the event, I mean, after looking at all the evidence, including from the British and of course Sy Hersh, I know with 90% certainty that it was the rebels whom we knew had sarin and who had every bit of incentive to trip the red line wire that Obama had been foolishly encouraged to set so that the U.S. would come in with its military overtly and stem the losses.
Assad was winning this time last year.
He was driving the rebels out of this or that stronghold.
Quick, quick.
Clock's ticking, Ray.
We got to get back to Ukraine.
Yeah.
I know.
There's so many damn wars they try to lie us into.
I shouldn't have got us off track at first.
Let me ask you this.
It makes sense, just guessing, that, okay, the rebels thought they were being threatened by Ukrainian attack jet.
They had magically somehow, they had this missile nobody can find that they shot it down with, whatever.
At least you could see the, how they could have made that mistake.
But under what circumstances does it make sense that the Ukrainians mistakenly targeted this civilian plane and shot it down?
I don't get it.
Well, Scott, the Ukrainian armed forces are not known for their discipline, nor their sobriety, nor their professionalism.
It's altogether possible that this was mistakenly a shot from the kind of weaponry that we know Ukraine has.
Okay?
We don't know.
I don't care what Kerry says.
There's no evidence that I believe that those missiles were given to the separatists out there in the eastern Ukraine.
If, you know, if there's a chance, I'm willing to say, okay, hypothetically, if Russia gave them those missiles, you can be sure, Scott, that at least 30 military advisors went with each one of those missiles to make sure, to make ironclad sure, that this would not happen.
Okay?
That's a good point.
Who has the missiles?
The Ukrainians have the missiles.
What are we told by our former colleagues?
Well, indirectly, we've learned that there is satellite photography of a Buk, a SS-11 missile battery in the Ukraine within range of the plane that was going over, and we're told that the satellite photography not only shows distinctive Ukrainian uniforms, but also a bunch of beer bottles strewn all over the campsite.
They were the campsites strewn all over the missile base.
Okay?
Now, you know, that's not definitive, but if the Russians are right, and I see the Russians as, you know, letting Obama and Kerry have more and more rope, the Russians have already given some evidence to the international inspection team, and if they're right, if they can prove that that radar was turned on, the Ukrainian radar, and that there were Ukrainian batteries within range, well, I would think, most likely, it was a mistake, but I lean toward the interpretation that it was the Ukrainians that did it, that the U.S. knows that full well, and that's why the U.S. is prevaricating, charging the Russians with this heinous deed, knowing that it was their puppets in Kiev that were really responsible.
It all makes sense to me, if that's the interpretation.
Right.
Okay, now, I'm sorry, we're almost out of time for this segment, but I'm going to keep recording you into the commercial break here for just a moment, because I want to ask you two things real quick.
The first one is, I got an email from a guy asking, and it's a, it sounds silly, but it's a good question.
Is there some reason that the American government would have to believe that the Russian nuclear arsenal is somehow no longer a threat?
Are they?
I mean, not that they would necessarily be right, Ray, but do they think that now they have first strike capability, they're not worried about it, the Russians are pushovers, and we're just going to turn them into our little bitches, and that's the end of that?
Or is anyone in D.C. at the Council on Foreign Relations or inside the State Department or the National Security Council pointing out that these guys got thousands of H-bombs, and we can actually only push them so far without us getting into real trouble here?
What the hell?
I mean, this policy really does seem to be based from the premise of, well, we're not really worried about that anymore, right?
Well, Kerry has said precisely that.
They said, aren't you a little concerned about escalation of armed hostilities with Russia?
He said, oh, no, we've taken that into account.
Now put yourself in Putin's position.
He's the Secretary of State, dismissively, kind of nonchalantly say, oh, yeah, we take that into account.
Well, the answer to your question is no.
There's nobody sensible that believes that the Russian nuclear deterrent is inoperable.
But there are a lot of crazies out there, Scott, as we know, and what the tactic now, led by Bobby Gates, actually, when he was Secretary of Defense, see, the Poles and the Czech Republic, they didn't much care for being on the targeting end of these anti-ballistic missile systems, which are actually aimed at securing a first strike capability.
And Putin has said that.
And Bobby Gates says, yeah, the Russians are afraid of that.
But you know what?
I don't, I don't really worry about the Russians too much, OK?
So that's the attitude.
Now, if, if Ukraine went to NATO, if U.S. ships, upon which these missiles are now based because of innovations by, by Gates, he, he want to prevent the Czechs or the Poles from turning around saying, no, no, you can't have them here.
So that's why.
And Putin has said it's precisely this threat, even more than the nominal membership in NATO.
It's the threat that Sevastopol in Crimea, their main naval, their only warm water port, would become a NATO port, that these missile defense so-called assistance will be put there.
And Putin himself has, don't be deceived, we know these are offensive missiles.
We know that they're targeted on our, on our ICBMs to give the U.S. a first strike capability.
That is incredibly, incredibly dangerous because then it's launch on warning and we haven't been back there for about 35 years.
So what I wanted to ask you about is there's a major offensive going on now in the east by the Kiev government.
And yet John Kerry was on TV.
Did you see him this morning on CNN talking about a ceasefire?
I'm wondering if maybe they're concerned that they gave Kiev too long of a leash.
Barbara Starr was reporting that they're launching ballistic missiles with thousand pound warheads at Donetsk and that apparently the Pentagon was pretty concerned about this.
And I just wonder what you think about what's happening today.
Well, Scott, this is a really good question because unnoticed by the press was the president's speech where he talked about an outrage of unspeakable proportions.
Okay.
And he leaned toward the interpretation that the Russians were responsible.
He also said for the first time in weeks that a ceasefire would be a good idea, that we should have an immediate ceasefire.
Now that was the 17th.
So that's 12 days ago.
Now why is that significant?
Well, because for the previous 10 days, even though the head of Germany, the head of France, so Merkel and Hollande and Putin himself together had called several times for an immediate ceasefire and the U.S. said, no, Ukraine has the right to defend itself.
At least I might add parenthetically as the Israelis have, quote, the right to defend themselves, end quote.
And so the only supporter of any moment of the Ukraine going ahead with not renewing the ceasefire and starting a major offensive in the East was the United States of America.
So it's significant that on the 17th, the president said, yeah, immediate ceasefire.
Now I'm afraid that the president having said that and his puppet having completely disregarded it, that, how shall I say this, that the president of the United States appears rather hypocritical, would you say?
Because everyone knows, everyone knows that Poroshenko wouldn't brush his teeth without asking Obama or Kerry first.
So in answer to your question, the Ukrainians are just hellbent on doing away with the resistance in the East.
The U.S. is rhetorically in favor of a ceasefire.
Kerry said it again today.
But until they put the reins on Poroshenko, the carnage is going to keep going there and the refugees will be all pouring across the Russian border.
Right.
And then what?
Well, you know, Putin, in my view, and I've had some experience with Russian leaders, you know, he knows what the game is.
He's, I'm afraid, not only clever, but he looks into the future and he does not want to be provoked into invading Ukraine.
There are lots of ways that he could support those in the Ukraine that need his support.
And it looks like, you know, sort of a face-off there.
I'm not sure the rebels are being extinguished, as the Ukrainians say they're going to do.
And so this thing will be a low-intensity conflict for a while, unless, unless some of these photos and some of these other reports find their way into the Western press and the Western press says, well, you know, what really is going on here?
Are the Ukrainian authorities from Kiev really trying to put down something that can't be put down?
And why, after all, is it impossible to talk about a federal solution to this and a neutrality of the kind that Finland has?
Take away those plans to have the Ukraine join NATO.
Make sure that there's a ceasefire and then some talks.
That's where grown people act.
Adults get together around a conference table, whether it's in Geneva or Paris or, or wherever, and they talk the thing out.
And so the stakeholders need to do precisely that, because these things can be settled.
But not if, not if the real design is to sort of envelop Ukraine into the model that the IMS, IMF would like to see.
And if there actually are still designs to incorporate Ukraine together with Crimea and everything else into NATO, that is such a, that is such a red line for Russia.
I have to say that there would be war if we really tried to do that.
What's funny is if you wanted to be a kook about it, you could say it's Russian agents in the American government who are setting all this up to go ahead and give at least eastern Ukraine back to Russia, because that seems to be the most likely outcome of this crisis on the path that they're going down right now.
America's not going to get Ukraine.
Russia's going to get it back is what's going to happen here is at least that's, as you're saying, that's what they're trying to bait Russia into doing.
But how does that make any sense if what they're trying to do is expand NATO?
Yeah, the Russians don't want to bite off that, that piece of land.
You know, it resembles Iraq in some respects.
Most sane people said, okay, it's an artificial creation by the British and French way back, you know, 100 years ago or so.
But yeah, let's keep it all together.
Let's have a government in Baghdad, in this case, that would be receptive to sharing power with others.
Well, it didn't work.
And now it looks like that sort of thing is devolving into Kurdistan.
And the Shia and the Sunnis would have their own separate kinds of thing.
Now, the oil makes it crucial there with respect to Iraq.
So similarly, with respect to Ukraine, I don't know any sane people that think it's a good idea to break it in two.
Now, that may eventuate and may come to that.
But we have the power to prevent Poroshenko from going off half-cocked.
And right now, we've been reluctant to use that power, even though we piously call for a ceasefire.
Where is the ceasefire?
It's far from a ceasefire out that way, and we could prevent that from happening.
So if Kerry is serious about this, all he has to do is call up Poroshenko and say, all right, lay off.
We're going to go to talks.
We're going to talk this thing through.
And he hasn't done it, and he won't do it.
And I don't trust him.
All right.
Thank you very much, Ray.
My pleasure.
Appreciate it.
You're most welcome.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Ray McGovern.
We'll be right back.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
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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.
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