08/18/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And I'm happy to welcome Ray McGovern back.
He's a former CIA analyst for 27 years, including was the morning briefer for Vice President H.W. Bush in the Reagan years.
And before the Iraq war, he and some others co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, where they write memos to the presidents telling them what they need to know and what they may or may not be being told by their own national security staff.
And he's a peacenik.
He goes around giving speeches to your church or your group about peace and liberty and lots of other things.
And I mean, the USS Liberty and also peace.
And he writes at ConsortiumNews.com.
He has his own archive, of course, at Antiwar.com, where we would reprint anything you wrote for anybody anywhere.
And he's on the blog today about the USS Liberty.
Oh, no, it's an article today about the USS Liberty and and lots of other stuff.
And of course, he's really great on Ukraine.
And that's why he's on the show.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Ray?
Thank you, Scott.
Glad to be back with you.
Good deal.
Very happy to have you here.
And you know what?
Let me just talk about the USS Liberty for just a second here.
I can't let you go on by asking you questions and getting it started, because then we'll do a whole interview about the liberty.
And we've done lots of great interviews about the liberty in the past that people can look up.
But you do have a new piece here today.
It's a viewpoint at Antiwar.com.
That would be original.antiwar.com slash McGovern.
And it's called a USS Liberty Heroes passing.
And so before we get to Ukraine, can you just tell us very briefly?
And I think this audience, they know about the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 and how they got away with blue bloody murder and LBJ helped them and the rest of it.
And anyone who doesn't know, you can read this article.
But can you at least tell us just real quick, Ray, about this particular hero that you're talking about who recently died?
Sure.
He was a seaman.
He was 23 years old.
And his name was Terry Harbartier.
He came from Texas.
And he was on the liberty when liberty was strafed and napalmed and other things done to it.
The Israelis had been very careful to take out all the active antenna on the liberty so that no messages could get out.
But there was one inactive antenna on the port side of the ship.
And Terry knew about that.
And he knew that it had not been working but that he could maybe fix it.
So he slid out onto the napalm glazed deck there, attached a new cable to this transmitter, got it going, and the radio person got an SOS out.
And the Israelis intercepted the SOS immediately and broke off the attack.
He was honored 42 years later in Visalia, California, with a silver cross, which is the highest honor except for the Captain McGonigal who got the Medal of Honor.
Now, I went to that ceremony, and it was an incredibly moving performance, a moving ceremony, because I met some of his crew members.
And many of them had suffered deep, deep PTSD.
It was just very, very poignant.
And Terry made light of his heroism.
He said, well, you know, anybody could have done that.
I'm pretty good with bailing wire and that kind of thing.
So Terry died last week.
And it just seemed to me that since so many people are still ignorant of this cardinal event in recent U.S. history, where the State of Israel learned that it could literally get away with murder, indeed, murder of U.S. sailors, 34 of them, wounding 174, and that the administration in Washington, this time it was LBJ, and even the U.S. Navy, to his disgrace, would not make a peep out of how deliberate they knew this attack was.
We had the intercepted communications pilot to command this American ship that's got an American flag on it.
You still want me to hit it?
Hit it.
Hit it.
Well, and the fact that, yeah, I mean, the fact that most people have never even heard of this at all really goes to show you how twisted and how controlled the debate about Israel is in the United States, where you say USS Liberty and people go, huh?
Yeah, well, that's just it.
You know, one little footnote here.
I was speaking out in Springfield, Missouri, about seven years ago.
It was right after Mearsheimer and Walt's piece came out on the Israel lobby.
And I was asked about it.
What did I think about that?
And I said, well, I thought it was great.
You know, very courageous thing.
Small wonder that no one in the U.S. would publish it, but that I was confused.
And they said, why?
And I said, because neither of them mentioned the best example of the power of the Israel lobby, namely the USS Liberty shoot up.
And I looked at this audience of 300, Scott, and I said, how many people know about this?
Three people.
OK, 1%.
So that's an audience that came out to see you speak.
Yeah, it was 300 people.
And that's a pretty select audience compared to, you know, the general population.
So it's not like people who are uninterested.
But the last thing I'll say is that in the third row, I pointed out the man.
I said, now, sir, can you tell us to come up here and tell us or just stand there and tell us how you know about the USS Liberty?
This fellow stood up right straight.
He said, sir, Sergeant Bryce Lockwood, U.S. Marine Corps member, U.S. Liberty crew.
Well, so really only two because he kind of doesn't count.
Now, something else.
All right.
Listen, so and we've talked about this.
We do a thing about it on the anniversary every June.
I think we just did one a few weeks back.
And I will beg people go and look, just type in McGovern and Liberty, and you can read many, many great and detailed essays by Ray McGovern.
And if you go to my website, you can find not just interviews of Ray, but I have interviewed at least two, I think three survivors of the USS Liberty attack about their experiences there as well.
If you want to search that at Scott Horton dot org.
But we got to move on to Ukraine, Ray, because you've got a comparative advantage in the expert pundit economy when it comes to talking about what the heck is really going on over there.
We only have about two and a half minutes, I guess, before the break comes.
So I'll just ask you real quick, if you could, to please address the latest news about this convoy that supposedly humanitarian aid that has been destroyed a couple of times or hasn't or I don't know what.
Can you tell me?
Did I say it's a Russian convoy meant for the rebels in the east?
Correct.
Yeah.
It's been stranded just outside the border with Ukraine for about 10 days now, if memory serves.
Interestingly, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, at a press conference after the meeting with three other foreign ministers, namely France, Germany and Ukraine, he was optimistic.
He said we've overcome many of the obstacles that were launched preventing the arrival of this colonnade of supplies.
And he was saying, you know, it looked like what happened the next couple of days.
You know, there's many a slip between cup and lip.
The people who are waging war out that way, especially the Ukrainian government, which won't quit, can manage to screw up things there with that column of relief supplies blessed by the International Red Cross and now by the Ukrainian authorities.
So there are all kinds of possibilities for provocation here.
And this, indeed, if the Russian convoy gets shot up, God, I don't know how much more patience the Russians will have in the Kremlin before they resort to more extreme measures.
So that's where it stands.
We're not sure it's going to come in.
But Lavrov yesterday, you know, he is the foreign minister.
He seemed pleased that that was the one thing, that and one other minor thing, that this meeting, five-hour meeting of four foreign ministers, including himself in Berlin, achieved yesterday.
They did not achieve a ceasefire.
Poroshenko is saying we're going to plot ahead here.
We're going to actually reorganize our forces.
The draft is going to be introduced.
And worst of all, the foreign minister of Ukraine, who was at that meeting on Saturday, he has appealed for military aid from the United States, and other people have said we want Ukraine to join NATO, that is, Ukrainian lawmakers.
That is poison.
That's trouble.
We'll have to see how that plays out.
All right.
Hold it right there.
It's the great Ray McGovern, everybody.
Former CIA, now a peacenik.
And we're talking about Ukraine.
And we'll be right back on the other side of this break.
LibertyRadioNetwork.com, ScottHorton.org.
RayMcGovern.com, too.
I should have said that first, really.
Hey, y'all.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to The Thing here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern about the situation in Ukraine.
And, yeah, well, so, Ray, you mentioned NATO there and how these Ukrainian politicians are talking about how they want to join NATO.
There's recently in the Senate, I saw Pat Buchanan wrote an article about this, how the Republicans in the Senate are pushing a bill that would make Ukraine a major non-NATO ally.
And so it looks like, I mean, I don't know if that's Obama's policy or not, but it looks like it's going to happen.
But, well, what would that really mean if we never even mind NATO?
But what if we made an official alliance with Ukraine, Ray?
That'll just keep the peace, right?
No, right.
That is precisely what Sergei Lavrov, who was a Russian foreign minister back in February of 2008, what he said to our ambassador in Moscow, William Burns, was literally, Nyet means nyet, end quote.
That is the title that William Burns gave to his cable from Moscow, a top secret cable.
How did I know about it?
Because of WikiLeaks, because of Bradley, because of Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning.
The cable is right out there.
What happened was there were rumors that NATO was going to try to incorporate Ukraine and Georgia into NATO membership.
And so Lavrov called Bill Burns in and said, look, Bill, you know, nyet means nyet, and here are the reasons why.
And Burns dutifully reported that back to the State Department and gave the reasons why, and they were compelling.
Guess what?
That's the 2nd of February 2008.
On the 3rd of April 2008, in Bucharest, at the NATO summit, the decision was taken, declaration was made, Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO, period.
Now, that's when it all really got pretty itsy-bitsy with the Russians.
But the Ukrainians were so disorganized that it did not really pose much of a threat until the U.S. and the EU mounted a coup d'etat in Kyiv on the 22nd of February.
Kyiv, the new, what shall we call it, the junta, adopted a resolution to go toward the West in the EU with an associate membership.
And, of course, NATO normally follows that kind of thing.
So nyet meant nyet in 2008, and it means exactly the same thing this year.
Problem is, the problem is that not even Poroshenko, the titular leader of Ukraine, is in control of many of the fascists, many of the neo-Nazi right sector and svoboda forces that are leading the charge against the federalists, is what I call them, the Russian-speaking federalists out in the southeastern Ukraine.
So it's a real mess.
And unless the U.S., which is the only power that has enough influence to stop this carnage, unless the U.S. tells its puppets in Kyiv, look, do what you can, do what you can to rein these folks in, because everybody is against continuing this war.
The three foreign ministers that met with Lavrov on Saturday called again for an immediate ceasefire.
This has got to happen, an immediate ceasefire.
And guess what?
The answer is, here's Poroshenko.
This is 15 minutes old, Scott.
This is really interesting.
This is Poroshenko, the Ukrainian partisan, saying that we need to regroup Ukrainian military units involved in the operations to the east of our country.
Quote, today we need to rearrange these forces better to defend our country, and new military operations need to be done under new circumstances.
Well, does that sound like they're winning?
Not to me, it doesn't.
Depends on, Ray, what their objective is.
I mean, are they expecting to just completely have boots on the ground on every corner and just conquer these two pseudo-breakaway provinces?
Are they trying to force a capitulation, a surrender to their terms by these groups?
Or are they trying to just scare the hell out of them all so that they all flee across the border into Russia and stay there, and then they can eventually just take it the long way, like Israel and the West Bank?
Well, it's a combination, I think, Scott.
What's clear is that Kyiv and these fascists, it's not a secret.
The UN itself is called Svoboda's party leader, and they are Nazi.
These folks are out for cleansing this part of the Ukraine from pro-Russian separatists.
Now, what Lavrov pointed out at his press conference yesterday was that, look, we had a deal.
We had a deal on April 15th, and we also had a deal on July 2nd.
And the notion was to get a ceasefire.
The Ukrainian foreign minister agreed to that, this Limkin guy, okay?
And then what happens?
Well, they completely disregarded it and under the tutelage of the United States said, well, press forward.
What I was trying to get at before is that what happens now really depends on what happens on the ground.
It's very murky, but it's becoming increasingly clear to me that far from being defeated, the pro-federalist forces there, the ones that are opposed to the junta, to the coup that happened in February, they are not being defeated.
They're there for the long term.
Whether or not they get Russian aid, Lavrov, of course, disavows that, but I suggest some Russian aid is coming through.
So what needs to happen now is this very simple.
The aid convoy has to be led through under circumstances where it's not shot up.
Ceasefire has to be not only proclaimed or advocated by the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and Russia, it has to be implemented.
And if it's not, then the foreign ministers of Russia, of Germany, and of France will do what they agreed to do yesterday, and that is report back to their capitals and figure out what their leaders want to do.
Now, if Angela Merkel is still such a subservient puppet of Washington, that's trouble, because this is playing with fire.
The Russians know that the Ukraine is not going to be part of NATO or even going to be a danger to them on their southern border.
And so if Angela Merkel has no perspective on history and no sense for what the Russians consider their strategic national interests, and she kowtows to the likes of John Kerry, we're in for a really, really rough sledding.
Last thing I'll say on this, this is all coming to a head because the next NATO summit is happening in Wales, okay?
I find it really kind of neat that the Welsh will have a chance to learn how the U.S. welched on its promise to Gorbachev not to move NATO one inch to the east of Germany.
Twelve countries have been incorporated into NATO since that time, all to the east of Germany.
And now, still on the books, is the NATO declaration that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO.
We're going to have to see how they handle that.
I'm going to be in Scotland at the time.
That's as close as I can get to Wales.
But I'm going to be giving a whole bunch of talks to try to explain to people the genesis of this and how where we are now represents an incredibly tragic lost opportunity.
When the Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, we had Russians that we could deal with.
And instead of incorporating them and inviting them into what George H.W. Bush called a Europe whole and free, the powers that be, the powers that were, ostracized Russia.
We preferred to have an enemy.
And what we see now in a concrete reflection of, I think, what's at the bottom of this, all those French and German tank makers, I mean, like tanks for battle, they're overjoyed now because they're going to get a lot more business.
And that's at the core of this thing.
The people profiting from tensions with Russia are the people building, selling and repairing the weapons.
And that goes to a large degree, I'm convinced, to explain why people like Obama and people like Merkel don't have the guts to stand up to them.
Yeah.
You know, J.P. Soteli had a piece all about agribusiness and all of their huge investments in Ukraine and how important they are, Monsanto.
And I don't know if it was Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland or other others.
But anyway, and of course, Joe Biden's son, the vice president's son, is over there on the board of directors of an oil company.
Now, they decided they would just go ahead and be as obvious as they could for chuckles, I suppose, Ray, on that one.
Seems like they could have got his best friend the job or something like that.
But OK, go ahead, put his son on there.
You wonder where the shame is, you know?
Yeah, no, I mean, they don't even realize the term conflict of interest hasn't been used in Washington, D.C. in 30 years.
So they don't even know it's it looks wrong.
Right.
That appearance of impropriety, they don't even know.
I don't know.
But now, so let me ask you this, Ray, because God dang it, we're talking about the possibility of war.
I mean, you're talking about there's only so much that the Russian government can be expected to take before they actually do put their tanks in eastern Ukraine.
And then what?
So we're not you know, this isn't parlor games here.
We're talking about the most important issue in the world, America's relationship with Russia.
And so, you know, for all this talk about, oh, Obama plays three dimensional chess and always so smart and this and that.
Could you at least reassure me that these goofballs are even trying to calibrate this thing in from a point of view of just how far can we push this without pushing it too far?
Or is this really just some ridiculous imperial free for all where, you know, 100 people get their say and nobody has any kind of check on the policy, really?
It's just whatever Kagan's wife would.
What's the worst she can do for us here is the policy.
Is that it or what?
Well, that's it.
Pretty much, Scott.
You see how Victoria Noland, Kagan's wife, stirred up things on the Maidan early this year, how she gave out chocolate chip cookies spiced with I don't know what, but the crowds got out of hand very quickly thereafter, how she picked the new interim and now permanent prime minister of the junta in the Ukraine, Yatsenyuk.
So you can see that there's very little disguising of what we're up to.
Is Obama in control?
I don't think so.
I think the people running our policy are people like John Kerry, who is not the brightest star in the universe, and Noland, to whom he's deferring.
What worries me is that they can push Putin a little too far.
And the saving grace, as I see it now, and I refer specifically to a major speech that Putin gave in the Crimea last week, he's playing it cool.
He's trying to be on the side of the angels.
And with all due respect to Western leaders, Putin has been a calming influence on us.
No threats, not one.
He's just saying, look, this has got to stop.
And he's facing a little pressure in Moscow as well to do more.
But to us, there are 2,000 people killed in Ukraine now, in eastern Ukraine.
Well, there are 2,000 people killed in Gaza.
Right?
So, I mean, Palestinians.
So most Americans say, well, those are a long ways away.
You know, it's no skin off my back.
Well, it is.
It is off the Ukrainians' back and the Russians' back.
And what I see Putin trying to do now is get these relief convoys in and establish a presence there.
Lavrov said this is not going to be the only such request.
Unfortunately, they're going to need a lot more help and then try to tamp things down to the degree that once Kyiv realizes that it's not going to be able to cleanse the eastern part of the country from people who don't accept the junta, once Kyiv understands that and once Washington understands that, then they have the Germans, the French and the Russians as willing partners to do the sensible thing, talk the thing through as we used to do in the old days.
Go to Geneva, go to Paris, sit down around the table, get the stakeholders there and figure it out.
It's not impossible to figure out unless you have motives such as the neoconservatives still have and Obama's got to face those down.
Right.
Well, you know, the presence of Russian peacekeepers did not keep Mikhail Saakashvili from attacking South Ossetia back in 2008 and which, of course, provoked a full scale Russian response and the guaranteeing of the sovereignty of South Ossetia ever since then.
And so it seems like, you know, it'd be nice to think that if Putin, you know, goes ahead and puts this humanitarian aid across the border that, hey, Kyiv, you better quit shooting at least for a minute here because of what the consequences could be if, you know, any of their false claims actually come true that they destroy a convoy like this.
The Russians just might go ahead and occupy at least these two provinces.
And then, you know, I don't know.
I guess it's a high likelihood, but it's not a guarantee that the Ukraine putsch government in Kyiv will go ahead and call it quits then.
Just how far do they think their leash goes, really?
You know, if they think America has their back to do what they want.
Yeah.
Well, it's odd that you mentioned Georgia and Saakashvili because it was just a couple of months after that NATO decision in Bucharest in 2008 that Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO.
Saakashvili was listening to the wrong people in Washington.
Cheney and the rest of them said, yeah, I think I'll give the Russians a bloody nose.
And what happened to him?
He got a real bloody nose.
OK.
So all that's sort of connected.
And what we have now is people who are not really bright and have no sense of history.
And I include Angela Merkel and I include Obama and John Kerry and all that.
And so what needs to happen now is people need to face up to the fact that this has been allowed to get out of hand, that no one really has any genuine incentive to bringing this to the doorstep of Russia and threatening to open hostilities.
And with the Russians, if you put yourself in the Russians' seat, which nobody ever does in this side of the pond, you've got to look at how they gauge a guy like John Kerry.
Now, John Kerry at precisely this time last year almost got the U.S. into a war with Syria based on false intelligence.
Now, John Kerry is still sort of running things on the Ukraine.
When John Kerry was asked, are you not aware, Mr. Secretary, that this could end up in armed hostilities with Russia?
You know what he said?
Oh, yes, yes, we've taken that into account.
OK, you're a Russian now, right, Scott?
And you listen to that sort of thing and you say, my God, my God, these are the people running U.S. foreign policy?
We better be on our guard here because no bets are off.
Last thing I'll say is that the Russians have now called formally for the U.N. to investigate the downing of that Flight 17.
And that's good because there's a lot of stuff out there that cuts across the grain of all this John Kerry-inspired, Putin did it, Putin's fault, bad Putin, Putin no shirt on sometimes, rides on horse with no shirt on, bad, bad, bad Putin.
It's ridiculous, this propaganda.
And there's enough evidence now out there to persuade me that it's much more likely that it was the Ukrainians themselves that did this and it's the U.S. that's covering up for them.
Yeah, it's starting to look much more that way to me, too.
I guess it's not conclusive yet and there should be more and better investigation.
I don't really have much faith that the U.N. would be any better at this than anybody else, necessarily.
But yeah, it does seem like the original assumption, Occam's Razor answer, that it was some kind of mis-targeting accident by the Ukrainian rebels seems to have been pretty well debunked by now.
And yet it does seem there were fighter jets in the air being flown by the coup government in Kiev.
So sure looking that way, Ray.
Yeah, one of these things, Scott, to keep in mind is that the Russians handed over their evidence four weeks ago or three weeks ago.
In other words, the proper authorities have copies of the intercepts, of the photography, of the things that the Russians are relying on to accuse the Ukrainians of having done this.
The U.S. has, to my knowledge, handed over nothing.
And the suspicion, I suppose, could be, and this is not anti-U.S. to raise this, is that there isn't any, that there is no good evidence, that the good evidence that the U.S. surely has points in the opposite direction to what John Kerry has been protesting too much about, namely that it's all Putin's fault.
Right.
All right.
Well, I've kept you way over time here.
Thank you so much for your time again on the show, Ray.
I sure appreciate it.
You're most welcome, Scott.
All right, y'all, that's the great Ray McGovern.
He's at raymcgovern.com, consortiumnews.com, original.antiwar.com, slash McGovern.
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