08/12/15 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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Ray McGovern from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and ConsortiumNews.com and RayMcGovern.com.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
I'm very happy to have you back on the show.
Oh, I should tell people that back when you were a CIA officer, oh, I should mention that he's a former CIA officer.
That's why the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity thing there.
Back when he was a CIA officer, expert and boss of experts on the Soviet Union back in the days of the Cold War.
Real expert on Russia, Ukraine, and America's interests and interventions in Eastern Europe and the rest of it.
And that's why I got you here.
I want you to tell me everything you know about what is going on recently and that is important between America and Ukraine and Russia.
And I guess, give me the bad news first, please.
Well, the bad news looks like the forces that would like to see Minsk 2 dead seem to be prevailing this week.
Now, that's the supposedly prevailing peace treaty that we have right now.
Yeah, the arrangement there dated February 12th, where Poroshenko was faced down by Putin and some of the allies and agreed to pull heavy armor, heavy artillery and tanks away from a disengagement zone there next to the Donbass.
And also to start negotiating a regional settlement, some kind of regional autonomy for the folks there in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Now, that has been faltering all along.
One of the interesting things here is that the right sector, proto-fascists, have been dead set against Poroshenko dealing with Russia or even abiding by Minsk 2.
And he's been trying, it seems, but it seems that they're very strong.
And this is my best guess as to why he doesn't feel capable.
You have the right sector and then the wrong sector.
The wrong sector, I would say, is Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.
She's got it wrong about Ukraine.
What she doesn't understand is that everything that her puppets there, including the right sector, try will be matched in force by Russia.
This is Russia's neighborhood.
I don't really understand how someone like Victoria Nuland, arrogant as she is, can't see that Russia holds the upper hand in that part of the world.
And you know, this right sector thing, it's sort of like the Al-Shabaab, where they're the smallest, weakest part of the Islamic Court's union until Bush smashed it and turned them into the only, you know, worthy fighting force.
They're the youth.
That's what Shabaab means, the youth, the young guys who are angry enough and have rifles enough to do something about it, who then grew up and became a much more powerful force in opposing and throwing out the Ethiopians.
Same kind of thing.
Where right sector was, come on, a street gang, basically, with a little kind of Sinn Fein political unit.
But they're basically a bunch of toughs and thugs, but, you know, street toughs, not battlefield tested, you know, and trained by American special forces and all kinds of things.
We're really creating a Nazi army over there, right?
Tell me I'm overreacting.
Well, we are training whomever we're training.
Well, they say they're training the National Guard, but who's the National Guard?
It's the right sector.
You know, John Conyers, to his credit, tried to introduce legislation saying that we're not, we shall not arm and train the Azov Brigade.
Now Azov Brigade is openly right sector, proto-fascist, the swastikas, even a spare, get this, Confederate flag every now and then seen in their, where they meet.
So these are bad apples.
And you know, when, when the coup took place, the most blatant coup in human history, according to George Friedman of Stratfor, on the 22nd of February, 2013, the right sector folks having been trained by some special units in Poland and elsewhere, the National Endowment for Democracy and so forth, put $5 billion into Ukraine over the previous years.
So yeah, they're a ragtag group of thugs, but they're organized now.
And they and other similar thinking folks led the putsch, led the coup d'etat in, in February 22nd of 2013.
And now they're sort of the spear point out there in the Eastern Ukraine.
You know, and they're kind of ideologues, they're sort of like Newland herself.
And how they think, you know, how they think that they can move their lines forward and kill a whole bunch of people in Donetsk and Luhansk without the Russians retaliating.
Well, you know, maybe that's what they want.
Maybe their, their aim is to get Russia in, in a bigger way, thereby able to blacken Putin still more and turn it into a wider conflict.
You know, you and I don't think that's a good idea, but sometimes this mirror imaging can get us into trouble.
Maybe that's what they want.
Yeah, well, and you know, it's been quite, quite a while.
And as you mentioned before, I guess there's been a few different statements along these lines and, and even, you know, protests and whatever waged where the right sector have basically said, you know, hey, parliament, you don't rule us.
I guess one of their members, one of their leaders is a member of parliament, but you know, as you've said, they've said many times, they're not bound by Minsk.
And in fact, one of their leaders was quoted and not by the Russian press either.
I forget who it was now, but it wasn't, I think it was the Brits saying that, well, what are you going to do about it?
We overthrew the last government.
You think we can't overthrow you?
And so, you know, they've kind of created this essay here and are they going to have the army crush it or are they going to let it run wild or what are they going to do?
You know, it's threatening the parliament itself now.
Well, that's right.
The folks in parliament, you know, they, they kind of take their orders from Victoria Nuland and Poroshenko, but not the right sector folks.
And as you point out, there are right sector and other fascist type folks in that parliament.
So, you know, it's a real, it's summer, of course.
This is when military offenses take place.
But I'm at a loss to think that Poroshenko is doing this of his own accord.
I rather think that he's being forced into it by the right sector folks who, you know, are, you know, as, as a bunch of thugs that they are, they've been trained pretty well now.
And they're probably a bit more of a match for the Ukrainian ordinary soldiers than anyone else.
And I don't think Poroshenko really has control of the situation now.
And that's perhaps why Putin and the Russians are, are not threatening right away, but they're expressing extreme concern.
And it's not Putin's practice to threaten.
He'll just do it, you know, and then the flag will go up and Dr.
Strangelove, I mean, Breedlove there or General Breedlove there at NATO will say, aha, see, the Russians are invading Ukraine again.
You know, I just read a thing in the Washington Post and actually someone sent along the link because it had a trial balloon about, well, maybe they need to go ahead and cut their losses about Donetsk and Luhansk in there.
It's just a little bit, it was a very hawkish article that had a little bit of a kind of teaser like that in there.
But at the same time, they said, well, according to NATO, there are, I forgot, five or six thousand Russian troops inside eastern Ukraine right now.
Come on.
They've said that 15 times since the coup, since, you know, starting, I guess, after the seizure of Crimea.
So, you know, a month after the coup or whatever, they've claimed that over and over and again, a dozen times or more that the Russians have invaded with thousands of infantry.
They never provided the slightest proof of that.
But that's, you know, the conventional narrative now is, I guess, that the the eastern portions of Ukraine are already occupied by Russia that and the Russians, I guess, mean to go ahead and take them.
I think your interpretation that if that happens, we could see what it's a reaction to right now.
But hang on one sec.
Right.
We'll be right back.
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All right, Joe, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern.
Former CIA officer turned peacenik.
And working on the Ukraine problem here.
Boy, we're in real trouble here.
Ray, they're talking about expanding the training to Ukraine's entire army.
They already have thousands of trainers there.
Right.
And not just Americans, but Australians and Brits.
And I forget who else.
But it doesn't sound like much of a stretch to think Americans could get killed in this thing.
And then what might happen?
And by the way, you also have Americans of stature saying, well, we need to be sending Russians home in body bags.
I wonder if you think that they're completely crazy.
Is there something in the water in Washington, D.C., or just what in the world is going on here?
I mean, this is Americans.
Even on this show, I hardly pay any attention to this story.
When it's obviously the most important thing that ever happened since the Cuban Missile Crisis or something.
What in the hell?
Well, you got that right, Scott.
You got that right.
And I think that, you know, that somebody did put something in the water here inside the beltway about 12 years ago.
How else do you explain this craziness?
I'll tell you some insights that I've gotten from kind of putting some papers back in filing.
I was reviewing a YouTube video of General Wesley Clark when he was running for president, October 2007.
Have a clip here if you want me to play it.
Well, I think it's not necessary.
I just want to stick out one little clip here where he says, you know, I talked to Paul Wolfowitz after the successful attack on Iraq, Desert Storm, January, February of 1991.
And he said that the biggest lesson that was learned there is that we can do what we want and post-Soviet Russia, quote, won't stop us, end quote.
I don't have that clip.
That'd be a good one.
Now, that's October 2007.
OK, so that's the lesson they thought they'd learned.
Now, when the US attacked Iraq on false pretenses, on false pretenses, on false pretenses, you know, I never thought I'd feel any nostalgia for the Soviet Union.
But I knew full well from my 50 years now of studying Russian history and Soviet history that we probably wouldn't have felt we could do that if there were a Soviet Union around and if the Soviet Union or Russia reacted more sharply to what we did in 1991 against Iraq.
So that's the geopolitical situation that exists now.
Now, General Clark has come up in other connections.
And I have in front of me here a draft non-paper from the hand of George Soros, I should say, from the computer of one of his secretaries.
And here's a chapter one here, paragraph one, General Wesley Clark, Polish General Szypaktek, and a few specialists under the auspices of the Atlantic Council will advise President Poroshenko how to restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement.
Right.
OK, so here he is, Clark showing up there, training these folks.
Now, I don't want to be too caustic here, but we really trained up those Iraqi troops real swell, didn't we?
I mean, Petraeus saying, wow, you know, 300,000 crack troops now we have.
And what happened a year ago?
A year ago, June, they ran away when ISIL started firing a couple of AK-47s at them and they left all their U.S.-given equipment behind.
That's why ISIL is such a force as it is now.
In other words, the Ukrainian Nazis, they're mean enough that they can pick on the Ukrainian people and they're mean enough that they can pick a fight with the Russians.
They can't stand against the Russians.
Come on.
They can't.
But you've got Clark and you've got others saying, yeah, we can train these guys.
And then we go back to MSNBC and CNN and the others and say these these trainings are going great.
And then you'll see who profits from this.
Now, tension is good for business.
War, even better.
And the people in control of our government and foreign policy have no, keine Ahnung, because the Germans, they don't have any concept of what war is like because they never served, most of them.
And they don't think they can ratchet up this stuff into a situation where the Soviets or the Russians will come in.
And then, as you say, one of these trainers is going to get killed and then the mainstream media is going to have a free for all.
Not only that, but you probably remember, since we're mentioning mentioning Wesley Clark, he said, you know, we ought to start rounding up Americans who are dissenting against our.
They should be looked on as subversives.
This is about two weeks ago.
So we have not only fascism being supported in Ukraine, but incipient fascism being supported by the likes of four star general, former NATO commander, General Wesley Clark, a Democratic presidential candidate.
And, you know, what Americans don't realize is that we started, OK, it's clear as day.
You know, everybody's entitled to their own opinion.
Not everybody's entitled to their own facts.
I had a had an example of how abysmal the ignorance is on this subject.
When I was attending a little seminar with very progressive people and a professor here from one of the universities in Washington said, you know, my son came home from Sunday school with a nice little placard that he made and it said, Putin, haven't you heard thou shalt not kill?
And she smiled and everybody else smiled.
And I said, you know, skunk at the picnic that I am Scott.
I raised my head.
Well, what's the illusion there?
She's Crimea, of course.
Crimea.
I said, well, how many how many people will kill them?
Well, a hundred, probably thousands.
I said, would you believe none?
Would you would you believe zero?
Oh, no, no, I can't believe that.
Of course they can't believe that because they never hear that in the mainstream media.
So what we have here is a situation where the media is really, really abysmal.
Now, I had one very unusual chance to point that out to The Washington Post, which is the worst on this, worst bar none, although Post Second, The New York Times.
What happened was Joe Lieberman wrote an article three Sundays ago.
Okay.
And he said, Putin attacked Ukraine without provocation.
And so I wrote this little thing and I was shocked that it got in.
I said, you know, the Post article starts with Putin had an early plan to annex Crimea.
This was an article back in March before McCain.
Now that article described, quote, a secret meeting Mr.
Putin held on February 23, 2014, during which, quote, Russia decided it would take the Crimea peninsula, end quote.
So that's the report in The Post.
Okay.
Now I pointed out that there was no mention of what happened the previous day.
And most of your listeners will know this, but they are in a minority.
What happened the previous day is what George Friedman called the most blatant coup in the history of mankind.
Okay.
So the fact that Putin got his national security advisors together on the 23rd and planned what they should do about Crimea is no surprise.
We would have done exactly the same thing.
And to their credit, I suppose I'd have to give them credit for printing my article because it directly criticizes what The Post had put in there before.
But the whole thrust here of what I'm trying to say is that what we have is a reaction, a reaction on the part of Russia to what they warned us would be Nietzsche.
Okay.
Nietzsche.
Uh, when rumors started circulating in January of 2008, okay.
What's that?
Seven years ago that Ukraine and Georgia would be folded into NATO.
Uh, the Russians went crazy and Lavrov, who was foreign minister then, as well as now, called Bill Burns, our ambassador to Moscow, and he said, look, he says, you know what Nietzsche means?
Nietzsche means Nietzsche.
If you even think about putting Ukraine in NATO, we will be, we will be obliged to, to consider out what we're going to do.
And there would likely be a civil war in Ukraine.
So Nietzsche means Nietzsche.
Okay.
That was February 1, 2008.
April 2, NATO decides in its wisdom, Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO, that's a direct quote.
Now, how do I know that our ambassador in Moscow was warned so, so, so specifically?
Well, I know it because Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, leaked a whole bunch of state department cables.
If I've read one from Moscow, I've read about a thousand.
Okay.
And this one was titled, to his credit by ambassador Burns, Nietzsche means Nietzsche, Moscow's red line on Ukraine.
Wow.
Now that's good.
That's the first I've heard of that one too.
Yeah, you can download it.
It was right around this time that Vladimir Putin himself said, Hey, look, my soldiers could walk to Kiev in two weeks.
Does anyone doubt that?
That was a little later.
Yeah.
Oh, a little later.
I, that's pretty explicit language.
That's sort of like saying, you know what, you could try to overthrow the government in what Toronto, who the hell rules the, who the hell rules the Canadians, you could try to overthrow them, but we won't let you, you can try to bring them into your military alliance, but we will invade and occupy the place, want to make a bet.
And then that sound like what American policy would be if anybody was messing with the Canadians independence from our empire.
Yeah.
Well, you see, we have a Monroe doctrine that allows us to do that.
Now, Russia, they don't, I'm being facetious.
Oh, they never had a president Monroe.
Well, that's their problem then.
It's a big loophole in international law.
They've never heard of.
Well, Putin has made it very explicit.
He said, quote, we will not allow it.
End quote.
And they are in a position, you know, they have the high cards, as I said before, they have the high geographic strategic economic, they have all kinds of high cards there, and I can only, you know, I suspect that for the likes of Victoria Newland and some of these Dr.
Strangelove characters we have in the military, that they just as soon have a little outburst of hostilities, not, not even, not even considering the escalation that that could lead to and the dangers for a really hot war, as well as a cold war once again with Russia.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the real thing of it too, is that especially going back to the Nazis here, is that these are guys who we've outsourced a lot of our decision making to them, not just to Poroshenko and the parliament, but these independent militias who, you know, walk around with their 88s and 14s and SS lightning bolts and swastikas and praising Hitler and all this kind of stuff and, you know, make a very plain who they are.
And they're just the exact wrong kind of party that you want in a situation like this.
Not only are we messing around with, you know, Russia's backyard, quote unquote, so to speak, sphere of interest, their most important neighboring nation, but we're doing so with complete wild cards in the deck here.
And of course, H-bombs at the ready.
Yeah, it's not a pretty picture.
I would hope that Angela Merkel and Hollande, who have a big stake in this now, they're part of Minsk, right?
I would hope that they would lean on Poroshenko because I don't think Washington is.
Maybe, maybe the president wants to, but maybe he'd have to ask, mother, may I to Victoria Nuland?
They need to tamp this thing down because Nazi, they should have a little bit of experience with what happens when fascism takes over, right?
And they need to just step up and play a bigger role.
All right.
With that, I'll let you go.
Thanks very much for coming back on the show, Ray.
Appreciate it.
Most welcome.
All right, so that's the great Ray McGovern, veteran intelligence professional for Sanity, a regular writer at ConsortiumNews.com and check out his everything at RayMcGovern.com.
That's it for the show.
Overtime.
See you tomorrow.
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