08/24/16 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

I love Bitcoin, but there's just something incredibly satisfying about having real, fine silver in your pocket.
That's why Commodity Discs are so neat.
They're one-ounce rounds of fine silver with a QR code on the back.
Just grab your smartphone's QR reader, scan the coin, and you'll instantly get the silver spot price in Federal Reserve Notes and Bitcoin.
And if you donate $100 to The Scott Horton Show, he'll send you one.
Learn more at Facebook.com slash Commodity Discs.
CommodityDiscs.com.
All right, y'all.
Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org is the website.
Check out all the archives there, sign up for the podcast feed, and follow me on Twitter at ScottHortonShow.
Okay, introducing our good friend Ray McGovern.
He was a CIA analyst, a Soviet expert back in the days for 27 years.
He's the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and his full-time work in retirement is truthing you out of war, as best he can anyway.
And he writes regularly at ConsortiumNews.com.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you?
Thank you, Scott.
Doing well.
Good, good.
Happy to have you here.
A lawless plan to target Syria's allies.
And everybody, I'm sure you saw the headline about former acting CIA director Michael Morell and what he had said on the Charlie Rose show about, yeah, we need to start killing some Iranians and killing some Russians.
But I had totally missed this, Ray.
He went back.
Charlie Rose brought him back on the show to give him what you call a mulligan.
You didn't really mean to say that, right?
Why don't you go ahead and restate what it was that you said, which surely wasn't what you actually said, but what you meant to say.
Go ahead there.
And then, so what did Michael Morell have to say after that, Ray?
Well, let me just reflect the obsequiousness of this introduction here.
He's saying, look, tell me what you really meant to say, Mike, because, well, perhaps you didn't speak as precisely as you should have, or perhaps I didn't ask the right questions, Morell.
No, no, Charlie.
You always ask the right questions, end quote.
You get a lot of flavor for this thing.
Yeah.
So, so you're rightly.
You're a regular Tim Russert, Charlie.
You're doing great.
Yeah.
Now, I would have missed this second, what I call a mulligan, you know, do over had I not had so many people sending me information that I always read and they tipped me off to this.
And I, there's no transcript for this thing.
They just wanted to get it on a record, right?
So I had to go through the thing and sort of translate from or at least transcribe it.
And it was not very different from the one that he gave initially on the 8th.
This one is nine days later.
It's on the 17th of August.
So in this follow up thing, Rose asked Morell to explain what he really meant.
Did he really meant that to send, did he really mean to send the US special forces to kill Russians and Iranians?
No, says Morell.
I'd be, I'd be quite satisfied if the US sponsored moderate opposition in Syria.
Did that, did that killing for us?
And as far as the US Air Force, the only thing I want, what I think is it would be, quote, an okay thing would be for them to, to bomb, you know, installations that are close to Assad.
He talks about, this is interesting, shows a level of intellectual or a level of experience on a guy like him.
He says, Charlie, look, we go in in the middle of the night, okay, a very, very, very limited US airstrike against, well, against his presidential aircraft, but against his helicopters, against his installations.
And what you do is you, you go in, in the middle of the night, right?
Just to send them a message and get his attention.
And then maybe his days are numbered.
Well, maybe, maybe Morell doesn't know that the Russian supplied anti-aircraft systems, missile defenses.
We ought to tell him, like, hey, they work during the night.
They work during the night.
So you want US, US Air Force.
Wait, wait, wait, Ray, breaking news.
You're telling me radars can see in the dark?
Well, now, I hope I haven't exceeded my classification.
Man, you're going to get in trouble.
I think you can see that on the web, actually.
So this is the level of discussion.
We're going to, he says twice.
So in the middle of the night, right, Charlie?
In the middle of the night, that's what we do.
And that, that will sort of scare him, as he said in the first interview.
Scare him.
Well, all he really means by the nighttime thing is that's when we know Assad is in bed.
So we're not going to kill him.
We're just going to blow up his helicopter so that when he wakes up in the morning, he'll be worried over breakfast.
Am I interpreting that right, you think?
Yeah.
But in this, in the nighttime.
You're right, though, that, yeah, American planes will still get splashed right out of the sky by Russian SAMs.
Well, he doesn't know about that, you see.
He's going to go, you know, this reminds me of the old saw about when Armstrong stepped on the moon and the Mongolian Space Agency had a press conference and they said, our astronauts are going to go and step on the sun in just two weeks.
And the correspondent said, well, don't you think it'll be a little, a little too hot to land on the sun?
And he said, I'm glad you asked that question.
We're going to go in the middle of the night.
So here's here's Morrell, he's going to go in the middle of the night and start a war with Russia.
Give me a break.
Hey, this is the acting director of the CIA.
Look, this is a conversation I'm just having with Daniel Lazare, your colleague at Consortium News a minute ago about, you know, F-22s being scrambled to threaten Syrian planes over Syria and claiming self-defense and a consensus in D.C. that this all makes sense, even though none of it makes any sense, Ray.
This is I mean, look, I know that the neocon Max Boot is always going to take the side of, you know, against the Shiites no matter what.
Right.
Because he's an agent of influence for Israel.
That's pretty easy.
But what about the rest of them?
It's so well, the Russians got H-bombs.
That's my point.
The only conclusion is that there's something in the water here in Washington that makes people all crazy.
And this would would be funny were it not so serious.
This morning we have Turkish tanks invading Syria.
Their priority, of course, is the Kurds.
There are all kinds of players in this.
And I hate to say it, but those people that are advising Obama, they don't know which end is up.
They can't understand this.
The only thing they can understand, as you alluded to obliquely before, is what Israel wants, what Israel says.
And Israel wants bedlam in Syria.
And they've certainly got that.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I don't know exactly where this originates or what, but it's so beneficial to all war parties when even still more, you know, a decade and a half into this, the enemy still is radical Islam, which is a great way of saying, I refuse to define my enemy and I reserve the right to switch sides back and forth all I want in this sectarian civil war that America started.
It's tearing the entire Middle East apart because, oh, yeah, radical.
That's that's the problem.
We don't need to define who's bin Laden night and who are there, you know, Shiite deadly enemies.
They're just they're a bunch of Muslims.
They're a bunch of radicals.
They're all just as dangerous as each other, even though actually, no, Iran hasn't done anything to America other than overthrow the fascist sock puppet government that we had installed in power over them.
But even then, that was 35 years ago.
Yeah.
You know, Scott, you may have missed this because it appeared in some obscure thing here, but the Russian ambassador in Tehran, OK, he commented that he referred specifically to not morale by name, but an ex CIA official has recently said in an interview with CBS that the Iranians and Russians in Syria should be killed.
Only terrorists say something like that, period, end quote.
Well, there's no exception from the definition of terrorism for the sole exceptional or indispensable country in the world.
If we're going to talk about terrorism as the use of violence for a political end, well, what's more what's more clear than trying to frighten, scare Assad by bombing his helicopters and his personal vehicles and his installations in the middle of the night, just in the middle of the night.
Oh, only in the middle of the night, though.
You know.
Right.
That's just going to lead to a doubling of Hezbollah and Iranian support this whole time.
It's not like, you know, there's that great new article at War on the Rocks about Sunni Shia this and DC mythology about it, where he talks about how, hey, the Iranians weren't in Syria cleansing all the Sunnis out.
They are here to help defend the Syrian state in the war that America and its allies started against them.
So it's, you know, Ray McGovern and Scott Horton don't have to have any love for Hezbollah or Iran whatsoever or or approval for their policy of intervening in Syria to simply point out that, look, what they're doing there is in reaction to the war that we started there.
This isn't, oh, the Shiites decided to declare war on all of the Sunnis of Syria and kill them all.
But why do we decide all that, Scott?
You know, it's, you know, for the normal American who's subjected to, you know, the mass media, it's really difficult for them to understand if they take an honest look at these things without indicating, going back to 1996, that there was a blueprint for all this to destroy all these countries, Iraq, Syria, Libya, even more.
And you know why?
Well, that blueprint was finetshinyahu, it was called a clean break.
And most of the academics, so to speak, who worked on that were Americans.
So this is the definition.
This is the acting out of that policy.
Now, why does Israel want Syria to fall apart?
Well, because the only way that Hezbollah can get resupplied in the arms it needs is to repel Israeli attacks on Lebanon is through Syria.
And Assad lets them do that.
Most of them come from Iran.
So there's a legitimate, if you can call it that, concern on the part of Israel that if they don't stop this, if they don't make sure that Assad's government falls, then this resupply will continue and the Israelis will be constrained, just as they were constrained a couple of years ago when Hezbollah beat them pretty badly.
Now, I'd like to talk, you talked about definition.
Well, how do you define, quote, the moderate opposition?
Now, Morrell uses moderate opposition six times in one paragraph.
So what did what did the president say on August 11th, two years ago, 2014, quote, he's talking to Tom Friedman, no, no progressive Tom.
With respect to Syria, said the president, the notion that arming the rebels would have made some sort of difference has always been a fantasy, period, end quote.
Whoa.
So the progressive or the moderate rebels are a fantasy, according to President Obama.
And yet here, Morrell is talking about them six times in one paragraph as the answer to this answer to this terrible problem.
OK, now, you know, what did they do?
Come out of the tomb like Lazarus after two years and say, oh, now we're ready to go again.
The Pentagon laughs at this.
They tried to arm moderate opposition and what they do, all but five, all but five after spending 100 million dollars or more, all but five turn their arms over to to some of the real terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and its successors.
What about CIA?
Well, they have a problem.
They have a problem because they can't take these, quote, moderate opposition forces and quote out from under Al Nusra, which the Russians and the Americans have already agreed are legitimate targets because they're real, real radicals, real terrorists.
So so here the US and Russia's start to bomb Al Asram, where there are some some some U.S. finance terrorists and the CIA says, there are guys, depending on sort of smiles and sort of keeps his mouth shut.
It's crazy.
The whole thing is crazy.
What needs to happen is what Obama, to his credit, and Putin and their foreign foreign minister and their and their secretary of state are trying to work out some kind of deal where they can identify where the bad guys are, separate whatever moderate opposition there is.
The Russians keep asking, where are they?
Tell us where they are on the map and we won't bomb them.
And they can't tell them where they are because they're all mixed in with the really bad guys.
So the moderates and the really bad guys intertwined in such a way that there's a real conundrum here.
How are you going to bomb them without bombing some of our quote assets?
Some of you know that the US is still saying that even though even though Jabhat al-Nusra has changed their name and supposedly broken from al-Qaeda that I believe the State Department said that, no, they're not buying it and that, you know, Al Nusra, which is now called Jabhat al-Sham or whatever, that no, they're still the enemy.
And this is, I guess, you know, like you're saying, sort of still a gray area in terms of, you know, working with the Russians to bomb.
America's certainly not bombing.
The CIA is still supporting them in the in the war in Aleppo right now, although they're, I guess, talking about maybe working with the Russians to bomb them.
But I don't know, Ray, if maybe you just haven't been persuaded enough by the awesome new public relations piece that al-Qaeda put in The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald's Intercept, where Murtaza Hussein interviews the spokesman for the new rebranded al-Qaeda in Syria, where the guy says, oh, yeah, no, the al-Qaeda thing, that was kind of in the past and we've decided to move on to a new stage where we're going to be more moderate and get along with people better and, yeah, you know, we're not necessarily renouncing our past or anything, but, you know, it's cool.
And Murtaza Hussein's like, oh, yeah, that's very interesting.
Next question.
No tough follow ups.
I swear I couldn't believe it.
I swear I could have been reading this thing in The Washington Post last night when I when I was looking at this.
And then so but that makes me think that, well, we're on the Petraeus plan here.
Here pretty soon, maybe not Obama, maybe Hillary's administration is going to go ahead and say, OK, Jabhat al-Sham has, even though they really have not.
But let's go ahead and pretend that they have completely broken from al-Qaeda and they are now the moderates, especially compared to those extremists in ISIS.
And so this way, we don't have to, you know, futz around trying to define the moderation of al-Zinki or al-Sham.
We'll just go ahead and and call al-Qaeda the moderates now, like Petraeus wanted to do a year ago.
And then and we'll have the intercept to run interference for us.
Yeah, I haven't seen that intercept thing yet.
But, you know, there's a raging dispute between the Pentagon on the one hand and the CIA on the other as to what to do now.
Hillary's plan is very, very similar to Michael Morell's plan.
No coincidence there.
Michael is certainly trying to get a job in the new administration.
And so if Hillary is elected, you can you can expect this full bore.
Now what's the problem here?
The Russians, the Russians are not going to let Assad fall.
The Iranians, they're not going to do it either.
It's their neighborhood.
And so if President Hillary Clinton orders someone in the stripe of John Allen, who ranted at the DNC convention to go ahead, go ahead and knock out just in the middle of the night, by the way, just in the middle of the night, knock out some facilities in Damascus, there's going to be U.S. plane losses, aircraft down, they're going to be people captured.
It's going to be pretty bad.
Russia's not going to allow it.
What's the difference between this year and this time last year, when the Russians were sending in all kinds of material, aircraft and so forth, but had not yet told Obama at the U.N., look, Mr. President, we're really not impressed by your gains against ISIS.
We're going to do it ourselves.
And meanwhile, we've been invited in in a constitutional and internationally legal way by the government, not the regime, but the government of Syria.
And we're going to do what's necessary, Mr. President.
It's up to you whether you cooperate or not.
Now, to his credit, I would add, Obama said, all right, I'll have Kerry talk with Lavrov and we'll work it out.
At least we won't shoot each other down over Syria and we'll do as much progress as we can make.
And they made some progress, but, you know, without a full hearted attempt at identifying who these moderate rebels are and separating them from al-Nusra and from other bona fide terrorists, it ain't going to work.
And who's not making it work?
Well, the people who want perpetual carnage in Syria.
And those people have to be not quite human, because the human tragedy here is what should be uppermost in everyone's mind.
People care about children, people care about people.
Well, every other person in Syria has lost their their home or their their place of residence.
You know about the refugees.
This thing is so it's so urgent that all this playing around with moderate and and bad guy rebels, it ought to stop.
And it's within the power of the United States to stop it.
Russia is trying its best.
Russia has a special problem.
Now, don't forget that Russia is much closer to Syria than the United States is.
Russia has a real problem with insurrections, with terrorists in its soft underbelly there in the Caucasus and Transcaucasus.
And so when I'm sure when Putin approached Obama at the UN, he said, look, you know, you guys can look beyond the sea there.
We can't.
Five thousand, five thousand Russians have gone to be trained, equipped and really, really ready to do terrorism.
What's going to happen when they come back to Russia?
That's something we have to worry about, Mr.
President.
You don't.
So we have skin in this game.
Please cooperate.
Let's see if we can get some sensible resolution.
Kerry is fighting an uphill battle opposed by Ash Carter and everybody else, because, you know, in the end analysis, war is pretty good for business.
Peace.
Very bad for business.
Depending on which business you're in.
But, yeah, war is good for my business.
But I just go just as soon go ahead and go bankrupt and get a real job.
Well, you know, I don't think they're going to keep me, you know, plenty with plenty of work to do from now on.
It looks like I don't usually quote the pope.
OK.
But when he got up before Congress a year ago and when he said, look, the real problem is the blood drenched arms traders.
Yeah.
And the congressmen and senators all clapped politely, you know, and then, you know, felt make sure that that money is still in their back pocket from the blood soaked arms traders.
That's the problem.
And that's why, like Kerry, who has sort of done a little conversion here and is actually discharging Obama's orders.
That's why he's running into so much trouble, because Ash Carter is in with the blood soaked arms makers and arms traders.
That's a big deal.
It can never be dismissed as an irrelevant factor.
It's the main factor, as Eisenhower told us more than 50 years ago.
So I wonder what you think is going to happen now.
We've got, you know, I guess a significant advance of Al Nusra and friends in Aleppo.
But then again, you know, I'm reading that it's sort of their last gas battle of the bulge type move here that they're you know, they've been run out of almost everywhere else.
And of course, the whole problem of the Syrian Kurds and the Turks and the Islamic State further east is a separate issue or kind of, I mean, obviously related, but different question.
Well, ISIS is or can be conceptually separate, but the Turks now are in northern Syria big time.
A couple of dozen tanks this morning.
This is just two hours old now.
And, you know, that's not very far from Aleppo.
So.
And that's to fight against the Kurdish separatists, but or against the Islamic state.
Is that what their claim is?
Well, they're claiming that they're trying to, of course.
They're attacking both, I guess.
Jason Ditt says they're attacking ISIS and Kurdish targets in northern Syria.
That's what they're saying, right?
Now, what really matters here is what kind of a deal Erdogan and Putin worked out when Erdogan was in Moscow last week.
Now, there are indications that Erdogan is now willing to accept Assad for the longer term.
OK, now, if that's the case and they have a mutual interest in stemming Kurdish advances in the northern part of Syria, that's really different.
And it should not prevent the Syrian army from taking over Aleppo after some more bloody fighting.
But all that remains to be determined.
I'm not sure what kind of deal Erdogan worked out with Putin, but I am sort of, what's the word?
Well, I'm impressed by the fact that the Turkish tanks rolled into Syria an hour before Joe Biden's plane touched down in Ankara.
Now, there's a message right there.
I mean, Biden's used to being embarrassed when he arrives in places like this, but this is pretty flagrant.
Now, if the Turks are really ticked off at the United States, if they're more willing to cooperate with the Russians now, you have an alliance here in northern Syria that would bode well for what Assad and his armies are trying to do and would bode very ill.
I wonder, though, if you think Erdogan would go so far as to betray al-Nusra and attack them?
The al-Qaeda guys in Aleppo, for example?
I don't think he gives a fig about al-Nusra.
I think he only cares about the Kurds.
And he's hellbent and determined that the Kurds will not set up a separate autonomous state in the northern part of Syria.
So in other words, he could have a deal with the Russians where, OK, fine, we'll leave Assad in power.
We'll stop backing al-Nusra, maybe even help you bomb him for a minute, as long as you promise us, Russia, that we're not going to have a real independent Kurdistan in northern Syria.
Yeah.
And as long as you stop the flow of arms and materiel and terrorists, many of them from the southern part of Russia.
So I don't know if that's been worked out.
But, you know, looking ahead, I would speculate that that might well be the deal.
And who comes up short on that?
Of course, the United States and the so-called moderate opposition people.
Yeah.
And the Syrian Kurds, the so-called state of Rojavas, sounds like the Americans probably are going to hurry up and stab them in the back in favor of our allies, the Turks, as well.
So this would be the 17th time since Henry Kissinger that we stabbed the Kurds in the back.
It's a very, very sad situation for the Kurds.
Yeah.
Well, they're damn fools to trust the Americans, whether the Iraqi Kurds, the Syrian Kurds.
I mean, I guess if you're a Syrian Kurd, what choice do you have than accept American airpower and support and special forces to come and help you?
But they're just setting themselves up to get...
Well, where are they to turn?
They're the pawns of history.
Yeah.
They have a pretty good foothold and have had for a decade now.
In northern Iraq, OK, that's 25 years now.
Well, yeah.
But I mean, ever since.
Well, yeah, that's right.
You're right.
Your math is better than mine.
So, you know, what's to prevent them from hoping for the same in Syria?
And the Turks are not going to allow it.
And the U.S. is really misleading the Kurds once again.
If they give the impression that the U.S. is willing to put skin in the game to prevent Erdogan from doing what he wants in the northern part of Syria.
Yeah.
Well, now, I guess Erdogan can deal with the Iraqi Kurds more easily because Barzani and Talabani, for whatever their faults, they're not the PKK.
And that's his...
Is it the Kurds and Kurdish independence at all?
Or is it the PKK that's really his problem?
Because he seems to get along just fine with the leadership in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Yeah.
They're not causing him much problem.
They have their own little territory there in Iraq.
Yeah.
And they're separate enough.
They're not really sharing territory in the exact way that the Syrian Kurds are along the border there in eastern Syria.
That's a difference in kind, not just degree.
Right.
Yeah.
They're like catty corner rather than across the street.
Man.
All right.
Well, it's a hell of a mess.
I'm sorry we're out of time because I got a million more questions for you.
But I got to get Ramsey Baroud on here to talk about Gaza.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show, Ray.
I really appreciate it.
You're most welcome, Scott.
All right.
So that is the heroic Ray McGovern.
Please go read him.
Make this a viral one.
I mean, this is really important.
It's got the quotes.
You couldn't believe in it.
You just look at this.
It said Consortium News right now, a lawless plan to target Syria's allies.
I mean, talk about the outer limits in the twilight zone combined.
This is just a lawless plan to target Syria's allies by the heroic Ray McGovern at Consortium News.
Scott Horton Show, Scott Horton dot org for the archives and the podcast feed.
Help support it.
Scott Horton dot org slash donate and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, y'all.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for Wall Street Window dot com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all the stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at Wall Street Window dot com and get real time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help follow along on paper and see for yourself.
Wall Street Window dot com.
Hey, I'll check out the audio book of Lou Rockwell's fascism versus capitalism narrated by me, Scott Horton at Audible dot com.
It's a great collection of his essays and speeches on the important tradition of liberty from medieval history to the Ron Paul revolution.
Rockwell blasts our status enemies, profiles our greatest libertarian heroes and prescribes the path forward in the battle against Leviathan fascism versus capitalism by Lou Rockwell for audio book.
Find it at Audible, Amazon, iTunes or just click in the right margin of my website at Scott Horton dot org.