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All right, it's our good friend Ray McGovern.
He was a CIA analyst for 27 years, and now he is one of our greatest anti-war activists, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and a regular speaker with Tell the Word.
He writes at raymcgovern.com, his own website.
He keeps lots of great stuff there, all his interviews that he does, and all that.
And you can find virtually all of his articles at consortiumnews.com, and reprinted as well at antiwar.com, including this one, Not Remembering the USS Liberty.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you, sir?
Thank you, Scott.
Doing well.
Good, good.
Happy to have you here.
So, let's see.
I don't know what year you retired, so I don't know if you were in the CIA at the time that this happened.
Were you?
Yeah, I was.
Okay, so.
Well, tell me about that part first.
Wait.
First of all, what's the USS Liberty?
It sounds like maybe it was a ship.
Well, actually, it was a ship.
It was a part of the Sixth Fleet.
It was an intelligence collection ship, and it was parked 13 nautical miles off the Sinai, meaning in international waters, monitoring with all the antennae you could imagine fitting on one ship, monitoring what the Russians and what the Egyptians were saying during the Six-Day War in June 1967.
So, it was right in the thick of things, and it was a big surprise that the Israelis would deliberately attack it, that they would try to sink it and leave no survivors.
And this, as hard as it is to believe by people, is, well, we have intercepted messages, pilot to control tower, but that's an American ship.
It's the same ship we reconnoitered this morning.
It's got big red, we fulfill your mission, carry out your orders, boom, boom, boom.
So, not much is known about this, because it was deliberately covered up by nine presidents, nine presidents, starting with Lyndon Johnson and including up to the most recent one, Obama.
So, we thought that for two reasons, since Trump has just arrived in Tel Aviv, and because a new book is coming out on this, it'll be out on June 8th, the anniversary of the attack on the Liberty, that we ought to put out a little reminder, so that even though our title says, not remembering the USS Liberty, of course, that's a cute way of saying, we intend to remember, we intend not to forget, that this, in a word, Scott, this demonstrated to the Israelis that they could get away with murder, literally, like, literally, in italics, they could get away with murder and the U.S. would cover up for them.
That's been happening, well, it happened before, it's been happening ever since, and it's one of the main reasons why U.S. policy in the Middle East is such a disaster.
All right, now, so here's the thing about that.
First of all, let me mention the book here, Philip Nelson's new book, Remember the Liberty, Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas, and that's the whole thing of it here, is that T word.
He's not talking about the Israelis, they're not Americans, they don't owe allegiance to the U.S. Constitution or the American people or the U.S. Armed Services, and yet that T word is right there in the title, and you mentioned, of course, about the cover-up and all of that, but this is the part that, you know, I don't know, I'm trying to think, if I'm an audience member and I've never heard of Scott Horton or Ray McGovern before, I'm hearing this for the first time, I'm thinking that actually this is unbelievable, that Ray McGovern must have part of this story wrong, at the very least, it must have been some sort of mistake, because what do you mean that the Israelis attacked a ship and killed all these U.S. sailors, and that they did it deliberately, and then that our government lied and covered up?
I mean, this just sounds like a lie.
Sorry, Ray.
Set me straight.
Okay.
Well, this, of course, is the general reaction, and Americans can be forgiven for that, because this has been one of the most suppressed stories over the last 50 years, and the 50-year anniversary is coming up just in two weeks now, on June 8th.
Let me start by citing what Admiral Murrer wrote.
Now, who is Admiral Thomas Murrer?
Well, he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1970 to 1974.
He then became ambassador to Her Majesty's Kingdom there in the UK.
But before that, he was chief of naval operations, 1967 to 1970.
And between those things, he was chief of the Atlantic Fleet at the time, or just after this time when the incident happened.
So what he writes is this.
On June 8th, 1967, Israel attempted to sink the U.S. Navy intelligence collection ship USS Liberty and leave no survivors.
The attack came by aircraft and torpedo boat in full daylight in international waters during the six-day Arab-Israeli war.
Number two, the U.S. cover-up taught the Israelis that they could literally get away with murder.
They killed 34 U.S. sailors and wounded more than 170 others out of a crew of, I think it was 298.
So about two-thirds of the crew was wounded.
And as part of the unconscionable government cover-up, it reads, the Navy threatened to court-martial and imprison any survivor who so much as told his wife what had actually happened.
Now, I know these guys.
I've been with them.
I know them pretty well.
And if you want to talk about PTSD, Scott, when you tell people who suffer this kind of tragedy, lose 34 of their comrades, and then are told, look, you can't even tell your wife.
As a matter of fact, they were instructed not even to talk to one another about it.
You want to see PTSD on steroids?
You got it, man.
And I've talked to these folks.
They've been suffering for 50 years because they've received no acknowledgment with just one exception, which I can explain later.
So we owe it, it seems to me, to these survivors, many of whom, as I say, I've had lunch and dinner with, and we owe it to their families to set the record straight and say, yes, it happened.
Yes, it was deliberate.
Yes, these casualties took place.
Yes, we know from intercepted communications and other means that the Israelis intended to leave no survivors.
What we don't know with any certainty is why they did this.
Now that's important.
I'm not claiming to know exactly.
I have some pretty good guesses.
But I don't know.
This is in the realm of interpretation.
I don't really know why they did it.
What I do know is that they did it.
And that's quite enough for me to point out that this is really dangerous when you allow a so-called ally to kill off 34 of your sailors and then cover up for them for 50 years, count them.
You said the radio intercepts are there.
We have the audio now of proving that it was deliberate, the orders from the Israeli commanders to the pilots and to the, I guess, the ship captains as well to, yes, I heard you say that's an American flag and I said shoot anyway, right?
Yeah.
And we also have even more damning this, you know, were it not to be written down by a monitor, a U.S. Navy, what do you call them, a petty officer, chief petty officer.
His name was Tony Hort.
I think he was in Morocco.
He monitored a conversation between then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and the commander of the 6th Fleet Carrier Division.
His name was Admiral Geiss.
Now McNamara called off the sending of fighter bombers from the USS Saratoga and the USS America to do battle with whoever it was that was attacking the USS Liberty.
And so Admiral Geiss protested that.
He said, you know, how can you call these planes back?
My ship is under attack.
But petty officer Tony Hort heard McNamara say, quote, President Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors, period, end quote.
You know what?
I don't understand, Ray.
And I'm not saying that they're horrible decisions should make sense to a rational man.
You know, I don't know.
This is McNamara and Johnson we're talking about here.
But if it's so easy to just say that, oh, you and all the rest of these guys should be quiet because it was just a mistake, which is the line now.
Why didn't they just say that in the first place?
If they're willing to cover up, why not send the planes and say, OK, guys, your bluff is called.
It didn't work.
The ship didn't sink.
Our jets are here.
Go ahead.
Turn around.
We're going to start calling it an accident right now.
And then that way you spare the giant cover up, you spare the PTSD on steroids that you mentioned making these guys that much worse.
They can't even talk to each other about it.
You spare us, hey, this much extra level of resentment of the Israelis for being able to do stuff like this and get away with it.
Isn't it counterproductive ultimately from the point of view of the empire and from the Israelis to to to go about it this way?
Well, Scott, it really the way it played out answers your question.
In other words, the Israelis very clearly wanted to sink the ship.
Even when lifeboats with the wounded were lowered down off off the side of the ship, the torpedo boats came back and machine gunned those lifeboats.
They poured napalm on top of the deck and they had a couple of helicopters with what they call special forces guys ready to land to end the end any survivors.
OK, now what happened?
Well, what happened is an incredible story.
The ship was was a mess.
There was utter chaos.
And a young sailor named Terry, how about a fellow from Texas?
Right.
He knew a lot about bailing wire and he knew how to do things.
And he said, Captain McConnickle, there is one antenna that the Israelis haven't taken out yet because they haven't been working.
OK, I can make it work.
I think if I can plug this connector into it, McConnickle says, no.
What are you crazy?
Look at that deck.
It's got napalm all over it.
How bright Jesus, sir.
I'd like to do that, because if we do that, we'll send in this and we'll send out an S.O.S. and maybe we get some relief.
Permission granted, says McConnickle.
So Terry, how about you?
Ice skates or slips across the deck with his little connector in hand.
I don't know if he actually used bailing wire, probably not.
But he connected the thing to the one antenna that hadn't been blown up.
They got an S.O.S. out.
And that S.O.S. was not only delivered quickly to those aircraft carriers of the Sixth Fleet, but of course, the Israelis interrupted or intercepted that S.O.S.
And they got out of Dodge right quick.
So they broke off the attack.
And that's the only reason that the USS Liberty ended up with only 34 dead and not the entire complement of 298.
So what happened next was after the aircraft carrier pilots were ordered to return to the ships, other U.S. forces in the area, and actually there was a Soviet ship in the area as well, they came to the rescue.
And no one knows how Captain McConnickle managed this, but he was able to get the ship as far west as Cyprus.
There, the crew were ordered to do this gruesome task of going back into the hole caused by the torpedo and fishing the remains of their comrades to the degree they could be fished out and buried.
And that's, you know, I've talked to a couple of people who were in control of that.
There's one, well, this is a story worth telling because it's immediate.
Back about 10 years ago, I went down to Springfield, Missouri, to give a speech to a rather large crowd.
It was a church basement, but with 300 people there.
And the whole thing was body rock, of course, at the time.
But Mearsheimer, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt had just written this incredible magazine article for The Atlantic.
It was called the Israel Lobby.
And the main finding, of course, was how powerful the Israel Lobby is in this country, the United States.
Now, when they gave the draft to The Atlantic, The Atlantic sort of paled and said, well, thanks, you know, we'll give you, you know, we'll give you kill a fee here, but we can't we can't use that.
OK, they went around to other magazines, the United States, not even the New York Review of Books would touch it.
They had they had to publish it in the London Review of Books.
So what am I saying?
I'm saying that I get I'm in the plane and I had printed out a copy.
I read it going down to my speech there in Springfield, Missouri.
And after I was finished, somebody raised their hand and they said, what did you think of Mearsheimer and Walt's Israel Lobby article?
And in the London Review of Books, I said to myself, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I just read that.
Well, what do you think of it?
I said, well, you know, I think it's really on target.
But it's one thing I just can't understand.
And that is if their conclusions are that Israel has untoward influence in the United States.
Well, they missed the they missed the best proof of that.
They missed the the famous incident in which Israel learned that they could kill a whole bunch of U.S.
Navy sailors and get away with it.
And I looked at that, those 300 faces, Scott, and they were all blank.
And so I said, the U.S. has liberty.
All blank, but three.
OK, who knows about the U.S. has liberty?
Three people raised their hand.
So I picked the I picked the guy in the front.
I said, well, sir, can you tell us how he says, sir, Marine Sergeant Bryce Lockwood, U.S.U.S. has liberty crew, sir.
Oh, God.
So I said, my goodness.
Well, Mr. Lockwood, could you come up here and tell us what happened, sir?
I have not been able to I've not been able to do that.
But it's 40 years now.
And yes, I think I'd like to try tonight.
Bryce Lockwood, the commanding sergeant of all the Marines, all of whom all of whom reported who reported to him were killed by the torpedo attack in the midships.
He came up and he gave a 10 minute rendition for the first time in 40 years in public of what he had experienced.
Now, so what am I saying here?
I'm saying that it's criminal that these survivors not only are unrecognized, but but are suffering under this incredible PTSD that comes of not having been able to talk to their wives or their comrades or anyone.
Now, I mentioned before, and this is worth pointing out, there is one exception.
Terry Harbardier.
Now, where did he live?
He lived in the Central Valley of California in a town called Visalia.
Now, I know it pretty well.
My my son, the doctor did some public service there.
OK, so what about what about Visalia?
Well, the congressman there, a fellow by the name of Devin Nunes, thought that his constituent, Terry Harbardier, should get a medal for saving that ship.
Whoa.
So he went through the rigmarole of going to the Defense Department.
You know what Terry had gotten thus far?
He'd gotten a Purple Heart in his mailbox at home.
OK, that's the that's the recognition that these guys got.
So to his great credit, Congressman Nevis, who most people know, is now chair of the House Intelligence Committee and shows he has some guts.
He he does.
He decided to give this award.
They told me about it.
I was on the next plane out to California, drove all night down to the Central Valley and made the 11 o'clock ceremony in Nunes's office.
It was great.
Terry, Terry was asked by a local press, well, you still have flack in you.
Well, yeah, he pulls up a shirt.
My God.
And then, you know, it was just a friendly, really, really good ceremony.
Now, why did Nunes do that?
Well, I think because he thought it was the right thing to do and that the only other person that had been honored at all was the with the Captain McConnickle.
And that was 15 years after the incident.
And, you know, when you give a Medal of Honor to someone that usually takes place in the Oval Office.
Well, for some reason or other, Lyndon Johnson didn't want to call any attention to this Medal of Honor.
And so it was presented on the smelly banks of the Anacostia River where the Navy still has this small little Navy base.
OK.
And guess what?
Before they decided they could give Captain McConnickle the Medal of Honor, they checked with the Israeli embassy to see if they might be offended.
Can you believe it?
There's really no end to this.
It just isn't.
Yeah, it's anti-Semitic to point out who was flying those jets that day, I guess.
Hey, listen, Ray, I have some clips here that I've poached from an Al Jazeera special and I was looking at it's it's six clips.
But on the other hand, I added up the times.
It's just a minute and a quarter.
And I think I haven't you know, I didn't play them earlier this morning to check.
But I believe included in here is audio of the at least, you know, the translations of the Israeli commands and all that.
And you know what?
If it turns out not worth it, I can cut this out.
But let's go ahead and play this and see if there's something worth responding to in these videos, because I'm pretty sure there's going to be something for us here.
America.
I hear him say American.
I don't know why I didn't continue playing.
Well, it's all in Hebrew and I can't understand it.
But the the the captions here, Ray, are ID.
No comment.
Use napalm.
Let the Navy finish it.
And then Dagan calls off the planes, pumping her with torpedoes is the other.
And people can look up the Al Jazeera special where they, I think, for the first time published the audio.
And they have, of course, actually have the Hebrew translations on screen there for you of these orders.
And you could hear the man say American.
It's the pilot, I believe, notifying command.
It's an American ship.
And then they respond.
Yeah.
Did I stutter?
Shoot.
Yeah.
You know, it's all very clear.
And, you know, there's a book out, Body of Secrets by that specialist author, James Bamford.
Yeah, right.
That's about 50 pages on this.
So why did we why did we think that we needed to spread some truth around about this at this point?
Well, as I mentioned before, the 50th anniversary is coming up and that's on June 8th.
And also this book is coming out.
Now, this book is really, really interesting because it it delves into LBJ's motivation here.
And Phil Nelson has written earlier books about LBJ and they pretty much make him out to be a thug.
OK.
And what Phil believes and what he adduces evidence for is that Johnson knew about the Six Day War before it started.
And he actually wanted to get U.S. U.S. units involved on Israel's behalf because he wasn't quite sure that the Israelis were were saying the truth when they said they could handle the Arabs all by themselves.
Thank you very much.
He thought it might be Brigadocio.
And so he wanted to have a reason for for getting involved.
That's what Phil Nelson says, that the reason would have been sinking the ship, blaming it on the Arabs, blaming it on the Egyptians and having a pretext to get involved militarily.
Wait now, Ram, I just want to make sure to clarify and understand here.
He thought this might be useful for that or maybe that LBJ had actually arranged it with the Israelis in the first place.
Well, Nelson says the latter.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
Now, I haven't read it as carefully.
I wrote the foreword to it.
I should probably have read the whole thing.
But but this is just one line of speculation.
But he has a lot of evidence that he uses for that.
I had always favored the interpretation that the Israelis were deliberately eager not to ask permission for what they did the next day, namely June 9th, 1967.
And that was to go into Syria to go up on the Golan Heights and seize the Golan Heights from Syria, which, of course, they still have.
Now, when I say they didn't want to ask permission, well, the Israelis are usually very happy to ask for forgiveness after they do something like that.
But they were saying they were afraid that that LBJ would call them on the phone and tell them not to seize the Golan Heights.
And so they were willing to sink this ship, possibly were willing to sink the ship to prevent him from knowing what they're going to do so that they could seize.
Yeah, I was never completely satisfied with that.
But that was where I leaned.
Now, there's another explanation that comes from two Israeli journalists who were right opposite the Liberty in Al Arish in that little seaport town in the Sinai.
And they reported that when the Israelis came down on, you know, three axes into Egypt, the Egyptians were just the Egyptians just stunned.
And, of course, the Israelis took a lot of prisoners, killed a lot of them and not the prisoners.
But they had this they had a couple of hundred prisoners in Al Arish.
Now, they're a real problem, especially when you want to turn your forces to go back up north on the Golan.
You have to feed them.
You have to give them water and all that kind of stuff.
Well, according to these Israeli journalists, these Egyptian POWs were put in trenches, gunned down, killed, period.
And then they looked up at the beach and said, oh, damn, look, that's the USS Liberty.
They're a line of sight here, for God's sakes.
Yeah, they're in international waters, but 13 nautical miles ain't a lot.
Oh, God, they probably have our conversations as well as everything else.
They know what we just did.
And that may have encouraged Moshe Dayan and the rest of them to say, well, let's get rid of the Liberty.
I don't know what's important to stay here is a distinction between why the Israelis did this, which no one we should really ask them, I think.
Let me go back to let me go back to the possibility that it was an accident.
I mean, the Israeli military is a government program, right?
So they picked out the wrong ship.
They should have known, but they screwed up.
Sure, sounds plausible on its face.
I mean, come on.
These are friends of ours, right?
Yeah, that would be OK.
Scott, we're not for the fact that for two hours earlier that morning, the USS Liberty was reconnoitered.
Reconnaissance flights by Israeli pilots going so close that they could wave to the sailors on the deck.
And the sailors on the deck waved back.
Two hours later, they came back, bombed, napalmed, strafed, knocked out the antennae.
And then an hour later, there came the three torpedo boats.
They all shot.
They all fired a torpedo.
Only one hit.
But it hit at midships, immediately killing all those Marines.
I think there were about 24 of them in that place where they were monitoring conversations.
And the only reason that Bryce Lockwood, the sergeant that I mentioned before, the only reason he escaped was because he was on the other side of the bulwark.
He had been instructed or ordered to get all the really, really sensitive cryptological equipment and throw it deep, deep into the Mediterranean.
That's where he was knocked unconscious.
But when he woke up, of course, with the water coming in, well, he described going back down into that hole because he saw two guys that were still alive, right?
So he pulled one of them up, and somebody clamped the darn hatch down.
Bang on the hatch, got it open, got this one guy up, and went back for the other.
He had him by the, what do you call it, the wrist, right?
And he's pulling him along, and all of a sudden, he broke loose.
And to hear Bryce describe how he watched his friend drift out through the big gaping hole in the ship into the Med is something you don't want to hear unless you're willing to tolerate it.
And then, of course, they asked Bryce and his teammates to identify all the body parts as soon as they got to Cyprus and bury them.
And then the next day, they were flown to Greece, and they were visited, each one of them, by Navy officers who briefed them and said, Look, this is very sensitive.
You are not.
You are not.
Under pain of court martial, you are not to mention this to your wives or to talk to one another about it.
Got that, folks?
And that is what they labored under for 40 years until Bryce broke the ice that evening in Springfield, Missouri, where he lives, and the others started writing books.
Right now, we have a new book, and I think it goes into gory detail with respect to what happened.
And it's co-written by three of the survivors.
So you're getting the first-hand look at this.
And when they asked me to write the foreword, I said, of course I would.
And I tried to cram as much into the foreword as I possibly could, including this.
I want to make sure that your listeners know that this business where Israel said it was in danger of an attack from Egypt.
There were Egypt deployments in the Sinai.
But one of the things that the New York Times actually did print, although it was years later, Menachem Begin, who was an Israeli prime minister for quite some time, he told the truth at one point.
I'm trying to find it in this.
There it is.
Most Americans believe, I'm quoting from my own article here, that the Israelis were forced to defend themselves.
Not so.
What do you mean, not so?
Well, who's my source?
Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
Now, 35 years ago, he said, and I quote, In June 1967, we had a choice.
The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us.
We must be honest with ourselves.
We decided to attack him.
End quote.
Now, where is that?
That's in the New York Times.
Quoting a Begin speech dated August 1982.
So the whole thing was an unprovoked attack.
It happened a long time ago.
And the Israelis have occupied Palestinian countries, the Palestinian land that they seized during that war for longer than the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe.
As we know, that was a very long time.
They're still there.
And I dare say our current president, President Trump, is not likely to brace them on anything, including the liberty, because of the power so well described by Mearsheimer and Wolf.
The Israel lobby in this country has never been more effective, never been more egregious and never been more untouchable as a third rail in U.S. politics.
All right.
So now back to that first question.
What was going on at the CIA?
Hey, did you hear in the cafeteria, right?
Everybody's talking.
The Israelis attacked one of our ships.
What are we going to do about it?
Tell me what happened.
Well, this was this was in the cafeteria.
I was I was working on Soviet foreign policy at the time.
And of course, we were watching very, very closely what the Russians were doing, what they were saying.
And we had some good information.
And of course, the big, big worry was, what would the Russians do?
And in the process of all this, I did monitor, for better, better word, the head of the Arab-Israeli branch in our little office, our big office.
Now, I remembered him gleefully saying, oh, the Israelis, they really got him.
They got him to a T. And I asked them later.
As a matter of fact, I just asked them about five years ago when I was writing about the Liberty.
I said, now, tell me, did the Israelis know they were attacking the Liberty?
Of course they did.
There are all kinds of interceptions.
Of course.
Why are you asking me that, Ray?
I said, well, I just wanted to confirm.
I said, well, you know, NSA says that they lost those intercepted messages.
And my friend says, lost.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
They misplaced them.
If they're not there, they destroyed them, Ray.
They destroyed them.
That's happened before, Ray.
For God's sake.
Sure.
Don't you remember?
Now, another source.
Pat Lang was a terrific military intelligence officer.
He was a colonel.
Should have been a general.
But he was going through infantry officer orientation course in Fort Holabird, Maryland, where outside of Baltimore, where that used to be, it took place.
I was in the class before him.
Well, he remembers.
He remembers using this as a case study.
And he wrote very clearly the particulars because, as he told me, it bothered him till forever.
It bothered him that the United States military, the United States Navy and the government and the Congress and everybody else wouldn't care very much about sailors being killed by our so-called AI would cover it up.
And one of the main cover uppers was an admiral in the U.S. Navy.
His name was John McCain.
Now, I don't want to blame the sins of the father on the son.
But the son is very, very hypersensitive to any mention of the USS Liberty.
And indeed, John McCain, Senator McCain now has endorsed a spurious book that spins lots of yawns about, oh, it's just a terrible mistake, which, of course, is the Israeli position.
So maybe maybe after 50 years, we can get Americans who care enough about all this to say, hey, you know, not only do these survivors and their families deserve some redress, but is it the case that Israel is exerting undue influence on our policy now?
And the answer to that is a bold yes.
And without knowing the answer to that, you can't possibly understand why the U.S.-Syria policy has been what it is.
No threat from Bashar al-Assad five years ago, six years ago.
Why?
Why did we decide to go in there and cause this rebel activity and fund it and help the Saudis and the Turks and the Qataris cause bedlam there?
Why?
Well, I explain it in the forum, in the foreword of this book, because I thought it needed to be brought up to date.
And what I refer to, of course, is another egregious slip by The New York Times.
I say that sarcastically because it happened to be the truth.
Here's what The Times said in 2013, right after Obama, quote, chickened out and didn't overtly attack Syria.
There was a new bureau chief in Jerusalem for The New York Times.
Her name was Jodi Rudarin.
And what she did was ask senior Israeli officials in power and people who retired, you know, what their take on Syria was.
You know, what is their preferred outcome?
That's what she asked, you know.
And she reported on September 6, 2013, there was an item in The New York Times, first page, Israel backs limited strike against Syria.
And she reports how the Israelis look at this.
Background here, Bashar al-Assad was beginning to win.
During 2013, he was pushing the so-called moderate rebels and others out of their fixed positions that they had held for years.
So here's what she says, Jodi Rudarin, quote, Or a strengthening of rebel groups increasingly dominated by Sunni jihadis.
Here she goes, quote, This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don't want one to win.
We'll settle for a tie, end quote, said Alon Pincus, a former Israeli consul general in New York, quote, Let them both bleed hemorrhage to death.
That's the strategic thinking here.
As long as this lingers, there's no real threat from Syria, period, end quote.
Okay, now wait, Ray.
I have to stop you here because before you get to your conclusion that you're working toward here, I want to add a little bit more evidence to it.
You may be well aware of this article in the Jerusalem Post where Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States under Benjamin Netanyahu said, Well, yes, see, we prefer these bad guys to those bad guys.
That goes on your pile.
But I wanted to add two things real quick to this, two more things real quick to it.
The first thing is Obama talking to Jeffrey Goldberg in 2012 in the Atlantic.
And Goldberg is basically badgering him and saying, shouldn't we be doing this to weaken Iran?
And Obama says, yes, in our estimation, Assad's days are numbered.
It's a matter not of if, but when.
How can we accelerate that?
Well, we're working with the world community to do that.
And if that happens, it would be a profound loss for Iran.
So here's Barack Obama right as he is pursuing heroically pursuing the Iran nuclear deal.
He is basically doing everything he can to continue the redirection and the Sunni turn and support for Saudi and Saudi's terrorist shock troops against the rest of Iran's interests in the region in order to sort of make up for that fact.
Just like the same way they said in The New York Times again that this is why he got on board for the Saudi war against the Houthis in Yemen is that this was to placate them.
That was their word.
The White House's words to placate the Saudis over the Iran nuclear deal.
And then I'm sorry, Ray, but what the hell?
Why not?
One more thing here.
It's Michael Oren, this time sitting down with Jeffrey Goldberg.
And I have the audio here.
It's only a couple of minutes.
It's and and I'll set this up correctly for you.
This is at the Aspen Fancy Pants Institute conference on June 28th, 2014.
June 2014.
That's a significant date.
Mosul had just fallen.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had just declared himself the caliph Ibrahim, ruler of the Islamic State in northwestern Iraq or western Iraq and eastern Syria.
And the guy in the audience says, hey, what's going on in Syria?
And Michael Oren is sitting down there with Jeffrey Goldberg.
And here's how he responds.
Keep in mind, I don't speak for the government anymore.
I'm speaking for me.
And Jeff.
No, you're not.
And what I'm going to say is harsh, perhaps a little edgy.
But if we have to choose the lesser of evils here, the lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shiites.
You're not speaking for me.
Okay.
It's a lesser evil.
It's an evil, believe me.
It's a terrible evil.
Again, they've just taken out 700 former Iraqi soldiers and shot them in a field.
But who are they fighting against?
They're fighting against a proxy with Iran that's complicit in the murder of 160,000 people in Syria.
You can just do the math.
And again, one side is armed with suicide bombers and rockets.
The other side has access to military nuclear capabilities.
So from Israel's perspective, if there's got to be an evil that's going to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail.
Again, I'm speaking entirely for myself.
Anyway, so, and of course, in the middle he said, so from Israel's perspective, and he's clearly speaking for the Netanyahu government, not only for himself there.
And he makes himself perfectly clear, Ray, that he's not talking about any mythical moderates.
He's referring directly to the Islamic State who just massacred 1,700 Shiite Iraqi Air Force cadets in the field.
He refers specifically to the triumph of the Islamic State, not just some mythical moderates in Idlib province trying to create a secular democracy in Syria.
Yeah, right.
He's referring to the worst of the bad guys.
And then I must note, too, his excuses are that, one, Assad and the Shiite side of the war in Syria are responsible for all the deaths, including all the army soldiers who die in it, Sunni and Shia.
And also that Iran has military nuclear technology, which I guess means they could hand a bomb to Hezbollah any day now.
So no wonder we have to support ISIS.
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Ray?
Yeah, well, Scott, you know, it's really hard listening to all that stuff.
Since it's it's the kind of propaganda I used to watch when I my job was to read Pravda every day.
Now about Jeffrey Goldberg, of course, he's he's one of the neocons, but he had this special relationship with Obama.
One wouldn't expect Obama to be anything other than sniveling in the direction of Israel when he's talking to Goldberg.
But he also told Goldberg that he was delighted that he had the presence of mind to resist the advice of all his advisers, all of them, and call off the attack on Syria.
What were they going to attack Syria with?
Tomahawk missiles.
Where?
From these cruise missile ships in the Mediterranean.
He called that off.
Now, he said to Jeffrey Goldberg, I call that off for a lot of reasons, but it was the right call.
Now, who bailed him out on that?
Well, a fellow named Vladimir Putin.
The next week he said, look, I think we can get the Syrians to give up all their chemical weapons and you'll look pretty good when they finish doing that.
And indeed, that's what happened in the next couple of months.
The chemical weapons were surrendered, were given to the U.S. on a ship specially configured to destroy such weapons.
And that's what happened.
Now, what was the result?
Well, the result was that those who wanted war, so that Bashar al-Assad, if he didn't lose, at least he wouldn't win.
Right?
Those who wanted that war were lusting for it.
They're called the neocons.
I had a personal experience watching them sort of really, really tearing their hair out at having missed this war.
What happened?
Well, they got to work.
And in six months, Vladimir Putin paid a very heavy price for his help to Obama and getting him out of this predicament he was in.
What did they do?
They mounted a coup on Russia's doorstep in Kiev, a coup that has been described as the most blatant coup in human history.
Why?
Because its preparations and its plotting was on YouTube 18 days before the coup itself.
So you do the math.
Eight months, nine months, they had it all together.
Victoria Nuland was going to show that Vladimir Putin is somebody who's evil incarnate.
She mounts this coup in Kiev and there's no cooperation possible between the Russians and the Americans anymore.
And that's been the case since February 22nd, 2014, when the coup took place and Russia reacted as anyone would have predicted.
You know, the first thing about Russia's interests in that part of the world.
Well, geez.
I mean, I guess as long as we're at it, why not?
Right.
The Klitschko piece is obviously the complicated electron here, especially the announcement of him as deputy prime minister.
And you've seen some of my notes on the troubles in the marriage right now.
So we're trying to get a read really fast on where he is on this stuff.
But I think your argument to him, which you'll need to make.
I think that's the next phone call we want to set up, is exactly the one you made to Yats.
And I'm glad you sort of put him on the spot on where he fits in this scenario.
And I'm very glad he said what he said in response.
I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience.
He's the guy, you know, what he needs is Klitsch and Tony Book on the outside.
He needs to be talking to them four times a week.
You know, I just think Klitsch going in, he's going to be at that level working for Yats and Yook.
It's just not going to work.
Yeah.
No, I think that's right.
I think that's right.
OK.
Good.
Well, do you want us to try to set up a call with him as the next step?
I can't remember if I told you this or if I only told Washington this, that when I talked to Jeff Feltman this morning, he had a new name for the UN guy, Robert Sary.
Did I write you that this morning?
Yeah, I saw that.
He's now gotten both Sary and Ban Ki-moon to agree that Sary could come in Monday or Tuesday.
OK.
So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and have the UN help glue it and, you know, the EU.
No, exactly.
And I think we've got to do something to make it stick together because you can be pretty sure that if it does start to gain altitude, the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it.
So on that piece, Jeff, when I wrote the note, Sullivan's come back to me via VFR saying, you need Biden.
And I said, probably tomorrow for an attaboy and to get the deets to stick.
So Biden's willing.
OK.
Great.
Thanks.
All right.
Great.
Thanks for going ahead and implicating the vice president at the very end of the call just to make sure that we're clear here.
I mean, dang, Ray, honestly, if you wrote that script, I'd say this is too good.
Not believable.
Not believable.
Go back and have him speak in code or something a little.
My God.
Well, you know, I've been around a long time, Scott.
I mean, and I've seen coups.
But I've never seen one advertised in advance.
Now, that, as your listeners will know, was a discussion between the assistant secretary of state, Victoria Noland, a Hillary Clinton person, and Jeffrey Piatt, who was the ambassador that we had in Kiev.
Now, was this an encrypted conference?
No, no.
These people are so arrogant.
They were speaking en clair.
Right.
And somebody, I don't know, maybe the Ukrainian, maybe the Russian service, intercepted this telephone call.
And on the 4th, now mind you, this is important, on the 4th of February 2014, they put it on YouTube.
Right.
And I'm looking at it.
My God.
And, you know, since Yatsenyuk was clearly the guy in line to be prime minister, I had a little sympathy for him.
I said, oh, poor Yatsenyuk, you know.
A decent respect for the opinions of mankind would preclude his becoming prime minister now, so they better take his cash and go to the Côte d'Or or to the Riviera now.
So then I wake up on the 23rd of February, and I turn the radio on, and there's been a coup.
And who's the new prime minister?
Yats!
They went ahead and used him anyway.
They were completely burnt on their plot, and they went ahead and followed through.
And it's funny, too, because, you know, I gave a speech, I think it was on the 14th, for the Future Freedom Foundation.
It was all about Middle East policy, but at one part I just have an aside where I go, hey, and look at Ukraine.
They're working on another coup d'etat in Ukraine right now, just like they did 10 years ago, so don't miss that.
And then Ron Paul, that was like a week before.
And Ron Paul, the night before the coup, Ron Paul was on a show that has some libertarian hosts on the Fox Business Channel.
And Matt Welch from Reason was saying, oh, come on, Ron Paul, how come you keep saying that they're working on a coup in Ukraine?
And Ron goes, well, because they are working on a coup in Ukraine.
They do this all the time.
They do it, you know, they leak the thing.
It's on YouTube.
You can listen to them talk about how they're doing it, and they're acting all incredulous.
And then the coup happened.
It was either that night or the next night was when the thing took place.
And, you know, Ron is a very sharp guy.
I don't want to sell him short, but all that was happening was he was paying attention and he's honest, right?
Yeah, well, those are two rare qualities.
Let me just add this.
About a week later, Amy Goodman asked me to be on the show, and she had this professor from Yale.
His name was Timothy Snyder, and he was an expert on Ukraine and all this stuff.
Yeah, the author of Bloodlands.
Yeah, right.
So we're on there together, and he started dismissing U.S. interference.
And so I said, well, Professor Snyder, are you unaware of the intercepted telephone conversation that showed the coup plotting?
And then the guy who they were going to put in, and you know what he says?
He says, well, if that's all you've got.
And then Amy changed the conversation.
I should have said, wait a second.
Yeah, isn't that enough?
That's all I need.
I don't know.
Yeah.
The other thing is, and this is really mischievous.
Last year, I usually, well, I spent about a month or so, several weeks in Germany.
And this time, someone got me in to see, well, he's sort of like the really high official, I won't say his name, in the German foreign ministry.
And he's a pretty experienced guy, very dignified and all.
You have to be sort of nice in talking to these folks.
And it became very clear to me that he wasn't going to acknowledge that there had been a coup in Ukraine.
So I said to him flat out, I'm not very diplomatic.
I said, well, sir, what about, you know, the coup in Kiev on the 22nd of February?
And you know what he said?
He said, what coup?
I said, are you unaware of the intercepted conversation?
And then what happened 18 days later?
He said, oh, that doesn't prove there was a coup.
Now, this is the principal advisor to the foreign minister, who in those days was not the worst of guys.
But here's the Germans maintaining this fiction that it wasn't a coup.
And for extra measure, let me just tell you that I have to write a review of a book on Ukraine today for Barons.
And guess what they have in their chronology for February 22nd, 2014.
I looked there first, you know, and the entry says, Yanukovych runs away.
Yanukovych leaves Kiev.
And I'm thinking, wait a second.
You know, that's not the full story for the 22nd of February, 2014.
And again, this book is written by another Yale professor and some think tank guy.
And it has to be panned.
I'm going to try to be as gentlemanly as I can be.
But if you don't include the coup in the chronology and you have this other kind of very tangential treatment of what happened in Ukraine then and since.
Well, you're not only getting false or fake facts, you're getting fake history.
And the mind boggles that the students at Yale would be fed this incomplete history where you don't even acknowledge it was a coup, much less that it was U.S. or Western sponsored.
Not much less that it was led by fascists or proto-fascists.
Much less that it was, you know, still killing Ukrainians in the east who refused to submit to the coup.
And they're getting a completely distorted view of history.
Now wait, because our tangent here is Putin, America's friend, even if the American government and the American people hate Russia.
Putin keeps saving Obama's bacon by helping get the Iranians to sign the nuke deal and helping to get Bashar al-Assad to get rid of the chemical weapons that he still had in his store.
So as to bail out Obama so Obama didn't have to attack and do the regime change in the summer of 2013.
And we're talking about how Jeffrey Goldberg was the, he went back to Goldberg.
In fact, this is what's great, right, is his exit interview from a year ago begins with Goldberg saying, oh, sarin gas, sarin gas.
But then when you get halfway through the article, there's this mysterious paragraph that says, oh, yeah, by the way, the director of national intelligence refused to make a declarative statement that Assad had used sarin gas against people in that attack in 2013.
And that was a big part of why Obama backed down.
So, I'm not sure how you want to work back around from from Newland and Ukraine.
I'm sure Kagan had something horrible.
I know.
Here's a segue.
The Kagan clan, which includes Newland, they're the ones who wrote when their policy in Syria backfired so badly that the Islamic State ended up sacking all of western Iraq.
They said, well, you know, what we need to do is invade immediately with twenty five thousand men.
And they said in their proposal right around the same time, June 2014, they said, well, there is no way to articulate a desired path to an end state here.
But anyway, we got to do it anyway.
We got to send twenty five thousand troops.
We have to launch Iraq War Three in order to reverse what was just the consequences, not just of Iraq War Two, but of the Syria war, Obama's Syria war, because after all, even though he wasn't bombing Damascus with Tomahawk missiles, he was supporting these jihadists.
Obama was a very weak figure here.
And and the fact that these neocons thought they could even suggest things like that is a tale worth telling.
The episode that you referred to a few minutes ago is very, very revealing because we know that honest people were able to dissuade Obama from launching a war on Syria, overt war on Syria, not just funding, quote, moderate and quote rebels.
In the very early part of September, because the intelligence was fixed to get him to be mousetrapped.
Now, what do I mean?
I mean, a year before he was given a piece of paper.
He was responding to Todd.
What's his name?
Todd, the guy at NBC, Chuck Todd, right?
OK, Chuck Todd at a press conference.
And now, Mr. Mr. President, you have just said that you are not going to insert you're not going to go into open warfare with Syria.
Now, are there no conditions under which you would change your mind?
And Obama, as if prompted, looks at this piece of paper and says, well, yes, there are.
Matter of fact, if the Syrians used or even moved their chemical weapons, that would change my calculations.
So that would be a red line for me.
That's a virtual quote.
OK, so that was the 20th of August 2012.
On the 21st, August 2013, as with clockwork, there's an incident outside of Damascus.
It's a Syrian attack.
It kills 100 people or so.
And it's blamed immediately on Bashar al-Assad.
But luckily, luckily, the president listened to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dempsey, who was in receipt of a report from his opposite number in London.
A general hotel, General, our chairman, General Dempsey.
Look, Martin, we've got a we've got a sample of that sarin that was used in that attack.
And it is not the sarin.
It's not the kind of sarin that we know to be in Syrian army stocks.
It's homemade sarin.
Martin, I think your president should know that.
Well, the president was told that that evening by Dempsey.
He was also told by some of his intelligence folks that, hey, you know, you got to be careful here because there are lots of people trying to mousetrap you, including our own CIA.
OK, now, Obama stepped back from that to his credit.
And part of his calculation was what you referred to a couple of years ago.
And that is that during the last week of August, we have this from Jeffrey Goldberg.
Who did he get it from?
Barack Obama.
OK, Obama told Goldberg a year ago that during this week when they're trying to figure out what to do, the sarin attack had taken place.
Kerry had blamed Bashar al-Assad.
There was contradictory evidence.
And besides, the British, my God, the British for the first time in 750 years voted against the war.
You know, the parliament.
And people, people were home and they were getting into their congressmen and senators faces and say, look, we don't want another war.
So so this is all background.
So what happens?
Well, James Clapper, who is not distinguished for telling you the truth, even he felt it necessary to go to Obama in the middle of the last week of August 2013 and say, now, Mr.
President, about the gosh, about those sarin attacks there.
You know, I have great, great respect for John Kerry.
I think he's a I think he's a wonderful, wonderful diplomat.
And he's got this war experience.
But, Mr.
President, guiding boats up the Mekong does not make you a strategic thinker.
I need to tell you that the case that he made for Bashar al-Assad doing this thing is how should I say this?
It's a.
Oh, yeah.
It's not a slam dunk, Mr.
President.
It's not a slam dunk.
Now, the illusion there, of course, is when George Bush and Dick Cheney way back on the 15th of December.
No, I think it's the 21st of December 2002.
Listen to John McLaughlin, the deputy head of CIA with his boss, Tenet.
McLaughlin gave him this briefing on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
And Bush says, is that all you got?
My God, is that all you got?
Oh, my God.
And Tenet sprung off the couch and he said, no, no, no.
Mr. President, it's a slam dunk.
I assure you, it's a slam dunk.
Now, how do we know that?
Because Condoleezza Rice was there and she ratted on what Tenet said.
Yeah, but Ray, you know what?
There's two sides to every story.
And George Tenet says that he never said it was a slam dunk, that the weapons were there.
All he said was it was a slam dunk, that Junior would be able to convince the American people that there were weapons there.
An entirely different thing.
He was saying, Mr. President, yes, you have what you need to deceive and lie to the American people and make them believe that it's true.
That's his defense of himself.
This is a distinction without a difference.
What he actually said was we can do a slam dunk.
We'll improve on what we have.
We'll get curveball.
We'll get all these other people.
Yeah, then it will be a slam dunk.
So I think you and I agree that he didn't say it's a slam dunk in this particular draft briefing, but that it's a slam dunk that we can get enough evidence together, fraudulent evidence, I would emphasize, to persuade the American people like we just said.
Of course, that's what Colin Powell did.
Sure, and I'm just kind of being sarcastic anyway, right?
His defense, I mean, Rice came out when this happened back a few years ago.
Rice came out and goes, yeah, he promised.
He said it was, or whoever were all the sources for the story, he said it was a slam dunk.
It was all on Tenet.
He said it was a slam dunk, that the weapons were there.
And Tenet came out and in his own defense said, no, all I said was that the lie was good enough to fool your mama.
I didn't say it was true.
Well, no honesty among thieves or some honesty.
What's worse, you know, anyhow, the point is here, of course, that slam dunk meant, you know, there's not enough evidence to suggest that Kerry was right.
And so for once, Clapper helped to restrain the president.
He had lots of other reasons.
And so on the 31st of August, he got out there in the Rose Garden and said something very different from what you hear from presidents these days.
He said, this is a matter of war, and so I'm going to ask for appropriate authorization from the Congress of the United States.
And of course, he knew that would put the kibosh on all that stuff.
How did he escape complete opprobrium?
Vladimir Putin bailed him out.
Six days later, there was a summit in St. Petersburg, not just a bilateral one, but the group of nine or whatever it was.
And that's when Putin said, hey, Mr. President, remember when we got together in Northern Ireland in June and we talked about getting rid of Syria's chemical weapons?
And we set up that working group in Geneva.
Let me tell you, that made great progress.
And I can tell you that Bashar al-Assad is willing to give them all up.
And Obama says, yeah, right.
He says, yeah.
As a matter of fact, listen to the press conference that the foreign minister in Syria is going to do tomorrow.
And you'll see he's going to say we'll give up all our weapons.
Well, that was a terrific relief for Obama.
Got him off the horns of a dilemma.
But it enraged.
It enraged the neocons.
Let me give you a personal example of how I experienced this.
A week later, I was asked for my last time to talk to CNN International on the top of this palatial CNN building in downtown Washington.
So I did my little thing, 10 minutes, talking to London, making believe there was a guy there and looking straight into the camera.
And as I come out and I open the door, whoops, there's a little guy there that I almost knocked over.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
It was Paul Wolfowitz.
Oh, man, you should have knocked him over.
Well, I'll tell you, I've undergone an awful lot of nonviolence training.
And never was I happier to restrain myself.
For Irishmen, it's particularly difficult.
Anyhow, so I said, I'm sorry.
He said, well, you know, watch where you're going.
Then I looked across the room.
There's Joe Lieberman.
Now, these guys, well, let me explain it this way.
These guys look like their mothers had just been run over by a Mack truck.
Dark suits, none of these flamboyant ties, black ties.
And they're looking at the boob tube there with other CNN people talking.
And indeed, they're saying, oh, Bashar al-Assad has these chemical weapons.
And the president, a red line, he set this up.
And he flubbed it.
And he's got no guts.
And the president, once he sets a red line, nobody will ever believe us again.
You know, blah, blah, blah.
It was really bad.
So I said to myself, hey, this is interesting.
What happens next is this.
Lieberman and Wolfowitz go on the other side of the elevator shaft at the very top of the CNN building to their own little private room.
And they do this interview, which we see on the tube there.
And the first thing Lieberman says is, no, you know, I don't want to call the president a chicken.
But this excuse that he can't start a battle or a war without congressional approval, well, you know, there's nothing in that.
That's just an excuse.
Blah, blah, blah.
See?
So I have this little constitution that I always carry around with me.
It was given to me by Dennis Kucinich.
I whipped it out of my pocket.
And I went to Article 1, Section 8, which shows that only Congress can declare war or authorize war or fund war.
And I had my pen and I underlined it.
I cut out the whole, tore out the whole Article 1.
And I said, I think this is going to be fun.
And I went into the palatial elevator shaft.
It looked like something out of Abu Dhabi or something, you know.
To wait for them.
Lying in wait.
Okay.
Next thing you know, they come out of their little booth and they come into the elevator shaft.
And I'm standing there.
Now, the ways of Washington are such that you can never, ever risk not recognizing somebody you should know.
Now, I had my best Goodwill suit on there and my best Goodwill tie.
So I looked pretty presentable.
So I went up.
I said, Joe, Paul, Ray McGovern.
And they said, oh, yeah, Ray, yeah.
They didn't know me from Adam, okay?
So I shake hands.
I said, now, Paul, hang on for a second.
Joe, I couldn't believe what you said about how long you've been a senator.
Like 24 years?
And you don't know the only Congress?
Like you were part of it.
Joe, I cut out the first article.
Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.
Look, I underlined it.
You can have it.
I got another Constitution at home.
Would you bring it home and read it and, you know, sort of educate yourself?
And just then, as Paul Wolfowitz is slinking away, appears this beautiful, six-foot-high, redheaded lady whose job it is to prevent high-level people like Lieberman and Wolfowitz from talking to the hoi polloi like me.
She comes in, and she's on this little stanchion, and she says, oh, gentlemen, I'm so sorry.
And so I said, well, so am I.
I don't know why you let clowns like this on your show when they don't even know what the Constitution says.
Well, we went down from there.
I didn't hang around much longer than that, and I've never been back in the CNN building.
But you know what, Scott?
It was worth it.
What's my point in saying all this?
These neocons were crestfallen, felt that they had lost a carefully calculated campaign to mousetrap the false flag of the President of the United States into honoring the red flag thing, the red line thing that they had given to Chuck Todd to raise with him.
And it was all working so beautifully, and then all of a sudden, all of a sudden, it all fell apart.
Obama was really, really just full of cowardice, and nobody would ever believe us again when we made a red line.
And then what happens?
He goes off to St. Petersburg, and he's rescued.
And so they're not only still angry at him, they're even angrier at Vladimir Putin, the rescuer here.
They've had to get back at him.
And as a result of the putsch, the coup in Kiev on the 22nd of February, was that eight months later?
Do the math.
Relations with Russia have plummeted to a very dangerous state.
And I remember your colleague Robert Perry at the time said, you know, I think what's really going on here in Ukraine, and the reason why now, in this way, it's revenge for Putin helping Obama make peace with Iran and at least prevent the war from getting worse in Syria.
And that was, they basically went to war against his policy after that.
Yeah, it worked like a charm.
I mean, not only do we have the coup, but then we try to get sanctions.
We try to get the West Europeans to cut off their noses to spite their faces and do sanctions against Russia.
We couldn't get them to do that.
And then all of a sudden, MH16 or 17.
Hold that thought for a second, because we can talk about that in a second, because I don't care.
I'll interview you for an hour and a half.
Everybody loves you.
And they'll listen to the whole thing.
I know they will.
But so on the Syria thing, I want to point out that at the end of the summer of 2013, we had, it just happened to be a perfect, from our side's point of view, a perfect political recipe against war in the sense that the typical right-wing jingoists who would always favor a war had this sort of Obama as Bill Clinton kind of point of view on it, where I'll be damned if I'm going to have my son take orders from this Muslim Kenyan terrorist or whatever it was that they had considered him.
So good.
They didn't believe in the commander in chief, so they didn't believe in the commander in chief's mission.
And so they were inoculated because Obama was in charge.
They were inoculated from wanting to climb on board.
And plus, the word was getting around among the hardcore right-wing nationalists, in a broken clock is right twice a day sort of a way, that, hey, we're talking about attacking a secular leader in a three-piece suit in favor of a bunch of bin Ladenite jihadists, which you don't have to be a right-wing Muslim-hating kook to notice that, but in this case it helped.
And so all the right-wing Muslim-hating kooks were saying, wait a minute, we're going to fight a war for Al-Qaeda?
We're going to against a Ba'ath party secular government?
They knew enough about it to know that that just did not make sense, and they just did not support that.
And who was left?
In the whole, what, for three, four weeks this went on, in August and September 2013, and there was no one who was pushing to attack Syria except the Israeli government and their fifth column in the United States, including those neocons that you just talked about in your anecdote.
There wasn't anyone else.
The rest of the country club Republicans and all the contractors and all the businessmen and all the people who climbed on board for Iraq War II, for example, they were nowhere to be seen.
And, in fact, I actually had a conspiracy theory at the time that Obama had actually encouraged, you know, had sent word to AIPAC that, hey, guys, I really need your help, so climb out on this limb with me, and then sawed it off.
Because what a huge failure.
And they failed to stop the nuclear deal, they failed to stop Chuck Hagel from getting confirmed as the Secretary of Defense, and they failed to get us into that war.
And, you know, I don't know that Obama really did that to him, but it was that notable that in the entire American echo chamber, I mean, yeah, Jake Tapper is always going to frame it that way, but in terms of whatever, all of so-called civil society in whatever shapes and forms, there was nobody but the lobby that was pushing for that thing.
Well, you know, that's not the way I would phrase it.
I think you're absolutely right, but I wouldn't say nobody but the lobby.
I'd say the lobby, and that was enough.
In other words, the power of the lobby, as we talked about in connection with the liberty, is formidable.
And, you know, when you look at September, well, the Israeli defenses were way up high.
The French fighter bombers were on the tarmac, and Obama was just about to push that button when General Dempsey told him what I just said, and when he realized that, well, he didn't have to do this, and maybe the Russians would bail him out.
And so they were really incensed by all this, and the rest of the thing played out in the way that I think we both agree, and Bob Perry was, as usual, the first one to suggest that Ukraine and Syria had this intimate connection.
But what happened in Ukraine was bad enough with respect to the coup that we put in this fellow Yatsenyuk.
You know, I noticed when you played that tape, I have to tell you that I was appalled, Scott, that you fooled around with that tape, that you messed with that tape, because Victoria Nuland used the F word.
Yeah, I muted it so that it would be family friendly here.
I know you were anticipating, oh no, is he going to play the swear?
No, I didn't play the swear.
Okay, now this is more than just comical, because she apologized the next day.
So for anyone who said that the Russians or the Ukrainians or somebody else fabricated these tapes, that's what Nuland was saying.
She said, you know, I'm really sorry I said that.
Of course, all the EU people said, oh yeah, what was she really saying?
She was saying that the EU would have been against this kind of coup, maybe those political hacks, not the security services, so I'm just joking, of course, but using the F word so cavalierly there was really good, because that showed that she had actually apologized for that.
But getting back to the Ukraine, it wasn't only the coup, it was trying to get everybody to march along with sanctions, economic sanctions that would hurt the Russians.
Now, did they succeed?
No.
The U.S. put in sanctions, and Kerry complained bitterly.
He complained bitterly up until early July 2014 that the Europeans didn't realize how they had put in economic sanctions against the Russians.
And then, falling out of the sky like a deus ex machina, comes MH17.
Whoa.
The Malaysian passenger plane with, I think, 290 or so passengers, all killed, being shot down by a missile.
Immediately, John Kerry gets up to Chuck Todd and all these others, Jake Tapper and all these guys, and three days after, that was the 17th of July 2014, three days later, Sunday, he's on all the shows, and he says, it was a Russian missile, it was a pro-Russian separatist, they did this, and it's very clear that they did this.
We have, said Kerry, trajectory information.
We know where the missile was shot from.
We know when it impacted on the MH17 plane.
We know that's precisely the time when it fell to the ground.
We know it was Russians or pro-Russians.
Now, guess what?
That was what, we're talking July 2014, so almost three years ago.
Now, has Kerry shared that information with anyone?
Well, maybe it's classified, too highly classified.
Well, he hasn't shared it with anyone, not even the Dutch who were supposed to be investigating all this.
Would Kerry have incentive to share that?
Well, I would say so, because there are a lot of people that doubt that he actually has that information, including me.
In other words, there is the kind of evidence that we intelligence analysts look at, and we say, now, okay, we know what kind of collection systems would have been targeted laser-like on that area of the Ukraine at precisely that time.
We have a pretty good idea, even those of us who have been out a while, of what the intelligence must be.
And we also know there's no surprise to anyone in the world that it's not just imagery, it's multispectral, it's radar, it's infrared.
These satellites, they work magic.
And so we know exactly what happened.
Why is it?
Why is it that we haven't deduced that proof?
And the answer that I come up with is simply that that so-called proof that we do have does not coincide with what John Kerry said on the 20th of July, three days after the event.
Otherwise, of course, you'd give it at least to the Dutch.
They could keep it secret.
So why am I saying all this?
Well, I'm saying all this because blaming it on the Russians and the pro-Russians of the world, blaming it on the Russians, nine days later, guess what the EU countries did?
Sanctions.
Sanctions galore.
Sanctions that hurt the West Europeans and the East Europeans just as much as they hurt the Russians.
So that's the kind of influence we have.
Sometimes we need a little Philip.
Sometimes we need a little extra pizzazz.
And this was given to us by the MH17 falldown.
So what I'm saying here is that by blaming the Russians and the pro-Russian separatists for this terrible event, that gave Kerry and all the others the ability to line them all up, line them all up.
All the Europeans had to line up behind us.
And we then went into this mode where General Strangelove, and I keep saying Strangelove, General Breedlove of NATO was making these false accusations that thousands of Russian troops were coming on the border there in Ukraine and elsewhere in Western Europe.
So this is really serious stuff.
If Kerry has the goods, or if anyone has the goods, they should let it all out.
And people might believe it, but they don't have the goods.
And this was simply a way to get the Europeans to fall into line and hurt their own economies as well as the Russian economy.
So this is part of the problem here.
What I say when I go to Germany, my German friends, don't say it that way, right?
Don't say it.
But what I always say is, look, you know, I've been around since the beginning of World War II.
I was born one week before Hitler marched into Poland, right?
Okay.
Now, I know a good bit about it because I grew up in the immediate aftermath of the war, and I've studied it really closely.
And, you know, it really boggles the mind that you haven't grown up, you Germans.
Now, that's what I'm not supposed to say.
I say, look, I can understand why you're totally dependent on us, especially with the Russians still peering down your throat, for a couple of decades.
And then I can understand you acting like adolescents.
You know, you still need a lot of protection.
You need money.
You need an allowance, right?
But, my God, it's 72 years.
When are you guys going to grow up?
When are you going to start acting like adults?
Now, that may not be the best way to say it, but that's how I feel about it.
And I really don't understand.
The Germans are pretty smart people.
I don't understand how much longer they will march in lockstep with a U.S. administration such as the one we have today.
I think it's probably, on balance, a good thing that they have their doubts about our role in NATO.
NATO is a vestigial organ.
It should be put back into mothballs.
And maybe that will create this kind of thinking.
But the U.S., well, we call it disingenuousness.
And the degree to which we try to exploit these things, like that tragedy of the Malaysian flight being shot down, well, you know, that really, over the long run, just increases the kind of distrust without which a superpower really can't prevail for very much longer.
All right, Ray, well, I think we'd better wrap it up, despite the fact that I have a few more topics I wanted to discuss with you here, but I've got to make sure this thing fits on people's phones.
Okay.
Thank you very much for your time.
Again, great to talk with you.
Good to be with you, Scott.
All right, Shaw, that's the great Ray McGovern.
He was a CIA analyst for 27 years.
He's the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
He writes at RayMcGovern.com, at ConsortiumNews.com, and at AntiWar.com.
We rerun virtually everything he writes.
This one is called Not Remembering the USS Liberty.
And, again, it's about this new book coming out, Remember the Liberty, Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas by Philip Nelson.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks again, guys.
And you know what?
If you're into this USS Liberty story, I've interviewed some survivors of the USS Liberty attack.
Just search my site for USS Liberty.
I've done some previous stuff with Ray and with survivors and other journalists on it, too.
I've covered it quite a bit over the years, so check that out.
All right, thanks, guys.
I'll see you over at LibertarianInstitute.org.
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