6/23/17 Ray McGovern on the latest Trump-Russia hoax in the Washington Post

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All right, you guys, introducing the great Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, he was actually the chief analyst of the Soviet Division, back when was the briefer for Vice President George Bush, Sr. in the Reagan years, and is the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which has been telling you better since at least 2002.
He writes great stuff at raymcgovern.com, you can see all his interviews on at least foreign TV and other things, all his great articles and everything at raymcgovern.com.
All his best articles get published also at consortiumnews.com and at antiwar.com as well, and he gives speeches to your group, especially East Coast-type people nearby where he lives there in the D.C. area, and that's through Tell the Word, and he will come and tell your group, religious or otherwise, about why to be as antiwar as he is, and I think you'll like it.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you, sir?
Thank you, Scott.
Doing well.
Good.
I'm very happy to hear that, and very happy to have you back on the show.
So this morning I saw on Twitter the media consensus.
They said, oh my God, wowee, I think, quote, zowie, the Washington Post has got the goods on Donald Trump and Russia and the Russian plot to put Donald Trump in the White House.
Oh my God.
I think the one guy said, I've stared into the void and I have become the void.
Oh, the horror.
But then, so I read the thing, and obviously I'm biased against this, and we've talked about, you know, we've debunked this story before on this show.
You've written all kinds of critical things about this whole narrative and all this stuff.
But I was really trying hard to believe them and see it their way, and yet, well, I don't know.
How about you?
Well, this seems to be a kind of a preventive act.
More and more people are asking, where's the beef, you know?
Where's the evidence?
And this is a kind of an attempt by the prostitutes that work for the Washington Post to draw up a nice little plausible sounding study, which doesn't do anything to persuade people who look for hard evidence.
It's kind of hard to watch all this happen, because it used to be that the Washington Post did some good work, but you have to go back to, actually almost back to Watergate to find that, and the same is true of the New York Times, of course.
So we've got a potpourri of allegations, and I guess the main thing here is that John Brennan clearly plays the big role in all this, and I guess maybe your listeners aren't quite aware of to whom John Brennan owes his schooling.
He's a protege of a fellow named George Tenet, who has a record of lying to the Secretary of State and to various other and sundry people, and I have one thing particularly in mind.
People have been asking me all day, would the head of the CIA lie to the president?
Would he lie to the world?
And the answer I have to say is, well, yeah, I mean, hello, let's go back to right before Colin Powell delivered his magnificent speech before the UN, I'm being sarcastic here, on the 5th of February 2003, about six weeks before we started a war of aggression against Iraq.
The question was, what was the evidence, of course?
Larry Wilkerson, colonel at the time, his chief of staff, and Colin Powell spent about four days up there at CIA headquarters where I hung my hat for 27 years.
I could see it all happening.
It got so bad that Powell and Larry Wilkerson went into a side room and they had a little discussion and it went this way.
It's a crock, isn't it?
This business about ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
They hate each other, don't they?
Yeah, they hate each other.
Why are they selling this crock?
Well, let's go back and tell them, we're not going to say anything in this speech about the nexus between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
So they go back in the room.
Two minutes later, who comes rushing in but George Tenet, the head of the CIA.
He's got a piece of, he's got a report here from al-Libi, a fellow who was interrogated by the Egyptians who know how to get people to confess.
And he's confessed that he was the travel agent.
He oversaw all manner of jihadists going up to Baghdad to be trained in explosives and chemical warfare and other sinister things.
Here it is.
Here's the proof.
Now, you know, Colin Powell had at that time been around long enough to see what was going on here.
Larry Wilkerson, the same.
But Powell, to his discredit, decided that maybe better fall for this.
And next day on the 5th of February, 2003, he talked about a sinister nexus between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
Now, what's the point of all this?
Well, the point of all this is that before we attacked with the British Iraq, 69% of the American people were convinced that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11.
His association with al-Qaeda, he had something to do with 9-11.
The weapons of mass destruction, yeah, they were also bad and they weren't there, of course.
But this sinister nexus, okay.
Now, how about now?
Well, there was an AP poll last week and it shows that 68% of the American people believe that the Russians are trying to mess up our democracy, that they're responsible for Donald Trump being our president, and they're threatening us in Europe and so forth and so on.
Now, 68%, well, I suppose you could argue that it's 1% less of Americans that have been totally deceived.
But I'd point out that 48% of that 68% believe this very strongly, okay.
So we're in the same kind of brainwashed atmosphere here.
Well, even my friends, you know, they say, well, Ray, you don't deny that the Russians interfered with our election, do you?
And I say, well, I need evidence.
You know, I'm one of these, I don't go on faith-based intelligence, I go on empirical intelligence and what I see, what I see, for example, and this really shocks them, is that yeah, our election process was interfered with, but, you know, it was the CIA that most of the interference, and I can prove it to you if you let me show you the documents.
And they say, documents?
And I say, yeah, you know, the CIA and NSA are really, really good about offensive cyber warfare hacking and so forth.
On defensive measures, not so much.
What am I talking about?
I'm talking about the uncanny ability that Julian Assange has to persuade people to leak, not hack, to leak documents to him that show the various machinations that the CIA and others are doing.
My specific reference is to something very, very significant.
It's called Vault 7, and it's the third release, so part three.
Interestingly enough, the New York Times wrote reports on part one and part two.
This has to do with original CIA cyber documents, which explain what they're doing, how they're attacking this, that, and the other thing.
No one has disputed the fact that they're original CIA documents, but why did the New York Times stop commenting on part three?
Well, part three is called Marble, okay?
That's a codename.
What does it stand for?
It stands for the CIA and NSA working out procedures and programs that allow them to obfuscate, the CIA word, pretty nice word, obfuscate who hacks into these things and to leave little telltale signs in five languages they worked in, Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, Korean, and Russian.
So if they have this ability to leave behind little, quote, telltale signs, in a quote like a little bit of Cyrillic, or maybe the first name and patronymic of the first head of the Russian secret service, the Chekhov, Felix Yermolnovich, well, you know, they can do that.
And it was done in 2016, this program was implemented.
Now that was on March 31st.
I remember it well because RT never calls me early in the morning.
This time they did, 7.15, Mr. McGovern, we have a very explosive report here.
We need you down.
Our studios aren't open yet, but we'll go to the Eurovision studios.
Can you be there by nine o'clock?
I said, what is it?
They sent it to me.
And I got in the car, drove in the carpool lane all the way in there.
And I had the presence of mind to get on the phone and say, Bill Binney, Bill Binney was the former technical director then, I said, Bill, you know, this is a really interesting program here.
Tell me about it.
Well, you know, how am I supposed to look at a program that allows the CIA to obfuscate the hack into, let's say, even the DNC computers?
Well, he says, look, Ray, here's a story.
I was there when this program started, OK?
It took them 15 years, 1-5, 15 years, and it took them 700 million lines of code.
So I said, Bill, hey, thanks a lot.
What's that mean?
He says, OK, Ray, the simplest way to tell you, one line of code costs $25.
Do the math.
You're talking several billion dollars invested in this program, not only from Marble, but Marble was a big part of it.
It allows them to hack into computers like the DNC computers, hide who hacked in, and obfuscate who hacked in by leaving little tell-tale signs like Cyrillic.
Now, is that what happened to the DNC computers?
Bill Binney and I are convinced that's far more likely than that the Russians hacked in.
You can't have it both ways.
You can't say that it had to be a state actor of sophisticated means, like the Russians, and then have them leave behind tell-tale signs like the first name and patronymic of Felix Edmundovich, the first, Dzerzhinsky is his last name, the first head of the Cheka.
Now, let me just finish this, I apologize for going so long, but it's really interesting, because for some reason, the sainted, anointed, widely respected former head of the FBI, James Comey, he neglected to do the forensics on the DNC computers.
You see, the DNC had their own favorite commercial outfit called CrowdStrike, which has a very dubious reputation, was wrong on some very key things, but they preferred CrowdStrike.
And CrowdStrike, of course, was no match for the program that the CIA and NSA had worked out together.
So, here's Comey, right?
Now, he hears about this hack, and for some reason, he doesn't go to the DNC or send his specialists and say, look, we need those computers, we need to do forensics on it.
Now, that's really odd, isn't it?
And you can see Comey squirming when he's asked this by the House and the Senate investigators.
Why didn't you seize those computers?
Well, we didn't get access.
Yeah, but why?
Well, we just didn't, and we depended on, I know it's better to pretend, it's better to depend on physical access, so we get our own forensics, but no, we had to use CrowdStrike forensics.
Now, CrowdStrike, of course, found the Cyrillic, right?
Okay, what does that mean?
That means if Comey were doing his job, he would have done exactly what I'm suggesting here, seized physical control to take a look and do the forensics himself.
Now, if he sent his specialists into the DNC to do that, he ran the risk of this happening.
They would come back and say, Mr. Comey, you won't believe the incredibly expensive, sophisticated program used to hack into the DNC.
I mean, it was far beyond CrowdStrike's ability to decide.
We can't even figure out how they did it.
Would you like us?
Yeah, here's an idea.
The only people who could help us out on this would be NSA.
Would you like us to seek advice from NSA?
We would have to say, no, no, no, no, please, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, because Comey is in with CIA and the NSA and all this stuff.
They are the deep state personified.
So it's very, very interesting.
There's no way to explain Comey's malfeasance here.
It's not just misfeasance, it's malfeasance.
If you're doing this investigation and people are saying the Russians hacked into the DNC computers, you need to do your job the right way.
Comey did not.
And he did not do it for the reason that he knew about this project, he knew about this cabal, and he doesn't want to rat on John Brennan and whoever the uniformed guy is head of the NSA was at the time.
Yeah.
Well, you made a pretty interesting case there, Mr. McGovern.
I got to say, well, so let's go back to this piece in the Washington Post today about it.
It seemed like, this isn't much, but I'm trying here, okay?
It seemed like the best case that they really made that something was going on here is that Obama and all his people were really concerned about it, right?
They never do prove anything.
They never say anything other than, well, some anonymous CIA guy claimed something to me, and so here it is.
In fact, I was noting on Twitter earlier that some of the paragraphs are just outright speculative in nature.
It seems as though the Washington Post is saying, we're reporting as a fact that this guy was daydreaming up some possibilities of what the Russians might do in the future, even.
Some of this is pretty far out.
But on the other hand, apparently, assuming that any of these anonymous claims to the Washington Post about the overall narrative about the White House reaction to this, well, geez, they must have been freaking out about something.
And after all, Ray McGovern, why wouldn't Vladimir Putin hate Hillary Clinton as much as any of us?
And after all, she did meddle in the elections of 2011 and what have you.
Never mind the enemy she made out of Julian Assange.
Saw that coming.
You really want to piss off Julian Assange?
You know?
I don't know.
Anyway, come at the king, you better not miss.
So all she does is miss.
And so maybe, I don't know.
In other words, maybe you're too biased toward real facts and information that can be proven when what you maybe need to do is do like the Washington Post and embrace the narrative and the imagination that maybe Putin really was behind some of this stuff.
And then wouldn't some of these other things make sense?
Like Obama was really concerned about it and wasn't sure what to do.
And he was constrained by politics from saying too much or else it would look like he was trying to tilt the scale toward Hillary, who he thought was going to win anyway and all this stuff.
It's a compelling narrative there, somewhat, sort of.
What do you think?
Yeah, I know you're being facetious here, but I'm from the Bronx, you know, and we call this whole thing a crock, okay?
And that's what it is.
I mean, okay, let's back up here.
I've been studying Russian leaders for 50 years.
That's a long time.
And the notion that Vladimir Putin is sitting around a table with his advisors, he's watching the election campaign.
You know, he's saying, oh my God, this is really interesting.
This guy, this guy Trump, he's unpredictable and he brags about it.
And what does he do at the least a front or slight?
He lashes out in a reckless way.
Oh man, this is going to be such fun.
This is just the guy I want to have his fingers on the nuclear codes across the ocean.
Oh man, this is going to be really exciting.
Give me a break.
Okay.
Now, at least Hillary, as bad as she was, she was predictable.
At least he had a record on Hillary.
Okay.
So the whole notion that he would have preferred Trump to Hillary is dubious in my view.
Now the other thing is this.
Everyone expected Hillary to win, right?
I mean, I was in Germany at the time.
They still have PTSD over there.
I didn't.
I called it.
I thought Jeb was going to stomp her.
And then as soon as I realized that Jeb was toast, which was pretty early too, uh, I said, well, she doesn't stand the chance.
You know how I knew in 2014 or even 13, she tried to do a second book tour about her time as secretary of state and they canceled it after one appearance because nobody showed up because nobody cared because her days were far over if she ever had a chance that was in a way.
But anyway, I'm way ahead of everybody else.
So don't, don't mind.
Well, Scott, I have to wonder then I have to ask you this under oath, uh, were you in touch with Vladimir Putin and did you tell him that?
Obviously.
Why do you think I interview you all the time?
The Russians are paying me literally dollars per week to support this pro-Russian narrative.
Okay, Scott.
You can be clairvoyant and I know you're a pretty sharp analyst.
Um, you would have to suggest that the Russians, uh, around Putin and Putin himself, um, really gave Trump a decent chance when everybody, you know what, even you're right.
You're right.
Certainly that the consensus was that it was hers to lose and all of that.
But you know what?
Hey, right wing populism is making a comeback all around the world and including in Russia and including in all of Europe.
And so why not?
But even then, uh, it's really the second part of your argument.
I think even if he saw Trump as having a 50 50 shot at it, tipping the, putting his thumb on the scale, I think you're about to say, Oh, that could just as easily backfire.
Hillary Clinton in the debate said, Donald Trump is Putin's puppet.
Russia's intervening in this election trying to, this didn't all come out after the election.
She was saying this all summer long.
And so assuming anybody believed her, that could have really hurt Trump, right?
That could have backfired in Putin's face if he really was intervening on Trump's behalf.
And in fact, if I was the KGB FSB political officer guy, I would be saying to Putin, don't intervene.
He's more likely to win if you don't than if you do, you could cause a terrible reaction there.
Americans are afraid of Russians, you know, I agree with that.
And, uh, the likelihood that a hack would be discovered, um, was so high that in my view, the percentage of, uh, that Putin would see in, in what, in, in, in how, and, you know, you know, how does this play out in real terms?
How is he going to influence anything by hacking into the, the NC computers?
Now, so back to Brennan telling Obama that there's a real problem here.
You're saying that Brennan cooked this thing up and he lied to Obama's face.
I mean, what about the DNI?
Wouldn't the DNI say, Hey, Obama, maybe that's only half.
Clapper lied under oath about NSA activities.
And after Snowden came out three months later, Clapper wrote a little note to the Senate intelligence committee saying, I'm sorry, what I said was a clearly erroneous period.
And for four years later, Clapper is still, that's not the same as lying to Obama though, right?
Clapper's the guy who told Obama, according to Jeffrey Goldberg, but it's against interest.
I think that Clapper told Obama, Hey, it's no slam dunk and I'm not really going to stand behind this war on Syria, or at least the information that, you know, based the Syria strikes on back in 2013.
I think Clapper needed to tell his analysts that he had done that because his analysts were up in arms.
They refused to do it.
So wait a minute, just to be clear here, Ray McGovern, you're saying that you think that Clapper, Comey and Brennan, that they were in on this together, even to fool the president to get the whole West Wing all as excited as the Washington Post today says that they were about how terrible this was.
I think that's equally possible.
It's an equal possibility that, uh, that, uh, Obama was fully in on this, you know, Obama's record of subservience to the intelligence people and to John Brennan personally goes back to June of 2008 when, when Brennan joined the campaign team.
And there are lots of indications, uh, that I could adduce to show that Obama was, uh, was a scared as we say in the Bronx, he was afraid of Brennan to the point where, and this is interesting.
Nobody knows this really because it only appeared in the Gordian Spencer Ackerman four part series interviews of a fellow named Daniel Jones, lead investigator on the Senate committee report based on CIA documents about CIA torture.
Okay.
Long story short, Ackerman asked, uh, Daniel Jones, how about the holdup?
Why is it that after you sanitize that executive summary, they still fought it tooth and nail?
And he said, because John Brennan had somebody very, very powerful working for him.
And the answer was, uh, Barack Obama, Barack Obama sent his chief of staff, Dennis McCullough to all the meetings having to do with getting sensitive material in or out of this report.
And they resisted it until the very end.
Dianne Feinstein was tearing her hair out.
She enlisted the help of Harry Reid, but guess what?
They lost the election.
I mean, they lost the majority and it was only because, uh, Mark Udall from Colorado who lost his reelection bid and had nothing, nothing to risk or to lose.
It was only because he told Dianne Feinstein, look, Dianne, this has gone on long enough.
The committee and the Congress is going to change hands or at least the Senate will look.
This is what we have to do.
You go tell the president that if he doesn't relent and allow the already sanitized executive summary to appear so that people could see the heinous activity that the CIA was involved in and that no good came from it.
If you don't do that, you go tell the president that I'm going to read that report from the floor of the Senate.
And so it's his choice.
I read it from the floor of the, of the Senate.
Now that's, I'm not sure that's happened, but that's what I think was the lever that persuaded Obama to stop protecting Brennan.
And that's the point of what I'm saying here.
Why would Obama keep protecting Brennan from, from exposure as a downright liar saying good information came from these heinous techniques?
There was no good information.
And that was shown in original CIA cables and other memoranda that Panetta in a former CIA director in a moment of weakness promised to make available to the Senate.
So here is Daniel Jones talking to Spencer Ackerman about the agony he went through for four years trying to get this thing sanitized up and out.
How his boss, Denise or Dianne Feinstein was, uh, was blocked by Dennis McDonough working for Barack Obama and how Harry Reid, when at her request, when he interviewed, intervened with the president said, Mr. President, we have to let this people know that this it's been approved by a, by a bipartisan majority.
You got to let this thing out.
And the president gave him on national security issues.
And Harry Reid says to him, you know, Mr. President, I wish that you could hear yourself what you're saying here.
We're going to press to get this thing out before we lose the majority in the Senate.
And just be aware we can do everything we can.
We'll finally, they got Mark Warner to threat to read it from the floor.
And that's what finally Obama on the 9th of December, 2014 says, all right, let it out.
It got two days worth of publicity.
Nobody's seen it since.
All we know now, and this is still worse, is that the person who replaced Dianne Feinstein, Richard Burr of North Carolina has recalled all copies of the 6,700 word full report.
And he doesn't want anybody else to have them.
And it was a congressional document.
So the executive branch is all returning all their copies.
I think there were only six made.
So we may never, we may never in our lifetime see the full report.
Obama is said to have one earmarked for his library.
And if you live 50 years longer, maybe you could see that, Scott, I don't think I'm going to be around 50 years longer.
So what I'm saying here is that you cannot underestimate the power that the deep state has on any president, and particularly a weak president like Senator, like President Obama.
And Donald Trump has taken them on.
Now that's the real, that's the real nexus of the problem here.
Yeah, I was going to ask you, so what's the motive here?
Because after all, I mean, just to try to get a little bit proper context in case people are thinking of this, it seems proper to note that Obama called Hillary Clinton and said, look, concede, you lost.
Don't try to drag this out, lady.
And she was like, oh, okay, and went ahead and, you know, basically called Trump at that point.
She didn't make a public announcement.
We were cheated out of her public announcement that night.
But at least she called Trump and conceded at that point.
And Obama was clear he didn't want to make trouble out of that.
But it does say in here that at some point after they gave him a certain amount of information, Obama said, all right, go back and look at everything and see if you can build a big case here, is the way that they put it.
And it does seem, you know, as you're saying, this isn't Obama himself.
This is what apparently the CIA itself, if that's not, you know, a direct synonym with the Washington Post.
I mean, it's pretty clear.
And I don't know if there are even any power factions of any real difference of opinion inside CIA.
I guess it doesn't seem like it, but they just seem like they're doing everything they can to pin Putin and Trump on each other, right, to scapegoat Vladimir Putin for Trump and vice versa.
And it seems that there's even a consensus within some people in D.C. that they really want to try to push this thing through to impeachment, although it already seems like that's played out and lost, right?
I mean, they tried to thwart him in the Electoral College and all this came to nothing.
So I'm not really sure, you know, what to make of all of this is like they're doing what half a coup, like they're not going to shoot him in the face in Dallas or anything like that.
But they're letting him know that we're not going to have a real detente with Russia, that that is that he has no say in that matter.
Is that what it is?
Yeah, that's part of it.
Part of it, you know, I'm not a psychiatrist, but, you know, on the 10th of November last year, a terrible virus came into being.
It's called the HWHW virus.
It's the Hillary would have won virus.
OK, now people are still in a state of equivalent to PTSD that Trump won.
It couldn't have been that Hillary Clinton was a terribly flawed candidate, as you recognize from the outset.
It couldn't be that she lost it by herself because nobody trusted her and she didn't go to the right states to campaign.
No, no, no.
Got me something else.
Now, let me tell you, that was very clear, very clear.
As soon as the first very damaging WikiLeaks disclosures came out, the ones that indicated that she had stolen, and I'm not exaggerating, they indicated that she had stolen the nomination from Bernie Sanders.
That was two days before the the convention, the Democratic National Convention.
Now, why do I say that?
I say that because that was the crucible.
What was she going to do?
What would Bernie say?
Oh, my God, what we do.
That's when they decided to put it on the Russians.
Now, I have ample proof that the way this thing went down, because Jennifer Palmieri, who was her PR person, admitted everything that she did right after the WikiLeaks disclosures at the convention and subsequently to make sure that that attention was diverted from the content of the WikiLeaks disclosures and diverted to the Russians, the Russians, the Russians.
Now, I'm in Washington, so I get to go to these little think tanks, and I went to the Clinton Podesta Center for American Progress Fund on the 6th of April, and it was quite enlightening because there was Jennifer Palmieri right there, and she had already written an article for the Washington Post saying, quote, the Clinton campaign warned you about Russia, but nobody listened to us.
Okay, what does she say?
She says that her task at the national convention was to go around to all the cable and other outlets, their tents, go in there and try to sell them on the notice, on the information that the Russians hacked into this computer system.
Now, here's what she says, and I quote it because I wrote it down and I checked it out on the tape.
You could check it out yourself.
It was a surreal experience, you know, so I did appreciate that the press, to absorb all this, it was just too fantastic to say that Trump was cooperating with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton.
The press and the process and all that was, here's a direct quote, it's hard for them to absorb, but when we got back to Brooklyn, Brooklyn's their headquarters, of course, but when we got back to Brooklyn, and this is a quote, and heard from, most of our sources were other intelligents with the press who work in the intelligence sphere, and that's where we heard things, and that's where we learned about the dossier, and the other story lines that were swirling about, and how to process this, and all this, and then we finally got to the point where we got the October 7 memorandum in which the director of national intelligence, Clapper, and the director of homeland security put out a statement saying the Russians did it, well, a month before the election, we finally got them to make that statement.
The statement didn't make any sense at all, it didn't prove the Russians did it, so here's what Paul Mary suggested on the 6th of April, now I think the answer for the Democrats is clearly in both House and Senate, is to talk about this more and more, and make it realer and realer.
Well, it got realer and realer, as she admits, when they got back to Brooklyn, and these intelligence people, what did she say, she said the intelligence people, the dossier, we heard things, and then along the way, the administration started confirming the various pieces.
Now, that was all John Brennan, okay, it got so bad, Scott, that the Wall Street Journal complained openly that the CIA was not talking to them anymore, she talked to the Washington Post and the New York Times, and come on, talk to us, too, and the press, you know, the press, just the prostitutes ran with this, and we see the latest manifestation of that today in the Washington Post.
You know, nobody asks the former technical director of the NSA, Bill Binney, who works with us to try to get some truth out, nobody asked me at the CNN.
I interviewed him.
Yeah, I know you did, but, you know, see, we alternative people, we have to figure out some smart way, and when something like this comes out, now, I've just talked to Radio Sputnik, that'll be on at 5 o'clock, so they'll have a leg up on interpreting these things, but we've got to find some way to get out to the people who are taken in by all this stuff and who are just completely convinced that the Russians interfered with our election.
Oh, they didn't?
Well, did they?
Yeah, well, they did, you know, it's so obfuscating, CIA word, that most people believe that Trump would not be president were it not for the Russians intervening.
That is toxic.
Now, you've got a situation in Syria now where it's altogether possible that US planes will be shot down by Russian air defense.
That is bad.
US pilots, we don't use pilots anymore, captured by the Syrians, by the Russians, the thing can go up very quickly, and it's, I've mentioned this percentage before, if 68% of the American people believe in a very hostile Vladimir Putin and Russia, they could easily be goaded by a fellow like Mad Dog Mattis into just testing out how far you can tweak the nose of the Russian bear.
Well, I mean, this is a real problem, right, is at this point when they're shooting down Syrian jets and they're bombing, I mean, they say, oh, we're bombing Shiite militias and Hezbollah on the ground, but hey, you might kill a Russian special forces hero, and that's going to play pretty bad out on the streets of Moscow and that kind of thing.
And here you and I and the rest of mankind are relying on the cool, patient wisdom of Vladimir Putin to just sit there and take it and say, you know what, they're going to slap us maybe a few times more, maybe a little bit harder, but we're grown up enough that we know better than to react in a way that's going to give them an excuse to say we started it.
And so, geez, nobody wants to die in H-bomb fire, and yet you tell me, Mr. CIA, Soviet Union analyst guy, how far exactly can we expect them to take it before pushing back and before pushing back in a way that obviously would become the excuse for the next step of escalation on the American side?
I don't want to be too worried about H-bomb war because it sounds like alarmism and worst case scenario type thing, and that's usually never what happens, right?
We haven't had a nuclear war with Russia yet.
On the other hand, geez, I don't know, it seems like they're causing problems where they don't need to.
The Americans, I mean.
Well, you know, you're quite right in describing a kind of a smart character in Vladimir Putin.
He's not going to be provoked, and that's part of the game here.
They would dearly like these people who profiteer on arms sales and arms manufacturing, tension in Central Europe and Syria, they would dearly love to have a little firefight there.
They're totally irresponsible in terms of how that might escalate.
They don't care.
They have no real experience in this.
So you have a sang-froid on the part of Putin.
But what happens when hardliners, what happens when nationalist types in Russia think that Putin is being too deferential to the United States, to the Israelis, to whomever?
Well, you know, it's not a sure thing that Putin will be there forever, and that's what I worry about.
The other thing I worry about is their very legitimate concern about the anti-ballistic missile placements in Romania and Poland, in the Black Sea, in the Baltic Sea.
Well, wait a minute, on Syria, if America shot down a Russian jet, we'd get a stern warning there.
What if we shot down two?
Again, I kind of think that, you know, I framed it that way.
I'm glad you agree with me.
But I guess the way I'm looking at it is this is all we've got, is that Putin seems to be the more adult in this equation.
And yet, on the other hand, he's not going to take too much more of this, right?
Well, for example, this is a lower scale of the same question.
Gee, Ray McGovern, how much longer can the CIA back al-Qaeda in Syria before the Russians intervene?
The answer is, once they really get a firm hold on Idlib province, that'll be one step too far for Russia, then here comes Russia, right?
Not that we necessarily predicted that to the dime, but that was the question and we got our answer.
So now my thing is, how much more can America hurt Russia in Syria, or for that matter, in Eastern Europe, without the Russians saying, oh yeah, and bombing some American position somewhere, or picking a real fight somewhere else, not hacking into Hillary's little emails, but doing something that really makes things worse for all of us?
Well, you know, I think that if Putin has a chance to talk to Trump, I think he may take the same line that he took with Obama in September of the year before last.
And that was, at the UN, he said, look, you know, we have skin in this game that you don't.
We have terrorists that are coming back into the southern part of our country.
There are 5,000 of them now, maybe 9,000.
They're getting trained, they're getting equipped, they're getting really, really good at insurgencies.
We're going to stop it now, and we invite you to join us, okay?
Because we're going to go after ISIS in a way that they haven't been gone after before.
You know we have aircraft and air defense, and we've been putting in the last month.
Two days from now, we're going to start using it.
That was the 1st of October, okay?
Now, what'd they do?
That's exactly what they did, and Obama, to his credit, adhered to Putin's overture to cooperate.
In other words, he said, look, I'd like to cooperate with this because we have a common enemy.
It's a much more immediate problem for us, but will you cooperate?
Well, long story short, for 11 months, John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov met and cajoled, and they finally got a limited ceasefire on the 9th of September last year, okay?
After 11 months, okay?
Wow!
Big achievement.
It was going to allow for people getting out of areas where they shouldn't be, and it was going to be a good ceasefire.
What happened?
Well, it went into effect on the 12th of September, and on the 17th of September, the US Air Force bombed fixed Syrian Army positions that had been in place for three months before, killed 100 Syrian Army types, wounded many more, and that was the end of the ceasefire.
What was Putin's reaction?
He goes to this conference in Balai, and he says, you know, I don't know how to understand this because I approved with President Obama, personally approved this ceasefire, and Obama assured me that he was behind it, but, you know, when people get back to Washington, well, let's, let me put it this way, says Putin, not everybody obeys the Commander-in-Chief.
Now, he knew damn well that it was Ash Carter, the Secretary of Defense, and his Air Force that scuttled the ceasefire, and John Kerry admitted that in an interview, bizarre interview with the Boston Globe three weeks later.
So what's Putin to think here?
Wait, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but can you elaborate on that?
Because I had missed that point, that Kerry went ahead and blamed the Defense Department and sort of, in other words, said it wasn't a mistake?
Is that what you're saying?
Well, two things.
Right after the ceasefire fell apart, he came to Washington and appeared at a think tank, and I was there.
This was, you know, 200 people is a big thing, okay?
He was interviewed, and as the interview got underway, he was asked, well, how do you feel about the ceasefire falling apart, and he said this, you know, this is, this was the toughest challenge of my whole professional life.
It was so complicated.
There was Kurd against Kurd, and Sunni, and Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and Shia, and Lebanon, and Iran.
It's just, it was very difficult to align all these forces.
Now, that's the word I will call attention to.
He wanted to align all these forces.
Who the hell did he think he was?
Because he's so tall and has such a good voice, he went to Yale or wherever he went?
He can align these things when nobody's been able to align these things in any imperial way for decades?
So that's the first thing, okay?
He thought he could align these things, and he thought he could get the buy-in from the Defense Department.
What he told the Boston Globe just two weeks later was, you know, it was really hard.
I had trouble working this out with Lavrov, and then we had the people involved on the scene.
But, you know, it was people in Washington.
Not everyone agreed in Washington, and so the ceasefire fell apart.
So two things here.
The hubris of thinking that by the force of his personality and his stature, John Kerry could align all these terribly complicated forces.
Didn't anybody tell him?
Didn't he know what to expect when he tried to muscle in with the CIA on this side?
It's just very, very difficult.
So it was beyond his comprehension that he was not able to align these forces.
And then the coup de grace, of course, was that when he thought he almost had them aligned, it was his own people, it was the Defense Department that sabotaged it deliberately because they knew those were Syrian Army forces on those hilltops.
Take that, civics teachers.
Just like you were talking about earlier, the war between the CIA and the Senate over the torture report.
When the only words out of John Brennan's mouth to Dianne Feinstein or whoever is the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee is, yes, ma'am, whatever you say, boss.
And yet he treated her like, well, who's the co-equal branch here, lady?
And in reality, of course, the CIA is far more powerful than any Senate committee or all of them combined.
At the end of the day, I think is what we're finding out.
But I mean, this is a, you know, hey, pretty notable, not just for its own story about the horrible sabotage of a bit of a piece in the midst of this horrible multi-sided Syria war.
But on the signpost to the last death throes of the constitutional republic here, the president and the secretary of state work out a peace agreement with the Russians on a major issue of people being bombed and things like that.
And the Defense Department immediately just intervenes and sabotages it and overrules the president of the United States.
And Ash Carter doesn't get fired like MacArthur or anything like that.
Obama just rolls right over again.
Yeah.
So you're really phrasing it quite well.
The deep state is real, OK?
It's not only the intelligence agencies, it's the Department of Defense, it's people like McMaster, the National Security Advisor, and the FBI and the NSA.
These are the core people.
And when they see their prerogatives being endangered or when they see they can put the kibosh on well thought out policies and even agreements between Pusheen and the president, they do it and they can do it and they get away with it.
So that's a big deal.
Now never has it been so clear that Brennan is so deeply involved in all this.
And all these dozens of former and acting or real or unreal intelligence and national security officers that are the sources for all this stuff, it's, you know, if I were President Trump and I saw that Attorney General or FBI Director Comey was in his 10th month of investigating me for ties with Russia and had neglected to look at who was responsible for all these leaks that made it look like Russia hacked or that the campaign was involved in nefarious activities with Russia, you know, if I were Trump and I would say, look, Comey, would you find leaks are a crime, OK?
Leaks are a crime, especially when it has to do with intercepted communications.
So would you look at, please, and then if you want to look at my ties with Russia before the campaign or during, you can do that too, but would you please look at these leaks?
Comey wouldn't do that.
Why?
Because he's one of the leakers and now he's admitted it.
And this is the epitome here.
So Comey admits in his last session before the Senate committee, yeah, I leaked that memcon, this memorandum of conversation that I did after Trump said, you know, he said, I hope you might stop the investigation of General, what's his name?
Flynn.
Yeah, Flynn, who, you know, is a good guy and he's quit.
And there's nothing there.
Now he writes this memo, right?
And then all of a sudden it becomes pretty dicey.
Trump is taking issue with that.
And so what does Comey do?
Comey leaks that memorandum.
To whom?
To the New York Times.
The paper?
No, not the paper.
He has his minions read it to them.
The Times says in one place, he had, he's expressed the hope that the investigation stopped in another place.
It says he wants that once the investigation of Flynn stopped.
Okay.
So it's not real clear what really is said there.
Okay.
Now, how can we find out?
Oh, well, where's the paper?
Oh, Comey says I had that leaked because I wanted a special counsel appointed.
Now, guess what?
The next day, a special counsel was appointed.
What's his name?
Bob Mueller.
What's his relationship with James Comey?
They weren't together for years.
They're co-conspirators in a whole bunch of things, including a late illegal, illegal surveillance, including torture, and including justifying an unjustifiable war against Iraq.
They're all in it together.
And Colleen Rowley has written that, but that can't get into the New York Times or the Washington Post or anything.
So what am I saying here?
I'm saying here, Comey wants to deny the press, we the people, deny anyone that special memorandum that he's done, which, quote, implicates, end quote, Donald Trump in obstruction of justice.
So what does he do?
He causes a special counsel to be appointed.
He makes sure that it's one of his best friends, and he gives it to him.
Whoops.
And not even the Congress can get it now because it's under investigation.
By whom?
By one of his best pals.
Now, how Comey was able to do that?
He had to persuade this guy, Rosenstein, right?
He had to go say, Hey, look, I need a special counsel.
And, you know, pretty pleased.
You were really good.
Everybody thinks that that Bob Mueller is just as upstanding and entirely integrity full as I am.
That would be a good guy.
Can you do it?
And if Rosenstein said, well, you know, that would, you know, when people look closely at that, that would, no, I don't think.
And then if past practice is any indicator, Comey might dig out a little folder that he has, just like J Edgar Hoover had these folders.
And he said, now, now, Rod, you know, people think Mueller's pretty good.
And we have this folder on, you know, some of the stuff that you've done.
And, you know, so, you know, it would be good all around if you would, you know, please do it and please do it today because we don't want a lot of people asking questions.
We want that memo secure and secure hands and Mueller's hands.
So I don't know if exactly that happened, but Rosenstein has not shown himself a profile in courage, has he?
He's let himself be used by Trump.
And I'm sure I'm not sure, but I suspect he let himself be used by Comey.
And so you have this cabal, this new cabal, Comey, Mueller and Rosenstein acting as snooping, trying to find out not who leaked, not who did those leaks.
Mind you, that would be, that would be Comey.
That would be Brennan.
That would be the NSA types.
No, no.
They're looking at these ties that the Washington Post tell us are so, so, so deplorable with respect to how Russia tried to change our democracy.
Wow.
They say today it's the crime of the century, right?
Apparently the century just started last summer.
If you believe any of this is true, because I can think of a couple of things since, you know, 2001, late 2001, sometime.
Well, in one respect, it is the crime of the century because most people have been deceived into believing it's true, you know, I mean, that this thing happened.
It's certainly the hoax.
Well, no, it's not even the hoax of the century.
I mean, compared to the fake genocide in Libya or the fake nuclear weapons program in Iraq or the fake nuclear weapons program in Iran or the staying in Iraq and fighting the eight year civil war.
And man, I mean, anyway, you know the list.
We all know the list.
It's unbelievable.
To me, it's just, it's a very particular, I don't know, maybe everybody else's culture is like this too, that form of exceptionalism where the rest of mankind isn't quite human.
You know, they say that the Chinese are very xenophobic too.
I guess I'd buy that.
But the way the Washington Post looks at it is that nobody that got killed by America, nothing, nothing of that nature could ever have amount to a scandal like something doing someone, something, someone doing something to us.
That's a completely different category of terror and horror.
Well, you're accepting us and that's because we're the exceptional nation.
After all, you know, America is the sole indispensable country in the world.
Now, when I go around talking to colleges, you know, I say, well, you've heard that, right?
So you know about synonyms?
Yeah, they say, yeah.
How about antonyms?
Maybe two will say, yeah, we know.
What's the antonym?
What's the opposite for exceptional or indispensable?
And, you know, they stroke their chins.
Oh, well, would be maybe dispensable.
I said, yeah.
So you're, you're a foreign country and you're looking at the sole indispensable country of the world.
So what do you, uh, dispensable?
Yeah.
Does that tell you something about how America looks at, at the rest of the world?
Well, yeah, I guess it does.
Oh, does that mean, is that the same as being exceptional?
Yeah.
And, you know, most people don't remember this, but after Vladimir Putin bailed out Obama by getting the Syrians to destroy their chemical weapons, this is early September 2013.
He wrote an op-ed for the New York Times.
Vladimir Putin did.
And he talked about the growing trust, both professional and personal, that had developed with President Obama, expressed the hope that that would continue, and then finished up with one paragraph that I am reliably told he drafted himself.
It said this, the only thing that I disagree with the president on is this notion of being an exceptional country.
In my view, countries are at different stages, some closer to democracy, others not, but that all countries should be considered equal under God.
And, uh, you know, I think that God says Putin, I think God smiles or God regards all people as equal.
And that's what we should do too.
Now, that's a virtual quote.
You can go back and look at it.
It was September 11, September 11, 2013.
That was the high watermark of Obama and Putin working together, or as I said, Putin persuaded the Syrians to destroy, to get their weapons destroyed on a U.S. ship specifically outfitted to destroy chemical weapons.
And that was done in the ensuing months.
Okay.
And Putin was looking forward to a better relationship.
What happened?
Well, there were people incensed that the U.S. didn't attack Syria with shock and awe, as was almost done because Obama hadn't pressed the button just yet.
Okay.
And what did they do?
Well, they waited six months and they did the coup in Kiev.
They were going to show Putin, he was in Sochi for several weeks, and they did the coup in Kiev.
And of course, we know how the U.S. reacted to that, how the Russians reacted.
There is not one scintilla of evidence that the Russians before that coup ever thought that they would need to take back Crimea.
Not one scintilla.
Go after the coup and after the new government that we recognize the next day, mind you, expressed the wish to join NATO and to ban Russian as an official language.
It was after that that Putin and his advisors got together and said, hey, the one thing we can't lose is our sole ice-free port in Crimea, Sevastopol.
So let's see what the people down there would like to do.
They don't want to be under this coup regime either, we bet.
And sure enough, the plebiscite was held a month later.
A month later, Crimea was rejoined to Russia.
Now, wait, pardon, I got to interrupt you real quick just to tell you that I'm going to send you an email with one more footnote for your narrative there, which only further confirms what you're saying.
And that is something that I got from James Carden, which was a British, I think, House of Commons report that detailed a part that I had missed completely, and I was trying to watch real close in real time.
And that was that three former Ukrainian presidents, including Yushchenko from the last coup from 2004, 10 years before, they all signed this thing saying that we ought to take the port and kick the Russians out of the port explicitly.
The three of them called for it.
And it was that was the final straw for Putin, according to this British parliamentary report.
So it wasn't even just the implication.
It was a direct threat to kick them out of the port before they seized the peninsula.
Yeah.
And, you know, Putin spoke about this.
And, you know, he said something jocular and he said something very, very serious.
The jocular thing was this.
It was one of these three hour press availability things that he does twice a year.
He said, you know, the NATO aspect was very important in terms of our rejoining Crimea to us.
But even more important was the prospect that anti-ballistic missile systems will be put into Ukraine.
Whoa.
He said that.
Most people miss that.
But that is the primary preoccupation of Putin, because once the Russian military think that our military can mount a first strike on our ICBM force in Europe, then there's a lowering of the threshold.
Then you have only five or six minutes to decide whether to kill the rest of the world rather than the 20 or 25 you have now.
So that's big.
So the other thing he said in a more jocular way was, you know, I'm sure that the NATO sailors are wonderful guys and we'd love to have them, but I'd really like to have it the way it is now, they asked permission to visit our port in Sevastopol, not the other way around.
So let's have it the way it is.
You know, well, hello.
Yeah, of course.
Now, it's Catherine the Great, for God's sake, at the time of our revolution that finally got Russia solidified down that far.
And that's when they put in the base.
They're not going to let any coup regime in Ukraine take over that base.
You know, Eric Margulies pointed out to me that hundreds of thousands of Russians, not just Soviet soldiers, but hundreds of thousands, four or five hundred thousand Russians died fighting the Nazis to keep them out of Crimea.
That to them, I mean, you think about what the Alamo means to a Texan.
I'm a Texan.
You got your West Point up there, you New Yorkers.
And Benedict Arnold's trees and where these kind of symbolic things.
How many people died at the Alamo?
A couple of dozen or something.
And they were stealing that land anyway.
They were clearly the aggressor.
Hundreds of thousands of people died defending Crimea from Nazi attack.
So I don't think there's any way that you can describe in English what that means to the heart of a Russian patriot, that they're going to hold on to that territory no matter what.
Yeah, you know, I was there exactly this time last year, and we toured the underground facilities that they held out in.
It was really quite a quite a struggle.
And you say, as you say, the casualties were great.
But Sevastopol has the status of what they call a hero city in Russia.
There are only about six or seven of them.
But there, the way they acquitted themselves when the Nazis tried to overcome all of Crimea is something of national pride to all the Russians.
And that's why you had most of the Crimeans, well, 90 percent of them voting to be annexed by Russia.
And again, I forget if you had a chance to mention or not, as verified by German and other independent polling firms who came and did the exit polls and the post election referendum surveys, etc.
Yeah, it was no surprise, you know, that that would be the way the vote went.
And, you know, it's interesting to just think back a little bit in history.
Crimea was always part of the Ukrainian SSR, which was one of the 15 republics of the USSR, right?
And when Stalin died in 53, a fellow named Khrushchev came in and he was a Ukrainian.
And so what did he decide?
He said, you know, I need a little bit more support in Ukraine.
So what I'll do is detach Crimea from the Russian Republic, you know, I'll give it to Ukraine and it won't make any difference except the symbolism of it.
And, you know, it doesn't matter because we're all happy in the USSR.
We'll be there forever.
So, yeah.
How did he do it?
How did he do it, Scott?
He took a piece of paper like this and he did what they call an ukaz.
OK, he was the dictator of a totalitarian country.
He could do whatever he wanted.
Right.
So here tomorrow, tomorrow, Crimea is part of Ukraine.
Now, did anybody say anything?
No.
Did it matter?
No, not then.
Right.
All of a sudden, just to be clear, just to be clear for people who are too young to have grown up then and remember what he's saying is because everybody in the USSR was answerable to the Kremlin period.
So it didn't it really made no difference whatsoever who was in charge.
Exactly.
And so what I'm trying to say, of course, here is that this time when Putin and his advisors got around the table, someone had the presence of mind to say, well, you know, like, how do the Crimeans feel about this?
And of course, they were up in arms against this fascist coup, fascist led coup in Kyiv.
And so it was a pretty logical solution.
Well, why don't we why don't we encourage them or they want to have a plebiscite anyway?
Let them do it.
We'll see what comes out.
And then if they want to be annexed, we'll welcome them with open arms.
Now, here's the thing, though, to cut to the real chase here, what you're describing is some cause and effect.
That's the all important context, because if Crimea or the Ukraine crisis are brought up at all, it's only the example of Russian aggression, Vlad the Terrible, the new czar and right wing Russian ranchivism.
And and if it ain't the Soviet Union, it's at least the battle days from before then.
And he's intent, obviously.
And I see him on Twitter all day.
They really do believe these, you know, liberal consensus centrist types that, of course, we we have to double down our presence in the Baltics before Russia invades.
What are we going to do when Russia invades the Baltics?
They're just take it for granted that this is soon.
And it's funny.
It's like the people who are the not the liars, but the believers in all the hype about Saddam.
It's like, how can you really be so caught up in this narrative?
But they are and they're really convincing themselves of that.
So and look at Crimea, for example, what Putin did there.
You know, it really is interesting.
I've been in the Baltics, right?
Yeah.
Why would why would Russia want to invite invade Estonia or Latvia, Lithuania?
It doesn't parse.
You know, if they wanted to invade some place.
Well, they have two republics in eastern Ukraine that begged them to to annex.
They say, hey, no, no, no, we're not going to do that.
Work it out for yourself.
We'll give you support.
We'll send volunteers and some a lot of food and some weapons, perhaps.
But hey, you fight it out.
We're not going to we're not going to take you guys on.
OK, now that speaks volumes to me.
This whole this is about the Russians attacking Western Europe.
I almost think that Victoria Nuland and the people running our policy there, Kerry and and Clinton, you know, they they knew how the Russian.
Well, if they didn't know how the Russians would react, they're really dumb.
OK, so there must have been some people say, well, the Russians would take Crimea back and they say, yeah, that's what they do.
And then we'll say they're invading Crimea.
And then in the east, we'll see it.
And then we'll get sanctions out.
Well, we'll do all kinds of things that we want to do to Russia.
And guess what?
We'll be able to tell the arms manufacturers, Maffei in Germany, for example, you know, they've been trying to develop this common European battle tank for a decade now.
Now they can do it.
And sure enough, the stock of Maffei skyrocketed.
And they, together with their French partner, are building the common European battle tank.
Whereas before, it was kind of hard to justify.
It's the perfect, it's the perfect sample right there of the economics of American militarism and imperialism.
Now we have the blatant economic interest of the private corporations, the arms dealers who make the equipment for the companies.
But you also have the economics of failure and the economic, quote, failure, at least the economics of a disastrous foreign policy that really takes, you know, failure for just a writ for more of the same.
They never lose their job and get replaced by the different security force.
It's still just the Pentagon.
So no matter what they do, if the coup works out in Ukraine, I think you and I've talked before about the editor of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Rose, parroting the, or toeing the party line on the Colbert show about the coup in Ukraine.
And this was just two days into the coup.
And he was saying, yeah, so see the way it's supposed to work, Colbert, we're going to get away with it.
And it's going to be easy because stupid Putin is distracted by the Olympics.
And so the trick is, how do we, you know, take his girlfriend away without provoking too much of a response from him?
Take Robin away from his Batman, take his girlfriend.
That was the phrases that he used.
And then, but it's okay if there's a three year war, a four year war in Eastern Ukraine and however many thousands of people die.
And there's all this chaos and American-Russian relations go completely to hell because whatever it was supposed to work.
But meanwhile, as you say, all the more reason now to continue to militarize, to continue to scare everybody.
Good propaganda, not just for Americans, but for the population of all of the satellite states in Western and Eastern Europe that, see, this is why we need to be in NATO.
This is why we need the Americans and their money and their equipment to protect us from the Russian bear.
Look what they're doing in Ukraine.
And it just multiplies and multiplies on itself.
Just like their disaster in Iraq leads to the Islamic State, leads to an empowered Iran, leads to all different consequences and all the more excuse to invade in Libya, intervene in Libya and in Syria and all over the Middle East too.
It's perfectly okay.
In fact, the worse it is, the better.
Why not?
And you've got the unhinged John McCain berating the new or the Deputy Secretary of Defense designate for being sort of reluctant to answer off the cup.
Why don't we give military support to this regime in Kyiv led by fascists?
In other words, McCain's right there selling these weapons and really berating this guy for being at all hesitant to do this.
Now, that's one thing you can say about Obama.
He resisted those efforts and he was helped by Angela Merkel.
She was here two years ago.
Well, they had the press conference after that.
So one of the guys says, Mr. Obama, what do you think about giving lethal military aid to Ukraine?
And he said, well, we're discussing that right now and we're doing that.
And Angela Merkel doesn't wait to be asked.
She says, eine schlechte Idee.
It's a really lousy idea.
Okay.
And then the question comes up again and she says, eine schlechte Idee.
So for once, for once, she spoke out and Obama listened.
Now, I want to add one element here.
And that is, you know, I used to not only work on Soviet foreign policy, but Soviet foreign policy toward China, which is a big deal in the 60s and 70s and very different from the way it is now.
Right now, they are de facto allies.
How did China react to Russian annexation of Crimea?
Well, I was shocked.
They pretty much approved it.
Now, the Chinese are allergic to changing, for good reason, good historic reason, changing borders and stuff.
But they pretty much tacitly approved it.
So what happens?
What happens if there's a dust up of a shooting match between Russian and American forces in Syria?
Well, remember where you heard this first, okay?
You're going to have Chinese naval vessels going down to those Sand Hill Islands there and in that part of the South China Sea, the Spratlys and the others.
And you're going to have the Chinese mounting a very peaceful, but very unmistakable, little adventurous move in that part of the world.
Just to remember the mad dogmaticist of this world, that Russia is no longer alone.
Russia is no longer at loggerheads with China.
And so you can't play them off against each other anymore.
This is a real danger.
And I hope there's somebody smart enough in the National Security Council or the State Department, to the degree it still exists, to point out, look, you know, the Russians have friends that they didn't used to have.
And you push them too far, you're going to have troubles in other parts of the world.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, listen, let me ask you one more thing.
And I've already kept you over time, but I like talking to you.
And I think my audience loves our long interviews of you anyway.
They're into it.
And so here's the thing.
Oh, assuming you got one more minute for me.
Yeah, sure.
So, yeah, Washington Post again here.
This is the big story of the day.
A couple of things about it that I noticed, and this has already happened before.
So maybe that would be their excuse that this source was already burned.
But the reason, and they don't prove this or demonstrate it in any way, of course.
But what they say in here is that, man, oh, man, did they have the most top secret source inside the Kremlin.
They knew what Putin was saying, who he was telling to do and what, and to do what things.
And they know.
And they didn't say whether it was electronic or whether they had a rat in there somewhere.
But they made it sound like Smithers was telling on Burns all day long over there.
And so it seems like they're really burning such an important source, or they at least could be burning.
In other words, this is the kind of thing where if it's the sort of news that would really benefit you and me, they would say, well, the government asked us not to print that part, right?
And they would censor it.
In this case, though, they're perfectly happy to say that.
And then also, they're perfectly happy to go on at some length about retaliatory measures.
And Obama had the CIA and NSA put all of these technological, quote, bombs of code inside Russian infrastructure and all these things.
And in fact, I'm actually blanking on what the rest of it was.
But they talked at some more length about the response and in preparations for possible responses that they could have deployed and this kind of thing.
And I was just wondering whether that struck you as odd.
Is it simply because all of it is in service to the government's narrative?
So it's perfectly fine.
Simple as that.
Well, you know, when you talk about placing cyber warfare devices such as was done against the Iranian nuclear facilities, you're talking about acts of war.
These are physical destruction of ports of the infrastructure of other countries.
And what we're getting now so far, at least, is kind of yawns.
Oh, yeah.
Well, see, I do that.
Oh, did they do it already?
Well, the Russians are wise to that.
On the more interesting question of the sources here, there is no reason in God's kingdom that more information cannot be released if these sources bear close scrutiny.
Now, people say, well, you can't endanger sources or methods.
Well, yes, you can.
And you should.
Yeah, especially when you're accusing the president of basically being a usurper.
This kind of thing.
I mean, it's not like they're saying, well, geez, things might have turned out different.
They're really using this to completely undermine the legitimacy of his presidency.
Not that I mind that in and of itself, all things being equal and everything, but they're not.
Yeah.
Well, you know, let me be clear.
I'm first in line for impeaching this guy.
But my God, you could do that on solid ground.
Let's face it.
He violated Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which says you can't start a war without congressional approval.
That would be a really neat precedent to set, right?
Why did they impeach him for that?
So what I'm saying here is this, that when you need to declassify information, you should do that.
And I have a specific example, which I think is very telling.
It has to do with Ronald Reagan.
On April 5th, 1986, La Belle Disco in Berlin was bombed, killed two U.S. servicemen, a Turkish woman, injured over 200 people, including 79 other U.S. service people.
Intercepted messages between Tripoli and agents in Europe made it clear it was Libya that was behind the attack.
Here's an excerpt, quote, at 1.30 in the morning, one of the acts was carried out with success, comma, without leaving a trace behind, period, end quote.
Well, what did Ronald Reagan do?
He waited 10 days, then he sent 60 Air Force bombers to strike the Libyan capital, leveling the palace and so forth, killed Gaddafi's 15-month-old adopted daughter, killed 15 other civilians.
A human cry throughout the world.
What did the U.S. do?
What proof did they have that the Libyans did that?
OK, what happens is Ronald Reagan comes to us and he says, I need that intercept.
And we say, OK.
He says, we need to release this to the press.
No, no, Mr. President, you can't do that.
Libyans don't know, number one, that we're intercepted.
And number two, they don't know that we can decrypt them.
No, no, we'll lose them.
What does he do?
He says, give it to me.
We're going to release it.
And it's released within an hour.
Now, what's the point there?
The point was that we did have, in this case, despite the ironic part of that Libyan message, namely that without leaving a trace behind, well, we had the trace.
We had the intercept.
It was revealed.
Did we lose the source?
Of course, we lost the source.
Is that too bad?
It's too bad.
But if I know much about this, we had three or four other such sources that we could easily substitute for.
So what I'm saying here is that given the importance attached to all this, if they have the goods on all this, they need to let the American people know.
I don't think they're going to do that.
And I think the reason is quite clear.
They don't have evidence that would stand close scrutiny by the likes of you and me.
Yeah.
I mean, that was the thing about this morning's Post article.
Again, I try to come at my own point of view from a devil's advocate response.
And you know what?
The Post does have some capable reporters.
God knows Trump must be some kind of criminal in a hundred ways.
No reason to think the best of him or of anybody else.
And they go, look, no, man, did you guys see?
Today is the day.
The Washington Post, they got a big one today.
I think this is it.
And then you read it.
And by the time you get four or five paragraphs in anything, they're going, well, remember, back in January, the CIA made some assertions.
And we're basically just going on that and blah, blah, nothing.
And that was all.
They didn't bring anything new to the table, really.
Other than, as I said, a little bit more detail on a story that may or may not be true at all that Obama was very concerned.
And so therefore, if you assume the conclusion, geez, he must have had a real reason to or something.
But in other words, in any scientific sense, they didn't move the ball forward whatsoever.
And you know what, Ray?
I don't know if you ever talked with Jeffrey Carr, the computer security expert.
But I had him on the show and I said to him, yeah, but Jeffrey Carr, I mean, some really smart people think that the GRU might have done this.
And he's like, sorry, Charlie, show me.
You can't prove it.
You know, I can't prove it.
Really, if it was true, you probably wouldn't be able to prove it or be very difficult for you to.
And by the way, I asked him and he clarified that on when it comes to William Binney saying, you know, that they would have been able to go back and and see how the hacking was done in the first place.
That was sort of a separate question.
But if you just wanted to look at the fingerprints of who broke in and what server they originally came from and that kind of thing, all of that can be faked.
And you talked about those highest level CIA hacking tools and whatever.
But also some guy, a capable engineer at a company somewhere could do that, too.
A capable hacker could do that, too.
And so I just said, you know, basically devil's advocate to Jeffrey Carr.
Yeah, but all the peer pressure in the world, man, come on.
Agree.
And he just said, no, I mean, it's just not there.
The evidence is just not there.
So anyway, well, it's strange times.
Yeah.
Hey, listen, you do great work.
I'm so appreciative that you make the time to come on the show and talk with my audience about all this stuff.
And with me, of course, well, you ask good questions.
So happy to talk.
All right.
Good times.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
All right, you guys.
That's a great Ray McGovern.
He's one of the founders of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity.
Always trying to debunk the latest hysterical false case for whatever violent conflict.
They really do great work.
You can read him at RayMcGovern.com and at ConsortiumNews.com and Antiwar.com.
And really, let me say about Consortium News that they have just been cut above everybody else, including Antiwar.com or anybody else.
Robert Perry, Ray himself, Gilbert Doctorow, James Carden and Jonathan Marshall and others.
They just do killer work over there at ConsortiumNews.com.
All right.
So that's it for me.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thank you very much for listening.
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Thanks.