04/25/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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And next up is our friend Ray McGovern.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
Everybody, you know Ray.
He was a CIA analyst for 27 years, and now he's a peacenik, and he's the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And he's a journalist and a columnist and writes really great stuff and has for a very long time.
And he knows a hell of a lot about Eastern Europe and Russia and in the old context and in the new.
So, very happy to have you here.
And I guess, well, let me say this to you first of all.
Eric Margulies, who you may or may not be familiar with, but a very experienced journalist and who knows a hell of a lot about Eastern Europe and Ukraine himself, he said on the show yesterday that he was recently in Spain, and while he was there, he spoke with some Russian diplomat types.
I don't know exactly what rank, but anyway.
And it was their terminology, they compared the current situation between us and Russia to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I guess they didn't say it was as bad, but they say it's the worst thing since then.
And so I chimed in and said, well, what about when Reagan ended detente and went back to brinksmanship?
That was kind of a big deal, right?
And Eric said, well, you know, whatever, gray area, it's all metaphors.
But anyway, it's that kind of level emergency going on right now in the face-off between America and Russia over Ukraine.
Do you agree with that?
Is that how serious the situation really is in real life, not just some rhetoric of people who want attention paid to them or something?
Well, I'd say it's a difference in degree rather than in kind.
What we have here is a situation that need not involve a provocation such as Khrushchev mounted against us when he put nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba.
And we now know, in retrospect, that they were already nuclear-tipped.
I mean, they were ready to go.
So this is in no way comparable.
What we have here is a situation where the U.S. overreached.
The New York Times did one regime change too many.
And Putin, whereas before the Soviet, the Russian Republic was not able to counter moves like this, now they are.
And he's drawn the line.
And the sorrowful thing for me is, you know, I never thought I'd see the time when the rules would be reversed 180 degrees.
I have to point out that John Kerry, every other sentence is a blatant lie.
And what Lavrov, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, what he's saying is the truth.
And, you know, it's really kind of hard for me to kind of turn my mind around here and say, wait, wait a second, the Russians are the bad guys.
We tell the truth.
And Lavrov left his pages today.
He was talking to a bunch of folks from the former Soviet Republic.
And he said, you know, this business about RT spreading propaganda, well, we're not even in the same league with John Kerry.
And, you know, it's really not diplomatic to brand our propaganda machine when we're trying to tell the truth.
And here we have Kerry twisting everything out of proportion.
And Kerry, you know, really kind of seizing the bull by the horns and saying that Putin has these fantasies where he's turning the situation on the ground completely out of proportion.
That ain't so.
It's Kerry that's doing that.
So bottom line for me is that the rhetoric is really worse than I thought it could be.
It's mostly Kerry.
You know how I see Kerry?
You know, he's one of these yelly guys and, you know, he's very well-heeled.
And he really, he's playing to the girls.
We have, you know, Samantha Powers, Susan Rice, and now we have the previous head of the Policy Planning Council of the State Department, Ann Marie Slaughter.
Now, she's out of Harvard and Oxford and she's supposed to know a lot, but she just wrote an incredible, incredible op-ed, which, you know, I'd like to just cite some stuff from so that I can show you how bad it is.
Let's see if I have it here.
Yeah.
What she's saying is we've got to give Russia a bloody nose, and the way we do that is we strike out at Syria.
That's just two days ago.
Bear in mind, she was head of the Policy Planning Council at the state.
She says, and I quote, is to make sure that the Russians know that we're serious.
Aerial bombardment is the way.
Equally important, shots fired at the U.S., by the U.S. and Syria will echo loudly in Russia.
Well, they sure as hell will, you know.
I mean, is the woman out of her gourd?
How does she expect that attacking Syria at this point is going to win them any points with the Russians or reverse the trend in Ukraine?
So, if this is the kind of advice that she and Samantha Power and Susan Rice and all those really tough, really tough women that Kerry likes to impress, and it's not only women, it's a bunch of neocons and others in the White House, men, then, you know, this is a sorry state of affairs because when you get into a hole like Kerry and Obama are in now, you don't keep digging.
You don't make it worse.
That's precisely what they're doing.
The Russians have the high cards here.
That's very clear.
Unless the neocons want to risk war with Russia, which I do hope that they're not crazy enough to want to do that, then this is just going to be a continual embarrassment for the United States of America with each week that goes forward.
I think you may have really solved this.
You know, Margulies was saying, it's these Amazon women, you know.
It's Rice and Power and I don't know if he mentioned Slaughter in his same thing.
And he was just saying basically that they're completely ignorant but bloodthirsty and exactly the wrong kind of people to be making this policy.
And if you compare them to earlier generations of American policymakers, they're just, you know, they're like the TV show version, the Saturday Night Live version of the way things used to be.
As bad as they were, at least they were competent in their evil, that kind of thing.
But now I think you've really tied it up with, yeah, and Kerry's just strutting around trying to impress them.
And meanwhile, they're taking us all on the road to hell and maybe the extinction of mankind.
But, you know, that's not that big of a deal.
Well, you know, I know somebody that went to prep school with Kerry, right?
And I said, what do you think about Kerry?
He said, well, you know, the word about Kerry was that he never gives up the puck.
So he's a big hockey player.
But he never passed the puck.
And we lost most of our games.
Now, I like to use it as a metaphor here.
I mean, as long as we let Kerry keep the puck, we'll get not only lose this game, but take a real bloody nose diplomatically.
Lavrov is making a fool of him.
And when Kerry is just kind of desperate to call people names, well, the rest of the world is looking on and saying, well, who is this guy?
Who is this guy?
It's very much like, you know, this is related only in the sense that it shows what kind of person Kerry is.
You know, when Putin had this big decision to make as to whether he would allow Edward Snowden to have political asylum in the Soviet Union, Kerry got up several times before the microphones, Mr. Putin, you must, you must give up Edward Snowden.
I know there's no extradition treaty between the U.S. and Russia, but you must.
You must.
And I get to see Putin sitting around with his advisors saying, who is this guy, you know?
Who is this guy telling me I must, you know?
And I dare say that that probably played into Putin's decision to do the right thing with respect to Snowden.
So on this as well, Kerry's making a grand fool of himself, and I wish he'd give up the puck.
Yeah, well, I mean, I saw him on TV yesterday, and yeah, he's completely out of his mind, or at least he's crazy to think that nobody can see through his protestations when he's saying, you know, the Russians aren't making the rebels in eastern Ukraine or whatever you call them.
I'm not trying to characterize them as targets for anyone.
The people who, the protesters who seized the buildings in eastern Ukraine there, the Russians have done nothing to make them leave.
Well, but they weren't invited to the meeting, and they didn't sign the agreement.
Only the Russians did, and I don't know to what degree.
Maybe the Russians haven't even tried to advise them to give up the buildings like the deal or something.
But for Kerry to sit there and yell and scream and stamp his feet about it when everyone, I mean all seven billion of us know that America just did a regime change against, it's overthrew a democratically elected government in Kiev, that the reason these people are protesting is because, and seizing these buildings, is because they're refusing to accept the authority of that coup d'etat government, and he's going to sit here and pretend that they don't have the right to seize the buildings when seizing buildings is exactly how the Nazis got the coup done a few hundred miles to the west of there, and everyone on earth knows it.
I mean, what the hell is he even talking about?
The only people buying it are the CNN anchors.
But everybody else is rolling their eyes going, who hired this guy?
George W. Bush or something?
What is this?
It's ridiculous.
It's laughable.
And see, now I've talked this all the way to the damn break.
How rude of me.
Anyway, that's all right, because when we get back, we're going to have more with the great Ray McGovern on the situation in Ukraine.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
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WallStreetWindow.com All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Ray McGovern.
RayMcGovern.com is his website.
He also writes at ConsortiumNews.com.
And as long as I'm mentioning that, I've got to tell you, Robert Perry is writing every day about Ukraine and just kicking ass over there about American intervention on Ukraine.
And there's some good ones by Ray there as well.
But you should be looking at Consortium News every single day during this crisis.
I was going to mention, Scott, that people get the idea that they know what's going on in Ukraine because they read the New York Times, right, and especially on Monday morning when it has a lead headline that talks about, you know, all these things that are going on and what happened to be wrong, and shows pictures, photos of these Russians that are identified as Russians in Russia first, and now they're in the Ukraine.
So what further need have we to prove?
Well, we know now that those pictures were bogus.
They were taken in the Ukraine, not in Russia.
And these, you know, face visual techniques or whatever they call them, recognition techniques, are bogus in and of themselves.
So Bob Perry pointed that out.
And to their credit, I suppose, the New York Times backed off once again.
Well, they had poached at least one of these pictures off Instagram and didn't even ask the photographer where it was taken.
And then she came out and said, hey, that's my picture, and I took it inside Ukraine when it was supposed to prove here are these same men in Russia, which means they must have crossed into Ukraine.
Ha!
Michael Gordon again.
Judith Miller's co-author strikes again, these guys.
Yeah, they're going to get us into another war if we don't stop them.
All right, now let me ask you about the mirror image of that, though, because yesterday Eric Margulies said he's got sources in the American military establishment who have told him that the Joint Special Operations Command, on the other hand, is very much in eastern Ukraine right now, laying groundwork, preparing the battlefield.
I don't know.
What do you know about that, former CIA man?
Well, I don't know anything specific, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Could you find out anything?
I'm not sure I could find out right away, but, you know, it goes without saying that you not only have the National Endowment for Democracy, which was sort of the replacement for CIA covert action overthrowing governments.
We do regime change now.
That's supported by all manner of surreptitious activity, most of which has been stoking the problems in Kiev and surrounding areas.
We even have people who are trained in Poland who talk about how they've recruited folks to go to Poland to get trained and how you create disturbances in the public squares like the Maidan and end up in Ukraine.
So it doesn't surprise me in the least.
By the way, let me mention that's at nie.com.pl.
That is the Polish paper that has published that story about these Ukrainians coming and being trained in Poland.
There may be more sources than that.
That's nie.com.pl.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah, well, and Poland is one of those countries that not only took in our prisoners that were kidnapped during the Iraq War, but allowed the CIA to have its own little black site interrogation building way off in the wilds of some forest.
And I guess to their credit, the head of their intelligence arm is now indicted, and they're pursuing that against them.
It would be nice if they pursue it against other people who are involved in torture.
But anyhow, Poland is in Iraq.
It was my wife that published the location of that torture prison, Ray.
Yeah, congratulations.
Remember that?
Yeah.
So all these things kind of fit in, and one of the marvelous things, or I should say one of the things to marvel at is the degree to which Europe is just sort of acting in such a servile way when they know what the truth is, and yet they sort of follow in behind the U.S.
Even now, I think that may be changing, but it's changing so slowly that it's remarkable that the knee-jerk, and they all say, well, you know, if Kerry said it, it must be right.
And, of course, they know.
They know what happened there, and he was caught with his pants down, and now he's got to act like a big machismo guy.
The sooner that Obama gets rid of Kerry, the better.
Yeah, you got that right.
Boy, I mean, I guess I wouldn't say I prefer Hillary, but I sure don't like him in that job.
Well, so now to the bottom line here, it sure looks, Ray, like the government in Kiev, such as it is, the American-installed coup d'etat, junta, or whatever the hell it is, they swear they're going to send, I guess, the right sector thugs and Svoboda and whatever, all they have left of a military now, and they've already killed some people.
But they're declaring, oh, yeah, no, we're going to fight.
We're going to basically invade eastern Ukraine and dislodge these people from all these government buildings that they have seized and end the Donetsk Republic, or however you exactly say that, and what have you.
And then so the question is, you know, double, obviously.
Do you think they're really going to do that?
And then what do you think the Russians are going to do?
And then, I guess the third question, and then what's going to happen in Washington, D.C., and in the skies over the Poles?
Well, let's start with the Ukrainians.
Now, they're getting expert advice from a high official who never served one day in the armed forces.
His name is John Brennan, and he knows a lot about what should be done in terrorism, right, against terrorism.
And that's why when he instructed the provisional government there in Ukraine to go after those people in eastern Ukraine, and they said, yeah, but they're our own people.
He said, oh, well, say it's a war on terrorism.
They said, oh, hey, that's a good idea.
So that's the way it's branded here.
Those people who don't like the corrupt Ukrainian government and don't like being put in the second-class citizenship status, they're all clearly terrorists.
Now, as we know, about this time last week, Scott, the initial offensive, so to speak, by this anti-terrorism war machine started, and a lot of the troops, including some of the armored personnel carriers and armored vehicles, they defected.
And a lot of the others were surrounded by Ukrainians who said, please, please, don't do this.
And they dismounted.
They gave their bullets and so forth, their rockets to the people, and the people bussed them back to the Ukrainian military base.
So this is a crowd that can't be relied on.
Even their airborne forces were involved in those fiascos.
So to the degree that Brennan is advising them on that, it's going to take probably another couple of weeks, but finally they're going to say, you know, this guy doesn't seem to know anything about the realities in Ukraine.
As for the Russians, you know, this is one of those situations where they can, and they fully intend to, sit back and watch what happens.
What's happened so far is that it is.
Wait, wait, what you're telling me is Western Ukraine, the government America has put in power there, can't invade the east and do a damn thing about the protesters.
And so therefore the violence, the consequences will not be severe enough to serve as at least, quote unquote, cause for Russia to intervene on the pro-Russian Ukrainians behalf.
Is that what you're telling me?
That's what I'm telling you, unless things change appreciably.
What the Russians can do is simply watch what's going on.
The economy is in shambles.
The gas may actually be curtailed or even shut off.
The gas deliveries, not only to Ukraine, but to Western Europe.
The Russians have all the high cards here.
That's why I can't understand why Kerry and Obama keep digging the hole deeper.
Now, if things change, you know, as bad as one life or five lives lost is, what we're getting is a hyped situation where you have some Reuters guys and other people in these little towns out in eastern Ukraine, and every time somebody takes a shot at somebody else, well, that's a major development.
Unless we see some real bloody confrontations involving Ukrainian forces against terrorists, of course, then I think the Russians can really kind of look back and say, you know, the U.S. is making a fool of itself.
We have the high cards.
We just wait and see what happens.
If the IMF wants to give Ukraine $18 billion, hey, that's great, because they owe us big time like $5 billion right off the top.
Now, as far as the U.S. is concerned, you know, this is the real problem.
I don't know who the heck is running our foreign policy.
If it's the likes of Samantha Power and Anne-Marie Slaughter and these really tough women, and, you know, as I say, the tough young men there in the White House as well, then Kerry's got to stand up to them just as he did, to his credit, right before, right when he was inches away from attacking Syria.
He's got to realize that he's got allies here, and one is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, and the other, hopefully, is those serious people in the CIA who will be advising Obama, look, you know, there's a history here, for God's sake, you know.
The Crimea, that became part of the Ukraine by a fluke, by an accident of history.
Khrushchev was Ukrainian.
He needed some support after Stalin died, and so he said, hey, let's give the Crimea to Ukraine.
It didn't matter which, because they were all part of the same Soviet Union, and who would have thought that the Soviet Union would implode in just a couple of years, okay?
So, now it matters, and for Obama to not understand that Russian interests are really important, and specifically in that area where we have the base of the Black Sea Fleet, for Obama not to understand that U.S. national interests are not affected in any way by what the Russians do in that area, well, you know, if he doesn't understand that, then he's a tool in the hands of these Karees and neocons and so forth.
Then I begin to really worry.
Right now, I'm just kind of bemused, and more worried than I was last week, let's put it that way, but I still think you have the Geneva Accords there.
They need to be implemented until I see 500 rather than 5 people killed on a given day.
I'm not going to be all that concerned.
Well, good, because actually, my plan is to die when I'm 80 or 90-something in a rocking chair on my front porch and not because of H-bombs landing on my head.
Oh, well, I hope you'll have enough clean water and clean air to live that long, Scott.
Well, that's an entirely different question.
It depends on how long we let the Pentagon continue being the world's worst polluters.
Anyway, hey, let me ask you this.
Yes.
Strategery-wise, because it does make sense, all the reasons, especially the H-bomb reasons, why cooler heads must prevail in this case.
I'm going to go ahead and be happy with that.
But what about strategy-wise over the long term?
It seems like, and I wonder, do you think they've got to have some consciousness that they're actually at least in danger of, if they haven't already done it, it seems like they're in danger of really healing the Sino-Soviet split that Kissinger and Nixon worked so hard to engineer back in the, or, you know, to exploit, really.
You tell me the story.
You were there back in the 1970s.
And, by the way, I'm keeping you away over time here.
I hope it's all right with you.
And so how stupid is that, to push Russia and China back into alliance over all the differences that they've always had?
Well, it's supremely stupid is the answer to your question.
That was my portfolio in the 60s and 70s, the Sino-Soviet dispute.
And we were all pretty surprised that the Russians and the Chinese did find their way to cooperate in another decade.
And when I was following this thing, the bilateral trade was $400 million a year between China and the Soviet Union.
You know what it is now?
Probably about $40 billion.
In other words, the relationship has already been healing.
How have the Chinese reacted to what's going on in Ukraine?
Very, very mildly.
You know, they don't like people, you know, assuming control over territory that isn't anomaly theirs, like the Crimea.
But have they criticized Moscow?
They have not.
And the Russians have a fertile field for all that oil and natural gas because instead of pipelining it to Western Europe, China needs this stuff desperately.
China needs other things that Russia can supply and is supplying.
So, you know, the Sino-Soviet dispute is over.
The way Kissinger, I have to say quite adroitly, played the two off, one against the other, that's passé.
What's happening now is China is a main beneficiary of the new accurate atmosphere between Moscow and Washington, and they can sit back and invite the Russians to kind of focus, to pivot toward the east, to coin a phrase, and to forget about worrying about these people who, you know, I'm beginning to believe Putin can only conclude that they cannot be trusted, not even Obama.
He worked out this deal on Syria.
Maybe he didn't expect Obama to say thank you or anything, but at least he would expect a modicum of respect, and instead he's getting personal invective from Obama's secretary of state.
Right.
Well, and now the thing is, too, I mean, it doesn't seem to me like there's any inherent problem with Russia and China getting along.
I mean, that's exactly what I want.
But I meant to say from the point of view of the American empire, it seems like they're so busy picking a fight with everyone that they're not even loyal, you know, never mind do they show respect to Vladimir Putin, they don't even show respect to the different departments of the State Department's policies, where here if they really want to contain China so bad, it would seem like, you know, that was what Dana Rohrabacher was even saying.
Well, geez, if China's what we're after, then we need to ally with Russia.
They're our partners, and we have al-Qaeda in common as an enemy with them, and all of this, and so why would we pick a fight with them over Ukraine?
So I don't really mean to say from a libertarian point of view that I have a problem with the healing of that split.
I just mean from my own point of view.
But just from the point of view of the empire, it doesn't seem like they have any kind of coherence into, you know, or they're so bent on, you know, world hegemony, they don't even really see the working parts the way they work.
Or I guess I'm probably just missing something.
I don't know.
No, no, I don't think you are.
You know, it's the height of irony, it seems to me, that, you know, three decades from now, we will be able to have a chapter in the history book that will be captioned that Victoria Nuland induces the fall of the empire, you know?
Victoria Nuland, the one who was passing out cookies on Freedom Square, Independence Square in Kiev, and who said in an intercepted telephone conversation that Yatses are a guy, and four weeks later, who becomes interim prime minister, Victoria Nuland's Yatsenyuk.
Now, what I'm saying here is this, that the Chinese are, you know, they're spilling their oats.
Now, there's a way to deal with that, and I prefer diplomacy than sending ships and, you know, Marines to Australia and all that kind of stuff.
But what I'm saying here is that there are islands off China and off the Philippines and off Japan that are disputed, and they have rich mineral deposits, oil and so forth underneath them.
Now, let's posit this.
Let's say the Japanese, to invoke their mutual defense treaty with us, I'd take a couple pot shots at the Chinese ships who are acting provocatively in that area, right?
Okay, so they say, oh, hey, Washington, you're bound to come to our aid.
What's China going to do?
Well, I think China's going to turn to the West and say, hey, Russia, you know, you can help us out on this.
Why don't you rattle a couple sabers?
Because you've got sabers to rattle.
We're U.S. troops now.
Well, sure, there are only 150 in each one of these Baltic republics and in Poland, but, yeah, you can do some menacing of your own.
In other words, the equilibrium could be established to the point where, you know, the defense treaty with Japan might not be worth very much, and once the Japanese realize that, we're in more trouble in the Far East.
So if you look at this in a major sort of strategic perspective, you've got change here that's really just beginning to really catch fire.
You've got the BRIC companies, what's that, Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
They're getting their economic act together.
The Russians, you know, I saw today with Russia, who was it?
It was Pucci.
He was saying, look, you know, MasterCard, VisaCard, you know, all that stuff, that goes to Western banks, to U.S. banks.
We're going to stop that.
That's crazy.
We're going to have our own MasterCard, VisaCard.
And you know what?
You know, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have the dollar as, you know, the benchmark of everything and then trading and loyalism, but we're going to change that too.
So these things happen, and a catalyst like this, you know, even though it's relatively minor and meaningless when we get to the Ukraine, because of the way it develops and because the lack of trust that could have built up after the Russians helped us out of Syria, you know, those chemical weapons are 80% destroyed now.
Why couldn't we build on that stuff instead of provoking the Russians in Ukraine?
Scott, I want to tell you about something that I'll give you a little tip here.
The veteran intelligence professionals for sanity have been appalled by all these letters from the NATO cons saying we've got to give a bloody nose to the Russians and all that stuff.
We have a memo that's going to appear tomorrow, and it starts out by saying we, the underside, have 3,300 years of intelligence, military, and law enforcement experience.
Unlike many experts and advisors who base their arguments on abstract notions about international scene, read Dan Murray Slaughter, our insights are drawn from a depth of hands-on experience inside the U.S. government here and abroad.
Given this background, we share a profound understanding of the great responsibility that accompanies great power, and we want to lay out our views on Ukraine, but more so in as much as the airwaves, TV, and the newspapers are giving a great deal of space to the same pundits and academics who got Iraq so wrong just over a decade ago.
So that's something to look forward to.
It's just two pages, but it's very pointed.
It's directed right at the president, as most of our VIPS memos are, and it's meant as sort of a counterweight to this idiot advice he's getting from the strong women and the macho men that he's been listening to, that Obama's been listening to in the White House, State Department, and so forth.
Well, you know, it's funny that it depends so much.
I mean, I don't know.
I guess I depend on all you guys to teach me a lot of things when you come on the show and help inform my perspective, but anyone ought to be able to see through their stupid opinions as being just too stupid to follow.
I mean, I don't know how in the world anyone, unless it was Obama's idea, how do they talk him into hiring Robert Kagan's wife and Dick Cheney's former Europe advisor, who, for all I know, worked on the Orange Revolution in 2004 or something like that, but still, Robert Kagan's wife?
Bill Kristol's alter ego?
Are you going to put her in charge of your Eastern Europe policy?
I mean, bad advice is one thing, bad presidents are another, you know?
Well, Hillary told him to.
That's just it.
I mean, I don't know.
Obama doesn't seem to have much of a backbone or common sense.
I guess he thought he could come in and act like Abraham Lincoln and have a group of people who are rivals, and that he could manage them.
He's a lawyer.
He's working on a Lincolnian death count now.
A few hundred thousand here, there.
All right, well, so let me ask you about, you mentioned the chemical weapons and the deal, and of course, I mean, this is my, other than giving, well, on the same level as giving Snowden temporary shelter, and really it was Obama that stranded him there by stealing his passport, but anyway, giving Snowden shelter, but then also giving Obama this out to avoid the war on his stupid red line that he had put down over the supposed Syrian government chemical weapons attack last August, and resolving that.
I mean, that was almost, still looking back, it's just unbelievable how close to a bombing campaign we were, and then it was called off.
I mean, that is just absolutely unheard of, and I got to be personally grateful to the guy for stopping that war, everybody should be, but then all the headlines lately are, yep, but then what does Assad do?
Oh, he might have given up 80% of his weapons or something, but here he is attacking civilians with chlorine gas, and I know you're not buying the official story of what they said about the attack last August, and we've spoken about that at length recently and back then as well, but what about these recent chlorine gas attacks?
It can't be impossible that it's Assad that did it, or do you know otherwise?
Well, I don't know otherwise, but it strikes me as the old Karl Rove tactic here.
You know, when somebody accuses you of something, well, then you turn it around, you accuse them of precisely the same thing, and at the very least you sow great confusion.
There were anti-Semites on the Independence Square in Kiev, all kinds of neo-Nazis, and so what happens now?
Well, the neo-cons turn that around and say, I don't know, it's the people in the eastern Ukraine who are anti-Semites.
Look at that forged declaration they served up.
So is everybody confused?
Yeah, everybody's confused.
That's the purpose, okay?
So now we have the chlorine gas.
Well, Kerry, I imagine, must be terribly afraid that somebody's going to finally take Sy Hersh and the rest of us seriously and say, Secretary Kerry, why did you lie 35 times in a row on August 30th by saying you knew that Bashar al-Assad was behind those chemical attacks?
We know now that it wasn't Assad.
Why did you lie?
And so how do they create confusion?
They accuse whoever of chlorine gas attacks.
Now, chlorine is not an effective chemical weapon to begin with, and there's no indication of the provenance of these things.
It's all very vague in the U.S. and the U.N. looking into it, but what have they done?
They've created another page one New York Times sort of confusion thing where people go, I thought Sy Hersh said it was the rebels.
Who's doing this one, you know?
So that's my reading of the thing.
I do not take it seriously for lots of reasons.
I really would like to see the sources of this information before I take anything seriously, the more so.
You think you could talk to some CIA friends and see whether they're believing in it?
We have lines out, Scott, so as soon as we learn something, if we do, we'll let you know, but I think this is not serious enough to expend a lot of effort on.
All right, thanks very much, Ray.
I'll let you go.
I sure appreciate it.
Not at all.
Bye now.
The great Ray McGovern, everybody.
RayMcGovern.com, ConsortiumNews.com.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
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Scott Horton here.
Are you a libertarian and or a peacenik?
Live in North America?
If you want, you can hire me to come and give a speech to your group.
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The military industrial complex.
The disastrous rise of misplaced power.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
I'd like for you to read this book, The War State, by Michael Swanson.
America's always gone to war a lot, though in older times it would disarm for a bit between each one.
But in World War II, the U.S. built a military and intelligence apparatus so large it ended up reducing the former constitutional government to an almost ceremonial role and converting our economy into an engine of destruction.
In The War State, Michael Swanson does a great job telling the sordid history of the rise of this national security state, relying on important firsthand source material, but writing for you and me.
Find out how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy all alternately empowered and fought to control this imperial beast and how the USA has gotten to where it is today, corrupt, bankrupt, soaked in blood, despised by the world.
The War State by Michael Swanson.
Available at Amazon.com and at Audible.com.
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We should take nothing for granted.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Help support CNI at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.