10/14/15 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Latest by Ray McGovern is at www.antiwar.com.
How CNN shapes political debate.
Very interesting.
He also writes at www.consortiumnews.com.
He's got his own site, www.raymcgovern.com.
Oh, did I mention he formerly was a CIA analyst for 27 years and now he's a Peace Nick, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and goes around giving speeches about why people should be anti-war and great stuff like that.
Oh, and VIPS, they write memos to the president about why he ought to stop doing all the horrible things that he does.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing well.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you on the show.
So, yeah, we got to talk about the plane that was shot down over Ukraine and the new report that's come out all about it.
I don't guess, maybe you've had a chance to write something, but I don't think it's been published yet about this.
I've been doing interviews, Scott, but I haven't, well, you can check my www.raymcgovern.com website.
The stuff is up there.
They're mostly interviews.
Okay, well, so I look forward to a long, in-depth piece for Consortium News or something like that, but so I got dibs on you first anyway.
MH-17 is the name of the plane.
The point is that it's the Dutch have finished their investigation of what happened to the plane.
Now, they don't, I don't believe, come out officially blaming anyone, but they do say that the plane was downed by a Buk missile launcher.
That doesn't necessarily help all that much because the Ukrainians and the Russians both have them, but there are many discrepancies and they're already being fought about.
I know you've read the report, so go ahead and let us have it.
Well, one of the things people should know, Scott, about the report is that a full participant was a country called Ukraine.
It's really quite bizarre to have one of the prime suspects participating fully in the investigation.
Why are the Belgians involved?
Why were the black boxes given to the UK?
I mean, there's so many anomalies here that the notion that a transparent investigation has taken place, well, you know, if you believe that, I can sell you a Brooklyn Bridge.
The Dutch have been under our, well, I call them a vassal state of the United States.
They're different from many other European countries.
They haven't differed with US policy on anything in three or four decades.
So when the Dutch Safety Board was given the task of looking into that, you could pretty much predict that if they had evidence blaming the Russians, they would certainly include that.
If they had no evidence including the Russians or blaming the Russians, they would be what they are right now, wishy-washy.
They think it was a Buk missile.
The Ukrainians have Buk missiles.
The Russians have lots of people that have Buk missiles.
But the point is, and what I have tried to drive home in the people I've talked to, is this.
The notion that we have to rely on social media.
As John Kerry said three days after the shoot-down, he described social media as an extremely important tool.
Now, yeah, all right, the tool for what?
Tool for truth or tool for misinformation?
Well, he came on all of the Sunday talk shows and blamed the Russians, the pro-Russians, the Russian missile, Russian, you know, it was Putin.
And the evidence he had used was social media, you know, video and stuff like that.
Except for one thing, and most people have missed this, Scott.
I'm going to read because I don't want to misquote him.
He was on with David Gregory as well as all the other Sunday show stoppers.
And this is what he told David Gregory on July 20, so three days after the shoot-down, quote.
We picked up the imagery, the imagery of this launch.
We know the trajectory.
We know where it came from.
We know the timing.
And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar, period, end quote.
Whoa.
So, John, you've got more than just social media, huh?
Where is it?
Show us the beef.
Did it appear in the Dutch safety people report?
No.
So either John Kerry has more than social media or he doesn't.
Last person I talked to said, well, wait, wait a second, Ray.
This is probably very sensitive stuff.
And, you know, sources and methods probably preclude the U.S. government from sharing that.
Well, not really.
I referred this person to an incident back in the, in the Reagan years, the 1980s.
When we had evidence that the Libyans were responsible for killing a whole bunch of people at a Berlin disco.
Okay.
How do we know that?
We had the intercepted message.
Now, Reagan, acting on that, bombed the hell out of Gaddafi's palace, killed, killed one of his children.
And the world was, you know, kind of outraged.
What evidence did you have that it was the Libyans that did that disco bombing?
And Reagan came to us and he said, you know, show me that, that intercept.
So he showed it to me.
He said, well, we're going to have to release this.
No, no, no, you can't do that.
You'll blow our source.
It's encrypted.
He says, release it.
And so the message, which pretty much said that we achieved our mission at 245 this morning, hurrah, hurrah, was released.
Now, why do I raise that?
I raise that because yes, we blew that source.
But Reagan thought it far more important to convince the world of what he considered the rectitude of his killing Gaddafi's son and just missing Gaddafi.
Well, hell, look at Adelaide Stevenson during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Here's the blown up U-2 photographs of the missiles going into Cuba.
So Soviets, you're called out.
You're lying.
I mean, they can do that very same thing here.
Let's see the blown up photos at the U.N. Security Council.
That was what Colin Powell was, you know, pretending to replay with his cartoons of the mobile biological weapons labs back in 03.
Look at me, I'm Adelaide Stevenson.
Only all I have is cartoons because I'm lying.
Sure.
Well, you know, the point is that this was a target of opportunity in terms of what Kerry had in mind.
You know, Kerry had weathered a really tough storm.
He had pretty much wanted the U.S. to attack Syria overtly, you know, with cruise missiles and so forth in August of 2013.
And behind his back, the president worked out with Putin a deal where Syria surrendered all its chemical weapons for destruction.
Okay.
And they were destroyed on U.S. ships.
Okay.
Now, Kerry took a lot of hits on that from the neocons who were, what's the word, lusting for war on Syria.
And so he had to prove his kind of neocon credentials, how anti-Russian he was.
And so he saw this as a good opportunity to do that.
And so he got up there and blamed the Russians and blamed it on social media, but also included this very curious thing about information, about the trajectory, about imagery that we know where it came from.
We know the timing.
Well, Mr.
Kerry, decent respect for the opinions of mankind would suggest that you really ought to make that available to us.
And you should, you could always sanitize it or you can always, you know, I'll bet we had a hundred pieces of information in that part of the world.
There was laser-like focus during those days.
So the fact that Kerry said these things, and we've not heard one word since about more reliable information than social media, suggests to me, I hate to say this about a U.S. Secretary of State, but it suggests to me that he's lying.
Yeah, of course he's lying, lies all the time.
Hey, listen, it's Ray McGovern, everybody.
And if you hold it right there, we're going to be right back.
We're going to talk a little bit more about just what happened to this plane in the, whatever you call it, I guess it's the Ukrainian Civil War.
At this point.
Be right back in just a second.
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Alright, y'all welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst.
Now peace, Nick.
We're talking about, well, the Secretary of State's claims about what evidence America had about what happened to MH-17 shot down over Ukraine.
And what evidence they're apparently willing to provide to the Dutch investigators, among other objections.
But now, so let me play the devil's PR man here for a minute.
Ray, at the time that it happened, it seemed like the Occam's razor explanation for what went on here was that the rebels screwed up.
Oops, and shot down the wrong plane.
The Ukrainian military had been bombing them from the sky.
They didn't have an air force.
They were getting bombed from the sky and they were trying to shoot down whatever the Ukrainians were throwing at them.
And they screwed up and they killed a bunch of civilians.
And then of course, yeah, the Americans and the Empire, they seized on it to try to blame Russia.
And now they're even saying, oh, it had to have been Russian soldiers, not just rebels who did it and whatever.
They want to take advantage.
But is that not the simplest explanation?
Is it in dispute?
How much is it in dispute, the territory where the missile apparently came from?
How large is the territory in question where it may have came from in your estimation?
And how certain is it that this was government and or rebel controlled territory?
You know, you mentioned the social media.
Well, the open source guys claim to have pictures from all different sources that they've taken their time and painstakingly compiled that show that here's this missile launcher traveling from Russia into rebel territory and then traveling back again ashore at a missile and pretty obvious what happened here and this kind of thing.
And so maybe it ain't fair, but I'll just play like I'm CNN and say that's the absolute truth and the burden is on you to come up with a better explanation than that.
Right.
Okay.
Well, this Bellingcat, this Higgins guy that's I think working for MI6 in the UK, his analysis, if that's the right word for it, has been disproven as being completely unreliable.
The photos that were used to show this kind of thing were shown to have been taken at different times and at different places.
So you can dismiss the Bellingcat or Elliot Higgins kind of information.
That is a propaganda operation.
Now, how about the Dutch safety report?
Well, the safety board talked about the square, the area in which the missile may have been shot from.
Now, I did some math.
They gave it in kilometers.
I got 200 miles square, 200 miles square, right on the border there with Russia.
Some, I've seen other figures, 130 or something like that square miles.
That's a lot of territory.
Now, simple answer to your question is this.
Yes, Scott, the simplest answer is what you described, but it has all kinds of problems attached to it.
Number one, there's no proof that either the rebels, so-called the anti-coup separatists there in the Eastern Ukraine had a VUK missile, had stolen a VUK missile, or knew how to operate it if they had stolen or acquired it.
There's absolutely no reason to believe that the Russians would have any incentive to send down one of their advisors.
Oh, here's how you shoot down a passenger plane.
So you're right.
It could have been a terrible mistake.
It could conceivably have been done by the pro-Russian rebels, but I don't think so.
What we have here is an immediate rush to judgment.
John Kerry saw this as a, no pun intended here, a target of opportunity, okay?
What he was trying to do was rally European support for sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine.
They had been very reluctant to do that.
And two weeks after the Russians were blamed for the shoot-down, the Europeans imposed significant sanctions.
Sanctions that not only hurt the Russians, but hurt them.
Now, when the Europeans find out that this was all a crock, as I think they will, when they find out that their economies have been damaged because they were sort of mousetrapped into doing sanctions when there was no real proof that the Russians were behind that shoot-down, there's going to be a little bit of dissidence among the Europeans.
Now, what I've done here is gone back to earlier experiences of this kind, and I see a direct parallel.
On September 1st, 1983, the Russians shot down KAL-007, a South Korean aircraft with, I think it had 269 passengers.
It was a passenger plane.
It had strayed way into Soviet airspace, and the U.S. seized on that.
This was Reagan.
This was the evil empire.
This was the arms merchants that were hell-bent on making an anti-ballistic missile system.
They had to make the empire really evil.
And so they said the Russians admit that they shot this down, and they did it deliberately knowing that it was a passenger aircraft.
A lie.
Now, how do I know that?
Well, among the ways I know it is that the guy in charge of this propaganda effort in the State Department, his name is Alvin A. Snyder.
He's written a book, and the book he called Warriors of Deceit.
Now, what did he say?
He said, well, I had a job to do.
I had to produce a video, and the perception we wanted to convey was that the Russians had cold-bloodedly carried out a barbaric act knowing that it was a civilian airliner.
Now, a decade later, this guy Snyder saw the complete transcripts, not just the seven minutes he was given.
These are transcripts between pilot and command control.
Now, he then realized that a lot of what was in the U.S. presentation before the U.N. on this occasion was false.
It was clear to Snyder that the Reagan administration wanted to present these false accusations, not only to fool the U.N., but to fool the people of the United States about how bad this evil empire was.
To that end, smearing the Soviets, well, that justified the means of falsifying the historical record and the intelligence.
Now, what was the moral that Snyder draws in his book?
This is going to get you, Scott.
He acknowledges his role in deception, but he draws a sort of ironic lesson from the incident.
He's a very senior official in the State Department.
This is what he says, quote, the moral of the story is that all governments, including our own, lie when it suits their purposes.
The key is to lie first.
End quote.
So, whoever lies first wins.
And that's exactly what John Kerry decided to do on the 20th of July, three days after the shoot-down, on the 17th of July, 2013.
Now, is it fair to say that you think, you prefer the explanation anyway, more likely to you, something like that, that it was the government that shot down, the Ukrainian government or a faction loyal to it, that shot down the plane?
Well, why would they have done it?
Well, you know, you have a bunch of oligarchs there.
You have a bunch of unguided missiles.
And I don't really come down on one side or the other.
All I think is that Kerry's case is not proven and that there are alternative explanations, which are more likely.
And I guess what I do, Scott, and I'm an intelligence analyst, not a journalist, okay?
So give me a little leeway here.
We were forced to make judgments based on very, very partial evidence.
And my judgment here is that if what Kerry bragged about having information about the imagery of the launch, the trajectory, where it came from, the timing, if he had that information, he would certainly release it.
The fact that he doesn't have that information, the fact that he will not release that information, I am morally convinced that the U.S. has the information knowing exactly who did this.
The fact that they don't release that information suggests strongly to me, as an intelligence analyst, that it does not support what Kerry got up and said three days after the shootdown.
And so it would just be too embarrassing to release.
They have the Dutch, you know, have the Dutch by the leash.
And they have the Belgians and everybody else.
The Ukrainians, as I pointed out before, were part of this investigation.
And there were reports saying that nothing could be concluded unless it was unanimous.
So we remain uncertain with respect to exactly how it happened.
But look, you had the sanctions imposed, right?
It worked, OK?
Whoever lies first wins.
There you have it.
All right, everybody, that's the great Ray McGovern, former CIA intelligence officer.
Now peace, Nick.
Veteran intelligence professionals for sanity.
And he writes at RayMcGovern.com and ConsortiumNews.com.
Thanks again, Ray.
Sure appreciate it.
Most welcome.
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