03/16/15 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
It's me, Scott.
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Okay, Ray McGovern is on the line.
For 27 years he was a CIA officer, but he's a peace nick now.
And he's got the spotlight today on AntiWar.com.
Guiding Obama into global make-believe.
And I know the title sounds kind of wishy-washy, but he doesn't let the president off the hook here.
But it's just about all of Obama's horrible advisors and all the horrible things that they do and the lies that they say.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing well.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
I really appreciate you joining us and covering this issue.
We spoke last week, but we only had just a few minutes at the end to talk about Russia and Ukraine.
And now you have this great new article out and everything.
So I want to talk with you more about this.
First of all, I kind of take it personal that the president of Russia said, well, I don't know if he said it or exactly how it was.
I only saw the headline.
But something like, oh, Putin implies, maybe said it himself, that he was ready to put Russia on a nuclear alert over the issue of Crimea.
That kind of thing.
And this, right, is everything which is more or less blowing over.
He wants to go talking tough like that.
And I wonder what's your reaction to that?
Well, I learned that from the Washington Post today.
And that's not a very reliable source.
But what they're talking about, what they're talking about is a film of sort of documentary, two hours long.
That was filmed months ago.
And in the lead in or whatever they call that, the trailer, I guess they call it, it's revealed that, and it ran last night, by the way, on Russian TV.
Putin says that, yeah, yeah, he planned this thing on the night of February 23rd, 2014.
So last year.
And Michael Birnbaum, who's the Washington Post reporter on all this, neglects to mention what happened the day before.
It's surreal.
The reader would never, never realize that on the day before, there was a putsch.
There was a coup d'etat led by pro-fascists, by proto-fascists and Nazi stormtroopers that dislodged the duly elected president of Ukraine.
He had to flee for his life.
But the idea you get from Birnbaum is, no, he kind of, he kind of just left because he was afraid.
Now, the business about the nuclear thing, all Putin says, as far as I can tell from the reporting, I haven't seen the actual documentary yet.
All he says is that the situation was so serious that, yeah, he was prepared to put his forces on nuclear alert.
But he'd try everything else short of that.
And what he explains and what the Russians are very proud of.
You know, we're very proud of our special forces are, you know, are the people who go in and get Osama bin Laden and shoot him in the head.
You know, you know, it might have been good to to capture him, you know, and ask him something about al-Qaeda.
He might have known something about that.
Anyhow, that's a digression.
We're very, you know, special forces and all that kind of stuff.
Well, so are the Russians.
And what Putin reveals in his film is that as soon as he saw the handwriting on the wall that NATO was coming in big time into Kiev, starting with this coup d'etat, which Victoria Nuland, our assistant secretary of state, advertised.
Now, she didn't advertise it deliberately, but as most of your listeners, I hope, know that just two and a half weeks before the putsch, before the coup, she was caught on the telephone with the U.S. ambassador to Kiev saying, Yats is our guy.
Klitschko and the rest can wait in the wings.
Yats knows about the Central Bank.
He knows about austerity.
He's our guy.
Now, little did she know that would be intercepted and put on YouTube.
Again, YouTube, two and a half weeks before the 22nd of February when the putsch took place.
So what we have here is a clear advertisement.
I have never.
I've been watching things 53 years now with the CIA.
I've never seen a coup advertised two and a half weeks before to include the new prime minister that the coup leaders are going to install and have it happen.
You know, it used to be, pardon my going back to old times, but it used to be a decent respect for the opinions of mankind would prevent a fellow named in an intercepted conversation by the coup plotters from becoming actually the prime minister.
But no, no, no.
Nuland has no shame.
She has no fear.
And so Yats, Yatsenyuk, who continues and is even today the prime minister of Ukraine, he got into into office.
So it's a very interesting story.
What Putin advertises is the use of his special forces.
They're called Spetsnaz.
What they did was reinforce the already permitted up to 20,000 forces in Crimea, sort of on the cutie, stealthily, gradually.
They had been doing that.
And so he claims, and I don't know if this is true or not, that they did not exceed the 20,000 troop level that is permitted by treaty with Ukraine.
But these were the so-called Yezhliy Uzi.
The translation is polite people.
And they were, you know, variously called the green people, the un-uniformed, the no insignias on their uniforms.
What they did was very cleverly get already at a given signal.
They took over Crimea without a shot being fired.
Now, a lot of people in this country have never learned that.
A professor.
I was at a Peacenik meeting not too long ago where a professor from Catholic University said, you know, we have to stand up to Putin.
My six-year-old son, six years, came home from Sunday school and he had composed a big placard, a big poster.
And it said, Putin, don't you know the commandment, thou shalt not kill?
So I raised my hand gently and I said, well, what are you referring to?
Crimea, Crimea.
The aggression on the Crimea, the invasion of Crimea.
I said, well, how many people got killed?
Oh, I don't know, hundreds, thousands.
I said, would you believe zero?
Would you believe zero?
Well, because it's true.
So I just raised that, Scott, to show the abysmal ignorance of the United States people on this.
And it's only partly their fault because they don't want to know about this.
But certainly they can't get that from Fox News or the other quasi news organizations that they tune into.
It's a very, very serious problem.
Yeah, well, no question the Americans have picked this fight here.
And now the article is about the latest.
So to fast forward a bit, we've got a peace deal here.
It's Minsk 2, Minsk 1 didn't quite hold, but Minsk 2 has Germany and France behind it.
It seems to be holding more or less.
And I think, you know, that means they're shooting on both sides from time to time.
But overall, the commanders have ordered everybody to stop killing each other anyway kind of thing.
So that's good enough for now.
But then as you're reporting here, the high commander of NATO at General U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove keeps leaking these stories.
He has for, you know, this whole last year that all the Russians are invading eastern Ukraine.
They're invading eastern Ukraine and they're behind the entire secession in the east and all this or attempted secession.
And now the music's playing.
We've got to go to this break.
But when we get back, we're going to talk about the Germans really pushing back hard against the Americans and their provocations at this very delicate time.
So hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Ray McGovern in just a second.
In the meantime, check him out at antiwar.com slash McGovern.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern here.
Former Soviet specialist at the CIA way back when.
Now he's a peacenik with the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
He gives speeches along those lines, too.
Peace, that is.
He writes for ConsortiumNews.com and we got his full archive at Antiwar.com as well.
Original.
Antiwar.com slash McGovern.
And he's the spotlight today, guiding Obama into global make-believe.
And so that's what we're talking about.
All the false narratives and the truth about American intervention in Ukraine and the aftermath.
And, you know, to go back to the coup thing there real quick, it seems notable.
We may have discussed this before, Ray, but there's this great clip of Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, the Journal of the Council on Foreign Relations.
So he's in the know.
And it was, I guess, the day that Putin was deciding to take Crimea.
It was that night, or 23rd, maybe it was the 24th of February 2014.
He was on the Colbert Report and talking about how, ha, ha, ha, we're sneaking off with Crimea.
And he explained, I mean, pardon me, with Ukraine, robbing to Russia's Batman.
And so we're the new boyfriend and we're winning her.
And so the trick is we've got to win Ukraine away from Russia without provoking too much of a backlash and, you know, try and get away with it.
But it was supposed to be easy and we could sit here and go on a comedy show and mock Putin for being a fool and being distracted by the Olympics while we're running off with the country next door and all of this.
But so I wonder whether you think that that was really right, that what they were going for in the first place then was it was supposed to be easy, more or less like 2004 with the Orange Revolution.
They didn't lose Crimea that time.
They didn't have a civil war with the East that time.
And, you know, is it, are they basically just floundering around now trying to figure out what to do?
I mean, it seems like they're deliberately trying to make it worse.
But I don't know why, if that wasn't their purpose in the first place, just to create a crisis.
Well, Scott, if they thought it was going to be easy, they're even dumber than I ever thought.
Anyone who knows one iota about Russian history or Russian strategic objectives and concerns would have known that as soon as they did a coup in Kiev and put on our own people and then said Russia, Russian would not be one of the official languages anymore and went through that whole charade.
You know, if you were Putin and you already worried about anti-ballistic missile systems going into the Black Sea and all around your periphery, and you saw this happen right on your border, and you knew that you only had one warm water port for your whole Navy, and that was Sevastopol in Crimea, you would make the necessary preparations just exactly the way Putin describes it after the 22nd of February.
Now, I come back to that because I've done an informal poll and I've included university professors, and 93% of Americans do not know what happened on February 22nd when we sponsored, advertised two and a half weeks before on YouTube, we sponsored a coup in Kiev.
That is key, okay?
Now, why is that key?
Well, it can't be dismissed.
We have the voice of Newland and our ambassador there in Kiev.
I was having a little debate on Amy Goodman about two months after this with a professor at Yale, and he was saying, oh, you know, McGovern, if that's all you have, if you base your whole thing on that conversation, well, come on.
And I said, well, that's not all I have.
But have you ever seen a revolution or a coup d'etat really advertised on YouTube two and a half weeks before?
Well, I got nowhere.
And Andrew Bacevich has an incredibly good article about Yalies and what they did to us with respect to Vietnam.
There's a unreality that attends to academics who come into Washington and think that since the cat's pajamas in Yale or Harvard, that they can run the world, and that's what's happened here.
Yeah, he calls them a blight, like Asian carp.
You got it, yeah.
So, you know, with all this brouhaha, I come back to the documentary.
I hope that we'll all be able to see that thing with Putin sort of bragging about how he did all this with zero casualties in Crimea.
You know, when I was in Russia most recently in September, I had an hour before I got on a plane.
I went to the souvenir shop, and there are cups all over the place, Putin doing the breaststroke, you know.
And there's one that shows the spetsnaz, the special forces of the Russian army, in their kind of, you know, with their blindfolds and so forth, not blindfolds, but their black attire.
And it says underneath it, Polite people.
And then on the other side, it shows Putin, and it says, The most polite of all people.
Now, the Russians knew what was going on, but they knew that he did this in a very clever way, not the ham-handed way that our covert action operators or the people we sponsor to do our dirty work do it.
Not one casualty.
Now, that story is going to come out.
Will they ignore that?
Of course, they'll ignore that in our media.
What I think is necessary is for serious Russian scholars, serious people from academe, and perhaps if you can find one from the media, like Steve Cohen or like John Mearsheimer, who wrote for Foreign Affairs and said, Ukraine is our fault, okay?
They need to get some sort of hearing in the mainstream media as an alternative voice before Obama, before he kind of chickens out and disregards what Germany is saying and goes with the neocons and gives Ukraine offensive military weapons.
All right, now back to that, what the Germans are saying and what the Americans are doing there.
Now, I know NATO is its own bureaucracy, but this guy is in the American chain of command.
He's just an American general, nothing more than that, ultimately.
Strangelove?
Yeah, Breedlove, which I kept getting confused and thinking he must be a Brit with a name like that, but there you go.
Oh, I know why, because that's the name of the head of the MI6 from the Downing Street memo.
That's why I was getting that confused.
I didn't know why.
All right, now, so anyway, different guy.
Maybe relation, I don't know.
Anyway, the head of NATO keeps lying about what Russia is doing in eastern Ukraine.
And as you point out, a few different sources, but especially Der Spiegel in Germany has shot this down with quotes from German intelligence saying, oh, well, you know, basically he's just lying.
No, there is not a Russian invasion.
No, the infantry has not crossed the border.
No to all these tanks, whatever it is.
And so, but to the point, what's it all about?
Are the Americans, this is what I was trying to ask you last week too, are the Americans really doing their best to undermine?
This guy, that's his orders.
Breedlove's orders are to undermine the French and German brokered peace deal here?
Yeah, it's Breedlove.
It's McCain.
It's Newland.
It's all the neocons.
They're trying to tell Obama, look, don't pay any attention to the Germans.
Germany is just one of those other countries in old Europe, for God's sake.
You don't have to mind them.
And so they're inflating all these statistics to the point where the German chancellery goes to Der Spiegel and says, you know, they live in a, they live in a wonder world here.
And every time I hear Breedlove talk, I shake my head.
Now that's not innocuous, Scott.
Think you're a Russian, right?
You're looking on at this and you see Breedlove and you see all these other people making these fantastic charges.
Well, number one, the charitable explanation is Obama just doesn't control anything having to do with foreign policy.
And number two, the worst interpretation is he doesn't care and he's quite, quite likely to bend on this.
What I see and what I'm really afraid of is a kind of noxious trade-off here.
Obama seems legitimately to want a deal with Iran on the nuclear issue.
He needs Russian help for that.
But he is not so intent on resisting the neocons on Ukraine.
So I'm afraid that giving, giving the neocons a sop, some sop on Ukraine by sending some offensive missiles to Ukraine, maybe he thinks he could calm them down a little bit so that they won't make so much noise if he does do a treaty or an arrangement with Iran.
Now, I don't have any evidence of that, but I've watched this mealy-mouthed, malleable president of ours lose his backbone.
And he's the kind of lawyer that would say, well, we compromise here.
So if he goes through with the Iran thing, which I'd like to see, he may think, well, I can give these people a sop by sending some Ukrainian, some arms.
And if he doesn't know what strong reaction he's going to meet from that, from the Russian side, well, he's very, very poorly advised.
Hey, do they still have a red phone on his desk there?
I sure hope so.
I sure hope so.
Both sides still have thousands of H-bombs.
So me too.
All right.
Thanks, Ray.
Appreciate it.
Most welcome, Scott.
Ray McGovern again, everybody.
Also, ConsortiumNews.com.
See you tomorrow.
Thanks for listening.
I'm Ray McGovern.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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