Take a break from Christmas shopping.  Find your earplugs and listen to Ray talking to Dave Lindorff of This Can’t Be Happening in a relaxed, sometimes humorous (in a black-comedy kind of way) conversation for the better part of an hour.  BUT, unless you are new to raymcgovern.com , you may find much of the first half familiar.  For frequent visitors to the website, there is some interesting new discussion – about the significance of the ABM Treaty scuttled by Bush and Cheney – during the second half of the interview.  We break down the interview into a few discrete time-segments below.

http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/3402

Those tired of hearing Ray on the spurious charges of “Russian hacking,” can fast forward to minute 25:00 when the discussion turns to central Europe and the fallout from the coup in Ukraine.  At minute 35:00 the discussion focuses more on strategic matters – particularly the destabilizing result of George W. Bush’s pulling the U.S. out of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which had been the key stabilizing factor in the strategic equation.  Ray traces that issue back to its beginning in May 1972.  It was analysts working for Ray in CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch, and military analysts in other branches, who were able to assure Nixon that CIA could verify if he could trust, so to speak. Ray was there in Moscow when President Richard Nixon came and signed the historic ABM Treaty.