Ray’s Interview With Burt Cohen, former New Hampshire State Senator
“The key is to lie first.” Thus far the words of Alvin A. Snyder. He was head of the U.S. Information Agency’s TV and Film Division in 1983 and helped prepare fraudulent testimony for use at the UN to blame Russia for a cold-blooded, barbaric act in deliberately downing an aircraft with full knowledge it was a passenger plane – KAL007 shot down over Siberia on September 1, 1983 killing all 269 aboard.
Snyder had been given a doctored tape “fixed” to blacken the Soviets by “indicating” they knew it was a passenger plane. When he learned a decade later that the Soviets did NOT know the intruding plane was a civilian airliner, Snyder wrote a book he called Warriors of Disinformation. This is the lesson he drew in his own words: “The moral of the story is that all governments, including our own, lie when it suits their purposes. The key is to lie first.”
So, whoever lies first, wins. Ray suggests that the same kind of “diplomacy” may be behind John Kerry’s attempt to demonize Putin and the Russians by accusing them of downing Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 and killing all 298 aboard. The highly dubious “evidence” adduced by Kerry brings quickly to mind the disingenuous but highly effective campaign 32 years ago to blame the Soviets for downing KAL007, “fixing” the evidence to “prove” they knew it was a passenger plane and shot it down anyway.
In a very relaxed and at times funny, 57-minute conversation with Burt Cohen, Ray explores the evidence, such as it is, and the highly consequential nature of the charges against Russia – on the strength of which the U.S. was able to put pressure on European countries to impose mutually harmful economic sanctions against Russia. Still more worrying is the blasé attitude of the sophomore policy makers in the White House toward escalating tensions and the possibility of a hot war involving the two main nuclear powers. Nothing could be more consequential, but there is little sign they realize this.
The interviewer, Burt Cohen, won election to New Hampshire’s State Senate in 1990 and was elected to seven terms, including time as Democratic Senate Majority Leader. He calls The Burt Cohen Show “Keeping Democracy Alive.” You may wish to tune in: