Ray gives the kind of interview automatically banned from the US “blame Putin” media.

Subject: The shootdown over eastern Ukraine. Print version will be in “Evening Moscow” newspaper on July 21.

The audio, taped via telephone today (Sunday) at 1:30 AM, runs for 24 min (it is in English; click on the “play” arrow in the box)

http://vm.ru/news/2014/07/20/eks-sotrudnik-tsru-rej-makgovern-ya-ne-isklyuchayu-zloveshchego-stsenariya-po-kotoromu-ssha-i-poroshenko-sgovorilis-chto-258364.html

 

Ray Interviewed by RT International on Shoot-Down of Plane Over Ukraine

It was barely 24 hours after the shoot-down. Ray’s emphasis on the need for calm statesmanship and restraint contrasts with the blacken-bad-Putin campaign launched almost immediately by the White House and its house organs in the “mainstream media.” It was reminiscent of the way the Reagan administration chose to exploit to the hilt the Soviet shoot-down of KAL007 on Sept. 1, 1983.

Horse’s-mouth type intelligence showed that the Russians were in the dark – literally as well as figuratively – about what kind of aircraft had intruded deep into Soviet territory. Intercepts showed, that they thought they were downing a U.S. spy plane of the kind that had been not far away just hours before the incident. Moscow eventually fessed up its terrible mistake, but the Reagan administration mantra remained, “The Soviet Union deliberately shot down a civilian airliner, murdering 269 people.”

Ray had a front seat for that incident and its aftermath. He also had learned to say, when ueberfragt (“over-asked” is the way the Germans put it), to respond, “I don’t have a clue,” as he did in disappointing the RT interviewer with this unusual response to his last question.

 

GAZA: ON THE MORALITY OF SIEGE and CIVILIAN CASUALTIES

From Moral Theologian Professor Daniel Maguire, July 21, 2014

Maguire has taught ethics at the Marquette University (a Jesuit university) for several decades, and is still teaching there (despite strong efforts by the Catholic Archdiocese to get Marquette to fire him). He writes:

What better time to review the Catholic and Jewish ethics of war?

Gaza has been subjected to another brutal method of war: siege. Siege directly violates the “just-war” principle of “discrimination,” i.e. non-combatant immunity, since it targets all indiscriminately, innocent and guilty alike. Peaceful flotillas have attempted to break the siege of Gaza by bringing desperately needed medicine and food to Gaza and they have been repulsed by Israel; in one case Israelis shot and killed nine of those on a peace flotilla, one of them an American citizen.

Siege is the most devastating of weapons, condemned by both Jewish and Catholic ethics. As Michael Walzer says in his “War Against Civilians,” “more people died in the siege of Leningrad than in the infernos of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki taken together.” The health effects of the ever tightening siege on children and others in Gaza are devastating.

Maimonides in the twelfth century summed up the Talmudic view of siege, saying it could only be justified if it left one side open for citizens to escape. Of course, it would then no longer be a siege. Conclusion: a siege is immoral.

As for the “just war” theory principle regarding civilian casualties, the Jewish scholar Mark Ellis calls Gaza the largest prison in the world, and bombing and strafing that prison is, in “just war” terms, murder. John Ford, S.J. addressed this in a landmark article in Theological Studies in 1944. In Ford’s thinking you cannot shoot into a crowded room and say you only intended to kill the bad guy.