Comments by Ray and others in a Russian documentary regarding NATO creeping eastward and missile defense were shown recently on one of Russia’s major TV channels, provoking a lot of discussion. The film ends with a clip of Ray reciting a (universally human) poem by Nikolay Nekrasov, “Heeding the Horrors of War,” at the EU Parliament in Brussels on Dec. 1, 2015.

http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2016/01/russian-tv-covers-star-wars-us-nato.html

(Those wishing to hear the poem can go to minute 47:18 – or can start a minute before to see John Lennon and Yoko Ono, as well. The first time Ray thought it appropriate to recite this poem to a Russian audience was in late April 2015, at a tree-planting commemoration in Moscow of the 70th anniversary of the meeting of Russian and American forces on the Elbe, April 25, 1945, two weeks before V/E day. Translation is pasted in below.)

Hat tip to Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of The Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. Last fall he and other Maine activists protested the Bath Iron Works “christening” of an Aegis destroyer with missile defense systems, which in turn inspired the Russian filmmaker to do a wider documentary dealing also with Russia’s concerns over encirclement by U.S./NATO.

Since this could end up destroying the whole lot of us before climate changes does; since Western media dismiss it all as Russian propaganda (if they mention it at all); and since Moscow’s very real concerns are pooh-poohed or dismissed as paranoia – perhaps it’s time to revisit some of the things President Vladimir Putin said publicly shortly after the U.S.-sponsored, largely fascist-led coup in Kiev on Feb. 22, 2014, which “regime-changed” the duly elected government of Ukraine:

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On April 17, 2014, six weeks after what has been (rightly) called “the most blatant coup in history” (George Friedman, President of STRATFOR, Dec. 2014, on the coup in Kiev), Putin held a Q and A session on Russian TV. In answer to a question, Putin said the following:

“We were promised … that after Germany’s unification, NATO wouldn’t spread eastward. … However, it started expanding by incorporating former Warsaw Pact member-countries and later on, the Baltic states, former Soviet republics.

“I used to say at one time: ‘Why are you doing this?” … I heard in response: ‘This doesn’t concern you.’…

“But … when the infrastructure of a military bloc approaches our borders, we have grounds for certain apprehensions and questions. … this compels us to counteract. …

“Missile defense … is no less, and probably even more important, than NATO’s eastward expansion. Incidentally, our decision on Crimea was partially prompted by this.

“Needless to say, first and foremost we wanted to support the residents of Crimea, but we also followed certain logic: If we don’t do anything, Ukraine will be drawn into NATO sometime in the future. We’ll be told: ‘This doesn’t concern you,’ and NATO ships will dock in Sevastopol, the city of Russia’s naval glory. …

“But if NATO troops walk in, they will immediately deploy these forces there. Such a move would be geopolitically sensitive for us because, in this case, Russia would be practically ousted from the Black Sea area. We’d be left with just a small coastline of 450 or 600km, and that’s it!

“This is a serious thing. So … we must consider these circumstances and react accordingly. …

“US missile defense … is not a defensive system, but part of the offensive potential deployed far away from home. Again we’re being told: ‘This is not against you.’

“However, at the expert level, everyone understands very well that if these systems are deployed closer to our borders, our ground-based strategic missiles will be within their striking range. Everyone is well aware of this, but we’re being told: ‘Please believe us, this is not against you.’…

“If they deploy these elements in Europe, we’ll have to do something in response, as we’ve said so many times. But this means an escalation of the arms race! Why do this?

“It would be much better to look at this issue and determine if there are missile threats from some directions and decide how this system should be controlled or accessed. It would be sensible to do it together, but no, they don’t want that.”

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The following day (March 18, 2014) Russia annexed Crimea. In a formal address to State Duma deputies in the Kremlin, Putin addressed these serious issues but chose at one point a more jocular touch about most NATO sailors being “wonderful guys, but…” (see below):

“We have already heard declarations from Kiev about Ukraine soon joining NATO. What would this have meant for Crimea and Sevastopol in the future? It would have meant that NATO’s navy would be right there, and this would create not an illusory but a perfectly real threat to the whole of southern Russia. These are things that could have become reality were it not for the choice the Crimean people made, and I want to say thank you to them for this.

“But let me say too that we are not opposed to cooperation with NATO. [But] NATO remains a military alliance, and we are against having a military alliance making itself at home right in our backyard or in our historic territory. I simply cannot imagine that we would travel to Sevastopol to visit NATO sailors. Of course, most of them are wonderful guys, but it would be better to have them come and visit us, be our guests, rather than the other way around.”

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Внимая ужасам войны,

Heeding the horrors of war,

При каждой новой жертве боя

At every new victim of battle

Мне жаль не друга, не жены,

I feel sorry not for his friend, nor for his wife,

Мне жаль не самого героя.

I feel sorry not even for the hero himself.

Увы! утешится жена,

Alas, the wife will be comforted,

И друга лучший друг забудет;

And best friends forget their friend;

Но где-то есть душа одна –

But somewhere there is one soul –

Она до гроба помнить будет!

Who will remember unto the grave!

Средь лицемерных наших дел

Amidst the hypocrisy of our affairs

И всякой пошлости и прозы

And all the banality and triviality

Одни я в мир подсмотрел

Unique among what I have observed in the world

Святые, искренние слезы –

Sacred, sincere tears –

То слезы бедных матерей!

The tears of poor mothers!

Им не забыть своих детей,

They do not forget their own children,

Погибших на кровавой ниве,

Who have perished on the bloody battlefield,

Как не поднять плакучей иве

Just as the weeping willow never lifts

Своих поникнувших ветвей.

Its dangling branches.

On the eve of President Obama’s last State of the Union address, Ray and Eugene Puryear discussed Obama’s legacy so far.

On “Loud and Clear,” Sputnik’s Brian Becker led an hour-long radio tour d’horizon, which focused mostly on what Ray called Obama’s legacy of putting steroids on the Military-Industrial Complex, about which President Eisenhower warned in his own Farewell Address.

Under Obama the MIC cancer has metastasized. Apres Obama, the Deep State will ensure that the disease continues to spread, UNLESS we-the-people step up and apply uncommonly strong therapy to our ailing body politic … and soon.

Call the disease late-stage Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media-Security Services Complex — usually fatal.

http://sputniknews.com/radio_loud_and_clear/20160112/1032989850/the-last-state-of-the-union.html

 

How a false-flag chemical attack near Damascus almost mousetrapped Obama into launching “shock and awe (II)” on Syria in late summer 2013.

New evidence from Turkish court proceedings and a Turkish Parliamentarian adds to the many previous signs that the perpetrators of the sarin attack were, in fact, rebels in Syria supported and supplied by Turkey. Sounds of Dissent’s John Grebe of WZBC-Boston on January 2 gave Ray the hour needed to explain what happened and the implications.

Before you listen: Doesn’t what you’ve seen in the NY Times convince you that Assad “gassed his own people?” Please listen:

https://archive.org/details/DidRebelsUseSarinGasRayMcGovernWZBC

​A Call for Proof on Syria-Sarin Attack

Documentary evidence based on an official Turkish investigation-then-cover-up corroborates earlier reporting that rebels in Syria – with the indispensable support of Turkey — were responsible for the chemical attack, not President Assad’s government (as U.S. officials and media stenographers keep claiming).

By Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, December 22, 2015

A Call for Proof on Syria-Sarin Attack

In Moscow on Dec. 10, Ray asked former Defense Intelligence Agency Director Michael Flynn about the August 21, 2013 sarin attack outside Damascus that brought the U.S. inches from applying “shock and awe” to Syria. Like, whose sarin was it?

It happened on Gen. Flynn’s watch; he was in charge of DIA at the time; but, alas, he could not remember the incident. Early Alzheimer’s?

Ray’s was the first question in the Q & A following an interview of Flynn by RT’s Sophie Shevardnadze. It begins at minute 29:45. The other questions are also interesting; the answers not so much.

 

A Blind Eye Toward Turkey’s Crimes

by Robert Parry, Dec. 16, 2015

A Blind Eye Toward Turkey’s Crimes

To refresh memories, in late summer 2013 Secretary of State John Kerry, the neocons, and the Fawning Corporate Media – all lusting for an open U.S. armed offensive to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – came within inches of mousetrapping President Obama into ordering a “shock and awe” attack on Syria.

The proximate casus belli was a sarin attack outside Damascus. It was blamed on the Syrian government, but the intelligence smelled to high heaven. As VIPS wrote in a Memorandum for the President on Sept. 6, 2013, Turkish-supported rebels were probably the culprits – a false-flag attack their chosen modus operandi.

Better late than never, confirmation has finally come that Turkish intelligence, not Bashar al-Assad, was responsible for the infamous sarin gas attacks outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. Intelligence analysts, including those in the Defense Intelligence Agency, strongly suspected that this was the case, but they were shut down by the White House and Kerry.

Ray had an opportunity to raise this question last Thursday in Moscow during a Q and A following a presentation by Gen. Michael Flynn (DIA Director from 2012 to 2014). Flynn said he did not remember anything about the sarin attack and its aftermath.

But the neocons remembered; they were cheated out of their war. As Ray reported at the time, Paul Wolfowitz and Joe Liebermann looked as though their mothers had just been run over by a truck, when Ray found himself in their company at CNN on Sept. 9, 2013. The ambiance was funereal. The dearly departed – the almost-war on Syria.​

How War on Syria Lost Its Way

On Dec. 3, 2014, Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), then ranking member and now chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, complained bitterly that the U.S. military was poised to launch a “very targeted, very brief” operation against the Syrian government for using chemical weapons before President Obama called off the attack at the last minute.

“I think the worst moment in U.S. foreign policy since I’ve been here, as far as signaling to the world where we were as a nation, was August a year ago when we had a 10-hour operation that was getting ready to take place in Syria but it didn’t happen.”

Well, bummer.

Corker’s remarks provide insight into the extent of military plans for imminent attack, which were ordered up by the White House in August 2013. A reporter covering Sen. Corker for The Hill dutifully wrote that it was all because Syrian President Bashar Assad defied Obama’s “red line” against using chemical weapons against rebels in the country’s civil war.

Corker added, “In essence — I’m sorry to be slightly rhetorical — we jumped in Putin’s lap, and we are where we are today in Syria.”

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/225844-corker-us-was-poised-to-launch-10-hour-attack-on-syria

Another revealing remark. Yes, Russian President Putin helped pull Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire by immediately persuading Assad to give up his chemical weapons for destruction. But the neocons are, if anything, persistent. The Western-instigated coup in Kiev a short six months later was, in part, payback for Putin’s effrontery in easing Obama’s “embarrassment” for having “chickened-out” of the wider war for which the neocons had been salivating.

Security or Surveillance?

Julian Assange (live-streamed), Phil Giraldi, Gregory Copley, and Ray devote an hour to Security or Surveillance: Privacy vs. Anti-Terror Security in the Digital Age at RT observance of its 10th anniversary at Metropol Hotel in Moscow, Dec. 10. Thom Hartmann moderated. (The segment containing Ray’s most relevant remarks is found between minutes 21:00 and 24:35.)

 

Follow-up interview on whether Saudis, Qataris, Turks can now be expected to join the U.S.-led coalition in a serious effort to “destroy” the very terrorists they have been funding, arming, and ushering into Syria. This was the question put to Ray at the start of the interview; it is what he called a “sick joke.” Dec. 15; 9 minutes

Ray highlighted the risk of another provocation by Turkey, NATO’s loose cannon and skillful provocateur. A Turkish member of Parliament had just substantiated much of what Seymour Hersh wrote about Turkey in his April 17, 2014 London Review of Booksarticle, “The Red Line and the Rat Line:”

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line

Seven months earlier VIPS had written a more timely (if less comprehensive) Memorandum to the President: Is Syria a Trap? (Sept. 6, 2013)

Obama Warned on Syrian Intel

Both pieces reported that Turkey appeared to have played a key role in the false-flag sarin gas attack outside Damascus on August 21, 2013. Obama came inches from letting himself be mousetrapped by the neocons into launching full-scale war on Syria, with John Kerry leading the charge and groups like “Human Rights Watch” and the NY Times cheering them on.

With Kerry meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, and President Putin this week – today (Dec. 15) it turns out, Ray offered some guesses as to what Kerry is likely to hear — besides appeals to rein in the Turks. What neither Kerry nor Obama seem to be able to grasp as yet, is that geography itself makes jihad in Syria and nearby countries a far more urgent problem for Russia than for countries sitting behind a large ocean.

Should it be so difficult to understand Kremlin fears that thousands of the terrorists enlisted, trained by the U.S. and others, paid by the Saudis, and granted safe passage by the Turks hail from, and will go back to, Russia? It is reasonable to assume that upon their return they will constitute huge problems not unlike those Moscow confronted in Chechnya not too long ago. This is not a synthetic concern but a real one, involving what the Kremlin sees as a clear and present danger to Russian national security.