Ray McGovern: Dangers of Misreading Putin

➡ Judge Andrew Napolitano and Ray McGovern discuss the potential dangers of the West misunderstanding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions. They highlight the seriousness of the situation, especially considering the potential use of nuclear weapons. They also discuss the political implications, including the upcoming elections and the potential impact on personal freedoms. The conversation ends with a critique of the media’s coverage of the situation and a call for better understanding and communication between nations.
➡ The article discusses the importance of trust in diplomacy, using the example of George Schultz, a diplomat who emphasized trust in negotiations. It also mentions a broken promise by Biden to Putin about not placing offensive strike missiles in Ukraine, which damaged trust. The article further discusses the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, suggesting that the West’s interference has complicated peace negotiations. Lastly, it criticizes the distortion of truth in media coverage of the conflict.
➡ The text discusses how honest intelligence can prevent wars, using the example of Iran’s nuclear weapon development. In 2007, an intelligence manager, Tom Finger, concluded that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon in 2003, which prevented a potential military attack. The text criticizes the use of false information to justify war, as seen in the case of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s claim about Iran’s nuclear weapon development. It ends with a call for more honest intelligence to prevent unnecessary conflicts.

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Monday, June 17, 2024. Ray McGovern joins us now. Ray, a pleasure, my dear friend. How dangerous is it for the west to misread Vladimir Putin? I ask you this in light of what was an open minded willingness to negotiate articulated by the russian president late last week, combined with an immediate, immediate cessation of military hostilities. Judge, it’s very, very dangerous. Not only that they would not understand it, but that the president and his co chair of advisors may not even have gotten the word that this is very, very serious indeed.

In other words, what was it that poutine said? We’re just one step away from real, real trouble. I have the thing here. We’re on the verge of real trouble, meaning nuclear use of nuclear weapons. So you have to hope that the intelligence people would be better than they have been for the last two and a half years. And that’s, in my view, a forlorn hope. Even if they tell the president, look, this is the deal that Putin is offering. Even if they tell him that, look, you ought to look at it, read it, and think about whether you could negotiate taking this into account.

There’s no indication that they will do that. And the fly in the ointment is the election. They can’t possibly agree to the conditions that Putin has reasonably, from his point of view, set down without suffering a definitive defeat in Ukraine. And they fear in the election, and we know what comes after the election, they are in jeopardy of losing their personal freedom, given the fact that judges in courts and emails all over the place have the goods not only on Hunter, but on daddy, on Sullivan and on Blinken. So we just spent some time with Professor Sacks, who, of course, has been in a jihad for a long time about the unwillingness of this administration even to talk to their russian counterparts.

And you touched on something that I did not ask Jeff Sachs about. But I will ask you to reach into your understanding of the way the intelligence community works. You just alluded to it. Wouldn’t Bill Burns say to him, hey, mister president, Putin is serious. He really wants to talk to you? We overheard him say this in the men’s room to Lavrov. I don’t know how into Putin’s inner circle they can surveil, but wouldn’t a statement like that to blink and Sullivan or Biden cause them, give them pause? Or doesn’t the CIA do that? Judge, many of us had high hopes for Bill Burns.

He knows a lot about substantive things or what’s going on in the world. But he’s a cog in the wheel. Witness the fact that in July of last year, he told the president to say that Russia had suffered a strategic defeat. The ineptitude of russian military forces has been laid bare for the whole world to see. Six days later, the president in Helsinki said, Putin has already lost this war with one. Now if that’s the kind of advice that Bill Burns and others, Austin, for example, who is well known for falsifying substantive intelligence at the highest level when he was head of CEnTCOM, if that’s the kind of intelligence they’re getting, well, that’s just fine with Lincoln and Sullivan, who may be smart enough to realize this, but it’s not fine when Biden is still making the decisions.

And I have to say, the overarching background of all this is look at President Biden roaming around aimlessly at that summit with the g seven. My God. That is what the Russians have to take into account. What is he likely to do if Sullivan and Biden say, you know, we ought to. We ought to use a mini note, go, we want to scare the hell out of Russia’s by doing x, y, and z? Well, he’s likely to do it, for God’s sake. And that’s why it’s very, very dangerous. Here’s an example of how serious President Putin is.

You will hear the translator articulate President Putin’s condemnation of western exceptionalism, recognition of NATO crumbling, and articulation. This is a dangerous phrase, but you can hear him say it. Point of no return. Cut number eight. Lastly, the self centeredness and arrogance of western countries have led us to a highly perilous situation. Today, we are inching dangerously close to a point of no return. Calls for a strategic defeat of Russia, which possesses the largest arsenals of nuclear weapons, demonstrate the extreme recklessness of western politicians. They either fail to comprehend the magnitude of the threat they are creating or are simply consumed by their notion of invincibility and exceptionalism.

Both scenarios can result in tragedy. It is evident that the entire system of euro atlantic security is crumbling before our eyes. At present, it is practically non existent and must be rebuilt. To achieve this, we must collaborate with interested countries, of which there are many, to develop our own strategies for ensuring security in Eurasia and then present them for broader international deliberation. This is the task set in the address to the Federal assembly to outline a vision for equal and indivisible security, mutually beneficial and equitable cooperation and development on the eurasian continent in the foreseeable future.

Could you imagine Biden attempting to counter that verbally? I’ve read the whole thing. Judge watched parts of it. It almost seemed to me that he was trying to draw contrast between Biden wandering around aimlessly, not able to string a whole paragraph together, and himself. It was. It was quite a performance. And the problem is that people don’t realize what went on because the New York Times and all those newspapers that followers lead have obfuscated and deliberately eliminated the real news. And the real news is that there was an agreement. There was an agreement whereby the Ukrainians said, all right, we forswear any.

Any idea of joining NATO, okay? And the Russians said, okay, we’ll pull back our troops and we won’t invade Kyiv. And we’ll also give you some guarantees. We’ll. We’ll get other people to give you some guarantees because we appreciate that you have concerned as well. That was the deal. That was the 29 march. Okay. On the 30 march, there was this fake massacre in Bucha, near Kiev, where the Ukrainians blamed the Russians, who had already left. Ritz got rid of Bucha. The Russians had already left when this massacre took place. And the Ukrainians, successfully, with the help of the New York Times and everybody else, blamed that on the Russians and said, there can be no dealing with the Russians.

And then on the 9 April, Boris Johnson comes in and says, look, don’t deal with the Russians. Don’t, don’t. You Ukrainians don’t deal with Russians because they’re terrible people. We can beat them. We’ll give you all the arms you need to beat them. Cancel that deal. Four days later, Putin recognized the deal was off. What’s my point here? The big deal. The notion that Ukraine would join NATO was faced into and agreed to by the ukrainian negotiators. The head was David Arakhamiya. Yeah, Arakhamiya is his name. And his faction leader in Zelensky’s party in the parliament.

He was there and he testified. And he said to the press, let me just include this. I mean, it’s just so outrageous how the New York Times has obfuscated and cut all this stuff together. Here’s the key of post. Okay? Headline, November 26, 2023. Russia ordered to end the war in 2022 if Ukraine scrapped NATO ambitions, says Zelensky’s party chief, who is David Arakhramiya? Okay, what else did he say? He said, we had it signed, sealed, and delivered. The Russians would give us some guarantees and we would agree to remain neutral. We would say we be neutral.

Now. That’s the name of the game. That was what the Russians were most concerned about. No. Ukraine and NATO and the New York Times and everybody else from the highest officials in our government and all the others said, oh, no, it’s not about NATO. It’s about Putin being an aggressor. Last codicil to this, of course, is if, as is clear from the substantive record, as is clear from the ukrainian chief negotiator, Putin agreed to stop and did stop and took troops away from Kyiv as a. As a gesture of goodwill. If he stopped in the Donbas, what’s to indicate that he wanted to.

Oh, after Ukraine, you won’t stop. He won’t stop. He will go take the rest of Ukraine and take Poland. I go to the English Channel. What’s to justify that? Nothing. But Moloch says the British would say we have our own expression of that way. My State Department colleagues call it bovine or masculine bovine excrement. Right. Right. Here’s Foreign Minister Lavrov, who was seated at that same table as President Putin, with what I suggest to you as a very, very savvy analysis of who trusts whom. Cut number one. You know, we don’t ask the west to trust us.

Trust is not something which is illustrating the western positions, the western actions. And today, there were many examples. I don’t want to recite those failures to deliver on the promises, those failure to deliver on the legal obligations. Frankly, I don’t care whether the west trust us or not. The west must understand the real situation. They don’t understand anything except real politics. Let them go to the people. You are democracies, right? Ask the people what the west should do in response to the Putin’s proposal. That’s a diplomat. That’s a human being that has a grasp on, on all of this.

Your thoughts before we take a little break? That is a diplomat, another diplomat with whom I served, actually, whom I briefed every other morning. Name is George Schultz. He would be 102 right now. He died two years ago. The last thing he did was a long piece for the foreign services journal. It had to do with trust. Without trust, you can’t make anybody make a deal with you. And that was his final message. He was able to get Reagan Gotchov to trust one another. It’s a big deal, this trust. And there are, Lavrov said, I’m not going to list all the violations of trust that I could.

But one of them, and a big one that I have emphasized is the promise that Biden made personally to putin on the 30 December 2021, not to put offensive strike missiles in Ukraine. They relate on that three weeks later. No one knows that better than Lavrov, who talked to Blinken on the 21 January 2022. Blink is that. Forget about that. We don’t know anything about that. Maybe we can limit the number of offensive strike missiles to Ukraine, but forget about that. So trust. Trust is the coin of the realm, and lacking it, you need guarantees. Trust, but verify.

You can be darn sure the next agreement, such as there will be, will be verifiable, and that’s a good thing. We’re going to take a break for a commercial announcement. When we come back, more with Ray McGovern, a little bit of a surprise of Joe Biden that is best or is worse, depending upon whether you like the president as soon as we come back. But first, this. You all know that I am a paid spokesperson for Lear Capital, but I’m also a customer, a very satisfied customer. About a year ago, I bought gold, and it’s now increased in value 23%.

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Learn about how to transfer this to an IRA. Protect your savings. 800 500 1146 20 learjudgenap.com. comma. Tell them the judge sent you. Can Ukraine win? Yes. Putin has failed, and he continues to fail. Putin has already lost. Putin’s already lost the war. Putin has already lost this war. I want to say that, and I want to say it loudly. Putin has already lost in terms of what he was trying to achieve. In many ways, Putin has already lost. And that is Russia has already lost this war. In short, Russia has lost. They’ve lost strategically, operationally and tactically.

Do these guys have any reverence for the truth or ability to acknowledge they didn’t know what the hell they were talking about? I’m reminded of Julius Caesar and Shakespeare. What is truth? Quiddist Veritas. The truth is what you want it to be. The problem is that most Americans don’t know the truth, largely because the New York Times and others are cooperating consciously with distorting the truth. Now, I mentioned this David Arakhamiya, okay, the chief negotiator. Now, when was he appointed to negotiate with the Russians? The 24th, the 28 February, 2020, 2022. That means four days after the beginning of the war.

Did he go to Belarus? He did. He negotiated. Then he went down to Turkey in Istanbul and came very close to an agreement. He said on the 28 march, he said, we’re really very close to an agreement. And in April, he said, Russia has agreed to almost all of Ukraine’s peace proposals. We don’t know about whether the US and the UK will agree or not. Whoa, that’s Arakhamiya. Now, what happened next? Boris Johnson was sent by the UK and the US. He arrived in Kiev on the 9 April. Put the kibosh on the whole thing. The New York Times has a major article, two major articles on this.

Yesterday in the Sunday time, no mention, search in vain for a mention of Boris Johnson and the way he put the, put the kibosh on this whole thing. So Americans are led to believe as they. Here it is. Here’s the headline. New York Times yesterday, the big thing that spread all over page 1011. Ukraine, Russia. Peace is elusive as ever. It’s elusive of ever, because the representatives of the warring nations, they held peace talks, but they fizzled. You know why they fizzled? Because they resorted to military action. And that’s just the other way around. They were successful.

And we have the documents, for God’s sake. But Johnson came in, told Zelensky, Zelensky was stupid enough to rely on western promises, and they went to war, admittedly. Say, no, no, we’re going to follow this militarily we depend. The US says that they’re with us for as long as it takes. We’ll do it. Now, judge, if I get a little emotional about this, I care about 500,000 young ukrainian dead now, and their mothers and their other relatives, they would not be dead if that agreement was allowed to go through between Russia and Ukraine. And again, again, the cardinal, the sine quan on for Russia was given by these ukrainian negotiators, and that is no Ukraine in NATO.

I’m going to make you feel a little better. I don’t usually read aloud what the viewers write in, but Lenny, 1777 writes this. Ray McGovern keeps getting younger each time he goes live with Judge Napolitano. That’s good news. Well, I couldn’t resist because I know you got a little emotional there. We saw a clip from Secretary Austin telling Senator Tuberville that Ukraine can win, along with all the other nonsense from the president and his buddies. Here’s Secretary Austin last week. Just as nonsensical and irritating, Putin is in no position to dictate to Ukraine. We’re in a position to dictate all the countries in the world, but Putin’s in no position to dictate Ukraine.

Number seven. He is not in any position to dictate to Ukraine what they must do to bring about a peace. I think, you know, that’s exactly the kind of behavior that we don’t want to see. We don’t want to see a leader of one country wake up one day and decide that he wants to erase borders and annex the territory of his neighbor. That’s not the world that any of us want to live in. And so I think, you know, he is not, in the, in my view, not in a position to dictate to Ukraine what it must do to pursue peace.

Here is the world we do live in from the perspective of the president of Russia. Cut number two. Let me remind you that at the end of the 20th century, after the end of the acute military ideological confrontation, the global community had a unique opportunity to build a reliable and just order, order in the field of security. This did not require much. A simple ability to listen to the opinions of all interested parties and a mutual willingness to take them into account. Our country was determined to do exactly this kind of constructive work. However, a different approach prevailed.

The western powers, led by the United States, believed that they had won the Cold War and had the right to determine how the world should be organized. He’s right. They won. They believed they had won the cold world a cold war and had the right to determine how the world should be organized. The very mentality condemned by Secretary Austin and attributed to the other side. Judge, you know, from an intelligence point of view, I have to remind people, that is the Pentagon that does the military intelligence. Now, there is no independent military analysis capability left in the CIA.

There was when I was there, and we took great umbrage of what the Pentagon was saying about Vietnam, for example. So here’s Austin. Here’s Austin against whom? Over 50 intelligence analysts at CENTCOM, where he was commander and at Defense intelligence Agency, filed a formal complaint with the Pentagon inspector general, saying Austin was shaping the intelligence, was making the intelligence look like what the president wanted. Okay, so this is the same. Austin didn’t, didn’t Biden know that? Well, maybe he did. Maybe that’s what Sullivan and Blinken wanted anyhow. He’s not giving the president any good intention, any good intelligence about enemy capabilities.

He went to West Point. Right? Obama didn’t go to West Point. And Obama’s famous dictum 2016 was, look, we shouldn’t give the Ukrainians the idea that they could prevail against a much stronger Russia on its border. And at that time, Blinken himself, working for Obama as deputy secretary of state, added, you know, if we give arms to Ukraine, that would not be smart, because Russia is in a position to double what we give to triple and quadruple what we give. That was Blinken in 2016. Why did he change his mind? I guess because megalomania prevailed with Biden and his closest associates.

You know, we can do this because we’re exceptional, because we’re indispensable, because we’re United States of America. Well, those days are over now, and Obama happened to be right on that one. What is the value of intel if it’s imbued with, infested with politics? Zero. Or actually minus zero. Now, judge, there are very few things I can cite that can show how good intelligence can really prevent wars, and one is that after Iraq, the next target was Iran. Bush and Cheney had their sights on Iran. So the question was, how close is Iran to getting a nuclear weapon? And the standard answer was five years from now.

Five years. They’ve been saying this for 20 years. Right? So, finally, an honest, really, an honest intelligence manager named Tom Finger came in from the State Department and said, look, I’ll do this job. I’ll run this estimate on how close Iran is to getting a nuclear weapon if you let me bring my own people in and you leave me alone for a year. That happened. The year was 2007. In November, the conclusion, unanimous with high certainty, Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon in 2003 and has not resumed work on a nuclear weapon. Unanimous with high confidence.

It was out there because Congress made it public. And Bush himself wrote in his memoirs, this deprived me of the military option on Iran because how could I possibly explain a nuclear attack or some kind of attack on a country that the intelligence community says has no active nuclear weapons program, end quote. Oh, too bad, huh? Deprived me of the military option. So what I’m saying here is that if you get an honest guy and you get honest analysts and they’re given their freedom to tell the truth, they can prevent a war. And I wish I could cite other examples, but I can’t really.

Yeah, here you have. Isn’t this hogwash? Of course. Well, it’s bollocks, as the British would say. It’s male bovine. For those who are taking the show, just audio only when I say, isn’t this hogwash? This is the famous or infamous picture of Prime Minister Netanyahu at the UN showing, claiming that Iran is in the final stage of developing a nuclear weapon. I don’t know the date on that. I think that’s about ten or twelve years ago. That’s my recollection. About seven or eight years ago, I would say. So they made all this up. Yeah. And there is terrific works done on this.

Gareth Porter, who writes for Consortium News, has written a book about this. And the evidence is there from UN inspectors, from some former israeli officials, from iranian officials. It’s all there. It’s bullocks. It’s all made up. And it’s met, of course, to justify war against Iran. And it almost worked. So that’s why. That’s why I emphasize. Yeah. I wish I could cite other, other instances where national intelligence estimates the supreme genre of intelligence, where it worked that way and prevented a war. I can’t, but that’s. That’s big enough for me. And I was prevented from saying, destroy the CIA because I didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

And now the baby is drowning in that same bath. The Netanyahu photo, Chris tells me, was September of 2012. So we were both very, very close. Ray, a pleasure, my dear friend. Terrific, terrific analysis from you, as always. I was happy to hear the Russia today people ask me to give my opinion of Ray McGovern, and it was extremely high. We’ll see you with Larry on the intelligence community roundtable at the end of the week. Have a great week, my friend. All the best. You too, judge. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Coming up later today, the aforementioned Larry.

Larry Johnson 05:00 this afternoon eastern. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.
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