I told her it would be cool if he came over on Friday April 17th. She said it was cool if it was just a low-key thing. I was thinking we could invite people to come over for dinner and conversation with Ray at 6:30.
This isn't a for sure thing, Beverly is going to put us in contact with him, but it looks like it could happen and be cool. I was thinking of inviting some anti-war pro-peace and justice folks over to join in the fun. Earth Day is the next day, by the way.
Here's what Bev sent me about Mr. McGovern. Also you can YouTube him and that's cool.
Bio on Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He writes and speaks for the arm of Tell the Word called “Speaking Truth to Power.”
Ray’s earlier career as a CIA analyst spanned 27 years—from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. The ethos of intelligence analysis in those days was reflected in the scripture passage chiseled into the marble entrance to CIA headquarters—“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Ray’s activities are now directed largely at closing the wide gap that has opened up over the past eight years between that ideal and current reality in the US intelligence community.
In January 2003, after it had become clear that intelligence analysis was being corrupted by political pressure to “justify” an unprovoked attack on Iraq, a handful of intelligence community alumni, including Ray, created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. VIPS now includes 67 former professionals from CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Army Intelligence, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other US intelligence agencies, plus the intelligence agencies of three “coalition” Allies, including Katharine Gun (UK), Frank Grevil (Denmark), and Andrew Wilkie (Australia).
VIPS’ first paper, a Memorandum for the President sent on February 5, 2003, offered a same-day critique of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address to the UN. In the memorandum VIPS warned that intelligence analysts were “increasingly distressed at the politicization of intelligence” and “were finding it hard to make themselves heard above the drumbeat for war.” The memo urged the president to “widen the discussion beyond...the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”
The thrust of VIPS’ next two pre-war memoranda can be gleaned from their titles: “Cooking Intelligence for War” and “Forgery, Hyperbole, Half-Truth: A Problem.”
“Fixing” the Intelligence For War
Documentary evidence dating back to eight months before the attack on Iraq showing that the U.S. and U.K. had doctored intelligence in order to “justify” it appeared on May 1, 2005, when the London’s Sunday Times published the official minutes of a July 23, 2002 meeting at 10 Downing Street. Those minutes, written that same day by a participant, contained the report by the chief of British intelligence, just back from talks with CIA director George Tenet in Washington, that “intelligence and facts were being fixed” around President Bush’s decision for war. VIPS was first off the blocks in providing commentary on this unique documentary evidence, publishing its analysis on May 4—weeks before the corporate press was forced to take note: http://www.tompaine.com/print/
The flurry of attention engendered in alternative media eventually embarrassed the corporate media into reporting this smoking gun. The corporate media reports were not only late but anemic, carefully steering away from the import of the Downing Street Minutes, which provided documentary proof of what we had long suspected; i.e., that President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had deliberately lied the “coalition” into an unnecessary war. Since then, report after report have confirmed that the president was a witting participant in the conspiracy to use the ogre of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq to justify launching the first resource war of the 21st Century—which, as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has now conceded, was “largely about oil.” Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz also pointed out that “Iraq swims on a sea of oil,” in referring to the real reason for the attack on Iraq. Both glossed over the fact that a large part of the motivation was also the misguided notion that attacking Iraq would make the Middle East safer for Israel.
Former White House Spokesman Scott McClellan, in his book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, provided a unique, first-hand account of how his former boss and senior aides abandoned “candor and honesty” to wage a “political propaganda campaign” that led the nation into an “unnecessary war.” If further proof were necessary, American author Ron Suskind reported last year that the head of Iraqi intelligence had been “turned” and told his British case officer in January 2003 precisely what then-Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri had told the CIA in the summer of 2002; i. e., that Saddam Hussein had no WMD. On September 18, 2002, former CIA director George Tenet personally briefed then-president George W. Bush on Sabri’s information regarding the absence of WMD in Iraq.
Fourteen additional VIPS papers were produced after the war began in Iraq; a list of titles is appended. The texts of all 17 issuances can be found at http://www.afterdowningstreet.
In addition to co-authoring most of VIPS memoranda, Ray has published many articles and op-eds. These have appeared in newspapers around the country and in Europe— The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Miami Herald, The International Herald Tribune, the Suddeutsche Zeitung, and the Berliner Tagesspiegel, for example). Ray and his VIPS colleagues have also appeared in several video documentaries—notably, Robert Greenwald’s “Uncovered: The War on Iraq” and “Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror” (produced by John Pilger). Cinema Libre Studio has produced a full-length documentary on DVD of Ray discussing US intelligence (Volume 3 in its “Speaking Freely” series of conversations with opinion leaders on world issues: (www.cinemalibrestudio.com).
Ray’s TV, radio interviews and other performances, many of them aired in domestic and foreign media, include:
Seattle, WA, March 8, 2009
(Youtube)
--Interview, February 5, 2009, by Afhin Rattansi, PressTV on Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on Leon Panetta to be director of the CIA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
-- Oxford Forum debate: January 22, 2009, “Resolved: George W. Bush Has Made the World a Safer Place” (speaking in opposition)
--News Hour with Jim Lehrer, January 6, 2009 (on nomination of Leon Panetta to be CIA director): http://www.pbs.org/newshour/
-- “Trial by Theater: Illegal War.” A 20-minute Culture Project video of Ray being deposed by former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega:
http://www.podango.com/
podcast_episode/1527/51599/A_ , November 19, 2007Question_of_Impeachment__ Trial_By_Theater/Article_I_ Initiation__Continuation_of_ Illegal_War_Part_6#51599
-- CNN (et al.): Rumsfeld-McGovern Live Exchange in Atlanta, May 4, 2006 (available on Youtube)
-- Major TV-radio networks: replay and commentary re Rumsfeld-McGovern exchange (including imaginative spoof by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show), May 4-8, 2006 (many of them still available on Youtube)
-- Washington Journal (C-SPAN), November 14, 2005
-- Testimony on Downing Street Memos before congressional briefing convened by Congressman John Conyers, then-ranking minority member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, June 16, 2005. The text of Ray’s prepared remarks can be found at http://www.afterdowningstreet.
org/node/289
--News Hour with Jim Lehrer, April 24, 2006 (on leaks about wars of aggression: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/
-- News Hour with Jim Lehrer, June 16, 2005 and August 10, 2004
-- Charlie Rose Show (debate with former CIA director James Woolsey), August 20, 2004
--“Uncovered: The War in Iraq:” documentary film by Robert Greenwald – October 2003
--Panorama (German TV—Erstes Programm, on the coming war), March 6, 2003
Many of Ray’s more recent articles have been posted first on Consortiumnews.com, and often on afterdowningstreet.org, commondreams.org, and counterpunch.org, among other websites, as well.
As mentioned above, on May 4, 2006 in Atlanta, at a Q&A session following a speech by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Ray took advantage of the opportunity to quote him back to himself on his earlier claims of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda and on weapons of mass destruction. Without immediate access to the kind of obfuscation available in “dodgy dossiers,” Rumsfeld was blatantly untruthful once again—actually twice again. CNN and MSNBC did some fact checking and exposed the fresh lies that evening. Other “mainstream media” finessed them, defending Rumsfeld against “heckling” by an “alleged” former analyst of the CIA. Youtube has posted the four-minute debate with Rumsfeld and various commentaries, (Keith Olbermann’s on evening of May 4, 2006, and Jon Stewart’s spoof on Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) “journalists” quizzing Ray a few days later are the best.)
Ray’s responsibilities at CIA included chairing a number of National Intelligence Estimates under presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter, and preparing the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) under presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. These, the two most authoritative kinds of intelligence reporting, have been alluded to in examining the performance of intelligence prior to the war in Iraq—and also the still unresolved issue concerning to what degree the president was warned in advance about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and how he reacted—or didn’t. (Both issues remain unresolved, because both parties cringed from allowing them to be investigated properly; a reality that the 9/11 Commission chair and co-chair have now explicitly admitted in saying the commission was doomed from the outset to fail.) The evidence is very strong that the president was adequately warned and did nothing; and that subsequently he successfully enlisted the help of former CIA director George Tenet in covering that up—to the point where Tenet lied under oath before the 9/11 Commission.) This is all on the public record, but ignored in the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM).
During the mid-eighties, Ray was one of the senior analysts conducting early morning briefings of the PDB one-on-one with the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. At his retirement ceremony Ray received the Intelligence Commendation Medallion and a letter of gratitude from then-President George H. W. Bush wishing Ray well in his transition to non-profit work. On March 2, 2006, he returned the medallion in a symbolic effort to dissociate himself from CIA participation in torture. (See http://www.truthout.org/docs_
A chapter by Ray, “A Compromised Central Intelligence Agency: What Can Be Done?” can be found in Patriotism, Democracy, and Common Sense: Restoring America’s Promise at Home and Abroad, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. In the chapter, Ray draws on his experience serving under nine directors of central intelligence to discuss in some detail the qualities needed in an intelligence director, and improvements that could be made immediately to enhance intelligence analysis and protect it from politicization. One of the recommended improvements, re-establishing the discipline of media analysis, was partially implemented in late 2005.
Ray also wrote a chapter, “Sham Dunk: Cooking Intelligence for the President,” for the book Neo-CONNED Again!, published in September 2005. The text of Ray’s chapter can be found at http://www.afterdowningstreet.
Ray is fluent in Russian, German, and Spanish. He earned a B.A., summa cum laude, from Fordham College and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Designated a “Distinguished Military Graduate,” he was commissioned in the U.S. Army and served two years as an infantry/intelligence officer. He holds an M.A. in Russian Studies from Fordham University, a certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown, and is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. A native of the New York City, Ray has been married to Rita Kennedy, also of New York City, for 47 years; they have five children and eight grandchildren.
