http://lawanddisorder.org/2016/09/law-and-disorder-september-18-2016/
(The segment with the interview of Ray runs for 18 minutes, from minute 41:20 to 59:30.)
Ray was asked to talk about the changes after 9/11, to include why, with a few other CIA “alumni,” he created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). The idea was to warn President George W. Bush there was no need to attack Iraq – even if some of what Colin Powell told the UN was true. VIPS went on to expose the fraudulent (NOT “mistaken,” fraudulent) intelligence cooked up by former analyst colleagues accustomed to giving more importance to career than to truth.
Ray’s experience watching, up close and personal, the corruption of the analysis directorate of the CIA suggests that it takes a generation to destroy an ethos of integrity in an institution. And that this can most readily be done by promoting malleable managers willing to pimp prostituted intelligence for the next promotion. And that’s how it (and they) went down in helping Bush and Cheney “justify” the attack on Iraq.
The interviewers also asked Ray to comment on why President Obama joined CIA Director John Brennan in trying to scuttle the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation on CIA torture, and how, for once, the Senate stood up to the White House and published a redacted executive summary including depiction of the heinous torture practices revealed in CIA’s own banality-of-evil cables. In sum, Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein refused to throw her tenacious investigators under the bus. This is explained in suspenseful detail in a recent Guardian series written by one of the best investigative reporters, Spencer Ackerman. See link (posted on raymcgovern.com) below: “US Media Ignores CIA Cover-up on Torture,” by VIPS, September 16, 2016, which in turn contains links to the Guardian series.
Nice coincidence. A good friend of Ray, Jeff Haas, a National Lawyers Guild attorney, who just spent 10 days at the Standing Rock Native American tribe encampment in North Dakota, was interviewed during the first segment. I was not surprised to learn that Jeff is working with other lawyers to see that the Native Americans are, finally, treated with true justice.
When Jeff and his equally intrepid wife Mariel Nanasi lived in Chicago, they laid the groundwork for putting former Chicago PD Commander (and torturer) Jon Birge behind bars. Jeff also represented the family of Black Panther Fred Hampton and successfully proved that Hampton was assassinated by the FBI and the Chicago PD. Haas wrote a riveting book about all this: “The Assassination of Fred Hampton.”
(Jeff’s segment runs from minute 01:15 to 19:00.)