His remarks (from 2:13:00 to 2:27:30), while far from eloquent, are from the heart. One small correction: Not for the first time, Ray says “Dan Ellsberg”, when he means Dan Berrigan. Ray has treasured both Dans as major guides on the journey — as well as Dan Maguire, ethics professor par excellence.
At the start, Ray shares briefly three “conspiracy theories” that he believes in:
— 9/11 Commission co-chairs Kean and Hamilton “We were set up to fail”.
— Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, “mastermind” of 9/11, was motivated by his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.
— The NY Times on 9/11/21 advances “conspiracy theory” that top U.S. military is lying through its teeth — again. Frontpages “Evidence Disputes U.S. Claim of ISIS Bomb in Kabul Drone Strike”.
We may not be guilty of the carnage of these past 20 years, but we are responsible. Indifference to the suffering of others is a greater sin than hate. Professor Dan Maguire warns us that it is our neglects, not just our deeds, that condemn us. Jeremiah: “The stain of your sin is still there, and I see through it, though you wash with soda and do not stint the soap.”
Acknowledging guilt is like looking at the sun. We blink and turn away from it. What is hard for individuals is even harder for nations. Still, it must be done.
Racism is still at the core of U.S. foreign/military policy — as it demonstrably was in the earlier carnage in Vietnam. After Vietnam, we had enough residual mercy to take in more than a million refugees from Indochina.
The most immediate task facing us is to do right by the refugees, the strangers/widows/orphans from the war in Afghanistan. Ambassador Chas Freeman, who helped create the enormous resettlement effort after Vietnam, poignantly asks “whether we are still the capable, welcoming, justice-oriented people we were when we took in the human casualties of our earlier policy failures.) Hats off to sponsors CODEPINK, Massachusetts Peace Action & ADDICTED TO WAR
An instructive article by an economist who dissects, explains, and forecasts clearly. Hudson also refers to the key role of the MICIMATT. A primer for non-economists.
Dear friends,Tonight 9/13/21 we bring light into the darkness that hides a long history of the lies and deceit of US foreign policy that has led the US public to be played like a cheap violin, away from the truth and into supporting unjust interventions. Our focus is particularly on Julian Assange and Wikileaks and the dominant US government and MSM narratives that have uniformly criticized his character and intentions. Special guest Ray McGovern returns to BLID to guide our investigation. Don’t be Lte!!
Below please find the title & summary of the Bringing Light Into Darkness show. We invite you to set your phone alarm so you can listen in tonight Monday 9/13/21 from 6-7pm CST. at koop.org or 91.7 FM if you live in Austin TX,
Our Perception of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks & US Foreign Policy: Are They Connected Misperceptions?
Our perceptions of Julian Assange’s character, the importance of WikiLeaks and the character of US foreign policy initiatives by our US government revelations are arguably all misperceptions. Tonight, our BLID show shares the evidence for this suggestion.
Our guest is Ray McGovern s a CIA analyst for 27 years during the administrations of JFK to that of George H.W. Bush. Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Reagan’s five most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985.
The narrative that our government has promoted and that our MSM has enabled and that has created the majority perception of the US public is that Assange may be guilty of sexually assaulting two women in Sweden and that he has put our national security at risk through irresponsibly publishing state secrets. But are these facts or fictions? There is a different interpretation of both the character of Julian Assange and his actions as a publisher that suggest he is a victim of slander and that he is being persecuted rather than prosecuted based on quality evidence.
Our investigation suggests we have a MSM that has enabled egregious foreign policy crimes by our government that has allowed higher crimes to consistently be committed by our US foreign policy outside of the awareness of the US public. That because of the revelations of the Pentagon Papers and the Afghan Papers and of WikiLeaks/Assange what has been revealed is a consistent pattern of lying to the US public by our government as well as the real impact of our foreign policy as one that is antithetical to democracy and the public good. Could this be the real motive to go after Assange by slandering his character with unsupported charges of sexual violence?
Should governments that have a pattern committing war crimes or have a pattern of promoting unjust wars and conflicts that result consistently in undermining the quality of life in the countries that we intervene in, should such a pattern of behavior be allowed to be hidden from public scrutiny & accountability? Who should we really be prosecuting? Is Assange on trial for telling the truth in the interest of revealing said war crimes, which makes his work consistent and indispensable to the public interest to know what our government policy is doing as it is executed in foreign lands?
Please join us tonight and judge this show’s content, as our guest Ray McGovern leads us in this inquiry. We feature a five-minute audio clip by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture specific to the sex crime allegations made against Julian Assange
If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. Malcolm X
The “Russian-hack-of-DNC-emails” canard was shot quite dead on Dec 5, 2017 in sworn House testimony by ‘CrowdStrike’ head https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/sh21.pdf Adam Schiff hid it for 29 months, then was forced to make public on May 7, 2020, SIXTEEN MONTHS AGO. Please, someone tell the NY Times.
Why did Obama send “moderate” rebels into Syria? Because Israel wanted “no outcome”. Former senior Israeli diplomat told NYT: “Let both sides bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. If this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.”
Sandbag: “to coerce by crude means”. Was Biden sandbagged by a Pentagon hoping to prevent full troop withdrawal? https://nytimes.com/2021/09/03/us/politics/afghanistan-evacuation.html Safer for complicit media to blame Biden/Blinken, overlook Gen. McKenzie slow-walking exit plans. Truman would have fired him, Austin & Milley.
Big questions re “ISIS-K” attack at Kabul airport on Aug 26. All had baggage, so who determined at once it was “suicide bomber”? Is ISIS-K creation of CIA & Saudis? A pretext for “Forever Bombing”? Hat-tip to Richard Ochs & Mintpress
Gates’s case is emblematic of how it is that ambitious, brown-nose functionaries (as well as rising four-stars) can ooze themselves into top positions and do irreparable harm. The only hope of preventing this in the future is to expose how the system now works, so I feel bound to add my two cents (plus a confession for having been Gates’s branch chief 50 years ago).
Goodman’s piece was occasioned by Gates’s key role in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq. I have followed Gates particularly closely since he took the job as defense secretary in late 2006 as Donald Rumsfeld finally heeded his generals’ advice that the Iraq war was hopeless, and that “surging” still more troops into Iraq in 2007 would simply compound a long list of errors.
Enter Robert Gates and “wing-man” Gen. David Petraeus who said they thought the surge a great idea. Its main purpose, actually, was to allow Cheney and Bush to leave office without losing a war. The cost? “Only” 1,000 additional U.S. troops delivered to Dover in “transfer cases”. Writing in November 2008 I reviewed the play by play and posed a question: “Robert Gates: As Bad as Rumsfeld?” (See: https://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/111908a.html ). Few of those watching closely thought the question in that title as off the wall as it had first sounded.
Goodman: Guts and Integrity
Mel Goodman was a very professional analyst of impeccable integrity. With an acute sense of horror, he watched Gates and his mentor William Casey (Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director) squander what had been CIA’s coin of the realm — its reputation for independent, unvarnished (Truman called it “untreated”) intelligence analysis. For example, Gates appointed sycophants like John McLaughlin, who had zero experience in Soviet affairs, to lead Soviet analysis and to warn loudly that Mikhail Gorbachev was merely a clever Commie and that the Communist Party would never give up power in the USSR.
Gates had quickly learned that parroting his avuncular, Russophobe patron Casey (and preventing objective analysis of the USSR) was a super-quick way to climb the career ladder. And Gates closely followed Casey’s example. In an unguarded moment on March 15, 1995, Gates admitted to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus that he had watched Casey on “issue after issue sit in meetings and present intelligence framed in terms of the policy he wanted pursued.”
Whether Gates truly believed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would never fall is an open question. What is clear is that he was a windsock — the perfect word for him (courtesy Mel Goodman).
It bears mention that Gates’s surrogates — like McLaughlin and his ilk — bubbled quickly to the top. McLaughlin and the other malleable managers promoted under Gates were the same ones who “loyally” saluted Gates’s Doppleganger George Tenet, when “bureaucratic deceit” was needed to “justify” launching a war of aggression on Iraq in 2003.
Nuclear Exchange Barely Avoided in 1983
As for Goodman, we have him and a couple other gutsy analysts of Russia to thank for being alive today. In Nov. 1983, they put their careers at risk, when they tried to warn the White House that the Soviets were interpreting a large U.S. nuclear exercise named “Able Archer” as preparations for the real thing — actual war.
CIA Deputy Director Robert Gates brushed them off. So they made an end-run around Gates to Director William Casey, despite knowing full well that Casey himself was normally reluctant to believe that the Russians could actually be afraid of the U.S. Thankfully, Mel et al. succeeded in convincing Casey this time. Whew!
The release earlier this year of documents on the Nov. 1983 Able Archer exercise prompted Mel Goodman to send this letter to The Washington Post; it was published on Feb. 22, 2021. Here is the text:
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Opinion: The ‘war scare’ and the CIA
The Feb. 18 news article “Newly released documents shed light on 1983 nuclear scare with Soviets” was an important reminder of the dangers of any military exercise that involves nuclear weapons, but it omitted a very important detail. KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who reported to British intelligence, was a source of the intelligence alert and the “war scare.” A group of CIA analysts convinced CIA Director William Casey that the “war scare” was real, and Casey ignored his deputy director for intelligence, Robert Gates, who argued that the Soviets were merely crying wolf. Because of our efforts, Casey convinced President Ronald Reagan that the “war scare” was real and our nuclear weapons command exercise was made less threatening. Then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used the “war scare” to persuade Reagan to pursue disarmament talks with the Soviet Union.
Melvin A. Goodman, Bethesda
The writer, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, was a Soviet foreign policy analyst at the CIA from 1966 to 1990.
Mel Goodman and I have the book on Gates, so to speak. So did the late Robert Parry, who published much of his own analysis of Gates, as well as ours, on Consortium News, the website Parry founded on 1995 for independent investigative reporting. To supplement what Mel writes in his recent article, let me quote from a piece I wrote in 2011 when Gates joined some of the rats leaving the sinking ship of the Iraq and Afghan war policies. I focused on Gates’s uncanny ability to schmooze — not only with pundits like the adoring David Ignatius, but in this particular case with the editor of The Boston Globe. In March 2011 I posted (See: https://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/030211a.html ) “How to Read Gates’s Shift on the Wars”. Excerpts below:
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The Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) is always ready with fulsome praise for Gates’s “candor” and “leadership” – and even for his belated recognition that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were nuts.
Certain kinds of public candor are so unexpected that they have the shock value of a gunshot at theopera,” purred a Boston Globe editorial on March 1, 2011 about Gates’s belated admission that only a crazy person would commit U.S. ground forces to wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. The editorial then lamented Gates’s planned retirement later in the year and urged President Barack Obama “to look hard for a successor with some of Gates’s unusual leadership qualities.”
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Unusual leadership qualities, indeed. Without doubt, it was surprising when Gates inserted the following comment into his speech on Feb. 25, 2011 at West Point:
“But in my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General [Douglas] MacArthur so delicately put it.”
Those of us who have known Gates for many years couldn’t help but wonder what he was up to, what was the ulterior motive behind his decision to put distance between himself and these two misbegotten wars
Having overseen two wars, was Gates signaling that he knew the conflicts would come to a “no good end”, and thus was he creating a public record for himself as something of a war skeptic, a Washington Establishment savant? Gates noted that 80 young West Point cadets had fallen in battle since 9/11 (and surely some in his audience would join them in filling future “transfer cases” from the feckless wars that Gates now says should qualify any supporter for a visit to the local psychiatrist.
The Final Straw
Gates finished his “Farewell Address” at West Point with these words:
As some of you have heard me say before, you need to know that I feel personally responsible for each and every one of you, as if you were my own sons and daughters; for as long as I am secretary of defense that will remain true. … I bid you farewell and ask God to bless every one of you.
