Ray McGovern

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/12/09/karen-kwiatkowski-receives-2018-sam-adams-award-read-her-acceptance-speech-here/
Washington, DC, December 8, 2018

Includes Karen’s acceptance speech and the award citation before a full house at the Festival Center.

Rob Reiner’s suppressed film, “Shock and Awe,” in which an actress plays Karen’s key role as whistleblower before the attack on Iraq, was shown before the award ceremony.

Video of the ceremony itself includes talks by Larry Wilkerson (awardee #7), as well as Karen, and awardee #15 John Kiriakou’s presentation to Karen of the Corner-Brightener Candlestick Holder for shining light into dark places  — the “Oscar” chosen by Sam Adams Associates as the most fitting.  The Q & A following Karen’s talk is also included.

That video will be posted in a few days on samadamsaward.ch, the website on which one can find detailed background information about previous awardees (as well as the answer to ‘Why Sam Adams?’).  From 2002 to 2018, the awardees are:

1 — Coleen Rowley
2 — Katharine Gun, UK
3 — Sibel Edmonds
4 — Craig Murray, UK
5 — Sam Provance
6 — Frank Grevil, Denmark
7 — Larry Wilkerson
8 — Julian Assange, Australia
9 — Thomas Drake
10 -Jesselyn Radack
11 -Thomas Fingar
12 -Edward Snowden, stateless
13 -Chelsea Manning
14 -William Binney
15 -John Kiriakou
16 -Seymour Hersh
17 -Karen Kwiatkowski

Dec. 2, 2018 (58 minutes)
YouTube: https://youtu.be/V6dhpFLj52A
Radio4All: http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/100408

Jack Gilroy asks about Ray’s various arrests for witnessing. Ray singles out one time he was convicted, since it illustrates not only the cowardly, narrowly political nature of once-admired Congress-creatures like John Conyers and Nancy Pelosi, but also their vulnerability to Deep State blackmail — not to mention their lack of respect for the Constitution.

The good and the bad of George H. W. Bush.  He knew about “the crazies,” and yet wimped out on telling his son, and the world, what a disaster attacking Iraq would be.  (See: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/04/05/coming-attraction-lunatic-loose-in-west-wing/ )

Earlier, he said not a word, when Bill Clinton broke Bush’s own promise to Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand NATO “one inch” to the East, which, in turn, has led to all sorts of very serious — and predictable — trouble.  (See, for example, this poignant lament by Sen. Bill Bradley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-alxZvUCS8  )
The Russians saw this as a betrayal of trust, and this turned out to be far more historically consequential that the elder Bush’s more enlightened initial behavior in 1990-1991 when the Soviet empire fell apart. It helps to explain the Kremlin’s lack of trust in such promises.

Paul Wolfowitz in 1991 after the “glorious victory” of Desert Storm: main lesson is “The Russians won’t stop us.”  And so it was again in 2003 with the attack and occupation of Iraq.  Not so, though, in 2014 with the Western-sponsored Putsch in Kiev, apparently with the misbegotten hope of absorbing Ukraine into NATO.  By then, the Russians could, and did, “stop us.”  Any residual Kremlin trust in the U.S. evaporated quickly, especially as the Russians watched U.S. vassal states in Euroope — one after the other —  bow to the U.S. diktat on sanctions.
THE MICIMATT

And cui bono from all this? The MICIMATT.  Eisenhower’s Military-Industrial complex has blossomed five-plus decades later into the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank (MICIMATT) complex.  President Trump is openly rooting for “Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and many other great U.S. defense contractors.”  The bono goes to the arms manufacturers and merchants; they are the cui.

The award given by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity on December 8 to its 17th annual honoree, Karen Kwiatkowski, at the Festival Center where Ray has worked for the last 20 years.  The center is an offshoot ministry of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour, under whose auspices Tell the Word, the non-profit that Ray now leads, does its work.  How Church of the Savior pastor Gordon Cosby explained why he wanted Ray to identify himself with the church when he speaks or writes.

The ethos of small-is-better-than-ever-bigger, and the revolutionary possibilities emerging from small groups that meet faithfully every week.  Finally, Ray points to the distinct advantage enjoyed by seniors willing to “put their bodies into it,” in order to show younger people the risks we are willing to take in times like these — ties that summon us to be “Winter Soldiers.”

YouTube:  https://youtu.be/mOppsiboBgA
Radio4All:  http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/100396
Nov. 21, 2018 (58 minues)
Jack covers the waterfront: how Ray, after serving as an infantry/intelligence officer during the early 60s, became a CIA analyst focusing on Russia’s relations with China and Vietnam; then chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch; Kennedy ad Khrushchev; JFK assassination and cover-up; Alan Dulles’s imaginative use of “conspiracy-theory” ploy to stanch well founded suspicions.

Gulf of Tonkin; Ray’s analyst colleague Sam Adams gets it right, is sacrificed on altar of institutional/political expediency; “Mac” Bundy’s cowardice; trying to inform Nixon and Kissinger; their imaginative use of U.S.-U.S.S.R.-China triangular diplomacy and how that powerful card has been frittered away; fabricated “intelligence” before the attack on Iraq; James Clapper’s admission, in his memoir, that he was “so eager to help [Cheny/Bush] that we found what wasn’t really there”! [WMD]; Ray braces Clapper on that, as Ray earlier had confronted Clapper’s patron, Donald Rumsfeld, in public [The impromptu, four-minute mini-debate that followed a Rumsfeld speech in Atlanta is still receiving hits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1FTmuhynaw ].  And, as if to crown the whole experience, Anderson Cooper asking Ray, twice, “Weren’t you afraid?”

The Downing Street Memo, minutes of Tony Blair with his 12 disciples on July 23, 2002 when Blair was told by the head of Britain’s CIA that Bush had decided to do regime change in Iraq; that the war would be justified by WMD and faux evidence of Saddam Hussein colluding with al Qaeda; and that, as the minutes of that meeting bolfly put it, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy;” this was eight months before the attack on Iraq.

Finally, a brief discussion of the international law principle of “universal jurisdiction:” how it snared former Chilean dictator Augosto Pinochet; how it was invoked in Paris in October 2007 while Rumsfeld was there to give a talk, causing him to abruptly sneak away to the airport and take the first flight back to safety in the U.S.; why Bush Jr. canceled plans to give a speech in Geneva in February 2011; why former CIA Director George Tenet is still hiding in his basement; why James Clapper might wish to cancel any plans to travel abroad; and why current CIA Director Gina Haspel, torturer extraordinaire, had to have a fighter escort flying to and from Turkey last month.  [The fighter escort may be apocryphal; the rest is real.]

November 20, 2018, 57 minutes (can skip the first 3)
https://www.peterbcollins.com/2018/11/20/in-depth-interview-ex-cia-analyst-ray-mcgovern-confronts-clapper-suspects-brennan-defends-assange/#more-18239

Ray enjoys sharing views with knowledgeable interviewers like Peter B. Collins.  They can cover some humorless issues in a relaxed, at times, humorous fashion.

By Ray McGovern, December 4, 2018
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/12/04/trumps-timidity-is-letting-comey-off-the-hook/

A gutless performance, except for the three House oversight committee chairs who had the courage to live up to their Constitutional responsibility and expose the machinations of the Deep State and, inevitably, its key accomplice — the media.  The chairs are about to be knocked over, now that those sitting on them have been “thrown under the bus.”

By David Stockman, December 3, 2018
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/hey-mr-trump-tear-down-that-deep-state-wall-of-secrecy-part-1/

Excerpts; Then Ray Commentary

“The Deep State thrives and milks the public treasury so successfully in large part because the Imperial City’s corps of permanent policy apparatchiks like Comey and Brennan (and thousands more) pretend to be performing god’s work. So doing, they preen sanctimoniously to the adoration of their sycophants in the mainstream media, claiming to be above any governance or sanction from the unwashed electorate…

“The president has the unquestioned constitutional power to both appoint and fire his own cabinet, sub-cabinet and upwards of 3,000 Schedule C policy jobs; and also to declassify (See below) anything lurking behind the Deep State’s massive wall of unjustified secrecy if he deems it in the public interest.

“Accordingly, Trump could have and should have fired Jeff Sessions long before he did and Rod Rosenstein even before that. After all, it is the spinelessness of the former and the Deep State treachery of the latter, that launched the hideous Mueller witch-hunt in the first place and that keeps it going from one absurdity to the next ridiculous over-reach. …

“The Brennan Report—The Foundational Document of the RussiaGate Witch-Hunt

(also known as the “Intelligence Community Assessment” of January 6, 2017)

“Still, we have to wonder why ** Trump doesn’t get the joke. Long ago he could have declassified everything related to the foundational RussiaGate document. That is, the [widely-praised-for-partisan-political-reasons but evidence-thin guesstimate] of January 6, 2017, ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections’.

[“Handpicked” Authors = Handpicked Conclusions]

“The report … is now well-understood to have been written by outgoing CIA director John Brennan and a hand-picked posse of politicized analysts from the CIA, FBI and NSA. It was essentially a political screed thinly disguised as the product of the professional intelligence community and was designed to discredit and sabotage the Trump presidency.

“As presented to the President-elect and released to the public in declassified form, it is all gussied-up with caveats, implying that the real dirt is in the “highly classified” version of the report. Except that’s just the typical Deep State hide-the-ball trick: When it can’t prove its “assessments” and “judgments”, it claims the evidence is top secret.”

For a preview of what to expect when the House Intelligence Committee changes hands next month, check out soon-to-be chair, Adam Schiff, telling Ray three days after Trump’s inauguration that he could not share with Ray the evidence of “Russian hacking.”  https://raymcgovern.com/2017/01/31/thats-bogus-ray-mcgovern-pwns-congressman-schiff-on-russian-hacking-fairy-tale/

And as for Schiff’s ability to separate fact from friction, this clip shows astonishing gullibility on Schiff’s part.

(See:  https://raymcgovern.com/2018/11/24/adam-schiffs-incredible-incurable-credulity/ )

Maybe Trump Does Get It; That It’s No Joke

**Stockman writes, “We have to wonder why Trump doesn’t get the joke.”  Ray suggests that, as President Ronald Reagan’s Budget Director, Stockman did not have to pay much heed to the Deep State, so long as he did not demur on the obscenely excessive budgets given to the FBI, DOJ, CIA, NSA, and the Pentagon.

With President Trump it’s a different kettle of fish — piranhas.  Trump has ample reason to fear that the Deep State is out to get him because it is.  And by this point he seems to have internalized quite enough fear that it would be dangerous to take on the intelligence community.  Needless to say, the stakes are exceedingly very high — for both sides. Even if, as seems likely, Trump dismissed the usual warnings as to how things work in Washington, he could hardly have missed Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s attempt to ensure that Trump knows what he should be afraid of.

Trump: Not Afraid? Then ‘Really Dumb’

On Jan. 3, 2017, three weeks before Trump took office, Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, that President-elect Trump was “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and doubting its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities:

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told Maddow. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

Schumer’s words came just three days before then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper and the heads of the FBI, CIA, and NSA descended upon the president-elect with the misnomered “Intelligence Community Assessment” — a rump, evidence-free embarrassment to serious practitioners of intelligence analysis, published that same day, alleging that Russian President Vladimir Putin had done what he could to get Trump elected.

Adding insult to injury, after the January 6, 2018 briefing of the president-elect, FBI Director James Comey then asked the others to leave, and proceeded to brief the Trump on the dubious findings of the so-called “Steele dossier” — opposition research paid for by the Democrats (and, according to some reports, by the FBI as well) — with unconfirmed but scurrilous stories about Trump cavorting with prostitutes in Moscow, etc., etc.

‘This Russia Thing’

It seems to have taken Trump a few months to appreciate fully that he was being subjected to the classic blackmail-type advisory previously used with presidents-elect by the likes of J. Edgar Hoover. Indeed, likely as not, this may be what Trump (his own worst enemy when he opens his mouth) had in mind when he told Lester Holt in May 2017 that he had fired Comey over “this Russia thing.”

In fresh news today, Comey has dropped his unprecedented legal maneuver to have a court quash a subpoena for him to appear for a closed-door deposition to the the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee.  Committee Chair Bob Goodlatte, R, VA, had decried Comey’s use of “baseless litigation” and called it an “attempt to run out the clock on this Congress,” a reference to the very short time left before Democrats take control.  Goodlatte added that a transcript of the closed-door deposition will be released “as soon as possible after the interview, in the name of our combined desire for transparency.”

The closed-door deposition is now scheduled for Friday, December 7, the 77th anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.  By all appearances, the committee has the goods on Comey. And, most important: The Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA); so the until-now secret FISA application “justifying” surveillance of Carter Page is almost sure to come up.

But don’t look for any surprise attack on Comey this December 7 from Judiciary Committee members, vulnerable though he is .  With just a few days left before Congress adjourns, House Republicans, like their President, have pretty much let the clock run out on them.  Few will see much percentage at this late date in “taking on the intelligence community.” Trump has already pretty much thrown them under the bus.

Congressional Timidity Rivaling Trump’s?

On September 17, 2018 President Trump boldly ordered “immediate declassification” of Russia-gate materials, including FISA-related material.  (See:

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/09/18/justice-dept-likely-to-slow-walk-declassification/

Four days later he backed down, explaining that he would leave it to the Justice Department’s inspector general to review the material, rather than release it publicly.

(See:  https://raymcgovern.com/2018/09/21/trump-flinches-again-lets-himself-be-slow-walked-see-item-immediately-below-by-deep-state-throws-devin-nunes-and-other-committee-chairs-under-the-bus-unless-until-he-changes-his-mind-again/ )

What’s in the FISA application?  House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes knows. In July he expressed hedged confidence “that once the American people see these 20 pages, at least for those that will get real reporting on this issue, they will be shocked by what’s in that FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] application” to surveil Carter Page, an American citizen, and member of Trump’s campaign team.

The leadership of the three House committees with purview over Russia-gate matters — Judiciary, Intelligence, and Government Operations — changes next month when the Democrats take over the House.  So while, earlier, Friday seemed to be shaping up as a key day for Comey — and for getting answers to questions on Russia-gate — what is likely to emerge will land with an anticlimactic thud. Even if the committee is able to expose additional misdeeds not already known, nothing much is likely to happen before Christmas.  And after that, the three committees and their aborted work will be history.

The dominant mainstream media narrative about Russia-gate — ignoring FBI-gate — will hop happily into the new year.  And no congressional “oversight” committee will dare step up to its constitutional duty, despite a plethora of documentary evidence on FBI-gate.  And why? Largely because “they” of the Deep State “have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Most important of all, any significant improvement in relations with Russia will remain stymied.  And the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank) complex, with its Deep-State enforcer, will have won yet another round.  Merry Christmas.

By Ray McGovern, December 1, 2018
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/12/01/the-bushes-fathers-and-sons-with-apologies-to-turgenev/