Sam Adams Associates for Integrity Honors Karen Kwiatkowski With 17th Annual Award

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

Nonviolent Direct Action Audio Interview of Ray: PART 2

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.”

Nonviolent Direct Action’s does unusual audio interview of Ray

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.]

Trump’s Timidity is Letting Comey Off the Hook

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.”