Panel Discussion of documentary film “Drone”

Multi-faith Anti-Drone Conference

Stony Point, New York, April 8, 2016

Panelists: Kambale Musavuli, Christopher Aaron, Ray McGovern

 

April 8 happened to be the 53rd anniversary of Ray’s entry on duty at the CIA.  There have been some changes – among them, the agency assuming titular responsibility for Air Force “pilots” killing “militants” in the Middle East by remote controlled drones.

 

In a speech the day before, President Obama had trivialized drone killing with a lame joke, saying he’d much rather be “fighting terrorists not with drones but with the Marvel comics superhero Iron Man.”  As is well known, Iron Man is not constrained by any Constitutional or moral concerns. Neither is Obama, the reluctant executioner, who did his customary handwringing over “circumstances” that dictate “wielding kinetic power” and end up hurting people “who shouldn’t have been hurt.”

 

Videographer Wilton Vought filmed the panel with his usual high-quality work (see the YouTube link below).  The two panelists who spoke before Ray are well worth watching and learning from.  Ray’s segment and the first Q&A question go from minute 17:50 to 30:45.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uwTdaRW6PY&feature=youtu.be

Ray will be lecturing in Germany again in early June

Committed Truth-Justice-Peace activists are figuring out how many cities to fit into a lecture tour like the one Ray (and Elizabeth Murray) did in the course of a busy week last September.  He is always happy to be identified as a member – “Mitglied der Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, der Veterans For Peace, und Pax Christi.
The organizers are using as a promotional video described as ein Eindruck von unserer Veranstaltung in Koeln – “an impression from our presentation in Cologne” (on Sept. 18, 2015).
The leitmotif of that lecture series started out as “Wie Werden Heute Kriege Gemacht” – “How Are Wars Made These Days?”  Halfway through the tour, as the first flood of Syrian refugees arrived at every Bahnhof, it became “Wie Werden Fluechtlinge [Refugees] Gemacht?”
The clips of Elizabeth and Ray begin under the rubric, “Every War Starts With a Lie” (13 minutes)

Why did the CIA take photos of “detainees” before sending them off to be tortured?

To humiliate them and help induce the desired state of “learned helplessness” before interrogation was probably one objective. It likely was also a CIA CYA operation – enabling CIA operatives to document that – however broken the detainees eventually became – “the prisoners were healthy as a horse when we sent them off.”  This constitutes additional evidence that the basic reason prisoners were “rendered” elsewhere was … you got it! – for torture; and that those insisting on the “BEFORE”-photos were fully aware of that.
KPFA radio’s Sonali Kolhatkar interviewed Ray on these issues on March 31, 2016 for her show “Rising Up With Sonali.”  There was time for Ray to adduce some specific examples. (16 minutes)