Ray shares more of the points he made in his talk before the White House. (6 min.)
Keith Alexander Joins Military Intelligence Industrial Complex for $1 million a month to supplement his $220,000/yr retirement pay and make ends meet.
The disgraced former four-star head of both NSA and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command must have something very special to offer as a cyber security consultant to Wall Street’s “Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association.” No doubt he will be spending long hours in the lab, applying his innovative technical skills to the task.
“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”
Ray comments for RT, July 31, 2014 (3 min.)
Will Obama Fire CIA Director John Brennan?
Here is a statement Ray just gave for a press release on John Brennan’s little peccadillos (!) like lying to Senate regarding CIA snooping on them and their staffers – and why he would do such an unusual (!) thing.
Statement of highly decorated veteran (27-year) CIA analyst, Ray McGovern. (On retirement Ray was awarded CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Award, and received a letter of commendation from then-President George H. W. Bush, whom McGovern briefed every other morning with the President’s Daily Brief.)
“It is inconceivable that the spying on the Senate committee happened without authorization by Director Brennan, so the question is why he did so. Easy answer: it has been established that Brennan had, at the very least, guilty knowledge of the torture, so the stakes for him personally could not be higher. He simply had to find out how damning the Senate report is about his own role. Brennan’s nominal boss, National Intelligence Director James Clapper is still in place after confessing to giving the same committee on March 12, 2013 sworn testimony (about NSA collection programs) that was in Clapper’s words, “clearly erroneous.” If President Obama does not fire Brennan, this will demonstrate that the President himself is afraid of our intelligence services – what blackmail material they may have on him and even whether they will target him, as they did John Kennedy.”
Why Is Washington Risking War With Russia?
Kiev’s siege of the Donbass, supported by the Obama administration, is escalating an already perilous crisis.
By Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen Cohen
This is serious; the authors are VERY serious people.
http://www.thenation.com/article/180825/why-washington-risking-war-russia
VIPS Challenge Obama to Disclose Real Intelligence – If Any – on Ukraine
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity: Memorandum for the President
Ray gives the kind of interview automatically banned from the US “blame Putin” media.
Subject: The shootdown over eastern Ukraine. Print version will be in “Evening Moscow” newspaper on July 21.
The audio, taped via telephone today (Sunday) at 1:30 AM, runs for 24 min (it is in English; click on the “play” arrow in the box)
Ray Interviewed by RT International on Shoot-Down of Plane Over Ukraine
It was barely 24 hours after the shoot-down. Ray’s emphasis on the need for calm statesmanship and restraint contrasts with the blacken-bad-Putin campaign launched almost immediately by the White House and its house organs in the “mainstream media.” It was reminiscent of the way the Reagan administration chose to exploit to the hilt the Soviet shoot-down of KAL007 on Sept. 1, 1983.
Horse’s-mouth type intelligence showed that the Russians were in the dark – literally as well as figuratively – about what kind of aircraft had intruded deep into Soviet territory. Intercepts showed, that they thought they were downing a U.S. spy plane of the kind that had been not far away just hours before the incident. Moscow eventually fessed up its terrible mistake, but the Reagan administration mantra remained, “The Soviet Union deliberately shot down a civilian airliner, murdering 269 people.”
Ray had a front seat for that incident and its aftermath. He also had learned to say, when ueberfragt (“over-asked” is the way the Germans put it), to respond, “I don’t have a clue,” as he did in disappointing the RT interviewer with this unusual response to his last question.
GAZA: ON THE MORALITY OF SIEGE and CIVILIAN CASUALTIES
From Moral Theologian Professor Daniel Maguire, July 21, 2014
Maguire has taught ethics at the Marquette University (a Jesuit university) for several decades, and is still teaching there (despite strong efforts by the Catholic Archdiocese to get Marquette to fire him). He writes:
What better time to review the Catholic and Jewish ethics of war?
Gaza has been subjected to another brutal method of war: siege. Siege directly violates the “just-war” principle of “discrimination,” i.e. non-combatant immunity, since it targets all indiscriminately, innocent and guilty alike. Peaceful flotillas have attempted to break the siege of Gaza by bringing desperately needed medicine and food to Gaza and they have been repulsed by Israel; in one case Israelis shot and killed nine of those on a peace flotilla, one of them an American citizen.
Siege is the most devastating of weapons, condemned by both Jewish and Catholic ethics. As Michael Walzer says in his “War Against Civilians,” “more people died in the siege of Leningrad than in the infernos of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki taken together.” The health effects of the ever tightening siege on children and others in Gaza are devastating.
Maimonides in the twelfth century summed up the Talmudic view of siege, saying it could only be justified if it left one side open for citizens to escape. Of course, it would then no longer be a siege. Conclusion: a siege is immoral.
As for the “just war” theory principle regarding civilian casualties, the Jewish scholar Mark Ellis calls Gaza the largest prison in the world, and bombing and strafing that prison is, in “just war” terms, murder. John Ford, S.J. addressed this in a landmark article in Theological Studies in 1944. In Ford’s thinking you cannot shoot into a crowded room and say you only intended to kill the bad guy.