55 Years Israel Admitted to Killing 34 US Sailors

The Navy “followed orders” to cover it up
By Ray McGovern, June 8, 2022

The murder of journalist Shereen Abu Akleh on May 11, 2022 (See: 
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/24/middleeast/shireen-abu-akleh-jenin-killing-investigation-cmd-intl/index.html ) is, sadly, not the first time Israeli forces have killed American citizens and gotten away with it.

The Israeli bulldozer that ran over — and then backed up over — 23 year-old Rachel Corrie to ensure her back was broken on March 16, 2003 is another sad example.

Today, we call to mind the most egregious example 55 years after June 8, 1967, when Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty in international waters, killing 34 and wounding more than 170 (total crew was 294). At the height of the attack, Seaman Terry Halbardier jerry-rigged an antenna so an SOS could be sent. The Israelis heard the SOS and broke off the attack.

The attack on the Liberty is not in dispute. Israel claimed it was a mistake. Intercepted Israeli communications and copious other evidence tell a different story. Below is an article I wrote to mark the 50th anniversary of the attack on the USS Liberty:
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/06/08/a-uss-libertys-heros-passing/

Gina Haspel Watched the Waterboarding at CIA ‘Black Site’

By Ray McGovern, June 5, 2022

It still makes me sick to my stomach — this time the sworn testimony of CIA contract psychologist/torturer James Mitchell that Gina Haspel was watching as he and psychologist/torturer colleague John Bruce Jessen waterboarded Saudi captive Ab al-Rahim al-Nashiri in Thailand. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/us/politics/cia-gina-haspel-black-site.html

For services performed (and obfuscated), Haspel passed muster in the Senate and was confirmed as CIA Director on May 17, 2018. It was hard for me to believe she had been nominated, harder still to believe the Senate Intelligence Committee, knowing what they knew about Haspel, would give her a pass. So I went to the Committee hearing on May 9, 2018.

Letting Haspel Off the Hook

It was very difficult to watch some of my former colleagues file into the front rows in full support of the nomination of a torturer to head the CIA. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), who had published a damning report on CIA torture in Dec. 2014, lost her nerve and let Haspel off the hook when she asked her if she had overseen the interrogation of al-Nashiri. Haspel: it’s classified. And, in fact, the answer was successfully kept out of the media until now, with Mitchell’s testimony.

Intelligence Committee Chair, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) waxed eloquent, telling Haspel:

“You are without a doubt the most qualified person the president could choose to lead the CIA and the most prepared nominee in the 70-year history of the agency. You have acted morally, ethically and legally over a distinguished 30-year career.”

See what I mean by getting sick to my stomach?

Point of Order!

I interrupted the hearing to expose the farce, reminding the senators that they knew a boatload of disqualifying facts about Haspel — including the answer to Feinstein’s question; and that, yet, they were about to approve her nomination to be director of the CIA.

Burr had me seized. Joe Lauria described what happened next: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/05/10/haspel-says-cia-wont-torture-again-as-ray-mcgovern-is-dragged-out-of-hearing/ . The 24 hours I had to spend in a very small cell in a dank DC jail felt right — even at the time. Feels more so in retrospect.

I have this moral thing about torture; I had thought almost everyone did! It turns out that Pete Hoekstra, chair of the House Intelligence Committee (2004-2007), had a different view. On March 2, 2006. I visited Hoekstra’s office to return the Intelligence Commendation Medallion given me at retirement for “especially meritorious service,” explaining, “I do not want to be associated, however remotely, with an agency engaged in torture.” It was no secret he fully supported the CIA methods; I did not hear back from him.

Years later, however, I welcomed the chance to elicit from Hoekstra open acknowledgement that he knew of and condoned the abuses carried out by the CIA (over which his committee was supposed to exercise oversight). On Dec. 11, 2014, I confronted the former Congressman live on CCTV’s “The Heat”, while discussing the Senate Intelligence Committee findings released two days before damning CIA torture.  It was a unique chance to hold Hoekstra publicly accountable for condoning torture, and the Michigan congressman rose to the occasion better than I could have hoped. (See minutes 8:15 to 10:41 of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfCjS2B1ShY).

Not Only Intrinsic Evil; Also Ineffective

For me torture belongs in the category of intrinsic evil — always wrong — in the same category as rape and slavery. Human beings simply do not do such things to other human beings. As an Army Combat Intelligence officer, I also knew that torture does not “work”. So, four months after I gave back my commendation medallion, I felt affirmed and gratified that the head of Army Intelligence, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, conceding past “transgressions and mistakes”, insisted:

“No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”

Gen. Kimmons’s integrity and guts also made me proud again of my parent service, the U.S. Army. And get this: Kimmons chose to say this at a Pentagon press conference he himself arranged for Sept. 6, 2006, the same day on which he knew President Bush would publicly advertise the efficacy of an “alternate set of procedures” for interrogation.  These were given the euphemism “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.” They include, under the exact same title in German (verschaerfte Vernehmung), interrogation “techniques” listed in the Gestapo Handbuch.

The NY Times story reporting that Haspel watched the waterboarding, typically of such stories, was buried on page 17 in the Saturday edition. The good news, I suppose, is that the draft got past the NYT censors and (I’m guessing here) that those censors may have shunned the usual procedure of seeking a prior nihil obstat from Headquarters in Langley. Below is a trimmed-down version of Saturday’s article, which was written by Carol Rosenberg and Julian E. Barnes:

———————————————————————————————————————

Gina Haspel Observed Waterboarding at C.I.A. Black Site, Psychologist Testifies

The testimony emerged in pretrial hearings in the Cole bombing case at Guantánamo Bay, where the war court is wrestling with the legacy of torture after 9/11.

By Carol Rosenberg and Julian E. Barnes

WASHINGTON — During Gina Haspel’s confirmation hearing to become director of the C.I.A. in 2018, Senator Dianne Feinstein asked her if she had overseen the interrogations of a Saudi prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, which included the use of a waterboard.

Ms. Haspel declined to answer, saying it was part of her classified career.

While there has been reporting about her oversight of a C.I.A. black site in Thailand where Mr. Nashiri was waterboarded, and where Ms. Haspel wrote or authorized memos about his torture, the precise details of her work as the chief of base, the C.I.A. officer who oversaw the prison, have been shrouded in official secrecy.

But testimony at a hearing last month in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, included a revelation about the former C.I.A. director’s long and secretive career. James E. Mitchell, a psychologist who helped develop the agency’s torture program, testified that the chief of base at the time, whom he referred to as Z9A in accordance with court rules, watched while he and a teammate subjected Mr. Nashiri to “enhanced interrogation” that included waterboarding at the black site.

Z9A is the code name used in court for Ms. Haspel.

The C.I.A. has never acknowledged Ms. Haspel’s work at the black site, and the use of the code name represented the court’s acceptance of an agency policy of not acknowledging state secrets — even those that have already been spilled. Former officials long ago revealed that she ran the black site in Thailand from October 2002 until December 2002, during the time Mr. Nashiri was being tortured, which Dr. Mitchell described in his testimony.

Guantánamo Bay is one of the few places where America is still wrestling with the legacy of torture in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Torture has loomed over the pretrial phase of the death penalty cases for years and is likely to continue to do so as hearings resume over the summer.

Defense teams have been asking military judges to exclude certain evidence from the war crimes trials of accused Qaeda operatives as tainted by not just torture but also cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In May, that meant revisiting what happened nearly 20 years ago at the secret prison in Thailand.

Dr. Mitchell described how in late 2002 he and another C.I.A. contract psychologist, John Bruce Jessen, waterboarded Mr. Nashiri, who is accused of orchestrating the bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in 2000. Seventeen American sailors were killed in the attack.

During three separate sessions, Dr. Mitchell held a cloth over the man’s face and adjusted it to direct the water as Dr. Jessen poured. …

The interrogation team shifted to other “coercive techniques,” including forcing the prisoner to spend time in a small confinement box. Dr. Mitchell said he had a “general memory of what was done” — the detainee, who was nude and sometimes hooded, was probably slapped and had the back of his head slammed into a burlap-covered wall — but testified that he did not have a “blow-by-blow recollection of any of that stuff.”

It was previously known that by the time Mr. Nashiri was waterboarded in late 2002, Ms. Haspel had taken over as the chief of base at the secret prison in Thailand. It has also been reported that she drafted cables relating what happened to Mr. Nashiri and what was learned during his interrogations and debriefings.

But Dr. Mitchell’s testimony went further. He testified that the chief of base observed the sessions, though she did not participate in them. [Emphasis added.] …

The judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., agreed to allow Dr. Mitchell to testify because the C.I.A. had destroyed videotapes that defense lawyers argue showed the psychologists torturing and interrogating Mr. Nashiri and another prisoner at the black site in Thailand. Defense lawyers said that deprived them of potential evidence, including something they might have wanted to show a military jury deciding whether to impose a death penalty.

The disclosure that the C.I.A. had destroyed the tapes — most of them showing Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee taken into custody and known to be tortured by the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11 attacks — prompted the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate the black site program.

Ms. Haspel has acknowledged her role in the destruction of those tapes as a chief of staff to the operations chief, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. At her confirmation hearing, she said, “I would also make clear that I did not appear on the tapes.”

Observers at the site in Thailand watched waterboarding and other interrogations via a closed-circuit video feed to a separate room. … The Senate Intelligence Committee study of the C.I.A. program, only a part of which is public, said that interrogators wanted to stop using “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Mr. Nashiri because he was answering direct questions, but they were overruled by headquarters.

Mr. Nashiri would also be tortured later, after Dr. Mitchell had taken him to a different C.I.A. black site. Another interrogator revved a drill next to the naked detainee’s hooded head, apparently to try to get him to divulge Qaeda plots. At another black site in 2004, the C.I.A. infused a dietary supplement into his rectum for refusing to eat. His Navy lawyer has called the procedure rape.

At her confirmation hearing, Ms. Haspel pledged not to set up any similar interrogation programs.

END of NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/us/politics/cia-gina-haspel-black-site.html

———————————————————————————————————————

Anybody else sick to their stomach?

Outright Flummoxed on The Critical Hour ‘Splaining US-China Policy

By Ray McGovern, June 2, 2022

I flunked miserably yesterday when asked to explain what this current generation’s “Best and Brightest” think they are doing in messing with the One-China policy that has kept the peace for 50 years.

We led off with Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in Taipei; Duckworth said the purpose was to “emphasize our support for Taiwan security”. Tsai went further in spelling this out:

“The U.S. Department of Defense is now proactively planning cooperation between the U.S. National Guard and Taiwan’s defense forces; we are looking forward to closer and deeper Taiwan-U.S. cooperation on matters of regional security.”

I sidestepped a question as to whether U.S. China policy is devised and run by lunatics.

On second thought, Biden’s foreign policy advisers Blinken and Sullivan, for example, seems to represent the same species of lunatic we’ve seen before.

I am thinking, of course, of what used to be called WASPS. That was one acronym/moniker used to describe the privileged, white, Ivy-mantled species of lunatic — like McGeorge Bundy and Walter Rostow — “exceptional people” — the kind who left three million Vietnamese dead only five decades ago. It turned out that their brand of exceptionalism-tinged-with-hubris could not even entertain the notion of being defeated by what were called “bare-footed brown feet in pajamas” — and communists, to boot!

Reality check: Biden’s economic policy advisers seem to be of the same lunatic species. Worth a read is Susannah Patton’s op-ed in today’s NY Times, China is Winning in Asia. Biden’s Plans Won’t Change That, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/opinion/us-biden-asia-china-economy-influence.html  .

‘Minister of Truth’ Nina Jankowicz Slurs Truthtellers, then Bows Out

A Light video on dark media
With The Grayzone’s Blumenthal, Mate, and Ray

I was a recent guest on The Grayzone to discuss the bizarre rise and fall of Department of Homeland Security’s short-lived ‘Minister of Truth’ Nina Jankowicz.  Included are her baseless attacks on The Grayzone, as well as recent attempts by state-backed “counter-disinformation” operations to censor The Grayzone, Ray, and others who dare to speak truth at variance with Establishment narratives.

May 27, 2022, 35 minutes

Catch-up Reading; Oberg is excellent (you won’t find him in the NYT)

By Ray McGovern, May 31, 2022

Listen to Kissinger and CIA’s Burns and Compare with Populist Platitudes
By Jan Oberg, The Transnational TRANSEND Media Service, MAY 30, 2022

Listen to Kissinger and CIA’s Burns and Compare with Populist Platitudes

Russia or China? The U.S. Has a Choice to Make.
By Zachary Karabell, May 30,  2022

Full Disclosure: Mr. Karabell is the founder of The Progress Network and the author of “Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power.” He is a former portfolio manager of the China-U. S. Growth Fund with Fred Alger Management.

Biden Says We’ve Got Taiwan’s Back. But Do We?
By Oriana Skylar Mastro, May 27, 2022

On Memorial Day: Thoughts on Action & Inaction 12 & 20 Years Ago

By Ray McGovern, May 29, 2022

What more to say? I dug the following piece out from 12 years ago, when anti-war progressives were acting against “forever wars” — whether run by Republicans or Democrats. Below that, I add a Ferner Footnote, with observations by Former Veterans For Peace President Mike Ferner, who drives home the point that a parade is not a protest. More is required.

Thoughts at the White House Fence

By Ray McGovern

December 20, 2010

“Show me your company, and I’ll tell you who you are,” my grandmother would often say with a light Irish lilt but a heavy emphasis, an admonition about taking care in choosing what company you keep.

Daniel Ellsberg and Ray

On Thursday, I could sense her smiling down through the snow as I stood pinned to the White House fence with Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges, Margaret Flowers, Medea Benjamin, Coleen Rowley, Mike Ferner, Jodie Evans, and over 125 others risking arrest in an attempt to highlight the horrors of war.

The witness was sponsored by Veterans for Peace, a group comprised of many former soldiers who have “been there, done that” regarding war, distinguishing them from President Barack Obama who, like his predecessor, hasn’t a clue what war is really about.

(Sorry, Mr. President, donning a bomber jacket and making empty promises to the troops in the middle of an Afghan night does not qualify.)

The simple but significant gift of presence was being offered outside the White House. As I hung on the fence, I recalled what I knew of the results of war.

Into view came some of my closest childhood friends — like Bob, whose father was killed in WWII when Bob was in kindergarten. My uncle Larry, an Army chaplain, killed in a plane crash.

Other friends like Mike and Dan, whose big brothers were killed in Korea. So many of my classmates from Infantry Officers Orientation at Ft. Benning killed in the Big Muddy called Vietnam.

My college classmate with whom I studied Russian, Ed Krukowski, 1Lt, USAF, one of the very first casualties of Vietnam, killed, leaving behind a wife and three small children. Other friends, too numerous to mention, killed in that misbegotten war.

More recently, Casey Sheehan and 4,429 other U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, and the 491 U.S. troops killed this year in Afghanistan (bringing that total to 1,438). And their mothers. And the mothers of all those others who have died in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. Mothers don’t get to decide; only to mourn.

A pure snow showered down as if to say blessed are the peacemakers. Tears kept my eyes hydrated against the cold.

The hat my youngest daughter knit for me three years ago when I had no hair gave me an additional sense of being showered with love and affirmation. There was a palpable sense of rightness in our witness to the witless policies of the White House behind the fence.

I thought to myself, this White House is a far cry from the Camelot White House that brought me to Washington, 47 years ago. Still, I found myself borrowing a song from the play, Camelot: “I wonder what the king is doing tonight. What merriment is the king pursuing tonight…”

Perhaps strutting before a mirror in his leather bomber jacket, practicing rhetorical flourishes for the troops, like, “You are making our country safer.” The opposite, of course, is true, and if President Obama does not know that, he is not as smart as people think he is.

More accurately, the troops are making Obama’s political position safer, protecting him from accusations of “softness” on Afghanistan, just as the troops spared George W. Bush from the personal ignominy of presiding over an obvious American defeat in Iraq.

Both presidents were willing to sacrifice those troops on the altar of political expediency, knowing full well that it is not American freedom that “they” hate, but rather U.S. government policies, which leave so many oppressed, or dead.

Despite our (Veterans for Peace) repeated requests over many months, Obama has refused to meet with us. On Wednesday, though, he carved out five hours to sit down with many of the fat cat executives who are profiteering from war.

It seems the President was worried that he had hurt the fat cats’ feelings – and opened himself to criticism as being “anti-business” – with some earlier remarks about their obscenely inflated pay.

Before our witness on Thursday, we read in the Washington Post that Obama told the 20 chief executives, “I want to dispel any notion we want to inhibit your success,” and solicited ideas from them “on a host of issues.”

‘The Big Fool Said to Push On’

In another serendipitous coincidence, as we were witnessing against the March of Folly in Afghanistan, the President was completing his “review” of the war and sealing the doom of countless more soldiers and civilians (and, in my view, his own political doom by re-enacting the Shakespearean tragedy of Lyndon the First).

Afraid to get crossways with the military brass, who see no backbone under that bomber jacket, Obama has missed another exit ramp out of Afghanistan by letting the policy review promised for this month become a charade.

Hewing to the script of “Lyndon the First,” Barack Obama has chosen to shun the considered views of his intelligence agencies, which, to their credit, show in no uncertain terms the stupidity of getting U.S. troops neck-deep in this latest Big Muddy in Afghanistan — to borrow from Pete Seeger’s song from the Vietnam era.

There is one reality upon which there is virtually complete consensus as highlighted by the U.S. intelligence agencies: The U.S. and NATO will not be able to “prevail” in Afghanistan if Pakistan does not stop supporting the Taliban. Are we clear on that? That’s what the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan says.

A companion NIE on Pakistan says there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that the Pakistani Army and security services will somehow “change their strategic vision” regarding keeping the Taliban in play for the time when the United States and its NATO allies finally leave Afghanistan and when Pakistan will want to reassert its influence.

Should it be too hard to put the two NIEs together and reach the appropriate conclusions for policy?

It is difficult to believe that – after going from knee-deep to waist-deep in the Big Muddy by his early 2009 decision to insert 21,000 troops into Afghanistan, and then from waist-deep to neck-deep by deciding a year ago to send in 30,000 more — Obama would say to “push on.”

The answer lies in a spineless persistence behind this fool’s errand, driven by fear of offending other important Washington constituencies, such as the neoconservative opinion-makers, and having to face the wrath of the much-bemedaled Gen. David Petraeus.

“When will we ever learn,” mourns another Vietnam-era song.

Well, we have learned — many of us the hard way. We need to tell the big fool not to be so afraid of neocon columnists and Petraeus’s medals — you know, the ten rows that made him so lopsided that they must have contributed to his famous slumping down on the witness table before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

So, outside the White House on Thursday, we found ourselves singing “We Shall Overcome” with confidence. And what we learned later of other witnesses that same day provided still more grit and determination.

For example, 75 witnesses braved freezing temperatures at the Times Square recruiting station in New York to express solidarity with our demonstration in Washington.

There in Times Square were not only Veterans for Peace, but grandmothers from the Granny Peace Brigade, the Raging Grannies, and Grandmothers Against the War. Two of the grandmothers were in their 90s, but stood for more than an hour in the cold.

The Catholic Worker, War Resister League and other anti-war groups were also represented.

What? You didn’t hear about any of this, including the arrest of 135 veterans and other anti-war activists in front of the White House? Need I remind you of the Fawning Corporate Media and how its practitioners have always downplayed or ignored protests, large or small, against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

A Rich Tradition

Civil Disobedience was Henry David Thoreau’s response to his 1846 imprisonment for refusing to pay a poll tax that violated his conscience. Thoreau was protesting an earlier war of aggression, the U.S. attack on Mexico.

In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau asked:

“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

Imprisonment was Thoreau’s first direct experience with state power and, in typical fashion, he analyzed it:

“The State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”

Prior to his arrest, Thoreau had lived a quiet, solitary life at Walden, an isolated pond in the woods about a mile and a half from Concord. He returned to Walden to mull over two questions: (1) Why do some men obey laws without asking if the laws are just or unjust; and, (2) why do others obey laws they think are wrong?

More recent American prophets have thrown their own light on the crises of our time while confronting the questions posed by Thoreau.

Amid the carnage of Vietnam, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ, posed a challenge to those who hoped for peace without sacrifice, those who would say, “Let us have peace but let us loose nothing. Let our lives stand intact; let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.”

Berrigan saw no such easy option. “There is no peace,” he said, “because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison.”

So, if the making of peace today means prison, that’s where we need to be. It is time to accept our responsibility to do ALL we can to stop the violence of wars waged in our name. Now it’s our turn to ponder those questions.

END of article: [  http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/122010a.html ]

Ferner Footnote:

As Memorial Day approaches, then-National President of Veterans For Peace Mike Ferner, who, like the rest of us, was dragged off the White House fence on Dec. 16, 2010, reminds us that A Parade Is Not a Protest. More is required of us.

Mike Ferner. Photo courtesy of AP.

Mike laments that eight years before the snowy action described above (so, 20 years ago!), in huge marches before the U.S./UK invasion of Iraq, “we had the streets”. What we needed to do was sit down and block them. But only a dozen marchers broke their stride and joined the sit-down Mike had called for (and sat).

Mike Ferner: “It is magical thinking that simply walking and carrying a sign would end the war; what is required today is tens of thousands of people caring enough to get arrested and stopping ‘business as usual’ in its tracks”.

Memorial Day Suggestion

Suggestion for Memorial Day: Confront a War Criminal (there are plenty of them to choose from; pick one near you)
Ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern on confronting war criminals
The Gray Zone, May 27, 2022 (9 minutes)