Questioning War From the Inside

by Lily Moseley

Chamblee High School Senior

A former senior CIA analyst and intelligence briefer for Presidents Reagan and H.W. Bush turned political activist, Ray McGovern has used his ethos in politics and his experience with war to validate his outspoken opinions against the war in Afghanistan.

McGovern graduated from Fordham University where he majored in Russian and proceeded to obtain a position in the CIA, where he worked as an intelligence briefer and analyst for 27 years.

“So I went back and I signed up for Russian [as my major]. Within a couple months the first man in space; another couple months there was a crisis in Berlin with Russian tanks and German tanks, then there’s the Bay of Pigs thing. So there became a real need for translators or people who knew about the Soviet Union and so it was a kind of natural step to go into the Army first, where I served two years as an officer, and then go into the CIA in the analysis part.”

Since his retirement from the CIA, McGovern has repeatedly protested US involvement in both the war in Iraq during the W. Bush administration and the war in Afghanistan during the Obama administration. McGovern has challenged the sincerity of several authorities including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when he quoted Rumsfeld as saying that he knew where the Weapons of Mass Destruction were after it had been confirmed that none existed. In addition, he was arrested for disorderly conduct when he stood silently in protest during a speech made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

McGovern’s strong thoughts against the wars are influenced by his experiences with the War in Vietnam and the Cold War.

“Many of the officers that I finished officer infantry school with at Ft. Benning were killed in Vietnam; many of my classmates at Fordham ROTC were killed in Vietnam and when you think of the immense nature of, not only the 50,000 names on the memorial in Washington, but of the 3 million Vietnamese [killed]. So, what kind of people are we that will acquiesce in the killing of 3 million Vietnamese? That soured me on these stupid wars. And then of course skipping all the way to Iraq, we could see, before the war, that the evidence for Weapons of Mass Destruction or ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda [was nonexistent.]”

McGovern also cofounded the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an organization of retired US intelligence workers who have criticized government policies and issued memorandums criticizing the policies of former President George W. Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Additionally, he coined the acronym O.I.L. (oil, Israel, logistics).

“I don’t think there’s anyone that thinks we would have attacked Iraq if their main export was cabbages, so I think that’s pretty clear. I is for Israel, and the reason is that the people who were planning and executing this invasion of Iraq were people so-called Neo-Conservatives, and their big problem is that they have difficulty distinguishing between what they see as the strategic interests of Israel on the one hand, and the strategic interests of the United States of America on the other. Israel wanted us to be involved big time in Iraq; they thought that it would make things more safe for them, which turned out to be just the opposite. The L is for logistics, the strategic military bases that the people think are needed to protect our interests there for the oil and for Israel.”

McGovern has encouraged opposition to the war in Afghanistan, expressing the need for taking action against it.

“Writing letters, writing articles and speaking are good things to do, but I’ve come to the point where I’ve concluded that that’s not enough, that I have to put my body into it, that we need to indulge or resort to nonviolent civil disobedience or civil direct action. We should care. And young people, I think, are sold short; I think people just kind of write them off and say, ‘well this time [unlike in Vietnam] they don’t have any vulnerabilities so they don’t care.’ I think they do care.”

Obama’s CIA pick has Afghan war bias

President Barack Obama’s nomination of Gen. David Petraeus to be CIA director raises troubling questions for anyone familiar with the need for tell-it-like-it-is intelligence analysis.

Sadly, the selection of Petraeus suggests that the president places little value on getting the objective analysis that was originally the CIA’s raison d’etre — the kind that could (and often did) challenge more narrowly focused views of the Pentagon. What could Obama have been thinking in giving the top CIA job to the general with the most incentive to gild the lily regarding “progress” made under his command?

Will Petraeus look kindly on discordant views regarding the wisdom and likely outcome of those wars? What is likely to happen to the careers of those CIA analysts who long since concluded that the troop “surges” pushed so publicly by Petraeus will merely squander the lives of American troops (not to mention billions of taxpayer dollars) and, ironically, make our country more vulnerable to attack from terrorists?

Petraeus already has a record of looking skeptically at CIA analysts. That is why he relegated them to straphanger status during the decision-making process in late 2009 on what to do about Afghanistan.

When Obama expressed doubts about the value of a major escalation in Afghanistan, Petraeus assured him that the sending of 33,000 additional troops would work. It won’t.

Before Obama acceded to the wishes of Petraeus and fellow generals in late 2009, CIA analysts weren’t even assigned to do the kind of National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, which has almost always been de rigueur before key presidential decisions like a large-scale escalation of war.

To his credit, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, who became director of National Intelligence in August 2010, bucked that tide. He insisted that two NIEs be prepared last fall — one on Afghanistan and one on Pakistan.

The estimate on Afghanistan concluded that the U.S. could not prevail without a firm decision by Pakistan to prevent Taliban fighters from crossing the border into Afghanistan. The one on Pakistan said there was little chance that the Pakistanis would do this.

The sobering conclusions of those NIEs were supported by a treasure trove of 92,000 documents written mostly by U.S. forces in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009 and released by WikiLeaks on July 25, 2010.

This more granular reporting from WikiLeaks laid bare the futility of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan — particularly the forlorn hope that the Pakistanis will “change their strategic outlook” and help pull U.S. chestnuts out of the Afghan fire.

The most explosive revelations provided embarrassing detail on the double game being played by the Pakistani Directorate for Inter-Service Intelligence, or ISI. The German magazine Der Spiegel put it this way: “The documents clearly show that this Pakistani intelligence agency is the most important accomplice the Taliban has outside of Afghanistan.”

No one disputes the authenticity of the U.S. reports released via WikiLeaks. But there is zero indication that their publication, just eight months after Obama’s fateful decision in late 2009, might have spurred a reassessment.

With U.S. Special Forces kicking down Afghan doors at night, drones terrorizing alleged “militants,” and whole villages destroyed in order to “save” them from the Taliban, Petraeus’ approach is a truly strange way to go about winning hearts and minds. By naming him head of the CIA, Obama has made it immeasurably more difficult to change course.

Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington. Mr. McGovern recently spent several days in Atlanta speaking at a number of events organized by the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition.

CIA Veteran Ray Mcgovern in Atlanta

For months the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition has been organizing for a multiple day visit from 27 year CIA veteran turned political activist Ray Mcgovern. His visit has opened up dozens of opportunities to create local discussions on US foreign policy during a week that has seen the war on terror back in the headlines.

In addition to multiple interviews and speaking engagements Ray McGovern spoke at the Atlanta Friends Meeting House last night to the largest crowd(about 300) I've ever seen there. We literally ran out of chairs. The topic was how to stop endless war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Beyond.

Ray touched on many other topics including the troubling shift in the culture of the CIA from an organization that collected data that was designed to help shape foreign policy to an organization that collected data in an effort to justify foreign policy. Of course there was much talk of the recent murder of Osama Bin Laden. One member of the audience asked Mr. McGovern if he thought that Osama Bin Laden had actually just been murdered or if it was a hoax.

Mr. McGovern did say that he believed the reports to be accurate but that he was troubled that there wasn't much of an attempt to capture him. He went on to say, "you would think that if the US really wanted intelligence on Al Queda then they wouldn't so quickly kill the one man who has more information than anyone else". Mr. McGovern went on to insinuate that he believes that the US didn't want to capture Osama Bin Laden alive because his testimony would be to damaging to the US.

Mr. McGovern will be in town for the next few days and I'm excited to report that he has agreed to do several interviews with high school and college students for school news papers that we set up. We will be publishing both student articles on this blog as well so look forward to those!

Photo Credit to Al Viola

Tim Franzen
American Friends Service Committee