Last night at the Wealthy Street Theatre, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst and former Army officer Ray McGovern spoke to a crowd of over one-hundred people as part of the Community Media Center’s “Media and Democracy” lecture series. The lecture, which was originally intended to be a debate between McGovern and Holland Congressman Pete Hoekstra who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, ended up being a lecture by McGovern when Hoekstra’s staff declined the invitation after eight weeks of contacting the office. When first approached, Hoekstra’s office did not reject the invitation, but after McGovern showed up at Hoekstra’s office in an orange jumpsuit and returned his Intelligence Commendation Award medallion, Hoekstra’s staff became increasingly suspicious. After publicly challenging Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week about his claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Hoekstra’s staff formally rejected the invitation.

McGovern began his talk by describing the origins of the CIA, specifically talking about how people frequently tell him that he “does not look like a spy” despite the fact that he spent 27 years at the CIA. He went on to describe how the agency was formed in 1947 under the National Security Act as a way to prevent more Pearl Harbors, with the idea of a central clearinghouse for intelligence arising out of the fact that before Pearl Harbor there were various reports coming in from different intelligence services that may have been able to prepare the United States for the Japanese attack. To serve this function, the CIA was setup to be the one place in government without a policy agenda and with the CIA designed to give information to the White House without being tainted or influence by political concerns. However, in its founding, the CIA does have two contradictory roles, as it is not only supposed to deliver unbiased information but it is also required to take on tasks assigned to it by the President and the National Security Council. Throughout his talk McGovern critiqued the CIA for becoming too politicized and “corrupted,” claiming that the analytic wing of the CIA, which in his view was traditionally without an agenda, had begun to be corrupted in 1981. This corruption got to the point where in 2001 and 2002, the CIA was willing to suppress its concerns about the intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and provided the Bush administration with the information that it needed to attempt to justify its war of aggression. McGovern went on to explain how the decision to invade Iraq and the CIA’s role in “the war on terror” has caused many CIA employees to quit and the CIA has lost 300 years of operational experience in the past couple of years.

McGovern then moved on to a discussion of the intelligence that led up to the Iraq War, highlighting with video the words of Secretary of State Colin Powell in February of 2001 who said that Iraq had no WMD and could not project conventional power and a similar assertion from National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice who said that the world can keep weapons from Saddam Hussein and that he is not a threat. However, as McGovern pointed out, this changed after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney began saying that Iraq had WMD. While some, such as McGovern’s Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, disputed the claim, the CIA largely collaborated with the Bush administration in developing a rationale for the war after a decision made to attack Iraq was made in early 2002. As many no doubt remember, the justification for the war was built on yellowcake uranium from Niger (impossible because Niger does not control the uranium that it mines and Iraq needed only to refine what it already had), aluminum tubes that were for artillery uses but were claimed to be for nuclear use by the Bush administration, and a “reconstituted nuclear program” that President Bush and National Security Advisor Rice said would be proven to exist by a mushroom cloud if the United States did not attack in October 2002. Moreover, while many such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell have described the period as a “blot” on their career, McGovern explained that administration officials and bureaucrats had an obligation to act and that their inaction has cost the lives of 2,400 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis and that they must be held accountable for what McGovern describe as a war that qualifies as a “supreme international crime” under Nuremberg due to the wars “accumulated evils” of torture, kidnapping, indefinite attention, and other such aspects of the Iraq War and the larger “war on terror.”

Of the “accumulated evils” described by McGovern, torture was given the most attention which he said had its origins on the evening of 9/11 when Bush said that he “didn’t care what the international lawyers say, we’re going to kick some ass” and that the “gloves were off” when it came to the treatment of detainees. Interestingly, McGovern described the first victim of torture as John Walker Lindh—the so-called “American Taliban”—who was tortured and then agreed to a plea bargain for a 20-year sentence (down from three life sentences) in exchange for keeping silent about torture. The Bush administration, specifically with David Addington and Alberto Gonzalez, drew up legal documents justifying torture that the president signed, all though as they said at the time of their drafting, Bush still may be held accountable for authorizing the CIA and the military to use torture to extract information. McGovern gave five reasons why torture is unacceptable and immoral with torture giving the country a bad image, torture endangering United States soldiers, torture “brutalizing the brutalizer,” torture providing unreliable information, and torture being intrinsically wrong and in the same category as rape and slavery.

Throughout his talk, McGovern explained that people—whether CIA analysts or ordinary people angry at the war—have an obligation to not only speak out against the war but also to act against the war. He explained that currently anger against the war is suppressed because people are able to maintain a distance from the war but that people such as the Raging Grannies and Cindy Sheehan are doing all that they can to make it impossible for people to ignore the war. He went on to describe the expectations of Iraqis, citing an Iraqi woman whom he toured the United States with in March of 2006, who became upset when people repeatedly asked her “what can we do?” instead of standing up and doing something. McGovern said that it is imperative for people to use their privileges and gifts to stop the war and asked the audience “what could we not do if we didn’t stick our necks out?”