McGoverned
There’s no questioning that Ray McGovern has been on a roll these past weeks. His articles of late have been more than outstanding reads – they’ve been quintessential insights that should be appearing on the front pages of major daily newspapers, not on what many characterize as obscure websites.
There are those that will, without bothering to delve into McGovern’s credentials, claim him a ‘liberal’, employing the now prevalent polarized political spectrum that has ignorantly become the measure with which most blindly calculate political sentiment. If you’re anti-war, for example, then you must be on the left, or a ‘liberal’. Traditional definitions thrust aside, the political landscape has been reduced to polar opposites – right and left, liberal and conservative. This phenomenon betrays an ignorance that has become endemic in our society, and one that has led to the slow deconstruction of one of its most crucial elements – compromise.
So, Ray McGovern’s a ‘liberal’. After all, most of his articles appear on ‘liberal’ websites, rendering his insights questionable by those that actually believe that a massive ‘liberal agenda’ exists that is set on destroying all things deemed sacred. That would be the popular line were someone to read McGovern’s observations without knowing anything about the man.
First, Ray McGovern, rampant leftist, is a retired 27-year veteran of the CIA who served under seven different Presidents. He is also a veteran, having served in the army between 1962 and 1964 as an intelligence officer. On top of that, he has his masters in Russian studies, a degree in theological studies, and is a graduate of Harvard business school’s advanced management program.
In the 60’s, McGovern’s area of focus at the CIA was the analysis of Soviet policy regarding Vietnam. He then went on to become one of Reagan’s intelligence briefers, serving in that position between 1981 and 1985. During that period he was also responsible for the preparation of similar briefs for the Joint Chiefs, Vice President Bush, Cabinet members, and the National Security Advisor. After Reagan left office, McGovern, by then a senior CIA analyst, became responsible for preparing the PDB for President George Bush Sr., who would go on to award McGovern with the Intelligence Commendation Medal, which he would later return.
That said, it should be noted that McGovern’s past isn’t unspotted. The agency for which he worked was guilty of a plethora of undertakings that can only be characterized as unconscionable while he worked there. So it’s important to keep that in mind. Of course, that doesn’t mean that people can’t change or come to terms with the darker aspects of what they were once a part of. Were individuals unable to have such epiphanies then Daniel Ellsberg would have never leaked the Pentagon Papers.
What makes Ray McGovern an asset is the fact that he spent so many years within that system and has the ability to now provide highly educated analysis, not unlike Ellsberg or, for that matter, Chalmers Johnson, who was also an intelligence analyst for the CIA at one time and would go on to write three ground breaking books that examine the realities of American neoimperialism.
In May of 2006, McGovern faced off with then Secretary Of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at an appearance in Atlanta. Most of the media coverage of the confrontation cut off McGovern’s initial remarks in which he stated that he was a 27 year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency and quoted a top CIA Middle East and counter terrorism analyst. The majority of the coverage of that exchange began with Rumsfeld’s initial rebuttal, removing the fact that McGovern spent over two decades briefing, among other top officials, Presidents, and casting him as a fringe lunatic at a time when dissention was so frowned upon that members of the audience who heard McGovern state his credentials actually had the audacity to boo him rather than honestly listen to a man with vastly more experience than probably everyone else in that room combined and then some.
As I stated at the beginning of this entry, McGovern has been on a hot streak of late. Here’s his latest…
