Video above contains highlights from an event of German peace and civil rights organisations, that took place in Lutherkirche Südstadt Cologne (http://www.lutherkirche-koeln.de) on September 18th, 2015.
Ray McGovern and Elizabeth Murray are members of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (V.I.P.S., http://warisacrime.org/vips), a group of former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officers, who began co-operation in connection with the U.S.A.’s and other states’ attack on Iraq in 2003 and, since then, have been addressing their critical analyses and recommendations to the governments of the U.S. and Germany.
Until his retirement in 1990, Ray McGovern (http://www.raymcgovern.com) served as CIA Senior Analyst, being responsible for the reporting on the Soviet Union to the White House. Elizabeth Murray worked as Deputy National Intelligence Director at National Intelligence Council until her early retirement in 2010. She was responsible for reporting on the Near and Middle East to the U.S. government.
The video below is of their full (1 hour 16 minute) talk.
The Washington Post has a big story delving deep into how the Hillary Clinton email scandal happened, noting that Clinton just didn’t want to give up her BlackBerry, even as the NSA told her repeatedly that it wasn’t secure and there were serious risks involved. What’s amazing, from the story, is how much everyone was focused on the BlackBerry side of things, and sort of skipped over the fact that she was using a private email account with the server set up in her basement. The WaPo article notes that for the first few months in her job as Secretary of State, the email server didn’t even have basic encryption tools enabled. All of that is a travesty, and you should read the whole article to understand the issue more, but I wanted to focus in on a related issue: the high court/low court treatment of Hillary Clinton as compared to others. In particular, the situation with Thomas Drake, the NSA whistleblower.
Almost five years ago, we wrote about the Thomas Drake case, highlighting some key passages in an astoundingly thorough New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer, which ripped the government’s case to shreds. That long article is also worth reading, but for this story, the key points are that Drake was getting on some people’s nerves by complaining about the decisions the NSA was making in the wake of 9/11 — moving towards using an expensive computer system that would suck up everyone’s data, while he and others had worked on a much more cost-efficient system that would get better results and had built-in protections for civil liberties. Drake blew the whistle and provided information to a Congressional oversight staffer.
Wilkerson says Snowden did not threaten U.S. security, and, in a perfect world, the whistleblower would be rewarded.
“I try to stay up with Snowden,” said Lawrence “Larry” Wilkerson. “God, has he revealed a lot,” he laughed.
A retired Army colonel who served as the chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in President George W. Bush’s administration, Wilkerson has established himself as a prominent critic of U.S. foreign policy.
He sat down with Salon for an extended interview, discussing a huge range of issues from the war in Syria to climate change, from ISIS to whistle-blower Edward Snowden, of whom Wilkerson spoke quite highly.
“I think Snowden has done a service,” Wilkerson explained. “I wouldn’t have had the courage, and maybe not even the intellectual capacity, to do it the way he did it.”
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence is a movement of former CIA colleagues of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, together with others who hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power. SAAII confers an award each year to a member of the intelligence community or related professions who exemplifies Sam Adam’s courage, persistence, and devotion to truth – no matter the consequences. Read more about the history here.
The annual Sam Adams Award has been given in previous years to truth tellers Coleen Rowley of the FBI; Katharine Gun of British Intelligence; Sibel Edmonds of the FBI; Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan; Sam Provance, former US Army Sgt; Maj. Frank Grevil of Danish Army Intelligence; Larry Wilkerson, Col., US Army (ret.), former chief of staff to Colin Powell at State; Julian Assange, of WikiLeaks: Thomas Drake, of NSA; Jesselyn Radack, formerly of Dept. of Justice and now National Security Director of Government Accountability Project; Thomas Fingar, former Deputy Director of National Intelligence and Director, National Intelligence Council, and Edward Snowden, former contractor for the National Security Agency; Chelsea Manning, US Army Private who exposed (via WikiLeaks) key information on Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as State Department activities; and to retired National Security Agency official William Binney, who challenged decisions to ignore the Fourth Amendment in the government’s massive — and wasteful — collection of electronic data.
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence is a movement of former CIA colleagues of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, together with others who hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power. SAAII confers an award each year to a member of the intelligence community or related professions who exemplifies Sam Adam’s courage, persistence, and devotion to truth – no matter the consequences. Read more about the history here.