Title: #NoWar2017 Pt 4: Sam Adams Associates (Drake, McGovern)
Show: WorldBeyondWar.org
Date: 2017-09-23
URL: https://youtu.be/oyks6CQbs-8
Duration: 34:00

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[00:00] and these are two basically different groups to about an example with a certain degree of overlap and I wanted especially to pay tribute to a number of people like brandy Keeler and number of others that I Peter president who shared both of those obsessions and I wanted to include and I said who who are committed as I went to the movement against nuclear war and in smallville internment

[00:30] in our case the Vietnam many many and it occurred to me that somebody that I always understood sharing those two concerns and commitments and obsessions was my friend cyber if the cold was but I knew that I would not like to be described as committed to a movement he's a piece of authorities for investigative journalism and even if I made a distinction there I had a feeling that he would he would be uneasy with

[01:01] but the truth is this is a man who is passionately committed to the best aspects of our Constitution there are some better than others the article one section eight the fact it should be a congress that decides when we get into a war and when they do that that should be in accord with the UN Charter and against aggression somebody who understands the dangers of

[01:32] nuclear war totally passionate about it in private and what comes out of that is truth in the firm's of realistic realistic report about when the government is deceiving us and when it's policies are based online ignoring our Constitution so he like Chelsea Manning is a hero of mine I'm very happy that

[02:04] this object sounds or has been given toward to both of us share of civil thank you [Applause] very much wanted to pay tribute to cider for very specifically assets in April 2006 he revealed from massive lager news

[02:37] that the torch every Bush administration in particular Vice President Richard Cheney Hayward plans for tax lights print excellent Iran and specifically for prepare nuclear attacks on a run and then the crew chiefs were opposed to this and criticized it of course they can only go so far under certain authority works he revealed that as philip ii of the former CIA official

[03:07] both reveal this planning and it is my belief based on following that very closely it's been a very important aspect of my life ever since in the eleven years since to avert any such attack i believe that it was cypress and filter always reporting at that time that blame George tell me which to reject the strong urging of Richard Cheney to use nuclear weapons against Iran to the cosmati for the world and I

[03:40] believe that he's never gotten the credit that he deserves for that I mean I I think we all were very very to thank you for giving me the opportunity [Applause] [Music] [Applause] well thank you daniel ellsberg both for the depth of perspective and for the

[04:11] current warnings very timely and very frightening I would say so thank you very much for participating in this and I wished I could have been here with us tonight but other constraints applied he received his award slightly earlier in the evening but was very honored to be another Sam Adams laureate so thank you so the next phase of this evening I'd like to call on to stage three on three next speakers first of all John Kiriakou

[04:43] please [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] right please could join us as well [Applause]

[05:13] [Music] and thirdly ray mcgovern where is he sitting [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay I will come and join you at the

[05:44] table as well so and I think first up we have Android I don't know ray will probably have a better idea on that one perhaps we should address questions at the end of the evening because we have microphones set up so let's stick with the agenda for now yes so Ann can I

[06:14] introduce you you're going to be speaking for five minutes on integrity and intelligence you serve 29 years in the US Army and retired as a colonel she was a US diplomat and resigned in March 2003 in opposition to push his war in Iraq and she's a passionate peace activist [Applause]

[06:48] first I want to address madea's question because if we don't address it she's going to keep asking you Chelsea Manning is not here as my understanding is because there are other things that were coming up she had hoped to be here but she isn't here and that's about all I know ciphers made a decision that he wanted to have the the same animus award our Lord had had a private dinner and he

[07:18] thanks us very much for that and wishes us all well though here at the the conference on war and the environment so with that I want to say thank you all so much for being here it's so important that we're here to talk about this intersection between war and the environment and as we are all here talking about an aspect of our government our government and its intelligence agencies I myself served both in the in the army and in the State

[07:49] Department I never was officially an intelligence officer however as a as a US diplomat even though I was not CIA everybody's an intelligence officer everybody that was working in the government and working overseas is actually don't listening talking to people and one hopes they're talking to them in a positive beneficial way for the whole world we know sometimes that's not true

[08:19] but one thing I would like to emphasize is that right now in this terrifically difficult time that we have with the Trump administration which is gutting our government and many people may agree with Trump that maybe it's over maybe we got too many people in the government how many of you all think we have too many people in government yeah well and which which ones should go

[08:52] okay yeah we got 1.4 million people in the military okay how many of you all think we ought to reduce that the CIA how many would like to have the EPA stay the Department of Education to stay okay how many would like to have what else do we have Department of Energy

[09:23] [Applause] there we go I like this crowd okay so what I want to talk about though is a little bit of the organization that I spent the last sixteen years that I was in the government with and that was the State Department and the State Department as you all know the reduction under the Trump administration is to be twenty nine percent twenty nine percent of the budget of the State Department is

[09:54] being taken away one could argue okay we do have a lot of programs a lot of programs that we have that for our ability to work in other cultures and some people say well that's all that's intelligence we are gathering intelligence about other places well I think that kind of intelligence is worthy I think we need to know a lot about other cultures know you we needed to know about them we need to know enough about them to know that we shouldn't be killing them that we should

[10:24] be we should be friends with people we should know enough about them to appreciate all of the culture that they bring to us and every one of those cultures that we're going after right now have a much longer history by how many thousands of years that our pitiful little 240 to 240 years I mean we are such babes in the woods on this thing and yet we're going after huge long I mean Iraq Iran had thousands and

[10:57] thousands of years old that they are we look at Korea Korea that was only divided 70 years ago after World War two we divided it we and the Russians divided that and now we vilified part of that peninsula the northern part of that peninsula beyond belief we vilified the North Koreans until most Americans not you all I don't think but most Americans think that North Koreans are just horrible terrible people and yes their government has done some very

[11:29] brutal things and yes our government done some very brutal things you know on the issues of North Korea of Iran the issue of Syria and of Iraq the issue of Somalia and of Libya our ability to use our government in the in a beneficial way that we as Americans are able to travel to countries and travel to countries proudly about our own country but that's not the way it is now is it no we don't allow seven countries now to

[12:02] get visas to come to the United States and there is now being retaliation against us that we it's more difficult for Americans to travel these types of things are parts of the huge problems that we face now with the Trump administration and while I know this little comment that I've made has not really been quite the intelligence thing that maybe you're looking for but I think that's just like what I'd like to

[12:34] say that we need to hold our government accountable and we need to to go after it when we know it's doing wrong and I know you all do it I know that you'll be out at the White House anytime you can let me just mention that for the next three weeks we're going to have a noon vigil we're going to follow the Catholic workers on there every Friday but we're going to have an Vigil every day on the issues of North Korea and in Iran so that our voices will be right there right at Trump

[13:04] speaking right to him it's our country and we have to make sure it's the country that we admire and respect thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] Thank You Anne fort is always an amazing rallying call get out there and do stuff I would like to introduce John Kiriakou again and person who probably needs very

[13:35] little introduction that is an event like this and I had the pleasure of sharing a panel with him in Berlin a few months ago and just to hear the stories of what it was like for him when he was imprisoned for exposing the crimes of others just blew me away it's every time as bad as I thought it was gonna be I began working for the CIA on the Monday after the Friday that Ray McGovern retired in January of 1990 so we never

[14:07] actually crossed paths inside the CIA but that week that first week was very important I was so proud to have been hired by the CIA and indeed that very first day along with a couple of hundred other new hires I put my right hand in the air and I swore an oath to protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic in retrospect I now realized I was probably the only one in the room who actually took that seriously one of the

[14:40] things that the director of security told us that week that was an introductory week for all of us was never to do anything that you wouldn't be proud to see on the front page of the Washington Post I also took that seriously and so in 2002 when a senior officer in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center asked me if I wanted to be trained in torture I said no I said it's torture no it's not it's

[15:11] enhanced interrogation techniques I said that's a torture program I speak frequently at colleges and universities around the country and I like to ask students their real-life questions now as background there is no ethics training at the CIA nothing nothing the problem with that besides the obvious is what a CIA psychiatrist once told me he said that the CIA actively

[15:43] seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies not sociopaths but people with sociopathic tendencies sociopaths have no conscience and with no conscience you can easily pass a polygraph exam because you don't react to anything but sociopaths are impossible to control people who have sociopathic tendencies do have a conscience but they're willing to operate in moral legal and ethical gray areas the problem is there's no real way

[16:17] to weed out the sociopaths and if you can't weed out the sociopaths you can't weed out the Psychopaths and the Psychopaths because they're psychopaths rise to the leadership positions so let's say that you are a CIA case officer and you're working overseas and it can be anywhere well let's say the Middle East you're in

[16:47] Egypt you're in a hotel room and you have recruited a member of a a bonafide terrorist group al Qaeda Hezbollah Isis whatever it is and this guy has been fantastic everything that he's told you has been true and you've used his information to actually disrupt future terrorist attacks so he's been vetted and he's really great so you're in this hotel room and you're meeting with him and at the start of the meeting he says listen before we

[17:18] meet I want to tell you I've given you everything I've told you everything that's been true you saved American lives now you're gonna do something for me you're gonna go out and you're gonna get me a prostitute right now or I'm never cooperating with you again so I want to see a show of hands how many people would get him the prostitute some not many the answer is sure I mean you know it's he's a scumbag of course but your job is to deal with scumbags and you would you would be expected to go

[17:50] out and get him the prostitute what if he asks for a child prostitute absolutely not under any circumstances but that's not the CIA talking that's John Kerry Anka talking because there's no rule your job as a CIA case officer is to break the laws of the country that you're serving in that's your job your job is to commit espionage which in most countries is a death penalty crime your job is to convince people to commit

[18:22] treason for you because they like you so much or they like the money that you're giving them so much so because it's the nature of your job to break the law there are no rules that are written for you to carry out that job now the problem there is that most CIA case officers would procure the child child prostitute and even if they felt funny about it they would be told by headquarters you

[18:53] have a job to do this is a bonafide source here go do your job that's the problem or the nature of the problem of ethics and intelligence operations there are no ethics and intelligence operations I've come to the conclusion after all these years that there probably doesn't need to be a CIA [Applause] was right in 1976 when he said that the

[19:25] CIA should be broken up John Kennedy was right in 1963 when he said the CIA should be broken up certainly other governmental organizations can carry out those duties and to tell you the truth I'm hard pressed to point to any CIA successes over the last half a century other than meddling in elections we always seem to do that short term successfully long term unsuccessfully but like I said the bottom line is there are no ethics and intelligence operations you either enter the CIA with

[19:55] your own set of moral values or you don't and again if you don't you're probably gonna do pretty well there sorry I had to keep this very short thank you very much for your time [Applause] [Music] junk thank you so much for like those comments and it reminds me of the old issue in the UK with the with mi6 which

[20:28] is the UK's CIA equivalent and one of the recruitment questions was do you have ethical flexibility terribly British way of saying are you a sociopath [Laughter] on that note we're going to talk to a former CI ray mcgovern co-creators veteran intelligence professionals for sanity VIPs to expose how intelligence was being falsified to justify war justify war in Iraq formerly a CIA

[21:01] analyst of 27 years he prepared this president's Daily Brief and chaired the National Intelligence Estimates and also someone who really got the ball rolling with Sam Adams and the award every year so thank you Ray and ten minutes ten minutes this is working this is working I guess good what a treat it is to see guys out there that's just incredible let me just say a couple of words I was a very close

[21:34] friend of Sam Adams he and I served together matter of fact we entered the agency together on the same day about seven months before John Kennedy was killed Sam was a straight arrow and the only other person I think in this room that knew him was I Hersh is there anybody else here from the old set that knew Sam Adams okay well let me just say that when we established the

[22:04] Sam Adams Award for integrity intelligence we couldn't do otherwise because Coleen Rowley had just blown the whistle on all the terrible things the mistakes and worse the FBI had done before what I love him matter of fact if they hadn't done those things it would have been a cinch to stop 9/11 and then we had NSA people come out of the woodwork who said there was evidence in NSA's database that showed exactly what was going to happen before 9/11 but that database was only

[22:37] that only costs the 30 million dollars they discarded that went with one that cost three billion dollars with a B as in boy and that wasn't working and so we never got that information so these the consequential things now today the 22nd of September is exactly 50 years and one month since general Abrams who was general Westmoreland's deputy in Saigon sent in a cable from Saigon disputing

[23:10] the numbers that Sam Adams had come up with which the numbers were between 500 and 600 thousand troops that is formed communist in South Vietnam general Westmoreland said no no it can't be more than two hundred and ninety-nine thousand two hundred and ninety-nine thousand a little fishy to you that was the the ceiling you couldn't go higher than that Abrams said in a very sensitive cable on the 22nd of August so fifty years and

[23:43] one month ago and it said this quote we can't possibly go with the higher numbers because we have been projecting an image of success in this war and there's nothing that we could do despite all the caveats that we could adduce to avoid the press from drawing an erroneous and gloomy conclusion 1967 just a couple months before Tet just a couple of months before all hell broke

[24:14] loose Sam to his dying day regretted that it didn't go down to the New York Times bureau in in Washington and so do I regret that you see you have that means I see the puzzled faces here you have to know that in those days the New York Times was an independent newspaper and actually if you gave them some documentary evidence they would put it on the front page it was really quite remarkable most young people don't know that so let me go through here very quickly what

[24:46] happened since then well you know Dan Ellsberg who spoke beautifully here before is also a good friend of mine and he and I on the third Sam Adams Award first we had Koli and rally then we had Catherine Gunn who worked for the British intelligence and who blew the whistle on what NSA was asking GCHQ to do I won't go into all that but she was an incredibly courageous person now Dan Ellsberg and I and others got together the following year and we formed the

[25:18] truth-telling coalition okay now we had the lawyers we had everything wrong you and you we would disconsolate that there was nobody throwing the whistle we had to wait six years then we had Bradley Bradley Manning and Chelsea Manning yeah we had hates Snowden then we had this Tom Drake again all the people from NSA who spoke truth to power and suffered mightily for it and stoughton of course was edified by Tom and by Bill Binney

[25:50] because bill Binney spoke out even before Snowden did and when we gave Snowden when we gave bill bunny the award two years ago Snowden said you know you got it wrong on that citation you said that bill got the idea from me it wasn't that way without bill Binney there would be no it Snowden okay and when it got to Hong Kong he said I knew I had to do this this way to a achieve

[26:20] my mission get them to cut the material out and number two to have some reasonable prospect that I could you know live live for a few more months okay so Tom Drake showed him that way because tom was persecuted for four years with our judicial system who actually forged so classified unclassified documents that they said they found in this thing the judge was so angry and Tom had a public defender by that he was out of money the joke was so he say you Justice

[26:52] Department lawyers get that get out of my court and let me show your face to me again forging evidence to convict this guy so what I'm saying here is that the whistleblowers that Dan Ellsberg I and Koli around the others were lusting after and never felt that did show up in 2004 did show up and that they're showing up big time let's do it yeah a Tom there's Tom Drake still here yeah

[27:24] he's right there Tom Harriet [Applause] [Music] another one of our parties is jesselyn Radack who was a butcher whistleblower for the department

[27:55] you know for a long time and Sam Adams associates all we have were women winners I mean if it weren't for Craig Murray the British ambassador to his Becky stun they come on the scene there he was the fourth one but just a little radio what she did was she told the Department of Justice hey um I'm the ethics person here and when you when you interrogate John Walker Lindh he's an American citizen I'm sure you're gonna read him his rights correct Edie correct she was not only

[28:29] disregarded but dissed and you have ran into about the same level of programs that Tom Drake did so they're both the real deal and there are others here from from other years that have have won what I want to talk about is this in the last two minutes it's another whistleblower nobody knows about it is already given Julian Assange heaps and heaps of documents matter of fact when Julia saj announced in early

[29:01] March of this year that this one contractor for the CIA had given him information that was more comprehensive and more important that all the stuff that Ed Snowden had released Oh anybody hear about that no oh okay did you hear from the New York Times well long story short this is a treasure trove it's called vault 7 now I'll just

[29:31] mention one thing that didn't make the New York Times and that is it it includes something called marble marble framework now this is a cyber offensive tool that allows the CIA to hack into a network or server or a computer and the word is up on the scape $0.35 word in CIA aquascape who hacked in and then leave

[30:02] little traces in foreign languages like oh they worked in five Chinese Arabic Farsi Korean and oh yeah Russian now think about that guys see if you can connect some dots here you know because nobody else is connecting those dots so if I used to say that you know psy and the professionalism with which he works and how deeply dependent he is on people

[30:36] within the structure that's incredible and he does incredible work but so does Julian Assange okay and what I have [Applause] that's not just because he's one of our Sam Adams associates winners in 2010 but because he is the one that this contractor NCAA knew they could go to who is it nobody knows anybody been

[31:07] arrested no does he still work with contract see you don't know so what I'm saying here is that we have a really good thing going it's only what 2000 Ford what 2,000 what cities there were 13 subtract 13 years after the Dan Ellsberg and I would disconsolate about how there were no truth tells us there were no no whistleblowers it's big time now to the degree you can support them and degree you can spread the information that they give they may not

[31:37] be in the New York Times okay but spread it with your friends make sure people know and if you live next door to a CIA person mow is lon I do do something nice to them and get a kind of rep or recruit them and have Thanks [Applause] thank you very much for you for that

[32:09] highly subversive speech we have two final speakers for this evening Todd Pierce a law war expert I also have trouble saying that retired jag lawyers his views are unrepresented with his former employers which is probably just as well from what I gather he's going to say so Todd would you like to come on the stage and kollene as well retired FBI agent and if you would like to take the podium together [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

[32:52] so if you can't recruit your neighbor the CIA operative I have another suggestion the first amendment right now and it ties in with this real this topic of intelligent egg rity and intelligence in a time of war Todd has researched everything from the Civil War I mean he knows this what they call the law of war unfortunately the law of war is hardly any law it means that you get rid of your Bill of Rights and especially the

[33:25] First Amendment if you remember back to our great Abraham Lincoln one of the first things he did was round up the editors a couple hundred editors were imprisoned for criticizing the war and you know Todd will talk a little more about this but the truth is they it goes back to Vietnam syndrome if anybody's watching if anybody's watching the burns Nova documentary right now you will know that this this big effort to mislead the public so that you can keep public

[33:56] opinion pushing for more war in order to win it and this was a huge thing not only during Vietnam but afterwards you had all kinds of suppression of a First Amendment even to the point of shooting people in protests etc right now the current
