Ray McGovern, What He Said!

Now in the run-up, and sale, of this our Mess-O-Potamia, one of the voices that I paid particular attention to was Ray McGovern’s. His group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), provided sound intelligence that was totally missing from the pitiful debate surrounding the impending debacle provided by our Administration’s stenographers: the Mainstream Media. The MSM knew the War Hounds were loose and chose to let them run wild.

Meanwhile, back in the Reality-based Community, the VIPS were telling it like it is. In the beginning Pat Lang was almost a regular on the NewsHour, until it became clear that he was right and then he was summarily relegated to “Never to be Seen Again Land” by PBS (that liberal bastion of media bias.)

I remember seeing the Colonel around W. 43^rd Street, by the Grey Lady, in Manhattan one evening on my way home from work. I wanted to go up to him and ask him if he thought America and Iraq were FUBAR. But, I thought better of it as I felt it would be unfair for a complete stranger to put him on the spot like that (even though I already had a pretty good idea of what I thought he would say.) I didn’t, at the time, know what a generous gentleman he was and that he more than likely would have given me, a stranger at the time, his time and a straight answer.

So, the long and the short of it is folks that when anyone from the VIPS talks, we better listen up. They know what they are talking about and are eloquent when they say it.

Here is just the beginning of Ray McGovern’s piece from TruthOut and Antiwar:

At Tuesday's Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the nomination of Robert Gates to be secretary of defense, I felt as though I were paying last respects to the Constitution of the United States. But there was none of the praise customarily given to the deceased. Rather, the bouquets were fulsomely shared round about among the nominee and the senators – all of the "distinguished," but none more distinguished than the Very Reverend John Warner, the gentleman from Virginia, chairman of the committee and presider at the wake.

"Distinguished, indeed," I could not help thinking; this is the committee that allowed itself to be co-opted by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputies Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith into abnegating its constitutional duty to prevent the United States from launching a war of aggression on false pretenses against a defenseless Iraq. The Nuremberg Tribunal ruled war of aggression "the supreme international crime inasmuch as it contains the accumulated evils of the whole" – kidnapping and torture, for example. This is the committee which, when such abuses came to light, let the Pentagon investigate itself. And I thought of how our Virginian forefathers, really distinguished Virginians like James Madison and James Mason, who crafted the checks and balances into our Constitution, and how they must be rolling over in their graves at the flaccid timidity of their 21st century successors. Perhaps the plain-speaking senator-elect from Virginia, James Webb, will be able to remind other senators of their duty and curtail their mutual fawning when he takes office in January.

It was a sorry spectacle Tuesday, as pretentious, patrician manners trumped courage and vitiated the advise-and-consent prerogative carefully honed by the framers of our Constitution for the Senate.

In other news, "A series of particularly brutal attacks across Baghdad Tuesday resulted in at least 54 Iraqis killed and scores wounded," according to the New York Times. The U.S. military announced that three more American soldiers were killed Monday, adding to the 13 killed over the weekend. Ten more U.S. soldiers were killed on Wednesday. And five Marines are expected to be charged today with the killing of 24 Iraqis, many of them women and children, in the village of Haditha in November 2005.

No such bothersome details about this misbegotten war were allowed into evidence yesterday by the stuffed shirts sitting in stuffed seats in a hearing room stuffed with 80 stenographers from our domesticated press. Rather, the hearing room seemed to serve as a kind of funeral parlor for the Constitution. There were plenty of bouquets, but none smelled very genuine.

That Gates would be given a free pass without serious probing was already clear in ranking member Carl Levin's (D-Mich.) deference to lame-duck chairman John Warner's (R-Va.) plan for a one-day, carefully scripted hearing, at which senators could disregard new, documentary evidence of Gates' deception of Congress and the Iran-Contra independent counsel. Expediting the hearing served to squander the leverage provided by the confirmation process to committee members, had any of them wished to put that leverage in play. Rather, Gates was often able to say, in effect, "Gosh, I just got here; didn't know about that; haven't read that, but I'll put that on the top of my reading pile."

Fully expecting that Levin's Democratic colleagues would join him in acquiescing in this charade, antiwar activists told me before the hearing began that they had come prepared with a chant:

"You won the elections. Now ask real questions!"

Mr. McGovern, needless to say, doesn’t have very high hopes for this “change” at the Pentagon, not to mention this Congress.

If his, and the VIPS, past performance was prescient, I am sure he is right again! Read the whole article or ignore it at your peril.

The Mainstream media ignored these voices in the past. If the MSM ignores their voices this time around they are doing it at their peril and, once again, endangering all of us.

The VIPS are serious folks and they are serious in their concern for our country!