Ray McGovern: Why Obama is scared of CIA Director Brennan

[Peace Patriot]

40. This is an excellent--and wide-ranging--interview!

It's not just about the JFK assassination--not at all. It's also about the Martin Luther King assassination, and many other things, including Brennan's recent "reorganization" of the CIA which will put operations in charge of analysis (just what Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney wanted!), details about Allen Dulles (fired by JFK then put in charge of the investigation of JFK's murder!), about Harry Truman (who initially organized the CIA) and his published assertion, just after JFK's assassination, that CIA operations should be shut down, a discussion of the Anthrax scare and the FBI's wrongful targeting of a top scientist (who apparently committed suicide), a discussion of recent events in the Ukraine and the U.S. coup d'etat in Kiev (which initiated the crisis) and much more. (It even mentions the current tanoak poisoning in Mendocino forests by the Fisher family's logging company (the Fishers of Gap stores). It's early in the interview and I can't remember, just now, why it was mentioned.) It's also about General Betray-Us and other people who are "above the law" (unfortunately Hillary Clinton among them). It's about blatant violations of the 4th and 5th amendments by our government and its secret agencies. The general context is why a president would fear a CIA Director (why Obama would fear Brennan).

Ray McGovern mentions James Douglass' book ("JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters") and McGovern came to the same conclusion that I did, after reading Douglass' brilliant book: that the CIA did it--Douglass has proven it. It is an outstanding book and should be read by every American.

It's a rare pleasure to hear a media interview during which you feel that both the interviewer and the interviewee are trying to say what they really believe, and why, and are speaking about the most heart-rending and important issues that we face as a country. How refreshing! You may not agree with everything either of them says, but there is no question that this is serious thought from serious, well-informed people. Those who would dismiss it as "conspiracy nuttiness" are taking the easy way out. They don't want to think, themselves, or they have some other motive for wanting YOU not to think about what McGovern has to say.

Just as an aside--among many issues, stories and details--McGovern mentions his work as a CIA analyst during the Vietnam War. What he says is that he and other analysts were permitted to tell the truth in their reports for the Executive branch. indeed, it was their job to tell the truth. No president can function effectively for long without truthful assessments, based on facts (or at least that was Truman's idea when forming the CIA--to provide accurate information to the president!). LBJ ignored those truthful analyses at his peril. He was forced to give up a second term. Those particular truths eventually got published, in "the Pentagon Papers," and became public. But what I'm talking about is the internal truth, within our government. We take it as routine when government lies to us--they have done it so often! But when government lies to ITSELF, we are in far more serious trouble, and we only have to look at Iraq, today, to know how true that is. There are a lot of other examples--on economic, environmental, educational and other issues, and, of course, on foreign policy--but Iraq is the most dramatic. The disaster in Iraq is the direct result of our government lying to itself--promoting lies, devising lies, pushing lies onto us and others, but also, at all levels, and across the branches and agencies of government, lying to each other every day. The falsity of our government, within the halls of government, is itself a disaster.

I felt nostalgia for a time when truth WITHIN government was EXPECTED. That it would leak out to the rest of us, from time to time, was a plus. But, at the least, you felt, back then, that SOME government people were honest and that the truth would win out, in the end. I don't think that is the case now. I think that those within government--at all levels, in all agencies--are, at best, covering their asses and fearing for their jobs and/or looking forward to their pensions, and, at worst, are lying to themselves and to each other every day, on all crucial issues, including fundamental issues like who they really work for. Good people have been battered so savagely that either they've left government or they can't stand what they are obliged to do and can't wait to get out of it. There are no honest CIA analysts telling Obama that drones won't "win hearts and minds"--or, if there are, that is what Brennan's reorganization is intended to eliminate. Lying is the order of the day. And the weapons manufacturers, and oil corporations, and lobbyists and P.R. firms rule over the lies.