Ray McGovern

June 17

Introduction by Steve France: The most common excuse for torture is that it is a necessary tool to get information. Our next speaker, Ray McGovern, knows information. He gave George W.'s father his morning intelligence briefing. When it comes to torture, Ray knows that it does not give reliable information, and that over time, it will destroy the moral foundations of the U.S. intelligence community and the American people.

Ray is a co-founder of VIPS, which is Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and he is working very hard against torture. He is also a committed member of the Ecumenical Church of the Savior in DC.

Ray McGovern: Thank you. I would be remiss if I didn't say how honored I feel to be here following the distinguished speakers who have already spoken. I would like to begin by mentioning the three people at Guantanamo who, exactly a week ago, took their own lives. Another detainee, who was arrested at age 14 in a mosque in Pakistan and brought to Guantanamo at age 15, has tried to kill himself two times without success.

About two months ago I was asked to do a radio program on torture. The producer said, "Now Mr. McGovern, we know where you stand on it, and we're going to have the other side represented by…" And I said, "There's another side?" "Oh, yeah, yeah, so and so worked for the Reagan administration and he thinks torture is OK, and so we'll have this little debate." I was tempted to say, "bring him on" but I don't like that expression. So I thought what I ought to do is to be a little more serious and list out what I thought to be the reasons torture isn't a good idea. I found myself listing them in reverse order of importance, and I would just like to recount them for you now.

First off, it gives our country a bad name. Now is that important? Sure it's important. Is that the most important reason? Of course not, but this is what John McCain is fixated on, and that's what our President confessed to: You remember last week he said: "Oh, yeah, Abu Ghraib; we're going to take a long time to outlive that one" … like that's his major concern about Abu Ghraib - our reputation. The next one up, I'd suggest, is that there is no surer way to create more terrorists or longer lines for Al Qaeda recruiting stations than to torture people. It's on Al Jazeerah every night; they can see it. Next one: it endangers our troops. That's a real, legitimate concern. You heard about the two soldiers that were captured this morning? I would emphasize that it endangers our troops, not only physically, but spiritually and morally, as well. What do we mean by that? I mean that when John McCain and others who were held in the Hanoi Hilton are asked how they made it, how they sustained themselves, how they got through all that, they all say, without exception, at the end of the day they could go back to their bunks and say, "Well, at least we don't do that." Now think about those two folks who were picked up yesterday - those two U.S. soldiers - they don't even have the spiritual fallback, the spiritual support to think, at least my country doesn't do that.

One major reason why torture isn't a good idea is because it doesn't work. Talk to any intelligence officer who's been around a while. I used to say it's the worst possible information you can get, but there's sort of a tie now between the stuff we got from Ahmad Chalabi and the others. The main reason to oppose torture is, of course, that torture is just plain wrong. I mean, it's in the same category as rape or slavery - intrinsically wrong, never allowed. That's why there are laws against it - because it's wrong. It's not wrong because there are laws against it. There are laws against it because it's wrong.

Now, I want to dwell for a little while on one reason to oppose torture that I feel very close to, and that is that torture brutalizes the brutalizer. When I was an army officer, we were taught that we were in loco parentis. We were to act as fathers of these young guys. In those days it was all guys, and we were all to take that responsibility seriously. Socrates--when they tried him--they tried him on two charges, didn't they? Does anybody remember what they were? Corrupting youth, and also, making the worst case appear the better - like weapons of mass destruction, like ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

I met a young GI, who was a sergeant then. His name is Sam Provence. He came here to Washington to consult with some Congressional committees. Sam was in Abu Ghraib, in military intelligence. Sam was a military intelligence sergeant, but he was not an interrogator. Nor was he an MP. His job was a systems administrator. His kept the computers up, but he had the bad luck to be on the night shift in that famous compound there at Abu Ghraib. He heard the screams, and he watched the people come in and most of them come back out. One night, he told me--and he told the press later--they captured a general. They brought the general in. After a couple of days, they couldn't break the general. They just knew that this general - because he was a general - would know where these weapons of mass destruction were. Or maybe he would know about these ties with Al Qaeda. They really got frustrated because Rumsfeld's screaming in Washington for information, and they couldn't get anything out of this general. So what did they do? They kidnapped his 15-year-old son, took him into Agu Ghraib, stripped him, hosed him down, put him into a pickup truck, drove him around for two hours in the winter night, brought him back, splashed mud all over him, and presented him to his father in the cell. What happened? They broke the father. Did the father know anything? No…he was in their quartermaster corps. He didn't know anything. Besides, in case you haven't heard, there weren't any WMD, and we knew that at the time. And, there weren't any ties with Al Qaeda, and we knew that at the time, as well. So Sam, to his great credit, couldn't abide this. He went to his superiors, and then he was ostracized. His clearances were pulled; he was reduced in rank and sent back to Germany to be a supply sergeant - not a sergeant anymore, but a supply officer stacking towels and things, ostracized in his community.

I correspond with him frequently, and I asked him several months ago, "Sam, I'll bet you're glad, even when all is said and done, and as much grief as this has caused you, I'll bet you're glad that you did what you did." He wrote back, and he said, "I thank God that I refused time and time again to be on one of their interrogation teams. Oh, how they tried. I knew if I had, there was no telling what they might have had me do, what I might have had to witness, and, of course, how it would change me. I didn't want to become a monster. In Iraq, people become animals, and it strikes fear into your heart when you feel it seizing you, and what a struggle it becomes to keep yourself from letting the beast out. Many give up and give into this. Many of the soldiers I knew at Abu Ghraib have gone on to paths of self-destruction. Of the four-man military intelligence guard force, one is now in prison for dealing drugs, one is a drug addict, one was just DUI in a traffic accident in which he got badly hurt, and I don't know what happened to the fourth. Even I," said Sam, "can be considered a casualty because I have lost everything I had earned in the Army because of Abu Ghraib, but I willingly sacrificed it and would do it again. There are others too, like this guy in my depression group, who admitted to me that he used to beat detainees up."

I think this is something that is not often mentioned but needs to be focused on: What happens to the young people that we put in these situations and order to carry out these things? In the army, we are all taught that you don't have to obey an illegal order, but what is an illegal order, when the President of the United States espouses torture? Sure, he says I'm against torture, but on the 7th of Feb. 2002, he signed a memorandum which authorizes torture. You can download it from the Web - 7 Feb, 2002. It was in response to all this business from Gonzales and those other lawyers. He said, and I quote, "We will treat these detainees humanely, as appropriate and as consistent with military necessity." Talk about loopholes--that's the loophole through which Don Rumsfeld drove that Mack Truck. There weren't any rules - deliberately.

Colin Powell, when all this was going on, wrote a memorandum to the President's lawyer. Colin Powell was the Secretary of State. He might have gone in to see the President about this. He knew what the ethos of this army was. Instead, he confined himself to writing a little letter, and he said this would reverse a whole century of U.S. Army discipline. It would introduce ambiguities in the status of prisoners and present real morale problems for this army. Powell was a day late and a penny short, and he knew that. Instead of going into the Oval Office and insisting on seeing the President, he let his lawyer talk with Gonzales and the other lawyers and pretty much gave up.

So that's how it all happened. I think we need to address this issue of whether it's worth it to try to torture people. There's a wonderful woman who has written a good bit on this. Her name is Jean Maria Arrigo. She goes into this business about what a state policy of torture really means. She points out, for example, that a state policy means the use of sophisticated torture techniques by a trained staff; institutional arrangements, like physician assistants - to Hell with the Hippocratic oath - leading-edge, secret, bio-medical research for torture techniques, well-trained torturers, quickly accessible at major locations, pre-arranged permission from the courts because of the urgency, rejection of independent monitoring due to security issues. Rush Holt, who was on the intelligence committee, had an interesting proposal. He proposed that all these interrogations be video-taped. Sounds sensible to me. The House Intelligence Committee wasn't interested. So these are the institutional arrangements that have to obtain for a State policy of torture.

She goes on to say that there is a major error in weighing - when you talk about the ticking bomb scenario - in simply weighing two things against one another, the harm to the prospective innocent victims against the harm to the guilty terrorist. What this completely ignores is the breakdown of key social institutions, and that state-sponsored torture of many innocents happen. If you state it most starkly, the damaging social consequences of a program of torture interrogation evolve from other institutional dynamics quite apart from the torture calculus. Read the article she wrote for Science and Engineering Ethics, Vol. 10, Issue 3, 2004. The title is "The Utilitarian Argument Against Torture and the Interrogation of Terrorists." I asked her what kind of reaction she got from the article. She said she had talked to a lot of military, a lot of intelligence folks, and a lot of philosophers. The military intelligence folks quickly grasped the utilitarian argument.

I think we have to take one step back and try to remember why we're in this fix. Our country has launched what Nuremberg called the "supreme international crime." We have initiated a war of aggression, and Nuremberg says that to initiate a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, differing from other international crimes only in so far as this one contains the accumulated evil of the whole. Think torture; think ghost detainees; think kidnappings; think rendition; think eavesdropping; think of all of these moral and legal violations that have occurred since we started on this path. And who's responsible? When I was in the army, there was something called "command responsibility." Anything that happened under your command, you were responsible for. Our government doesn't abide by it, because there is no accountability at all. As a matter of fact, accountability seems to have been banned from the dictionary in Washington.

What are we to do? I think it's time to be appropriately virtuous. After we gathered together our band of VIPS, we started writing about what we hoped to prevent--the upcoming war. We didn't succeed. We wrote three memos to the President; he wasn't reading. And we found ourselves getting really, really angry. When I grew up, it was OK to be angry for a day, or if you were Irish, you got a week to be angry. But I was angry for weeks and weeks and weeks. At Fordham, where I went to school, we had to study a lot of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas was wrong about a whole bunch of things, but he was right about virtue. He said that virtue is in the middle; that is, too much of something is no good, too little also is no good. Virtue is in the middle. Take courage, for example: courage is just enough of what you need; foolhardiness, no good; timidity, also no good. Thomas complained bitterly that there was no word for the virtue of anger, and he quoted John Christiansen from the 4th century, saying: "He or she who is not angry when there is cause for anger, sins." Why? Because "Anger looks to the good of justice." And if you can live amid injustice without anger--not to mention torture--why you are unjust. And Thomas added his own little codicil. He talked about unreasoned patience. Think about what that could mean, "unreasoned patience." Thomas said, "Unreasoned patience sows the seeds of vice, nourishes negligence, and persuades not only evil people, but good people, to do evil."

I was born in August, 1939, and I've always had a sort of bizarre affinity for that period - an overweening interest in it, and especially that month when Hitler sent his tanks into Poland on the 1st of Sept. I had a chance to live in Germany for over five years, and I had all manner of opportunities to ask German people: how could it be? How could it be that you, among the most educated, the most cultured people in the Western world, how could you sit around and let Hitler do the kinds of things he did? Why is it that your Catholic Church, your evangelical Lutheran Church, couldn't find its voice? You know? I mean, there were German officers that were saying Geneva is obsolete. I never got a good answer to that, but I have studied some of the Germans who did come to the fore, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, and Albrecht Hofstra. He was a really interesting fellow. He was a geologist at the University of Berlin, and he had tenure. He kept his mouth shut right up until the war, and then when he saw what was happening, his conscience got to him, and he started speaking out against what was happening; he acquired quite a following, and then he was thrown into prison like Bonhoeffer was. Now the SS had very orderly procedures, and they were required to extract a written confession from you before they shot you or hung you. Hoffstra resisted that, and they got so upset, they shot him anyway, but as they picked him up off of the floor, out of his pocket came this little piece of paper on which was written a sonnet. I would like to recite it very briefly and translate it for you. It's called "shulte:" "Yes, I am guilty, but it's not what you're thinking. I should have earlier recognized my duty. I should have more sharply called evil, evil. I put off my judgment for too long. I did warn - not enough, not clearly enough - and today I recognize what I was guilty of."

My fear is that it's getting kind of late in the day. Fascism is creeping up on us. I'll just mention one thing that you might not be aware of. In the intelligence authorization bill, there is a section that says the Director of National Intelligence, Negroponte, is to conduct a study to determine whether he already posses the authority to revoke the pensions of CIA alumnae who discuss classified information, or whether he needs yet additional authority. He is to report back in 90 days. Now, sure, I have a personal stake in that, but isn't that symptomatic of what's going on here? This is Rep. Hokestra who put that in, to whom I gave back my intelligence commendation medal, and they stuck that in the bill a couple of weeks later. So what does that mean? Who decides what is classified? Gonzales. He's already said that you cannot talk about the wiretapping because that is still classified. It has not been declassified yet. So this is pure and simple an intimidation technique. I hope it doesn't get through; it's in conference now with the Senate. I don't know what will happen. But, you know, smart people say, "Oh, Ray, don't worry about it. The first amendment still exists. It'll always trump that," and I look around at the judges making these decisions, and say, "right." I feel real confident about that. But even if the 1st Amendment does obtain, I don't have the money to hire some lawyers to go to court with me against this. So that's pure and simple a very crass technique aimed at silencing us, as well as others. And that's just one example.

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I think the time calls for prophecy. I think we all, all of us in the Abrahamic tradition, come out of a tradition of prophets. The 8th century prophets, of course, were a little eccentric. Take Jeremiah, for example. He went around for, I think it was, three years stark naked. Now exegetes - without any humor - say now it's not clear he was always stark naked, just during liturgical services. Well, whichever, you know, you can't let the man off the hook. What was he saying? What was he saying? I think he was saying. "Look, I strip myself. You don't listen to me, so I strip myself of my clothes to show you that you are stripped of the vision given you by Yahweh - a vision of justice and shalom, and your nakedness is far worse than mine."

We all share that vision. We just need to do something to show that. I think we need to do a lot more than we have been doing. I think we need to spread the word around. I am not at all as sanguine as Sy Hersh and still less than Senator Levin that the press has come around. I don't see it. I like to hope it, but I don't see much change. And, so it's really up to us… to us to have the imagination to do things. Now, like what? Well, that's for all of us to figure out in community, in small groups. But when you hear an enlightened voice, when you hear an imaginative idea--like I heard when Jennifer Harbury sent me am email and said, "Ray, you come on over. We have something we're planning." I went right over that day. She said, "We have these 16 orange suits, and we've saved one for you. We're going to march the halls of Congress. We're going to have a press conference first. We'll all look like that iconic vision of the Guantanamo prisoner." They had it all figured out. The National Capitol police didn't have a dress code. If you weren't handing out any material, and if you didn't have slogans all over you, you could wear whatever you want. And so, Jennifer and Diana arranged for a press conference in the Methodist building right on the Hill there. We all were already infiltrated into the Rayburn and other buildings. But Jennifer was having a press conference, and then she turned it over to others and said I have to leave now, and on the way over she called the Capitol police and said, "We're having a peaceful demonstration. We're not going to do anything unlawful, but we're going to be here and there." She told them where we were going to be, and she hung up and went through security and went to the ladies room and got her orange jumpsuit on. It was an incredible, incredible thing. The people were just stunned to see us marching around. Nobody made fun. Everybody kind of looked and said, "Wow." I was up and down in the Rayburn cafeteria, and they couldn't arrest us. The police came up to me and said, "Are you alone?" I said, "Yes." They said OK.

So what I'm saying is, get yourself hooked up with imaginative people. They usually happen to be women for some strange reason, and then do what they tell you, and you'll come up with some really neat ideas.

We can do things like that, and more powerful things as well. I'd like to close simply by citing that quote from Dante that JFK liked to use: "The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of crisis." I Google'd Hell just last night, and it's hotter in Hell than it is in Crawford, Texas, in August, and that's pretty hot. So let's put our shoulders into it, let's put our bodies into it, or else we can just go to Hell.