Ray McGovern-- Arrested Thursday Oct 30th, For Wanting to Ask Gen. Petraeus Questions

[JEB]

http://www.opednews.com/Podcast/Exclusive-Ray-McGovern--by-Rob-Kall-General-Petraeus_Police-Brutality_Police-State_Ray-McGovern-141031-688.html


Some democracy we got here. Not.

[PuraVidaDreamin]

1. A Tireless Activist

For the people. Thank You Mr. McGovern

[PuraVidaDreamin]

2. A snippet

Petraeus forwarded Boot's blog item, entitled "A Lie: David Petraeus, Anti-Israel," which had been posted at the Commentary magazine site at 3:11 p.m. on March 18. However, Petraeus apparently forgot to delete some of the other exchanges between him and Boot at the bottom of the e-mail.

McGovern was aware of this history and told me that he thought an opportunity to question Petraeus in such a setting with Boot might prove illuminating. After his arrest and release, McGovern told RT that he had planned to ask Petraeus, who was responsible for training the Iraqi army, about his failure to train those forces sufficiently to stand up to a recent offensive by the Islamic State.

"Will you come out of retirement and try to do it better this time to train the Iraqi forces?" McGovern said, describing his intended question.

Petraeus retired from the U.S. Army in 2011 to become the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which he left in disgrace in December 2012 after revelations that he had an extramarital affair with an admiring female biographer.

"This is no saint. This is actually no great strategist," McGovern said of Petraeus. "He's an embarrassment to the U.S. Army in which I used to be proud to have served."

From Consortium News
http://consortiumnews.com/2014/10/31/petraeus-spared-ray-mcgoverns-question/

[KoKo]

3. The Comments Section on this Article has some good links...

The McGovern Address to the Schiller Institute is an interesting watch or listen.

[JEB]

4. Thanks for posting and the link.

[Octafish]

5. Ray McGovern is a good man, a patriot and a hero -- an aware human being.

From 2006:

Ray McGovern thanks the research community for going after the Truth. In an interview with Randi Rhodes, the former CIA analyst discussed his changing beliefs regarding “Conspiracy Theorists.” He was asked about 9-11 and the security stand-down…

“All of that – all of that—strains credulity. I was foolish enough in my callow youth to believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission on the JFK assassination. That went on to even in my middle age I was inclined to believe the inquiry into the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Never. Never again, Randi, will I disparage people who look into these things and bear the brunt of crticicism as ‘conspiracy theorists.’ I think those people are doing a patriotic service to this country. And I think we have to remember The reason there are so many questions is this administration refuses to answer these questions.”

Old DU2 thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x345011

Sorry, JEB! The original links to Randi's show is no longer online or available via wayback.

http://www.premierenetworks.com/live/audio_highlights?from=10

The great DUer bobthedrummer will remember...

PS: Thank you for the OP and thread, JEB! Ray McGovern is TOPS!

[JEB]

6. I can't believe this isn't news.

Not only are war criminals not prosecuted, but they are protected from uncomfortable questions by unconstitutional police actions. Questions that I can't believe the press aren't asking. Ray McGovern is a patriot in ways that Petraeus can't even dream of. Have we always been this screwed and I'm just more aware or are we slipping into a black hole of fascism?

[Octafish]

8. Bertram Gross named the Situation ''Friendly Fascism'' in 1980...before Reagan, etc...

The professor served FDR and the New Deal Democrats and is remembered today for his work to reduce poverty. Among his accomplishments, he helped author the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act. Later he taught at CUNY and Wayne State University in Detroit, where he founded the Center for Urban Studies.

Friendly Fascism

The New Face of Power in America

by Bertram Gross
South End Press, 1980, paper

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Friendly_Fascism_BGross.html

INTRO EXCERPT...

Friendly fascism portrays two conflicting trends in the United States and other countries of the so-called "free world."

The first is a slow and powerful drift toward greater concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government partnership. This drift leads down the road toward a new and subtly manipulative form of corporatist serfdom. The phrase "friendly fascism" helps distinguish this possible future from the patently vicious corporatism of classic fascism in the past of Germany, Italy and Japan. It also contrasts with the friendly present of the dependent fascisms propped up by the U.S. government in El Salvador, Haiti, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere.

The other is a slower and less powerful tendency for individuals and groups to seek greater participation in decisions affecting themselves and others. This trend goes beyond mere reaction to authoritarianism. It transcends the activities of progressive groups or movements and their use of formal democratic machinery. It is nourished by establishment promises-too often rendered false-of more human rights, civil rights and civil liberties. It is embodied in larger values of community, sharing, cooperation, service to others and basic morality as contrasted with crass materialism and dog-eat-dog competition. It affects power relations in the household, workplace, community, school, church, synagogue, and even the labyrinths of private and public bureaucracies. It could lead toward a truer democracy-and for this reason is bitterly fought...

These contradictory trends are woven fine into the fabric of highly industrialized capitalism. The unfolding logic of friendly fascist corporatism is rooted in "capitalist society's transnational growth and the groping responses to mounting crises in a dwindling capitalist world". Mind management and sophisticated repression become more attractive to would-be oligarchs when too many people try to convert democratic promises into reality. On the other hand, the alternative logic of true democracy is rooted in "humankind's long history of resistance to unjustified privilege" and in spontaneous or organized "reaction (other than fright or apathy) to concentrated power...and inequality, injustice or coercion".

A few years ago too many people closed their eyes to the indicators of the first tendency.

But events soon began to change perceptions.

The Ku Klux Klan and American Nazis crept out of the woodwork. An immoral minority of demagogues took to the airwaves. "Let me tell you something about the character of God," orated Jim Robison at a televised meeting personally endorsed by candidate Ronald Reagan. "If necessary, God would raise up a tyrant, a man who may not have the best ethics, to protect the freedom interests of the ethical and the godly." To protect Western oil companies, candidate Jimmy Carter proclaimed presidential willingness to send American troops into the Persian Gulf. Rosalyn Carter went further by telling an lowa campaign audience: "Jimmy is not afraid to declare war." Carter then proved himself unafraid to expand unemployment, presumably as an inflation cure, thereby reneging on his party's past full employment declarations.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/RiseFall_Friend_Fascism_FF.html

The good professor painted an accurate picture of what was to come.

James Madison

EXCERPT...

Despite the sharp differences from classic fascism, there are also some basic similarities. In each, a powerful oligarchy operates outside of, as well as through, the state. Each subverts constitutional government. Each suppresses rising demands for wider participation in decision making, the enforcement and enlargement of human rights, and genuine democracy. Each uses informational control and ideological flimflam to get lower and middle-class support for plans to expand the capital and power of the oligarchy and provide suitable rewards for political, professional, scientific, and cultural supporters.

A major difference is that under friendly fascism Big Government would do less pillaging of, and more pillaging for, Big Business. With much more integration than ever before among transnational corporations, Big Business would run less risk of control by any one state and enjoy more subservience by many states. In turn, stronger government support of transnational corporations, such as the large group of American companies with major holdings in South Africa, requires the active fostering of all latent conflicts among those segments of the American population that may object to this kind of foreign venture. It requires an Establishment with lower levels so extensive that few people or groups can attain significant power outside it, so flexible that many (perhaps most) dissenters and would-be revolutionaries can be incorporated within it. Above all, friendly fascism in any First World country today would \ use sophisticated control technologies far beyond the ken of the classic fascists.

p177
Although American hegemony can scarcely return in its Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson form, this does not necessarily signify the end of the American Century. Nor does communist and socialist advance on some fronts mark American and capitalist retreat on all fronts. There are unmistakable tendencies toward a rather thoroughgoing reconstruction of the entire "Free World." Robert Osgood sees a transitional period of "limited readjustment" and "retrenchment without disengagement," after which America could establish a "more enduring rationale of global influence." Looking at foreign policy under the Nixon administration, Robert W. Tucker sees no intention to "dismantle the empire" but rather a continued commitment to the view that "America must still remain the principal guarantor of a global order now openly and without equivocation identified with the status quo." He describes America as a "settled imperial power shorn of much of the former exuberance." George Liska looks forward to a future in which Americans, having become more mature in the handling of global affairs, will at last be the leaders of a true empire.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Specter_FriendlyFascism_FF.html

So. Here we are, 34 years on, and things have moved further into theto make the USA into the Fourth Reich.

PS: Thank you for the kind words, JEB! The fact you grok means the world!

[JEB]

7. As always, thanks for the links and insight.