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I Do Not Wish to Be Associated With Torture
By Ray McGovern
03/02/06 "ICH" -- -- Hon. Pete Hoekstra, Chair House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence Washington, DC
Dear Congressman Hoekstra:
As a matter of conscience, I am returning the Intelligence
Commendation Award medallion given me for "especially commendable
service" during my 27-year career in CIA. The issue is torture,
which inhabits the same category as rape and slavery - intrinsically
evil. I do not wish to be associated, however remotely, with an
agency engaged in torture.
Reports in recent years that CIA personnel were torturing detainees
were highly disturbing. Confirmation of a sort came last fall, when
CIA Director Porter Goss and Dick Cheney - dubbed by the Washington
Post "Vice President for Torture" - descended on Sen. John McCain to
demand that the CIA be exempted from his amendment's ban on torture.
Subsequent reports implicated agency personnel in several cases of
prisoner abuse in Iraq, including a few in which detainees died
during interrogation.
The obeisance of CIA directors George Tenet and Porter Goss in
heeding illegal White House directives has done irreparable harm to
the CIA and the country - not to mention those tortured and killed.
That you, as Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence, show more deference to the White House than dedication
to your oversight responsibilities under the Constitution is another
profound disappointment. How can you and your counterpart, Sen. Pat
Roberts, turn a blind eye to torture - letting some people get away,
literally, with murder - and square that with your conscience?
If German officials who were ordered to do such things in the 1930s
had spoken out early and loudly enough, the German people might have
been alerted to the atrocities being perpetrated in their name and
tried harder to stop them. When my grandchildren ask, "What did you
do, Grandpa, to stop the torture," I want to be able to tell them
that I tried to honor my oath, taken both as an Army officer and an
intelligence officer, to defend the Constitution of the United
States - and that I not only spoke out strongly against the torture,
but also sought a symbolic way to dissociate myself from it.
We Americans have become accustomed to letting our institutions do
our sinning for us. I abhor the corruption of the CIA in the past
several years, believe it to be beyond repair, and do not want my
name on any medallion associated with it. Please destroy this one.
Yours truly, Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an
analyst at the CIA for 27 years, and is on the Steering Group of
VIPS.
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