 Next up, I want to introduce Ray McGovern, who is an activist who writes and lectures about war and the role of the Central Intelligence Agency. He's a former intelligence officer himself who worked as a CIA analyst for 27 years. In 2003, he co-founded veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, more commonly known as VIPs. So, without further ado, I'm going to pass the floor over to Ray McGovern. Thanks for being with us, Ray. There you are. Okay. Am I unmuted? We can hear you just fine. Okay, great. Can't get rid of this little thing here. Oh, we can hear you. Thanks for having me, especially for the organizers here. You know, my Irish grandmother used to always say to me, as she said, now Raymond, show me your company and I'll tell you who you are. Well, I couldn't be a better company. It's sort of like homecoming here. I won't mention all the people. Sammy Allarian, I will mention because he's a special friend and it's so terrific to see him looking so well. Let me start by mentioning three conspiracy theories in which I believe. Now, the first one is by the heads, the chairs of the 911 Commission. And what they said here was that they were set up to fail. They wrote a book, a book, two years after the 911 Commission produced their book. And they said that we were set up to fail. We were aware that the commission would be doomed to fail if not actually designed to fail. So I believe that it's odd to attribute a conspiracy theory. I think it's similar to the co-chairman of the commission, but I think it fits. You know, the second one would be. Well, I have the 911 Commission report here. And you know, when they caught Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who's supposed to be the main, you know, the brainstorm or guest or all this stuff. And here's what they said in the commission report. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's animus toward the United States, they're not from his experiences in at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. It wasn't like they call them a towel head or that he had a bad experience with a with a somebody there. But rather from his violent disagreement with US foreign policy favoring Israel favoring Israel. The little footnote there says, you know, that's what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew said when he tried to knock down the Twin Towers in 1993. He said he was really proud to be to be sentenced to many years in prison because of his deep, deep hatred for US policy favoring Israel. So Samuel Arion was quite right. And the reasons, the real reasons for 911 that he adduced, they're the right ones. And I'll just say the third conspiracy theory that I believe has to do with the New York Times today. Believe it or not, front page. Here's the headline. Evidence disputes US claim of ISIS bomb in Kabul drone strike. Whoa. It's the New York Times saying that our top military lies to its teeth. Well, that suggests that they are okay. So there's a conspiracy theory and which the New York Times is participating. Suffice it to say that I really, really react really strongly against people who who accuse my former colleagues and my former neighbors in New York City of being conspiracy theorists. My God, there's so many conspiracies you can't shake a stick at them. Now, what I'd like to move toward here is what the Kathy Kelly actually talked about. And that was, you know, we're not all responsible, but we're all, we're not all guilty, but we're all accountable, we're all responsible. I think it's, it's fair enough to say that when we talk about acknowledging guilt, it's really, really difficult that it's like looking at the sun we blink and then we turn away. And what's hard for individuals is doubly hard for nations. Now, the old monasteries know this and so they had a certain process they call the chapter of false where they recited some of the, some of the indifference that they showed to others. Now, indifference, as Rabbi Heschel said, is worse, is the greatest sin than hate. In other words, well, I don't have to spell that out for you though I indifference is a greater sin than hell hate. It's our neglects, not our deeds that condemn us. Jeremiah, the prophet. The stain of your sin is still there and I see through it. Though you wash your hands with soda and do not stint with soap. So in this spirit, I think the September 11 and its sequels and its wars that can us to a national examination of conscience. Why is it, why is it so easy for us to to kill people who don't look like us let's face it. Racism is a major issue here. What I'd like to point out here is that this was very clear during Vietnam, and not only were our troops trained to call Vietnamese VC gooks and that kind of stuff. And the ones in Desert Storm towel heads and so forth. But you know, back in 1970. Here's another written by James Baldwin from France to Angela Davis, who had just been arrested. Okay, and she appeared on the cover of Newsweek, Newsweek magazine in chains. Okay. Now here's James Baldwin. Dear sister Angela. I might have hoped by this hour that the very sight of chains on black flesh would be so intolerable a site for the American people and so unbearable a memory that they would spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But now, more than ever, Americans appear to measure their safety in the chains and corpses of others. So, Newsweek puts you on its cover chain. Let me put it this way, sister Angela, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness, they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered other people. As their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between their own experience and the experience of others, they will never feel themselves sufficiently worthwhile to become responsible for themselves. As they once put it in our black church, they will perish in their sins, that is, in their delusions. All right, he finishes up this way. My dear sister Angela, some of us white and black know how great a price has already been paid to bring a new consciousness. If we know that, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own, which it is. We must render impassable with our own bodies to carter to the guest chamber. For if they take you in the morning, they'll be coming for us in the night. Therefore, peace for the James. I think we have to recognize the racism that underlies a lot of what we do abroad. We can recall the words of General William Westmoreland after the carnage in Vietnam saying to a interviewer, you know, the Oriental, they don't put the same price on life. Life is cheap in the Orient. Well, is life cheap in Afghanistan? So what do we do? I think first we have to recognize that we're all all responsible, even though we're not all guilty. Okay, we have tried womanly and manfully to prevent all this for over 20 years now. We have to keep trying. And the first thing I think we need to do is bind up the wounds and welcome in the biblical sense, the poor. The refugee, the orphan and the widow. That's what we talk about in a biblical sense about the preferential option for the poor. Those are the people that Yahweh and Jesus and the prophet cared about first and foremost that we do justice. Okay, we do justice to the least of these. And how can we do that right now? Well, after Vietnam, there were 3 million refugees from Indochina. There were another half million that perished at sea. We took in a million by 1982, I believe it was we had a million Indochinese refugees. They made a great contribution to our civilization and to our society. We have to do the same thing now. We owe it to the people who cooperated with us who are now in danger because of their cooperation to do the right thing. And Biden, to his credit, has tried to make sure that we are prepared to do that. It's going to take a monumental effort and there will be a lot of resistance to it. But that's one thing we can do. There's a lot of other things we can do. And, you know, as Dan Ellsberg started after Catonsville, he said, you know, people say, oh, we can't do anything. We can't do anything. Well, we can do things. We can do things. And sometimes it doesn't feel, you know, like they're efficacious and Dan warns us. He says, you know, it's not about results. Results are not unimportant. But they're secondary to the goodness of the act. I'll just finish with a little portrayal of how Dan pictured Philip and his own and the others. Catonsville people in the only federal building in Catonsville, Maryland as they poured after they poured their own blood on draft carts. How they how they're sitting around and then says, you know, I was thinking about, you know, this is this was a big deal. People are going to call me an idiot or clown or or come here. So was this worth doing? I said, yeah, it was worth doing. Results are not unimportant, but they're secondary to goodness of the act speaks for itself. And then Dan, a poet, he said into this post office came portentiously an FBI inspector. I looked around the room and he saw my brother Philip who had his clerics on. And he said, you again, I'm going to change my religion. And Dan comments, no higher compliment could ever come to my brother Philip. So what we need to do is keep our sense of humor as we're doing this. It's hard work. And those of you that I've been associated with for the last 20 plus years have been able to keep that sense of humor. Younger people remember you've got to lighten it up every now and then, but stay true to the justice aspects of this because, you know, if we want peace in the biblical sense. Peace is no more nor less than the experience of justice. Thank you very much. Thank you Ray McGovern. Let me just say I'm honored to be in your company. I'm honored to be here and wise and powerful words and part of what we're doing today in remembering 911 and the global war on terror and the absolute destruction is to be in fellowship with one another, and to provide each other as much needed comfort as we do this important work to truly change what our country has been doing and to turn a new page.