I Do Not Wish to Be Associated With Torture
By Ray McGovern
From: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030206A.shtml
Thursday 02 March 2006
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
Truthout.org Editor's Note: Ray McGovern and 15 others took action today in the halls of Congress. The 16 donned orange jumpsuits similar to those
worn by detainees at Guantánamo Bay. They wore gags over their mouths decorated with one word - torture. Not another
word needed to be said as they walked the halls of Congress. McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA, also returned his
Intelligence Commendation Award medallion which was given to him for "especially commendable service." He delivered the
medal to Congressman Pete Hoekstra along with the letter below. --smg/TO
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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.