I just received the following news and I am way too upset to write a coherent piece on this.
Ray McGovern is a good friend of mine. We live less than 10 miles apart. Together we have participated in many events and protests. He is one of the most informed, articulate, gentle, peace-loving and peace-seeking human beings I’ve ever known . . . For me, this hits too close to home: My father was similarly brutalized by dictator regimes, and that was only the beginning, before it escalated to being tortured and having his toenails pulled out by the state police. Why? He was a doctor, a surgeon with an inquiring mind, and he spoke out whenever he could against dictatorships and for liberties. Participating in peaceful demonstrations, encouraging others to rise up for their rights, and reading authors such as Steinbeck (the American author black-listed there as ‘communist and anarchist’) landed him on the list of to-be-punished and pacified . . .
Right now, at this point, all I have to say to those who second-guess our nation’s police state status is this: “Shame on you!” As for my irate minority friends over here at Boiling Frogs, please help disseminate this news, because the scum bag media won’t;’ thank you.
At Clinton speech: Veteran bloodied, bruised & arrested for standing silently
As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her speech at George Washington University yesterday, condemning governments that arrest protestors and do not allow free expression, 71-year-old Ray McGovern was grabbed from the audience in plain view of her by police and an unidentified official in plain clothes, brutalized and left bleeding in jail. She never paused speaking. When Secretary Clinton began her speech, Mr. McGovern remained standing silently in the audience and turned his back. Mr. McGovern, a veteran Army officer who also worked as a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years, was wearing a Veterans for Peace t-shirt.
Blind-sided by security officers who pounced upon him, Mr. McGovern remarked, as he was hauled out the door, “So this is America?” As you see, Mr. McGovern is covered with bruises, lacerations and contusions inflicted in the assault.
Mr. McGovern is being represented by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF). “It is the ultimate definition of lip service that Secretary of State Clinton would be trumpeting the U.S. government’s supposed concerns for free speech rights and this man would be simultaneously brutalized and arrested for engaging in a peaceful act of dissent at her speech,” stated attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the PCJF.
In addition to publishing Boiling Frogs, where this article originally appeared, Sibel Edmonds is the founder and president of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), a nonprofit organization dedicated to aiding national security whistleblowers. She has appeared on national radio and TV as a commentator on matters related to whistleblowers, national security, and excessive secrecy & classification, and has been featured on CBS 60 Minutes, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The American Conservative, and others. Her book, ‘Shooting the Messenger,’ co-authored with Professor William Weaver, is forthcoming from Kansas University Press in the fall of 2010.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“In all cities it is easier to hurt a man than to help him.”
Plato, (Meno 94 c)
It hurts to witness the full display of Hillary Clinton’s duality during her recent speech at George Washington University, when while speaking of the glories of freedom of speech and people power she allowed the brutalizing of Ray McGovern in full view of her.
As explained by Mr.McGovern following his release from jail, his daughter was not there by his side to let him know that people were getting ready to pounce on him.
Also, an apparent passive/aggressive game between the ice-woman and Mr.McGovern has been going on since 2002 when Mr. McGovern would ask a student of his, who also worked as personal staff chief for then Senator Clinton, to deliver to her articles written by him on his opposition and that of Veterans for Peace [and probably that of half of the world too] to wars in Afghanistan as well as in Iran. Articles and outcries which were never answered or addressed by Senator Clinton.
For years the ice-woman ignored the former CIA servant’s cry for Peace .
Hillary’s Passive/Aggressiveness on the subject of Peace and Mr. McGovern had its denouement in full view of an audience and a camera when the tables turned and her passiveness turned to aggressiveness via the thugs who brutalized Mr.McGovern with her silence and full consent.
Like power crazed personalities, this may be one of the moments that Hillary Clinton might be, privately, the proudest of: that she allowed the power of truth in the voice of one humble servant to be shut down; like a parent castigating an unruly child and sending him to a dark room full of bruises, or a dictator silencing by force and whatever means his opposition.
Publicly this is the most outrageous moment of the ice-woman’s career.
The brutalization of Mr.McGovern within full view of her sight and ear, brought to light her hypocrisy on the matter of freedom of speech and people power, her love for power and: a well hidden narcissistic strand somewheree in there. Somewhere?