It is not gratuitous or politically factional to object to the authority & leadership “retired” CIA & FBI agents & former US State Department & military officers have in the corrupted antiwar movement. The most prominent among them are Ray McGovern (CIA), Ann Wright (US Army colonel & State Department official), & Colleen Rowley (FBI). They are all of the 1960s political generation but instead of joining with the millions protesting US wars, beginning with the Vietnam War, they committed their lives to working in service to the Pentagon. It wasn’t until retirement & the Iraq War in 2003 that they found their souls & transubstantiated into leading voices of a weak & fractured antiwar movement.

Let me say, in the interests of full disclosure, that Colleen Rowley is the FBI agent who by her own admission to me flagged my criminal record for using a Weapon of Mass Destruction in 2000, just a few years before morphing into a leader of those she had previously been spying on. In 2009, she was unwilling to lift a finger to get that removed from my record, making me unable to get jobs requiring a security clearance.

Transformation & political change are possible at any age so it could be just coincidence that their pensions were secure before they did their morphing. But the problem is that they haven’t changed from their Pentagon days. Now they are ardently promoting Assad & Putin & have helped corrupt the US antiwar movement by supporting Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians. They’re on the same side as the US when it comes to counterrevolution in Syria, regardless of their new anti-imperialist rhetoric. They advance conspiracy theories in place of political analyses & promote the writings & speak on panels & platforms with outright fascists. It was McGovern who admitted in a 2004 interview with Mother Jones that their group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity collaborates with “virtually all the agencies,” including “very distinguished operations officers, & from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, from the NSA, Army Intelligence, & from the State Department.” So the question emerges: just how independent are these “retirees” from the US Pentagon?

If each has nearly 50 years of working, spying, & doing analyses for the Pentagon, why did it take till 2003 to oppose the many US wars millions of Americans have been marching against since 1965? What was it about the barbarism of the Iraq War that snapped for them when Vietnam, Granada, Panama, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Somalia, & all the other barbarous wars went right over their heads? Just asking for a friend–that little boy being rescued by a White Helmet in Afrin City where Syrian & Russian bombs are “falling like rain.”

(Photo from White Helmets)