If the Scenery Is on Fire, Must the Show Go On? The Case for an Independent International Intelligence Service
May 26—Is the arc of the moral universe bending, with ever-greater curvature, toward justice? Yesterday, the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague ordered the State of Israel to cease its war-crime violations of international law being perpetrated by its military assault in Gaza, now known to be responsible for the deaths of over 35,000 people, and possibly thousands more among the 10,000 still declared missing. (There have been about another 1,000 killed in the West Bank as well since Oct 7.)
Attorney Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, and former representative of the nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina before the ICJ, in its Genocide Convention case against Yugoslavia, said: “Congratulations to the Republic of South Africa and to the International Court of Justice! (This is) Exactly what we need to stop the ongoing genocidal humanitarian catastrophe in Rafah at the United Nations Security Council and in the United Nations General Assembly under the Uniting For Peace Resolution.” Boyle is here referring to United Nations General Assembly Resolution 377 (V), adopted November 3, 1950.
This resolution empowers the General Assembly to override the United Nations Security Council—in this case, specifically the United States—under conditions that the world deems immediate action to be essential, in order to preserve the international peace and security of the world. The United Nations website, regarding Emergency Special Sessions, says that Resolution 377 “Resolves that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or active aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with the view to making appropriate recommendations to members for collective measures, including, in the case of a breach of the peace or active aggression, the use of armed force if necessary, to maintain or restore, international peace and security….”
So, contrary to what many, if not most, were saying, or predicting, about the ineffectiveness of the student protests, the interventions against the likes of Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland, and the encampments and other acts of nonviolent resistance, including statements, resolutions, etc., something is indeed now changing and moving. Yes, the crime has not yet ceased, or even abated; but the moral universe, embodied in the ghost of Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s indictment of Israel, has spoken, and the world is beginning to respond.
Francis Boyle has on previous occasions addressed the International Peace Coalition (IPC), an independent grouping convened by Schiller Institute Founder and chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche. He was unable to do so Friday precisely because of the breaking ICJ development. The IPC meeting, titled “America is Dangerously Adrift. Can It Be Saved from Self-Destruction?” was addressed yesterday by Larry Johnson, Graham Fuller, and Ray McGovern, all veteran former analysts for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, as well being as members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. VIPS is an organization that, since the illegal Anglo-American “preventive war” against Iraq, has sought to reverse the seemingly-unstoppable, but not inevitable, self-inflicted downward spiral of the United States.
The three, along with LaRouche Independent candidate for Congress in New York City’s 15th Congressional District Jose Vega, engaged in an essential dialogue with Zepp-LaRouche, who has campaigned relentlessly for her Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture, designed to supersede the geo-strategic/geo-political outlook that is the standard, failing operating procedure of the Anglosphere. “Kissingerian” geo-politics is a sick mental relic from a bygone colonialist/imperial era, the main axiomatic system and catalyst provoking an otherwise-hapless “confederacy of dunces,” largely assembled around the State Department, into an inevitable thermonuclear exchange that may yet wipe humanity from the face of the Earth.
Returning to the Court of Justice: Note that the week began this past Monday, May 20, with the announcement by International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan: “Today I am filing applications for warrants of arrest before Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court in the Situation in the State of Palestine.” He named three Hamas leaders, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Secretary Yoav Gallant as targets of his warrants of arrest, and for criminal offenses against humanity, represented by their unjust killing of the people of Gaza.
This was not appreciated by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham (R), the prototypical American Southern-fried jarhead, who was not much amused by the ICC prosecutor’s impartial view of justice. Nor were several of his Congressional colleagues, 12 of whom had earlier, on April 24, sent a letter that threatened repercussions against the ICC, if the Court dared to take the steps “bending toward justice,” which Khan requested. “Target Israel and we will target you,” they wrote. They further stated that they would bar Khan and his family from travel to the United States. “You have been warned,” the letter concluded.
When Senator Graham this week remarked, that he and his Congressional colleagues “will find a way to register our displeasure with the ICC because if they’ll do this to Israel, we’re next,” his words were met with immediate, spontaneous, enthusiastic applause from protesters present, who deeply appreciated the prospect of Graham in the docks. Not pleased, Graham could only retort: “Yeah, you can clap all you want.”
But here’s the question: Does Graham know something that he isn’t saying? How many times in the past five decades have Americans found out—or not—after the fact, about a “secret government” carrying out some massive crime somewhere in the world—as well as in the United States itself—in the name of “justice”? What if this time, though, it’s different—that the crime underway in Gaza, if interrupted as it transpires, reveals crimes not yet admitted? What if it reveals who—since it certainly isn’t Biden—and what unelected, “un-democratic” force, is actually presently running the United States?
Perhaps something else underlies the American Democratic and Republican neo-cons’ frantic defense of Netanyahu, including their recent tone-deaf proposal to bring him to speak to a joint session of the U.S. Congress!! Maybe they should first consult with Israeli opposition figures in the Knesset. This week, about Netanyahu, Israeli politician Yair Lapid said, “Jews … were killed and murdered on (Netanyahu’s) watch, who is not willing to say: ‘I am guilty, I am responsible, I am going home.’ Your punishment, Mr. Netanyahu, is that this is how history will remember you. This is what you will be remembered for. For not taking responsibility, for not admitting your guilt. That you didn’t even know how to ask for forgiveness and leave at [the appropriate] time.”
Are there Americans, formerly or presently in government service, whose judgment the world can afford to trust? There need to be, if any solution to the present crisis is to be found. IPC member Ray McGovern, who in the 1980s regularly briefed President Reagan and other Administration officials, described to the 51st IPC meeting today how he had been “surprised” by three unexpected occurrences in his intelligence evaluations of the past two years. There was the Russian special military operation (SMO) of Feb. 24, 2022, which he did not expect. “I pretend to a good bit of expertise, particularly on Russian and Soviet foreign policy. But, every now and then, I’m surprised.” He described the second occasion, as the seismic change in the relationship between Russia and China, as expressed in their memorandum of Feb. 4, 2022, and what McGovern described as a deep consultation between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping before the initiation of the SMO. This also surprised me, McGovern said. His third example: "More recently, I was really surprised that the Russians made it clear that they would be running exercises of non-strategic nuclear weapons—whoa!—tactical nuclear weapons. This was mentioned earlier, including by Helga. My God! I never would have expected that.
“So, What’s the lesson I draw from this? One lesson is, that the Russians are dead serious about Ukraine. They’re not going to give up. And what they are trying to do is to tell the United States, these people with tin ears, look, we are so dead serious that we are willing to do an unprecedented step—and it is an unprecedented step.”
Ironically, but lawfully, it is precisely Ray McGovern’s ability—any competent intelligence officer’s ability—to recognize the changes in reality, contrary to her/his assumptions, that qualifies them as the best sort of intelligence officer in a time of crisis. Indeed, that quality makes one a potential leader for an American, or any other, “patriotic” intelligence service, freed from neo-colonial, neo-imperial lethal flaws in thinking, contrary to the true interests one’s own nation, and of all forward-thinking nations. McGovern and his colleagues, those of the Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, are needed. They would be welcome in any dialogue with Russia, China, or any other nation in the world, which wishes to see an early end to “Anglo-American amateur hour,” before amateur hour puts an end to the world.
Lyndon LaRouche had always believed that the American government required exactly such a liberation from the legacy of Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel P. Huntington, and their intellectual “Great Mother,” the Harvard Anglophile and Confederate, William Yandell Elliott. The LaRouche Oasis Plan, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Ten Principles, require an independent, daily international “Alert Service” to be established, which publishes the expanding dialogue that can rapidly correct the lethal axioms that have now been challenged by the ICJ and ICC to a degree, but which must be defeated for the world to survive even the rest of this year. “Whom the gods would destroy, the Truth must unbind.”
