Roy Godson

1942-

Namebase notes:

Roy Godson has taught at Georgetown University since 1971, specializing in international relations and national security. During the 1980s he directed the Washington office of the National Strategy Information Center, a think tank for right-wing militarists. Godson has also been a consultant to the National Security Council and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. No mere academic, in 1985 Godson helped Oliver North channel contributions from private donors to the contras by using the Heritage Foundation to launder the funds.

According to Rightweb:

Roy Godson served as the U.S. representative to the Intl Youth Year conference, an event funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. He also served as a consultant to the U.S. Information Agency in the early 1980s and was a member of the CIA transition team in 1980.^[1]

Roy Godson is on the boards of the Committee for a Democratic Majority and the League for Industrial Democracy. ^[2] Godson heads the Washington DC office of the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), a right-wing think tank for military strategy. ^[3]

In 1981 Phil Kelly wrote:

One of the central characters now distinctly overweight is Stephen Haseler, founder of the Social Democratic Alliance, the vanguard split from Labour, expelled last year for threatening to run candidates against it, a threat now to be fulfilled, in the GLC elections in May. Now that others have 'come out' the SDA hopes to be the organisationa! core of the planned social democrat party.

Haseler works for the US National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) founded in 1962 by William J Casey now appointed by Reagan to head the CIA. NSIC is a pressure group for militant anti-communism and is at the centre of a vast network of front organisations. One of its main activities, Casey told the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on his CIA appointment, has been the buiIding of academic respectability for the practice of intelligence. It has helped to sponsor more than 200 professorial chairs and teaching posts in US universities and colleges devoted to teaching and researching intelligence.

NSIC provided some of the cash used by journalist and CIA contract employee Brian Crozier to transform his news agency Forum World Features, a CIA front organisation into the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC). Haseler works for the NSIC's 'left face', the Advisory Committee on European Democracy and Security (ACEDS), which published his book, Eurocommunism. Co-author of the work was NSIC's Dr Roy Godson, director of the International Labor Programme at Georgetown University in Washington DC. This institution has been a centre of cold war sentiment among US intellectuals, and many of itsstaff now find themselves in the Reagan administration. According to Haseler and Godson, Eurocommunism is nothing more than a Soviet ploy to detach western Europe from the U.S. without a war.

The same theme articulated by (among others) Henry Kissinger and David Owen, has been faithfully echoed in the Labour and Trade Union Press Service, a duplicated bulletin issued to trade union papers by the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding (LCTU). The press service is 100 percent subsidised by NATO. It was started by a former US Labor Attache in London, Joseph Godson, who also works at Georgetown University and happens to be Roy Godson's dad. Three leading right-wing US trade unionists who are vice-chairmen of the LCTU are also members of the ACEDS. British members of the LCTU include Owen, Rogers, Tom Bradley (another renegade Labour MP) and EEPTU leader Frank Chapple. ^[4]

Godson is close to the Bush administration's Pentagon neoconservatives.

Informed sources say the person in charge of the unnamed unit is Abram Shulsky, another key member of the Perle-Wolfowitz war party. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) was elected to the Senate in 1976, he "brought with him some of [Sen. Henry M.] Jackson's most militantly neoconservative former aides, among them Elliott Abrams, Chester Finn, Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt," according to a 1986 account in The Washington Post. Perle was also a former Jackson aide, and Shulsky, Perle and many kindred thinkers got jobs in President Reagan's Department of Defense in the 1980s. Shulsky also spent years at the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, a project of the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), and at the RAND Corporation. At RAND, along with other fellow neocons, including I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby (now Cheney's chief of staff), Shulsky contributed a study called "From Containment to Global Leadership: America and the World after the Cold War." That study was a forerunner of the recent military strategy document released by the Pentagon suggesting that the United States act to preserve its global hegemony, even if it means pre-emptive war or preventive war making.

Roy Godson, the head of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence and a colleague of Shulsky's for many years, has high hopes for the success of the Pentagon's Iraq intelligence unit, despite its small size when arrayed against the CIA's might. "It might turn out to be a David against Goliath," says Godson. ^[5]

Affiliations

• Dean Godson, brother
• Joseph Godson, father
• President, National Strategy Information Center
• Steering Committee, Center for Democracy and Civil Society
• Founder member, Consortium for the Study of Intelligence

Notes

1. ^ Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix B, Vol 12, 1988.
2. ^Letter from the League for Industrial Democracy, received July 1989; Letterhead from the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, received July 1989.
3. ^ Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committe on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983).
4. ^ An Unholy Alliance by Phil Kelly from The Leveller #52 (1981)
5. ^ The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA; Devising bad intelligence to promote bad policy, by Robert Dreyfuss, The American Prospect, 16 December 2002.
6. Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards: US Covert Action and Counterintelligence, Roy Godson, 2001, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data>