The man himself;
A couple of his poems;
Invitation
© Raymond Maxwell
The Queen’s Henchmen
request the pleasure of your company
at a Lynching – to be held
at 23rd and C Streets NW
on Tuesday, December 18, 2012
just past sunset.
Dress: Formal, Masks and Hoods -
the four being lynched
must never know the identities
of their executioners, or what/
whose sin required their sacrifice.
A blood sacrifice –
to divert the hounds -
to appease the gods -
to cleanse our filth and
satisfy our guilty consciences.
Arrive promptly at sunset –
injustice will be swift.
there will be no trial,
no review of evidence,
no due process, and no
accountability.
Dress warmly -
a chilling effect will instantly
envelop Foggy Bottom.
Extrajudicial.
Total impunity.
A kangaroo court in
a banana republic.
B.Y.O.B.
Refreshments will not be served
because of the continuing resolution.
And the ones being lynched?
Who cares? They are pawns in a game.
Our game. All suckers, all fools,
all knaves who volunteered to serve -
Us. And the truth? The truth?
What difference at this point does it make?
In the event of inclement weather,
or the Queen’s incapacitation,
her Henchmen will carry out this lynching -
as ordered, as planned.
And another;
Trapped in a purgatory of their own conceit…
© Raymond Maxwell
Trapped in a purgatory
of their own conceit…
The web of lies they weave
gets tighter and tighter
in its deceit
until it bottoms out -
at a very low frequency -
and implodes.
It may be just a matter of perception –
they can’t undo their wrongs
for fear it’d undermine their
perceived authority –
an authority they think they require
to stay in charge.
Yet all the while,
the more they talk,
the more they lie,
and the deeper down the hole they go.
There’s nothing I need to go back to -
nothing to re-litigate -
nothing to defend -
and certainly nothing to prove
to the unworthy.
Just wait…
just wait and feed them rope.
Raymond Maxwell: Former Deputy Asst Secretary Removed Over Benghazi Pens a Poem
In December 2012, the NYT reported that four State Department officials were removed from their posts after an independent panel criticized the “grossly inadequate” security at a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that was attacked on Sept. 11, leading to the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. According to the report, the four officials “have been placed on administrative leave pending further action” citing the State Department’s spokeswoman as source.
The same report included a quote from Thomas R. Pickering, a former ambassador (and former #3 at the State Department) who led the independent review who said this: “We fixed it at the assistant secretary level, which is, in our view, the appropriate place to look, where the decision-making in fact takes place, where, if you like, the rubber hits the road.”
One of those four officials is Raymond Maxwell; he is also one of the three Deputy Assistant Secretaries who were thrown under the bus in the Benghazi fallout. He was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Maghreb (North Africa) Affairs at the Bureau of Near East Affairs from 2011-2012. He advised the Assistant Secretary on the Maghreb and oversaw development, coordination and implementation of USG policy in the region. Previous to that, he was the Director of the Office of Regional and Multilateral Affairs (RMA) also at the Bureau of Near East Affairs from 2009-2011. More here.
Mr. Maxwell is also a poet with hopes of becoming “a music and poetry librarian in his next life.” This past April, we became aware that he participated in the National Poetry Writing Month, an annual project in which participating poets attempt to write a poem a day for the entire month (see his blog). We think one of his poems, “Invitation“is particularly striking. How can we not appreciate the dark humor of BYOB … “because of the continuing resolution?” Certainly, the poem is blunt and aims to shock but it also makes us think that as as long as one is the boss of words, one is not totally helpless.
http://diplopundit.net/2013...enghazi-pens-a-poem/Raymond Maxwell: A happy ending … despite the fact that the “system” does not work
Following our publication of Raymond Maxwell’s poem in this blog, we received an unsolicited note from a veteran FSO we know from Post X. The FSO knows Raymond Maxwell well, all the way back to A-100 and notes that Mr. Maxwell spent 14 years in the United States Navy before joining the Foreign Service. The FSO added that Mr. Maxwell was “definitely the first one to become a DAS” [deputy assistant secretary] from his A-100 class, and the first one to make it to Senior Foreign Service. Excerpt below:
For years, I have told a story about Ray to junior officers that I thought showed that there was justice in the “system,” and which I thought had a happy ending (until now). Ray has always been a stand-up guy. On his first tour, he went as a General Services Officer to a small West African post. He had a boss (Admin Officer) who did not play by the rules, and Ray refused to go along with unethical or illegal practices in the execution of his duties. He hadn’t left the Navy just to sell out his principles in the Foreign Service. For a first tour officer, that put him in a precarious position and made tenure (and a career) less than a sure thing. Fortunately, Ray’s next tour went well, as did every tour after that. Not only did he set the standard in every position he ever held, he also took the hardest jobs — a couple of them in Iraq back when nobody else wanted to go there.
When I first learned that Ray was going to be a scapegoat for our most recent 9/11, I felt that this story no longer had a happy ending. He was a victim of “damage control,” which in government tries to push accountability down to the lowest level possible. But in a sense, the happy ending is that Ray remained the stand-up guy, the man of principle that he has always been, in service to our country for over 35 years in the United States Navy and in the Foreign Service of the United States, despite the fact that the “system” does not work. His service has been a great gift to our nation.
I do hope that a generation of officers who worked with Ray, were mentored by Ray, or who hear the stories about him, are themselves inspired to a higher standard of public service than is currently the accepted norm in our beloved Department of State. Is there hope for the future? Actually, I don’t know.
The FSO who wrote this is in active service, so there will be no other details on that. Mr. Maxwell remains in administrative leave status and defers all press inquiries to the State Department spokesperson and State Department Public Affairs.
http://diplopundit.net/tag/raymond-maxwell/CBS story
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301...mat-a-prolific-poet/
