08/27/09 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, it is Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Of course, we're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
Our next guest on the show today is Ray McGovern.
He's got an article up in the viewpoint section at Antiwar.com today.
You can find it at original.antiwar.com slash McGovern.
It's called Closing In on the Torturers.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Doing well.
And by the way, I should mention, you're a 27-year CIA analyst, retired, and co-founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And also, you can find what Ray writes at ConsortiumNews.com, the great Robert Perry site.
Mm-hmm.
Wow.
It's an incredible article.
This is extremely important news this week.
The reaction to it, you know, I guess we can discuss.
But basically, what I want to know, Ray, is what you learned when you read the CIA Inspector General's report about the Bush-Cheney torture regime.
Well, I learned particular, Scott.
It was pretty clear that this thing would be pretty awful, but you really have to read it.
You really have to read it to be, as the Attorney General Eric Holder has confessed, sickened, just sickened at the things that happened with Department of Justice approval for the most part.
Those who have taken the trouble to read the key documents already released, they started with the International Committee of the Red Cross report, which the committee interviewed the high-value so-called detainees and had a lot of this detail right in there.
That was leaked to the press several months ago.
Then there was the Senate Armed Services Committee report, which had more detail.
Then we had those four Department of Justice legal briefs, which said pretty much, look, if you don't cause a death or major organ failure, well, you know, have at it.
You're pretty much free to do anything you want, and we won't call it torture.
So in a way, I was prepared for the worst, but this is really, really bad.
Drills applied to an inch away of a guy's forehead, threatening to bring his mother in to be assaulted in front of him, threatening to kill his children, all manner of pretty awful things.
The bottom line here is that all this was based on extremely dubious information, information that for the most part couldn't pass the smell test in normal circumstances.
But the premium was on finding terrorists, you know, hunting them down and smoking them out and all this stuff, and anybody who was on any one of these lists was fair game.
The analysts themselves told the Inspector General of the CIA that they really felt badly because the information was so sparse and that people were really subjected to these quote, enhanced interrogation techniques, end quote, who really were quite innocent and against whom there was very, very scattered, very, very elusive evidence.
So lots of people were, as I say in the piece, tortured on presumptions.
Presumptions?
Well, he trained at an Al-Qaeda camp, therefore, ergo, he must know a lot of things, and if he won't tell us what he knows, well, then we apply these techniques, because obviously he knows.
So the principle applied was, yeah, there are things we need to know.
These people probably know them, and the only way to get that information out of them, despite all the experience of real professional interrogators, is to apply these techniques, including waterboarding and worse, and so the good news, of course, is that the Attorney General, Eric Holder, has stepped up to the plate here and said, look, with all this information coming out, and I, you know, responsible for investigating and defending the law, I have no choice.
I have to include an investigation of these things in among the duties I've already assigned or that has already been assigned to this John Durham, who, you know, started working a year and a half ago, mind you, on the deliberate destruction of the CIA tapes of these interrogations.
So the good news is, Durham is off and running.
He's got a jump start, so to speak, since he knows most of these facts, chapter and verse.
It shouldn't take him too terribly long to pursue what Eric Holder has asked him to do, and that is make a preliminary investigation as to whether a full-scale prosecutorial investigation would be warranted.
Well, you know, you say that Holder stepped up to the plate, but are you worried that maybe he's just bunted and that this will be, okay, well, we tried, but, you know, there really was nothing solid to take to a grand jury, and so we decided not to pursue it and that's the end of that.
Isn't that the most likely outcome here?
Well, the thing I'm concerned about is the circumscribing of what is allowed to be considered torture.
The very flexible definition that I referred to before is, you know, it's pretty hard to be brought up on charges unless you kill somebody, but guess what, Scott?
Over a hundred people were killed, died because of torture.
And there are other problems with the attempt to at least portray this as an effort to reach out to the apples at the bottom of the barrel.
Does that sound familiar?
Like your apple grape?
Okay, they're going to look at the people who, you know, the people who waterboarded 183 times when the Department of Justice said, well, you shouldn't waterboard over, say, 173 times.
Now, give me a break.
Now, they may pursue, they may start out that way, Scott, but as night follows the day, the people who are so accused will say, well, look, I was following directions from A, B, and C. You better ask them.
A, B, and C will say, D, C, D, and E, and it'll go right up to the people who were the torturers in chief, and their names are Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.
So the hope is basically that these CIA guys will all start flipping and pointing their fingers at Kofor Black, and then he'll point his fingers at George Tenet, and then he'll point his fingers at David Addington and Dick Cheney, and we'll just have all these former torturers will all turn state's witness on each other, huh?
Well, you know, that's the way it works, you know.
Not many people are still around who lived through Watergate, but I sure did.
I read every sentence in the Washington Post during those years when the Washington Post was a real newspaper, and, you know, people said, oh, Ray, for Pete's sake, Nixon will never be impeached, but it started out this way.
It started out with the small fry, and they took the small fry, and they gave pretty hefty sentences, and whoops, all of a sudden the small fry started singing, and it went right up to the top.
I expect that will happen this time, and so I'm less concerned than many of my colleagues that the thing can be kept to a very narrow interpretation of what people are saying, namely just the CIA guys, not the ones who did the torture that was permitted by the Department of Justice.
Doesn't that sound...
I mean, Scott, I just have to say this, that if people take the trouble to read those four memoranda that President Obama, to his great credit, against all kinds of opposition, you've heard the story, that Panetta, the head of the CIA, four former directors of the CIA, everybody said, no, you can't do this.
Well, he released them anyway with very small redaction.
This is in April he did this, and why did he do that?
Because he knew that if Americans took the trouble to read any of those things, they would be so appalled that they would create the kind of pressure under Obama to allow him to proceed further, to release, for example, the photos and other things.
And guess what, Scott, going around the country, talking to this or that group, or this or that university, guess how many people have taken the trouble to go to the ACLU website — it was the ACLU suit that released these memos — and go to the ACLU website and download just one of those memos and read any of it?
I'm afraid to know the answer to that.
Hardly anyone.
And so I think what Obama is counting on is, you know, he's saying, this is my calculation of how he's looking at this.
Look, I've got really big fish to fry — healthcare, you know, pollution, global warming, wars.
I'll get to this other stuff.
But meanwhile, you know, I, Barack Obama, I really don't know if Americans really give a hoot, okay?
I don't know if they really care.
So I'm going to release these memos to them and see how they react.
And if they don't take the trouble to read them, well, that's sent a message to me.
And if they do take the trouble, if they raise holy hell about it, well, that's what I'm talking about when I say, make me do it, you know?
So maybe this, you know, we're talking about April, those four memos, maybe this, maybe the CIA IG report, which, after all, is — John Helgerson gave me my exceptional service award when I retired.
I mean, I know these guys.
Helgerson did a good job, and he was ostracized by the rest of the agency.
And as you know, the date of his report was 7 May 2004.
Now, if my math is correct, that's five years plus ago.
So finally, it's out.
And it's heavily redacted, but it's very easy to read between the lines, literally, in this case.
And it's a very damning report.
And I don't think that Eric Holder or John Durham, who's been put on this, will be able to delimit it to just a few bad apples at the bottom of the barrel.
It's patently clear that the bad apples, the worst ones, that were at the very top of the barrel and the ooze from their fouling that barrel contaminated — well, contaminated not only the people at the bottom, but the people almost at the top.
People like Rumsfeld, people like Powell, people like Condoleezza Rice, people like the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Byers, who's still content he didn't know anything about it when his name is on the memo that the president issued permitting torture.
You know, I'll say it one more time for those listeners who haven't heard me say this before.
There is a smoking gun out there, folks.
It's a presidential memorandum dated 7 February 2002.
Look it up on your — put it onto your URL.
It starts out — the subject starts out, quote, humane treatment of Al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees.
That's the title.
But the text says, forget about Geneva.
Geneva is exempt as far as these folks are concerned.
And we will treat them, quote, humanely, comma, as appropriate, comma, and as consistent with military necessity, period, end quote.
That's not what Geneva says, and that was the carte blanche to allow all this thing to happen.
Well, now, in your article that's on antiwar.com today — again, it's called Closing In on the Torturers — you mention the infamous butcher, Harry Truman, who signed the National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA, among other things, and included those magic words that, I think, you don't have to be David Addington to conclude, say that the president, through, you know, using his CIA agents as his proxies, may break the law and do what they want.
That's why it's covert action, because it's illegal.
So at some point it seems like that would be the basic defense of the CIA agents, right?
Is that, yeah, look, the whole thing is a crime, but Harry Truman legalized it back then, so, you know, go argue with history.
Well, they'd be on very thin ground there.
It is true, for your listeners, that one sentence inserted into the National Security Act of 1947, which created not only the CIA, but the Defense Department, the Air Force, lots of other big things.
Okay, that one sentence, after it got talking about, you know, what the real functions of the CIA were, analyzing all kinds of information in a central place, therefore a central intelligence agency, and being able to speak the truth without fear or favor, namely, not being under the Pentagon, not being on the State Department, that kind of thing, then there's this one sentence inserted in there, which says, the director of central intelligence shall perform such other functions and duties as the president shall, from time to time, direct.
Now, that gives the president pretty much carte blanche, depending on who he or she is, to use the CIA as his or her personal gestapo, and I use that word advisedly.
There's no check on that, and an unscrupulous president like George W. Bush did precisely that.
All he needs is the cooperation of sycophants like George Tenet and a Congress that prefers to see no evil, and that's what we had, a Congress that was completely derelict in its duty for oversight, and so that's what you get.
You get wars of aggression, and you get the accumulated evils that Nuremberg said inevitably flow from a war of aggression, you know, torture, kidnapping, putting people in black holes without telling their wives or their children, much less the Red Cross, all these kinds of things in violation of international and national law.
So there's a real conflict here.
That sentence is in the National Security Act of 1947, but there are laws, four of them, four domestic laws and four international laws.
Look up what Scott Horton has been saying about that, the other Scott Horton, and you'll see that the president is still not free to violate the law, statutes or international law or the Constitution, with that as an escape clause.
He can't do it.
Well, now, I've got to tell you, I'm glad to hear your more positive interpretation.
I guess the other Scott Horton, I talked to him on the show yesterday, or the day before yesterday, and he's, you know, I think still a little bit hopeful, too, that this could actually go somewhere, but he still calls it the modified, limited hangout, you know, as you described, the kind of deliberately targeting the lowest guys on the chain.
But it seems like the public debate on this issue, Ray, is stuck between a modified, limited hangout, or to whatever degree you think that's an appropriate way to call this investigation, on the one hand, and a bunch of faux outrage on the right saying, you know, this is a big distraction and we have to look forward and how dare you persecute our heroic CIA officers who, after all, we're only trying to save all of our lives.
The debate is already between, you know, neither position I would take, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Well, let me address the modified, limited hangout first.
Again, I'm constantly reminded that no one anymore is as old as I am, and very few remember the dicta from Watergate, but this was John Ehrlichman, if memory serves, saying to President Nixon in one of the recorded conversations, look, we're going to do a modified, limited hangout, and we're not going to let it all hang out, okay?
Well, that's the way they started in Watergate, and so I think Scott Horton, the lawyer, is dead right on, as he always is, and that's the way it starts.
But guess what?
Look what happened in Watergate.
The modified, limited hangout, as soon as people started being jailed for substantial sentences, that quickly unraveled, and before you knew it, you had people like John Dean coming forward and people confessing to what really happened, and that's what I, you know, I may be too hopeful.
You know, I have to confess I was much too hopeful in thinking that Leon Panetta had more integrity than he does.
But I think on this one, once they start pulling one of these strings, the whole thing's going to unravel, and I noticed that Scott Horton, the lawyer, that after he talked with you, he's written some things pointing out, as I noticed when I read Eric Holder's statement, that contrary to what everyone else is saying, including Glenn Greenwald, by the way, it is not, the investigation is not limited to the intelligence community, and the key phraseology in there is, in good faith.
And I think it's sort of like a...
Yeah, he told me that means the door is left open to, for example, any tortures that were going on before the cover-up memos were issued, after the fact, in August of 2002, they'd been torturing people since the early spring.
And so all of those acts would not be protected, he said.
That's right, and also, if it can be demonstrated, and again, I'm no lawyer, but I know Scott has said this, if it can be demonstrated that those legal briefs, outrageous as they are, were ordered up by the president, and most certainly Cheney, to justify their intention to do these crimes, and it is easily proven, actually, and we'll see some more of those documents coming out, then there is no good faith.
Then John Yoo, and David Addington, and Bradbury, and the rest of them, they were just doing what bad lawyers do for the mafia, and that does not excuse the decisions made by, quote, the decider, or the vice decider, Dick Cheney.
So once it's established that these opinions were not given in good faith, then you get down to the guys at the bottom.
How about them?
You know?
How about them?
Well, can they argue that, well, we thought it was a good faith?
Yeah, I don't know.
What I will say is this, that Nuremberg made a very, very significant decision in saying that the defense that was adduced by Nazi types, saying, I was only following orders, right?
You know, that didn't wash.
That was not an adequate defense.
Now, look at those Nazis.
Look at those fellows that were working for the SS or the Gestapo, you know?
Suppose they disobeyed orders, you know?
Put yourself in their position.
If they disobeyed orders, they would be shot in the head, or at least thrown into prison, okay?
So they had a pretty potent argument there, and still, that argument was rejected.
Now, how about my former colleagues in the CIA, okay?
Now, they get these orders to do the kinds of things that are now revealed in the IG report, okay?
Now, I've written in the past that anyone from a Judeo-Christian perspective knows that these things are wrong.
You know what, Scott?
I get all kinds of good email from friends who are atheists, and they say, Ray, you're wrong.
Anybody who's human knows those things are wrong.
I'm an atheist.
I have no truck with Judeo-Christians, but I know that's wrong, so please include me in, okay?
My point is simply this, that if you're a human being, you kind of instinctively know you don't do these things to another human being.
That's number one.
Number two is what I started to say before.
My colleagues, my former colleagues, or these folks, these contractors that they went out and recruited, I suppose they said, well, you know, I don't know if we should really order-boil anybody 183 times, you know?
I think that, you know, are they going to be shot in the head?
No, Scott, they're not going to be shot in the head.
You know what, the biggest damage that could happen to them is that their contractor CEOs might get a little angry at them, that they might not get advanced in their contractor hierarchy, or if they're employees of the CIA, they might get a bad fitness report.
Well, you know, that reminds me of the article in the New York Times, I think yesterday, which should have been titled The Banality of Evil, and it was all about how, oh, look, everybody, the way that the people were tortured was very strictly controlled by the bureaucrats, and they made sure to authorize each and every move, and I guess the mood of the article is supposed to be, so it's a little better than the Gestapo or something like that, but of course, all it really read like was, wow, a bunch of little Eichmanns, I hate to use that horrible paraphrase or whatever, at the CIA, sitting there, just like Eichmann, at their little desk, with a typewriter, coming up with justifications for torturing people to death, right?
Yeah.
Well, and how-to manuals for what exactly to do to them.
Yeah, well, those are the four Justice Department memos that I suggest everybody read.
Go to ACLU's white website, just download them and read them.
But you know, there are precedents, you talked about Eichmann, well, you know, there are Nazi documents that justify the deportation of thousands and thousands of Jews in cattle cars which were so overcrowded that many died on the way.
The justification read something like this, we only have the three trains that we can send to the east because the others all have to bring weapons and soldiers there, okay?
Now we have so many Jews, we have to stick them in these three trains.
Oh no.
We make them stop, we make them stop every eight hours and they can get out and they can breathe the air, and the ones that don't make it back in because they can't do it physically, well, they are shot in the head, so they die instantaneously, so there's no torture there.
Those things read that way, Scott.
Right, we're consistent with military necessity, we will respect their human dignity, right?
Something like that.
You know, so you read these things, you read the IG report and most particularly read the text that comes under Department of Justice letterhead.
It's got to be the most disgraceful text ever put under Department of Justice letterhead.
And so my point simply is this, that Americans need to get involved now.
There's an even chance that not only Durham, but I think Congress needs to get involved because what is needed is the kind of investigation that was waged by the two committees in Congress in the mid-70s, the Pike Committee in the House and the Frank Church Committee in the Senate, because what they did, they took their time and they went into an investigation of what CIA had been doing since the 50s and 60s, they came up with all this assassination stuff and wiretapping and all that kind of thing, and they were responsible for laws that were, again, that were introduced to restrict this.
The FISA law came out of that process, that's the one that restricts the eavesdropping without a court warrant, and the assassination executive memorandum from Gerald Ford that came out of that process.
Well, again, Bush and Cheney have both admitted on TV, yes, I ordered this torture regime.
They both bragged about it, specifically in the case of Katani down there at Guantanamo Bay, and I think probably in context of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Sheikh, something like that.
But they've both on TV said, hell yeah, I did it, what?
And, in fact, Bush said the same thing about the, as we know, millions of violations of the FISA statute.
Yeah, he did that on the FISA thing, saying he approved that 30 times.
Now, one has to be a little bit more careful.
Both Cheney and Bush have admitted that they authorized waterboarding.
And, of course, the big dispute is whether waterboarding is torture.
Well, waterboarding, to limit your purview to waterboarding, is to do a disservice to this whole business, because when you read the IG report or those Department of Justice memos, you could see that torture was handled in all manner of ways.
Sleep deprivation.
You know, here's his Department of Justice lawyers.
Well, we have reviewed the literature.
There isn't much on sleep deprivation, and we've talked to your medical people, and the guideline would be 11 days maximum.
If you keep people awake more than 11 days, then there's a chance there could be major organ failure, and that could be tantamount to getting close to maybe almost torture.
These things are so banal and so reprehensible that once the American people learn about these things, and I compliment you and others in the alternative media that's trying to get the word out, once they learn about it, I have a basic trust in the American people's good sense that they will rise to the occasion, and particularly if John Conyers and Patrick Leahy do the kinds of things that those gutsy Democratic senators and representatives did in 1975, can bring hearings to being, and make people testify under oath, because then it will all wash out.
People will be informed as to what happened in a convincing way, and we get the stuff behind us, and then we can do the kinds of things that Harry Truman suggested after he was president.
Namely, hey, this is not the CIA that I set up.
Where do we go overthrowing governments and doing all manner of other things?
That's not what I intended.
And that goes back to that one sentence in the National Security Act, and there's a history behind that that we don't have time to go into right now.
Well, I want to focus on two things that you did bring up here, and I think that, you know, if the end of this interview really is to try to get listeners to, I don't know, call their congressman for a change or something, then we should focus on these two extremely important points.
The first, and which you've already mentioned both of them, the first is that the vast majority of these people, on any sort of second examination, have turned out to be innocent.
Less Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh and a couple of others.
Almost all of these guys, the only reason they're in there is because they tortured somebody else into pointing the finger at them or something, and they're almost entirely innocent, as we know from the habeas corpus hearings.
Every time one of these guys gets a chance before a federal judge, he's on the next boat home.
And secondly, there were murders committed against people who were bound and shackled and helpless, unable to fight back, in custody of American intelligence and military forces who were tortured to death.
That's a crime, right?
That's against the law or something?
No.
It's against U.S. criminal law, namely the War Crimes Act of 1996, passed by a predominantly Republican Congress, signed into law, and you know, the interesting thing about that one, Scott, is that one provides for the stiffest of penalties if someone dies in your custody.
And the stiffest of penalties, of course, is the capital punishment, is execution.
So I sort of got into this article in a kind of different sort of way by suggesting that George Tenet and Don Rumsfeld are going to end up in prison, and if they end up in prison, they'll be lucky.
You know why?
Because it's demonstrably true that people died in their custody, and that the punishment for that, the preferred sentence for that under the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996, is execution, is the death penalty when someone dies, and that is the sentence of choice.
So if they end up in prison, that will be because some judge was lenient, because he could stick it to them in terms of capital punishment.
And you know, you see how that's supposed to work, right?
Is that we're America, the land of liberty and the Bill of Rights, and we don't, our government does not torture people.
So we can have as many death penalty war crime statutes on the books as you can invent, and it's fine, because we're leading by example.
That's not the way you do things.
And yet, no, here we are in 2009, Ray, and you're saying, ah, sorry, these laws have been broken by politicians in our previous government and their appointees and their lawyers.
Well, you know, Scott, that's a really good point, and let me just add a little detail here, which might shock some of your listeners.
When the Department of Justice was going to justify, so to speak, this kind of activity, they needed a memo that the president would sign, and Colin Powell objected to the notion that his army would be torturing people.
He objected for all of about five days, and then he decided, well, it wasn't worth objecting anymore.
Well, what happened was that David Addington, the lawyer for the vice president, drafted a memorandum, which Alberto Gonzalez finally signed.
It's dated January 25, 2002.
Look at that.
It's right available, and it's a PDF, original format.
And what it said was this.
Mr. President, we think Geneva is quaint and obsolete, and you don't have to bother about Geneva.
You can just determine that Geneva doesn't apply, but we have to tell you, Mr. President, as your lawyers, that there is this War Crimes Act of 1996, and actually, Mr. President, that has really stiff penalties, and actually including death if some detainee dies.
But we think, and this is the language, it's incredible.
We think, quote, there is a reasonable basis in law, end quote, that you, Mr. President, can escape severe penalties if at some point in the future some mean-spirited prosecutor or special counsel proceeds against you.
Now, that is mafia lawyer language.
How much can you do?
Well, we're pretty sure you can do anything you want, even though not only international and not only the Geneva Conventions, but the War Crimes Act of 1996 has very stiff penalties, Mr. President, including death, but there's a reasonable basis in law that you can escape that.
Wow.
It's right out there.
25 January, 2002, less than two weeks later came that February 7th memorandum, which the Senate Armed Services Committee now has decided, quote, open the door, end quote, to subsequent torture.
All right, Ray, let me change the subject with you for the last couple of minutes here.
How soon should the United States military completely leave Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan?
About five years ago.
The military is the problem, Scott.
You know, it boggles my mind to look at what's being said.
It's as though Vietnam never happened.
It's as though people have never read Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly from Troy to Vietnam.
It's as though people have no sense, no context of what it is that's going on there in those far off lands.
Now, Iraq, Iraq's going to be a big problem for us in the future.
OK, why?
Because the surge, the surge worked only insofar as its main purpose was devised, and that was to give Dick Cheney and George Bush two years to get out of town without losing Iraq, without Iraq falling completely apart.
Mark my words, as the U.S. troops leave, we're going to see more and more violence there.
And that could have all happened two years ago.
And so here we are sacrificing 1,500 U.S. forces to postpone the inevitable withdrawal with violence for two years.
Now, as far as Afghanistan, it's been a complete fake.
You know, I maybe have said this to you before, but Alexander the Great, you know, what made him great?
Well, I'll tell you what made him great.
When he tried to get to China, because he heard there's lots of good stuff there to plunder, he realized he had to go to Afghanistan.
And so he went into Afghanistan.
And guess what happened?
All kinds of militants, insurgents, people who, for some strange reason, didn't like invaders coming into Afghanistan.
They started whittling away at his armies.
They were taking real attrition to his armies.
And so Alexander the Great looked up at those mountains, and he looked at the casualties that were being inflicted.
And he said, you know, this is probably a bad idea.
I'm going to change my mind.
I'm going back to Asia Minor.
That's what made him great.
He had the good sense to change his mind.
Now, these guys, these guys around here, you know, that are advising Obama, my goodness, I just can't see how anybody can follow their advice because they don't know what's going on.
Ain't it funny that Petraeus even sounds like a Roman emperor's name?
I can just see him marching into the Oval Office with his uniform still on a few years from now.
All he needs is the toga.
So it's a fool's errand.
And just to see U.S. kids being killed, like four yesterday, two today.
And, you know, I had one guy come up to me one time and say, well, Mr. McGovern, what's your problem?
We were losing hundreds a week in Vietnam, two or three or four U.S. forces a day.
You know, that's a very small price to pay for the place.
Spoken like a true Republican communist, right?
You got to break a few eggs to make an omelet, don't you know?
That's what Lenin and Republicans believe.
Well, you know, we have to keep our, maintain our position.
And, you know, and by the way, you know, that gas and oil there in Turkmenistan, you know, we have really good projects on the books here to run that pipeline down there into the Indian Ocean.
All that kind of stuff comes into play.
We want to be in there so that we have a position of strength vis-a-vis China, the Soviet Union, the whole sphere.
And what we have to do is turn this over to the Arab League and to the other folks who are willing to negotiate this kind of thing, just as we eventually were forced to do in Vietnam and get the heck out of there.
All right, everybody.
That's Ray McGovern.
You can find what he writes at ConsortiumNews.com and at Original.
Antiwar.com slash McGovern.
And his article up there today is called Closing In on the Tortures.
Thanks again very much for your time.
You're most welcome, Scott.
Appreciate it.