10/01/09 – Joe Lauria – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
May none of the horrible things that I just said reflect on my next guest.
It's Joe Lauria.
He's an investigative reporter with credentials from here all the way over there, and he's been covering the United Nations over the past couple of weeks in their General Assembly meeting.
Hello, Joe.
How are you?
I'm okay, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you showing up today.
So I think you said in your email you've covered how many, 18 of these General Assembly meetings in New York?
That's correct.
The first one was 1990, H. W. Bush.
And now, and you said that this is, I don't want to paraphrase you wrong, this is something out of all those.
This is one of the most interesting, maybe the most interesting one I've ever covered.
Of course, you know, the others are all a blur.
They sort of meld into each other.
Maybe 10 years from now, or maybe next year, I will have forgotten this one.
But it being fresh in my mind because of two main reasons I think it's interesting is the issues, there were real issues discussed here, and that was just a coincidence that happened while some important things were going on, and the personalities.
The main issues were Iran, of course, this is coming to a head, and it came to a head while we were here, and climate change, which has become a very urgent matter.
I never heard world leaders, even Sarkozy and Brown, speaking with such clarity and urgency about this problem.
The Middle East peace process and nuclear nonproliferation were also related issues where there was actually a substantial discussion going on.
And then of course you had Barack Obama's first appearance here, and the first appearance of Muammar Gaddafi, which was the most talked about event of the entire week.
So I don't know where you want me to start.
Personalities or substance?
Also, Zalaya, too.
By the way, the situation in Honduras with Zalaya was a big issue.
Yeah, well, actually, why don't you start with that?
Because that's something that really I know the least about.
What I know for a fact is it ought to be none of America's business, but I bet I couldn't assume that that's actually the case this time.
Shouldn't it be a U.S. business what's going on in Honduras?
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I think nothing going on in any country is America's business, basically, but I guess it'd be safe to say that we're intervening in there on one side or the other, yeah?
Well, I mean, intervening is not intervening other than diplomatically, and I think that here's the issue.
You had an elected president.
His term is ending.
He can't run again in January.
He has talked about perhaps changing the Constitution so that the presidency can be extended.
In other words, it's a term limit of one term to be extended.
And he asked for a referendum to be held about whether the people would like to have a constitutional convention to discuss this, and not to change the law, not to have a constitutional convention, whether there was a popular desire for this.
The Supreme Court of the country ruled according to their Constitution that only the Congress or their parliament can hold such a referendum the president's executive branch can't call for it.
So technically, he was out of bounds asking for that.
They used that as a technicality in the middle of the night to go in and grab this guy in his pajamas at gunpoint, put him in, drive him to the airport, and dump him in El Salvador just at the airport there.
All right, well, let me stop you right there, because I want to ask you a little bit about that technicality.
On one hand, well, I just want to narrow it down, basically.
I was under the impression that the referendum that was to come up to decide whether the president would be able to run for more terms was going to be at the same time as the election for the next president.
I mean, there's already a term limit.
So the president that was proposing the extension of the term limit could not have benefited directly from it.
Right, that's correct.
I don't know if it's going to be the exact same time.
Is that correct?
I'm not sure it's going to be the exact same time, but it is true that he himself was not going to run again.
He wanted to just change it for a future president.
That's what I understand.
That's what he says anyway.
You know, there's a lot of spew back and forth about this.
The issue is, I think he did something wrong, but there's obviously, there are other ways to go about this.
If, in fact, this was such a high crime and misdemeanor, there are impeachment processes in that Constitution that were not invoked.
You don't go to the middle of the night and throw a guy out in a military coup, even if the military didn't stay in power and they handed it over to this caretaker government.
This is fundamentally wrong, and I think that the United States should take a stand there.
I mean, how many times has the United States in recent history, since the war and before that, intervened in America and then the other way, to overthrow a democratically elected government, like Allende in Chile, and installed military dictatorships to recover some of the worst governments we've seen in post-war history?
Well, the question was how many times.
I don't think anybody can count that high.
You know what I'm saying?
So, I think that they should intervene.
Should they intervene militarily to restore the government?
Well, that would be a bit extreme, but I think he needs to be defended, and I think that's what happened here.
The UN did not allow the caretaker government to send their representative to speak here, and the fact was that the South African president, who I interviewed afterward, made an interesting point in his speech.
He stood up for the fact that the UN should not recognize any governments that come to power unconstitutionally, and there are many governments that are recognized.
The principle of the UN membership is sovereignty, and it really doesn't matter how you got it and how you maintain it, as long as you're a sovereign and you're recognized by enough countries that are on there, or by de facto, you become the head of the government.
I mean, Gaddafi came to power by a coup, and he's the leader, and he spoke here, and there are others.
In Madagascar, there was a similar coup that happened a few months ago, and the new guy, the coup leader, was allowed to speak here, and he was complaining about that.
That's a whole other thing.
You could probably do a whole show on just a movement, whether the UN should have standards and only democracy should belong.
I mean, if you want to join the European Union as a country, you have to go through a whole series of changes to your domestic law before you can.
There are no such hurdles like that.
You just have to be a sovereign here to join.
Others feel that you need even the worst kinds of leaders to come here.
This is a neutral area where they could be talked to and could be met, so there's a usefulness of having them come here, and that brings me to Gaddafi I'd like to talk about, because that speech was just quite extraordinary, one hour and twenty-six minute speech, a fifteen minute limit, because no one would stop him.
At one point, a meek clerk brought up a note to him to tell him that he had gone over the limit.
That was about an hour into the thing, and he just threw that paper away, and at one point he flipped a booklet up towards the Secretary General, and he was said to have ripped the U.N. charter, but I never actually saw that, but he was handling it roughly, and his main attack on the charter was that the veto powers of the Security Council make it an undemocratic institution, which reflects the undemocratic nature of world power in the U.N., and he wants that changed, and he said a whole bunch of things, but the histronics, of course, is what people focused on.
It was funny.
It was outrageous.
Yeah, he brought up the Kennedy assassination, right?
He wanted investigations into the Kennedy, why are they investigating the Security Council Hariri assassination in Lebanon, and not the Kennedy assassination?
And he talked about, you know, the swine flu being a biological weapon, and he said a few things that were out there, but he said things also that are historically true, that need to be heard, but are never going to be understood or listened to, because Gaddafi is completely dismissed as a madman.
One example is, he simply said that in history, Europeans have treated Jews a lot worse than Arabs have, and I think that if you look at the record, that has to be true, from the Inquisition to the Russian programs, certainly to Hitler, that same record has not been the case amongst the Arabs, until he said the founding of Israel, and then many of the troubles began.
Not that it was a perfect relationship, but anyway.
So things like that, you know, that maybe nobody ever says, will not be listened to by Gaddafi, and even, you know, he wants to move the U.N. out of New York to Vienna, I mean, he had a lot of interesting and funny things to say, and that was a big highlight, because you just don't get that kind of a performance at the U.N., a very self-important stage, especially on that day.
And it's just, it's kind of sad to me, Joe, that it takes Gaddafi, of all people, to get out there and, you know, so-called speak truth to power, or whatever, is there nobody else?
Right, he talked about America.
Or Ahmadinejad, you know, a couple of villains in their own right, no matter what America's position against them is.
Well, you know, I mean, he talked about America's, all of America's wars, he went through all of them, from the post-war period, in Vietnam and in Latin America and whatnot, and he talked about how Reagan told him he would send poison roses to him, meaning the cruise missiles, one of them which killed it off his baby, if you remember, back in 86.
And he also said that Obama could be president forever, for as long as he's concerned, because he believes he'll go back to square one once he leaves.
So he got on the bandwagon, the Obama bandwagon, which I will tell you now a little bit about Obama, is that he, you know, he's a rock star, and everybody was going crazy whenever he appeared.
I was standing outside the Security Council when he came out with Gordon Brown, and there was this hush in the background of women, women staff, diplomats, whoever they were, imagine them walking.
I thought he was walking, I'm going to admit this on the air, because I always thought he was walking with Brown to the microphones that are set up outside the Security Council.
He walked right by me, and he wasn't stopping, so I didn't think I could ask a substantial question at that point.
Hopefully, I would, or my colleagues would, when he went to the mic.
So I guess, how do you find the, how do you like the UN so far, Mr. President, when you said that we're having a wonderful time, but I didn't believe him?
I could have asked him something more substantial about Iran, but I just figured he kept walking.
So Obama did not speak to the press there, but his speech was, you know, well-delivered, but very short in details, particularly on climate change, which was the focus of this, one of the main focuses of this General Summit, because Ban Ki-moon is a very, very weak and inconsequential Secretary General that people have a lot of respect for.
He made climate change his issue, and that's a good one for a Secretary General.
Hold on a second there with the climate change.
I'd like to let you address that, but I wanted to ask you a little bit about the U.S. relationship, and for that matter, the British relationship with Libya.
Of course, there's all this controversy that the only reason they let the Lockerbie bomber go, or at least the convicted Lockerbie bomber, I don't really know the story behind that, I'd love to know it, but anyway, that the only reason they let him go was because the British wanted to work this oil deal with the Libyans, and of course, there's also a whole narrative about how the only reason that Qaddafi became a good guy and started sucking up to the West and cooperating with the West is because we taught him a lesson by bombing Iraq, and he knew not to mess with us after that, but then I remember Gary Hart wrote a thing for, I guess it was the New York Times Magazine, about how Qaddafi had been trying to suck up to the West since 1996, I believe it was, and the U.S. just refused to allow him into the fold, or however exactly you define that, and then finally Bush let him in because he needed to say that something was an accomplishment from the Iraq war, so they made up that one.
I just wonder, I guess, just tell us, what is the relationship between the U.S., Britain, and Libya as it stands right now?
Well, it was shortly after the invasion of Iraq when the WMD did not materialize that the Libyans announced they had a weapons of mass destruction program, and they were going to give it up.
That was a, you know, the Brits and the Americans were really trying to sell that as a consequence of the invasion of Iraq, and it may have had something to do with that, but certainly that wasn't a substitute for finding the WMD in Iraq.
I mean, it was a joke that they thought people were going to buy that, but the relationship changed there, and something, and then not long after that, a lot of British companies started showing up in Iraq, in Libya, rather, and started making oil deals, so this has been a restitution of the relationship between the West and Libya, and the Rockabee thing, this guy's conviction, there are a lot of questions, by any means, the next slide I'm going to cover that story, but I do know that there's a lot of questions about his conviction, about the testimony of this tailor, or this clothing salesman in Malta, about whether he actually sold this jacket to the bomber's name, eluding me at the moment, the convicted bomber, and he was based on this clothing found amongst debris, that they convicted this guy, it's very flimsy, as far as I can tell, so maybe that was a politically driven conviction, and now it was a politically driven, or economically driven, release.
But anyway, that was a big thing about whether Brown and Gaddafi would actually meet and shake hands, they were supposed to meet in the Security Council the next day, when Obama chaired a Security Council meeting about nonproliferation, but he just flew home that night, Gaddafi, he had it here at the U.S., the whole thing with his tent, which became a sideshow.
Well, now, before we get to climate change, let me ask you one more thing, too, I want to get your opinion on the form of the thing, you mentioned that Gaddafi railed against the Security Council and their veto power, which basically that's the Allies from the end of World War II, and I guess they have a rotating member or whatever, and if they vote no, then that's vetoing the plans of the rest.
So there's that, but also, I mean, isn't basically the form of the UN, I mean, all the baby blue and everything else aside, basically what it is, is it's kind of a global delegation of the war power, of the superpower, or at least the major powers on Earth, to this International Council, that's what the Security Council is, they're the only ones who can legalize starting a war, and we saw the Bush administration go through the whole charade of at least trying to get the Security Council to authorize his invasion of Iraq, and I just wonder, would the invasion of Iraq been any better if just because France and Russia and Germany agreed about it or something, or is it legitimate to have that kind of authority delegated to something like the United Nations, where France and Russia and America agree they can start a war against some hopeless country like Iraq, for example?
Well, yes, I think just in virtue of what you said, that there are five countries having to decide is better than one.
If one can unilaterally invade and occupy a nation, that's the kind of thing they wanted to do away with.
Stop Hitler marching into Poland, for example.
Yeah, but then again, they use resolutions like, say, 1441, as the excuse to go ahead and start the war.
Saddam Hussein is in violation of UN resolutions, even though the Security Council didn't vote for the war on the second vote, they still were the tripwire for the war, in a sense, weren't they?
No, no, no, no, what you had was, which would copy out, and so they got in a lot of trouble, is an illegal war, illegal in the sense of international law, which there's no way to really enforce.
So the United States, Colin Powell wanted that resolution, Cheney didn't, because he knew they weren't going to get it.
I don't think Rumsfeld was too keen on it.
They came here and they failed.
They didn't, they did whatever they wanted anyway.
That's the issue here.
True, true.
And it wasn't that Britain and France and Germany and Russia opposed that war.
It was very important, because they knew this was going to be a huge mistake.
They also had their own interests in that country with Saddam as well, but they did not approve it.
The U.S. went and did whatever the hell they wanted anyway.
That's a problem for the U.N., it's a problem for the world.
It became a problem for the United States, occupying this country.
And they listened.
You know, things may have been different, but anyway, that's the reason for having that, and this is exactly what Gaddafi brought up at this period.
A lot of the American wars, like Vietnam and whatnot, all the Latin American interventions were illegal because the Security Council never authorized any of these operations.
So what good is the U.N.?
I mean, that's the question, so what's debated here?
Does it do a lot of good in a lot of areas?
We could talk for hours about the things it does, humanitarian work, postal union, and aviation, and all the things that are hidden that the U.N. does, that it hasn't done, that it's given to the world, that people don't appreciate.
But as far as that, the war-making power, you're right, those five countries can block or authorize a military intervention.
For example, the first Gulf War, in 1991, was authorized by the Security Council.
Only Yemen and Cuba are two non-permanent members that are opposed.
So the first Bush, Bush Sr., the emperor, the fig leaf, the authority of the U.N. gave him to get Saddam out of Kuwait, because Saddam had unilaterally invaded another country, which went against the Charter, so it was hard to argue against that.
But that's exactly what Bush's son did to Iraq, unilaterally invaded a country.
Yeah, you know, I think you really are on to something when you use the term fig leaf there, because it seems like this is especially how moderate, so-called democratic types can get on board for the war, is by making it a baby-blue humanitarian mission and this kind of thing, and it becomes, the American empire is not the American empire, it's the global community of friendship.
Well, you just brought up, there was a debate here about, in August, with Norm Tromsky was invited here and a few others to argue against this idea of humanitarian intervention, or responsibility to protect.
And the argument from me, from Tromsky, and the former president of the General Assembly, Father Miguel Descoto Brockman, who was a former foreign minister of Nicaragua, was that these kinds of interventions are covers for actual neo-colonial, neo-imperial wars and interventions to grab resources and strategic reasons and whatnot.
It's a very very interesting debate, but the UN General Assembly has approved this, but nobody is going to really do it.
I mean, there have been a couple of examples of where people say this has happened, one being Vietnam intervening in Cambodia in 1979 to stop the Pol Pot genocide there, but there aren't too many cases where anybody could really see where there was a military intervention to take place to stop a live killing going on, Rwanda being the key case where there was no real interest there, so they let the killings go on.
In response to that, they came up with the UN with this responsibility to protect, it's a doctrine, and you know, will it be implemented?
That's the other question, and when it does get implemented, it could be a mixture of reasons.
The US intervened in Serbia to end that war, and some people think it helped the Germans' foreign policy out, and other interests, and others said just to stop the killing could be a mixture of the two.
It's a really murky area, but going back to climate change...
Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
I just want to say on climate change that unlike issues like racism or sexism that have been with us for millennia and make progress when people start to talk about it, it becomes conscious that this is an issue, and there's public pressure put on people not to behave in these ways and to drop these attitudes, that could take a long time.
Climate change is an issue that needs immediate action from government, and what this big climate change summit at the head of state level did here was simply for the first time bring heads of government and state together, over a hundred, to talk about it, and that's from the PR point of view, from the public consciousness point of view, that's a great thing, but it's not enough because this problem has gone a lot quicker than even the scientists a few years ago thought in terms of melting ice caps and whatnot.
And the essential element here goes it's an historical problem, going back to the beginning of industrialization in Europe and taking the resources and labor in the form of slavery sometime from developing countries, from Africa and from Asia, to build up a Western industrialized civilization, taking those resources and spewing them into the air that have caused now, over these couple of centuries, this global climate crisis, and the only way now to stop it is if the West is to convince the developing countries, who now are going to their own industrialization, industrial revolutions, not to do it the way the West did, with burning carbon.
And the poor country is saying, well, you ripped us off all this time, and now you tell us we can't develop the way you did?
So, if you want us to use alternative energies, you've got to help us pay.
In other words, it's almost like restitution.
Pay us back, which you ripped us off from for all those centuries to make you powerfully rich, which in the process you poisoned the atmosphere, and we're all choking now.
And if you pay us now, we will develop those alternative energies.
Otherwise, we have to develop, it's the priority of our nation.
The African Union has asked for $67 billion a year, and the Western governments don't want to do that.
And that's the real problem of getting a climate change deal.
And the big elephant in the room here is the American business community, because the Senate is holding up legislation that would give some targets for reduction of admissions, and a lot of the Senators, of course, are influenced, shall I say, by business.
And business doesn't want these kinds of reductions.
In general, I'm speaking of, some companies are getting on board.
It's starting to see this as becoming a public relations issue for them.
But for the most part, growth, economic growth and expansion versus saving the climate is at the crux of this thing, and the developing world wants to be paid to develop alternatively, and the American business community is holding up American action that could lead the way.
So we're at a very big crisis at this point.
And I have to say, people like Sarkozy made a really strong speech, and Brown about the urgency of dealing with this matter, even more so than Obama.
Obama really didn't come forward as strong as he should have, I thought, on the climate.
Those are the big issues that we have here at the UN.
Let me ask you this, though, seriously, because I have a real concern about this, which is you turn anything over to politicians, they're going to do something evil.
And I never did really know all the details, but wasn't it the case that the old Kyoto Treaty wanted to basically create a new currency that would be traded among governments and among giant corporations, multinational corporations, these pollution credits?
I mean, this sounds to me like an absolute nightmare, no matter whether you're a regular person in America or whether you're a regular person in Zimbabwe.
Look, there's been many, many people and governments coming up with different proposals to try to solve this thing.
There may have been one of them, I don't really remember that part of it, frankly.
And the Kyoto Treaty is expiring and it needs to be replaced in 2012, and that's why they're having this big summit in Copenhagen to try to get a new treaty.
And this meeting of the UN was to try to help bring that about.
It doesn't look like it's going to happen.
I mean, how to arrange, how to solve this thing is, it's very, very urgent.
And, you know, the other urgent issue we're going to talk about is Iran and the foreign ministers of the permanent members ahead of this meeting that happened in Geneva today, where the Iranians apparently agreed to talk again and they may cut some of their own enrichment production and buy more foreign enriched fuel for civilian reactors.
And this could be a big breakthrough, but the Iranians are playing a lot of games about their program and with the IAEA, whether they can come and inspect what they can do or not.
So this is a huge crisis that is boiling and it could get ugly in the next year or so if there isn't some kind of diplomatic solution here in terms of military action.
Well, you know, we've been covering this in depth on the show.
We had Gareth Porter on in the first hour today and talked with Scott Ritter about it the day before yesterday.
And, you know, it seems to me, as Scott Ritter said, to be a tempest in a teapot.
They're talking about what is, in fact, not even really a technical violation of a small subsection of their subsidiary agreements and so forth.
But in the word, when these facts come out of the mouths of Western leaders, they turn out completely different.
Talking about this new facility that was discovered in the mountain in Qom, that was not a violation of the...
Right, because the 3.1, the subsidiary agreement 3.1 that everybody is crying they violated, first of all, it's just a technical issue.
It's not a matter of obstructing the IAEA's ability to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material.
But secondly, their parliament never ratified, most importantly, really, their parliament never ratified the additional protocol or the subsidiary agreements.
They voluntarily went along with the additional protocol during good-faith negotiations, as they were called, with Britain, France, and Germany.
And then they actually made a great offer, I think something along the lines of what you just mentioned, of maybe having the fuel enriched in Europe and brought in, even.
They were willing to compromise that far, and the E3 never responded, due to pressure by Rice and John Bolton.
So, therefore, they withdrew from the... stopped complying with the additional protocol, which was only good-faith measure, and which was never ratified by their parliament.
So it's not binding.
And so they're under the regular safeguards agreement, which says they have six months before they introduce any nuclear material to declare it, and that's what they did.
And you've got to admit, Joe, it's brilliant the way, here, they send a letter to the IAEA saying, hey, here's what we're doing, and then four days later, Barack Obama comes out and says, aha, we caught you, busted.
No, no, no, no.
What happened was, the Americans knew about this, and the Iranians found out the Americans knew about it, and they were going to bring it up.
What's the evidence for that?
Hold on a minute.
Well, I just got sources that have told me that I believe, and therefore, I have other things that I'm working on.
I could tell you, maybe I even know how the Americans found out about it, weeks ago.
I want to know how the Iranians found out the Americans knew about it, because that seems to me like the big spin.
But where's the proof?
First of all, you're not correct about the six months.
They're not telling the truth, the Iranians, about that.
In fact, in the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it stated you only had to notify six months before you introduced the nuclear material into a facility.
That was changed in 1992.
Iran, in 2005, agreed to that change, the change being you have to notify the IAEA when you decide to build a new facility, even before you lay the first brick, or the first foundation.
The reason being, the IAEA needs to go in and help design the building to make it possible for them to then monitor, where to put the cameras, how to get in there.
That's all that's about.
And the Iranians said last year they wouldn't, unilaterally, they would not agree with the 2005 decision anymore, and they wanted to go back to the 1968 agreement that had been changed in 1992.
And under IAEA rules, you cannot have a unilateral decision from either side.
So this is not correct.
The Iranians had to tell them before.
It's a technical issue, but they're not telling the truth about that.
I don't think that's right.
I think you need to refer to Scott Ritter's article in The Guardian about that.
I will.
Because the thing is, the thing that mandates that they notify the IAEA as soon as they lay one brick is part of 3.1, which is not applicable, because they were only going along with it in good faith while they were negotiating with the E3, but it was never ratified by their parliament.
That's a different issue.
That's the additional protocol is a different issue than what we're talking about.
You're right, they never ratified the additional protocol.
That allows, the additional protocol allows inspectors to go to buildings, non-nuclear facilities, facilities like a nuclear plant where they think maybe it's really a nuclear facility.
You need to sign the additional protocol for the IAEA to go and ask to inspect a non-nuclear facility.
Iran has not done that.
So the inspectors cannot go to another building unless it's a nuclear facility declared.
That's a different issue than what they have to declare.
But how do you know that the Iranians only told the IAEA because they knew they'd been found out by the U.S.?
Why would they tell them, then, if they had a year in advance?
That's what they always do.
That's what they did with Ishafan, and that's what they did with Bushehr, and that's what they did with Natanz.
Why did they tell them?
The timing was very fishy, wasn't it?
They've never been in violation of their safeguards agreement this whole time, according to ElBaradei.
Well, they were in violation this time of not informing them when they started to build this building.
That was a violation.
Well, but the IAEA says that it's only a violation of their safeguards agreement if it inhibits the ability of the IAEA to continue to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material.
And in this case, that has not happened at all, even if 3.1 was still binding.
Well, what I understand is that they had to notify when they made the decision to build this underground facility, and they did not.
So that's a violation.
Now, you know, this is all technical stuff, but it does mean something when you're negotiating.
And we don't know what's happening completely in Geneva, where that's going to go.
I think it's a good sign that there is negotiation, by the way, that the U.S. is taking part.
And we don't have Bolton and Wright anymore rejecting out of hand Amotaki, the foreign minister of Iran, was in a press conference here at the U.N. today that I attended, and he made it clear that they're happy that the Americans are not just taking their proposal and throwing it away, ripping it up.
That's what the Bush administration did.
Soon as Iran said something, they just threw it away.
When Iraq, Saddam, remember the big dossier he provided with all the...
Yep.
12,000 pages.
Yeah.
And in five minutes, he said it was BS.
And they didn't even look at it.
Turned out the guy was right.
There was no delay.
So at least there's a differentiated attitude on the American side, and you're seeing a baby steps on the Iranian side.
And who knows what's really going on.
Maybe they are only interested in civilian.
I mean, but it's very suspicious, because they haven't been completely for it.
Well, I'm sorry, because we're just all out of time now.
But I really appreciate your time on the show.
It's been very interesting.
And I'd like to have you back on to talk more about what happened as far as Palestine.
I'd very much like to know what the General Assembly was talking about there.
But we're just all out of clock here.
Thanks for inviting me on again.
All right.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us, everybody.
That's Joe Loria.
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