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The real word on WMD in Iraq

LECTURE BY SCOTT RITTER, FORMER CHIEF UN WEAPONS INSPECTOR IN IRAQ, AT SIMON'S ROCK COLLEGE OF BARD, GREAT BARRINGTON, MA.
March 26, 2003

This talk was the keynote event of a teach-in on the Iraq war which was approved by 95% of the faculty and student body of Simon's Rock, and included members of local communities in addition to college faculty, staff, and students. The teach-in itself was mostly conducted by a steering committee of students. For the sake of their privacy, and in lieu of my having obtained consent to publish their names prior to distribution, any obvious statements of identity by non-public figures have been removed. Any errors in this document are the responsibility of the transcriber, who was in the audience during the presentation.

(mumbled conversation, background noise, student fiddling with microphone)

Student: Good evening, everyone. (pause) Welcome to Simon's Rock. My name is (deleted), I'm a member of today's teach-in steering committee....(barely-audible cries from the back that the mic is still set wrong).....Sorry. (fiddles) Everyone can hear me now? Ookay. My name is (deleted), I'm a member of today's teach-in steering committee ; for those who weren't able to attend our events throughout the day today, I'd like to reiterate that the purpose of today's teach-in has been to educate, above all else. Our goal has been to provide information in order to create a common basis for intelligent thought and discussion. In order to come to an informed conclusion, individuals must be aware of and educated about as many perspectives surrounding an issue as possible. While it is clearly beyond our ability to provide all perspectives, we hope that people will emerge with more information, which will either bolster whichever position they have taken, or allow them to begin developing an opinion. I believe I speak truthfully when I say today's teach-in has been a great success.

(applause, cheering)

...Both members of the Simon's Rock community, as well as the wider community, interacting and learning from each other, in a variety of workshops and facilitated discussions. Tonight's lecture promises to be the culmination of that. We are very lucky to have Scott Ritter here with us tonight. Most recently, he acted as the chief weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq. He is also the author of a book entitled Endgame: Solving the Iraqi Problem Once and For All. We are pleased that he has agreed to share with us his extensive knowledge about Iraq, and the events leading up to the current situation. Before I ask him to come up, a few brief announcements. There will be a clipboard circulating on which you can write any questions you might wish him to address during the question and answer period that will happen after the lecture. Please put your name after the question and please write legibly. He will get to as many questions as possible. And...um....once that clipboard has gotten to the....back and everyone has seen it, could you please...um....somehow...manage to pass that back up to the front? Um...at the end, I ask that you please stay seated so that we may convey any last-minute instructions or announcements to you. With that, I hope you've had a wonderful day, and please welcome Scott Ritter.

(applause, cheering as Ritter takes the podium)

Ritter: Thanks. (laughs self-consciously) Just one second while we work out the sound, here. (laughs self-consciously again, fiddles with mic) Okay. Everybody can hear me okay? (inaudible nays from the back) No? How 'bout now? (inaudible ayes) Okay.

First of all, thank you very much for the opportunity to come here and speak to you all tonight....I certainly wish I were under different circumstances, but, uh, regardless of where we stand on the issue of what is transpiring in Iraq....right now, I think we should all be united in agreement that this is a very important issue - one that must be considered in an educated manner by all Americans. That there is nothing wrong with informed debate, discussion, and dialogue about issues that weigh on us like this one does.

And...what....(sudden, moderate applause)....and so...what....what I hope....occurs tonight...is that....I will have a discussion with you : a dialogue. I'll... set...the marker on the table there by putting out some facts, some figures, and discussing some issues, but then we're going to...interact. And...uh...for this evening to really mean something, I think it's imperative that we take this interaction with us when we leave this building, because democracy only can succeed when the people of a democracy get engaged, get involved. And it will only function properly when the people who do get involved empower themselves with knowledge and information.

(moderate applause and cheering, which grows)

And it's imperative that this is a continuous process, especially on this issue of war with Iraq. This war is dividing our nation. And I stand before you as somebody who is a living representation of this division. You probably know me as, probably, one of the more vocal critics of war with Iraq - as somebody who has continuously opposed the Bush Administration's policy in regards to confronting Saddam Hussein.

What many of you don't know me as is a former Marine Corps officer - somebody who spent twelve years in the Marines, someone who has trained Marines for combat, somebody who has waged war with my Marines. And I have to tell you that I am deeply divided about what is happening in Iraq as we speak. You see, I watch TV, and I..see the image of a 19 year old lance corporal, and his face reminds me of all of the other nineteen year old lance corporals that I trained...that I led. And it was a privilege and an honor to lead these fine Americans. These are truly a national treasure, and I was...thrilled to have twelve years' experience with these Marines - to lead them in times of peace...and in times of conflict.

And yet I see this nineteen year old Marine. He's nineteen, he's a lance corporal...but the face I saw was that of a thirty three year old, because he's been up for forty eight hours, with less than 1 hour's sleep....and he's guarding a bridge...in a place in Iraq called Nasiriyah . And right down the road from this bridge is a burnt out armored personnel carrier that had taken a...rocket propelled grenade hit the other day, and eight of his comrades died. And he saw them die. These are his buddies, that he trained with. And when you die in war, it's not a video game. You just don't fall down and go.....(softly) ooh......these boys burned to death. Burned to death. Their armored personnel carrier took a direct hit, and before they could leave the personnel carrier, they were incinerated - some of them trapped alive inside the vehicle - and their screams could be heard by everybody.....including this Marine.

Nineteen years old, going on thirty three, staring down the road...at a village, that is supposed to be populated by Iraqis he was told he was coming to liberate. He was told he's in Iraq to liberate these people. He was told they would welcome him with open arms. And yet he's lookin' at this village, and he's confused. He says it's gonna' be a long day ahead. I have no idea who the enemy is. And I have no idea...why they don't like us. Welcome...to war with Iraq.

I'm torn because my loyalty is to that Marine. My loyalty is to the Marine Corps. My loyalty is to my country. As a Marine Corps officer, I took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic ; the same oath that Marine took. The same oath that every single one of the wonderful men and women who wear the uniform of the United States military....took...serving us. And I think a key question is : are they upholding and defending the Constitution of the United States as we speak? Are they engaged in something that represents the true defense of the United States of America? Are they serving with honor? It's a tough question. Because a lot of people say, "you can't be against this war, because that means you're against the troops". And what I'm trying to put out here today is that you can be so for these men and women....so for them, so on their side....and be against this war. In fact, I'm gonna' tell you my bias right up front. If you're for the troops, you have no choice but to be against this war.

(several seconds of prolonged and thunderous cheering)

These are honorable....men and women who have been told to do...a dishonorable thing. This war : why are we at war? It's a question everyone should ask. What is this war about? We have been told, by our Commander in Chief, by the President of the United States, that Iraq represents a threat to our security ; Iraq represents a threat to international peace and security. And this threat is quantified as such : Iraq is a nation that has weapons of mass destruction - chemical weapons, biological weapons, they're working on a nuclear weapons program, and they are developing long-range ballistic missiles which can be used to deliver these weapons to cities around the world. This is in violation of international law ; Iraq has disregarded a series of UN Security Council resolutions calling for their disarmament. Iraq is a rogue state. Compounding this problem is Iraq's known links to international terror. And as Americans we must be concerned by international terror because we were struck in a horrific fashion on September 11, 2001, by the forces of international terror : Osama bin Laden, and Al Qaeda. And we are at war against the forces of terror. We took that war to Afghanistan, we are now taking that war everywhere in the world where terror resides, and Iraq is a nation that is embedded with terrorism. Saddam Hussein is a state sponsor of...terror. And in order to defeat terror, we have to defeat Saddam Hussein. Because Saddam Hussein has a rogue nation, which violates international law to retain weapons of mass destruction, will provide these terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, so that they can, by proxy, attack the United States. There will be another September 11th, we are told, but this time it'll be much worse. Because those who attack us will use weapons of mass destruction, making the events of September 11th pale in comparison, and ladies and gentlemen, I have to tell you, that is a compelling argument.....

If it were true.

And there lies the rub. If that argument were true, I wouldn't be here tonight. I'd be in Iraq....leadin' a company of Marines...into combat. Fighting in defense of my country. Because...I am not a pacifist. I am a warrior, trained in the art of war...who believes that there comes a time and a place to stand up for what one believes in. And I put on the uniform of the United States Marines to defend you. Everyone in Iraq has put on that uniform to defend you. You should realize this. They are committed to give their lives for you. There are 250,000 Americans in the Middle East right now who are prepared to die, dammit, they are dying - for you. What are you willing to do for them...is a key question.

You see, they put on the uniform to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, they didn't put it on to defend....the president. They didn't put it on to defend the White House, Congress, the Pentagon. They didn't put it on to defend any individual, or, building. They put it on to defend a piece of paper. A piece of parchment....the words of which define who we are as a people. It says we are a nation of laws, a nation with ideals, a nation with values. A nation worth fighting for, a nation worth dying for. And if there is a threat out there that puts into question the existence of this nation that we call the United States, then I am prepared to die for that, and so are those others who serve us so proudly. But they're your Marines. They're your soldiers, they're your sailors, they're your airmen.

Because this is not a dictatorship, this is a democracy - the Constitution says we the people of the United States of America. We are the government. We are the ones who are supposed to...decide the course of action - now we elect people to represent us to higher office, and we entrust them to do the right thing, but for a democracy to function we must hold those whom we elect to represent us accountable for what they do in our name. And when we are told by the President of the United States that there is a threat in Iraq worthy of war, we must demand that the President back up this assertion with something that remotely resembles substantive fact - we cannot, on an issue of this gravity, accept at face value what we are being told - that is not democracy. Blind faith in your President is not a democratic virtue. It is a vice that belongs to fascism.

(applause)

We have an obligation as citizens of this country to be critical. Criticism is not a bad thing, it's not even a negative thing. I mean, think about it, if I'm a factory director and I have employees, I have a responsibility to give them... a critique of their performance. I call them in, and I say, "you're doing a great job. You're on work on time, you're doing every other task, you're exceeding expectations." That's a critique! It's a positive critique, but it's still criticism. Or maybe they're not performing at the standards, I'd want to tell them that. That is criticism ; it could be positive ; I want to get them in line.

Never forget this, ladies and gentlemen : the President of the United States is your employee. He works for you. Therefore, you are obligated as his employer to be critical of his actions, to hold him accountable. There's nothing wrong with this. It's what makes this country different from others, it's what makes this system we call the "democratic republic"....special. But if we don't invest ourselves into this concept, if we don't act on this, then it's simply a concept, not reality. We can call ourselves a democratic republic, but maybe we're something different. Maybe we're something more aligned to a benevolent dictatorship. That's not what the United States of America is supposed to stand for.

So let's be critical here for a second : I think we owe it to ourselves ; we have to learn from history. Wouldn't it have been nice if Americans had invested themselves into the democratic process, say, in 1964, when Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, talking about a threat from Vietnam, North Vietnam, and the need to deploy American military forces, that led to even greater commitment of forces, and led to a ten year nightmare called....The Vietnam War? Now eventually we realized we'd made a mistake. I think the time to recognize we made a mistake is up front. It would've saved fifty eight thousand American lives, it would have saved two million Vietnamese lives, it would've saved a trillion dollars of national treasure. It would've saved a great moral blot on the conscience of the United States.

So here we are at war with Iraq. Why are we at war? Iraq has weapons of mass destruction - the statement has been made definitively by the President of the United States, over and over and over again. You hear it in the daily briefings by the Pentagon : "we know Iraq has chemical weapons, we know Iraq has biological weapons." It's stated with all certainty. Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, stood before the Security Council on 5 February, we know they have chemical weapons, he said.

(short pause)

You know, when I hear somebody say they know something, that implies certainty of knowledge. That implies they have facts. Therefore, I'd like them to share those facts with me so that I can share in this certainty of knowledge - that's an important thing in this thing we call democracy. We need to share in the commitment to this course of action. So when I hear the government say they know, I want to know "how do you know this"? "What is this based upon?" And it's sort of curious for me to hear the government say this when I was a weapons inspector in Iraq for seven years! And if you go back and study my history of work in Iraq, I think you'll find that I had a reputation of being somethin' of a hard-nosed inspector. No one could ever say I cut the Iraqis any slack. No one could say that I was "soft on Saddam". In fact, the Iraqi government hated me, because I held them to account, in accordance with international law.

And I have to tell you, my experience as an inspector is as follows : By 1996, we accounted for 90-95% of the chemical, biological, nuclear, and long-range missiles produced by Iraq ; we accounted for 100% of the factories used to produce these weapons, together with their associated production equipment. And we mitigated against concerns that might exist about the unaccounted-for material by putting employees to the most intrusive, effective on-site inspection regime in the history of arms control ; we monitored the totality of Iraq's industrial infrastructure, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, and we never found any evidence of retained chemical or biological weapons, nuclear weapons, or ballistic missiles, or efforts by Iraq to reconstitute a manufacturing base. We qualitatively disarmed Iraq. We fundamentally disarmed Iraq. Iraq did not have a militarily viable weapons of mass destruction capability.

Now some people will say, well, "the President isn't talking about militarily viable weapons of mass destruction. The President is talking about capability which could be turned over to terrorists, and you yourself acknowledge that there's 5-10% unaccounted for." I agree. So let's talk about that 5-10% for a second. Let's talk about biological weapons. That seems to be a favorite of the Bush Administration, I mean, Colin Powell took a lot of time and effort on 5 February of this year to hold up a small vial of white powder before the Security Council and say, "if this vial contained anthrax, one teaspoonful of this could kill thousands." And Colin Powell's right.

But what Colin Powell didn't say - and he alluded to that anthrax attack that took place in October of 2001 - but what he didn't say is that the only nation that produces dry powder anthrax of this concentration is the United States of America. In fact, what he didn't tell you is that the anthrax used to attack the United States in October of 2001 was produced by the Department of Defense in laboratories in the United States. Iraq doesn't produce dry powdered anthrax - if you wanted to be accurate about Iraqi anthrax, you would've held up a bottle (holds up his half-empty bottle of Diet Coke), like this Diet Coke, and you would've said "if this bottle contained liquid bulk anthrax produced by Iraq..."....then he'd have to stop for a second. Because he couldn't go on. Because it can't kill ya.

(scoffs, murmurs of laughter ripple through the audience)

It's useless! I mean, if we've learned anything from biological attack, we know that for the anthrax to be effective, you have to inhale it. It's gotta get in your lungs. That's why dry powder's so important, you see - you produce concentrated anthrax, dry powder, you mill it down to .3-.5 micron size, you put it in the air (sniffs), you breathe it in, and now you're in trouble. Now if you take this liquid bulk anthrax and you find a way to aerosolize it, that is, to get this to spray out so that the droplets themselves are microscopic in size, now you can inhale it - you're in deep trouble. The Iraqis were never able to perfect that. And we know that. This is all the Iraqis produced. Liquid bulk anthrax. Now that's agent. It's not a weapon.

Now we know Iraq put the stuff in ballistic missile warheads, they put it in aerial bombs. And therefore, they're called "biological weapons". But the only way an Iraqi "biological weapon" was gonna kill you is if it hits you on the head. Because if it missed you, and went into the ground, you've got a hole in the ground, the stuff breaks open, you've got sludge there, it's useless.

So the threat is highly exaggerated, but we need to be concerned about it, you see, cause Iraq produced a hell of a lot of this stuff. They had a factory, Al Haqqam state establishment, with massive fermentation capability. Biological weapons are produced through a fermentation process, especially anthrax, you start with this little dish, and you put the bacterium in there, and you put growth media in there - it's the nutrients that the bacterium eat - and then they multiply, and you take that, you put it in a small fermentation unit, you pump in more nutrients, you brew it up until it expands, and then you transfer it into a larger fermenter, and the same thing. It's a process. And it's a tough process - not everybody can do it - you know, um, if biological weapons were so easy to produce, everyone would have one! There's a reason why only the most advanced technological nations, the most advanced nations in the world have biological weapons. They're very difficult to produce. Now Iraq had this big factory, the Al Haqqam state establishment, and they had massive fermentation capability, and they bought a lot of growth media.

Now one of the reasons why we're concerned about Iraq's biological weapons is that they denied having one in 1991, when they were supposed to declare it. Now why'd they deny it? We have to be concerned, there has to be a reason why they would deny this. They didn't admit it until 1995. And the only way they finally admitted it is through the hard work of the inspectors. We went out and investigated this program and found out that they bought.....tons.....of growth media. Two hundred times more than what could be legitimately accounted for in civilian research and development - you see, anybody here who's a doctor or does biological research and development, you use growth media to do basic...uh...work. I mean, I take kids in to the....the doctor for strep throat, they swab, they stick it in - that's growth media. To grow up the strep culture to see if my kids are sick. It's legitimate ; there's nothing wrong with having growth media. But the Iraqis bought a hell of a lot of it. More than you could ever account for for legitimate purposes. So we confronted the Iraqis on it, and they had to acknowledge, "yes, we had a biological program".

Ding.

Now we said, "How much did you produce?"

They said, "Eight and a half...thousand liters of anthrax".

That's a lot.

But you know, it's not enough. Cause we took a look at how much growth media they'd produced, and we said "It doesn't add up. You've got all this growth media, you've got this big factory, and you say you only produced eight and a half thousand liters, how did that happen?"

And the Iraqis said, "well, it's sort of a big factory....uh, we've never done this before....and, um, you know, we sort of turned it on, we started brewing it up, and we screwed up the first batch, so we had to flush it out....we brewed it up again, got up to the third step, but then the thing broke, so we had to flush it out....we could never really do it very effectively." And after being in Iraq for a number of years, I sort of believed them, because they don't do too much effectively when it comes to science.

But weapons inspections isn't about taking the Iraqi claims at face value. Especially when they lie to you ; you have to hold them accountable to provide verifiable evidence. And we said, "where is the growth media?" they said, "we destroyed it." We said, "Well, where is the documentation of the destruction?", they said "it was done on verbal orders ; we just took it out into a field, and....andand dumped it into the ground." And they took us to the field, and we did a core sample, we dug down there, and sure enough, there's evidence of a lot of growth media being dumped in the ground. But we can't tell you how much they dumped there. We don't know. So we said, "Hey, this is unacceptable. We're backing off here. You have to provide documentation that backs up your assertion that you have accounted - destroyed for this material. And until you do, we'll look at this factory, and we believe that the maximum production output based upon growth media, and the size of this factory, and the time that it was in operation is twenty five thousand liters. You have to account for twenty five thousand liters of anthrax.

Now notice what I just said. It's a hypothetical number, made up by the inspectors to represent maximum production potential. When you listen to Colin Powell and the Administration speak, they say that Iraq has twenty five thousand liters of anthrax unaccounted for, and they speak as if it's there, sitting in Iraq, waiting to be used right now. It's a threat to our national existence! Maybe it is. Maybe Iraq pulled the wool over these stupid inspectors' eyes. Maybe they got all that stuff, but you know, as crafty as the Iraqis are, they can't violate the laws of science. I mean, I know Saddam's a tricky guy, but he can not make an apple go up. And he can not make liquid bulk anthrax survive more than three years. You see, after three years, liquid bulk anthrax germinates, and becomes useless sludge. That's three years in ideal storage conditions. Nothing in post-Gulf War Iraq resembles ideal storage conditions.

Now, the last known batch of anthrax produced by Iraq was in 1991. The factory they produced it in was eliminated, blown up by the inspectors in 1996. Now I'm only a simple Marine. But you do the math for me, okay? It's 2003. The factory was blown up in 1996. We monitored it from '91-'96, but let's assume that the inspectors fell asleep on the job and the Iraqis snuck a batch through, and it came out on the day before we blew up the factory.

Three years. That's 1999. They can't have anthrax today, ladies and gentlemen. It's physically impossible for Iraq to have anthrax, unless they built a new factory since 1998. And no evidence has been put forward to sustain that allegation. None whatsoever. Weapons inspectors, when they returned to Iraq in 2002, spent three and a half months scouring Iraq up and down, able to go anywhere anytime with no obstruction, and they found nothing to support the allegation that Iraq had biological weapons. You know, the CIA provided a stack of information on where they thought the anthrax was being produced. It's the same stuff, if you watched TV in the fall of 2002, you saw the repeated briefings by Donald Rumsfeld and his cohorts, where they put up photographs of places in Iraq, and they said : "Iraq is rebuilding this factory, Iraq is rebuilding this factory, and this factory, and all of these are proof that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."

Well, gosh, you know, the inspectors went there, investigated, and came back, and said, "There ain't nothin' going on in those plants now, and there hasn't been anything going on in those plants for four years. There's no evidence."

Anthrax, ladies, and gentlemen : forget it. The President of the United States tells you Iraq has anthrax, Colin Powell tells you Iraq has anthrax, I'm telling you, there is no way that Iraq can have anthrax using the evidence they have cited. If they want to say Iraq has anthrax today, they need to sustain that with substantive fact. Now there are some people who will say, "look, that stuff might be secret. Really sensitive. We might have a spy inside who, if we release this information, will be executed by the Iraqis (as if we care about Iraqi life) - but let's just assume the CIA has a pang of moral conscience and wants to keep their spy alive for a minute by not releasing this, they don't have the release it to the American people. But they do have to release it to Congressional Oversight Committees, in the Senate, and in the House. And they didn't. They didn't present anything that remotely resembled substantive fact to sustain the allegation that Iraq has biological weapons. They didn't sustain the allegation that Iraq has nuclear weapons - if you remember Condoleeza Rice....nice little catch phrase that was repeated over and over again by the objective, impartial American media : "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Iraq, according to our intelligence, can have nuclear weapons within six months, we have to act now to preserve this democracy.

And your Congress bought into that. You want to know why Congress bought into that? Because a week before the vote in October of last year in which Congress abrogated their Constitutional responsibilities and turned over war powers authority to the President of the United States, the critical members on these oversight committees were given briefings by the CIA. These briefings put forward evidence that Iraq had acquired aluminum tubes, which were ideal for the manufacture of centrifuges, that would be used to enrich uranium. Furthermore, they were shown documents that said Iraq had bought 100 tons of enriched yellowcake ore from Niger, in Africa. Why would Iraq be buying this if they didn't have a nuclear weapons program? ; that's the logic that was put out there. We have proof, here are the documents, Iraq bought the uranium. Why would they buy it if they didn't have a nuclear weapons program? And even senators like Dianne Feinstien of California, who was so against this war, sat on the intelligence committee, came out, and said "I have seen compelling evidence that forced me to change my mind. Iraq is a threat," and she voted for war.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, those documents were forgeries. And the CIA knew it when they briefed the senators. Those aluminum pipes have no capability of being used for centrifuges - they're used for rocket motor engines, and the tensile strength and the other specifications of these aluminum tubes will not stand up to the stress put on a centrifuge spinning at 100,000 RPMs, and the Department of Energy - that aspect of the US government responsible for nuclear enrichment technology - said this. But Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon and George Tenet's CIA overruled the Department of Energy, and said, "no, this is used for centrifuges".

The senators were lied to. And the lies they were told changed their votes. And their votes have changed history, because their votes have empowered President Bush to be the sole person possible, or responsible, for making the decision of whether or not we go to war. We, the people of the United States, lost our voice when Congress gave that power to the President.

Nuclear threat. Not chemical weapons - we're told right now that we better be scared because the Marines found three thousand chemical suits and atropine injectors at a hospital in Nasiriyah. This is the smoking gun, Iraq has chemical weapons, the entire Bush case for war has been legitimized.

Let's talk about those chemical suits for a second. Why would the Iraqis have 'em? Let's start with one end of the spectrum : because they have chemical weapons they are planning to use against the United States. You have to take this into consideration. If you're a military professional, waging war, you must consider this a possibility ; hence the need for our troops to wear full chemical/biological protective kit when they go into combat. Has anybody ever worn that stuff? (snorts) It's like wearing a giant rubber raincoat. You are sweating, it's heavy, it's wet-drags you down. Try to wage war - try to do anything - wearing this kind of gear. It exhausts you. It makes you less than efficient in combat. Hence the second reason why Iraq might have that material up there. To put in the minds of the American commanders the potential for Iraq to use chemical and biological weapons, thereby compelling the Americans to wear this heavy equipment, reducing the combat efficiency of the United States military. But that's a little too crafty. I'll ask you another question. In World War Two, were any chemical weapons used by the Germans or the Americans in combat operations? The answer is no. Yet take a look at the equipment that the Germans and the Americans wore into combat : gas masks. Why? It was part of their military doctrine. A doctrine which was developed in World War One, where chemical weapons were used. And so both armies approached this big war having to be prepared for the potential for use by the other side of chemical weapons. That's what we do. Now we're wearing chemical and biological weapons suits into combat. What do you think the Iraqis are thinking? That we might use chemical weapons! We say we don't have 'em! Well they say they don't have 'em!

(short pause)

Why would Iraq have chemical and biological weapons? Because they had developed a military doctrine during the 1980's where they did use chemical weapons, and so did the Iranians. And, you know, they still have tensions with Iran. Why would you have three thousand chemical weapons suits in a hospital, together with injectors? Because it is an emergency reserve supply in case Iraq engages in a conflict in which chemical weapons are used by the other side.

That's why. It's not a smoking gun. And yet it's been broadcast to the American public and the world as though chemical weapons use by Iraq is imminent.

Najaf. That's a name that should ring bells in everybody's head. Not because of its historical links with the Islamic religion, but because recently....it's been all over....Cable News Network and broadcast news. Najaf. The chemical weapons factory at Najaf.

(short pause)

You know the one I'm talking about. The one our troops found. That was gonna be the smoking gun that showed Iraq had chemical weapons and legitimized in one fell swoop the Bush war on Iraq.

Najaf. Chemical weapons factory. Let's talk about that for a sec, because it's important - it sort of brings in this whole thing about the media. What I always ask people to do when they hear something is to take a deep breath, and take a step back. And put on their thinking cap. Najaf. Chemical weapons factory. Where'd it come from? As a former intelligence officer, I always want to know the source. The initiator was a Jerusalem Post reporter embedded in a battalion of the Third Infantry Division. Do your homework, the Jerusalem Post has been one of the biggest cheerleaders of war with Iraq for some time now. The Jerusalem Post reporter passed this report to Fox News.

(short pause ; some of the audience begins to laugh as they realize where this is going.)

Fair and balanced. Fox News broadcast it to the American public as confirmed - cause Fox News called up a senior (unnamed) Pentagon official who said "yes, a chemical weapons factory has been found." Now Fox News said it was so, so Reuters - Wire Service - writes a news story that gets published around the world....quoting Fox News! And now the whole world's repeating the story and it's taken on a life of its own : turn on MSNBC and you've got.... some...old retired general saying (puts on gruff, exaggerated, scratchy voice) "Yeah, they coulda.....chemicalweaponsfactory...it could be a VX nerve agent plant! VX! THE MOST DEADLY SUBSTANCE KNOWN TO MANKIND!"

(short pause ; inevitable laughter peters out)

And yet, he doesn't know a damn thing about VX nerve agent, or how it's produced. I mean, what is a VX nerve agent plant? I mean, we need to be concerned about that cause we're told by the Bush Administration Iraq has VX nerve agent.

(short pause)

Well, they had it. They produced it. But, you know, VX nerve agent - one of the most deadly substances known to mankind - is produced in a modern facility. Industrial facility. And VX nerve agent isn't produced in isolation. What it is is a combination of several precursor chemicals - chemicals that have to be combined to produce VX under specific circumstances, in a specific sequence, a specific industrial process that's very advanced. If everyone could produce VX why doesn't everyone have it? Cause it's hard to produce. Only five nations have ever perfected the technique. And one of 'em is not Iraq. Iraq tried to produce VX - you see, they had to buy the precursor chemicals from abroad, because they don't have the ability to produce them. Some people think they have developed it, but that means you have to have different facilities now, that are producing precursor chemicals that go to this Najaf facility, if it is a VX production plant, and they make VX.

But you know, the only technique Iraq ever perfected on VX is a technique that.... made it up to about 94-95% purity. Now you have to add a stabilizer on top of that to eliminate the proteins - because if you don't eliminate the proteins, the proteins immediately eat down, and neutralize the VX nerve agent. So they put a stabilizer in there, and they got it up to 97% purity. Which isn't good enough....for long-term storage. But...the VX produced by Iraq could survive one to eight days after being mixed. That means that after you produce the VX nerve agent and you have it in your vat, you have to take it to another facility called a munitions filling facility, where you take the VX nerve agent and you put it into the sub-munitions, you put it into the artillery shells, the rocket shells, so that you can fire.

Now, chemical weapons.....they're not very effective. One artillery
round is useless, two is useless - I'm talking about, for military purposes. You know how many chemical rounds - artillery shells - 155 meter artillery shells - you need to put down a militarily viable chemical barrage?

Five to ten thousand.

Five to ten thousand. So if you just think about it, Iraq is going to have a VX nerve agent capability - you we have a Najaf facility, producing VX nerve agent - undetected by weapons inspectors cause we're pretty stupid (murmurs of laughter) - that's producing VX nerve agent - to use it in combat, they have to produce it right up at the moment they want to use it. It's not like you can produce it now and wait a month. If you wait, five, six, seven days, it's useless : you've got to put in a new production batch. So they produce it. Now they've gotta go fill these artillery shells : Two thousand of 'em!....to make it viable. And now, what do you do with the artillery shells? Use it, or lose it. If you hold them in storage, they degrade, they're useless - then you have to start the process all over again. Undetected.

But Iraq has a VX nerve agent capability. We've been told so. And they're gonna use it against us. And Najaf was the factory. The problem with that Najaf factory, though, is what we're talking about here is something that Saddam denies having. In fact, if Saddam is found to have chemical weapons, George Bush wins. That's something we all need to keep in the back of our mind. Remember, we were lied to going into this war, and I'm very concerned there's a potential we'll be lied to going out of this war. If they don't find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they will find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

(short pause)

Najaf. It's one of the most holy cities in Shi'ia - the Shi'ia sect of Islam. The Imam Ali is buried there. The grandson of the prophet Mohammed. There's a cemetery in Najaf where every Shi'ia wants to be buried. They take pilgrimages to this cemetery - it goes for hundreds of miles. Najaf was a city where the Shi'ia rose up against Saddam, in March of 1991, at the end of the Gulf War. The Shi'ia took control of Najaf. Najaf is a city where Saddam came in and brutally suppressed the Shi'ia revolt, slaughtering thousands of the Shi'ia. Najaf is a city where Saddam's agents are all over the place suppressing the Shi'ia constantly. Najaf is not a secure place. Why would you put a chemical weapons factory in Najaf? It doesn't make any sense - But let's say they did it. This is a facility of strategic importance - if the Americans discover this facility, the game's up. The world will line up behind the United States, and Saddam is sunk - his only hope is to hold off the United States while international support builds to stop this war. And now he's in danger, you see, because the Third Infantry Division is hooking in around Najaf, and he's got his chemical weapons factory there! So he's gonna' defend it with.......thirty soldiers? (scattered laughter from audience) Cause that's what the report said, thirty soldiers surrendered, they say, and - without a fight - they were just like "Nope, we give up!"

Now they capture two generals - this is significant, we're told by Fox News - two generals are being interrogated as we speak for what they know.

(short pause)

But Fox didn't tell you that....you know....military industrialization is what drives Iraq. Every factory manager is a general! Doesn't mean he's a general, he's just given a uniform and a rank, and people run around and salute him. (Scattered laughter) Thirty soldiers salute him. And they surrendered - with the general! (Laughter dissipates). Was there any effort?...no, where's the Hammurabi Division, where's the Medina Division, where's the Republican guard that's supposed to fight to the death to defend this site of strategic importance? - They weren't there. Was there any effort to blow the place up, at least put some high explosives in there and (clicks tongue) pop it before the troops come in? Nothin'. Nothin'.

And for two days, this story was out there. Najaf. The chemical factory at Najaf.

(pause)

You know what it was?

(short pause)

Diesel fuel storage.

(scattered laughter)

Diesel Fuel Storage.

That's it.

Ladies and gentlemen, there's no chemical weapons in Iraq. We destroyed their factories, we destroyed their weapons. Oh yeah, we've been told by the President and by Colin Powell that there's a thousand tons of chemical agent unaccounted for. And we presume it exists. Let's talk about that again. Where's that come from? It comes from an Air Force document - Iraqi Air Force document - seized by the inspectors in June 1998, that showed - that...indicated a discrepancy in the accounting by the Iraqi military and the utilization of their chemical weapons during the Iran/Iraq war.

Basically, we had one accounting that showed how many weapons Iraq had used from 1983 to 1988 - and we derived an accounting of chemical agent from that. Now this document comes in, it shows that there are six thousand five hundred munitions difference : that the Iraqis had not accounted for six thousand five hundred munitions. This equates to over a thousand tons of chemical agent.

(short pause)

Be scared, ladies and gentlemen, be very scared. Cause that's a lot of chemical agent : nerve agent, sarin, tabun.

(short pause)

But you know what Colin Powell didn't say? He didn't put in that little Appendix A that's always at the bottom on that Air Force document, you know, the one written by the world's best chemical weapons experts, who said: "Cautionary Note : Any chemical weapon produced by Iraq between 1983 and 1988, given the poor quality control of the Iraqi program, can not be viable today." The material degrades after five years.

(Pause)

And we're talking about weapons produced...1988 and earlier. There cannot be a thousand tons of chemical agent in Iraq that is derived from an accounting error based upon munitions produced from 1983 to 1988. (becomes more and more impassioned) For Iraq to have chemical weapons today, Iraq would have had to reconstitute a manufacturing base since 1998, and no evidence has been provided to sustain that allegation. I've already discussed to you how it's impossible for Iraq to have VX nerve agent. It's impossible for Iraq to have any chemical agent, because they would need a factory, they would need filling munit...er...filling stations....none of this was detected, and the Bush Administration has not made the case that it exists. (extremely impassioned) Their case for going to war in Iraq is derived from an Air Force document showing a one thousand ton discrepancy of chemical agent that can not be effective today. Their case for going to war is about twenty five thousand liters of anthrax that can not be effective today. Ladies and gentlemen, we went to war with Iraq based upon a lie. A damn lie. A lie that is killing Americans as we speak.

(thunderous applause and cheering for over ten seconds)

So there's not a single weapon of mass destruction that Iraq can provide to these terrorists. We don't even want to go down that route - because there's no link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that's worth mentioning. Oh, we've been told there's a link. You take a poll of Americans, and 80%'ll say "we believe that there is a link between Iraq...and al Qaeda." And you say, "How do you derive this...perception?" And they say, "Because we know Mohammed Atta, one of the 19 hijackers, met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, Czechoslovakia - we read about it in the Wall Street Journal!"

(Pause)

But the FBI, and CIA, and the Czechoslovakian government will tell ya that meeting never took place. It's a total fabrication. But the lie was repeated enough times by Fox News, by the Wall Street Journal, and by other media outlets, the uninformed American public bought it as truth. And now they'll buy anything they're told, such as, "there's a terrorist training camp in Sauman Pat - where, conveniently enough, the Iraqis brought in Islamic, Arab terrorists - not Iraqi - and trained them in groups of five - that's a convenient number, that would be about the number that operated on the four hijacked airplanes - on how to hijack an airplane using box cutters!" Imagine that! Those crafty Iraqis! Now this information came to light in November 2001, after the...horrible events of September. You know how it came to light? Because Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, in trying to make his case for war with Iraq to the President of the United States, was told : "we need a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden." And Paul Wolfowitz called up his sources in the...Iraqi National Congress - an Iraqi expatriate group that is sworn to get rid of Saddam Hussein - and said, "I need a defector." And they produced a defector - that suddenly could talk about this terrorist training camp and talk about the training, et cetera. The 'defectors' were liars. The CIA said they were liars. But this information bypassed the CIA and made it straight to the White House, and the President was briefed, on direct reporting from an uncorroborated human source - that comes from a compromised Iraqi liberation organization.

(Pause.)

If that doesn't shock you, nothing will. The President of the United States receives a briefing every morning called the Presidential Daily Brief - the PDB. It's probably the most sensitive document the intelligence community has, because it's this intelligence that drives America's national security policy on a daily basis. For something to appear on the PDB when I was an intelligence officer - and I got two items on that PDB in my entire career - it has to be vetted. Very carefully. Through a process where people check every fact. Every word is checked. Every word has meaning, because you're briefing the most powerful man in the United States of America. And what Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz did is put information in the PDB that bypassed that whole CIA checklist. Direct from Iraqi defector....straight to the President!

Is that really how we want our decision make-our decisions to be made in the United States? Ladies and gentlemen, he's our President. He works for us. We need to hold him accountable for what he does and what he did. We are at war with Iraq because of a lie.

(Pause)

Now. Let's go on with this war with Iraq. Ambassador Negroponte gave a presentation to the Security Council of the United Nations last week that said, "America went to war with Iraq because Iraq failed to abide by its obligations under Security Council Resolution 1441 - that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Iraq represents a threat." Now I've already demonstrated to you that Iraq....doesn't have weapons of mass destruction. I can't demonstrate to you that Iraq's not in violation of 1441 - they are. They're in violation of all the security council resolutions George W. Bush says they're in violation of. They're guilty as charged. But let's talk about that, cause it's not a clean slate, you know, if we were running a prosecution here, could we convict? And that's what we're talkin' about here - convicting Iraq, and giving them the death penalty. We're already out there implementing the death penalty as we speak. But how did we get to the conviction stage? What case did the prosecution make? You know, to disarm Iraq, to have Iraq be in compliance, a couple of things have to occur - one, Iraq has to fully cooperate with the weapons inspectors. I can tell you, as my seven year experience, that didn't happen. Iraq never fully cooperated with the inspectors. Two, if you're gonna' pass a law, enforce the law. And the resolution requiring Iraq to disarm is law. International law. And I'll tell you another thing, it's not just international law, it's American law.

I talked about the Constitution? The one I'm willing to give my life for? Article Six of the United States Constitution says that when the United States enters into any agreement - international agreement or treaty that's been ratified by two thirds of the United States Senate (bangs on podium), that is the law of the land here in America. We are signatories to the United Nations charter. Therefore, we are bound by the United Nations charter. And the United Nations charter, under chapter seven, says that when the Security Council passes a Chapter Seven Resolution, that is an enforceable resolution. So we have to enforce that resolution. Not because, just because the Security Council said, but remember we're a permanent member of the Security Council, with a veto. The Security Council doesn't do anything that we don't agree with - because if we don't agree with it, we veto it! We're gonna' experience an American veto in the next couple days when the Russians put forward a veto condemning the invasion and demanding a cease fire. We'll get to see how the United States executes its veto option.

No, nothing happens in the United Nations security council without American approval. And the United States drafted and voted for Resolution 687, calling for Iraq's disarmament. That means that is the law of the land here in America.

One of the things that this resolution said is that economic sanctions imposed on Iraq in August 1990 when they invaded Kuwait - and extended by the Security Council in April 1991 when they said Iraq must be disarmed - the sanctions were imposed and maintained as a means of compelling Iraq to cooperate with the weapons inspectors, but it clearly says that when Iraq or if Iraq is found to be in compliance with its obligation to disarm, sanctions will be lifted.

How do you square that with the statement made by James Baker, then Secretary of State, in the summer of 1991....when he said, "Even if Iraq complies with its obligation to disarm, economic sanctions will be maintained until which time Saddam Hussein is removed from power." See, all, all these people say, you know, "Sanctions? It's Saddam's fault. Saddam had the key. Saddam could unlock the door and open the door and solved it all if he'd only cooperated with the inspectors." I'm here to tell you that America's policy in regards to Iraq has been, since 1991, regime removal. It's never been about disarming Iraq. It's not Saddam who shut the door, it's the United States that slammed the door. It's not Saddam who has the key ; James Baker put the key in the door, turned the lock, and threw the key away. Sanctions will never be lifted against Iraq until Saddam Hussein is removed from power ; America has a policy of regime removal, not of disarmament. We have used disarmament from the very beginning as a vehicle to sustain this policy of regime removal. Disarmament legitimizes sanctions, sanctions contain Saddam, sanctions destabilize Saddam, and the weapons inspection process enables the United States to gain access to the most sensitive sites in Iraq, collecting intelligence about the security of Saddam. That's why the US supports inspections - not to disarm Iraq - because you know, if we disarm Iraq, if the inspections are found to work, what happens? Sanctions are lifted. Containment is broken. Iraq comes back into the fold of the international community with Saddam Hussein still in power, which is the last thing the United States government wants. So don't buy into disarmament as the reason why we're going to war with Iraq ; we're going to war with Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power, plain and simple. And I again remind you that the United Nations charter is binding to America.....because of the Constitution. And the United Nations charter, of which we are signatories, prohibits regime removal! (impassioned) It says that no nation or group of nations has the right to pick the leadership of a sovereign state - that is the sole prerogative of the people of that nation. So when you hear the President say, "My policy is regime removal", what he's really saying is, "I don't give a damn about the Constitution of the United States, I don't give a damn about international law."

(another prolonged burst of applause and cheering.)

So let's talk about this war for a minute. (Applause dies out.) This war is being waged as we speak. And we're in for a dark time ahead. I'm gonna' tell you something right off the bat - you may not want to hear it :

We've lost this war. It's done. We can't win it. It's over. We cannot win this war. We cannot win this war....diplomatically - because we have invaded Iraq in violation of international law.

This war is a moral stain on America.

You see, we have waged a war of aggression. An illegal war of aggression. Now that's an important term, "war of aggression" - because it's used by the Nuremberg Trial. Justice Jackson, a member of the Supreme Court who sat on the Nuremberg Trial (forcefully) stared German generals and politicians in the face as he convicted them to die by hanging - for the crime of waging aggressive war. Aggressive war, according to Judge Jackson, is the greatest crime against humanity you can have, because aggressive war encompasses all other crimes. And the Germans were convicted of this. And we are now waging aggressive war in violation of international law because we lack authority to go to war in accordance with the United Nations Charter, which is binding to the United States because we are signatories. The world will not support us on this.

Now there's a gamble that we could convince the world to support us retroactively. That gamble went as follows : "we are the world's sole remaining superpower. We are above the law. If you don't support us, we will hold you accountable." That's why we bullied and bribed people to try to get them to vote for this resolution. It didn't work. But we said, "Even if it doesn't work, we reject international law. We're gonna' go to war in Iraq....militarily...and we will overwhelm the Iraqis. We will go to war with Iraq, and we will shock and awe them into submission. We will go to war with Iraq, and we will have a blitzkrieg of historical proportions that compels the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam, greet the Americans as liberators, the Iraqi army will surrender and Saddam Hussein will be gone, and by doing so the world will recognize how powerful America is and why it is not in your interests to oppose us." This is a military strategy called effects-based warfare.

The author?

Donald Rumsfeld, military genius.

(ripples of laughter)

Effects-based warfare takes....centuries of military doctrine and art, and throws it away! Because that's old war, like old Europe - we want new War. New war is the kind of war where we don't have to engage in the bloody business of fighting. New war is where we just convince you of the inevitability of defeat. New war is where we bring in the world's most highly advanced military and show you how strong we are - by saying it over and over again, repeat after me, "America is the strongest military!" - and we say it over and over again, our media repeats it, and we want everybody to buy into it. About the inevitability of defeat. And why are we gonna' win? Because the Iraqi people will welcome us as liberators - say it all over - "They want us to liberate their country ; they will welcome us with song and flowers."

(Pause)

Say it enough times, and you may believe it. The other thing that you need to repeat is that the Iraqi military is a shell of its former self, they do not support Saddam, and when we come in they will join us, they will rise up against Saddam, they will surrender, they will not resist - this leaves a handful of... loyal units around Saddam who will certainly be confronted by the inevitability of their demise, so we tell them, "If you don't resist us, we'll let you live, we're only going after the top two thousand bad guys. Turn 'em over, it's all over!" And just in case they don't want to surrender, we will shock and awe them, in an amazing display of explosive pyrotechnics. And they will see how almighty we are, and they will surrender.

That is effects-based warfare. What it means is that when a military person looks at Donald Rumsfeld and says, "You want me to take on Iraq?! I need seven hundred thousand troops!", Donald Rumsfeld says, "Get out of my office, we're going in with two hundred fifty thousand, only one hundred twenty thousand of which represents combat troops on the ground." Ladies and gentlemen, Iraq is a nation of twenty three million. They have armed forces of four hundred and fifty thousand ; they have additional Republican Guards of a hundred and twenty thousand ; they have Special Republican Guards of thirty thousand ; they have a fedayeen of eighty thousand ; they have a Ba'ath Party militia of nine hundred thousand! And we're going in with a hundred and twenty thousand combat troops! And not only are we only going in with a hundred and twenty thousand combat troops, but as part of the process of convincing of the inevitability of our victory....we're gonna' take one division, and shoot it up to the west side of the Euphrates, where there is no resistance, and they're gonna' cordon around, right to the doorstep of Baghdad, and go BOOF! The Iraqis : "Ohhhhh....we give up." And then we land the Marines....you know what else we do? We embed journalists. We put journalists with all the units, so that when the military units come across the beach, and the Iraqis are there saying "welcome, America, welcome!", the journalists are showing 'em, it's broadcast on TV, it's part of an information warfare program, psychological operations, that convinces the world that we are inevitable - that victory is inevitable. We are...undefeatable.

The problem with this....is that it's all wrong. You see....the Iraqis aren't stupid. And in 1992, they formed a special program at a place called the Al Baqqar Institute For Higher Military Studies. How do I know this? Cause in 1992, I inspected this facility - because the Al Baqqar Institute Of Higher Military Studies is where Iraqi doctrine is developed. And we felt that if Iraq was retaining chemical weapons, they would have....doctrine being developed to incorporate chemical weapons into their military plan of action. We inspected it, we found no chemical doctrine, but we investigated, and we found interesting things. Files...of interviews with Iraqi battalion commanders. Regimental commanders, brigade commanders, division commanders. And we read these, because we were curious - "are they talking about chemical weapons?"

No. These were honest-to-God debriefings of these battalion commanders, saying "what went wrong? How did we lose? Why did we lose? What did the Americans do right? What did we do wrong? What do we need to learn so we never make this mistake again?"

Now I went back and told the CIA about this, I said, "hey, these guys - they're like studying us, and they're learning lessons", and the CIA went "No, the Iraqi army is a shadow of its former self. They can't fight. We kicked their ass. They'll all surrender ; they'll all retreat." I went back to Al Baqqar Institute in 1997 - again, looking for chemical weapons. I found that they'd advanced this concept into actually....rebuilding the Iraqi military from the ground up. Gone were the Iran-Iraq war tactics of multi-division combat. No, the division broke down into battalion combat teams. Battalion combat teams were trained to fight at the village level, and urban warfare. They weren't gonna' fight America on the open plains. If America invaded Iraq in 1997, they were preparing for this war - they were gonna' suck us into the cities!

Furthermore, they understood the necessity of bringing in the entire population, because they study Mao, and they know that you have to swim among the fish...to win this war. And the fish are the Iraqi people. And so Saddam instructed the Ba'ath party to study Quaranic scriptures. To study Islam. To go down and integrate yourself with the tribes. To become one with the tribes. They took....the fedayeen, which everybody thought was nothing but a bunch of thugs working for Uday, and they dissolved a complete brigade of the Special Republican Guard, and integrated them. And took the fedayeen down to the village level. The Iraqis have been preparing for this war for over six years. Studying us. Adapting their tactics. Waiting.

And I told the CIA this - I wrote a paper about this - I was ignored. Last fall I wrote one last paper, saying "Ground war with Iraq : if we go to war along this line, we will be defeated." Because, if we extend our lines of communication 300 miles up into Iraq, we've exposed it now to a hostile population, who will blow up our supply lines, attrit us, stop us ; you know, tanks - we have the best tanks in the world when they have fuel, and when they have ammunition.

300 miles. An M1A1 Abrams tank uses 3 gallons of gas per mile. It sucks up gas like (snaps fingers) that. They're all the way up there, they have no fuel. The fuel can't get to 'em, cause the Iraqis are blowing the crap out of our convoys. This was all. predictable. Are the Iraqi people gonna'...welcome us? Not on your life! Not on your life - they were gonna' fight to the death. Not because they love Saddam, but because they love Iraq. That's what we have to understand. The Iraqi people today are fighting a war of national survival against an illegitimate invader, and it SICKENS ME (applause) that my Marines are known as this!

(applause continues for about 10 seconds)

No, we can't win the war in Iraq because we don't have enough military power - now, we're pouring divisions in as we speak : the Fourth Infantry Division's coming down, thirty thousand more, but that's not enough - we're gonna' need the First Armor, we're gonna' need the First Cav. But you know what else is gonna' happen here? Effects-based strategy was about not alienating the Iraqi people, so that rules of engagement - they were about sparing civilian populations. The problem is, the civilian population is the enemy now! They're fighting us! Now we're shocked, you know, that, uh, we're going through a village, and some guy with a machine gun comes out of the village and shoots at us - how dare they wear civilian clothes? How dare the minutemen at Concord and Lexington stand up to the British redcoats wearing civilian clothes? How dare they? (A new wave of applause and cheering starts) How dare? How dare (applause peters out) the French Resistance in Occupied France wear civilian clothes when they blew up German supply lines - how dare they? How dare those patriots? But they're French - cheese-eating surrender monkeys, we don't care about them anymore!

(Laughter)

So how dare those Russians stand up to the.... German invader? How dare those Yugoslavian partisans? How dare occupied Europe oppose the illegal, illegitimate Nazi invader by wearing civilian clothes - ladies and gentlemen - patriots wear civilian clothes when they defend their nation. (Applause) And it's hypocrisy for us to talk about civilian clothes - you see, some of my best friends are in the Special Forces (applause peters out), engaged in combat right now. These are friends that I have sweated with, and bled with, and cried with, and gotten drunken with, these are.... (forcefully) good friends.....and they're in Western Iraq right now.

You think they're wearing...American military uniform while they crawl around the suburbs of Baghdad? Think again. They're wearing civilian clothes. So it's hypocritical for us to sit back here, on our high horse, and say "Those Iraqis are all terrorists!" Well, the British called Samuel Adams a terrorist, too! Because Samuel Adams was defending his home, his village, his town. His country. And that's what the Iraqis are doin'. That's why we're gonna' lose this war. Because we don't belong there. We have no right to be there.

(short pause)

We can't win this war. But we can do some damage, you see, because as we speak, several things are happening. The Hundred and First Airborne Division has set up a base. And they're preparing to launch helicopters to engage the Republican Guard. A couple months ago, the Eleventh Air Cav went out, and fought a big battle, near Karballah. They put thirty two Apache Longbow helicopters - the best attack helicopter the world's ever seen - the most sophisticated piece of equipment (raps twice on podium) - one of the things which makes victory inevitable. Thirty two Apache helicopters went screaming out to engage the Republican Guard, and you know what? The Republican Guard said, "Bring it on, baby!" They shot 'em up. Thirty one of thirty two were shot full of holes, twenty five of those will not fly again for a week and a half while they're repaired - one was shot down. And the Apache Longbow boys went, "Wow! We have never seen anything like that!" There are pilots right now that are refusing to get back in their helicopter until something is done about that air defense. And the One-Oh-First gets this report and they said - "We need..." - this is what should scare you - "We need to change the rules of engagement. We need to view all of Iraq as a free-fire zone. When we go into a village, we need to be allowed to shoot anything we deem to be a threat - whether it be a school, a mosque, a hospital - anything! Because Iraq is now the threat."

The United States Air Force has also been given the green light now to freely engage the city of Baghdad. The city of Basra. The United States Marine Corps has turned the town of Nasiriyah into a free-fire zone. The Eleventh Marine Artillery Un...Regiment that I fought with, that I trained with - I'm watchin' them on TV, firin' 155 millimeter shells into a populated area. Cause that is the enemy. The people of Iraq are now the enemy. We've given up on liberating them ; we're now going to defeat them and occupy them. We will lose this war militarily. We can't win. We can win a tactical engagement...but we have been sucked into something worse than Vietnam.

(Scattered bits of applause from the anarchists in the back, which starts to grow)

And this is - you shouldn't clap - (applause dies immediately) this is something that should make everybody cry, it sickens me! Because again, my loyalty is to those Marines. I want them home. If they're gonna' fight and die for my country, it has to be in a cause worthy of their sacrifice, not this, Mr. President! Not this! Not Iraq! We've lost militarily. You know what else we've lost? We've lost economically. This war is going to be devastating, both in the short term and long term, for the economy of the United States of America. We can't afford this war.

I guarantee you this : the $75 billion supplemental budget the President's getting to pay for this war is not enough. This war is going to cost two hundred billion dollars in the short term ; probably a trillion dollars in the long term, if it's extended. And that will destroy an already staggered American economy. And you know what else? George Bush has lost politically. Because one thing I know about the American voter - they vote their pocketbooks. And when the Americans start being unemployed, when the American economy's trashed, when retirees see their pension gone, they have to go and get another job, when George Bush has bankrupted the country so we can't have...affordable medical care, we don't have good education, the infrastructure starts to rot.....

(Pause. Deathly silence.)

He's been destroyed politically.

(A further half-second of uneasy silence, broken by a sudden whoop from the crowd, and accompanying applause as this sinks in.)

George Bush is a one-term president.

(Steady applause.)

So America has lost this war with Iraq. (Applause dies.) But we need to find a way to win the war for America. We need to take a hard look at how we got to this position we find ourselves in. And I'm telling you right now : I damn everyone in this room. I damn the entire country ; because this war reflects an across-the-board failure of American democracy to function properly. (Applause starts again, slowly) We have forgotten what it means to be citizens. We collectively have allowed ourselves to be wrapped (applause peters out) in a cocoon of comfort - we are consumers. And as long as the government keeps us comfortable - keeps that cocoon in place - and pushes us along compliantly on the direction towards prosperity, we let them get away with.....murder.

(short pause)

That's not being.....an American. That's being a good German - and you know what I mean by that. I'm not a good German. I am a good American. And a good American means that you have to understand what it takes to build this democracy and sustain this democracy, and that is citizenship. And citizenship requires us to invest ourselves...into the grass roots of this nation ; to get involved in every aspect of governing.

Citizenship requires us to put in sweat equity, intellectual equity ; citizenship requires us to vote....more than thirty seven percent! We should have ninety, a hundred percent of Americans participating in the electoral process. Citizenship requires us to hold accountable those who represent us.

George Bush needs to be held accountable, and I believe he will be, in November, 2004 - but that's too late, ladies and gentlemen. You now have to redouble your efforts to hold your elected representative accountable NOW!

This war has to stop now! How many American lives are we gonna' lose if we allow this war to continue ; how many Iraqi lives will be lost ; how much more damage will be done to the credibility of the United States, unless we stop this war now! And I'll tell you what, - the citizens of the state of Massachusetts, you have more leverage than you could possibly know, because you have a senator named John Kerry, who wants to be president of these United States. Who sits on some of the most influential committees in Congress, and the Senate. Hold Mr. Kerry accountable for what he does in your name ; demand that Senator Kerry hold immediate Senate hearings on the war with Iraq, to promote a cease fire, and American withdrawal, and a solution to the Iraqi problem that is in compliance with international law as set forth by the Constitut...er...by the United Nations Charter and the Constitution of the United States. In doing so, we will....redeem...the Jeffersonian Republic that we should be aspiring to.

Two hundred twenty seven years ago, American patriots fought a war, a revolution, to free themselves from an imperial power. Sadly, we have become an imperial power, and patriots around the world - and I am not pro-Saddam - I despise Saddam, I despise everything he stands for. Iraqi patriots are fighting a war to free themselves from a modern-day imperial power. That's not the America that I want to be representing my children a decade from now : I want that Jeffersonian republic ; I want the American democra...democratic republic. We need to fight for that. We need to regain control - we, the people of the United States of America. Thank you very much.

(Cheering and thunderous applause for almost thirty seconds ; a standing ovation in most of the room.)

Thanks.

(applause continues)

Thank you.

(applause peters out)

Q&A :

I apologize...cause that went a little long - I got a little (huffs self-consciously) - I got a little emotional there - I'll try and answer your questions now. (responds to something off-mic as he's handed the clipboard full of questions which was passed around at the beginning) Okay, my discretion - Well, okay, I'll....I'll try and answer 'em all.

(reads)

"Is it likely in your opinion that the US Administration will fabricate or import evidence of weapons of mass destruction if they occupy Iraq?" This is a question...well...I won't read the name....but...good question. Um....it's something we need to be guarded against - I'm not going to sit here and say right now that there's definite evidence that this is going to happen. But what I will tell you is that...we know from our experience that the United States fabricated information and evidence to get us to the point we're at. Congress was lied to and deceived by the CIA.

Um...I'll tell you another thing that should worry everyone in here : there's a gentleman named Charles Duelfer, he used to be the deputy executive chairman of the weapons inspection team of the United Nations. While he was deputy executive chairman, he was also a senior State Department employee. As a UN weapons inspector, he implemented American policy of regime removal, using the inspection process to further American objectives. This is a man who, in 1996, on an inspection that I was the leader of, took a film clip of smoke rising over a building that we were being blocked from. Now, he turned that over to CNN, and they broadcast it on TV, saying "this smoke is from documents the Iraqis burned while they held the inspectors at bay."

What really happened is as soon as we saw that smoke, I went up to the Iraqis and said, "I don't give a damn if you're keeping me out of that building, I'm goin' over the wall to investigate that smoke right now....with a...with a video camera." They said, "sure." They came in, they wanted to see was happenin', too, they said "smoke, ah, what's that?" Some old man who was responsible for the physical upkeep of the building raking leaves into a pile and burning them! I said, "you can't do that!" And the Iraqi's "what"?, I put out the fire, and I said "I want an inspector here now lookin' over the yard", and we put an inspector there, and the problem was solved.

That's the true story, but what CNN showed was smoke coming up, and we were told the Iraqis were burning documents - Charles Duelfer did this. Charles Duelfer, in 1997, in a meeting with the CIA which I was present, turned to the CIA person responsible for liasing with the special commission, and said "Damn it, we're not finding anything, why don't you guys put a missile in Iraq for us to find?" Quote, unquote.

Charles Duelfer's the man, in 1999, wrote a report that's been quoted by Congress and by the Administration about how Iraq retains weapons of mass destruction that failed to incorporate the scientific judgments of his experts that would mitigate against the findings that he put out, for instance, anthrax - how it can't be viable today. Why the one thousand tons of unaccounted-for chemical agent can't be viable today. He excluded this from the report.

Charles Duelfer today...is in Kuwait, as the senior man in charge of a unit called the Seventy Fifth...Site Exploitation Team. Their job is to go into Iraq, and investigate findings of weapons of mass destruction. And they have a team of CIA scientists, Department of Defense scientists...who will go in there and find the smoking gun.

This is a man with a known track record of fabricating information to implicate Iraq : why in God's name are we trustin' him right now, on this issue? If we want to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, if we want to sustain this, then it's imperative that the United States bring the United Nations inspectors, and put them in Iraq. Let them do the investigation. I'll trust their findings more than I'll trust the...any findings associated with the name of Charles Duelfer.

(applause)

(reads) "What has my name to do with a question?" I don't know. (shrugs, then reads another) Do you think, in the end, this war will have actually solved anything ; is there any value in it?"

If this war was about what President Bush said it was about - defending the United States of America from a real and present threat - yes. But this war's not about that. This war is about...implementation of a national security strategy of American unilateral global domination, as set forth in the strategy published by the Bush Administration in September of last year : the one that says that America will not brook any competition - any nation or group of nations that seeks to be our equal - not superior, but our equal - militarily or economically - is viewed as a threat, and can be preemptively struck...by the United States. That the United States alone has the right to define threats, and then strike them, eliminate them. We don't care about multilateralism, we don't care about unilateralism.

This war with Iraq is....the case study of implementation of this policy. Next step : Syria. Iran......North Korea. This war is about the initiation of...global war....in perpiture. Because that's what neoconservatives need....to retain their hold on power - this is very Orwellian ; war is peace. Not just overseas : here at home! The War on Terror. Homeland Security. That PATRIOT Act.

I mean, we've got the national mood ring : yellow, orange, red, how do we feel today? Are we under high threat, or, what threat level are we? How many times have we been attacked by terrorists since September 11th? And yet we're told that we're constantly in a state of...threat. War. At home.

Why do they do this? To feed on the fear and ignorance of the American public, so that they can put forward policies....and these policies should scare the.....bejeezus out of you.

The PATRIOT Act : a frontal assault on the Constitution of the United States - and remember, I took an oath to uphold and defend that Constitution - and here's the operative phrase -
"against all enemies, foreign......and domestic."

(applause)

And I'm gonna' give you something that should scare you, too : the other night, I was drivin' - and I've been listening to the...right wing radio stations, lately - and there was a guy up there named Michael Savage, he has a program called The Savage Nation - and, um, this guy was taking phone calls from people, and he was talking about.....a scenario. He said, "You know, that Muslim..." - he didn't call him an American - "that Muslim...rolled a grenade...into a tent....in Kuwait. Killed two Americans, wounded twelve. That Muslim solider. But he's not a real soldier, he's not a real American, he's a MUSLIM...." - and he spits the word out, "Muslim" - "you know, and we've got military that has lots of these Muslims in it. We gotta find a way to handle these Muslims, we can't trust 'em. They're not worthy of trust. We've gotta go and do what we did in World War Two, y'see, the Japanese weren't worthy of trust after they stabbed us in the back in World War Two. So we've gotta take...all the Muslims and put 'em in a concentration camp, like we did the Japs. And then if we want the Muslim men to be real Americans, they have to prove it, by joining a Muslim-only unit that we send into the hardest combat - and they've gotta' prove their loyalty by dying for America...."

(short pause)

Is that America? Is that what we stand for? But I'm tellin' you right now, there's a lot of fear and a lot of ignorance and a lot of hatred and a lot of intolerance out there. And we've gotta find a way to defeat that. Do I think in the end this war will have actually solved anything? - No. This war is gonna' create more problems than it could ever solve.

(reads) International systems is the....(tries to decipher the next question) let me just read this....(softly, in fits and starts)....so why be surprised when America changes its mind...the League of Nations should have illustrated what the....(trails off incoherently, a few seconds of silence)....

....there is no international law. Okay, so I guess the basic, uh, the basic system here is that....I - I think the nature of the question is that the United States cannot be bound by international law because the experience of the global - the....the global experience since....in the last century showed that international law...that there is no international law, it's violated all the time.

Um, on the surface you could probably make an argument for that, I mean, it's easy to demonstrate how many times international law has been sidestepped as a matter of convenience. Uhm, but we need to recognize a couple things : One, the failure of the League of Nations to be a viable state led...er....be a viable organization led to World War Two. And World War Two led to the deaths of....millions. Tens of millions of people globally. And one of the things we wanted to accomplish at the end of World War Two, through the framing of the United Nations, and the creation of the United Nations charter, was a system of laws, an international framework of laws, that would prevent a situation like World War Two from ever developing again. It foreswore war as a means of resolving disputes between nations - let's laugh about that collectively, because how many wars have been fought since 1945 until today? So we know that war is a reality. But how many global wars have been fought that have resulted in the global destruction that was the equivalent of what occurred in...World War Two? How many nuclear weapons have been used since World War Two?

So the United Nations is not a perfect institution, my goodness I can attest to that, I worked there for seven years. But you know? It has promise. Because.....we need to understand this : we live in a community of nations. And this community of nations has got to find a way to peacefully coexist or we will destroy ourselves. (applause begins) And destroy this planet. And the United Nations is the vehicle (applause ends) we got - does it need to be fixed? You're darn right it needs to be fixed. But we can't discard it, because the alternative is a unilateral American power....that...endorses preemptive strikes. Preemptive strikes - think about it.

If we endorse it, say it's good for us, what's India gonna' do to Pakistan? Even scarier, what's going through North Korea's mind right now? They're sittin' there thinkin, "Axis of Evil....Iraq, Iran...North Korea! And we're seein' what they're doin' to number one - we ain't gonna' wait ; we're gonna produce nuclear weapons, and then we're gonna' come up with a preemptive strike strategy of our own! This is, if you cross this red line, we will nuke you, and we will nuke Japan and we will nuke Seoul ; we will nuke everybody we can get ahold of. And we're not bluffin' because...we know we can't bluff. We know what you already did to Iran...and Iraq....so we're gonna' take ya out now!" Is this the world we wanna live in? The United Nations prevents this kind of situation from developing ; that's why we need the United Nations. Let's fix it, let's not do away with it.

(reads) "What will it take for the world, particularly the Muslim world, to view America once again as a nation which defends freedom, and not as a bully?"

It'll take the United States adhering to the letter of the law set forth by the United Nations charter, and the Constitution of the United States.

You know, we stand for something good. I grew up in Europe in the 1970's and the early 1980's, during the height of the Cold War. And I have to tell ya, you could travel around Germany, France, Italy, and people liked America. We weren't perfect. We had problems. They could turn on a TV and see the race riots, and see the Vietnam War was goin' on, but even at the height of the Vietnam War, the height of the Vietnam War, the world still looked to us as a good thing. We're makin' a little mistake down there in Vietnam, but we're still....a benevolent power - we're a power that engaged in treaties, we engaged with organizations. We aren't viewed that way today.

I've just come back from...several trips around the world - going to Italy, France, England, Germany, Japan, the United Arab Emirates...Canada, of all places ; our good friends in Canada....don't like us. No one in the world views us as the good guy anymore. We're the bad guy. We're something to be feared.

What's it gonna take? For the United States to demonstrate that we are the nation of freedom, and justice, and liberty for all that we promise to be in our Constitution. That's why I say that we have to wage a war - a war to regain control of this thing we call American democracy. When the American people regain control of their country, the world will regain confidence in our America.

(reads) "What do UN inspectors......delegate as weapons of mass destruction, or is this a term invented by the (snickers) Bush Administration?" Well, it's not invented by the Bush Administration, it's a term of art that's been out there for some time in the nonproliferation community. Um....if you want to speak, in terms of, you know, a real weapon of mass destruction, there's really only one, and that's a nuclear weapon. A nuclear weapon is a city killer. Chemical weapons actually aren't a very effective weapon. A Marine Corps rifle company with an unlimited supply of ammunition is a weapon of mass destruction. Chemical weapons aren't ; biological weapons theoretically could be, but haven't been demonstrated to be.

Uh...but weapons of mass destruction are - that term is designed to promote fear...um...and, you know, we do have treaties that ban chemical weapons, ban biological weapons ; I have no problem with that term, except that....it's come to be used in a manner which implies that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction threaten the national existence of the United States. And yet we are destroying the Iraqi nation with.....weapons that...aren't weapons of mass destruction, apparently. Apparently, the Mother of All Bombs isn't a weapon of mass destruction. Apparently, two thousand pound, satellite-guided munitions that are impacting on Iraq at a rate of six to seven hundred a day aren't weapons of mass destruction. What's happening in Iraq apparently is not destruction - at least not on a mass level. No, that's a misleading term. Modern war, whether it's fought with conventional munitions or unconventional munitions, is a means of delivering mass destruction.

(applause)

(reads) "What impact do the protests around America have on the decision made by the government?"

Um....well, George Bush has told you that he doesn't care what you think.....um....but I have to tell ya that....don't sell short the demonstrations. Don't sell short the means of sustaining....um....public opinion. The demonstrations did have an impact - a huge impact.

But you know what?....You didn't sustain it. Where are the demonstrators now? And the other problem with the demonstrators is....what do you stand for? I know what you stand against. But what do you stand for?

Y'see, if you're gonna' demonstrate, demonstrate to when. I'm not...some....I consider my..a..I'm a conservative Republican. And I consider myself to be reflective of a mindset other than this war on Iraq ; the mindset of the vast majority of, you know, mainstream Americans out there...who are sort of undecided about this war. They wanna know what it is we should do, I mean, okay, you say you're against the war, but what's your alternative? Peace? What? You want me to light a candle, hold your hand, and sing "Kumbayah"? You've gotta be kidding me! What do you stand for?

(weak smattering of applause)

What do you represent? And that's one of the problems : where's the alternative to the Republican ideology? We know what the Republicans stand for ; can anybody in this room tell me what the Democratic Party stands for today? Not a damn thing.

And until...somebody stands up and redefines the Democratic Party, and puts out an alternative - a viable alternative - the Republicans are gonna' dominate. Your demonstrations count if ya stand for something, and ya sustain it. That's the only way they're gonna' count.

Now, in fairness, I'll go to the other sheet....(late-starting applause as he turns the page) let me see, (reads) "the chemical weaponry that killed many Kurds in the Iran-Iraq war from Hussein is commonly thought it was a misfire on behalf of the Iranians."

Okay, and "what makes up common chemical weapons, what components of the VX nerve gas?" Chemical weapons are just that - chemicals ; a combination of various chemical substances that, when combined....are lethal. They either are nerve agents that affect the nervous system ; they can be blister agents, they can be blood agents...um...either way, they're gonna' kill you in a horrific fashion.

Uh, the chemical weaponry that killed the Kurds in Iran - let's put it this way. During the Iran-Iraq war, both sides used chemical weapons. Neither side is innocent on that. Uh, but let's put it into perspective. The Iraqis, when they employed chemical weapons against the Iranians, killed around three to four thousand Iranians during the whole course of the Iran-Iraq war. Now, machine guns and artillery killed another seven hundred, eight hundred thousand. But we don't care about machine guns or artillery or land mines - we just care about those chemical weapons.

The chemical weapons that were used against Halabja...killed over five thousand civilians. Let's talk about Halabja for a second.....now let's...let's...build this scenario, here. Work with me on this one, because, uh, Iraq is at war. Let's remember that. And it's a war of national survival against the Iranians. And the Iranians are launching an attack, in 1988, through the Halabja valley, threatening the Dianna Bakkur Dam, which is about...forty miles this way (gestures). The Dianna Bakkur Dam provides hydroelectric power for Baghdad. If they take the Dianna Bakkur Dam, the lights go off in Baghdad. That's a bad thing, if you're Saddam Hussein.

So now the Iranians are attacking. Before they attack, the Iranians go in, and they convince the Kurdish militia of Halabja to switch over. And join the Iranians. And the Kurdish militia of Halabja launches surprise attacks against the Iraqi defensive positions, clearing them out. Driving back, threatening Dianna Bakkur. So Saddam Hussein flies in elite forces to launch a counterattack. Now the Iranians, in launching this attack, employed chemical munitions. The Iraqis come in and say, "Okay, you wanna play that game? We'll play that game." They have to immediately drive down the valley - the Iranians have taken position on the hills, the Kurds are in the village. The Iraqis know they can kick the dog doodoo out of the Kurds any day of the year ; it's the Iranians on the hill they're worried about. So they put mustard agent on the hills, to drive the Iranians off the hills. The Iraqis start driving through the town of Halabja. The Iranians pour cyanide-based chemical agent into Halabja to stop the Iraqi offensive, but the Iraqis drive through, leaving the Kurdish population to pay the price.

Now notice what I said. What killed the Kurds of Halabja? A cyanide-based gas. Who employed cyanide-based gas? The Iranians. The Iraqis used mustard, and sarin, and...uh....tabun nerve agent. That didn't kill the Kurds of Halabja. The Iranians killed the Kurds of Halabja, and the CIA knows it ; in fact, the CIA has published a report about this, but you won't hear talk about that. We're shown the photographs of the dead Kurdish women and children, and we said, "Saddam did it!" Saddam didn't do Halabja. He did other villages ; let's be honest about this - he gassed the Kurds. I'm not saying he didn't do it. But you don't hear the whole story ; it's a complicated issue. And it's not as though the Kurds were...these innocents, here. They were traitors! They betrayed their country ; they turned over, went on the side of Iran!

And let's not be hypocritical here ; what did we do to the Shenendoah Valley during the Civil War? What did we do to the citizens of the Shenendoah Valley when they supported...when they were the breadbasket of the Confederate Army? We slaughtered 'em. What about Sherman's march to the sea, through Georgia? Burning and pillaging the farms...to...punish the civilians...to prevent them from being able to supply the Confederate army. That's war, ladies and gentlemen - war is hell.

Should Saddam Hussein be held accountable for what he did? I guess so. But we knew about it, and we didn't say anything then.

In 1988, Donald Rumsfeld had a team of intelligence specialists go to Iraq, provide them with intelligence - I've met the senior Iraqi intelligence officer, Wafiq S'aam Ari, who met with his CIA counterparts, they put satellite imagery down of the Al Faal Peninsula, where a lot of fighting is going on today, and they plotted out the Iranian military positions. They showed them ; "this is where the Iranians are", then they sat back and watched as the Iraqis planned their attack - because the United States was going to incorporate intelligence collection to support the attack. And as they planned the attack, the Iraqis said, "And we're gonna' put chemical weapons here, chemical weapons here, chemical weapons here...", and the Americans sat there and said NOTHING. Nothing. So I don't wanna hear a damn word about how upset we are about Iraq's use of chemical weapons - we weren't upset then ; it's hypocritical for us to be upset now.

(reads) "How do we know the information from the Iraqi defector bypassed the CIA checklist?"

(pause)

Well, the CIA has said so. I mean, um....the CIA officials were very upset about this, and this has been published in the....ah, here we go....the Washington Post - can we believe it? Um, this comes from CIA people themselves ; I know a few of 'em, and they've complained vociferously about how this information has been bypassed. Now is the CIA lying about this, do they have their own agenda? Today, I don't know anymore. But I've been told by senior CIA officials that the information that made it to the Presidential...uh...Presidential Daily Briefing bypassed...their quality control checklist.

(reads) "Given the situation of war in Iraq right now, what can peace activists best do?"

(pause)

Restore democracy.

(reads) "If weapons of mass destruction are not found in Iraq, do you believe that the US government will plant them?"....okay. We already answered that. "Can they be traced?" is the good question, and the answer is yes. That's the beauty of it. If they do this, we can prove it - but only if we have United Nations, impartial, objective inspectors present. They can't be traced if the US is in control of the entire process ; that's why it's imperative that, at a minimum, we get the UN inspectors engaged in this process.

(snickers as he reads the next question, then reads) "Why did I have to check Hussein's bedrooms, and what did I find there?"

Um.....heh...(awkward pause)....we didn't want to inspect his bedrooms ; in fact, we didn't wanna even inspect his palaces. The palaces were a, uh - this is in reference, I think to something I've said in the past - "I inspected his bedrooms, I've seen his toilets - gold plating, mirrors, etc." Um...it's part of a palace complex that we inspectors never wanted to go to, but that we were compelled to go to because the United States made palaces an issue. The United States said, "the reason why we're not finding anything in Iraq is because they're hiding them in palaces." The reason why the United States wanted to get to palaces is so they could collect intelligence about Saddam Hussein's security. In December 1998, after the United States kicked the inspectors out - Iraq didn't kick them out, the United States kicked them out - the United States bombed Iraq - Operation Desert Fox - ninety seven targets were struck ; eighty six of them dealt with presidential security ; all eighty six were derived from intelligence gathered by the weapons inspectors. It's amazing when we don't know anything about these facilities, some of the inspectors go there and go into the bedrooms and were able to plot out with great precision everywhere Saddam is, his security is, his government is, and during the bombing campaign (raps on podium several times) the weapons hit with extreme precision.

The Iraqis aren't stupid, they put two and two together, they understood who gave that information to the US targeters, and that's why inspectors were never allowed in. We went to the bedrooms because if we didn't go to the bedrooms, the CIA would've said we didn't do a good job inspecting - and then we couldn't relieve them of their fears of what's in these palaces ; we had to inspect every square inch of these palaces to ensure that the CIA would respect the findings of the inspections. That's why we went to the bedrooms. That's why we went to the bathrooms. I guarantee that if I had not gone down and looked in that toilet, a report would've been written that said, "Iraq stashed biological weapons in that toilet". Now, there's something biological in that toilet, but it certainly isn't a weapon.

(flips through some more questions) All right.....(reads)...."What is your opinion on the rise of the Project For a New American Century to which Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz belong, and what role do you think it'll play in American foreign policy?"

It's not what I think it'll play, it's what it does play.

Understand that the national security strategy that was implemented...is being implemented now, that was promulgated in September - is derived from a strategy that was put forward by Paul Wolfowitz when he was a deputy undersecretary of Defense working under Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney back in 1992. It is basically a strategy that came out of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Paul Wolfowitz said, "Look, the Soviet Union's gone. We just went through a very difficult time : the Cold War. We never wanna go through this again. We are now the sole remaining superpower - we have all the power. We need to sustain this power. We need to make sure that never again...competition arises." And he put forward this policy of American unilateralism and pre-emptive strike. And amazing thing : George Herbert Walker Bush, President 41, said "No!". Said, "that's not an American policy. That violates international law ; that violates multilateralism. I won't go for it.", and he canned it. Actually, what he told Wolfowitz is "rewrite it, and tone it down a little bit."

The problem is, President Bush had to get re-elected for that policy to come back. He didn't. So Wolfowitz retreats with this policy. And for the next eight years of Clinton presidency, the neoconservatives like Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney....Scooter Libby....Feith, Bolton, and others....festered in neoconservative think tanks. Festered. And that's the proper word - festered.

They hated Clinton ; they hated what Clinton stood for. They hated what Clinton was doing. And they developed this strategy of American unilateral power. And they came together for the project of New American Century, because this was gonna' define the next century, how America was gonna' dominate the globe, how we were going to be a benevolent dictatorship for the world. And this policy came forward. A lot of people shaped it ; Paul Wolfowitz was the ideological and intellectual pulse. And when Paul Wolfowitz became the Deputy Secretary of Defense, he tried to put that policy back out there. A lot of people weren't comfortable with that policy at that point and time - it was too harsh. They couldn't sell it to Congress ; they couldn't sell it to the American people.

Until September eleventh.

September eleventh occurred - that horrible day - and on September twelfth, Paul Wolfowitz was in front of the President saying "we need to go to war with Iraq to end the war on terror." And a year later.....that policy which was rejected by President George Herbert Walker Bush as un-American was certified as the new national security strategy for the United States of America.

So...this Project For a New American Century is directing the course of American foreign policy. And think about it - the course of our nation, indeed, the course of the world, is being decided by the product of a dozen or so neoconservative intellectuals. Is that democracy?

(reads) "Can you comment on mainstream press current unwillingness to give equal time to the anti-war point of view?"

Um....I'll just comment on the press for a second. If anybody thinks that what we watch on TV and what we read in the newspaper constitutes journalism, think again. A journalist is an objective, impartial reporter. What we have right now is an extension of the Bush Administration's propaganda effort.

(applause)

I just came back from Calgary, Canada, where I participated in a conference on media and the war. You know, and the Canadian Broadcast Corporation has a standard - you know, standards....that journalists have to abide by. There are some important things in there. One, you don't incorporate the lexicon - the terminology - of any side. In order to retain your impartial status, you don't start using the terminology. Turn on TV. Every single one of these reporters and talking heads has become sort of an armchair general : (gruff, sensational voice) "Left flank envelopment, JDAMS pounding them, driving forward, thrusting, engaging...." It's like the Pentagon...on a continuous basis. I have nothing against the Pentagon.

But...we need to understand that the Pentagon has a bias. The Iraqis have a bias. The journalists, to give us fair and objective reporting, cannot have a bias. Or if they do have a bias, at least be honest, like Fox News, and put it up front. I mean, when you turn on Fox, you know what you're gettin'.

(murmurs of laughter)

But when you turn on CNN, you think you're supposed to be gettin' something different - it's just Fox with a nice veneer put on top of it. It's the same thing. These people have bought into this war, because they are dominated by corporate interests that will profit from this war. (applause, cheering for several seconds) Therefore, they will never give the antiwar movement a fair shake ; they will never objectively report about the demonstrations that..that took place.

I mean, Aaron Brown - you know, that really good CNN guy, Aaron Brown, with his finger on his cheek. (murmurs of laughter). I remember watching the San Francisco demonstrations, and Aaron Brown was gonna' put it on, but before he put it on, he had to say a couple things (intones solemnly) : "We're now going to go to San Francisco, where there are demonstrations in the streets. Ladies and gentlemen, I know many of you out there find this distasteful at this time of war. But...we are America, this is a democracy, and these people are expressing their freedom of speech, and we may not agree with it, but it's there... - and so CNN, because we are fair journalists and objective journalists, will show you this, but it'sssssss.....we're not really happy that we have to show you this"....is that fair and objective? How 'bout to say, "we're cutting to San Francisco, where there's demonstrations in the streets ; the San Francisco Police estimate the size at...uhhhm.....approximately ten thousand....we have some imagery that shows the police arresting demonstrators : the mayor reported thirteen hundred arrests." That's a report. Now you can cut to the next news. You don't have to give me all that commentary up front, Aaron, about...uh....how distasteful this is for you. Just report the news.

We don't get reporting. We get commentary. The fact that we have embedded journalists is a problem. It's neat...if you like to see war story on TV every night. But understand this : when you embed a journalist - and there's another term they used in this Calgary report - it's not "embedded", it's "in bed with". (moderate laughter) And....these journalists....it's not their fault, but when you go to war with a unit, and your life is in the hands of that lieutenant, that sergeant, that corporal - the Stockholm Syndrome takes over. You become one of them. You become an extension of them. Therefore, you are reporting the war from their point of view. Do you think for a second you're gonna' get a reporter who just had a car ram into his APC, and blow them up with an RPG, talking about "the fedayeen Saddam - what they really are"? Or is he gonna' say, "Those terrorists - the fedayeen Saddam - fanatics - brutal thugs - they're showing no (sp) disregard for civilian life!" Is this fair and objective reporting? No. It's reporting with a bias, and that bias is understandable when they travel with these soldiers. But let's not call it journalism. Let's recognize what it is : an extension of the Department of Defense information warfare program. That's why the Department of Defense had these journalists there to begin with.

(moderate applause)

(reads) "What are the international consequences of unilateral pre-emptive attack?"

I think it's very serious ; as I said, I'm very concerned about what India's gonna' do ; we know that India had a plan to pre-emptively strike Pakistan - conventionally. They were massing an armored force that was going to strike within a matter of weeks, to punch through and overwhelm the Pakistani defenses, and take the Pakistani capital, and decapitate the Pakistani leadership, and, in accordance with that plan, if that armor thrust failed, India would respond with nuclear weapons. That's pre-emptive strike. Now, the Pakistanis have found out about this plan, so I guarantee the Pakistanis have a little pre-emptive strike plan of their own. Next time they get any inclination that the Indians are comin' across the border (hits podium) they're gonna' pre-emptively strike.

What are the implications of an all-out nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan? You don't even want to begin to think about it : the hundreds of million dead - not only there, but around the world, as that radioactive fallout...cause I tell ya what, they don't produce clean nuclear weapons. They...they're....that dust gets in the jet stream and works a way around the world, and you're gonna be affected here in the United States. Those are the consequences of pre-emptive strike. That's why the United Nations has a role to play in this world today, because the United Nations is designed to provide a forum that prevents this kind of crazy activity.

(applause)

(reads quickly and only half-intelligibly) "....Do you feel that is it likely that Iraq still has a stock of any chemical or biological weapons?"

No.

"What are the implications if we don't find any weapons if we occupy Iraq?"

I don't think we're gonna' occupy Iraq. But the consequences of not finding it are irrelevant at that point, because we've already shown that we are violating international law. Sometime this week, the Russians will probably go to the Security Council, and seek to pass a resolution that condemns the American invasion of Iraq, calls it illegitimate in the eyes of international law, demands an immediate cease-fire, and seeks to create a United Nations force to go in and interpose itself between the Iraqis and the Coalition. The United States will undoubtedly veto this resolution - at which point in time the Russians and the Arab League will appeal to the General Assembly of the United Nations, in accordance with Resolution...I think it's 337, it might be 373, I'm not quite sure of the number (responds to input from off-mic)...373?...it says..."If the Security Council.....", see, remember what's happening here - the United States has invaded Iraq without authority of the Security Council ; we are violating international law.

The United Nations charter says that if the Security Council is incapable of dealing with a threat to international peace and security - demonstrates that it cannot deal with it because of repeated vetos - then the General Assembly must step in. And the General Assembly can pass a resolution ; if that resolution is voted on positively by more than two thirds of the general assembly, it takes on the equivalent force of a Security Council resolution. We will get a General Assembly resolution that condemns the United States of America as a violator of international law, that demands an immediate cease fire, that requires a United Nations force to go in....and if we thumb our nose at the United Nations....we're telling the world to go to hell. We don't care about you.

(something else is said by someone off-mic) Well, we already did that, but this is going to be even worse - we're pretending that the United Nations has viability. We've convinced nations like Spain and Italy that they have a role down the road. But if the United States violates a General Assembly vote under Resolution 373....that's us against the world now, in a serious way : the world believes in the United Nations. We don't. And if you wanna' talk about massive implications of our failure to respond to a General Assembly resolution....it's....it's mind boggling what will happen. There's no way President Bush will be able to sustain this, because it sets up automatic sanctions ; it sets up automatic conflict ; it is war between America and the world. Is this truly the nation that we want to be part of? I don't think so. This is what's going to be happening in the near future.

(flips through clipboard) Okay. I don't wanna keep everybody here all night ; (laughs self-consciously) I'll answer a couple more. Um....(reads) "How significant are petroleum interests in motivating our Administration to launch this war, and why are we not doing more to pursue oil interests (snickers) in Venezuela instead?"

The answer about Venezuela - I'm not an economist. Um. About petroleum interests....what I do know about oil - now there's a guy out there named Richard Perle, I think everybody should be familiar with him, he's one of the guys who got us into this mess. 'The Prince of Darkness'...neoconservative ideologue...extraordinaire. And we don't agree on too much. But Richard Perle and I agree on one thing : this is not a war about oil.

Y'see, oil is about business. Or as they say in West Texas, "bidness" (snickers), and we gotta remember who's in the White House right now, so we gotta' think about it from his perspective. It's about business. Business is about making money. Oil is a money business - they make a lot of money, they have a lot of power.

Iraq has a lot of oil. Right now, Iraq is sittin' on top of proven reserves that constitute the second largest proven reserves of oil in the world, but almost every oil expert says that the potential of Iraq exceeds that of any other nation ; that Iraq is, in fact, sitting on the world's largest reserves of oil. Makes Iraq pretty important. Iraq right now is producing 1.5 million barrels of oil a day. The Minister of Oil, who I've met with many times, has said a five-year plan that Iraq has calls for a fifty billion dollar investment and the refurbishment of the Iraqi oil fields...and in five years Iraq could be producing 7 million barrels of oil a day ; that's a lot of oil. That's good business. So if this is a war about oil, it would be about going into Iraq and creating a stable environment for the expansion of the Iraqi oil infrastructure so that oil companies can make money pumpin' oil out of the ground.

No, we're goin' to war with Iraq, where we're gonna' destroy or degrade this infrastructure - and we don't have to blow up the oil wells. Understand that Iraq's oil infrastructure has suffered egregiously over the past twelve...years. One thing I've been studying a little bit is...oil wells, and what it means.

You know, one of the things you look for in an oil well is pressure. You need pressure. That's one of the things they judge when they sell land - how much pressure is down there? And that means that, as you pump oil out of the ground, there's a whole art to it, so that you maintain pressure, so that you effectively extract the oil. When you don't maintain your oil wells, you bleed pressure, which means you have the oil in the ground, but you can't get it out now, effectively. What do people do when they don't have effective oil pressure? They inject water, artificially raising the pressure to get oil out. But when you inject water, you start polluting and diluting the oil, so now the oil that comes out downstream has to be refined in...in a very ineffective manner, making it very...very expensive. You destroy oil wells doing this. Iraq is injecting water right now, so that they can sell it under Oil for Food, and make enough money to feed their people.

(pause)

No oil man's gonna' go into Iraq unless he has an absolute certainty of economic and political stability. If you think for even a second - even if we defeat the Iraqi army and occupy Baghdad - that the Iraqi people are gonna' be welcoming us with open arms and saying "Thank you for liberating us", think again ; now, I'll give you something that's very disturbing...to think about. Iraq is a nation 60% Shi'ia. The Shi'ia are the ones that we were hoping would rise up against Saddam Hussein ; and we had every reason to believe, at least on the surface, that they would do so, because of Saddam's track record against the Shi'ia : brutal suppression, executions, 1991.

To show you how disconnected the Bush Administration is about reality, does anybody have any idea what's happening this week in Iraq....in the Shi'ia calendar?......It's the most....holy time for the Shi'ia....you see, and you know where they go? Karballah. The Shi'ia make a pilgrimage this time, to go to Karballah to celebrate the Battle of Karballah, fought back in the eighth century AD. The Battle of Karballah...we need to reflect on this, you know, it's, it's big in the minds of the Shi'ia. A guy named Yaziz - horrible ruler at that time - Yaziz surrounded Hussein - an extension of the Prophet Mohammed, who is now leader of the Islamic - of, of the Muslim world - he surrounded Hussein and his followers, and said, "If you don't submit to me," - they were surrounded in a giant, in a mosque - "If you don't submit to me, I will starve you out until you die." So Hussein and his followers, instead of being starved, broke free and fought Yaziz, in a battle of martyrdom. Hussein was killed. So were his followers. Yaziz is reviled every year by the Shi'ia community. They revile him. He is evil.

You know what's happening in mosques around the Shi'ia world right now? The clerics are standing up - you see, the pilgrims can't go to Karballah because the Third Infantry Division's there. And what's the Third Infantry Division doing? They're participating in an effort to surround Saddam Hussein and starve him out. Every Shi'ia cleric right now is saying that the Shi'ia world is facing a new Yaziz. And his name is Bush. And we must rally around the new Hussein, and his name is Saddam Hussein.

(a few of the anarchists in the back start to clap again)

Don't clap! - this is frightening. Because we have taken a situation where Saddam Hussein, a brutal dictator who is not deserving of any quota of respect - a man who should be thrown out of office - a man who doesn't deserve to be in power - we've legitimized him in the eyes of the very people we needed to get rid of him - the Shi'ia are on Saddam's side, and you wanna' reinforce this, there's an organization called Dawa - the Dawa, small little group, eight to ten thousand fanatics, who Saddam Hussein fears, they are waging a mortal struggle with Saddam for the past twenty years ; the Dawa has come closer than anybody else to assassinating Saddam Hussein. There's a nice little videotape there that the CIA has that shows a rocket-propelled grenade going into a convoy of silver Mercedes, and then riddling the one behind that one with machine gun fire. Saddam Hussein was in that convoy, just in the car in front of the one that got hit by the RPG. How do I know that's true? Because when I went to Saddam Hussein's bodyguard unit, there were two silver Mercedes covered with tarps. You pull one off, and and there's the RPG round going through it, you pull the other one out, and there's the machine gun bullets. No, they tried to kill Saddam.

Do you know what the Dawa just did this week? The head of the Dawa came out, and said "We swear allegiance to Saddam Hussein to fight against the American aggressor". If we have convinced Dawa to switch sides ; we have lost this war. Is this a war about oil? No. Because if it were about oil, we would never engage in this policy - there is no way that any western oil company is ever going to go into Iraq and invest the resources necessary to upgrade the Iraqi oil facilities so long as the population of Iraq hates and despises us. This war is about American imperial domination ; oil plays a role afterwards, oil is not leading that.

(reads) "After Iraq, what's next?"

I dunno. First of all, I'll tell you right now, after Iraq, nothing's next, because Bush has been defeated. See, the whole concept of this strategy of pre-emption was bluff and bluster. The whole idea is that we would convince the world that....our domination is inevitable. That it's futile to resist.

And one thing that the whole world's learning right now is that those nineteen year old American Marines are not supermen. That a bullet kills an American the same as it kills anybody else. That you can stand up and fight the United States ; that American victory is not inevitable. Which means that the policy of intimidating Iran, Syria, and other nations is gone ; no one will ever again be intimidated by the United States. Now this doesn't necessarily reflect a good thing, because as I said, if we can't intimidate 'em, then we were gonna' go to war against 'em.

Right now, in the Pentagon - and this is a statement of fact - there is a planning cell planning for war against North Korea in June of this year. In June of this year. Now, we may not go to war ; remember the original planners of the Iraqi invasion were planning to go to war in November of last year, and it got extended. But they're planning. And the key element of this plan - another reason why June is an important date - is that sometime in May, American nuclear laboratories will perfect the design of a nuclear penetrating bomb. No...low yield nuclear weapon, but one that can penetrate deep into the earth and explode, blowing up caves and underground bunkers. The plan that's being worked on right now calls for a pre-emptive strike that incorporates up to fifty nuclear weapons against North Korea, to eliminate their artillery, that's...embedded in caves along the DMZ, to knock out their nuclear missile capability, to knock out their nuclear weapons capability. Fifty nuclear weapons. Pre-emptively.

This is insane, ladies and gentlemen, this is why it's imperative that we regain control of this country now : because if we don't, our future is shot.

And I wish I could take more questions, but unfortunately, I gotta get back to Albany, New York tonight, so thank you very much, it was a pleasure talkin' to you.

(deafening applause and cheering ; a standing ovation until the end of the recording)

the voice from the sewers

As best I could, I had homesteaded a couple of feet on the steps leading up to the speakers' platform. I pulled splinters out every night, but under the steps was a room like a caboose and there on a couple of shelves were the Telephones. FROM the convention leaders, floor captains, state and delegation heads TO Harry Hopkins at the Blackstone, in charge of Everything and through him to the Man in the White House. Sooner or later I was bound to hear something to my advantage, so, ear to crack, I made myself as small, limp and inconspicuous as possible, people going up and down the platform walked around or over me. If I moaned they never looked down to see whether I was a crocodile or a three-toed sloth.

Until the day Bill Slocum, once a Journal reporter, tripped over me. In his embarrassment, he tried to make up to me by saying he was now working for one of the big radio networks, and would I like to come and see the broadcast setup? I remembered that Mrs. McA had bragged about seven hundred women radio chairmen, so I thought I ought to take a look.

I am sure Mrs. McA knew nothing about the Voice from the Sewers, nor, in all fairness, did Bill Slocum; he wanted to start me at the bottom and show me the whole operation and we stumbled on this deep dark secret.

Down down down we went into caverns measureless to man. I felt the drip drops of foul water and soon I heard ancestral voices prophesying war. The hair lifted on my scalp, as in the bowels of Chicago this demon wailed, magnified and eerie:

ILLINOIS WANTS ROOSEVELT
NEW JERSEY WANTS ROOSEVELT
THE WORLD WANTS ROOSEVELT
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF AMERICA I WISH YOU COULD SEE THIS CONVENTION HALL HERE IN CHICAGO
ITS BEDLAM HAS CAUGHT FIRE WITH WILD ENTHUSIASM FOR ROOOOOOSSSSEEEEEVVVVELLLLLLLTTTTTT.

I put my hand against the damp wall. When Slocum and I had left the hall minutes before it had been sunk into a profound lethargy, a lethargy, I'd overheard it said on the phones, was keeping Farley and Alben Barkley awake nights. They didn't want to go into a campaign against the wild new enthusiasm of Wendell Wilkie off this lukewarm, halfhearted showing. Nothing could halt Roosevelt's nomination, but apathy or a browbeaten air of initimidation, along with the third-term issue, might cost them the election.

Nobody seemed to have any idea what to do about it. They had forgotten Mayor Kelly's methods. Or used them?

I turned back as though a fire alarm had sounded at sea. It floods back around me, I can hear my fleeing feet. I wish I could transport us to that time when we knew so little about Radio, when it was still a sort of chimera, an audio illusion, and as that disembodied voice pursued me up stone steps, through a little tunnel, I tell you frankly I thought I had gone nuts. Then there before me was the same vast smoking glaring stadium caught in the same flat list;ess silent movie, you know now from television that a north delegation has no way of knowing what a south delegation is doing, and east and west never the twain shall meet, but now they could all hear a traumatic bray describing them to each other:

NEW YORK WANTS ROOSEVELT
NEW YORK IS ON ITS FEET WAVING BANNERS
NEW YORK IS CHEERING MADLY FOR ROOSEVELT

Under the rail where I hung gasping the New York Delegation was looking over its shoulder to see if anyone was following them. I shuddered with relief. At least it wasn't ME. The delegates from New York didn't know either, the whites of their eyes were beginning to show. They began to react, to obey the suggestions. I slid off the rail and as I hit the corridor and heard the same voice reverberating I thought the porpoises are coming out of the seat to take over. Bill Slocum wasn't around any more. By all the gods, I said to myself, if I have any courage at all I am going to see what is behind that door! The door where dwelt the phanton voice bellowing in galvanic waves. I took a deep breath, said Jesus, Mary and Joseph as the nuns had taught me long ago and banged open the door.

Before me I saw a small doss-like chamber. On the table were black boxes of mechanical equipment and a pair of large feet. Behind it a man -- they were his feet -- leaning back with eyes on the ceiling, on his face an expression of sheer creative bliss. As I took two steps forward the door shut behind me, he shouted, LOOK AT PENNSYLVANIA, and I jumped out of my skin.

We were alone.

Four damp walls with no windows.

No periscopes.

Only the equivalent. A radio microphone in his hand reaching up up up to the floor, and out out out to the United States of America and all the ships at sea.

I had no way of knowing he was another of Mayor Kelly's men, but at least I knew he was human.As fast as I could, I was nearly out of gas, I raced back upstairs an sat quietly in the press box watching it happen.I got to the city room by climbing the stairs and there behind the desk sat Howey [the editor]. He said, "What've you got?" and I told him.

"Who was he?" Howey said.

Slocum had been guiltless; just the same if I didn't snitch on him I had the right to ask for the name. I passed it on to Howey.

"Geeseezzzzz!" Howey said. "That's Kelly's Superintendent of Sewers!"

He sat looking at me. Between lolling on the steps, running the relay and watching the spectral drama of the Voice from the Sewers, the sweat had rolled and then dried on me like garlic in the mud. I must have looked like one of the porpoises with a low blood count. Howey's glass eye estimated I might have been too distraught to be trustworthy, and he said, "It's too goddam good to be true. Are you sure?"

With what sounded to me like a sob, I said, "YES."

Howey said, "All right, all right, step on it," and began to yell at the telegraph desk. Repulsive as he was, I loved him. No other editor would have had the guts. He said, "Hold it to fifteen hundred words --" ...

[here's part of what she wrote:]

If you happened to be listening far from the smoky, jammed glaring convention hall you may have thought the delegates from those states were standing on their hind legs and doing high pressure stunts in a throbbing demand for a Third Term for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Nothing, my friends, could be further from the truth. The delegates were standing flat-footed. The scheduled whoopee was flopping like a hooked catfish...In this greatest emergency of the convention one man was rushed to the mike, in the basement, with orders to needle the convention into something that had to sound like a wild and roaring and heartfelt demonstration.

The man who was ready to die -- and sometimes sounded like he might of apoplexy -- for the dear old Democratic Party was Tommy Garry, superintendent of Sewers for the City of Chicago, a staunch henchman of Mayor Kelly...The stunned and bewildered delegates were suggestible with anxiety and fatigue. They stare in all directions to locate the phantom voice...The boys on the floor began to be sure they'd missed their cues... So, the three thousand delegates who couldn't see each other were hypnotized by the phantom voice and made its pictures come true...

Well, it was something to have heard. Those of you who listened in your living rooms all around America may have thought there wre many voices, many men hollering wildly -- the mechanial device made it sound like that from the beginning and in the end of course it had roused the delegates to cast off uncertainty and inertia and join the gag. But the voice that saved the Roosevelt Convention came from the Sewers of Chicago, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

Stone soup and stew -- news and views.

"It seems crazy," said Floyd Peterson, a commercial fisherman who, as a member of the local Tlingit tribe, can drive his all-terrain vehicle across native land to this otherwise inaccessible corner of the forest. ''Why do the politicians want this timber cut, when there is no market for it?"

o brave new world that has such people in it!

Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users, making drugs such as heroin and cocaine pointless to take. Such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years.

The Department of Trade and Industry has set up a special project to investigate ways of using new scientific breakthroughs to combat drug and nicotine addiction.

A national anti-drug immunisation scheme is one of the proposals being put forward by the Brain Science, Addiction and Drugs project, an expert committee of scientists appointed by the Government earlier this year....

Meanwhile, experts at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, have developed a super-virus, harmless to humans, which produces proteins that can block or reduce the effects of cocaine.

The team at Scripps tested the virus on rats by injecting it into their noses twice a day for three days.

On the fourth day, the rats were given a shot of cocaine. The researchers found that cocaine had more effect on the rats not injected with the virus than those that were. Scientists hope that the virus will help stop the cravings experienced by cocaine users for the drug by blocking the pleasure they normally associate with cocaine. This anti-drug medication is expected to be available to users within the next two years in the form of a nasal spray.

Over the next decade an increasing number of new “pharmacotherapy” medications will become available with the potential to tremendously impact the use and abuse of illegal drugs and the overall direction of national and international drug policy. These pharmacotherapy medications are designed to block or significantly reduce the “highs” elicited by illegal drugs. Used as part of a drug treatment program, pharmacotherapy medications may provide a valuable aid for people seeking a chemical aid in limiting or eliminating problem drug use. However, the tremendously politicized nature of the “drug war,” raises substantial concerns that in addition to those who choose to use such medications, some people will be compelled to use them. In the absence of extraordinary circumstances, governmental action compelling a person to use a pharmacotherapy drug would violate a number of constitutional guarantees and other legal rights protecting people from forced medical treatment. Among the rights potentially implicated by compulsory use of pharmacotherapy drugs are the right to informed consent, the right to bodily integrity and privacy, the protection against cruel and unusual punishment, and the right to freedom of thought.

Patriot games

First, the commission proposes the creation of a National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). It would have two functions: intelligence and operations. Of its intelligence function, the commission says: “The NCTC should lead strategic analysis, pooling all-source intelligence, foreign and domestic, about transnational terrorist organizations of global reach.” Operationally, “The NCTC should perform joint planning. The plans would assign operational responsibilities to lead agencies, such as State, the CIA, the FBI, Defense and its combatant commands, Homeland Security, and other agencies.” According to the commission, the head of the NCTC “must have the right to concur in the choices of personnel to lead the operating entities of departments and agencies focused on counterterrorism, specifically to include the head of the Counterterrorist Center, the head of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, the commanders of the Defense Department’s Special Operations Command and Northern Command, and the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism."

Then the commission would couple this all-powerful new entity with the creation of a National Intelligence Director. The NID would be an intelligence czar, overseeing both foreign and domestic intelligence collection and analysis. "The National Intelligence Director must be able to directly oversee intelligence collection inside the United States.” The NID would also have authority to “approve and submit nominations to the president of the individuals who would lead the CIA, DIA, FBI Intelligence Office, NSA, NGA, NRO, [parts of] Homeland Security and other national intelligence capabilities.” And the NID would control their budgets. The NID would also oversee covert operations. And: “The head of the NCTC would report to the national intelligence director.”

In tandem, the NCTC and the NID would create an intelligence power of truly awesome scope. Because terrorism is essentially a political crime, as the ACLU reminds us constantly, counterterrorist investigations always involve politics, dissidents and rebels. It’s not like investigating crimes, or like intelligence on war-making capabilities of nations. Just as the Patriot Act knocked down the “wall” between the CIA and the FBI, making it far easier to conduct domestic spying operations against American citizens not suspected of a crime, the NCTC-NID combination would concentrate the power to carry out domestic spying in all-powerful nexus, located (where?) in the White House. The NID would report directly to the president, or to the “POTUS,” in the pompous wiring diagram in the commission report. Says the report: “The intelligence entity inside the NCTC .. would sit there alongside the operations management unit, … with both making up the NCTC, in the Executive Office of the President.”

Such changes in our foreign and domestic spying capabilities cannot, and should not, even be considered in the months before a presidential election, with each party competing with the other to show how tough on terrorism they are. I expect that normal bureaucratic resistance will happily block the commission's radical plan this year, but you never know. One thing we do know: If Osama bin Laden & Co. are planning some attack this year, the commission's Big Brother plan won’t stop them—whether it’s enacted or not....

During my 27 years at the Central Intelligence Agency I served under nine directors and worked closely with four of them. They were in charge.

One of them, Admiral Stansfield Turner, came to the Agency from his post as commander of the Sixth Fleet, with a keen appreciation of the need for the authority necessary to carry out his responsibilities. Recognizing that his authority over the intelligence community was largely ad referendum to the president, he went to President Carter and obtained what was needed. Writing in yesterday’s Washington Post, Turner recounted that Carter issued a presidential executive order giving DCI Turner authority over all 15 intelligence agencies “to reallocate funds and people among them and to set priorities for both collecting and analyzing intelligence.” Turner notes, “This enabled a far greater degree of coordination than we have today.”

So it need not be the case that “no one is in charge.” Mr. Hamilton’s comment notwithstanding, in my view saying the president is in charge is a completely satisfactory answer—and that the president need only empower the DCI by executive order to enable him to get the job done.

Did the commission seek out Admiral Turner’s views during its long investigation? Is it a totally new concept to the commission that, as Turner puts it, “the recommended position of National Intelligence Director (NID) already exists? It is the director of central intelligence, created by the National Security Act of 1947, with responsibility for coordinating the nation’s 15 intelligence agencies.”

Did commission staff not uncover Turner’s thoughtful op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor of May 28, 2002, in which he emphasized that: “With a stroke of the pen tomorrow, the president could make the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) responsible for ensuring coordination and give him/her the authority to do so…and thus move a good distance toward rectifying the failure last summer to deduce what would happen on Sept. 11.” Turner then added, “Without the president’s personal intervention and exercise of decisive leadership,” one cannot ensure that “future performance will be better.”

As for the commission’s recommended cabinet-level National Intelligence Director, Turner’s article yesterday reiterated what so many others have been saying—that we don’t need a new layer of bureaucracy. This truism, which should be self-evident, was spoken first by one who ought to know: Tom Ridge, head of the recently created Department of Homeland Security. I was struck by his very quick—and somewhat cryptic—comment on the NID proposal: “I don’t think you need a czar,” Ridge said on Fox News Channel. “We already have one level of bureaucracy that we don’t need.”