Air America
national radio network, September 2, 2006, 11:30pm
Peter Werbe opens by asking Ray to tell the story
of how he confronted Rumsfeld on his lies about the WMDs on national television
last May, and the all the media fall-out from it.
* * *
PW: “Looking at an
effort called World Can’t Wait, and these hugely expensive full-page
advertisements in the New York Times, one I believe on Wednesday. Tell us about
the organization, what it’s all about and what they’re trying to accomplish.
RM: We all scraped
our piggy banks to get that ad out there. We had no rich gurus to support us.
The attempt is to do something new and different. Something akin to what the
Polish dissidents did to eventually throw down a very unjust and illegal
government. The idea is that something extraordinary is needed because these
are indeed extraordinary times where the president is acting as though he were
king and the other two branches of government seem to be acquiescing in that.
There are also hopeful signs but without massive– massive participation —
massive demonstration of interest in this whole thing like we had during Vietnam, it’s
not going to be easy to turn the tide. Unlike some of my colleagues I have a
lot of hope for what will happen in November and that hope is that you can fool
a certain percentage of the people some of the time, but I have great faith in
the basic common sense of the American people. And assuming the voting machines
are not fixed as they have been in the past, I have hope that things are going
to change. But that hope at the same time gives me great fear of the period of
the next two months because God knows what this crowd will come upon as a
September or October Surprise. It may
begin with Iran.
PW: Yeah. The slogan
here is Drive Out the Bush Regime, which has a very strong, almost– well, I
won’t use the word I was gonna use because it’s misused by the Bush regime. But
it’s very strong, it almost sounds extra-parliamentary, if you will, and yet so
many people that I have great respect for like yourself and other people have
signed on to this– Daniel Ellsberg, Gore Vidal, I mean I could spend another 5
minutes naming all the names who have signed on to this. Tell me what the
process was– and actually if you can, what would it mean to drive out the Bush
regime.
RM: Well, I used to
say that the Bush regime is arguably guilty of perpetrating a war of
aggression. We know now it is not necessary to use “arguably.” Nuremberg defined war of
aggression, saying that those who initiate such are perpetrating the most
serious international crime, differing from other war crimes only insofar as it
contains the accumulated evils of the whole. That’s a direct quote. Think
torture, think kidnapping, think putting people in black holes without even
telling the Red Cross, think of
illegal wire tapping. Think of the whole gamut. Now on two counts the king —
oops, isn’t that interesting– the president is demonstrably guilty. Hamdan [v. Rumsfeld] says that he has violated the war crimes act of 1996 passed
by a Republican-dominated Congress which says you must tie U.S. criminal
law inextricably to the Geneva Conventions. Now, on the advice of Cheney’s
lawyer, Addington, and Gonzalez, [Bush] prescinded — he set himself apart–
from Geneva. And now he’s been told that that was
unconstitutional and that was illegal. And that was the Supreme Court telling
him that– the Hamdan decision. And
more recently, just 3 weeks ago, we had Judge Taylor in Detroit saying he violated the 4th amendment
of the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 which
prohibits explicitly government eavesdropping on Americans without a court
warrant. Now the president has admitted to that and as John Dean has pointed
out, the president has thus admitted to an impeachable offense. Why is it
impeachable? Because that’s precisely one of the points–
PW: Right– high
crimes and misdemeanors. Now the day is Thursday, October 5, for the World
Can’t Wait– Drive Out the Bush Regime, a day of mass resistance. And unlike
other days, this is not going to center in Washington
or New York or San Francisco. Am I right in my understanding
— rather, it’s going to be all over the country?
RM: Yeah, it will be
in Washington and New York of course, but we hope to raise up
the whole country. You see, what happened in Germany they waited till the
‘propitious time,’ and it became too late. And if we know anything from
history, we know, as Martin Luther King said once, there is such a thing as too
late. There’s quite enough evidence here to convict the president of war crimes
and crimes against humanity, but if somebody doesn’t rise up and say that —
out loud without any fear or favor — we will be lost. And we can’t depend on
the Democrats and the Democratic Party. We need to give them a good boost and
get them to speak for the people.
PW: “People are
listening all over the country on 80 to 90 stations — many of them in very
small towns around our country — and this is something that everyone can link
onto, in their own way, in their own city, and it has the capacity, as you’re
saying, Ray McGovern, to transform itself into mass resistance so that it’s in
every little bit of our country. It’s been fascinating talking to you” See you in the streets on October 5th, and it
is worldcantwait.org. Peter Werbe. I’ll be right back with you on the Air
America radio network.
PW: “Ray McGovern is
an activist but it sounds like it’s based around his faith-based sense of
morals and ethics, because he works for a church. So we were kind of throwing it out to you. A
lot of people– they think, “I don’t believe the official lies. I don’t
buy the story being put out Bush Co. I know it’s a racket, I know the war was
based on lies, I know they’re looting the middle class and looting the working
class, making the poor poorer while the rich get much much much richer and the
country is driven into debt.” So then what are you going to do about it?
That’s the real question, and frequently people say, “well I don’t know,
what am I gonna do, I don’t know about anything that’s going on.” Well,
we’re telling you about something that’s going on. So the ball is now in your
court. Nobody likes to have someone come up to them and start grabbing them by
the lapels — and in a sense that’s what I’m doing, and I apologize for that.
But we’re talking about critical issues now of life and death and the nature of
democracy in this country. It’s not guaranteed. You don’t get a postcard in the
mail that says “There will be fascism in 3 days, so you better get your
ass out if you don’t like the way it’s gonna go.” Or you think you’re the
person that’s gonna be interned like [happened] in Chile
or Argentina.
The idea that it can’t happen here — it CAN happen here unless we do what we
have to do as citizens to protect democracy and the Constitution. We are facing
a formidable foe — people that have the power, that have armed force behind
them, that have the media behind, that have the big money behind them. But the
people have won before facing these odds, facing these very same foes in
different guises and different times. So we can do it, but it depends on all of
us. It really does.
Here’s Della.
Della: I’m glad you
brought up the Mexican vote and the way Obrador is protesting it and what they
are doing down there. Of course we know that Bush is really the de facto
president of Mexico–
PW: Sure
Della: He’s very
concerned that Calderon wins, he even called to congratulate him even before
the election was certified”. That
election is very important to us because it will severely impact our economy,
the reason is that the final stages of NAFTA won’t go into effect until next
year, and the final stages of NAFTA will mean that all subsidies to farmers in Mexico will be
take away. But the subsidies we give to our large agricultural companies will
continue.
PW: And the Mexican
protection that allows American produce to come in to Mexico. So they’ve ruined the lives
of millions of Mexican farmers, particularly corn farmers who stream into Mexico City mostly. The
ones with the most drive, they come here, because their traditional life has
been destroyed, they have to feed their families, so they’re gonna go where the
money is”.
* * *
PW: “It is all
simmering beneath the surface, one day it will blow” and hopefully it’ll happen
on some day like this October 5 when World Can’t Wait is preparing these
national demonstrations.