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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.

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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".

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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.

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