Debunking the Myths: Our (Bush’s) National Strategy for Victory in Iraq

Welcome to Talk Nation Radio

David Swanson, joins us today to talk about the increasing debate about bringing US troops home from Iraq. David Swanson is the co-founder of the After Downing Street Coalition. He was the press secretary for the Denis Kucinich for President Campaign and is Washington Director of Democrats.com a board member of progressive democrats of America and also Washington director of Impeach Pac. On the web site of afterdowningstreet.org you will find early analysis of a document the Bush Administration has just released calling for “Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” David Swanson describes the document as a public relations document, part of a strategy to describe what has happened in Iraq to date as a resounding success while refusing to establish any standards for accountability.

(From the After Downing Street web site: “The problem is it’s not a new strategy for success in Iraq; it’s a public relations document. The strategy describes what has transpired in Iraq to date as a resounding success and refuses to establish any standards for accountability. It dismisses serious problems such as the dramatic increase in bombings as “metrics that the terrorists and insurgents want the world to use.” Americans understand it’s time for a new course in Iraq. Unfortunately, this document is little more than an extended justification for a President “determined to stay his course.”)

NOTE: Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq Bush to keep things pretty much the same though promises have been made recently to both keep U.S. forces in Iraq and draw U.S. forces down by 20,000 to 30,000. Just prior to the President’s speech today November 30, 2005 there were reports that he planned to announce a draw down of U.S. forces.

This is the ~uncut~ version of a November 30, 2005 interview.

Dori Smith: David Swanson welcome to Talk Nation Radio.
David Swanson: Thank you.

Smith: Let’s start right in with the hinting that Bush would bring some U.S. Troops home from Iraq. Debunk the myth.

Swanson: Well it’s not clear that he is you know after two and a half years of this and over 2100 U.S. troops dead and as many as 100,000 Iraqis dead the President has decided he needs a plan. And he has released this plan, a National Strategy for Victory in Iraq but there are no clear measurements in it. There’s no clear indication of what victory would be, how we measure it, when it will occur and how we will get there. It’s just not a plan and it does not have dates in it. It does not have numbers in it. There’s no reason to believe much has changed in the White House strategy.

Smith: Let’s take a look at what the Iraqi and American people feel. The latest polls show that Iraqis when asked about the presence of coalition troops, 82% would like them to leave. The President has been running between 60% to 65% of the American people don’t trust him on Iraq and his approval ratings are just tanking. So when the White House and President Bush, Condoleezza Rice our Secretary of State, or the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, begin to talk about “Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” who are they really speaking for at this point?

Swanson: Maybe they are speaking for the military contractors who have been outted recently as buying mansions and Rolls Royces for Republican Congress members. I’m not sure who they would be speaking for. As you note the public here and in Iraq wants this war over and so if we are talking about bringing Democracy to Iraq we are talking out of both sides of our mouths because as a Democracy the United States wants the war ended. And the people of Iraq want the war ended. So if Donald Rumsfeld is talking about great increases in Iraqi security forces that will allow US forces to gradually pull out but he has been talking that line for over two years and we have not seen any real indications that that’s the case and he ignores the glaring problem that many of the Iraqi forces that are in Iraq are engaged in murdering Sunnis in Iraq so the same goes for this plan that the White House has released today. There is no mention in it of the problems that are ongoing in Iraq. The murders and the death and the ongoing resistance to the occupation. So it’s disturbing. I think that the White House may have been better off saying nothing than saying what the President is saying today. I don’t think it is going to help them.

Smith: Now they do seem to be saying a very many things at one time but let’s talk about the troop numbers in general because the only numbers we have heard have tended to be under 30,000 troops to come home after the December 1st election. That represents roughly the same number that the United States added to the force during the time just before the referendum on the Constitution. There were so many attacks and there were so many indications that the election was just not going to happen without added troop strength that they did indeed put twenty or thirty thousand more troops in as I understand it. So what we are really talking about then is bringing those additional troops home after the election process if finished.

Swanson: Yes that’s right. The proposals that they are making and the proposals that the more right leaning democrats are making are not any substantive change. They are bringing back 20, 30,000 troops that were put in extra and making a big deal out of bringing them back. Well there was quite a silence about adding them in and so it’s not a serious proposal and it’s not what the American public and the Iraqi public is demanding which is a complete end to the occupation. Not gradually over the next two years reducing the U.S. troop size to what we were told it was going to be to begin with but rather completely ending the occupation, abandoning the permanent military bases that are being built, and declaring that Iraq’s resources, notably the oil, belong to Iraq. If we can’t do that then this is just PR. It’s not a peace plan.

Smith: And getting back to what you were saying about the death squads that we have been reading about lately in the mainstream press, though some members of the more independent, alternative, and progressive media sources have been reporting on this for some time now, that hundreds of Sunni men have been found shot to death. Large numbers of them with their hands tied behind their backs shot in the head in ditches and other places. Now, the story on this seems to go that some of those additional security forces that Donald Rumsfeld may be referring to when he talks about the increase in the boots on the ground that are Iraqi may indeed be death squads. Let’s talk about that. I know there is a story up on the After Downing Street .org web page, an article by Dexter Filkens in the New York Times and its dated 11-29-05.

Swanson: That’s an article that talks about the Iraqi security forces which are largely Shiite and by many reports identify themselves more as Shiites than as Iraqis. They are not really being an Iraqi nation at this point but rather a U.S. occupation zone and there have been many reports from Sunni civilians of family members being taken away and then turning up dead and we know that death squads are a strategy that some of the Neocons in Bush’s circle have condoned in the past in Central America. And we know that this may be going on in Iraq. And there is no mention of this problem in any way in the President’s lengthy “Plan for Victory” today. So it’s encouraging that the New York Times is talking about some of the horrors that are going on in Iraq. It would have been nice for them to foresee that when they were promoting the war and then running Judith Miller stories that she has now resigned in disgrace over. But yes, from the point of view of Iraqis they are not seeing democracy. They are not even seeing security. And we have really turned Iraq into the most dangerous place in the world and the breeding ground for terrorism that the President pretends it was all along. So this war has made the world and the United States much less safe than we were and created a breeding ground for terrorists.

The first step in changing that is for the U.S. to pull out, to end the occupation, which will end the insurgency against the occupation and Iraq will not suddenly be a paradise but it will be able to move forward and currently its not an you know the way that we are going to end this may be through Congress, cutting off the money but it also may be through ending the Military’s ability to recruit because while as we have said they have a huge number of troops over there and are very reluctant to reduce it
in any significant way they are having a very difficult time recruiting the numbers of troops from the U.S. to maintain that level.

Smith: David Swanson tell us too about what has been going on behind the scenes within the Progressive Democratic community that you are in touch with in the wake of Representative Murtha’s very strong remarks about the need for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Swanson: Well there are those who have concerns over the precise wording of Murtha’s bill in that it calls for leaving some small force behind or close to Iraq and it’s not as specific and detailed as some other bills that are before the House of Representatives now. But the fact that he is traditionally a supporter of wars who has turned against this particular war means that he is someone that the national media pays attention to, that other hawkish democrats and moderate Republicans pay attention to and so his statements and the media around it gave a big boost to the effort to end the war.

So more power to him. It’s terrific. It would be nice if those Congress members who have opposed the war since before it began and who offer some expertise on what is wrong with wars and what is wrong with the system we have in which military contractors have such power in Washington. It would be nice if they were heard from as well. But Murtha’s bill is one that most peace groups are promoting as well as a couple of other of pieces of legislation. Jim McGovern from Massachusetts has a bill that would end funding for the war and would provide funding only for the safe and orderly withdrawal of our troops and for diplomatic efforts and financial assistance to an international force. So that is an excellent piece of legislation as well.

Barbara Lee, Congresswoman from California, has a bill that would simply make it the U.S. policy not to keep permanent military bases in Iraq. Which is something that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and President Bush have stated is our policy but we are clearly building permanent military bases in Iraq and not a single Republican has signed on to Congresswoman Lee’s bill so that tells you something.

There is also an effort in the house to act on what is called a “discharge petition” on a bill that would begin to end the occupation late next year. This is a bipartisan bill from Congressmen Abercrombie and Jones and a discharge petition means that you collect a majority of signatures in the House and force the debate on the floor of the full house rather in committees because many many good pieces of legislation in this effort to end the war and to hold accountable those who lied about it before hand have been killed in committee. So we are promoting that as well. And information about all of these is available at After Downing Street dot org.

Smith: I want to ask though, the overall impact that what Representative Murtha said, in the way the Bush Administration has been able to articulate it’s defense of the war…because we have seen this kind of very odd schizophrenic response when it’s come to troop withdrawal over the last few weeks and I would just note that on November 20th Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said that an immediate troop pull out would be a, “terrible thing”. FOX News reported on the following day that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said it might be possible to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq from 160,000 to fewer than 100,000 by the end of next year. He also said according to FOX, “Put yourself in the shoes of the enemy. The enemy hears a big debate in the United States and they have to wonder, maybe all we have to do is wait and we’ll win.” –Going down my interesting list…The President of course has been saying that under no circumstances would he consider withdrawing troops from Iraq, however, when he was in China on November 20th at the same time Rumsfeld was arguing that he would never pull them out, Bush was suggesting that we “put ourselves in the shoes of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.” So it’s either put ourselves in the shoes of the enemy or put ourselves in the shoes of the U.S. soldiers. Either way, I don’t think the American people want to wear those shoes, do you?

Swanson: (Chuckles) No, and many of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, according to various reports a majority, would like to come home. There are many, and because of communication by email with soldiers in Iraq, and because of groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War, we know, soldiers there know what’s going on there and we know what soldiers are thinking over there. Many of them would like to end this. But Bush and Cheney attacked Murtha out of the gate and then saw that they needed to change course and pull back from that because it was seen as too extreme for them to be attacking someone like Congressman Murtha. So they stopped that and to some extent they seem to have stopped saying that a gradual withdrawal will be joining the side of the terrorists. But they are not providing any time table. They continue to maintain that a time table would allow the insurgents to plan for their take over of the country. But, you know, this is nonsensical. The ability to launch a suicide attack on a building does not equate by any means to the ability to take over and run a country and there is no reason to believe that someone like Zarqawi is going to immediately take over Iraq when the U.S. ends the occupation. This is Bush playing on our fears with a piece of nonsense as extreme as his threats of a mushroom cloud.

Smith: Given this level of dialogue that is still focusing on the “war on terror” and Zarqawi and people like that. Let’s take a look at what could happen if the troop numbers are withdrawn. If 20,000 to 30,000 are withdrawn, if U.S. soldiers start to move out perhaps of some of the city that they are occupying right now, would it be possible as Seymour Hersch has suggested that the U.S. Military might turn to a new level of an air war?

Swanson: Seymour Hersch has a good record of having good sources and he says that that is being planned in the Pentagon and we have to take that very seriously and given the Bush Administration’s documented utter disregard for the value of civilian life there is certainly the possibility that the U.S. will withdraw troops and increase bombing. You know information has come out fairly recently about the U.S. use of white Phosphorus as a chemical weapon in attacking Fallujah. There is absolute disregard for the value of life. So that may very well be part of the plan.

Smith: We are talking about a Military and an administration that have resorted to extreme uses of force. That has been criticized and cited as war crime behavior. Let’s take a look at that and include in our discussion the more recent information on After Downing Street dot org, about the attacks that were suggested by the President on Al-Jazeera.

Swanson: It’s interesting. We have not seen the memo or the pair of memos but it has been reported by credible sources in the United Kingdom that President Bush very much wanted to bomb the Al-Jazeera headquarters in Iraq and that Prime Minister Tony Blair had to talk him out of it. If you look back at the period of time when that was said to be occurring there were all kinds of verbal attacks on Al-Jazeera from the Bush Administration in the media and Donald Rumsfeld was denouncing Al-Jazeera as aiding the terrorists. And if you look at the record there have been over a dozen attacks on the media by U.S. Military forces in Iraq including a rocket that killed an Al-Jazeera reporter. So it’s entirely credible that that was going on. And when you look at the unprecedented crack down on free speech in the United Kingdom right now where no media outlet is allowed to report on the contents of these memos, which speak to something that is years old, that presumably is not of vital importance to current national security, you have to assume that the Bush Administration is behind that crack down.

If you look at today’s Los Angeles Times there is a report on U.S. soldiers in Iraq writing stories and quietly slipping them in with payment to the Iraqi press, you see two new documented examples of an extensive campaign to control information and distort the reporting of information here and abroad by the U.S. media. It’s interesting that we learn so many of these stories from leaked memos in the United Kingdom which is what happened back in May and June when the memos were leaked about the secret plans for war and the plans to fix the facts around the policy and lie to the American public about claims of weapons of mass destruction and ties to 9/11 –if it weren’t for British whistleblowers I don’t know where we would be. And we call ourselves a democracy.

Smith: Talk a little bit more about the kinds of emotions that are going on in D.C. within the parties as people consider the stakes right now as we see well over 2,000 US soldiers dead, probably more than 100,000 Iraqis dead as a result of the violence itself and many more sick from what has been used in the war zone; Iraqis, 71% of them don’t have clean drinking water routinely and many are without electricity most of the time. It’s just a very difficult place. We’ve heard reports from Dahr Jamail that the hospitals have been coming under siege. We heard that from Aisha at Doctors for Iraq in an interview some months back that U.S. forces were actually occupying hospitals and that there was an increased bombing in Western Iraq. So that there has been an escalation of the violence, which of course ratchets up the stakes for everyone involved, the Iraqi people, the U.S. soldiers. And now what we are seeing is an increase in the level of emotionalism that the American people have toward bringing the troops home. This is something too that Representative Murtha has acknowledged. He says, “I have never seen such an outpouring in the 32 years I’ve been in Congress of support and people with tears in their eyes, people walking along clapping when I’m walking through the halls of Congress, saying something needed to be said.”

This really does strike at the heart of the matter doesn’t it, that last portion of what he said, something needed to be said. I just want to call that to mind as we discuss what the Press has not done and what people like you David Swanson have been trying to do online and in conversations like this one throughout the years of the Bush administration.

Swanson: Yeah, something did need to be said, it still needs to be said, and there are those on both sides of Congress who are still refusing to say it. Murtha’s office on that first day when he made that announcement was telling us that they have gotten 1600 phone calls, 1300 of them positive. So there was an outpouring of support for him having had the nerve to say what most of the public already knows is true according to the media’s own polls. So there is tremendous passion among the public, the war remains the top issue of concern to voters and the majority of them want it ended either now or within the next year.

If you look at Congress, Congress is dragging behind the American people. There are leaders. There is an Out of Iraq Caucus in Congress led by Congress woman Maxine Waters with about 70 members now in it and yet you have democrats like Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman taking an extremely different position. You have the nominal leaders of the democratic party, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed, willing to take certain steps but not quite. NOTE: Shortly after this interview David Swanson put a new piece up on the After Downing Street web site to note that Representative Nancy Pelosi made a stronger statement of support for Representative Murtha. You can read it here.

–They put out statements supporting Murtha but not actually agreeing with him. And on the Republican side you have the beginning of defections. You have a half dozen members who have voted in Committees for democratic proposals to investigate the lies or to begin to plan an end for the war and so it’s an interesting situation in which Congress is slowly beginning to move in the direction of where the public is but it’s very uncertain and you have the Republican Party drastically losing the support of the American public. You have studies showing that the President’s unpopularity cost the Republican candidates the Governorship in New Jersey and Virginia and the Democratic Party still refusing to take that opportunity that’s lying in front of it and declare clear opposition to the war and win the support of the public.

You have a majority of the public according to polls wanting Bush and Cheney impeached for their lies that launched this war and you have not a single Congress member, Democrat or Republican, willing to utter the “I” word. There are numerous challengers who will be running next year against Republicans and against incumbent Democrats who are supporting an immediate impeachment of Bush and Cheney and if you have been to any forums or meetings recently on this topic where that particular element has come up nothing lights up a room and leads to endless standing ovations than expressing a willingness to impeach the President.

Smith: Looking at your web site, After Downing Street dot org what we see are several Talking Points made, two are said to be “impeachable offenses,” –deciding to deceive and mislead Congress and the American People with false claims about weapons of mass destruction and ties between Hussein and 9/11 and then secretly diverting 700 million dollars from the war in Afghanistan to start bombing Iraq to provoke a war. Let’s just talk about the level of deceit and we’ve seen a lot of criminality exposed, corruption at the highest levels. There are investigations ongoing. Some people are resigning. Where do we stand in the exposing of how corrupt this administration is and why isn’t that helping the Democrats to put more fire in their talk about what needs to happen next?

Swanson: It’s helping some Democrats. There are 70 or 80 Democrats who are pretty darn good on this and a lot of other issues and a lot of other issues but it’s not helping all of them. You have Senator Lieberman writing in the Wall Street Journal that the war must go on and just not understanding where the American public is concerned much less the base of the Democratic Party of which 80% would like the President impeached for this war. It’s interesting that the document that came out today about Victory in Iraq said nothing about removing weapons of mass destruction or about ties to 9/11 but if you go back to the letter that the President sent to Congress on March 18th 2003 explaining as required by law why it was necessary to go to war, there were two reasons in there, only two reasons, and they were the alleged weapons of mass destruction and the ties to 9/11, both of which were known by the President at that time to be false, and that is lying to Congress and that is a felony under more than one statute, and that is the highest crime imaginable.

So impeachment was drastically trivialized under President Clinton but to be unwilling to talk about impeachment when there is the strongest evidence that the highest crime possible has been committed really means taking impeachment out of the Constitution from here forward. If we can’t use it now we never will. And so the evidence is overwhelming. You know the Downing Street Memos that came out were interesting because they were so frank and so open. We were never supposed to see the minutes of that meeting and because it was such an authoritative source. But the evidence has just piled up that the President “knowingly lied”.

We are now being told by Republican sympathizers that he is not really accountable because he is too dimwitted because he didn’t know he was lying. And yet we know that he did. We know that within ten days after the 9/11 attacks he was informed that Iraq had nothing to do with it. We know he went to meetings and demanded stronger evidence that Iraq had something to do with it and complained that the evidence wasn’t strong enough. But then went out on national television and stated as an absolute certainty that all of these things were true. That 9/11 was connected to Iraq. That Iraq had nuclear weapons. That Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. And so forth. And right down the line each of these claims was known at the time to be false. The aluminum tubes were denounced by the Department of Energy and by the International Atomic Energy. The source on the biological and chemical weapons was denounced by the German Intelligence agents who were speaking to him and completely unreliable. –Each claim was known to be false and this group at the White House, the White House Iraq Group, was put together to market those claims regardless. And there can be no greater affront to Democracy than that. Than consciously selling the public a war on the basis of fraudulent claims.

Smith: Finally we have heard a lot about “peak oil” and certainly the recent increases in gasoline prices and oil price have awakened the American People to this problem. Are we looking at a conflict that America does not have the ability to pull out of for the reason that the leadership, and with the acceptance of Congress, the leadership refuses to look at anything that will not continue to keep Iraqi oil at least accessible to the U.S.?

Swanson: Yes, at least inaccessible to any other rival to the U.S. You know I think that ultimately this is about power and dreams of empire and the oil industry is part of that but I don’t think the oil profits are ultimately the biggest or sole cause of this war. But I think that until we face up to the destruction of the planet that is resulting from burning oil and we begin to shift our energy policy to renewable and sustainable and reduced use we are going to have these problems and we are going to have this drive to control oil for profit and for power and to prevent others from controlling it.

We talk about peak oil but we will make this planet uninhabitable by burning oil before we run out of it and so it is necessary to face up to that, not just for the security of the world and to avoid the incredible disasters like this war, but to begin to curtain global warming and the other effects of burning the oil. Until we face up to that we are going to be looking at a disastrous foreign policy.

Smith: When it comes to the November election do you find that the Democratic Party is gaining in its ability to take more seats, more congressional seats; do you feel that the Republicans really do have something to worry about?

Swanson: Well the Republicans are worried and they are scared and you see Republican Congress members edging away from Bush. You saw the gubernatorial candidate in Virginia refused to appear at events in Virginia with Bush and then ultimately being forced to just prior to the election and you see the results showing in the studies and the polls showing that Bush’s unpopularity cost the Republican Party the Governor’s seat in Virginia and New Jersey. And you see polls showing you that a generic Democrat, an average Democrat is more popular to people in Congressional races than an average Republican. The problem with that is, you know, that’s almost always the case. It’s increasing now but real actual specific Democrats never do as well as the average Democrat because, and this is my interpretation, but I think because people see that as an alternative to the Republican. You know, anyone but Bush will vote for a Democrat, but then when they look at a specific Democrat and half of the positions that he or she espouses are the same as the Republicans, it doesn’t amount to as much. So the fear that I have and many have is that strategists will look at the elections of the past year and say –the Democrats did well in California, and Virginia, and New Jersey, by keeping quiet, by avoiding controversial topics and letting the Republicans destroy themselves, and that will not work, that will not work in 2006 to win a majority in Congress. These are Federal elections and because the top issue on people’s minds is the war, and because the Republican is in each and every case win the war vote. So if people support the war they are not going to vote for the Democrats. If people oppose the war they are going to stay home unless there is a candidate who clearly opposes the war and this is what happened in the Presidential election last year. People stayed home who opposed the war because they had a choice between two pro war candidates.

So the door is wide open for the Democrats. The Republicans are destroying themselves but the idea that the Democrats will have a majority in 2007 because they kept quiet and said nothing and avoided controversial topics…is just not going to happen. If that’s the approach the Democrats try I’m afraid we will continue to have a Republican majority in both houses of Congress. And that’s that because there are steps that the public wants taken now that the Democrats, the most progressive, the most courageous Democrats in the House of Representatives are saying they will try in 2007, notably impeachment. There are numerous candidates out there who have launched campaigns for Congress in 2006 who are openly and adamantly for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. But when you ask the leaders of the Progressive Democrats in Congress now, why are you not introducing articles of impeachment when we have been taken to war on the basis of lies they say well we will do that in 2007 when we have the majority. Well unless they tell people now what they are going to do people don’t have a reason to vote them into a majority and probably won’t.

Smith: Finally, talk about what some of the most important efforts are going to be for the group of people that put together After Downing Street dot org and for the Progressive Democrats, what kinds of things are you urging people to do?

Swanson: One of the things we are asking people to do is to hold events and we are asking everyone to get organized and hold a public meeting, a town hall forum, on ending the war. We are asking as many groups as possible to do this on January 7th which is a Saturday and it’s a day when Congress members will be in their districts rather than in Washington. They are likely to be home the first half of January. And we are asking people to invite their Congress members to either host or be a guest at these forums.

There is a system set up on the After Downing Street web site. You can either sign up for an event in your area that is already posted there or you can post one yourself and help organize it. And the organizations that are helping in this effort and asking their members to do this, it’s a pretty lengthy list, I won’t try to read it all, but it includes United For Peace and Justice, http://www.pdamerica.org/”>Progressive Democrats of America the Backbone Campaign the Gold Star Families for Peace, etc. and so that is one concrete action that people can take to try to make a lot of noise in the beginning of January about the public demand to end this war before Congress goes back into session: Hold this public event and invite the media.

In addition there are a number of resolutions in Congress including the discharge petition on one bill that we want people to be emailing and phoning their Congress members and asking them to support and that information is on the After Downing Street web site. Along those lines on the 6th of December which is next Tuesday, and this is pretty unprecedented that this number of groups get together, United for Peace and Justice and Win Without War which are the two biggest coalitions, and numerous other peace organizations, are asking everyone to phone Congress and ask to end the war. It’s a very simple message: End the war in Iraq.

Next Tuesday is when Congress finally gets back from Thanksgiving. They got a little more time off than the rest of us. But on Tuesday they get back to Washington and all of these organizations, if you are on any email list of any peace organization you will get an email early Tuesday morning asking you to phone Congress that day and if we can completely flood them they won’t be able to do anything else that day but think about ending the war.

Smith: David Swanson thank’s so much for joining us on Talk Nation Radio.
Swanson: Thanks for having me.

David Swanson is the co-founder of the After Downing Street Coalition. He was the press secretary for the Denis Kucinich for President Campaign and is Washington Director of Democrats.com a board member of progressive democrats of America and also Washington director of Impeach Pac. On the web site of afterdowningstreet.org you will find early analysis of a document the Bush Administration has just released calling for “Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.”

For Talk Nation Radio I’m Dori Smith. Visit WHUS to listen live Wed. at 5 PM.

This transcript has been slightly modified from the original form for clarity.