LPAC Fredags-webcast, 16. oktober 2015:
De lækkede ‘Dronepapirer’:
Brug chancen til at katalysere et presserende nødvendigt oprør,
hvis vi skal redde USA.
v/Jeffrey Steinberg

Som hr. LaRouche understregede, har vi nu en chance for at katalysere et presserende nødvendigt oprør, der kommer internt fra det Demokratiske Parti og de amerikanske borgere generelt imod alt, hvad Obama og hans team står for. Det er den presserende nødvendige handling, der må udføres, hvis vi skal redde USA; og hvis vi skal opbygge et virkeligt kvalificeret præsidentskab til at erstatte Barack Obama i det Hvide Hus, som De forenede Staters præsidentskab. Engelsk udskrift.

LaRouche PAC Webcast, October 16, 2015:

Take the Opportunity of Catalyzing an Urgently Needed Revolt

MATTHEW OGDEN: Good evening; it’s October 16, 2015. You’re watching our weekly Friday night live webcast from larouchepac.com. And we are broadcasting live tonight, at our usual time; 8pm Eastern, 5pm Pacific. And we thank you for tuning in. My name is Matthew Ogden, and I’m joined in the studio tonight by Jeffrey Steinberg of Executive Intelligence Review magazine. And the two of us had the opportunity to meet with Mr. LaRouche earlier today; and had a very important and necessary conversation that we intend to convey the essence of to you. He had a very concise message; and our aim tonight is to get that across to our viewership.

So, we’re looking at the opportunity right now, as Mr.LaRouche emphasized, of catalyzing an urgently needed revolt from within the Democratic Party and the American citizenry generally, against everything that Obama and his team stand for. And this is the urgent, necessary action that must be taken, if we are going to save the United States; and if we’re going to build a truly qualified Presidency to take the place of Barack Obama in the White House as the Presidency of this United States. Over the course of this week, the evidence against Obama has only continued to pile up. This is very clear evidence; and we intend to present this evidence in summary form to you tonight. This will include, but will be exclusively, significantly number one: The release by Glen Greenwald and by Jeremy Scahill in their publication, {The Intercept}, of what they’re calling “The Drone Papers”; a reference obviously to the famous “Pentagon Papers” of the 1970s, which incidentally were read into the Congressional Record by former Senator Mike Gravel, who has appeared on several forums with representatives of the LaRouche Movement nationally, recently. Number two, you have the continued fall-out from the savage, deadly, murderous bombing of the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, under the orders and the command of Barack Obama; which the MSF organization is referring to explicitly as a war crime. And number three, in this context, we have the announcement by Obama just yesterday that he is extending the US perpetual-war military deployment in Afghanistan even further. And I know that Jeff will get into all three of these points more in depth tonight.

But first, what Mr. LaRouche wanted to begin tonight’s broadcast with, is the significance of what’s being referred to as the “insurrection” that has erupted from within a certain layer of the Democratic Party leadership — the Democratic National Committee — which came to a head around this CNN debate that was held in Sin City; Las Vegas, earlier this week on Tuesday. This insurrection is being led by none other than Tulsi Gabbard, a Congresswoman from Hawaii, who is one of the five vice chairs of the Democratic National Committee [DNC]. Our viewers might recall that Tulsi Gabbard made herself an outright, outspoken enemy of the Obama White House about two weeks ago, by very prominently denouncing Obama’s World War III policy in Syria on national television; stating that 1) the overthrow of President Assad would be a grave mistake, akin to the overthrow of both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi. This is significant from Tulsi Gabbard, who is herself an Iraq War combat veteran. She called for the direct cooperation with President Putin of Russia in military operations in defeating ISIS and al-Qaeda. This was in the image of Franklin Roosevelt’s cooperation with Russia during World War II to defeat Hitler and the Nazis; which is by the way an echo of exactly what President Putin himself called for in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly.
And this isn’t the only policy which Tulsi Gabbard has openly disagreed with Obama on; she’s also a major and outspoken supporter of the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall. And this is a point that Mr. LaRouche stressed was very significant and must be emphasized.
So, it just so happens that Congresswoman Gabbard is at the center of the rebellion within the leadership of the DNC against the chairwoman of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is an ally of Obama. So, according to an article in Bloomberg today, which is titled “Insurrection Erupts at the Democratic National Committee”, this has, in fact, been brewing for quite some time; but it boiled over this week when Gabbard was dis-invited by Debbie Wasserman Schultz from attending the Democratic Party debate in Las Vegas, because she had openly criticized the policy of limiting the number of these Democratic debates to only six.

Only four of them are before the significant primaries at the beginning of next year. And Gabbard also criticized the policy of punishing any of the candidates if they participated in any forums that were not sanctioned by the DNC. Now, what this is being called, and the adjectives that are being used in this Bloomberg article are “autocratic”, “dictatorial”, this policy by Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And there’s an open coup that’s brewing against her leadership of the Democratic National Committee. And I’m going to ask Jeff to get into is the implications of this.

I’d advise that people read some of the coverage that’s in this Bloomberg article. One very significant quote is by another one of the vice chairs, a man named RT Ryback; a former mayor of Minneapolis, who is allied with Tulsi Gabbard on this issue. He is outspoken, saying Wasserman Schultz is operating with dictatorial, autocratic power over the Democratic National Committee; her leadership must be questioned. And he’s almost at the point of saying she should be kicked out as the leader of the Party. Ironically, this is coming on the heels of the exact same treatment that was dished out to John Boehner on the Republican side.
So, what I’m going to introduce Jeff with, is just a quote from this article. And I think this sort of summarizes exactly what we have the responsibility to address here tonight. “Says one Democrat with close ties to the Democratic National Committee, ‘The next Chair is going to have to burn the place down and rebuild it.” So Jeff, how do we do that?

JEFFREY STEINBERG: Thanks, Matt. I think the critical thing to bear in mind here is that Debbie Wasserman-Shultz is nothing other than a total clone and voice at the DNC for President Obama. Go back to the beginning of the Obama presidency. Initially, former Congressman and former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland had been called by the White House, and had been asked to be the Chairman of the DNC, and had been told, “Wait by your phone, because you’re going to get a call from the President very soon.” He waited, and waited, and waited, and then several days
later, read in the newspaper that Debbie Wasserman-Shultz had been named instead as the party chairman.

As we understand this, this was the direct result of an intervention by Valerie Jarrett, by Michelle Obama, and it was a foretaste of many things that would follow from them. So, what she is doing to the Democratic Party is all being done on the basis of orders coming directly from the White House. Tuesday’s debate in Las Vegas was a demeaning insult to the institution of the Presidency. That’s not to say that everything that the participants in the debate said was demeaning, but the whole way that the debate was organized by CNN, which has no qualifications whatsoever to actually be hosting a debate like this, was turned into some version of the Barnum and Bailey circus mixed with the
Gong show. Every candidate brought swarms of people, probably right off the floors of the casinos half drunk, and they were being encouraged to scream and razz and make all kinds of noise whenever their candidate had something to say. It was shameful, it was demeaning, and what Mr. LaRouche said is that this was organized by the British. This wasn’t even done directly by President Obama. This was the kind of stunt that’s meant to demean the office of the Presidency, and people who participated in this process were by and large victims of a set-up that should have never ever been allowed to happen.

Of course, this is the same CNN that bailed out Obama four years ago, when Mitt Romney was about to nail him on what had actually happened in the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks in Benghazi, but instead, you may recall Candy Crowley jumping in on behalf of Obama, and shutting down Mitt Romney mid-sentence. So what you have here is an assault against the appropriate decorum and respect for the Office of the Presidency, and even though there were a few comments by Martin O’Malley, on two occasions, openly calling for Glass-Steagall, the reality is that the entire event
was a shameless circus, and the best thing to do is to make sure that this is forgotten as soon as possible, and that there is never again this kind of insult to the Office of the Presidency by allowing this kind of clown show to occur.

And Mr. LaRouche, during his Thursday night Fireside Chat with supporters from around the country, emphasized that we’ve got to return the Presidency to a constitutional framework. We’ve got to have qualified candidates, and we’ve got to assemble not an individual, not some personality or popularity contest, but we’ve got to assemble a qualified team of people, a President, a Vice President, qualified people to fill out the cabinet, so that we can get away from the horror show of the last 15 years, where 8 years of Bush and Cheney, and now 7 years of Obama, have all but effectively destroyed the institution of the Presidency.

Now the reality is that we can’t wait. The reality is that Obama must be removed from office in the immediate days ahead, and this is not a matter of trying to scramble around to find some pretext in which to do that, because Matt just mentioned at the outset, that the Glen Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill new publication, the Intercept, has published an extraordinary 8-part series, based on newly-leaked government documents. These documents were prepared after Edward Snowden had already dumped his material, and had already left government, and probably already taking refuge in Russia. But what these documents show is that President Obama is guilty of mass murder. The entire drone program that has been the hallmark, the entirety, of the Obama administration’s counter-terrorism program, has been conducted outside the framework of the U.S. Constitution, outside of international law, and represents perhaps the single greatest incident of mass murder in the modern history of this planet.

Now, that may sound extreme, but I would urge all of you to not just read the 8-part series of articles, but to go to the links to the actual documents that reveal the true nature of this Obama administration, completely lawless mass murder campaign. One of the points that’s made right at the outset, in the opening article of this series, is that since 1975 — and you can go back to the history of the revelations about CIA crimes, the Church and Pike Committee investigations — during that period President Gerald Ford issued an Executive Order and laws were passed, making it explicitly illegal for the U.S. President to order assassinations. And of course, President Obama, since the very beginning of his term in office, has been regularly convening Tuesday meetings at the White House, where they’ve been specifically developing kill lists of targets to be gone after. And so, rather than use the appropriate and accurate term of assassinations, President Obama and his team choose the word “targetted killings,” but the concept is identical.
Now, we’ve talked on a number of occasions in recent weeks, on these webcasts on Friday night, about the fact that General Michael Flynn, who was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and was fired by President Obama in the summer of 2014 for being a major obstacle to the kinds of illegal programs the Administration has been running since the beginning – General Flynn was interviewed by The Intercept to comment on the documents and to comment on his own first-hand knowledge of this assassination program. General Flynn had been the Director of Intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command, for Central Command, and then became the head of the entire Defense Intelligence Agency. Here’s what he had to say about the Obama Administration’s program:

“The drone campaign right now really is only about killing. When you hear the phrase ‘capture or kill’, capture is actually a misnomer. In the drone strategy that we have, `capture’ is a lower case c. We don’t capture people any more. Our entire Middle East policy seems to be based on firing drones. That’s what this Administration decided to do in its counter-terrorism campaign. They are enamored by the ability of Special Operations and the CIA to find a guy in the middle of the desert, in some shitty little village (pardon my French), and drop a bomb on his head and kill him.”

Now to hear President Obama, you would think that the White House program has been surrounded by Constitutional lawyers who’ve been studying every step along the way, to make sure that everything involved in this program is legal. In a speech at the National Defense University several years ago, President Obama discussed the program, and again, quote: “The United States has taken lethal, targetted action against al-Qaeda and its associated forces, including with remotely piloted aircraft, commonly referred-to as drones. As was true in previous armed conflicts, this new technology raises profound questions about who is targetted, and why. About civilian casualties and the risk of creating new enemies. About the legality of such strikes under U.S. and international law. About accountability and morality. Drone strikes, he concluded, are effective and legal. Now, it happens that under pressure, particularly after news reports about his Tuesday kill-meetings at the White House, caused quite a stir, the White House issued a policy document. It’s in the public record, it didn’t have to be leaked out. It’s called “U.S. Policy Standards and Procedures for the Use of Force in Counter-Terrorism Operations Outside the United States and Areas of Active Hostilities.” I won’t bore you with the precise language of this document, but among the highlights, they say, “In every instance we prefer to capture rather than kill. We have precise standards for the use of lethal force, and these criteria include, but are not restricted to, near-certainty that the terrorist target is present, near-certainty that non-combatants will not be injured or killed, an assessment that capture is not feasible at any time of the operation, an assessment that the relevant government authorities in the country where action is contemplated cannot or will not address the threat to U.S. persons, and an assessment that no other reasonable alternatives exist to effectively address the threat to U.S. persons.” And they say, “There must be a legal basis for using lethal force, and secondly, that lethal force will only be used against a target that poses a continuing imminent threat to U.S. persons.”
Now, the fact of the matter is that these were strict rules for targetted killing that were promulgated by the Obama Administration, signed by the President himself, and as documented in The Intercept series, by commentaries by people like General Flynn, this policy has been violated in virtually every instance. So even by the criteria that his own Administration set forth, President Obama has been guilty of carrying out what can only be described as mass murder. Now, there are procedures for dealing with crimes of mass murder.
Number one, to the extent that the President is directly implicated in these actions, this is cause for immediate and obvious impeachment, and perhaps, because of the urgency and timeliness of this, it would be more appropriate to simply invoke the 25th Amendment. If you have somebody who has been living under the cloak of apparent civility and respectable position, but who turns out to be a mass murderer, then you’d have to conclude that that person was suffering from a form of socio-pathological insanity. That invokes the 25th Amendment immediately. And so, that’s the situation that we’re dealing with. What Mr. LaRouche said, is in this case, you would want to remove that person, President Obama, from office immediately, and then immediately commence with criminal proceedings for the mass-murders that he’s committed.

Now, among the documents that were leaked to the authors of this series of articles, is a document that was prepared by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, in April of 2012. It was called the Performance Audit of the Department of Defense Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR). And what this audit by the House Intelligence Committee concluded, is that the entire targetted-kill program was rife with violations, with failures to live up to any of the standards that would be appropriate under the Constitution, or even under the Obama Administration’s own guidelines, and that basically there was a mad rush to try to line up as much money as possible for these drone-kill programs, and therefore there were shortcuts, there was misrepresentation of the program, and in fact since the September 11 attacks, the Defense Department has spent $67 billion on putting together the ISR infrastructure that the Obama Administration has exclusively used for the drone killing-program.

Now, other comments on this. Again, from General Flynn. He said that the White House, for expedient reasons, abandoned its own guidelines. There were no attempts to capture. There were no attempts to work with local governments on setting up the circumstances to capture. There was no attempt to live up to the standard that to be a legitimate target for these assassinations, the individual had to oppose an immediate and imminent threat of terrorist attack against the United States. And what General Flynn said, quote, “We’ve tended to say, drop another bomb via a drone, and put out a headline that ‘We killed Abu Bag of Donuts’ and it makes us all feel good for 24 hours. And you know what? It doesn’t matter. It just made them a martyr. It just created a new reason to fight us ever harder.” Flynn went on to say that there was “way too much reliance on technical aspects of intelligence, like signals intelligence, or even just looking at somebody with unmanned aerial vehicles. He gave an example. “I could get on the telephone from somewhere in Somalia, and I know I know I’m a high-value target. And I say in some coded language, ‘The wedding is about to occur in the next 24 hours.'” Flynn said, “That could put all of Europe and the United States on a high-level alert, and it may just be total bullshit. SIGINT is an easy system to fool, and that is why it has to be validated by other INTs, namely like human intelligence. You have to ensure that the person is actually there, at that location, because what you really intercepted was the phone.”

And in fact, one of the things that was concluded in this in-depth House Intelligence Committee review of this drone-kill program was that in most instances, there was almost exclusively reliance on the tracking of cell phones, and so, very often, it was the cell phone that was the determinant of the location where the drone attack occurred. And in many instances, almost a majority of the instances, many innocent people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time were killed, and immediately afterwards, even though these people were not known, they didn’t even know what their identities were when the drone-firing took place, they would immediately be classified as unknown enemy combatants. In other words, if you were there, you were de facto a terrorist, and it was de facto justified that you were a legitimate target for Obama’s assassinations.

Now, the documents also included a number of structural flow-charts. The point that the Pentagon and the CIA wanted to make, was that these programs did not involve a few people sitting around in a room, going through piles of what they themselves called “baseball cards” — photographs and biographical information on the people who were on the potential-target list. It was based on the data in these “baseball cards” that the President of the United States would sign the kill-order. And once the kill-order was signed — and by the way, it usually took on average 58 days from when an individual was identified by name to when he went through the process of investigation, surveillance, and his name landed on the President’s desk for a finding that this person should be killed. And then from that moment on, there was a 60-day time deadline for accomplishing the killing. I’m sure part of the reason for that is that every week there were more and more names being added, and the priorities were continuously shifting. But the fact of the matter is, that there was an elaborate chain of command through which this vetting process took place; chains of command within the military and the CIA. Then there was a chain of command which led up to what was called the Principals Committee, which are the leading members of the President’s Cabinet and heads of other agencies that have critical roles to play in this process. And then in every single instance, the ultimate decision was made and was signed off on by the President of the United States. So, in other words, every single person killed in this drone warfare program was authorized for assassination by President Obama.

Now, we know that there were a number of leading advisors, particularly John Brennan; who for the first four years of the Obama Presidency was the President’s Counter-terrorism Advisor right there at the White House — then he was made Director of the CIA. We know that David Petraeus, who was formerly a high-ranking military commander, brought over to the CIA, and who was found not only to have been engaging in an extramarital affair, but was caught passing massive amounts of classified documents to his mistress and biographer; and yet he only received a slap-on-the-wrist misdemeanor, and to this day is still a key advisor to President Obama. Petraeus propagated a series of orders, establishing the chain of command and the operational profile of at least the Joint Special Operations Command [JSOC] part of this kill program. But ultimately, everything landed on the desk of President Obama; and when he signed the kill order, the 60-day clock began to tick down, and that was when the operations in the field went into action.

We know, of course, that Anwar al-Awlaki — an American citizen — clearly someone who had an association with al-Qaeda, was put on the assassination list; and yet, as an American citizen, he was denied any of the Constitutional due process that all American citizens are entitled to. And so, al-Awlaki was killed in an American drone attack in Yemen; several weeks later, his 16-year old son and another American citizen were killed in another drone attack. The administration had to scramble to cover that up. And now there are at least some indications that Anwar al-Awlaki may have been targeted for cold-blooded murder; because he was an FBI informant, and in that capacity, knew certain secrets about how this whole process and program of targeting was working, and perhaps knew of certain government ties to al-Qaeda. We don’t know that, but there are court actions underway right now that may provide an even further light on the specific case of al-Awlaki. In Afghanistan, in Yemen, in Somalia, in Pakistan — those were the four major areas where this mass assassination was taking place; there were extensive drone bases, massive amounts of military equipment. But yet, in all of the instances, it would appear that more often than not, the criteria that the administration itself put forward were never in a single instance adhered to; and the collateral damage, the number of innocent people later, after the fact, posthumously declared enemy combatants was massive. We don’t even begin to have a total death toll, but for every individual on the Presidential-approved kill list, there were multiple numbers of people who were killed simply because they were in the immediate vicinity. And one aspect of the program evolved to the point that targeted assassination operations were conducted on the basis of activity profile, not even identification of specific individuals. In the case of Afghanistan, there were instances where drone-targetted operations were directed against weddings, simply because the drones detected a large number of young males holding up guns in the air and firing them into the air. Now that happens to be part of a fairly typical tribal wedding ceremony in Afghanistan; so we don’t know how many of these targeted assassinations were conducted on the basis of those kinds of activities.

Now, there was a report that was issued in 2014, that was done by General John Abizaid, who was the former head of the Central Command, and a lawyer from Georgetown named Rosa Brooks, who was a former attorney at the Department of Defense. And that report noted that there are “enormous uncertainties” in drone warfare, and that these uncertainties “are multiplied further when the United States relies on intelligence and other targeting information provided by a host nation government. How can we be sure we are not being drawn into a civil war; or being used to target the domestic political enemies of the host state leadership?” So, in other words, this program was completely out of control, off the charts; but was thoroughly embraced by President Obama from his first days in office – probably initially courtesy of people like John Brennan. But the fact of the matter is that a massive number of crimes have been committed. The official documents, including those classified documents leaked out to {The Intercept}, make it clear that there was an absolute, unambiguous chain of command. In other words, the way that law enforcement would map out the structures of a mafia organization that they were going to break up; and unambiguously, the godfather of this entire mass kill program was President Obama. And if that doesn’t constitute sufficient criteria for immediately launching impeachment proceedings or invoking of the 25th Amendment, then we’ve pretty much lost any sense of what our Constitutional republic is all about.

OGDEN: OK, I would like to just present the institutional question which we got in this week, which is very brief. It reads as follows: “Mr. LaRouche, the United States is to extend its military presence in Afghanistan beyond 2016. What is your opinion about the extension of our military presence in Afghanistan?”

STEINBERG: Well, I think first of all, you’ve got to consider the timing of this announcement. Regardless of whatever process there was, however long the deliberations were about making this decision, I find it extremely distasteful that the President chose to make this announcement just days after the United States had bombed the hospital of Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz. There are new developments just in the last 24 hours, indicating that some American or NATO either tanks or APCs — armed personnel carriers — had arrived on the site soon after the bombing had ended, and had basically plowed through the rubble. And at least in the eyes of Doctors Without Borders, this was an attempt to bury and conceal evidence of a major crime that was committed. We spoke last week about the fact that Doctors without Borders had issued a call under the Geneva Convention for a top-down investigation, and they basically say that the actions that were undertaken under the auspices of President Obama, constituted war crimes.

So I think if you step back, and think about the thrust of what we’ve presented here in the last half hour or so, about the nature of the drone program, and then situate the bombing of this Doctors Without Borders hospital within that overall framework, I think you’ll see that this situation is completely out of control, and lawless. In fact, one of the commentators who have been noting the horrors of this incident has pointed out that it may come down to the fact that President Obama’s only legacy is that he will have been the only Nobel Peace Prize award recipient to bomb another Nobel Peace Prize recipient — because Doctors Without Borders has also been far more legitimately granted that award.

Now, the fact of the matter is that the United States has been engaged in Afghanistan since 2001, since soon after the 9/11 attacks, and here we are, 14 years later, still debating the question of whether or not we’re on the verge of the Taliban taking the place over again. I think that that 14 year process, at an estimated cost to U.S. taxpayers of well over $2 trillion, ought to raise some serious questions about whether this policy is advisable to continue indefinitely into the future, even past the Obama Presidency. And one of the ways that the argument is being framed, for why the U.S. should remain and why NATO should remain, in Afghanistan, is the argument that there’s more training, there’s more assistance needed, but the implication is that there’s only a binary choice: either we stay, or we go, as if there were no other options on the table, which is emphatically not true.

There are some senior retired U.S. military officials, and others, who have recently proposed that there is a viable alternative, and that you have the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is a regional security arrangement which involves Russia, China, all of the countries of Central Asia, and as of their last meeting earlier this year, it also includes India and Pakistan. And it’s virtually a certainty, now that the P5+1 agreement has been ratified both here in the U.S. and by the Majlis in Iran, so that the sanctions will be lifted in the months ahead, that Iran will be the next member country given full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Just look at that on a map. Every country surrounding Afghanistan is a member of the SCO, and again, within a very short period of time Iran, which borders on Afghanistan, will be included in that membership. Right now, they’re associate members, so in effect they’re already part of the deliberations.

What about having the SCO, which has a strong vested interest in the security and stability of the area, working out a coordination with the US and NATO for a hand-off of security responsibility, as well as economic development responsibility, to the SCO? China, which was one of the initial sponsors of the SCO, has a critical vested interest, because the entire One Belt, One Road policy that is the cornerstone of Xi Jinping’s international outreach, requires stability in exactly that area around Afghanistan. You have countries that are of the same ethnic background. You’ve got Tajiks and Uzbeks, and Iranians, Persians, who form a major part of the population of Afghanistan. You’ve got Pushtuns, who are also across the border in Pakistan. India has historically played an extraordinarily important and close role with the government in Kabul, and of course, Russia is gravely concerned about the security of Central Asia, as well as the Caucasus region of Russia.

So, it would be a sane and natural policy for the U.S., for NATO, to enter into discussions with the SCO, and propose an orderly transition, and develop a coherent strategy for bringing this whole 15 year crisis to an end. If you in fact go back to the original Brzezinski plans for conducting covert operations against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which preceded by six months the Soviets coming into Afghanistan, you see that this area has been affected by an even more than 30 years of war uninterrupted process. So there is an alternative. There’s a thoughtful, diplomatic, economic, security alternative, and one must wonder, if this option is not being considered, whether the real concern here is to keep Afghanistan safe for the opium trade, because 95 % of the world’s opium supply, at enormous profits, is coming out of Afghanistan.

OGDEN: Well, thank you very much, Jeff.

What we’ve now presented in the summary course of this webcast tonight, was what Mr. LaRouche asked for. It is high time for the Obama policy to go. The evidence has just been presented by Jeff and myself here on this broadcast tonight, and that evidence speaks for itself. However, the task still remains, as Mr. LaRouche has emphasized, that LaRouche PAC and responsible citizens across the United States, must also build a New Presidency, to lead the United States out of what is arguably the worst disaster that we’ve ever faced as a nation, after eight years of Bush and Cheney, and then eight more years of Obama.

It’s very clear, what Mr. LaRouche’s thoughts were about the Tuesday Democratic debate, and what Jeff said earlier about the CNN kind of clown show atmosphere that was created around that. But as people who listened to Mr. LaRouche’s fireside chat last night might have heard, he was also emphatic on keeping our vision clear as to what our responsibility as citizens is, not to just pick and choose among candidates, but to create what he calls a Presidency, and to conclude tonight’s webcast, I actually want to read what I found to be a very compelling section of Mr. LaRouche’s discussion on this question of the Presidency last night.

He said: “The point is that people usually think that we want a President. Now, according to our national law, we do get a President, one President. We also get a Vice President. But on the other hand, what we need is a team of citizens who are qualified to lead the formation and institution of a system of government under a Presidential system. In other words, you can’t just say, this is the President; now everyone’s going to listen to him. That’s not right. You have to have a President who is acceptable, who’s qualified to lead the nation, but no one person can control the United States as a nation efficiently. There has to be a team based on the kind of team that we had when we composed a Presidential system. It also means we depend in the way that we can deal with certain members of Congress, in the House of Representatives in general, and so forth.

“You have people who don’t always agree with each other, but we need that kind of office as a deliberation process, in order to have the kind of people of the United States find they have a core of agreement on goals and purposes which suit the requirements of the Presidency.

“Now the other part of that has a feature to it. When we create a Presidential system, we don’t create a President per se. We try, in the best features of our existence, in our history, our intention is always to introduce new concepts, more appropriate concepts, more brilliant, more fruitful than ever before. Maybe some people can come together as a team around that idea. They might be rivals, but our goal is to go to the higher level, the highest level of achievement, of the improvement of our system of government: to create a team of people who are qualified, and actively qualified, to conduct the business of our government as a whole. And that’s the way we have to look at it.”

So, lest we get too distracted by the personality contests, and all of the media hype that’s created by CNN and related organizations, I think it’s important to keep that idea is mind.

And that’s what Mr. LaRouche has devoted his entire career to, over the last 40 to 50 years of his public life. So we have the responsibility as leaders of the LaRouche PAC, and you have the responsibility as viewers of this broadcast here tonight, to cooperate with us in trying to bring that lofty and noble goal about.

I appreciate your attention to our broadcast tonight. I advise that you take the evidence that we’ve presented here, and let it speak for itself. Please share this as widely as you can. Get it around to your friends and neighbors, and continue to participate in all of the events that LaRouche PAC is hosting — from these Friday night broadcasts, to the Fireside chats with Mr. LaRouche, and the continuing activities in Manhattan, including the discussion that I know we will be engaged in again tomorrow, with Mr. LaRouche himself.

So, thank you very much for tuning in tonight, and please stay tuned to larouchepac.com.