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RUSH: Here is Gary in Sacramento, my adopted hometown. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Good morning, Rush.

RUSH: How so?

CALLER: Hey, having heard your strong opposition to the release of this CIA torture report earlier this week I wanted to, with your permission, cite three facts that might suggest that the report and its release is a good idea.

RUSH: Well, fine, have at it.


CALLER: The first would be if you took all the reasons that you and I have heard this week for not releasing and why it was a bad idea and put ’em on a list, you and I are both old enough to have heard all those reasons before from the same kind of military leaders and the same kind of politicians that we’re hearing it from now. When you and I would have heard of it before would have been 40 years ago during the aftermath of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam when Lieutenant Calley decided it was a good idea to turn his troops loose to slaughter a whole village of women and children and old men.

RUSH: Yeah. You’re right. I remember that, but I don’t in any way associate this with Lieutenant Calley and the My Lai Massacre.

CALLER: Well, it’s somebody in the chain of command making a decision that something that shouldn’t have been done would be done.

RUSH: No, there’s nobody in the chain of command making a decision. We have a US senator who’s ticked off of because she didn’t get away with acting like she didn’t know anything about it.

CALLER: Well, I don’t know if that in itself would have justified the report and its publishing. But the point I wanted to make was back then there was a big uproar about it shouldn’t be published; the details shouldn’t be investigated and revealed to the public because it would destroy America’s image and it would just ruin morale for the military. I was actually with the military at the time and for two decades afterwards. But the aftermath of investigating it and publicizing all the details of My Lai was that incident and the reports and the facts became a cornerstone of training for every military person that entered the service in the last 40 or 45 years. It was a teachable moment for 40-something years.

RUSH: I still don’t see what any of that has to do with whatever happened at Guantanamo Bay with prisoners that were captured by our side and for whom we have a report that’s been written by Senate staffers that didn’t even talk to anybody at the CIA, didn’t even interview them. This is old news. It’s purely political. I don’t get the analogy to William Calley, Lieutenant Calley.

CALLER: It’s something that shouldn’t have happened and —

RUSH: No, there’s not universal agreement on that, that it shouldn’t have happened.

CALLER: Well, there’s not, and there wasn’t then, either. Because a lot of people in the military were saying, “Hey, you know, stress gets to people, and they were under duress and all this, and there was justification for it.”

RUSH: Wait, My Lai was mass murder of civilians and everything! What are we…? I don’t get what the comparison here is.

CALLER: The comparison is —

RUSH: This is captured prisoners — Al-Qaeda, Taliban, you name it — and we gleaned valuable information from them. Even the Obama CIA director is admitting this.

CALLER: Well, actually I watched that same briefing yesterday, and he didn’t admit that there was valuable information gleaned from the torture. What he actually said was the people that had been tortured at some point afterwards, had provided information that was of use. Not valuable information, not important or key or critical information, just information that was of use in planning the operation to get Obama [sic]. So he’s never said — and I wished he had. I really do. Being a veteran and wanting to have some kind of justification for what’s gone on. I wanted him to say, “Here’s the important facts. Here’s a hundred important details that we’ve gleaned from the torture,” and that would have made me feel a little bit better.

RUSH: Well, the problem is the Senate staff report is fact free. You want facts from the CIA director? The Senate staff report on which you’re basing all of this is fact free. It’s nothing but opinion. There was no attempt to get any facts. This thing is purely political, and it’s hypocritical to boot because every one of these senators that’s behind this thing is acting like they were lied to and misled when they were told everything about this program.

They were told everything about these techniques that were being used, and they’re coming forth now acting like they were kept in the dark and lying about it, and that’s why Jose Rodriguez is calling them a bunch of hypocrites. But the comparison here to My Lai? That’s not the proper comparison. I mean, if you want to compare something… (sigh) I don’t think this has any foundation at all.

If you wanted to make some kind of comparison, you’d have to draw an analogy to this and the allegations that happened at Haditha in Iraq where the Marines were charged with rape and pillage and all those other things that every Democrat that heard about it chimed in on and agreed happened. Jack Murtha, John Kerry. That would be your comparison, not this.

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