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Aug. 26, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:27
August 26, 2009, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Time Text
And greetings to you, folks.
Great to have you here.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, as usual.
Half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair.
Telephone number if you want to be with us today, 800-282-2882, the email address, LRushbo at EIBNet.com.
I told you, I told you, here it is.
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick fired up the political chattering class Wednesday, that's today, telling a radio station he would approve a plan to appoint an interim successor for Ted Kennedy until a special election could be held.
Massachusetts needs two voices, Duval Patrick said in the radio, which was picked up by state-controlled AP and disseminated nationwide.
Now, again, to reiterate, back in 2004, when John Kerry, who, as we all know, served in Vietnam, was running for the presidency, the Democrats assumed like they do every year that it was going to be a slam-dunk win.
And back then, Mitt Romney was the governor of Massachusetts.
That could be a problem because the governor got to appoint the replacement until the next election.
And Ted Kennedy said, we don't want a Republican appointing Republican to this seat here.
They passed a law, took that power away from the governor and mandated a special election within five months of any vacancy.
Last week, Senator Kennedy sends his impassioned letter back to the state legislature, Massachusetts.
Hey, I want to change the law that you changed for me back in 2004.
I want to put it back the way it was.
We've got a Democrat governor in there now, and I want him to be able to choose my successor.
And so right on queue, here comes the governor, Duval Patrick.
I'm up for that.
Sure.
They'll do anything in Ted Kennedy's name here.
They'll go for it.
Told you it was going to happen, and it will only be a matter of time.
I want to move on to the CIA and the Obama administration.
This is a subject that continues to inflame me.
It just makes my blood boil.
It irritates me all the heck.
If I were a CIA agent, if I were a CIA interrogator, I would tell Eric Holder to start the trial this week.
And by the way, the last surviving Kennedy brother, Barack Obama, again today makes it plain, I got nothing to do with this investigation.
That's the Attorney General doing all that.
Attorney General doing that.
We got tape.
We played it yesterday, 2007.
Obama said, first thing I'm going to do if I'm in the Oval Office is order my Attorney General to conduct these investigations is what he was always intending to do.
And he's done it.
He's hiding.
He's hiding like Bill Clinton hid behind Janet Reno, the Waco invasion.
By the way, before I get into this, I should tell you, we have from the White House, they haven't put much out this week, but they've put this out, the CIA terrorist detainee interrogation procedures.
The Obama administration actually has prepared a short little audio tape.
Well, it's video.
We got the audio of it.
That is to be played at all detention.
You have that ready to go, Mike?
Yeah.
It's to be played at all interrogation centers like Club Gitmo, Abu Ghrab, wherever we are holding prisoners.
What the interrogators are going to be hearing, the official interrogation instructions from the White House, direct from the Commander-in-Chief.
So if I were a CIA interrogator, if I were a CIA agent, I would tell Eric Holder, I would say, start this trial this week.
Go ahead and charge me.
I want a jury of 12 fellow Americans to tell me, I want you to get a verdict from 12 Americans and tell me that while I sweated and froze in Iraq or Afghanistan making ridiculous wages, while I endured horrific and threatening conditions, that I was not trying to protect my country, I want you to get a verdict out of 12 Americans, Mr. Attorney General, that I was compromising the security of this country,
that I was demeaning the moral ideals of this country.
If I were one of these CIA agents, I would love to do a Jack Bauer.
Love to do a Jack Bauer on Holder or Obama and have a jury tell them to take a hike.
Now, my buddy Andy McCarthy posted at National Review Online a little piece here.
It makes them nuts that Cheney was right.
Over at the Weekly Standard blog, Stephen Hayes eviscerates the claims of the Washington Post's Greg Sargent, who wonders why the famously pro-Cheney media are not tearing into the vice president for hyping the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques.
And Steve Hayes relates, it could be because by simply reading the reports that were declassified earlier this week, one learns that the coercive methods clearly worked on Khaliq Khalil Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was the bomber of the USS COLB.
The techniques worked.
This is what Cheney, you know, they come out and the Obama administration says, we're going to investigate these techniques.
The techniques violated the moral fiber of the United States.
We trashed our ideals, blah, blah, blah.
And Cheney said, wait a minute.
You release the results.
Release the results.
And they were finally released.
And everybody now sees that the techniques were effective.
See, back in the spring, the Obama administration tried to rig the torture debate by revealing secret tactics to our enemies.
They revealed what the tactics were.
Do you remember this?
It's just absurd.
But at the same time, the Obama administration denied the American people information about the intelligence, the life-saving intelligence that those tactics produced.
And Cheney didn't let him get away with it.
He publicly insisted that the intel be released so the interrogation program could be judged fairly.
So Obama tactically tried to bury the fact that Cheney was right by stonewalling for five months and then finally releasing the intel on the same day that it disclosed a five-year-old report on interrogation abuses.
And the same day that Holder said he was going to appoint a prosecutor to look into all this.
Now, media are mum because they're trying to help Obama obscure the fact that Cheney was right.
That's why they're not making a big deal out of it.
And it just drives them nuts that Cheney was right.
It drives them nuts that Cheney called him on this.
This administration did everything it could to screw this country.
And Cheney called him on it.
Now, listen to what Andy writes here.
He says there is a principled human rights position on all this.
You can say no one wants to see bad things happen to people, but I honestly believe that abusive tactics are so corrosive of our society's principles that it would be better for 10,000 Americans to be killed in a terror attack than for us to prevent the attack by subjecting a morally culpable terrorist to non-lethal forms of coercion that cause no lasting physical or mental harm.
Now, that would be the honest argument, but it isn't going to persuade many people.
But this is what the Obama administration is saying by virtue of its policies here.
So the continued pretense against all evidence and logic is the tactics don't work, but fewer and fewer people are being fooled.
The tactics do work.
And what the Obama administration is saying by investigating the interrogators and by getting all bent out of shape over these tactics that were used against these poor terrorists in his effort to villainize the United States as the world's demon.
He's basically saying, look, we don't want to see bad things happen to people, but I really would prefer 10,000 Americans get killed that we mistreat a terrorist because I want to preserve American ideals.
That's what the hell he's saying.
And that's what he's doing by investigating these people.
He's giving aid and comfort to the enemy here.
And there's nothing moral about what he is doing.
Because the bottom line here is immoral.
When the Bush administration saw its moral obligation, which, by the way, happens to be a constitutional obligation too, that is protecting innocent citizens for whom the government exists and from whom their governing authority comes.
The Obama administration, I tell you, folks, I hate saying this.
I'm just very uncomfortable saying this.
The Obama administration sees its job as protecting those who have and will wage war against American citizens.
That's his view.
That's the way this administration is acting.
Protect those who have and will wage war against innocent American citizens.
They have changed the language in identifying the enemy to blur the moral imperative.
They've cut spending on defense to limit our ability to inflict harm on the enemy.
They've placed several of the enemy's lawyers at the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense where they can set policy that benefits the enemy.
All of this has happened.
And now they seek to bankrupt and ruin those who fought the enemy from the CIA.
The Obama administration is rolling the dice that we're not going to have another terror attack.
They're rejecting the notion that they have to secure the citizens of America against terrorists as a matter of moral obligation.
It's just, folks, it is unconscionable what is happening here in the area of foreign policy.
Saying, I'm not comfortable with the word victory, talking about Afghanistan.
And now investigating, and make no mistake, the purpose of these investigations is to financially and professionally ruin these people.
Because he wants our enemies to feel more comfortable with, it's just, it's, I know it's controversial.
It's hard to believe.
You can't believe anybody would be thinking this or saying this about the president of the United States.
But Peter King, the congressman from Long Island, furious, blasted a disgraceful Eric Holder for opening this investigation.
He said it's bull bleep.
It's disgraceful.
You wonder which side they're on.
It's a total breach of faith.
And either the president is intentionally caving to the left wing of his party or he's lost control of his administration.
He has not lost control of his administration.
He's running this administration.
And it is a breach of faith.
And he is trying to rally his base.
He is doing that because the public option in healthcare is in trouble, but he's also following his instincts on this.
So when you've got a member of Congress saying, what side are they on?
You know, a lot of other Americans are asking the same question.
We'll take a timeout and continue right after this.
Back to the phones.
It's Charlie from Fairfax, Virginia.
Hi, Charlie.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Great to have you here.
Hi, Rush.
It's great to talk to you.
Thank you.
I was at the town hall last night with the esteemed Howard Dean and Republican and Congressman Moran.
Yeah.
And I have, so I don't even know where you want me.
I can't, I don't even know where to start.
It was so unbelievable.
But I have to tell you, I don't know if you saw all the stuff that happened on C-SPAN because they covered it live.
Well, I didn't see it on C-SPAN, but I have two audio soundbites here.
And it looks to me like from reading the transcript of the soundbites.
Oh, absolutely.
And they couldn't even get the PowerPoint fly to work.
So, you know, it's like, well, you want our health care.
Okay.
Anyway, okay, Howard Dean was supposed to speak.
And he did not because the 20% of us that were totally outnumbered there booed and heckled him so badly that he was not able to get up and give his 10 or 15 minute speech, whatever it was supposed to be.
And Moran was so sad that he had to turn over every question, almost every question, to Howard Dean.
And he just couldn't answer him.
Yeah.
As I was saying, let's listen to the audio soundbites together, shall we?
Okay.
All right.
Here's first.
This is Jim Moran.
It's a healthcare town hall meeting.
This is just one heated moment.
I'm sorry, but I can't even hear the governor, and I'm sitting next to him, which means that there are hundreds of people in this gymnasium who can't hear him because of a handful of people.
These folks are not from the 8th District.
They really don't belong here, and I'm going to ask them to leave.
Well, that's a great way for a member of Congress.
Just get out of here.
Get out of my town meeting.
So Howard Dean is trying to answer some questions for Moran.
Yes.
Right.
Right.
Yes.
Because Moran couldn't answer them.
Yeah, so that's what we're going to hear together right now.
Experts?
Who are these experts?
Who?
Well, us just all hands.
We'd like to get rid of Medicare.
Help from Howard.
Help from Howard.
I asked you to answer it, Congressman.
You're my congressman.
Howard Dean isn't my Congressman.
Let's have a vote.
All those in favor of getting rid of Medicare, raise your hand.
That was Howard Dean.
So, yeah, it sounds like a pretty fun time to me.
Oh, yeah.
And we were down there on the floor.
We were totally outnumbered, and we got there early enough.
There's plenty of union people there that got in there ahead of us, and they passed out all their signs, and they were obnoxious, and they wouldn't leave us alone.
I got to tell you, though.
I got to tell you.
Charlie, I got to say, I'm so proud of you people are showing up and doing this.
Oh, I was so hoping you were going to say that because it was an 80-20 split, and we shut him out.
I'm so proud of us.
Well, you should be proud of yourselves.
I mean, this is.
I am.
This is great stuff.
I mean, this is passionate America.
We keep hearing the DNC and Obama's ground soldiers are going to ramp up all these organized events to do what?
To pressure fellow Democrats to vote for government-run health care?
That's pretty bizarre.
They claim to represent real America.
Really?
Real America doesn't need to be organized.
Real America doesn't need to be paid to attend town hall meetings.
You showed up on your own, Charlie, as is everybody else showing up to protest these things.
Real America does not want government-run health care.
The DNC and Obama's ground troops are not real America.
They are operatives.
And this is, it's just, it's visible.
It's on display.
Now, this is not affecting Obama.
He cares about it only to the extent that it's going to make it harder to do.
But he isn't changing his mind.
And it's not changing these people's minds in the Senate or in the House.
In fact, with the passing of Senator Kennedy, I mean, it's full speed ahead now.
But Obama's great uncle, a man by the name of Dunham, Ralph Dunham.
CNN got hold of Ralph Dunham at a town hall in Fairfax City, Virginia.
Dana Bash spoke to great uncle Ralph Dunham about health care reform.
And Dana Bash said, do you feel like you have a good grasp of what's in the plans for overhauling health care?
No, I don't, because the thing's over a thousand pages long, and the House and the Senate are going to straighten out the two bills and nobody knows what's going to be it, I don't think.
Do you feel confused by it?
I don't really know very much about it.
I don't know whether to be confused or not.
I'm hoping to get some information just like everyone else.
Obama's great uncle, a family member, doesn't even understand the plan.
He needs to start listening to this program.
But I mean, that's just, it's hilarious.
Pensacola Beach in Florida.
This is Steve.
Hello, sir.
Great you're here.
Mega Dittos, Rush.
I want to thank you not only for the middle class, but you are the champion for the poor because face it, if this does go through, the rich, the elite rich, will have their own plan.
They can afford any plan that the insurance companies put out there.
It's the poor and the middle class.
We're going to be forced to be put in this socialistic, and that's what we're upset about.
You know, and I think the politicians that are out there, I had an uncle who was a senator up in North Mississippi.
And I tell you, he listened to his elite friends at the clubhouse that told him what to do and say.
And he lost his seat years ago about that.
And with everything with the, like, how the government works, look at Hurricane Ivan wiped me out, wiped my house out.
SBA came in and said, oh, we're going to help you.
We're going to help you.
I gave them all the forms to fill out.
When at the end of the day, they'd come back to tell me, oh, we can't loan you any money because you don't have any income.
I said, I need the money to rebuild my business.
And they say, well, they couldn't think outside the box to say, we're going to still help you.
I said, you know what?
Keep your money.
I'll do it myself.
I just reopened after almost five years being down.
Now I'm reopening.
And it's because people like you that champion the middle class.
And now they're even poor you're champion.
You've always done that.
What's wrong with these people?
You know, you made my day saying that.
I'm a little speechless.
But I mean, you're because you're right, but nobody's ever said that to me before.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, I know.
I'm looking for something here.
The audio soundbites are all out of order here today because I played them out of order.
Yeah, grab 19 and 20, audio soundbites 19 and 20.
This is last night on MSNBC.
And they talked to Sherrod Brown's wife, who's Connie Schultz.
She is a columnist, a newspaper columnist for the Cleveland plane dealer.
And the host of this show asked Connie Schultz about the death book, the VA death book.
And she said, why are the anti-reform people moved on to veterans?
Well, I think they were running out of steam on America's number one most vulnerable group, senior citizens.
So now they're trying to prey upon veterans.
They're preying on fear.
And this has become a game for too many of the Republicans.
And I wish I would make an appeal to the elected Democrats in the Senate and the House.
You campaigned across the country to elect Barack Obama.
You campaigned across the country telling Americans you can trust this man.
You can trust what he's proposing for America.
This is no surprise now that he's proposing health care reform.
It was a major plank of his campaign.
If you thought we could believe in him, then I wish each and every one of you that would be the universal message now.
We can trust him.
We can trust this plan.
We can change the way health care is delivered in this country.
That's the wife of Democrats, Congressman Senator Sherrod Brown.
Connie Schultz is a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Needer.
Connie, no, the people have lost trust in Obama, and he's not going to get it back.
Nothing that he has said would get better is getting better.
Everything's getting worse.
We are more vulnerable to a terror attack than ever before.
No jobs are being created.
No jobs are being saved.
We have a debt that is $9 trillion.
Some people are saying it's going to get as high as $14 trillion over the next 10 years.
The deficit.
Folks, listen to this.
The budget deficit in 09 will be larger than all of George W. Bush's annual deficits combined.
Obama's first budget deficit, higher than every Bush deficit added up and combined.
I mean, nobody would do what Obama is doing.
No, that's a story in the Washington Examiner by Mark Tapscott.
Obama's 09 deficit exceeds all eight years of Bush Red Ink.
He's lost trust, Connie.
He's lost trust with the American people.
He's not going to be able to get it back.
There's one more soundbite.
A question was asked: well, you mentioned town hall meetings earlier, and there was one held by Chuck Grassley in Iowa yesterday.
And a man in attendance reportedly compared Obama to Hitler, said he would take a gun to Washington if enough people would go with him.
How worried do you think we ought to be about violent language like that?
I felt this way from the moment that Sarah Palin started campaigning and using hate language.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has been talking about how the citizen militia is churning again because of the hate talk.
This is not without consequences.
Innocent people are feeling scared.
And when people get scared, they run.
They run away from it.
They don't want to embrace change.
And in that way, I think the Republicans are hoping they can win because it's the only way people who oppose health care reform right now are going to win.
And that's by making everybody just scared to death.
They are genuinely scared to death.
Sarah Palin didn't start any hate language.
So you're listening to a cliched liberal, a brain-dead, mind-numbed liberal.
They don't get it.
Well, even if they do, it doesn't matter.
One thing they know is the American people want no part of this.
And all that does is make them hold the American people in even greater contempt and have more desire to ramrod something the American people don't want down their throats.
Here's Linda in Keller, Texas.
Linda, I'm glad you called.
It's great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
What an honor it is to talk to you.
Thank you very much.
I am a first-time caller.
I have listened to you for years, and I'm just so proud of what you do for our country.
I am calling in regards to Miss Welfare mentality, our caller that you had earlier.
That would be Christine.
Yes, Christine.
I don't know where this welfare mentality came from.
We have been a proud people for many years.
America was built on entrepreneurism.
I'll tell you where it came from.
You know where it came from?
Franklin Delamo Roosevelt, Social Security.
Yes.
His big plans to try to get out of the Depression created the whole notion of entitlement, and the Democrat Party has been building on it ever since, and it's taken a long time.
They still haven't gotten, I think we're still safe.
They haven't gotten to the point that 50% or more of the American people have an entitlement mentality, but they're dangerously close.
But these people need to really take a hard look at the countries that are socialized and see the situations that the populations are in because there is a lesson learned there.
We do not want to go down that road.
And there is something that I think President Obama and the Democrats have underestimated the American people, our resolve and our passion for keeping this country to what it is supposed to be under our founding fathers.
Well, that leads to another element of this, and that's the public education system.
You say they need to look at these socialized countries.
What did they do?
What did they look?
The news is all over the place about the healthcare systems, particularly.
We had the story today.
4,000 mothers in Great Britain denied hospital beds because there aren't any.
And giving birth in elevators, hospital bathrooms, in the hallways, in their offices and so forth.
They got birth panels, as Mark Stein said.
Birth panels.
I mean, but the left in this country is not made up of thinkers.
It's made up of feelers.
It's made up of emotional self-loathers.
People that don't like themselves and they don't like the country.
They're unhappy with their lot in life and they want everybody else to be miserable.
And the only way to make everybody equal is to make everybody miserable.
You have to spread misery around to make everybody equal.
They want equality of outcomes.
It's just, it's absurd.
And it's, if you heard the call from Christine, you cannot reason.
You can't reason.
You can try to get through to them, but it's an art.
And most of the time, you just can't.
But you're very nice, Linda.
I appreciate call.
Very well spoken.
I'm honored to have you in the audience.
Internet criminals might be rethinking a favorite scam for stealing people's personal information.
There was a report released today by IBM shows a big drop in the volume of phishing emails, P-H-I-S-H-I-N-G, phishing emails.
That's when fraud artists send what looks like a legitimate message from a bank or some other company.
It's not clear what the decline means.
IBM says it could be that computer users are getting smarter about identifying phony websites.
It also could be that criminals are moving on from phishing to another kind of attack.
Let me tell you what it's, I'll tell you why this is.
Why Flock?
One of our esteemed sponsors.
People are aware of identity theft that's happened throughout their lifetimes.
They hear about it intensifying during this recessionary period.
Horror stories are all over the place.
The AP has reported federal prosecutors charged a Miami guy with the largest case of credit and debit card data theft ever in the United States, accusing this one-time government informant of swiping 130 million accounts on top of 40 million that he had previously stolen.
Sturdley, I think we can agree today.
We had interesting times with many of the female callers.
And I just, it must be something in the air today.
I just got a note from a friend of mine, Cheryl Ladd, Charlie's Angels Fame.
She said, you were superb today.
I'm not finished.
I wrote her back and said, I'm not finished.
What?
All right, to the phones.
This is John in Peoria, Arizona.
You know, Sterling, you find, it's Peoria, Illinois.
It's Syracuse, New York.
You find the Syracuse, Indianas.
You find the Peoria, Arizonas.
And nobody's ever heard of.
John, hello.
Are you there?
Yeah.
Rush, hi.
I am from Peoria.
Yeah, I know.
That's what I said.
Listen, listen, I've got a few things.
First time I called, I'm a respiratory therapist.
You don't talk much about those people, but we deal with people on ventilators and life support, and I've done this for 46 years.
I retired because of my back problem.
That goes into my call.
Anyways, let's start out with this Let's Kill Grandma thing, the death panel.
You've got to remember, I'm really conservative.
I don't fly on airplanes because they have left wings.
But I'm going to disagree with you on a little bit on this one.
There's not really a death panel, and they do need that because you get people out there on ventilators, Rush, and nobody knows what to do.
They should have taken care of this a long time ago.
And you've got people just dying.
Wait a minute.
Now you got me confused.
Are you advocating death panels?
No, no.
No, they're not death panels.
They're misusing the word.
They're doing that right now, Rush, but they're not doing it like they should.
They should be forced to do this because we get people on ventilators, and I can't talk much because of HIPAA, you know, but we get people on ventilators.
Nobody knows what to do.
This guy's terminal or this lady's terminal, and they're on a ventilator for, you know, six months.
And it's just terrible.
So the whole thing is.
Well, wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Look at this death panel thing is not hard to understand here, folks.
It's very simple.
All you have to do is read H.R. 3200.
And that's scary.
Nobody has written a bigger horror book than H.R. 3200.
It mandates end-of-life counseling.
We have the president of the United States who says, in response to a question from an American citizen, no, the will to live will not be a factor in our decision as to what we're going to tell our doctors to do.
Take a pay pill.
I don't care what you call them, but there are going to be government bureaucrats treating American citizens as budget items.
You guys, look at my grandmother.
I've told the story yesterday.
My grandmother had a stroke.
A doctor said to us, it's unlikely she's going to come out of this vegetative state.
And they said, what do you want to do?
And they advised.
They advised the feeding tube, let grandmother die.
But it was our decision.
Now, you could say that we were the death panel.
Well, we had to decide.
It wasn't easy, but we had to decide.
We had to believe what the doctors told, but we did it ourselves, but there was not some bureaucrat making the decision.
Basically, just on the basis of budget items.
And some families want to hold out for the miracle.
I just, I don't know what's so hard to understand about this.
The death panel phrase Sarah Palin came up with is precisely controversial because it was accurate.
It helped people understand exactly what was in store.
And I want to close here by repeating part of my eulogy that I gave in the first hour to Ted Kennedy.
The left is going to exploit him.
They're going to exploit his death.
They're going to exploit his legacy to push health care through.
But the greatest tribute would be that every American, every man, every woman and child would get the same health care options that Ted Kennedy got.
Ted care for all, forever.
Will there be a single liberal come forward, embrace Senator Kennedy's example of seeking and securing the best medical care available?
Ted Kennedy, lion of the Senate, the United States government was never a partner in his death.
Obama, remember, said that we are God's partners in matters of life and death to the rabbis.
Ted Kennedy never invited any bureaucrats into the decision-making process.
There are lessons to be learned in life and death.
Senator Kennedy's last days and his death are a powerful manifestation of the survival instinct, of the will, the spirit to live.
God bestowed on each of us the miracle of life.
It's a gift that is personal and it is priceless.
The suggestion that a partnership between government and God in life and death is vulgar.
It's a debasement of life.
It's un-American.
Ted Kennedy's passing is a powerful reminder of the respect and dignity of the intensely personal will to live we all possess.
The state was excluded from that part of Ted Kennedy's life, speaks well of the country and government that Ted Kennedy was elected to serve.
And to put his name on a health care bill, to try to ramrod a health care bill through in his name, in his honor, that does not honor the will to live, is hypocrisy and insulting.
To pass and ramrod a health care bill in his name that would deprive people by its existence by virtue of law, that would deprive people of the health care he got.
That's the most insulting thing the left could do.
And they're not even aware of it.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
Now, I purposely didn't get into this today, but I will tomorrow.
I want to remind everybody tomorrow, I have a letter here which details Senator Kennedy's offer to help the Soviet Union defeat Reagan's efforts to build up the nuclear deterrent in Europe.
Do you remember now that when I remind you, you remember this?
I'm going to give you the details of this tomorrow.
It was, we learned it when the KGB files opened up after the wall fell.
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