I was hearing, and because it relates to what we're facing right now, I was at a lecture just the other night, a number of you were there, in Berkeley on the subject of torture, and a British ambassador, a very courageous and truth-telling ambassador who was fired for his truth-telling, I was describing why he was fired as ambassador to Uzbekistan, because he had reported to his own foreign office and with copies to other embassies the fact that the country to which he was accredited was one of the worst totalitarian tyrannies in the world. And he first became aware of their extreme practice of torture for which we exercise, we the U.S. and CIA, send people to Uzbekistan to be tortured. in the process of extraordinary rendition. He said he was not just a little footnote here.

[01:01]

He was not aware of people being sent to camps in Europe, Poland and Romania. And he had some doubts whether that even happened, if you know the newspaper reports on that. But he knew they were sent to Uzbekistan so that when the president says, we don't torture We don't send people to countries where they might be tortured. We require them. That's one more total revolting lie. I say revolting because the pictures that introduced him to what it meant to be a dissenter or a suspect in Uzbekistan were put on his desk, and he was looking at pictures of people who had been boiled to death. Upper body. Rest of their body immersed in boiling, upper body remaining tortured in other means, but the lower body immersed in boiling liquid. We send people there. Of course, he was horrified.

[02:05]

And his reports on this led to his being removed and fired. Or he resigned eventually. But they tried to fire him. He has written about this, by the way, in a book that cannot be published in the UK because of the Official Secrets Act. So every publisher has been warned and alerted they will be subject to prosecution if they were to publish his book. He was the youngest ambassador in the British Foreign Service, a very ambitious and upcoming ambassador. He can't get it published over here yet because it's too British. No one has heard of Uzbekistan. And... People are not that anxious to hear about where we send suspects. Anyway, listening to him, I wanted to make the point that the torture, horrible as it is, is kind of a retail kind of tyranny compared to threats of bombing and especially practice of bombing and especially threats.

[03:11]

of nuclear bombing or the practice of nuclear bombing, which will be on a vast scale. And it doesn't have to be nuclear. And I did say to, you know, it's a horrible thing to lay on an audience, but Americans should know it. And most of you didn't know it. Most of the people in Tokyo were suffocated by the extinction of oxygen from these fires. Others burned to death, of course, went on the streets from the shelters, the asphalt This is, by the way, by our very careful planning as to how to do this, including targeting to the best we could any fire stations that might alleviate the fire with high explosive so they couldn't get the fire under control. Early on, it would burn, burn, burn, and develop these enormous temperatures. So the people left their shelters with their children. Remember, all the adult males were abroad committing aggression elsewhere. And so these people ran out into the streets. But the asphalt in the street was melted and burning.

[04:16]

So their feet, of course, stuck in the asphalt, and they burned like candles in the street. But those who could made it to the canals that crisscrossed Tokyo, like Venice. Many, many canals in Japan. to get away from the heat, and they hopped into the canal. But the canals were boiling. So they boiled to death by tens of thousands. This was five months before Hiroshima. In the next five months before Hiroshima, as McNamara estimated in the movie The Fog of War, or accepted the figure, we killed 800,000 civilians. It would have been more if our tactics had been, if the weather had been right. The weather had been better. That's before Hiroshima. Then when you add Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you get another 300,000. It gets you up to 1.1 million. Now, that's not 6 million, and it's not 20 million, as in Russia. But it's a million.

[05:20]

Civilian. We have used nuclear weapons a couple of dozen times since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. mostly in secret. We've used them the way you use a gun when you point it at somebody's head in an alley, whether or not you pull the trigger. You're using that weapon. You couldn't do that if you didn't have the weapon, and if you weren't ready, at least to appear ready, to pull the trigger. Of course, we're somebody who has pulled the trigger, so our threats have a good deal of credibility. And if you get your way without pulling the trigger, that's the best use you could make of the gun or the weapon. We're doing that this week. Even Democrats, leaders, like Nancy Pelosi, when asked if she would take the nuclear option off the table, where Bush and Rumsfeld have ostentatiously placed it, all options are on the table.

[06:28]

Nuclear options? All options are on the table. Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leader, generally often very good in her positions. Same thing, same exchange. All options are on the table. Now, a nuclear attack that would be the first one on an underground site, the first actual explosion of a weapon since Nagasaki, as I say, it's not the first use. We are using it right now. The first actual explosion would, I think, start a wave of proliferation, lead to responses probably against Israel by Iran, which in turn would probably evoke nuclear attacks by Iran, a nuclear war in the Middle East, and be the start of a war with incalculable and very long-term consequences. But above all, a precedent for Pakistan, for India, for Korea, for everything that weapons are now... Usable in the combat sense, if you can call that combat, in the massacre sense, not just the threat sense.

[07:31]

The UN General Assembly has said a number of times, by overwhelming majorities, that a first use of nuclear weapons, this is since the 50s, I think, when they first said this, and they've said it many times, a first use of nuclear weapons would be a crime against humanity. Indeed, the gravest crime against humanity. Hard to argue with that, except that none of the NATO countries, who rely on first-use threats to this day, led by the U.S., signed that. They voted no on that with a couple of others, Israel and, I think, Yemen or something. But, in fact, the majority is right on that. Crime. Evil. And you not only should not do evil, you shouldn't threaten evil.

[08:35]

The US actually is by far from the worst, far from being the worst empire in history. It's an empire like others. We like to think of ourselves as being very different, but we never have been that much. as Thoreau pointed out, on the African War, on the, what am I saying, the Mexican War, joined by U.S. Grant, who described our Mexican War as not only aggression, but as wicked a war as he knew of, he was ashamed that he had not had the moral courage to resign his commission. Moral courage to resign his commission as lieutenant, and instead he fought in it and stayed in the army. You could go back. The Mexican War happens to be quite a strong precedent for aggression, more comparable to Iraq, much more clearly than our other wars. As I said, I wouldn't have endorsed our other wars with my current perspective, but none of them except for Iraq is so clear a case of aggression, even Vietnam.

[09:42]

I won't go into that. I'll just state that. This is clear-cut aggression. Iraq was. And an attack on Iran would be, which is threatened now, would be another clear-cut aggression, a direct blow at world order of any kind, with enormous casualties resulting. If our troops, our people at home from an expanded terror campaign, the Irani reactions to this, possibly sweeping the seas clean of our regional naval forces. They have a capability of doing that with cruise missiles, and that will in turn be cited by our president as why all-out war against Iran is necessary. So we're on the brink of nuclear threats, I believe, and even if non-nuclear threats being carried out, aggressive threats. And the question is, what should we do about that? and say it's not enough to look to the Bible for guidance on this, or clearly the Koran or the Old Testament.

[10:54]

I've gotten very jaundiced, I have to say, on fundamentalisms of monotheism, but then Hinduism doesn't look much better with their massacres of the Muslims in India. And I was asking my friend, Buddhist Joanna Macy, Joanna, have the Buddhists done anything beastly lately like this? And she promptly told me that there are people now in Sri Lanka, used to be Salon, Sri Lanka, who will stop Tamils, who are Hindus, or people, just people they don't know, on the road and ask them to recite the precepts, which of course include do not harm, do not kill. And if they don't know the precepts, they kill them. And I heard a talk by another Buddhist, actually, who had been in Sri Lanka and found himself in a truckload of Buddhist soldiers armed with automatic weapons on their way, which he said taught him, anyone can ignore the teachings of anyone, which is a good observation about the world.

[12:03]

Certainly, as I say, Buddhism, though, these people are clearly, in this case, violating precepts. going against the admonitions of their religion, philosophy, discipline, the Dharma. How did we get here? I think that the idea that individual egotism, the notion of a separate independent self, that has to be protected, that's vulnerable to others, and it's independent of others, and has a permanent soul, a permanent self, and so forth, that has to be protected. The aggrandizement of the individual, which, and I could easily be wrong on this, but which is my impression that Buddhism has focused on a great deal, escaping from this sense of individual existence, egotism, greed, aversion, ignorance, by the individual in particular,

[13:07]

they focus on, I don't think is the main problem, the main threat to our human survival or the main cause of suffering in the world. I don't want to disagree with the Buddha here, but I offer, not something I invented, the notion that group egotism, group greed, ignorance, and aversion is much harder to escape from than individual, less escape from. and is the cause of most of the real danger in the world. The real suffering is caused by groups, by hierarchically organized groups, nations and states especially, but obviously not only them, people who are organized in religion, crusades of various kinds, and indeed that individuals, as I know from my own direct observation,

[13:58]

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