Regime Change: How the CIA put Saddam's Party in Power
From Richard Sanders, 24 October 2002
Source: Andrew and Patrick Cockburn,
excerpt from Out of the Ashes, The Resurrection of Saddam
Hussein, 2000.
Cited by Tim Buckley
<http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2000/msg01267.html>
With the death of former CIA director Richard Helms, the
corporate media is offering a rare glimpse into the CIA's use of
political assassinations. Unfortunately, however, the coverage
is highly-sanitized. It covers up much more than it reveals.
Contrary to what the corporate media suggests, assassination is
not a clean, surgical method of removing very specific political
enemies. It is only one small element in a larger cluster of
crimes used by the CIA in executing a regime change.
The reality is that the CIA's use of assassination to
exterminate political leaders has historically been closely
linked to many other political crimes that are, arguably, even
worse.
For example, when planning, coordinating, arming, training and
financing repressive military coups, as the CIA has done so many
times, their henchmen are wont to carry out mass arrests, mass
torture and mass murder. It's a nasty business. As Kissinger
once said about the CIA's betrayal of Iraqi Kurds, covert action
should not be confused with missionary work.
Although 32 of the 98 recent stories on Richard Helms (found
using a google media search) mention the term assassination, not
one of these articles mentions any of the following terms that
are equally relevant to CIA operations: torture, murder, arrest.
Only 4 of the 98 recent stories on Helms mention the term coup.
In one case, the article uses the term to praise Helms, saying
he scored a journalistic coup when he interviewed Adolph Hitler
in 1935. Richard Helms' contact with Nazis didn't end there (and
probably didn't begin there either). Helms went on to work
closely with General Reinhard Gehlen, the notorious Nazi
spymaster who was hired by US intelligence to set up an
organization within the CIA. The Gehlen Org recruited thousands
of Nazi agents to run covert operations in Eastern Europe after
the war. Gehlen is, of course, not mentioned in any of recent
news reports on Helms. Neither is the fact that the OSS (the US
agency that preceded the CIA) had a lot in common with the SS.
To both, the biggest evil in the word was summed up in one word,
communism. And to both, the elimination of communists, labour
activists and other undesirable elements that got in the way of
corporatism was their chief preoccupation.
Political assassination is a valuable weapon in the covert
operative's toolbox. But it is only one tool among many. A
successful right-wing covert action not only removes the enemy's
head, it replaces the body politic.
The CIA has been organizing regime change for 50 years. They
have removed many governments that are unfriendly to US
corporate interests and replaced them with regimes that are more
likely to work closely and slavishly to carry out the economic
and geopolitical desires of the US corporate elite.
But the CIA's crimes don't end when a right-wing coup has
succeeded. The CIA then has to keep its repressive despots in
power in order to ensure that they can put into place and then
maintain a variety of unjust economic systems and structures.
This is done with arms sales (and outright gifts of surplus
weapons), glowing diplomatic support, intelligence support (sic)
and massive economic investment (i.e., pillaging as much profit
as possible by exploiting the natural resources that drew them
in there in the first place, and handing out some of the spoils
to a loyal local elite).
When the corporate media describe the CIA's use of political
assassination as if it exists in isolation from mass
imprisonment, torture and murder, they cover up the horror, pain
and suffering experienced by thousands of ordinary people in
countries where CIA-backed blood baths have taken place. They
neglect to reveal that when the CIA carries out its high-profile
assassination efforts, they also carry out murders of thousands
of lesser-known political figures.
It's standard procedure with many coups that thousands of
grassroots activists and organizers get rounded up, tortured and
killed. Such waves of mass violence make today's serial sniper
in Washington look like a Boy Scout. The CIA has used such goons
to eliminate its opponents and as a scare tactic to ensure that
other citizens, who might otherwise have protested the regime
change, decide instead to lay very low in order to stay alive.
An apt example of a real CIA assassination campaign was the
Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Tens of thousands of people where
specifically targetted, tracked down and assassinated, many by
snipers. Although Helms held the post of Director of the CIA
during the height of this mass serial assassination program,
none of the 98 recent stories on Helms, found with the google
search engine, even mention Phoenix. Reliable estimates on the
total number of people killed by the US in South East Asia
during the Vietnam war range from three to five million people.
But, of course, there is no mention of Helms culpability in any
recent corporate media articles. they say it is taboo to speak
ill of the dead, but what they don't say is that it is even more
taboo to speak ill of the CIA, or breath word that CIA directors
are criminals for overseeing the deliberate murder of millions
of innocent civilians.
During Helms' tenure as director of the CIA under President
Johnson, he also oversaw the secret war against Laos. But, it
was no secret for the people of Laos. Over two million tons of
bombs were dropped on this small country. The word Laos is not
mentioned in any of the 98 recent corporate media articles found
by google in a search for Richard Helms. Tio much of the world,
it's still a secret war.
Another very good example of a CIA-organized regime change was a
coup in 1963 that employed political assassination, mass
imprisonment, torture and murder. This was the military coup
that first brought Saddam Hussein's beloved Ba'ath Party to
power in Iraq. At the time, Richard Helms was Director for Plans
at the CIA. That is the top CIA position responsible for covert
actions, like organizing coups. Helms served in that capacity
until 1966, when he was made Director.
In the quotations collected below, the name of the leader who
was assassinated is spelled variously as Qasim, Qassim and
Kassem. But, however you spell his name, when he took power in a
popularly-backed coup in 1958, he certainly got recognized in
Washington. He carried out such anti-American and anti-
corporatist policies as starting the process of nationalizing
foreign oil companies in Iraq, withdrawing Iraq from the US-
initiated right-wing Baghdad Pact (which included another
military-run, US-puppet state, i.e., Pakistan) and
decriminalizing the Iraqi Communist Party. Despite these
actions, and more likely because of them, he was Iraq's most
popular leader. He had to go!
In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The
failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam Hussein. In
1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully assassinate Qasim
and Saddam's Ba'ath Party came to power for the first time.
Saddam returned from exile in Egypt and took up the key post as
head of Iraq's secret service. The CIA then provided the new
pliant, Iraqi regime with the names of thousands of communists,
and other leftist activists and organizers. Thousands of these
supporters of Qasim and his policies were soon dead in a rampage
of mass murder carried out by the CIA's close friends in Iraq.
Iraq is once again a target of US regime change. Despite that,
precious little is being said by the corporate media about how
the CIA aided and abetted political assassination, regime change
and mass murder, all in the name of putting Saddam's Ba'ath
power into power for the first time in Iraq.
One thing is for sure, the US will find it much harder to remove
the Ba'ath Party from power in Iraq than they did putting them
in power back in 1963. If more people knew about this diabolical
history, they just might not be so inclined to trust the US in
its current efforts to execute regime change in Iraq.
Here then are some quotations that I've gathered on this
fascinating early history of CIA involvement in the vicious
history of regime change in Iraq:
In early 1963, Saddam had more important things to worry about
than his outstanding bill at the Andiana Cafe. On February 8, a
military coup in Baghdad, in which the Baath Party played a
leading role, overthrew Qassim. Support for the conspirators was
limited. In the first hours of fighting, they had only nine
tanks under their control. The Baath Party had just 850 active
members. But Qassim ignored warnings about the impending coup.
What tipped the balance against him was the involvement of the
United States. He had taken Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad
Pact. In 1961, he threatened to occupy Kuwait and nationalized
part of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), the foreign oil
consortium that exploited Iraq's oil. In retrospect, it was the
ClAs favorite coup. We really had the ts crossed on what was
happening, James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the Middle
East, told us. We regarded it as a great victory. Iraqi
participants later confirmed American involvement. We came to
power on a CIA train, admitted Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Baath Party
secretary general who was about to institute an unprecedented
reign of terror. CIA assistance reportedly included coordination
of the coup plotters from the agency's station inside the U.S.
embassy in Baghdad as well as a clandestine radio station in
Kuwait and solicitation of advice from around the Middle East on
who on the left should be eliminated once the coup was
successful. To the end, Qassim retained his popularity in the
streets of Baghdad. After his execution, his sup- porters
refused to believe he was dead until the coup leaders showed
pictures of his bullet-riddled body on TV and in the newspapers.
Source: Alfred Mendes,
Excerpt from Blood for Oil, Spectr@zine.
<http://www.spectrezine.org/war/Mendes.htm>
The Ba'athist coup, resulted in the return to Iraq of young
fellow-Ba'athist Saddam Hussein, who had fled to Egypt after his
earlier abortive attempt to assassinate Qasim. Saddam was
immediately assigned to head the Al-Jihaz al-Khas, the
clandestine Ba'athist Intelligence organisation. As such, he was
soon involved in the killing of some 5,000 communists. Saddam's
rise to power had, ironically, begun on the back of a CIA-
engineered coup!
Source: From Practical History,
London, May 2000.
<http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7672/iraq.html>
1963: Qasim's government is overthrown in a coup bringing the
Arab nationalist Ba'ath party to power. They favour the joining
together of Iraq, Egypt and Syria in one Arab nation. In the
same year, the Ba'ath also come to power in Syria, although the
Syrian and Iraqi parties subsequently split.
The Ba'ath strengthen links with the U.S. During the coup,
demonstrators are mown down by tanks, initiating a period of
ruthless persecution. Up to 10,000 people are imprisoned, many
are tortured. The CIA supply intelligence to the Ba'athists on
communists and radicals to be rounded up. In addition to the 149
officially executed, about 5,000 are killed in the terror, many
buried alive in mass graves. The new government continues the
war on the Kurds, bombarding them with tanks, artillery and from
the air, and bulldozing villages.
Source: Muslimedia:
August 16-31, 1997
<http://www.muslimedia.com/archives/features98/saddam.htm>
Iraqis have always suspected that the 1963 military coup that
set Saddam Husain on the road to absolute power had been
masterminded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). New
evidence just published reveals that the agency not only
engineered the putsch but also supplied the list of people to be
eliminated once power was secured--a monstrous stratagem that
led to the decimation of Iraq's professional class.
The overthrow of president Abdul Karim Kassim on February 8,
1963 was not, of course, the first intervention in the region by
the agency, but it was the bloodiest--far bloodier than the coup
it orchestrated in 1953 to restore the shah of Iran to power.
Just how gory, and how deep the CIA's involvement in it, is
demonstrated in a new book by Said Aburish, a writer on Arab
political affairs.
The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite
(1997), sets out the details not only of how the CIA closely
controlled the planning stages but also how it played a central
role in the subsequent purge of suspected leftists after the
coup.
The author reckons that 5,000 were killed, giving the names of
600 of them--including many doctors, lawyers, teachers and
professors who formed Iraq's educated elite. The massacre was
carried out on the basis of death lists provided by the CIA.
The lists were compiled in CIA stations throughout the Middle
East with the assistance of Iraqi exiles like Saddam, who was
based in Egypt. An Egyptian intelligence officer, who obtained a
good deal of his information from Saddam, helped the Cairo CIA
station draw up its list. According to Aburish, however, the
American agent who produced the longest list was William McHale,
who operated under the cover of a news correspondent for the
Beirut bureau of Time magazine.
The butchery began as soon as the lists reached Baghdad. No-one
was spared. Even pregnant women and elderly men were killed.
Some were tortured in front of their children. According to the
author, Saddam who 'had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo
to join the victors, was personally involved in the torture of
leftists in the separate detention centres for fellaheen
[peasants] and the Muthaqafeen or educated classes.'
King Hussain of Jordan, who maintained close links with the CIA,
says the death lists were relayed by radio to Baghdad from
Kuwait, the foreign base for the Iraqi coup. According to him, a
secret radio broadcast was made from Kuwait on the day of the
coup, February 8, 'that relayed to those carrying out the coup
the names and addresses of communists there, so they could be
seized and executed.'
The CIA's royal collaborator also gives an insight into how
closely the Ba'athist party and American intelligence operators
worked together during the planning stages. 'Many meetings were
held between the Ba'ath party and American intelligence--the
most critical ones in Kuwait,' he says.
At the time the Ba'ath party was a small nationalist movement
with only 850 members. But the CIA decided to use it because of
its close relations with the army. One of its members tried to
assassinate Kassim as early as 1959. Saddam, then 22, was
wounded in the leg, later fleeing the country.
According to Aburish, the Ba'ath party leaders--in return for
CIA support--agreed to 'undertake a cleansing programme to get
rid of the communists and their leftist allies.' Hani Fkaiki, a
Ba'ath party leader, says that the party's contact man who
orchestrated the coup was William Lakeland, the US assistant
military attache in Baghdad.
One of the coup leaders, colonel Saleh Mahdi Ammash, former
Iraqi assistant military attache in Washington, was in fact
arrested for being in touch with Lakeland in Baghdad. His arrest
caused the conspirators to move earlier than they had planned.
Aburish's book shows that the Ba'ath leaders did not deny
plotting with the CIA ro overthrow Kassim. When Syrian Ba'ath
party officials demanded to know why they were in cahoots with
the US agency, the Iraqis tried to justify it in terms of
ideology comparing their collusion to 'Lenin arriving in a
German train to carry out his revolution.' Ali Saleh, the
minister of interior of the regime which had replaced Kassim,
said: 'We came to power on a CIA train.'
It should not come as a surprise that the Americans were so
eager to overthrow Kassim or so willing to cause such a blood
bath to achieve their objective. At the height of the cold war,
they were causing similar mayhem in Latin America and Indo-China
overthrowing any leaders that dared show the slighest degree of
independence.
Kassim was a prime target for US aggression and arrogance. After
taking power in 1958, he took Iraq out of the Baghdad Pact, the
US-backed anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East, and in 1961
he dared nationalise part of the concession of the British-
controlled Iraq Petroleum company and resurrected a long-
standing Iraqi claim to Kuwait ( the regime which succeeded him
immediately dropped the claim to Kuwait).
But the cold war does not by itself explain Uncle Sam's
propensity to violence. When president George Bush bombed Iraq
to smithereens, killing thousands of civilians, the cold war was
over. Clinton cannot cite the cold war for insisting that the
brutal regime of sanctions imposed on the country should stay.
In fact the brutal, blood-stained nature of Uncle Sam goes back
all the way to the so-called 'Founding Fathers,' who made no
attempt to conceal it. As long ago as 1818, John Quincy Adams
hailed the 'salutary efficacy' of terror in dealing
with 'mingled hordes of lawless Indians and negroes.' He was
defending Andrew Jackson's frenzied operations in Florida which
virtually wiped out the indigenous population and left the
Spanish province under US control. Thomas Jefferson and his
colleagues were not above professing to be impressed by the
wisdom of his words.
Source: Kryss Katsiavriades and Talaat Qureshi,
The Acts of the Democracies: 1960 to 1964
<http://www.krysstal.com/democracy_1960to1964.html>
Kassem had helped found the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OPEC) in an attempt to curtail Western control of
Arab oil. He had been planning to nationalise the Iraq Petroleum
Company in which the USA had an interest. Iraq had also
disapproved when Kuwait had been given independence by the UK
with a pro-west emir (king) and oil concessions to Western
companies. A few days before the coup, the French newspaper La
Monde had reported that Kassem had been warned by the USA
government to change his country's economic policies or face
sanctions. British government papers later declassified would
indicate that the coup was backed by the USA and UK. The new
government promises not to nationalise American oil interests
and renounces its claim to Kuwait. The USA recognises and
praises the new government.
Source: Gareth Smyth,
In the Middle East, the CIA has hurt its friends and helped its
own enemies.
<http://www.mafhoum.com/press2/cia276_files/home_files/azpolitics
_03.htm>
A history of twists and turns, with the CIA often as a blunt
axe, have made it very difficult for the United States to be
seen as a reliable, or even honest, presence in the Middle East.
The resentment is not confined to Arabs. Nine years ago, Massoud
Barzani, who has rarely ever traveled away from Kurdistan,
agreed to visit Washington with a deputation of the opposition
Iraqi National Congress (INC). Massoud, used to the traditional
baggy trousers and cummerbund, looked uncomfortable in an Armani
suit at receptions, but the INC was keen to create the right
impression with senators and opinion-formers. Nonetheless,
Massoud refused an invitation to visit Henry Kissinger.
Despite all the compromises of Kurdish politics, Massoud had
never forgiven the former secretary of state for engineering the
1975 Algiers agreement between Iraq and Iran, when the two sides
suddenly settled long-standing differences and felt free to deal
with their internal problems, including the Kurds. Algiers came
just two years after Massoud went to Washington to meet Richard
Helms, the CIA director, and Al Haig, the White House chief of
staff a meeting that led to both CIA and Israeli advisers moving
into northern Iraq to help the Kurds. Algiers left the Kurds
high and dry, ending a generation of Kurdish revolt led by
Massoud's father, Mulla Mustafa, whose broken heart sent him
into exile and an early death. Even if those in Washington
forgot quickly, Massoud did not.
The relationship between the CIA and Saddam Hussein is a long
one. In 1963, the Americans plotted with the Ba'ath against
Abdel Karim Kassem, a man who, in the words of the writer Said
Aburish, retains more of the affection of the Iraqi people than
any leader this century. The CIA supplied lists for the Ba'ath
to kill leftists and communists, and Washington flew arms to
Kirkuk to use against the Kurds.
In Aburish's biography of the Iraqi leader, the author quotes
many anti-Saddam Iraqis including Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the
INC on CIA cooperation with the second Ba'ath coup in 1968.
Later, in the 1980s, the United States and Britain helped arm
Saddam in his confrontation with Iran only to turn against him
over the 1990 Kuwait crisis. When in 1991 the Iraqi people rose
against Saddam, the United States was fearful that change would
put its majority Shi'ites and thus Iran in power, and US forces
stood by as the Republican Guard crushed the rebellion. The CIA
then worked on sponsoring a coup in Baghdad, a strategy that
crumbled in 1996 when Iraqi intelligence infiltrated a
conspiracy led by the ex-Ba'athist Iyad Alawi. Having rounded up
hundreds of officers, the mukhabarat sent a message to the CIA
team in Amman: We have arrested all your people. You might as
well pack up and go home.
The CIA's half-hearted support for the INC also ended in 1996,
when Saddam exploited Kurdish in-fighting to crush an INC
presence in the Kurdish-controlled zone in the north. As Iraqi
tanks moved in, the CIA fled and left the INC people to their
fate. Washington washed its hands of the affair, and Chalabi
noted that CIA officials are not known for their veracity.
Source: Ruth Wilson,
American Policy in Iraq
<http://www.speakeasy.org/wfp/37/american.html>
In 1963, Saddam Hussein worked with the CIA to carry out the
coup by the Baath party, which eventually brought him to power
in Iraq. The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab
Elite by Said K. Aburish, which was reviewed recently in
Counterpunch (The CIA: Lest We Forget, CounterPunch. Sept.16-30
1997, p.2), describes how the CIA, Saddam and other members of
the Baath party collaborated to bring about the coup, murdering
perhaps 5,000 people in the process. The United States went on
to help Saddam win the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. According to
Noam Chomsky, There were no passionate calls for a military
strike after Saddam's gassing of Kurds at Halabja in March,
1988; on the contrary, the US and U.K. extended their strong
support for the mass murderer, then, also 'our kind of guy'
(Iraq and the UN Sanctions, The Economist, Nov.19 1994, p.47)
Source: Stephen R. Shalom
Middle East Time Line (revised, 12 Dec. 2001)
<http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/pfvs/2001IV/msg01736.html>
1963: U.S. supports coup by Iraqi Ba'ath party (soon to be
headed by Saddam Hussein) and reportedly gives them names of
communists to murder, which they do with vigor.
Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The
Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, New York: Harperperennial. 1999,
p. 74; Edith and E. F. Penrose, Iraq: International Relations
and National Development, Boulder: Westview, 1978, p. 288; Hanna
Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements
of Iraq, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978, pp. 985-86
Source: Thomas Powers,
The Man Who Kept The Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, 1979,
pp. 160-164.
It is astonishing how many tough-minded men in American
government have been convinced by the regular spiel that the CIA
has a deeprooted antipathy to proposals for political murder. A
witness to still another episode of the sort was Armin Meyer, a
career diplomat with a long history in the Near East going back
to the Office of War Information, a kind of offshoot of the OSS,
during World War II. In July 1958, when the government of Iraq
was overthrown in a coup notable for its violence, Meyer was
deputy director of the State Department's Office of Near Eastern
Affairs. The following year he was promoted to director and as
such was called in whenever the CIA contemplated covert
operations in Iraq. The new ruler of the country was an army
general named Abdul Karim Kassem, who had murdered his
predecessors as well as a number of foreigners who happened to
be in Baghdad at the time of his coup. On top of that, he
immediately restored diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union,
later lifted a ban on the Iraqi Communist party while
suppressing pro-Western parties, and in many other ways invited
the hostility of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. On one
occasion during Armin Meyer's tenure as director of the Office
of Near Eastern Affairs, he attended a meeting in Allen Dulles's
office at the CIA to discuss how the United States might remove
Kassem. Meyer had attended many such meetings; they were a
routine of government; but this one stuck in his mind.
During the meeting one of those present suggested that Kassem
was the problem, and maybe the best way to get rid of him was to
get rid of him. Wait a minute, Dulles said. An awful silence
followed. Dulles was a man of great personal authority, and his
words on this occasion had a cold and deliberate emphasis which
Meyer never forgot. Dulles wanted one thing to be understood: it
is not in the American character to assassinate opponents;
murder was not to be discussed in his office, now or ever again;
he did not ever want to hear another such suggestion by a
servant of the United States government; that is not the way
Americans do things.
Dulles was so clear on this point, and spoke with such evident
passion and conviction, that Meyer simply could not understand
how Dulles ever could have been party to an assassination plot
no matter who gave the orders. Meyer knew what was in the Church
Committee's reports, but he simply did not believe it, there
must be some error, it was beyond Meyer's capacity to conceive
that he could have been mistaken on this point, Dulles had left
no room for doubt: he would not be a party to assassination.
The regular spiel
...
The message to McNamara, and to us, ought to be loud and clear:
assassination was too sensitive a matter to be discussed in
official meetings or to be recorded in official memos and
minutes. What those high officials who received the regular
spiel failed to comprehend was the degree of secrecy which
surrounded any matter as explosive as assassination. Armin
Meyer, for example, was convinced by Dulles's version of the
regular spiel that he would never be a party to assassination.
He knew what was in the Church Committee's Assassination Report
roughly knew, that is; he had not actually read itbut he
couldn't square what he'd heard with what he thought he knew. If
he had read the report, the whole report, and most particularly
the long footnote on page 181, he would have known that Dulles's
solemn disapproval was in truth nothing more than the regular
spiel. In February 1960, while the government was trying to
decide what to do about General Kassem, the chief of the DDP's
Near East Division proposed that Kassem be incapacitated with a
poisoned handkerchief prepared by the DDP's Technical Services
Division. In April the proposal was supported by the DDP's Chief
of Operations, Richard Helms, who endorsed Kassem's
incapacitation as highly desirable. Meyer would further have
known that Bisseil did not act in such matters without Dulles's
approval, and that Bissell was convinced he could hardly have
made this point any clearer to the Church Committee that Dulles
would not have proceeded without an order from the only man with
the authority to okay an attempt on a foreign leader's life. In
this instance the handkerchief was duly dispatched to Kassem,
but whether or not it ever reached him, it certainly did not
kill him. His own countrymen did that on February 8, 1963, by
executing him before a firing squad on live television in
Baghdad.
What Livingston Merchant, Armin Meyer, Robert McNamara, and
others failed to understand was that official meetings in the
office of the Director of the CIA, or of the Secretary of State,
or of the Special Group, were hardly the place to discuss
something that was really secret. From the CIA's point of view
the Secretary of State's office was about as secure as the floor
of Congress with a full press gallery. It you were going to plan
an assassination in the Secretary of State's office, or record
the discussion in the minutes, you might as well send a press
release to the New York Times. Eisenhower and Kennedy went after
two enemies in particular in the years between 1959 and 1963
Lumumba in the Congo and Castro in Cuba but when they gave the
job to the CIA they expected secrecy, and that is what they got.
