And You Thought It Was Over

[packsaddle 753]

"...But are you actually going to equate lying about an extra-marital affair to taking a nation to war for ulterior motives. Both would be wrong, but the consequences of one are much greater than the other."

 

I agree. One lie betrayed a spouse and upset much of the public. The other lie has dead bodies attached to it.

[ScouterPaul 11]

Saudi Arabia = Terroist

 

In an artical written by Tom Gross in 02/02 the following information was given:

 

15 of the 19 hijackers (911) were from Saudi Arabia.

1 of the 19 entered the U.S. on a Saudi Arabia diplomatic passport.

Over 100 of the detainees at Guantanimo are Saudi Arabian's

240 of the 250 al Queda prisoners being held by Pakastan are Saudi Arabians.

 

Humna rights violations is another issue for a seperate post.

 

How many 911 terrorists were from Iraq?

[Fuzzy Bear 12]

There are more questions than there are very good answers.

 

WMD has changed the world we live in even if Iraq did not have them at the time we blew them out of the desert. The whole Middle East sets like a large can of WMD and we watch?

 

Saddam kept the games going for the inspectors and the world for years and now we find that he did not have WMD? I am not sure that anyone should keep looking or that Bush should investigate. What would we really be doing?

 

Is Bush really going to try to investigate the cause of war? If he finds out what caused war, does he really beleieve (*I found squiggly red lines) his findings will help him in the polls (* no matter what he finds)?

 

Bush said that we are not Nation builders and now we are fighting over who will get the billions to rebuild Iraq? What did I miss?

 

Saddam lived in grand palaces while his people starved but now we find that Saddam really means, 'he who lives in a small hole'?

 

A crazy person is one that appears to not take responsibility for their actions. What can we say about the world in the 21st century? Have we been sucked into a vortex of pure unadulterated psychosis?

 

FB

 

[Proud Eagle 13]

Most people seem to forget this, but in 1997 regime change became the law of the land in regards to relations with Iraq. Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act and it was signed into law by President Clinton. The reasons for that were Saddam's human rights record, history of aggression, non-compliance with UN resolutions, breaking the gulf war cease-fire agreement, and the continued threat to the region and world he posed by his actions and is personal instability/unpredictability. Developement of WMD was also part of the reason.

 

During the Clinton adminstration there were a series of bombing raids and cruise missile strikes target at Saddam's WMD programs.

 

No nation thought that Iraq had sworn off WMD prior to the invasion. Even the French position, as revealed through public statements and their UN voting record reveals they thought that Saddam either had WMD or was trying to develope more WMD.

 

Reports about the Iraq scientists and government officials interviewed after the invasion show that there was an elaborate program to decieve the UN inspectors, to bluff the international community into thinking there might be WMD, and to cover up certain problems in the WMD programs so Saddam himself wouldn't know what was going on. Even some of Saddam's field commanders expected chemical weapons to be used to stop our invasion. Many were suprised when chemical weapons were issued to them or used by other units. Essentially Saddam managed to convince everyone both in and out of Iraq that he probably had WMD hidden away somewhere.

 

Saddam was sort of like the guy that robs a 7-11 with a fake gun. It looks real enough to the cashier so that they give up the money, and real enough for the police to think it was an armed robery on the survaliance tape. However, if push comes to shove, (or shooting in this case) the truth becomes quite clear.

 

There are also some unanswered questions about a large convoy of likely Iraqi government trucks that left Iraq prior to the war and went to Syria. No one is really certain what exactly happened to their contents, or even what the contents were. While it seems unlikely it is possible Saddam thought he would somehow be able to return to power if no WMD were found, and so he sent his WMD to some other place. It is also possible they just buried or burned the things out in the middle of the desert.

 

Now to me it makes perfect sense to have an investigation into what went wrong. However, there are several other investigations and inquiries under way. The findings of those investigations (such as the Iraq Survey Group) are going to be important for conducting a meaningful investigation into the intelligence situation prior to entering Iraq. It would therefore be best to start the investigation with these critical pieces of information, rather than gaining that information at the half way point and causing much other work to be wasted. The independent investigation into why our intelligence system failed us for so many years in regards to Iraq's WMD would logically lead to investigating why our intelligence system failed prior to September 11th, prior to the USS Cole bombing, prior to the Kobar Towers bombing, prior to the African Embassy bombings, prior to the invasion in regards to Iraq's economy and infastructure, and about the far more advanced than believed Iraqi missile programs, and in other such cases.

 

Now the most problamatic thing about the investigation is that there is a great misunderstanding by some people as to what the ivestigation should do. One portion of the population believes the proper inquiry should be into how and why the Bush administration were able to manipulate and falsify intelligence information to support the objective of regime change with the objective of carrying out their own so called "regime change" here. The rest of the population is now interested in finding out why the intel was so bad with the aim of fixing the intelligence system. Incidentally there are a great many governments that should be launching such investigations, because it certainly appears from the private observers stand point that everyone had bad intelligence on the matter.

 

Now the matter of intelligence information being sexed up is pretty well been laid to rest, at least in regards to our comrades accross the pond. The inquiry led by Lord Hutton (not certain of the spelling) concluded that the Blair government (in most parliamentary systems the "government" is what we would call the "administration") did not sex up the public reports about Iraq. That finding would also seem to support the theory that Bush did not sex up American intelligence, since so much of what was publicly reported was so near to the same in each country.

 

Anywase, the response from our Canadian friend seems to indicate that he hasn't quite figured out the United States, particularly with regards to its politics. Most near everyone I know guessed that Bush would eventually support an investigation, but that he was waiting for both a more advantagous moment from the political and operational standpoints.

 

Oh, and about that lying. Clinton deliberately purgered himself and lied to the public. Bush, it would seem, passed on information he was given that it seems was incorrect. Let me provide a similar but unrelated example.

 

Who would you think does the greater wrong, the SM that uses the program incorrectly because they don't fully understand it, or the one who understands the program and willfully uses it incorrectly ? I would place greater blame on the the latter SM because he intentionally abused the program. He may only cause small harm, but he is abusing the system and lying to the parents and boys. The first SM may in fact do far more harm to the boys and program, but he at least can honestly claim to have acted out of ignorance. The first SM may even be able to be trained in the BSA program and become a good SM. The second SM will not likely respond to further training because of some flaw that is in him.

[Achilleez 10]

The following isn't particularily directed at this thread. But I figured it was a good of place as any to put it. Nor do I share the views presented in it. But Gwynne Dyer is a respected Canadian historian and journalist, and this is what he had to say on terrorism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

West Overrates Terrorism

The Toronto Star ^ | September 10, 2003 | Gwynne Dyer

 

 

Posted on 09/10/2003 11:28:07 AM PDT by quidnunc

 

 

 

 

Two years on, Sept. 11 is still a raw anniversary for most Americans, who cannot forget the terrible scenes in lower Manhattan as more than 3,000 people died in a terrorist attack. But not one further American has died from Islamist terrorism on home soil since then. Was it all just a flash in the pan?

 

 

The Bush administration pumps up the terrorist threat to distract attention from the economy and provide a pretext for some other actions.

 

 

But for all the colour-coded alerts and the thousands of suspects held without trial, all the paranoia and duct tape, the past two years have been among the most terrorism-free in modern American history. Apart from the brief anthrax panic that cost four or five lives in late 2001, even the domestic crazies are giving it a rest.

 

 

Islamist terrorism is down in the rest of the world, too. If you ignore local conflicts of a more or less colonial character in which terrorism already played a major role before 9/11, the total number of deaths worldwide in Islamist attacks in the past two years is 348 and fewer than 50 of the victims were Americans.

 

 

For obvious diplomatic reasons, the governments in Moscow, Tel Aviv and New Delhi have been trying to redefine their own local struggles with Muslim opponents as part of America's global "war on terrorism," but it just won't fly.

 

 

The Palestinian militants of Hamas and Islamic Jihad only attack Israelis, the Kashmiri and Pakistani militants of Lashkar-e-Taiba and their associates only attack Indians, and the Chechen guerrillas only hit Russian targets.

 

 

In every case the basic quarrel is about territory, and the terrorists see themselves acting in a tradition of national liberation war that stretches back to the Irish, Israeli, and Algerian wars of independence (all of which involved a good deal of terrorism).

 

 

The recent terrorist attacks in Iraq also don't count, whether carried out by secular Baathists or the burgeoning Islamic resistance movement, since they are part of a local struggle against foreign occupation. What's left after all that is genuine international Islamist terrorism and there isn't very much of it.

 

 

Add up the attacks.

 

 

Nothing for six months after 9/11, and then an attack on a Christian church in a diplomatic compound in Islamabad, Pakistan in March, 2002, in which five people were killed including the wife and daughter of an American diplomat.

 

 

A truck laden with explosives and driven into a synagogue in Tunisia in April, 2002, killing 21 tourists, mostly Germans. A suicide bomb in Karachi in May, 2002 that killed 14, including 11 French engineers working on a defence project.

 

 

Another long gap until the fall, then the attack on a Bali nightclub last October that killed 202 people, mostly Western tourists. In the same month a suicide bomber attacked a French oil tanker off Yemen, killing one crewman.

 

 

Last November, other suicide bombers drove into an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, killing 15 people and injuring 80, mostly Kenyans. In May of this year, suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia hit a foreign compound in Riyadh, killing 34, and others in Morocco blew themselves up in a number of places around Casablanca, killing 45.

 

 

Finally, in August, 12 people were killed in the bombing of the Marriott hotel in Jakarta.

 

 

And that's it. In two years, a total of 348 people have died in seven countries in attacks that could be loosely linked with Al Qaeda or its many affiliates and emulators far fewer than have been killed by bolts of lightning in the same period.

 

 

Global terrorism is a highly overrated threat.

 

 

The attackers on 9/11 were extraordinarily successful because they employed teams of suicide hijackers including trained pilots, a new and unforeseen technique that would only be a surprise once, and because nobody was on a high state of alert.

 

 

They changed everybody's perception of terrorism because of the number of deaths they caused, and because they struck at the nerve centres of the world's greatest power. But since then, it's been back to low-tech attacks on soft targets, and the terrorists haven't been having much success.

 

 

Even if the U.S. invasion of Iraq generates a whole new wave of terrorist recruits, it won't make much difference to this larger picture so long as the terrorists' weapons remain conventional. So-called "weapons of mass destruction," like poison gas and biological agents, aren't really very impressive either; in a real-life situation, they would generally be no more lethal than a well-placed truck bomb.

 

 

A nuclear attack would be entirely another matter, of course, but how likely is that? Extremely unlikely: Terrorists do not have the resources to make nuclear weapons, and no existing government would give them one.

 

 

No Muslim country, except Pakistan, even owns any nuclear weapons, and one of the unspoken truths of the current international order is that a takeover by radical Islamists in a nuclear-weapons state would trigger instant and decisive international action to disarm it. (Not that the invasion of Iraq was about that; Iraq had neither radical Islamists in charge nor WMD, which is why so few countries followed the U.S. lead.)

 

 

Terrorism is not an enormous threat to life as we know it. It is a marginal nuisance that some governments find useful to inflate into an enormous bogeyman. We should all get a grip on reality and stop worrying so much.

 

[ManyIrons 10]

Respected by whom? This guy's axe must be worn down to a nub by now. Imagine trivializng victims of terrorist attacks by equating them with people struck by lightning. Perhaps it would benefit Mr. Dyer to reread what President Bush actually said in his, oft misquoted, 2003 State of the Union address:

 

"Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late."

 

Here's a link to C-Span to read the entire speech www.c-span.org/executive/transcript.asp?cat=current_events&code=bush_admin&year=2003