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Chaotic Citizen 631995,

See this web site, one of hundreds like it: A Timeline of CIA Atrocities. And this one, too showing U.S. government documents collected by George Washington University: The Secret CIA History of the Iran Coup, 1953.

And, hundreds of books like Blowback

Summary of your comment:

The U.S. government doesn't engage in violent secret behavior.

Besides, other governments engage in violent secret behavior, also.

It's impossible to know what happened in secret, because secrets always remain completely hidden.

Discussing violent secret behavior of the U.S. government is too popular.

People who read Slashdot should focus on the violent behavior of other governments.

Although you haven't read any of the books, or followed the history of the U.S. government of the last 70 years, your knowledge is far superior, and you feel "justified" in being disrespectful.

Quote from the parent comment: In the case of the CIA, "collecting information" is their job description.

Ignorance of government: Not only are most U.S. citizens ignorant of the activities of their government, they are willfully ignorant, in that they hold strong opinions with little or no attempt to educate themselves.

The CIA "Directorate of Operations", at present called the "Clandestine Service" is responsible for most of the U.S. government's problems in the Middle East today. That part of the CIA destroys governments and kills people. For example, see these documents collected by George Washington University: The Secret CIA History of the Iran Coup, 1953.

That part of the CIA: 1) Breaks laws at will, 2) Inserts lies into newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines, 3) Kills people they decide they want to kill, 4) Is not under any real control, 5) Hides how much money is spent, 6) Often acts to protect the profits of wealthy people in the U.S., sometimes spending $100 of taxpayer money to protect $1 of private profit, 7) Is not honest about its purposes, and 8) Generally acts as a secret police and an arm of a hidden government that resembles a dictatorship rather than a democracy.

If you really love your country, you will learn about your government. I love the U.S., and that's why I've educated myself about both the good and the bad.

If you look at the actual documents released by the CIA, you'll see that the number 1 item on the list of family jewels is totally blacked out; number 2 is the use of a member of the mafia to attempt to assassinate Castro. See the summary on page 5 of the scanned pdf here. Pages 8-10, which provide more detail of the deleted item, are also completely obliterated.

If the CIA were involved in the assassination of Kennedy, this is exactly where the item would be...

Of course, a really clever CIA might fabricate just such a redaction to incite all manner of speculation and spread FUD about the rest of what they did...

The "abuses" did have a purpose, a lofty one at that.

So the means justify the means? Like the massacre of 200,000 East Timorese, one third of the population of East Timor? While the US didn't invade East Timor the US government under Pres Ford and Henry Kissinger encouraged and supported Indonesia's invasion of East Timor. They even supplied arms to Indonesia despite a congressional ban.

Do they get into their mind control experiments?

I love your selective quoting (although that's usually what you get by grabbing a random list off the internet). Let's take pick a random one, shall we?

"We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country"

OMG! Al Gore was trying to encourage us to go to war! The parent was so wrong! ... Except that they weren't:

Full context:

"Moreover, if we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and depleted fourth rate military of Iraq and then quickly abandon that nation as President Bush has abandoned Afghanistan after quickly defeating a fifth rate military there, the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam. We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

We have no evidence, however, that he has shared any of those weapons with terrorist group. However, if Iraq came to resemble Afghanistan - with no central authority but instead local and regional warlords with porous borders and infiltrating members of Al Qaeda than these widely dispersed supplies of weapons of mass destruction might well come into the hands of terrorist groups.

If we end the war in Iraq, the way we ended the war in Afghanistan, we could easily be worse off than we are today. When Secretary Rumsfield was asked recently about what our responsibility for restabilizing Iraq would be in an aftermath of an invasion, he said, "that's for the Iraqis to come together and decide."

During one of the campaign debates in 2000 when then Governor Bush was asked if America should engage in any sort of "nation building" in the aftermath of a war in which we have involved our troops, he stated gave the purist expression of what is now a Bush doctrine: "I don't think so. I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something here. We're going to have a kind of nation building corps in America? Absolutely not."

The events of the last 85 years provide ample evidence that our approach to winning the peace that follows war is almost as important as winning the war itself. The absence of enlightened nation building after World War I led directly to the conditions which made Germany vulnerable to fascism and the rise to Adolph Hitler and made all of Europe vulnerable to his evil designs. By contrast the enlightened vision embodied in the Marshall plan, NATO, and the other nation building efforts in the aftermath of World War II led directly to the conditions that fostered prosperity and peace for most the years since this city gave birth to the United Nations.

Two decades ago, when the Soviet Union claimed the right to launch a pre-emptive war in Afghanistan, we properly encouraged and then supported the resistance movement which, a decade later, succeeded in defeating the Soviet Army's efforts. Unfortunately, when the Russians left, we abandoned the Afghans and the lack of any coherent nation building program led directly to the conditions which fostered Al Qaeda terrorist bases and Osama Bin Laden's plotting against the World Trade Center. Incredibly, after defeating the Taliban rather easily, and despite pledges from President Bush that we would never again abandon Afghanistan we have done precisely that. And now the Taliban and Al Qaeda are quickly moving back to take up residence there again. A mere two years after we abandoned Afghanistan the first time, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Following a brilliant military campaign, the U.S. abandoned the effort to destroy Saddam's military prematurely and allowed him to remain in power.

What is a potentially even more serious consequence of this push to begin a new war as quickly as possible is the damage it can do not just to America's prospects to winning the war against terrorism but to America's prospects for continuing th

Link http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB159/inde x.htm (www.gwu.edu)

And, in case you've yet to see this, check out this site articel for further cluelessness.....

The NSA is not in any way like the secret police. More like government hackers. Also, you might want to look up (the declassified portions of) USSID 18. I'll get you started:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB23/07-11 .htm

Of course, most of the protections that keep the NSA from spying on US persons can be circumvented by a determined executive branch. Fortunately the people actually at the NSA complained about the recent abuses, which is part of the reason anyone knows about abuses at all.

They think they deleted it, the same way you thought you voted.

got backups?

• 1 - Send troops

• 2 - ???

• 3 - Profit FTW !

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction...

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

France were quite content to look the other way on Saddam Hussein's atrocities because they had a nice trade relationship with him.

They were widely criticized for this "cheese eating surrender monkey" approach.

Mmmh, if this is true, maybe it counts as prior art in his patent dispute with the makers of Kleenex. They were using Penrose tiles because the quasi-periodic structure makes it less likely that the overlapping of the pattern will cause ridges to form. Math patents!!

Note also that the current US Director of National Intelligence, John McConnell, was previously Senior Vice President with Booz Allen Hamilton. They aren't just telco management consultants, they're government management consultants (this doesn't mean they're not bozos, but it does mean that if they are bozos, they're very dangerous bozos)

You keep mentioning this East Timor, I never really paid to much attention to it because I didn't think the US was involved in it outside of not protesting it. You seem fixated on it so I brushed up a littlw and it seems that I'm once again correct. Wikipedia often gets rewriten to support one cause or another. So when I confirmed my position with the link you gave to the wiki as well as followed it to the same conclusion from other links in the site, I checked a few other placed too. It apears the the US didn't support anything at all. They just didn't object to it. You make it sound like we were directly behind it and ford was the most evil president until Bush.

I call BS. Ford and Kissinger encouraged or gave green light to Suharto to invade East Timor:

From the National Security Archives at George Washington University: Ford and Kissinger Gave Green Light to Indonesia's Invasion of East Timor, 1975: New Documents Detail Conversations with Suharto
Finally, according to the State Department, 90 percent of the weapons used in the invasion came from the United States. Two years later, as the atrocities in East Timor were reaching a peak, President Jimmy Carter authorized an addition $112 million in weapons sales to Indonesia.
Coverage of the fall of Suharto reveals with startling clarity the ideological biases and propaganda role of the mainstream media. Suharto was a ruthless dictator, a grand larcenist and a mass killer with as many victims as Cambodia's Pol Pot. But he served U.S. economic and geopolitical interests, was helped into power by Washington, and his dictatorial rule was warmly supported for 32 years by the U.S. economic and political establishment. The U.S. was still training the most repressive elements of Indonesia's security forces as Suharto's rule was collapsing in 1998, and the Clinton administration had established especially close relations with the dictator ("our kind of guy," according to a senior administration official quoted in the New York Times, 10/31/95).
But Suharto is a U.S. ally, and has conducted his atrocities with either the approval or the active participation of the U.S. government.
Despite the atrocities and numerous U.N. resolutions condemning the invasion and occupation, the U.S., Japan and a number of Western European countries continue to provide the invader with about $5 billion in annual economic assistance.
The Indonesian dictator (pdf) then raised the Timor issue, saying, "We want your understanding, if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action." Ford replied: "We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem and the intentions you have."
Suharto needed Washington's go-ahead due to a 1958 agreement that prohibited Indonesia from using U.S.-origin weaponry, which made up 90 percent of Jakarta's arsenal at the time, except for "legitimate national self-defense." (2) For this reason Kissinger suggested that the invasion be framed as self-defense, thus circumventing any legal obstacles.
Ford, Kissinger and 1975
East Timor was ruled by Portugal for about 3 centuries. During World War II, thousands of East Timorese lost their lives helping Australia forces fight against the Japanese. East Timor was then invaded by Indonesia shortly after Portugal abruptly left, in 1975. This was the day after U.S. President Ford's visit to Indonesia, with what people have suspected as being a "green light" to invade. At that time, Indonesia had military, economic and politica

You keep mentioning this East Timor, I never really paid to much attention to it because I didn't think the US was involved in it outside of not protesting it. You seem fixated on it so I brushed up a littlw and it seems that I'm once again correct. Wikipedia often gets rewriten to support one cause or another. So when I confirmed my position with the link you gave to the wiki as well as followed it to the same conclusion from other links in the site, I checked a few other placed too. It apears the the US didn't support anything at all. They just didn't object to it. You make it sound like we were directly behind it and ford was the most evil president until Bush.

I call BS. Ford and Kissinger encouraged or gave green light to Suharto to invade East Timor:

From the National Security Archives at George Washington University: Ford and Kissinger Gave Green Light to Indonesia's Invasion of East Timor, 1975: New Documents Detail Conversations with Suharto
Finally, according to the State Department, 90 percent of the weapons used in the invasion came from the United States. Two years later, as the atrocities in East Timor were reaching a peak, President Jimmy Carter authorized an addition $112 million in weapons sales to Indonesia.
Coverage of the fall of Suharto reveals with startling clarity the ideological biases and propaganda role of the mainstream media. Suharto was a ruthless dictator, a grand larcenist and a mass killer with as many victims as Cambodia's Pol Pot. But he served U.S. economic and geopolitical interests, was helped into power by Washington, and his dictatorial rule was warmly supported for 32 years by the U.S. economic and political establishment. The U.S. was still training the most repressive elements of Indonesia's security forces as Suharto's rule was collapsing in 1998, and the Clinton administration had established especially close relations with the dictator ("our kind of guy," according to a senior administration official quoted in the New York Times, 10/31/95).
But Suharto is a U.S. ally, and has conducted his atrocities with either the approval or the active participation of the U.S. government.
Despite the atrocities and numerous U.N. resolutions condemning the invasion and occupation, the U.S., Japan and a number of Western European countries continue to provide the invader with about $5 billion in annual economic assistance.
The Indonesian dictator (pdf) then raised the Timor issue, saying, "We want your understanding, if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action." Ford replied: "We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem and the intentions you have."
Suharto needed Washington's go-ahead due to a 1958 agreement that prohibited Indonesia from using U.S.-origin weaponry, which made up 90 percent of Jakarta's arsenal at the time, except for "legitimate national self-defense." (2) For this reason Kissinger suggested that the invasion be framed as self-defense, thus circumventing any legal obstacles.
Ford, Kissinger and 1975
East Timor was ruled by Portugal for about 3 centuries. During World War II, thousands of East Timorese lost their lives helping Australia forces fight against the Japanese. East Timor was then invaded by Indonesia shortly after Portugal abruptly left, in 1975. This was the day after U.S. President Ford's visit to Indonesia, with what people have suspected as being a "green light" to invade. At that time, Indonesia had military, economic and politica

Then when the palistines sided with germany in WW2, the tensions never rested with germanies defeat and hostilities continued forcing the jews to incorperate to protect themselve.

It wasn't Palestinians siding with the NAZIs that caused problems in Palestine. The British barred Jews from immigrating into Palestine into and through the 1930s. Actually what most people don't know is that the NAZIs helped European Jews emmigrate to Palestine. The Gestapo and SS even trained Jews in military tactics to fight the British. The Stern Gang, or Lehi, was one such group. Now if you were to ask the British there for the British Mandate of Palestine, it was the Jews who were terrorists, such as the Stern Gang.

When the government say we are going to give Iraq back to it's people and we will be out of there once they can operate and maintina thier own security, I belive them.

Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq for one reason, because Saddam was stockpiling Weapons Of Mass Destruction, WMDs. Bush even evoked mushrooms clouds overhead, saying the US had to invade to prevent those mushroom clouds. Colin Powell, whom I had great respect for until then, even stood in the UN Security Council chambers dragging one photo out after another saying how many WMDs there were in Iraq. Well I have not seen one such thing. Now, since like Scot Ritter kept saying there weren't any WMDs, Bush has changed the reason for invading to spreading democracy. He doesn't give a fuck for democracy, if he did instead of congratulating the Venezuelan coup he would of supported the democratically elected president of Zenezuela, Chavez.

Why, because the United states has done it before after four or more seperate wars and we have given everything back to the people.

And the US admin has also supported rightwing dictators who have massacred thousands. Nixon and Ford after him along with Henry Kissinger supported Gen Pinochet overthrow of another democratically elected president, Salvador_Allende. After the coup thousands were murdered and tens of thousands simply "disappeared">. According to the Valech Report tens opf thousands were tortured.

And that's just the start of it. Ford and Kissinger also supported General Suharto, who seized power from his predecessor to become president of Inonesia, in his invasion of East Timor in 1975. This after East Timorese voted for independence from Portugal, Portugal gave them independence then they elected thier government. However neither Ford nor Kissinger liked it so they supported the invasion of East Timor by Suharto afer which some 200,000 East Timorese were killed. That was 1/3 the population of East Timor.

Don't try to tell me the US admin has never done anything wrong or has not supported murderous dictators. Hell the Reagan and Bush Sr admin both supported Saddam while he was massacring his own people.

5) AMD and Intel continue to beat the crap out of each other with customers gaining but wondering why there is no software that supports those new 8-way processors, as both compilers and third-party developers fail to keep up.

The compilers exist, in the sense that outfits like PathScale and PGI already have compilers that support OpenMP and some degree of automatic parallelization. They need a lot of work to scale to larger numbers of cores but the primary roadblock here is integration with IDEs and moving these technologies into mainstream computing. If these companies and Microsoft figure out how to make these compilers pervasive with Visual C++, etc. things will change quite dramatically. I don't think this will happen in 2007, though. What will happen is that compiler vendors make significant strides improving access to parallel programming models, pareticualrly with support for Co-Array Fortran and UPC.

Your posts are both misleading and full of inaccuracies.

1. You seem to be implying that the amount people killed as a result of Saddam's policies during the Iraq-Iran war would be related to the amount of people that would be killed between 2003-present in a non-invaded Iraq. I don't see why this would be the case. The circumstances in those time periods would be entirely different. Most importantly Saddam was completely supported and backed by the US during the Iraq-Iran war, which was most likely what allowed him to carry out such atrocities. If you don't believe me, then feel free to read the publicly available declassified records available from the National Security Archives at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/index .htm. Among other things, they contain the minutes from Rumsfeld's meetings with Saddam during the early 1980's, when the US-Iraq special relationship developed.

2. Of course Iraq is of "extreme strategic significance". The country has one of the largest energy reserves in the world, and if the US manages to stabilize Iraq enough for US oil companies to invest in it at the expense of the Iraq people, then the US will have increased its superpower status substantially. Read the "Crude Designs" report (http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2005/cru dedesigns.htm) for an analysis of this.

3. As "A beautiful mind" correctly points out, your figure of 57,617 Iraqi deaths in the war is completely false. Look at the Iraq Body Count's webpage that you linked to. They explicitly state that that number refers to the number of iraq deaths REPORTED. That's a big difference between that and the total number of Iraq deaths, which is probably around 600,000. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_mor tality_before_and_after_the_2003_invasion_of_Iraq)

4. The philosophy you propose seems ignorant and racist. I don't see why an American life should be worth more than others, as you suggest when you say "I don't think it's worth a single American life to help people who are not among our own". And why is it so important that the US get "paid back". If the US does save lives as a result of its actions, then shouldn't that in itself be enough compensation. Furthermore, inaction which you propound as a guiding principle of US politics is completely unrealistic. The US's economy is tightly linked to that of many other countries, and US companies have a presence in many other countries. These facts alone necessitate that the US be involved in world politics, and humanitarian reasons should justify this as well.

5. You claim that the US owes nobody anything else and that the US should get paid back for police work that it has done in the past. What "police work" are you refering to? Most of US military intervention has been to protect and secure the interest of US companies, and things are the other way around: The US owes other countries for unjustified intervention in the past. Here are some examples:

* The invasion of Panama in 1989 (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Panama)
* The US-backed coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002 (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_coup_attem pt_of_2002)
* 25 years of US sanctions against Cuba that have been repeatedly denounced by the UN (See http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2006/ga10529.doc .htm)
* US sanctions against Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of over 500,000 children (See http://dir.salon.com/story/people/feature/200

What about hundreds of Iraqi people's lives that were lost? That doesn't count eh?

The choctaw.

I'm not sure how much or from what tribe but my parents have told me I'm part Indian. An uncle on my moms side says the same thing but he told me to get the info from her. Appearly she won't talk about it because it a "dirty secret". As she has a French Canadian background I believe it's Ottawa or one of the Iroquois Confederacy tribes. My dad also has a French Canadian, er Acadian, background I don't be supprized if there was Indian in his background as well.

And a small group of people but still numbering in the millions wants to kill us- mainly because we make them feel bad because they are so backwards but partially because they are educated from birth that we are "monkeys" and not human. At 4 years old they are pledging to commit suicide killing us. At 5 years old almost a decade ago, they were cheering in the streets when we died.

Who are these people? Do you mean Arabs and other Muslims? Thinking of bin Laden? You may not recall or know this but bin Laden only started his war on America because the US stationed troops in the Holyland, Saudi Arabia. After Saddam invaded Kuwait there was a concern he may invade Saudi Arabia as well. bin Laden told the Saudis his al Quada would defend SA if Saddam attacked, but they declined his offer and asked for the US's assistance. It was only after this when the attacks came, he wanted the infidels out. Prior to the Kuwaiti invasion the US had indirectly supported bin Laden. We supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan, of which bin Laden was a member, in their fight against the Soviet Union.

As far as the US making people mad, it's only right that many do hate the US or at least the policies of the US. The US has a bloody past, it has assasinated or supported those responsible for killings of leaders in other countries. The US helped in establishing the Shah of Iran in power as well as Saddam later. It supported Gen Pinochet's overthrow of a democratically elected government in Chile after which thousands were killed and tens of thousands simply "diappeared". In other parts of the Americas it supported regimes in Guatemala and Honduras while many Mayas were massacred, and the Contras while they were terrorizing many in El Salvador. In the Middle East the US continues to support Israel, even after Israel attacked the USS Liberty. On the other side of the world the US supported Indonesian President Suharto's invasion of East Timor, this dispite a congressional bar for such aid. Pres Ford and Henry Kissingergave Suharto the greenlight for the invasion. After the invasion about 200,000 East Timorese were killed, that's one third the populationof East Timor.

Fact is is there are plenty of people who quite rightly have the right to feel hatred for the US.

Again- the problem is that in an age where even a 16 year old can kill 10 to 20 people, you really don't want people sworn to killing you so they will go to heaven wandering around unsupervised.

I'd have to say I'm the opposite of you, I'd rather keep my liberty and take to chance of being a victim than give up any liberty for a little temperary security. As Benjamin Franklin said, paraphrasing, "Anyone who gives up liberty for a little safety will get nor deserve either." Besides it's government that is the biggest threat to both liberty and safety. Look throughout history and you'll see the biggest massacres were done by governments or those trying to seize control. Most recently it's been Hitler, Pol Pot, the Rwandan government, Soharto, and Stalin. Saddam, who the US supported might be added as well, as well as Chiang Kai-shek led KMT's invasion of Formosa, otherwise called Tiawan. 28 February 1947 was Formosa's Holocaust. Some have also said Mao was responsible for 50,000,000 dead.

I

As for refunding US aid. Considering any aid provided by the US is almost always tied directly to its foreign policy, refusing it probably wouldn't be an option...

While you're complaining about you're own generosity it might be worth noting that the US donates %.22(GNI) putting it behind all but Portugal, the top 5 countries donate over %.8(GNI). And before you say, but the US is a larger economy so %.22 is a huge amount, the UK, France and Germany alone donate more than the US.

As for refunding US aid. Considering any aid provided by the US is almost always tied directly to its foreign policy, refusing it probably wouldn't be an option...

While you're complaining about you're own generosity it might be worth noting that the US donates %.22(GNI) putting it behind all but Portugal, the top 5 countries donate over %.8(GNI). And before you say, but the US is a larger economy so %.22 is a huge amount, the UK, France and Germany alone donate more than the US.

It's also strange how you're glossing over the fact that the US is a member of the UN and voted on this issue. Guess how they voted? Well despite not having any troops involved they insisted that UNAMIR (the UN forces) should be withdrawn.

US Department of State, cable number 099440, "Talking Points for UNAMIR Withdrawal", April 15, 1994.

"the international community must give highest priority to full, orderly withdrawal of all UNAMIR personnel as soon as possible."

"that we will oppose any effort at this time to preserve a UNAMIR presence in Rwanda."

US Department of State, cable number 127262, "Rwanda: Security Council Discussions", May 13, 1994.

With much of the killing completed and most of the remaining armed forces fleeing the RPF's countrywide advance, US officials argue against a UN plan for a robust effort launched into Kigali to protect surviving Rwandans, rescue others, and deliver assistance. Such a plan, "in current circumstances, would require a Chapter VII mandate", and the US "is not prepared at this point to lift heavy equipment and troops into Kigali". It is however, willing to consider its own plan, "outside-in", by which protective zones would be established on Rwanda's borders. Even this plan, however, is likely to be "an active protection operation requiring the use of lethal force." As for the several thousand Rwandans in Kigali under deteriorating UN protection, "we recommend that these ad hoc protective efforts should continue until a suitable alternative arrangement can be ensured." Even when a plan for 5,500 troops with a protection mandate is finally approved on May 17, the troops would not all be in place until September, two months after the RPF captures the country and one month after Gen. Dallaire completed his service in Rwanda.

It's also strange how you're glossing over the fact that the US is a member of the UN and voted on this issue. Guess how they voted? Well despite not having any troops involved they insisted that UNAMIR (the UN forces) should be withdrawn.

US Department of State, cable number 099440, "Talking Points for UNAMIR Withdrawal", April 15, 1994.

"the international community must give highest priority to full, orderly withdrawal of all UNAMIR personnel as soon as possible."

"that we will oppose any effort at this time to preserve a UNAMIR presence in Rwanda."

US Department of State, cable number 127262, "Rwanda: Security Council Discussions", May 13, 1994.

With much of the killing completed and most of the remaining armed forces fleeing the RPF's countrywide advance, US officials argue against a UN plan for a robust effort launched into Kigali to protect surviving Rwandans, rescue others, and deliver assistance. Such a plan, "in current circumstances, would require a Chapter VII mandate", and the US "is not prepared at this point to lift heavy equipment and troops into Kigali". It is however, willing to consider its own plan, "outside-in", by which protective zones would be established on Rwanda's borders. Even this plan, however, is likely to be "an active protection operation requiring the use of lethal force." As for the several thousand Rwandans in Kigali under deteriorating UN protection, "we recommend that these ad hoc protective efforts should continue until a suitable alternative arrangement can be ensured." Even when a plan for 5,500 troops with a protection mandate is finally approved on May 17, the troops would not all be in place until September, two months after the RPF captures the country and one month after Gen. Dallaire completed his service in Rwanda.

I haven't given much thought to who is a likely in the as the GOP candidate in '08.

I firmly believe that one of the biggest weaknesses in any democracy-styled electoral society is that the persons who actually desire to hold political office are unsuitable, simply because they desire it. At the same time, if your choice in a political election was predicated upon a lesser of two evils decision, you have by your own admission chosen evil.

My solution actually started out as a joke, but seems more appropriate as i grow older. It is to end all elections immediately, and instead begin to choose our politicains they way the draft lottery worked or juror pool selection works; purely randomised picking out of the entire population base of eligible citizens, and all adult citizens are in the pool, excepting of course, people who actually desire to hold political office, because they have psychological ailments which make them unfit.

A possible strong GOP candidate is still Chuck Hagel, but he cannot have my vote irregardless of the other candidates. He weaseled during the heat of the BuShilling Anal Navigators lies in '04; went MIA in Africa on a 'factfinding' trip. He damn well knows that Kerry would still stand up for him if the tables were reversed too. There's a real wannabe in Brownback. He's got the fever, and has been keeping pretty quiet of late. He's the choice of Pat Robertson, although it's hard to believe that he would receive staunch backing from a vast majority of the religious right. He's Catholic, and many evangelicals are still very anti-papist.

It is also extremely difficult to launch a winning presidential run from the Senate or the House. To much easily obtainable ammo that can be used nationally against them.

That would seem to indicate another governor. Who is able? Tough for any Atlantic Seaboard Yankee to carry the essential by GOP South, so the Mass frat boy from hell is a probable no go. Maybe Perry from Texecution, but I have a feeling that after the Delay mess is finished down there, he's going to be carrying one hell of a foot locker himself. The only two Western States that have a big enough population base, and enough credence with the GOP would be Arizona (Dem Gov and a Woman), and California, and we both know that The Kindergarten Konan hasn't a prayer. Someone must have an old copy or two of pumping iron around to scare the bejeezus out of the repressed right. Arnold was quite fond of the ladies when he was young, and it's pretty easy to understand why this runs counter to the instincts of many rightards.

Taft is screwed, Ohio is one mess of political mud for the GOP presently. Your Gov isn't much of a darling these days with the conservative pundits, and being a New Yorker, he'd have to have them on his side.

My take on the GOP for '08 is that it's wide open for a midwestern or semi-southern GOP governor. Didn't I read something about Iowa's Gov the other day?

That's about it for a rambling muse from me presently on the GOP. I have been working a bit on marking up the Gates Chapter in the Walsh Iran/Contra report, but started playing with a different idea for displaying footnotes, so it isn't finished yet. All that is left is the CSS though, so it should be up either early morn your time, or late afternoon mine today, depending on what I get accomplished before crashing. Look for a reference to the file at: History at Liberated Text

Oh yeah, almost forgot; two more Brzezinski refs:

• David Corn, "Anthrax, Mujaheddin and the CIA", AlterNet, October 19, 2001.
• The National Security Archive, "Interview with Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, for CNN's Cold war Series

I call Bullshit. The War Game was performed in 1999. It specifically resulted in an expectation that 400,000 troops would be required to REMOVE Saddam from power -not to rebuild the country. It was the After Action Review that concluded all of the rest of this.

When I was reading the summary, I was surprised by how prescient it was. These guys really had a crystal ball, and we should have listened to them. Then I looked at the actual document. Wow, I thought. Still some incredible stuff. THEN I SAW THE DATE of the After Action Review that was used to draw these conclusions. It was a LONG time after the action. It wasn't written in 1999. It was written in July of 2004.

Here is the link. The belief that we knew what to expect in 1999 but weren't smart enought to listen to ourselves is completely bogus.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB207/Dese rt%20Crossing%20After%20Action%20Report_1999-06-28 .pdf

I actually think that militarily, we had enough men over there to start with

We definitely did not have enough troops over there to secure any kind of peace. As early as 1999 we knew the anemic amount of troops sent over would not come close to being enough. George Bush is incompetent and he deserves, at the very least, impeachment and removal from office.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

Please read the entire article, which includes links to documents showing that the U.S. intelligence new about Saddam using chemical weapons against "kurdish insurgents". The document in question was written in Nov. 1983. They had known about Iraq's use of chemical weapons against the Iranians for longer. Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam in Dec. 1983.

Which is not to imply that Rumsfeld necessarily knew what Hussein doing, him being an envoy at the time not the Defense Secretary as he was yesterday. Our government did know, though, and sent Rumsfeld on his make-nice mission anyway. Never forget that -- when it was expedient, the government welcomed a genocidal maniac as an ally, and then turned on them when it was convenient. Try to remember when in twenty years you're hearing about the evils of Uzbekistan and the need for 'liberation'.

> That handshake was after Hussein had gassed the kurds with US supplied chemicals.

No, it was five years earlier.

1983
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

1988
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_poison_gas_at tack

Not to mention the 500,000 Iraqi deaths

You are going to count the Iraqi deaths due to George Bush invading Iraq and occupying the formerly-sovereign nation against Saddam Hussein? Damn, you 'Pugs are some clever bastards. It is like when you go on the air and claim your misinterpretations (or re-interpretation out of context) of what John Kerry said means Kerry must have said what you misinterpreted him to say. No. Sorry. Your mistake is not someone else's fault. George Bush lying about WMD being in Iraq is not someone else's fault. The occupation of Iraq appearing to have no end in sight is not someone else's fault. Bush ignoring intelligence about the foolishness of invading Iraq with an understaffed force and ignoring intelligence before 9/11 is not someone else's fault.

Perhaps there should have been a codefendant in this trial. We, the United States, have a funny way of arming dictators and encouraging them then cutting and running.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

The US did support Iraq. Did we sell them weapons? Not really but who knows. But we did help them financially during the Iraq-Iran war and they were for all intents and purposes our allies.

Iran had submitted a draft resolution asking the U.N. to condemn Iraq's chemical weapons use. The U.S. delegate to the U.N. was instructed to lobby friendly delegations in order to obtain a general motion of "no decision" on the resolution. If this was not achievable, the U.S. delegate was to abstain on the issue. Iraq's ambassador met with the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Jeane Kirkpatrick, and asked for "restraint" in responding to the issue - as did the representatives of both France and Britain.

But the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq's communist, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according to former U.S. intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the executions.

Many suspected communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End.

the outcome of Saddam's orders was easy to predict, which is in striking contrast to US military policy.

Actually the U.S. military had already done the predictive exercises and determined it would be a very bad idea to go into Iraq with anything less than 400,000 soldiers. And even then the predictions were dire. Of course, Bush has not held up his hand and told the American people he had access to this intelligence from less than four years before he decided to invade Iraq. In other words, there is no striking contrast. George Bush and Saddam Hussein are two peas in a pod.

I wonder how many people will see this report Monday morning?

Well, we all saw Saddam shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld 23 years ago didn't we? He used to be your son of a bitch out in the Middle East not too long ago too... Who knows what embarrassing things he might reveal about the extent of the support he got from the United States back then.

I think Saddam deserves to be punished as much as the next guy. He is categorically evil and I find myself unable to deny him the death penalty. But this is so convenient for the United States. He has a great deal to tell the world about how we supported the rise of his regime. How we tried to play Iran and Iraq against each other by supplying both with weapons. Eliminating Saddam makes us that less likely to see accountability for our past transgressions.

Now that Saddam has had his trial, it is about time to put Donald Rumsfeld (and other now prominent neo-conservatives) on trial for providing material support to a man we knew to be a brutal dictator.

Though commenting on your sig, I'd say that the current administration is more an indictment on liberal fiscal policies than conservative. Bush's policies certainly aren't a platform of states' rights and fiscal responsibility.

Is this ironic? Iraq did have WMD.

Of course they did and Rumsfeld knows it since he probably still has the receipt.

Does it mention the 'Insurrection Act' what does the bill say in regard to the President suspending personal rights. Does Public Law 109-364 give the President power to .. take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities. Yes or No. How is this different that declaring martial law. Could you point us to a working link so as we can judge for ourselves.

"The referred article seems to have been posted originally on Saddam Hussein's supporter's website. It doesn't make it wrong of course but it doesn't lend to credibility or unbiased reporting :", RenderSeven

The US was a one time fan of Hussein back when he was a low level assassin working for the CIA. Here's a picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with him.

"Reads to me more of a response to Katrina. Remember Katrina? Thats where we blamed the FEDERAL government for not sending in the state national guard when they had no authority to do it", RenderSeven

There is no mention of Katrina in the cited article

was The Bill Doesnt Say This At All (Score:5, Black Ops)

I read the links to the blog -- interesting to see a whole community of "news" ignoring the basic facts: we knew about these old WMDs because *we* sold these weapons to Hussein. That's not a secret, at least not to anyone paying attention to the news.

At any rate, of course the Republicans currently in the white house didn't make a stink abut "OMG! There they are! We are vindicated!" because these aren't the WMD that prompted the US to go into war. These WMD they'd rather you forget, since we gave Hussein *those* weapons. By "We", I mean Reagan, Bush Sr. Rumsfeld, etc., so it'd be especially embarrasing for this administration in particular if we dwell on this.

Remember the mushroom clouds? These are the weapons that publicly rationalized going to war(before the public version became spreading democracy and saving the Iraqis by bombing them) and, as it turns out, and as even Bush readily accepts, never existed.

Pointing out that we found useless remmants of the WMD we provided to Hussein doesn't exactly make us look good -- so of course Bush and co. don't make a stink of it especially since it involved many of the players in power today.

Check out the world you actually live in:

http://www.sundayherald.com/27572

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

>...admit that invading Iraq for the reasons stated were acceptable after all,

Humanitarian assistance was not one of the reasons stated. Nor was Saddam's ghastly human rights record a reason for the invasion: he was just as bad back at the time of the handshake.

>Then there will be protests at a University, but that's ok.

>If I might suggest a situation for history to repeat itself, I propose Kent State.

The people who moderated this up may be unfamiliar with the event he is proposing to repeat. In 1970 the National Guard opened fire on students at Kent State. Not "opened fire on protestors", because they killed and wounded people who were nowhere near the protest. William Schroeder's entrance wound was in the lower back, and his exit wound was in the upper body. This is because he was lying on his face when he was shot, having hit the dirt as he'd been trained to in the ROTC.

Who is using Ada?

More sources about the secret re-classification:

Article with examples: The U.S. Intelligence Community's Secret Historical Document Reclassification Program

transcript with the historian who noticed this happening:DE-DECLASSIFICATION - interview with Matthew Aid

Oh yeah, all the old ones than Donald Rumsfeld sold them ... forgot about those.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/hands hake300.jpg

Your definition of terrorism is over simplistic.

Initiating conflicts, intentionally targeting civilians, intentionally putting civilians in harms way = terrorism.

Guatemalan assasinations

CIA wrote the book on targeting civilan targets and using "martyrs". The manual recommended "selective use of violence for propagandistic effects" and to "neutralize" (i.e., kill) government officials. Nicaraguan Contras were taught to lead:

        "demonstrators into clashes with the authorities, to provoke riots or shootings, which lead to the killing of one or more persons, who will be seen as the martyrs; this situation should be taken advantage of immediately against the Government to create even bigger conflicts."

The manual also recommended:

        "Carefully selected, planned targets -- judges, police officials, tax collectors, etc. -- may be removed for PSYOP effect in a UWOA [unconventional warfare operations area]."

Wrote the book on torture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_manuals)

And don't forget that we put Sadam in power. and trained that pesky Afganistan freedom fighter named bin Laden

Think about Rwanda (...) where the UN might as well not have showed up for all the good that wasn't done.

Now, I'm not saying that other nations haven't failed Rwanda either, but considering the example given by the US in this matter, it's not a big surprise that the UN failed...

Not a few of the items which appear in his book(s) on NSA have been fiction.