the one thing Bush did NOT do was stand by his word. Sure he stood by the resolution.
I don't mean to pick nits, but Bush is a liar all the way around; he did not stand by the resolution.
In the UN Security Council resolution on Iraqi WMD before the war, the US did not specify the use of force -- Russia and/or France would have vetoed it.
The US gov't also thought it was important that the UN Security Council be in unanimous support of the resolution, so the US gov't had to get Syria (then a non-permanent member of the Security Council) on board too. Syria was adamant about no use of force.
So the US draft resolution was modified removing the US desire to use force. This modified resolution passed unanimously.
Immediately after its passage the US liars started claiming that the resolution gave them the "right" to use force. Bush lied again.
This lie serves one simple purpose: keep the two party corporate system in power.
Agreed; or as George Monboit stated, "A vote for Kerry is not just a vote against George Bush. It is a vote for the survival of the system which made Bush happen."
Remember the FCC issue about giving greater ownership and monopoly powers to big media corporations? That garnered BY FAR the most public feedback (overwhelmingly against) of any issue in the history of the FCC.
The FCC still passed it. They didn't give a damn what the public's opinion was.
I'm sorry, but I think letter writing, phone calls, and sewing circles are going to have to be combined with numerous loud, noisy protests in the streets of American cities.
this is clearly something that should NOT HAPPEN in America.
While I agree it shouldn't be happening, one really has to wonder what the purpose is of making such a high-profile issue out of this. How many people are now intimidated as a result of Kennedy's treatment?
Agreed. But irrelevant. Hussein would have been overthrown by the Iranians during the 1980s except for one reason: The US supplied him and kept him in power! You can't have it both ways; one day he's a great vicious thug, the next day he's a bad vicious thug.
Saying that 10,000+ were "mangled" is an outright lie.
Mangled is not very descriptive, it could mean many things. As to the number, this UPI article from Dec. 2003 states almost 11,000 medical evacuations from Iraq. No doubt, some of those evacs are for suicide attempts, post-traumatic stress, and other mental problems. Mangled could mean many things.
the highest number of wartime civilian casualties in Iraq: right around 12,000
Are you referring to the Iraq Body Count's stats? If so, those numbers are generally recognized as being low as they refer to deaths only cited by the major media.
Strangely, in the quick check I did, I did not find a poll bluntly asking Iraqis if they were better off under Saddam or better off under the illegal US occupation. I wonder if I missed it or whether the corporate mass media is afraid to ask the question. (I'd appreciate a link if anyone finds such a mainstream poll.)
you actually think Michael Moore is a source for legitimate political discourse.
Have you read Moore's book and seen the sources that he cites? Have you examined those sources that are cited?
I have. Moore's position on the elections of 2000 is largely based on the work of mainstream Florida newspaper articles, and the investative reporting of the BBC which pointed out Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris' scheme to ban tens of thousands of Floridians from voting; voters which -- surprise -- were overwhelmingly (~90%) Democrats.
Surprisingly, those BBC reports appeared on the BBC's prime-time nightly news on consecutive nights. They have yet to appear on American network television.
I am by no means a Michael Moore fanatic. I view his work on Fahrenheit 911 as not as in-depth or as insightful as his "Bowling for Columbine" work. For example, Fahrenheit 911 completely ignores the most massive anti-war protests in the history of the world, and it ignores Israel as a factor for the war on Iraq (heck, even the Pentagon admits Israel was a factor).
But whether I'm a Moore fanatic or not does not mean that Moore is a liar or should be completely ignored on all subjects.
You seem to forget that Germany, France and Russia are all being investigated because they were taking bribes through the "Oil for Food" program
US companies are implicated in the corruption of that program also. The US gov't has refused to do an audit of the oil for food program. Your point?
All that US and Bush did was stand by his word when it came to said Resolution.
Please don't talk about the US and Bush's "word" -- it's worthless. One should not believe liars.
What happened to the UN inspectors in Iraq while Clinton was in office? Iraq claimed that the inspectors were really spying for the US -- an illegal activity which gave Iraq full, legal reason to kick them out. The US said, "No, they're not spies". Iraq said, "Yes, they are." Iraq interfered with the inspectors' inspections and Clinton then ordered the inspectors out and launched cruise missile strikes.
Later, Scott Ritter, the Marine Corps officer who headed up the UN inspection team for quite some time, admitted that the US inspectors were spying for the CIA. The Iraqis were right and the US gov't was lying.
Later, when Bush passed the resolution for Iraq to disarm, Iraq said they had disarmed. The US demanded documentation. The Iraqis provided a CD-ROM of thousands of pages of documentation.
The US demanded first-access (before the UN) to that CD-ROM and promised not to modify its contents. The US lied, and when it got the CD-ROM it removed all references to American companies providing dual-use chemicals and technologies to Iraq's 80s-era WMD program. THEN the US turned the CD over to the UN.
Under great pressure and the US/British military build-up, the Iraqis agreed to let the UN spies/inspectors back into their country. Hundreds of inspectors went to Iraq. They went all across the country, directed by US intelligence.
The inspectors found *nothing*. The Iraqis were telling the truth, they had no WMD. The US gov't is the liar, and Iraq was telling the truth.
The US then launched its illegal invasion.
This timeline ignores the FACT that two very high officials of the Bush administration have publicly stated that Bush wanted war with Iraq before any of the UN resolutions or the above controversy.
Do we forget Bush's former Treasury Secretary on the "60 Minutes" TV show displaying a map of Iraq being divided up among US, British and western oil companies -- a map created very early (long before 9/11) in the Bush administration? Do we really have to debate the above points?
Anyone with a minimal grip on reality knows the REAL reason why Bush went to war with Iraq -- and it had nothing to do with WMD!
Based on these events, it's crystal clear: The US gov't violated the UN Charter in launching an offensive war to conquer Iraq and to put a puppet gov't in place in Iraq. That's harsh, but there's no other way to put it.
It's also harsh to say that George Bush and his group are war criminals for launching that aggressive war -- but again, it's true.
What the hell, right? So what if ~1000 American kids are dead and 10,000+ are mangled. So what if tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead and many more are mangled. So what if we jail Iraqi resistance fighters by the thousands and torture people routinely? What's the big deal? They're only people, right?!:-(
What about the governments of Russia, Germany, Britain, even France coming to similiar conclusions about WMD?
I'd say Britain doesn't count; Blair is Bush's poodle and he was willing to do or say anything to curry favor with his masters.
As for Russia, Germany and "even France", they came to no such conclusion. They resisted the war, they refused to give the US the UN fig-leaf for its oil grab.
And to top it all off, for the months that UN inspectors were in Iraq before the war, searching everywhere the US told them to, they found no WMD!
There was only 1 government (and its poodle) who was bleating endlessly about Iraqi WMD. The US gov't.
Why is it that Bush is called a Liar when John Kerry and Hillary Clinton came to the same conclusion that Bush did, re WMD.
Because they were "briefed" on "secret" intelligence by the liars who wanted to go to war. They were told stories about how Iraq had pilotless drones and would mount them on ships and would attack the US mainland (all fiction), and many other fairy tales.
They were spineless, not daring to go against the gov't/media-generated war hype, and so they believed the lies that were fed to them. (But don't worry too much about them, they'll be "rewarded" with campaign donations from the corporate drones who were gleefully campaigning for war.)
Why the hell would you go into a country based on a total lie?
Well, the three most popular reasons are:
(1) To secure OIL, especially the huge reserves which were closed off to US oil companies and nationalized and used for Iraq's own benefit
(2) To eliminate one of Israel's enemies and generally weaken the Arab world
(3) To secure new US military bases (since the Saudis were kicking us out) in the Middle East
Can we please raise the level of political discourse in this country? I would love to argue about the military efficacy of invading Iraq. I'd love to debate the merits of McCain Fiengold.
In other words, you'd rather not talk about messy details.
Why talk about the sheer immorality and undemocratic methods used by a war-mongering administration to invade a country and kill thousands, and to rewrite its society turning it into a "free market" playtoy for American corporations, when instead we can talk about the "military efficacy" of our illegal invasion?
Why talk about corruption of politicians and corporations writing laws and the entire wholesale purchase of our two[sic]-party electoral system, when we can instead talk about the details of a law, McCain-Fiengold, which does not work, and which was written by two people steeped in the corruption of the system that they were trying to give a quick paint job to so as to prevent more systemic reform?
The system is designed to be used against "enemies" and to scare people into submission.
Just look at the recent reports of FBI/homeland security "visiting" potential protesters of the Republican convention in order to instill fear. Look at the way these laws against "terrorism" are now being used against everyone from peace advocates to drug dealers/users and common criminals.
They're working exactly as they were indended to work.
While the story topic is nice, IMHO, the ALA's work in publicizing Ashcroft's demand that libraries remove information about certain US laws from their libraries is far, far more important of a public service!
So the report says do nothing. Ignore the fact that the public domain is slowly drying up as Corporate America constantly lengthens copyrights. Ignore the fact that we have college students getting sued by giant mega-corporations for swapping a song with some friends. Ignore the issues of concern and don't make any major decisions, right?
So in a nutshell, this report is sort of like the 9/11 Commission's report: "Nothing seriously wrong here, let's just talk about it to placate the public and then the public will go back to debating which Superbowl commercial is better..."
Who the hell do those Japanese think they are? Do they think they run their own country?! Do they think that the Japanese Parliament gets to enact laws that protect their citizenry from monopolies?!
Don't worry though; they'll soon fall into line lock-step behind the American and European plutocrats.
The chemical weapons he has used were from Germany or Japan, and NOT the US.
If that is true, explain this: Before the latest US war against Iraq, Iraq turned over thousands of pages of documents detailing its WMD activities -- the infamous CD-ROMs. Those CDs were turned over to the UN but the US demanded first access. The US removed -- only to be found out after the war started -- thousands of pages which implicated US corporations in selling dual-use chemicals and related military support gear to the Iraqis during their US-supported war against Iran.
And the US has admitted that it sold -- ostensibly under the guise of medical use -- anthrax to the Iraqis which the Iraqis then used to weaponize.
I'd love to say that our hands are clean. But unfortunately, US hands are just as dirty as France or Russia's when it comes to selling Iraq weapons.
As for conventional weapons, the main reason Iraq had so many Russian (USSR) and French guns, armored vehicles and jets is simple: they were cheaper than US equipment.
I've already commented on the propaganda aspects of this story.
However, it is interesting to read the thoughts of a real expert (as opposed to us armchair idiots:) on the topic.
Scott Ritter, the former US Marine officer and UN Weapons Inspector whose controversial (to the Bush regime at least) views on Iraqi WMD were proven correct by the war, has this to say about the recent sarin artillery shell which was found.
The Tehran Times has within the past month or two carried several articles in which they've claimed that the US has "imported" old chemical weapons and equipment to be "found" at the appropriate time.
While one could argue that an Iranian source is hardly reliable, at this point -- thanks to Bush & company's repeated lies -- an Iranian source is just about as credible as anything coming out of the US gov't.
IMHO, this is just another "announce with fanfare and then retract it a week later when no one is paying attention" tactic.
Remember the mobile biological trailers that were found? Bush himself announced that as solid proof that WMD were found and the war was justified after all. When it was disproven a month or so after the initial "find", of course no one paid any attention. The Bush regime has honed such deception to a science so fine that the Nazis would be embarrassed with their own "crude" propaganda techniques.
We are talking about a man who deliberately went and fought for a foreign government against his own country.
If the person was killed in battle, then it would be a moot point. But he wasn't, he was captured and was a US citizen. Citizens of the US have unalienable rights that cannot be denied without due process of law.
That is, IMHO, treason
Agreed. So what we should do is to put the person on trial -- with all the rights of a citizen -- and if he's found guilty, execute him, throw him in jail, or carry out whatever legal punishment that the court decreed. That is following the rule of law. (Isn't this Civics 101?!)
Terrorists, American citizens or not, give up their rights
Who gets to issue out the label of "terrorist"? I've already cited one example of a US citizen snatched off the street in the US -- and there are dozens of others. Who gets to put the label of "terrorist" on a person? What process decides when this label is issued?
These are serious questions. Already there are lawyers arguing that peaceful protesters against the war can be ID'ed as "terrorists" under existing post-9/11 laws. The president himself has said that making an analogy between Iraq and Vietnam is "aiding" the enemy!
Without clear, democratically established legal guidelines firmly written in law, we create a slippery slope where civil liberties will become increasingly threatened. Besides the war protester example I mentioned, we're already seeing parts of the Patriot[sic] Act being applied to organized crime instead of terrorists. Hey, I'm not for organized crime, but I am for the 4th and 6th Amendments to the Constitution. The slippery slope is already starting...
I feel the same about someone who goes to another country and relinquishes their American citizenship.
IMHO that's irrelevant. The person gave up their citizenship. In that case, they're not an American citizen, they're not entitled to our constitutional rights; they're entitled to various rights under international treaties that the US has signed, but that's not the same as the rights US citizens possess.
That's what I get for trying to grab a quick article to summarize a complex point.:-)
First, the person in question was an American citizen. He has unalienable rights including all the protections of the Bill of Rights. The enemy combatant label was invented by Lincoln and has no basis (or at best, a weak basis) in American law as pass by an elected Congress. While Lincoln's actions may have been understandable, in my view they were -- like his closing of newspapers -- blatantly unconstitutional. We are supposed to be a society based on the rule of law. We have a law against treason. The person in question should be told what he is accused of and entitled to a lawyer and the protections we give American citizens. After a trial, if found guilty, he should be punished.
The one incident mentioned in the Boston Globe editorial is but one incident. There have been thousands of other people (admittedly, mostly non-US citizens) snatched off from American streets and put in prison without charges and without access to a lawyer or families. How many? We don't know -- the gov't refuses to say.
Another example is an Intel engineer, Maher Mofied 'Mike' Hawash. Maher was snatched off the street in Oregon and held without charges.
At the time, Intel VP Stephen McGeady wrote, "I think many of your readers would be surprised to learn that our government can detain indefinitely a U.S. citizen, especially one with a wife, three children, a job and deep roots in our community....Americans are taught that the Constitution protects us against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, and that our freedom and these constitutional liberties are what we are fighting for in Iraq and elsewhere, yet one of our neighbors can be taken from his home or office and held without charge for weeks or months."
After months of imprisonment, Maher plead guilty in a plea bargain.
Guilt or innocence isn't the top priority -- the process is. Hitler executed a lot of guilty people in his concentration camps; what's the difference between his methods and the Texas death penalty today -- it's the legal process. It's following the rules of law and our laws give citizens certain rights, including a presumption of innocence, the right to a lawyer, to face your accuser, etc. Violation of these rights is LITERALLY un-American.
And this is what the Bush administration is currently doing. In the most literal sense, the people doing these violations are undermining our Constitution. Are these so-called "patriots" committing acts of treason?
Besides the previously mentioned Common Dreams site, another useful source on this issue is the ACLU's Patriot Act site and in particular, its Summary of the USA PATRIOT Act and Other Government Acts. A close examination of those sites will show the rights to a lawyer, fair trial, search & seizure, assembly and other essential rights in our Bill of Rights have been severely curtailed in the name of the failing war on terrorism. What's worse, this violation of civil liberties by Attorney General Ashcroft and Bush has resulted in 0 (zero!) terrorists being convicted!
Whether one agrees with all the ACLU's points or not, one should remember that there is a small difference between fascism and liberal democracy. While it may be melodramatic, one should remember that pre-WWII Germany lead the world in many ways. It only took a failed war and some economic chaos to pave the way for the election of Hitler and the rise of fascism.
And one should also remember Ben Franklin's words of wisdom, "Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
(And with that said, climbing off from this soapbox is going to be a helluva job...:-)
Okay, I'm in the mood for a good troll...:-) Maybe you're one of the millions that haven't heard that key portions of the Bill of Rights have been revoked.
The answer: Why right here in the good ol' land of the free, the USA!
FWIW, I'd also highly recommend that Common Dreams web site, if you're inclined to learn more. It is a site run by some Yankees in Maine which features tons of mainstream news articles from the US, Canada, and the UK, along with a smattering of leftish/non-mainstream articles. It's done in the concept of informing people and "speaking truth to power." A few searches on that site will turn up dozens of articles supporting the above statement.
Querying site...processing HTML...correlating post data with ISP logs...submitting data to database...updating/creating user entries...updating users' Seisint Inc. "terrorist quotient"(tm)...submitting relevant users and data to federal authorities so that they can protect our freedom[sic]!
On a serious note: In a police state where the gov't can snatch anyone they want off the streets and hold them incommuncado, without charges and without access to a lawyer, we have no civil liberties.
To me, articles about such things are no surprise today. The only surprise is that the American people surrendered to fascism so easily.:-(
Grow up. We all have to be adults here and face the real world. A world where like it or not, be at peace or not, people are just going to come out of the woodwork and try and kill you.
Perhaps if we stopped invading countries to steal their resources, and if we stopped forcing countries into economic squalor, stopped basing troops in their countries against the popular will of the people that live there, and stopped supporting brutal dictatorships, maybe, just maybe, they would not want to kill us.
What do you say we give that one a try?
Or, considering the US invaded the most countries and had by far the most military interventions during the 20th century, maybe our goal is to reset our record during the 21st century? After all, we're already well on our way...
The problem with all these expensive new weapons isn't that we have morons who run our foreign policy and invade countries based on pathetic, easy-to-disprove (e.g. WMD) lies.
The problem with these "smart" weapons isn't that we have low-skilled people in the military fleeing "McJobs" flipping burgers or Wal-Mart clerking who were primarily interested in the military in order to fund a college education. (E.g. like the MPs stupid enough to take pictures of their torture.)
The problem with these weapons isn't that we simply cannot afford them and that as a nation we would be far, far better off sinking our riches into education or economic development rather than more toys for generals to play with.
The problem isn't even that, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
The problem is that these weapons won't solve our "security"[sic] problems. We make our own enemies. We funded and created Bin Laden and Hussein. The Iraqis are now defeating the US military with little more than improvised explosives, courage, and a desire to defend their homeland. These new weapons will simply spur an arms race that we cannot afford and our insecurity will remain that will cause us to spend more and develop more new weapons. It's a race to the bottom.
So never mind that Saddam had WMDs, as the Kurdish and Iranian survivors of his WMD attacks will attest.
I think from a logical perspective, Hussein's brutal treatment of others is irrelevant as to why the US went to war. The war was sold to the American public as an immediate, imminent threat to the USA by Iraq having WMD. That justification was an outright lie by the Bush regime.
If you want to talk about Hussein's human rights abuses, that's another issue. No doubt Hussein should have been overthrown a long time ago. In fact, he would have been overthrown, except that Ronny Raygun, Rumsfeld, and others backed Hussein during the 1980s when Hussein launched an aggressive war against Iran. If we had followed a moral foreign policy, the Iranians would have defeated Hussein and would have overthrown him during the Iran-Iraq war.
Funny how the US backing of tyrants and murderers comes back to haunt us. I mean, we backed Bin Laden in Afghanistan, we were a big reason for the rise of militant Islam, we helped arm Iraq and sold Iraq anthrax, and we helped prevent a UN investigation of Iraq following chemical attacks on civilians. A moral foreign policy would have prevented a lot of those issues.
But to rewrite the justification for the war as "liberating" Iraq or because we now cry crocodile tears over Iraqi human rights abuses is just a way to lie our way out of the fact that the original justification for the war -- WMD -- was blatant, lying propaganda fed by a crooked administration and willing mass media to a skeptical American public.
Why not? The media has been a key to this whole illegal war. When the Bush regime trotted out its pack of lies about WMD to convince the American people to forget about the economy and to support the war (rah! rah! go team!), the corporate media did not question the lies and just jumped on the bandwagon. After all, who cares about truth when there's ratings to be had! (And now, given the FCC's recent ruling about monopoly ownership of media markets, the corporate mass media has been repaid for their slave-like service.)
When Private Jessica Lynch was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got captured, the US media ignored the stories of brave Iraqi doctors and nurses donating their own blood to keep her alive, and instead printed (now proven false) stories about her fighting while shot and fighting to the death until she ran out of image.
Since this kind of blatant propaganda was a key to the support of the war, why not some propaganda directly aimed at computer geeks?! Hey, we deserve our own lies too!!
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the one thing Bush did NOT do was stand by his word. Sure he stood by the resolution.
I don't mean to pick nits, but Bush is a liar all the way around; he did not stand by the resolution.
In the UN Security Council resolution on Iraqi WMD before the war, the US did not specify the use of force -- Russia and/or France would have vetoed it.
The US gov't also thought it was important that the UN Security Council be in unanimous support of the resolution, so the US gov't had to get Syria (then a non-permanent member of the Security Council) on board too. Syria was adamant about no use of force.
So the US draft resolution was modified removing the US desire to use force. This modified resolution passed unanimously.
Immediately after its passage the US liars started claiming that the resolution gave them the "right" to use force. Bush lied again.
This lie serves one simple purpose: keep the two party corporate system in power.
Agreed; or as George Monboit stated, "A vote for Kerry is not just a vote against George Bush. It is a vote for the survival of the system which made Bush happen."
Remember the FCC issue about giving greater ownership and monopoly powers to big media corporations? That garnered BY FAR the most public feedback (overwhelmingly against) of any issue in the history of the FCC.
The FCC still passed it. They didn't give a damn what the public's opinion was.
I'm sorry, but I think letter writing, phone calls, and sewing circles are going to have to be combined with numerous loud, noisy protests in the streets of American cities.
What liberty?!
Seriously. It's a rapidly evaporating concept.
this is clearly something that should NOT HAPPEN in America.
While I agree it shouldn't be happening, one really has to wonder what the purpose is of making such a high-profile issue out of this. How many people are now intimidated as a result of Kennedy's treatment?
Saddam Hussein was not a nice guy.
Agreed. But irrelevant. Hussein would have been overthrown by the Iranians during the 1980s except for one reason: The US supplied him and kept him in power! You can't have it both ways; one day he's a great vicious thug, the next day he's a bad vicious thug.
Saying that 10,000+ were "mangled" is an outright lie.
Mangled is not very descriptive, it could mean many things. As to the number, this UPI article from Dec. 2003 states almost 11,000 medical evacuations from Iraq. No doubt, some of those evacs are for suicide attempts, post-traumatic stress, and other mental problems. Mangled could mean many things.
the highest number of wartime civilian casualties in Iraq: right around 12,000
Are you referring to the Iraq Body Count's stats? If so, those numbers are generally recognized as being low as they refer to deaths only cited by the major media.
As to whether the Iraqis are better off with the US occupation or with Hussein's dictatorship, the ultimate source of authority on this is the Iraqi people themselves. And based on western public opinion polls, the Iraqi people have spoken: they have run out of patience and a majority want the US out, the vast majority consider the US to be an occupier and a solid majority want US troops gone immediately, 55 percent said they would feel safer if the US left, and Americans polled believe the invasion of Iraq has increased the terrorist threat to the United States, not decreased it. (Note, CommonDreams.Org is a news aggregator; those stories are from wire services and mainstream newspapers.)
Strangely, in the quick check I did, I did not find a poll bluntly asking Iraqis if they were better off under Saddam or better off under the illegal US occupation. I wonder if I missed it or whether the corporate mass media is afraid to ask the question. (I'd appreciate a link if anyone finds such a mainstream poll.)
you actually think Michael Moore is a source for legitimate political discourse.
Have you read Moore's book and seen the sources that he cites? Have you examined those sources that are cited?
I have. Moore's position on the elections of 2000 is largely based on the work of mainstream Florida newspaper articles, and the investative reporting of the BBC which pointed out Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris' scheme to ban tens of thousands of Floridians from voting; voters which -- surprise -- were overwhelmingly (~90%) Democrats.
Surprisingly, those BBC reports appeared on the BBC's prime-time nightly news on consecutive nights. They have yet to appear on American network television.
I am by no means a Michael Moore fanatic. I view his work on Fahrenheit 911 as not as in-depth or as insightful as his "Bowling for Columbine" work. For example, Fahrenheit 911 completely ignores the most massive anti-war protests in the history of the world, and it ignores Israel as a factor for the war on Iraq (heck, even the Pentagon admits Israel was a factor).
But whether I'm a Moore fanatic or not does not mean that Moore is a liar or should be completely ignored on all subjects.
You seem to forget that Germany, France and Russia are all being investigated because they were taking bribes through the "Oil for Food" program
US companies are implicated in the corruption of that program also. The US gov't has refused to do an audit of the oil for food program. Your point?
All that US and Bush did was stand by his word when it came to said Resolution.
Please don't talk about the US and Bush's "word" -- it's worthless. One should not believe liars.
What happened to the UN inspectors in Iraq while Clinton was in office? Iraq claimed that the inspectors were really spying for the US -- an illegal activity which gave Iraq full, legal reason to kick them out. The US said, "No, they're not spies". Iraq said, "Yes, they are." Iraq interfered with the inspectors' inspections and Clinton then ordered the inspectors out and launched cruise missile strikes.
Later, Scott Ritter, the Marine Corps officer who headed up the UN inspection team for quite some time, admitted that the US inspectors were spying for the CIA. The Iraqis were right and the US gov't was lying.
Later, when Bush passed the resolution for Iraq to disarm, Iraq said they had disarmed. The US demanded documentation. The Iraqis provided a CD-ROM of thousands of pages of documentation.
The US demanded first-access (before the UN) to that CD-ROM and promised not to modify its contents. The US lied, and when it got the CD-ROM it removed all references to American companies providing dual-use chemicals and technologies to Iraq's 80s-era WMD program. THEN the US turned the CD over to the UN.
Under great pressure and the US/British military build-up, the Iraqis agreed to let the UN spies/inspectors back into their country. Hundreds of inspectors went to Iraq. They went all across the country, directed by US intelligence.
The inspectors found *nothing*. The Iraqis were telling the truth, they had no WMD. The US gov't is the liar, and Iraq was telling the truth.
The US then launched its illegal invasion.
This timeline ignores the FACT that two very high officials of the Bush administration have publicly stated that Bush wanted war with Iraq before any of the UN resolutions or the above controversy.
Do we forget Bush's former Treasury Secretary on the "60 Minutes" TV show displaying a map of Iraq being divided up among US, British and western oil companies -- a map created very early (long before 9/11) in the Bush administration? Do we really have to debate the above points?
Anyone with a minimal grip on reality knows the REAL reason why Bush went to war with Iraq -- and it had nothing to do with WMD!
Based on these events, it's crystal clear: The US gov't violated the UN Charter in launching an offensive war to conquer Iraq and to put a puppet gov't in place in Iraq. That's harsh, but there's no other way to put it.
It's also harsh to say that George Bush and his group are war criminals for launching that aggressive war -- but again, it's true.
So he lied to us about iraq having WMD?
:-(
What the hell, right? So what if ~1000 American kids are dead and 10,000+ are mangled. So what if tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead and many more are mangled. So what if we jail Iraqi resistance fighters by the thousands and torture people routinely? What's the big deal? They're only people, right?!
What about the governments of Russia, Germany, Britain, even France coming to similiar conclusions about WMD?
I'd say Britain doesn't count; Blair is Bush's poodle and he was willing to do or say anything to curry favor with his masters.
As for Russia, Germany and "even France", they came to no such conclusion. They resisted the war, they refused to give the US the UN fig-leaf for its oil grab.
And to top it all off, for the months that UN inspectors were in Iraq before the war, searching everywhere the US told them to, they found no WMD!
There was only 1 government (and its poodle) who was bleating endlessly about Iraqi WMD. The US gov't.
Why is it that Bush is called a Liar when John Kerry and Hillary Clinton came to the same conclusion that Bush did, re WMD.
Because they were "briefed" on "secret" intelligence by the liars who wanted to go to war. They were told stories about how Iraq had pilotless drones and would mount them on ships and would attack the US mainland (all fiction), and many other fairy tales.
They were spineless, not daring to go against the gov't/media-generated war hype, and so they believed the lies that were fed to them. (But don't worry too much about them, they'll be "rewarded" with campaign donations from the corporate drones who were gleefully campaigning for war.)
Why the hell would you go into a country based on a total lie?
Well, the three most popular reasons are:
(1) To secure OIL, especially the huge reserves which were closed off to US oil companies and nationalized and used for Iraq's own benefit
(2) To eliminate one of Israel's enemies and generally weaken the Arab world
(3) To secure new US military bases (since the Saudis were kicking us out) in the Middle East
Can we please raise the level of political discourse in this country? I would love to argue about the military efficacy of invading Iraq. I'd love to debate the merits of McCain Fiengold.
In other words, you'd rather not talk about messy details.
Why talk about the sheer immorality and undemocratic methods used by a war-mongering administration to invade a country and kill thousands, and to rewrite its society turning it into a "free market" playtoy for American corporations, when instead we can talk about the "military efficacy" of our illegal invasion?
Why talk about corruption of politicians and corporations writing laws and the entire wholesale purchase of our two[sic]-party electoral system, when we can instead talk about the details of a law, McCain-Fiengold, which does not work, and which was written by two people steeped in the corruption of the system that they were trying to give a quick paint job to so as to prevent more systemic reform?
Why reevaluate? The system is working perfectly.
The system is designed to be used against "enemies" and to scare people into submission.
Just look at the recent reports of FBI/homeland security "visiting" potential protesters of the Republican convention in order to instill fear. Look at the way these laws against "terrorism" are now being used against everyone from peace advocates to drug dealers/users and common criminals.
They're working exactly as they were indended to work.
While the story topic is nice, IMHO, the ALA's work in publicizing Ashcroft's demand that libraries remove information about certain US laws from their libraries is far, far more important of a public service!
Everyone's favorite tyrant AG John Ashcroft wanted ordered the American Library Association to destroy all copies of the federal laws on asset forfeiture and to prevent disclosure of their content. Thanks to quick action and a lot of publicity by the ALA and others, the fascists backed off.
So the report says do nothing. Ignore the fact that the public domain is slowly drying up as Corporate America constantly lengthens copyrights. Ignore the fact that we have college students getting sued by giant mega-corporations for swapping a song with some friends. Ignore the issues of concern and don't make any major decisions, right?
So in a nutshell, this report is sort of like the 9/11 Commission's report: "Nothing seriously wrong here, let's just talk about it to placate the public and then the public will go back to debating which Superbowl commercial is better..."
Who the hell do those Japanese think they are? Do they think they run their own country?! Do they think that the Japanese Parliament gets to enact laws that protect their citizenry from monopolies?!
Don't worry though; they'll soon fall into line lock-step behind the American and European plutocrats.
The chemical weapons he has used were from Germany or Japan, and NOT the US.
If that is true, explain this: Before the latest US war against Iraq, Iraq turned over thousands of pages of documents detailing its WMD activities -- the infamous CD-ROMs. Those CDs were turned over to the UN but the US demanded first access. The US removed -- only to be found out after the war started -- thousands of pages which implicated US corporations in selling dual-use chemicals and related military support gear to the Iraqis during their US-supported war against Iran.
And the US has admitted that it sold -- ostensibly under the guise of medical use -- anthrax to the Iraqis which the Iraqis then used to weaponize.
I'd love to say that our hands are clean. But unfortunately, US hands are just as dirty as France or Russia's when it comes to selling Iraq weapons.
As for conventional weapons, the main reason Iraq had so many Russian (USSR) and French guns, armored vehicles and jets is simple: they were cheaper than US equipment.
However, it is interesting to read the thoughts of a real expert (as opposed to us armchair idiots:) on the topic.
Scott Ritter, the former US Marine officer and UN Weapons Inspector whose controversial (to the Bush regime at least) views on Iraqi WMD were proven correct by the war, has this to say about the recent sarin artillery shell which was found.
The Tehran Times has within the past month or two carried several articles in which they've claimed that the US has "imported" old chemical weapons and equipment to be "found" at the appropriate time.
While one could argue that an Iranian source is hardly reliable, at this point -- thanks to Bush & company's repeated lies -- an Iranian source is just about as credible as anything coming out of the US gov't.
IMHO, this is just another "announce with fanfare and then retract it a week later when no one is paying attention" tactic.
Remember the mobile biological trailers that were found? Bush himself announced that as solid proof that WMD were found and the war was justified after all. When it was disproven a month or so after the initial "find", of course no one paid any attention. The Bush regime has honed such deception to a science so fine that the Nazis would be embarrassed with their own "crude" propaganda techniques.
If the person was killed in battle, then it would be a moot point. But he wasn't, he was captured and was a US citizen. Citizens of the US have unalienable rights that cannot be denied without due process of law.
That is, IMHO, treason
Agreed. So what we should do is to put the person on trial -- with all the rights of a citizen -- and if he's found guilty, execute him, throw him in jail, or carry out whatever legal punishment that the court decreed. That is following the rule of law. (Isn't this Civics 101?!)
Terrorists, American citizens or not, give up their rights
Who gets to issue out the label of "terrorist"? I've already cited one example of a US citizen snatched off the street in the US -- and there are dozens of others. Who gets to put the label of "terrorist" on a person? What process decides when this label is issued?
These are serious questions. Already there are lawyers arguing that peaceful protesters against the war can be ID'ed as "terrorists" under existing post-9/11 laws. The president himself has said that making an analogy between Iraq and Vietnam is "aiding" the enemy!
Without clear, democratically established legal guidelines firmly written in law, we create a slippery slope where civil liberties will become increasingly threatened. Besides the war protester example I mentioned, we're already seeing parts of the Patriot[sic] Act being applied to organized crime instead of terrorists. Hey, I'm not for organized crime, but I am for the 4th and 6th Amendments to the Constitution. The slippery slope is already starting...
I feel the same about someone who goes to another country and relinquishes their American citizenship.
IMHO that's irrelevant. The person gave up their citizenship. In that case, they're not an American citizen, they're not entitled to our constitutional rights; they're entitled to various rights under international treaties that the US has signed, but that's not the same as the rights US citizens possess.
That's what I get for trying to grab a quick article to summarize a complex point. :-)
First, the person in question was an American citizen. He has unalienable rights including all the protections of the Bill of Rights. The enemy combatant label was invented by Lincoln and has no basis (or at best, a weak basis) in American law as pass by an elected Congress. While Lincoln's actions may have been understandable, in my view they were -- like his closing of newspapers -- blatantly unconstitutional. We are supposed to be a society based on the rule of law. We have a law against treason. The person in question should be told what he is accused of and entitled to a lawyer and the protections we give American citizens. After a trial, if found guilty, he should be punished.
The one incident mentioned in the Boston Globe editorial is but one incident. There have been thousands of other people (admittedly, mostly non-US citizens) snatched off from American streets and put in prison without charges and without access to a lawyer or families. How many? We don't know -- the gov't refuses to say.
Another example is an Intel engineer, Maher Mofied 'Mike' Hawash. Maher was snatched off the street in Oregon and held without charges.
At the time, Intel VP Stephen McGeady wrote, "I think many of your readers would be surprised to learn that our government can detain indefinitely a U.S. citizen, especially one with a wife, three children, a job and deep roots in our community....Americans are taught that the Constitution protects us against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, and that our freedom and these constitutional liberties are what we are fighting for in Iraq and elsewhere, yet one of our neighbors can be taken from his home or office and held without charge for weeks or months."
After months of imprisonment, Maher plead guilty in a plea bargain.
Guilt or innocence isn't the top priority -- the process is. Hitler executed a lot of guilty people in his concentration camps; what's the difference between his methods and the Texas death penalty today -- it's the legal process. It's following the rules of law and our laws give citizens certain rights, including a presumption of innocence, the right to a lawyer, to face your accuser, etc. Violation of these rights is LITERALLY un-American.
And this is what the Bush administration is currently doing. In the most literal sense, the people doing these violations are undermining our Constitution. Are these so-called "patriots" committing acts of treason?
Besides the previously mentioned Common Dreams site, another useful source on this issue is the ACLU's Patriot Act site and in particular, its Summary of the USA PATRIOT Act and Other Government Acts. A close examination of those sites will show the rights to a lawyer, fair trial, search & seizure, assembly and other essential rights in our Bill of Rights have been severely curtailed in the name of the failing war on terrorism. What's worse, this violation of civil liberties by Attorney General Ashcroft and Bush has resulted in 0 (zero!) terrorists being convicted!
Whether one agrees with all the ACLU's points or not, one should remember that there is a small difference between fascism and liberal democracy. While it may be melodramatic, one should remember that pre-WWII Germany lead the world in many ways. It only took a failed war and some economic chaos to pave the way for the election of Hitler and the rise of fascism.
And one should also remember Ben Franklin's words of wisdom, "Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
(And with that said, climbing off from this soapbox is going to be a helluva job...:-)
Okay, I'm in the mood for a good troll... :-) Maybe you're one of the millions that haven't heard that key portions of the Bill of Rights have been revoked.
The answer: Why right here in the good ol' land of the free, the USA!
This editorial from the Boston Globe should illustrate the point.
FWIW, I'd also highly recommend that Common Dreams web site, if you're inclined to learn more. It is a site run by some Yankees in Maine which features tons of mainstream news articles from the US, Canada, and the UK, along with a smattering of leftish/non-mainstream articles. It's done in the concept of informing people and "speaking truth to power." A few searches on that site will turn up dozens of articles supporting the above statement.
All respondents to this article have been noted.
:-(
From Seisint Inc. system logs:
Querying site...processing HTML...correlating post data with ISP logs...submitting data to database...updating/creating user entries...updating users' Seisint Inc. "terrorist quotient"(tm)...submitting relevant users and data to federal authorities so that they can protect our freedom[sic]!
On a serious note: In a police state where the gov't can snatch anyone they want off the streets and hold them incommuncado, without charges and without access to a lawyer, we have no civil liberties.
To me, articles about such things are no surprise today. The only surprise is that the American people surrendered to fascism so easily.
Perhaps if we stopped invading countries to steal their resources, and if we stopped forcing countries into economic squalor, stopped basing troops in their countries against the popular will of the people that live there, and stopped supporting brutal dictatorships, maybe, just maybe, they would not want to kill us.
What do you say we give that one a try?
Or, considering the US invaded the most countries and had by far the most military interventions during the 20th century, maybe our goal is to reset our record during the 21st century? After all, we're already well on our way...
The problem with all these expensive new weapons isn't that we have morons who run our foreign policy and invade countries based on pathetic, easy-to-disprove (e.g. WMD) lies.
The problem with these "smart" weapons isn't that we have low-skilled people in the military fleeing "McJobs" flipping burgers or Wal-Mart clerking who were primarily interested in the military in order to fund a college education. (E.g. like the MPs stupid enough to take pictures of their torture.)
The problem with these weapons isn't that we simply cannot afford them and that as a nation we would be far, far better off sinking our riches into education or economic development rather than more toys for generals to play with.
The problem isn't even that, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
The problem is that these weapons won't solve our "security"[sic] problems. We make our own enemies. We funded and created Bin Laden and Hussein. The Iraqis are now defeating the US military with little more than improvised explosives, courage, and a desire to defend their homeland. These new weapons will simply spur an arms race that we cannot afford and our insecurity will remain that will cause us to spend more and develop more new weapons. It's a race to the bottom.
It's worth keeping in mind Cringley's column this week. It's entitled, "The Only Way to Beat Microsoft is by Ignoring Microsoft."
So never mind that Saddam had WMDs, as the Kurdish and Iranian survivors of his WMD attacks will attest.
I think from a logical perspective, Hussein's brutal treatment of others is irrelevant as to why the US went to war. The war was sold to the American public as an immediate, imminent threat to the USA by Iraq having WMD. That justification was an outright lie by the Bush regime.
If you want to talk about Hussein's human rights abuses, that's another issue. No doubt Hussein should have been overthrown a long time ago. In fact, he would have been overthrown, except that Ronny Raygun, Rumsfeld, and others backed Hussein during the 1980s when Hussein launched an aggressive war against Iran. If we had followed a moral foreign policy, the Iranians would have defeated Hussein and would have overthrown him during the Iran-Iraq war.
Funny how the US backing of tyrants and murderers comes back to haunt us. I mean, we backed Bin Laden in Afghanistan, we were a big reason for the rise of militant Islam, we helped arm Iraq and sold Iraq anthrax, and we helped prevent a UN investigation of Iraq following chemical attacks on civilians. A moral foreign policy would have prevented a lot of those issues.
But to rewrite the justification for the war as "liberating" Iraq or because we now cry crocodile tears over Iraqi human rights abuses is just a way to lie our way out of the fact that the original justification for the war -- WMD -- was blatant, lying propaganda fed by a crooked administration and willing mass media to a skeptical American public.
Why not? The media has been a key to this whole illegal war. When the Bush regime trotted out its pack of lies about WMD to convince the American people to forget about the economy and to support the war (rah! rah! go team!), the corporate media did not question the lies and just jumped on the bandwagon. After all, who cares about truth when there's ratings to be had! (And now, given the FCC's recent ruling about monopoly ownership of media markets, the corporate mass media has been repaid for their slave-like service.)
When Private Jessica Lynch was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got captured, the US media ignored the stories of brave Iraqi doctors and nurses donating their own blood to keep her alive, and instead printed (now proven false) stories about her fighting while shot and fighting to the death until she ran out of image.
You'll never see stories like this in the US media.
Since this kind of blatant propaganda was a key to the support of the war, why not some propaganda directly aimed at computer geeks?! Hey, we deserve our own lies too!!