I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you haven't actually read the article. The fact that you don't actually address any of the article's points makes this clear to begin with, and your mischaracterization of those points drives the point home:
Of the ten points in the article, one is statistical in nature, and that one is pointing
out a statistical error on Moore's part (that Moore doesn't account for differences in population
when comparing raw numbers of crimes in different countries, thus using numbers which say the opposite
of what he claims they say).
But that one's a mistake on Moore's part (let's assume that, out of charity), a sign of Moore's ignorance about
his own subject matter.
The other examples in the article, in which Moore blatantly edits film clips to put together sentences people
never said, or photoshops text into ads which he claims other people ran are lies outright, by any definition of the word.
Or are you arguing that such lies -- which make up the bulk of the film -- are somehow `okay', because you agree
with the point Moore is trying to make?
Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.
If someone else screws your girlfriend so much that you don't get to, you stay a virgin. If brave US soldiers go fight terrorists overseas so you don't have to fight them here, you get to live in peace.
Any questions?
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And while we're on the subject of dodged questions, I have twice now presented the following criteria as
a baseline for academic research which wishes to be taken seriously:
Seek independent verification of claims by unreliable sources such as the information ministries of totalitarian states
Provide information on your data and your methods for peer review
Do not invent new methods of extrapolation and regression without subjecting the methods to peer review, especially if you have no background or formal training in statistics.
along with two basic questions:
Do you agree with these criteria?
Do you claim that Mr. Herold has met these criteria?
Each time, you have stonewalled these questions, cutting them from your reply and leaving them unanswered. Should the readers of this thread take this as
evidence that you are not comfortable with your answers? I sure do...
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He did indeed source it: though he did not mention Blair in the UN speech itself, he did brief the British press about it afterwards. And he is rather embarrassed about it now.
I can't speak for what link the British press may have made between Powell's and Blair's (separate) sets of presented evidence, but in either
case, surely you would agree that an `unnamed source' which appear only in the Guardian (a paper with a well-defined ideological position, to put it mildly)
is not necessarily the best source of information on what Powell is thinking, no?
How many would you consider `acceptable', especially in the absence of any studies substantiating Mr. Herold's claims?
I have just answered this in detail on the other sub-thread where you asked it, though you probably haven't read this yet.
Or failed to answer it, as the case may be. In either case, my response to that answer is
here.
In this post you directly alleged that the only missile Iraq fired on Kuwait was the single Seersucker which impacted outside a shopping mall in Kuwait City. The Iraqi Information
Minister claimed the same thing, but every single news outlet referenced in that thread including the ones you posted links to claimed otherwise.
That post was by glrotate. There are many links in that thread to news reports of Scuds landing in Kuwait: all have the US Defense Dept as their source, none are verified. The
military would not let anyone see all these alleged Scuds. I certainly can't blame a reporter for quoting US Defense Dept briefings: that's news. But I won't believe the reports
until I read that the press went and actually saw 14 impact sites with fragments of Scuds.
That post was indeed by glrotate. My apologies -- from the haste with which you posted to defend it, I took his position to be yours as well, and mistook who had posted first.
Is his position yours as well?
Video of several of those intercepts was also taken by several
news agencies, including al Jazeera.
I've yet to see a single actual statistician consider Mr. Herold's work as valid, but perhaps you could give us a counterexample? Even one?
A man is innocent until proven guilty. You have attacked Professor Herold's work, not me: prove his guilt, and I will accept it.
A man may be presumed innocent until proven guilty, but academic work is presumed faulty until adequately peer-reviewed. Mr. Herold's
refusal to submit his work to peer review is thus the academic equivalent of a guilty plea, or at least a pleas of nolo contendere to charges
of intellectual dishonesty.
I've just shown you several statisticians and even a trade group of statisticians which consider Mr. Herold's work to be nonsense. Can you show me any that have confirmed his work?
Any?
I can only recall one, that of STATS: please remind me of which other statisticians you quoted? Remember that the Iain Murray article is in fact a reprint of his original piece on
the STATS site.
In any case, the twelve distinguished statisticians on STATS' advisory board indepently review and sign off on every piece
of research which STATS publishes.
Can you show me a single statistician who has defended Mr. Herold's work? One?
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How do you think one publishes peer-reviewed works in these areas without statistics? Are only statisticians skilled analysts of statistics? Statistics is the backbone of the study
of economics, and he has a PhD in Economics from Berkeley. Your assertion that "Mr. Herold has no background or formal training in statistics" is therefore demonstrably false.
Except that none of the publications which Mr. Herold sees fit to mention in his resume are peer-reviewed works at all.
It is, I suppose, possible that he has mysteriously chosen to include only his less serious and less academic
work on his resume, but I'm sure you'll agree that this is unlikely.
Likewise, you will note that the bulk of Mr. Herold's work in `economics' is of the `social history' sort, being concerned with
interviews, oral history, and other `soft' subjects. I have no reason to believe that this does not include his work at Berkeley.
All of this is rather moot, however -- having refused to submit his work to peer review (or even to share his data and methodology for
independent verification), Mr. Herold has shown himself to be a stranger to even the most basic concepts of academic integrity and
intellectual honesty, no matter what his training may be.
You have submitted three examples of double-counts. They may be true, though I have no means of checking them. 3/3000 = one-tenth of one percent of entries possibly wrong. 3/3400 =.08 of one percent. Both can reasonably considered negligible. I would personally consider that if 30-40% of the low side of his estimate were proven wrong, that would be grounds on
which to consider the rest of his work suspect. Since STATS judges that only 690 of his entries are what they would consider reliable, that would mean 77%.
Except that that's not three double-counted deaths out of three thousand deaths, that's three reports which were double counted out of one or two hundred
reports which were tallied (we have no way of knowing for sure how many reports, since Mr. Herold refuses to release his data). Thus, we are in fact talking about
a one-point-five to three percent rate of double- or triple- counting reports, even if the instances of such double-counting which are evident from the small
percentage of his data which Mr. Herold has released are the only such instances in the total body of data.
Worse, since some of the reports which Mr. Herold tallies are claims from Taliban government spokesmen of hundreds of deaths (completely unverified by non-taliban
sources), the percentage of deaths double-counted may, in fact, be much higher.
And again, that's just the little bit which can be determined from the information Mr. Herold has released about his data on Afghanistan. He has released even less
information regarding his data on Iraq...
And yes, the shoddy reasoning you demonstrate here is indeed the same standard you are applying in our discussion of Chile. Readers of this thread can see what you're
trying to pass for evidence in that thread
here.
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As I said before, it does you no good to count the number of other researchers working on the Iraq Body (mis)Count
project, when the project states explicitly that it is using data sources and methodologies chosen by one man -- a
Women's (Wimmin's?) Studies Professor from a small state school with no background or formal training in statistical
matters.
Likewise, no number of researchers signing on will grant academic integrity to a project which refuses to produce its
data and methods for peer review, which is the barest minimum as far as standards of intellectual honesty go.
That those statisticians who have written about Mr. Herold's work have called it handwaving and bunkum doesn't help, of
course -- as does your complete failure to provide a single statistician who has written approvingly of Mr. Herold's
work.
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Okay, let's go through the links you've posted. All of them:
In this post you linked to a list
of articles about Chile. Some of these articles make the same assertions you make (though most explicitly do not), but either explicitly state that
there is not yet evidence to back their claim, or simply do not discuss evidence at all.
Do you claim that this link, which does not claim to provide such evidence, was `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?
In this post, you link to a report
pointing out that Pinochet committed murders, something no one in this thread has denied. Even so, you appear not to have read the report, since you misstate
it's findings about the number killed by a factor of five to ten.
Do you claim that this link, which is entirely concerned with the activities of Pinochet's government after he came to power, was `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's
rise to power?
In this post, you mysteriously link
to a site which praises palestinian murder-suicide bombings, calls Louis Farrakhan `wise' and `balanced', and repeats centuries-old anti-Jewish blood-libels, but
contains no content about Chile at all.
Do you claim that this link is `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?
A picture of the dustjacket of Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which you have not read. Had you read it (as I have), you would
know that Hitchens admits openly that he has no evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's coup, but believes that such evidence may someday be found. In either case, only two
of the book's eleven chapters discuss Chile at all.
Do you claim that this link, to the cover of a book which explicitly admits not having such evidence, is `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?
A copy of a `secret' memo mentioning that Henry Kissinger met with Pinochet in 1976. 1976, of course, was three years after Pinochet's rise
to power, and the meetings in question are a matter of public record in any case -- in fact, they established the connections which Reagan was later to use to
pressure Pinochet into stepping down.
Do you claim that this link, which is entirely concerned with events of three years after the coup, is `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?
An article written in 1999 which states that no evidence of a US link to Pinochet's rise to power has been found, but that such evidence might turn up when
all of the CIA's records regarding Chile are declassified. It has now been three years since those records were declassified, and dozens of groups going over
those records for evidence of such a link have found that, in fact, the CIA was as surprised by Pinochet's rise to power as anyone else was.
Do you claim that this link, which explicitly admits having no evidence at the time of writing, is `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?
And if you do not, in fact, claim that any of these things are evidence (and remember, none of them claim to have such evidence), what on earth do you mean when you write
``The links I have given are all evidence.''?
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And on to the rest of your post:
And they are not "Herold's numbers", as I've already explained to you: he's one of a staff of 21
researchers.
How many people Mr. Herold has running around copying down the pronouncements of the Iraqi Information
Minister, al Jazeera, and other sources he lists is not really the question here. Mr. Herold has taken
full credit for the `methodology' his researchers are using, and for the data sources they are tracking,
and now that both of those choices have been discredited, it is he who should be answering the criticisms
which have been raised. That he has not done so (or even provided enough information to allow normal
peer review of his choices) is telling.
It's worth noting that one of those researchers is Dr. Glen Rangwala of the Univ. of Cambridge.
Tony Blair's infamous "intelligence dossier" on Iraq was based in large part on plagiarism from Rangwala's
doctoral thesis on Iraq done 12 years ago, and spiffed up by British civil servants to look like recent
research. Rangwala noticed, and complained in public, so the Blair government is still feeling the fallout
from that particular pack of lies about the war. That poor schmuck Colin Powell singled out Blair's
"valuable dossier" for particular praise while he was fighting hard to persuade people that some sort of
threat existed from Iraq. Bet he now wishes he hadn't.
While I wouldn't want to speak for Mr. Blair or his sources, your resort to insults (`poor schmuck' and the
like) here certainly seems to suggest that you aren't very confident that your
argument stands on it's own merits. In any case, looking over
Colin Powell's presentation to the UN,
I note that he did not source Mr. Blair or his dossier for any
of the evidence he presented, so your case looks a bit forced, no?
But it's telling that you only attempt to discredit the Iraq numbers by attacking a single past piece of
work by a single member of a team of 21. It makes me wonder why you can't find anything else to criticise
about the Iraq Body Count numbers.
An interesting claim on your part, since I've shown a number of problems with the methodology and data
sources Mr. Herold is using on both this project and the last one, and since he explicitly states that
he is using the same long-since discredited methods as used in that `past piece of work' to analyze the conflict in Iraq...
However, this is a moot point, since as we discuss below, Mr. Herold is relying on bogus (according to every
actual statistician who has looked at them) statistical interpretations of the same data as everyone else,
not on independent data.
You mean "every actual statistician" you've read and agree with. Why would a statistician go to the press to
say he agrees with someone's statistics? You will only ever read about a disagreement in the press, as
agreement is not news. And since you can't possibly have read the opinion of every "every actual
statistician" who has looked at them, I suggest you stop claiming that you have.
Are you really that unfamiliar with the concept of `peer review'?
No work in any serious field is taken
very seriously until it has been corroborated by peer review, so the fact that Mr. Herold is so unwilling to
subject his work to such review is far more telling than you seem to think.
Except that Herold's `attempt at a count' was (according to him) based on the exact s
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Now, let's go through what you did say in your post, as silly as it may be:
A long post, yet you manage to address none of the agreed upon facts. As far as I can tell, everyone agrees
on the following:
Everyone? Really? You've read the opinions of everyone? Cool! Where can I find the writings of everyone
who's reviewed Herold's research? Or did you mean "everyone" you happen to agree with?
A puerile dodge -- I note that you do not yourself claim to disagree with any of these statements,
so you resort to a semantic point, instead.
* Mr. Herold has no background or formal training in statistics
That's an interesting assertion. May I see some evidence please?
Mr. Herold's resume is currently off-line
(whether through server trouble or as a response to the number of people
who have recently pointed out how thin it is), but a quick look at
google's cached copy confirms that it lists not a single published work of a statistical nature,
whether peer-reviewed or otherwise.
More generally, his resume is remarkably short on peer-reviewed works in any field for an academic of his
age, which may explain why he has resorted to teaching Women's (Wimmin's?) Studies at a small state school in
New Hampshire...
* In preparing his reports, Mr. Herold includes numbers provided by the Iraqi information minister as
directly factual,
Which numbers please? How many? Two? Three? A hundred? What percent of 3000 are they?
How many would you consider `acceptable'? Since we both agree that some number of reports from Iraqi Information
Minister Mohammed Sayeed Sahhaf were taken as directly true without verification by Mr. Herold, why don't you
tell us why we should take seriously any study which considers such sources `reliable'?
something no one else agrees is reasonable to do.
No-one? There it is again! I've just got to see this database of the opinions of tens of thousands of
professional statisticians you've found. Please post the URL: I will happily pay a subscription charge to
see research that thorough.
While I must admit that the possiblity that anyone would consider it a reasonable research practice
to take the pronouncements of Mohammed Sayeed `There are no American tanks within 300 miles of here! What's
that noise?' Sahhaf as a reliable source of casualty information had escaped me, I'd be more than willing to hear
arguments why you think we should -- or is this another case where you have no actual point to make, so
you're looking for some semantic detail on which to hang your hat?
* Even a cursory examination of Mr. Herold's claims turns up several instances of double- and even triple-
counting of numbers from other sources.
Hm, so now it's gone from "numerous" to "several". How many is "several" please? Two? Three? A hundred?
Again, how many would you consider `acceptable'? And why has Mr. Herold done nothing to address the cases
of double- and triple- counting already pointed out, even in his report on Afghanistan?
wouldn't Marc Herold's numbers agree more closely with the estimates of other journalists in Iraq than in
Afghanistan? As it happens, they don't.
Which "other journalists" please? Are you claiming that all journalists disagree with Iraq BodyCount's
numbers? You've read every journalist
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Now, now -- temper, temper, temper, Mr. Fox. Assuming your intention is actually to
convince anyone of anything (if not me, then at least the readers of this thread), bouts
of impotent rage and puerile name-calling like that last post aren't going to get you anywhere.
In a second post, I'll speak to what you did respond to in your post, but before I do, I'd like
to point out what you didn't respond to, something I find quite interesting.
In my previous post, I had written:
Here are some basic halmarks of sound research, which any academic could tell you:
Seek independent verification of claims by unreliable sources such as the information ministries of totalitarian states
Provide information on your data and your methods for peer review
Do not invent new methods of extrapolation and regression without subjecting the methods to peer review, especially if you have no background or formal training in statistics.
These are basic, simple concepts of intellectual honesty and academic integrity, yet they are foreign to Mr. Herold and his work. Why?
In responding to my post, you chose to clip this part, leaving these points unanswered. Now it
seems to me that there are three possibilities:
You do not in fact feel that these criteria are important
You believe that Mr. Herold has, in fact, met these criteria (even though he admits having done none of these things)
You realize that Mr. Herold has not, in fact, met these criteria, and thus cannot be considered to meet even the
most basic standards of intellectual honesty and academic integrity
The fact that you chose not to respond to this part of the post suggests the third of these possibilities holds. Is this the case?
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Right here is a list of all links
you have posted in this thread. Every single one -- and none of them are to sites which even claim to
have evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power.
Given this, is it not extremely dishonest for you to speak of the possibility of you providing `more' evidence?
As for what's `mystifying', some might find it extremely mystifying that you would spend over a dozen posts making
excuses for not posting the evidence you allege you have, but in fact there's a perfectly obvious explanation -- you
don't have any.
And in fact I'd say that by now the readers of this thread have more than enough reason to reach just that conclusion...
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Heh -- as I said, my objection was not to the word `tertiary', but to your apparent belief
that if you used enough big words, no one would notice that you had still failed to provide
anything which even claimed to be evidence of your original claim in what? Twelve
posts now?
Nor, if I were you, would I count on your constant questioning of what evidence I `would accept'
being seen as anything but the dodge that it is. It's not like you need my permission to
post to slashdot -- and if you actually did have convincing evidence, nothing I could say
would make it unconvincing to the people reading this thread.
So let's have it -- or do you (as I suspect) have no evidence at all, in which case you are merely clinging desperately
to an unbacked assertion for ideological reasons.
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A long post, yet you manage to address none of the agreed upon facts. As far as I can tell, everyone agrees on the following:
Mr. Herold has no background or formal training in statistics
In preparing his reports, Mr. Herold includes numbers provided by the Iraqi information minister as directly factual,
something no one else agrees is reasonable to do.
Even a cursory examination of Mr. Herold's claims turns up several instances of double- and even triple- counting
of numbers from other sources.
These are the facts on which everyone agrees (even Mr. Herold). These are facts which you do not
attempt to address in your post, so I'm assuming you agree with them as well, whether you consider
them important or not.
Given this, I'd say the readers of this thread have more than enough information to decide whether Mr. Herold's claims
make sense, but I'd like to speak to a few of the points you raise anyhow:
a) journalists got nowhere near the same access to the Afghan bombings as they did in Iraq.
While it is far from clear that this is correct (in actual fact a number of international reporters
were reporting from all over Afghanistan during the war, while the Baghdad regime only allowed
reporters in a limited area of Baghdad), if this were the reason for the discrepancy,
wouldn't Marc Herold's numbers agree more closely with the estimates of other journalists in Iraq
than in Afghanistan? As it happens, they don't.
However, this is a moot point, since as we discuss below, Mr. Herold is relying on bogus (according
to every actual statistician who has looked at them) statistical interpretations of the same data
as everyone else, not on independent data.
b) your journalists compare back-of-the-envelope estimates by some human rights groups and
journalists, who clearly stated at the time that they were estimates, with Herold's attempt at a
count. When Herold started out, he was the only one attempting a count. The PDA later also attempted
Except that Herold's `attempt at a count' was (according to him) based on the exact same reports which yielded
the other estimates -- in other words, given the exact same reports, he came up with different numbers.
As a number of independent analysts have shown, he yielded these higher numbers not by `counting better',
but by double- and triple- counting a number of actual incidents, and by including in the count every
random claim of the Afghan or Iraqi regimes, without any independent verifications.
You've already shown us (in this thread)
that if the Iraqi information minister said `no ballistic missiles fired into Kuwait', that's what you believe to this
day, even though every other media source (even sources such as al-Jazeera) counted fourteen such missiles.
For those of us who do not take the words of Iraqi Information Minister Mohammad Sayeed Sahaf as gospel truth,
however, Mr. Herold's numbers, which rely heavily on those pronouncements, carry far less weight than you
seem to give them.
an Afghan count too, which came out lower. Neither claims to count all the deaths, as some could not
possibly have been reported, such as isolated families being wiped out in the sticks. The PDA one was
even more catuious than Herold, but neither counts subsequent deaths from disease and starvation that
were a direct result of the bombings. Both are then almost certainly too low, but it would take years
of hard work to count those additional numbers. Little chance of that happening, now that the US has
allowed the warlords to take the country over again, as they did after the Soviet invasion.
Ah yes, the left's old lie: ``the afghan bombing led to startvation and disease and chaos''. This
allegation has already been
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Nice try, but it's increasingly clear that you haven't actually read Hitchens' book at all. I have read it, and noted repeatedly that Hitchens states
explicitly that he has no evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's coup. Which part of this didn't you understand? Likewise, if you claim the
articles you posted (which I list exhaustively above) provide evidence (something they themselves do not claim), what evidence do you allege they
provide?
Likewise, while it's nice that you think using (to you) big words such as `tertiary' improves your argument, these words in fact do not change the fact
that I have linked media, government, and intelligence documents from the actual year in question, all of which are primary documents, while you have
linked what? A couple of articles written decades later, all of which explicitly admit they don't have evidence of US involvement.
So while you can go on hiding behind claims that I `wouldn't accept' your evidence if you want, the fact that you have yet to produce anything which even
claims to be evidence in eleven posts to date suggests that such whining is actually a cover for the fact that you don't have any.
If you do, post it -- because you have long since convinced anyone reading this thread that you have nothing...
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There we have it ladies and gentlemen -- while many of you thought that Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Sayeed ``No American Tanks within 100 Miles! What's that noise?'' Sahaf was
inflating civilian casualty statistics, jdfox has uncovered the real truth: he was actually underreporting them! What a brilliant thesis...
Of course, there are plenty of concrete reasons to doubt the statistics provided by Womens' Studies (should that be `Wimmin's studies'?) professor
Marc Herold:
the fact that Mr. Herrod
was so spectacularly (and famously) wrong in Afghanistan, reporting more than three times as many civilian casualties as the sources he claimed
to have gotten his statistics from, and more than twice as many civilian casualties as the Taliban themselves did (see the section on civilian
casualties at the end of that article)
The fact that the non-partisan Statistical Assssment Service, a group of professional
and academic statisticians formed to combat the incorrect use of statistics in the media has
examined Mr. Herold's methods and found them fatally flawed.
So what was that you were saying?
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Your.sig is also quite amusing. For those not in on the joke, iraqbodycount.net is a site maintained by a Women's Studies professor
at the University of New Hampshire, which has the unusual distinction of claiming more civilian casualties in Iraq than even the Iraqi
Information Minister, Mohammed Sayeed Sahaf claimed.
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Hehehehe. Digging out `the rest' of the evidence? I've just cataloged the pages you've linked to -- none of which even claim
to have evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's coup. When asked about this, you reply that you `have lots of evidence' but aren't
willing to link it, and then suggest that I'm not providing evidence, even though I've linked to multiple primary documents, none
of whose findings you've contested.
So you can go ahead and call me irrational if you want -- but I'm the one backing up my claims with primary evidence, while you're the one
insisting that something is true and that there is evidence proving it, but that you are unwilling to link that evidence.
Forgive me if I'm not impressed. I doubt the readers of this thread are either...
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Hehehehehehehe. In between making other wild claims (no one `cluster-bombed' Baghdad, needless to say), you finally
admit that you're not actually going to post any evidence, and are instead taking your ball and going home?
Well, it's been fun. I think it's quite clear to anyone still reading this thread that your belief in US misdeeds
in Chile has long since become an essentially religious conviction, based on no evidence at all...
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Heh, nice try. While I suppose you could continue to assert that there is
lots of evidence out there, you just won't link to any of it because you're
afraid that I `won't accept it', I suspect that by now anyone reading this thread
has realized that your evidence is like the mysterious girlfriend that a kid in middle
school claims he has, and yet never actually produces -- something which doesn't actually
exist, and yet which you talk about endlessly.
After all, let's look at the thread to date. For nine messages now, you have been
assuring us that you can provide links to evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's rise
to power, and yet what have you produced? Here's what:
In this post you linked to a list
of articles about Chile. Some of these articles make the same assertions you make (though most explicitly do not), but either explicitly state that
there is not yet evidence to back their claim, or simply do not discuss evidence at all.
In this post, you link to a report
pointing out that Pinochet committed murders, something no one in this thread has denied. Even so, you appear not to have read the report, since you misstate
it's findings about the number killed by a factor of five to ten.
In this post, you mysteriously link
to a site which praises palestinian murder-suicide bombings, calls Louis Farrakhan `wise' and `balanced', and repeats centuries-old anti-Jewish blood-libels, but
contains no content about Chile at all.
A picture of the dustjacket of Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which you have not read. Had you read it (as I have), you would
know that Hitchens admits openly that he has no evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's coup, but believes that such evidence may someday be found. In either case, only two
of the book's eleven chapters discuss Chile at all.
A copy of a `secret' memo mentioning that Henry Kissinger met with Pinochet in 1976. 1976, of course, was three years after Pinochet's rise
to power, and the meetings in question are a matter of public record in any case -- in fact, they established the connections which Reagan was later to use to
pressure Pinochet into stepping down.
An article written in 1999 which states that no evidence of a US link to Pinochet's rise to power has been found, but that such evidence might turn up when
all of the CIA's records regarding Chile are declassified. It has now been three years since those records were declassified, and dozens of groups going over
those records for evidence of such a link have found that, in fact, the CIA was as surprised by Pinochet's rise to power as anyone else was.
the findings of the Chilean chamber of deputies regarding Allende's abuses. You, of course
keep refering to these as `ad hominem accusations by politicians', a claim which shows a tremendous disregard for democracy or the rule of law on your part. The
legal rulings of the duly appointed body of a democratically ele
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On the contrary, I pointed out that none of the three pages you linked to contained
or even claimed to contain evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to
power. It's all very well for you to allege that I `wouldn't accept' your evidence,
but claiming so is hardly a substitute for providing evidence at all, now is
it?
So we're back where we started: as at the point where you joined this thread, I have
presented primary documents refuting your claim of US involvement, while you, on the other
hand, have presented nothing but a few articles which either make no attempt to present
evidence, or openly admit not having evidence of US involvement.
If there is, in fact, no evidence backing your claim (and again, you have yet to present
anything which even claims to be such evidence), you can hardly expect me buy into
your weird black-helicopter theories merely because you allege (without evidence) that
other people have bought into it...
Um, yes. Did you read those articles? Did they allege that illegal
SCUD and al-Samoud missiles were not fired? No. They state that the
Patriot missile system was also involved in two friendly fire incidents.
And? Why just today, CNN is reporting
in more detail on an Iraqi use of illegal al Samoud missiles during the war. The missile described
in the story was fired from `North of Basra' and landed outside Camp Doha in Kuwait.
It only takes about five minutes and a map of Iraq
to confirm that a missile firing on a camp outside Kuwait City from Basra has a range greater than the 150 km
permitted. As noted here,
the al-Samoud also violates the restrictions on maximum engine size for rockets and missiles.
Thirteen other illegal ballistic missiles were fired during the war as well, as both the articles I linked and the
articles you linked confirm. Eight of these others were intercepted, and five were off course enough to be
deemed unthreatening to troops or populated areas.
Are you denying these facts, even though the articles both of us have posted agree on them? Are you agreeing
with glrotate that no such missiles were fired, and the cruise missile attack on Kuwait City was the only attack?
Really?
Re:Here's some evidence
on
IT at the CIA
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Did you actually read those links, or just post them without
reading them? I suspect the latter, because here's what you just
posted:
A link to the dustjacket of Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of
Henry Kissinger. As it happens, I've actually read Mr. Hitchens'
book in full, not just the dust jacket -- in fact, I have it in front
of me as I write. Only two of the work's eleven chapters discuss Chile,
and even there Hitchens does not allege that any evidence shows that the US
aided Pinochet's rise to power, he rather suggests that such evidence
might emerge, and accuses the US of aiding Pinochet's
government years later In
fact, such evidence hasn't emerged, in all the thirty years since
the coup.
A link to a copy of a `secret' memo stating that Kissinger met with
Pinochet... in 1976. 1976, of course was three years after the
coup which brought Pinochet to power, and the fact that we opened contact
with him around then is hardly a `secret' in either case. This is, after all,
exactly the contact which Reagan used to convince Pinochet to step down.
A link to an article expressing hope that when the CIA's papers on Chile
are declassified `later this year' (the page you link was written in 1999),
they will include evidence of US involvement. The papers were indeed declassified,
early the next year. They contained no such evidence.
Really, are you reading these things before you post them? Because if you
are, it doesn't speak well for your conspiracy theories that such thin backing
is all you find to post.
I'd also like to comment on your positing that it is `evidence' of America's
guilt that many in Europe believe we were involved. I'm not sure how many,
in fact, do, but if this is in fact widely accepted, then what?
It's widely accepted in the Arab world that Jews drink the blood
of Children, after all, just as it was very recently widely accepted in Europe
that that Mr. Hitler was a nice gentleman who we could all
do business with as long as you don't get him talking about the Jews.
As I said above, saying that `this other guy holds the same irrational
belief that I do' is not evidence. If it were, the earth would be flat
(because the flat-earthers have dozens of members), and there would
be hangars full of UFOs out at Roswell.
As you continue to provide no evidence at all to actually back your wild
black-helicopter theories,
and as the only primary evidence presented in this discussion has
all contradicted your claims, you're just not going to get anywhere by
the argument `these other people believe this thing without evidence, so
I do to'.
Re:Here's some evidence
on
IT at the CIA
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On the contrary, the `evidence' you posted was a link to a list of articles which claim the same thing
you claim, also without providing evidence. In contrast, I have posted a number of links to primary
documents from the era in question, and to analyses of those primary documents.
So again, what makes you believe that the US had a role in Pinochet's rise to power? That you `heard it
somewhere, once'? Or have you seen evidence which would back up this wild claim? You do understand why
it behooves you to provide a link to such evidence, don't you? You do understand why no one reading this
thread is likely to be convinced by such claims if the only backing you can bring for them is that some
other guy once said the same thing, also without evidence, in an article published thirty years after the fact, right?
As for elections, I have already shown that Allende threw out the results of the Constitutional Elections of
1973, much as he ignored the results of any number of votes of the Chilean legislature. I have already
provided primary documents showing how Allende had effectively dissolved the legislature and judiciary
within Chile, thus destroying the Chilean constitution. If you want to hang your hat on a narrow legalistic
claim that it is not `cancelling' an election for the branch of government whose job it is to carry out that
election's results to throw those results out, go ahead -- but
don't expect anyone to be convinced by such a claim. If you want to claim that counter to every action he took
during his three years in power, Allende planned to obey the results of the elections of 1976 (as he ignored
the results of the elections of 1973), go ahead, but again, don't expect the readers of this thread to take
you seriously when you do so.
As it happens, he had no chance to prevent those elections from being held. He had no chance to throw out their
results as he had the results of 1973's elections. That this happened only at the expense of a decade or more of Pinochet
is a shame -- but we can still take heart that Chile is today a stable and free democracy as a result.
Re:Here's some evidence
on
IT at the CIA
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With due respect, jdfox, I have already posted several links discussing the March 1973 Constitutional Elections
in Chile.
As even this anti-Pinochet site acknowledges,
Allende consistently ignored the results of the March,1973 Constitutional elections, spinning the results which
had been 58-44 against his rule as a `victory'. Other documents I have linked point out that Mr. Allende
used of violence, imprisonment, and torture against journalists and political opponents to achieve even this
44 percent showing.
Likewise, I have already demonstrated that by the summer of 1973, the entirety of the Chilean constitution was
in suspension, that the courts and the legislature had been effectively shut down, with all of their
power now in the hands of Allende and Allende alone, and with even direct votes of the legislature
and direct rulings of the courts being ignored by Allende's administration.
Now I understand, given how far-fetched your original claims have turned out to be, and given how much
difficulty you are having finding evidence to back your wild assertions, that you would like to change
the subject. And I understand that getting hung up on a legal technicality (If an election was held, but its
results ignored, was that election `cancelled'?), but unless you can provide evidence that Allende intended
to behave differently in the elections of 1976 than he had in the ignored elections of 1973, you won't get
anywhere this way.
Which brings us back to your original black-helicopter theories: since you have yet to present any evidence of
US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power, and since you have now changed the subject, lashing out desperately
in hopes of finding some other point to cling to, can we assume that you now accept that your original premise (that the US
aided Pinochet's coup) was simply false?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you haven't actually read the article. The fact that you don't actually address any of the article's points makes this clear to begin with, and your mischaracterization of those points drives the point home:
Of the ten points in the article, one is statistical in nature, and that one is pointing out a statistical error on Moore's part (that Moore doesn't account for differences in population when comparing raw numbers of crimes in different countries, thus using numbers which say the opposite of what he claims they say).
But that one's a mistake on Moore's part (let's assume that, out of charity), a sign of Moore's ignorance about his own subject matter.
The other examples in the article, in which Moore blatantly edits film clips to put together sentences people never said, or photoshops text into ads which he claims other people ran are lies outright, by any definition of the word.
Or are you arguing that such lies -- which make up the bulk of the film -- are somehow `okay', because you agree with the point Moore is trying to make?
Well?
It's also, of course, a complete work of fiction, long since discredited.
If someone else screws your girlfriend so much that you don't get to, you stay a virgin. If brave US soldiers go fight terrorists overseas so you don't have to fight them here, you get to live in peace.
Any questions?
And while we're on the subject of dodged questions, I have twice now presented the following criteria as a baseline for academic research which wishes to be taken seriously:
- Seek independent verification of claims by unreliable sources such as the information ministries of totalitarian states
- Provide information on your data and your methods for peer review
- Do not invent new methods of extrapolation and regression without subjecting the methods to peer review, especially if you have no background or formal training in statistics.
along with two basic questions:- Do you agree with these criteria?
- Do you claim that Mr. Herold has met these criteria?
Each time, you have stonewalled these questions, cutting them from your reply and leaving them unanswered. Should the readers of this thread take this as evidence that you are not comfortable with your answers? I sure do...Or failed to answer it, as the case may be. In either case, my response to that answer is here.
That post was indeed by glrotate. My apologies -- from the haste with which you posted to defend it, I took his position to be yours as well, and mistook who had posted first. Is his position yours as well?In either case, in that thread I posted links to a number of reports on those firings, not all taken from DoD sources, including an eyewitness account from a CNN news crew. Interestingly enough, you did too .
Video of several of those intercepts was also taken by several news agencies, including al Jazeera.
A man may be presumed innocent until proven guilty, but academic work is presumed faulty until adequately peer-reviewed. Mr. Herold's refusal to submit his work to peer review is thus the academic equivalent of a guilty plea, or at least a pleas of nolo contendere to charges of intellectual dishonesty. In any case, the twelve distinguished statisticians on STATS' advisory board indepently review and sign off on every piece of research which STATS publishes.Can you show me a single statistician who has defended Mr. Herold's work? One?
Likewise, you will note that the bulk of Mr. Herold's work in `economics' is of the `social history' sort, being concerned with interviews, oral history, and other `soft' subjects. I have no reason to believe that this does not include his work at Berkeley.
All of this is rather moot, however -- having refused to submit his work to peer review (or even to share his data and methodology for independent verification), Mr. Herold has shown himself to be a stranger to even the most basic concepts of academic integrity and intellectual honesty, no matter what his training may be.
Except that that's not three double-counted deaths out of three thousand deaths, that's three reports which were double counted out of one or two hundred reports which were tallied (we have no way of knowing for sure how many reports, since Mr. Herold refuses to release his data). Thus, we are in fact talking about a one-point-five to three percent rate of double- or triple- counting reports, even if the instances of such double-counting which are evident from the small percentage of his data which Mr. Herold has released are the only such instances in the total body of data.Worse, since some of the reports which Mr. Herold tallies are claims from Taliban government spokesmen of hundreds of deaths (completely unverified by non-taliban sources), the percentage of deaths double-counted may, in fact, be much higher.
And again, that's just the little bit which can be determined from the information Mr. Herold has released about his data on Afghanistan. He has released even less information regarding his data on Iraq...
And yes, the shoddy reasoning you demonstrate here is indeed the same standard you are applying in our discussion of Chile. Readers of this thread can see what you're trying to pass for evidence in that thread here.
As I said before, it does you no good to count the number of other researchers working on the Iraq Body (mis)Count project, when the project states explicitly that it is using data sources and methodologies chosen by one man -- a Women's (Wimmin's?) Studies Professor from a small state school with no background or formal training in statistical matters.
Likewise, no number of researchers signing on will grant academic integrity to a project which refuses to produce its data and methods for peer review, which is the barest minimum as far as standards of intellectual honesty go.
That those statisticians who have written about Mr. Herold's work have called it handwaving and bunkum doesn't help, of course -- as does your complete failure to provide a single statistician who has written approvingly of Mr. Herold's work.
Okay, let's go through the links you've posted. All of them:
- In this post you linked to a list
of articles about Chile. Some of these articles make the same assertions you make (though most explicitly do not), but either explicitly state that
there is not yet evidence to back their claim, or simply do not discuss evidence at all.
Do you claim that this link, which does not claim to provide such evidence, was `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?- In this post, you link to a report
pointing out that Pinochet committed murders, something no one in this thread has denied. Even so, you appear not to have read the report, since you misstate
it's findings about the number killed by a factor of five to ten.
Do you claim that this link, which is entirely concerned with the activities of Pinochet's government after he came to power, was `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?- In this post, you mysteriously link
to a site which praises palestinian murder-suicide bombings, calls Louis Farrakhan `wise' and `balanced', and repeats centuries-old anti-Jewish blood-libels, but
contains no content about Chile at all.
Do you claim that this link is `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?And finally, in this post you link to:
- A picture of the dustjacket of Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which you have not read. Had you read it (as I have), you would
know that Hitchens admits openly that he has no evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's coup, but believes that such evidence may someday be found. In either case, only two
of the book's eleven chapters discuss Chile at all.
Do you claim that this link, to the cover of a book which explicitly admits not having such evidence, is `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?- A copy of a `secret' memo mentioning that Henry Kissinger met with Pinochet in 1976. 1976, of course, was three years after Pinochet's rise
to power, and the meetings in question are a matter of public record in any case -- in fact, they established the connections which Reagan was later to use to
pressure Pinochet into stepping down.
Do you claim that this link, which is entirely concerned with events of three years after the coup, is `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?- An article written in 1999 which states that no evidence of a US link to Pinochet's rise to power has been found, but that such evidence might turn up when
all of the CIA's records regarding Chile are declassified. It has now been three years since those records were declassified, and dozens of groups going over
those records for evidence of such a link have found that, in fact, the CIA was as surprised by Pinochet's rise to power as anyone else was.
Do you claim that this link, which explicitly admits having no evidence at the time of writing, is `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?And if you do not, in fact, claim that any of these things are evidence (and remember, none of them claim to have such evidence), what on earth do you mean when you write ``The links I have given are all evidence.''?
And on to the rest of your post:
How many people Mr. Herold has running around copying down the pronouncements of the Iraqi Information Minister, al Jazeera, and other sources he lists is not really the question here. Mr. Herold has taken full credit for the `methodology' his researchers are using, and for the data sources they are tracking, and now that both of those choices have been discredited, it is he who should be answering the criticisms which have been raised. That he has not done so (or even provided enough information to allow normal peer review of his choices) is telling.
While I wouldn't want to speak for Mr. Blair or his sources, your resort to insults (`poor schmuck' and the like) here certainly seems to suggest that you aren't very confident that your argument stands on it's own merits. In any case, looking over Colin Powell's presentation to the UN, I note that he did not source Mr. Blair or his dossier for any of the evidence he presented, so your case looks a bit forced, no?
Likewise, attempting to dismiss a brutal totalitarian regime with an active WMD program and demonstrated ties to al Qaeda as a non-threat is, at best, wishful thinking on your part.
An interesting claim on your part, since I've shown a number of problems with the methodology and data sources Mr. Herold is using on both this project and the last one, and since he explicitly states that he is using the same long-since discredited methods as used in that `past piece of work' to analyze the conflict in Iraq...
Are you really that unfamiliar with the concept of `peer review'?
No work in any serious field is taken very seriously until it has been corroborated by peer review, so the fact that Mr. Herold is so unwilling to subject his work to such review is far more telling than you seem to think.
Now, let's go through what you did say in your post, as silly as it may be:
A puerile dodge -- I note that you do not yourself claim to disagree with any of these statements, so you resort to a semantic point, instead.
Mr. Herold's resume is currently off-line (whether through server trouble or as a response to the number of people who have recently pointed out how thin it is), but a quick look at google's cached copy confirms that it lists not a single published work of a statistical nature, whether peer-reviewed or otherwise.
More generally, his resume is remarkably short on peer-reviewed works in any field for an academic of his age, which may explain why he has resorted to teaching Women's (Wimmin's?) Studies at a small state school in New Hampshire...
How many would you consider `acceptable'? Since we both agree that some number of reports from Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Sayeed Sahhaf were taken as directly true without verification by Mr. Herold, why don't you tell us why we should take seriously any study which considers such sources `reliable'?
While I must admit that the possiblity that anyone would consider it a reasonable research practice to take the pronouncements of Mohammed Sayeed `There are no American tanks within 300 miles of here! What's that noise?' Sahhaf as a reliable source of casualty information had escaped me, I'd be more than willing to hear arguments why you think we should -- or is this another case where you have no actual point to make, so you're looking for some semantic detail on which to hang your hat?
Again, how many would you consider `acceptable'? And why has Mr. Herold done nothing to address the cases of double- and triple- counting already pointed out, even in his report on Afghanistan?
Now, now -- temper, temper, temper, Mr. Fox. Assuming your intention is actually to convince anyone of anything (if not me, then at least the readers of this thread), bouts of impotent rage and puerile name-calling like that last post aren't going to get you anywhere.
In a second post, I'll speak to what you did respond to in your post, but before I do, I'd like to point out what you didn't respond to, something I find quite interesting.
In my previous post, I had written:
In responding to my post, you chose to clip this part, leaving these points unanswered. Now it seems to me that there are three possibilities:
- You do not in fact feel that these criteria are important
- You believe that Mr. Herold has, in fact, met these criteria (even though he admits having done none of these things)
- You realize that Mr. Herold has not, in fact, met these criteria, and thus cannot be considered to meet even the
most basic standards of intellectual honesty and academic integrity
The fact that you chose not to respond to this part of the post suggests the third of these possibilities holds. Is this the case?Right here is a list of all links you have posted in this thread. Every single one -- and none of them are to sites which even claim to have evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power.
Given this, is it not extremely dishonest for you to speak of the possibility of you providing `more' evidence?
As for what's `mystifying', some might find it extremely mystifying that you would spend over a dozen posts making excuses for not posting the evidence you allege you have, but in fact there's a perfectly obvious explanation -- you don't have any.
And in fact I'd say that by now the readers of this thread have more than enough reason to reach just that conclusion...
Heh -- as I said, my objection was not to the word `tertiary', but to your apparent belief that if you used enough big words, no one would notice that you had still failed to provide anything which even claimed to be evidence of your original claim in what? Twelve posts now?
Nor, if I were you, would I count on your constant questioning of what evidence I `would accept' being seen as anything but the dodge that it is. It's not like you need my permission to post to slashdot -- and if you actually did have convincing evidence, nothing I could say would make it unconvincing to the people reading this thread.
So let's have it -- or do you (as I suspect) have no evidence at all, in which case you are merely clinging desperately to an unbacked assertion for ideological reasons.
A long post, yet you manage to address none of the agreed upon facts. As far as I can tell, everyone agrees on the following:
These are the facts on which everyone agrees (even Mr. Herold). These are facts which you do not attempt to address in your post, so I'm assuming you agree with them as well, whether you consider them important or not.
Given this, I'd say the readers of this thread have more than enough information to decide whether Mr. Herold's claims make sense, but I'd like to speak to a few of the points you raise anyhow:
While it is far from clear that this is correct (in actual fact a number of international reporters were reporting from all over Afghanistan during the war, while the Baghdad regime only allowed reporters in a limited area of Baghdad), if this were the reason for the discrepancy, wouldn't Marc Herold's numbers agree more closely with the estimates of other journalists in Iraq than in Afghanistan? As it happens, they don't.
However, this is a moot point, since as we discuss below, Mr. Herold is relying on bogus (according to every actual statistician who has looked at them) statistical interpretations of the same data as everyone else, not on independent data.
Except that Herold's `attempt at a count' was (according to him) based on the exact same reports which yielded the other estimates -- in other words, given the exact same reports, he came up with different numbers. As a number of independent analysts have shown, he yielded these higher numbers not by `counting better', but by double- and triple- counting a number of actual incidents, and by including in the count every random claim of the Afghan or Iraqi regimes, without any independent verifications.
You've already shown us (in this thread) that if the Iraqi information minister said `no ballistic missiles fired into Kuwait', that's what you believe to this day, even though every other media source (even sources such as al-Jazeera) counted fourteen such missiles. For those of us who do not take the words of Iraqi Information Minister Mohammad Sayeed Sahaf as gospel truth, however, Mr. Herold's numbers, which rely heavily on those pronouncements, carry far less weight than you seem to give them.
Ah yes, the left's old lie: ``the afghan bombing led to startvation and disease and chaos''. This allegation has already been
Nice try, but it's increasingly clear that you haven't actually read Hitchens' book at all. I have read it, and noted repeatedly that Hitchens states explicitly that he has no evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's coup. Which part of this didn't you understand? Likewise, if you claim the articles you posted (which I list exhaustively above) provide evidence (something they themselves do not claim), what evidence do you allege they provide?
Likewise, while it's nice that you think using (to you) big words such as `tertiary' improves your argument, these words in fact do not change the fact that I have linked media, government, and intelligence documents from the actual year in question, all of which are primary documents, while you have linked what? A couple of articles written decades later, all of which explicitly admit they don't have evidence of US involvement.
So while you can go on hiding behind claims that I `wouldn't accept' your evidence if you want, the fact that you have yet to produce anything which even claims to be evidence in eleven posts to date suggests that such whining is actually a cover for the fact that you don't have any.
If you do, post it -- because you have long since convinced anyone reading this thread that you have nothing...
There we have it ladies and gentlemen -- while many of you thought that Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Sayeed ``No American Tanks within 100 Miles! What's that noise?'' Sahaf was inflating civilian casualty statistics, jdfox has uncovered the real truth: he was actually underreporting them! What a brilliant thesis...
Of course, there are plenty of concrete reasons to doubt the statistics provided by Womens' Studies (should that be `Wimmin's studies'?) professor Marc Herold:
- the fact that Mr. Herrod
was so spectacularly (and famously) wrong in Afghanistan, reporting more than three times as many civilian casualties as the sources he claimed
to have gotten his statistics from, and more than twice as many civilian casualties as the Taliban themselves did (see the section on civilian
casualties at the end of that article)
- The fact that Herold's statistical methods have
been thoroughly debunked, which is no surprise, as he has no training or background in statistics at all.
- The fact that he steadfastly refuses to explain where he
gets his numbers, despite repeated demonstrations that he is double- and even triple- counting actual incidents, and accepting other incidents
as genuine based only on the allegations of Taliban and Iraqi Information Ministry sources.
- The fact that the non-partisan Statistical Assssment Service, a group of professional
and academic statisticians formed to combat the incorrect use of statistics in the media has
examined Mr. Herold's methods and found them fatally flawed.
So what was that you were saying?Your .sig is also quite amusing. For those not in on the joke, iraqbodycount.net is a site maintained by a Women's Studies professor
at the University of New Hampshire, which has the unusual distinction of claiming more civilian casualties in Iraq than even the Iraqi
Information Minister, Mohammed Sayeed Sahaf claimed.
Hehehehe. Digging out `the rest' of the evidence? I've just cataloged the pages you've linked to -- none of which even claim to have evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's coup. When asked about this, you reply that you `have lots of evidence' but aren't willing to link it, and then suggest that I'm not providing evidence, even though I've linked to multiple primary documents, none of whose findings you've contested.
So you can go ahead and call me irrational if you want -- but I'm the one backing up my claims with primary evidence, while you're the one insisting that something is true and that there is evidence proving it, but that you are unwilling to link that evidence.
Forgive me if I'm not impressed. I doubt the readers of this thread are either...
Hehehehehehehe. In between making other wild claims (no one `cluster-bombed' Baghdad, needless to say), you finally admit that you're not actually going to post any evidence, and are instead taking your ball and going home?
Well, it's been fun. I think it's quite clear to anyone still reading this thread that your belief in US misdeeds in Chile has long since become an essentially religious conviction, based on no evidence at all...
Heh, nice try. While I suppose you could continue to assert that there is lots of evidence out there, you just won't link to any of it because you're afraid that I `won't accept it', I suspect that by now anyone reading this thread has realized that your evidence is like the mysterious girlfriend that a kid in middle school claims he has, and yet never actually produces -- something which doesn't actually exist, and yet which you talk about endlessly.
After all, let's look at the thread to date. For nine messages now, you have been assuring us that you can provide links to evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power, and yet what have you produced? Here's what:
and nothing more.
In contrast, I have linked to:
On the contrary, I pointed out that none of the three pages you linked to contained or even claimed to contain evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power. It's all very well for you to allege that I `wouldn't accept' your evidence, but claiming so is hardly a substitute for providing evidence at all, now is it?
So we're back where we started: as at the point where you joined this thread, I have presented primary documents refuting your claim of US involvement, while you, on the other hand, have presented nothing but a few articles which either make no attempt to present evidence, or openly admit not having evidence of US involvement.
If there is, in fact, no evidence backing your claim (and again, you have yet to present anything which even claims to be such evidence), you can hardly expect me buy into your weird black-helicopter theories merely because you allege (without evidence) that other people have bought into it...
Um, yes. Did you read those articles? Did they allege that illegal SCUD and al-Samoud missiles were not fired? No. They state that the Patriot missile system was also involved in two friendly fire incidents.
And? Why just today, CNN is reporting in more detail on an Iraqi use of illegal al Samoud missiles during the war. The missile described in the story was fired from `North of Basra' and landed outside Camp Doha in Kuwait.
It only takes about five minutes and a map of Iraq to confirm that a missile firing on a camp outside Kuwait City from Basra has a range greater than the 150 km permitted. As noted here, the al-Samoud also violates the restrictions on maximum engine size for rockets and missiles.
Thirteen other illegal ballistic missiles were fired during the war as well, as both the articles I linked and the articles you linked confirm. Eight of these others were intercepted, and five were off course enough to be deemed unthreatening to troops or populated areas.
Are you denying these facts, even though the articles both of us have posted agree on them? Are you agreeing with glrotate that no such missiles were fired, and the cruise missile attack on Kuwait City was the only attack? Really?
Did you actually read those links, or just post them without reading them? I suspect the latter, because here's what you just posted:
Really, are you reading these things before you post them? Because if you are, it doesn't speak well for your conspiracy theories that such thin backing is all you find to post.
I'd also like to comment on your positing that it is `evidence' of America's guilt that many in Europe believe we were involved. I'm not sure how many, in fact, do, but if this is in fact widely accepted, then what?
It's widely accepted in the Arab world that Jews drink the blood of Children, after all, just as it was very recently widely accepted in Europe that that Mr. Hitler was a nice gentleman who we could all do business with as long as you don't get him talking about the Jews.
As I said above, saying that `this other guy holds the same irrational belief that I do' is not evidence. If it were, the earth would be flat (because the flat-earthers have dozens of members), and there would be hangars full of UFOs out at Roswell.
As you continue to provide no evidence at all to actually back your wild black-helicopter theories, and as the only primary evidence presented in this discussion has all contradicted your claims, you're just not going to get anywhere by the argument `these other people believe this thing without evidence, so I do to'.
On the contrary, the `evidence' you posted was a link to a list of articles which claim the same thing you claim, also without providing evidence. In contrast, I have posted a number of links to primary documents from the era in question, and to analyses of those primary documents.
So again, what makes you believe that the US had a role in Pinochet's rise to power? That you `heard it somewhere, once'? Or have you seen evidence which would back up this wild claim? You do understand why it behooves you to provide a link to such evidence, don't you? You do understand why no one reading this thread is likely to be convinced by such claims if the only backing you can bring for them is that some other guy once said the same thing, also without evidence, in an article published thirty years after the fact, right?
As for elections, I have already shown that Allende threw out the results of the Constitutional Elections of 1973, much as he ignored the results of any number of votes of the Chilean legislature. I have already provided primary documents showing how Allende had effectively dissolved the legislature and judiciary within Chile, thus destroying the Chilean constitution. If you want to hang your hat on a narrow legalistic claim that it is not `cancelling' an election for the branch of government whose job it is to carry out that election's results to throw those results out, go ahead -- but don't expect anyone to be convinced by such a claim. If you want to claim that counter to every action he took during his three years in power, Allende planned to obey the results of the elections of 1976 (as he ignored the results of the elections of 1973), go ahead, but again, don't expect the readers of this thread to take you seriously when you do so.
As it happens, he had no chance to prevent those elections from being held. He had no chance to throw out their results as he had the results of 1973's elections. That this happened only at the expense of a decade or more of Pinochet is a shame -- but we can still take heart that Chile is today a stable and free democracy as a result.
With due respect, jdfox, I have already posted several links discussing the March 1973 Constitutional Elections in Chile.
As even this anti-Pinochet site acknowledges, Allende consistently ignored the results of the March,1973 Constitutional elections, spinning the results which had been 58-44 against his rule as a `victory'. Other documents I have linked point out that Mr. Allende used of violence, imprisonment, and torture against journalists and political opponents to achieve even this 44 percent showing.
Likewise, I have already demonstrated that by the summer of 1973, the entirety of the Chilean constitution was in suspension, that the courts and the legislature had been effectively shut down, with all of their power now in the hands of Allende and Allende alone, and with even direct votes of the legislature and direct rulings of the courts being ignored by Allende's administration.
Now I understand, given how far-fetched your original claims have turned out to be, and given how much difficulty you are having finding evidence to back your wild assertions, that you would like to change the subject. And I understand that getting hung up on a legal technicality (If an election was held, but its results ignored, was that election `cancelled'?), but unless you can provide evidence that Allende intended to behave differently in the elections of 1976 than he had in the ignored elections of 1973, you won't get anywhere this way.
Which brings us back to your original black-helicopter theories: since you have yet to present any evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power, and since you have now changed the subject, lashing out desperately in hopes of finding some other point to cling to, can we assume that you now accept that your original premise (that the US aided Pinochet's coup) was simply false?