Give me a break. Your points have nothing to do with "fact checking" -- that would require actually checking if the assertion is a fact. Instead, you managed to come up with a list of meaningless questions to find out of this idiotic assertion could be possibly true. If you will note, you could use those same questions to prove that the landing on the moon could have been faked, or that Elvis could still be alive.
Is there an superior/generally accepted alternative explanation
No, not really. The other proposed explanations (e.g. Terry McCallef(sp) did it) are even weaker.
Are you kidding? The Democrats had been rabidly and blindly trying to attack Bush on this issue since he ran for Governor of Texas. National security was perceived as the Republicans biggest strength in the 2004 election, and Democrats were painted as weak. Do you really think that it is all that far-fetched to assume that a Democrat forged these documents in an attempt to undermine the Republicans perceived greatest political strength while at the same time bring to light an "issue" that they had been trying to capitalize on for years?
Does the proposed explanation require anyone to act out of character, or against their own interests?No, not at all. In fact, the two prime reasons for suspecting Rove are 1) that it's very similar to things he's been known to do in the past (e.g. spreading negative information against his own candidate, such as he did for Harold See, forging documents as he did against Alan Dixon), and 2) it accomplished exactly what he would have wanted
There isn't any proof that Rove spread negative information about Harold See. In fact, the only serious accusation against Rove in that campaign (that he denies) was negative information that was allegedly spread about their opponent, not Harold See. And you really should qualify your reference to Alan Dixon to include that it was a College prank and he was only 19 years old, and Rove has apologized for it. And passing out some "Free Beer" posters at a rock concert isn't exactly on the same level of forging a document about your candidate and hoping that the media picks up on it so your opponent might look bad.
Could the same arguments be turned around?
Not really. Nothing in the memos was contested, and all of it had been previously reported (e.g. by the BBC). Bush never even attempted to deny any of it. The people who would know even stated that the information in the memos was essentially correct. So it wouldn't have helped Kerry's team much at all to have the documents, even if they had been legitimate.
Of course Bush denied it. He went to great lengths to prove that his National Guard service was fulfilled, and that he was honorably discharged from the service. And the only person who would have been qualified to say if the information was "essentially" correct was the author, who was conveniently not around to make any comment.
The Democrats fear and loathing of Karl Rove is laughable. I guess it makes sense, however. They have spent years trying to convince everybody that the first US President with a Harvard MBA is a complete moron, so they have to find some explanation as to why they keep losing to him. The evil-genius-wizard-behind-the-curtains title for Karl Rove fits that bill.
Its pretty clearly up to Choicepoint to provide accurate data, otherwise if there is no accountability they might as well just make up a bunch of names and use those instead.
Actually, no. Per state law requirements, ChoicePoint was hired (by Democrat Ethel Baxtor) to provide a list of possible convicted felons to each county, and each individual county election supervisor was required to verify the names on the list, provide an avenue for appeal, and ultimately remove previously convicted felons from the voter registration rolls.
If their source was bad, they should have either found another source to validate the data (they should be doing that anyway, it's just good practice to validate the quality of the data you sell -- it is pretty hard to believe that they did not have at least a general idea about the accuracy of the data) or they should not have reported it at all.
Again, they were not required to provide validated data. State law placed the burden of validating the names soley on the county election officials.
It was, by the way, the Democrats who wrote and voted for these state laws in Florida after the 1996 Miami mayoral Democratic primary, which was found to have widespread fraud.
The reason nobody is talking about this is because:
1) It's wrong. The US Civil Rights Commission failed to find a single person who was incorrectly removed from the voting rolls and not allowed to vote in the 2000 election because of the Felon list.
2) ChoicePoint had no authority or means to remove voters from the rolls. Only the local county election officials did.
3) That was 6 years ago, and most whiny liberals have given up crying about this non-issue by now.
4) Subsequent independent media reviews of the Florida 2000 election have all found that the outcome would not have changed using the existing rules that existed on the day of the election.
Ask Senator McCain how he feels about Mr. Rove's tactics.
You mean tactics that Mr. Rove denies using, and there is no proof that he used? Oh yeah, were back to "innocent until accused by Democrats".
And considering that Senator McCain has been a very vocal defender of Karl Rove in the Plame case, it's pretty apparent that he doesn't harbor very much ill will.
And Valerie Plame & co.
I'd rather ask Mr. Fitzgerald, who has yet to accuse Rove of any wrongdoing in the Plame case.
But, again, because a Democrat has made an accusation, that seems to be enough for you to think he is guilty.
"Convicted"? It doesn't have to be illegal to be morally reprehensible.
But it does have to be reality, and not some wet dream fantasy of the Democratic party who is trying to get rid of the guy who is largely responsible for their recent defeats at the polls.
No, I mean "Will stoop to absolutely anything to achieve his goals".
Or "Will be accused by his opponents of stooping to absolutely anything to achieve his goals". The only political dirty trick he has been "convicted" for was a college prank when he was 19, and he has since apologized for it. But considering the track record of Democratic candidates that have opposed politicians that Rove advised of the past 3 decades, it's no wonder you guys keep trying to make stuff up to bring him down. His legend must be bigger than Sasquatch in liberal circles.
I'd have exactly the same problems with the guy if he agreed with me politically, and used the same tactics to achieve his agenda.
So, you have problems with 95% of all politicians world wide. Funny, I didn't see you claiming that they have "black hearts".
But thanks for the integrity check, Skippy!
No problem. Somebody has to keep reminding left wingers that it is "innocent until proven guilty" and not "innocent until he kicks our butts at the polls so we have to make up stuff to try and bring him down".
(Kerry, FWIW, talked about eliminating some of the tax incentives that encourage companies to offshore. At least he understood the problem and had an appropriate, if timid, response.)
No, Kerry didn't understand the problem. The tax "incentives" that supposedly encourages companies to offshore aren't "incentives" at all. This so-called "incentive" is that the US corporate tax rate is much higher than most other countries, so companies have a valid reason to shift their operations and profits to countries with lower tax rates. Kerry's solution to this was to increase corporate taxes by taxing profits on goods that were produced overseas.
Fact Check: In fact, tax experts say the incentive has been there for decades - since there has been a corporate income tax. It's not Bush's doing.
The incentive exists because the US taxes corporations at rates higher than most other countries. According to the Institute for International Economics, the effective rate for US corporations was just over 30% in 2002, while mainland China's effective corporate rate was only 11.3%, Britain's 18.2%, Mexico's 15.1% and Indonesia's a miniscule 0.2%.
Maybe you should do a fancy google search on fundamentalist mormonism so you can learn that those schools you are referring to have nothing to do with this conversation.
There is no such thing as a Mormon school that "doesn't pay taxes and does get public funding". All of the Mormon schools are privately funded. And if you go to a biology class at a Mormon university, you are going to learn about evolution.
I want to be pretty clear that these are not "my" points -- they are the points of a team of DOJ lawyers that reviewed the program and gave it their approval.
This is a pretty big assertion here. The Constitution isn't a very long document, read it. It seriously doesn't say that. But it does say that...
so to bring your second point to consideration, Congress can't issue any law or resolution that gives the President this power
I would refer you to the document again, particularly their response:
In United States v. United States District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972) (the "Keith" case), the Supreme Court concluded that the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement applies to investigations of wholly domestic threats to security--such as domestic political violence and other crimes. But the Court in the Keith case made clear that it was not addressing the President's authority to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance without a warrant and that it was expressly reserving that question: "[T]he instant case requires no judgment on the scope of the President's surveillance power with respect to the activities of foreign powers, within or without this country."
There are several more case citations in the document to back up this point.
I'll certainly have to double check this, but I believe that FISA actually states that it is the sole statute dealing with the subject of foreign intelligence wiretapping.
No, FISA prevents the government from "engag[ing] . . . in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute". SCOTUS case Hamdi v. Rumsfeld referred to in the document confirmed that the AUMF is such a statute.
With all due respect, this is certainly a case for the SCOTUS to decide. That's a pretty bold assertion.
SCOTUS already did decide it in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.
They applauded because Bush's proposals to "fix" social security were terrible
No, they applauded because they think it is more important to score a political victory than it is to solve an inevitable problem.
If they really thought that Bush's proposal was that horrible, they would have come up with a better plan, just as Bush asked them to do in his SOTU address last year.
You can find out exactly what authority is being asserted from this 42-page DOJ Whitepaper. Read the document to fully answer your question. From the summary:
-The Constitution gives the President sole authority to conduct warrantless surveillance of enemy forces for intelligence purposes to detect and disrupt armed attacks on the United States
-On 9/18/2001, Congress gave the President authority to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided" in terrorist attacks and to "prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States."
-The supreme court rule in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that warrantless electronic surveillance was included in the joint authorization passed on 9/18/2001
-FISA specifically states that Congress can authorize surveillance by a statute other than FISA. The USSC confirmed in Hamdi that the 9/18/2001 joint authorization was an allowable statute.
-The NSA activities all fell within the 4th Amendment exception to the warrant requirement and satisfies and the fundamental requirement of reasonableness
Read the entire document for complete case references and quotes.
That's what I'm trying to do. But apparently you think you countered rather than strengthened the point I was trying to make about the problems that arise when people on differing sides of a debate are operating on different definitions of the word describing the topic they are debating.
Yes. I accept all of the dictionary definitions of the word "science", you accept only one.
And please, do read that dictionary definition again. It may not spell out the words "the scientific method", but what, exactly do you think definition 1a, "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena." is describing?
It is describing the process of human discovery that has occurred as long as intelligent life has existed on this planet. The theory that the world is flat was most certainly derived in this manner. The observation that the earth is locally flat, and the experimental investigation of traveling for miles and miles without detecting any curvature and still observing a locally flat earth led to the very wrong theory that the entire earth is flat.
Moreover, if you're debating with someone who is on the "side" of science in this day and age, what do you think THEY mean when they use the word science?
I guess it would depend on whether they were a rational, thinking scientist, or an intellectual snob like you. Not everybody in the scientific world is so willing to easily discount anything that alters their infallible view of science. In fact, I would expect most rational, thinking scientists to realize that scientific theory can never be proven right -- it can only be proven wrong.
If you'd thrown the word "science" into dictionary.com, which gives responses from several different dictionaries, you'd also have seen this among the results:
Right. And the fact that you are clinging to this specific definition while ignoring the half a dozen other more broad definitions, while at the same time lecturing about a basic misunderstanding about the definition of words, is comical.
Dictionaries will give you both common usage and specific usage definitions for words. If someone debating from a scientist's point of view uses the word "theory", which has a specific definition within science, and rather different defintion in common usage, both which a good dictionary will provide, which definition do you think will help you better understand what the other person was trying to say?
It all depends on whether you actually want to understand what the "opposing" side is trying to say, or if your goal is to score "points" by deliberately misinterpreting the intended meaning of the communication for the purpose of "scoring points" by twisting their words around. I just don't see the latter approach as being particularly fruitful, and I actually find it worth spending my time on writing posts like this simply in the hope of lowering the ratio of miscommunication in a discussion.
I'm not deliberately misinterpreting the intended meaning of your communication, I'm saying that the intended meaning of your communication is complete crap. The parent asserted, and you have tried to defend, the claim that "science" is always right. And it turns out that the only reason you are able to claim this is by using a narrow definition of the word "science". Certainly you can see the logical fallacy in the claim "Science is always right because things that are wrong aren't science".
Interesting how you managed to pound out a long winded dissertation on the definition of "science" when you apparently don't even know the definition yourself. This definition is neither strict nor explicitly connected to the Newtonian Scientific Method.
Science, by definition, is a broadly defined as "activities applied to an object of inquiry or study", and your examples of "Invention, research and other progress of human knowledge" clearly fit this definition.
Language is the tool we use to communicate, and if different sides in a debate keep redefining the meaning of the words used to decribe the core concepts being debated, then the language becomes meaningless, and thus, the debate itself will become meaningless, and both sides will be reduced to packs of monkeys trying to out-OOK each other.
Typical response from the intellectual snobs. Science isn't really science unless YOU agree with it.
So according to you, when the Aztecs were developing sophisticated agriculture techniques, and creating significant theories about Astronomy and climate, it wasn't really science because Newton hadn't been born yet. And when Lucy the 3-foot tall monkey-human was prancing around Africa and figuring out how to rub sticks together and make fire, that wasn't really science because she didn't know what the word "hypotheses" meant.
And yet you still somehow consider anybody who has the nerve to disagree with your supreme intellectual thought a brainwashed fool who can't comprehend your superior though process.
By it's very definition, Scientific Method requires reproducible experimentation in order to support a hypothesis or prediction. By it's very nature, macro evolution is impossible to experimentally reproduce. Finding small, old bones in Africa only proves that there were small, old bones in Africa. Any further hypothesis generated from this observation has to be supported by reproducible experiments, and the only way to reproduce this experiment would be to put a bunch of monkeys in a closed system and wait around for a few hundred million years to see if they start making cars, programming computers, and flying airplanes.
It is interesting how intellectual snobs, such as yourself, fail to grasp this concept. Macro evolution is not proven by observation as you claim, it is an theory that tries to explain observation.
There have been very few absolute reversals in science, why do you expect that evolution will be any different?
What are you talking about? Science is always changing. A few thousand years ago, Science taught that the world was flat and that the earth was the center of the universe. A few hundred hears ago, science thought that illness meant you were possessed by a demon or troll. If you think that scientific though is not going to be drastically different centuries from now, you are ignoring history.
I understand that the risk that the levees could break was well-known, and that governments (at various levels) decided to do nothing about it.
Actually, no. The only risk that was well-known by the Government was that the levees might overtop and flood (not break) during a Cat 5 storm. Greg Breerword, a deputy district engineer for project management with the Army Corps of Engineers, told the New York Times:
"We knew if it was going to be a Category 5, some levees and some flood walls would be overtopped. We never did think they would actually be breached."
In fact, in 2002 the Bush adminisration commissioned a detailed study to simulate the effects of a Catagory 5 storm on the city of New Orleans, and the LSU engineers who worked on the project specifically stated that a breach in the levees was possible, but not at all expected.
I'm sorry, but you are just plain wrong. I strongly suggest that you at least read the 20 page key findings summary from the ISG report and educate yourself on this subject beyond a CNN quote. The ISG (and CIA) never said there was no research. On the contrary, they documented 1200+ pages of WMD violations. The first CIA report from David Kay in October 2003 stated:
We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN.
I would quote more from these reports but I an only stomach so much spoon feeding from a report that has been publicly available for a year now.
That said, if an attack is eminent, war is no longer preventative, and is thus justifiable. So to use the Pearl Harbor analogy. If we had intel that said an attack on Pearl was coming soon. I would wait until there was a wave of bombers in the air coming toward Pearl, then scramble intercepters.
This is just silly. When would you have dealt with the 9/11 hijackers? After the plane took off and they pulled the knives out? Do you think that cops shouldn't be able to stop bank robbers until they pull a gun out and point it at a bank teller? We shouldn't stop rapists until they have committed their first rape?
What you don't seem to understand is that inaction puts far more innocent lives at risk. Saddam killed as many as 2,000,000 people before we took him out. If we didn't act, IIS agents would still be kidnapping dissidents and throwing them in jail never to be heard from again, or tossing them over a rooftop, or dipping them into an acid bath, or raping their wives in front of them. Saddam would still be developing weapons capable of killing far more innocent people than have died as a result of the invasion. Terrorists would still be operating and killing innocent people with the full support and training of Iraq. And 25,000,000 innocent Iraqis would be living under the oppressive rule of a brutal tyrant. If you were truly concerned about innocent civilians, it seems you would support removing people like Saddam.
AFAIK they supported the families of Palestinian "martyrs", but that's about it.
Well, no. In addition to the open support of Hamas, Saddam also supported Abu Nidal, Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, PKK, Carlos the Jackal, and Al Qaeda splinter terrorists like Ansar al-Islam, Jund al-Islam, and Abu Musab Zarqawi. He was implicated in numerous global terror threats, including an attempted bombing in Prague, an attempted assassination of a former US President, and assassination attempts on dissidents worldwide. Not to mention the solid evidence that Putin claims to have proving that Iraq was planning terrorist attacks inside the US border.
You could also say that USA sponsors terrorism. School of the Americas anyone?
No, you couldn't. There is no proof whatsoever that the School of Americas provided training to murder innocent civilians, and the actions of the rouge graduates of this training were condemned by our Government.
Iraq's "offensive capabilites" were largely destroyed in the first Gulf War and during the blockade that followed.
Not really. We found clear and documented violations of ballistic missiles capable of exceeding the required 150KM range, and even more evidence that Iraq was arranging the shipment of 2000KM ballistic missiles from North Korea. We also found clear and documented violations in the area of UAV development. This doesn't even include the most obvious and most dangerous offensive capability of terrorism. The only capability required for terrorism is a suitcase and an idiot willing to kill himself to get to 72 virgins in the clouds.
Really?. If you don't want to link, allow me bo shorten the article to you: "Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons at the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003 and had not begun any program to produce them, a CIA report concludes.". AFAIK, the troops discovered few abandoned Iran-war era artillery-munitions in a distant warehouse, but that's it.
Are you under the mistaken impression that the only WMD we should have been concerned about was the 20 year old, halfway potent remnant chemical stockpiles from the Iran/Iraq war that were never accounted for? We never found those, but we did find a long list of new weapons programs that we, and the UN inspectors, had no idea existed. The ISG report was very clear. Saddam was doing a very good job of hiding his WMD research and production plans from the US and the UN inspectors, and his main goal was to resume full scale research and production as soon as the sanctions were lifted. I don't know why you would be so concerned about some non-existent 20 year old mustard shells when the reality of what we found was much more destructive and much more frightening.
And I assume that in this case "interests" mean "steady supply of oil"?
A steady supply of oil isn't just a US interest -- it is a global interest. There is no sense in pretending that the entire world doesn't function around a steady energy supply.
But anyway, they should then stop their bullshit about spreading freedom and democracy, since clearly that is not on their agenda. And looking at past actions of USA, it never really has been.
Blah, blah, blah. Blame the US for everything. We've never heard this before.....
Does the charter not state that war should not be waged without the approval of the security counsel? (Don't try to agrue that it was a legal war becasue we were enforcing the resolutions of an organisation whose laws say that our acts of enforcement were illegal, there is just too much cognitive dissonance there)
The security council voted 17 times to approve the use of force to get Iraq to comply, and never voted to revoke this authorization. Each of these 17 resolutions were passed under the 7th chapter of the UN charter which makes enforcement compulsory for member states.
Honestly it has been a while since I read 687... You are going to have to refresh my memory as to how it is concretecompliance is possible. If I recall correctly that is one of them that calls on Iraq to prove it is free of weapons by allowing inspections. Well, the inspectors didn't find anything (significant) and yet many were convinced that Iraq had banned weapons.
So how exactly is it possible to prove that you don't have something when the accuser can simply claim that you must be hidding it?
You'd better read 687 again to refresh your memory. It affirmed the authorization of force given in 678 for the purposes of 1) Kicking Iraq out of Kuwait, 2) Forcing compliance on WMD, and 3) Restoring peace and security to the region.
And I guess you weren't paying attention when the ISG released their report last year. They found that Iraq was maintaining their prohibited weapons programs, and they were doing a pretty good job hiding those programs from the US and UN inspectors.
SOA has gone alot further than having graduates that became criminals. SOA explicitly trained people in the use of guerilla tactics against populations to inspire fear as a means to influence elections. When Sunni's do that we call it terrorism.
Considering that nobody knows exactly what training took place at the School of Americas, it is interesting how you claim to know what was taught and what the results were from this training.
Some of this is true, some is almost hyperbolically exadgerated. But I will say that if I were in charge of national security, I would go through this process:
1. Gather information
2. Identify threats
3. Prioritize threats
4. Determine what action has the best likelyhood of positive results
5. Determine if the likely results of that action are better than the likely results of inaction
6. Act (if applicable under step 5)
I think this is a perfectly reasonable algorithm. Would you disagree with this?
In my accessment the Bush admin skipped steps a large chunk of 1,3,maybe 4, and definately 5.
I disagree with your assessment. Information was being gathered on Iraq well before they violated international law and invaded Kuwait. The universal conclusion from this information was that Iraq was a threat, which is why the UN security council unanimously voted 17 times to disarm them. Iraq was clearly a top priority threat as well. There were no other countries that were in open defiance of chapter 7 UN resolutions, had a history of attacking non-hostile nations, and were on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. And 9/11 taught us that inaction to these kinds of threats is not acceptable.
Your right war is never perfect, it is also rarely necessary.
In a perfect world, war would never be necessary. A quick reading of any history book will quickly tell you that we are living in a world that is far from perfect.
With USA's backing. USA supported Iraq openly in it's war against Iran. And USA didn't care one bit when Iraq gassed the Kurds.
Wrong. When Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran, the US universally condemned it, immediately passed legislation banning the export of precursor chemicals to Iraq, successfully convinced other western countries to ban the export of these chemicals, and voted for all the UN resolutions condmening the act.
It was? I remember that when the war was "over", Bush gave his "Mission accomplished"-speech. In it he said that "USA has removed major supporter to Al-Qaida". Well, the fact was that Hussein hated Bin Laden, and there was no connection between the two. Bin Laden did contact Hussein and proposed an alliance between the two. Husseins reply was "Not interested. Fuck off". Now, thanks to the invasion, Iraq is excellent breeding-ground for terrorism. And since the invasion, the amount of terrorism in the world has skyrocketed. So if the plan was to reduce terrorism by invading Iraq because they were "supporting terrorism", I think it can be safely said that the plan failed.
Are you ignorantly claiming that Iraq wasn't on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list for the last, say, 30 years?
how exactly? Iraq had no links to the 9/11 it has no offensive capabilities to threaten USA (hell, they had no capabilities to threaten their neighours!) So how was Iraq "threatening"? In a sense that they could in theory do SOMETHING to USA? Well, Finland could in theory do something bad to USA/Americans, are we to be invaded as well?
Iraq's offensive capabilities have been extensively demonstrated and documented for over 2 decades, and their support of international terrorism only strengthened those capabilities. The only offensive capabilities Iraq needed was a few terrorist nuts willing to carry out their plans, just like they were trying to do in Prague and Kuwait and here.
But, all this is besides the point. The reason Iraq was invaded was that they had WMD's, remember? Well, I'm still waiting for those WMD's to be discovered. And when it started to become obvious that there were no WMD's to be found, the reason for the war switched from WMD's to "bringing freedom and democracy to the people of Iraq".
The WMD's have been found and have been extensively documented. The ISG released a 1200+ page report detailing countless WMD violations found after the 2003 invasion, including a number of programs that the UN didn't have a clue about and Iraq was doing a pretty good job of hiding. There is a reason why people like David Kay and Tommy Franks have said that Iraq was more dangerous than we imagined before the war.
I for one find this whole thing to be weird. Apparently USA has the need to spread democracy. Then why is USA being buddies with Pakistan, which is ruled by a military dictator who overthrew a democratically elected government just few years ago? if WMD's are so bad, why is USA friends with Pakistan who has openly admitted that they have nukes? USA says one thing, but they act completely different. If WMD's and dictatorships are bad, then surely Pakistan should be occupied by now?
Clearly WMD's and spreading democracy are not the only considerations. Our leaders should only act when our security or our interests are threatened, which would certainly rule out Pakistan.
Seriously, this talk of "spreading democracy" and "WMD's" is pure bullshit and karma-whoring. Looking at the comments of US Administration before the invasion, it seems that there are three possibilites:
a) They lied
b) Current US Administration is filled with morons who are simply incapable of handling the job they are required to do. Inconsistent foreign-policy ("Dictatorships are bad! But not all dictatorships. WMD's in the hands of dictators are a bad thing! But not always!"), illegal invasions of sovereign nations based on flimsy evidence etc. etc.
c) Both
So, what is it?
I choose:
D) The international consensus for the 13 years prior to the invasion was that Iraq was a threat to peace and security, and the 9/11 attacks taught us that we could not allow these kinds of threats to peace and security to go unchecked.
Cheat? Writing software that does what you want it to do isn't cheating, and there is nothing preventing AMD from releasing their own compilers that do the exact same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Give me a break. Your points have nothing to do with "fact checking" -- that would require actually checking if the assertion is a fact. Instead, you managed to come up with a list of meaningless questions to find out of this idiotic assertion could be possibly true. If you will note, you could use those same questions to prove that the landing on the moon could have been faked, or that Elvis could still be alive.
Is there an superior/generally accepted alternative explanation No, not really. The other proposed explanations (e.g. Terry McCallef(sp) did it) are even weaker.
Are you kidding? The Democrats had been rabidly and blindly trying to attack Bush on this issue since he ran for Governor of Texas. National security was perceived as the Republicans biggest strength in the 2004 election, and Democrats were painted as weak. Do you really think that it is all that far-fetched to assume that a Democrat forged these documents in an attempt to undermine the Republicans perceived greatest political strength while at the same time bring to light an "issue" that they had been trying to capitalize on for years?
Does the proposed explanation require anyone to act out of character, or against their own interests?No, not at all. In fact, the two prime reasons for suspecting Rove are 1) that it's very similar to things he's been known to do in the past (e.g. spreading negative information against his own candidate, such as he did for Harold See, forging documents as he did against Alan Dixon), and 2) it accomplished exactly what he would have wanted
There isn't any proof that Rove spread negative information about Harold See. In fact, the only serious accusation against Rove in that campaign (that he denies) was negative information that was allegedly spread about their opponent, not Harold See. And you really should qualify your reference to Alan Dixon to include that it was a College prank and he was only 19 years old, and Rove has apologized for it. And passing out some "Free Beer" posters at a rock concert isn't exactly on the same level of forging a document about your candidate and hoping that the media picks up on it so your opponent might look bad.
Could the same arguments be turned around? Not really. Nothing in the memos was contested, and all of it had been previously reported (e.g. by the BBC). Bush never even attempted to deny any of it. The people who would know even stated that the information in the memos was essentially correct. So it wouldn't have helped Kerry's team much at all to have the documents, even if they had been legitimate.
Of course Bush denied it. He went to great lengths to prove that his National Guard service was fulfilled, and that he was honorably discharged from the service. And the only person who would have been qualified to say if the information was "essentially" correct was the author, who was conveniently not around to make any comment.
The Democrats fear and loathing of Karl Rove is laughable. I guess it makes sense, however. They have spent years trying to convince everybody that the first US President with a Harvard MBA is a complete moron, so they have to find some explanation as to why they keep losing to him. The evil-genius-wizard-behind-the-curtains title for Karl Rove fits that bill.
Its pretty clearly up to Choicepoint to provide accurate data, otherwise if there is no accountability they might as well just make up a bunch of names and use those instead.
Actually, no. Per state law requirements, ChoicePoint was hired (by Democrat Ethel Baxtor) to provide a list of possible convicted felons to each county, and each individual county election supervisor was required to verify the names on the list, provide an avenue for appeal, and ultimately remove previously convicted felons from the voter registration rolls.
If their source was bad, they should have either found another source to validate the data (they should be doing that anyway, it's just good practice to validate the quality of the data you sell -- it is pretty hard to believe that they did not have at least a general idea about the accuracy of the data) or they should not have reported it at all.
Again, they were not required to provide validated data. State law placed the burden of validating the names soley on the county election officials.
It was, by the way, the Democrats who wrote and voted for these state laws in Florida after the 1996 Miami mayoral Democratic primary, which was found to have widespread fraud.
The reason nobody is talking about this is because:
1) It's wrong. The US Civil Rights Commission failed to find a single person who was incorrectly removed from the voting rolls and not allowed to vote in the 2000 election because of the Felon list.
2) ChoicePoint had no authority or means to remove voters from the rolls. Only the local county election officials did. 3) That was 6 years ago, and most whiny liberals have given up crying about this non-issue by now.
4) Subsequent independent media reviews of the Florida 2000 election have all found that the outcome would not have changed using the existing rules that existed on the day of the election.
Ask Senator McCain how he feels about Mr. Rove's tactics.
You mean tactics that Mr. Rove denies using, and there is no proof that he used? Oh yeah, were back to "innocent until accused by Democrats".
And considering that Senator McCain has been a very vocal defender of Karl Rove in the Plame case, it's pretty apparent that he doesn't harbor very much ill will.
And Valerie Plame & co.
I'd rather ask Mr. Fitzgerald, who has yet to accuse Rove of any wrongdoing in the Plame case.
But, again, because a Democrat has made an accusation, that seems to be enough for you to think he is guilty.
"Convicted"? It doesn't have to be illegal to be morally reprehensible.
But it does have to be reality, and not some wet dream fantasy of the Democratic party who is trying to get rid of the guy who is largely responsible for their recent defeats at the polls.
No, I mean "Will stoop to absolutely anything to achieve his goals".
Or "Will be accused by his opponents of stooping to absolutely anything to achieve his goals". The only political dirty trick he has been "convicted" for was a college prank when he was 19, and he has since apologized for it. But considering the track record of Democratic candidates that have opposed politicians that Rove advised of the past 3 decades, it's no wonder you guys keep trying to make stuff up to bring him down. His legend must be bigger than Sasquatch in liberal circles.
I'd have exactly the same problems with the guy if he agreed with me politically, and used the same tactics to achieve his agenda.
So, you have problems with 95% of all politicians world wide. Funny, I didn't see you claiming that they have "black hearts".
But thanks for the integrity check, Skippy!
No problem. Somebody has to keep reminding left wingers that it is "innocent until proven guilty" and not "innocent until he kicks our butts at the polls so we have to make up stuff to try and bring him down".
Just because people troll him doesn't mean that Karl Rove doesn't have the blackest of black hearts...
And by "blackest of black hearts" you mean "has the nerve to disagree with my politically", right?
(Kerry, FWIW, talked about eliminating some of the tax incentives that encourage companies to offshore. At least he understood the problem and had an appropriate, if timid, response.)
No, Kerry didn't understand the problem. The tax "incentives" that supposedly encourages companies to offshore aren't "incentives" at all. This so-called "incentive" is that the US corporate tax rate is much higher than most other countries, so companies have a valid reason to shift their operations and profits to countries with lower tax rates. Kerry's solution to this was to increase corporate taxes by taxing profits on goods that were produced overseas.
Fact Check:
In fact, tax experts say the incentive has been there for decades - since there has been a corporate income tax. It's not Bush's doing.
The incentive exists because the US taxes corporations at rates higher than most other countries. According to the Institute for International Economics, the effective rate for US corporations was just over 30% in 2002, while mainland China's effective corporate rate was only 11.3%, Britain's 18.2%, Mexico's 15.1% and Indonesia's a miniscule 0.2%.
Maybe you should do a fancy google search on fundamentalist mormonism so you can learn that those schools you are referring to have nothing to do with this conversation.
There is no such thing as a Mormon school that "doesn't pay taxes and does get public funding". All of the Mormon schools are privately funded. And if you go to a biology class at a Mormon university, you are going to learn about evolution.
I want to be pretty clear that these are not "my" points -- they are the points of a team of DOJ lawyers that reviewed the program and gave it their approval.
...
This is a pretty big assertion here. The Constitution isn't a very long document, read it. It seriously doesn't say that. But it does say that
so to bring your second point to consideration, Congress can't issue any law or resolution that gives the President this power
I would refer you to the document again, particularly their response:
In United States v. United States District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972) (the "Keith" case), the Supreme Court concluded that the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement applies to investigations of wholly domestic threats to security--such as domestic political violence and other crimes. But the Court in the Keith case made clear that it was not addressing the President's authority to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance without a warrant and that it was expressly reserving that question: "[T]he instant case requires no judgment on the scope of the President's surveillance power with respect to the activities of foreign powers, within or without this country."
There are several more case citations in the document to back up this point.
I'll certainly have to double check this, but I believe that FISA actually states that it is the sole statute dealing with the subject of foreign intelligence wiretapping.
No, FISA prevents the government from "engag[ing] . . . in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute". SCOTUS case Hamdi v. Rumsfeld referred to in the document confirmed that the AUMF is such a statute.
With all due respect, this is certainly a case for the SCOTUS to decide. That's a pretty bold assertion.
SCOTUS already did decide it in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.
They applauded because Bush's proposals to "fix" social security were terrible
No, they applauded because they think it is more important to score a political victory than it is to solve an inevitable problem.
If they really thought that Bush's proposal was that horrible, they would have come up with a better plan, just as Bush asked them to do in his SOTU address last year.
Exactly. Someone really should have told Bush this before he scrapped a perfectly good 30-year old treaty in favor of science fiction nonsense...
And what exactly does a "perfectly good 30-year old treaty" with a political entity that no longer exist do for us?
You can find out exactly what authority is being asserted from this 42-page DOJ Whitepaper. Read the document to fully answer your question. From the summary:
-The Constitution gives the President sole authority to conduct warrantless surveillance of enemy forces for intelligence purposes to detect and disrupt armed attacks on the United States
-On 9/18/2001, Congress gave the President authority to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided" in terrorist attacks and to "prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States."
-The supreme court rule in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that warrantless electronic surveillance was included in the joint authorization passed on 9/18/2001
-FISA specifically states that Congress can authorize surveillance by a statute other than FISA. The USSC confirmed in Hamdi that the 9/18/2001 joint authorization was an allowable statute.
-The NSA activities all fell within the 4th Amendment exception to the warrant requirement and satisfies and the fundamental requirement of reasonableness
Read the entire document for complete case references and quotes.
That's what I'm trying to do. But apparently you think you countered rather than strengthened the point I was trying to make about the problems that arise when people on differing sides of a debate are operating on different definitions of the word describing the topic they are debating.
Yes. I accept all of the dictionary definitions of the word "science", you accept only one.
And please, do read that dictionary definition again. It may not spell out the words "the scientific method", but what, exactly do you think definition 1a, "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena." is describing?
It is describing the process of human discovery that has occurred as long as intelligent life has existed on this planet. The theory that the world is flat was most certainly derived in this manner. The observation that the earth is locally flat, and the experimental investigation of traveling for miles and miles without detecting any curvature and still observing a locally flat earth led to the very wrong theory that the entire earth is flat.
Moreover, if you're debating with someone who is on the "side" of science in this day and age, what do you think THEY mean when they use the word science?
I guess it would depend on whether they were a rational, thinking scientist, or an intellectual snob like you. Not everybody in the scientific world is so willing to easily discount anything that alters their infallible view of science. In fact, I would expect most rational, thinking scientists to realize that scientific theory can never be proven right -- it can only be proven wrong.
If you'd thrown the word "science" into dictionary.com, which gives responses from several different dictionaries, you'd also have seen this among the results:
Right. And the fact that you are clinging to this specific definition while ignoring the half a dozen other more broad definitions, while at the same time lecturing about a basic misunderstanding about the definition of words, is comical.
Dictionaries will give you both common usage and specific usage definitions for words. If someone debating from a scientist's point of view uses the word "theory", which has a specific definition within science, and rather different defintion in common usage, both which a good dictionary will provide, which definition do you think will help you better understand what the other person was trying to say? It all depends on whether you actually want to understand what the "opposing" side is trying to say, or if your goal is to score "points" by deliberately misinterpreting the intended meaning of the communication for the purpose of "scoring points" by twisting their words around. I just don't see the latter approach as being particularly fruitful, and I actually find it worth spending my time on writing posts like this simply in the hope of lowering the ratio of miscommunication in a discussion.
I'm not deliberately misinterpreting the intended meaning of your communication, I'm saying that the intended meaning of your communication is complete crap. The parent asserted, and you have tried to defend, the claim that "science" is always right. And it turns out that the only reason you are able to claim this is by using a narrow definition of the word "science". Certainly you can see the logical fallacy in the claim "Science is always right because things that are wrong aren't science".
Interesting how you managed to pound out a long winded dissertation on the definition of "science" when you apparently don't even know the definition yourself. This definition is neither strict nor explicitly connected to the Newtonian Scientific Method.
Science, by definition, is a broadly defined as "activities applied to an object of inquiry or study", and your examples of "Invention, research and other progress of human knowledge" clearly fit this definition.
Language is the tool we use to communicate, and if different sides in a debate keep redefining the meaning of the words used to decribe the core concepts being debated, then the language becomes meaningless, and thus, the debate itself will become meaningless, and both sides will be reduced to packs of monkeys trying to out-OOK each other.
Indeed. You should probably work on that.
Typical response from the intellectual snobs. Science isn't really science unless YOU agree with it.
So according to you, when the Aztecs were developing sophisticated agriculture techniques, and creating significant theories about Astronomy and climate, it wasn't really science because Newton hadn't been born yet. And when Lucy the 3-foot tall monkey-human was prancing around Africa and figuring out how to rub sticks together and make fire, that wasn't really science because she didn't know what the word "hypotheses" meant.
And yet you still somehow consider anybody who has the nerve to disagree with your supreme intellectual thought a brainwashed fool who can't comprehend your superior though process.
By it's very definition, Scientific Method requires reproducible experimentation in order to support a hypothesis or prediction. By it's very nature, macro evolution is impossible to experimentally reproduce. Finding small, old bones in Africa only proves that there were small, old bones in Africa. Any further hypothesis generated from this observation has to be supported by reproducible experiments, and the only way to reproduce this experiment would be to put a bunch of monkeys in a closed system and wait around for a few hundred million years to see if they start making cars, programming computers, and flying airplanes.
It is interesting how intellectual snobs, such as yourself, fail to grasp this concept. Macro evolution is not proven by observation as you claim, it is an theory that tries to explain observation.
There have been very few absolute reversals in science, why do you expect that evolution will be any different?
What are you talking about? Science is always changing. A few thousand years ago, Science taught that the world was flat and that the earth was the center of the universe. A few hundred hears ago, science thought that illness meant you were possessed by a demon or troll. If you think that scientific though is not going to be drastically different centuries from now, you are ignoring history.
I understand that the risk that the levees could break was well-known, and that governments (at various levels) decided to do nothing about it.
Actually, no. The only risk that was well-known by the Government was that the levees might overtop and flood (not break) during a Cat 5 storm. Greg Breerword, a deputy district engineer for project management with the Army Corps of Engineers, told the New York Times:
"We knew if it was going to be a Category 5, some levees and some flood walls would be overtopped. We never did think they would actually be breached."
In fact, in 2002 the Bush adminisration commissioned a detailed study to simulate the effects of a Catagory 5 storm on the city of New Orleans, and the LSU engineers who worked on the project specifically stated that a breach in the levees was possible, but not at all expected.
(Quote taken from here)
I'm sorry, but you are just plain wrong. I strongly suggest that you at least read the 20 page key findings summary from the ISG report and educate yourself on this subject beyond a CNN quote. The ISG (and CIA) never said there was no research. On the contrary, they documented 1200+ pages of WMD violations. The first CIA report from David Kay in October 2003 stated:
We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN.
I would quote more from these reports but I an only stomach so much spoon feeding from a report that has been publicly available for a year now.
That said, if an attack is eminent, war is no longer preventative, and is thus justifiable. So to use the Pearl Harbor analogy. If we had intel that said an attack on Pearl was coming soon. I would wait until there was a wave of bombers in the air coming toward Pearl, then scramble intercepters.
This is just silly. When would you have dealt with the 9/11 hijackers? After the plane took off and they pulled the knives out? Do you think that cops shouldn't be able to stop bank robbers until they pull a gun out and point it at a bank teller? We shouldn't stop rapists until they have committed their first rape?
What you don't seem to understand is that inaction puts far more innocent lives at risk. Saddam killed as many as 2,000,000 people before we took him out. If we didn't act, IIS agents would still be kidnapping dissidents and throwing them in jail never to be heard from again, or tossing them over a rooftop, or dipping them into an acid bath, or raping their wives in front of them. Saddam would still be developing weapons capable of killing far more innocent people than have died as a result of the invasion. Terrorists would still be operating and killing innocent people with the full support and training of Iraq. And 25,000,000 innocent Iraqis would be living under the oppressive rule of a brutal tyrant. If you were truly concerned about innocent civilians, it seems you would support removing people like Saddam.
AFAIK they supported the families of Palestinian "martyrs", but that's about it.
Well, no. In addition to the open support of Hamas, Saddam also supported Abu Nidal, Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, PKK, Carlos the Jackal, and Al Qaeda splinter terrorists like Ansar al-Islam, Jund al-Islam, and Abu Musab Zarqawi. He was implicated in numerous global terror threats, including an attempted bombing in Prague, an attempted assassination of a former US President, and assassination attempts on dissidents worldwide. Not to mention the solid evidence that Putin claims to have proving that Iraq was planning terrorist attacks inside the US border.
You could also say that USA sponsors terrorism. School of the Americas anyone?
No, you couldn't. There is no proof whatsoever that the School of Americas provided training to murder innocent civilians, and the actions of the rouge graduates of this training were condemned by our Government.
Iraq's "offensive capabilites" were largely destroyed in the first Gulf War and during the blockade that followed.
Not really. We found clear and documented violations of ballistic missiles capable of exceeding the required 150KM range, and even more evidence that Iraq was arranging the shipment of 2000KM ballistic missiles from North Korea. We also found clear and documented violations in the area of UAV development. This doesn't even include the most obvious and most dangerous offensive capability of terrorism. The only capability required for terrorism is a suitcase and an idiot willing to kill himself to get to 72 virgins in the clouds.
Really?. If you don't want to link, allow me bo shorten the article to you: "Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons at the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003 and had not begun any program to produce them, a CIA report concludes.". AFAIK, the troops discovered few abandoned Iran-war era artillery-munitions in a distant warehouse, but that's it.
Are you under the mistaken impression that the only WMD we should have been concerned about was the 20 year old, halfway potent remnant chemical stockpiles from the Iran/Iraq war that were never accounted for? We never found those, but we did find a long list of new weapons programs that we, and the UN inspectors, had no idea existed. The ISG report was very clear. Saddam was doing a very good job of hiding his WMD research and production plans from the US and the UN inspectors, and his main goal was to resume full scale research and production as soon as the sanctions were lifted. I don't know why you would be so concerned about some non-existent 20 year old mustard shells when the reality of what we found was much more destructive and much more frightening.
And I assume that in this case "interests" mean "steady supply of oil"?
A steady supply of oil isn't just a US interest -- it is a global interest. There is no sense in pretending that the entire world doesn't function around a steady energy supply.
But anyway, they should then stop their bullshit about spreading freedom and democracy, since clearly that is not on their agenda. And looking at past actions of USA, it never really has been.
Blah, blah, blah. Blame the US for everything. We've never heard this before.....
Does the charter not state that war should not be waged without the approval of the security counsel? (Don't try to agrue that it was a legal war becasue we were enforcing the resolutions of an organisation whose laws say that our acts of enforcement were illegal, there is just too much cognitive dissonance there)
The security council voted 17 times to approve the use of force to get Iraq to comply, and never voted to revoke this authorization. Each of these 17 resolutions were passed under the 7th chapter of the UN charter which makes enforcement compulsory for member states.
Honestly it has been a while since I read 687... You are going to have to refresh my memory as to how it is concretecompliance is possible. If I recall correctly that is one of them that calls on Iraq to prove it is free of weapons by allowing inspections. Well, the inspectors didn't find anything (significant) and yet many were convinced that Iraq had banned weapons.
So how exactly is it possible to prove that you don't have something when the accuser can simply claim that you must be hidding it?
You'd better read 687 again to refresh your memory. It affirmed the authorization of force given in 678 for the purposes of 1) Kicking Iraq out of Kuwait, 2) Forcing compliance on WMD, and 3) Restoring peace and security to the region.
And I guess you weren't paying attention when the ISG released their report last year. They found that Iraq was maintaining their prohibited weapons programs, and they were doing a pretty good job hiding those programs from the US and UN inspectors.
SOA has gone alot further than having graduates that became criminals. SOA explicitly trained people in the use of guerilla tactics against populations to inspire fear as a means to influence elections. When Sunni's do that we call it terrorism.
Considering that nobody knows exactly what training took place at the School of Americas, it is interesting how you claim to know what was taught and what the results were from this training.
Some of this is true, some is almost hyperbolically exadgerated. But I will say that if I were in charge of national security, I would go through this process:
1. Gather information
2. Identify threats
3. Prioritize threats
4. Determine what action has the best likelyhood of positive results
5. Determine if the likely results of that action are better than the likely results of inaction
6. Act (if applicable under step 5)
I think this is a perfectly reasonable algorithm. Would you disagree with this?
In my accessment the Bush admin skipped steps a large chunk of 1,3,maybe 4, and definately 5.
I disagree with your assessment. Information was being gathered on Iraq well before they violated international law and invaded Kuwait. The universal conclusion from this information was that Iraq was a threat, which is why the UN security council unanimously voted 17 times to disarm them. Iraq was clearly a top priority threat as well. There were no other countries that were in open defiance of chapter 7 UN resolutions, had a history of attacking non-hostile nations, and were on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. And 9/11 taught us that inaction to these kinds of threats is not acceptable.
Your right war is never perfect, it is also rarely necessary.
In a perfect world, war would never be necessary. A quick reading of any history book will quickly tell you that we are living in a world that is far from perfect.
With USA's backing. USA supported Iraq openly in it's war against Iran. And USA didn't care one bit when Iraq gassed the Kurds.
Wrong. When Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran, the US universally condemned it, immediately passed legislation banning the export of precursor chemicals to Iraq, successfully convinced other western countries to ban the export of these chemicals, and voted for all the UN resolutions condmening the act.
It was? I remember that when the war was "over", Bush gave his "Mission accomplished"-speech. In it he said that "USA has removed major supporter to Al-Qaida". Well, the fact was that Hussein hated Bin Laden, and there was no connection between the two. Bin Laden did contact Hussein and proposed an alliance between the two. Husseins reply was "Not interested. Fuck off". Now, thanks to the invasion, Iraq is excellent breeding-ground for terrorism. And since the invasion, the amount of terrorism in the world has skyrocketed. So if the plan was to reduce terrorism by invading Iraq because they were "supporting terrorism", I think it can be safely said that the plan failed.
Are you ignorantly claiming that Iraq wasn't on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list for the last, say, 30 years?
how exactly? Iraq had no links to the 9/11 it has no offensive capabilities to threaten USA (hell, they had no capabilities to threaten their neighours!) So how was Iraq "threatening"? In a sense that they could in theory do SOMETHING to USA? Well, Finland could in theory do something bad to USA/Americans, are we to be invaded as well?
Iraq's offensive capabilities have been extensively demonstrated and documented for over 2 decades, and their support of international terrorism only strengthened those capabilities. The only offensive capabilities Iraq needed was a few terrorist nuts willing to carry out their plans, just like they were trying to do in Prague and Kuwait and here.
But, all this is besides the point. The reason Iraq was invaded was that they had WMD's, remember? Well, I'm still waiting for those WMD's to be discovered. And when it started to become obvious that there were no WMD's to be found, the reason for the war switched from WMD's to "bringing freedom and democracy to the people of Iraq".
The WMD's have been found and have been extensively documented. The ISG released a 1200+ page report detailing countless WMD violations found after the 2003 invasion, including a number of programs that the UN didn't have a clue about and Iraq was doing a pretty good job of hiding. There is a reason why people like David Kay and Tommy Franks have said that Iraq was more dangerous than we imagined before the war.
I for one find this whole thing to be weird. Apparently USA has the need to spread democracy. Then why is USA being buddies with Pakistan, which is ruled by a military dictator who overthrew a democratically elected government just few years ago? if WMD's are so bad, why is USA friends with Pakistan who has openly admitted that they have nukes? USA says one thing, but they act completely different. If WMD's and dictatorships are bad, then surely Pakistan should be occupied by now?
Clearly WMD's and spreading democracy are not the only considerations. Our leaders should only act when our security or our interests are threatened, which would certainly rule out Pakistan.
Seriously, this talk of "spreading democracy" and "WMD's" is pure bullshit and karma-whoring. Looking at the comments of US Administration before the invasion, it seems that there are three possibilites:
a) They lied
b) Current US Administration is filled with morons who are simply incapable of handling the job they are required to do. Inconsistent foreign-policy ("Dictatorships are bad! But not all dictatorships. WMD's in the hands of dictators are a bad thing! But not always!"), illegal invasions of sovereign nations based on flimsy evidence etc. etc.
c) Both
So, what is it?
I choose: D) The international consensus for the 13 years prior to the invasion was that Iraq was a threat to peace and security, and the 9/11 attacks taught us that we could not allow these kinds of threats to peace and security to go unchecked.
Cheat? Writing software that does what you want it to do isn't cheating, and there is nothing preventing AMD from releasing their own compilers that do the exact same thing.