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Originally Posted by Mojo_PeiPei
Hundreds of thousands of people now?
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Originally Posted by DoubleK
One hundred million, even.
Mayhaps, soon, a billion?
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You both know about this:
Quote:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...593607,00.html
The secret Downing Street memo
.......................C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August. (2002) .........................
.........................The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.
The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change......................
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You know that the Bush administration has admitted that there were no WMD in Iraq, as they described them in 2002 and in early 2003, and that they had no evidence that WMD were transferred out of Iraq.
Can either of you post your opinion on how high the resulting death count of an invasion and a war that was contrived under the circumstances described above: <h3>Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.</h3>?
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http://www.roberthjackson.org/theman2-7-8-2.asp (ninth paragraph)
The United States chief prosecutor at Nuremberg declared to the world in his closing statement at the trial of the principle Nazi war criminals, that "We charge unlawful aggression but we are not trying the motives, hopes, or frustrations which may have led Germany to resort to aggressive war as an instrument of policy. The law, unlike politics, does not concern itself with the good or evil in the status quo, nor with the merits of the grievances against it. It merely requires that the status quo be not attacked by violent means and that policies be not advanced by war."
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Your posts, quoted above, lead me to suspect that neither of you is yet ready to consider the possibility that your president, and the PM of the UK, and high ranking civilian and military government officials in the U.S. and in the UK, should be investigated and tried for war crimes against humanity by an independent, interntaional, prosecutorial entity. That, however, is the sad, current state of affairs that Bush, Blair, et al, have put themselves, and us, in.
I answered your question here, Mojo_PeiPei :
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...0&postcount=10
I told you "how Bush is a war criminal". Is your reaction to split hairs with ObieX on the reported number of war related deaths in Iraq. I'll provide some more info on the number of deaths, but understand that the U.S. position when the Nazis were prosecuted was that the principle crime was initiating aggressive war and invasion against other jurisdictions for political purposes.
The developments today make a convincing argument that the US and UK have now done exactly that. If this is true, the war crimes accusations are valid, whether they result in one death or in a million.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Oct28.html
100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A16
One of the first attempts to independently estimate the loss of civilian life from the Iraqi war has concluded that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died because of the U.S. invasion................
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Quote:
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/
PR10: Monday 7th November 2004
IBC response to the Lancet study estimating "100,000" Iraqi deaths
Some people have asked us why we have not increased our count to 100,000 in the light of the multiple media reports of the recent Lancet study [link] which claims this as a probable and conservative estimate of Iraqi casualties.
Iraq Body Count does not include casualty estimates or projections in its database. It only includes individual or cumulative deaths as directly reported by the media or tallied by official bodies (for instance, by hospitals, morgues and, in a few cases so far, NGOs), and subsequently reported in the media. In other words, each entry in the Iraq Body Count data base represents deaths which have actually been recorded by appropriate witnesses - not "possible" or even "probable" deaths.
The Lancet study's headline figure of "100,000" excess deaths is a probabilistic projection from a small number of reported deaths - most of them from aerial weaponry - in a sample of 988 households to the entire Iraqi population. Only those actual, war-related deaths could be included in our count..............
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Quote:
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=4292
US Cannot Tune Out Its Iraq Crisis
Ghida Fakhry
The Financial Times, 2 May 2004
You want a solution? Change the channel - it's all propaganda and lies." This is how Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, US military spokesman in Iraq, responded to doubts raised by images from Iraq broadcast by Arab television channels. Gen Kimmit's words echoed the increasing nervousness of US officials towards the Arabic satellite TV networks, which they sometimes dub 'the anti-coalition media'.
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