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Banned
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Originally Posted by reconmike
Homeland was refered to by Slick Willie, only it was a reference to what was behind his zipper, ya know like "come on Monica the homeland needs a little attention".
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reconmike, powerclown, Ustwo....how do you know what you know? You were wrong about WMD, about al Qaeda being in Iraq with Saddam's "approval", "before we got there"....wrong about Iran's "ongoing" nuclear weapons development program.... why don't these "setbacks" trigger any reticence, any reflection about your political opinions?
Aren't people going to die, avoidably, and for no fucking reason, when your wrong? Doesn't that matter to you, even if those killed are American troops?
You've forged quite a reputation on this forum, because of the absurdity of your positions, yet you evidently see no need to seriously back them up, except of course for eye rolling, emotional theatrics, snide, one line drive by posts, and Clinton pee pee jokes.
What's Bush's "saying"....? "Fool me once....shame on...we won't get fooled again". Yet he fools you....a fool fooling you...time after time....and you clamor for more....why?
Could the US treasury be in more dire financial straits, could the US military be more hollowed out....would more Americans be dead, would more middle easterners be dead, would US relations with the rest of the world be worse, had Bush done nothing since 9/11? He's done all of it with your blessings. I never forget that, when I read your posts....do you ever forget that?
Are US troops or citizens, "safer" when they are captured now, by US adversaries, or when the US respected the Geneva convention clauses and did not torture? Are there less foreigners today with deep greivances against the US, than there were on 9/12/01? Could it be conceivable that there are hundreds of thousands of addtional foreign folk with deep seated greivances against the US today, than there were in 2001?
What are your goals? What do you want for the US? What part of them has "Bush team" accomplished?
Quote:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/...nians-wer.html
U.S.: Iranians 'Were a Heartbeat From Being Blown Up'
January 07, 2008 12:57 PM
Jonathan Karl Reports:
The standoff between three U.S. Navy ships and five Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz Sunday was one step away from turning violent.
"They were a heartbeat from being blown up," a Pentagon official, speaking of the Iranians, told ABC News.
According to the Navy intelligence report on the incident, the Iranians radioed, "I am coming at you. You will blow up in a couple of minutes."
The Navy ships radioed back, presumably transmitting a warning. All three ships also engaged in "evasive action," and according to senior Pentagon officials, the "prepare-to-fire" order had been given and the gun stations manned.
Pentagon officials today expressed surprise the Navy ships allowed at least one of the Iranian speedboats to get so close -- just 200 yards away -- without firing.
They say at least one of those speedboats boasted a machine gun, and all were behaving as if they were packed with explosives.
A Navy official told ABC News that while there have been similar incidents in the Gulf, Sunday's differed because of the "aggressive actions" taken by the Iranians.
"I've never seen a provocation like this is in international waters," another military official who has served for more than 25 years said.
The White House seconded that notion.
"We urge the Iranians to refrain from such provocative actions that could lead to dangerous incidents in the future," White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto said.
Published reports cite the Iranian Foreign Ministry as confirming the incident but calling it "ordinary."....
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Quote:
Press Gaggle by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and Press ...
Jan 9, 2008 ... HADLEY: This was a serious incident, and it almost involved an exchange of fire between our forces and Iranian forces. ...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20080109.html
President Bush and Prime Minister Olmert Participate in Joint ...
We have made it clear publicly, and they know our position, and that is, there will be serious consequences if they attack our ships, pure and simple. ...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0080109-4.html
http://www.voanews.com/persian/archi...TOKEN=82118255
News and Views January 11 reported that Iran aired a new tape meant to reinforce Tehran’s argument that the incident between Iranian Revolutionary Guard patrols and US warships on Sunday was a “normal inspections of vessels,” not a hostile act. In an exclusive interview with PNN, Commander Lydia Robertson, spokesperson for the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, said the fast boats – highly maneuverable patrol craft – were “visibly armed” and began aggressive maneuvers against the three American ships, steaming in formation into the Persian Gulf.....
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<h3>VS. REALITY:</h3>
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DefenseLink News Transcript: DoD News Briefing with Vice Adm ...
Jan 7, 2008 ... And I didn't get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats. ...
...The behavior of the Iranian ships was, in my estimation, unnecessary, without due regard for safety of navigation and unduly provocative in the sense of the aggregate of their maneuvers, the radio call and the dropping of objects in the water......
....Q Admiral, Jim Miklaszewski with NBC.
At any time, <h3>did any of the crew members radio to these five boats, warning that they could come under fire?</h3> And given the experience of the suicide bombing on the USS Cole, why did not any of these ships at least fire warning shots?
ADM. COSGRIFF: I think that without getting into the specifics of our tactics, it's fair for you and your readers and listeners to assume that we do have procedures that are measured. They are escalatory. Radio calls were made from the U.S. warships. They were not heeded. The ships were stepping through the procedures, including increased readiness, onboard readiness. It is the judgment of the commanding officer, in the totality of the situation, what the next step is to take and when to take it. <h3>In this case, the commanding officers did not believe they needed to fire warning shots. </h3>
Indeed, I should also say, this happened fairly quickly. So the time from when you might consider a radio call, to maybe some additional measures up to but before warning shots, transpired fairly quickly. But again they followed the procedures to the letter, and <h3>it was their judgment in the totality of the information they had in the situation, that warning shots were not necessary.</h3>
.......
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcrip...nscriptid=4116
Iranian Boats May Not Have Made Radio Threat, Pentagon Says
Jan 11, 2008 ... "No one in the military has said that the transmission emanated from those boats. But when they hear it simultaneously to the behavior of ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...000692_pf.html
Iran Shows Its Own Video of Vessels’ Encounter in Gulf - New York ...
Jan 11, 2008 ... Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast had come from shore, or from another ship nearby. They said it might have ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/wo...muz.html?fta=y
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Quote:
http://hamptonroads.com/2008/01/navy...an-speed-boats
Navy commanders detail incident with Iranian speed boats
U.S. Navy Captain David Adler, right, and Commander Jeffery James, left, at the U.S. Navy base in Manama, Bahrain, on Sunday. (Hasan Jamali | AP)
By Steve Stone
The Virginian-Pilot
© January 14, 2008
..."We saw Iranian flags on at least one," Adler said. And one had what appeared to be a weapons mount but "it was just too far away to tell" if there was a weapon on it...
.....The packages were placed in the water alongside the warships and ahead of them.
"I saw them float by," Adler said. "They didn't look that threatening to me."
Meanwhile, "We were going through our pre-planned response and our measured, very disciplined responses trying to warn them off before we had to take any lethal action," James said. "And, fortunately for everybody involved, <h3>they turned outbound before we got to the point where we needed to open fire."...</h3>
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More Official US "Iran bashing":
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Then there was the Explosively Formed Projectile (EFP) story of Iranians supplying Shia militias with especially lethal IEDs which the military and intelligence community pitched to credulous journalists. On February 10, 2007, Michael Gordon came out with the first of several pieces at the New York Times which were notable for their anonymous sourcing and unsubstantiated claims. These articles were heavily criticized in the blogosphere but it didn't stop Gordon from revisiting the subject on March 27, 2007 and August 8, 2007 and recycling many of the previous charges.
....<h3>In Gordon's original piece the accusation was made that the smuggling of EFPs into Iraq was "approved by Supreme Leader Khamenei and carried out by the Quds Force." This claim quickly fell apart but it did not stop Bush without any additional evidence from asserting</h3> in a February 14, 2007 Valentine's Day presser:
I can say with certainty that the Quds Force, a part of the Iranian government, has provided these sophisticated I.E.D.'s that have harmed our troops . . . And I'd like to repeat, I do not know whether or not the Quds Force was ordered from the top echelons of the government. But my point is, what's worse, them ordering it and it happening, or them not ordering it and its happening?
Blaming the Iranians for American deaths in Iraq provided a useful excuse for Bush's failures there and helped gin up the case for a future conflict with Iran.
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<h3>Boys, how many times will the NeoCons manipulate your concern and emotions, your patriotic "fervor"? They can only do it to you if you're already open to it, and you let them.....</h3>
The editor, Bill Keller, and the public editor of the NY Times admit that they willingly allowed themselves to be fooled by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney concerning justification for invading Iraq. Surely these NY Times staffers are not men of greater integrity, higher principle, than you guys are?
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February 25, 2007
The Public Editor
Approaching Iran Intelligence With Intelligent Skepticism
By BYRON CALAME
COVERAGE of the American saber- rattling about Iranian intervention in Iraq posed an important test for The New York Times, <h3>given the paper’s discredited pre-war articles about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.</h3> And it has triggered a rash of complaints from readers who believed The Times was again serving as a megaphone for the White House.
I decided to review The Times’s articles of the past month, focusing on two key aspects of newsroom culture that affect the coverage of intelligence and national security. The degree of skepticism was an obvious choice, given the lack of it during the pre-war embarrassment. The other was the level of editing vigilance reflected in the stories.
This time the issue is whether the Iranian government is providing weapons and support to Shiite militias in Iraq. The Times and other media had frequently mentioned, as early as 2005, the military’s belief that some sophisticated roadside bombs were coming from Iran. By late 2006 these bombs, known as explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.’s, were killing a larger number of Americans. The growing death toll caused the commanders in Iraq to call for action.
The problem came front and center early this year after President Bush had authorized raids on Iranian facilities in Iraq in an attempt to confirm and disrupt the suspected flow of E.F.P.’s. When the Iranian ambassador to Iraq, among others, called for an explanation of the raids, the Bush administration promised to provide one shortly. Then a Page 1 story in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/world/middleeast/10weapons.html">The Times on Saturday, Feb. 10</a>, reported an intelligence community consensus that Iran is providing the deadly E.F.P.’s, and offered fresh details. That Sunday in Baghdad, military officials gave an anonymous briefing about the bombs. Later in the week, at a news conference, the president addressed the issue.
The situation closely parallels the pre-war period when The Times prominently reported that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Deeply shamed when they were not found, the paper <a href="http://nytimes.com/ref/international/middleeast/20040526CRITIQUE.html">publicly acknowledged</a> that its coverage had been “insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.”
Times editors clearly were mindful of the W.M.D. coverage as they pursued the Iranian weapons issue. “W.M.D. has informed everything we’ve done on Iran,” Bill Keller, the executive editor, told me three days after the Baghdad briefing. “We don’t have to tell the reporters to be as skeptical as possible. W.M.D. restored a level of skepticism.”
The skepticism and qualification, for example, were woven into <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/world/middleeast/12weapons.html">The Times’s Feb. 12 article</a> about the Baghdad briefing. The result was solid journalism that helped readers sort out the physical evidence — such as captured roadside bombs with serial numbers — from the intelligence assessments based on inferences and deductions.
Consider this healthy skepticism in the third paragraph of the story by James Glanz from Baghdad: “The officials also asserted, without providing direct evidence, that Iranian leaders had authorized smuggling those weapons into Iraq for use against the Americans. The officials said such an assertion was an inference based on general intelligence assessments.”
Qualifications appropriately permeated the article. The unnamed military officials, it said, asserted “without specific evidence that the Iranian security apparatus, called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force controlled delivery of the materials to Iraq. And in a further inference, the officials asserted that the Quds Force, sometimes called the I.R.G.C.- Quds, could be involved only with Iranian government complicity.”
The Times’s in-depth Saturday article laying out details of the E.F.P. issue contained a clear-cut qualification, prominently placed right in the second paragraph: “The assertion of an Iranian role in supplying the device to Shiite militias reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies, although officials acknowledge that the picture is not entirely complete.” The story by Michael R. Gordon, the paper’s chief military correspondent, had been in the works for more than two weeks and was published after The Times learned on Friday that the military briefing was scheduled for Sunday, Mr. Keller said.
(Mr. Gordon has become a favorite target of many critical readers, who charge that the paper’s Iran coverage is somehow tainted because he had shared the byline on a flawed Page 1 W.M.D. article. I don’t buy that view, and I think the quality of his current journalism deserves to be evaluated on its own merits.)
While the Saturday scoop relied heavily on anonymous sources from unnamed agencies, the article described an admirable search for those likely to have differing views. It cited interviews with “civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies,” and pointed out that group included “some whose agencies have previously been skeptical about the significance of Iran’s role in Iraq.”
One intelligence “assessment” in the Saturday article, however, needed some qualification. “As part of its strategy in Iraq,” the story said, “Iran is implementing a deliberate, calibrated policy — approved by Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei and carried out by the Quds Force. ...” To the extent that the assessment was based on inferences, readers deserved to be reminded of that. And they deserved a clearer sense of the extent to which the “broad agreement” cited high up in the article applied to this specific assessment.
The Times continued to seek reaction to the E.F.P. intelligence from a variety of government officials, turning up <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/world/middleeast/13weapons.html">what a Page 1 article on Feb. 13</a> termed a “healthy dose of skepticism.” The next day, President Bush addressed the credibility of the intelligence assessments at a news conference, saying he was certain that factions within the Iranian government had supplied the roadside bombs. But he carefully added: “I do not know whether or not the Quds Force was ordered from the top echelons of the government” — a point made in the lead paragraph of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/world/middleeast/15prexy.html">The Times’s story on Feb. 15</a>.
Editing vigilance on intelligence and national security coverage means dealing with the <a href=""http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/opinion/30publiceditor.html>anonymous sourcing</a> that many deem essential to bringing vital issues to light in that murky area. So editors need to ensure that unnamed sources are in a position to know and that any biases are clear to the reporter.
The Times’s most important requirement for anonymous sources — that an editor must know their identity — was followed for Mr. Gordon’s Feb. 10 story. Douglas Jehl, a deputy chief of the Washington bureau and his editor, told me he knew the name of each anonymous source in the article. The story also attempted a generalized explanation of why the officials were willing to talk. I do wish, however, that the article had found a way to comply with the paper’s policy of explaining why sources are allowed to remain unnamed.
The risk that the anonymity masked a policy-driven leak such as those that fed some of The Times’s pre-war W.M.D. coverage was reviewed before the Feb. 10 article was published. In an e-mail, Philip Taubman, the Washington bureau chief, wrote that he asked early on: “Did a tip or information come from the policy echelons of the government, from intelligence agencies, from American commanders and troops in Iraq?” In this case, he said: “Michael Gordon’s coverage started at ground level in Iraq, and has not been based on policy-driven leaks in Washington.”
Failing to reach out for dissenting views was a pre-war shortcoming, The Times has previously acknowledged. So even after Mr. Gordon had “nailed” key parts of the Feb. 10 article, according to Mr. Keller, editors specifically asked him “to talk to places in government that had been skeptical of W.M.D.,” such as the State Department.
Still, editors didn’t make sure all conflicting views were always clearly reported. For example, the article on Mr. Bush’s news conference pointed out that the position of the president — and the similar position taken earlier in the week by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — differed from the suggestion at the Sunday Baghdad briefing that the weapons effort involved top levels of the Iranian government. That story also should have noted, however, that the president’s view on this point differed from the intelligence assessment given readers of the Feb. 10 article.
On balance, The Times’s E.F.P. stories of the past month — especially the carefully qualified Baghdad briefing article — reflected healthy levels of skepticism and editing vigilance. They also showed that it’s possible for coverage not to be totally dictated by government intelligence leaks. And that lesson could serve Times readers well if the administration should ever decide to publicly invoke intelligence assessments in its simmering struggle to restrain Iran’s development of a nuclear capability.
The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.
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Last edited by host; 04-13-2008 at 01:33 PM..
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