ok, whats going on with all the oil? - Page 2 - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

Elphaba · 09-12-2006, 10:10 PM

An aside perhaps.

OPEC is not pleased with the recent fall in the price per bbl and is contemplating reducing output to keep prices high. Keeping prices over $70 seems to be the new target in manipulating available oil.

Charlatan · 09-13-2006, 04:57 AM

You should all remember that it isn't OPEC that is making the most money out of the high price of oil... it is Big Oil. This isn't neccessarily a bad thing, it's just something you should remember before pointing fingers at OPEC (not that anyone was yet).

aceventura3 · 09-13-2006, 06:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

What else have you got? ....and is there anything that could be presented to you that would lessen your certainty that invading Iraq was a wise, or a justified decsion for president Bush to make?

I base my views on my analysis of the situation. What would change my mind is a presentation of a credible plan of action that would secure the oil market in the Middle East and bring stability to the region. A plan that doesn't involve the threatened use and willingness to use the military as some suggest.

Many seem to be arguing points and issues that are different than what I consider important. For example - The record shows Saddaam had no nuclear weapons. I accept that, howerver, I believe he would have instituted a progam, get the weapons and use them. Some some keep arguing the point about him not having the weapons or a program therefore the invasion was not needed. What I am saying is - Saddaam wanted to control the territory and oil in the middle east, invaded countries in the past, defyed UN mandates, and he would have used nuclear weapons when it obtained them.

That situation was unacceptable in my opinion.

The oil for food program shows we did not have him or the situation under control.

Saddamm needed to go.

He was a threat.

Military action was needed.

Acting after the fact would have been much more costly.

I know I am repeating myself, but I bring up the same points because I don't think I have ever recieved direct responses.

dc_dux · 09-13-2006, 06:18 AM

Iraqi PM Al-Maliki started an official visit to Iran yesterday:

Quote:

Al-Malikisaid Iran was an important and friendly country for Iraq, adding the two sides face bright horizons for expansion of bilateral cooperation in the future. He assessed as fruitful his visit to Tehran, saying it was a turning point in ties between the two sides.

Pointing to good ties between Tehran and Baghdad, Iran President Ahmadinejad termed his talks with the Iraqi premier as "very good", saying, "The two sides share common stance on regional and international issues. Both sides are determined to consolidate brotherly ties."

Ace....So what we have done through our invasion and your so-called "foothold" is to make Iraq another puppet state of the fundies in Iran, along with Syria, and to a lesser extent, Lebanon, through control of Hezballah.

Sound strategic thinking.........If your strategic goal was to increase Iran's influence and power in the region.

BTW, Al-Maliki is the number two man in the Dawa Party:

Quote:

The Islamic Dawa Party or Islamic Call Party (Arabic حزب الدعوة الإسلامية Hizb al-Da'wa al-Islamiyya) is, historically, a militant Shiite Islamic group and, presently, an Iraqi political party. Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq are two of the main parties in the religious-Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, which won a plurality of seats in both the provisional January 2005 Iraqi election and the longer-term December 2005 election.

The political ideology of al-Da'wa is heavily influenced by work done by Baqr al-Sadr who laid out four mandatory principles of governance in his 1975 work, Islamic Political System. These were:

1. Absolute sovereignty belongs to God.
2. Islamic injunctions are the basis of legislation. The legislative authority may enact any law not repugnant to Islam.
3. The people, as vice-regents of Allah, are entrusted with legislative and executive powers.
4. The jurist holding religious authority represents Islam. By confirming legislative and executive actions, he gives them legality."

Ace...do you believe having Dawa and SCIRI in control in Iraq is good for the political stability and long term future of the region, and subsequently, the US?

Willravel · 09-13-2006, 07:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

I base my views on my analysis of the situation. What would change my mind is a presentation of a credible plan of action that would secure the oil market in the Middle East and bring stability to the region. A plan that doesn't involve the threatened use and willingness to use the military as some suggest.

What about investing a fraction of what we've spent on the war in alternative fuels? Instead of continuing to invest in an exhaustable resource, and a resource that seems to fuel war, we might consider trying to make things like hydrogen, biodiesel, etc. more efficient. It is conceivable that if the time and money put into oil were invested in something renewable and something we can produce at home, our econemy would become more stable, global terrorism would decrease (because we would no longer be forced to interfere with or go to war with ME countries), our environment would improve considerably, and we would be investing in our own fuel production.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

Many seem to be arguing points and issues that are different than what I consider important. For example - The record shows Saddaam had no nuclear weapons. I accept that, howerver, I believe he would have instituted a progam, get the weapons and use them. Some some keep arguing the point about him not having the weapons or a program therefore the invasion was not needed. What I am saying is - Saddaam wanted to control the territory and oil in the middle east, invaded countries in the past, defyed UN mandates, and he would have used nuclear weapons when it obtained them.

You believe that he had the capability to find, build or buy nuclear weapons? Because the CIA and most other inteligence agencies would disagree with you, and they have evidence and testimony to back their conclusions. General Zinni, a man I greatly respect, explained the situation quite well. As quoed in Host's post above:

Quote:

Originally Posted by GEN. ZINNI

Well, I—first of all, I saw it in the way the intelligence was being portrayed. I knew the intelligence; I saw it right up to the day of the war. I was asked at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing a month before the war if I thought the threat was imminent. I didn’t. Many of the people I know that were involved in the intelligence side of this, or, or in the military felt the same way. I saw the—what this town is known for: spin, cherry-picking facts, using metaphors to evoke certain emotional responses, or, or shading the, the context. We, we know the mushroom clouds and, and the other things that were all described that the media’s covered well. I saw on the ground, though, a sort of walking away from 10 years worth of planning.

One of the spun stories was that of Saddam's ability to make war. If you asked any General who was involved in ME politics before the Second Gulf War, they will tell you that Saddam's power was deterriorating at an alarming rate. This was the post war plan after Desert Storm 1. It was working. Then came Bush version 2.0 and his administration of cowboys.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

The oil for food program shows we did not have him or the situation under control.

That shows that not even the UN is capable of being free of corruption, something that shouldn't suprise anyone.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

Saddamm needed to go.

He was a threat.

Military action was needed.

Acting after the fact would have been much more costly.

How terribly incorrect. Saddam was not a threat t the US. Saddam was no longer a thread to his neighbors. Saddam was heading towards not even being a threat to his own people. Military action was taken by the US not because of Saddam's ability to make war, but beacuse of these reasons among others:
1) W. Bush hates Saddam Husain. He's hated him since the early 90s. He has been very public about how he feels.
2) Iraq has oil fields, and our president is an oil tycoon (a failed one, but one non the less).
3) Our vice president used to work for Haliburton, a provider of products and services to the oil undistry.
4) War time presidents are allowed to get away with more.
5) The PNAC gang has been planning this for over 10 years, and they assumed that Sadam would become more powerful in their 10 year old plan.
6) Jesus told Bush to go to war.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

I know I am repeating myself, but I bring up the same points because I don't think I have ever recieved direct responses.

I hope my responses are more direct, and I apologize if my previous responses have not.

roachboy · 09-13-2006, 07:19 AM

what i do not understand is the linkage between the tanking situation and iraq and oil prices more broadly.
i understand direction no. 1 taken by the thread--the actions of everybody's favorite war profiteers at halliburton--but not the link to the ongoing spiked gas prices.
i understand direction no. 2 as well: the question of whether there is a way to use oil as a wedge to continue supporting the iraq debacle. i still haven't found a better book than michael klare's "resource wards" on american energy policy--there is little doubt that the invasion of iraq fits into the logic of long-term strategies centered around securing oil supplies that have shaped a significant aspect of american foriegn policy of the last 30 years or so. at the same time, this was not the way the war was sold...and the problems with the sales job, the deceptions upon which it was based, and the debacle that the bush people unleashed on themselves, on the americans in the military, on iraq, on the region, and on the planet have been rehearsed above and elsewhere.

i find it interesting to see ace trying to work with the fragments of rationale that the bush administration now relies on to continue fobbing off its self-defeating policies on the people. i think he presents an unwinnable case as well as could be expected.

but i still do not see any actual argument for or data about the linkage between what is happening in iraq and oil prices.
i am obviously not saying that i am suspicious about the existence of such links--i would just like to know what they are.

host · 09-13-2006, 11:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

......Many seem to be arguing points and issues that are different than what I consider important. For example - The record shows Saddaam had no nuclear weapons. I accept that, howerver, I believe he would have instituted a progam, get the weapons and use them. Some some keep arguing the point about him not having the weapons or a program therefore the invasion was not needed. What I am saying is - Saddaam wanted to control the territory and oil in the middle east, invaded countries in the past, defyed UN mandates, and he would have used nuclear weapons when it obtained them.

That situation was unacceptable in my opinion.

The oil for food program shows we did not have him or the situation under control.

Saddamm needed to go.

He was a threat.

Military action was needed.

Acting after the fact would have been much more costly.

I know I am repeating myself, but I bring up the same points because I don't think I have ever recieved direct responses.

aceventura3, the last sentence in your above quote, IMO, is contradicted by what the Duelfer report said, documented in the article that I included in my last post. Twice, now, I'm making a sincere and thorough effort to demonstrate, and document, why I believe that the Bush administration had no basis for pre-emptive invasion and occupation of Iraq, for the justifications that you maintain are valid and legal. Kindly respond with some references that explain what triggered the "About Face", that changed the threat that Saddam's Iraq posed to the US, considering the comments of Powell, Rice, and DIA chief Thomas R. Wilson, in 2001, before 9/11, and Cheney's 9/16/01 statment that we had Saddam Hussein, "bottled up".

I would think that you would perceive a motivation to defend your justification for the invasion, since the record strongly indicates that Saddam posed no threat, in Cheney's own opinion, as late as on 9/16/01, Powell said that the sanctions against Iraq had been reformed to keep Saddam from obtaining WMD, Duelfer reported that there was no program to obtain or rebuild the WMD capability, and ten days before the invasion, the WMD inspection program was back in place in Iraq, and the French Foreign Minister, Villepin, made a speech before the UN, stating that:

Quote:

<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/07/villepin.transcript/">Villepin: 'War is acknowledgment of failure'</a>
.....And what have the inspectors told us? That for a month Iraq has been actively cooperating with them, that substantial progress has been made in the area of ballistics with the progressive destruction of al-Samoud II missiles and their equipment, that new prospects are opening up with the recent question of several scientists. Significant evidence of real disarmament has now been observed, and that is indeed the key to Resolution 1441.

Therefore, I would like solemnly to address a question to this body, and it's the very same question being asked by people all over the world. Why should we now engage in war with Iraq? And I would also like to ask, why smash the instruments that have just proven their effectiveness? Why choose division when our unity and our resolve are leading Iraq to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction? Why should we wish to proceed by force at any price when we can succeed peacefully?

War is always an acknowledgment of failure. Let us not resign ourselves to the irreparable. Before making our choice, let us weigh the consequences. Let us measure the effects of our decision. And it's clear to all in Iraq, we are resolutely moving toward completely eliminating programs of weapons of mass destruction. The method that we have chosen worked. ........

aceventura3, as you can see, I'm documenting that Powell said he had worked to "reform" the sanctions, and right after the 9/11 attacks, Cheney said that Saddam was "bottled up". Rice had the same opinion, six weeks before 9/11. When the US invaded Iraq, Villepin had said in his speech, ten days before that the WMD inspectors were back in Iraq, and making serious progress for "a month". I will credit the Bush policy of assembling a threat of use of military force, under the resolution of the UN, for restoring the inspections teams that "were making progress".

aceventura3, the scenario that you wanted to keep Saddam from restarting WMD development or obtaining and holding WMD, was in place, by all accounts, before Bush ordered the military invasion. To order invasion, in spite of that, is a war crime, similar to shooting a disarmed "suspect", after calling away the police who were frisking him for hidden weapons....just because....you...with the gun, still felt threatened by the suspect. Your stance IMO, reduced to unsubstantiated and it follows...unjustified, pre-emptive war.....is one that both Bush and Cheney failed to justify, in new attempts in the last few days, probably because of the huge, contrary body of evidence that hangs over this. A strong case, IMO, can also be made that the invasion of Iraq was not justified to the point that arguments that it was an illegal war of aggression, must be respected, and without any more valid justification than Bush and Cheney can now come up with, may end up prevailing.

Quote:

http://davidcorn.com/
September 12, 2006
For Bush, a 9/11 Anniversary Changes Nothing:
I am often asked why we are in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat.

But what is the president's evidence for that? As our book notes, the final report of the Iraq Survey Group - the CIA-Defense Department unit that searched for WMDs in Iraq - concluded that Saddam's WMD capability "was essentially destroyed in 1991" and Saddam had no "plan for the revival of WMD." The book also quotes little-noticed congressional testimony that Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson, then head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, gave in March 2002. He noted that Iraq was not among the most pressing "near-term concerns" to U.S. interests and that as a military danger Iraq was "smaller and weaker" than during the Persian Gulf War. Wilson testified that Saddam possessed only "residual" amounts of weapons of mass destruction, not a growing arsenal. In an interview for the book, he told us, "I didn't really think [Saddam and Iraq] were an immediate threat on WMD."

Quote:

http://russia.shaps.hawaii.edu/secur...lson_2002.html
Global Threats and Challenges

Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson
Director, Defense Intelligence Agency

Statement for the Record
Senate Armed Services Committee

19 March 2002
......Iraq

Saddam's goals remain to reassert his rule over the Kurds in northern Iraq, undermine all UN restrictions on his military capabilities, and make Iraq the predominant military and economic power in the Persian Gulf and the Arab world. The on-going UN sanctions and US military presence continue to be the keys to restraining Saddam's ambitions. Indeed, years of UN sanctions, embargoes, and inspections, combined with US and Coalition military actions, have significantly degraded Iraq's military capabilities. Saddam's military forces are much smaller and weaker than those he had in 1991. Manpower and equipment shortages, a problematic logistics system, and fragile military morale remain major shortcomings. Saddam's paranoia and lack of trust - and related oppression and mistreatment - extend to the military, and are a drain on military effectiveness....

.....Iraq retains a residual level of WMD and missile capabilities. The lack of intrusive inspection and disarmament mechanisms permits Baghdad to enhance these programs........

...and from David Corn's Sept. 11, 2006 entry on davidcorn.com, again, reacting to Cheney's statements to Tim Russert, on Sept. 10, 2006:

Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday, Cheney encountered a decent grilling from host Tim Russert, who pressed him on how Cheney and George W. Bush had justified the war in Iraq. "Based on what you know now, that Saddam did not have the weapons of mass destruction that were described, would you still have gone into Iraq?" Russert asked. Yes, indeed, Cheney said, hewing to the company line. And he pointed to what appeared to be evidence that supported that no-regrets stance:

Look at the Duelfer Report and what it said. No stockpiles, but they also said he has the capability. He'd done it before. He had produced chemical weapons before and used them. He had produced biological weapons. He had a robust nuclear program in '91. All of this is true, said by Duelfer, facts.

Well, let's look at the report of Charles Duelfer who headed up the Iraq Survey Group, which was responsible for searching for WMDs after the invasion. (Duelfer took the job following David Kay's resignation in late 2003.) It just so happens that in our new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?link_code=ur2&tag=davidcorncom-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&location=%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F0307346811%2Fsr%3D8-1%2Fqid%3D1156557686%2Fref%3Dsr_1_1%3Fie%3DUTF8">Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War</a>, Michael Isikoff and I quote from that report, and it noted that Saddam's WMD capability was essentially destroyed in 1991.

That is the opposite of what Cheney told Russert the report said. Cheney went on to remark,

Think where we'd be if [Saddam] was still there...We also would have a situation where he would have resumed his WMD programs.

<h3>Yet Duelfer reported that at the time of the invasion, Saddam had no plan for the revival of WMD.</h3>

Cheney even justified the invasion of Iraq by citing an allegation that was just debunked in a Senate intelligence committee report released on Friday. Claiming there was a significant relationship between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda, he cited the case of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (who was recently killed in Iraq). After the US attacked the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Cheney said, Zarqawi

fled and went to Baghdad and set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of '02 and was there from then, basically, until basically the time we launched into Iraq.

The implication here is that Baghdad sanctioned the terrorist activity of Zarqawi, a supposed al Qaeda associate. But the Senate intelligence committee report--released by a Republican-run panel--noted that prior to the invasion of Iraq Zarqawi and his network were not part of al Qaeda. (That merging came after the invasion.) More important, the report cites CIA reports (based on captured documents and interrogations) that say that Baghdad was not protecting or assisting Zarqawi when he was in Iraq. In fact, Iraqi intelligence in the spring of 2002 had formed a "special committee" to locate and capture him--but failed to find the terrorist. A 2005 CIA report concluded that prior to the Iraq war,

the [Saddam] regime did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates.

So why is Cheney still holding up Zarqawi as evidence that Baghdad was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden? If he knows something the CIA does not, perhaps he should inform the agency.

During the Meet the Press interview, Cheney blamed the CIA for his and Bush's prewar assertions that Iraq posed a WMD threat. That's what the intelligence said, Cheney insisted. Our book shows that this explanation (or, defense) is a dodge. There were dissents within the intelligence community on key aspects of the WMD argument for war--especially the charge that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Cheney dwelled on that frightening possibility before the war, repeatedly declaring that the US government knew for sure that Iraq had revved up its nuclear program. Yet there was only one strong piece of evidence for this claim--that Iraq had purchased tens of thousands of aluminum tubes for use in a centrifuge that would produce enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb. And that piece of evidence was hotly contested within the intelligence community.

One CIA analyst (whom we name for the first time in Hubris) was fiercely pushing the tube case. Yet practically every other top nuclear expert in the US government (including the centrifuge specialists at the Department of Energy) disagreed. This dispute was even mentioned in The Washington Post in September 2002. But neither Cheney nor Bush (nor national security adviser Condoleezza Rce) took an interest in this important argument. Instead, they kept insisting the tube purchases were proof Saddam was building a bomb. They were wrong. And the nuclear scientists at the Department of Energy (again, as our book notes) were ordered not to say anything publicly about the tubes.

This is but one example of how the Bush White House rigged the case for war by selectively embracing (without reviewing) convenient pieces of iffy intelligence and then presenting them to the public as hard-and-fast proof. But Cheney is right--to a limited extent. The CIA did provide the White House with intelligence that was wrong (which the White House then used irresponsibly). The new Senate intelligence report, though, shows that this was not what happened regarding one crucial part of the Bush-Cheney argument for war: that al Qaeda and Iraq were in cahoots.

Before the war, Bush said that Saddam "was dealing" with al Qaeda. He even charged that Saddam had "financed" al Qaeda. The Senate intelligence report notes clearly that the prewar intelligence on this critical issue said no such thing.

The report quotes a CIA review of the prewar intelligence: "The data reveal few indications of an established relationship between al-Qa'ida and Saddam Hussein's regime." The lead Defense Intelligence Analyst on this issue told the Senate intelligence committee that "there was no partnership between the two organizations." And post-invasion debriefings of former Iraqi regime officials indicated that Saddam had no interest in working with al Qaeda and had refused to meet with an al Qaeda emissary in 1998.

The report also augments the section in our book on Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a captured al Qaeda commander who was taken by the CIA to Egypt where he was roughly--perhaps brutally--interrogated and claimed that Iraq had provided chemical weapons training to al Qaeda. Though there were questions about al-Libi's veracity from the start, Secretary of State Colin Powell used al-Libi's claims in his famous UN speech to argue that Saddam and Osama bin Laden were partners in evil--that there was a "sinister nexus" between the two. Al-Libi later recanted, and the CIA withdrew all the intelligence based on his claims. In other words, the Bush administration had hyped flimsy intelligence to depict Saddam and bin Laden as WMD-sharing allies.

The Senate intelligence report concluded that "Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qa'ida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al-Qa'ida to provide material or operational support."

What did Cheney tell Russert? Saddam, he insisted, "had a relationship with al Qaeda." When Russert pointed out that the intelligence committee "said that there was no relationship," Cheney interrupted and commented, "I haven't had a chance to read it."...

Powell, Rice, Cheney, and Adm. Wilson were on record, contradicting the later case made for "war".

Quote:

http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/powell-no-wmd.htm
2001: Powell & Rice Declare Iraq Has No WMD and Is Not a Threat

SENATOR BENNETT: Mr. Secretary, the U.N. sanctions on Iraq expire the beginning of June. We've had bombs dropped, we've had threats made, we've had all kinds of activity vis-a-vis Iraq in the previous administration. Now we're coming to the end. What's our level of concern about the progress of Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons programs?

SECRETARY POWELL: The sanctions, as they are called, have succeeded over the last 10 years, not in deterring him from moving in that direction, but from actually being able to move in that direction. The Iraqi regime militarily remains fairly weak. It doesn't have the capacity it had 10 or 12 years ago. It has been contained. And even though we have no doubt in our mind that the Iraqi regime is pursuing programs to develop weapons of mass destruction -- chemical, biological and nuclear -- I think the best intelligence estimates suggest that they have not been terribly successful. There's no question that they have some stockpiles of some of these sorts of weapons still under their control, but they have not been able to break out, they have not been able to come out with the capacity to deliver these kinds of systems or to actually have these kinds of systems that is much beyond where they were 10 years ago.

So containment, using this arms control sanctions regime, I think has been reasonably successful. We have not been able to get the inspectors back in, though, to verify that, and we have not been able to get the inspectors in to pull up anything that might be left there. So we have to continue to view this regime with the greatest suspicion, attribute to them the most negative motives, which is quite well-deserved with this particular regime, and roll the sanctions over, and roll them over in a way where the arms control sanctions really go after their intended targets -- weapons of mass destruction -- and not go after civilian goods or civilian commodities that we really shouldn't be going after, just let that go to the Iraqi people. That wasn't the purpose of the oil-for-food program. And by reconfiguring them in that way, I think we can gain support for this regime once again.

When we came into office on the 20th of January, the whole sanctions regime was collapsing in front of our eyes. Nations were bailing out on it. We lost the consensus for this kind of regime because the Iraqi regime had successfully painted us as the ones causing the suffering of the Iraqi people, when it was the regime that was causing the suffering. They had more than enough money; they just weren't spending it in the proper way. And we were getting the blame for it. So reconfiguring the sanctions, I think, helps us and continues to contain the Iraqi regime.

At the preceding link and here:
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/034...2,47837,6.html
On July 29, 2001, Rice said:
Well, the president has made very clear that he considers Saddam Hussein to be a threat to his neighbors, a threat to security in the region, in fact a threat to international security more broadly.....

....But in terms of Saddam Hussein being there, let's remember that his country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.

Quote:

http://www.usembassy.it/file2001_03/alia/a1030612.htm
Secretary of State Colin Powell said the modified Iraq sanctions policy will prevent Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from acquiring weapons of mass destruction but allow Iraqi civilians to obtain needed consumer goods.

"We will keep them from developing their military capability again, just the way we have for the last ten years, but we will not be the ones to blame because the Iraqi people, it is claimed, are not getting what they need to take care of their children or to take care of their needs," Powell said at a press conference with Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh in Washington March 6.[2001]

Quote:

http://www.usembassy.it/file2001_03/alia/a1030802.htm
08 March 2001

Text: Powell Explains Changes in Iraq Sanctions Policy
Secretary of State Colin Powell says the sanctions regime that was put in place to prevent Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction needs shoring up.

Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee March 8 that the United Nations sanctions regime has kept Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in check. "Even though we know he is working on weapons of mass destruction, we know he has things squirreled away, at the same time we have not seen that capacity emerge to present a full fledged threat to us," he said.

However, Powell said that when he took office five and a half weeks ago "I discovered that we had an Iraq policy that was in disarray, and the sanctions part of that policy was not just in disarray; it was falling apart."....

.......It became clear, he said, that the sanctions had to be modified in order to "eliminate those items in the sanctions regime that really were of civilian use and benefited people, and focus [sanctions] exclusively on weapons of mass destruction and items that could be directed toward the development of weapons of destruction."

Powell said he found support for this modification from Arab allies, permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and many NATO colleagues. "And so we are continuing down this line that says let's see if there is a better way to use these sanctions to go after weapons of mass destruction and take away the argument we have given him that we are somehow hurting the Iraqi people. He is hurting the Iraqi people, not us."

To end the sanctions, Powell said, Iraq must permit the U.N. inspection teams to return to their work.....

Quote:

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2001/2940.htm
Richard Boucher, Spokesman
Washington, DC
May 17, 2001

At his May 17 briefing at the State Department in Washington, Boucher said the U.S. government expects a draft resolution on revising the sanctions on Iraq to be circulated at the U.N. Security Council next week. He said the British proposal currently circulating at the U.N. for modifying the sanctions tracks with the U.S. position.

"We are working towards what will be a significant change in our approach to Iraq in the United Nations," Boucher said. "The focus is on strengthening controls to prevent Iraq from rebuilding military capability and weapons of mass destruction while facilitating a broader flow of goods to the civilian population of Iraq."

Quote:

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/200...d_rhetoric.php
Bush's Canned Rhetoric
David Corn
September 12, 2006

Anniversaries are artificial. Was anything truly different on Monday because it was five years to the day murderous jihadists killed 3,000 people in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? George W. Bush showed that the day was not unique, for he delivered a speech that contained nothing new.....

......If there was a reason to pay heed to this speech, it was to hear how Bush would link Iraq to 9/11. Bush made the connection this way:

 On September the 11, we learned that America must confront threats before they reach our shores—whether those threats come from terrorist networks or terrorist states. I am often asked why we are in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat.

He did not specify how Saddam had been a clear threat. The Iraqi tyrant had no weapons of mass destruction and no capacity to manufacture them. The report submitted by Charles Duelfer—the final head of the Iraq Survey Group, which searched for the WMDs after the invasion—noted that Saddam's WMD capability “was essentially destroyed in 1991” and that Saddam had no “plan for the revival of WMD.”

And Saddam had no significant ties to the evildoers of 9/11, according to the recently released report of the (Republican-controlled) Senate intelligence committee. The committee cited a 2005 CIA assessment that noted, "The data reveal few indications of an established relationship between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's regime." The Senate report concluded that Saddam had wanted nothing to do with al-Qaida.

No weapons. No partnership with the jihadists. And as Tim Russert pointed out when Dick Cheney appeared on "Meet the Press" on Sunday, even the vice president after 9/11 had said that Saddam was “bottled up.” So what was the threat? Bush did not explain. He did assert that the world is “safer because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power.” Perhaps. Perhaps not. World safety is one of those standards that's quite difficult to evaluate. If the United States had devoted the time and money spent on the Iraq enterprise to securing and rebuilding Afghanistan and fully funding homeland security, maybe we would all be safer.

Quote:

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache...s&ct=clnk&cd=1
(Above is cached link to whitehouse.gov to highlight Cheney's phrase)
Camp David, Maryland
September 16, 2001

The Vice President appears on Meet the Press with Tim Russert

VICE PRES. CHENEY: There is--in the past, there have been some activities related to terrorism by Saddam Hussein. But at this stage, you know, the focus is over here on al-Qaida and the most recent events in New York. <h3>Saddam Hussein's bottled up, at this point, but clearly, we continue to have a fairly tough policy where the Iraqis are concerned.</h3>

MR. RUSSERT: Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to this operation?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: No.....

There is no telling. But one can safely say that the 3,000 or so Iraqi civilians who are murdered each month in the sectarian violence that has been unleashed in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq would probably have an opinion on this safety question—if they could speak from the grave. In his speech, Bush breezed past the issue of Iraq’s death toll, citing the political advances in Iraq and essentially ignoring the casualties and chaos there. He offered prayers for the families of those Americans lost in battle. For the slain Iraqis, he had not a word.

Once more, he offered canards to defend staying the course. “Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone,” Bush remarked. “They will not leave us alone.” But can the White House produce one example of a serious-minded critic of Bush's Iraq policy who believes that that al-Qaida will hoist a white flag if the United States disengages in Iraq? This is the disingenuous work of too-clever speechwriters and message-makers in the White House. The president and his aides cheapened the debate—even during the remembrance of a national tragedy.

Quote:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/051305X.shtml
Navy Judge Finds War Protest Reasonable
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Report

Friday 13 May 2005

In a stunning blow to the Bush administration, a Navy judge gave Petty Officer 3rd Class Pablo Paredes no jail time for refusing orders to board the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard before it left San Diego with 3,000 sailors and Marines bound for the Persian Gulf on December 6th. Lt. Cmdr. Robert Klant found Pablo guilty of missing his ship's movement by design, but dismissed the charge of unauthorized absence. Although Pablo faced one year in the brig, the judge sentenced him to two months' restriction and three months of hard labor, and reduced his rank to seaman recruit....

......Pablo maintained that transporting Marines to fight in an illegal war, and possibly to commit war crimes, would make him complicit in those crimes. He told the judge, "I believe as a member of the armed forces, beyond having a duty to my chain of command and my President, I have a higher duty to my conscience and to the supreme law of the land. Both of these higher duties dictate that I must not participate in any way, hands-on or indirect, in the current aggression that has been unleashed on Iraq."

Pablo said he formed his views about the illegality of the war by reading truthout.org, listening to Democracy Now!, and reading articles by Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Naomi Klein, Stephen Zunes, and Marjorie Cohn, as well as Kofi Annan's statements that the war is illegal under the UN Charter, and material on the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals.

I testified during the sentencing hearing at Pablo's court-martial as a defense expert on the legality of the war in Iraq, and the commission of war crimes by US forces. My testimony corroborated the reasonableness of Pablo's beliefs. I told the judge that the war violates the United Nations Charter, which forbids the use of force, unless carried out in self-defense or with the approval of the Security Council, neither of which obtained before Bush invaded Iraq. I also said that torture and inhuman treatment, which have been documented in Iraqi prisons, constitute grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and are considered war crimes under the US War Crimes Statute. The United States has ratified both the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, making them part of the supreme law of the land under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

I noted that the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires that all military personnel obey lawful orders. Article 92 of the UCMJ says, "A general order or regulation is lawful unless it is contrary to the Constitution, the laws of the United States...." Both the Nuremberg Principles and the Army Field Manual create a duty to disobey unlawful orders. Article 509 of Field Manual 27-10, codifying another Nuremberg Principle, specifies that "following superior orders" is not a defense to the commission of war crimes, unless the accused "did not know and could not reasonably have been expected to know that the act ordered was unlawful."

I concluded that the Iraq war is illegal. US troops who participate in the war are put in a position to commit war crimes. By boarding that ship and delivering Marines to Iraq - to fight in an illegal war, and possibly to commit war crimes - Pablo would have been complicit in those crimes. Therefore, orders to board that ship were illegal, and Pablo had a duty to disobey them.

On cross-examination, Navy prosecutor Lt. Jonathan Freeman elicited testimony from me that the US wars in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan also violated the UN Charter, as neither was conducted in self-defense or with the blessing of the Security Council. Upon the conclusion of my testimony, the judge said, "I think that the government has successfully proved that any service member has reasonable cause to believe that the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal."

The Navy prosecutors asked the judge to sentence Pablo to nine months in the brig, forfeiture of pay and benefits, and a bad conduct discharge. Lt. Brandon Hale argued that Pablo's conduct was "egregious," that Pablo could have "slinked away with his privately-held beliefs quietly." The public nature of Pablo's protest made it more serious, according to the chief prosecuting officer.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, President-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. She writes a weekly column for t r u t h o u t.

Quote:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19212
Volume 53, Number 13 · August 10, 2006

Why the Court Said No
By David Cole
1.

Since the first few days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has taken the view that the President has unilateral, unchecked authority to wage a war, not only against those who attacked us on that day, but against all terrorist organizations of potentially global reach. The administration claims that the President's role as commander in chief of the armed forces grants him exclusive authority to select "the means and methods of engaging the enemy."[1] And it has interpreted that power in turn to permit the President to take actions many consider illegal.

The Justice Department has maintained that the President can order torture, notwithstanding a criminal statute and an international treaty prohibiting torture under all circumstances. President Bush has authorized the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, despite a comprehensive statute that makes such surveillance a crime. He has approved the "disappearance" of al-Qaeda suspects into secret prisons where they are interrogated with tactics that include waterboarding, in which the prisoner is strapped down and made to believe he will drown. He has asserted the right to imprison indefinitely, without hearings, anyone he considers an "enemy combatant," and to try such persons for war crimes in ad hoc military tribunals lacking such essential safeguards as independent judges and the right of the accused to confront the evidence against him.

In advocating these positions, which I will collectively call "the Bush doctrine," the administration has brushed aside legal objections as mere hindrances to the ultimate goal of keeping Americans safe. It has argued that domestic criminal and constitutional law are of little concern because the President's powers as commander in chief override all such laws; that the Geneva Conventions, a set of international treaties that regulate the treatment of prisoners during war, simply do not apply to the conflict with al-Qaeda; and more broadly still, that the President has unilateral authority to defy international law.[2] In short, there is little to distinguish the current administration's view from that famously espoused by President Richard Nixon when asked to justify his authorization of illegal, warrantless wiretapping of Americans during the Vietnam War: "When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."

If another nation's leader adopted such positions, the United States would be quick to condemn him or her for violating fundamental tenets of the rule of law, human rights, and the separation of powers. But President Bush has largely gotten away with it, at least at home, for at least three reasons. His party holds a decisive majority in Congress, making effective political checks by that branch highly unlikely. The Democratic Party has shied away from directly challenging the President for fear that it will be viewed as soft on terrorism. And the American public has for the most part offered only muted objections.

These realities make the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, issued on the last day of its 2005– 2006 term, in equal parts stunning and crucial. Stunning because the Court, unlike Congress, the opposition party, or the American people, actually stood up to the President. Crucial because the Court's decision, while on the surface narrowly focused on whether the military tribunals President Bush created to try foreign suspects for war crimes were consistent with US law, marked, at a deeper level, a dramatic refutation of the administration's entire approach to the "war on terror."

At bottom, the Hamdan case stands for the proposition that the rule of law—including international law—is not subservient to the will of the executive, even during wartime. As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the concluding lines of his opinion for the majority:

In undertaking to try Hamdan and subject him to criminal punishment, the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction.

The notion that government must abide by law is hardly radical. Its implications for the "war on terror" are radical, however, precisely because the Bush doctrine has so fundamentally challenged that very idea.....

.....In its arguments to the Supreme Court, the administration invoked the Bush doctrine. It argued that the President has "inherent authority to convene military commissions to try and punish captured enemy combatants in wartime," even without congressional authorization, and that therefore the Court should be extremely hesitant to find that Bush's actions violated the law.[3] And it insisted that in declaring that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda Bush had exercised his constitutional war powers, and his decision was therefore "binding on the courts."[4]

The Supreme Court, by a vote of 5–3, rejected the President's contentions. (Chief Justice Roberts did not participate, since it was his own decision that was under review.) The Court's principal opinion was written by its senior justice, John Paul Stevens, a World War II veteran, and the only justice who has served in the military. He was joined in full by Justices Ginsburg, Souter, and Breyer, and in the main by Justice Kennedy. Kennedy also wrote a separate concurring opinion, and because he provided the crucial fifth vote, his views may prove more significant in the long run.[5]

The Court found, first, that the administration's procedures for military tribunals deviated significantly from the court-martial procedures used to try members of our own armed forces, and that the Uniform Code of Military Justice barred such deviations unless it could be shown that court-martial procedures would be "impracticable." The administration made no such showing, the Court observed, and therefore the tribunals violated the limit set by Congress in the Uniform Code. The Court could well have stopped there. This conclusion was a fully sufficient rationale to rule for Hamdan and invalidate the tribunals. Had it done so, the decision would have been far less consequential, since Congress could easily have changed its law or declared that court-martial procedures are impracticable.

But the Court went on to find that Congress had also required military tribunals to conform to the law of war, and that the tribunals impermissibly violated a particular law of war— Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which requires that detainees be tried by a "regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."

Common Article 3 is denominated "common" because it appears in each of the four Geneva Conventions. It sets forth the basic human rights that apply to all persons detained in conflicts "not of an international character." The administration has long argued that because the struggle with al-Qaeda is international, not domestic, Common Article 3 does not apply. The Court rejected that view, explaining that the phrase "not of an international character" was meant in its literal sense, to cover all conflicts not between nations, or "inter-national" in character. (Conflicts between nations are covered by other provisions of the Geneva Conventions.) Since the war with al-Qaeda is a conflict between a nation and a nonstate force, the Court ruled, it is "not of an international character," and Common Article 3 applies.

The Bush administration devoted much of its brief to arguing that the Geneva Conventions are not enforceable by individuals in US courts, and Hamdan's lawyers devoted equal space to arguing the opposite. The Court, however, neatly sidestepped that question, finding that it need not decide it because Congress had incorporated the Geneva Conventions into US law when it required that military tribunals adhere to the "law of war."

The fact that the Court decided the case at all in the face of Congress's efforts to strip the Court of jurisdiction is remarkable in itself. That the Court then broke away from its history of judicial deference to security claims in wartime to rule against the President, not even pausing at the argument that the decisions of the commander in chief are "binding on the courts," suggests just how troubled the Court's majority was by the President's assertion of unilateral executive power. That the Court relied so centrally on international law in its reasoning, however, is what makes the decision truly momentous.

3.

The Hamdan decision has sweeping implications for many aspects of the Bush doctrine, including military tribunals, NSA spying, and the interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects. With respect to trying alleged war criminals, the administration now has two options. Without changing the law, it can put into effect the regular court-martial procedures that are used for trying members of the American military. The administration has already rejected that option, and has instead said that it will ask Congress for explicit approval of military tribunals that afford defendants fewer protections than courts-martial would. Because the Court's decision rests on statutory grounds, the President could in theory seek legislation authorizing the very procedures that the Court found wanting. Already, Senators Jon Kyl, Lindsay Graham, Arlen Specter, and others have announced that they will seek legislation to authorize military tribunals.

But because the Court also ruled that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies, and that the tribunals as currently constituted violate that provision, legislative reform is not so simple. Were Congress to approve the tribunals in their present form, it would thereby be authorizing a violation of Common Article 3. Congress unquestionably has the legal power, as a matter of domestic law, to authorize such a violation. Treaties and legislation are said to be of the same stature, and therefore Congress may override treaties by enacting superseding laws. But passing a law that blatantly violates a treaty obligation is no small matter. And the US has a strong interest in respecting the Geneva Conventions, since they protect our own soldiers when captured abroad. It is one thing to put forward an arguable interpretation of the treaty, as the administration did in contending that Common Article 3 simply did not apply in Hamdan's case. It is another thing to blatantly violate the treaty. As a result, the Hamdan decision is likely to force the administration to make whatever procedures it adopts conform to the dictates of Common Article 3.

The Court's decision also has significant implications for the controversy over President Bush's authorization of NSA spying without court approval. On its face, that program violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which requires that a special court grant permission for wiretapping. The administration has defended the NSA program with two arguments. It claims that Congress implicitly authorized the program when it enacted the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against al-Qaeda in 2001. And it maintains that the President has inherent unilateral power to authorize such surveillance as commander in chief, notwithstanding the fact that it was criminally banned by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.[6]

In Hamdan's case, the administration similarly argued that the AUMF of 2001 authorized the military tribunals, and that in any event the President had unilateral authority to create the tribunals as commander in chief. The Court dismissed both contentions......

.........On July 11, the administration announced that Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England had issued a memo to military officers instructing them that the Supreme Court had ruled that Common Article 3 applies to the conflict with al-Qaeda, and ordering them to ensure that their practices conformed to Common Article 3. Some news accounts characterized this as a "major policy shift," but in fact the memo merely states what the Supreme Court decided. The memo did suggest that the military had always been abiding by a directive from President Bush to treat detainees "humanely." What it did not say, however, is that administration lawyers had claimed under that dictate that the following tactics were legally available for interrogating al-Qaeda suspects: forced nudity; "using detainees['] individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress"; waterboarding; and "scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family." In addition, the military found nothing inhumane with the interrogation of a Guantánamo detainee that included forcing him to strip naked and wear women's underwear, putting him on a leash and making him bark like a dog, and injecting him with intravenous fluids and then barring him from going to the bathroom, forcing him to urinate on himself. If the military considers all of this "humane," the assertion that it will abide by Common Article 3 is meaningless.

Some members of Congress have specifically objected to the implications of the Court's reliance on Common Article 3, and have suggested that they might try to undo it. Senator Graham has complained that the Court's ruling might make our soldiers liable for war crimes. But if American soldiers commit war crimes, they should be held responsible. Congress only recently passed the McCain Amendment's ban on all cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment by overwhelming margins. Surely the last message we should want to send to the rest of the world is that the McCain Amendment was only for show, because we are not actually willing to be bound by these rules if they have any enforceable effect.

<h3>In fact, the Court's decision further suggests that President Bush has already committed a war crime, simply by establishing the military tribunals and subjecting detainees to them.</h3> As noted above, the Court found that the tribunals violate Common Article 3, and under the War Crimes Act, any violation of Common Article 3 is a war crime. Military defense lawyers responded to the Hamdan decision by requesting a stay of all tribunal proceedings, on the ground that their own continuing participation in those proceedings might constitute a war crime. But according to the logic of the Supreme Court, the President has already committed a war crime. He won't be prosecuted, of course, and probably should not be, since his interpretation of the Conventions was at least arguable. But now that his interpretation has been conclusively rejected, if he or Congress seeks to go forward with tribunals or interrogation rules that fail Article 3's test, they, too, would be war criminals.

David Cole s a Professor of Law at Georgetown and the author of Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism and Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security, both now available in revised paperback editions. (August 2006)

aceventura3, the Bush admin. is concerned enough that the analysis in the Law Professor David Cole'ss preceding, excerpted review, puts it in legal jeopardy, for it's commission of Crimes against Humanity, to attempt:

Quote:

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...q/15246142.htm
Posted on Thu, Aug. 10, 2006

Retroactive war crime protection drafted
PETE YOST
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration drafted amendments to the War Crimes Act that would retroactively protect policymakers from possible criminal charges for authorizing any humiliating and degrading treatment of detainees, according to lawyers who have seen the proposal.

The move by the administration is the latest effort to deal with treatment of those taken into custody in the war on terror.

At issue are interrogations carried out by the CIA, and the degree to which harsh tactics such as water-boarding were authorized by administration officials. A separate law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, applies to the military.

The Washington Post first reported on the War Crimes Act amendments Wednesday.

One section of the draft would outlaw torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, but it does not contain prohibitions from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions against "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." A copy of the section of the draft was obtained by The Associated Press.

The White House, without elaboration, said in a statement that the bill "will apply to any conduct by any U.S. personnel, whether committed before or after the law is enacted."

Two attorneys said that the draft is in the revision stage but that the administration seems intent on pushing forward the draft's major points in Congress after Labor Day. The two attorneys spoke on condition of anonymity because their sources did not authorize them to release the information.

"I think what this bill can do is in effect immunize past crimes. That's why it's so dangerous," said a third attorney, Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice....

....Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Congress "is aware of the dilemma we face, how to make sure the CIA and others are not unfairly prosecuted."

He said that at the same time, Congress "will not allow political appointees to waive the law."

Larry Cox, Amnesty International USA's executive director, said that "President Bush is looking to limit the War Crimes Act through legislation" now that the Supreme Court has embraced Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. In June, the court ruled that Bush's plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals violates Article 3.

....and yup.....this is long....but so is this ordeal, and since the folks who ordered the invasion of Iraq, can't justify why they did it, I think that sharing what I've learned, could be beneficial to you, aceventura3, because, there is no telling where embracing a policy of "pre-emption", failed and resulting in crimes against humanity, will take our country with it's destroyed international "standing", next......

aceventura3 · 09-13-2006, 06:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

aceventura3, the last sentence in your above quote, IMO, is contradicted by what the Duelfer report said, documented in the article that I included in my last post. Twice, now, I'm making a sincere and thorough effort to demonstrate, and document, why I believe that the Bush administration had no basis for pre-emptive invasion and occupation of Iraq, for the justifications that you maintain are valid and legal.

Legality in war is a technicality. It is like the golden rule - he who has the gold makes the rules - He who wins the war defines its legality.

With that aside. Saddam routinely fired on US military planes in the no fly zone in Iraq. That alone could prove to be justification for war.

Quote:

Kindly respond with some references that explain what triggered the "About Face", that changed the threat that Saddam's Iraq posed to the US, considering the comments of Powell, Rice, and DIA chief Thomas R. Wilson, in 2001, before 9/11, and Cheney's 9/16/01 statment that we had Saddam Hussein, "bottled up".

I don't have a source or need a source. In my opinion he was not "bottled up". He was a man who was motivated to make war and he had done it in the past, he was not cooperating (being submissive) with the the US or UN, he was rebuilding his military machine. Are you suggesting he was a changed man with no interest in making war? If you say yes to that we fundamentally disagree. If no then we simply disagree on the point of - if we had him under control or not. To that question - we will never know the answer, all we can do or all anyone can do is speculate.

Quote:

I would think that you would perceive a motivation to defend your justification for the invasion, since the record strongly indicates that Saddam posed no threat, in Cheney's own opinion, as late as on 9/16/01, Powell said that the sanctions against Iraq had been reformed to keep Saddam from obtaining WMD, Duelfer reported that there was no program to obtain or rebuild the WMD capability, and ten days before the invasion, the WMD inspection program was back in place in Iraq, and the French Foreign Minister, Villepin, made a speech before the UN, stating that:

The only problem with me trusting the French in this situation is the fact that Sadaam owed them billions of dollars. As I recall they had an economic incentive not to support the war.

Quote:

aceventura3, as you can see, I'm documenting that Powell said he had worked to "reform" the sanctions, and right after the 9/11 attacks, Cheney said that Saddam was "bottled up". Rice had the same opinion, six weeks before 9/11. When the US invaded Iraq, Villepin had said in his speech, ten days before that the WMD inspectors were back in Iraq, and making serious progress for "a month". I will credit the Bush policy of assembling a threat of use of military force, under the resolution of the UN, for restoring the inspections teams that "were making progress".

Can you at least ackowledge that Sadaam was playing games with inspectors? Can you ackowledge that he was basically thumbing his nose at UN mandates? If you can do that - I will ackowledge that, with the real threat of war, Sadaam was going to allow the pretense of the inspectors making progress in the month you refer to. In my opinion, by that time my mind was already made up.

Quote:

aceventura3, the scenario that you wanted to keep Saddam from restarting WMD development or obtaining and holding WMD, was in place, by all accounts, before Bush ordered the military invasion. To order invasion, in spite of that, is a war crime, similar to shooting a disarmed "suspect", after calling away the police who were frisking him for hidden weapons....just because....you...with the gun, still felt threatened by the suspect. Your stance IMO, reduced to unsubstantiated and it follows...unjustified, pre-emptive war.....is one that both Bush and Cheney failed to justify, in new attempts in the last few days, probably because of the huge, contrary body of evidence that hangs over this. A strong case, IMO, can also be made that the invasion of Iraq was not justified to the point that arguments that it was an illegal war of aggression, must be respected, and without any more valid justification than Bush and Cheney can now come up with, may end up prevailing.

No. I see it more like a guy that lives on my block who in the past used his attack dog to attack his neighbor, then continually threatens to harm others on the block. after we tell him to get rid of the dog and that we are going to inspect his property to make sure the dog is gone, he fails to let us do it and plays games with the mandate. He also throws rocks at my children when they walk past his house, and he shows no respect for our association rules. when we call the police, the police don't do anything.

At some point I am going to go over and kick the guys a$$.

Sure - my mother-in -law and a few other will call me a neandrethal, I may go to jail, etc.

But I won't live on a block where my children are not safe.

I won't live on a block where a guy bully's others.

I will do what needs to be done.

Quote:

aceventura3, the Bush admin. is concerned enough that the analysis in the Law Professor David Cole'ss preceding, excerpted review, puts it in legal jeopardy, for it's commission of Crimes against Humanity, to attempt:

I think Bush is spending too much time and effort trying to make "nice, nice" with his political opponents. Are we guilty of war crimes? I don't know. However, I a graduate of the school of - if your enemy breaks your finger - you break his arm.

You don't understand me, and I don't understand you. Would you let someone make threats against the people you love, without taking some action? Would you wait until after they act on the threat before taking action? Do you agree - that at some point talk is not enough?

Quote:

....and yup.....this is long....but so is this ordeal, and since the folks who ordered the invasion of Iraq, can't justify why they did it, I think that sharing what I've learned, could be beneficial to you, aceventura3, because, there is no telling where embracing a policy of "pre-emption", failed and resulting in crimes against humanity, will take our country with it's destroyed international "standing", next......

Don't say they can't justify why they invaded Iraq. What I get from your posts is that you don't agree with the justification given. To me that is an important difference.

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

aceventura3, the last sentence in your above quote, IMO, is contradicted by what the Duelfer report said, documented in the article that I included in my last post. Twice, now, I'm making a sincere and thorough effort to demonstrate, and document, why I believe that the Bush administration had no basis for pre-emptive invasion and occupation of Iraq, for the justifications that you maintain are valid and legal.

Legality in war is a technicality. It is like the golden rule - he who has the gold makes the rules - He who wins the war defines its legality.

With that aside. Saddam routinely fired on US military planes in the no fly zone in Iraq. That alone could prove to be justification for war.

Quote:

Kindly respond with some references that explain what triggered the "About Face", that changed the threat that Saddam's Iraq posed to the US, considering the comments of Powell, Rice, and DIA chief Thomas R. Wilson, in 2001, before 9/11, and Cheney's 9/16/01 statment that we had Saddam Hussein, "bottled up".

I don't have a source or need a source. In my opinion he was not "bottled up". He was a man who was motivated to make war and he had done it in the past, he was not cooperating (being submissive) with the the US or UN, he was rebuilding his military machine. Are you suggesting he was a changed man with no interest in making war? If you say yes to that we fundamentally disagree. If no then we simply disagree on the point of - if we had him under control or not. To that question - we will never know the answer, all we can do or all anyone can do is speculate.

Quote:

I would think that you would perceive a motivation to defend your justification for the invasion, since the record strongly indicates that Saddam posed no threat, in Cheney's own opinion, as late as on 9/16/01, Powell said that the sanctions against Iraq had been reformed to keep Saddam from obtaining WMD, Duelfer reported that there was no program to obtain or rebuild the WMD capability, and ten days before the invasion, the WMD inspection program was back in place in Iraq, and the French Foreign Minister, Villepin, made a speech before the UN, stating that:

The only problem with me trusting the French in this situation is the fact that Sadaam owed them billions of dollars. As I recall they had an economic incentive not to support the war.

Quote:

aceventura3, as you can see, I'm documenting that Powell said he had worked to "reform" the sanctions, and right after the 9/11 attacks, Cheney said that Saddam was "bottled up". Rice had the same opinion, six weeks before 9/11. When the US invaded Iraq, Villepin had said in his speech, ten days before that the WMD inspectors were back in Iraq, and making serious progress for "a month". I will credit the Bush policy of assembling a threat of use of military force, under the resolution of the UN, for restoring the inspections teams that "were making progress".

Can you at least ackowledge that Sadaam was playing games with inspectors? Can you ackowledge that he was basically thumbing his nose at UN mandates? If you can do that - I will ackowledge that, with the real threat of war, Sadaam was going to allow the pretense of the inspectors making progress in the month you refer to. In my opinion, by that time my mind was already made up.

Quote:

aceventura3, the scenario that you wanted to keep Saddam from restarting WMD development or obtaining and holding WMD, was in place, by all accounts, before Bush ordered the military invasion. To order invasion, in spite of that, is a war crime, similar to shooting a disarmed "suspect", after calling away the police who were frisking him for hidden weapons....just because....you...with the gun, still felt threatened by the suspect. Your stance IMO, reduced to unsubstantiated and it follows...unjustified, pre-emptive war.....is one that both Bush and Cheney failed to justify, in new attempts in the last few days, probably because of the huge, contrary body of evidence that hangs over this. A strong case, IMO, can also be made that the invasion of Iraq was not justified to the point that arguments that it was an illegal war of aggression, must be respected, and without any more valid justification than Bush and Cheney can now come up with, may end up prevailing.

No. I see it more like a guy that lives on my block who in the past used his attack dog to attack his neighbor, then continually threatens to harm others on the block. after we tell him to get rid of the dog and that we are going to inspect his property to make sure the dog is gone, he fails to let us do it and plays games with the mandate. He also throws rocks at my children when they walk past his house, and he shows no respect for our association rules. when we call the police, the police don't do anything.

At some point I am going to go over and kick the guys a$$.

Sure - my mother-in -law and a few other will call me a neandrethal, I may go to jail, etc.

But I won't live on a block where my children are not safe.

I won't live on a block where a guy bully's others.

I will do what needs to be done.

Quote:

aceventura3, the Bush admin. is concerned enough that the analysis in the Law Professor David Cole'ss preceding, excerpted review, puts it in legal jeopardy, for it's commission of Crimes against Humanity, to attempt:

I think Bush is spending too much time and effort trying to make "nice, nice" with his political opponents. Are we guilty of war crimes? I don't know. However, I a graduate of the school of - if your enemy breaks your finger - you break his arm.

You don't understand me, and I don't understand you. Would you let someone make threats against the people you love, without taking some action? Would you wait until after they act on the threat before taking action? Do you agree - that at some point talk is not enough?

Quote:

....and yup.....this is long....but so is this ordeal, and since the folks who ordered the invasion of Iraq, can't justify why they did it, I think that sharing what I've learned, could be beneficial to you, aceventura3, because, there is no telling where embracing a policy of "pre-emption", failed and resulting in crimes against humanity, will take our country with it's destroyed international "standing", next......

Don't say they can't justify why they invaded Iraq. What I get from your posts is that you don't agree with the justification given. To me that is an important difference.

Ch'i · 09-13-2006, 07:34 PM

ace,

there is a time when talk is not enough, and that time is when the enemy makes their move; when all other options are depleted. i hope you understand that pre-emptively striking a country we do not agree with makes us as correct as them.

country "a" is being told to disarm by country "b" which is unwilling to do so itself. country "b" has more weapons than country "a." both countries have commited war crimes, both have invaded other countries. is it unreasonable for country "a" to refuse to acknowledge the ultimatum of country "b?" superiority does not make a country correct, or just. any country willing to use preliminary violence in order to settle a dispute is no greater than the country it is in contradiction with.

why should any country adhere to rules that do not apply to all countries?

your family is not in direct threat of an attack from suddam.

dc_dux · 09-14-2006, 03:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

Don't say they can't justify why they invaded Iraq. What I get from your posts is that you don't agree with the justification given. To me that is an important difference.

When you go to war based on false justifications (i.e. bad intelligence or intelligence you manipulate to suit your objective), two things are likely to happen:

(1) You increase the difficulty of winning the war because your justifications dont match the reality on the ground.

The sobering findings from the non-partisan GAO report last week reflect this:

The report was the latest in a series of recent grim assessments of conditions in Iraq.

But the report was unusual in its sweep, relying on a series of other government studies, some of them previously unpublicized, to touch on issues from violence and politics to electricity production. Published on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the GAO report was downbeat in its conclusions -- underscoring how Iraq's deteriorating security situation threatens the Bush administration's goal of a stable and democratic regime there.
The report, citing the Pentagon, said that enemy attacks against coalition and Iraqi forces increased by 23 percent from 2004 to 2005 and that the number of attacks from January to July 2006 were 57 percent higher than during the same period in 2005.

(2) You lose public support as more and more facts are revealed that your justifications were false.

Support for the war and the belief that it was a necessary component of the GWOT had steadily decreased to the point that over 60% of the public no longer believes it.

When its your war, and both (1) and (2) happen, you are only left with one option - to continue to steadfastly present your false justifications as if they were true and to manipulate the facts on the ground to make it appear that the war is progressing better it is.

Which is what Bush et al have been doing since the war started...and continue to do.

As late as last week, Bush, Cheney, Rice are still implying some sort of operational relationship between Saddam and al Queda when the most recent report from the Senate Intelligence Committee affirms that there was no evidence to support this supposition.

The Defense Department admitted last week that it DID NOT count people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks — including suicide bombings — when it reported a dramatic drop in the number of murders around Baghdad last month.
http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/stor...25-2095927.php

aceventura3 · 09-14-2006, 05:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ch'i

why should any country adhere to rules that do not apply to all countries?

your family is not in direct threat of an attack from suddam.

The use of force against Iraq was authorized by our Congress and the UN. Sadaam was the one not following the "rules".

I have a close friend who is currently in the US but is from Isreal. I have met her mother who still lives in Isreal.

After the world responded to Sadaam's aggression, he started bombing Isreal - for no strategic military reason. He was paying $25k to the families of suicide bombers, he ignored UN mandates. The Iraqi people didn't address the problem, Islamic leaders didn't adress the problem, France didn't address the problem, the UN didn't. The US and Pres. Bush had the courage to step up and do what needed to be done.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

When you go to war based on false justifications (i.e. bad intelligence or intelligence you manipulate to suit your objective), two things are likely to happen:

I admit Bush is not among the best communicators. I remember listening to his speaches before and after the war, and I recall him giving many reasons for the war. You focus on the few that were proven false, I don't.

And, perhaps you don't speak Bush's "language", but to me one of the more important reasons for the war in Iraq is his statement regarding "taking the war to the terrorists". Here is what that means - Terrorist fight an unconventional war. We are set up to fight a conventional war. We need to get the war in a more conventional setting. How do we do that? We find a suitable location for the war. That location was Iraq. Afganistan was not a suitable location. Terrorist went to Iraq to "defeat the great satan" like flys are attracted to a dung heap.

Some say our actions created more terrorists. I don't agree. The people fighting against us, have always hated and have always wanted to kill us.

Willravel · 09-14-2006, 06:59 AM

I know you're busy, ace, but did you read post #45?

dc_dux · 09-14-2006, 09:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

I admit Bush is not among the best communicators. I remember listening to his speaches before and after the war, and I recall him giving many reasons for the war. You focus on the few that were proven false, I don't.

I focus on the fact that Bush and and his spokespeople continue to lie to the American people when they knew the intelligence was wrong. I dont care how he communicates. I do care about what he says.

I also care about what he didnt say- or even worse, what he didnt know - in terms of possible outcomes of such an invasion on the stability of the region.

As I noted before, the two most threatening outcomes of an invasion being the Sunni-Shiite sectarian violence and the new Iraq-Iran "best buds"
( http://www.mehrnews.com/en/NewsDetai...?NewsID=379444 )

Add to that the Turks massing forces on the Turkey/Iraq border nervously watching as Iraq Kurds flex their muscles. Turkey will never allow an independent Kurdistan:

....the war in Iraq seems to have only emboldened the group (PKK) as fellow Iraqi Kurds just over the border have grown stronger and more autonomous since the invasion...

...."It's a huge potential headache for the US. The last thing the US wants is a war between Kurds and Turks in Iraq. The last place that is calm in Iraq is in danger of going up in flames."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0829/p10s01-woeu.html

Its hard for me to see how any of this leads to more stability and is in the US best interest.

host · 09-14-2006, 11:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3
Don't say they can't justify why they invaded Iraq. What I get from your posts is that you don't agree with the justification given. To me that is an important difference.

Thank you for reading my post and devoting the time to responding in detail.

If you are correct about the UN resolution for the use of force if Saddam did not cooperate with weapons inspectors, and Saddam's bounty payments to families of suicide bombers, and 12 years of Iraqi attempts to shoot down coalition "no fly zone" enforcement aircraft (No aircraft was ever shot down, and the coalition responded to the attempts with proportional force, bombing and firing missles at the Iraqi radar and air defense weaponry sites.), why did Cheney continue to link pre-invasion Iraq and al Qaeda, and a Kermal (Khurmal) "poison camp", I exposed as an untruth:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...24#post2120124 ,
on Tim Russert's NBC broadcast, just this past sunday?

To me, this easily refuted justification by Cheney, exposes the "depth" of what is left "standing" in this administration's justification for pre-emptive war. Cheney told us there was an al-Qaeda "connection", and backed it up with "Zarqawi was in Baghdad in 2002" and backed that up with "Kermal".
Show me any "death of Zarqawi", or post "death" reporting, that even bothers to mention if Zarqawi's body was missing the leg, or showed signs of prior injury, that would back the oft trotted out, and tired...claim by the US that Zarqawi was in Baghdad for "medical treatment", and that Saddam knew of his presence.

There is much evidence....I've cited it....in my other posts on this thread, and at the post at the preceding link, to support that the Bush administration knew that the "no fly zone" was effective from a cost and a strategic standpoint. Wolfowitz spoke to a congressional committee, shortly before the invasion, and asked if it wanted to spend another $30 billion, over the next 12 years, to continue the air enforcement of the "no fly zone"? He admitted that it worked to contain Saddam, but offered invasion as a cost "saving" solution.

Zinni talked to Tim Russert, in april, and described the consensus that I have documented on this thread. A post 1991 gulf war plan, was still effective, for the reasons it was intended to be. Other coalition allies paid part of the cost of keeping that "no fly zone" enforcement and observation, in place.

Powell, well into 2001, said first that the UN sanctions against Iraq needed "repair", and then said that they had been "fixed". As France's Villepin, pointed out, 10 days before the invasion, the WMD inspections were finally working, for at least the past month, and "why destroy the tools" finally in place to disarm and confirm disarmament of Iraq.

The pre-invasion plan had left Iraq as the stabalizing presence in it's region that blocked what we see emerging now. You probably aren't aware that Kurds seriously intend to pursue an attempt to create an independent state that includes 25 percent of Turkey....a vast area north of Kurdish northern Iraq....any Turk who you ask, will confirm that.

The invasion destroyed the "planning", as Zinni described it, that kept Iranian shiite and secular strategic, regional ambitions, in check, for the 12 years before the invasion. A really ingenious "balance", sustainable for years to come, that was bloodless....for the US and for most Iraqi civilians, had proved a reasonable financial cost, had prevented reconstituting, and even serious planning for initiating renewed Iraqi WMD programs, and kept Saddam's Iraq strong enough to check Iraq, and discourage the Kurds in the north from risking fighting a war on two fronts....against Turkey, and against Saddam if he saw an opportunity to engage the Kurds if war with Turkey broke out....was the plan that the Bush-41 administration had devised and time demonstrated....achieved almost all of it's objectives.

The missing element...weapons inspection, seemed to be back in place on March 7, 2003, as Villepin spoke. Villepin pleaded for time to see if the inspections would continue to work, and warned that a unilateral US/UK invasion would provoke avoidable division....and it did.

Powell had failed to persuade France, and the rest of the world, except for Britain and inconsequential, mostly bribed "allies", a month before, in his UN "presentation", of urgency or justification, for invasion of Iraq. We know why, now....Powell concentrated his documentation, and much of his visual presentation, on bio weapons "trailer" that didn't exist, and Zaraqawi's "Kermal", "poion camp", that other governments, who could read the reports that I presented here:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...24#post2120124
US news media re-reported that fact, two days after Powell's presentation:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...61575#continue

Powell's own aid of 16 years, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, later called that day, "the lowest point in my professional life".

Quote:

http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/wilkerson.html

.......DAVID BRANCACCIO: I've never met the Vice President. He's the kind of guy who could lean on somebody?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Absolutely. And be just as quiet and taciturn about it as-- he-- as he leaned on 'em. As he leaned on the Congress recently-- in the-- torture issue.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: We've been talking grand policy. The then director of the CIA, George Tenent, Vice President Cheney's deputy Libby, told you that the intelligence that was the basis of going to war was rock solid. Given what you now know, how does that make you feel?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: It makes me feel terrible. I've said in other places that it was-- constitutes the lowest point in my professional life. My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life.

I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council. How do you think that makes me feel? Thirty-one years in the United States Army and I more or less end my career with that kind of a blot on my record? That's not a very comforting thing. 

DAVID BRANCACCIO: A hoax? That's quite a word.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, let's face it, it was. It was not a hoax that the Secretary in any way was complicit in. In fact he did his best-- I watched him work. Two AM in the morning on the DCI and the Deputy DCI, John McLaughlin.

And to try and hone the presentation down to what was, in the DCI's own words, a slam dunk. Firm. Iron clad. We threw many things out. We threw the script that Scooter Libby had given the-- Secretary of State. Forty-eight page script on WMD. We threw that out the first day.

And we turned to the National Intelligence estimate as part of the recommendation of George Tenent and my agreement with. But even that turned out to be, in its substantive parts-- that is stockpiles of chemicals, biologicals and production capability that was hot and so forth, and an active nuclear program. The three most essential parts of that presentation turned out to be absolutely false.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You've said that Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld managed to hijack the intelligence process. You've called it a cabal.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Decision--

DAVID BRANCACCIO: And--

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: -- making process.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: The decision making process...........

aceventura3, your stance undermines the risks that patriots like Wilkerson have taken.....in favor of your continued support for liars and their anit-US, anti-international treaty....against aggressive war....policies. Is it "worth it"?

....could easily discern.....was not in an area of Iraq that Saddam had control over, and was reported to be left "intact", deliberately by the US, to be used in propaganda....like Powell presented....to justify invasion of Iraq on grounds of phony "al Qaeda" ties to Saddam.

It's not that I just "don't agree with the justification given", aceventura3, it's because I know enough to tell you that justification, based on lies like Cheney told us as recently as sunday, are disheartening and embarassing, and coming from the VP of the US, more alarming, because either they are criminal rants, or he believes them and that puts him in an observable state of incompetent to continue to "serve" in office. Shitty choices....but that's all they have left us with, in Iraq, too!

Marvelous Marv · 09-28-2006, 11:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pan6467

Ok, show me anything anywhere that shows Saddam's regime promoted terrorism before 9/11. He did not have anything to do with 9/11, nor did he train the terrorists nor did he have WMDs.... all 3 of those were used to sell this war, not the fact "it was to preserve the free market of oil" or whatever.

I know your comment is dated, but my jaw dropped when I read it.

http://www.cfr.org/publication/9513/

Quote:

Has Iraq sponsored terrorism?
Yes. Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship provided headquarters, operating bases, training camps, and other support to terrorist groups fighting the governments of neighboring Turkey and Iran, as well as to hard-line Palestinian groups. During the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam commissioned several failed terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities. Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the State Department listed Iraq as a state sponsor of terrorism. The question of Iraq’s link to terrorism grew more urgent with Saddam’s suspected determination to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which Bush administration officials feared he might share with terrorists who could launch devastating attacks against the United States.

Quote:

Moreover, Iraq has hosted several Palestinian splinter groups that oppose peace with Israel , including the mercenary Abu Nidal Organization, whose leader, Abu Nidal, was found dead in Baghdad in August 2002. Iraq has also supported the Islamist Hamas movement and reportedly channeled money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

Quote:

Has Iraq ever used weapons of mass destruction?
Yes. In the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi troops repeatedly used poison gas, including mustard gas and the nerve agent sarin, against Iranian soldiers. Iranian officials have also accused Iraq of dropping mustard-gas bombs on Iranian villages. Human Rights Watch reports that Iraq frequently used nerve agents and mustard gas against Iraqi Kurds living in the country’s north. In March 1988, Saddam’s forces reportedly killed thousands of Iraqi Kurds in the town of Halabja with chemical weapons.

host · 01-17-2007, 10:56 PM

RE: <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=2181808&postcount=115">aceventura3's post #115 on Maybe more of a vent than debate.. THREAD</a>

I thought that this is a better place to respond to aceventura3's challenge at the link above.

My exchanges with ace, last september, reinforce what dc_dux observed in the
"Maybe more of a vent than debate.. THREAD". Facts do not persuade ace to budge an inch from what he believes. Direct contradictions of findings of fact by SSCI phase II and the 2004 Duelfer WMD report, to what Cheney and Bush said as recently as in Aug. and Sept., 2006, do not sway ace, in the least.

The reality that, in summer 2006, Bush and Cheney still can be observed, on the whitehouse.gov website archived pages....justifying invading and occupying Iraq by linking Saddam to al-Zarqawi, and by stating that Saddam had, or was making, or could make, or wanted to make WMD, long after the evidence presented both by Duelfer and the SSCI, clearly shows only the last accusation to be not completely false and/or misleading.....does not sway aceventura3 from believing that the Bush policy of pre-emption is correct and legal.

The justification for invading Iraq in 2003 are pealed away to the last Bush Cheney justification; the presumption that Saddam wanted to reconstitute his pre-1991 WMD and CBW programs....because, as ace noted in the post linked above, Bush said

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0021007-8.html

......We also must never forget the most vivid events of recent history. On September the 11th, 2001, America felt its vulnerability -- even to threats that gather on the other side of the earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat, from any source, that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America........

....and that is it....for ace, no example(s) of Bush or Cheney lying or deliberately misleading the world as to their justifications for invading Iraq can weaken, to any degree, Bush's solemn vow to "confront any threat, from any source......

ace never responded to my last post here, just above Marv's....and he certainly showed in our exchanges on this page that it mattered not that Cheney lied about al-Zarqawi and Kermal, or that five days after 9/11, Cheney told Tim Russert that the US had Saddam "bottled up".

It matters not that Bush chose to grind down US ground forces in Iraq, a place where there were no Islamic Fascist butcher killers in the area controlled by Saddam, dictator of a famously secular regime, or that Bush ignored the growing threat posed by North Korea, and actually accelerated that country's program to produce nuclear weapons grade plutonium, vs. the predicted 20 years that prgram would have taken under the Bush abandoned accord that the US reached with North Korea in 1994.

ace cannot justify his tolerance for US leaders who tell us lies to justify pre-emptive war against neutralized, or at best, nations who are inconsequential threats, while they do nothing to forcefully pre-empt, or confront nations who actually demonstrate a growing aggressive, nuclear threat, so........???

Ch'i · 01-17-2007, 11:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

The reality that, in summer 2006, Bush and Cheney still can be observed, on the whitehouse.gov website archived pages....justifying invading and occupying Iraq by linking Saddam to al-Zarqawi, and by stating that Saddam had, or was making, or could make, or wanted to make WMD, long after the evidence presented both by Duelfer and the SSCI, clearly shows only the last accusation to be not completely false and/or misleading.....does not sway aceventura3 from believing that the Bush policy of pre-emption is correct and legal.

The justification for invading Iraq in 2003 are pealed away to the last Bush Cheney justification; the presumption that Saddam wanted to reconstitute his pre-1991 WMD and CBW programs....because, as ace noted in the post linked above, Bush said
Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0021007-8.html

......We also must never forget the most vivid events of recent history. On September the 11th, 2001, America felt its vulnerability -- even to threats that gather on the other side of the earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat, from any source, that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America........
....and that is it....for ace, no example(s) of Bush or Cheney lying or deliberately misleading the world as to their justifications for invading Iraq can weaken, to any degree, Bush's solemn vow to "confront any threat, from any source......

And for anyone who is still unsure of this...

Quote:

Originally Posted by G. W. Bush

"You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror."—Interview with CBS News, Washington D.C., Sept. 6, 2006

09-13-2006, 04:57 AM	#42 (permalink)
Charlatan Getting it. Super Moderator Location: Lion City	You should all remember that it isn't OPEC that is making the most money out of the high price of oil... it is Big Oil. This isn't neccessarily a bad thing, it's just something you should remember before pointing fingers at OPEC (not that anyone was yet). __________________ "My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars." - Old Man Luedecke

09-13-2006, 07:19 AM	#46 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	what i do not understand is the linkage between the tanking situation and iraq and oil prices more broadly. i understand direction no. 1 taken by the thread--the actions of everybody's favorite war profiteers at halliburton--but not the link to the ongoing spiked gas prices. i understand direction no. 2 as well: the question of whether there is a way to use oil as a wedge to continue supporting the iraq debacle. i still haven't found a better book than michael klare's "resource wards" on american energy policy--there is little doubt that the invasion of iraq fits into the logic of long-term strategies centered around securing oil supplies that have shaped a significant aspect of american foriegn policy of the last 30 years or so. at the same time, this was not the way the war was sold...and the problems with the sales job, the deceptions upon which it was based, and the debacle that the bush people unleashed on themselves, on the americans in the military, on iraq, on the region, and on the planet have been rehearsed above and elsewhere. i find it interesting to see ace trying to work with the fragments of rationale that the bush administration now relies on to continue fobbing off its self-defeating policies on the people. i think he presents an unwinnable case as well as could be expected. but i still do not see any actual argument for or data about the linkage between what is happening in iraq and oil prices. i am obviously not saying that i am suspicious about the existence of such links--i would just like to know what they are. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

09-13-2006, 07:34 PM	#49 (permalink)
Ch'i Artist of Life	ace, there is a time when talk is not enough, and that time is when the enemy makes their move; when all other options are depleted. i hope you understand that pre-emptively striking a country we do not agree with makes us as correct as them. country "a" is being told to disarm by country "b" which is unwilling to do so itself. country "b" has more weapons than country "a." both countries have commited war crimes, both have invaded other countries. is it unreasonable for country "a" to refuse to acknowledge the ultimatum of country "b?" superiority does not make a country correct, or just. any country willing to use preliminary violence in order to settle a dispute is no greater than the country it is in contradiction with. why should any country adhere to rules that do not apply to all countries? your family is not in direct threat of an attack from suddam. Last edited by Ch'i; 09-13-2006 at 07:38 PM..

09-12-2006, 10:10 PM	#41 (permalink)
Elphaba Deja Moo Location: Olympic Peninsula, WA	An aside perhaps. OPEC is not pleased with the recent fall in the price per bbl and is contemplating reducing output to keep prices high. Keeping prices over $70 seems to be the new target in manipulating available oil.

09-14-2006, 06:59 AM	#52 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	I know you're busy, ace, but did you read post #45?