Kucinich begins impeachment process for GW Bush

Dennis Kucinich has introduced articles of impeachment for George W Bush to Congress:

Thirty-five articles were presented by Rep. Dennis Kucinich to the House of Representatives late Monday evening, airing live on C-SPAN.

"The House is not in order," said Kucinich to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), upon which Pelosi pounded her gavel.

"Resolved," Kucinich then began, "that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate. ...

"In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and to the best of his ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has committed the following abuses of power..."

The first article Kucinich presented, and many that followed, regarded the war in Iraq: "Article 1 - Creating a secret propaganda campaign to manufacture a false case for war against Iraq."

Link (Thanks, Mary!)

• [Cowicide]

  MSNBC POLL with (currently) 643,427 responses

  Do you believe President Bush’s actions justify impeachment?

  89% Yes, between the secret spying, the deceptions leading to war and more, there is plenty to justify putting him on trial.

  4.1% No, like any president, he has made a few missteps, but nothing approaching “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

  4.7% No, the man has done absolutely nothing wrong. Impeachment would just be a political lynching.

  2% I don’t know.

  Link to poll:
  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10562904/

• [JSG]

  #94 GREGLONDON

  I’ll answer your questions one at a time.

  You’re kidding, right? No I’m not kidding.

  You want me to give you a link to Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame’s husband, saying the niger yellow cake story was shit? If you read the Congressional Report, it states on page 37 that the CIA’s Director of Operations issued a report from a foreign government service, stating with more detail than the first report and in “verbatim text”, that ” Subsequently, the governments of Niger and Iraq signed an agreement regarding the sale of uranium during meetings held July 5-6, 2000. The report indicated 500 tons of uranium per year.” Now there is a lot that is redacted from the report, but it later states that a CIA analyst asked about the credibility of the report to which the analyst “says he was told by the CIA’s DO that the report was from a “very credible source.”

  And as an added bonus, if you check the CIA world fact book, under Niger, one of the main industries uranium mining.

  Have you heard of Wilson or Plame? Yes, I do know who Wilson and Plame are.

  Will you also be needing a cited “reference” to explain that Plame was outed by the White House in retaliation for Wilson speaking the truth? No, I don’t need references for them, as stated, I know how they are.

  Here is a direct quote from the Congressional report:
  “On February 18,2002, the embassy in Niger disseminated a cable which reported that the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal “provides sufficient detail to warrant another hard look at Niger’s uranium sales. The names of GON [government of Niger] officials cited in the report track closely with those we know to be in those, or closely-related positions. However, the purported 4,000-ton annual production listed is fully 1,000 tons more than the mining companies claim to have produced in 2001.” The report indicated that the ambassador had met with the Nigerien Foreign Minister to ask for an unequivocal assurance that Niger had stuck to its commitment not to sell uranium to rogue states. The cable also noted that in September 2001 the Nigerien Prime Minister had told embassy personnel that there were buyers like Iraq who would pay more for Niger’s uranium than France, but the Prime Minister added, “of course Niger cannot sell to them.” The cable concluded that despite previous assurances from Nigerien officials that no uranium would be sold to rogue nations, “we should not dismiss out of hand the possibility that some scheme could be, or has been, underway to supply Iraq with yellowcake from here.” The cable also suggested raising the issue with the French, who control the uranium mines in Niger, despite France’s solid assurances that no uranium could be diverted to rogue states.”

  And the CIA doesn’t do follow up interviews with Wilson and the officials in Niger to make absolutely sure that no uranium was sold? The CIA believes an ambassador and doesn’t do a second round of interviews? All because Wilson was going on a business trip and would be in Africa and had contacts? To me that seems a little slipshod, and it seems as though the CIA has had another intelligence breakdown.

  Have you been living under a fucking rock? No I do not live under a rock, I have a nice house in the suburbs.

  Do you need a cited reference to remember that the second UN resolution, the one that authorized the use of force, failed to get international support? We did have international support, there is England, Australia, Georgia, South Korea, Poland, Romania, El Salvador, Bulgaria, and many others.

  Here is a link:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinational_force_in_Iraq#More_than_100.2C000_military_personnel

  Did you miss the news about the secret memo regarging the Bush/Blair meeting? I suppose so, please link to it.

  Were you watching the news in early 2003? Yes I was. Or were you watching Fox and eating up the propaganda channel? I don’t watch FOX news, can’t stand the corny anchors. But that is as much a propaganda channel to those of the leftist ilk as CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and MSNBC seems a source of propaganda to a conservative.

  In Iraq, we were over there to find out if Saddam had weapons programs.

  you just keep telling yourself that pokey.

  May I ask why you believe we are in Iraq?

• [Red Leatherman]

  For so many reasons I would like to see Bush Impeached. but I fear that his crimes may exceed the minor offences that our system is adept at handeling. it seems that historicly the more vast the crime the less likely the sucess in prosecution.

  By the way, my first post, but I’ve been a reader since sometime around 911. but you know, I’ve read a lot of post, so I know, you know? yeah you know. and they know.
  but I am confused. not about simple things but about more important things and on a much higher level.
  Now you know.

• [Takuan]

  true

• [GregLondon]

  When the facts don’t come to the same conclusion as you…

  don’t trust the facts!

• [Egypt Urnash]

  Write your congressperson and urge them to help out on this. Or call them – someone want to come up with a quick link to find your congressperson’s office number?

  Even if they voted against it when this came up before; even if they’re GOP. They’re supposed to represent you, and there’s a little voice reminding even the most cynical old hand at politic-as-usual that this is what they’re there for.

• [Takuan]

  http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080622113024.5rfe5v9s&show_article=1

• [GregLondon]

  Oh, and this is simply bullshit:

  That is, of course, if you actually think that the amount of dead soldiers some how equates to the success of the mission.

  You either think invasion in March 2003 was better than allowing Blix a few more months to finish inspections, or you DON’T.

  If you want to play games with red herring about D-Day, then you can play with yourself.

  Either you think the invasion in Mar 2003 was a better choice than allowing inspectios to continue, or you don’t.

  Me, I think as long as Blix was reporting that Iraq was complying with inspections we should have continued with inspections. I was especially in favor of inspections after he reported they could be done in a few months, less than a year.

• [Anonymous]

  congress had access to the same intelligence.

  Dear sweet Ghu ….
  What intelligence? The reports that were carefully written and edited to support Bush and Cheney and their mad rush to start a war? The other ones that were suppressed so that Bush and Cheney could say that ‘intelligence supports’ their views?

  [I remember reading all those stories, and noticing that the justification for invading Iraq kept changing. I was calling it the 'excuse of the month club'. I don't know what's in the air and water in DC that no one there apparently could see it.]

• [minTphresh]

  congrats there, red. just remember, theres no joy like your first disemvowelling!

• [JSG]

  Well I can see that I’m in the minority here. This isn’t any sort of partisan attack on Rep. Kucinich, but he has done this before. Every time it has been shot down because of lack of merit not because of political expediency. The only reason that Rep. Kucinich does this is for media exposure. The President has done nothing wrong in Iraq, there may have been missteps, but they have been fixed.

  Rarely is the reason for going to war the same as the reason the war was fought. The Civil War is a great example, we went into the war to preserve the union. After the war was fought the reason changed to freeing the slaves. Both are honorable reasons for fighting a war. In Iraq, we were over there to find out if Saddam had weapons programs, he wasn’t working with UNSCOM which was established specifically for post Gulf War Iraq. When we went into Iraq we found out that Saddam may not have had weapons. Ok fine, do we leave then? Or do we take out a tyrant for the good of the people of Iraq and the neighbors of Iraq?

  We realized that another democracy in the Middle East was a good thing so we remained and fought for a stable democracy in Iraq. The men and women of the armed forces are fight along side the Iraqi’s to stabilize the nation. They are working on infrastructure and helping rebuild schools in Iraq. The next election is in October. We’ll be seeing more of those women in their burkas with the purple fingers.

  Will Iraq ever be a peaceful and prosperous nation? It took the United States a little under 200 years to even be a blip on the radar of other nations, so we’ll see.

• [GregLondon]

  jsg, before you post anything else defending the endless lies that have been used to justify an immoral war, I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

• [JSG]

  GregLondon,

  “There was no shredder.
  It never existed. There is zero evidence to support it. You failed to even google it. You read one thing that asserts something about Saddam, it was completely fabricated, and you then argue that Saddam “should have been taken out”.”

  I know that there was no shredder, but in the link you posted from the Times Online there was also this…

  “This is one of the many witness statements that were taken by researchers from Indict — the organisation I chair — to provide evidence for legal cases against specific Iraqi individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. This account was taken in the past two weeks.

  Another witness told us about practices of the security services towards women: “Women were suspended by their hair as their families watched; men were forced to watch as their wives were raped . . . women were suspended by their legs while they were menstruating until their periods were over, a procedure designed to cause humiliation.”

  So because one woman was found to be lying do we throw out everything else that others have told Indict? It was not completely fabricated, just her story.

  Again, Mr. Knightley focuses on one story rather than the whole of the Indict report. Here is the Indict website: http://www.indict.org.uk/

  You said,
  “The similarities between Nayirah’s testimony, the shredder story, and you’re selective quotations of Blix are that you quote something out of context, and you ignore the truth.”

  Ok, so I’ve read and quoted the whole of Blix’s March 2003 report, not selectively. My question is what is the truth that I have ignored?

  “So who’s to say that the proactive attitude of the Iraqi’s would last months?”

  That’s an honest question, Blix states he had a total of 10 of 38 interviews that were free from outside influence that means that 28 had some sort of outside influence.

  “Since we started requesting interviews, 38 individuals were asked for private interviews, of which 10 accepted under our terms, 7 of these during the last week.”

  Not everybody, apparently, had the same”immediate, active and unconditional cooperation” that was needed for the weapons inspection.

  Here’s Blix and his February 14th report to the UN.

  http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/blix14Febasdel.htm

  “Introduction

  Mr. President,

  Since I reported to the Security Council on 27 January, UNMOVIC has had two further weeks of operational and analytical work in New York and active inspections in Iraq. This brings the total period of inspections so far to 11 weeks. Since then, we have also listened on 5 February to the presentation to the Council by the US Secretary of State and the discussion that followed. Lastly, Dr. ElBaradei and I have held another round of talks in Baghdad with our counterparts and with Vice President Ramadan on 8 and 9 February.

  Work in Iraq

  Let me begin today’s briefing with a short account of the work being performed by UNMOVIC in Iraq.

  We have continued to build up our capabilities. The regional office in Mosul is now fully operational at its temporary headquarters. Plans for a regional office at Basra are being developed. Our Hercules L-100 aircraft continues to operate routine flights between Baghdad and Larnaca. The eight helicopters are fully operational. With the resolution of the problems raised by Iraq for the transportation of minders into the no-fly zones, our mobility in these zones has improved. We expect to increase utilization of the helicopters. The number of Iraqi minders during inspections had often reached a ratio as high as five per inspector. During the talks in January in Baghdad, the Iraqi side agreed to keep the ratio to about one to one. The situation has improved.”

  Everything so far sounds good, they are ramping up for more inspections. The only problem that I have so far is with the ratio of minders to inspectors. The 1 to 1 ratio is bad, 5 to 1 is horrible. The onus is on Iraq to show that they have no WMD’s, why were there any minders at all? Why didn’t the Iraqi government open there books and all of the possible places where there could have been WMD’s, allow free rein to Blix and his inspectors to prove that the Iraqi’s were living up to the resolutions?

  “Since we arrived in Iraq, we have conducted more than 400 inspections covering more than 300 sites. All inspections were performed without notice, and access was almost always provided promptly. In no case have we seen convincing evidence that the Iraqi side knew in advance that the inspectors were coming.”

  Again that’s great news, but the bit about access being almost always provided promptly makes me wonder if they were moving things, or just making sure that the UN could move freely through the site.

  “The inspections have taken place throughout Iraq at industrial sites, ammunition depots, research centres, universities, presidential sites, mobile laboratories, private houses, missile production facilities, military camps and agricultural sites. At all sites which had been inspected before 1998, re-baselining activities were performed. This included the identification of the function and contents of each building, new or old, at a site. It also included verification of previously tagged equipment, application of seals and tags, taking samples and discussions with the site personnel regarding past and present activities. At certain sites, ground-penetrating radar was used to look for underground structures or buried equipment.”

  Again almost all good and just revamping after four years of no inspections. What I question is why only use ground penetrating radar at certain sites, why not all sites?

  “Through the inspections conducted so far, we have obtained a good knowledge of the industrial and scientific landscape of Iraq, as well as of its missile capability but, as before, we do not know every cave and corner. Inspections are effectively helping to bridge the gap in knowledge that arose due to the absence of inspections between December 1998 and November 2002.”

  There’s that four years when Iraq could have done anything with the B&C weapons that they wanted to. This is scary “we do not know every cave and corner.” again the onus is on Iraq to tell of every cave and corner where weapons could have been hidden.

  “More than 200 chemical and more than 100 biological samples have been collected at different sites. Three-quarters of these have been screened using our own analytical laboratory capabilities at the Baghdad Centre (BOMVIC). The results to date have been consistent with Iraq’s declarations.”

  Great, 3/4 of these 200 chemical and 100 biological have been screened at BOMVIC, and have been consistent, but what about the other 1/4?

  “We have now commenced the process of destroying approximately 50 litres of mustard gas declared by Iraq that was being kept under UNMOVIC seal at the Muthanna site. One-third of the quantity has already been destroyed. The laboratory quantity of thiodiglycol, a mustard gas precursor, which we found at another site, has also been destroyed.”

  Great, it is working. However had Iraq allowed weapons inspectors unfettered access in 1998 then they would be no problems.

  “The total number of staff in Iraq now exceeds 250 from 60 countries. This includes about 100 UNMOVIC inspectors, 15 IAEA inspectors, 50 aircrew, and 65 support staff.”

  Great, no problems here.

  “Mr. President,

  In my 27 January update to the Council, I said that it seemed from our experience that Iraq had decided in principle to provide cooperation on process, most importantly prompt access to all sites and assistance to UNMOVIC in the establishment of the necessary infrastructure. This impression remains, and we note that access to sites has so far been without problems, including those that had never been declared or inspected, as well as to Presidential sites and private residences.
  In my last updating, I also said that a decision to cooperate on substance was indispensable in order to bring, through inspection, the disarmament task to completion and to set the monitoring system on a firm course. Such cooperation, as I have noted, requires more than the opening of doors. In the words of resolution 1441 (2002) – it requires immediate, unconditional and active efforts by Iraq to resolve existing questions of disarmament – either by presenting remaining proscribed items and programmes for elimination or by presenting convincing evidence that they have been eliminated. In the current situation, one would expect Iraq to be eager to comply. While we were in Baghdad, we met a delegation from the Government of South Africa. It was there to explain how South Africa gained the confidence of the world in its dismantling of the nuclear weapons programme, by a wholehearted cooperation over two years with IAEA inspectors. I have just learned that Iraq has accepted an offer by South Africa to send a group of experts for further talks.
  How much, if any, is left of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and related proscribed items and programmes? So far, UNMOVIC has not found any such weapons, only a small number of empty chemical munitions, which should have been declared and destroyed. Another matter – and one of great significance – is that many proscribed weapons and items are not accounted for. To take an example, a document, which Iraq provided, suggested to us that some 1,000 tonnes of chemical agent were “unaccounted for”. One must not jump to the conclusion that they exist. However, that possibility is also not excluded. If they exist, they should be presented for destruction. If they do not exist, credible evidence to that effect should be presented.”

  So in February, Blix said the above, and in March he said that the documents were slow in being produced. I’d expect in a time when things are being ramped up across the border in Kuwait that the documents would be at hand for the UN.

  “We are fully aware that many governmental intelligence organizations are convinced and assert that proscribed weapons, items and programmes continue to exist. The US Secretary of State presented material in support of this conclusion. Governments have many sources of information that are not available to inspectors. Inspectors, for their part, must base their reports only on evidence, which they can, themselves, examine and present publicly. Without evidence, confidence cannot arise.”

  So what I assume he is stating here is that the Iraqi government had no evidence that they felt they could show the inspectors, that is not living up to 1441. It should not be up to the Iraqi government to decide what documents are to be shown to the inspectors, the documents should be at hand for the inspectors.

  “Mr. President,

  In my earlier briefings, I have noted that significant outstanding issues of substance were listed in two Security Council documents from early 1999 (S/1999/94 and S/1999/356) and should be well known to Iraq. I referred, as examples, to the issues of anthrax, the nerve agent VX and long-range missiles, and said that such issues “deserve to be taken seriously by Iraq rather than being brushed aside…”. The declaration submitted by Iraq on 7 December last year, despite its large volume, missed the opportunity to provide the fresh material and evidence needed to respond to the open questions. This is perhaps the most important problem we are facing. Although I can understand that it may not be easy for Iraq in all cases to provide the evidence needed, it is not the task of the inspectors to find it. Iraq itself must squarely tackle this task and avoid belittling the questions.”

  No evidence that Iraq either still holds these weapons or destroyed them, the inspectors needed evidence.

  “Work in New York

  In my January update to the Council, I referred to the Al Samoud 2 and the Al Fatah missiles, reconstituted casting chambers, construction of a missile engine test stand and the import of rocket engines, which were all declared to UNMOVIC by Iraq. I noted that the Al Samoud 2 and the Al Fatah could very well represent prima facie cases of proscribed missile systems, as they had been tested to ranges exceeding the 150-kilometre limit set by the Security Council. I also noted that Iraq had been requested to cease flight tests of these missiles until UNMOVIC completed a technical review.”

  Iraq should not be permitted to test any sort of weapons system. The only one who should be allowed to test anything is UNMOVIC to see if Iraq is compliant with all resolutions.

  “Earlier this week, UNMOVIC missile experts met for two days with experts from a number of Member States to discuss these items. The experts concluded unanimously that, based on the data provided by Iraq, the two declared variants of the Al Samoud 2 missile were capable of exceeding 150 kilometres in range. This missile system is therefore proscribed for Iraq pursuant to resolution 687 (1991) and the monitoring plan adopted by resolution 715 (1991).”

  Illegal weapons in Iraq, that violated resolution 687, that said no ballistic missiles that can travel over 150 km.

  “As for the Al Fatah, the experts found that clarification of the missile data supplied by Iraq was required before the capability of the missile system could be fully assessed.”

  Again, I wonder how many Al Fatah Missiles were found? I saw no number. If anyone smarter than me can tell me that would be wonderful.

  “With respect to the casting chambers, I note the following: UNSCOM ordered and supervised the destruction of the casting chambers, which had been intended for use in the production of the proscribed Badr-2000 missile system. Iraq has declared that it has reconstituted these chambers. The experts have confirmed that the reconstituted casting chambers could still be used to produce motors for missiles capable of ranges significantly greater than 150 kilometres. Accordingly, these chambers remain proscribed.”

  Another illegal weapon, again, how many missile casings were there?

  “The experts also studied the data on the missile engine test stand that is nearing completion and have assessed it to be capable of testing missile engines with thrusts greater than that of the SA-2 engine. So far, the test stand has not been associated with a proscribed activity.”

  Not known to be illegal, yet.

  “On the matter of the 380 SA-2 missile engines imported outside of the export/import mechanism and in contravention of paragraph 24 of resolution 687 (1991), UNMOVIC inspectors were informed by Iraq during an official briefing that these engines were intended for use in the Al Samoud 2 missile system, which has now been assessed to be proscribed. Any such engines configured for use in this missile system would also be proscribed.”

  So, 380 missile engines were illegal according to resolution 687. As Dr. Blix stated in his preamble, had the Iraqi government allowed unfettered access four years previously, they most likely would have had no sanctions placed upon the Iraqi government.

  “I intend to communicate these findings to the Government of Iraq.

  Meeting in Baghdad

  At the meeting in Baghdad on 8 and 9 February, the Iraqi side addressed some of the important outstanding disarmament issues and gave us a number of papers, e.g. regarding anthrax and growth material, the nerve agent VX and missile production. Experts who were present from our side studied the papers during the evening of 8 February and met with Iraqi experts in the morning of 9 February for further clarifications. Although no new evidence was provided in the papers and no open issues were closed through them or the expert discussions, the presentation of the papers could be indicative of a more active attitude focusing on important open issues.”

  Or it could be a stalling technique. Of course the UNMOVIC team was on the ground, I wasn’t.

  “The Iraqi side suggested that the problem of verifying the quantities of anthrax and two VX-precursors, which had been declared unilaterally destroyed, might be tackled through certain technical and analytical methods. Although our experts are still assessing the suggestions, they are not very hopeful that it could prove possible to assess the quantities of material poured into the ground years ago. Documentary evidence and testimony by staff that dealt with the items still appears to be needed.”

  Testimony by whom, members of the UNMOVIC team? Or by members of the Iraqi team that created the anthrax or VX? Of course the UN must have documentary evidence, that the Iraqi government was lax in finding and producing.

  “Not least against this background, a letter of 12 February from Iraq’s National Monitoring Directorate may be of relevance. It presents a list of 83 names of participants “in the unilateral destruction in the chemical field, which took place in the summer of 1991”. As the absence of adequate evidence of that destruction has been and remains an important reason why quantities of chemicals have been deemed “unaccounted for”, the presentation of a list of persons who can be interviewed about the actions appears useful and pertains to cooperation on substance. I trust that the Iraqi side will put together a similar list of names of persons who participated in the unilateral destruction of other proscribed items, notably in the biological field.”

  I assume that this is the 10 members of the 38 people that the UN wanted to interview.

  “The Iraqi side also informed us that the commission, which had been appointed in the wake of our finding 12 empty chemical weapons warheads, had had its mandate expanded to look for any still existing proscribed items. This was welcomed.”

  12 empty warheads, that could have contained a whole host of chemical weapons, and could be anywhere in Iraq in one of its caves or crevices.

  “A second commission, we learnt, has now been appointed with the task of searching all over Iraq for more documents relevant to the elimination of proscribed items and programmes. It is headed by the former Minister of Oil, General Amer Rashid, and is to have very extensive powers of search in industry, administration and even private houses.”

  An Iraq Minister of oil, searching for paperwork, in his own land. Well, that’s a good idea.

  “The two commissions could be useful tools to come up with proscribed items to be destroyed and with new documentary evidence. They evidently need to work fast and effectively to convince us, and the world, that it is a serious effort.”

  Absolutely they do, and it sure doesn’t seem as though the Iraqi government took the effort seriously, they seem to be dragging their feet.

  “The matter of private interviews was discussed at length during our meeting in Baghdad. The Iraqi side confirmed the commitment, which it made to us on 20 January, to encourage persons asked to accept such interviews, whether in or out of Iraq. So far, we have only had interviews in Baghdad. A number of persons have declined to be interviewed, unless they were allowed to have an official present or were allowed to tape the interview. Three persons that had previously refused interviews on UNMOVIC’s terms, subsequently accepted such interviews just prior to our talks in Baghdad on 8 and 9 February. These interviews proved informative. No further interviews have since been accepted on our terms. I hope this will change. We feel that interviews conducted without any third party present and without tape recording would provide the greatest credibility.”

  I agree completely with Dr. Blix here, the interviews need to take place quickly, because the multinational force was on the border of Iraq. The only problem that I have is with the iraqis not allowed to use tape recorders, I see no reason why that matters.

  “At the recent meeting in Baghdad, as on several earlier occasions, my colleague Dr. ElBaradei and I have urged the Iraqi side to enact legislation implementing the UN prohibitions regarding weapons of mass destruction. This morning we had a message that a Presidential decree has now been issued containing prohibitions with regard to importation and production of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. We have not yet had time to study the details of the text of the decree.”

  It’s a start, a little late, but a start.

  Intelligence

  “Mr. President, I should like to make some comments on the role of intelligence in connection with inspections in Iraq.

  A credible inspection regime requires that Iraq provide full cooperation on “process” – granting immediate access everywhere to inspectors – and on substance, providing full declarations supported by relevant information and material and evidence. However, with the closed society in Iraq of today and the history of inspections there, other sources of information, such as defectors and government intelligence agencies are required to aid the inspection process.”

  Absolutely, ever piece of paper that the inspectors want should have been in their hand before they asked. The closed society argument is a little odd, sure the society is closed, but the Hussein regime could have probably put any piece of evidence into the hands of inspector at a moments notice.

  “I remember myself how, in 1991, several inspections in Iraq, which were based on information received from a Government, helped to disclose important parts of the nuclear weapons programme. It was realized that an international organization authorized to perform inspections anywhere on the ground could make good use of information obtained from governments with eyes in the sky, ears in the ether, access to defectors, and both eyes and ears on the market for weapons-related material. It was understood that the information residing in the intelligence services of governments could come to very active use in the international effort to prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. This remains true and we have by now a good deal of experience in the matter.”

  Thats great, but that was also 1991, it is now 2003, things change, new obstructionist leaders come to power, but if Dr. Blix can find out if countries have any WMD’s that’s great, what matters is if the country is ruled by a dictator that throws the inspectors out and for four years can do what he wishes.

  “International organizations need to analyse such information critically and especially benefit when it comes from more than one source. The intelligence agencies, for their part, must protect their sources and methods. Those who provide such information must know that it will be kept in strict confidence and be known to very few people. UNMOVIC has achieved good working relations with intelligence agencies and the amount of information provided has been gradually increasing. However, we must recognize that there are limitations and that misinterpretations can occur.”

  Sounds a lot like what happen in the United States with the intelligence on Iraq and with Joseph Wilson’s report. Two parts of this paragraph stuck out, the bit about how countries benefit from intelligence that come from more than one source, and that last sentence about misinterpretations.

  “Intelligence information has been useful for UNMOVIC. In one case, it led us to a private home where documents mainly relating to laser enrichment of uranium were found. In other cases, intelligence has led to sites where no proscribed items were found. Even in such cases, however, inspection of these sites were useful in proving the absence of such items and in some cases the presence of other items – conventional munitions. It showed that conventional arms are being moved around the country and that movements are not necessarily related to weapons of mass destruction.”

  So, that’s good, even though there are arms moving around the country that are not necessarily WMD’s.

  “The presentation of intelligence information by the US Secretary of State suggested that Iraq had prepared for inspections by cleaning up sites and removing evidence of proscribed weapons programmes. I would like to comment only on one case, which we are familiar with, namely, the trucks identified by analysts as being for chemical decontamination at a munitions depot. This was a declared site, and it was certainly one of the sites Iraq would have expected us to inspect. We have noted that the two satellite images of the site were taken several weeks apart. The reported movement of munitions at the site could just as easily have been a routine activity as a movement of proscribed munitions in anticipation of imminent inspection. Our reservation on this point does not detract from our appreciation of the briefing.”

  So maybe they were moving banned weapons and maybe they weren’t, but thanks for the information.

  “Plans for the immediate future

  Yesterday, UNMOVIC informed the Iraqi authorities of its intention to start using the U-2 surveillance aircraft early next week under arrangements similar to those UNSCOM had followed. We are also in the process of working out modalities for the use of the French Mirage aircraft starting late next week and for the drones supplied by the German Government. The offer from Russia of an Antonov aircraft, with night vision capabilities, is a welcome one and is next on our agenda for further improving UNMOVIC’s and IAEA’s technical capabilities. These developments are in line with suggestions made in a non-paper recently circulated by France, suggesting a further strengthening of the inspection capabilities.”

  I would have liked to have seen the UN move in with all of these assets at the start of their inspection, but you go in with what you have, whether your happy about it or not.

  “It is our intention to examine the possibilities for surveying ground movements, notably by trucks. In the face of persistent intelligence reports for instance about mobile biological weapons production units, such measures could well increase the effectiveness of inspections.”

  Again you go in with what you’ve got at a delicate time like this.

  “UNMOVIC is still expanding its capabilities, both in terms of numbers of staff and technical resources. On my way to the recent Baghdad meeting, I stopped in Vienna to meet 60 experts, who had just completed our general training course for inspectors. They came from 22 countries, including Arab countries.”

  Great the more inspectors the better.

  Time lines

  Mr. President,

  “UNMOVIC is not infrequently asked how much more time it needs to complete its task in Iraq. The answer depends upon which task one has in mind – the elimination of weapons of mass destruction and related items and programmes, which were prohibited in 1991 – the disarmament task – or the monitoring that no new proscribed activities occur. The latter task, though not often focused upon, is highly significant – and not controversial. It will require monitoring, which is “ongoing”, that is, open-ended until the Council decides otherwise.”

  So it went from months to open ended, I’ve got no problem with that.

  “By contrast, the task of “disarmament” foreseen in resolution 687 (1991) and the progress on “key remaining disarmament tasks” foreseen in resolution 1284 (1999) as well as the “disarmament obligations”, which Iraq was given a “final opportunity to comply with” under resolution 1441 (2002), were always required to be fulfilled in a shorter time span.”

  No matter how long it takes the Iraqis should comply with 1441.

  “Regrettably, the high degree of cooperation required of Iraq for disarmament through inspection was not forthcoming in 1991. Despite the elimination, under UNSCOM and IAEA supervision, of large amounts of weapons, weapons-related items and installations over the years, the task remained incomplete, when inspectors were withdrawn almost 8 years later at the end of 1998.”

  Again, Dr. Blixs states earlier in this report that had Iraq complied with the UN in 1998 there, most likely, would have been no need for sanctions.

  “If Iraq had provided the necessary cooperation in 1991, the phase of disarmament – under resolution 687 (1991) – could have been short and a decade of sanctions could have been avoided. Today, three months after the adoption of resolution 1441 (2002), the period of disarmament through inspection could still be short, if “immediate, active and unconditional cooperation” with UNMOVIC and the IAEA were to be forthcoming.”

  Again, why did Iraq, after eight years, throw out the inspectors in 1998? What did they have to hide?

  Now there are no sanctions in Iraq, no oil for food program, the new, elected Iraqi government has a reasonably working army, naturally the new government and the army has some kinks to work out, but no country went from new government to working government over night.

  You yelled…

  “OH. MY. GOD.

  THREE TRILLION DOLLARS, THOUSANDS OF AMERICAN DEAD, THAT”S SUCH A BETTER PRICE TO PAY THAN TO HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THE POSSIBILITY THAT IRAQ MIGHT, SOME DAY, MAYBE STOP BEIGN PROACTIVE. DAMN THEIR EYES FOR COOPERATING WITH INSPECTIONS!”

  The cooperation was tenuous at best. Three trillion dollars, does that include the price of the vehicles, and the transport to Kuwait, plus gasoline for the vehicles? Of course that also includes pay, which the soldiers would have gotten anyway, oh, plus hazard pay, which is most likely sitting in a bank in America, to be used by the families of the soldiers. Because the soldiers are getting three squares a day free I think, and if not free then they do have to pay for it. Iraq is not a money hole. People get paid and then sped some of that money.

  As to the thousands dead, I feel sorry for them. Let’s look at history The invasion of Normandy, there were 195,700 soldiers from the U.K. and the U.S. 5100 died trying to establish a beach head. In the Pacific theater alone 300,000 died in combat.

  You must understand that these men and women go into to the military knowing that there is a chance, slim though it is, that they will die young, at the hands of an enemy or in a training accident. If they don’t, then why do they practice with weapons large and small? Besides, the army is a volunteer force, so if a person doesn’t wish to get shot at, maybe the military isn’t for them.

  So any question that I missed, please feel free to add them to your next post.

• [magic whiskey]

  Kucinich should be happy he was on camera. You know, the last time a Jedi Master tried to take down the Emperor he got into a big lightsaber battle over it.

• [GregLondon]

  I’ll say it again, if Hussein allowed the inspectors to do their job, in 1998, and followed all of the resolutions, then the people of Iraq would be living in as much peace as Hussein would allow.

  question 195.a: If the US was actively trying to kill Saddam and using inspections as cover for spies to get targeting information, do you seriously expect Saddam to allow inspections to continue until our spies were successful?

  There was a coup attempt in 96. Another one in 97. Bush and Clinton had both made clear that sanctions would stay in place until Saddam was out of power. Not until inspections were finished. And you put the ENTIRE blame for Saddam halting inspectors trying to kill him on Saddam?

  question 195.b: Was the US more interested in Inspections being completed or Saddam being killed?

  question 195.c: Did the UN resolution authorize sanctions to remain in place until inspections were complete or until Saddam was removed from power?

  question 195.d: was US actions tying sanctions to removal of saddam covered by UN resolutions or unilateral?

  Irrelevant, they are a sovereign nation according to the UN.

  Uh, hey, guess what, oh great international lawyer: Iraq was a sovereign nation too. No resolution called for Saddam to be removed from power. No resolution authorized a military invasion of Iraq.

  Uh, what about 97-03? 90-95% disarmed, not 100%

  Congratulations, you just argued for the 1% doctrine.

• [Kieran O’Neill]

  … and the article remains the most viewed story on CBS news, despite being next to impossible to find on the website in any other way.

  At least it suggests that those at the receiving end of the Bush propaganda machine (the mainstream U.S. media) haven’t been completely brainwashed. Yet.

• [Takuan]

  well, the important thing is that Exxon, Shell, Total and BP are poised to pick up where they left off 36 years ago. And after all, isn’t that all that REALLY matters?

• [Antinous]

  There’s no cash prize for longest comment. Really. I don’t know how that rumor got started.

• [Takuan]

  I’m already de-fuzzing the hemp.

• [Antinous]

  I pasted this into a Word doc. It’s 108 pages.

• [Takuan]

  America still allows for capital punishment. Treason is still a capital crime. How hard would it be to get beheading approved?

• [GregLondon]

  Greg; fess up. This HAS to be you carrying both sides.

  No. Sorry. I’m finding some holes in my set of URL’s, though, but jsg is helping me fill them up. So, it’s all good.

  You might notice a slight pattern between jsg and me. I post a URL to some facts. Then jsg argues that there might be the possibility of something we didn’t know. I post a URL that disproves that. Then jsg argues for some other area of unknown in which he can create the possibility of an alternate history. I post a URL that disproves that. And so on.

  It occurred to me a few days ago that jsg is operating on a “Iraq of the Gaps” sort of like the “god of the gaps” folks who argue that we don’t know some particular piece about evolution with certainty, and then use that unknown to jam in the god of their choice and argue that it’s equally valid.

  But the thing about Iraq is, it ain’t like evolution. We’ve got objective evidence from 1950 all the way to the present to paint a picture of what’s really been happening.

  As jsg tries to create some slice of history that we couldn’t know what Saddam was doing, therefore Saddam must be doing the worst possible thing, I find hard evidence that fills in the hole.

  I keep imagining jsg saying “for the love of god, montresor” as I wall up the holes, but I don’t think he realizes that his arguments are based solely on the “gaps”.

• [Agent 86]

  Teresa, in the middle of his steaming pile, you missed him implying you got your facts wrong.

  Getting back to the article that I linked to, that you deleted, it was not written by Erza Klien, but by James Kirchick the assistant editor of The New Republic

  …I guess he didn’t read to the second sentence of your article.

  This is a little old, but better late than never. It’s a piece by James Kirchick, a New Republic writer who happens to be Martin Peretz’s assistant.

• [Evil Jim]

  A bit late, isn’t it?

• [GregLondon]

  These are pdf files from the Government Printing Office of the Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq

  http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/s108-301/sec3.pdf

  Good grief. You didn’t even read your own reference. Do a search for the string “2003″. You will find a total of four, count them four, matches for intelligence acquired in 2003. Three of them before the invasion, one in may. All of them relate to the “tubes” that the White House had claimed were for centrifuges. All of them say the tubes were NOT centrifuges.

  here is the rest…

  http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/Iraq.html

  The bioweapon report contains two matches for the string “2003″. One match simply refers to Colin Powels speech in 2003, the othe is in December 2003, which said that CURVEBALL was completely worthless as an intel source.

  The chemical weapon report contains absolutely no matches of the string “2003″. Everything contained therein is 2002 or earlier.

  Now, since it’s clear to me that you were living under a rock in early 2003, and didn’t know what was going on just prior to Bush’s rush to war, I’ll break it down for you in little bitty pieces. (also, because your concept of “history” seems to be best described as “cherry picking” what you want to hear, no matter how out of date it is)

  Iraq had nuclear, chemical, and biological programs back in the 1990′s. A number of UN resolutions had been put in place to require Iraq disarm their WMD’s. Weapon inspectors had been in Iraq up until 1998, when they evacuated just prior to Operation Desert Fox.

  Bush made a speech in Sept 2002 to the UN saying that he wanted Iraq to comply with the disarmament resolutions. Resolution 1441 was introduced.

  Several countries were concerned about the wordign of the resolution, specifically, they were concerned that references to “material breech” was some lawyerism that would be used by the US to mean that if Iraq did not comply, then the US could use military force without another UN resolution to approve it.

  The US assured the UN that this was not the case.

  Resolution 1441 passed on November 8, 2002.

  Weapons inspectors returned to Iraq on November 27, 2002. There was initial complaints from the inspectors that Iraq was being a pain in the ass. In January, Hans reported 100 sites visited and no evidence of WMD’s found. By February, Hans reported investigating over 300 sites and no evidence of WMD’s found.

  In March, 2003, Hans reported more inspections, still no evidence of any WMD program, and said that it would take less than a year to fully verify that Iraq had dismantled it’s WMD program.

  Bush first tries to get a second UN resolution to approve an invasion. When its’ clear the world thinks he is stark raving mad, he withdraws the resolution and argues that 1441 does in fact contain authorization for use of force, exactly what the administration had said it did NOT mean back in November 2002.

  March 19, Bush orders the invasion of Iraq.

  Your “references” are old news from the 90′s and up to 2002. All evidence from early 2003 was pointing more and more and more towards the FACT that Iraq had no WMD program. Hans Blix had said he would be finished in a few months. But Bush wanted to invade Iraq, even if there weren’t WMD’s, so he had to jump the gun before Hans came out and gave Iraq a “full compliance” report card.

  The dates in your “references” refer to intel that was out of date. The 2003 references in your own documents go on to say that the aluminum tubes were probably rocket parts, not centrifuge parts.

  But Bush invaded anyway, knowing before the invasion that all the latest intelligence said that Iraq was complying with Resolution 1441, had no WMD program, and would be certified by the inspectors as fully complying within a few months.

  So, the fact that you ignore all of this evidence, the fact that you ignore the sequence of history, the fact that you point at documents referring to 2002 information and before, the fact that your very own “references” show that the 2003 intel pointed towards Iraq having no WMD program, the fact that all intell coming in early 2003 said Iraq was complying with 1441, saying Iraq would be fully inspected within a couple of months, the fact that you ignore the entire historical narative and cherry pick data you like says you’re either (1) a Bush suck-up and troll purposely ignoring facts, or (2) a moron guilty of defending immoral behaviour from the White House based on nothing but your own sheer ignorance of facts.

  Now, continued defense of the indefensible means you’re a bush suckup and troll. If on the other hand, you acknowledge ignorance of some of the facts at and around Jan-Mar 2003, and if you acknowledge that WMD’s had nothing to do with the invasion, then ignorance has been remedied.

• [GregLondon]

  you’re ruled by thugs,liars and thieves

  Well, cowards, at the very least.

  Then again, JSG has demonstrated that people who had once complimented the Emporer on how stylish his new clothes were, some of those folks are going to be resistant to admitting they screwed up.

  And impeaching Bush would land as a personal screwup for some folks who had originally supported him. I will note, as an example, the shifting excuses that JSG employed above. Once we were in Iraq and found now WMD’s, well, maybe we ought to throw out Saddam while we’re in the neighborhood. Rather than admit wrong, they keep moving the goalposts to somewhere out in front of us.

• [Takuan]

  I’ll take what I can get. Here, help me with this trap, hold it up while I oil the hinges…

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  TBO42:
  

  If you spent more time listening and trying to understand what jsg was really about, perhaps by asking open and non-hostile questions, you might have made much more progress.

  Progress toward what? JSG wasn’t here to listen. He was here to preach the gospel that Bush never lied about Iraq. The fact that Bush lied frequently and copiously about Iraq didn’t faze him for a minute. Under the circumstances, Greg’s response has been appropriate.

  Facts do matter, after all.

  Speaking of which, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that Greg belittled JSG. He did call him an idiot, and questioned the existence of his moral principles — which, I agree, was regrettably blunt of Greg — but he engaged with JSG’s arguments seriously and at length.

  You write as though you’re familiar with online arguments. I am therefore puzzled by your apparent belief that the point of a head-to-head argument like this is to convince the other person. That almost never happens. The minds that get changed, if any do, belong to the onlookers.

  Surely you must know that? I’d hate to think you were headtripping Greg, or trying to cast him as some kind of a brute because he didn’t back down on an argument he didn’t start. Your attempt to drum up sympathy for poor JSG being “pushed into a defensive mode” seems especially odd, given that JSG has a hide like a rhinoceros, and jumped into the argument with considerable relish. If I may quote you on the subject:
  

  Your debate focused mainly on the details and timeline of the inspection process, which aren’t central to jsg’s views.

  JSG’s personal views aren’t what JSG discussed. He showed up here and asserted, rather vigorously, that Bush hadn’t lied about Iraq. The main source he was citing was a notoriously tendentious piece by Fred Hiatt, whom JSG quoted as saying
  

  ‘The president’s statements “were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates.”‘

  That statement of Hiatt’s was not true. Neither was the rest of what he said. Furthermore, Greg London is hardly the only person who’s said so in the time since the article was published.

  But Greg is not the one who brought up the subject of “the details and timelines of the inspection process.” JSG did that, when he alleged that Bush’s statements “were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates.” If you make that the issue under dispute — and JSG surely did — you’re going to wind up talking about the details and timing of weapons inspections during the run-up to the war.

  Onward.
  

  He ended up debating you on those points because he had been pushed into “defensive mode” on those issues.

  You cannot possibly be saying that JSG is a poor fragile little dab of a thing, a shrinking violet who was rudely forced into a corner in the course of an argument he started. I must therefore think that what you mean by “pushed into a defensive mode” is that his arguments were flawed, his facts weren’t facts, his sources were just plain bad, and Greg London persisted in pointing it out.

  By the way, I’m having trouble figuring out how you supposedly know what JSG really wanted to talk about, seeing as how it’s so different from what he did talk about. Are you a buddy of his?
  

  He never got around to presenting an overall summary of his reasons for supporting the war.

  So? JSG’s personal reasons for supporting the war were not what he chose to talk about. He’s had every chance to do so. He hasn’t. Instead, he’s advanced more and more scattered, far-fetched arguments in support of his original thesis. Greg has doggedly kept track of the overall structure of the debate through all the changes, and whenever possible has dug up decently sourced info rebutting JSG’s latest.

  Are we supposed to feel sorry for JSG? Because I don’t see it. He’s done as he pleased. No one’s forced him to do anything.

  What I do notice is that Greg has gone to far more effort than JSG has. He’s done more research, explained more background, tied together more facts, sorted out more chronologies and attributions, and backed it all up with a lot more logic. The closest JSG has come to acknowledging this has been to repeatedly shift the ground of his argument and pretend that that was his position all along. I am not impressed.

  The only constructive suggestion I can think of to offer you is that this approach of yours would work better on someone who can’t track a debate. If they have a short memory, that would probably help too.

• [mdkid]

  I’m getting a 404 error for the link

• [Takuan]

  quickly!
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/stevebell/0,,2284712,00.html

• [GregLondon]

  Finally, I love the way you try to change the subject to whether or not I’m a creationist (I’m not)

  Glad to have written something you love. It was merely to explain your “WMD of the Gaps” approach to Iraq. If you’re not a creationist, then you should be able to understand the problem of “God of teh Gaps”, of asserting the existence of something inside of no knowledge.

  But then, I realized that if you were a creationist, you wouldn’t see a problem with asserting the existence of something inside of ignorance. A creationist wouldn’t have a problem with God of the Gaps, and wouldn’t have a problem with WMD’s of the gaps.

  So, I figured I should ask.

  Also, my last post in its entirety did nothing but address your basic approach of asserting that we didn’t know this or didn’t know that, at which point, you then assert the possibility of the existence of WMD’s, at which point, you justify the invasion.

  You can try to wave your hands all you want about Saddam “playing some game” with inspections, but the FACT is he was cooperating in January, February, and March of 2003. Blix said he would be finished in a few months.

  AT WHICH POINT, you must assert the WMD of the GAPS.

  HOW LONG could we count on Saddam cooperating with inspectors, you ask.
  WE DON”T KNOW, you answer your own question.
  THEREFORE WE MUST INVADE, you conclude.

  Argument from ignorance is a basic logical fallacy. If you’re not a creationist, and not a complete Bush apologist, then you should be able to figure that out.

  And I find it slightly humorous that given an entire post on WMD of the Gaps, you ignore the topic completely, and instead assert that there were gaps, and therefore, invasion was acceptable.

  Oh, and don’t act like Wilson was the only one who disproved the Niger/Yellow Cake thing. The UN came out and said that the Niger documents were such bad forgeries that anyone with access to google search could have figured it out.

  Not to mention, you CHERRY PICK your intelligence again, ignoring INTELLIGENCE TO THE CONTRARY, simply on the grounds that it disagrees with the conclusion you want:

  “Conclusion 16: Language in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq/Yellow cake overstated what the Intelligence Community knew.”

  “Conclusion 19: Even after obtaining the forged documents and being alerted by INR about problems with the documents, analysts at both the CIA and DIA did not examine them to see the obvious problems with the documents.”

  “Conclusion 20: The CIA’s comments and assessments about the Iraq-Niger Uranium reporting were inconsistent and, at times, contradictory.”

  http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/s108-301/sec2.pdf

  This is intelligence that not only contradicts your intelligence but actually asserts that your intelligence is crap. So, play games with Wilson all you want. Nothing changes the fact that there was PLENTY of intelligence AT THE TIME that showed tbe niger claims to be false, forgeries, and without a single basis of fact. It is all assertions of WMD’s from ignorance.

• [noen]

  I can’t help but worry that Kucinich will get nowhere with this. Unless the leadership has changed it’s position that impeachment is off the table.

  Meanwhile, back at the Crawford ranch, the Bush family settles down for a light snack. Hurrah, the butter is finished!

• [zikzak]

  To those bemoaning the fact that this is a nice idea, but purely symbolic because it will never get anywhere:

  The reason it won’t get anywhere is because of you and me. We’re willing to occasionally comment on the sidelines about things we disagree with, but if impeachment gets “taken off the table” it’s not like we’re actually going to do anything about it.

  Stop paying war taxes. Organize a work-stoppage against Bush, refuse to go back to work while Bush is in office. See how fast impeachment comes back on the table when people actually affect the bottom-line of this country.

  Or, if those things seem to inconvenient, content yourself with complaining about politicians who, much like us, won’t do anything drastic to address a dire situation.

• [GregLondon]

  Oh, and what do you do for a living, jsg?

• [Takuan]

  try this then
  http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/politics/blog/2008/06/kucinich_pushing_for_bush_impe.html

• [JSG]

  Greg London,

  “You know what? 50 years ago, you would have been a koolaid drinking mouthpiece of the nazi youth. You look at hard evidence, you look at “Sanctions will not be lifted until Saddam is out of Power”, you ignore the content of what is being done and said to determine who is right, and instead focus solely on what flag each person is waving to determine their moral standing.”

  What little you know of history, The Ba’ath party was started in the 40′s by a group of Arabs that were extremely fond of the Nazi party. The Ba’ath party was an Arab nationalist group, much like the Nazi’s were a national socialist group. I loathe what the Nazi’s did, and am glad that Hitler and his minions are dead, as well as Hussein and his minions. I do look at hard evidence and I see a country that invaded another country, the UN did not like this, nor did a lot of other countries, and they pushed Hussein back to within his own borders. The UN placed sanctions on Iraq to produce all illegal weapons according to a resolution, Hussein didn’t, so the UN Security Council voted on more resolutions. One after another after another, until 11 of them had been passed and, basically, ignored by Hussein. He would allow the Inspectors to look for illegal weapons, then the inspectors were shot at, intimidated, and thrown out.

  I’ll say it again the onus was on Iraq to prove that they had no illegal weapons, and to destroy them in front of the UN inspectors, they didn’t.

  Besides, if the UN loathed the invasion of Iraq so very much where are the resolutions and the sanctions on America?

  “In effect, you will always come back with “The US can do no wrong”.”

  Not true, there are a lot of things that I wish the US had done better, differently, but hindsight is 20-20, Neither of us know what we would have done in similar situations. I said in one of my earlier posts that I wish that Rumsfield had been let go earlier, I said that I wish Petraeus had come on earlier, and I wish that Major General Doug Stone had taken control of the prisons a lot sooner.

  “No illegal weapons, less of a threat, however the inspectors only got 90-95% done, not 100% as the 11 resolutions called for. One Percent Doctrine. What any sane man before 9/11 would have quickly identified as a logical fallacy, a hasty generalization in the extreme, a slippery slope of vertical proportions, has since become official US policy, defended by flag waving drones like you.”

  How is calling for Iraq to live up to what the UN called for a one percent solution? It has not become US policy, if it were I think that we would be in the Sudan, Yemen, Indonesia, and many other countries searching for the one scientist that has done work for Al Qaeda.. Lest we forget that Blix stated that there were still illegal weapons in Iraq in March of 03. The 100 Al Samoud-2′s and possibly the Al Fatah’s missiles.

  “Since you’re not saying anything that I wasn’t hearing back in 2001, 2002, and 2003, since you are unwilling to look at new facts that have come to light since then, since youre narrative of history is indistinguishable from propaganda being spewed the day after 9/11, I think it’s safe to say that you’re sufficiently immune to facts that we can stop talking.”

  I thought we were talking about the past, I thought that this little debate was about why we went into Iraq? Please, post some new facts, I would love to read them. You wish to talk about the current situation in Iraq, ok. As in the past, I have sent a link to an article about Major General Doug Stone, the current warden of the prisons in Iraq, the way that he is turning a bad situation around. Let’s discuss Iraq’s working government. Let’s discuss Iraq’s working army and police force. Let’s discuss the free election in January 2005, the one that the Shi’a, Sunni, and Kurds said were the first genuinely free elections in the history of Iraq, and the subsequent one this October. Let’s discuss the fact that the Shi’a, Sunni and the Kurds are getting along fairly well. Let’s discuss that, recently, Australia left Iraq, not with its tail between its legs, but because the areas that Australia was in charge of can now take care of itself. Let’s discuss the fact that the Iraq Army launched an offensive in Basra in March 08. This was the Iraq Army’s show, and their held their own. As you can read here… http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/world/middleeast/20iraq.html?_r=1&ref=middleeast&oref=slogin

  I find it interesting that you can do little but insult me, call me a nazi, or a drone when none of this is true. I look at the same information that you do, I just come to different conclusions. But let’s not stop talking, please, I’d love to read some facts about Iraq.

  “Have a nice day.”

  You too.

• [JSG]

  Well, If I can’t link to a Los Angles Times article written by an assistant editor from the New Republic, a center left publication, then I might as well quit this charade. In your mind, no matter what you are right, George Bush knew that Hussein had no weapons but invaded anyway even though he would most likely have most of the media down his throat, not to mention the democrat party.

  You talk of democracy and freedoms, yet you delete a link that might have changed minds. Classy.

• [arkizzle]

  Is there any chance of tis actually going through? And who is the “leadership” that gets to decide impeachment is off the table? Not the current administration surely?

• [GregLondon]

  jsg: Seymour Hersh is a propagandist, and Ritter is an immature dolt.

  Irrelevant. The point is what Ritter was saying back in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002, that Iraq was 90-95% disarmed, was backed up by Bush Jr’s personal Iraq Survey Group, Kay and company, in 2003 and 2004. Bush’s own people reported that most of Iraq’s WMD’s had been destroyed in 1991 and during Ritter’s inspections in the 90′s.

  You can try to throw a red herring by saying Ritter was immature. It’s irrelevant to the fact that Ritter was right, and Bush’s own people confirmed it.

  Question 191.A: Did Kay and the Iraq Survey Group confirm that most of Iraq’s stockpiles of WMD’s were destroyed in 1991 and by Ritter’s inspections?

  me: Speaking of MIA remains, I think there might be a few remains in Vietnam. Maybe we should declare war on Vietnam right this very moment.

  jsg: Have you read resolution 686? I’ve not seen the same, multiple, UN resolutions on Vietnam. Yes they may still be holding prisoners of war, but if you have a resolution, please post it.

  Question 191.B: Are you saying we can only invade if the UN approves it?

  If so, that’s hillarious, because of all the resolutions passed by the UN from 1990 to right this very moment, NONE authorize an invasion. Not even the October 2002 UN Resolution. There was a big discussion at the time that the resolution did not contain any automatic triggers. The US confirmed this during the voting period. By March 2003, when his second resolution specifically authorizing an invasion was clearly not going to pass, Bush pulled it and said the October 2002 resolution authorized an invasion if Iraq did not comply. i.e. He claims the 2002 resolution contained automatic triggers.

  So, again, you cherry pick your facts and ignore what doesn’t agree with the conclusion you want.

  As you can see, there were plenty of reasons for going into Iraq. Hussein was a threat to the peaceful nations of the Middle East

  He was a far bigger threat in 1982 when he had invaded Iran. Our response was to give him 5 billion dollars, ship him chemical and biological weapons, and attack the Iranian navy.

  he was a tyrant and a dictator.

  Oh please. Get over yourself. Kuwait was a monarchy. After we kicked Saddam’s military out of Kuwait, we reestablished the monarchy.

  He still had not produced the remains of Speicher

  Question 191.C: Would not returning the remains of one dead american serviceman justify an invasion costing thousands of more american dead, three trillion dollars, and an open ended occupation?

  This is a simple yes/no question that you will avoid from this point forward. Because if the answer is “no”, then bringing it up is pointless smoke and mirrors.

  and Hussein didn’t allow full and open access to the inspectors.

  Uh, yeah, he did. 91-97, inspections were going on. 90-95% disarmed by 1998 according to Ritter, Kay, and the Iraq Survey Group. Except we weren’t interested in inspecting, we were using inspections to try to find out where Saddam slept at night so we could kill him.

  Oh, and before you say Ritter was lying about the CIA spies, don’t forget the link I posted above from one of the inspectors who actually confessed to spying from 1996-1998.

  We were trying to get Saddam to refuse inspections so that we’d use that as justifcation for an attack. i.e. Desert Fox.

  I’ll ask again, why are we still in Iraq, why does congress continue to fund the war if it is illegal, immoral, and based solely on lies?

  Question 191.D: JSG, from 1982 until 1988, the United State President and Congress funded Saddam during the Iraq war against Iran. Intel reported in 1982 that Iraq was about to lose the war it had instigated against Iran back in 1980. Rather than allow Iraq to lose, we took Iraq off the Terror List to make it legal to transfer weapons to Iraq. We gave them 5 billion dollars (funnelled through an Italian bank). We shipped them military equipment. We shipped them chemical and biological agents. The US sent Iraq about a thousand tons of chemical and biological agents, funneled through a west german company. As early as 1983, intelligence reports indicated that Saddam was using WMD’s against Iran on a daily basis. In the following years, the UN would try to condemn Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, but the US and Britain would always veto the resolution. During that time, Reagan would publicly condemn Iraq while the US was still shipping him more chemicals, more weapons, and more money. Now, my question is this: Are you saying it is impossible for the US to fund a war that is illegal, immoral, and based on lies?

• [Wally B]

  Uh… why isn’t this on the major news services yet? It’s a little early to cry either conspiracy or fraud, but this would seem to be a pretty newsworthy item. The AP is carrying it, but apparently no one else. MSNBC is talking about crane safety, CNN is talking about Obama, Google’s news tab is talking about tomatoes — oh, sorry. I just referred to MSNBC as a news service. My bad.

• [GregLondon]

  Junk.

  It just seems appropriate at this point.

• [GregLondon]

  I don’t think you’ll change his mind.

  Probably not. Oh well, I learned some things reading some of JSG’s links. It was even worse than I thought. I also learned how amazingly slippery people can get with their logic.

  Using tiny truths, out of context, to tell a massive lie. It’s amazing to me how effective it is at getting people to believe something that just isn’t true.

  until he started spouting that you can’t trust AP reports

  OK, that’s funny. ;)

• [RKUssery]

  Here’s a link or two to the video on YouTube.
  (part one) http://youtube.com/watch?v=1qy3z7XWtQc
  (part two) http://youtube.com/watch?v=dv2SdTeN7dY

  There’s nothing about this on the Fox Affiliates I’m forced to watch at work.

• [spazzm]

  It’s on Reuters now.

  While this isn’t much more than a defiant gesture, I can’t help hoping it will speed up the regime change.

• [Takuan]

  yep

• [GregLondon]

  jsg: from your latimes op-ed piece:

  After Sept. 11, President Bush did not want to risk allowing Hussein, who had twice invaded neighboring nations,

  dude, check your history. (1) What two nations did Saddam invade?

  murdered more than 1 million Iraqis

  History check: (2) when did Saddam murder a million Iraqis?

  to remain in possession of what he believed were stocks of chemical and biological warheads and a nuclear weapons program

  (3) when did saddam acquire chemical and biological weapons?

  Since you seem to be ignoring my questions, I’ll answer for you:

  (1) The two countries Saddam invaded were Iran and Kuwait. Saddam invaded Iran in 1980. In 1982, Iran had kicked Saddam pretty seriously, taking back all of the territory Saddam had captured, and going on the offensive. In May 1982, US Intelligence made a report that stated that in all likelyhood, Saddam would lose the war against Iran unless something drastic changed. In June 1982, Reagan announced the US would throw itself behind Iraq, that it was imperitive that Iraq not lose the war. Iraq was taken off the State Department Terrorist Sponsor list so that we could ship military weapons, intelligence, and other support to Iraq.

  Iraq invaded Iran in 1980. In 1982, when it looked like Iraq was going to lose the war, Reagan stepped in and supported Iraq.

  So, invading a country in a total act of aggressive war doesn’t by default get you on our bad side. Sometimes it gets you US money and weapons.

  Oh, and the second country was Kuwait, 1990. We support Iraq’s invasion of Iran until 1988. In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait.

  (2) Saddam murdered Iraqis before, during, and after the Iran-Iraq war. We supported Iraq up until the end of the Iraq war in 1988. Any murderin’ by Saddam before 1988 was OK in the eyes of Reagan and Bush Sr, why can’t it be OK in your eyes?

  (3) this is the funniest of them all. Saddam got chemical and biological weapons during the Iran-Iraq war. He got them from a bunch of different countries. I think something like 20 different US companies shipped various chemical/biological agents and mechanical parts to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. The US center for disease control shipped Iraq a number of live samples of weapons grade agents. And while Saddam was using mustard gas, sarin, vx, and other agents against Iran and his own people, Donald Rumsfeld was meeting with Saddam and shaking his hand (1982, 1983), US money, equipment, and satellite intel were flowing into Iraq to help Saddam, and the US navy started attacking Iranian naval ships.

  So, any claims of chemical or biological weapons being the reason, those claims also need to explain why it wasn’t a problem from 1982-1988 when we were pumping money, equipment, and intel into helping Saddam win his aggressive war against Iran, the war he initiated, the war he started.

  The US gave Iraq massive support in 1982 to prevent it from losing the war against Iran. This support continued until the war ended in 1988.

  Anything that Saddam did before 1988 that is cited as an excuse as to why we invaded them in 2003 needs to also explain why those very same actions got Reagan’s tireless support from 1982 to 1988.

  Or it’s just flight surgeon horseshit.

• [GregLondon]

  Times/UK reports that UNMOVIC was created to get rid of American spies in UNSCOM.

  http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0918-08.htm

• [Takuan]

  Dear JSG:

  Did you you happen to notice the posts I made regarding the American CIA support of Saddam Hussein and their key role in placing him in power?

• [proto opus]

  my understanding is that this is the only way to get the charges recorded in the ‘congressional record’. not sure what that does, other than making the enumeration of high crimes and misdemeanors a part of the official record.

  (kucinich is closer to my views than anyone else i’ve seen in my 60 years, fwiw.)

• [GregLondon]

  jsg: The cooperation was tenuous at best. Three trillion dollars, does that include the price of the vehicles, and the transport to Kuwait, plus gasoline for the vehicles?

  You’ve now chosen to dig your heels in and defend the dumbest comment in the history of the internet (and that’s saying a lot):

  You worship the god of the gaps. You take a lack of complete and total certainty for something and use it to disregard actual objective data that people are witnessing with their own eyes.

  In effect, you argue that, yes, Blix reports Iraq was complying. But how do we know Saddam didn’t have an army of unicorn-riding undead-cavalry officers? Huh? Huh? We have to invade while Iraq is complying with inspections before it is too late!

  This is looking at actual working inspections and positing the existence of extraterestrials. This is the one-percent doctrine gone off a very deep and disturbing end.

  Putting it in very small words:

  jsg: Put the gun down and come out with your hands up!
  suspect: (puts gun down, puts hands up, walks out slowly)
  jsg: (shoots suspect)
  bystander: What did you do that for?
  jsg: Because we didn’t know how long he would proactively cooperate.

  Any sane man would either acknowledge their mistake or try to weasel their way out of it by saying they meant something else and its just a misunderstanding. But you, you actually respond with “Yeah, I feel bad for the dead, but it’s better this way”.

  I’m glad you’re feeling better, but I think we stopped communicating some time ago.

• [IWood]

  Zizak @ #58-

  You first.

• [Brad Templeton]

  There is not possibly enough time to do this before the terms of both congress and the President expire, even if there were the political support for this to happen, which I suspect there is not.

  As such, Kucinich is making it so that Bush will be recorded as a President who had articles of impeachment read in the house, but which failed to get out of the house. Perhaps better, I suspect the leadership thinks, that it be recorded that they never tried to impeach, rather than tried and failed.

• [GregLondon]

  jsg@90: In Iraq, we were over there to find out if Saddam had weapons programs

  Oh my god. You’re a koolaid drinking moron.

  he wasn’t working with UNSCOM which was established specifically for post Gulf War Iraq.

  Sure. That’s true.

  in the minds of complete imbeciles who refused to look at facts being reported around the world as to just how complete bullshit this idea was.

  Jan 2003

  In response to White House pressure to go on fishing expeditions to find intel that fit the story, CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin tells Cheney’s aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby says “I’m not going back to the well on this. We’ve done our work.”

  reports from the National Intelligence Council express skepticism over Niger yellow cake story.

  Hans Blix appears before the UN and reports that inspectors have found no “smoking guns” in Iraq after two months’ work, and that they have not encountered any impediments from the Iraqis.

  Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency says the tubes Iraq has (that the White House claims were for centrifuges) couldn’t be used for centrifuges wihtout massive rework and seemed more likely to be rocket parts.

  The UN issues a press release regarding Iraq’s response to Resolution 1441. “It would appear that Iraq had decided in principle to provide cooperation on substance in order to complete the disarmament task through inspection.” The press release reports that UN weapons inspectors, after 60 days on the job, have inspected 106 locations and found “no evidence that Iraq had revived its nuclear weapons programme.”

  According to a secret memo brought to light in early 2006, President Bush told British PM Tony Blair he plans to invade Iraq even if UN inspectors find no evidence of banned Iraqi weapons programs.

  British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush meet in the Oval office to discuss the impending invasion of Iraq. A memo of the private meeting written by two senior British officials later reveals that Bush and Blair were aware that no WMDs had been found and that it was possible that they never would be, but Bush, determined to invade, spent the meeting discussing ways in which the two could justify the invasion.

  February 2003

  The Los Angeles Times reports in 2005: Three days after Powell’s speech, the U.N.’s Team Bravo conducted the first search of Curveball’s former work site. The raid by the American-led biological weapons experts lasted 3 1/2 hours. It was long enough to prove Curveball had lied.

  Hans Blix appears before the UN Security Council and says his inspectors have enjoyed uninhibited access to 300 sites over a period of 11 weeks. Everything is in accordance with the Iraqi weapons declaration, and no weapons of mass destruction have been found.

  March 2003

  IAEA official tells U.S. that the Niger uranium documents are forgeries so error-filled that “they could be spotted by someone using Google.”

  Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, appears before the Security Council and says that searches have found “no evidence” of mobile biological production facilities in Iraq. He also says that the Iraqis are cooperating with the inspectors. The IAEA’s ElBaradei also speaks and says, “After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq.” He says the Niger uranium documents are “not authentic.”

  Joseph Wilson appears on CNN, says the Niger uranium document are obvious forgeries.

  The U.N. resolution justifying the use of force will not pass (Bulgaria is the only country other than the original sponsors to publicly support it).

  With little international support, the U.S., Britain, and Spain officially scrap the quest to obtain a new U.N. resolution on Iraq. Four and a half months have passed since U.N. Resolution 1441, and a new resolution would signal the world’s belief that Iraq had failed the terms of that resolution and now faced the consequences. The “coalition of the willing” announces it will enforce the U.N. resolution without the U.N.’s approval.

  March 19: the US led invasion of Iraq begins.

  When we went into Iraq we found out that Saddam may not have had weapons. Ok fine,

  OK fine???? The white house was being slammed by an international clue bat that there were no WMD’s for several months leading up to the invasion, and even then refused to give up on invading.

  Or do we take out a tyrant for the good of the people of Iraq and the neighbors of Iraq?

  You, sir, are a complete and absolute idiot.

  A month before the invasion, Bush and Blair are sipping tea discussing the FACT that there were no WMD’s in Iraq, discussing the FACT that the lack of WMD’s was completely IRRELEVANT to Bush’s desire for invasion, and discussing how to JUSTIFY an invasion anyway.

  Your president lied to you and you believed him. Rather than admit the emporer has been running around naked since 2002, you argue how well his new clothes fit.

• [GregLondon]

  jsg,

  I read the link to the Times Online and it makes my point, Hussein was evil and should have been taken out during the Gulf War, he wasn’t and that is a travesty.

  Sorry, but you swallowed the propaganda hook, line, and sinker.

  There was no shredder.

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/feb/25/iraq.iraqandthemedia

  It never existed. There is zero evidence to support it. You failed to even google it. You read one thing that asserts something about Saddam, it was completely fabricated, and you then argue that Saddam “should have been taken out”.

  Epic fail on your part.

  Tom Lantos said

  I had two very specific quesetions. you answered neither one.

  I asked: “What is the full context of those two articles? Then compare that to you quoting Blix from Jan 2003 while ignoring what Blix said in Feb and Mar 2003. Do you see any similarities?”

  The full context of Nayirah’s testimony is that it was a fully fabricated lie from the beginning.

  “It was not until nearly two years later that the truth emerged. The story was a fabrication and a myth, and Nayirah, the teenage Kuwaiti girl, coached and rehearsed by Hill & Knowlton for her appearance before the Congressional Committee, was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States.”

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4270014,00.html

  The similarities between Nayirah’s testimony, the shredder story, and you’re selective quotations of Blix are that you quote something out of context, and you ignore the truth.

  Quoting PART of Blix and ignoring the full story is propaganda. You’ve done nothing but spew propaganda.

  Readign something nasty about Saddam, like the shredder story, and using that to argue that Saddam should be “taken out” indicates you have ZERO capacity for objectively looking at data.

  You consistently come to the conclusion you want, then find the data that fits your conclusion. Even if its totally fabricated data.

  You’re a troll or a Bush suckup.

  If you don’t mind me pulling some quotes from Blix’s report.

  “Even with a proactive Iraqi attitude, induced by continued outside pressure, it would still take some time to verify sites and items, analyse documents, interview relevant persons, and draw conclusions. It would not take years, nor weeks, but months. ”

  So who’s to say that the proactive attitude of the Iraqi’s would last months?

  Right. Inspections were working in March 2003. Iraq was proactively cooperating with inspectors. But just in case Iraq might stop cooperating, we should invade.

  Defeat from the jaws of victory.

  Again how long would the Iraqi’s remain proactive?

  OH. MY. GOD.

  THREE TRILLION DOLLARS, THOUSANDS OF AMERICAN DEAD, THAT”S SUCH A BETTER PRICE TO PAY THAN TO HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THE POSSIBILITY THAT IRAQ MIGHT, SOME DAY, MAYBE STOP BEIGN PROACTIVE. DAMN THEIR EYES FOR COOPERATING WITH INSPECTIONS!

  What a wonderful reason to go to war.

  Remember that bit I said about cherry picking data to fit the conclusion you want?

  You’re doing it again.

  I think you actually just failed the Turing Test.

  I am glad that the UN teams looked in undeclared buildings, but did they search the multiple palaces of Hussein? How about the folks that helped make it in the first place? Be nice if Blix could interview them. I bet he could figure out how much was made if he asked the maker rather than the ones destroying it.

  Well, obviously you know better about how to inspect for chemical weapons than Blix does.

• [GregLondon]

  Again, why did Iraq, after eight years, throw out the inspectors in 1998?

  Oh. My. God.

  Inspectors left in 1998 because the US informed them they should leave as Operation Desert Fox was coming and that they could be in danger. Iraq didn’t throw them out. The US told them to get out.

  It’s amazing how resilient you are to the truth.

• [Takuan]

  you lot just carry on, don’t mind me. Can someone please help me a moment with the sandbag – it’s so important to get the weight right. Ah, there’s a good lad!

• [GregLondon]

  It’s 108 pages

  wow.

  I didn’t know it had gotten that long.

  I’ll try to come up with a short, page or two, introduction that gives an overview of the entire timeline. Something that gives a narrative to the whole history in one short reading.

• [jonathan_v]

  Any member of the House can introduce articles of impeachment.. they’re just always ignored

  In the text of the article, they allude to Cynthia McKinney’s outgoing bill to bring forth articles of impeachment against Bush in 2007 ( http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=146722 )

  He did this because he wanted to. Sadly, no one else in the House listened or cared.

• [Belac]

  It’s Kucinich. Of course the media isn’t covering it. When it comes up to a vote, or if Brad Ellsworth supports it, then it’ll be newsworthy.

• [Cowicide]

  #106 posted by Agent 86:

  JSG, did you miss the part where Bush&Co put together a secret org

  Agent, he saw it, but he didn’t “see” it. I refer you to this post here:
  ► Post Link (Post #102 above)

• [GregLondon]

  36 years? Operation Ajax was in ’53.

  what happened in ’72?

• [tbo42]

  Yeah, since the conversation was over anyway, why not call a spade a spade.

  Most people on both sides of the ideological side have reasonably good intentions. Sometimes those good intentions are dangerous, but that’s not the same as being a “Nazi”. Just because someone is wrong doesn’t mean they’re deliberately evil.

  How many times have you witnessed someone like jsg actually change their minds on an internet conversation?

  I’ve changed other people’s minds myself a few times on other issues, actually. I’ve also been on the receiving end of that approach, and appreciated the respect I got. That’s what I meant about having learned “the hard way”–I didn’t have much luck until I started employing the tactics I described previously.

  I think, in trying to change jsg’s mind, you missed the forrest for the trees. Based on jsg’s statements, my experience talking to people like him, and on present-day conservative writing on the issue, I would guess jsg’s “internal” view of the war is more like this:

  There were a lot of reasons for wanting to get rid of Saddam. WMD was one of them, and 9/11 made it clear that we have to take a proactive approach to threats, even if we have incomplete information. Saddam had an obligation to prove he had no WMD, rather than us having an obligation to prove he did. His lack of total cooperation (i.e., the occasional delays and deception), together with all the other reasons for getting rid of him, justified the invasion. Even if the inspection process had been completed, it was no guarantee that Saddam had no WMD. The fact that we supported Saddam in the past (vs. Iran) was justified by the circumstances of the time (Cold War, etc.), and is irrelevant to considerations of whether we should invade now.

  (Apologies to jsg if I’ve mis-characterized his position; I am inferring a lot based on things he mentioned only in passing and on things others have said.)

  Your debate focused mainly on the details and timeline of the inspection process, which aren’t central to jsg’s views. He ended up debating you on those points because he had been pushed into “defensive mode” on those issues. He never got around to presenting an overall summary of his reasons for supporting the war.

  If you had an infinite amount of time to debate jsg, it would probably be worthwhile to first hash out all the facts about the inspection process, timeline, etc., albeit in a more diplomatic way. The thing is, you don’t have infinite time, so you have to make your points count.

  If you spent more time listening and trying to understand what jsg was really about, perhaps by asking open and non-hostile questions, you might have made much more progress.

  For instance, you could have asked whether, given all his reasons for taking out Saddam, and the likely cost of invading Iraq, was that the best use of our armed forces? In framing the question this way, you acknowledge his concerns, and also present him with numerous “ways out”. For instance, he could say that, in retrospect, we would have been better off just waiting for the inspection process to finish, then using the troops in Afghanistan or to pressure Iran into allowing better inspections.

  They stay quiet for a few weeks or a few months, during which, they figure out a reason for their switch, and then they come out adamantly against Bush.

  Don’t make it harder for people to switch by being a jerk to them. Who wants to admit to himself that he was wrong and the jerk was right?

• [Takuan]

  http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Kucinich_We_went_to_war_for_0626.html

• [JSG]

  GregLondon,

  Sorry, I was on vacation Independence Day and all that.

  Blix still said that there were problems with the UN inspectors being allowed to inspect. You are still grasping at the argument that the inspections would be done in a few months? Even though Hussein had made life tough for the UN inspectors even throwing them out at one point.

  “In 1981 when he invaded Iran. And we supported him with five billion dollars, weapons, and military intelligence. Not to mention we blocked every UN resolution that attempted to condemn Iraq for using gas against Iran.”

  Because Iran had held the US embassy and some who worked in the embassy for 444 days. So when it suits your need, UN resolutions must be paid attention to, but when it doesn’t suit your needs then they can be ignored. 90% – 95% is not 100% and I don’t care how long Blix said it would take there is no way it would have taken months.

  What would you have like to see happen in Iraq pre 2003? Would you rather have seen Hussein still in power in Iraq? What would you like to see happen in Iraq now?

  “You keep waving that flag, pokey.”
  You too my friend, you too

• [EH]

  #2 & #13: There are 225 days left in Bush’s term; Clinton’s impeachment took 181 days. Unless you’re saying that, pace your cynical tone, there are just too many crimes to try over the remainder of the term, impeachment does not require the official being prosecuted to be in office.

• [siliconsunset]

  ” #151 posted by GregLondon Author Profile Page, June 17, 2008 2:39 PM

  jsg: Look out, he’s got a gun!

  bystander: You gave it to him three years ago.

  jsg: He throws people in a shredder.

  bystander: no, he doesn’t.

  jsg: Put the gun down and come out with your hands up!

  suspect: (puts gun down, puts hands up, walks out slowly)

  jsg: (shoots suspect)

  bystander: What did you do that for?

  jsg: Because we didn’t know how long he would proactively cooperate.

  bystander: good for you, but you’re bullet went through me to get to him.

  jsg: he was an evil man and had to be taken out.

  bystander: I’M BLEEDING BECAUSE YOU SHOT ME TO GET TO HIM!

  jsg: Because one person is wrong, does that mean that everyone is wrong?

  bystander: No, but you’re wrong, and I need a doctor because of how wrong you were.

  jsg: I have some fishing line in my car.

  bystander: get the hell away from me.”

  You, Sir, are hereby presented with this coupon, good for one entire Internet. Congratulations on your victory and enjoy your prize.

  I’m glad that the intelligent, well spoken, and determined individual was on my side of the opinion toll and had more than adequate information with which to back himself up. God bless Americans, and let the propaganda sour in the mouths of those being bottle-fed by this “administration”.

• [GregLondon]

  Whatever people say about the past, the fact is that we are in Iraq now. Do we pull out, leaving a lot of those that depend on us, in the lurch? Or do we stay and try to help setup a democracy?

  So, there you are, standing at the roulette table. You’ve been playing for six years. YOu’ve lost half a trillion dollars so far, and you’ve racked up 2.5 trillion dollars in debts.

  The entire basis of your argument hinges on the idea that you can win if you play long enough.

  But your argument is indistinguishable from a gambling addict who keeps playing to try to “win back” some of what he’s lost.

  But the odds are stacked against you. The house always wins in the end. You fail to grasp the concept of what a “sunk cost” is. And you fail to grasp that you’re trapped in an illusion that you should be able to profit if you just play long enough. If you could just play for six more months, you could turn this whole thing around.

  Some times the smartest bet is to not play.

• [GregLondon]

  What little you know of history, The Ba’ath party was started in the 40′s by a group of Arabs that were extremely fond of the Nazi party.

  And got Five Billion dollars of support, along with weapons, chemical and biological agents, nuclear components, from the US from 1982 to 1988.

  I do look at hard evidence and I see a country that invaded another country, the UN did not like this, nor did a lot of other countries, and they pushed Hussein back to within his own borders.

  You mean in 1980, when IRAQ INVADED IRAN? Oh, wait, we actually supported them on that one.

  You mean when we overthrew the democratic government of Iran in ’53?

  You mean when we reinstalled the MONARCHY in Kuwait in 2001?

  You mean when we support the monarchy of Saudi Arabia from 1945 to now?

  Shoot, pumpkin, you’ve got bupkiss.

  How is calling for Iraq to live up to what the UN called for a one percent solution?

  Because the choice in March 2003 was either (1) let Blix finish in a few months or (2) spend a trillion dollars and invade.

  There was no legitimate reason to invade by March 2003 when Inspections were working and would be finished in a few months. None. Only the 1-percent doctrine can justify the “well, he isn’t 100% disarmed and we don’t know how long he will cooperate with inspections, Let’s invade now!”

  find it interesting that you can do little but insult me, call me a nazi, or a drone when none of this is true. I look at the same information that you do, I just come to different conclusions.

  Cherry picking the data you like and ignoring the big picture isn’t “coming to a different conclusion”, it’s your own personal Operation Rockingham.

  Ignoring the conclusions of the one inspector who was right from the very beginning, Ritter, who was backed up by Blix in 2003, and who was confirmed to have been right by Kay and Duefler in 2003, 2004, is not “coming to a different conclusion”.

  It’s drinking the koolaid, then swallowing the cup.

  Well, thanks to your total immunity to facts, I think I was able to go through pretty much the entire history of Iraq and compile a pretty decent time line in one place.

  1,000 Tons of American-Made Weapons-Grade Handwavium In Iraq

• [Iron Clad Burrito]

  #8:

  Is there any chance of tis actually going through?

  About as much chance as McKinney’s had. It was symbolic.

  Oh… and Pelosi said impeachment was off the table 2 years ago. Google that phrase “impeachment is off the table” and follow the news.

• [GregLondon]

  Again, I saw no provision, in any resolution, stating that the members of the inspection teams had to be of the non-intelligence variety.

  You also saw no provision in the Resolution that approved assassination or regime change or overthrowing Saddam. Yet, we encouraged it in 91, and actually instigated it in 96, 97, and 98.

  You want to argue legal technicalities? Then you have to abide by legal technicalities. No UN resolution ever approved assassinating Saddam.

  I’ve said it countless times, had Hussein allowed the weapons inspectors to do their jobs in 1998, Iraq would still be under his rule.

  And you still ignore a basic question:

  Question 198.A: Do you think inspections would have been the least bit more successful if by 1998 we hadn’t used inspections on several different occaisions as a delivery method for attempting to assassinate Saddam?

  We could have disarmed Saddam by the mid 90′s if we hadn’t spent years trying to kill him, if we hadn’t announced as early as 1991 that Sanctions weren’t tied to Inspections (as the UN Resolution said), but rather Sanctions were tied to Saddam stepping down from power.

• [Pyre]

  And notice how this pettifogging handwaving smokescreening effort by JSG has only served to distract from the original (and titled) topic. Odd coincidence, that.

• [Oneiroi]

  On one side, I am annoyed by the new tactic of trying to impeach every president when they do things the other party doesn’t like. I don’t like the idea of our government getting impeachment happy.

  On the other hand, I think this time it’s actually more deserved as opposed to perjury about sex life. Questions on constitutionality of several actions, and on actions of the administration on getting us into war.

• [GregLondon]

  Blix still said that there were problems with the UN inspectors being allowed to inspect. You are still grasping at the argument that the inspections would be done in a few months?

  Uh, yeah, because Blix said he’d be done in few months.

  Taking Blix’s quote saying there were problems and ignoring Blix’s quote saying they’d be done in a few months: cherry picking.

  I’d be surprised if you’d do anything else at this point.

  Even though Hussein had made life tough for the UN inspectors even throwing them out at one point.

  Even though US spies on inspection teams in the 90′s tried to kill him. And Saddam didn’t throw out the teams, he refused further inspections until those spies who were trying to kill him were removed from the teams. At the time, the US refused, and so stalemate.

  The only reason the inspection teams left Iraq was because the US warned them that Operation Desert Fox was coming down the pipe.

  Did you notice that when inspectors went back in in 2002, that the team was no longer called UNSCOM but instead was called UNMOVIC? Did you notice that instead of being headed by an american and populated by mostly americans, it was headed by Blix and populated mostly by non-americans?

  The changes were made to avoid a repeat of the fiasco of the 90′s, of having US agents using UNSCOM to gather intel on Saddam, target him, try to kill him, and overthrow him, when they were supposed to be inspecting WMD’s.

  Because Iran had held the US embassy and some who worked in the embassy for 444 days.

  And what was the cause of the Iranian revolution, pokey? Why did the Iranians overthrow the Shah of Iran who was in power from 1953 up until 1980?

  Because the shah was one of the worst human rights violators in the middle east at the time. His prisons tortured and killed political prisoners as standard procedure. Amnesty International reported in 78 or so that his prisons probably held 50,000 to 100,000 political prisoners.

  Guess who put the Shah in power, made sure he stayed in power, and turned a blind eye to his human rights violations, pokey?

  That’s right, Pokey, we did.

  You think the Iranian went into the US embassy because they hate us for our freedom?

  Nice koolaid.

  when it suits your need, UN resolutions must be paid attention to, but when it doesn’t suit your needs then they can be ignored.

  That’s the first honest thing you’ve said yet.

  90% – 95% is not 100% and I don’t care how long Blix said it would take there is no way it would have taken months.

  Prove it or bullshit.

  You have no claims of weapons inspection expertise. You have nothing to point to that contradicts any of the facts. All you’re doing is quoting Blix when it suits you and asserting that he is wrong when it doesn’t suit you. You don’t like the fact that Blix said he’d be done in months, so you assert that he’s wrong.

  Zero evidence. Complete and utter bullshit.

• [Takuan]

  extraordinary times make extraordinary laws….
  Now, we’ll be needing the tarpaulins for the monkey, he’s a messer, or Old Takuan’s no judge of these affairs( but ah,he IS). The fat, bald one’s a spitter, so he’ll be a-needing the hood….

• [Avram]

  JSG, but you haven’t quoted from Rockefeller’s report. All you’ve done is read Fred Hiatt’s biased summary of it, in which he cherry-picks a few sentence fragments that support his pro-war views.

• [Takuan]

  Greg, he’s pulling your chain, no one can be that stupid.

• [Jim Dandy]

  posted by noen
  

  I can’t help but worry that Kucinich will get nowhere with this.

  Worry? Of course he’ll get nowhere. The Dem leaders will see to that. It’d be instant political suicide for the entire Democratic party. Dem leaders aren’t as out of touch with reality as Kucinich (which isn’t saying much).

• [NoahApples]

  It could be more than symbolic. The threat presented could dissuade or be used to mediate a possible declared state of emergency, which would postpone the election. It could happen.

• [SamSam]

  One of the most viewed on CBS, as Kieran says, but not anywhere else on the front page. Nowhere on the front pages of CNN, MSNBC or NYTimes.com, despite all those websites having an average of about 30 articles on their front pages….

  Can we start a campaign to move the story higher on the “most-viewed” lists (it’s not on any of the last three posted above).

  Here’s the Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Kucinich-Impeachment.html?scp=2&sq=kucinich&st=nyt — email it to someone or your other address (Times list works by email). I just emailed it to three different addresses.

  Here’s Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/09/AR2008060902878.html — you only need to view it.

  Here it is on ABC news: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=5034180 .

  (Note WashPost and ABC have the exact same TWO stories on it, one copied from the AP wire and one copied from the Reuters wire. Did no editor notice that thy were posting two identical versions of the same story??)

  I can’t find it at all on MSNBC or CNN

• [Stefan Jones]

  Courtesy the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Contacting Congress How-To.

  * * *

  If you can’t impeach a president for lying, getting the country into a unnecessary war, egregiously fucking up the followup to that unnecessary war, screwing over critics of the unnecessary war, and screwing up the finances of the country to pay for the unnecessary war, what should it be used for?

  Oh yeah, blowjobs.

• [Baldhead]

  Let’s see…. nothing will happen before the election anyways.

• [Takuan]

  Petroleum firm nationalised

  1972 – Iraq nationalises the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC).

  1974 – In implementation of the 1970 agreement, Iraq grants limited autonomy to the Kurds but the KDP rejects it.

  1975 March – At a meeting of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) in Algiers, Iraq and Iran sign a treaty ending their border disputes.

  1979 16 July – President Al-Bakr resigns and is succeeded by Vice-President Saddam Hussein.

• [Takuan]

  you’re jumping ahead. America hasn’t invaded and obliterated Iran yet.

• [Tenlow]

  Well, it won’t do any good but I wrote my congressmen. Well congress man and congresswomen. I’d like to see people at least talk about it for a while.

• [buddy66]

  @#127:

  That’s a first-rate WMD rant you put together. I’m in awe of it. If the guy can be swayed by any argument, your sequential summary should do it. If he’s resolutely stupid, however, he’ll continue blundering down the path of ignorance, blinders and earplugs firmly in place. I’m going to put it in my ammo hut and roll it out whenever needed; credited with your permission, of course.

• [Tenn]

  Well, it may not do any good, but it’ll say, Hey World, We Disapprove Too.

  Which may be helpful. Or may not be. Or may somehow lose the Democrats the election. Or lose McBush the election. Or… fade into the annals of history, ignored because Kucinich is only worth listening to in order to see his wife.

• [Boba Fett Diop]

  Tak, don’t forget to have a sharp stick on hand to poke Cheney with. You’ve got to make sure he hasn’t just closed off his trachea and gone into hibernation.

• [GregLondon]

  jsg: Look out, he’s got a gun!

  bystander: You gave it to him three years ago.

  jsg: He throws people in a shredder.

  bystander: no, he doesn’t.

  jsg: Put the gun down and come out with your hands up!

  suspect: (puts gun down, puts hands up, walks out slowly)

  jsg: (shoots suspect)

  bystander: What did you do that for?

  jsg: Because we didn’t know how long he would proactively cooperate.

  bystander: good for you, but you’re bullet went through me to get to him.

  jsg: he was an evil man and had to be taken out.

  bystander: I’M BLEEDING BECAUSE YOU SHOT ME TO GET TO HIM!

  jsg: Because one person is wrong, does that mean that everyone is wrong?

  bystander: No, but you’re wrong, and I need a doctor because of how wrong you were.

  jsg: I have some fishing line in my car.

  bystander: get the hell away from me.

• [Evil Jim]

  I’ll help you Takuan. We should have a lottery to see who gets to pull the lever.

• [zikzak]

  @59, iwood: One shouldn’t wait for others to do the right thing before one joins in. The fact that others are doing or not doing something doesn’t make it more or less right. However, if you require a role model or inspiration to follow, I’m glad to play that role. Done. You’re up next.

  @66,neon: There is a lot you can do, just not anything you’re willing to do. You call work stoppage a blunt instrument. It’s not an instrument for specific change at all, it’s a way to directly strip leaders of their power. When leaders step out of line they must first have their power stripped. Only then can discussion of alternatives begin. Plenty of leaders have been forced to resign due to little more than a general strike. That doesn’t fix everything, but it establishes the political climate: if the leaders get corrupt, the economy will grind to a halt and nobody will get their way. This is a necessary precursor to a functional democracy.

  Withholding taxes works the same way – it can’t fix our problems, but it can very effectively punish a corrupt government and make it difficult on a practical level to carry out their plans.

  Corrupt leaders don’t care if you have good alternative ideas or not, or even if you’ve gotten a lot of other people to agree with you. They care if they can get away with enacting their plans without being punished. As long as we’re paying for their weapons (or CCTV cameras), and keeping “business as usual” afloat by shopping and working, there’s no reason to consider anything we have to say. When we make our economic behaviors conditional upon their behaviors, they have to pay a lot more attention to us.

• [Takuan]

  why, thank ye very kindly there Young Evil Jim, that be right good-hearted o’ ye. Alas though, professional standards demand I do the client’s personal service meself. Not so much for the likes of them, of course, I just dare not bring the trade into disrepute. Tell ye what, ye can stay below the scaffold if there’s any hitch, ye grab the legs and give a good jerk – if anthin’ gang agley. Or just if ye be in the mood for a good swing!

• [dogu4]

  It may be only symbolic, as many are saying in criticism of the efforts, but symbols historically have sometimes been the most important things, acting as catalysts for greater events and awareness.
  And it could lead to further investigation after his presidency when I suspect he won’t be covering his ass with paper quite so effectively.
  In any event, it will draw attention to the perilous position “business as usual” has meant for our government (Bush is hardly the first or only…and both mainstream parties have dirty hands).
  But just “getting” Bush isn’t that important to me, though I believe he will reap as he’s sown and will look forward to that day.

• [JSG]

  #91 GREGLONDON

  My last post may have been a bit melodramatic, but that is still no reason to get as bent out of shape as you appear to be.

  So you call me a bunch of names, real mature, but where do you get your information from? I see no sited references.

  These are pdf files from the Government Printing Office of the Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq

  http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/s108-301/sec3.pdf

  If you read the whole thing, I’ll admit it is rather long, but worth it. You will notice that it basically blames those that wrote up the NIE. They may or may not have exaggerated Saddam’s alleged weapons program, as you can see some of this intelligence was found to be true. Case in point, the section where it states that “The assessments regarding Iraq’s continued development of prohibited ballistic missiles were reasonable and did accurately describe the underlying intelligence.”

  Another interesting quote, “The fact that Iraq had repeatedly lied about its pre-1991 WMD programs, its continued deceptive behavior, and its failure to fully cooperate with UN inspectors
  left the IC with a predisposition to believe the Iraqis were continuing to lie about their WMD efforts.” Or maybe some thought that the Baathists were believable, after all Saddam used chemical weapon on the Kurd’s in Halabja, and the Israelis did severely damage the Osirak Nuclear testing reactor in 1981 and the American forces destroyed it in the Gulf War. You can read about both on Google Maps and Wikipedia.

  Another interesting quote, “revelations after the Gulf War starkly demonstrate the extensive efforts undertaken by Iraq to deny information. The revelations also underscore the extent to which limited information fostered underestimates by the Intelligence Community of Saddam’s capabilities at that time.”

  I’ll let you read it, here is the rest…

  http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/Iraq.html

  This Congressional report is long, and it is not definite, because no intelligence is prefect, it is a lot of educated guesses. There are a lot of maybes and should’ve in this report. The committee was looking at these documents with 20/20 vision, something that nobody had at the time that Iraq was invaded.

• [Takuan]

  it’s offical,you’re ruled by thugs,liars and thieves:
  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080611/ap_on_go_co/bush_impeachment

• [eustace]

  All our hands should be on the lever.

• [Anonymous]

  Yo, Greg London, you rock. Keep up the good work.

  JSG – keep spinnin’ my friend, you are providing wonderful fodder for Mr. London’s educational missives.

  I can’t help but wonder, though, why neither of you has mentioned that Kuwait (which Iraq invaded because the Kuwaitis were stealing Iraqi oil) WAS and currently IS a slave-holding nation? I mean, it seems like every coupla years they promise the UN that they really, really, really will stop with the slavery, and this time they really, really, really mean it… cross their hearts and hope to die!

  If invading a sovereign nation because they do bad stuff is the measure of a leader, than that dirtbag Saddam is a freakin’ hero for taking on Kuwait.

• [Takuan]

  arrr… I suppose then we could make a Special Exception then. The trap will be solenoid locked to a web-polling accumulator. If the majority of the World Web say so be it: So be it.

• [JSG]

  GregtLondon,

  Seymour Hersh is a propagandist, and Ritter is an immature dolt.
  Here’s my proof:

  http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,351165,00.html

  When asked by the interviewer about some that call him the new Jane Fonda, he answers…

  ‘If they want to have an exercise video then why don’t they come here and say it to my face and I’ll give’m an exercise video, which will be called, “Scott Ritter Kicking Their Ass.”‘

  That’s so very mature for a Marine and a UN weapons inspector.

  And then there is this,

  You’ve spoke about having seen the children’s prisons in Iraq. Can you describe what you saw there?

  The prison in question is at the General Security Services headquarters, which was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children — toddlers up to pre-adolescents — whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I’m not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I’m waging peace.

  So his need to “wage peace”, again quite mature, stopped him from reporting on a prison where children were being held for only being the offspring of those that Hussein did not like. I’m at a loss for words, he had a reason that he thought would encourage those that would see regime change as a worthy goal, and he stayed silent.

  You said….

  “When I brought up the cost of the invasion/occupation being thousands of American’s dead, you downplay it by saying the US lost thousands of soldiers in a few hours on D-Day. Now, when that logic no longer suits you, you argue that the body of a downed American pilot is justification for invasion/occupation the the additional deaths of thousands of American military people?”

  Again, I don’t downplay the death of any soldier, what I was saying was that thousands die in a few hours and that is considered a success, and 4000 die over a period of five years, and that is considered a horrible failure. You want to talk mud slinging, jeez.

  Have you read resolution 686? I’ve not seen the same, multiple, UN resolutions on Vietnam. Yes they may still be holding prisoners of war, but if you have a resolution, please post it.

  Anyway, it states that Iraq must, “(c) Arrange for immediate access to and release of all prisoners of war under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross and return the remains of any deceased personnel of the forces of Kuwait and the Member States cooperating with Kuwait pursuant to resolution 678 (1990)”.

  Another resolution that told the Iraqi Government what they must do in order to get out from under the thumb of the UN, they did no such thing. I’ve said it before, if Iraq had done what they had agreed to, then the inspections would have ended in 1998? 1999? and Iraq could have lived in as much peace as the Hussein regime would have allowed. But they didn’t.

  I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to quote the ILA, I meant to quote this which quotes the part of the ILA that I was using:

  http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=107_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ243.107.pdf

  As you can see, there were plenty of reasons for going into Iraq. Hussein was a threat to the peaceful nations of the Middle East, he was a tyrant and a dictator. He still had not produced the remains of Speicher and Hussein didn’t allow full and open access to the inspectors.

  I’ll ask again, why are we still in Iraq, why does congress continue to fund the war if it is illegal, immoral, and based solely on lies?

• [Takuan]

  Ye can always trust ashes , lad. That an’ a good soak in the Holy water with a bit of chopped garlic, followed by a quick running stream. Here in the abyss we can hear ‘em still, every one as ever had a scythe blade run through the froat and the haid cut off, burnt n’ flushed. They ends up platin’ out on the bottom muck and makes a vague background murmur o’low-grade evil that as reminds us ta be careful.

• [GregLondon]

  JSG@110:

  Hillary Clinton, October 10, 2002
  John Edwards, Oct 10, 2002

  Oh, god. What is it with you and dates? Oct 2002 comes before March 2003. And since you can only cut and paste quotes without understanding what the hell context they occurred in, UN Resolution 1441 was PASSED on November 8, 2002. October, coming before November (at least in my calendar, maybe not on your planet), would be full of comments by people pushing for Resolution 1441.

  Everyone supported 1441. I supported Resolution 1441. Inspectors hadn’t been in Iraq since 1998, when they evacuated because the US bombed Iraq during operation desert fox.

  So, quotes from circa 1998, are leading up to operation desert fox. After which, inspections halt. 9/11 happens, and people make a whole lot of bleeting noises in 2001. Then October 2002 rolls around and Resolution 1441 gets pushed through unanimously in the UN.

  Note: unanimously.

  There is no one who says that inspectors should not be back in Iraq. That’s what 1441 was about, getting compliance from Iraq to submit to inspections to confirm it had disarmed as laied out in previous resolutions. Unanimous support for inspections.

  Inspectors go in after the resolution passes. In the first month, Iraq gives them static. Blix complains. More pressure is applied. Iraq starts letting them inspect. Hans gives his report in January, 2003:

  Dr. Hans Blix, Chief UN Weapons Inspector
  Addressing the UN Security Council
  January 27, 2003

  Dr. Hans Blix, Chief UN Weapons Inspector
  Addressing the UN Security Council
  January 27, 2003

  Dr. Hans Blix, Chief UN Weapons Inspector
  Addressing the UN Security Council
  January 27, 2003

  Dr. Hans Blix, Chief UN Weapons Inspector
  Addressing the UN Security Council
  January 27, 2003

  Hey, look at that, you quoted him four times.

  Problem is, JSG, you selectively quote Blix. He made another report in February and another one in March.

  You don’t quote the parts from Blix that actually say inspections are making progress, that inspections will be completed in MONTHS.

  You don’t quote the only man who was actually on the ground and saw with his own eyes, other than to quote him out of context (even in january, he had reported that over a hundred sites had been inspected already and had passed, but you don’t quote that), and you quote only the older parts that agree with your fantasy, your emporer’s new clothes fantasy.

  Because if you read his februrary and march speeches and reports, you would not see a man calling for invasion, you would see a man who says inspections are working, that all evidence shows that Iraq had disarmed, and that inspections could be completed in a few months.

  A few months.

  This was not a man calling for invasion.

  Yet you quote him four times, from months before the invasion, as if that were his last word on Iraq inspections. Read his entire reports from March and show me his calls for invasion.

  So, quotes from Oct 2002 are quotes from people pushing for INSPECTIONS, quotes from people pushing for RESOLUTION 1441. Which was passed UNANIMOUSLY.

  Quotes from Hans Blix right after inspections started will show that Iraq was resisting, but that he had managed to inspect sites and no evidence of WMD’s had been found.

  Quotes from Hans Blix by Feb and Mar of 2003 will show that overall, Hans Blix was confident that inspections were seeing the true story of Iraq, that Iraq had disarmed, and confidence that Iraq could be certified as fully complying with 1441 within a few months, before 2003 was over.

  Quotes from Oct 2002 are for INSPECTIONS, are for RESOLUTION 1441. Quoting people from Oct 2002 who were saying we needed to have inspections in Iraq doesn’t mean they were calling for invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

  You only quote the parts of Blix’s words that support the result you want. You only quote parts of his report from January 2003. You ignore his later reports. And the reason you ignore them is because they would completely shatter the illusion you’ve convinced yourself of.

  The word for that is “propaganda”.

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  I see our friend JSG doesn’t believe in democracy.
  

  #82 posted by JSG , June 10, 2008 8:29 PM

  #78 TERESA NIELSEN HAYDEN / MODERATOR

  To answer your question better, is this the same David Kurtz that writes for Talking Points Memo?

  Yes, JPG. He writes for Talking Points Memo. Which is a very highly-regarded weblog that follows stricter standards of journalistic accuracy than most of the major newspapers, has broken some major stories, brings in enough ad revenue to have editorial independence, employs a paid staff of full-time investigative reporters, and has been the recipient of numerous commendations and awards.

  I’m afraid Greg London is right about your sources. You’re citing as “facts” assertions that have been disproven by direct investigations and multiple reliable sources. In many cases, what you’re citing as “facts” have been known to be untrue for years now.

  Reality matters. Facts matter. What you’re saying is objectively wrong.

  Talking Points Memo is a far more reliable source of information than the ones you’ve been using. You can’t dismiss what David Kurtz has written. You have to argue the actual facts — and the facts are not on your side.

  Our Founding Fathers and our entire system of government are also not on your side:
  

  The same TPM that has a list of approved site which include Daily Kos, Altercation, The Democratic Strategist, Eschaton, and Andrew Sullivan, the lone quasi republican on a list of leftist websites.

  Daily Kos, Altercation, The Democratic Strategist, and Eschaton are all respectable sites.

  Daily Kos is a bit of a special case. Kos himself is an honest investigator, analyst, and commentator. You may not agree with him — in fact, I’m sure you don’t agree with him — but you can’t call him a liar. He is a declared partisan of the Democrats, but you can hardly object to that when your own complaint is not that there are partisans, but that you find the balance of partisans uncongenial.

  Daily Kos has sub-bloggers and a great many comment threads — it’s a huge site — which sometimes fall into rhetorical excess, but they’re still far more reality-based and reality-driven than what you’ll find on major sites like Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, and Power Line.

  Andrew Sullivan is the other special case. He’s sometimes spot-on, other times off the wall; and his post-9/11 PTSD does seem to be abating.

  Thus for the linked-to sites that you mention. Let’s move on to your objections.

  You haven’t established that the information published in those weblogs is inaccurate. I doubt that you could, since one of the biggest reasons TPM links to them is that they’re reliable. They hew as close to known facts as they can.

  What you object to is that, after looking at the facts, they come to different conclusions than you do.

  May I point something out? In a democracy, people are allowed to do that. In fact, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. But you don’t want it to work that way. You’re calling honest citizens and public servants liars, and doing your best to smear their reputations, because they don’t hold the same opinions you do.

  But it’s worse than that. You’re saying they can’t be right, they’re not allowed to be right, even though the facts support them and don’t support you, because they don’t hold the same positions you and your friends hold. And why are those positions so important to you? Because they support the party you favor.

  That’s not reality. That’s not democracy. What you want is a dictatorship where one party is in power because it’s in power, the party tells you what to believe, and if the facts contradict it, it’s the facts that have to go, not the party-approved opinions.

  Look how far you’ve fallen. You don’t argue with David Kurtz on the facts. Instead you take refuge in guilt by association, that classic tool of tyrants: David Kurtz has written for Talking Points Memo, and TPM links to Eschaton and Altercation and Daily Kos, which hold opinions that run counter to the opinions of your chosen side, and therefore by definition cannot be legitimate; so they’re wrong and Talking Points Memo is wrong and David Kurtz is wrong, and therefore what he’s saying can’t be correct, so you can dismiss it.

  That’s what matters to you: not what’s true, but what supports your side. You don’t have the gumption it takes to be a citizen of a democracy. You’ve sold yourself cheap for a false promise that you’ll always be safe and always be right. You are a sucker.
  

  Mr. Kurtz is biased.

  No. He has investigated the facts, and come to conclusions that contradict your party’s preferred version. If you find that intolerable, you’re neither a republican nor a democrat. You’re a radical extremist, and you’re pushing for a totalitarian system of government.
  

  There is no illusion of journalistic non partisanship,

  David Kurtz is practicing standard journalism. No matter what kind of hogwash you’ve undertaken to believe, the real world is still out there, and real people can still go out and check real facts. In a free country, it’s the preferred method of gathering information.
  

  of course when has there ever been.

  That’s an enormous lie. You tell it to yourself, and repeat it to your friends, because in your hearts you know you’ve abandoned and betrayed the entire concept of truth. But you don’t want to feel bad about yourself, so you pretend everyone does it.

  Everyone doesn’t do it.

• [JSG]

  #44 WSTRL

  Dvd Krtz? Rlly? H’s s fr t th lft h prbbly blvs Ls Chng.

• [JSG]

  GregLondon,

  Still wishing to discuss the past rather than the future, I seem to remember you saying that quoting from anything from before 2002 was stupidity on my part, or something like that, oh well.

  I find it interesting that you say the US supplied these precursors to WMD’s or dual use technology, and of course no other nation had anything to do with Iraq in the 80′s. Not Britain, or France, or even the USSR. But the most interesting thing is that the New York Times article that you quoted in the blog that you referenced had nothing to say about the US supplying any sort of chemical or biological weapons to Iraq. In fact it does say that Iraq and Iran were using gas warfare as early as 1981, yet the US was not even involved until ’83. So who supplied both sides with chemical weapons?

  Of course during the Iran-Iraq war the US was, more or less, in favor of Iraq. In order to keep fundamentalism out of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and most of the Middle East the US had naturally wished that Iraq would be the dam that stopped fundamentalism.

  As to the article in The St. Petersburg Times, I wonder why no other news agency picked up on this story. I am surprised that this story is not the first item in the 24 hour news channels group of news stories, ever 5 years later. I can only assume that it is on Lexis-Nexis. Of course most, if not all of the story, occurred in the 80′s, a time when the US was at least civil with Iraq. Of course, those dual use items were non-infectious diagnostic tests for animals, so says former CDC director David Satcher. CDC spokesman, Llewelyn Grant goes on to state that “We did work with Iraq’s scientists along with other scientists on microbiological agents and reagents. That did occur in the mid-80s but . . . there were no other shipments that were sent after the incident involving Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.” Of course when Iraq invaded Kuwait, Iraq became an enemy of the United States.

  Grant and Nancy Wysocki, vice president at American Type Culture Collection, a nonprofit bioresource center in Virginia that exported anthrax bacteria and other pathogens to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from 1985 to 1989 both said that Iraqi clients could not have acquired biological materials without setting forth a legitimate research purpose.

  “I do look at hard evidence and I see a country that invaded another country, the UN did not like this, nor did a lot of other countries, and they pushed Hussein back to within his own borders.

  You mean in 1980, when IRAQ INVADED IRAN? Oh, wait, we actually supported them on that one.”

  Nope, I mean when Iraq invaded Kuwait for no good reason, starting the Gulf War. When Iraq invaded Iran there was at least a reason, Iran had recently gone through a fundamentalist revolution, Iraq was afraid that the Shi’a majority would over run Iraq with their fundamentalist views.

  “You mean when we overthrew the democratic government of Iran in ’53?”

  You mean after the Shah nationalized the oil reserves? After Britain embargoed Iranian oil and started a plot to depose Mossadegh that the Brit’s invited the US in on.

  “You mean when we reinstalled the MONARCHY in Kuwait in 2001?”

  According to the UN, Kuwait was a sovereign country and they never invaded another country, nor had any weapons that are illegal under multiple UN resolutions.

  “You mean when we support the monarchy of Saudi Arabia from 1945 to now?”

  Hey, have they tried to assassinate a sitting President? Did they have WMD’s? But in all of your questions regarding Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and really any other nation, the things that matter are time and loyalties, a friend this year could be an enemy next week, and vice versa. Tomorrow, Iraq could be an enemy, but so could Britain.

  “How is calling for Iraq to live up to what the UN called for a one percent solution?

  Because the choice in March 2003 was either (1) let Blix finish in a few months or (2) spend a trillion dollars and invade.

  There was no legitimate reason to invade by March 2003 when Inspections were working and would be finished in a few months. None. Only the 1-percent doctrine can justify the “well, he isn’t 100% disarmed and we don’t know how long he will cooperate with inspections, Let’s invade now!”

  Still a seer, still think that Iraq would have cooperated until the inspections were over? They hadn’t in the past, why would they now. There was absolutely a legitimate reason to invade, Iraq had broken every resolution that was voted on, and the US had passed Public Law 107-243 stating that Iraq was in violation of the resolutions and had to submit to those multiple resolutions or face the consequences. The UN resolutions had no teeth, nothing that said if you do not do this, this and this then the UN will have no other choice but to invade. The US put teeth behind the resolutions with PL 107-243.

  “Cherry picking the data you like and ignoring the big picture isn’t “coming to a different conclusion”, it’s your own personal Operation Rockingham.”

  I could say the same of you. You cherry pick the data so it fits with your story line. The only thing that I’m doing is quoting other sources that contrast with the selected sources that you quote.

  “Ignoring the conclusions of the one inspector who was right from the very beginning, Ritter, who was backed up by Blix in 2003, and who was confirmed to have been right by Kay and Duefler in 2003, 2004, is not “coming to a different conclusion”.

  Did you actually read the Duefler report and the subsequent articles most notable the Unresolved Disarmament Issues, It isn’t light reading yet you will see that the Hussein regime were still throwing up road blocks to the inspectors, even within days of the invasion.

  In any event, the regime fell, the insurgency is in its death throes, the Iraqi people are better off now then they were under the Hussein regime.

• [JSG]

  GregLondon,

  It is not from ignorance that I come to the conclusion to invade Iraq. I come to this conclusion because Hussein ignored the multiple resolutions that said what he had to do in order to get out from under the thumb of the UN. Are we to ignore these resolutions? 90%-95% is not what the UN asked for. Hussein invaded a sovereign nation. Resolution 686 states that Iraq must return any detained Kuwaiti or third state nationals held by Iraq. If Iraq was living up to every resolution then where is Scott Speicher? I believe that the Middle East as well as the world are far better off without Hussein in power.

  Iraq is rebuilding, it will not be easy, but at least now it is possible.

• [Xenu]

  Finally Kucinch does something for America. Look you short freak, we’re SICK of you teasing us with your hot young wife. More stuff like this, less teasing.

  And yes, Mr. Kucinich, I’ve voted for you twice. Do SOMETHING dammit!

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  And Greg, you were splendid.

• [GregLondon]

  jsg: Every Senator, Representative, and each member of the Clinton and Bush administration had the same intelligence.

  Oh, stuff it already, will ya? They didn’t have the same intelligence. Bush kept saying to most of the world that he had “top secret: trust us” intel on Iraq. And what he told Blair just before the invasion was that WMD’s probably wouldn’t be found, and that he, Bush, didn’t care.

  The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.

  What are you, some kind of mental case? What the hell does that have to do with March 2003?

  Bush invaded in March 2003. In January, February, and March of 2003, ALL intel, and I mean ALL INTEL, was saying that Iraq had no WMD program, that inspections were proving they had no WMD program, and that inspections would fully verify this in a few more months.

  If you quote anything from 2002 or before, you’re a complete and absolute moron.

• [noen]

  There is not a lot that we can do Zikzak. Demonstrations, work stoppages and general strikes are nice but they are a blunt instrument and somewhat ineffective. The most effective thing that people can do is to be active in local politics. The ringhtwing in American spent 30 years working locally in order to effect the change that they wanted. They succeeded. We can do the same if we are willing to work for it. If not, if the left is not willing to buckle down and work for change then perhaps they don’t deserve it.

  The really big message to take from the recent success of Barak Obama is in how he defeated Hillary. Hillary’s campaign was enormously successful in it’s fund raising through traditional channels. She ran a good, tough campaign and Obama beat her. How? He raised something like 50 million through social networking over the internet.

  That is a reason for hope. For a long time the right has been pursuing it’s “Southern strategy” i.e. exploit the racism, homophobia and fundamentalism of a certain demographic to further your political agenda. Which, BTW goes directly against the self interest of that same demographic. That strategy is failing catastrophically, I have to wonder if the GOP will even survive much longer.

  The reason that this gives me pause to hope is that perhaps we are entering a period of relative political sanity. We’ve been dominated by special interests for too long. One hopes that the power of fund raising through the distributed networking of the social web can get us to a more representative political era. That would be good I think not only for the left but also for the right. It’s win win. Cross your fingers.

• [Agent 86]

  I just finished reading the 63 page pdf, and I have to admit, even I was surprised.

  The largest list I had previously seen contained somewhere around 20 points (and was not well written), and though I had already heard of the rest as political scandals, I had no idea Bush was implicit in each.

  As for the MSM, I do believe they are largely holding off till after the voting has finished, so that viewers will not have a chance to contact their representatives (I’m a cynic, but the MSM has made me cynical).

  I am massively disappointed in the apathy of my fellow citizens, not a single friend was interested enough to hear me recite the list of wrong-doings, none the less allow me to go into actual detail.

• [Pyre]

  JSG @ 186:
  All that right beside a “Not in our Name” advertisement, not exactly an unbiased source

  There you have it folks, a source is discredited if he’s quoted on a webpage, and an objectionable advert (from another source) also appears on that same webpage.

  I think that has just poisoned every conceivable well there ever has been and ever could be.

• [Takuan]

  thars still the problem of the shriving. I’ve already asked the Old Ones and They’ll have no part of them. Isn’t there some gods, somewhere, so depraved and vile that they’ll take even these souls? Unless…. none on the Dark Side like bein’ hornswoggled – pr’aps there’s no souls to shrive!
  I guess we’ll have to turn to Congress.

• [GregLondon]

  Oh, once again, I have to wonder if you actually read the things you quote out of context.

  You quote Kerry from March 17, 2003. The historical context you fail to mention is that Kerry’s speech is made AFTER Bush made his speech to the US. Bush, once again mistaking himself as some sherriff in a western movie, gives Saddam the dumbest ultimatum of all time: Step down from power, or we will invade you.

  Note: Bush didn’t say “comply with inspections, or we will invade”. He had shifted the goal posts to something that everyone and his mother would know wouldn’t happen: Saddam stepping down from power. That would be like the republicans counting all the votes for Gore in Florida or something. Not gonna happen. So, at that point, Bush had effectively announced without any doubt that we would invade Iraq.

  Since you are willing to quote part of Kerry’s speech, making him an expert witness to your case, quoting other bits from that very same speech is fair game:

  Yet the Administration’s handling of the run up to war with Iraq could not possibly have been more inept or self-defeating. President Bush has clumsily and arrogantly squandered the post 9/11 support and goodwill of the entire civilized world in a manner that will make the jobs ahead of us – both the military defeat and the rebuilding of Iraq – decidedly more expensive in every sense of that word.

  My strong personal preference would have been for the Administration – like the Administration of George Bush, Sr. — to have given diplomacy more time, more commitment, a real chance of success. In my estimation, giving the world thirty additional days for additional real multilateral coalition building – a real summit, not a five hour flyby with most of the world’s powers excluded — would have been prudent and no impediment to our military situation, an assessment with which our top military brass apparently agree. Unfortunately, that is an option that has been disregarded by President Bush. In the colloquial, we are where we are.

  It will take years to repair the needless damage done by this Administration

  On March 17, 2003, Caligula had ordered the army to war. What else is there to do at that point but cross your fingers and hope that we win without suffering too many casualties? That’s all I could hope for at that point.

  That’s pretty much what everyone was saying in their speeches after March 17, 2003. The die was already cast, the rubicon had already been crossed. Bush had made war, unilateral war, unavoidable. OK. Go team. Let’s try to win this and come home. Pep rally.

  Which makes your set of quotes very interesting, actually.

  You have massive quotes from October 2002, which are all pre-Resolution 1441. And then you have massive quotes from March 17 forward (which are all after the war had started and questioning the war, if you happened to poke your head out from under your rock in March 2003, would have been treasonous at that time)

  You quote pro-Resolution 1441 stuff as if it were pro-invasion stuff. And you quote post start-of-war stuff, ignoring the criticism, and mistaking pep rally talk as if the war were avoidable at that point. It wasn’t.

  Then you selectively quote Hans Blix from Jan 2003. But you ignore his reports from February and March.

  All in all, it’s little more than cherry picking the past, out of context, to form propaganda that matches your fantasy.

• [scarlot harlot]

  It doesn’t matter if they impeach him, just that someone is finally trying to do it!!! And we tried to impeach Clinton for a little nookie?

  Liar Liar….Burn the witch!!!! I mean bastard! GW has made a mockery of almost every reason we should be proud to live in America. I want his record tarnished so no one will think he did a good job 20-50 years from now when recalling his pathetic time in office.

• [Takuan]

  I’m offski to Sheol for a bit o’ rest, on the morrow then

• [Kieran O’Neill]

  @#87: Fantastic!

• [GregLondon]

  Pyre, yeah, but I found two good URL’s that point directly to the fact that Bush lied.

  The Iraq on the Record Report, prepared by Rep. Henry A. Waxman, is a searchable collection of 237 specific misleading statements made by Bush Jr. administration officials about the threat posed by Iraq.

  link

  A study coauthored by nonprofit journalism organization the Center for Public Integrity found that in the two years after September 11, 2001 the president and top administration officials had made 935 false statements, in an orchestrated public relations campaign to galvanize public opinion for the war

  link.

  And a nice, organized timeline at warhw.com with links, that I’ve compiled and can use for future koolaid drinkers.

• [JSG]

  Where do you get the information about Scott Ritter and the illegal CIA spies?

  More cherry picking…

  “That is, of course, if you actually think that the amount of dead soldiers some how equates to the success of the mission.”

  The point that I was making was, this might seem cold or inhuman, but wars are not an individual matter, it is whether or not the mission was a success that is important.

  In my opinion, the Iraq war is a success, because Hussein was an evil dictator, and deserved nothing less than what he got in the end. I know it wasn’t always like that, I do think that Rumsfield should have been kicked out a long time before he was, I think that the surge should have started a long time before it did and I think that Petraeus should have been in place much earlier than he was. Of course that is looking at this issue with 20/20 vision. Even the disgrace at Abu Ghraib has been turned around. In this months Readers Digest there is a story of Major General Doug Stone, here’s a link…
  http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/iraqi-militants-becoming-citizens/article76144.html

  Things are improving in Iraq, as I’ve said before, there have been free elections and the next one is coming up in October.

  As I’ve said in the past if Saddam had allowed the inspectors to do their jobs from the beginning there would’ve been no sanctions and no oil for food. Iraq could have been as free as Hussein would allow.

• [Daemon]

  On the other hand, I can sort of see the republicans throwing bush to the wolves just to seperate the party from his unpopularity as forcefully as possible.

• [JSG]

  One more thing,

  It doesn’t matter where or by whom the story is written, this was a report from Sen. Rockefeller a democrat, from a democrat run Senate. With no input from the GOP. Yeah, this is biased toward the Republican Party.

• [Jules]

  Yog @144

  The 48 hour ultimatum was delivered at 0401 Baghdad time on March 18th 2003. The US began bombing Iraq at 0530 Baghdad time on March 19th, with an attack on a site where Saddam was thought to be staying, 25.5 hours later.

  If you give someone a 48 hour deadline to step down it’s usually considered good form to allow them the entire 48 hours.

  Well, I mean, you can’t go and attack somebody exactly when they’re expecting it, can you? Everyone knows that surprise is important, don’t they?

• [Cowicide]

  #101 posted by GregLondon:

  Rather than admit wrong, they keep moving the goalposts to somewhere out in front of us.

  People of this type are not mentally wired in such a way as to be able to admit wrong… and when they “try” to do it, it’s always with some severe caveats that negate any true wrongdoing.

  There are only evildoers “out there”, no wrongdoers in the mirror in their “world”.

  You can argue with these people all night long, but when you show enough facts and, God forbid, critical thought and analysis to prove your side… they clam up, mumble and slink away to sputter their same, exact line of horseshit to the next unwitting victim.

  I’ve said this for many years and I’ll say it again… brain scans will show that they have neurological issues that actually work very similar to the new Moog Guitar where certain normal mental reactions are muted and others are on “infinite sustain”.

  No, I’m not kidding (and I”m honestly not trying to be insulting) and over the years I’ve been proven right in study after study (and even some preliminary brain scans). The hardline conservative GOP mindset is a mental disorder. It might be possibly treated in the future with medication, but first we all have to admit the uncomfortable truth. These people really DO have a type of mental disorder.

  I know it’s hard to swallow and years ago, normal people and conservatives alike used to laugh and chide me for my hypothesis; but they aren’t laughing as much any more…

  Small sample of some public sources:
  http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2004/10/65521
  http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/07/22_politics.shtml
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/aug/13/usa.redbox
  http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9469-dodging-punishment-may-be-its-own-reward.html
  http://psychcentral.com/news/2007/09/10/brains-of-liberals-conservatives-may-work-differently/1691.html
  http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001998.html
  http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20061222-000001.xml
  http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5isgJ0r_9nH41VBhtXvN17pxlA31Q
  http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-politics10sep10,0,5982337.story?coll=la-home-center

  There IS ongoing research in this territory; expect much more news on this in the future. And, NO, I don’t believe in mandatory medicating or anything draconians like that except in the most severe cases (genocidal tendencies, etc.).

• [JSG]

  #108 GREGLONDON

  If you quote anything from 2002 or before, you’re a complete and absolute moron.

  So I can’t quote law, or anything from the debate that lead to the war in Iraq?

  They didn’t have the same intelligence.

  If the above is true then why did Hilliary Clinton say this…

  “In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security.” — Hillary Clinton, October 10, 2002

  And John Edwards say this….

  “Saddam Hussein’s regime represents a grave threat to America and our allies, including our vital ally, Israel. For more than two decades, Saddam Hussein has sought weapons of mass destruction through every available means. We know that he has chemical and biological weapons. He has already used them against his neighbors and his own people, and is trying to build more. We know that he is doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons, and we know that each day he gets closer to achieving that goal.” — John Edwards, Oct 10, 2002

  Then there is this…

  CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Were we right to go to this war alone [sic], basically without the Europeans behind us [sic]? Was that something we had to do?

  SENATOR JOHN EDWARDS (Democrat, North Carolina): I think that we were right to go. I think we were right to go to the United Nations. I think we couldn’t let those who could veto in the Security Council hold us hostage. And I think Saddam Hussein being gone is good. Good for the American people, good for the security of that region of the world, and good for the Iraqi people.

  MATTHEWS: If you think the decision, which was made by the president, when basically he saw the French weren’t with us and the Germans and the Russians weren’t with us, was he right to say, “We’re going anyway”?

  EDWARDS: I stand behind my support of that, yes.

  MATTHEWS: You believe in that?

  EDWARDS: Yes.

  Senator John Edwards (Democrat, North Carolina)
  During an interview on MSNBC’s “Hardball”
  October 13, 2003

  Hey that last one was from 2003 is it okay if I use that one?

  This one is from 2003 as well, may I use this one?

  “There is now no incentive for Hussein to comply with the inspectors or to refrain from using weapons of mass destruction to defend himself if the United States comes after him. And he will use them; we should be under no illusion about that.”

  Joseph Wilson, Advisor to John Kerry 2004 Presidential Campaign In a Los Angeles Times editorial: “A ‘Big Cat’ With Nothing to Lose” February 6, 2003; Page B17

  Here is another from 03.

  BILL MOYERS: President Bush’s recent speech to the American Enterprise Institute, he said, let me quote it to you. “The danger posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons cannot be ignored or wished away.” You agree with that?

  JOE WILSON: I agree with that. Sure.

  BILL MOYERS: “The danger must be confronted.” You agree with that? “We would hope that the Iraqi regime will meet the demands of the United Nations and disarm fully and peacefully. If it does not, we are prepared to disarm Iraq by force. Either way, this danger will be removed. The safety of the American people depends on ending this direct and growing threat.” You agree with that?

  JOE WILSON: I agree with that. Sure. The President goes on to say in that speech, as he did in the State of the Union Address, is we will liberate Iraq from a brutal dictator. All of which is true.

  Joseph Wilson, Advisor to John Kerry 2004 Presidential Campaign During an interview with Bill Moyers February 28, 2003

  Yet another from 2003

  “It is the duty of any president, in the final analysis, to defend this nation and dispel the security threat. Saddam Hussein has brought military action upon himself by refusing for 12 years to comply with the mandates of the United Nations. The brave and capable men and women of our armed forces and those who are with us will quickly, I know, remove him once and for all as a threat to his neighbors, to the world, and to his own people, and I support their doing so.”

  Senator John Kerry (Democrat, Massachusetts)
  Statement on eve of military strikes against Iraq
  March 17, 2003

  Another quote from 2003.
  “Those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don’t have the judgment to be President, or the credibility to be elected President.

  No one can doubt or should doubt that we are safer — and Iraq is better — because Saddam Hussein is now behind bars.”

  Senator John Kerry (Democrat, Massachusetts)
  Speech at Drake University in Iowa
  December 16, 2003

  One more…
  “I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the president made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him.”

  Senator John Kerry (Democrat, Massachusetts)
  During a Democratic Primary Debate at the University of South Carolina May 3, 2003

  The congress and the administration had the same intelligence. If there is anyone to blame, it is he analysts that said Hussein still had weapons. But I don’t think you can honestly blame them because intelligence analysis is not an exact science.

• [buddy66]

  The late great polemicist Norman Mailer used a wonderful boxing metaphor to describe Saddamn Hussein on the eve of the 2003 invasion: “…a hollowed out palooka hanging on the ropes.” I think it an apt description of JSG.

• [Pyre]

  “the insurgency is in its death throes”

      — #212 posted by JSG, June 27, 2008 3:42 PM

  “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”

      — Dick Cheney, Monday, May 30, 2005

  These guys don’t even bother dusting off their talking points.

• [Agent 86]

  Here Here, Ant! My brain stopped working halfway through his comment, when I realized I was only halfway through.

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  JSG:
  

  Well, If I can’t link to a Los Angles Times article written by an assistant editor from the New Republic, a center left publication, then I might as well quit this charade.

  You faker. I removed the link for the reasons stated. The chief reason was that it in no wise qualified as a response to the arguments that have been raised here. You haven’t responded either, though you’ve been free to do so all along.

  At the time I removed the link, I didn’t say a word about your source being Mr. “I can’t get laid, and it’s the liberals’ fault.” I thought I was being merciful.
  

  You talk of democracy and freedoms,

  I do indeed. I have a high opinion of freedom and democracy.
  

  yet you delete a link that might have changed minds.

  I deleted the link for the reasons given.

  If your arguments are capable of changing minds, then make the arguments. Produce your evidence. Demonstrate your reasoning. We’re waiting to see you do it.
  

  Classy.

  That’s the most inadequate insult I’ve seen in a month of Sundays.

  Do feel free to come back when you have something to say.

• [raisedbywolves]

  Hey, if I could semi-seriously try to impeach Bush, you can bet I’d be all over that. Even if I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.

• [GregLondon]

  Oh my god. I just realized that the “Domino Theory” from the days of teh Vietnam war is just another version of the “One Percent doctrine”.

  Both take a logical fallacy of a hasty generalization, a slippery slope, and transform it into international policy of a superpower.

  An image in my head of Cheney explaining the one-percent doctrine keeps morphing into Johnnie Cochran telling a jury, “Look at silly the monkey!”

  And then someone’s head at Fox new explodes.

• [JSG]

  A few more….

  “Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance — not even today — of the disarmament, which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.”

  Dr. Hans Blix, Chief UN Weapons Inspector
  Addressing the UN Security Council
  January 27, 2003

  “The nerve agent VX is one of the most toxic ever developed.
  13,000 chemical bombs were dropped by the Iraqi Air Force between 1983 and 1988, while Iraq has declared that 19,500 bombs were consumed during this period. Thus, there is a discrepancy of 6,500 bombs. The amount of chemical agent in these bombs would be in the order of about 1,000 tonnes.”

  Dr. Hans Blix, Chief UN Weapons Inspector
  Addressing the UN Security Council
  January 27, 2003

  “The recent inspection find in the private home of a scientist of a box of some 3,000 pages of documents, much of it relating to the laser enrichment of uranium support a concern that has long existed that documents might be distributed to the homes of private individuals. …we cannot help but think that the case might not be isolated and that such placements of documents is deliberate to make discovery difficult and to seek to shield documents by placing them in private homes.”

  Dr. Hans Blix, Chief UN Weapons Inspector
  Addressing the UN Security Council
  January 27, 2003

  “I have mentioned the issue of anthrax to the Council on previous occasions and I come back to it as it is an important one.

  Iraq has declared that it produced about 8,500 litres of this biological warfare agent, which it states it unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991. Iraq has provided little evidence for this production and no convincing evidence for its destruction.

  There are strong indications that Iraq produced more anthrax than it declared, and that at least some of this was retained after the declared destruction date. It might still exist. Either it should be found and be destroyed under UNMOVIC supervision or else convincing evidence should be produced to show that it was, indeed, destroyed in 1991.”

  Dr. Hans Blix, Chief UN Weapons Inspector
  Addressing the UN Security Council
  January 27, 2003

• [Agent 86]

  I read a few studies recently about JSW’s behavior. I wonder if they are related to the studies someone above posted (which admittedly I did not read, there seemingly being not enough hours in the last few days)?

  Also, my html/writing was badly done last comment, read as:
  Better yet, did you even read the transcript of the speech, which this article is about, that we should be commenting on? Just the first few “high crimes and misdemeanors” would be alright.

• [GregLondon]

  Most people on both sides of the ideological side have reasonably good intentions. Sometimes those good intentions are dangerous, but that’s not the same as being a “Nazi”. Just because someone is wrong doesn’t mean they’re deliberately evil.

  Most people aren’t deliberately evil, including the Nazi Youth.

  http://www.kimel.net/popularity.html

  Under the Versailles Treaty, Germany had to disarm, give up land and pay heavy reparations. The devastated country suffered from widespread unemployment, runaway inflation, and low national morale. In 1919 the Weimar Republic was established. The Germans were used to a strong autocratic regime and here they had to deal with a fractionalized democratic Reichstag with many parties: Communists, Socialist and Rightist and live under a constant threat of a communist revolution.

  In this unstable chaotic situation Hitler used his strong nationalistic convictions and oratory skills to the fullest. His message was simple: Germany did not loose the war but was stabbed from the back by the Jewish and socialist traitors. The Versailles Treaty is the root of all evil and had to be denounced. The Jewish capitalists and the Jewish communists are the mortal enemies of the German people. The Germans are a superior race destined to rule the World; the Fuhrer is infallible in all matters of life and death and the destiny of Germany is in his hands. The message was well received

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler#Reichstag_fire_and_the_March_elections

  Elections were scheduled for early March, but on 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building was set on fire.[41] Since a Dutch independent communist was found in the building, the fire was blamed on a Communist plot to which the government reacted with the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February which suspended basic rights, including habeas corpus. Under the provisions of this decree, the German Communist Party (KPD) and other groups were suppressed, and communist functionaries and deputies were arrested, put to flight, or murdered.

  (end)

  The Nazi party got 43% of the vote that year, the largest voting block of any other political party.

  If you spent more time listening and trying to understand what jsg was really about, perhaps by asking open and non-hostile questions, you might have made much more progress.

  I have trouble trying to understand what someone is really about when they deny basic facts of history. If we can’t agree on any premise, then we can’t agree on any train of logic or conclusion.

  you could have asked whether, given all his reasons for taking out Saddam, and the likely cost of invading Iraq, was that the best use of our armed forces?

  jsg, question for you. see above.

  In framing the question this way, you acknowledge his concerns,

  You do realize that his concerns are based on lies, right? Lies told by Bush and the rest of the white house. Lies that from the day of 9/11 falsely connected Iraq with 9/11, when no such connection existed.

  If jsg’s “concerns” were that Iraq was behind 9/11 and might do something like that again, which a lot of people was thinking by March 2003, then you don’t “acknowledge the concern” if the concern is an out and out fucking lie.

  If you happened to have noticed, jsg’s fall back argument, the argument that he returned to whenever facts completely refuted anything else he had said, that even if Saddam was 90-95% disarmed, even if Iraq was complying, jsg would argue that we didn’t know how long Saddam might comply, and he was only 90-95% in compliance.

  with Saddam walking out the door with his hands up, jsg argues that it was righ to open fire.

  If he had any other “concerns” he had plenty of time to make them known.

  Instead, his concerns were nothing more than a demand that the Reichstag Fire Decree be enforced and that the communists responsible be arrested, suppressed, and taken out, as needed.

  and also present him with numerous “ways out”

  Imagine yourself in Nazi Germany in 1938. Hitler has lied himself into power. Lied about history. Lied about attacks on Germany. Lied about who is at fault. Lied about how to fix it. Imagine that, and most importantly, imagine the Germans are eating it up. Because they were loving that stuff.

  you think they want a way out?

  jsg is getting something out of defending Bush, out of defending decades of lies, out of continuing the propaganda that got us into this mess in the first place. I don’t know what it is. Maybe he’s got some piece of his identity wrapped up in the flag waving. Maybe he’s got a friend or family member serving in Iraq and feels the need to defend their honor. Maybe he’s in high school and wants to sign up when he gets old enough. Maybe he owns stock in Haliburton.

  Whatever the reason, he isn’t exhibiting any behaviour that indicates he wants a way out.

  The only thing there is to do is to try and remove whatever benefit he sees in attaching himself to the fairy tale. Point out the lies. Point out the deceit. Point out the trail of money, weapons, chemicals, agents. Point out the speeches by Bush that lied directly to the American people about intel that had clearly been flagged as false.

  And if after that, he still wants to support the nazi party, he’s beyond listening to facts.

• [Antinous]

  Dear commenters,

  Please refrain from calling your fellow commenters morons, idiots, imbeciles, pinheads, retards, cretins and the like. That invective should be saved for the politicians under discussion.

• [Takuan]

  http://thinkprogress.org/2008/06/18/cbss-lara-logan-tell-me-the-last-time-you-saw-the-body-of-a-dead-american-soldier/

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  JSG, I see you’re shifting the grounds of the argument again. I assume this is because you can’t respond to any of Greg’s challenges without admitting that your “evidence” is made out of used kleenex. I also assume that if he answers your new sets of arguments — he’s been doing a lot more work than you have — you’ll decline to respond, and shift your grounds yet again.

  When I called you a faker, I didn’t mean it as an insult. It was intended as a purely descriptive term.

• [tbo42]

  You know what? 50 years ago, you would have been a koolaid drinking mouthpiece of the nazi youth

  Congratulations! You’re our 200th poster, and you win the Godwin’s Law prize :-)

  I’d like to thank the participants for an excellent effort. Just reading all the posts took me forever–I can’t imagine how long it took to research everything. I learned a fair bit from reading.

  I think it’s safe to say that you’re sufficiently immune to facts that we can stop talking.

  Greglondon, ask yourself this: using the tactics you employed in this debate (overwhelming number of facts combined with insults and belittlement of your opponent, etc.), how many times have you been successful not in “winning the debate”, but in actually changing someone’s mind? My guess is the answer is zero. Based on how well informed you are, it appears you’ve had this debate many times, so you now have lots of data with which to judge your own performance.

  You need to ask yourself two questions:

  1) Why am I doing this?
  If it’s for no other reason than to “win debates on the internet”, more power to you. Perhaps you derive a lot of satisfaction from winning (it *is* fun, at least sometimes). You’re providing entertainment for others who share your viewpoints, and you occasionally help inform others who aren’t put off by your debating style. That said, you change very few minds, and don’t accomplish much in proportion to the time you spend. If your goal is to change public opinion, one mind at a time, you could be much more effective.

  2) How can I be more effective at changing people’s minds?
  I learned this the hard way: most people don’t respond well to aggressive tactics. If you want to change minds, show people you understand their position. Show them that you respect them. Appeal not just to their logic, but to their emotions. Try not to appear angry or contemptuous. Acknowledge valid points made by your opponent (and yes, jsg did make some). Be fair. Your opponents will appreciate this, and hopefully respond with an open mind instead of defensiveness.

  I’m sure you hold opinions on topics on which you are not an expert. Some of your opinions are almost certainly wrong. Ask yourself how you would like to be treated in a debate about such an issue. Put yourself in jsg’s shoes.

  I have to say that, while you won the debate, jsg came across as the nicer, more reasonable (but less informed) participant. It seemed like you were transferring a lot of your hatred of Bush onto jsg, which is a mistake on multiple levels.

• [Avram]

  JSG #134: Do we stay and help the people, try to change the human rights record for Iraq?

  Buried in the first half of that sentence is the unquestioned assumption that our staying there actually helps the Iraqis instead of harming them.

  A lot of the trouble in Iraq is caused by our presence there. I’m sure a lot of the foreign terrorists in Iraq are attracted by the presence of American (and other western) soldiers. The Bush administration has even brought up this point as a goal of the invasion: “We’re taking the fight to the terrorists abroad, so we don’t have to face them here at home.”

  The idea of attracting terrorists to Iraq instead of having them attack the US might sound good to a lot of Americans, but I think if I were an Iraqi I wouldn’t be very happy with it.

• [minTphresh]

  what a load of poopie.

• [ninnyfriedcheez]

  Isn’t the Bush Administration currently negotiating a long-term presence in Iraq, i.e., permanent military bases, control of Iraqi airspace, and legal immunity for US soldiers?

  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/revealed-secret-plan-to-keep-iraq-under-us-control-840512.html

  Now is a great time to show the rest of the world that we don’t have nefarious desires to control the entire middle east (at least some of us some of us don’t) by rejecting Bush and his policies outright.

  Call or email your congressperson and tell them to listen up, despite what Pelosi said.

• [GregLondon]

  me: question 195.b: Was the US more interested in Inspections being completed or Saddam being killed?”

  jsg: I think that Hussein wasn’t as important as making sure that Iraq had absolutely no illegal weapons.

  You know what? 50 years ago, you would have been a koolaid drinking mouthpiece of the nazi youth. You look at hard evidence, you look at “Sanctions will not be lifted until Saddam is out of Power”, you ignore the content of what is being done and said to determine who is right, and instead focus solely on what flag each person is waving to determine their moral standing.

  In effect, you will always come back with “The US can do no wrong”.

  No illegal weapons, less of a threat, however the inspectors only got 90-95% done, not 100% as the 11 resolutions called for.

  One Percent Doctrine.

  What any sane man before 9/11 would have quickly identified as a logical fallacy, a hasty generalization in the extreme, a slippery slope of vertical proportions, has since become official US policy, defended by flag waving drones like you.

  Since you’re not saying anything that I wasn’t hearing back in 2001, 2002, and 2003, since you are unwilling to look at new facts that have come to light since then, since youre narrative of history is indistinguishable from propaganda being spewed the day after 9/11, I think it’s safe to say that you’re sufficiently immune to facts that we can stop talking.

  Have a nice day.

• [noen]

  NoahApples
  The threat presented could dissuade or be used to mediate a possible declared state of emergency

  This is very observant. Pelosi and Reid have already warned Bush that he’d be impeached immediately if he invaded Iran. That they allowed Kucinich to go forward with this might mean it’s a shot across the bow. Another thing that it might accomplish is to prevent Bush from making preemptive pardons. Or from him stepping down and then Cheney pardoning him. Impeachment is not a criminal procedure, it’s purely political.

• [JSG]

  [URL deleted]

  He says it better than I could.

  You say that Bush deserves to be impeached, fine, but congress had access to the same intelligence. Once we found out that Iraq had no weapons, then what, do we leave? Do we stay and help the people, try to change the human rights record for Iraq?

  I do not believe that the Bush Administration had a lot of faith in Blix or the UN, but that is my opinion, not fact.

  In this country there are few whom actually practice journalism, a good journalist is objective, Mr. Kurtz and TPM are not objective, but neither is Fox News or talk radio. Both are biased and partisan.

• [Jupiter12]

  Why did SanFran Nan say impeachment was off the table? I remember how excited everybody was when she became Speaker but then she seemed to fizzle out. Why hasn’t she held Bush and Cheney accountable?

• [JSG]

  #101 GREGLONDON

  Again, intelligence gathering and analysis are not a perfect science. Every Senator, Representative, and each member of the Clinton and Bush administration had the same intelligence. In the past Iraq had WMD’s, and they used them on the Kurds in Halabja. Saddam Hussein had a record of violations of international law.

  Below is the text of a bill that Bill Clinton signed into law, The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.

  http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=105_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ338.105.pdf

  Below is the pdf file of public law 107-243. It was voted on and passed by the 107th congress, some of it has to do with WMD’s, but not all of it.

  http://www.c-span.org/resources/pdf/hjres114.pdf

• [Charlie Stross]

  He’s doing it in the wrong order.

  In the (vanishingly unlikely) event that this impeachment was to actually happen, what would the consequences be?

  In two words: President Cheney.

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  Kevitivity, I think you’ll find that Kucinich is savvier and more durable than many people imagine.

  JSG @39:
  

  ‘The president’s statements “were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates.”‘

  Malarkey.

  I don’t care whether Rockefeller and/or Fred Hiatt said that. I am mildly curious about whether that statement follows a section that says, “Of course, this happened after Bush reconfigured intelligence collection and reporting in ways guaranteed to yield bad intelligence while giving him the answers — i.e., the war — he wanted.”

  However, it doesn’t really matter whether it makes that distinction. The fact is, Bush & Co. lied themselves blue in the face. So did Fred Hiatt. Check out Brad DeLong’s post on the subject. There’s only one reason to keep believing that piece in the Washington Post: because you want to believe it.

  People who require you to believe lies are in the same category as people who don’t believe in counting votes: they aren’t on your side and never will be, no matter what else they said this year.

  MintPhresh @55, you confuse me. I see no reason to disemvowel Red Leatherman.

• [JSG]

  #78 TERESA NIELSEN HAYDEN / MODERATOR

  To answer your question better, is this the same David Kurtz that writes for Talking Points Memo? The same TPM that has a list of approved site which include Daily Kos, Altercation, The Democratic Strategist, Eschaton, and Andrew Sullivan, the lone quasi republican on a list of leftist websites.

  Mr. Kurtz is biased. There is no illusion of journalistic non partisanship, of course when has there ever been.

• [JSG]

  GregLondon,

  You asked…

  “On March 15, 2003, was invading Iraq at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars a better path than to let inspections finish in a few months?”

  It would have been proper in light of the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998. Again, there was no telling if the Iraqi government would have remained as agreeable in the months to come. The Iraqi government ran hot and cold when it came to working with the inspectors. Also those hundreds of billions of dollars are not just thrown down a rabbit hole, what are the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on? Getting the troops and their vehicles to Kuwait? Fuel for said vehicles? Paying the soldiers? Training the soldiers? Getting new equipment i.e. from Jeeps to Humvee’s? What was it spent on? Please tell me, I’d like to know.

  The two articles that you quote, you never mention that Scott Ritter had a book to pimp, and you never mention that Seymour Hersh was the person interviewing Ritter.

  Cherry picking again.

  Here’s an excerpt…

  “What I’m going to do is just ask Scott a series of questions. I’ve read his book a couple of times, and basically we’re going to try to have some fun. Consider Scott and I your little orchestra playing on the deck of the Titahic as it goes down, because we are all in grave trouble here. So, Scott, to begin, before we even talk about how we got to where we are, my own personal view is we have two options in Iraq. Option A, we can get all our troops out by midnight tonight, and option B, we can get them all out by tomorrow night at midnight.”

  Both of these men are great sources of propaganda and there are a lot more examples of their bias and outright lies.

  http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/11719/

  Yes, a great propagandist lies with a tiny bit of truth.

  “A FORMER UN weapons inspector yesterday admitted spying for the Americans while working in Iraq.

  American Bill Tierney confessed to giving the Pentagon targets for military action when he was a member of an inspection team between 1996 and 1998.”

  All that right beside a “Not in our Name” advertisement, not exactly an unbiased source, but ok, so there were two spies in Iraq, dandy, the over flights by the U-2 spy planes could have told the US about the same as amount as someone on the ground. Besides, I read nothing in the resolutions stating that the inspectors must not be from any intelligence group.

  Then there is this from Resolution 686
  “Arrange for immediate access to and release of all prisoners of war under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross and return the remains of any deceased personnel of the forces of Kuwait and the Member States cooperating with Kuwait pursuant to resolution 678 (1990)”

  Iraq did not do this, remember Capt. Michael Scott Speicher?

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Scott_Speicher

  Where is he? Is he living? Dead? I’m sure his family would like to know.

  In resolution 687 it says this…

  “Concerned by the reports in the hands of Member States that Iraq has attempted to acquire materials for a nuclear-weapons programme contrary to its obligations under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1 July 1968,”

  So Iraq was looking for nuclear weapons before the late 90′s, as early as 91, thus breaking the treaty.

  Endless lies? To justify an immoral war? Greg, do you think it possible that you might be mistaken?

• [Kieran O’Neill]

  There’s an interesting OpEd by John Kusumi on the non-coverage of this by the major U.S. news outlets here.

  ” At CBSnews.com, “Revolutionary Swimsuit Built For Speed” is a higher priority for the editors who choose the front page stories. But they have a box at the top right, which indicates the “most viewed” story is Kucinich Offers Impeachment Articles Against Bush. So the tendency of editors is on display at the left, while the tendency of readers is on display at the right. “

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  No, JSG. The situation’s not equal on both sides. That’s another way you tell yourself “everyone does it.” Everyone does not do it. Talking Points Memo and David Kurtz are hugely more credible than Fox News.

  Also, I believe I’m going to disallow your link. It doesn’t answer any of the lines of argument that have been running in this thread (which BTW you’ve fallen far behind on answering). It’s every bit as tripealicious and contrived as Hiatt’s editorial, and covers much the same ground. And if you genuinely believe that journalists aren’t to be believed, which has been your chief response to the many arguments you’ve faced here, you can’t get out of your jam by quoting another journalist in a mainstream daily paper — and certainly not that one.

• [Xopher]

  LOL “…the New Republic, a center left publication…”!!! For values of ‘center left’ equal to ‘neocon’, yeah.

  JSG, you are absurd. Weren’t you ever asked to “show your work” in school? Just throwing links around doesn’t show that you understand the arguments being given in the sources you link to. And linking to an article of questionable relevance shows that you don’t.

  If you can’t explain an argument in your own words, you don’t really understand it. Apply that as a test for your own understanding, and you will put in fewer links. Actually you’ll probably stop commenting, because I think you’re just here to chant “No, no, you’re all wrong you dirty libruls,” with your hands over your ears and your eyes shut.

  But then anyone who still supports the WPE has to have been in that position for some time now.

• [Takuan]

  I’m prepared to believe it. Ever since I was small I have been impressed by how some people just don’t have the capacity for empathy and compassion expected in normal humans. It’s not just a matter of their opinions derived from experience, it’s their hardwired default mode. Not to be confused with the chronically depressed, I’ve known plenty of depressed, compassionate people. These uncaring seem to range from full on sociopath/psychopaths through to the types that fall into traditional “damn-everyone-else” religions without going through any period of doubt. The smug, the pecksniffs, the hall monitors and eventually the low grade official.

• [minTphresh]

  i’m sorry, do you need my sources on that?

• [Torporous]

  Some very good comments on the timing of this.

  Takuan. Wonderful weaving. I will gladly lend a hand.

  Thanks for the delicious imagery and the laugh.

• [GregLondon]

  jsg: where do you get your information from? I see no sited references

  You’re kidding, right? You want me to give you a link to Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame’s husband, saying the niger yellow cake story was shit? Have you heard of Wilson or Plame? Will you also be needing a cited “reference” to explain that Plame was outed by the White House in retaliation for Wilson speaking the truth?

  Have you been living under a fucking rock?

  Do you need a cited reference to remember that the second UN resolution, the one that authorized the use of force, failed to get international support?

  Did you miss the news about the secret memo regarging the Bush/Blair meeting?

  Were you watching the news in early 2003? Or were you watching Fox and eating up the propaganda channel?

  In Iraq, we were over there to find out if Saddam had weapons programs

  you just keep telling yourself that pokey.

• [Takuan]

  heh! She said “tripealicious”!

• [insomma]

  Wow. I love you guys. Thank you for this wonderful thread.

  /runs to soak eyes in saline/

• [JSG]

  I was not using the quotes from Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards to state that they were pro or anti invasion, I was using them to show that Congress and Bush & Co. were using the same intelligence. I was using the other quotes to do the same thing. The intelligence was the same for the President as it was for Congress.

  At some point in history Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, and he had a nuclear program. He used the B&C weapons on the Iranians and the Kurds of Iraq. And who know with certainty that he wasn’t rebuilding. Blix said that he had searched anywhere from 100 to 300 known sites, and found nothing, ok what about other sites that are not likely or known? Blix did say that he found paperwork in the private home of a scientist. It must have been like trying to find a needle in a hay stack. I doubt that 30 days would have done much to change the situation. In the end I don’t care about WMD’s, they can’t deliver anything over in the states. However, the US military was in Afghanistan, could he have caused problems there?

  Hussein had numerous human rights violations including genocide, torture, and executions. After we invaded, for whatever reason, and found no WMD’s, then what, do we leave the people of Iraq to the dictator that has tortured and committed genocide against the Iraqi’s? Do we take out Hussein and leave immediately, allow a power vacuum and let the Iranians waltz in and go from one dictator to another? Or do we stay, allow the soldiers to do what needs to be done and try for a democracy in Iraq?

  • [Antinous]

    JSG,

    Iraq under Saddam Hussein was no worse than 70% of the world. Its sole distinguishing feature was its strategic value for securing petroleum interests. If you remove that from the equation and reduce it to a case of ethics, then why haven’t we invaded China?

• [Takuan]

  http://www.greenleft.org.au/2002/506/27605

• [Agent 86]

  Wow, I thought I was done with this thread, but somehow it keeps sucking me in.

  I just want to thank Greg for that little website he stuck together, I’m going to attempt to memorize it this week (so I can argue from a position of knowledge IRL, not just on the web).

• [Takuan]

  http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/217.html

• [GregLondon]

  I think this qualifies as the H-Bomb of Presidential Impeachment Evidence:

  “A study coauthored by nonprofit journalism organization the Center for Public Integrity found that in the two years after September 11, 2001 the president and top administration officials had made 935 false statements, in an orchestrated public relations campaign to galvanize public opinion for the war”

  Link

  To quote Mrs. Miracle Max: “LIAR!“

• [Takuan]

  http://www.sianews.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=856

• [Takuan]

  http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2849.htm

• [Takuan]

  http://www.fff.org/comment/com0406g.asp

• [Takuan]

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5368360.stm

• [Takuan]

  http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

• [Cowicide]

  #103 posted by JSG

  Below is the text of a bill that Bill Clinton signed into law, The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.

  Fine, after we impeach Bush then we’ll also retroactively double-impeach Bill Clinton too, are you happy?

• [JSG]

  Doesn’t Kucinich do this every year?

  Let’s not forget that the Democrats have looked in to the lead up to the Iraq war and found that ‘The president’s statements “were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates.”‘

  It says that a lot here:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/08/AR2008060801687.html

  In the WaPo none the less.

• [Agent 86]

  I almost hope jsg keeps posting, this is about as amusing as watching the discussion with evidence. Plus, I now have a one stop resource for shutting up people that are rah-rah for war.

• [GregLondon]

  yog@144: If you give someone a 48 hour deadline to step down it’s usually considered good form to allow them the entire 48 hours.

  So, you’re saying Bush Jr. can’t do basic arithmetic?

• [Agent 86]

  JSG, did you miss the part where Bush&Co put together a secret org, outside of normal US intelligence community, to skew, change, and falsify intelligence reports that were then circulated within our actual intelligence agency? Better yet, did you even , which this article is about, that we should be commenting on? Just the first few would be alright.

• [GregLondon]

  with your permission, of course.

  Permission granted.
  Good hunting.

  ;)

• [Takuan]

  “improving”
  http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/06/daily_life_in_sadr_city_iraq.html

• [Elysianartist]

  Probably too little too late. Just send in the Feds and arrest that war criminal and his thug buddy Cheney. Send them to the Hague. Today.

• [JSG]

  Sorry, here is the link.

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/08/AR2008060801687.html

• [JenniferFolly]

  YAY!

• [Village Idiot]

  RE: #99 TAKUAN , JUNE 11, 2008 11:54 PM
  it’s offical,you’re ruled by thugs,liars and thieves:
  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080611/ap_on_go_co/bush_impeachment

  Don’t forget cowards! Yay! A quote from that article:

  By 251-166, House members dispatched the measure to a committee on Wednesday — a procedure often used to kill legislation.

  Hot potato! Hot potato comin’ through! Ouch, I don’t want it! Here, you take it!

  That quote needs a quick edit: “…to kill legislation and prevent a virulent outbreak of gay prostitution scandals and suicidal depression among legislators.” Fixed.

  I’m also surprised no mention has been made so far of the fact that Saddam was put and kept in power by the US Gov’t (there might have been one but I missed it).

  Still, he had to go at some point in the run-up for Stage 2; Iran. Then, with Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and most of Europe as ‘allies’ (some voluntary, some compulsory), we can move to Stage 3, the End Game, aka Russia. Lots and lots of awesome resources there that can help keep sustaining our cozy little suburban Dream Castles that we can comfortably troll from in air-conditioned splendor. And hell, all Russia has watching their back is China and… Um, damn, this is gonna get interesting.

  Ironic how our insatiable demand for cheap plastic crap at our Mal-Warts is helping build up China and thereby the Chinese military so as to be a more formidable ally to Russia when we start messing with them.

• [Purly]

  I was going to vote for him. I wish he had never dropped out.

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  JSG @65: That’s a true ad hominem argument. Does asserting that he’s “far to the left” make David Kurtz’s article inaccurate somehow? Feel free to elaborate on that.

• [eustace]

  GREGLONDON, you are my hero. I’m really impressed with the work you are putting into this.

• [zuzu]

  Its sole distinguishing feature was its strategic value for securing petroleum interests.

  I thought it was actually the petrodollar and the false boon the United States economy reaps in excessive demand for the U.S. Dollar due to its role as a reserve currency for baskets floating other fiat currencies around the world.

  Hence why the Neo Cons are aching to invade Iran because of their oil bourse denominated in euros, not dollars.

  Corporate welfare for the oil industry (i.e. socialized cost of warfare) was a secondary objective.

• [JSG]

  GregLondon,

  I don’t think so, this is a Wikipedia site, so I hope it is okay that I link to it.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_disarmament_crisis_timeline_1997–2000

  October 31, 1998
  Iraq ends all forms of cooperation with the UNSCOM teams and expels inspectors from the country. Operation Desert Fox didn’t take place until December 16th-18th.

  Now President Clinton did sign the Iraq Liberation Act into law on October 31, 1998.

  Here’s the link to the text of the Iraq Liberation Act…
  http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.4655.ENR:

  In order to not seem to be cherry picking, here is the timeline that lead to the war in Iraq.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_disarmament_crisis_timeline_2001-2003

  So for a year the idea of invasion was on the table, why then didn’t Hussein open up everything he had that was illegal, or even legal, to the UN weapons inspectors? Oh, he did destroy 34 of 100 Al-Samoud 2 missiles, again what about those Al Fatah missiles? Iraq was manipulating the weapons inspectors. If Hussein was serious about the inspections he would have jumped through hoops to get the information into the hands of the weapons inspectors. Again the onus was on Iraq to prove that these weapons did not exists.

  You said,

  “Yeah, I feel bad for the dead, but it’s better this way”.

  Cherry picking my comment and a misquote. Now what I was trying to state in the whole paragraph was that during the D-Day invasion, a success by virtually everybody’s standard, 5,100 soldiers died, and yet with the Iraq war, that some think is an abject failure, over 5 years, 4,000 have died. That is, of course, if you actually think that the amount of dead soldiers some how equates to the success of the mission.

  Again, please ask any questions that I missed in previous posts.

• [wastrel]

  jsg:

  WaPo editorial page is hardly a credible source.

  Ref:

  http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/06/washington-po-4.html

  I like this comment:

  http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/06/washington-po-4.html#comment-118178022

• [JSG]

  Ok, I will elaborate, it gives Mr. Kurtz, to me, as much credit as a leftist gives FOX news. They may be reporting the same news as CNN but it is light years away in spin.

  Here is Sen. Rockefeller’s report to the Senate:

  http://rockefeller.senate.gov/press/phase2publicstatements.pdf

  All 171 pages. I notice that in almost all of the speeches and quotes they say things like “I believe”, “could have a nuclear program”, and “predicts”. No certainties just best guesses.

  In the end that is what intelligence is, a best guess.

• [pauldrye]

  #40: Yes, criminal charges post-Presidency please, none of this namby-pamby impeachment. Though I can’t imagine the US actually doing what should be done. It’s going to take another country (Belgium? Ireland? Hello, anyone?).

  Vanishingly unlikely as it all-too-depressingly is, if criminal charges were to happen it’s going to be an Augusto Pinochet situation: many years on when some prosecutor with more interest in justice than politics brings down the hammer on behalf of innocents renditioned.

• [GregLondon]

  The point that I was making was, this might seem cold or inhuman, but wars are not an individual matter, it is whether or not the mission was a success that is important.

  This is a yes/no question, in case you didn’t know.

  In March 16, 2003, when Blix had just recently reported that inspections were working and would be completed in a few months, did you think AT THAT TIME that it would be better if the US invaded?

  yes or no?

  Normandy doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it. And “success” includes “cost”. Total cost of inspections would have been in the tens of millions of dollars, probably. The invasion, according to anyoen not drinking koolaid would cost hundreds of billions. (The first Gulf War, which didn’t require occupation, cost 60 Billion. Invading and occupying would have to cost much more).

  On March 15, 2003, was invading Iraq at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars a better path than to let inspections finish in a few months?

  Yes or no?

  one word.

• [GregLondon]

  Hague.

• [JSG]

  GregLondon,

  You said….

  “question 195.a: If the US was actively trying to kill Saddam and using inspections as cover for spies to get targeting information, do you seriously expect Saddam to allow inspections to continue until our spies were successful?”

  Where to begin, First, the spies that were in with the inspectors had absolutely no idea where Hussein was. Those spies were there to find targets for any future strike against Iraq. Not to try to kill Hussein.
  Then there is this, http://www.fair.org/activism/unscom-history.html

  So in 99 it was treated as fact, but in 02 it was treated as an allegation. The news media doesn’t just write a story without doing their research, the first thing that any good journalist does is gets on to Lexis-Nexis to see if anybody had written a story similar to the one that they are about to write. If so then they might use the quotes from the article, or even contact the writer of the earlier article to find out some of his sources.

  “There was a coup attempt in 96. Another one in 97. Bush and Clinton had both made clear that sanctions would stay in place until Saddam was out of power. Not until inspections were finished. And you put the ENTIRE blame for Saddam halting inspectors trying to kill him on Saddam?”

  Again, no spies were trying to kill Hussein, they were there to find targets for any future air strikes. If you think that one man could walk up behind Hussein and shoot him in the back of the head, then you are living in a James Bond world. With the security surrounding Hussein, it would be easier to take him out by using a nuclear bomb on Baghdad. Plus remember the Security Council is made up of more than the US and the UK, if the Council saw fit to allow Iraq to do business without sanctions then they could do it easily. But the Security Council found that Hussein was interfering with the Inspectors, so the sanctions stayed in place.

  “question 195.b: Was the US more interested in Inspections being completed or Saddam being killed?”

  I think that Hussein wasn’t as important as making sure that Iraq had absolutely no illegal weapons. No illegal weapons, less of a threat, however the inspectors only got 90-95% done, not 100% as the 11 resolutions called for.

  “question 195.c: Did the UN resolution authorize sanctions to remain in place until inspections were complete or until Saddam was removed from power?”

  The sanctions were put in place in resolution 661, it says that it is reaffirming resolution 660 that was ignored by Iraq, but it doesn’t really give a time, I suppose that it is open ended.

  “question 195.d: was US actions tying sanctions to removal of saddam covered by UN resolutions or unilateral?”

  Again, Public Law 107-243 didn’t state that the US was trying to kill Hussein, even The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 only sought, in Sec. 3, The Sense of Congress Regarding United States policy toward Iraq, that, “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.”
  “Should be the policy” is a long way from being policy.

  “Irrelevant, they are a sovereign nation according to the UN.”

  “Uh, hey, guess what, oh great international lawyer: Iraq was a sovereign nation too.”

  Hey, guess what, Iraq invaded Kuwait, taking away the
  sovereignty of Kuwait.

  “No resolution called for Saddam to be removed from power. No resolution authorized a military invasion of Iraq.”

  Right, “It should be the policy is what The Iraq Liberation Act said,170-243 sought to uphold all of the many resolutions that were put in place by the UN, but broken by Iraq.

  “Uh, what about 97-03? 90-95% disarmed, not 100%”
  “Congratulations, you just argued for the 1% doctrine.”

  If I’m arguing for the 1% doctrine, which I’m not, then so was the UN in the form of 11 resolutions that Hussein broke again and again. The UN would have only had to pass one resolution in order for inspections to be completed in Iraq, but the UN had to pass 11 resolutions, and Iraq still didn’t live up to them. I’ve said it before, had Iraq allowed the inspectors to do their jobs and lived up to all 11 resolutions that were passed, then the people of Iraq would have been living with as much freedom as Hussein would allow.

  The 1% doctrine was a quote from Vice President Cheney stating that “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.” This was an idea that was born, during a briefing, in November 2001, two months after September 11th. It was only an idea, there have been no laws passed that state anyone working with Al Qaeda will be invaded, it takes a majority of Congress to do that, as shown in Public Law 107-243. This is not what I am saying, at all. I thought that you could tell the difference between Al Qaeda and Iraq? Al Qaeda is our enemy, they’ve killed at least 3000 innocent people, anybody that is working with Al Qaeda, including Iraq, should be looked at with great uncertainty, and if they are working with Al Qaeda, like Iraq, then we must certainly look at whose benefit the other country is looking out for, Al Qaeda, or the US. So it is not about our analysis but our response, which could include anything from a harshly worded letter, to sanctions, to bringing the issue to the UN, to the extreme, invasion. The latter I seriously doubt simply because most nations understand that working with Al Qaeda is a very bad idea, they have turned themselves into pariahs.

• [GregLondon]

  JSG: Blix said that he had searched anywhere from 100 to 300 known sites, and found nothing, ok what about other sites that are not likely or known?

  What about the other sites? What about the other sites? What about the other sites? How many TIMES do I have to point out that BLIX HAD STATES just before the invasion that inspections were WORKING and that he estimated it would take a few more months to inspect all of Iraq.

  November 2002, Resolution 1441, the resolution calling for INSPECTIONS, was passed unanimously. December 2002, Jan, Feb, Mar 2003, guess what Hans Blix was doing???

  INSPECTIONS!

  Yes, that’s correct. Hans Blix was tasked to do the very thing that Resolution 1441 had demanded. He’d spent four months getting his team up to speed and had inspected 300 sites. He estimated he would FINISH THE JOB in a FEW MONTHS.

  And because by March of 2003, Iraq was COMPLETELY COMPLYING WITH RESOLUTION 1441, when Bush made his Ultimatum Speech on March 17, 2003, he didn’t tell Saddam to COMPLY with 1441 or we’ll invade. He didn’t say that BECAUSE SADDAM WAS COMPLYING WITH INSPECTIONS.

  COMPLYING WITH INSPECTIONS.

  INSPECTIONS THAT WOULD BE FINISHED IN A FEW MONTHS.

  At the very moment when it is established that Resolution 1441 is SUCCEEDING, that was when BUSH INVADES.

  Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

  And do you remember the buzzword Bush used at that point? He couldn’t use “inspections” anymore, because Blix was clear INSPECTIONS WERE WORKING. He couldn’t use “Comply with UN Resolution 1441″ because IRAQ WAS COMPLYING.

  Do your remember, JSG? The little phrase that was “Regime Change”????

  Probably not, because that buzzword isn’t on your cute little neocon cut-and-paste websites you get your idea of history from.

  Early March, 2003, Hans Blix gives his monthly report to the UN on inspection progress. In short, inspections are working, they are getting access to any site they ask for, they have found no evidence of WMD’s, and Blix estimates that inspections to satisfy Resolution1441 will be COMPLETE in a few months.

  SO BUSH MOVES THE GOAL POSTS. On March 17, 2003, Bush gives Saddam the ultimatum that he and his sons must step down from power, OR WE WILL INVADE.

  We hadn’t invaded YET. Inspections were WORKING.

  So Bush changes the goalposts to REGIME CHANGE.
  He gives Saddam 48 HOURS TO STEP DOWN OR WE WILL INVADE IRAQ.

  NOTICE THE SEQUENCE OF EVENTS THERE. Compare that to your narrative here:

  After we invaded, for whatever reason, and found no WMD’s, then what, do we leave the people of Iraq to the dictator that has tortured and committed genocide against the Iraqi’s?

  You’ve got it entirely backwards.

  We didn’t invade for WMD’s. INSPECTIONS WERE WORKING. RESOLUTION 1441 WAS SCHEDULED TO BE COMPLETED IN A FEW MONTHS. We didn’t invade for WMD’s, find no WMD’s, and then change the goal posts to regime change.

  WE PASSED RESOLUTION 1441, and when Iraq complied with inspections, we changed the goalposts, we gave Saddam 48 hours to step down, AND THEN WE INVADED.

  You are so steeped in your neocon propaganda that you can’t even give the correct order of the basic events.

  Resolution 1441 demands inspections.
  Iraq submits to inspections.
  Blix reports inspections working and will be complete in a few months.
  Bush gives Saddam 48 hour ultimatum, STEP DOWN FROM POWER OR WE WILL INVADE.
  Bush invades.

  Anyone who thinks we invaded for WMD’s can’t tell history from a propaganda site.

• [sparkzilla]

  I’m getting a 404 error for the concept.

• [noen]

  Why hasn’t she held Bush and Cheney accountable?

  The usual answer is that Dems have a thin one vote majority and what with the Blue Dog Dems voting GOP on many issues impeachment would therefore fail. The cynical answer is that they are complicit and owned by the same corporate backed interests that got us into this mess in the first place. Probably a bit of both.

• [GregLondon]

  you win the Godwin’s Law prize

  Yeah, since the conversation was over anyway, why not call a spade a spade.

  how many times have you been successful … in actually changing someone’s mind?

  Actually, I’ve changed quite a few people’s minds over time. One was an “Intelligent Design” person. Another was in a massive debate about Open Source licensing. The difference between them and jsg is that they were more open to facts.

  How many times have you witnessed someone like jsg actually change their minds on an internet conversation? How many minds of flag waving Bush apologists, history revisionists, one-percent doctrinists, have you changed?

  Bush’s approval rating at the end of 1991 was 92%. It is now around 25%. Did you see those people change as the result of something someone else said?

  I haven’t. I see before and after. I have never seen someone start a thread arguing in support of Bush and switch to arguing against Bush before it’s over. What I see is they favor Bush up until a point, then they go quiet for a while. They stay quiet for a few weeks or a few months, during which, they figure out a reason for their switch, and then they come out adamantly against Bush.

  jsg probably won’t switch during this thread. But maybe he’ll get enough info that he can come up with some reason, some justification, to explain to himself why he switched.

  The problem with “The Emporer’s New Clothes” is that the story wasn’t an honest appraisal of people’s reactions to being told they’re wrong. What would have happened when the kid said the emporer was naked was that all the folks who said what nice clothes he had would have slinked off until they could figure out some justification for switching sides.

  “The king threatened my job if I didn’t go along.”

  Most people don’t invest their self identity into something for several years and then just go, “Oh, I was mistaken.” and switch.

  My guess is that of those 25 percenters who still support Bush, at least some of them know on some gut level that they were wrong, but they can’t figure out how to get out of it.

  Maybe jsg will switch in a couple months and come out with the excuse “Oh, he lied to me” to justify the switch. I don’t know. My guess is the very last hold outs will not change their allegiance from Bush until a couple months or so after Bush is out of office. Once he is no longer the emporer, they can finally revolt against him. Well, when that time comes, jsg has plenty of data to find an excuse.

  1) Why am I doing this?

  Well, jsg was sort of a guinea pig. I took all the research I did in this discussion and put it into a single timeline. Every time he would point out some hole in the data, I’d go find more URL’s to prove him wrong, and then put it in the timeline.

  He basically had spouted off just about every neocon excuse I have heard used to justify the war. So I used that as a way to make sure I had URL’s that proved every excuse was a lie.

  You can read the entire thing, in chronological order, with links, and some explanations, here.

  Anyone who wants to bookmark this thread for its links and facts and history, might want to take a gander at that page, which has everything in chronological order.

• [JSG]

  GregLondon,

  “Irrelevant. The point is what Ritter was saying back in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002, that Iraq was 90-95% disarmed, was backed up by Bush Jr’s personal Iraq Survey Group, Kay and company, in 2003 and 2004. Bush’s own people reported that most of Iraq’s WMD’s had been destroyed in 1991 and during Ritter’s inspections in the 90′s.”

  90-95%, most, not 100%, nor all of the weapons, the onus was on Iraq to give a full accounting of all of it’s illegal weapons.
  I’ll say it again, if Hussein allowed the inspectors to do their job, in 1998, and followed all of the resolutions, then the people of Iraq would be living in as much peace as Hussein would allow.

  “Question 191.A: Did Kay and the Iraq Survey Group confirm that most of Iraq’s stockpiles of WMD’s were destroyed in 1991 and by Ritter’s inspections?”

  The big word, to me, is most, even Blix stated that he didn’t know what was in every cave and crevice in Iraq. How do we know that was all that Hussein had under his control? These men were looking for known weapons, the Al Samoud 2 missiles, the questionable Al Fatah missiles, etc. Not the possible unknown weapons that Hussein might have had. Now we know definitively that Iraq had illegal weapons, and now we have them, to destroy, and as a bonus the US got Hussein, and a great majority of the Ba’ath party. Hussein will never darken anyones door step with threats that he will use illegal weapons or WMD’s.

  Question 191.B: Are you saying we can only invade if the UN approves it?

  Absolutely not, any country that views another as threat should take action against that nation. The reason for asking the question about 686 was because you seem to be a fan of the UN, so I was showing you that again Hussein was not living up to what the UN and the Iraqi government agreed upon.

  “If so, that’s hilarious, because of all the resolutions passed by the UN from 1990 to right this very moment, NONE authorize an invasion. Not even the October 2002 UN Resolution.”

  I understand that, but if you read Public Law 107-243, that gave Bush the right to use any force that was deemed necessary. Plus, if you read resolution 678, you will see the second and subsequent paragraphs states…

  “2. Authorizes Member States co-operating with the Government of Kuwait, unless Iraq on or before 15 January 1991 fully implements, as set forth in paragraph 1 above, the above-mentioned resolutions, to use all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions and to restore international peace and security in the area;

  3. Requests all States to provide appropriate support for the actions undertaken in pursuance of paragraph 2 of the present resolution;

  4. Requests the States concerned to keep the Security Council regularly informed on the progress of actions undertaken pursuant to paragraphs 2 and 3 of the present resolution;”.

  You said….

  “He was a far bigger threat in 1982 when he had invaded Iran.”
  Really? Even after Iran took US hostages for 444 days? While Iran was in the midst of a fundamentalist revolution? Iraq was a secular government, the US backed the one that seemed more friendly. The US wasn’t the only country backing the Iraqi either, there was France, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Singapore, Italy, the UK, the US, and Russia, though Russia supported both sides.

  “Our response was to give him 5 billion dollars, ship him chemical and biological weapons, and attack the Iranian navy.”

  No our response was to send him 200 million in helicopters and help him with intelligence and military assistance. And to allow Jordan and Saudi Arabia to transfer US howitzers as well as other military objects. I find it interesting that although all of the other countries that supported Iraq during the war you zero in on the US as giving Hussein all these horrible weapons, completely breezing over all of the other nations that supported Iraq who could also have given chemical weapons.

  “Oh please. Get over yourself. Kuwait was a monarchy. After we kicked Saddam’s military out of Kuwait, we reestablished the monarchy.”

  Irrelevant, they are a sovereign nation according to the UN.

  “Question 191.C: Would not returning the remains of one dead american serviceman justify an invasion costing thousands of more american dead, three trillion dollars, and an open ended occupation?”

  Wow, who’s uncaring now? Again the UN said that he had to hand over all of the captured soldiers, living or dead, he didn’t, he was in breach of that part of the resolution.

  There are no simple yes or no answers when discussing something as big as war. You said, “costing thousands of more american dead, three trillion dollars, and an open ended occupation?” We have been over this how many times? I’ve asked you to please tell me where that three trillion dollars has gone? I’ve discussed with you the four thousand dead, it is a shame that anyone dies during war, but these soldiers go through months if not years of training, they all understand that as a soldier they might be called to do their duty and possibly die in the performance of that duty. This is a volunteer force, anybody that doesn’t wish to be there does not have to be there.

  “Uh, yeah, he did. 91-97, inspections were going on. 90-95% disarmed by 1998 according to Ritter, Kay, and the Iraq Survey Group. Except we weren’t interested in inspecting, we were using inspections to try to find out where Saddam slept at night so we could kill him.”

  Uh, what about 97-03? 90-95% disarmed, not 100%, as was required by the UN. I’ve said it before had Hussein allowed the inspectors to do their jobs then the Iraqis could have lived with as much peace as Saddam would allow.

  “Oh, and before you say Ritter was lying about the CIA spies, don’t forget the link I posted above from one of the inspectors who actually confessed to spying from 1996-1998.”

  I did call Ritter a liar, but I was wrong, he is an immature dolt. I believe that I said that of all of the resolutions there is nothing there about not allowing intelligence members into the groups of inspectors.

  “We were trying to get Saddam to refuse inspections so that we’d use that as justification for an attack. i.e. Desert Fox.”

  How? How could we get a dictator to do something that he doesn’t wish to do? The UN was looking for weapons, Hussein or one of his minions, would give an excuse, or fire on the inspectors, or follow them around and intimidate them. Plus, the security council is made up of how many countries? Yet it is the US that is to blame for all of Iraq’s woes.

  I’ll have to answer this next one in pieces….

  “Question 191.D: JSG, from 1982 until 1988, the United State President and Congress funded Saddam during the Iraq war against Iran.”

  As did the UK, France, USSR, etc. Plus, it was ’83 through ’88 that the US supported Iraq, all of the others supported Iraq from from 1980, I believe. In the summer of 83 Iran had complained to the Security Council that Iraq had been using chemical weapons for some time, the US was not fully behind Iraq until the winter of 83.

  “Intel reported in 1982 that Iraq was about to lose the war it had instigated against Iran back in 1980. Rather than allow Iraq to lose, we took Iraq off the Terror List to make it legal to transfer weapons to Iraq. We gave them 5 billion dollars (funneled through an Italian bank).”

  Because we thought, at the time, that Iraq was a better country than Iran. The number that I think you mean is, 200 million in helicopters, other assorted bits of military hardware and intelligence. 5 billion for the whole war maybe.

  “We shipped them military equipment. We shipped them chemical and biological agents. The US sent Iraq about a thousand tons of chemical and biological agents, funneled through a west german company.”

  Does France, the UK, West Germany, and the USSR know how to make chemical and biological weapons? I’m sorry, but I need proof of this “fact”.

  “As early as 1983, intelligence reports indicated that Saddam was using WMD’s against Iran on a daily basis. In the following years, the UN would try to condemn Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, but the US and Britain would always veto the resolution. During that time, Reagan would publicly condemn Iraq while the US was still shipping him more chemicals, more weapons, and more money. Now, my question is this: Are you saying it is impossible for the US to fund a war that is illegal, immoral, and based on lies?”

  Yes, the summer of 83, Iran was complaining about the use of chemical weapons, the US became fully involved in the winter of 83. To answer your question, it’s not impossible, improbable as all hell, but not impossible. The US has a news media that would shout this from the mountain tops. And crucify anyone whom was responsible for that war. Yet, the only report that I’ve seen is from Ted Koppel, and that one was about Vice President George Bush handling the events in Iraq, not President Reagan. The US news media would shout the failures in Iraq from the mountain tops, after the regime fell but before the surge worked, they seem to be silent on Iraq now.

  “Times/UK reports that UNMOVIC was created to get rid of American spies in UNSCOM.”

  Yet the link takes you to a “progressive” site and not the Time/UK site. Again, I saw no provision, in any resolution, stating that the members of the inspection teams had to be of the non-intelligence variety.

  I’ve said it countless times, had Hussein allowed the weapons inspectors to do their jobs in 1998, Iraq would still be under his rule. The sanctions would have been lifted, no more oil for food program, but he didn’t. The onus was on Iraq to give a full report of the illegal weapons that they had and to allow full and open access to anything that the inspectors wished to see. He didn’t, and now, in my opinion, Iraq is better off without Hussein and the Ba’ath party in control.

• [cajunfj40]

  Here is an article from ~20 minutes ago from the Belfast Telegraph that lists all 35 articles. Decent litle summary, but no transcript yet. Anyone found a good transcript yet? No video at work…

  Later,
  -cajun

• [minTphresh]

  dearest theresa, i meant no harm, certainly it was an ill attempt at a humorous welcome. please forgive your humble servant/savant. and this whole partisanship/rightwing/leftwing/repub/ocrat paradigm that JSG is peddling just doesn’t seem to flush ’round these here parts. “he’s a lousy liberal who just wants to tax and spend because he hates freedom!” gimme a break.

• [JSG]

  #111 ANTINOUS

  Absolutely, I’m sorry if I did that.

• [Takuan]

  quite the speech, wonder if he remembers it
  http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030317-7.html

• [Takuan]

  “Teresa”, not “Theresa”. Beware the Wrath of the FireAunt!

• [GregLondon]

  jsg: yet you delete a link that might have changed minds.

  Dude, you have no idea.

  You haven’t said one thing yet that isn’t out of context or ignores the basic sequence of history.

  You quote Blix out of context from Jan 2003 and ignore his reports from Feb and Mar 2003.

  You quote from speeches made by people in October 2002 who were arguing for the passage of UN resolution 1441 calling for inspections and you present them as if they were arguing for the invasion in Mar 2003.

  You quote bits of history from 1998 as if nothing had changed between 1998 and 2003.

  I’m surprised you haven’t quoted Nayirah who testified before the Human Rights Caucus of the US Congress in 1990 about how Saddam’s army committed atrocities when they invaded Kuwait. Bush Sr. referred to the story six times five weeks after her testimony. In the Senate debate whether to approve military action to force Saddam out of Kuwait, seven senators specifically mentioned her testimony. You should look her up and see if you can grasp what the context of quoting her here would imply.

  Then take a look at this newspaper article from March 2003: “See men shredded, then say you don’t back war” [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/thunderer/article1120757.ece]

  Once you’ve researched the full context of Nayirah’s testimony and the article about the shredder, here’s a simple, direct question for you: What is the full context of those two articles.

  Then compare that to you quoting Blix from Jan 2003 while ignoring what Blix said in Feb and Mar 2003. Do you see any similarities?

  I await with anticipation your answers to these two direct questions.

• [GregLondon]

  jsg: Where do you get the information about Scott Ritter and the illegal CIA spies?

  You just can’t do it, can you? If it will conflict with your twisted view of reality, you refuse to look.

  OK, fine, here’s an interview with John Ritter, the guy in charge of UNSCOM from 91-98.

  http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051114/ritter/2

  (paste)

  the CIA was having a difficult time getting near Saddam because he has a very effective security apparatus. By 1995, Saddam’s survival becomes a political liability to Bill Clinton, and he was coming up for reelection in ’96, and he turned to the CIA and said get rid of Saddam by the summer of 1996: I need that man gone. And the CIA worked with British intelligence, they brought in somebody named Ayad Allawi. … he was a paid agent of British intelligence and the CIA, and he worked with them to orchestrate this coup d’état that required them to recruit people on the inside of Iraq to be ready to take out Saddam. But you needed a trigger, and the trigger was a UN weapons inspection that I helped organize.

  We thought we were going after the concealment mechanism, but it turned out that the CIA was setting us up so that we would go to facilities that housed Saddam’s security. It was anticipated they would block us, and then when we withdrew, there would be a military strike that would decapitate the security of Saddam.

  The one place that we wanted to go to, the Third Battalion, we weren’t allowed to. The CIA said don’t worry about that, we know those guys, they’re not bad. And they were supposed to rise up and take Saddam out. Well, the Iraqi intelligence service was very effective at infiltrating this coup, they wrapped it up, and nothing happened in terms of getting rid of Saddam. Except one thing, the Iraqis were fully aware of the role played by the CIA in infiltrating UNSCOM and using UNSCOM for devices. And the ultimate tragedy of this is that from that point on, every time a UN weapons inspector went into Iraq–somebody with a blue hat–they weren’t viewed by the Iraqis as somebody who was trying to disarm Iraq, they were viewed by the Iraqis as somebody trying to kill their President, and they were right.

  ( end paste )

• [Cowicide]

  Too late… the American shpl failed to wake up in time. Now it’s just up to future generations to fix all the horrific damage done and bring up America back from its knees. Of course, that’s IF and only IF America (and the World for that matter) can even survive the lasting, murderous effects of this treasonous corporate communist regime.

  IMPEACH BUSH.

  TOO LATE USA, YOU FUCKED UP.

  [cow throws out middle hoof to most of America and rolls on down the pasture to get a few drinks with Gore Vidal]

• [Takuan]

  Greg; fess up. This HAS to be you carrying both sides. It HAS TO. Please.

• [Takuan]

  I remember this though

  “A fresh concern for the US in 1983-84 was the possibility that Iraq would use its new French-built Super-Etendard planes equipped with anti-ship Exocet missiles to attack tankers going to Iran. The Iranians, in turn, threatened to close the Gulf to oil tankers. The US made it clear that in such a contingency its military forces would make sure that the Gulf remained open to shipping. The Secretary of State stated in October 1983 that Washington would not accede to blackmail in closing the Gulf.

  To avoid even the need for such military action–and responding to reports that Iraq might crumble under the Iranian onslaught–the Reagan Administration carefully considered a tilt toward Iraq. Such ideas were bolstered when, in the middle of the policy reassessment, terrorist attacks organized by Iranian-supported elements struck at the US Marines in Lebanon and the US embassy in Kuwait.

  The problem was how the US might actually help Iraq. Direct and indirect economic assistance was granted, as was encouragement for Baghdad to find ways of increasing its oil exports. Some intelligence information was already being shared. In December, Ambassador Rumsfeld became the highest US official to visit Baghdad in six years.”

• [SamSam]

  @ 36: People always mistakenly think that impeaching Bush would immediately lead to President Cheney.

  When Clinton was impeached, did it lead to President Gore?

  Impeachment is only the first in a two-step process for getting rid of someone, the second of which in conviction of the crimes that the person is accused of. As Clinton showed, it’s much easier to impeach someone than to convict them.

• [JSG]

  #147 GREGLONDON

  I read the link to the Times Online and it makes my point, Hussein was evil and should have been taken out during the Gulf War, he wasn’t and that is a travesty.

  As to Nayriah, as Con. Tom Lantos said, “The notion that any of the witnesses brought to the caucus through the Kuwaiti Embassy would not be credible did not cross my mind… I have no basis for assuming that her story is not true, but the point goes beyond that. If one hypothesizes that the woman’s story is fictitious from A to Z, that in no way diminishes the avalanche of human rights violations.”

  This was in the run up to the Gulf War in 1991, and the Times Online article was in the run up to the current war, I get it. That doesn’t mean that Hussein wasn’t killing Kurds at Halabja. Because one person is wrong, does that mean that everyone is wrong?

  I assume you mean this from Blix,

  http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/SC7asdelivered.htm

  If you don’t mind me pulling some quotes from Blix’s report.

  “Even with a proactive Iraqi attitude, induced by continued outside pressure, it would still take some time to verify sites and items, analyse documents, interview relevant persons, and draw conclusions. It would not take years, nor weeks, but months. ”

  So who’s to say that the proactive attitude of the Iraqi’s would last months?

  “It is obvious that, while the numerous initiatives, which are now taken by the Iraqi side with a view to resolving some long-standing open disarmament issues, can be seen as “active”, or even “proactive”, these initiatives 3-4 months into the new resolution cannot be said to constitute “immediate” cooperation. Nor do they necessarily cover all areas of relevance. They are nevertheless welcome and UNMOVIC is responding to them in the hope of solving presently unresolved disarmament issues.”

  Again how long would the Iraqi’s remain proactive?

  “Iraq proposed an investigation using advanced technology to
  quantify the amount of unilaterally destroyed anthrax dumped at a site. However, even if the use of advanced technology could quantify the amount of anthrax, said to be dumped at the site, the results would still be open to interpretation. Defining the quantity of anthrax destroyed must, of course, be followed by efforts to establish what quantity was actually produced.”

  How much have they produced? No way of telling. Maybe the amount is in the records that were found by Blix.

  “There is a significant Iraqi effort underway to clarify a major source of uncertainty as to the quantities of biological and chemical weapons, which were unilaterally destroyed in 1991. A part of this effort concerns a disposal site, which was deemed too dangerous for full investigation in the past. It is now being re-excavated. To date, Iraq has unearthed eight complete bombs comprising two liquid-filled intact R-400 bombs and six other complete bombs. Bomb fragments were also found. Samples have been taken. The investigation of the destruction site could, in the best case, allow the determination of the number of bombs destroyed at that site. It should be followed by a serious and credible effort to determine the separate issue of how many R-400 type bombs were produced. In this, as in other matters, inspection work is moving on and may yield results.”

  Eight complete bombs? That’s comforting. Plus they have no idea how many R-400 bombs were produced, even more comforting. Why weren’t these bombs taken apart and destroyed piece by piece? Rather they buried complete bombs.

  As of today, there is more. While during our meetings in Baghdad, the Iraqi side tried to persuade us that the Al Samoud 2 missiles they have declared fall within the permissible range set by the Security Council, the calculations of an international panel of experts led us to the opposite conclusion. Iraq has since accepted that these missiles and associated items be destroyed and has started the process of destruction under our supervision. The destruction undertaken constitutes a substantial measure of disarmament – indeed, the first since the middle of the 1990s. We are not watching the breaking of toothpicks. Lethal weapons are being destroyed. However, I must add that no destruction has happened today. I hope it’s a temporary break.

  “To date, 34 Al Samoud 2 missiles, including 4 training missiles, 2 combat warheads, 1 launcher and 5 engines have been destroyed under UNMOVIC supervision. Work is continuing to identify and inventory the parts and equipment associated with the Al Samoud 2 programme.

  Two ‘reconstituted’ casting chambers used in the production of solid propellant missiles have been destroyed and the remnants melted or encased in concrete.

  The legality of the Al Fatah missile is still under review, pending further investigation and measurement of various parameters of that missile.”

  34 out of how many? and only one launcher and 5 engines. Oh, and the legality of the Al Fatah missile is still up in the air, I wonder how many of those the Iraqi government had?

  “On 14 February, I reported to the Council that the Iraqi side had become more active in taking and proposing steps, which potentially might shed new light on unresolved disarmament issues. Even a week ago, when the current quarterly report was finalized, there was still relatively little tangible progress to note. Hence, the cautious formulations in the report before you.”

  Little tangible progress, and potentially might shed new light on unresolved issues. That sure makes me feel safe.

  I need to break this next part up a bit…
  “There have been reports, denied from the Iraqi side, that proscribed activities are conducted underground.”

  I’m sure they would tell after kicking out the inspectors for four years, you don’t suppose they moved them in those four years.

  “Iraq should provide information on any underground structure suitable for the production or storage of WMD.”

  They should have done that in 1991 after the Gulf War.

  “During inspections of declared or undeclared facilities, inspection teams have examined building structures for any possible underground facilities. In addition, ground penetrating radar equipment was used in several specific locations. No underground facilities for chemical or biological production or storage were found so far.”

  I am glad that the UN teams looked in undeclared buildings, but did they search the multiple palaces of Hussein?

  “I should add that, both for the monitoring of ground transportation and for the inspection of underground facilities, we would need to increase our staff in Iraq. I am not talking about a doubling of the staff. I would rather have twice the amount of high quality information about sites to inspect than twice the number of expert inspectors to send.”

  So Blix needed more staff, understandable, but he wishes for more high quality information, also understandable. If I’m reading this correctly Blix couldn’t search everywhere he felt needed to be searched because of lack of manpower, nor could he find all of the site where Hussein, allegedly, kept his WMD’s due to lack of information.

  “As I noted on 14 February, intelligence authorities have claimed that weapons of mass destruction are moved around Iraq by trucks and, in particular, that there are mobile production units for biological weapons. The Iraqi side states that such activities do not exist. Several inspections have taken place at declared and undeclared sites in relation to mobile production facilities. Food testing mobile laboratories and mobile workshops have been seen, as well as large containers with seed processing equipment. No evidence of proscribed activities have so far been found. Iraq is expected to assist in the development of credible ways to conduct random checks of ground transportation.”

  Again, glad the UN teams are going to declared and undeclared sites. Blix does state that no evidence has yet been found. “Yet” being the operative word. However there is no concrete proof so I’ll side with the UN on this one, no evidence has yet been found.

  “Where authentic documents do not become available, interviews with persons, who may have relevant knowledge and experience, may be another way of obtaining evidence. UNMOVIC has names of such persons in its records and they are among the people whom we seek to interview. In the last month, Iraq has provided us with the names of many persons, who may be relevant sources of information, in particular, persons who took part in various phases of the unilateral destruction of biological and chemical weapons, and proscribed missiles in 1991. The provision of names prompts two reflections:

  The first is that with such detailed information existing regarding those who took part in the unilateral destruction, surely there must also remain records regarding the quantities and other data concerning the various items destroyed.

  The second reflection is that with relevant witnesses available it becomes even more important to be able to conduct interviews in modes and locations, which allow us to be confident that the testimony is given without outside influence. While the Iraqi side seems to have encouraged interviewees not to request the presence of Iraqi officials (so-called minders) or the taping of the interviews, conditions ensuring the absence of undue influences are difficult to attain inside Iraq. Interviews outside the country might provide such assurance. It is our intention to request such interviews shortly. Nevertheless, despite remaining shortcomings, interviews are useful. Since we started requesting interviews, 38 individuals were asked for private interviews, of which 10 accepted under our terms, 7 of these during the last week.”

  How about the folks that helped make it in the first place? Be nice if Blix could interview them. I bet he could figure out how much was made if he asked the maker rather than the ones destroying it. Of course without any outside influence. That is a great idea.

  “Iraq, with a highly developed administrative system, should be able to provide more documentary evidence about its proscribed weapons programmes. Only a few new such documents have come to light so far and been handed over since we began inspections. It was a disappointment that Iraq’s Declaration of 7 December did not bring new documentary evidence. I hope that efforts in this respect, including the appointment of a governmental commission, will give significant results. When proscribed items are deemed unaccounted for it is above all credible accounts that is needed – or the proscribed items, if they exist.”

  It would be nice to have more documentation, didn’t Blix repeat that in the past?

  “Inspections in Iraq resumed on 27 November 2002. In matters relating to process, notably prompt access to sites, we have faced relatively few difficulties and certainly much less than those that were faced by UNSCOM in the period 1991 to 1998. This may well be due to the strong outside pressure.

  Some practical matters, which were not settled by the talks, Dr. ElBaradei and I had with the Iraqi side in Vienna prior to inspections or in resolution 1441 (2002), have been resolved at meetings, which we have had in Baghdad. Initial difficulties raised by the Iraqi side about helicopters and aerial surveillance planes operating in the no-fly zones were overcome. This is not to say that the operation of inspections is free from frictions, but at this juncture we are able to perform professional no-notice inspections all over Iraq and to increase aerial surveillance.

  American U-2 and French Mirage surveillance aircraft already give us valuable imagery, supplementing satellite pictures and we would expect soon to be able to add night vision capability through an aircraft offered to us by the Russian Federation. We also expect to add low-level, close area surveillance through drones provided by Germany. We are grateful not only to the countries, which place these valuable tools at our disposal, but also to the States, most recently Cyprus, which has agreed to the stationing of aircraft on their territory.”

  Some friction? And the Iraq government was bitching about aerial surveillance in no fly zones, I thought those were placed there so that the Shia and the Kurds could live in relative peace?

  “For nearly three years, I have been coming to the Security Council presenting the quarterly reports of UNMOVIC. They have described our many preparations for the resumption of inspections in Iraq. The 12th quarterly report is the first that describes three months of inspections. They come after four years without inspections. The report was finalized ten days ago and a number of relevant events have taken place since then. Today’s statement will supplement the circulated report on these points to bring the Council up-to-date.”

  So this is three months of inspections and the Iraqi Government is still giving the UN problems even though the multinational force was sitting on their doorstep in Kuwait.

  I haven’t read the report from February, I’ll try to find it and get back to you.

• [GregLondon]

  me: “On March 15, 2003, was invading Iraq at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars a better path than to let inspections finish in a few months?”

  jsg: It would have been proper in light of the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998.

  The ILA act of 1998 authorized the president to designate a group inside Iraq that would be capable of overthrowing Saddam and giving that group money and possibly weapons. It didn’t authorize US military force to invade and occupy Iraq. You might have noticed that Clinton didn’t actually invade Iraq at any point during his presidency. He launched airstrikes at some WMD sites and some locations where Saddam was thought to be hiding, but, seriously, the cost of Operation Desert Fox was zero american lives lost and maybe a few million dollars.

  Bush Jr’s invasion and occupation cost about six orders of magnatude more than Desert Fox.

  And again, the choice in March 2003 is between two options: (1) Hans Blix finishes inspections in a few months at the cost of tens of millions of dollars or (2) invade and occupy Iraq at the cost of three trillion dollars, thousands of american dead, tens of thousands of Americans permanently disabled.

  The ILA of 98′s got nothing to do with an invasion. So, between (1) and (2), which do you pick?

  remember Capt. Michael Scott Speicher? Where is he? Is he living? Dead? I’m sure his family would like to know

  Uh, remember just a few posts earlier when you said this?:

  Now what I was trying to state in the whole paragraph was that during the D-Day invasion, a success by virtually everybody’s standard, 5,100 soldiers died, and yet with the Iraq war, that some think is an abject failure, over 5 years, 4,000 have died.

  When I brought up the cost of the invasion/occupation being thousands of American’s dead, you downplay it by saying the US lost thousands of soldiers in a few hours on D-Day. Now, when that logic no longer suits you, you argue that the body of a downed American pilot is justification for invasion/occupation the the additional deaths of thousands of American military people?

  It really doesn’t matter how hypocritical you are, does it? If it is useful to dismiss american dead, you dismiss them. If it is useful to invoke the missing body of a dead American, you invoke the dead.

  Speaking of MIA remains, I think there might be a few remains in Vietnam. Maybe we should declare war on Vietnam right this very moment.

  Oh, and I just love it when you invoke the minutest detail of a UN resolution when it suits you, but disregard the fact that NO UN RESOLUTION EVER AUTHORIZED INVADING IRAQ. The sheer hypocricy is just mind blowing.

  you never mention that Scott Ritter had a book to pimp, and you never mention that Seymour Hersh was the person interviewing Ritter.

  Oh stuff it, already. You either come straight out and say that Ritter and Hersh are BALDFACE LYING or shut yer yap with this chicken shit, round about, character smears.

  Oh, and while you’re telling me Ritter’s and Hersh were lying, you will also need to indicate whether Hans Blix was lying in Mar 2003 (he couldnt be done in a few months if Iraq wasn’t 90% disarmed), and you’ll also have to indicate whether David Kay was lying in October 2003, and whether Charles Duefler was lying in 2004.

  Maybe you forgot (well, you’d have to read all of history, not just cherry pick the propaganda, see), but Kay and Duefler were part of Bush’s own personal “Iraq Survey Group”, his own personal band of Americans tasked to find WMD’s after we invaded Iraq. They reported that Iraq’s WMD capability was essentially destroyed in 1991. And the rest of it was mopped up by Ritter’s inspection teams in the 90′s. The report indicates that at the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003, Saddam possessed no stockpiles of WMD’s and had not begun any program to produce them.

  [http://www.slate.com/id/2094415/]
  [http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/06/iraq.wmd.report/]

  Ritter, Blix, Kay, Duefler, all say basically the same thing. If you say Ritter is a liar, then how can Ritter be lying if Blix, Kay, and Duefler all say the same thing that Ritter said?

  How is that, jsg?

  Are they all pimping books???

  Or, could it be that you’re cherry picking?

  Could it be that when the reports don’t agree with what you want to believe, you start your mud slinging trying to imply the person making the report might by lying even though you have absolutely no evidence to support that smear? Even if all you have is some bullshit implication of lying because he was “pimping” a book?

  Sorry. No dice.

  In this attack on Ritter’s character, you are totally and absolutely wrong. In Ritter’s assessment that Iraq was 90-95% disarmed as of 1998, you are wrong.

  Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

  You’ll never have the guts to admit it, but everyone here knows you’re talking complete and total crap at this point.

• [minTphresh]

  D.K., gawd how i love that crazy little rat-faced bastard! undoubtedly the largest brass balls in congress! sail ye hardy, lad. and give no quarter!

• [Takuan]

  The bush Legacy: copy,distribute and preserve:

  Kucinich’s case: the 35 points
  Article I
  Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq
  Article II
  Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression
  Article III
  Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War
  Article IV
  Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States
  Article V
  Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression
  Article VI
  Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of HJRes114
  Article VII
  Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War.
  Article VIII
  Invading Iraq, A Sovereign Nation, in Violation of the UN Charter
  Article IX
  Failing to Provide Troops With Body Armor and Vehicle Armor
  Article X
  Falsifying Accounts of US Troop Deaths and Injuries for Political Purposes
  Article XI
  Establishment of Permanent U.S. Military Bases in Iraq
  Article XII
  Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of That Nation’s Natural Resources
  Article XIIII
  Creating a Secret Task Force to Develop Energy and Military Policies With Respect to Iraq and Other Countries
  Article XIV
  Misprision of a Felony, Misuse and Exposure of Classified Information And Obstruction of Justice in the Matter of Valerie Plame Wilson, Clandestine Agent of the Central Intelligence Agency
  Article XV
  Providing Immunity from Prosecution for Criminal Contractors in Iraq
  Article XVI
  Reckless Misspending and Waste of U.S. Tax Dollars in Connection With Iraq and US Contractors
  Article XVII
  Illegal Detention: Detaining Indefinitely And Without Charge Persons Both U.S. Citizens and Foreign Captives
  Article XVIII
  Torture: Secretly Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official Policy
  Article XIX
  Rendition: Kidnapping People and Taking Them Against Their Will to ” Black Sites” Located in Other Nations, Including Nations Known to Practice Torture
  Article XX
  Imprisoning Children
  Article XXI
  Misleading Congress and the American People About Threats from Iran, and Supporting Terrorist Organizations Within Iran, With the Goal of Overthrowing the Iranian Government
  Article XXII
  Creating Secret Laws
  Article XXIII
  Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act
  Article XXIV
  Spying on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment
  Article XXV
  Directing Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens
  Article XXVI
  Announcing the Intent to Violate Laws with Signing Statements
  Article XXVII
  Failing to Comply with Congressional Subpoenas and Instructing Former Employees Not to Comply
  Article XXVIII
  Tampering with Free and Fair Elections, Corruption of the Administration of Justice
  Article XXIX
  Conspiracy to Violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965
  Article XXX
  Misleading Congress and the American People in an Attempt to Destroy Medicare
  Article XXXI
  Katrina: Failure to Plan for the Predicted Disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Failure to Respond to a Civil Emergency
  Article XXXII
  Misleading Congress and the American People, Systematically Undermining Efforts to Address Global Climate Change
  Article XXXIII
  Repeatedly Ignored and Failed to Respond to High Level Intelligence Warnings of Planned Terrorist Attacks in the US, Prior to 911.
  Article XXXIV
  Obstruction of the Investigation into the Attacks of September 11, 2001
  Article XXXV
  Endangering the Health of 911 First Responders

• [Antinous]

  Anything that mutilates the corpse is considered cruel and unusual punishment. Pain, not so much.

• [GregLondon]

  jsg: In the summer of 83 Iran had complained to the Security Council that Iraq had been using chemical weapons for some time, the US was not fully behind Iraq until the winter of 83.

  So, having ACTUALLY USED GAS in summer, it’s OK if we support Iraq a few months later in winter… because they’ve reformed?

  February 1986: According to a U.S. intelligence report, Iraq attacks Iranian forces using mustard and the nerve agent Tabun, allegedly resulting in 8,000 to 10,000 fatalities.

  Ooop. When did you say we got fully behind Iraq again? Winter 83? I guess, they were using gas before, after, and during the time we supported them.

  This:

  “a nonprofit bioresource center in Virginia that exported anthrax bacteria and other pathogens to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from 1985 to 1989.”

  “if Saddam Hussein today has a large arsenal of biological weapons, partly it was the United States that provided the very live viruses that he needed to create those weapons” “between 1985 and 1989, the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control sent Iraq 14 agents “with biological warfare significance,” including West Nile virus,” (quoting Senator Riegle)

  U.S. exports that ended up in Iraq’s nuclear weapons between 1985 and 1990 found that Unisys made $2.6-million, Semetex $5.1-million, Hewlett Packard $1.6-million and International Computer Systems $7.4-million.

  “Much of what came from America went with the blessing of the U.S. Commerce Department, which approved the sale of more than $1.5-billion worth of dual-use goods”

  “1988, American Type Culture Collection shipped 11 items to Iraq’s Ministry of Trade, including four strains of anthrax bacteria.”

  Then there is this:

  A secret State Department document, released yesterday by Rep. Henry B.Gonzalez (D-Tex.) concluded that the United States approved exports to “probably proliferation-related” users-makers of chemical, missile, nuclear and germ weapons-inside Iraq. The cases included: “At least 17 licenses . . . for the export of bacteria or fungus cultures either to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission or the University of Baghdad.

  And yet, March 1984, The US refuses to back UN resolution condemning Iraq for its use of chemical weapons. The only way the UN can pass the resolution without US veto is when the resolution is reworded so as to remove any reference to Iraq

  Oh snap.

  So, we knew Iraq was using WMD’s against Iraq from the beginning. We exported WMD’s to Iraq throughout the 80′s. We stopped the UN from condemning Iraq in 1984. And we shipped them chemical and biological agents all the way up to 1988 or so.

  So, I will ask you again, a simple yes/no question:

  Question 196.a: Are you saying it is impossible for the US to fund a war that is illegal, immoral, and based on lies?

  Because if you’re so god-damn adamant that we had to invade Iraq because its WMD program was immoral and illegal and against UN resolutions, then you seriously have some ‘splaining to do as to why it was moral and legal for the US to give them those WMD’s in the first place, when we knew exactly what they were doing with it.

• [GregLondon]

  90%-95% is not what the UN asked for.

  inspections is what the UN asked for, and by March 2003, Blix said inspections were working and would be done in a few months.

  Hussein invaded a sovereign nation.

  In 1981 when he invaded Iran. And we supported him with five billion dollars, weapons, and military intelligence. Not to mention we blocked every UN resolution that attempted to condemn Iraq for using gas against Iran.

  Iraq is rebuilding, it will not be easy, but at least now it is possible.

  You keep waving that flag, pokey.

• [Kieran O’Neill]

  Sigh. The Hague.

  Now, what are the odds of that happening from a country that passes laws punishing other countries for daring to even participate in the ICC, and allowing for the use of military force to liberate any U.S. citizen brought before the court? (American Servicemembers Protection Act of 2002)

• [GregLondon]

  A FORMER UN weapons inspector yesterday admitted spying for the Americans while working in Iraq.

  American Bill Tierney confessed to giving the Pentagon targets for military action when he was a member of an inspection team between 1996 and 1998.

  link

  via

• [JSG]

  GregLondon,

  Still wishing to discuss the past, ah well.

  First, I don’t believe that I said that the Niger forgeries were to be believed. I asked a question about whether or not Wilson was to be believed. If you are saying that because those Niger forgeries are false then Wilson is to be believed then there is a problem with your logic. Both could be false, why would a CIA agent suggest her husband investigate this matter? Because he was going to Africa anyway? Just a little questionable. But lets not call Wilson’s creditability into question, he still said highly doubtful that Iraq had purchased any yellow cake, I love Washington speak, nobody ever answers in the definitive.

  I suppose that highly doubtful is as close to decisive as possible, even though a war was teetering on the brink. After all I’m sure that Wilson thought to himself that if he and his sources were wrong and Iraq had purchased yellow cake from Niger, and he had reported that there was absolutely no possibility, and ten years from now Iraq had a nuclear war head then he might be in trouble, as would most of the Middle East.

  Secondly, Hussein may not have had any WMD’s, now, but it was the UN’s job to find and destroy any and all illegal weapons. Unfortunately for Hussein, he played stupid little games with the inspectors, and that was something that some in the world could no longer stand for. There was always more than the WMD reason for going into Iraq, my reference is Public Law 107-243. Iraq agreed to a cease fire in order to end the Gulf War, Hussein did not hold up his end of the resolutions, so a international coalition went back into Iraq and collapsed the Hussein regime within three weeks. Should we have left then? Should we have stayed to help rebuild Iraq? Should the coalition have fought the insurgency? Was the insurgency a product of the fall of the Hussein regime? Is Iraq better off without the Hussein regime in power?

  Currently, the Iraqi government works, the insurgency is waning, there is another election planned for October, but there is an awfully long way to go until Iraq becomes a destination on orbitz.com.
  _______________________________________________________________
  Finally, I love the way you try to change the subject to whether or not I’m a creationist (I’m not) and asking for all of this information that has nothing to do with this debate. Oh well, I can’t wait to read your next post.

• [Village Idiot]

  The important question is: How do we get our money back? It’s like busting the thief that stole all your money but only after they’d partied it all away.

  I’d rather see Congress go after the corporations (Halliburton, etc.) that raked in vast sums of money with no-bid contracts for projects that may or may not have been completed (or started for that matter). That’s even less likely than impeachment, unfortunately.

  Justice is an abstract concept, but compensation is quite tangible. A case could be made that Cheney’s former position at Halliburton (the CEO, fer chrissakes) and at least several years of receiving $1 million a year from the company (which continued until after the Iraq war started, and may still be ongoing) is an extreme conflict of interest to say the least.

  We have these shape-shifting reptilian space bankers like Cheney in positions to both order the destruction of a country (nobody really thinks Bush is in charge, do they?) AND influence the awarding of the contracts to rebuild said country afterwards. Nice gig, that is if you have no respect for your fellow Americans, or the Constitution for that matter.

  And whatever happened to Rumsfeld? Remember him? He had his own conflicts of interest to profit from, and is the tip of his own corrupt iceberg. No offense to icebergs intended.

  That said, impeaching Bush might improve our relations with the rest of the world a little bit; better late than never…

• [Takuan]

  hey, I could glue that head back on so neat you’d never know!

• [buddy66]

  #135,

  ‘tripealicious’! Teresa, YOU’RE splendid.

  Nice bit of surgery, that. No blood splashed around.

• [Pyre]

  In any event, the regime fell,

  Definitely.

  the insurgency is in its death throes,

  As has been said of it for how many years now?

  the Iraqi people are better off now then they were under the Hussein regime.

  Including all the tens of thousands of dead ones killed by invaders, their bereaved survivors, and those without the comforts of life they used to have (electricity, clean water, health care, standing walls, the absence of bombs and bullets)?

• [GregLondon]

  jsg You cherry pick the data so it fits with your story line.

  jsg, if you’ve got two reports before you one says “Iraq has yellow cake from niger” and the other says “Iraq/Niger connections are crap”, and if you treat those reports as having equal weight, then the two reports counter each other, and you must conclude that we don’t know with any certainty whatsoever that Iraq has yellow cake from Niger.

  That is the conclusion I came to in Feb 2003. The White House had made claims about Niger, but then Wilson reported that there was no evidence in Niger of any such transaction, and the UN said the Niger documents were such bad forgeries someone could have figured they were fake just by using google.

  claim/counter claim => results in => no weight to the claim that Iraq has yellow cake.

  You, on the other hand, you give extra weight to the intel you want to hear. You dismiss intel you don’t want to hear and count it as having no weight.

  Back at #78, you said In the end that is what intelligence is, a best guess.

  But you don’t vet the guesses together. You cherry pick the ones that claim what you want and you disregard the ones that counterclaim.

  I don’t cherry pick because I’m willing to look at all the claims. And if you look at them as best guesses, and if they contradict, then you can’t decide one is right and the other wrong without cherry picking.

  I see claim and counter claim and decide that they counteract each other and that basically there is no evidence to support the claim. At which point, we know nothing with any certainty. At which point, we know nothing that even can qualify as a “best guess” because the guesses contradict each other.

  At the point in which we no nothing with any certainty, at the point which we no nothing with even a best guess, that is the point in which there is absolutely no justification for a military offensive. There is no morality in invading from a place of ignorance, not even knowing what we’re invading or why, other than that we don’t know, but we’re too terrified to wait any longer.

  Which is, again, your fall back. “How long do we know Saddam would comply?” you ask. Well, not knowing isn’t justification for “knowing” that he wouldn’t and justification for invading.

  You have, from the beginning, argued for intelligence gaps. You argue for the period when inspectors weren’t in Iraq and you argue that Saddam might have created an entire arsenal of WMD’s. You have zero evidence that it’s true. But then you argue that since it might be true, even if there is only 1 percent chance that it’s true, that we can justifiably act as if it were undeniably proven to be true and spend three trillion dollars and invade.

  You wouldn’t happen to be a creationist, would you?

  Because what you’re arguing for here is like a creationist’s “god of the gaps”, except you argue for “WMD of the gaps”.

  God of teh gaps arguments will find some missing gap in the knowledge of what we know with certainty about evolution. It might point to some “transition species” that is missing between two species and therefore argue that there was too big of a jump for evolution to make in a single mutation, and therefore, they argue, evolution hasn’t been “proven”. Inside this gap of knowledge, they insert their Old Testament, Creationist God, who reaches down and causes that jump to happen.

  You find a gap in intelligence, and inside it, you insert the possibility of an entire arsenal of WMD’s the likes of which could take on teh Soviet Union and USA at the height of the cold war. You posit that since we don’t know that such arsenal did NOT exist, it is therefore valid to consider that it MIGHT exist. From that gap of knowledge, you hypothesize the existence of an arsenal, and then LACKING EVIDENCE TO PROVE IT DOESN”T EXIST, you argue that its valid to assume it DOES exist.

  WMD of the gaps.

  And then you go on to use that WMD of the gaps, that WMD that might have existed while Iraq was ONLY (shiver) 95% disarmed and WHO KNOWS what could be HIDDEN in that OTHER FIVE PERCENT, create a WMD boogeyman inside that LACK OF KNOWLEDGE, and THEN USE THAT INVENTED WMD TO JUSTIFY INVASION.

  2002-03-xx: US Intelligence report regarding the yellow cake/Niger allegations comes to several conclusions about what the intelligence community was saying during this time. The main conclusion is that it is clear that the CIA was cooking the intelligence about Iraq/Niger connections, and it wasn’t telling seniour policy makers all the information known about the intel, especially witholding significants doubts that surrounded the allegations:

  “Conclusion 14: The CIA should have told Cheney and senior policy makers that it had sent someone (Wilson) to niger to look into the allegations, and should have briefed Cheney on the former ambassador’s findings” (that the allegations were baseless)

  “Conclusion 16: Language in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq/Yellow cake overstated what the Intelligence Community knew.”

  “Conclusion 19: Even after obtaining the forged documents and being alerted by INR about problems with the documents, analysts at both the CIA and DIA did not examine them to see the obvious problems with the documents. Both agencies continued to publish assessments that Iraq may have been seeking Uranium from Africa. The CIA continued to approve the use of similar language in the President’s speeches.”

  “Conclusion 20: The CIA’s comments and assessments about the Iraq-Niger Uranium reporting were inconsistent and, at times, contradictory.”

  “Conclusion 21: When coordinating the State of the Union, no CIA analysts or officials told the NSC to remove the “16 words” or that there were concerns about the credibility of the Iraq-Niger unanium reporting. A CIA official’s original testimony to the Committee that he told the NSC to remove the words “Niger” and “500 tons” from the speech, is incorrect”

  “Conclusion 24: In responding to a letter from Senator Carl Levin on behalf of the Intelligence Community in February 2003, should not have said that “reporting suggest Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Niger” without indicating that State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) believed the reporting was based on forged documents, or without indicating that the CIA was reviewing the Niger report.”

  [http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/s108-301/sec2.pdf]

  2002-09-xx: Tyler Drumheller, then the head of CIA spying in Europe, called the BND station chief at the German embassy, seeking access to Curveball. Drumheller was told that “there are a lot of problems. Principally, we think he’s probably a fabricator.”

  [http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1120-01.htm]

  In september of 2002, US intel is told by the British, the people who are actually debriefing CURVEBALL, that the British intel poeple think CURVEBALL is a liar. And yet, from September 2002 forward, the white house will ignore THIS piece of intelligence, cherry pick the piece they WANT to believe, and spout off about mobile biological labs in Iraq. That was the story that Curveball told them, that Saddam had Mobile chemical/biological labs hiding in the desert.

  2002-10-01: FAULTY INTELLIGENCE: the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is sent to Congress days before lawmakers voted to authorize use of military force against Saddam. The report states with “high confidence” that Iraq “has now established large-scale, redundant and concealed BW agent production capabilities.” It said “all key aspects” of Iraq’s offensive BW program “are active and that most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War.”

  The presidential commission would state that this assessment was “the most important and most alarming” judgements in the document, and was based largely on information from Curveball. Even though in the last few months the CIA had flagged Curveball’s biggest corraborator as a liar and even though Germany had told the CIA that they thought Curveball was a fabricator, the NIE says it has “high confidence” on what amounts to Curveball’s fantasies.

  The NIE also reports that Iraq has 500 tons of yellow cake from Niger (it doesn’t), mentions the aluminum tubes for centrifuges (which aren’t), that Saddam has stockpiled 100 to 500 tons of chemical weapons (he hasn’t), that Saddam is producing biological weapons in mobile labs (he isn’t). The report states it has “high confidence” that “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs” (it isn’t), “high confidence” that “Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles” (it doesn’t).

  [http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/iraq-wmd.html]

  [http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1120-01.htm]

  THIS is the “intelligence” that is given to congress to authorize the war in October 2002. Congress is told that the CIA believes WITH HIGH CONFIDENCE that there are mobile labs, even though Curveball has been flagged as a liar. The intelligence reports WITH HIGH CONFIDENCE that Iraq has 500 tons of yellow cake, even though there have been several INTELLIGENCE REPORTS that say the claims HOLD NO WATER WHATSOEVER.

  That is what cherry picking looks like. You can’t have two reports say the exact opposite thing and report that one is true WITH HIGH CONFIDENCE based on nothing else but those reports. Cherry picking.

  So, jsg, since you’ve proven you are immobile aroudn this topic, how about a change of topic. Are you by any chance a creationist? Do you support the idea of “teaching the controversy” in public schools?

  What do you do for a living? How does the company you work at make money?

  to be fair, I’ll answer my questions: I’m not a creationist. I’m an evolutionist. I don’t support the “teach the controversy” for public schools. I’m an electrical engineer, and my company makes consumer entertainment products.

  you?

• [cajunfj40]

  Too bad it was only 35. I’d have preferred it be 37.

  <clerks>“37!?!”</clerks>

  later,
  -cajun

• [Takuan]

  Still no “main stream” media coverage of this in the USA.

  Now do you understand how all those dead Iraqis came to be?

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  Thank you — but really, Greg London did the heavy lifting.

• [Yog]

  Greg London says, (#127 above):

  WE PASSED RESOLUTION 1441, and when Iraq complied with inspections, we changed the goalposts, we gave Saddam 48 hours to step down, AND THEN WE INVADED.

  But this is not strictly true.

  The 48 hour ultimatum was delivered at 0401 Baghdad time on March 18th 2003. The US began bombing Iraq at 0530 Baghdad time on March 19th, with an attack on a site where Saddam was thought to be staying, 25.5 hours later.

  If you give someone a 48 hour deadline to step down it’s usually considered good form to allow them the entire 48 hours.

  Perhaps Mr. Bush was worried that Saddam might actually step down and where would he get an excuse to invade then?

  Incidentally, in the speech in which Mr. Bush gave the deadline, he said:

  Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

  Mr. Bush was deliberately lying when he said it; he knew at that very moment that Iraq did not in fact possess nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons.

• [eustace]

  I was disappointed to find nothing in the LA times today.

• [JSG]

  #142 TERESA NIELSEN HAYDEN
  JSG:

  “You faker. I removed the link for the reasons stated. The chief reason was that it in no wise qualified as a response to the arguments that have been raised here. You haven’t responded either, though you’ve been free to do so all along.
  At the time I removed the link, I didn’t say a word about your source being Mr. “I can’t get laid, and it’s the liberals’ fault.” I thought I was being merciful.”

  You faker? Talk about a most inadequate insult.

  I assumed there are two question being debated here, one did we go to war under faulty intelligence? The article from the LA times that I quoted, and you deleted, answered that. The second question is why did we go to war with Iraq? I’ve given and seen a lot of possible reasons. I’ve said that the reason we went to war was because Bush and Congress were afraid that Iraq had WMD’s, I got a lot of flack for that, fine. I’ve also said that after we found out that there were no weapons, what were we to do, leave? We know that Hussein has a horrible record of human rights, so are we there today to help fix that by promoting a democracy? I got some flack for that, one poster stated that 70% of the nations of the world have a horrible human rights record. Ok, but we are there, on the ground, I’d like to think that we help when and where we can, my question is what are some of the 70% that have a horrible human rights record? Saudi Arabia? North Korea? Iran? Maybe a democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan can make a difference in some of that 70%.
  Another reason given for the invasion is because of oil, the United States gets most of it’s oil from non OPEC countries, here is a link:

  http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_m.htm

  Getting back to the article that I linked to, that you deleted, it was not written by Erza Klien, but by James Kirchick the assistant editor of The New Republic, Here is the link again, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kirchick16-2008jun16,0,4808346.story

  Whatever people say about the past, the fact is that we are in Iraq now. Do we pull out, leaving a lot of those that depend on us, in the lurch? Or do we stay and try to help setup a democracy?

  The next election will be in October, we will see if the voters in Iraq wish their country be a democracy or not.

• [Sister Y]

  From the darkly amusing “White House Weekly,” the email newsletter I subscribe to from the Bush White House – this is Bush talking about a meeting with Iraqi President Talabani:
  

  “He is a man who’s been on the front lines of helping to unify Iraq and to help Iraq recover from a brutal regime — that of Saddam Hussein.”

  Even W feels the need to specify which brutal regime Iraq is recovering from.

  Sorry for the interruption, I just wanted to share. Carry on.

• [Agent 86]

  I don’t think you’ll change his mind. If you get him to acknowledge your points, he’ll just start attacking the sources. I’ve had my dad trapped logically, until he started spouting that you can’t trust AP reports (well, not the 99.9% that he doesn’t agree with). It was his magic “get out of thinking, free” card, that made it so he still somehow won the argument/debate in his mind.

• [GregLondon]

  Sigh. your resilience to context is quite impressive. If you hear something that agrees with the conclusion you want, do you bother at all to check it’s accuracy or the surrounding context?

  Ever?

  Anyway, Iraq expelled inspectors in late 1997. After some UN negotiations, Iraq allowed inspections to resume in Jan 1998.

  By mid-1998, Iraq had accused the US of inserting CIA spies in UNSCOM, that they were inspecting sites that had nothing to do with WMD’s, and that they were looking for tactical information about how to specifically target Saddam. This was in violation of the UN resolution for inspections.

  It also turns out that these accusations was true.

  Scott Ritter, head of UN inspections from 1990 to 1998 says there were spies on his team, against his wishes. Ritter wanted Iraq to comply with inspections. He didn’t support the US pressure to fabricate excuses to invade or to assassinate Saddam.

  Mid ’98, Iraq demanded several American inspectors be expelled (because they were spies) and refused further inspections until inspections were following UN rules, i.e. free of spies, not inspecting locations for tactical information.

  Inspection teams remained in Iraq, but were at a standoff with regard to performing inspections.

  Just prior to operation desert fox, the US notified inspection teams to get out of dodge before the bombs hit.

  And while Operation Desert Fox is claimed to be related to UN inspections, out of 100 targets, only a fraction of the targets were WMD sites. ~30 targets included anti-aircraft sites. 50 targets were specifically aimed at killing Saddam himself, his special guard, etc. Many of the targets reflected information gleaned by CIA spies on UNSCOM inspection teams.

  Note that UN resolutions for inspections in the 1990′s did not authorize “regime change” or invasion or the assassination of Saddam, nor did it authorize the use of UN inspection teams as a means for CIA spies to get tactical information to determine how to kill Saddam.

  Had the US not been so bent on killing Saddam, and had allowed inspections to proceed without spies, inspections would have probably been done in a few months.

  Scott Ritter, who lead inspections at the time, stated that by 1998, Iraq was somewhere around 90% disarmed. There had been a lot of resistance to inspections from 1991 to 1998, but there had also been a lot of progress. Ritter had been pushing for getting the last 10% done, but the US was looking for an excuse to kill Saddam, and refusing to allow inspections for the last 10%, even if it was because those inspection teams were seeded with illegal CIA spies, was good enough reason for some.

  It didn’t matter to some people that Iraq had only stopped inspections because there were illegal US spies. All they cared about was that they could say a soundbite out of context that “Iraq refuses to be inspected!” These sorts of people use exactly the same logic you do, jsg, they find a fact that agrees with them (Iraq refused inspections mid 1998!) and they ignore the full context that surrounded that fact (because UN inspection teams had US spies!).

  These folks didn’t want Iraq certified to be disarmed. We wanted Saddam dead. They wanted control of Iraq.