Post by Ernst BlofeldPost by midtowngPost by Ernst BlofeldIf you'd like to apologize to the Iraqi people
for opposing their liberation,
Liberation? Is that what foreign military
occupation is called now?
Well, you can email that guy in Iraq and ask
zeyad_w at hotmail dot com
http://healingiraq.blogspot.com
What's the matter? Afraid that actually speaking
to someone who was liberated by American
and British forces, and as a result doesn't
have to face being fed into a shredder or
have his family killed, would puncture your
inflated sense of moral worth? That it wouldn't
be quite as easy to make dumb and offensive
comparisions between a savage dictatorship
and a temporary occupation?
Idle dismissal of life, indeed.
You got me there, because tens of thousands of the people
you need to apologize to are dead because of the lies you backed.
Here's some more names you should apologize to:
http://www.cmonitor.com/stories/news/opinion/editoria2004/edit013004_2004.shtmL
On election day, the Department of Defense released the names of five
more America's soldiers killed in Iraq. Three of them died on
Saturday, a day the presidential candidates spent wooing voters and
defending their votes and statements for and against the war.
One of dead, Sgt. Randy Rosenberg, 23, was from Berlin. Rosenberg
played hockey, graduated from Berlin High School in 1998 and married
Misty, a Goffstown girl, just 18 months ago. He wrote regular letters
from Iraq to his grandfather, William Gemitti, a Korean war veteran
and the hunting and fishing companion of Rosenberg's youth.
In the Humvee with Rosenberg when the bomb went off along a road near
Khalidiyah, a city 60 miles west of Baghdad, was Specialist William
Sturges of Spring City, Pa. Sturges, whose wife was serving as a medic
in a combat hospital in Iraq, was 24. The couple have a 16-month-old
son. Sturges also had a 4-year-old son from an earlier relationship.
The modern Army allows both parents to serve overseas if it approves
their child care plans.
Killed with Rosenberg and Sturges was 22-year-old Jason Chappell of
Hemet, Calif. All three were part of the "All American" Task Force of
the 9th Calvary. Chappell, who had a 3.8 grade-point average, was a
star member of his high school's championship academic decathlon team.
He joined the Army, a local newspaper said, because he had not decided
what to do after high school.
Two more American soldiers were killed in a separate bombing that
Saturday, the day Sen. John Kerry skated with Bruins hockey stars in
Manchester, Wesley Clark held a rally with Ted Danson, John Edwards
met with voters at a Laconia soda shop and Howard Dean held a town
meeting on the Seacoast.
One was Sgt. Keith Smette, 25, of Makoti, N.D., a town of 140 people
near Fargo, where his parents run the local grain elevator. Like
Rosenberg, Smette was an athletic kid. He liked to hunt, fish and play
baseball. He left North Dakota State University with one year to go to
volunteer for duty in Iraq.
Sgt. Ken Hendrickson was the fifth man killed that day. The
41-year-old former school custodian left for Iraq four days after his
wedding. His teenage son told the paper in Hendrickson's hometown,
Bismarck, N.D., that his father loved to do "animated voices as he
read his favorite books" - The Stinky Cheese Man and The Foot Book by
Dr. Zeuss. From Iraq he sent his family photographs of the ground to
prove that it was not sand but "powdered dirt."
As of Wednesday, 519 members of the armed forces had died since the
invasion of Iraq.
Post by Ernst BlofeldPost by midtowngSo you don't feel obligated to apologize to the
American people for lying to them, eh?
No--"Lying" means knowingly forwarding false information,
and that's not what happened. Unless you think
every intelligence agency on the planet was in on
the conspiracy, along with Saddam Hussein, who
_himself_ was convined he had WMD programs.
Every intelligence agency on the planet considered Saddam
a non-threat. But Every intelligence agency on the planet
considered Saddam's links to terrorists as unlikely.
Bush lied about those things and you repeated those lies.
http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_feb1.html
If Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD), as it long insisted,
we must draw one of two conclusions.
Either President George Bush, and secretaries Colin Powell and
Donald Rumsfeld, lied about the global threat they claimed Iraq posed,
and deceived Congress and the American people. Or, they were grossly
misinformed by their intelligence experts and must be judged fools of
the first order.
If Bush and his team of chest-thumping, self-proclaimed national
security experts were really misinformed about Iraq's weapons and
capabilities, then they started a war by mistake - and presided over
the two biggest national security fiascos since Pearl Harbor: the 9/11
attacks and the invasion of Iraq.
It turns out President Saddam Hussein, whom Bush repeatedly
branded a "liar," was in fact telling the truth all along when he said
all of Iraq's old weapons systems had been destroyed. It was Bush and
British PM Tony Blair who weren't telling the truth.
Saddam should hire attorney Johnny Cochrane and sue the U.S. and
Britain for all they're worth.
So, take your pick.
The Iraq war either was the Mother of All Lies, or the Mother of
All Fiascos.
[...]
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-livit013651247feb01,0,3575764.column
DeLay, then-House Republican whip, said that unless President Clinton
was impeached for lying, somewhere someday a mother would "lose
custody of her baby in court because a father lies," and professors
would sell good grades for cash, and brave men would die due to lies
in the military, and businesses would collapse from "a cancer" of
lying throughout the land. You can look this up in the congressional
record. DeLay may even have had a point.
But I bring this up not to remind you of that sad episode in the
country's moral life, and in the marriage of the Clintons. I mention
it only to ask - honestly, because I am as curious as any other
increasingly anti-war American with grave doubts about the
truthfulness of my government in its pursuit of foreign (and domestic)
policies - why there was no earthquake in Washington this week when it
emerged that President George W. Bush may have launched an entire war
on the basis of a lie?
There was no earthquake, no Bible thumping, no Pat Robertson or
Tom DeLay. There were some high-end campaign speeches by the
Democrats. The president went to New Hampshire not to campaign for
president. (That's what he said.) And that is the up-to-the-minute
report on the state of the national moral umbrage.
But if a Lewinsky lie was big enough to paralyze the government
for two years, what is the proper response to a possible lie that
costs more than 500 American soldiers and untold thousands of Iraqis
their lives?
[...]
http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/harris.html
As everyone knows, the war in Iraq was launched by the United States
and Britain to save the world from the "imminent" danger of Saddam's
WMDs. President Bush declared that there wasn't time for Hans Blix and
his team of UN weapons inspectors to complete their work in Iraq. In
the language of the post-9/11 White House, the threat level was a
throbbing red. It was the Marines or chaos.
The language was equally purple on the other side of the pond. We
now know from the Hutton report that the prime minister's personal
spinmeister, Alastair Campbell, ordered intelligence staff to change
the claim that the Iraqi military "may be able" to deploy weapons of
mass destruction in 45 minutes to "are able" -- a fraud that Blair
used to full effect to stampede his reluctant countrymen into war.
We also know from Lord Hutton that Blair's chief of staff,
Jonathon Powell, asked the head of the joint intelligence committee to
redraft a dossier that suggested Saddam Hussein "might use WMD if
under attack" to baldly state that he "would use them," period, no
qualifier, zilch. Perhaps these factoids explain why the Independent
newspaper greeted Lord Hutton's exoneration of Tony Blair and
vilification of the BBC in a single-word headline: "Whitewash."
The only people who outdid the newly beatified Blair in
exaggerating the WMD bogeyman worked for the president of the U.S.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld boasted that not only did Saddam
have WMDs, the Americans knew exactly where they were from U.S.
intelligence dossiers.
Secretary of State Colin Powell brought documented evidence to the
UN Security Council to make the same case. Wolf Blitzer may have
frothed patriotically, but for normal people, Powell's slide show
proved to be a rather less defining moment than when Adlai Stevenson
tabled before the same body spy satellite photos of real Soviet
missile installations in Cuba.
Sadly, the satellite photographs produced by the current secretary
of state turned out to be doctored, the mobile anthrax labs he
projected on the big screen for skeptical Security Council members
mere artists' conceptions.
In the meantime, Bush and Blair apologists now prefer to speak of
weapons programs rather than weapons and the fact that everyone is
better off without Saddam Hussein. Perhaps, or perhaps not, depending
on whether you believe liberation is no free elections and 13,000
Iraqis in prison without charges. But one thing is beyond dispute.
Fifteen thousand Iraqis and more than 500 American soldiers have so
far died for reasons other than the ones that George Bush and Tony
Blair earnestly pressed on their citizens.
[...]
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5613.htm
Sunday February 1, 2004: (The Observer) Senior American officials
concluded at the beginning of last May that there were no weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, The Observer has learnt.
Intelligence sources, policy makers and weapons inspectors familiar
with the details of the hunt for WMD told The Observer it was widely
known that Iraq had no WMD within three weeks of Baghdad falling,
despite the assertions of senior Bush administration figures and the
Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
[...]