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Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:ramchop wrote:Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:Nobody controls the United States of America you blithering idiot.
Brings to mind the term "loose cannon".
Uhhh....how about "democracy" instead you dumb ass. No one person or special interest group controls America.
Bye!
ramchop wrote:Are you always this easy to wind up?Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:you fucking backpacking vagabond from a dirt poor country with no ideals.
I like that, can I add it to my resume?
Resolute Optimist wrote:Hmmm... looks like we can expect a happy future all together.
Charity in international politics and strategy dosen't exist. Why do you think it took so long for the Americans to turn up in France during WWII? And don't bother with the "we should have let you dumb fucking sheep rooters die" crap Gai... Although I'm sure you can't resist it.
Jack wrote:Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:ramchop wrote:Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:Nobody controls the United States of America you blithering idiot.
Brings to mind the term "loose cannon".
Uhhh....how about "democracy" instead you dumb ass. No one person or special interest group controls America.
Bye!
The Jewish lobby and hence Israel controls the US government. The Iraq situation is Israel's war. The Jewish lobby is forcing the US government to send troops to protect Israel. Wake up and smell the roses, Gai. Sorry I will not lower myself to your level and call you names.
Resolute Optimist wrote:Hmmm... looks like we can expect a happy future all together.
Charity in international politics and strategy dosen't exist. Why do you think it took so long for the Americans to turn up in France during WWII? And don't bother with the "we should have let you dumb fucking sheep rooters die" crap Gai... Although I'm sure you can't resist it.
Resolute Optimist wrote:Tea and crumpets rule.
Resolute Optimist wrote: two towers fall down and you're pissing yourselves.
Resolute Optimist wrote: Of course we also now know that they arrived so late because the more destroyed Europe was the money was going to roll in.
Resolute Optimist wrote:
Stop feeling so sympathetic towards your countrie's leaders. They aren't doing much about North Korea who is already pointing a nuke missile at the west coast so what makes this a priority?
Resolute Optimist wrote:
The creation of Israel was total madness. A radical religious state, implanted on someone else's land in the Middle East... The mind boggles.
Resolute Optimist wrote:Of course we also now know that they arrived so late because the more destroyed Europe was the money was going to roll in.
cstaylor wrote: Here's my problem with the French: they have to find a conspiracy in everything. Anyone here read that trash that passed as "facts" from that French "author", Thierry Meyssan? Yet the French public lapped that crap up.
Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:PS: We aren't going to wipe out Saddam and his military for Israel. We are going to wipe them out because of the twin towers that have been removed from our landscape.
cstaylor wrote:That's true... the French aren't the only nuts on the planet. ]
House cafeterias change names for 'french fries' and 'french toast'
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/11/sprj.irq.fries/index.htmlThe cafeteria menus in the three House office buildings changed the name of "french fries" to "freedom fries," in a culinary rebuke of France stemming from anger over the country's refusal to support the U.S. position on Iraq.
GomiGirl wrote:Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:PS: We aren't going to wipe out Saddam and his military for Israel. We are going to wipe them out because of the twin towers that have been removed from our landscape.
eerrr no.. the tragedy that is 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq.
What is scary is that the Bush regime is leveraging off the anger and sadness to pick a fight with a long term adversary.. Personally I think that a big reason (not the only one) that Bush wanted to go forward is that it is a winable fight with minimal US casulties and making Bagdad into a moonscape will prove who is the king of the sandpit..
The recent stories in the media about closing in on Bin Laden is all smoke and mirrors.. think for yourselves..
It is too easy to be an armchair General and politicial..
Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:What do you mean King of the Sandpit? What does this mean? Speak in concrete terms please.
Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:Not closing in on Bin Laden???? We now have his number two and some of his sons. Excuse me but can you read?
GomiGirl wrote:Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:What do you mean King of the Sandpit? What does this mean? Speak in concrete terms please.
I am drawing an analogy between the recent warmongering to child-like bullying and power plays for who is "king of the sandpit". If I use words of one syllable or less would this help you?
" wrote:Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:Not closing in on Bin Laden???? We now have his number two and some of his sons. Excuse me but can you read?
Yes but it is all very convenient to dredge up and litter the media with an even more hated enemy who is also from the middle east to maintain support for a globally unpopular war.. Is the tail wagging the dog again?
Keep in mind a healthy scepticism when watching the news..
Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:Really Gomi, bullying. Did we bully Afghanistan. The same thing is going to go down in all likelihood in Iraq. The people will be glad to be rid of Saddam and their situation will undoubtedly improve. Equally true is that they will resent us for pulling them out of their quagmire. So be it. The United States was a country born to lead the world. This is our cross to bear and we will make you our backward cousins understand.
Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:Ahem. The question was are we closing in on OBL. Now you deflect. We are closing in. What tail, what dog??????
Wickedly fictional with historical overtones truer than many care to admit, Wag The Dog examines the blurred lines between politics, the media and show business.
Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote: The tragedy of 9/11 has nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq. No... that is not true. We know that Iraq supports terrorist organizations.
In early months of Bush administration, the issue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was not near the top of the foreign policy agenda. Revival of the issue after September 11 appeared primarily to be a pretext for settling unfinished business. Iraq's links to al-Qaeda have proved too tenuous to include Iraq directly in the "war on terrorism." Most recently, the FBI itself has raised doubts about the veracity of the story that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. Hence the weapons issue has now taken center stage, with the US invoking UN resolutions and hoping to rally international support on this basis. - http://www.zmag.org/content/Iraq/merip_graham.cfm ( MERIP Press Information Note 96, "Sanctions Renewed on Iraq," by Sarah Graham-Brown, May 14, 2002.)
The United States is now set on war with Iraq. What justification is there for such a war? Occasionally it has been suggested that Iraq was somehow linked to the 11 September attacks. The strongest alleged link has been the supposed meeting of Mohammed Atta, the 11 September ringleader, and an Iraqi diplomat expelled from the Czech Republic for spying. The two are meant to have met in Prague in 2001, a 'fact' confirmed by Czech interior minister Stanislav Gross in Oct. 2001. When the Czech police completed their inquiry in Dec. 2001, however, 'Jiri Kolar, the police chief, said there were no documents showing that Atta visited Prague at any time this year [2001], although he had visited twice in 2000'. Another man by the name of Mohammed Atta did visit Prague in 2001, but according to a Czech intelligence source, 'He didn't have the same identity card number, there was a great difference in their ages, their nationalities didn't match, basically nothing. It was someone else.' (Daily Telegraph, 18 Dec. 2001, p. 10) Despite the disintegration of this fable, it continues to circulate and to be repeated as fact. Useful lies can live for a long time. As for any links between Baghdad and al-Qaeda, an anonymous former CIA officer has remarked that, 'The reality is that Osama bin Laden doesn't like Saddam Hussein. Saddam is a secularist who has killed more Islamic clergy than he has Americans. They have almost nothing in common except a hatred of the US. Saddam is the ultimate control freak, and for him terrorists are the ultimate loose cannon.' (Daily Telegraph, 20 Sept. 2001, p. 10)
Initially, Washington included Iraq on its list of countries with links to al-Qaeda, but when European governments insisted that there was no intelligence evidence connecting Baghdad to Osama bin Laden's organisation, the US changed tack. "Now the emphasis is on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programme and the danger that Saddam might send out his own agents armed with chemical or biological devices", one [British] official said.' (Times, 16 Feb. 2002, p. 19) The latest CIA report on the topic (Jan. 2002) says, that without 'an inspection-monitoring program' 'it is more difficult to determine the current status' of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programmes. No smoking gun, then. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has written, 'Given the comprehensive nature of the monitoring regime put in place by UNSCOM [UN Special Commission weapons inspectors], which included a strict export-import control regime, it was possible as early as 1997 to determine that, from a qualitative standpoint, Iraq had been disarmed. Iraq no longer possessed any meaningful quantities of chemical or biological agent, if it possessed any at all, and the industrial means to produce these agents had either been eliminated or were subject to stringent monitoring. The same was true of Iraq's nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities.' (Arms Control Today, June 2000) According to Ritter, a former US Marine, 'manufacturing CW [chemical weapons] would require the assembling of production equipment into a single integrated facility, creating an infrastructure readily detectable by the strategic intelligence capabilities of the United States. The CIA has clearly stated on several occasions since the termination of inspections in December 1998 that no such activity has been detected.' As for biological weapons, 'The Iraqis do have enough equipment to carry out laboratory-scale production of BW agent. However, without an infusion of money and technology, expanding such a capability into a viable weapons program is a virtual impossibility. Contrary to popular belief, BW cannot simply be cooked up in the basement]http://www.zmag.org/content/Iraq/rai_no_justification_for_war.cfm[/url]
It is now clear that (despite intensive investigative efforts) there is simply no evidence of any Iraqi involvement in the terror attacks of September 11. The most popular theory, of a Prague-based collaboration between one of the 9/11 terrorists and an Iraqi official, has now collapsed. Just two weeks ago, the Prague Post quoted the director general of the Czech foreign intelligence service UZSI (Office of Foreign Relations and Information), Frantisek Bublan, denying the much-touted meeting between Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, and an Iraqi agent.
More significantly, the Iraqi regime's brutal treatment of its own population has generally not extended to international terrorist attacks. The State Department's own compilation of terrorist activity in its 2001 Patterns of Global Terrorism, released May 2002, does not document a single serious act of international terrorism by Iraq. Almost all references are either to political statements made or not made or hosting virtually defunct militant organizations.
We are told that we must go to war preemptively against Iraq because Baghdad might, some time in the future, succeed in crafting a dangerous weapon and might, some time in the future, give that weapon to some unknown terrorist group --maybe Osama bin Laden-- who might, some time in the future, use that weapon against the U.S. The problem with this analysis, aside from the fact that preemptive strikes are simply illegal under international law, is that it ignores the widely known historic antagonism between Iraq and bin Laden. According to the New York Times, "shortly after Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait in 1990, Osama bin Laden approached Prince Sultan bin Abdelaziz al-Saud, the Saudi defense minister, with an unusual proposition. c Arriving with maps and many diagrams, Mr. Bin Laden told Prince Sultan that the kingdom could avoid the indignity of allowing an army of American unbelievers to enter the kingdom to repel Iraq from Kuwait. He could lead the fight himself, he said, at the head of a group of former mujahideen that he said could number 100,000 men." Even if bin Laden's claim to be able to provide those troops was clearly false, bin Laden's hostility towards the ruthlessly secular Iraq remained evident. There is simply no evidence that that has changed.
Ironically, an attack on Iraq would increase the threat to U.S. citizens throughout the Middle East and perhaps beyond, as another generation of young Iraqis come to identify Americans only as the pilots of high-flying jet bombers and as troops occupying their country. While today American citizens face no problems from ordinary people in the streets of Baghdad or elsewhere in Iraq, as I documented during my visit to Iraq with five Congressional staffers in August 1999, that situation would likely change in the wake of a U.S. attack on Iraq. In other countries throughout the Middle East, already palpable anger directed at U.S. threats would dramatically escalate and would provide a new recruiting tool for extremist elements bent on harm to U.S. interests or U.S. citizens. It would become far more risky for U.S. citizens to travel abroad. - http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0802-02.htm
...after the September 11 attacks, many in the Bush Administration said, "Osama bin Laden could not have carried out this attack without state sponsorship..."... "Iraq had to be the ones responsible for this." And conveniently at that point in time defectors started coming out. Defectors talked about a terrorist training camp south of Bagdad in Salman Pak where they train people to take over airplanes conveniently in groups of four and five armed with knives. Amazing how this information came out after September 11. It's not true. I've been to that terrorist training camp. It's not a terrorist training camp, it's a hostage rescue camp put in place in the 1980s by by the British government to support Saddam Hussein because any nation that has a national airlines has an assault force capable of conducting hostage rescue of aircraft that have been subject to hijacking. We have it. Iraq has it. That's what Salman Pak is plain and simple.
As we speak, American Marines, soldiers, Seal commandos, Air Force personell are in Afghanistan. We've deafeted al Qaeda, at least militarily. We've occupied their camps. We've captured their caves. We've captured computers with harddrives. We've captured documents - thousands of them. And guess what we're finding? And in the months since we've captured these, we've arrested over a thousand al Qaeda members across the world because these documents give 'em up. We know who al Qaeda met with. We know who they plotted with. We know what they were trying to do. And guess what these documents don't show? Any linkage whatsoever with Iraq. See, there is no linkage between al Qaeda and Iraq. These are two totally separate entities. Two totally separate problems. That didn't stop the administration though, from keeping the beat of the war drum against Iraq. - http://radio4all.net/pub/archive5/mp3_3/ug113-hour1mix.mp3
As the White House searches for every possible excuse to go to war with Iraq, pressure has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates to fit a political agenda. In this case, the agencies are being pressed to find a casus belli for war, whether or not one exists.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements, and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," Vince Cannistraro, the agency's former head of counterterrorism, told The Guardian, a London newspaper.
In his latest attempt to link Iraq and al-Qaeda, Bush referred to a "very senior al-Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year." But the administration has given no indication that Abu Musab Zarqawi collaborated with senior Iraqi officials.
Bush also charged that "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases." Former CIA officer Robert Baer, who spent years following al-Qaeda, told The Guardian that there were contacts between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqi government in Sudan in the early 1990s and in 1998. "But," he added, "there is no evidence that a strategic partnership came out of it. I'm unaware of any evidence of Saddam pursuing terrorism against the United States." - http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2002-10-24-oped-bamford_x.htm
These assertions, however, might be as good as the case gets for U.S. officials linking the terror network to Iraq. While some members of al Qaeda could be operating out of Iraq, intelligence and investigative sources said there is evidence the group also operates out of Iran and Pakistan. And while there is evidence Iraqi officials might have helped al Qaeda years ago, the same case could be made for Pakistani, Yemeni and Saudi officials.
Bin Laden recently declared solidarity with the Iraqi people, but he lashed out at Saddam's government. In the latest audiotaped message purported to be recorded by the al Qaeda leader, bin Laden denounced Saddam's socialist Baath party as "infidels."
Bottom line: U.S. officials claim there is evidence of an al Qaeda-Iraq connection -- but there is no "smoking gun."
If Colin Powell were to visit the shabby military compound at the foot of a large snow-covered mountain, he might be in for an unpleasant surprise. The US Secretary of State last week confidently described the compound in north-eastern Iraq - run by an Islamic terrorist group Ansar al-Islam - as a 'terrorist chemicals and poisons factory.'
Yesterday, however, it emerged that the terrorist factory was nothing of the kind - more a dilapidated collection of concrete outbuildings at the foot of a grassy sloping hill. Behind the barbed wire, and a courtyard strewn with broken rocket parts, are a few empty concrete houses. There is a bakery. There is no sign of chemical weapons anywhere - only the smell of paraffin and vegetable ghee used for cooking.
http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,892112,00.html
DJEB wrote:Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote: The tragedy of 9/11 has nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq. No... that is not true. We know that Iraq supports terrorist organizations.
There has been no link made between 9-11 and Iraq. There have been a number of failed attempts to make a link, but all these have been debunked. Even the head of the CIA George Tenet said there was no link. As for Iraq links to terrorist groups, these have not existed for 15 years, ie. since Iraq was a U.S. ally. More fact, less assertions, please.
StickyRiceLover wrote:After all of the Debates the fact remains that Iraq's going to get a visit from the U.S. Who's next on the list? It will happen country by country.
It is hard to describe how much more powerful we are than any other country in the world.
The fact that the U.S. is going to have its way with the world must burn some of you guys up. I'm not saying it's right but I'm saying that's how it looks like it's going to roll out. Time will tell if this post is true and if it is then that means most of the opinions contrary to the U.S. opinion doesn't matter much. I will make it a point to bring this back up in 6 months for you regulars. (not to rub it in of course) Until then I will stick to topics related to Japan.
Peace to All,
SRL.
Gaisaradatsuraku! wrote:You know I've got to say that this issue is on of the few issues that I have flipped flopped on repeatedly. Months ago I was firmly opposed to the war. Recently, I have been convinced that we must go in.
Actually, I am beginning to think now that it is more and more likely that we will not go in at all.
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