Is Bush neuro-impaired?
POSTED BY: SignyM
UPDATED: Thursday, December 16, 2004 02:09
VIEWED: 8191
PAGE 4 of 10
Saddam evaded , lied , distorted and defied the UN's resolutions and inspectors for 12 yrs. You want to give Saddam a pass, say all those parts were for completely benefolvent, benign uses, and want to parse the words of the U.N. report to make it appear as if Saddam was all above board and playing by the rules. He was not. Even the Food for Oil scam SHOWS that he wasn't being honest. After 9-11 , and all we know about Saddam, all we found out about him after the war, you STILL want to give him the benefit of a doubt. I don't want to give Saddam a pass for what he did, and I'll support those who'll stand up to such brutal tyranny.
To me, this issue is utterly moot. There isn't any question on whether Saddam was evil, used WMD on civilians, violated 17 UN Resolutions, broke treaty agreements from Gulf War 1 , and even bribed members of the U.N.( the VERY countries that some would have us trust and work with -PLEASE! spare me ) to make a complete mockery of the Food for Oil program.
It's 2004, Saddam is out of power, his brutal sons are dead, and while more work needs to be done, much has already been accomplished. I can't put this in any more plain English than I've already done, so I guess that concludes my comment on this issue.
" They don't like it when you shoot at 'em. I worked that out myself. "
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Auraptor, Saddam wasn't being honest. But then, neither was Bush. It's not a question of whether Saddam was "honest" or not... If that were the standard then we would have reason to invade every single nation in the world! The question is: Did Saddam pose a credible threat? The answer is- NO.
Now, my colleagues and I have spent a some time discussing why Saddam might want to be so cagey about WMD when he didn't have them, and finally someone came up with the answer- it was to keep Iran off-balance. We make the mistake of thinking that just because we are the largest power in the world, we are the ONLY power in the world.
Interviews with Saddam reinforce and expand on this idea. Saddam assumed that our intelligence was better than it actually was, that we already KNEW he didn't have WMD. He assumed that we would recognise the pose for what it was- keeping Iran at bay. Oddly, he counted on the USA to protect him from WMD that Iran might be producing.
Reality bites, doesn't it?
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Ah ... it's called STUPIDITY. 
Though whether Bush is truely stupid is beside the point, it's the image he presents. Bush flaunts the ignorant cowboy image to his advantage. Bush appeals to people who live lives so myopic and steeped in fundementalist insanity he seems like one of them - you only need Jesus to guide you.
This has culturally been the mainstay since the Reagan years. Now, with "reality shows" and "JackAss the Movie" we have a form of success through stupidity. The ultimate lowest common demoninator. Movies are laden with explosions and FX to a degree that it's no longer spectacle but two hours of knuckle-headed violence. Hell, even James Bond used to stop to chat up a sexy babe between fights.
Stupidity is something people have become proud of. "We don't need book learnin'! We're lright and those professor types are full of crap!" - yikes.
And now we have stupidity running the USA. When Bush makes a mistake, such as... oh - say lying about Saddam Hussien being a threat to the USA and thus gets Congress to award Bush War powers, he turns around and tells the American people the war is really about "values" and that Saddam was "bad".
The real reason is that Iraq has all the Oil America desperately needs. DESPERATELY. So America makes up a STUPID lie and when that is found out they simply play upon the stupidity of the people.
I believe the political term is "the ole switcheroo".
Look at the beliefs Bush has to play with. He has convinced people that Saddam has had weapons for 12 years - but it's been proven, even by Bushes own weapons inspectors that Saddam had no significant WMDs since 1991.
1991 !!!
Now, if everyone knew this why is the White House insisting, as Dick Cheney has said over and over, that Saddam was a threat?
Stupidity.
Stupidity is the peoples problem, sure. But it shouldn't be the White Houses problem, that only makes America look stupid - and boy, America looks like the biggest ass in history right now.
To support the stupid position and propoganda of the White House people will pull out every irrelevant strawman fact to try, desperately, to justify thier stupidity. As if that isn't stupid in itself.
Take the arguement that Saddam was running around Iraq murdering people and creatin mass graves. Well, he did - in the 80s! Back when Saddam gassed Kurds with sarin gas he bought from the USA (thanks Donald Rummsfeld) and CIA help. If America wants to kill mass murders I'm all for it, but let's try to rememeber who put that mass murderer in power in the first place.
The switrcheroo again. Sure, it's true that Saddam murderes a whole town, but it's not true that he did it AFTER the Gulf War.
Saying so is a lie - or just stupid. Now, since the White House should know the difference... which are they?
Real stupidity is to be punished, not rewarded. If people go around being ignorant or stupid I say punish them. I do. 
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Quote:
VIENNA, Austria (CNN) -- Some 380 tons of explosives, powerful enough to detonate nuclear warheads, are missing from a former Iraqi military facility that was supposed to be under American control, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog says
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/25/iraq.explosives/index.html
Auraptor- Here is the latest news on the topic of WMD "components". I want you to REMEMBER this article so that the next time some right-wing paper says "The IAEA reports that WMD components were removed from Iraq" you will remember that:
1) High explosives do NOT constitute a WMD threat. They could be used to detonate a nuclear bomb, but were NOT being used for this purpose in Iraq.
2) UNMOVIC and IAEA had these items tagged and monitored and would have continued to monitor them had the USA not kicked them out.
3) It was done on the UNITED STATES' WATCH.
My SO has been saying for months (literally) that access to high explosives may be the turning point of the insurgency. After almost each car bombing, he would murmur- "Just imagine if that had been high explosives". He has a wonderful tactical and strategic imagination, which is why he likes FF so much. The stolen explosive were supposedly more powerful than C4, so this could be a big, big deal for US forces.
Reality bites, doesn't it?
And to expand a bit on what Ghoulman just posted- Reality bites stupid people harder.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:Quote:
VIENNA, Austria (CNN) -- Some 380 tons of explosives, powerful enough to detonate nuclear warheads, are missing from a former Iraqi military facility that was supposed to be under American control, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog says
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/25/iraq.explosives/index.html
If I may...
Worse, it's stupid. Tis article is another example of right wing propoganda that depends on stupidity. Let me demonstrate...
380 tons of TNT powerful enough ...
Look, aside from the fact that that much tonnage isn't even close to practical for missle use (too much, too heavy) ANYTHING can be used to begin a nuclear chain reaction. It simply has to blow up at the same time... at the same moment.
So the article uses a specious arguement, one even a moron like me can see through at first glance, as evidence to back up it's lie.
And this is how the media operates - it depends on the zombie public to simply accept the idea that there are, in fact, weapons of mass destruction.
The Nazis did this aaaaall the time. And it worked.
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Quote:
Originally posted by rue:
So, a google search on: "demetrius perricos" un "security council" provided me with many, many news items...
http://www.thevanguard.org/thevanguard/columns/040618.shtml?ID=13323
Rue, you might want to remove the Vanguard link from your list of cites, since it disagrees with just about everything you said. Or were you just checking to see if we're still awake?
Quote:
UN Confirms: WMDs Smuggled Out of Iraq
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© June 18, 2004, Rod D. Martin
In a report which might alternately be termed “stunning” or “terrifying”, United Nations weapons inspectors confirmed last week not merely that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but that he smuggled them out of his country, before, during and after the war.
Late last week, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) briefed the Security Council on Saddam's lightning-fast dismantling of missile and WMD sites before and during the war. UNMOVIC executive chairman Demetrius Perricos detailed not only the export of thousands of tons of missile components, nuclear reactor vessels and fermenters for chemical and biological warheads, but also the discovery of many (but not most) of these items - with UN inspection tags still on them -- as far afield as Jordan, Turkey and even Holland.
Notably absent from that list is Iraq's western neighbor Syria, ruled by its own Baath Party just like Saddam's and closed to even the thought of an UNMOVIC inspection. Israeli intelligence has been reporting the large-scale smuggling of Saddam's WMD program across the Syrian border since at least two months before the war. Syria has long been the world's foremost state-sponsor of terrorism.
Perricos highlighted the proliferation danger to the Security Council, as well he should: UNMOVIC has no idea where most of the WMD material is today, just that it exists and it's gone; and anything in Syria is likely to be in Jerusalem or New York tomorrow.
This is the biggest news story of 2004 so far. Yet you haven't heard about it, have you?
You probably haven't heard about Canada's Prime Minister Paul Martin either -- a socialist and no friend of America. Addressing a group of 700 university researchers and business leaders in Montreal last month, Martin stated bluntly that terrorists have acquired WMDs from Saddam. “The fact is that there is now, we know well, a proliferation of nuclear weapons, and that many weapons that Saddam Huseein had, we don't know where they are…. [T]errorists have access to all of them,” the Canadian premier warned.
The tip of this terrorist sword was scarcely deflected on April 26th, when Jordanian intelligence broke up an al Qaeda conspiracy to detonate a large chemical device in the capital city of Amman. Directed by al Qaeda terrorist leader Abu al-Zarqawi -- the same man who personally beheaded American Nicholas Berg in Iraq last month -- the plotters sought to use a massive explosion to spread a “toxic cloud”, meant to wipe out the U.S. embassy, the Jordanian prime minister's office, the Jordanian intelligence headquarters, and at least 20,000 civilians (by contrast, only 3,000 died on 9/11). Over twenty tons of chemical weapons were seized from the conspirators, who were just days away from carrying out their plot.
One wonders where CNN and USA Today think twenty tons of nerve gas and sarin came from: Chemical Weapons-Mart? Yet their coverage, like most major media outlets, mentioned not a word about Saddam's smuggled WMDs, which -- according to liberal dogma -- “don't exist.”
Even though the UN says they do exist, now spread around the world.
It's not just the UN. Bill Clinton says they exist, even after the war: in a July 2003 interview with Larry King, the ex-president uncharacteristically defended George Bush, saying “it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there [was]…a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for” in IrNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Geezer- are YOU awake?? Grab some coffee, bring your normal skepticism to the table, and read this CAREFULLY:
Quote:
Late last week, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) briefed the Security Council on Saddam's lightning-fast dismantling of missile and WMD sites before and during the war. UNMOVIC executive chairman Demetrius Perricos detailed not only the export of thousands of tons of missile components, nuclear reactor vessels and fermenters for chemical and biological warheads, but also the discovery of many (but not most) of these items - with UN inspection tags still on them -- as far afield as Jordan, Turkey and even Holland.
Now, where did it say that WMD were removed? It said that "missile components", "nuclear reactor vessels" and "fermenters" "WITH UN INSPECTION TAGS STILL ON THEM" went missing.
Missiles, fermenters, and nuclear reactor vessels are NOT.. repeat NOT... WMD. Missiles are, well, missiles. Saddam was allowed missiles (Samoud or S2) for defensive purposes provided that they didn't exceed a certain range (I think it was 120 miles) and carried conventional warheads. Every nation in the world has missiles. You may at times see Saddam's missiles referred to as "ballistic" missiles, making them sound even scarier because we all think about "intercontinental ballistic missiles" or ICBMs, but "ballistic" simply means unguided: It get shot high up into the air and lands where the initial trajectory pointed it.
Nuclear reactor vessels are part of CIVILIAN nuclear power generation and medical research, and that is many, many many many steps removed from nuclear weapons. A number of universities in the USA have nuclear reactors to make isotopes and create gamma rays for medical purposes, for example.
Fermenters have a number of legitimate uses, including brewing beer and culturing mold-based antibiotics like penicillin. The part of the article that says: "fermenters for chemical and biological warheads" is a lie. The UN had already assessed that these items were NOT part of a WMD program.
It's just like the 380 tons of high explosives that disappreared from under USA noses. It COULD be used to detonate a nuclear device and will likely be portrayed as a "WMD" or "WMD component" in right-wing newspapers, but that was not what it was being used for in Iraq, and like the other missing items it had been tagged and was being monitored by the UN (intil the USA screwed them up).
BTW- our lab has already had to sign several export license agreements for "dual use" items like pressure sensors (it COULD be used in a nuclear reactor!) and chemical detectors (they COULD be used for making CWA!). My gosh- may as well tag our lab too!
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Regarding the foiled attack in Jordan:
Quote:
One wonders where CNN and USA Today think twenty tons of nerve gas and sarin came from
First of all, it wasn't 20 tons of "nerve gas and sarin". That was never in any news stories. The chemicals were stated as "a mixture of 71 different chemicals" including several tons of sulfuric acid, "nerve agents" and "blister agents". If the terrorists actually had their hands on sarin and nerve gas, they wouldn't NEED 20 tons. Several 55-gallon drums would be sufficient.
The chemicals were almost certainly industrial. To get a rough order of magnitude on industrial chemical injuries, the chemical disaster at Bhopal killed more than 10,000 people and injured 600,000 from a leak of 40 tons of methyl isocynate which is a "blistering agent" (causes blistering of the lungs, pulmonary edema and death due to drowning).
Now, I'm not going to provide a recipe for how to create a toxic cloud from basic industial chemicals, but since I am a chemist working on both a CWA anti-terrorism project AND industrial releases, some of the chemicals that could be used to create a toxic cloud of "blistering agents" and "nerve agents" are as close as your kitchen sink and garage. Sarin and mustard gas are not necessary, especially in "ton" quantities.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Geezer- are YOU awake?? Grab some coffee, bring your normal skepticism to the table, and read this CAREFULLY:Quote:
Late last week, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) briefed the Security Council on Saddam's lightning-fast dismantling of missile and WMD sites before and during the war. UNMOVIC executive chairman Demetrius Perricos detailed not only the export of thousands of tons of missile components, nuclear reactor vessels and fermenters for chemical and biological warheads, but also the discovery of many (but not most) of these items - with UN inspection tags still on them -- as far afield as Jordan, Turkey and even Holland.
Now, where did it say that WMD were removed?
Here?
Quote:
Notably absent from that list is Iraq's western neighbor Syria, ruled by its own Baath Party just like Saddam's and closed to even the thought of an UNMOVIC inspection. Israeli intelligence has been reporting the large-scale smuggling of Saddam's WMD program across the Syrian border since at least two months before the war. Syria has long been the world's foremost state-sponsor of terrorism.
Or here?
Quote:
The tip of this terrorist sword was scarcely deflected on April 26th, when Jordanian intelligence broke up an al Qaeda conspiracy to detonate a large chemical device in the capital city of Amman. Directed by al Qaeda terrorist leader Abu al-Zarqawi -- the same man who personally beheaded American Nicholas Berg in Iraq last month -- the plotters sought to use a massive explosion to spread a “toxic cloud”, meant to wipe out the U.S. embassy, the Jordanian prime minister's office, the Jordanian intelligence headquarters, and at least 20,000 civilians (by contrast, only 3,000 died on 9/11). Over twenty tons of chemical weapons were seized from the conspirators, who were just days away from carrying out their plot.
One wonders where CNN and USA Today think twenty tons of nerve gas and sarin came from: Chemical Weapons-Mart? Yet their coverage, like most major media outlets, mentioned not a word about Saddam's smuggled WMDs, which -- according to liberal dogma -- “don't exist.”
The amount of torture applied to logic that is required to interpret these right-wing rants as even vaguely supportive of Rue's conclusions makes Abu Ghraib look like a summer camp initiation.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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