Perspective

Discussion in 'Texas Bikers' started by Bill Walker, Jul 18, 2005.

  1. Bill Walker

    Bill Walker Guest

    Nah.. you really didn't say that you'd "beat anyone up".. That would have
    been too damn funny.. What you actually said was.. "you and a couple of your
    friends would pay me a little visit in Irving, Tx." Not exact, but close
    enough.. ROTFL.. As soon as I posted the address, you immediately went
    into denial mode and commenced to back pedal..
     
    Bill Walker, Jul 27, 2005
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  2. Bill Walker

    Bob Thomas Guest

    Whatever.

    bob
     
    Bob Thomas, Jul 27, 2005
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  3. Bill Walker

    chornbe Guest


    Speaking as someone with a similar mix of biological and step children,
    you're completely off on that. It *might* just be that the biological
    father either doesn't want to take custody or is unable for a variety
    of reasons, or has fallen so out of touch with the child that it's
    simply not a viable alternative.

    Once again, you show how ignorance of a subject can't keep that
    oh-so-great Walker intelligence from marching into a subject and
    claiming assumption and supposition as total and complete gospel fact.

    And as for this...


    THAT, Dear Bill, is EXACTLY the same kind of bullshit that you and your
    son are getting pissed about - someone disrespecting a personal
    tragedy.

    You're a hypocrite. Again, that's not senseless name calling, that's
    stating openly what is apparent and obvious to everyone here.

    A lying hypocrite.

    Period.
     
    chornbe, Jul 27, 2005
  4. Bill Walker

    Ruppster Guest

    What's with this "we" shit? Speak for yourself, kimosabe. If you want
    to make such a brain dead statement as that don't drag the rest of the
    US down to your level.

    Ruppster
     
    Ruppster, Jul 27, 2005
  5. Bill Walker

    Ruppster Guest

    I can't believe I even treated you with an ounce of respect. Thanks
    for showing me I was wrong to think you could act like a real human
    being. Teach me not to pay attention to what the others were saying
    about you.

    Ruppster
     
    Ruppster, Jul 27, 2005
  6. Bill Walker

    chornbe Guest


    Not to rub it in, but... I did try to warn you :)
     
    chornbe, Jul 27, 2005
  7. Bill Walker

    Ruppster Guest

    I know when I came back to this group after a long absence that there
    were a lot of people stirred up about them and a lot of name calling
    going back and forth but since I hadn't witnessed what all went on I
    tried to give them the same benefit of the doubt as I would anyone
    else. I tried to keep an open mind and form my own opinion. Well, you
    can see what that got me. It's pretty said when someone thinks a
    debate is "baiting".

    Ruppster
     
    Ruppster, Jul 27, 2005
  8. Bill Walker

    Ruppster Guest

    For someone I thought might have been a wise, old gent you sure don't
    have a clue about why some people get a divorce. Not all divorces end
    in anger. Contrary to what you think some people can work out their
    differences and go back to being friends after a divorce. Since you
    don't have the facts all you can do is assume.
    Here you go again, trying to turn your opinion in to facts. You don't
    know shit about what the natural father was like. Just because he's
    the natural father does not make him the automatic choice. If he is a
    good guy then he should have no problem getting legal custody of his
    daughter. But if Don is willing to put up a fight to keep her from her
    true father that should tell you there is something wrong with the
    natural dad to warrant this. So unless you have the "facts" before you
    your lies don't mean shit. Keep on making all the assumptions you
    want.

    Ruppster
     
    Ruppster, Jul 27, 2005
  9. Bill Walker

    Bill Walker Guest

    ROTFL... You sure want to get involved in all this, don't you ? Alright..
    give us all the scoop on that natural father, OK ? Obviously there is some
    cause for Don Binns to have even used all that as an excuse for aborting his
    long anticipated trip to Texas..

    Don Binns commenced his little preface to it, by asserting his wife had
    passed away.. As it developed, it became his ex-wife.. The overwhelmning
    grief that he expressed didn't seem to affect all the planning and
    organizing that he was doing in preparation for the t-shirt party and for
    the entire week following her death, he was posting all the arrangements for
    that trip..

    Cancer is a killer.. usually it is pronounced prior to death.. Don Binns was
    so actively involved in that silly party in Texas, maybe he just failed to
    notice, or perhaps he was kept out of the loop by his ex-wifes' legitimate
    family.. Either way, his expressed grief didn't seem to interfere until it
    was convenient.. hmmm.. Could have been an agreeable divorce, but more
    likely, Don Binns screwed up and the ex-wife kicked his sorry ass out of the
    house..

    Speculation about the relationship between that natural father and his
    daughter would be beside the point, because no one knows anything about it..
    Whatever it might be or have been, there is evidently some kind of situation
    that warrants concern for Don Binns.. After all, that was a part of the long
    winded excuse he gave for bowing out of that trip to Texas.. ROTFL... I'd
    suspect that my speculation is much closer to the truth than what you have
    offered.. At any rate, he doesn't need you to defend him, he can do that
    himself.. when and if he comes up with a likely story of excuse..

    Bill Walker
     
    Bill Walker, Jul 27, 2005
  10. Bill Walker

    Vic Guest

    One thing you've probably learned by now, is that the Walkers do not even
    try and 'debate', they try and 'convince'. If they fail at that, they
    assume you're an idiot, or that you're just plain picking on them (baiting).
    Once they reach that point, there's nothing they won't use to discredit you,
    even if they have to make some thing up. Welcome to the group of the
    'unconvinced', Ruppster. Look at it this way, it's a lot better then buying
    into their load of BS, right? o:)....

    Regards,

    Vic

    Vic
     
    Vic, Jul 27, 2005
  11. Bill Walker

    chornbe Guest



    Every time you speak you prove yourself one click worse on the
    despisometer.
     
    chornbe, Jul 27, 2005
  12. Bill Walker

    Ruppster Guest

    Exactly, no one knows anything about it (except Don of course).Thanks
    for proving my point for me. So how can you sit there and make
    statements that it's this way or another? You don't know jack shit and
    neither do I. But I'm not the one throwing out statements about Don's
    situation as if they were gospel. You like to slap people around if
    they dare to call you a liar yet you will call someone else a liar in
    a heartbeat when you don't have a single fact to back your claim.
    Sounds like one hell of a double standard to me. Keep up the good
    work, you do yourself proud.

    Ruppster
     
    Ruppster, Jul 27, 2005
  13. Bill Walker

    Tony D Guest

    Good luck Wakko, Congrats:)

    --
    Tony D
    1971 R75/5 boxer
    2004 R1150 Rockster
    Philly Hoodlum©#37
    SENS (less) LFS#38 PHS
    BS#149 FYYFMFFY
     
    Tony D, Jul 27, 2005
  14. Bill Walker

    Bownse Guest

    QkQfQCQqqqzbZCQTSsqQGGzrzRbpzWCZzZBPqjZVqTZRmDQTPQqDkQzPQQZbZwqCQmQqssZl
    qDZvBpzkqjQFsS
     
    Bownse, Jul 28, 2005
  15. Bill Walker

    Bownse Guest

    which he still seems to have a hard time understanding was a compliment
    to the grandfather.

    who, in my family, we call "gramps" and other nicnames without any
    disrespect meant or taken.
     
    Bownse, Jul 28, 2005
  16. Bill Walker

    Hank Guest

    Can you be more specific? Show us the treaty and the wording
    in it that was being violated at the time of bu$h's terror
    attack.
    Exactly which resolution was Iraq violating, and what did
    Iraq need to do in order to be in compliance?
    According to Hans Blix, Iraq was cooperating well
    with his inspection team. You seem to be spewing
    pro war, pro terrorism, pro hate lies again.

    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0127-04.htm

    "Iraq Largely Cooperating with Inspectors, UN Security Council Hears
    Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix said Iraq has largely cooperated
    with arms experts, in a report to the UN Security Council that could
    determine whether the world body backs military action against Baghdad."



    -


    http://www.commondreams.org/
    http://www.truthout.org/
    http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/
    http://thirdworldtraveler.com/
    http://counterpunch.org/
    http://responsiblewealth.org/
    http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/pol/80315675.html

    In September and October 2003, McClellan said he had spoken
    directly with Rove about the matter and that "he was not
    involved" in leaking Plame's identity to the news media.
    McClellan said at the time: "The president knows that Karl
    Rove wasn't involved," "It was a ridiculous suggestion"
    and "It's not true."
    Yet another in the endless stirng of bu$h's lies.

    "We argued, as did the security services in this country,
    that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the
    threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners
    have now paid the price of the Government ignoring such
    warnings." Respect MP George Galloway 7-7-05

    "They are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And
    there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to
    take... men with blind hatred and armed with lethal weapons
    who are capable of any atrocity... they respect no laws of
    warfare or morality."
    -bu$h describing his own illegal invasion of Iraq.
    http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm

    "Brutal and sadistic? By what girly-man standards? Compared
    to how Saddam treated his prisoners, a bit of humiliation was
    a walk in the park. AFAIK, No one died or even lost any blood."
    -Albert Nurick, a usenet kook and blatant liar, on the rape,
    torture and murder at bu$h's Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0512-10.htm

    "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things
    that matter." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

    "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them. And then
    he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did."
    -- George W. Bush

    "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the
    will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the
    Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
    -- Adolf Hitler

    "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
    or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is
    not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
    to the American public."
    -- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

    Don't let bu$h do to the United States what his very close
    friend and top campaign contributor, Ken Lay, did to Enron...
     
    Hank, Jul 28, 2005
  17. Bill Walker

    Hank Guest

    Well then, you're clearly unaware of the facts.


    http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/0618-28.htm
    http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0217-12.htm
    http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0730-06.htm

    Published on Wednesday, July 30, 2003 by the Minneapolis City Pages
    The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies about War and Terrorism
    Bring 'em On!

    by Steve Perry

    1) The administration was not bent on war with Iraq from 9/11 onward.

    Throughout the year leading up to war, the White House publicly
    maintained that the U.S. took weapons inspections seriously, that
    diplomacy would get its chance, that Saddam had the opportunity to
    prevent a U.S. invasion. The most pungent and concise evidence to the
    contrary comes from the president's own mouth. According to Time's
    March 31 road-to-war story, Bush popped in on national security
    adviser Condi Rice one day in March 2002, interrupting a meeting on UN
    sanctions against Iraq. Getting a whiff of the subject matter, W
    peremptorily waved his hand and told her, "**** Saddam. We're taking
    him out." Clare Short, Tony Blair's former secretary for international
    development, recently lent further credence to the anecdote. She told
    the London Guardian that Bush and Blair made a secret pact a few
    months afterward, in the summer of 2002, to invade Iraq in either
    February or March of this year.

    Last fall CBS News obtained meeting notes taken by a Rumsfeld aide at
    2:40 on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The notes indicate that
    Rumsfeld wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit
    S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]....
    Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

    Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the Bushmen's leading intellectual
    light, has long been rabid on the subject of Iraq. He reportedly told
    Vanity Fair writer Sam Tanenhaus off the record that he believes
    Saddam was connected not only to bin Laden and 9/11, but the 1995
    Oklahoma City bombing.

    The Bush administration's foreign policy plan was not based on
    September 11, or terrorism; those events only brought to the forefront
    a radical plan for U.S. control of the post-Cold War world that had
    been taking shape since the closing days of the first Bush presidency.
    Back then a small claque of planners, led by Wolfowitz, generated a
    draft document known as Defense Planning Guidance, which envisioned a
    U.S. that took advantage of its lone-superpower status to consolidate
    American control of the world both militarily and economically, to the
    point where no other nation could ever reasonably hope to challenge
    the U.S. Toward that end it envisioned what we now call "preemptive"
    wars waged to reset the geopolitical table.

    After a copy of DPG was leaked to the New York Times, subsequent
    drafts were rendered a little less frank, but the basic idea never
    changed. In 1997 Wolfowitz and his true believers--Richard Perle,
    William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld--formed an organization
    called Project for the New American Century to carry their cause
    forward. And though they all flocked around the Bush administration
    from the start, W never really embraced their plan until the events of
    September 11 left him casting around for a foreign policy plan.

    2) The invasion of Iraq was based on a reasonable belief that Iraq
    possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to the U.S.,
    a belief supported by available intelligence evidence.

    Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair that weapons of mass
    destruction were not really the main reason for invading Iraq: "The
    decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main
    justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for bureaucratic
    reasons.... [T]here were many other important factors as well." Right.
    But they did not come under the heading of self-defense.

    We now know how the Bushmen gathered their prewar intelligence: They
    set out to patch together their case for invading Iraq and ignored
    everything that contradicted it. In the end, this required that
    Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. set aside the findings of analysts from
    the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (the Pentagon's own spy
    bureau) and stake their claim largely on the basis of isolated,
    anecdotal testimony from handpicked Iraqi defectors. (See #5, Ahmed
    Chalabi.) But the administration did not just listen to the defectors;
    it promoted their claims in the press as a means of enlisting public
    opinion. The only reason so many Americans thought there was a
    connection between Saddam and al Qaeda in the first place was that the
    Bushmen trotted out Iraqi defectors making these sorts of claims to
    every major media outlet that would listen.

    Here is the verdict of Gregory Thielman, the recently retired head of
    the State Department's intelligence office: "I believe the Bush
    administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American
    people of the military threat posed by Iraq. This administration has
    had a faith-based intelligence attitude--we know the answers, give us
    the intelligence to support those answers." Elsewhere he has been
    quoted as saying, "The principal reasons that Americans did not
    understand the nature of the Iraqi threat in my view was the failure
    of senior administration officials to speak honestly about what the
    intelligence showed."

    3) Saddam tried to buy uranium in Niger.

    Lies and distortions tend to beget more lies and distortions, and here
    is W's most notorious case in point: Once the administration decided
    to issue a damage-controlling (they hoped) mea culpa in the matter of
    African uranium, they were obliged to couch it in another, more
    perilous lie: that the administration, and quite likely Bush himself,
    thought the uranium claim was true when he made it. But former acting
    ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times
    on July 6 that exploded the claim. Wilson, who traveled to Niger in
    2002 to investigate the uranium claims at the behest of the CIA and
    Dick Cheney's office and found them to be groundless, describes what
    followed this way: "Although I did not file a written report, there
    should be at least four documents in U.S. government archives
    confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's
    report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the
    embassy staff, a CIA report summing up my trip, and a specific answer
    from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have
    been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I
    have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard
    operating procedure."

    4) The aluminum tubes were proof of a nuclear program.

    The very next sentence of Bush's State of the Union address was just
    as egregious a lie as the uranium claim, though a bit cagier in its
    formulation. "Our intelligence sources tell us that [Saddam] has
    attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for
    nuclear weapons production." This is altogether false in its
    implication (that this is the likeliest use for these materials) and
    may be untrue in its literal sense as well. As the London Independent
    summed it up recently, "The U.S. persistently alleged that Baghdad
    tried to buy high-strength aluminum tubes whose only use could be in
    gas centrifuges, needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Equally
    persistently, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the tubes
    were being used for artillery rockets. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed
    El Baradei, told the UN Security Council in January that the tubes
    were not even suitable for centrifuges." [emphasis added]

    5) Iraq's WMDs were sent to Syria for hiding.

    Or Iran, or.... "They shipped them out!" was a rallying cry for the
    administration in the first few nervous weeks of finding no WMDs, but
    not a bit of supporting evidence has emerged.

    6) The CIA was primarily responsible for any prewar intelligence
    errors or distortions regarding Iraq.

    Don't be misled by the news that CIA director George Tenet has taken
    the fall for Bush's falsehoods in the State of the Uranium address. As
    the journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote shortly before the war, "Even as
    it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a
    second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The
    Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to
    produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. ...
    Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low,
    with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the
    push for war."

    In short, Tenet fell on his sword when he vetted Bush's State of the
    Union yarns. And now he has had to get up and fall on it again.

    7) An International Atomic Energy Agency report indicated that Iraq
    could be as little as six months from making nuclear weapons.

    Alas: The claim had to be retracted when the IAEA pointed out that no
    such report existed.

    8) Saddam was involved with bin Laden and al Qaeda in the plotting of
    9/11.

    One of the most audacious and well-traveled of the Bushmen's fibs,
    this one hangs by two of the slenderest evidentiary threads
    imaginable: first, anecdotal testimony by isolated, handpicked Iraqi
    defectors that there was an al Qaeda training camp in Iraq, a claim
    CIA analysts did not corroborate and that postwar U.S. military
    inspectors conceded did not exist; and second, old intelligence
    accounts of a 1991 meeting in Baghdad between a bin Laden emissary and
    officers from Saddam's intelligence service, which did not lead to any
    subsequent contact that U.S. or UK spies have ever managed to turn up.
    According to former State Department intelligence chief Gregory
    Thielman, the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies well in advance
    of the war was that "there was no significant pattern of cooperation
    between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist operation."

    9) The U.S. wants democracy in Iraq and the Middle East.

    Democracy is the last thing the U.S. can afford in Iraq, as anyone who
    has paid attention to the state of Arab popular sentiment already
    realizes. Representative government in Iraq would mean the rapid
    expulsion of U.S. interests. Rather, the U.S. wants westernized,
    secular leadership regimes that will stay in pocket and work to
    neutralize the politically ambitious anti-Western religious sects
    popping up everywhere. If a little brutality and graft are required to
    do the job, it has never troubled the U.S. in the past. Ironically,
    these standards describe someone more or less like Saddam Hussein.
    Judging from the state of civil affairs in Iraq now, the Bush
    administration will no doubt be looking for a strongman again, if and
    when they are finally compelled to install anyone at all.

    10) Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress are a homegrown
    Iraqi political force, not a U.S.-sponsored front.

    Chalabi is a more important bit player in the Iraq war than most
    people realize, and not because he was the U.S.'s failed choice to
    lead a post-Saddam government. It was Chalabi and his INC that
    funneled compliant defectors to the Bush administration, where they
    attested to everything the Bushmen wanted to believe about Saddam and
    Iraq (meaning, mainly, al Qaeda connections and WMD programs). The
    administration proceeded to take their dubious word over that of the
    combined intelligence of the CIA and DIA, which indicated that Saddam
    was not in the business of sponsoring foreign terrorism and posed no
    imminent threat to anyone.

    Naturally Chalabi is despised nowadays round the halls of Langley, but
    it wasn't always so. The CIA built the Iraqi National Congress and
    installed Chalabi at the helm back in the days following Gulf War I,
    when the thought was to topple Saddam by whipping up and sponsoring an
    internal opposition. It didn't work; from the start Iraqis have
    disliked and distrusted Chalabi. Moreover, his erratic and duplicitous
    ways have alienated practically everyone in the U.S. foreign policy
    establishment as well--except for Rumsfeld's Department of Defense,
    and therefore the White House.

    11) The United States is waging a war on terror.

    Practically any school child could recite the terms of the Bush
    Doctrine, and may have to before the Ashcroft Justice Department is
    finished: The global war on terror is about confronting terrorist
    groups and the nations that harbor them. The United States does not
    make deals with terrorists or nations where they find safe lodging.

    Leave aside the blind eye that the U.S. has always cast toward
    Israel's actions in the territories. How are the Bushmen doing
    elsewhere vis-Ă -vis their announced principles? We can start with
    their fabrications and manipulations of Iraqi WMD evidence--which, in
    the eyes of weapons inspectors, the UN Security Council, American
    intelligence analysts, and the world at large, did not pose any
    imminent threat.

    The events of recent months have underscored a couple more gaping
    violations of W's cardinal anti-terror rules. In April the Pentagon
    made a cooperation pact with the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), an
    anti-Iranian terrorist group based in Iraq. Prior to the 1979 Iranian
    revolution, American intelligence blamed it for the death of several
    U.S. nationals in Iran.

    Most glaring of all is the Bush administration's remarkable treatment
    of Saudi Arabia. Consider: Eleven of the nineteen September 11
    hijackers were Saudis. The ruling House of Saud has longstanding and
    well-known ties to al Qaeda and other terrorist outfits, which it
    funds (read protection money) to keep them from making mischief at
    home. The May issue of Atlantic Monthly had a nice piece on the House
    of Saud that recounts these connections.

    Yet the Bush government has never said boo regarding the Saudis and
    international terrorism. In fact, when terror bombers struck Riyadh in
    May, hitting compounds that housed American workers as well, Colin
    Powell went out of his way to avoid tarring the House of Saud:
    "Terrorism strikes everywhere and everyone. It is a threat to the
    civilized world. We will commit ourselves again to redouble our
    efforts to work closely with our Saudi friends and friends all around
    the world to go after al Qaeda." Later it was alleged that the Riyadh
    bombers purchased some of their ordnance from the Saudi National
    Guard, but neither Powell nor anyone else saw fit to revise their
    statements about "our Saudi friends."

    Why do the Bushmen give a pass to the Saudi terror hotbed? Because the
    House of Saud controls a lot of oil, and they are still (however
    tenuously) on our side. And that, not terrorism, is what matters most
    in Bush's foreign policy calculus.

    While the bomb craters in Riyadh were still smoking, W held a meeting
    with Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Speaking publicly
    afterward, he outlined a deal for U.S. military aid to the Philippines
    in exchange for greater "cooperation" in getting American hands round
    the throats of Filipino terrorists. He mentioned in particular the
    U.S.'s longtime nemesis Abu Sayyaf--and he also singled out the Moro
    Islamic Liberation Front, a small faction based on Mindanao, the
    southernmost big island in the Philippine chain.

    Of course it's by purest coincidence that Mindanao is the location of
    Asia's richest oil reserves.

    12) The U.S. has made progress against world terrorist elements, in
    particular by crippling al Qaeda.

    A resurgent al Qaeda has been making international news since around
    the time of the Saudi Arabia bombings in May. The best coverage by far
    is that of Asia Times correspondent Syed Saleem Shahzad. According to
    Shahzad's detailed accounts, al Qaeda has reorganized itself along
    leaner, more diffuse lines, effectively dissolving itself into a
    coalition of localized units that mean to strike frequently, on a
    small scale, and in multiple locales around the world. Since claiming
    responsibility for the May Riyadh bombings, alleged al Qaeda
    communiqués have also claimed credit for some of the strikes at U.S.
    troops in Iraq.

    13) The Bush administration has made Americans safer from terror on
    U.S. soil.

    Like the Pentagon "plan" for occupying postwar Iraq, the Department of
    Homeland Security is mainly a Bush administration PR dirigible
    untethered to anything of substance. It's a scandal waiting to happen,
    and the only good news for W is that it's near the back of a fairly
    long line of scandals waiting to happen.

    On May 26 the trade magazine Federal Computer Week published a report
    on DHS's first 100 days. At that point the nerve center of Bush's
    domestic war on terror had only recently gotten e-mail service. As for
    the larger matter of creating a functioning organizational grid and,
    more important, a software architecture plan for integrating the
    enormous mass of data that DHS is supposed to process--nada. In the
    nearly two years since the administration announced its intention to
    create a cabinet-level homeland security office, nothing meaningful
    has been accomplished. And there are no funds to implement a network
    plan if they had one. According to the magazine, "Robert David Steele,
    an author and former intelligence officer, points out that there are
    at least 30 separate intelligence systems [theoretically feeding into
    DHS] and no money to connect them to one another or make them
    interoperable. 'There is nothing in the president's homeland security
    program that makes America safer,' he said."

    14) The Bush administration has nothing to hide concerning the events
    of September 11, 2001, or the intelligence evidence collected prior to
    that day.

    First Dick Cheney personally intervened to scuttle a broad
    congressional investigation of the day's events and their origins. And
    for the past several months the administration has fought a quiet
    rear-guard action culminating in last week's delayed release of
    Congress's more modest 9/11 report. The White House even went so far
    as to classify after the fact materials that had already been
    presented in public hearing.

    What were they trying to keep under wraps? The Saudi connection,
    mostly, and though 27 pages of the details have been excised from the
    public report, there is still plenty of evidence lurking in its
    extensively massaged text. (When you see the phrase "foreign nation"
    substituted in brackets, it's nearly always Saudi Arabia.) The report
    documents repeated signs that there was a major attack in the works
    with extensive help from Saudi nationals and apparently also at least
    one member of the government. It also suggests that is one reason
    intel operatives didn't chase the story harder: Saudi Arabia was by
    policy fiat a "friendly" nation and therefore no threat. The report
    does not explore the administration's response to the intelligence
    briefings it got; its purview is strictly the performance of
    intelligence agencies. All other questions now fall to the independent
    9/11 commission, whose work is presently being slowed by the White
    House's foot-dragging in turning over evidence.

    15) U.S. air defenses functioned according to protocols on September
    11, 2001.

    Old questions abound here. The central mystery, of how U.S. air
    defenses could have responded so poorly on that day, is fairly easy to
    grasp. A cursory look at that morning's timeline of events is enough.
    In very short strokes:

    8:13 Flight 11 disobeys air traffic instructions and turns off its
    transponder.

    8:40 NORAD command center claims first notification of likely Flight
    11 hijacking.

    8:42 Flight 175 veers off course and shuts down its transponder.

    8:43 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 175 hijacking.

    8:46 Flight 11 hits the World Trade Center north tower.

    8:46 Flight 77 goes off course.

    9:03 Flight 175 hits the WTC south tower.

    9:16 Flight 93 goes off course.

    9:16 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 93 hijacking.

    9:24 NORAD claims first notification of likely Flight 77 hijacking.

    9:37 Flight 77 hits the Pentagon.

    10:06 Flight 93 crashes in a Pennsylvania field.

    The open secret here is that stateside U.S. air defenses had been
    reduced to paltry levels since the end of the Cold War. According to a
    report by Paul Thompson published at the endlessly informative Center
    for Cooperative Research website (www.cooperativeresearch.org),
    "[O]nly two air force bases in the Northeast region... were formally
    part of NORAD's defensive system. One was Otis Air National Guard
    Base, on Massachusetts's Cape Cod peninsula and about 188 miles east
    of New York City. The other was Langley Air Force Base near Norfolk,
    Virginia, and about 129 miles south of Washington. During the Cold
    War, the U.S. had literally thousands of fighters on alert. But as the
    Cold War wound down, this number was reduced until it reached only 14
    fighters in the continental U.S. by 9/11."

    But even an underpowered air defense system on slow-response status
    (15 minutes, officially, on 9/11) does not explain the magnitude of
    NORAD's apparent failures that day. Start with the discrepancy in the
    times at which NORAD commanders claim to have learned of the various
    hijackings. By 8:43 a.m., NORAD had been notified of two probable
    hijackings in the previous five minutes. If there was such a thing as
    a system-wide air defense crisis plan, it should have kicked in at
    that moment. Three minutes later, at 8:46, Flight 11 crashed into the
    first WTC tower. By then alerts should have been going out to all
    regional air traffic centers of apparent coordinated hijackings in
    progress. Yet when Flight 77, which eventually crashed into the
    Pentagon, was hijacked three minutes later, at 8:46, NORAD claims not
    to have learned of it until 9:24, 38 minutes after the fact and just
    13 minutes before it crashed into the Pentagon.

    The professed lag in reacting to the hijacking of Flight 93 is just as
    striking. NORAD acknowledged learning of the hijacking at 9:16, yet
    the Pentagon's position is that it had not yet intercepted the plane
    when it crashed in a Pennsylvania field just minutes away from
    Washington, D.C. at 10:06, a full 50 minutes later.

    In fact, there are a couple of other circumstantial details of the
    crash, discussed mostly in Pennsylvania newspapers and barely noted in
    national wire stories, that suggest Flight 93 may have been shot down
    after all. First, officials never disputed reports that there was a
    secondary debris field six miles from the main crash site, and a few
    press accounts said that it included one of the plane's engines. A
    secondary debris field points to an explosion on board, from one of
    two probable causes--a terrorist bomb carried on board or an Air Force
    missile. And no investigation has ever intimated that any of the four
    terror crews were toting explosives. They kept to simple tools like
    the box cutters, for ease in passing security. Second, a handful of
    eyewitnesses in the rural area around the crash site did report seeing
    low-flying U.S. military jets around the time of the crash.

    Which only raises another question. Shooting down Flight 93 would have
    been incontestably the right thing to do under the circumstances. More
    than that, it would have constituted the only evidence of anything
    NORAD and the Pentagon had done right that whole morning. So why deny
    it? Conversely, if fighter jets really were not on the scene when 93
    crashed, why weren't they? How could that possibly be?

    16) The Bush administration had a plan for restoring essential
    services and rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure after the shooting war
    ended.

    The question of what the U.S. would do to rebuild Iraq was raised
    before the shooting started. I remember reading a press briefing in
    which a Pentagon official boasted that at the time, the American
    reconstruction team had already spent three weeks planning the postwar
    world! The Pentagon's first word was that the essentials of rebuilding
    the country would take about $10 billion and three months; this stood
    in fairly stark contrast to UN estimates that an aggressive rebuilding
    program could cost up to $100 billion a year for a minimum of three
    years.

    After the shooting stopped it was evident the U.S. had no plan for
    keeping order in the streets, much less commencing to rebuild. (They
    are upgrading certain oil facilities, but that's another matter.)
    There are two ways to read this. The popular version is that it proves
    what bumblers Bush and his crew really are. And it's certainly true
    that where the details of their grand designs are concerned, the
    administration tends to have postures rather than plans. But this
    ignores the strategic advantages the U.S. stands to reap by leaving
    Iraqi domestic affairs in a chronic state of (managed, they hope)
    chaos. Most important, it provides an excuse for the continued
    presence of a large U.S. force, which ensures that America will call
    the shots in putting Iraqi oil back on the world market and seeing to
    it that the Iraqis don't fall in with the wrong sort of oil company
    partners. A long military occupation is also a practical means of
    accomplishing something the U.S. cannot do officially, which is to
    maintain air bases in Iraq indefinitely. (This became necessary after
    the U.S. agreed to vacate its bases in Saudi Arabia earlier this year
    to try to defuse anti-U.S. political tensions there.)

    Meanwhile, the U.S. plans to pay for whatever rebuilding it gets
    around to doing with the proceeds of Iraqi oil sales, an enormous cash
    box the U.S. will oversee for the good of the Iraqi people.

    In other words, "no plan" may have been the plan the Bushmen were
    intent on pursuing all along.

    17) The U.S. has made a good-faith effort at peacekeeping in Iraq
    during the postwar period.

    "Some [looters] shot big grins at American soldiers and Marines or put
    down their prizes to offer a thumbs-up or a quick finger across the
    throat and a whispered word--Saddam--before grabbing their loot and
    vanishing."

    --Robert Fisk, London Independent, 4/11/03

    Despite the many clashes between U.S. troops and Iraqis in the three
    months since the heavy artillery fell silent, the postwar performance
    of U.S. forces has been more remarkable for the things they have not
    done--their failure to intervene in civil chaos or to begin
    reestablishing basic civil procedures. It isn't the soldiers' fault.
    Traditionally an occupation force is headed up by military police
    units schooled to interact with the natives and oversee the
    restoration of goods and services. But Rumsfeld has repeatedly
    declined advice to rotate out the combat troops sooner rather than
    later and replace some of them with an MP force. Lately this has been
    a source of escalating criticism within military ranks.

    18) Despite vocal international opposition, the U.S. was backed by
    most of the world, as evidenced by the 40-plus-member Coalition of the
    Willing.

    When the whole world opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the outcry was
    so loud that it briefly pierced the slumber of the American public,
    which poured out its angst in poll numbers that bespoke little taste
    for a war without the UN's blessing. So it became necessary to assure
    the folks at home that the whole world was in fact for the invasion.
    Thus was born the Coalition of the Willing, consisting of the U.S. and
    UK, with Australia caddying--and 40-some additional co-champions of
    U.S.-style democracy in the Middle East, whose ranks included such
    titans of diplomacy and pillars of representative government as
    Angola, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Eritrea, and Micronesia. If the American
    public noticed the ruse, all was nonetheless forgotten when Baghdad
    fell. Everybody loves a winner.

    19) This war was notable for its protection of civilians.

    This from the Herald of Scotland, May 23: "American guns, bombs, and
    missiles killed more civilians in the recent war in Iraq than in any
    conflict since Vietnam, according to preliminary assessments carried
    out by the UN, international aid agencies, and independent study
    groups. Despite U.S. boasts this was the fastest, most clinical
    campaign in military history, a first snapshot of 'collateral damage'
    indicates that between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi non-combatants died in
    the course of the hi-tech blitzkrieg."

    20) The looting of archaeological and historic sites in Baghdad was
    unanticipated.

    General Jay Garner himself, then the head man for postwar Iraq, told
    the Washington Times that he had put the Iraqi National Museum second
    on a list of sites requiring protection after the fall of the Saddam
    government, and he had no idea why the recommendation was ignored.
    It's also a matter of record that the administration had met in
    January with a group of U.S. scholars concerned with the preservation
    of Iraq's fabulous Sumerian antiquities. So the war planners were
    aware of the riches at stake. According to Scotland's Sunday Herald,
    the Pentagon took at least one other meeting as well: "[A] coalition
    of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the
    American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), met with U.S. Defense and
    State department officials prior to the start of military action to
    offer its assistance.... The group is known to consist of a number of
    influential dealers who favor a relaxation of Iraq's tight
    restrictions on the ownership and export of antiquities....
    [Archaeological Institute of America] president Patty Gerstenblith
    said: 'The ACCP's agenda is to encourage the collecting of antiquities
    through weakening the laws of archaeologically rich nations and
    eliminate national ownership of antiquities to allow for easier export.'"

    21) Saddam was planning to provide WMD to terrorist groups.

    This is very concisely debunked in Walter Pincus's July 21 Washington
    Post story, so I'll quote him: "'Iraq could decide on any given day to
    provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or
    individual terrorists,' President Bush said in Cincinnati on October
    7.... But declassified portions of a still-secret National
    Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released Friday by the White House show
    that at the time of the president's speech the U.S. intelligence
    community judged that possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE,
    which began circulating October 2, shows the intelligence services
    were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda
    terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was
    collapsing after a military attack by the United States."

    22) Saddam was capable of launching a chemical or biological attack in
    45 minutes.

    Again the WashPost wraps it up nicely: "The 45-minute claim is at the
    center of a scandal in Britain that led to the apparent suicide on
    Friday of a British weapons scientist who had questioned the
    government's use of the allegation. The scientist, David Kelly, was
    being investigated by the British parliament as the suspected source
    of a BBC report that the 45-minute claim was added to Britain's public
    'dossier' on Iraq in September at the insistence of an aide to Prime
    Minister Tony Blair--and against the wishes of British intelligence,
    which said the charge was from a single source and was considered
    unreliable."

    23) The Bush administration is seeking to create a viable Palestinian
    state.

    The interests of the U.S. toward the Palestinians have not
    changed--not yet, at least. Israel's "security needs" are still the
    U.S.'s sturdiest pretext for its military role in policing the Middle
    East and arming its Israeli proxies. But the U.S.'s immediate needs
    have tilted since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now the
    Bushmen need a fig leaf--to confuse, if not exactly cover, their
    designs, and to give shaky pro-U.S. governments in the region some
    scrap to hold out to their own restive peoples. Bush's roadmap has
    scared the hell out of the Israeli right, but they have little reason
    to worry. Press reports in the U.S. and Israel have repeatedly
    telegraphed the assurance that Bush won't try to push Ariel Sharon any
    further than he's comfortable going.

    24) People detained by the U.S. after 9/11 were legitimate terror
    suspects.

    Quite the contrary, as disclosed officially in last month's critical
    report on U.S. detainees from the Justice Department's own Office of
    Inspector General. A summary analysis of post-9/11 detentions posted
    at the UC-Davis website states, "None of the 1,200 foreigners arrested
    and detained in secret after September 11 was charged with an act of
    terrorism. Instead, after periods of detention that ranged from weeks
    to months, most were deported for violating immigration laws. The
    government said that 752 of 1,200 foreigners arrested after September
    11 were in custody in May 2002, but only 81 were still in custody in
    September 2002."

    25) The U.S. is obeying the Geneva conventions in its treatment of
    terror-related suspects, prisoners, and detainees.

    The entire mumbo-jumbo about "unlawful combatants" was conceived to
    skirt the Geneva conventions on treatment of prisoners by making them
    out to be something other than POWs. Here is the actual wording of
    Donald Rumsfeld's pledge, freighted with enough qualifiers to make it
    absolutely meaningless: "We have indicated that we do plan to, for the
    most part, treat them in a manner that is reasonably consistent with
    the Geneva conventions to the extent they are appropriate." Meanwhile
    the administration has treated its prisoners--many of whom, as we are
    now seeing confirmed in legal hearings, have no plausible connection
    to terrorist enterprises--in a manner that blatantly violates several
    key Geneva provisions regarding humane treatment and housing.

    26) Shots rang out from the Palestine hotel, directed at U.S.
    soldiers, just before a U.S. tank fired on the hotel, killing two
    journalists.

    Eyewitnesses to the April 8 attack uniformly denied any gunfire from
    the hotel. And just two hours prior to firing on the hotel, U.S.
    forces had bombed the Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera, killing a
    Jordanian reporter. Taken together, and considering the timing, they
    were deemed a warning to unembedded journalists covering the fall of
    Baghdad around them. The day's events seem to have been an extreme
    instance of a more surreptitious pattern of hostility demonstrated by
    U.S. and UK forces toward foreign journalists and those non-attached
    Western reporters who moved around the country at will. (One of them,
    Terry Lloyd of Britain's ITN, was shot to death by UK troops at a
    checkpoint in late March under circumstances the British government
    has refused to disclose.)

    Some days after firing on the Palestine Hotel, the U.S. sent in a
    commando unit to raid select floors of the hotel that were known to be
    occupied by journalists, and the news gatherers were held on the floor
    at gunpoint while their rooms were searched. A Centcom spokesman later
    explained cryptically that intelligence reports suggested there were
    people "not friendly to the U.S." staying at the hotel. Allied forces
    also bombed the headquarters of Abu Dhabi TV, injuring several.

    27) U.S. troops "rescued" Private Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital.

    If I had wanted to run up the tally of administration lies, the Lynch
    episode alone could be parsed into several more. Officials claimed
    that Lynch and her comrades were taken after a firefight in which
    Lynch battled back bravely. Later they announced with great fanfare
    that U.S. Special Forces had rescued Lynch from her captors. They
    reported that she had been shot and stabbed. Later yet, they reported
    that the recuperating Lynch had no memory of the events.

    Bit by bit it all proved false. Lynch's injuries occurred when the
    vehicle she was riding in crashed. She did not fire on anybody and she
    was not shot or stabbed. The Iraqi soldiers who had been holding her
    had abandoned the hospital where she was staying the night before U.S.
    troops came to get her--a development her "rescuers" were aware of. In
    fact her doctor had tried to return her to the Americans the previous
    evening after the Iraqi soldiers left. But he was forced to turn back
    when U.S. troops fired on the approaching ambulance. As for Lynch's
    amnesia, her family has told reporters her memory is perfectly fine.

    28) The populace of Baghdad and of Iraq generally turned out en masse
    to greet U.S. troops as liberators.

    There were indeed scattered expressions of thanks when U.S. divisions
    rolled in, but they were neither as extensive nor as enthusiastic as
    Bush image-makers pretended. Within a day or two of the Saddam
    government's fall, the scene in the Baghdad streets turned to
    wholesale ransacking and vandalism. Within the week, large-scale
    protests of the U.S. occupation had already begun occurring in every
    major Iraqi city.

    29) A spontaneous crowd of cheering Iraqis showed up in a Baghdad
    square to celebrate the toppling of Saddam's statue.

    A long-distance shot of the same scene that was widely posted on the
    internet shows that the teeming mob consisted of only one or two
    hundred souls, contrary to the impression given by all the close-up TV
    news shots of what appeared to be a massive gathering. It was later
    reported that members of Ahmed Chalabi's local entourage made up most
    of the throng.

    30) No major figure in the Bush administration said that the Iraqi
    populace would turn out en masse to welcome the U.S. military as
    liberators.

    When confronted with--oh, call them reality deficits--one habit of the
    Bushmen is to deny that they made erroneous or misleading statements
    to begin with, secure in the knowledge that the media will rarely
    muster the energy to look it up and call them on it. They did it when
    their bold prewar WMD predictions failed to pan out (We never said it
    would be easy! No, they only implied it), and they did it when the
    "jubilant Iraqis" who took to the streets after the fall of Saddam
    turned out to be anything but (We never promised they would welcome us
    with open arms!).

    But they did. March 16, Dick Cheney, Meet the Press: The Iraqis are
    desperate "to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as
    liberators the United States when we come to do that.... [T]he vast
    majority of them would turn on [Saddam] in a minute if, in fact, they
    thought they could do so safely").

    31) The U.S. achieved its stated objectives in Afghanistan, and
    vanquished the Taliban.

    According to accounts in the Asia Times of Hong Kong, the U.S. held a
    secret meeting earlier this year with Taliban leaders and Pakistani
    intelligence officials to offer a deal to the Taliban for inclusion in
    the Afghan government. (Main condition: Dump Mullah Omar.) As Michael
    Tomasky commented in The American Prospect, "The first thing you may
    be wondering: Why is there a possible role for the Taliban in a future
    government? Isn't that fellow Hamid Karzai running things, and isn't
    it all going basically okay? As it turns out, not really and not at
    all.... The reality... is an escalating guerilla war in which 'small
    hit-and-run attacks are a daily feature in most parts of the country,
    while face-to-face skirmishes are common in the former Taliban
    stronghold around Kandahar in the south.'"

    32) Careful science demonstrates that depleted uranium is no big risk
    to the population.

    Pure nonsense. While the government has trotted out expert after
    expert to debunk the dangers of depleted uranium, DU has been
    implicated in health troubles experienced both by Iraqis and by U.S.
    and allied soldiers in the first Gulf War. Unexploded DU shells are
    not a grave danger, but detonated ones release particles that
    eventually find their way into air, soil, water, and food.

    While we're on the subject, the BBC reported a couple of months ago
    that recent tests of Afghani civilians have turned up with unusually
    high concentrations of non-depleted uranium isotopes in their urine.
    International monitors have called it almost conclusive evidence that
    the U.S. used a new kind of uranium-laced bomb in the Afghan war.

    33) The looting of Iraqi nuclear facilities presented no big risk to
    the population.

    Commanders on the scene, and Rumsfeld back in Washington, immediately
    assured everyone that the looting of a facility where raw uranium
    powder (so-called "yellowcake") and several other radioactive isotopes
    were stored was no serious danger to the populace--yet the looting of
    the facility came to light in part because, as the Washington Times
    noted, "U.S. and British newspaper reports have suggested that
    residents of the area were suffering from severe ill health after
    tipping out yellowcake powder from barrels and using them to store food."

    34) U.S. troops were under attack when they fired upon a crowd of
    civilian protesters in Mosul.

    April 15: U.S. troops fire into a crowd of protesters when it grows
    angry at the pro-Western speech being given by the town's new mayor,
    Mashaan al-Juburi. Seven are killed and dozens injured. Eyewitness
    accounts say the soldiers spirit Juburi away as he is pelted with
    objects by the crowd, then take sniper positions and begin firing on
    the crowd.

    35) U.S. troops were under attack when they fired upon two separate
    crowds of civilian protesters in Fallujah.

    April 28: American troops fire into a crowd of demonstrators gathered
    on Saddam's birthday, killing 13 and injuring 75. U.S. commanders
    claim the troops had come under fire, but eyewitnesses contradict the
    account, saying the troops started shooting after they were spooked by
    warning shots fired over the crowd by one of the Americans' own
    Humvees. Two days later U.S. soldiers fired on another crowd in
    Fallujah, killing three more.

    36) The Iraqis fighting occupation forces consist almost entirely of
    "Saddam supporters" or "Ba'ath remnants."

    This has been the subject of considerable spin on the Bushmen's part
    in the past month, since they launched Operation Sidewinder to capture
    or kill remaining opponents of the U.S. occupation. It's true that the
    most fierce (but by no means all) of the recent guerrilla opposition
    has been concentrated in the Sunni-dominated areas that were Saddam's
    stronghold, and there is no question that Saddam partisans are
    numerous there. But, perhaps for that reason, many other guerrilla
    fighters have flocked there to wage jihad, both from within and
    without Iraq. Around the time of the U.S. invasion, some 10,000 or so
    foreign fighters had crossed into Iraq, and I've seen no informed
    estimate of how many more may have joined them since.

    (No room here, but if you check the online version of this story,
    there's a footnote regarding one less-than-obvious reason former
    Republican Guard personnel may be fighting mad at this point.)

    37) The bidding process for Iraq rebuilding contracts displayed no
    favoritism toward Bush and Cheney's oil/gas cronies.

    Most notoriously, Dick Cheney's former energy-sector employer,
    Halliburton, was all over the press dispatches about the first round
    of rebuilding contracts. So much so that they were eventually obliged
    to bow out of the running for a $1 billion reconstruction contract for
    the sake of their own PR profile. But Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg
    Brown Root still received the first major plum in the form of a $7
    billion contract to tend to oil field fires and (the real purpose) to
    do any retooling necessary to get the oil pumping at a decent rate, a
    deal that allows them a cool $500 million in profit. The fact that
    Dick Cheney's office is still fighting tooth and nail to block any
    disclosure of the individuals and companies with whom his energy task
    force consulted tells everything you need to know.

    38) "We found the WMDs!"

    There have been at least half a dozen junctures at which the Bushmen
    have breathlessly informed the press that allied troops had found the
    WMD smoking gun, including the president himself, who on June 1 told
    reporters, "For those who say we haven't found the banned
    manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."

    Shouldn't these quickly falsified statements be counted as errors
    rather than lies? Under the circumstances, no. First, there is just
    too voluminous a record of the administration going on the media
    offensive to tout lines they know to be flimsy. This appears to be
    more of same. Second, if the great genius Karl Rove and the rest of
    the Bushmen have demonstrated that they understand anything about the
    propaganda potential of the historical moment they've inherited, they
    surely understand that repetition is everything. Get your message out
    regularly, and even if it's false a good many people will believe it.

    Finally, we don't have to speculate about whether the administration
    would really plant bogus WMD evidence in the American media, because
    they have already done it, most visibly in the case of Judith Miller
    of the New York Times and the Iraqi defector "scientist" she wrote
    about at the military's behest on April 21. Miller did not even get to
    speak with the purported scientist, but she graciously passed on
    several things American commanders claimed he said: that Iraq only
    destroyed its chemical weapons days before the war, that WMD materiel
    had been shipped to Syria, and that Iraq had ties to al Qaeda. As
    Slate media critic Jack Shafer told WNYC Radio's On the Media program,
    "When you... look at [her story], you find that it's gas, it's air.
    There's no way to judge the value of her information, because it comes
    from an unnamed source that won't let her verify any aspect of it. And
    if you dig into the story... you'll find out that the only thing that
    Miller has independently observed is a man that the military says is
    the scientist, wearing a baseball cap, pointing at mounds in the dirt."

    39) "The Iraqi people are now free."

    So says the current U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, in a
    recent New York Times op-ed. He failed to add that disagreeing can get
    you shot or arrested under the terms of the Pentagon's latest plan for
    pacifying Iraq, Operation Sidewinder (see #36), a military op launched
    last month to wipe out all remaining Ba'athists and Saddam
    partisans--meaning, in practice, anyone who resists the U.S.
    occupation too zealously.

    40) God told Bush to invade Iraq.

    Not long after the September 11 attacks, neoconservative high priest
    Norman Podhoretz wrote: "One hears that Bush, who entered the White
    House without a clear sense of what he wanted to do there, now feels
    there was a purpose behind his election all along; as a born-again
    Christian, it is said, he believes he was chosen by God to eradicate
    the evil of terrorism from the world."

    No, he really believes it, or so he would like us to think. The
    Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, told the Israeli newspaper
    Ha'aretz that Bush made the following pronouncement during a recent
    meeting between the two: "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I
    struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I
    did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East."

    Oddly, it never got much play back home.




    --


    http://www.commondreams.org/
    http://www.truthout.org/
    http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/
    http://thirdworldtraveler.com/
    http://counterpunch.org/
    http://responsiblewealth.org/
    http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/pol/80315675.html

    In September and October 2003, McClellan said he had spoken
    directly with Rove about the matter and that "he was not
    involved" in leaking Plame's identity to the news media.
    McClellan said at the time: "The president knows that Karl
    Rove wasn't involved," "It was a ridiculous suggestion"
    and "It's not true."
    Yet another in the endless stirng of bu$h's lies.

    "We argued, as did the security services in this country,
    that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the
    threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners
    have now paid the price of the Government ignoring such
    warnings." Respect MP George Galloway 7-7-05

    "They are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And
    there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to
    take... men with blind hatred and armed with lethal weapons
    who are capable of any atrocity... they respect no laws of
    warfare or morality."
    -bu$h describing his own illegal invasion of Iraq.
    http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm

    "Brutal and sadistic? By what girly-man standards? Compared
    to how Saddam treated his prisoners, a bit of humiliation was
    a walk in the park. AFAIK, No one died or even lost any blood."
    -Albert Nurick, a usenet kook and blatant liar, on the rape,
    torture and murder at bu$h's Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0512-10.htm

    "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things
    that matter." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

    "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them. And then
    he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did."
    -- George W. Bush

    "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the
    will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the
    Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
    -- Adolf Hitler

    "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
    or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is
    not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
    to the American public."
    -- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

    Don't let bu$h do to the United States what his very close
    friend and top campaign contributor, Ken Lay, did to Enron...
     
    Hank, Jul 28, 2005
  18. Bill Walker

    Hank Guest

    You deny proven facts, and make innacurate claims
    that you're unable to support - like these:

    "He was defying UN resolutions."

    Exactly which resolution was Iraq violating, and what did
    Iraq need to do in order to be in compliance?

    "He was deceiving weapons inspectors."

    According to Hans Blix, Iraq was cooperating well
    with his inspection team.





    -


    http://www.commondreams.org/
    http://www.truthout.org/
    http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/
    http://thirdworldtraveler.com/
    http://counterpunch.org/
    http://responsiblewealth.org/
    http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/pol/80315675.html

    In September and October 2003, McClellan said he had spoken
    directly with Rove about the matter and that "he was not
    involved" in leaking Plame's identity to the news media.
    McClellan said at the time: "The president knows that Karl
    Rove wasn't involved," "It was a ridiculous suggestion"
    and "It's not true."
    Yet another in the endless stirng of bu$h's lies.

    "We argued, as did the security services in this country,
    that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the
    threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners
    have now paid the price of the Government ignoring such
    warnings." Respect MP George Galloway 7-7-05

    "They are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And
    there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to
    take... men with blind hatred and armed with lethal weapons
    who are capable of any atrocity... they respect no laws of
    warfare or morality."
    -bu$h describing his own illegal invasion of Iraq.
    http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm

    "Brutal and sadistic? By what girly-man standards? Compared
    to how Saddam treated his prisoners, a bit of humiliation was
    a walk in the park. AFAIK, No one died or even lost any blood."
    -Albert Nurick, a usenet kook and blatant liar, on the rape,
    torture and murder at bu$h's Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0512-10.htm

    "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things
    that matter." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

    "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them. And then
    he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did."
    -- George W. Bush

    "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the
    will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the
    Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
    -- Adolf Hitler

    "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
    or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is
    not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
    to the American public."
    -- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

    Don't let bu$h do to the United States what his very close
    friend and top campaign contributor, Ken Lay, did to Enron...
     
    Hank, Jul 28, 2005
  19. Bill Walker

    pieface Guest

    U.N. Resolution...1441.
     
    pieface, Jul 28, 2005
  20. Bill Walker

    Hank Guest

    This is another prime example of your ignorance of the
    facts.
    There is no "allegedly" about the contents of the
    DSMs. They has been made public. If you weren't an
    ignorant and gullible bu$h apologist, you'd know that.
    Also, Richard Dearlove was the chief of Britain's MI6,
    most definitely not some "mid level staffer". Add there is
    no "supposedly" about his his meetings with senior
    bu$h officials in Washington. He has just returned and
    was briefing Prime Minister Blair on the meeting. So in
    just one sentence, you managed to spew three blatant
    lies.
    When you attempt to defend liars, thieves, war criminals,
    and terrorists, nine times out of then, you'll end up looking
    like an ignorant (and un-American) fool. Seems like you'd have
    figured that out by now....

    http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jun2005/post-j22.shtml



    -


    http://www.commondreams.org/
    http://www.truthout.org/
    http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/
    http://thirdworldtraveler.com/
    http://counterpunch.org/
    http://responsiblewealth.org/
    http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/pol/80315675.html

    In September and October 2003, McClellan said he had spoken
    directly with Rove about the matter and that "he was not
    involved" in leaking Plame's identity to the news media.
    McClellan said at the time: "The president knows that Karl
    Rove wasn't involved," "It was a ridiculous suggestion"
    and "It's not true."
    Yet another in the endless stirng of bu$h's lies.

    "We argued, as did the security services in this country,
    that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the
    threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners
    have now paid the price of the Government ignoring such
    warnings." Respect MP George Galloway 7-7-05

    "They are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And
    there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to
    take... men with blind hatred and armed with lethal weapons
    who are capable of any atrocity... they respect no laws of
    warfare or morality."
    -bu$h describing his own illegal invasion of Iraq.
    http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm

    "Brutal and sadistic? By what girly-man standards? Compared
    to how Saddam treated his prisoners, a bit of humiliation was
    a walk in the park. AFAIK, No one died or even lost any blood."
    -Albert Nurick, a usenet kook and blatant liar, on the rape,
    torture and murder at bu$h's Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0512-10.htm

    "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things
    that matter." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

    "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them. And then
    he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did."
    -- George W. Bush

    "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the
    will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the
    Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
    -- Adolf Hitler

    "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
    or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is
    not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
    to the American public."
    -- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

    Don't let bu$h do to the United States what his very close
    friend and top campaign contributor, Ken Lay, did to Enron...
     
    Hank, Jul 28, 2005
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