Subject:
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Re: Preaching to the Choir
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Wed, 11 Aug 2004 14:36:24 GMT
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Viewed:
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1659 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Chris Phillips wrote:
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:
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(snip)
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Now I must ask you to provide specific cites for this allegation, because
I reject your assertion.
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This is hardly new ground, but alright, here are the specific cites:
From George Bush’s State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003:
Lie #1:
“The United Nations concluded in 1999 that Saddam Hussein had biological
weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax -- enough doses
to kill several million people.”
In support of this claim, Bush cited a UN Special Commission report that
states with low confidence only that Iraq posessed “growth media” that might
be used to develop anthrax.
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What’s wrong with that? In theory he was correct.
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Theory is not fact. To extrapolate the worst possible scenario from a report
and then state that “the UN has concluded ...” is a lie.
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Furthermore, to conclude that the amount of
growth media estimated by the UN could produce 25,000 liters was based on a
series of dubious assumptions that went well beyond the scope of the UN
report. Bush took a report which suggested a possibilty and stated it as
fact, couched in terms designed to alarm (dare I say terrorize?) the public.
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So did he lie, or did he present a feasible worst-case scenario?
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Bush is terrorizing the American public to further his personal political
agenda. Sounds like state-sponsored terrorism to me.
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Lie #2:
“The United Nations concluded that Saddam Hussein had materials sufficient
to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin -- enough to subject
millions of people to death by respiratory failure. He hadn’t accounted for
that material.”
The UN never “concluded” that Hussein had this material. Hussein had
declared 19,000 liters to the UN, and they estimated that he “could have
produced” more than double that amount. Bush took the most extreme
interpretation of an outside estimate and stated it as fact.
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Again, in theory it could have been the case. We are talking about WMDs
here. Would you want your leader to underestimate an enemy whom you
believed to possess the potential to cause mass murder?
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The fact that
Hussein had actually declared the materials to the UN was conveniently
forgotten.
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What you are conveniently forgetting is that SH blantantly lied to the UN on
numerous occasions, and his word was worth goose excrement.
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In this case (and many others) SH has been shown to have been truthful. Bush
has lied to the American people routinely. Is his word also worth goose
excrement?
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Lie #3:
“Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials
to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such
quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands.”
This claim was based on a CIA report which only stated that “gaps in Iraqi
accounting, and estimates of current production capacity strongly suggest
that Iraq maintains a stockpile of chemical agents, probably VX, sarin,
cyclosarin, and mustard.” Again, Bush took this report to its worst
possible extreme, and stated it in the most alarming terms possible.
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Presenting worst-case scenarios and lying are not the same thing.
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When you consider that the UN had already destroyed most of these materials, and
that the VX Saddam was known to have posessed would have deteriorated to the
point of being useless by the late 1990’s, (both facts known to this
administration) this gross misrepresentation of the situation is a lie.
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Lie #4:
“U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000
munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned
up 16 of them -- despite Iraq’s recent declaration denying their existence.
Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these
prohibited munitions.”
The UN report cited earlier credited Hussein with at most 15,000 munitions,
and had overseen the destruction of 40,000. Unless Bush sold him another
15,000 that nobody else knows about, he wildly exagerated these numbers.
Furthermore, the fact that the UN had already succeeded in ordering the
destruction of 40,000 implies that the sanctions were working.
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So, because Bush believed his intelligence and it was wrong, he is a liar?
No.
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What intelligence did Bush have to believe? The best available intelligence at
that time did not support his numbers. History has not supported them, either.
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Lie #5:
“From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had
several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ
warfare agents, and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors.
Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He’s given no evidence
that he has destroyed them.”
The 3 defectors remain unidentified, and the administration refuses to
provide even the least bit of information as to why their testimony was
deemed credible. Regardless, no mobile weapons labs have been found.
Hussein may not have given evidence that they were destroyed, but to date,
Bush has offered no evidence that they ever existed.
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So what is your claim? That Bush made up the story? That would be a lie.
Anything short of that, no.
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We have no way of knowing whether Bush simply fabricated this claim, because he
has refused to provide his evidence. Again, he was required to provide this
evidence to Congress as a precondition for the invasion.
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Lie #6:
“The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam
Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design
for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching
uranium for a bomb.”
By Iraq’s own admission,
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Again, your willingness to trust anything coming out of Iraq is laughable.
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Ah, so when Saddam Hussein claimed to have a nulcear program, we shouldn’t have
believed him? Then the president is the biggest fool of us all if he used such
a claim as the basis for his war.
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they had a fledgling nuclear program in the early
1990s, but the International Atomic Energy Agency reported in 1998 that
“there were no indications of Iraq having achieved its program goals of
producing a nuclear weapon; nor were there any indications that there
remained in Iraq any physical capability for production of amounts of
weapon-useable nuclear material of any practical significance.” Bush chose
to ignore the latest intelligence and rely instead on the most alarming
report from a decade earlier.
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And how is that a lie exactly?
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Bush’s best intelligence showed that Iraq had no nuclear program. He might just
as well have stated that “Tyrannosaurs were marauding the midwest.” It may have
been true at one time, but is hardly justification for taking action in the
present. Clearly his implication was that there was a present threat from a
nuclear program that he knew to be defunct. That is a lie.
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Lie #7:
“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Not only did these reports turn out to be false, but it has been shown that
members of the Bush administration (including Dick Cheney) knew that this
was the case at the time of the SOTU address. The reference had been
scrubbed from an earlier speech because the information was deemed
unreliable, and Colin Powell refused to use it for the same reasons when he
addressed the UN several days after the address.
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That whole story stunk. The person who had a hard time with the truth was
Joseph Wilson.
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Now who is making unsubstantiated claims? You discard the truth just because
you don’t agree with it. Ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent to investigate the
uranium story, and he debunked it.
I reject your blanket assertion that “the whole story stunk.” Can you be more
specific? If not, the truth stands.
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Lie #8:
“Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase
high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam
Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to
hide.”
The CIA report on the aluminum tubes was inconclusive at best. Our experts
could not state with any certainty that these tubes (which SH hadn’t even
succeeded in acquiring) were intended for a nuclear weapons program.
However, the IAEA had concluded and had already reported to the UN that the
tubes sought by Iraq were not suitable for a nuclear program.
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The bottom line on nukes WRT SH is-- he’d already have them were it not for
the Israelis and their bold attack in ‘81 on Osiraq. To assume that SH
wasn’t trying to redevelop that capability would be naive at best. The “man”
had zero credibility.
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Again, John, how about some specifics? As the saying goes, “when you assume,
you make an ... of U and ME.”
The “man” who has zero credibility at this point is sitting in the Oval
Office.
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Was SH flouting the UN resolutions? Of course! But it was the UN’s job to
enforce those resolutions and we had no business taking any enforcement
action over the objections of the UN Security Council.
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Objections? They threatened SH in 1441, and wouldn’t follow through! What
good were they? (except to a deceiver like SH)
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Well if we reject the legitimacy of the UN then we can hardly use their
resolutions against Iraq as our reasons for invading, can we?
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On the other hand,
Bush purposely distorted the facts available to him in such a way as to
alarm the American people and silence opposition to an ill-conceived,
poorly-planned, and illegal invasion of a sovereign nation. Bush still
refuses to provide any proof to back up his wild exagerations, or even
acknowledge that he may have made some mistakes in overstating his case for
war.
So John, how exactly are these direct lies to Congress, the American
People, and the world not grounds for impeachment? I sense another
dodge coming on...
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Even if what you are alleging were true, why then haven’t the Dems jumped
all over impeachment proceedings????
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Nice dodge, John. Avoid a question by asking another question. Until you
answer my question, I would have to conclude that you agree.
But since you ask, I can think of at least two reasons why impeachment
proceedings have not been initiated:
- The Republican Party controls both houses.
- Impeaching Bush would only put Cheney in the driver’s seat.
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They did assume it to be fact; why else did they approve of the invasion in
the first place? Everybody assumed it to be fact!
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You are wrong here, John. The Senate resolution authorized the invasion of
Iraq only if the president filed a finding of fact within 48 hours of the
invasion to prove the two facts that I stated above. As with any legal
document of this type, the Senate resolution began by stating the underlying
assumptions which Bush was required to prove.
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So you are claiming that they weren’t damned sure that he’d find the evidence
to justify their voting to go to war???? Why??? To trap Bush into some
debacle at the cost of American lives? I don’t buy it.
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John, debating with you is like debating with a toddler. Bush and Co. claimed
to posess slam-dunk evidence before the invasion. Congress said “Ok, bring us
the evidence and then you can have your little war.” This is how any such
authorization is always granted. Bush’s authority to wage war was predicated on
him supplying that evidence to Congress first.
It doesn’t matter who assumed what we would find after the invasion. What
matters here is that Bush claimed to have evidence that he has so far refused to
provide to Congress, and his invasion is illegal under US law because he has
not done so.
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So you would have advocated an immediate withdrawal after no WMDs were
found? How is Bush in violation?
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My point has nothing to do with the fact that no WMD were found. My point
has everything to do with the president ignoring the legal obligations of
his office on the way into war. The fact that no WMD were found simply
underscores the dangers inherent in the kind of blind arrogance our
president is afflicted with.
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He has
refused to provide facts to support the premise of the invasion.
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??? All of Congress saw the facts he used.
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Again, Congress approved the invasion only on the condition that Bush
provide a declaration of proof that his allegations against Saddam Hussein
were true. Bush never provided any such proof.
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Okay. So suppose he was wrong in his assessment. Is that a crime?
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Yes, it is a crime. What do you call negligent action that leads to 10,000+
deaths?
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And so
then what exactly? He immediately withdraws our troops after 48 hours and
calls the whole thing off? What course of action would you have suggested?
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Diplomacy, John. We should have taken more time to convince our allies of the
wisdom and necessity of an invasion before we just went running in there with
both barrels blazing. If there was any truth to Bush’s hogwash, surely he could
have gotten our allies on board. Impatience is not a virtue.
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Clear enough for you? The man is an international outlaw,
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Then would you advocate him standing trial before the Hague?
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Why not?
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Because he is an American beholden only to US laws on US soil.
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His invasion of Iraq did not occur on US soil. Perhaps his illegal murder of
10,000 Iraqi civilians dictates that he should be extradited to Iraq to stand
trial there.
Ironically, Bush uses the bogus claim that simply because the prisoners held at
the prison at Guantanamo Bay are not on US soil, he is not bound by the
dictates of US law in his treatment of them.
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The Patriot Act was enacted under the Bush administration, slammed through
the congress right after the worst terrorist attack on American soil.
Regardless of whether some of its provisions had been sought by previous
presidents, I submit that the gross violation of basic constitutional rights
that this vile piece of law represents were championed by Bush, Cheney, and
Ashcroft.
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“Vile piece of law”? Have you even read what is in it? The Patriot Act
merely empowers law enforcement officers to deal with the threat of
terrorists in the same effective manner that they do organized crime, drug
dealers, etc.
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Actually, the Patriot Act includes vast new powers that have been previously
unavailable to law enforcement officials.
Read it yourself.
John, you may not be concerned that our government has claimed the right to take
someone into custody indefinitely, without releasing their identity or providing
them contact with a lawyer or an opportunity to defend themselves in court, but
these rights have always been the cornerstone of our legal system.
I have provided ample evidence here in this message thread that the present
administration cannot be trusted at face value to speak the plain truth. You
have provided nothing to dispute my evidence. Should we really trust these same
people with such totalitarian powers?
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US citizens and foreign nationals are taken into custody and held
without charges or due process of law for years on end.
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For one who hates generalities, you use them a lot. Specifics.
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Guantanamo Bay.
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Um, listing a body of water is not what I’d call “specific”.
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John, if you are not being purposely dense here, then you must be living in a
cave.
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Okay, are you alleging that what occured there was policy?
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Are you alleging that it was not? (Again, your question is not an answer to my
question.)
It has been shown that the Bush administration sought legal advice to allow the
extreme, coercive treatment of prisoners. It has been shown that the abuse was
sanctioned up the chain of command. The same kind of abuse has happened in at
least three theatres of operation: Afghanistan, Cuba, and Iraq.
John, prove to me that this abuse was not official policy. Specifics, please!
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Even Afghanistan and America have been the
locations of these unconstitutional arrests and human rights violations. I
would be more specific with names and dates, except that in the most
eggregious cases, the government will not release this information.
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Then lets drop it for lack of information one way or the other.
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Are you actually claiming that the US did not arrest US citizen Jose Pedilla on
US soil and try to claim him as an “enemy combatant” who was not subject to his
constitutional rights? Are you actually claiming that we are not holding 600+
human beings in veal cages in Cuba, and subjecting them to torture in an
ill-conceived atempt to extract questionable information from them?
For somebody who claims to consider every issue to the Nth degree before issuing
your proclamations, you seem to indulge yourself in an awful lot of ignorance to
the underlying facts.
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So if a brutal dictator were executing his citizens by the 100,000s and you
knew it and you could end it, you wouldn’t because of the sovereignty of
his nation?
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Which sounds nice, but wasn’t the reason Bush told us we needed to go into
Iraq.
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We went into Iraq to depose a leader whom we deemed as a threat to our
national security. Now that the SH regime is gone, Iraq is no longer a
threat, and Iraq is again a sovereign nation.
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It is merely a convenient afterthought now that Bush’s lies have been
exposed. There are plenty of countries ruled by brutal dictators that we
haven’t intervened in.
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Exactly! And why not? Because they aren’t perceived as a direct threat to
the national security of the United States.
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So if a brutal dictator were executing his citizens by the 100,000s and you knew
it and you could end it, you wouldn’t because none of them were American
citizens?
The “humanitarian mission” angle doesn’t cut the mustard. It wasn’t the real
reason we invaded, therefore I reject your feeble attempts to use it as a
justification for the invasion after the fact.
So John, I’ve taken the time to answer your call for specifics, and I have
supported my claims. How about providing some specific answers (not questions)
of your own?
- Chris.
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Preaching to the Choir
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| (...) Where did he go? I guess John's brain must have self-destructed when faced with the undeniable truth. So what I want to know now is, if nobody can step up to the plate and defend Bush, who exactly are all these people who answer polls stating (...) (20 years ago, 15-Aug-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Preaching to the Choir
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| (...) (snip) (...) What's wrong with that? In theory he was correct. (...) So did he lie, or did he present a feasible worst-case scenario? (...) Again, in theory it could have been the case. We are talking about WMDs here. Would you want your (...) (20 years ago, 11-Aug-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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