Punishing the French

[joemama]

Juju,

If the administration was trying to be credible - and dispel any notions of planted evidence or malfeasnce, they would allow the United Nations inspectors to verify and help find any WMDs that they discover. The fact that they are denying entry to the U.N. leaves me in doubt.

These are the same people that said that aluminum tubes imported into Iraq were used for gas centrifuge uranium enrichment - which turned out to be a lie. They said that they had documented proof that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Africa - which turned out to be a very poor forgery. They cited a dossier as proof of Iraq's weapons program - that turned out to be a plagarized term paper written 10 years ago. They strained to link AL- Qaeda to Saddam Hussein's regime - which was tenious at best.

It seems like you're just engineering a situation where you're going to believe what you want to believe no matter what happens

I am student of science. When a person makes a scientific claim, scientists maintain skepticism until the claim has been demonstrated to be valid, and other sceintists have verified the claim. The whole business of having an open and self-corrective scientific community makes maintaining a fraudulant claim almost impossible. In this open environment, truth is not a matter of trust, it is a matter of independent verififcation of initial claims.

The fact that the U.S. is going to exclude any international verification of WMDs found - takes any discoveries they make out of the realm of real, valid, verifiable proof, and makes them simply based upon faith that the government would not lie.

As you can see above, the govenrment certainly seems to have no problem using flassified documents, plagiarism, lies, and circumstantial evidence to pursue it's chosen course of action.

How can you think that blind faith is justified?

If they do find WMD, are you going to assume they were planted?

Without internaitonal verification, any discoveries are suspect.

If an administration lied to the world to start a war - then excluded the world from verifying any of the claims the administration made, how can you automatically assume that any discoveries are valid?

What is your burden of proof?

I think we should at least wait and see what happens before we start speculating

I agree, but without international oversight, I am going to have a hard time buying anything they find.

DId you know that the guy they picked to head the WMD search force is a very close friend of Condoleeza Rice? Is it really that far fetched to think that he might be a team player?