Punishing the French

[ScottSolomon]

Bush said that. He was trying to get out foll me once shame on you, fool my twice shame on me. But his linguistic gears were a little creaky that day and he mangled the idiom beyond recognition.

I was trying to be humourific.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Oh, OK. I hadn't heard that particular fo...foux...faoux...fuck up. Thanks.

[Undertoad]

The bigger problem with all of this is that it's selective use of data. A boatload of stuff was presented over the last few months, and a bunch of people cherry-picked it for the things they felt they could punch holes in and then held up that rather small number of things as troubling evidence of some sort. If you tried that kind of stunt in science class, you'd get an F.

But don't take my word for it. Here's the whole "aluminum tubes" section of the Powell speech at the UN... notice how none of it is discredited by anything anyone here has posted, and notice how the parts they can't attempt to discredit are simply left alone. Explain the tubes without explaining the magnets? You can't:

He is so determined that has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries, even after inspections resumed. These tubes are controlled by the Nuclear Suppliers Group precisely because they can be used as centrifuges for enriching uranium.

By now, just about everyone has heard of these tubes and we all know that there are differences of opinion. There is controversy about what these tubes are for. Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Other experts, and the Iraqis themselves, argue that they are really to produce the rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket launcher.

Let me tell you what is not controversial about these tubes. First, all the experts who have analyzed the tubes in our possession agree that they can be adapted for centrifuge use.

Second, Iraq had no business buying them for any purpose. They are banned for Iraq.

I am no expert on centrifuge tubes, but this is an old army trooper. I can tell you a couple things.

First, it strikes me as quite odd that these tubes are manufactured to a tolerance that far exceeds U.S. requirements for comparable rockets. Maybe Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than we do, but I don't think so.

Second, we actually have examined tubes from several different batches that were seized clandestinely before they reached Baghdad. What we notice in these different batches is a progression to higher and higher levels of specification, including in the latest batch an anodized coating on extremely smooth inner and outer surfaces.

Why would they continue refining the specifications? Why would they continuing refining the specification, go to all that trouble for something that, if it was a rocket, would soon be blown into shrapnel when it went off?

The high-tolerance aluminum tubes are only part of the story. We also have intelligence from multiple sources that Iraq is attempting to acquire magnets and high-speed balancing machines. Both items can be used in a gas centrifuge program to enrich uranium.

In 1999 and 2000, Iraqi officials negotiated with firms in Romania, India, Russia and Slovenia for the purchase of a magnet production plant. Iraq wanted the plant to produce magnets weighing 20 to 30 grams. That's the same weight as the magnets used in Iraq's gas centrifuge program before the Gulf War.

This incident, linked with the tubes, is another indicator of Iraq's attempt to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.

Intercepted communications from mid-2000 through last summer showed that Iraq front companies sought to buy machines that can be used to balance gas centrifuge rotors. One of these companies also had been involved in a failed effort in 2001 to smuggle aluminum tubes into Iraq.

People will continue to debate this issue, but there is no doubt in my mind. These illicit procurement efforts show that Saddam Hussein is very much focused on putting in place the key missing piece from his nuclear weapons program, the ability to produce fissile material.

[Whit]

     The dicussion of WMD's is interesting and all but isn't it past that? I mean the discussion is still going and question aren't being asked much outside of the UN. And Bush has made it pretty clear that he does't care about them.
     I'm just saying that the people still keeping score on it are in the minority, I did an unofficial poll of my own, (I do that a lot) most people didn't know about the tubes at all. Nobody seemed to care if they had them or not, saying that it was over either way. I'm not saying that my poll is perfect, but I know that I got the info I wanted from random people I met. No trick questions. I even met one guy that had never even heard of the Patriot Act...

[ScottSolomon]

Maybe you are right. Naybe just a few lies are okay. Maybe it is fine to knowingly use plagiarized documents to prove your case. Maybe it is fine to alter the statement and intent of OBL's recordings. Maybe it is fine to used forged documents.

My point is, if you lie a few times, believing you in the future is very difficult. I have seen scads of Bush lies. I have seen Powell lie several times. Many of Powell's testimony have been disproven ( like the chemical weapons plant that Blix visited the day after Powell's presentation - finding it without indoor electricity or plumbing ), most of his assertions relied on faith - that Powell was not dissembling.

How many lies does it take to damage one's credibility?

Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium

The only people I saw pushing that point of view were the Bush accolytes. The Federation of American Scientists disagreed with his take.

who have analyzed the tubes in our possession agree that they can be adapted for centrifuge use.

Everybody said this - the point was, the modifications required were immense, and Iraq was not thought to have the technology capable of making said modifications.

Second, Iraq had no business buying them for any purpose. They are banned for Iraq

They were dual use items, which were selectively restricted at different times for different reasons. If they were going to be used for rockets, they are not in violation of the sanctions. If they were going to a nuclear weapons program they are. Powell believed the latter, the rest of the world believed the former.

Pencils were also restricted items because they contain graphite - which could be used in a nuclear reactor.

manufactured to a tolerance that far exceeds U.S. requirements for comparable rockets

An assertion that could be true, but also may not be true. different weapons systems all have different specifications - this - in and of itself is not proof of anything. Most of the scientific community seem to think that the tubes specs. were not indicative of anything. The tubes still required massive reworking to function the way Powell is suggesting they functioned.

including in the latest batch an anodized coating on extremely smooth inner and outer surfaces.

So, according to Powell, if you are going to make a missile, the surfaces of the missile should not be finished. Even though these things may be stored for several years, you cannot anodize them to keep the surface from getting damaged.

Why would they continuing refining the specification, go to all that trouble for something that, if it was a rocket, would soon be blown into shrapnel when it went off?

Poorly built weapons are unreliable. This line of argument is specious anyway. If you look at an artillery shell, a TOW missile, a Javelin, or any other weapons system, they are all polished, clean, and the aluminum has an anodized coating on it. Even the weapons that are about to be blow up are built well - because a soldier trusts his life to the reliability of a weapon.

We also have intelligence from multiple sources that Iraq is attempting to acquire magnets and high-speed balancing machines

Sort of like saying - we have intelligence from numerous African sources that Iraq tried to purchase fissile material from Nigeria. When does an unsubstantiated claim become the truth? I gues you have to give them your faith, but I have a hard time giving faith to liars.

Iraqi officials negotiated with firms in Romania, India, Russia and Slovenia for the purchase of a magnet production plant

An item that is true.

Iraq wanted the plant to produce magnets weighing 20 to 30 grams. That's the same weight as the magnets used in Iraq's gas centrifuge program before the Gulf War.

An item that is speculation. Followed by a link back to the pre gulf war weapons program. Does he have any proof or documentation that Iraq wanted to produce magnets that were 20-30 grams or is that just an assumption?

This incident, linked with the tubes, is another indicator of Iraq's attempt to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.

So two specious claims - put together - makes a compelling argument? What are the claims? Iraq had high specification aluminum tubes, and some Iraq officials wanted to buy a magnet plant. If you assume that Iraq is trying to reconstitute it's nuclear program - and work back from there, this makes perfect sense. If you are trying to determin if Iraq has a nuclear weapons program, these points don't make a compelling case.

Intercepted communications from mid-2000 through last summer showed that Iraq front companies sought to buy machines that can be used to balance gas centrifuge rotors.

DId Powell ever produce these communications? Or did he just claim that we intercepted them - and left it at that?

I have a relly hard time buying this guy's word. If that is all he offered, I can't really trust it.

These illicit procurement efforts show that Saddam Hussein is very much focused on putting in place the key missing piece from his nuclear weapons program, the ability to produce fissile material.

I thought they had proof that Iraq was buying nuclear material from abroad.




I don't know. Maybe I am wrong. But I have not seen any reports that we have found any nuclear reactos or weapons plants. If we find chemical WMDs, but not a nuclear program, does that mean Powell was lying - or just all this just fall down the memoory hole?

[Hubris Boy]

Originally posted by richlevy

Hubris thy name is Bush.

Actually, my name is Mike.

[slang]

Originally posted by Hubris Boy


Actually, my name is Mike.

Mike Bush, by any chance?

[Undertoad]

Oh dear, look what just popped up:

UK Newspaper Says Documents Link Bin Laden to Iraq

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Sunday Telegraph newspaper said it had discovered documents showing Iraqi intelligence hosted an envoy from Osama bin Laden in 1998 and sought to meet the alleged September 11 mastermind in person.

[Undertoad]

I don't know. Maybe I am wrong. But I have not seen any reports that we have found any nuclear reactos or weapons plants. If we find chemical WMDs, but not a nuclear program, does that mean Powell was lying - or just all this just fall down the memoory hole?

While the embedded reporters were still there we were seeing one report per day. The Pentagon finally said all first reports are false because initial tests may well mean nothing. Now that the embedded reporters are gone, I'd wait a month or two before locking in so tightly on this "we'll find nothing" attitude.

Right now they are sifting through the papers in Baath party offices. Not only are they making al Qaeda connections, they've got a Brit MP taking million-dollar bribes to support the anti-war effort.

It's good to be back at this stuff; I'd gone on hiatus from serious posting in Current Events, but this thread's in Politics!

[slang]

Originally posted by Undertoad

it had discovered documents .

Documents *planted* by the evil Bush admin.

[Whit]

Maybe you are right. Naybe just a few lies are okay. Maybe it is fine to knowingly use plagiarized documents to prove your case. Maybe it is fine to alter the statement and intent of OBL's recordings. Maybe it is fine to used forged documents.

     Er, I didn't mean to suggest it was okay. I was more saying that no matter how right you are it won't matter. Most people have forgetten the reason... er... excuse for the war had anything to do with WMD.
     No, not everyone, and most likely not anyone on this board. Obviously though people that are reading this are the types to seek out a little more info. I'm saying that I think that finding nothing at all would have almost no effect of Bush at the national level. The people that keep track already have problems with Bush. So, nothing new here.
     Yeah, it might cause problems on the international level, but Bush has already pissed everyone off. Nothing new there.

[ScottSolomon]

This story is from the independent in UK.

Revealed: How the road to war was paved with lies

Intelligence agencies accuse Bush and Blair of distorting and fabricating evidence in rush to war
By Raymond Whitaker
27 April 2003


The case for invading Iraq to remove its weapons of mass destruction was based on selective use of intelligence, exaggeration, use of sources known to be discredited and outright fabrication, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

A high-level UK source said last night that intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush to war with Iraq. "They ignored intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat," the source said. Quoting an editorial in a Middle East newspaper which said, "Washington has to prove its case. If it does not, the world will for ever believe that it paved the road to war with lies", he added: "You can draw your own conclusions."

UN inspectors who left Iraq just before the war started were searching for four categories of weapons: nuclear, chemical, biological and missiles capable of flying beyond a range of 93 miles. They found ample evidence that Iraq was not co-operating, but none to support British and American assertions that Saddam Hussein's regime posed an imminent threat to the world.

On nuclear weapons, the British Government claimed that the former regime sought uranium feed material from the government of Niger in west Africa. This was based on letters later described by the International Atomic Energy Agency as crude forgeries.

On chemical weapons, a CIA report on the likelihood that Saddam would use weapons of mass destruction was partially declassified. The parts released were those which made it appear that the danger was high; only after pressure from Senator Bob Graham, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the whole report declassified, including the conclusion that the chances of Iraq using chemical weapons were "very low" for the "foreseeable future".

On biological weapons, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told the UN Security Council in February that the former regime had up to 18 mobile laboratories. He attributed the information to "defectors" from Iraq, without saying that their claims – including one of a "secret biological laboratory beneath the Saddam Hussein hospital in central Baghdad" – had repeatedly been disproved by UN weapons inspectors.

On missiles, Iraq accepted UN demands to destroy its al-Samoud weapons, despite disputing claims that they exceeded the permitted range. No banned Scud missiles were found before or since, but last week the Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, suggested Scuds had been fired during the war. There is no proof any were in fact Scuds.

Some American officials have all but conceded that the weapons of mass destruction campaign was simply a means to an end – a "global show of American power and democracy", as ABC News in the US put it. "We were not lying," it was told by one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." American and British teams claim they are scouring Iraq in search of definitive evidence but none has so far been found, even though the sites considered most promising have been searched, and senior figures such as Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister, intelligence chiefs and the man believed to be in charge of Iraq's chemical weapons programme are in custody.

Robin Cook, who as Foreign Secretary would have received high-level security briefings, said last week that "it was difficult to believe that Saddam had the capacity to hit us". Mr Cook resigned from the Government on the eve of war, but was still in the Cabinet as Leader of the House when it released highly contentious dossiers to bolster its case.

One report released last autumn by Tony Blair said that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, but last week Mr Hoon said that such weapons might have escaped detection because they had been dismantled and buried. A later Downing Street "intelligence" dossier was shown to have been largely plagiarised from three articles in academic publications. "You cannot just cherry-pick evidence that suits your case and ignore the rest. It is a cardinal rule of intelligence," said one aggrieved officer. "Yet that is what the PM is doing." Another said: "What we have is a few strands of highly circumstantial evidence, and to justify an attack on Iraq it is being presented as a cast-iron case. That really is not good enough."

Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who first pointed out Downing Street's plagiarism, said ministers had claimed before the war to have information which could not be disclosed because agents in Iraq would be endangered. "That doesn't apply any more, but they haven't come up with the evidence," he said. "They lack credibility."

Mr Rangwala said much of the information on WMDs had come from Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC), which received Pentagon money for intelligence-gathering. "The INC saw the demand, and provided what was needed," he said. "The implication is that they polluted the whole US intelligence effort."

Facing calls for proof of their allegations, senior members of both the US and British governments are suggesting that so-called WMDs were destroyed after the departure of UN inspectors on the eve of war – a possibility raised by President George Bush for the first time on Thursday.

This in itself, however, appears to be an example of what the chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix called "shaky intelligence". An Iraqi scientist, writing under a pseudonym, said in a note slipped to a driver in a US convoy that he had proof information was kept from the inspectors, and that Iraqi officials had destroyed chemical weapons just before the war.

Other explanations for the failure to find WMDs include the possibility that they might have been smuggled to Syria, or so well hidden that they could take months, even years, to find. But last week it emerged that two of four American mobile teams in Iraq had been switched from looking for WMDs to other tasks, though three new teams from less specialised units were said to have been assigned to the quest for "unconventional weapons" – the less emotive term which is now preferred.

Mr Powell and Mr Bush both repeated last week that Iraq had WMDs. But one official said privately that "in the end, history and the American people will judge the US not by whether its officials found canisters of poison gas or vials of some biological agent [but] by whether this war marked the beginning of the end for the terrorists who hate America".

Used in accordance with the "fair use" provision of the constitution as non-comercial reprint.

[slang]

Originally posted by ScottSolomon
"it was difficult to believe that Saddam had the capacity to hit us".

Saddam's ability to directly attack us was not the issue as I understood it. His ability to hand off WOMDs, many of which are very difficult to track, to terrorists *was* the reason. That's why I supported this war.

As Colin Powell explained in the Feb 5 "show and tell" to the UN, a small amount of the Anthrax toxin did enormous damage. Enough to effectively shut down the post office and the Senate for a couple of weeks. What I was fearful of , as well as a substancial number of Americans, was that we would see these weapons/materials imported for use against us. Our economy is fragile and the possibility that people might become victims of terror WOMDs would seriously damage the economy, even if the chances of being directly affected are slim. Look at what the DC sniper did for the local economy. What were the true chances of being shot by malvo? Much less than being capped by the natives, but people stopped spending. It made a big difference, terror WOMDs would be exponentially worse.

Given the physical makeup of these substances, it would be extremely difficult to keep them out. Hell, we can't even keep Mexicans from sneaking over here in masses, how could we detect and intercept vials of chem or bio weapons? We aren't set up for that thorough of inspection at the ports etc. That would cost a fortune to set up the security and increase the cost of almost everything. Just look at the fustercluck the "new and improved" airline security has cost and caused.

Whether the true possibility of al-qeada getting Saddam's WOMDs is high or low, that's why *I* supported this massive, expensive military action.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,81023,00.html

"Preventing Saddam from aiding terrorists is seen by a plurality as the most important reason to take military action. By a three-to-one margin Americans say the top reason for action is to keep Iraq from supplying weapons to terrorists, with 14 percent say the most important reason is to promote democracy and human rights and 10 percent say to secure oil supplies. Twenty percent say it is a combination of these."

[Undertoad]

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_...5E1702,00.html

FRANCE gave Saddam Hussein's regime regular reports on its dealings with US officials, The Sunday Times reported, quoting files it had found in the wreckage of the Iraqi foreign ministry.

The conservative British weekly said the information kept Saddam abreast of every development in US planning and may have helped him to prepare for war.

ruh-roh!

[xoxoxoBruce]

Revealed: How the road to war was paved with lies

My parents told me the toys came from Santa Clause. Even when I knew better I didn't care as long as they kept coming. The reasons Bush/Blair gave are now moot. What they/we do now will effect the future of the middle east orders of magnitude more than the reasons it started.