Sure! Bring on the trial! Let's have at it! Oh, that's right! He was able to have it put off until after the midterms. Wonder why?
The larger issue here is that we have an administration that is stupid enough to pick a fight with the CIA because the spooks wouldn't rubber stamp their PR plan in the run-up to the Iraq War.
No, the "larger story" is that there are honest elements in the CIA who simply won't stand for this administration trying to pin the run-up to the war in Iraq on "intelligence failures" when the intelligence was there, but ignored. Furthermore, there are elements in the CIA who are understandably upset about the administration outing one of its undercover operatives for political gain. THAT is the "larger story" here. If Bush dedicated as many resources to the War on Terror as he has to the War in Iraq, we might have actually captured or killed bin Laden and Afghanistan might be a secure, stable democracy by now.
and millions of iraqis would continue to be crushed under the boot of saddamite fascism. by why worry about a bunch of muslims? the chimes of freedom indeed, arabs need not apply.
it's comical - indeed, chortle worthy - to hear you accuse others of not caring about muslims when you just glossed over the tens of thousands of Iraqis blown to bits, tortured or otherwise killed by, inter alia, US action, various insurgents, and the roaming sunni-shiite death squads that the kind of freedom we brought to Iraq has installed as the keepers of law and order. Even with the help of his crazy sons, in the same period of time I doubt saddam could have instituted the scale of human loss and misery that 3 years of the US in Iraq and the resulting chaos has caused, at least that's what most Iraqis think. I mean, hell a state security service can only torture and murder so many people. Now that the free market has arrived, any old nutbag in Iraq can start up his own death squad or torture house. That's called entrepreneurship.
Would that GWB and his cabal had trumpeted this as the most important reason to invade Iraq. There might have been a real debate on the subject, we might have chosen to continue the containment policy, and we could have devoted our resources to finding and killing the people responsible for 9/11. There were (and continue to be) many tyrants in the world who were being far more destructive to their people than Saddam. If humanitarianism were our real goal, we would have gone after them, not Iraq.
The "containment" policy was a crushing economic embargo that was like a slowly, crippling wound. Though it was easier to just maintain an economic embargo as the Euros desired, it was destroying the country in the most inhumane way possible. Yes, the US has done many deplorable things in its past, but I think Bush was actually trying to change the country and not just cripple it. And as I've been to the regions in North Pakistan, I've seen the horrible conditions and thousands of miles of underground caves and treacherous terrain. If we sent 100,000 troops there,we would only be bigger targets. To find a small group of people, intelligence and tactical squads are much more effective than sheer size.
She has not only categorically denied leaking any classified information, but also claimed that she didn't even have access to the information leaked. Here is the headline. It actually isn't weird that people involved in the exact same field of work knew each other.
So all of this conspiracy theory stuff is going on, meanwhile the agency itself isn't even asserting that she told about the secret prisons?
Which basically tells me that yes; they busted her for talking to reporters. Which was wrong and she shouldn't have been doing. but... Why did the administration throw such a high profile, public fit about this woman? She was an easy target and the administration wanted to make a big deal out of "catching" someone who was possibly leaking information. And *gasp* She happened to back Kerry. Well that's just gravy!
It is typical that rather than address the real problem of an illegal and immoral program, they try and send a message to people who uncover those programs.
A wound that kept Saddam from being able to pursue WMD programs. Why did we start the embargo in the first place? Wasn't it to stop Saddam from pursuing WMD programs/ And was, by the way, keeping Saddam from pursuing WMDs. And he succeeded, didn't he? He changed it from a relatively stable country into a country on the verge of, if not in the middle of, a civil war with the potential to engulf the whole region. Bigger targets than we are in Iraq? Simply not possible. In that case, intelligence, tactical squads, and thousands of troops to control movement in already searched areas would be more effective, no?
