So, you're not on any "side"? You have no opinion? What? BTW, thanks for failing to contribute to the discussion again.
Macbeth: Clarification 1) That was the point I was trying to make, I was referring to TM's best suggestion. 2) My point with the looting and destruction is that it would not be happening if we hadn't taken away the law enforcement. The same thing would happen here in the US, so its not just about the people or their hostility towards Saddam. They are simply using an easy opportunity to steal and justifying it by saying Saddam and the Gov. origanily stold from them. Treeman: They couldn't smuggle in tanks, aircraft, etc. basically anything other than ammunition for existing systems and small arms/ shoulder fired missiles etc. You need to read up on fixed lagrange orbits and modern spy sat. systems, you are completely wrong on every point on this one. On my other statements simply refer to my previous posts.
underoverup: So, you're in the "Iraq is/was WMD-free camp"? Ooo-kay... I guess we'll just have to wait and see who gets humiliated - er, um, who turns out to be right on that one - since you apparently think that unless Saddam either used them on us or had them sitting by the front door of one of his palaces waiting for us, he didn't have them in the first place. Whatever. The coming weeks/months will tell who was right on that one. Oh no! We took away Iraq's law enforcement for a week! It's the end of the world!!! I already told you that Iraq's law enforcement bodies are set to be reinstituted within the next few days. I would say that Iraq having its law enforcement bodies up and running again anywhere within the first six months, let alone first six days, is good progress in stabilizing the situation and rebuilding. Why do you persist in blowing that particular issue out of proportion? Really? They did successfully smuggle billions of barrels of oil across the border. They did successfully smuggle tens to hundreds of thousands of tons of small arms across the border, and they didn't do it one grenade at a time. Larger items and replacement parts did make it across the border, only at a trickle. Are you seriously trying to tell me trhat they couldn't get maybe a dozen trucks across the border? Incidentally, if we've got a constant eye on the border and it's sealed tight, then why are senior Iraqi officials and Saddam's family members showing up in resort towns on the Syrian coast? You don't know what you're talking about. And you seem to think that the US military has some sort of high-tech omnipresence with its spy sats. I am always mystified when I encounter people who think this... We have windows of observation up there, not all-seeing friggen eyes in the sky. We take snapshots of specific areas every hour or so, we do not have a continuous play-by-play 24/7. Newer sats do give us real-time updates and video, but we can not keep them aimed at a single spot for all of eternity. Not only would that be far, far too expensive, but there are a jillion other things going on tyhat require our attention. We are talking about the Iraqis smuggling a few trucks across the border - actiivity that for the past 8 years has gone on on a daily basis. We are talking about before the war. Do you think any of our resources would have been diverted to view anything else? Perhaps the Iraqi army moving around the country, since that would have been of more immediate interest to our military? Or being used for UNMOVIC purposes, since we let them borrow our sat time? Perhaps watching the Iranians, as we always must do? Perhaps turned towards Afghanistan? You are basically saying that we have a 24/7 view of the entire Syria-Iraq border, and that nothing can get across or could get across before the war without our knowledge. You are saying that there was no smuggling route between Syria and Iraq. I think that you need to rethink this theory before you proceed. I will make you look like an ass if that is what you're saying - that is a promise. What a nice way of saying "no matter what you say, I will not change my position". Gee, where have I heard that before?
Yes, we have nukes on a few SSBNs (submarines); these are a strategic deterrant from the Cold War days meant primarily for Russia and China. No surface ships carry any WMD; all nukes were removed from aircraft carriers by order of Bush I. Ground and air forces have no quick access to them. I work at a depot where some of our stuff is stored; I see it every day. It is not easily or quickly accessible. I know exactly what I'm talking about.
Just another quick thought on the comparison between our WMD programs and Saddam's: 1) We are actively getting rid of ours. Everyone knows about the scaling down of our nuclear arsenal; what most people don't know about is that large de-mil facilities are currently - as I speak - being built at our depots which house chemical weapons in order to destroy them. Your boy Bush has ordered that they all be eliminated, and they are. 2) We regularly allow international teams, to include Russian and Chinese inspectors, to inspect our WMD facilities. Signs around our depot storage areas are printed in English, Russian, and Chinese... Ours are closely monitored by the international community. Can anyone say either of these things about Iraq?
Treeman your tone has turned aggressive and sarcastic, indicative of someone who has run out of quality discussion. Next you'll start pointing out spelling and various gramatical errors. Bush is trying to defend the looting and current humanitarian crisis as I type this-- he is doing a poor job. "Its a great day to be on national television" "We're making progress" stay on point George. Of course they have smuggling routes any ass knows that- you obviously do and are quite proud to have figured this secret out. They don't have smuggling routs for the movement of large weapons or massive quanities of WMD. Iraq would store the weapons in their own country period and would not send them to Syria. Thats a cop-out to use if they fail to find any WMD in Iraq. Billions of barrels of oil huh not even millions or hundreds of millions you went straight to billions. Working the supply room of a gun shop does not count as a military supply depot Your arguements, statistics, and overall ideas are exaggerated and completely out of proportion to what is happening in the real world.
Oh, overunderup - Here's a link to some info on the Keyhole satellite: http://www.howstuffworks.com/first-time.htm?referer=question529.htm Save you the time: You can think of a KH satellite as a gigantic orbiting digital camera with an incredibly huge lens on it. Optical image reconnaissance satellites use a charge-coupled device (CCD) to gather images that make up a digital photograph for transmission back to Earth from an altitude of about 200 miles. Since the satellites are in orbit, they cannot hover over a given area or provide real-time video of a single location. I would advise you to drop that particular subject now, before any other statements of yours come back to bite you in the ass.
No, I just get aggressive and sarcastic when dealing with someone who effectively says nothing but "nanny-nanny-boo-boo, I'm right you're wrong"... I have given you a counterpoint to every single argument you have presented here. Your response? On my other statements simply refer to my previous posts. In other words, the "Vancome Lady Defense". No, I make those too. It would be hypocritical, not to mention pointless and gutless, to do that. Dork. Has it occurred to you that the bits about progress and a great day could refer to the fact that we have defeated a mortal enemy in record time and with record casualties and freed 24 million people in the process? Nah, he couldn't possibly mean that... How big do you think that a microbe is? How big do you think that an artillery shell is? Has it occurred to you that it is possible - dare say, even likely - that Iraq did not load all of its WMD onto one large truck for transport? That they - crazy as it sounds - used several trucks and several shipments to move some of what they had? Hmm... No, it is a distinct and likely possibility that has evidence to support it (several reports from various sources, witnesses included). On the off chance that none are found *in the coming weeks and/or months*, that is. Again, I don't understand why you expect us to find them this very minute; they were hidden from the inspectors, and they will be hidden from us. It's a large country. Well, unless prices for smuggled Iraqi oil are drastically different than everyone else's oil, then yes - billions over the past decade. That oil wasn't smuggled out of the Gulf, you know. I work at the Pueblo Chemical Depot, dumbass. Look it up. It ain't no supply room in a gun shop. Mine? I'd say yours are. That is, after all, what this whole thread is about. I'd like to thank you, though - you walked right into my little trap (He-He-He!). I just knew some antiwar idiot would come in here and pretend that he was still correct in his assumptions, even given recent developments. You didn't let me down. Whaddya think of the spy-sat info? Want to change your mind on that one yet?
No, I won't put down the books. I prefer to supplement my evening news steady diet of nothing with different viewpoints from some people who actually did some background investigation on their stories before they printed them. Has it occured to anyone that the government doesn't, by default, do what's in the best interests of the average citizen? Are the american people a bunch of ignorant yokels? I don't even have to answer that, just turn on primetime tv and watch survivor, american idol, and the rest of the mindless programming that gets such great ratings and you'll probaly find that it's not a great leap to conclude that the majority is easily appeased.
1984 is not real, Heretic. Wag the Dog was just a movie. Real world doesn't work that way. Nice to see you hear a steady diet of differing viewpoints. Just makes it all the more curious how you could arrive at some of the ones you have... Does the US government always do what's in the best interests of its citizens? No. Does it always do what is in its own best interests? No. Do the two always conflict? No. The trick is to find out when they all copincide; this is one of those times. If you don't realize that by now, then you probably never will. Are there stupid Americans? Yes. Are some Americans ignorant yokels? Yes. Are the majority of them in either category? I certainly don't think so. Are we all just being fooled by a corrupt government? If you really, truly, actually believe that, then you have seen too many Oliver Stone flicks.
We have spy satellites in low orbit and in high orbits you've found a link that describes a low orbit satellite. Here is a general definition of a L1 or Geosychrosis orbit: Geosynchronous Orbit A geosynchronous orbit is achieved when the satellite completes one orbit around the earth in one sidereal day. (A sidereal day is the time it takes the earth to rotate once with respect to the stars (not the sun). A sidereal day is 23 hours 59 minutes, 4.091 seconds, compared to a mean solar day which is 24 hours.) This gives the satellite an altitude of about 35,786 km (19,300 nm or 22,236 statute miles). A satellite in a geosynchronous orbit, pretty closely matches the earth's rotation and "appears" from the ground to stay overhead at all times. It is only "pretty close" because, though the satellite has a sidereal period, nothing has been said about the inclination or eccentricity. Give the satellite a nearly circular orbit, but some inclination, say 10 degrees, and the satellite will, over the course of an entire day, appear to inscribe a line in the sky - 10 degrees above the celestial equator to 10 degrees below it. Change the eccentricity a little and the apparent path of the satellite can be changed to some rather odd shapes, from lopsided figure eights to a circle. Communications and surveillance satellites use geosynchronous orbits. There are hundreds of links supporting or discrediting every point we have made today. A point by point discussion is silly when I simply have to repeat what i've already typed. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday searching and quoting in a hopeless attempt to prove every decenting opinion wrong.
You're the one who keeps mentioning 1984, not me. I do believe that John Ashcroft and people like him are horrible for this country. It may be fine with you to reduce civil liberties but it's not okay with me. The first casualty of war is truth. Know who said that? A conservative englishman named Winston Churchill. You may have heard of him.
I have seen the statistical evidence broken down in several places which proves otherwise. Most notibly for about a year afterwords, but continuing for up to 3 or so years there was a marked increase in the number and costliness of terror attacks. Most of them were hijackings that didn't end in disaster happening somewhere far away which most people have probably forgotten, or hezbolah crap happining in Lebanon which people don't necessarily associate with Libya, but it was all related. The beginning of the end of Libya's role as the main training ground for terrorism didn't happen until the early 90's. I did a quick search for the figures but I haven't been able to find where I saw them... when I find them I'll post the detail breakdown. I do realize that this situation may be different, but I think that you are overestimating your ability to predict with any degree of accuracy how this will be recieved in all corners of the world, especially considering your particular distaste for Arabs, which you have stated more than once, though you seem to lump a whole bunch of different cultures into "Arab", such as Turkoman, Uzbek, Pashtun, Kurdish, Assyrian, etc. This, I think, is not unlike the hubris of Ossama bin Ladden or Saddam, who have banked in the US being "soft" or "corrupt" only to find out that "we" are not all the same, and our different experiences make generalizations like these seem powerfull, while they are in fact extremely deceptive and misleading. Again I respect your knowledge and views, but think you often approach things as a "bull in a china shop". While this may be a fine and even useful trait in many situations, I'm concerned that the president & co. are using the same approach for a situation where the necessary attribute is extreme delicacy.
I'm sorry, but treeman's completely right on this one, and this is an often misquoted issue. The "bad astronomy" site has a page in particular about media making this incorrect assertion here. Communications satelites and electronic monitoring satelites can work in geosynchronous orbits because they deal with very long wavelenght waveforms that disperse quite a bit and don't require the type of location resolution that visual detection requires. Optics require much lower orbits. Keep in mind that the 360km keyhole satelite orbit is 1/100th of the distance from the 35,786km geosynchronous orbit. That is an incredibly difficult additional magnification requirement for what is already the most advanced optics in the world (after the "rubber mirror" on the ABL). Using the highly eliptical molniya orbits as described in the article, you can achieve continous coverage with a pair of satelites, but the continual coverage is only for a very specific area and because of complexity doesn't get adjusted. You can't therefore, simply reorbit more satelites over an area. You are then stuck with a limited number of eyes available for any one given area at one time The keyhole name here is apt because as with looking through a keyhole you get a clear view undetected, but with only a very narrow field of view. Also, you can't simply launch a few more satelites into orbit because in addition to the millions required to build satelite, it costs $7000 per pound to launch something into low earth orbit. The current keyhole, the KH-12, weighs 18 tons. At 2000lb/ton, the cost to place one of these guys in orbit is close to $250mil! Because of these limitations, satelite time is in many ways like processor time used to be on mainfraim computers in the sixties. People used to have to wait in line for days in order to get their turn to run their program and get back results. Satelite time = large demand, small supply.
National Reconnaisance Office controls the satellites and ques the taskings by priority level of who requested them. Defense Intelligence Agency deals mostly with the IMINT(Imagery Intelligence) National Security Agency deals mostly with the SIGINT(Signals Intelligence) CIA passes most of their requests through other agencies because their primary responsibilities lay in the HUMINT(Human intelligence) areas.
A multi-billion dollar microwave radar imaging telescope. Ottomaton thanks for the thoughtful post, but we will have to agree to disagree. We have many advanced classified technologies that can't be explained away by "Bad Astronomy or "How things work". To use common sense for a moment the Hubble designed in the 70's placed in orbit with a flawed mirror (corrected but not as sharp as designed) can image extremely large objects at vast distances currently up to 13 billion light years. That ratio is much greater than a satellite in a 22,000 mile lagrange orbit looking back at the planet with optics designed specifically for reconnaissance. A satellite in that orbit can't image something 5 inches across, but it can track larger objects in hot spots around the globe. Go Rockets
I've seen pictures way smaller than 5 inches across. Max satellite resolution on a good day is pretty scary.
You do realize that everything comming out of hubble is composited, multipassed, enhanced, filtered, not occuring in real time, etc? I also hope that you realize that when you have a perfectly dark medium and you hide in the orbit of the earth you can also expose the ccd detectors for as long as you see fit, and you don't really have to worry about motion blur when it comes to a two day exposure of a rotating galaxy 15 million light years away... Secondly, people do make note everything that is launched from the limited number of available launch sites, and people do get to look at the budgets submitted to congress for secret projects even if they don't see what those projects are. You keep making vague implications about some ubersatelite system that can do anything it wants and can image the mole on my butt from the Oort Clouds 24 hours a day, but you don't offer any plausable explination about how that would work, how the government launched it from a known launch site, or hid a launch site from public knowledge, or how the ubersatelite was payed for... Unless you want to believe that the NSA/CIA/etc are selling cocaine in LA to fund their secret equitorial launchsite in South America and constructing the object from technologies taken from the mothership in Roswell, please provide some mildly plausible and concrete theory or technology that fits into the reality of the world that these systems have to interface with. The government can do some really freaky strange things that don't seem real, (see VanEck phreaking) but all of them interface with the same laws of physics that both Bad Astronomy and How Things Work use, in addition to using and interfacing with the industrial and physical apparatus that the rest of the world uses. If there was, for instance, a satelite launch facility in the middle of the US, it wouldn't be secret for long because the noise and light from the launch would be seen and an air traffic controler somewhere would wonder outlound why a 3 miles square outside of Boise was restricted for air traffic. Even when the facts of the situation are incorrect, as is the case with the "Aurora" airplane, the "Switchblade", etc. there is at least knowledge that there is something that exists.
Treeman, I thought they were F-111's. That was part of the controversy with France at the time... they didn't allow them to cross their airspace. And we lost an F-111, if I remember correctly. If we had had Tomahawks, we might not have missed. As for the rest of what I quoted (damn, some of you make for long reading... not that there's anything wrong with that! It just takes awhile to pull out a small quote), It seems odd that you would point to one of our BIG problems in the region, our military presence on the ground, and in the next breath say that we're helping to remove it by occupying Iraq, giving us another base. Does not compute?
