http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52813-2003Jun12.html Ahh... an article on the Nigerian fiasco. Looks like more spin.
Just to be a stickler, Niger, home of uranium, and Nigeria, home of the Olajuwons, are different countries. Nigerian is the adjective form of Nigeria. I don't know what the adjective form of Niger would be.
everything is spin ---- my head is spinning from all the lies, my only hope is the bush administration will somehow receive the same scrutiny as Clinton. Thats not to much to ask is it?
To answer my own question, someone from Niger is a NigeriEN, while your friends in Lagos are NigeriAN.
Yes that is too much to ask, there's no equivalent of Grover Norquist and the rest of the nuts with money, Fox News, and The New York Times on the left...
http://www.house.gov/reform/min/inves_admin/admin_nuclear_evidence.htm http://www.house.gov/reform/min/pdf...n_iraq_nuclear_evidence_june_12_statement.pdf http://www.house.gov/reform/min/pdfs_108/pdf_inves/pdf_admin_iraq_nuclear_evidence_june_10_let.pdf http://www.house.gov/reform/min/pdfs/pdf_inves/pdf_admin_iraq_nuclear_evidence_march_17_let.pdf So if I get this straight the CIA claims its evidence was shaky and the adminstration claims it was only using what the CIA offered, so we get - no one is to blame for spreading lies...
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,977853,00.html Iraqi mobile labs nothing to do with germ warfare, report finds Peter Beaumont, Antony Barnett and Gaby Hinsliff Sunday June 15, 2003 The Observer An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist. The conclusion by biological weapons experts working for the British Government is an embarrassment for the Prime Minister, who has claimed that the discovery of the labs proved that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction and justified the case for going to war against Saddam Hussein. Instead, a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told The Observer last week: 'They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.' The conclusion of the investigation ordered by the British Government - and revealed by The Observer last week - is hugely embarrassing for Blair, who had used the discovery of the alleged mobile labs as part of his efforts to silence criticism over the failure of Britain and the US to find any weapons of mass destruction since the invasion of Iraq. The row is expected to be re-ignited this week with Robin Cook and Clare Short, the two Cabinet Ministers who resigned over the war, both due to give evidence to a House of Commons inquiry into whether intelligence was manipulated in the run-up to the war. It will be the first time that both have been grilled by their peers on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee over what the Cabinet was told in the run-up to the war. MPs will be keen to explore Cook's explanation when he resigned that, while he believed Iraq did have some WMD capability, he did not believe it was weaponised. The Prime Minister and his director of strategy and communications, Alastair Campbell, are expected to decline invitations to appear. While MPs could attempt to force them, this is now thought unlikely to happen. The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, is expected to give evidence the week after. The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons will also cause discomfort for the British authorities because the Iraqi army's original system was sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command & Control.
Where's Treeman with his pseudo science? This reminds me of when Treeman asserted that the anthrax in Maryland after 911 must have come from Iraq due to scientific sounding declarations.
Here's what John McCain had to say about it, in the Washington Post. Past the Point of Justifying By John McCain Sunday, June 15, 2003; Page B07 Like many Americans, I am surprised that we have yet to locate the weapons of mass destruction that all of us, Republican and Democrat, expected to find immediately in Iraq. But do critics really believe that Saddam Hussein disposed of his weapons and dismantled weapons programs while fooling every major intelligence service on earth, generations of U.N. inspectors, three U.S. presidents and five secretaries of defense into believing he possessed them, in one of the most costly and irrational gambles in history? After the first Persian Gulf War, the discovery of Hussein's advanced nuclear weapons program following years of international inspections surprised everyone. When U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998, they catalogued Iraq's continuing possession of, or proven failure to disclose, one of the biggest chemical and biological weapons arsenals in history. Critics today seem to imply that after seven years of elaborately deceiving the United Nations, Hussein precipitated the withdrawal of U.N. inspectors from his country in 1998, then decided to change course and disarmed himself over the next four years, but refused to provide any realistic proof that this disarmament occurred. I am not convinced. Nor was chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, who recently catalogued Iraq's failure to come clean on an array of weapons programs the United Nations believed were continuing. Nor were Congress and President Clinton, who advocated regime change in Iraq in 1998 -- before the U.N. inspectors left. While war was never inevitable, it was, in retrospect, the most telegraphed military confrontation in history. Hussein had plenty of time to destroy or disperse weapons stocks and to further conceal weapons programs, which often rely more on human knowledge than physical infrastructure. If Hussein had the weapons destroyed or concealed, reconstituting them would have required primarily the skills of Iraqi scientists. Precious few Iraqis would have been involved in the actual destruction or concealment. That's why capturing and interrogating Iraqis involved in concealment -- as well as scientific personnel -- is essential. Despite highly intrusive inspections after the Gulf War, U.N. inspectors were shocked in 1995 when an Iraqi defector revealed the existence of Iraq's enormous biological weapons program. Until we capture Hussein or prove him dead and eradicate the remnants of his apparatus of terror, which continues to coordinate daily attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, Iraqi scientists will not feel free to talk, and warped dreams of outlasting America will persist. We went to war in part because Hussein failed to account for his weapons, had proven his willingness to use them and behaved in a way that encouraged governments around the world to believe he possessed them. Our intelligence about a hostile foreign government is never perfect. When it tends overwhelmingly toward one conclusion -- in Iraq's case, that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- should we give the benefit of the doubt to a dictator with a record of deceit and aggression? It is certainly appropriate to examine the quality of the intelligence that influenced the administration's decision to go to war. It is appropriate to examine what went right and what went wrong in the prosecution of the war and in its aftermath. But I find it impossible to credit as serious the suggestion that this war shouldn't have been fought because, lacking better intelligence, we ought to have assumed Hussein's good faith. We should not let legitimate debate about the search for weapons minimize the task now at hand: the reconstruction and democratization of Iraq. Discovering the truth about Iraqi weapons is important, securing Iraq's democratic future even more so. This will be the final measure of our victory, not how many gallons of anthrax we find. The United Nations found a lot, and we will either find more or find out where it went. We fought this war to defend the security of the United States against the threat from Hussein's proven weapons programs and his refusal to come clean, his record of aggression against his neighbors, the utter collapse of containment, the possibility of his cooperation with terrorists, and his brutal oppression of the Iraqi people. Does anyone believe that the United States, the Iraqi people or the Arab world would be better off if Hussein were still in power, if 8-year-old children were still held in Iraqi prisons, if Hussein were still threatening his neighbors? Hussein alone was responsible for this war, and we need make no apologies for supporting the use of U.S. military force to rid the world of his murderous regime. It is too early to declare final victory in Iraq. But we're well past the point of knowing that our war to liberate Iraq was right and just. The discovery of mass graves filled with the bodies of murdered children should have convinced even the greatest skeptic. We made America more secure, liberated millions from a reign of terror and helped create the prospect for the establishment of the first Arab democracy. That should make Americans proud -- and critics of the administration's decision to go to war a little more circumspect. The writer is a Republican senator from Arizona.
It's probably cause he's all crazy in the head from his Vietnam POW days, ohh wait, that's what a Bush hack told me during the South Carolina Republican Primary. Never mind.
Since he repeated it for emphasis, if our standard is a country where children are murdered, there are a lot more children getting killed in the Congo. What's the difference between Congo and Iraq? Also, he's using children much more liberally than most people would - the UN reports on the Congo mean people younger than driving age and McCain apparently means people who have parents. I'm not defending Saddam but hyperbole doesn't help McCain's argument. If we selectively use those arguments, our logic looks inconsistent and selectively applied. Otherwise I can buy his other arguments. This seems more appropriate for the WMD who cares thread. Can someone point me to a story that validates his point about the mass graves being filled with children and not filled with people of all ages?
I agree about expectations...my argument against the war, insofar as it related to WMD, was that we had shown insufficient evidence, not that they didn't exist...and I feel that my point has already been proven about that. But expectations didn't make a case then, and they don't now...To say that it seems improbable, therefore it must not be is incredibly flawed thinking...To quote the original reasoning detective: " When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." It would now appear close to the point where the vast stores of WMD we were told about seem to be an impossibility. Maybe there are some minor caches hidden somewhere, or forgotten about...but the thousands of tons of chems, the borderline active nuke program...well, I'll leave it with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, he said it better.
It was in the New York Post, right under today's "BALL TWO? FAMOUS BASEBALL PLAYER GAY!!!!" story....
This may have been posted elsewhere----I think it still applies here. Do the majority of Americans believe in finding proof for invasion-- I guess not?!?!?! Low Opinion Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction? It doesn't matter. By Michael Kinsley Why are we even bothering to keep looking for those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? At this point, what difference does it make whether we find them or not? Trying to find them serves two ostensible purposes: One is to prevent them from being used, and the other is to settle the argument about whether they exist. But neither purpose really applies any longer. As we are belatedly noticing, other nations are closer to having a usable nuclear weapon than Iraq. The claim was that nuclear and other weapons were especially dangerous in the hands of a malevolent madman like Saddam Hussein. Now Saddam is gone. Iraq is not quite yet the gentle, loving democracy promised by Bush administration propaganda. But its government, or lack of one, is hardly the rogue nuclear power we must fear the most. As for settling the argument about WMD as a justification for the war, that argument is already settled. It's obvious that the Bush administration had no good evidence to back up its dire warnings. And even if months of desperate searching ultimately turn up a thing or two, this will hardly vindicate the administration's claim to have known it all along. The administration itself in effect now agrees that actually finding the weapons doesn't matter. It asserts that the war can be justified on humanitarian grounds alone, and that Saddam may have destroyed those weapons on his way out the door. (Exactly what we wanted him to do, by the way, now repositioned as a dirty trick.) These are not the sorts of things you say if you know those weapons exist. And if it doesn't matter that they don't seem to exist, it cannot logically matter if they do. The general citizenry doesn't seem to care whether those weapons are discovered or not. Americans tell pollsters they do not mind that WMD haven't materialized and are not even withholding judgment while the search goes on. Some now believe the war was justified on other grounds. Some believe the weapons exist despite the lack of evidence. Some actually believe that WMD have been discovered. And some even believe that the Bush administration outright lied about WMD, but they don't care. According to a Harris poll out Wednesday, a majority of Americans still think the Bush administration was telling the truth before the war when it said it had hard evidence of WMD. A Knight Ridder poll released last weekend reports that a third of the populace believes that the weapons have been discovered. A Fox News poll last week found that almost half of Americans feel that the administration was "intentionally misleading" about Iraq's weapons, but more than two-thirds think the war was justified anyway. A Gallup Poll released Wednesday concludes that almost 9 out of 10 Americans still think Saddam had or was close to having WMD. By now, WMD have taken on a mythic role in which fact doesn't play much of a part. The phrase itself—"weapons of mass destruction"—is more like an incantation than a description of anything in particular. The term is a new one to almost everybody, and the concern it officially embodies was on almost no one's radar screen until recently. Unofficially, "weapons of mass destruction" are to George W. Bush what fairies were to Peter Pan. He wants us to say, "We DO believe in weapons of mass destruction. We DO believe. We DO." If we all believe hard enough, they will be there. And it's working. The most striking thing about polls like these isn't how many people believe or disbelieve some unproven factual assertion or prediction, but how few give the only correct answer, which is "don't know." In the Fox News poll, vast majorities expressed certitude one way or the other about the existence of WMD in Iraq, the likelihood of peace in the Middle East, and so on. Those who voted "not sure" (an even more tempting cop-out than the pollsters' usual "don't know") rarely broke 20 percent and usually hovered around 10. Four-fifths or more were sure about everything. As someone who manufactures opinions for a living, it is my job to be sure. And my standards for the ingredients of an opinion are necessarily low. There may be a few ancient pundits such as George Will who still follow the traditional guild practices: days in the library making notes on 3-by-5 cards, half a dozen lunches at the club with key sources, an hour spent alone in silence with a martini and one's thoughts—and only then does a perfectly modulated opinion take its lovely shape. Most of us have no time for that anymore. It's a quick surf around the Net, a flip of the coin, and out pops an opinion, ready-to-go except perhaps for a bit of extra last-minute coarsening. Still, even the most modern major generalist among the professional commentariat likes to have a little something in the way of knowledge as he or she scatters opinions like bird seed. The general public, or at least the part of it that deals with pollsters, is not so cowardly. Most people, it seems, will happily state a belief on a question of fact that nobody knows the answer to, and then just as happily do a double back flip from that shaky platform into a pool of opinions about which they are "sure." Pollsters themselves, and the media who report their findings deadpan, are partly responsible for this. Every news report about a poll result reinforces the impression that opinion untethered to reality is valid or even patriotic (and to be "not sure" is shameful). The modern pundit culture is also partly to blame, I suppose, with its emphasis on televised argumentation. Viewers do not always grasp the difference between low standards and no standards at all. Are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Sure there are—in every sense that matters, reality not being one of them.
