Oh, no worry there, Sam. The suggestion that Kerry is so loathesome and vile as to celebrate gleefully the suffering inflicted on our soldiers… well, that would be reprehensible, now wouldn’t it? What kind of creep would make such an insinuation?
At this point, they were only insurgents-to-be. There weren’t any terrorists in Saddam-controlled Iraq.
Bzzzt. He said himself he wasn’t qualified. He was partisan and would do anything Bush asked him to do.
This story is going to fizzle. The fact is, no one knows when the stuff was removed. I’d be very surprised to hear Kerry talking about this by the end of the week.
And now it looks like CBS wanted to break this (non)story on election eve (Minus exculpatory evidence, of course.). Gosh, why is that?, I wonder…
So what? Does that make it any less legitimate?
And what “exculpatory evidence” would that be, Brutus? Gosh, I wonder…
I don’t understand how this FUBAR can possibly be a non story. Please enlighten me.
Why, Louis, it’s obviously a non-story because it’s critical of Glorious Leader, so it’s obviously untrue. Thus, a non-story. See? It’s so simple when you turn your brain off…
Did we only get that surveillance stuff working after we were in control of the area? Somehow, I was under the impression we were doing surveillance even before the war. In fact, do you have any evidence that the surveillance was tighter once we were in control than before?
Good point…The fact that Bush pursued a policy to make it less likely that WMD and other related materials would get into the hands of terrorists and that this policy actually did exactly the opposite, how can we possibly blame this on him? And, it is not like there were any of us before the war who were worried about this being the case…I mean who could have possibly predicted it!!! :rolleyes:
Yeah, we shouldn’t allow people to report truthful things. That ought to be illegal.
Oh, and the original letter was written by the Iraqi provisional government. Do you want to go after them too?
I am proud to say that I predicted that Bush-supporters might get craven enough to use the “thinking / hoping for bad things” defense but I really hoped they wouldn’t get that desperate. This is now the second use of this defense in the last few days. So, let me inform you of something, Sam. Even if Kerry were to get a perverse pleasure out of things in Iraq getting this fucked up (and given that Kerry is going to have to deal with this mess he’d have to be a freakin’ masochist for that to be the case), John Kerry does not have magical powers…His thinking (or the thinking of others of us who think this administration gives incompetence a bad name) does not make things happen. This might come as news to you, but what makes things happen is the ineptness of the policies of the current administration. That is, actions make things happen, not thoughts. So quit trying to distract everybody from how screwed up the actions have been by saying that it appears that John Kerry thinks bad thoughts!
Nonsense JShore. 
It’s a well-known fact that everytime someone says a harsh word about Glorious Leader a fairy dies and Baby Jesus cries.
This story was originally in the Chicago Tribune - dated September 30, according to Josh Marshall. So it’s not like the SCLM was saving this for the last minute; it just didn’t break through the clutter. It apparently took the IAEA’s ringing the alarm bell to do the trick. (Maybe the IAEA is secretly working for Kerry. But wait a second, they had nothing to act on until they got the word from Allawi’s government in Iraq. Maybe Allawi’s secretly for Kerry.) Besides, the Bush Administration had to know about this story before the SCLM did; they could have at any time prevented the SCLM from saving this story for the last minute. Maybe the Bush Administration’s secretly for Kerry. :rolleyes:
So that seems to answer the question of whether this stuff is actually being used against our troops.
Shit.
“Oh, come on. People are fungible. You can have them here or there. The fact of the matter is, we’ve made a judgment and we’ve announced the judgment. It’s very clear. You understand it”
-Rumsfeld
Wow. Great cite, RT.
I don’t mean to be flip, but so what? And since when does “probably” mean “definitely”? Lots of S.H. era weapons are being used against our troops. There’s nothing particularly special about these weapons except that they’re in the news now. The fact reamains that no one knows what happened to these weapons.
On a related note, I hear a lot in the news about the “UN seals” that were put on the bunkers. Does anyone know what these seals consist of and how difficult it would be for someone to duplicate them if they wanted to?
-The man who told us he absitively, posolutely knew Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that posed a ‘grave and gathering danger’ to the US.
To quote Weirddave, of all people, “nobody blames you for missing a little piece of bullshit when you’re waste deep in the stuff.” And that seems to be the argument being advanced here: don’t blame the architects of the war plan because they didn’t secure this particular site; there were a whole bunch of weapons caches just like it that they didn’t have the troops to secure. So don’t pay it no never mind; we’re fucked far beyond the ability of this one weapons stash to make a difference.
Pardon me if I don’t find that particularly comforting.
I’ve already raised the point that we didn’t have enough troops to keep potential in-country opponents from getting their hands on a shitload of weapons that they could easily use against us. As a result, there is no way we (or any new Iraqi government) can achieve a state monopoly on violence. Hence, the occupation was FUBAR from the start.
There are reasons why talking about this site all by itself is worthwhile, though:
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Even if we’d secured every other weapons cache in Iraq, failing to secure this one would have kept the resistance alive for years all by itself. There was enough juice here for a few thousand OKC bombings, or a quarter of a million roadside bombs, or some mixture of the two.
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We clearly knew about this particular weapons cache in advance of the war. The IAEA told us about how much conventional bang was there, and it was on our list of suspected WMD sites. One can argue about whether we should have been able to guard a whole bunch of conventional weapons depots that we didn’t have advance intelligence about, but surely we were aware of the need to secure weapons that could be used against our forces after Baghdad fell. (If not, our leaders believed their own propaganda about how we would be welcomed as liberators - and that’s far worse.) So we should have allocated the troops to secure the major conventional-weapons sites we knew about, and this was one of those.
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The lies and evasions of the Bush Administration are in plain view here: “We didn’t know this site might’ve been looted until just the other day.” “Kerry’s blaming our troops for this.” And so forth.
Anyway, as I’ve been saying since May 2003, paraphrasing the 1992 Clinton campaign: “it’s the war plan, stupid.” It’s the failure of the war plan to be efficacious for doing anything beyond toppling Saddam that’s the fundamental scandal here.
We didn’t have enough troops to guard suspected WMD sites; we didn’t have enough troops to guard major conventional weapons caches; we didn’t have enough troops to keep Iraq’s infrastructure and government records from being looted; we didn’t have enough troops to properly run our prisons in Iraq - one of the factors that led to Abu Ghraib; we didn’t have enough troops to deal with an insurgency; we didn’t have enough troops for anything but defeating Saddam’s conventional army.
And because we didn’t have enough troops:
- Iraq lacks civil order.
- Iraq is awash in conventional weapons.
- If Iraq had had WMDs, they’d be in the hands of terrorists by now.
Like I’ve been saying since last May, we should thank our lucky stars that Bush was surely lying about the WMDs. Because if he was telling the truth, the failure of his war plan to be anything approaching sufficient for securing potential WMD sites, and Bush’s postwar lack of concern about our failure to have done so, would in my mind constitute the highest level of treason and betrayal. Consciously or not, he’d be doing the work of an al-Qaeda mole in the Oval Office.
And his failure, and his lack of concern about his failure to guard these enormous conventional weapons depots from unfriendly hands, constitutes a terrible betrayal of our men and women in uniform. Our troops know they’re putting their lives on the line when they go to war. But they have the right to expect that our leaders have done their reasonable best to minimize the risks to their life and limb as they fight our wars for us. The failure of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. to even come close to doing so should earn them our everlasting anger.
Oh, yeah, I got it now.
(bolding mine) Aren’t various and sundry church groups attempting to influence a U.S. election? Why not investigate them? Personally, I believe any and all church groups should keep their damn mouths shut—I’m more concerned about some of them than I am some U.N. person.
First of all, unless the 380 tons isn’t the 2000 lb./each kind, then it would only take 18 semi 18-wheelers to carry the load, which legally in most of the U.S. can carry approximately 43,500 lbs. cargo. A 22-wheeler can carry even more weight. And that’s just the legal limit, they could carry as much weight as the trucks and roads could handle.
I’m not sure how the facility is set up, but in the best case scenario, with palletized loads, fork trucks, and a loading dock, one person could load one truck in less than an hour. Even without this set-up, just bring in a bunch of pallets and a couple of fork trucks on the first truck, set up a make-shift loading dock, then begin palletizing the munitions and loading them. An average warehouse crew in America can pick, palletize, and load over a dozen tractor trailers, over 200 tons of product, in eight hours.
Additionally, over the road sand and gravel haulers could have been used instead. With 10 or 14 wheels, and much shorter in length, they could carry as much as could be crammed into the bed.
Furthermore, your scenario makes a lot of assumptions. You assumed that only one group of people did the looting. You assumed that they looted everything at once. You assumed that the trucks would all travel together in a large convoy. No one knows exactly what all the facts are, but those assumptions seem pretty far-fetched.
Sam Stone: And on a final, political note, John Kerry is going to run a serious risk of blowback if he goes after Bush on this one. He’s starting to look opportunistic. The minute the public decides that he’s happier when things get worse in Iraq, he’s going to lose a lot of support.
I’m not so sure. After all, would you rather put up with an opportunistic President or a massively incompetent one? If the planners of this war, which was launched with the explicitly stated goal of preventing Iraqi weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists, actually managed inadvertently to facilitate Iraqi weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, I don’t see how Bush can come out of it looking anything but massively incompetent. A little bit of “nyah-nyahing” on the part of Kerry is pretty trivial by comparison.
That was already a chuckle even without any commentary. But Gen. Wesley Clark stepped to the plate and knocked that softball clear out of sight:
You tell 'em, Wes!