The depth and persistence of your perfidy on this issue is approaching the treachery of treason. The number one threat to the Republic is rational ignorance!
Further attempts to spread your falsehoods will be met with “serious consequences.”
Well as far as Bush and Blair are concerned the intelligence that has been released was full of caveats. Lot’s of “could have” “may have” etc. The statements I heard coming from politicians were along the lines of “we have rock solid evidence of WMD” “We know where they are” etc.
Lying or exaggerating it doesn’t really make much difference to me. They played fast and lose with the facts to bring their respective countries into a war. They don’t deserve to be in office AFAIC. If I was British I’d have been a Blair supporter BTW so it isn’t always about hating Bush.
Rational ignorance at work.
Does the OP - or anyone - support some sort of basic intelligence test as a prerequisite for voting?
Not an intelligence test per se, but a knowledge test along the lines of the one suggested in Great Debates a while back wouldn’t be a bad idea in my opinion.
Everybody, including Clinton, Bush, and every poster here if they’re honest, thought that Saddam had something under wraps. We didn’t know quite what, but we had suspicions that Saddam did nothing to discourage; to a great degree, Saddam’s ouster was his own fault for playing games with the UN for so long.
But the crucial difference between Bush and everyone else, including Clinton, is that Bush sent Colin Powell to the UN with what were supposed to be photos of mobile chemical weapons labs and exact numbers of Saddam’s CBN cache. Bush claimed that Saddam was buying uranium ore from Niger. Bush claimed that Saddam had collaborated with Al Qaeda in unleashing 9/11. Bush did not say he “thought,” or “suspected”–he claimed that he KNEW, that he had absolute proof of all his allegations. Everyone else suspected Saddam had weapons, but Bush calimed to have absolutely conclusive evidence to that effect.
Bush either deliberately lied or he declared war based on the lies of others. Bush apologists simply lack the honesty to say the yes, Bush was wrong, he didn’t know what he claimed to.
I think that this is the wrong end to change.
The troubles are systemic. Very intelligent people can be mal-informed.
Wow. Set the Wayback Machine for 1994.
I kind of get the impression that Bruce Tinsley would like the idea…
“Dumb Crow” laws perhaps?
Enjoy,
Steven
Certainly not. If, however, you were to propose some sort of basic honesty test as a prerequisite for running, we might get somewhere.
Note that the Bush-supporters polled overwhelmingly understood the Bush administration to be advancing the (demonstrably false) information that they believed. Either Bush’s administration has been a monumental flop of an administration when it comes to communicating–and a success at communication would have meant a failure to persuade people to agree to their course of action–or the Bush administration has willfully misled its own supporters. I really don’t see another option.
No intelligence test for voting. But yeah: I think that willfully tricking people into supporting a war ought to be grounds for impeachment, as should any effort to willfully deceive people into supporting a course of action that results in bloodshed.
Daniel
Another possibility: When a person receives their voting card, they should get a notice saying, “ON ELECTION DAY, THE POLLWORKERS WILL TRY TO TWEAK YOUR NOSE. DO NOT LET THEM!”
On election day, the pollworkers should complete every voter’s checkin by saying, “By the way, there’s a spot on your shirt” and pointing. Anyone who looks down to see the spot and gets their nose tweaked doesn’t get to vote.
Weed out the terminally gullible.
Daniel
Not me. And a lot of members on the UN would say, like I do : He played a bluf game? Of course. But a president of a sovereign nation that plays a bluffing game does not give the God Given Right to a president of an other sovereign nation to plot his murder and give orders to execute him.
Which is exactly what Bush did: To kill the president of a sovereing naiton, his sons and family, his government and thousands and thousands of the citizens of that sovereign nation. And still counting as I write this.
Salaam. A
This is true IFF “having something under wraps” necessitates “regime change”. I believed, and said so at the time, that “something under wraps” was properly handled with “inspections/sanctions”. Saddam’s “ouster” was unnecessary and the “fault” for it lies on those who took drastic action in response to meager indicators.
Enjoy,
Steven
Well, to be fair, the world has operated on a perception that clandestine non-compliance is the norm for such a long time, that clandestine compliance just threw everybody a curve. Saddam was evidently the first leader to attempt to use this strategy, and it backfired on him. Clearly, the theory underlying its successful application is going to require some tweaking.
Hussein obviously wanted to keep a bit of doubt in the hearts of Syria and Iran. Understandably so. As you say, it backfired.
Comments such as this are very damaging to your credibility.
Damn Kerry supporters and their fancy…uh…brains. 
I could tell right away. Clowns smile; Bush smirks.
Clothahump, Mr. Hayes is a flunky for The Man. Do not trust him. He’s trying to keep you down. Free your mind with these publicly available items Mr Hayes failed to mention:
Originally posted here
Brief recap for general edification:
[indent]
Iraq News, February 10, 1999, Federation of American Scientists
It starts off talking about how there were no traces of the precursors of VX nerve gas nor its degradation product at the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant, al-Shifa, that the US bombed in 1998. It also has this in it:
[indent]In their report, made available to the New York Times, Kroll Associates found no evidence of a direct link between Idris and bin Ladin," even as the White House maintained, “We stand by our evidence linking this plant to bin Ladin’s network.”
US officials also revealed the existence of other sites in Khartoum thought to be associated with Iraq and VX production. Clinton chose al-Shifa as a target, because it was the only VX-related site not near a populated area.[/indent]
This is from February 1999. It mentioned empta, the precursor to VX, so I looked up Empta, and found this:
*link*
The Clinton administration seems unwilling to confront its similar mistake in the Sudan. When informed that the Washington law firm of Akin Gump was pursuing a $20 million compensation claim for the Ashifa pharmaceutical plant destroyed by the Aug. 20, 1998, cruise missile strike, one administration official responded: ‘‘Lawyers for Akin Gump have confused who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.’’
But have they? Here, as with the Iranian airliner shoot-down, Washington offered a host of allegations. The plant, said to produce nerve gas, was supposedly heavily guarded, run by the Sudanese military, financed by Saudi Arabian terrorist Osama bin Laden, and produced no commercial products. A soil sample supposedly contained the chemical EMPTA, which is used in the production of VX, a nerve gas, and supposedly has no nonmilitary purpose.
Alas, as before, everything Washington said turned out to be false. Those who visited the plant said it was not guarded. Even the administration abandoned its claim that bin Laden was behind the plant; officials shifted to the claim that the Sudanese military or Iraq was involved. But there was no evidence that Khartoum was in charge and the alleged Iraqi connection seems limited and innocuous. Sudanese dissidents said the new plant owner is nonpolitical.
It turns out the Ashifa factory did make pharmaceuticals and veterinary drugs. Moreover, architects, engineers and suppliers say that the plant lacked the extra space, equipment, materials and air-sealed doors necessary for chemical weapons work.
Most important, EMPTA is difficult to isolate in soil; EMPTA’s composition resembles that of several herbicides and pesticides, and could be confused with them in an imperfect test. Moreover, it turns out that there are legitimate, though limited, commercial uses of EMPTA. And in February, American chemists, brought in by the plant’s owners, failed to detect even trace elements of EMPTA.
If the bolded part is true, then the purported link between Iraq and al-Qaida asserted is uncontestedly not demonstrated by the connection between al-Shifa and the shipment of medicines to Iraq.
From the Voice of America via FAS
The New York times" Saturday [8/29] published a front page story detailing how some of the intelligence, which led to the attack against the al Shifa factory, was apparently wrong. The paper says the u-s description of the facility as a “highly secretive, tightly secured military-industrial site”…that … “produced no commercial products” … And, that Mr. Bin laden was directly involved in financing the operation, appears to be wrong.
American and European engineers who helped build, design and supply the plant, all say it made both human medicine and veterinary drugs, and was not a tightly guarded chemical-weapons facility patrolled by Sudanese soldiers as a senior intelligence official described it last week.
…“Omaha World-Herald”…
The next day, [[un]ambassador] Richardson’s story fell apart. **The administration acknowledged that it had erred. Officials said the United States hadn’t known, when the attack was ordered, that the plant produced medical and veterinary products. They also conceded that they have overstated evidence of [Osama] bin Laden’s ties to the factory. **
Of course this is the complementary opposite of the more recent fear. Here the fear was that bin Laden was supplying Hussein with WoMD instead of Hussein supplying bin Laden.
From here:
But soon, Western professionals who had worked at the Sudan plant began to speak credibly of the plant being just what the Sudanese government claimed it was: a civilian factory producing a major share of the pharmaceuticals for an impoverished country.
Western journalists who rushed to the scene of the U.S. missile attack found medicine, but no security features that one would expect at a military or weapons facility. Sudan’s government offered journalists unfettered access to the area.
The U.S. government said that it had obtained a suspicious soil sample from near the plant nine months before the cruise attack. But as New York Times reporter James Risen noted in an exhaustive study a year after the Sudan factory had been leveled, “officials throughout the government raised doubts up to the eve of the attack about whether the United States had sufficient information linking the factory to either chemical weapons or to Mr. bin Laden.”
Risen reported that intelligence analysts in the State Department were drafting an internal report saying the cruise attack on the Sudan factory had not been justified, but the report was killed by higher ups.
What’s not in dispute is that Sudan government officials forced Osama bin Laden to leave their country in 1996. Or that the Al Shifa factory had been purchased by a Sudanese businessman five months before the missile attack–a fact that was unknown to the U.S. at the time it targeted the plant.
EMPTA FAQ
Q. EMPTA’s structure resembled that of an agricultural insecticide, known as FONOFOS, which is commercially available in Africa. While the two are not identical, they have molecular similarities and could be confused in a laboratory test performed under less-than-ideal conditions, according to a counterterrorism expert who ran the Army’s chemical and biological warfare programs at Fort Campbell, Ky., in the 1980s. Could the “EMPTA” actually have been an innocuous pesticide?
A. Fonofos is actually O-ethyl-S-phenyl ethylphosphonothiolate (CAS reg. no. 944-22-9; it’s specifically exempted from the CWC Schedule 2). Thus it differs from EMPTA as follows: (1) ethylphosphonyl rather than methylphosphonyl, (2) S-phenyl thiophosphonic ester rather than thiophosphonic acid. GC/MS should be able to tell the difference between the two under just about any circumstances I can imagine, because of difference no. 1. Ordinary gas chromatography in a decent laboratory should be able to distinguish EMPTA and fonofos, provided that the phenyl group is not hydrolyzed away before it gets to the lab (a reasonable proposition for a soil sample, even one not promptly stored at 4 degrees), even assuming that the EMPTA must be derivitized for the analysis. Using liquid chromatography techniques, where no derivitization is required, difference no. 2 makes the analysis even more definitive.
I think one needs to be careful to distinguish the conditions under which the soil sample was obtained (one presumes these were less ideal than is customary in the environmental business) and the conditions under which they were analyzed. The Army’s chemical and biological defense programs required rapid response and no false negatives; if there is a toxic cloud coming over that hill they need to know it fast so they can don their masks and suits. They prefer to do this for a false alarm every so often rather than learn of a chemical attack because a few sentries start twitching on the ground. As a result the Army’s experience (and the counterterrorism expert’s, by inference) tends to focus on field methods that are very quick and give an occasional false positive.
Although the papers do not say, there seems to be no reason to assume that analysis of the soil samples from the Sudan was conducted under conditions where “we need the answer in 5 minutes or else your comrades might die.” Unless someone knows differently, it seems to me fair to presume that the analyses were performed using techniques and instrumentation capable of distinguishing a diester of ethylphosphonothioic acid from a monoester of methylphosphonothioic acid.
Finally, according to EPA:
"Fonofos is immobile in sandy loam and silt loam soils. It is mobile in quartz sand. It decomposes in aerobic soils by microbes in 4-8 weeks. Fonofos is non-volatile from soil but volatile from water. It degrades in aerobic soils with a half like of 3-16 weeks. Fonofos is moderately persistent."
Fonofos is used mostly on corn, but it is used on ornamental turf. For fonofos to turn up at the plant in Khartoum, it would thus appear that either (a) the plant had a nice lawn that had been treated relatively recently, or (b) there had been some recent spraying activity nearby and there was either overspray or blowing dust. I do find it interesting that it is the NY Times that raised this possibility; I would imagine given the high visibility PR campaign that had fonofos (or for that matter, any organophosphate) been used anywhere near the plant the government of the Sudan would have been loudly proclaiming the fact.
In sum, it could have been a fonofos false positive, but I remain skeptical of the possibility.
AND
ABCNEWS talked to many international arms control experts, scientists and some U.S. intelligence officials who say they now believe that the CIA soil sample, and the tests done on it, prove nothing.
- The CIA test found such a small amount of the chemical EMPTA that the results could have been wrong.
- The lab that did the test did not use the most sensitive and reliable technique — mass spectrometry — to analyze the sample.
- The CIA used only one laboratory to carry out the tests. International standards normally require testing in three independent labs.
“The evidence is based on trace amounts of a compound in soil, and we know that compound is not stable in soil,” says chemical toxicologist Dr. Hendrik Benschop. “So, this would not add up to solid scientific evidence.”
[An] investigation of the factory ruins… collected samples from 13 locations at the site. Sophisticated testing and analysis by three different laboratories showed that the samples contained no EMPTA.
…Defense Intelligence Agency… …concludes that the decision to bomb was based on bad intelligence … and bad science.[/INDENT]
To be accurate, it threw the U.S. and the U.K. a curve. Everyone else had seemed prepared to handle it properly.