WashPost Editor calls Keystone rejection an insane act

Iraq wasn't about oil, it was about Saddam Hussein providing the 9-11 jackers with the anthrax they used to poison the US senate office building and a couple of post offices. If it HAD been about oil it would have been a legitimate candidate for stupidest policy in the history of mankind since a fraction of the cost could have bought all the oil we'd ever have wanted to get from Iraq.

Holy christ you're an idiot.

I know, you don't believe Hussein had anything to do with 9-11 or the anthrax attacks which followed...

The first case of anthrax after 9-11 (Bob Stevens) showed up about ten miles from where Mohammed Atta himself had been living, i.e. the short drive from Coral Springs to Boca Raton.

The last previous case of anthrax in a human in the United States prior to 9-11 had been about 30 years prior to that.

There are other coincidences. For instance, the wife of the editor of the sun (where Stevens worked) also had contact with the hijackers in that she rented them the place they stayed.

Atta and the hijackers flew planes out of an airport in the vicinity and asked about crop dusters on more than one occasion. Indeed, Atta sought a loan to try to buy and and modify a crop duster.

Atta and several of the hijackers in this group also sought medical aid just prior to 9/11 for skin lesions that the doctors who saw them now say looked like anthrax lesions.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-03-24/news/0203240066_1_dr-christos-tsonas-cutaneous-anthrax-hijackers

Basically, you either believe in the laws of probability or you don't. Anybody claiming that all these things were coincidences is either totally in denial or does not believe in modern mathematics and probability theory.

While the anthrax in question originally came from a US strain, it isn't too surprising that Iraq might have that strain since that strain was mailed to laboratories around the world years earlier. That is, it wsa mailed out for the purpose of allowing other nations to develop medicines to cure it, not to make weapons out of it...

Nonetheless, it was highly sophisticated, and went through envelope paper as if it weren't even there; many thought it to be not only beyond the capabilities of Hussein but of anybody else on the planet as well including us. Nonetheless, later information showed Husseins programs to be capable of such feats:

http://www.aim.org/publications/media_monitor/2004/01/01.html




Basically, the anthrax attack which followed 9/11 had Saddam Hussein's fingerprints all over it. It was particalized so finely it went right through envelop paper and yet was not weaponized (not hardened against antibiotics). It was basically a warning, saying as much as:




There is no way an American who had had anything to do with that would not be behind bars by now. In fact the one American they originally suspected told investigators that if he'd had anything to do with that stuff, he would either have anthrax or have the antibodies from the preventive medicine in his blood and offered to take a blood test on the spot. That of course was unanswerable.


The basic American notion of a presumption of innocence is not meaningful or useful in cases like that of Saddam Hussein. Even the Japanese had the decency to have their own markings on their aircraft at Pearl Harbor; Nobody had to guess who did it. Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, is like the kid in school who was always standing around snickering when things went bad, but who could never be shown to have had a hand in anything directly. At some point, guys would start to kick that guy's ass periodically on general principles. Likewise, in the case of Saddam Hussein, the reasonable assumption is that he's guilty unless he somehow or other manages to prove himself innocent and, obviously, that did not happen.


At the time, the US military was in such disarray from the eight years of the Clinton regime that there was nothing we could do about it. Even such basic items as machinegun barrels, which we should have warehouses full of, were simply not there. Nonetheless, nobody should think they would get away with such a thing and, apparently, Hussein and his baathists didn't.

Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War" documents some of this:



I mean, we didn't even have fricking machinegun barrels anymore. A friend of mine called up several barrelmakers about a barrel for a target rifle in the early spring of 02 and was told they were working 24/7 making machinegun barrels and didn't have time for any sort of civiliam firearm business.

A country with any sort of a military at all has to have warehouses full of that sort of thing and we had ******* none. We basically needed to go into Iraq the day after 9-11 and we were not able to due to the state Slick KKKlinton had left the military in, it took two years of building.


In the case of nuclear weaponry there appears to have been a three-way deal between Saddam Hussein, North Korea, and Libya in which raw materials from NK ended up in Libya to be transmogrified into missiles pointed at Europe and America by Saddam Hussein's technical people and with Iraqi financial backing (your oil-for-terrorism dollars at work), while Kofi Annan and his highly intelligent and efficient staff kept the west believing that their interests were being protected:



Muammar Khadaffi later gave the **** up and renounced the whole business.

The Czech government is sticking with its story of Mohammed Atta having met with one of Saddam Hussein's top spies prior to 9-11 and there are even pictures of the two together on the internet now:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/539dozfr.asp

Then again as I mentioned, there's the question of the anthrax attack which followed 9-11. Saddam Hussein's the only person on this planet who ever had that kind of weaponized anthraxs powder.

http://www.aim.org/publications/media_monitor/2004/01/01.html

Moreover it does not take hundreds of tons of anthrax powder to create havoc.

The sum total which was used was a few teaspoons full. In other words, a lifetime supply of that sort of thing for a guy like Saddam Hussein could easily amount to a hundred pounds worth, and I guarantee that I could hide that in a country the size of Iraq so that it would not be found.

The question of whether or not Hussein had 1000 tons of anthrax powder is simply the wrong question. The right questions are, did the guy have the motive, the technical resources, the financial wherewithal, the facilities, and the intel apparatus to play that sort of game, and the answers to all of those questions are obvious.

Basic simple reality here... Only four nations have ever had any sort of a weapon anthrax program: the United States, England, Russia, and Iraq; of the four, only Iraq would ever have provided Mohammed Atta with weapon anthrax.

What ceili said.

Id like to know what consortia of consulting companies was responsible for the pipeline route analyses and why didnt they consider the safetty and security issues.
Here we have this huuuge "Homeland Security" agency that is out there providing "advisories" to water companies about resource security. (I was involved ina redesign of some stuff at the FreenLAne Reservoirs of Philly and we hadda jump through major hoops to satisfy some requirement that is supposed to assure no contamination by any terrorists).
Then, on the other hand, we take and locate a huge pipeline through THE major geographically defined aquifer in the US. This makes absolutely no sense to anyone except gunga and spurt.

As I noted a couple of posts back, the connection between Saddam Hussein and the anthrax attacks is provable other than for people who don't believe in the laws of probability.

The law of probablity?

You mean like its very probable that the law(FBI) tracked down the actual culprit and they had nothing to do with Saddam?

They wanted people to think that for some reason, I assume mainly they didn't want people thinking what Hussein had done was even possible.

For an American to have been in on the thing however he'd have had to have been in on 9-11 itself since an anthrax attack couldn't even be staged in the amount of time between 9-11 and the anthrax attacks. You need to learn to think for yourself just a little bit if you hope to succeed in life.

Occam's razor is the great enemy of conspiracy theorists.

Cycloptichorn

Not all refineries are the same, either in capacity or the capabilities required to handle the heavy crude involved. Those with the required heavy crude capability are centered in Texas and Louisiana. Moreover environmental regulations make it very hard to either add new ones or add to the cvapacity of existing ones.

Even if all the Canadial crude was refined into the multiple different products that result in any of the 12 or so refineries distributed "along the Canadian border"from Seattle to Michigan, the refined products would have to be shipped to their msany consumers across the country. That is a much more complex, costly and environmentally hazardous distribution problem than merely transporting the crude by pipeline to an existing refining and distribution network.

That's funny gunga..

Maybe you meant the (law of) probablity that you would say something stupid again.

Of course!! I should listen to you, an obvious expert on anthrax.

Since you are such an expert on anthrax and the time it takes to weaponize, it makes me wonder why you are trying so desperately to shift the blame to Hussein.

Why does President Obama want our country to be energy poor?

One of the reasons the unemployment rate has been stuck above 8 percent for years is because the Obama administration is actively blocking the private sector from creating jobs. Approving the Keystone XL pipeline, now in its third year of review, would have gone a long way toward boosting American job creation and strengthening our energy security. But the President prefers the politics of energy poverty and has sided with environmentalist radicals over hardworking Americans and their families.

The decision for the president should have been simple because the question is simple—is a pipeline from Canada to the United States in the “national interest?” Precisely what part of stable oil supplies, tens of thousands of good-paying jobs, and strengthening trade with our closest ally is not in the national interest?

Apparently, that’s not good enough for the Obama administration. Somewhere along the way, it seems, the president has misunderstood the difference between what is good for America and what is good for the special interests that support him and staff his favorite lobbying groups.

The opponents of the Keystone XL claim that the pipeline would be an environmental catastrophe, yet the Obama administration’s extensive environmental review found otherwise. In fact, the State Department’s environmental studies confirmed what we knew from the beginning—that a new pipeline would have a limited environmental impact, much less so than transport by barge, truck, or railcar. That pipelines have a limited environmental impact is one of the reasons we have more than 50,000 miles of crude oil pipelines in the U.S. already.

Another common complaint is that a pipeline will increase greenhouse gas emissions. This argument only makes sense, however, if the oil were to stay in the ground forever. But as Austan Goolsbee, the former chairman of the Obama’s White House Council of Economic Advisers, recently said, “Eventually, [a pipeline] is going to be built. It may go to the Pacific, it may go through Nebraska, but it’s going to be built somewhere.”

Indeed, the Canadian sands oil will enter the global oil supply whether U.S. refineries is the destination or not. To date, firms in China—the world’s fastest growing consumer of energy—have spent over $18 billion in acquiring interests in Canada’s oil sands.

The reality at the White House has nothing to do with protecting the environment -- it’s about reinforcing a myth of energy scarcity on the United States and driving up the price of energy.

For decades, one of the key tenets of environmental doctrine has been that the United States, and North America as a whole, is running out of affordable energy sources like oil, natural gas, and coal. For this reason, they argue, our economy must switch to renewables like wind farms and solar panels that produce electricity at intermittent rates. Through mandates, government has forced consumers to buy these sources, and the Obama administration has propped up Big Green Energy through taxpayer-funded loans to companies like Solyndra.

Yet the discovery of cost-effective oil production from Canadian oil reserves—as well as the large-scale deployment of shale technologies here in the U.S.—turns the environmentalists’ politics of energy scarcity on its head, and that is at the heart of the administration’s opposition to Keystone XL. The president wants the United States to be energy poor.

But we are not energy poor. North America is the richest place on earth when it comes to affordable energy sources.

Recently, the Institute for Energy Research released The North American Energy Inventory, which pulls together data from government sources to prove that North America holds the world’s largest combined oil, coal, and natural gas resources in the world.

How vast? There is enough oil in North America to fuel our present needs for 250 years. That’s how vast.

But it does not matter how vast our resources are if we cannot access them. That’s the point of the Keystone XL pipeline—to provide better access to Canada’s oil resources and the jobs for American workers that come from developing them. After all, it’s a $7 billion pipeline, the majority of which will be built by American workers in at least five states.

An infrastructure project of this size will create real construction jobs, and it will create jobs in American refineries when the oil starts flowing. All of these jobs are private sector—without taxpayer subsidies—and will help get American working families back on their feet.

Earlier this week, the President’s Jobs Council understood this. They said that “We should allow more access to oil, natural gas and coal opportunities on federal lands” and move forward quickly on projects that “deliver electricity and fuel,” including pipelines. If that doesn’t include the Keystone XL pipeline, it’s hard to understand what the President’s Jobs Council has in mind.

Allowing the Keystone XL pipeline to be built will create thousands of jobs and give the U.S. access to more oil resources from Canada, with the end result of improving our energy security.

More than anything, the Keystone XL pipeline is about symbolism.

That President Obama would prefer to push the U.S. down the road toward energy poverty instead of allowing it to share in the bounty of North America’s energy riches should not be lost on U.S. consumers.

It’s time for this president to stop worrying about his own job prospects and start worrying about millions of Americans who haven’t had a job since he was sworn into office.

Thomas J. Pyle is President and CEO of the American Energy Alliance.

Artificial poverty in midst of natural wealth...

The two really big factors in the wealth of nations today are energy and banking, and Bork Obunga is trying to squeeze us to death in both areas. Handing Wall Street banks a trillion dollars for them to park at the fed in the form of excess reserves for us to pay interest on doesn't help us any more than shutting down Keystone does.

I can lead a jackass to water, obviously I can't make him drink...

Do your own google search on "saddam hussein anthrax "

One item which turns up fairly quickly:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92270&page=1#.TxrWsG-miM4

If youre trying to write like spendius, youve gotten off to a good start here. YOu should just get rid of any punctuation and let er rip like Jack Kerouac

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92270&page=1#.TxrWsG-miM4

Youre such a moron spurt. There is probably more drilling going on now than there has been in 55 years . The drillers themselves are deciding to "cap" their wells because the price of nat gas is plummeting due to the oversupply v world demand.

I dont even think you understand how capitalism works.

I'll match my writing against anything else seen on A2K, that isn't asking for a hell of a lot. What if anything do you see in the post you mention which you believe an English teacher might have problems with?