THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

Has anyone considered- if Iraqis do not want "democracy" imposed on them (which is a nonsense anyway, democracy can only grow from within) maybe they should not have it imposed.

Do you think you have democracy in America? It's a moot point. Only candidates with colossal funds can succeed in the USA, and the money comes from big business. Hence the book title "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy". Is it a true democracy?

Only registered Republicans can attend GOP political gatherings now- in the land of the free. Something sinister is going on.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

For those who are having a hard time visualizing this,

350 tons is over 700,000 POUNDS of high explosive that we have lost track of. A single pound of the stuff is enough to blow the sh*t out of a humvee or make an extremely effective suicide bomb.

The people running Iraq are f*cking inept.

Cycloptichorn

Boortz has it right...again.

THE MISSING EXPLOSIVES

You'll hear much in the news today about the International Atomic Energy Agency saying that about 300 tons of explosives have "gone missing" in Iraq. This, of course, is not good. Let me ask you this though. If you've already heard this story, tell me when you think these explosives disappeared. Last week? Last month? My guess is that you will believe that these explosives recently disappeared.

Well ... you may well have the story wrong. The IAEA says that they were monitoring the explosives prior to the war. Now they're gone. The IAEA doesn't know when they disappeared. They can't say that Saddam didn't remove them before the American invasion. They can't say that Saddam's soldiers didn't move them to another location after the invasion began. They just don't know.

The Kerry campaign will be sure to make a huge deal out of this today. They'll pin the disappearance squarely on President Bush. The facts don't support that, but what do the facts mean when you're trying to win an election.

The following is an excerpt of the speech former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark gave in Los Angeles in 1998 at a rally against the sanctions on Iraq. One of the most incisive of Clark's comments were, "Wealth governs this country, and wealth uses military violence to control the rest of the world as best it can. And we're responsible, and we will pay the price for it."
Rally Against Sanctions on Iraq,
Holman United Methodist Church, Los Angeles, CA.

Ramsey Clark:
U.S. Will Pay Price for Rule of the Rich

"If you think it's been a long evening, wait 'til I get through. But we're going to have to take some long evenings, because this planet is deeply troubled, and the greatest cause of that trouble is our own government. In the speech that Rev. James Lawson referred to that Martin Luther King made on April 5, 1967, the most startling thing that he said at the time and the thing that caused the most anger and hatred to be directed toward him - was this sentence: "The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government." Thirty-one years ago!"

"Why anyone would have been startled is hard to say, because it was an obvious fact. But apparently we need more education in the obvious than we do examination of the obscure and unknown. Last year, U.S. military expenditures with all the suffering on the planet, all the sickness and hunger and ignorance and pain the American military budget was $265 billion. The second-largest government expenditure for militarism was $48 billion, and that was the Russian Federation. And the United States military expenditures exceed those of the [next] top 12 government expenditures on earth by themselves, and are more than one-third of all the military expenditures on the planet."

"We have a war party in this country, and we've had it all along! And you can call it Democrat for a while, you can call it Republican for a while, but it has been the special economic interests in this society that have governed us from the time that we founded our governments on this continent. And the people have never controlled those governments. We call ourselves the world's greatest democracy. We are absolutely a plutocracy. It is the most obvious thing in the world. Wealth governs this country, and wealth uses military violence to control the rest of the world as best it can. And we're responsible, and we will pay the price for it."

"If we don't control our violence, if we don't control the effect of the symbol of our glorification of violence on our children and on the rest of the planet, then this human species is going to be the first to destroy itself completely. And that's the road the United States government has put us on. The single most pertinent statement on this issue is by Henry Kissinger. When the Iran-Iraq War began [in 1980] over a million very young men lost their lives in that war Henry Kissinger said, at the beginning of that war, eight years of war, "I hope they kill each other."

"And that was exactly our policy. What could be better? Have them kill each other. Then who has to worry about that region anymore, you know? And don't think that's not exactly our policy all over the world, where there are poor people living today. That's the solution to overpopulation. Call it triage, whatever you want to call it. Let them kill each other. Let them die. And they're dying all over Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the masses of poor people live. They are expendable there, as they are expendable here."

"Appalling is what we've done and what we've threatened to Iraq. The worst violence that all of our technology could unleash, and then the strangulation of the sanctions. The thing we have to realize is, it's what our government leadership has been doing all along. It's not terribly different than how we addressed the folks that were here to meet the Mayflower, standing on the dock: the North American aboriginal peoples, the "Indians," as we call them. A long, steady course of destruction of those peoples. It's not terribly different than what we did to the slaves who were brought over in chains from Africa, those that survived the transit, which wasn't easy."

"You look in our history books, you don't read about a Philippine-American war. You read the Philippine history books and they know about a Philippine-American war. We call it the "Spanish-American War." We were "liberating" the Filipinos. We killed more than a million. Now we're bragging about the "covert actions" that we're going to engage in against Iraq. Do you doubt for a minute that they're planning covert actions in half a dozen other places right now? And we'll react to them five years after the misery has begun, and the people have been devastated?"

"What we have to realize is that if we don't stand up and stop this now if we can't stop these sanctions in Iraq; and, with them, we can't prohibit any further use of sanctions that are designed to impact on the poor, then there are no poor people on the planet that will ever be safe from our government and its future acts. It's imperative that we stop them in Iraq today, and that we prohibit them in the future as applied to any people. Because it is a weapon of mass destruction."

"We have to stop military interventions by our government completely. We cannot permit more U.S. military interventions in foreign countries. We have to stop economic interventions. We have to cancel foreign debt that has enslaved most of the poor countries of the planet cancel it. So let's organize through every effort and opportunity we have in our families, in our churches, in our mosques, in our synagogues, in our schools and at our jobs a massive coalition committed to end militarism and economic exploitation by our government. Thank you."

Dilema: How do you tell the good guys from the bad guys

(October 26, 2004 -- 12:31 PM EDT // link // print)
Just a pit stop.

This morning MSNBC interviewed one of the producers from their news crew that visited al Qaqaa as embeds with the 101st Airborne, Second brigade on April 10th, 2003.

This is the 'search' that the White House and CNN are hanging their hats on (empahsis added)...

Amy Robach: And it's still unclear exactly when those explosives disappeared. Here to help shed some light on that question is Lai Ling. She was part of an NBC news crew that traveled to that facility with the 101st Airborne Division back in April of 2003. Lai Ling, can you set the stage for us? What was the situation like when you went into the area?
Lai Ling Jew: When we went into the area, we were actually leaving Karbala and we were initially heading to Baghdad with the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. The situation in Baghdad, the Third Infantry Division had taken over Baghdad and so they were trying to carve up the area that the 101st Airborne Division would be in charge of. Um, as a result, they had trouble figuring out who was going to take up what piece of Baghdad. They sent us over to this area in Iskanderia. We didn't know it as the Qaqaa facility at that point but when they did bring us over there we stayed there for quite a while. Almost, we stayed overnight, almost 24 hours. And we walked around, we saw the bunkers that had been bombed, and that exposed all of the ordinances that just lied dormant on the desert.

AR: Was there a search at all underway or was, did a search ensue for explosives once you got there during that 24-hour period?

LLJ: No. There wasn't a search. The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away. But there was - at that point the roads were shut off. So it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there.

AR: And there was no talk of securing the area after you left. There was no discussion of that?

LLJ: Not for the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. They were -- once they were in Baghdad, it was all about Baghdad, you know, and then they ended up moving north to Mosul. Once we left the area, that was the last that the brigade had anything to do with the area.

AR: Well, Lai Ling Jew, thank you so much for shedding some light into that situation. We appreciate it.



Of course, as we noted last evening, contrary to the Drudge/CNN account, this wasn't the first detachment of troops to visit al Qaqaa. That came a week earlier when explosives were in fact found in a quick spot check of the facility.

Bear in mind the the al Qaqaa facility contains a vast number of buildings. Different press reports put the number anywhere from 87 to 1100. The discrepancy, I believe, is a definitional one, depending on whether one counts major buildings or individual bunkers and storage units.

Iraq was invaded in March 2003.

Quote:

Earlier this month, in a letter to the I.A.E.A. in Vienna, a senior official from Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology wrote that the stockpile disappeared after early April 2003 because of "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."

...

By late 2003, diplomats said, arms agency experts had obtained commercial satellite photos of Al Qaqaa showing that two of roughly 10 bunkers that contained HMX appeared to have been leveled by titanic blasts, apparently during the war. They presumed some of the HMX had exploded, but that is unclear.

...

In May 2004, Iraqi officials say in interviews, they warned L. Paul Bremer III, the American head of the occupation authority, that Al Qaqaa had probably been looted.

Allawi: US-led military partly to blame for army massacre


Iraqi PM warns violence will rise ahead of January polls as more than 560 killed in four months to September.


BAGHDAD - Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said Tuesday that carelessness by some elements of the US-led military in Iraq was to blame for the killing of 49 unarmed army recruits and three drivers on Saturday.

"I think it was because of gross negligence by some elements within the multinational forces," Allawi told the country's interim parliament, without giving details.

"The killings represent the epitome of what could be done to hurt Iraq and the Iraqi people," adding that a special investigation had been launched.

Allawi warned that violence would rise ahead of January polls, as his government said more than 560 people had been killed in suicide attacks between June and September.

"I can tell you we expect more attacks against Iraq," said Allawi.

He said the Iraqi government had intelligence that more militants from hardline Islamic groups had infiltrated the insurgents' stronghold of Fallujah, west of the capital.

More than 560 people (eds: correct) have been killed and 1,200 injured in 92 suicide attacks in Iraq in the four months to September, said Interior Minister Falah Naqib, also in an address to parliament.

July was the deadliest month, with 34 attacks which left 245 people dead and 235 injured, he said.

In one of the biggest attacks by insurgents, 70 people were killed in a suicide car bombing at a police station in Baquba, a restive city northeast of Baghdad, on July 28.

Assessing the fledgling police force, the interior minister admitted their ranks had been infiltrated by rebels.

"With the problem of unemployment, a number of the police are on the terrorists' payroll and are ready to attack a tank or a police post in exchange for money," he said.

...Had Bush not chosen to execute a pre-911 agenda-driven, unjustified, unilateral, ill-planned and obviously counter-productive invasion of Iraq, we might still be truly united behind him in a "sincere" attempt to fight real terrorism.

I participate here at A2K because I enjoy the dialogue. There are actually many meaningful informative interchanges. I do not believe a post has to be capable of altering someone's political position to be valid or worthwhile.

So, post away if you like, if it makes you feel good, but it will not make any difference.

"Earlier this month, in a letter to the I.A.E.A. in Vienna, a senior official from Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology wrote that the stockpile disappeared after early April 2003 because of "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."

Forgive my ignorance and lack of time to go searching the answer, but is this from the Duelfer Report?

In any event, to place was not gaurded after the invasion and Bush should have done so as his job of commander in cheif.

So this is no proof of saddam moving weapons out of the area and I don't remember reading about that here in the past so if you don't mind, foxfrye, to please offer up some proof of saddam moving weapons out of Iraq before the invasion.