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

McTag and old europe, Americans can be too blunt sometimes. Look what we did to Iraq.

I believe I can simplify this for you and I would start by taking the God bit out at the beginning. Every army marches "with God on its side".

I would say you could reach a judgement about morality by asking yourself the question "would I like it if this was done to me?" and go from there.

Was it moral for the strongest military in the world to attack an enfeebled country and then scratch around for "justification"? No it wasn't.

Well I don't disagree with what you said McTag. But what you said was not responsive to what I said.

Well, you said: "Could the use of nuclear weapons ever be justifiable?"

I'd say: no. never.

Even if it would save a million or more lives OE? In such a case how do you justify not using them? These are not easy questions. And there are no easy answers.

Not directly I suppose, no. I wanted to indicate that I have a problem with the concept of bombing people in order to save them.

In any case, all this talk of "saving" comes well after the event, and is nothing to do with the reasons for the attack.

And, is an entirely different situation from the decision over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whatever your opinions on that might be.

Foxy, would you kill a person to save another person? Would you kill an innocent person to save another innocent person?

I think it was short-sighted or a bit self-serving for McTag to erase God from Fox's discussion of "justification". Those of us who attended church from an early age had our definition of the word 'justification' closely based on how the word applies to our religion.

May not make it correct, but we can certainly not erase that meaning from our minds, nor should we. That's akin to us saying you are just plain wrong if your definition is not the same as ours.

Tolerance. It's a good thing.

It has not ecaped my attention that I have spoken in depth of faith, prayer, the Pope and justification in the nude today.

Indeed, Lash. Here, all the bells have been ringing for half an hour. I have a weird feeling today.

He died at 9:37PM, Rome time.

<smiles at Pope>

[when i try to link from yahoo it don't work which is why it may seem as if my links come from odd places as it requires me to go some trouble searching the source. this one was the AP)

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/11296093.htm

Posted on Sat, Apr. 02, 2005

U.S. forces may have beaten Iraqi general

ROBERT WELLER

Associated Press


FORT CARSON, Colo. - Previously secret court testimony indicates an Iraqi general imprisoned by U.S. forces was badly bruised and may have been severely beaten two days before he died of suffocation during interrogation.

References to the alleged beating appear in a transcript, released under court order, from a military preliminary hearing for three soldiers charged with murder and dereliction of duty in the death of Maj. Gen. Abed Mowhoush on Nov. 26, 2003. A fourth soldier faces the same charges but waived a hearing.

During the interrogation, Army prosecutors claim Mowhoush was put headfirst into a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord and knocked down before the soldiers sat and stood on him, prosecutors said. The cause of death was determined to be suffocation.

The defendants - Chief Warrant Officers Lewis Welshofer and Jefferson Williams, Sgt. 1st Class William Sommer and Spc. Jerry Loper - have all denied wrongdoing, saying commanders had sanctioned their actions.

According to the transcript, witnesses said others had also beaten Mowhoush days before the Army interrogation. Their names and agencies were blacked out.

Col. David A. Teeples, the men's commander, said during the closed hearing: "My thought was that the death of Mowhoush was brought about by .... (blacked out) and then it was unfortunate and accidental, what had happened under an interrogation by our people."

According to the transcript, Army special investigator Curtis Ryan testified that he found extensive bruising when he examined Mowhoush shortly after he died. "So, at some point prior to the 26th, he had been beaten," Ryan said.

An autopsy revealed that Mowhoush had also suffered broken ribs, testimony showed.

The military closed the hearing to the public shortly after it began in December, but The Denver Post successfully sued to open it, and the proceeding concluded this past week in open court. The transcript was released Thursday and posted on the Internet.

Fort Carson's commander, Maj. Gen. Robert Mixon, will decide whether the soldiers are court-martialed, after he receives a recommendation from the investigating officer, Capt. Robert Ayers. No timetable was set.

OE's question is provocative and I'll need to think about it before I answer. I will get back to it.

Meanwhile every television station, every radio station, and every conversation around town is of Pope J9hn Paul II. All the church bells are tolling no matter what brand of church they may be. What a great tribute to a truly great man. Whether or not one agrees with him on any given issue, he was truly a man of conviction and allegiance to noble principle. The world is richer for his presence here and poorer for his passing.

All I meant was that you said that ends don't justify the means but they may require them, which leaves open the justification status as it did in the beginning which started with the statement of the ends justifying the means. Wasn't really getting into the definition or anything.

I am sorry for the Pope passing as well; he meant a lot to a great many people.

Just saw Bush on tv. He said the Pope always stood for "a culture of life, where the strong protect the weak". That's true. The Pope was strictly against the death penalty. The Pope was strictly against the Iraq war.

I feel deeply hurt by the way Bush makes use of the Pope's words.

Lash

Put some clothes on, preferably black.

Iraqi Politicians Complain of Flaws in Interim LawThe document, which Iraqi officials co-wrote with the Americans, was approved in March 2004 and is the most enduring political legacy of the formal American occupation. It is called the transitional administrative law, or as the TAL, and sets the timetable for elections and the rules for installing a government, and it tries to address difficult issues, like the question of property restoration for Kurds exiled from the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

Senior politicians, particularly Shiite Arabs, are now attacking the TAL for enshrining a process that they see as contributing to the deadlock. They are especially critical of the measure that requires a two-thirds vote by the national assembly to appoint a president, and they point out that the law fails to set a deadline for the appointment.

"This is really sort of a weakness in the TAL," said Adnan Ali, a deputy head of the Dawa Islamic Party, the Shiite party whose leader, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is the top candidate for prime minister. "It's an obstruction rather than an assurance. This should have been done differently."

Mr. Ali and other politicians acknowledge that hardheaded self-interest among the various factions has caused the delays, but they say the transitional law could have set a lower bar for consensus and specified more deadlines.

In most countries with parliamentary systems, the party that wins a simple majority of the seats has the right to install an executive government, legal experts say. Here, the main Shiite bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, won 140 of 275 assembly seats in the Jan. 30 elections, but must ally with one or more partners to form a coalition government because of the two-thirds rule.

The most obvious partner is the Kurdistan Alliance, which won 75 seats. But, nine weeks after the elections, the two sides have yet to finalize any deal.

Officials from the two groups also say the process has slowed because they are trying to bring in the parties of Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister, and the Sunni Arabs, who largely boycotted the elections.

Iraqis have grown disillusioned and restless, and the day-to-day workings of ministries have slowed because of the uncertainty. American commanders have warned of a possible rise in violence.

A car bomb exploded Saturday at a police station in the town of Khan Bani Saad, 10 miles north of Baghdad, killing four policemen and one civilian and wounding three policemen and a civilian, the Interior Ministry said.

Also on Saturday, the American military said a marine was killed the previous day by small-arms fire Ramadi.

But some American diplomats here and some Iraqi officials who helped write the transitional law say the process is unfolding as it should. They emphasize that the two-thirds requirement was meant to prevent any single group from dominating the new government. They also say they did not set a deadline on appointing the president to avoid "micromanaging" the process.

"The thinking simply was to have a balancing of powers and interests in the transitional period," said Feisal al-Istrabadi, a senior fellow at the DePaul University College of Law and a main drafter of the transitional law. "It seemed to me that it was appropriate that a supermajority be required so no one party will dominate. I still believe that was the right decision."

The transitional law requires that the assembly appoint, by a two-thirds vote, a president and two vice presidents, called the presidency council. Those officers then have two weeks to appoint a prime minister, who would in turn select a cabinet. The assembly would approve those positions by a majority vote. If the presidency council fails to choose a prime minister within the two weeks, the assembly can appoint one by a two-thirds vote.

Mr. Istrabadi said that he personally pushed for the two-thirds requirement, but that he did not expect such high bars in the permanent constitution the new assembly must write.

Enough what?

Disagree. Nice butt.

Steve, you don't yet qualify. You are merely stating your opinion. To qualify you must blatantly misrepresent a source.

For example, if you had posted only that part of a reference that alleges Bush contemplated an alleged bad thing, but left out that part that alleged Bush decided not do the alleged bad thing you would qualify.