blatham wrote:Quote:I view 9-11 and poisoning the US senate office building with anthrax as acts of war and there is overwhelming evidence that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the anthrax part of the deal.
swolfie
And we'd love to know how you might have formed your concepts of reasonable evidence, burden of proof, logical argument and fallacy.
I've posted this once or twice before, nonetheless you appear not to have seen it:
The first case of anthrax after 9-11 (Bob Stevens) showed up within miles of where several hijackers stayed JUST BEFORE 9/11, a very unlikely coincidence considering that they could have stayed anywhere in the country.
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 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.
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.
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
Quote:
In a major development, potentially as significant as the capture of Saddam Hussein, investigative journalist Richard Miniter says there is evidence to indicate Saddam's anthrax program was capable of producing the kind of anthrax that hit America shortly after 9/11. Miniter, author of Losing bin Laden, told Accuracy in Media that during November he interviewed U.S. weapons inspector Dr. David Kay in Baghdad and that he was "absolutely shocked and astonished" at the sophistication of the Iraqi program.
Miniter said that Kay told him that, . That would make the former regime of Saddam Hussein the most sophisticated manufacturer of anthrax in the world." Miniter said there are "intriguing similarities" between the nature of the anthrax that could be produced by Saddam and what hit America after 9/11. The key similarity is that the anthrax is produced in such a way that "hangs in the air much longer than anthrax normally would" and is therefore more lethal.
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:
Quote:
"Hey, fools, some of my friends just knocked your two towers down and if you try to do anything about it, this is what could happen. F*** you, and have a nice day!!"
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:
Quote:
'Cheney?s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, quickly questions the wisdom of mentioning state sponsorship. Tenet, sensitive to the politics of Capitol Hill and the news media, terminates any discussion of state sponsorship
with the clear statement:
Quote:"I'm not going to talk about a state sponsor."
'Vice President Cheney further drives the point home:
Quote:
"It's good that we don't, because we're not ready to do anything about it."
Again, the Japanese had the decency to have the rising sun on their aircraft at Pearl Harbor. Given what we have to deal with in the case of the events of Autumn 01, including the anthrax attacks, in my view at least, the United States would have been fully justified in using nuclear weapons to remove the entire islammic world from this planet starting with Mecca and Medina on general principles. What the Bush administration has actually done, aside from being considerably more reasonable than that, is fully justified by the facts.
In the case of Saddam Hussein, in my view, the evidence that the 9-11 hijackers themselves were responsible for the anthrax attacks seems certain and, GIVEN THAT and given the quality and nature of the anthrax in question, there is no reasonable way to believe that anybody other than Hussein could have provided them with it or that they would have had any rational or reasonable motive to try to get it from anybody else.
