The Science Of Fox News

That was one of more obvious and idiotic straw man fallacies that i've seen online. I said nothing of the kind, you'll need to find someone else to pick a fight with on that basis.

In 1996, under increasing pressure from the Clinton administration and Saudi Arabia, the government of Sudan forced bin Laden to leave, and he went to Afghanistan. While in Afghanistan, he ran an extensive training camp for jahadis, and sent his trained fighters to assist the Taliban in overrunning opposition strongholds in Afghanistan, including one incident in which about 5000 Afghan civilians were slaughtered. The Taliban were, effectively, a terrorist organization in the country they claimed to rule. In fact, bin Laden was in Waziristan, a region which straddles the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Troops of the Northern Alliance, the armed resistance to Taliban rule in Afghanistan, mounted an operation to capture bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan (Waziristan), forcing him and his cronies to flee that part of Pakistan.

Leaving aside the undeniable fact that ultimatums are non-negotiable, and leaving aside Mullah Omar's proven track record of bargaining in bad faith with just about everyone, no one with more than half a brain was going to let bin Laden pull the kind of escape he had managed in 1996 from the Sudan.

Really, you jokers are so obsessed with your hatred of Bush that you just make it up as you go along, coupled with an appalling ignorance of recent history.

Just the one explanation I'd require, is that while it was no problem to televise the hanging of Hussein, the street slaughter of Qadaffi, and regular images of beheadings and throat sawings with blunt instruments, the sea burial of Usama would not be permitted because it would upset too many people?

I don't get that at all.

I don't claim to be privy to their decisions nor their reasons for them. However, i suspect that their logic was that televising such an event would only provide recruiting fodder for Al Qaeda. I'm not sure that i agree with that, as Al Qaeda was functionally dead at that point. It had become a name to conjure with among young, stupid would-be jihadis, but the organization had been decapitated and simply didn't exist any longer out side people's minds.

I wouldn't have blamed Iraq for Sept 11 or lied about claiming to know about phantom WMDs, and I would have ended the assault on Afghanistan when they offered to hand bin Laden over to even a third country.

Loved my time in Chicago.

You are a blithering idiot. Bush should have stopped the bombing of Afghanistan as soon as they offered to put bin Laden under arrest and send him to a third nation. Who give a whit about what "non-negotiable" means, except you and blood money rich Neo-Cons?

100,000 plus civilian deaths and billions of tax dollars later what has your ilk accomplished these fifteen years? Your war party didn't even get bin Laden.

Seriously, have you looked into medicating your ugly temper?

I am interested in just who Setanta's "ilk" are.

I actually agree with Setanta and I never considered myself a Neo-Con. Having him arrested and put into a third nation (not even sure that was real) would have done nothing, he would have been as quickly let out again. He organized the attack of our nation which killed over 3000 souls, he should have been under our custody and control or dead.

I agree the way the Bush administration carried out the war and changed the rules so they could use torture techniques was a shame on our nation that will be there forever even if some day we manage to get GITMO closed; (It will have to have a complete democrat super majority and a democrat president long enough to get it done, which would take time figuring out what to do with the ones who are still left, imo, maybe they should be let out as time served and punished enough.) but we had no choice but to go into Afghanistan. We should have stayed there and got the job done rather than sidetracking to Iraq but that is another issue.

We'll have to disagree on this one. My point with Setanta is his nastiness and boorishness.

If I were trying to nail down bin Laden, getting him into a third country would have played into my hands. I'd have his location.

Not that there is a comparison by a long shot (really mean that) but we know Edward Snowden's location and we are no closer to getting our hands on him.

The day Obama took office US debt was 10.6 Trillion.
The current debt is 18.66. The projected deficit for next year is .426.
That will put us at about 19.2 with the extra month in there.

So... No, the debt won't double under Obama.

When Bush took office, the debt was 5.7 trillion. It was 10.66 when he left office.
Debt under Bush went up by 85%. The debt under Obama has gone up 81%. Debt came closer to doubling under Bush than it will under Obama.

But that is using numbers on the exact days and ignoring the fiscal years they actually budgeted.

If we use fiscal years budgeted by Presidents then the debt under Bush went from 5.8 Trillion on Oct 1, 2001 to 11.9 on Oct 1, of 2009. That would be a doubling of debt under Bush. While Bush was President the US budgets enacted added 6.1 trillion in debt.

Under Obama the debt will go from 11.9 to 18.1 on Oct 1, 2015 with a projected deficit of .941 over the next 2 fiscal years. This would mean under Obama the US has added 7.1 trillion in debt.


sources -
http://treasurydirect.gov/NP/debt/current
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals - table 1.1

Respectfully, I submit Snowden is no bin Laden.

lot of his information is time sensitive. The longer he's in Moscow as a tourist the mor he's losing value.

Ask Julian Assange if he feels as effective hanging around freely in the Ecuador Embassy.

A needless point since I already said there was no comparison. The point being knowing someone's location is not having control over that someone unless you have jurisdiction. In the end, it worked out fine as far as getting Bin Laden.

They dont want to kill him. Just talk to him or jail him for looks.

As Baldimo pointed out, providing a source,'the claim in The Guardian article was false, as the bombing did not start until October. Your figures for civilian deaths are wildly inaccurate, if you are claiming that the United States was responsible for those deaths. Your asshole buddies the Taliban killed most of the Afghan civilians in that war, terrorist-lover. From the Wikipedia article on deaths in the war:



You don't give a rat's ass about how many Afghans were killed, the only thing motivating you is your obsessive hatred of Bush. That's why you attempt to vilify me with wild, hysterical accusations--anyone who doesn't hate Bush the way you do is a limb of Satan in your book.

You don't know ****, and you don't attempt to find things out, because you think that you already have all the answers, in fact, the one answer, Bush is evil incarnate. Anyone who doesn't agree with you is also evil. What a f*cking idiot.

That remark about temper is hilarious, coming from you. Are you familiar with the term irony?

I could not agree more. The stumblebum way in which the war was conducted after 2003 was a direct result of the change in focus from Afghanistan to Iraq.

From the Watson Institute at Brown University:



It's difficult to get exact figures because so many organizations had Bob's attitude, and were just looking for substantiation of Bush's war crimes. For example, Human Rights Watch only began tallying civilian deaths from insurgent (largely Taliban) attacks in 2006, when the figures became too large to ignore. Note that the figure of 92,000 includes NATO personnel, Afghan security forces and Taliban and other insurgents, as well as civilians. But fewer than 27,000 civilian deaths, and increasingly, those were caused by the Taliban.

I guess when Bob gets to angry and hysterical, he just makes sh*t up.

Some would argue both Snowden and Assange are under control, or are at least much less effective.