The US, UN & Iraq III

If the "it" is your opinion then it should not be surprising. They tend to differ in subjective matters. :-)

I never accused anyone of lying

from the bbc tonight

The secret September 2002 Pentagon intelligence report concluded that there was "no reliable information" that Iraq had biological or chemical weapons.

Unjust is unjust is unjust. Doesn't matter how many times the perp stands up and say it is just, it is unjust!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ok Bill its unjust, now whats the question?

The political propaganda is difficult to sort out as it has so many faces. One of the faces lost is Ari Fleischer -- perhaps he finally had qualms about being required to spiel out all the rhetorical garbage with a straight, somber face. Ask the same question to more than one representative of this administration and you don't get the same answer. As a matter of fact, the answers change over a period of time as short as a week (dare I say, even a day?) The more a politician tries to impress that they aren't spinning, the more dizzy they become.

I did think it was a lot of work for McGentrix to put all that caselaw into a post and I thank him because I got to read all of it line by line.

What he ought to do now, all of us maybe, is read all that again, paragraph by paragraph and ask "Was that true?" Pay particular attention to the Al Queda reference and the ties to 9/11.

I enjoyed the parts that related to the former President Bush, I thought that at least was honest.

This however was the topper for me.



How about making decisions based not on bad information but on non-existent information: ????


The Bush White House intended to wage war against Hussein and occupy Iraq. They have done so.

Steve, Now you know why Bush pulled out of the World Court.

Joe has nailed it. But "it" boils down to the administration lying to Congress and the rest of us. Lied? Does it come back that THAT again? Yes. If you think you should go to war and give dubious or unproven information as the real McCoy, that's lying. When you add, "but we can't give you the secret information," that should be a clue! When, after the fact, the "secret information" shows you didn't have the facts, that's part of the lie. When you then say, Well, that's not what we meant exactly, you are in the same situation as a previous president about whether is is is.

The administration did not pull the U.S. out of the World Court.

We did announce our intent not to attempt to ratify the International Criminal Court Treaty which Clinton initialled but sat on for three years without ever submitting it to the Senate for ratification - because it had zero chance of passage. The treaty would have given jurisdiction over U.S. citizens and government officials to an independent court, based in Brussels, with jurisdiction over "crimes against humanity" very broadly defined - to include actions that offend the dignity of peoples or nations, etc. The court and treaty does not permit trial by jury or provide for the procedural protections provided in our constitution.

While it may have been in the interest of the Liliputians to tie down Gulliver, it was certainly not in Gulliver's interest to be tied down by them. Certainly the ghastly example of Augusto Pinochet being held for a year in Britain, where he had gone for medical treatment, as a result of a politically motivated subpoena issued by a Spanish judge (who did not bother to resurrect the ghost of Franco) should be proof enough of the folly of such an agreement. Certainly the hypocrisy of the ongoing trials of Croatian generals in the UN court should remind us of the political factors that inevitably dominate such proceedings of "independent" international tribunals.

You guys act like Bush has been the only one saying WMDs existed in Iraq.
Lotsa Dems--and I'm pretty sure Clinton said so, as well.

And, I believe most of the world accepts WMD DID exist in Iraq. When they were moved, hidden, destroyed seems to be the question.

george

A lot of evil - e.g. the EU - is situated in Brussels.

The ICC, however, has its seat in Den Haag/The Netherlands.

With all due respect, i'd say you have a lot of work to do to subtantiate that first statement.

As to the second, that is only a question for those who refuse to question the honesty or the provenance of the original contention that Saddam had WMD's, and could be considered a threat to US security through their use.

For those uninformed, the Dem Haag is the "Hague" to us mortals. c.i.

Dead Kurds, Setanta?
I shall go forth for more substantiating documentation.

Meanwhile, what about the travelling bio labs? I mean, the chems used on the Kurds and the labs aren't as sexy as a nuke, but they ARE proof.

<sexy comment not meant to be provocative...>

George

The ghastly bit about Pinochet is that he was not tossed out of the helicopter on his way to Northolt as he did to so many of his enemies in Chile.

Travelling bio labs? As far as I know (see: e.g. latest news on bbc), those trucks found could perhaps beeen used as ....

Perhaps, Walter. You are correct, for the moment.

13 May 2003

Iraq Expert Says It's Too Early to Assess Saddam's WMD Program
Ken Pollack believes Iraqi WMD capability, at least, will surface

By David Anthony Denny
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- It is much too early to make a determined assessment as to what the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq did or did not have in the way of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), according to Iraq analyst and author Kenneth Pollack.

Pollack spoke to journalists in London, Madrid and Moscow by digital video conference May 13. His topic was WMD.

"I think it is still very early in the process," he said. "It's not just that ?'the fat lady hasn't sung,' it's that, in many senses, the orchestra is still tuning up."

Pollack qualified the notion that it is still too early to tell what WMD Iraq may have by mentioning the report of a mobile biological warfare laboratory that surfaced in the press last week. The vehicle was discovered in Iraq on April 19, and it continues to undergo testing, he noted. [The Pentagon announced May 13 that a second, similar laboratory was found by U.S. troops in Iraq on May 9, and is also undergoing further examination in Baghdad.]

The mobile lab "is potentially a very important development," Pollack said. "[T]he press reports that we've seen do seem to suggest that this is exactly what it's suspected to be: that it is one of the Iraqi mobile biological warfare laboratories which several of the defectors reported on. But obviously, until the U.S. government comes out and makes an official statement, I'm not going to go out on a limb and suggest that I know something that the U.S. government doesn't know. Because in point of fact, I don't."

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We'll have to wait.

Dem Haag

is ice cream

Dem Hagg is mud wrestling fat ladies!

Hmm....thinking