But They Can't Find Bin Laden

Brandon9000 wrote:

cicerone imposter wrote:
Brandon wrote:
The invasion of Afghanistan to remove a regime which hosted Al Qaeda, the invasion of Iraq to resolve the non-negligible (at that time) probability that they were still developing doomsday weapons, and the ban on partial birth abortions.

I asked about what Bush did right. Osama is still at-large, and the violence in Afghanistan has increased. Please keep up with the news.

Iraq's doomsday weapons development didn't exist; this administration admitted such about one year ago. Where have you been all this time? We shouldn't be bombing the shet out of a country with conflicting intel reports. It's up to any administration of this country to ensure 100 percent that any enemy is planning to attack us before we retaliate. That's the universal law of humanity and ethics.

Bad logic. If a policeman frisks a suspect and doesn't find a gun, do you think he shouldn't have frisked him? If the suspect has a gun and the policeman doesn't frisk him, the policeman may die. What you are saying is that investigating the reasonable probability of a monumental calamity is unwarranted if it LATER turns out that the event didn't happen. That's not very smart.

Bad logic. If the policeman frisks the suspect and doesn't find a gun, he shouldn't shoot him.

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The Bush administration "ooops" killed about 100,000 innocent Iraqis.

Updated: 9:24 p.m. ET April 25, 2005

WASHINGTON - In his final word, the CIA's top weapons inspector in Iraq said Monday that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction has "gone as far as feasible" and has found nothing, closing an investigation into the purported programs of Saddam Hussein that were used to justify the 2003 invasion.

"After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted," wrote Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, in an addendum to the final report he issued last fall.

"As matters now stand, the WMD investigation has gone as far as feasible."

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cicerone imposter wrote:

The Bush administration "ooops" killed about 100,000 innocent Iraqis.

Updated: 9:24 p.m. ET April 25, 2005

WASHINGTON - In his final word, the CIA's top weapons inspector in Iraq said Monday that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction has "gone as far as feasible" and has found nothing, closing an investigation into the purported programs of Saddam Hussein that were used to justify the 2003 invasion.

"After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted," wrote Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, in an addendum to the final report he issued last fall.

"As matters now stand, the WMD investigation has gone as far as feasible."

Tell me about a large just war sometime in history in which many innocent people didn't lose their lives. If the reason for going to war is correct, then the fact that innocent people lose their lives, as in every war, does not make going to war immoral.

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Intrepid wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:
cicerone imposter wrote:
Brandon wrote:
The invasion of Afghanistan to remove a regime which hosted Al Qaeda, the invasion of Iraq to resolve the non-negligible (at that time) probability that they were still developing doomsday weapons, and the ban on partial birth abortions.

I asked about what Bush did right. Osama is still at-large, and the violence in Afghanistan has increased. Please keep up with the news.

Iraq's doomsday weapons development didn't exist; this administration admitted such about one year ago. Where have you been all this time? We shouldn't be bombing the shet out of a country with conflicting intel reports. It's up to any administration of this country to ensure 100 percent that any enemy is planning to attack us before we retaliate. That's the universal law of humanity and ethics.

Bad logic. If a policeman frisks a suspect and doesn't find a gun, do you think he shouldn't have frisked him? If the suspect has a gun and the policeman doesn't frisk him, the policeman may die. What you are saying is that investigating the reasonable probability of a monumental calamity is unwarranted if it LATER turns out that the event didn't happen. That's not very smart.

Bad logic. If the policeman frisks the suspect and doesn't find a gun, he shouldn't shoot him.

No yours is. My point was that the investigation of something that may very well be a lethal danger does not become immoral or incorrect if it ultimately turns out that the danger no longer exists.

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So we've got the right to go in and kill somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 people and then say "oops" and it's all forgotten? Like hell, Brandon. You've got one of the weakest conceptions of morality I've ever seen. Well, you and the Bush administration. The weapons inspectors told us we were wrong THEN. They were right. The IAEA told us we were wrong. They were right. France and Germany said the evidence was weak and negotiations would work. They were right. Saddam told us he'd destroyed the weapons and inspections could be arranged anywhere. He was right. We were wrong. Look, Brandon, I have a reasonable suspicion you have machine guns in ytour house, and I think maybe you're planning on using them on someone. No concrete evidence, just that people I rely on have told me so. I'm going to turn your house into a smoking crater--is that all right with you? That's what Bush did--you think it's moral if someone did it to you, just on suspicion?

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username wrote:

So we've got the right to go in and kill somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 people and then say "oops" and it's all forgotten? Like hell, Brandon. You've got one of the weakest conceptions of morality I've ever seen. Well, you and the Bush administration. The weapons inspectors told us we were wrong THEN. They were right. The IAEA told us we were wrong. They were right. France and Germany said the evidence was weak and negotiations would work. They were right. Saddam told us he'd destroyed the weapons and inspections could be arranged anywhere. He was right. We were wrong. Look, Brandon, I have a reasonable suspicion you have machine guns in ytour house, and I think maybe you're planning on using them on someone. No concrete evidence, just that people I rely on have told me so. I'm going to turn your house into a smoking crater--is that all right with you? That's what Bush did--you think it's moral if someone did it to you, just on suspicion?

I'm not a dictator who has annexed neighboring countries and signed a treaty to verifiably destroy my real WMD and shut down my real WMD development prorams. You are quite mistaken when you say that a reasonable probability of a collosal danger is not a terribly serious self-defense issue. We're not talking about barging into some innocent person's house based on a wild rumor. We're talking about a case in which a very evil dictator actually had the weapons and programs, and previously attempted to thwart inspections. There were two possibilities, and both had some reasonable probability of being true. Either Hussein had destroyed the weapons and programs, or else he had hidden them better. Either might have been true. Had the latter been the truth, it could have resulted in entire cities being exterminated a few years down the road by nuclear bombs or bioweapons. The fact is that a moderate probability of an immense danger does entitle others to use force to protect themselves.

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Brandon, Go back and learn a little history about Saddam's WMDs and who sold and gave it to him. You're about as ignorant as they come. If what you say is true, why hasn't Bush attacked North Korea, Iraq, or China?

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cicerone imposter wrote:

Brandon, Go back and learn a little history about Saddam's WMDs and who sold and gave it to him. You're about as ignorant as they come. If what you say is true, why hasn't Bush attacked North Korea, Iraq, or China?

You just can't debate in a dignified way without attacking your opponent personally, can you? It doesn't matter where Hussein got WMD, only that he had them. Furthermore, he had development programs to perfect nuclear and bioweapons. Either he had destroyed the weapons and programs or he hadn't, and he had unfortunately not furnished the incontrovertible proof that he had promised. We simply had to take the significant probability of the latter scenario seriously. 12 years had passed, and had he been perfecting these weapons in hiding, he might, at some point, have simply announced that he had them and would brook no further interference.

We haven't attacked North Korea because it is too late. They have nukes now, and should we invade, they would have the option of killing a million people with their atomic bombs. We invaded Iraq precisely to prevent it from reaching this stage of near invulnerability.

We don't invade China both because they are stable and sane and therefore don't pose the same kind of risk for the use of WMD, and because invading them would result in something approaching the destruction of human civilization.

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cicerone imposter wrote:

Brandon wrote:
The invasion of Afghanistan to remove a regime which hosted Al Qaeda, the invasion of Iraq to resolve the non-negligible (at that time) probability that they were still developing doomsday weapons, and the ban on partial birth abortions.

I asked about what Bush did right. Osama is still at-large, and the violence in Afghanistan has increased. Please keep up with the news.

Iraq's doomsday weapons development didn't exist; this administration admitted such about one year ago. Where have you been all this time? We shouldn't be bombing the shet out of a country with conflicting intel reports. It's up to any administration of this country to ensure 100 percent that any enemy is planning to attack us before we retaliate. That's the universal law of humanity and ethics.

Care to explain how the violence has increassed? I'm here and not much is going on. There have been a few bombs but for the most part the only violence increase has been on our side finding and getting the Taliban and Terrorists.

If you refer to the Helicopter that went down last week there isn't much I can say on that other then it wasn't due to enemy fire. Thank God I didn't know anyone on board. Those are the types of helicopters I work on and I was scared that it was one of my units birds but it wasn't.

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cicerone imposter wrote:

Brandon, Go back and learn a little history about Saddam's WMDs and who sold and gave it to him. You're about as ignorant as they come. If what you say is true, why hasn't Bush attacked North Korea, Iraq, or China?

This is a good idea, A little history to help us understand Iraq.

A mass murderer under US protection

Pol Pot's regime killed between 1.5 to 2.3 million people between 1975-1979, out of a population of approximately 8 million. The regime targeted Buddhist monks, Western educated intellectuals, people who appeared to be intelligent (for example, individuals with glasses), the crippled and lame, and ethnic minorities like ethnic Laotians and Vietnamese.

The most critical role was played by the United States government, which saw Pol Pot as a useful Cold War ally, since he was at war with Vietnam, which was allied to the Soviet Union. With US backing, China supplied the Khmer Rouge with military equipment and the right-wing military regime in Thailand, a US client state, allowed free flow of supplies to Pol Pot's guerrillas in their base camps along the Thai-Cambodian border.

As Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser, later admitted, "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could."

Equally important was the diplomatic support from the United States and other imperialist powers, which recognized the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia and backed the seating of Pol Pot's representative as the Cambodian delegate to the United Nations for more than a decade. Throughout the 1980s the Reagan administration blocked international efforts to characterize the events of 1975-78 in Cambodia as genocide or to hold the Khmer Rouge leadership responsible for mass murder, since it would undercut the American alliance with Pol Pot.

The final collapse of the Khmer Rouge and its disintegration into rival factions was bound up with the imposition of a new imperialist settlement on Cambodia under the UN's auspices in 1993. The aim of this UN intervention was to open up the country as a source of cheap labor for international investors. Since then, key Khmer Rouge groupings have formally surrendered and been integrated into the army and official political life in Cambodia. The remnants are fighting a rearguard action on the Thai-Cambodian border.

Only last year, after an internal split in the remnants of the Khmer Rouge led to Pol Pot's arrest, did the United States withdraw its objections to his trial as a war criminal. But there was no mistaking the sigh of relief in Washington after the Khmer Rouge leader died, apparently of natural causes.

As one Cambodia scholar, Stephen Heder, a lecturer at London's School of oriental and African Studies, told the New York Times: "There's certainly a major American responsibility for this whole situation. A war-crimes trial could have posed a problem for the US because it could have raised questions about US bombing from 1969 through 1973."

With its typical indifference to history, the American media carried interviews with Henry Kissinger after the death of Pol Pot in which there was no mention of the US contribution to the tragedy of Cambodia. The principal architect of Nixon's Cambodia policy pontificated about Pol Pot's bloody crimes and discussed the prospects of a war crimes trial for the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. If the truth be told, Kissinger would deserve his own place in the dock at any such tribunal.

http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/apr1998/plpt-a18.shtml

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Brandon9000 wrote:

It doesn't matter where Hussein got WMD, only that he had them.

Are you nuts? The past several years have proven he didn't have them. Egads!!!!

Brandon9000 wrote:

Furthermore, he had development programs to perfect nuclear and bioweapons.

Funny, in the buildup to the war, nobody was tallking about development programs. They said he had the weapons. Once we invade and find nothing, the Brandons of the word decide the issue was devolopment programs, not the actual weapons. Sorry, won't work. You said weapons, you damn well better produce weapons. And so far, you have produced nothing but excuses.

Brandon9000 wrote:

Either he had destroyed the weapons and programs or he hadn't, and he had unfortunately not furnished the incontrovertible proof that he had promised. We simply had to take the significant probability of the latter scenario seriously.

Nonsense. We had inspectors on the ground looking for those weapons, and they had found none. Saddam simply was in no position to deploy those weapons as long as the inspectors were there, and they had, in the second round, virtually unfettered access to the country-even to invade private homes and property-to search for those weapons.

True-the first round of inspections, Saddam did not provide unfettered access. But as the troops built up in neighboring Kuwait, he finally opened up the whole country to the inspectors to look where they pleased, without any interference whatsoever. In the US, such an arrangement would be impossible, violating the illegal searches and seizures clause of the Constitution. Yet Iraq granted us this power. so we knew damn well there were no WMD's in the country, and we had the right to stick around as long as we pleased to find out what he did with any WMD's he once might have had.

Yet Bush ordered these unfettered inspectors out of the country before they had the chance to do their work. Why? Because he was afraid they would find what Bush least wanted to hear-there were no WMD's in Iraq!!!

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kelticwizard wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:
It doesn't matter where Hussein got WMD, only that he had them.

Are you nuts? The past several years have proven he didn't have them. Egads!!!!

No, the past few years have proven that he finally destroyed them. He was certainly known to have originally had both WMD and development programs, whic is why he signed a treaty to verifiably destroy them. At the time of the invasion, there was only some probability that he had destroyed them, and some that he hadn't.

kelticwizard wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:
Furthermore, he had development programs to perfect nuclear and bioweapons.

Funny, in the buildup to the war, nobody was tallking about development programs. They said he had the weapons. Once we invade and find nothing, the Brandons of the word decide the issue was devolopment programs, not the actual weapons. Sorry, won't work. You said weapons, you damn well better produce weapons. And so far, you have produced nothing but excuses.

False. Before the invasion, many people, including me, were talking about the need to invade before his development programs reached fruition.

kelticwizard wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:
Either he had destroyed the weapons and programs or he hadn't, and he had unfortunately not furnished the incontrovertible proof that he had promised. We simply had to take the significant probability of the latter scenario seriously.

Nonsense. We had inspectors on the ground looking for those weapons, and they had found none. Saddam simply was in no position to deploy those weapons as long as the inspectors were there, and they had, in the second round, virtually unfettered access to the country-even to invade private homes and property-to search for those weapons.

True-the first round of inspections, Saddam did not provide unfettered access. But as the troops built up in neighboring Kuwait, he finally opened up the whole country to the inspectors to look where they pleased, without any interference whatsoever. In the US, such an arrangement would be impossible, violating the illegal searches and seizures clause of the Constitution. Yet Iraq granted us this power. so we knew damn well there were no WMD's in the country, and we had the right to stick around as long as we pleased to find out what he did with any WMD's he once might have had.

Yet Bush ordered these unfettered inspectors out of the country before they had the chance to do their work. Why? Because he was afraid they would find what Bush least wanted to hear-there were no WMD's in Iraq!!!

No, had he chosen to keep his weapons and development programs going, nothing, including inspections, would have stopped him from smuggling the components of an atomic bomb or bioweapon into the target country and assembling them there. There was a non-trivial probability that he was concealing hidden weapons and development programs from inspectors. As for Iraq's cooperation, here is a sample of it:

Quote:

September 17, 1997- While seeking access to a site declared by Iraq to be "sensitive," UNSCOM inspectors witness and videotape Iraqi guards moving files, burning documents, and dumping ash-filled waste cans into a nearby river.

Source

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How many of you complaining that we havent found OBL yet have ever been to Afghanistan?

I have,and finding one person there is next to impossible.
Afghanistan is a country roughly the size of Texas,with mountains and valleys so hard to get to that you have to use helicopters,just to get to them.
There are caves there deep enough to hide entire armies in,let alone one man.

That we havent found him yet only shows that he either has a deep hole to hide in,or that his allies are keeping him one jump ahead of coalition forces.

Either way,he will be found.
Remember,each cave,valley,and mountain pass must be searched individually,we cant just search them all at once.

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If we had concentrated all of our efforts and resources on finding Bin Laden in one of those caves instead of going to Iraq to set up the 51st state we would probably have him. Oh wait, that's not as important is it? Never was. :wink:

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blueveinedthrobber wrote:

If we had concentrated all of our efforts and resources on finding Bin Laden in one of those caves instead of going to Iraq to set up the 51st state we would probably have him. Oh wait, that's not as important is it? Never was. :wink:

Not neccessarily.
If you move to Texas,and dont want to be found,then it would be damn near impossible to find you,even knowing what you look like.
He is one man,in a country of 25 million.
Finding one man in one town is difficult,let alone in one country,especially when that person doesnt want to be found,or has people helping him.

Having served in Afghanistan,I can safely say that IF he is still there,we will find him.
But,if he is not in Afghanistan,we wont find him there.

Maybe we did go into Iraq to early,but that is the point for another discussion.
I can say that we are looking for him in Afghanistan,and if he is still there,we will find him.

Remember,it took 15 years to find Josef Mengele,and the whole world was looking for him.
Dont say that we wont find him,just because we havent found him yet.

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blueveinedthrobber wrote:

If we had concentrated all of our efforts and resources on finding Bin Laden in one of those caves instead of going to Iraq to set up the 51st state we would probably have him. Oh wait, that's not as important is it? Never was. :wink:

News flash: Sometimes adults have more than one serious task which has to be done at the same time.

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Brandon wrote:
News flash: Sometimes adults have more than one serious task which has to be done at the same time.

With the worst incompetent president of the US in the white house that have managed to screw up everything he touched, that is a statement of irony indeed!

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Brandon, the US has thousands of nuclear weapons, the world's most deadly WMDs. The US is the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons against people. The US still has tons of chemical weapons. The US has also used conventional weapons in such numbers that they produce conflagrations essentially equivalent to the effects of WMDs (the firestorms in Dresden and Tokyo, amongst others in WWII). The US has a documented history of invading Muslim countries, not to mention a documented history of subverting their governments (Iran 1954). The Wolfowitz-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Perle cabal, who set the direction for the DOD had consistently railed for years before Bush was elected, and after he was elected, that we must take out Iraq and force Muslim countries to change to our wishes.

USING PRECISELY THE SAME ARGUMENTS YOU USE TO JUSTIFY OUR INVADING IRAQ, this means Osama binLaden was justified in attacking us, a move he thought would destabilize the US, deter us from attacking Muslim countires, and bring the West crashing down. He was wrong, as it turns out, BUT BY YOUR JUSTIFICATION FOR PREEMPTIVE STRIKES, he was justified. BY YOUR LOGIC, just because he was wrong doesn't mean he wasn't justified in doing it.

If you grant one country or people the right to preemptively try to destroy another country they perceive, however wrongly, as a threat, then you have to grant everybody that right. Unless you say, as some people here do, that no-one but the US has the right, and the US can do whatever it damn well wants. Say that, and you have no international law whatsoever. Either everybody hasthe right or no one does.

I think, and most of the rest of the world, except for a few sycophantic governments (and not their people) thinks, no one has that right. Osama didn't, and we were wrong to invade Iraq, particularly with the specious tie to the war on terror.

And since you say, once again, that war was justified as providing a definitive answer to the question of whether Iraq had WMDs, then I invite you once again to tell me that you DON'T feel the concomitant costs, the 2400+ plus American dead, the 10,000+ American wounded (most of whom, by all accounts, will bear horrible disabilities for life), the 30,000+ Iraqi deaths--the "collateral damage" civilian oopsies, the costs to the US economy financed by international borrowing since Bush refuses to raise taxes to pay for them--which in the past has screwed the economy for years after the wars ended, the international disrepute, and perhaps worst the finishing school provided in Iraq for the creation of a whole new generation of terrorists and to go along with that the strengthening of existent terrorist groups and the forging of closer links of commmunication between them, brought about by what is perceived, as Osama said, as the crusade of America against the Muslim world.
That is what has happened in Iraq. Do you think the costs REALLY are worth answering your inane question? Most of the country has reasonably concluded the whole thing was a cockup. And those numbers show only an upward trend.

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Why do I keep getting sucked into giving myself carpal tunnel syndrome typing answers to people who haven't thought for themselves since they were three?

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username,
OBL was justified,using the arguments you put forth.
AND,we are justified in using whatever force is required (up to and including nukes) to retaliate and put an end to the threat.

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But They Can't Find Bin Laden

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