I was pointed to this column on MSNBC's website by a friend's LiveJournal. It uses an odd, somewhat amusing bit of logic to paint Democratic candidate John Kerry as a fool: http://www.msnbc.com/news/930674.asp?0cv=OA01%22 Basically, the argument is that Kerry is a fool because he believed Bush about Iraqi WMDs. That's right, someone is arguing we shouldn't vote for Kerry because Bush lied and Kerry bought it: "...the evidence that the Bush/Blair team was exaggerating or inflating the WMD issue was available long before the, er, lull in inspections that has now befallen us. And it was made available to Kerry, too, as a very mordant article on the Net by his constituent Charles Jenks has recently shown. Thus, for the senator to say that he was deceived along with all of us is provably false. He is now belatedly entering the ranks of those who claim never to have been fooled in the first place." Somehow I doubt the Bush administration will want to use that in their campaign. But just imagine, they could get him coming and going: "John Kerry unpatriotically questioned Bush's leadership before the war. Then he revealed himself as a fool when he believed Bush's statements about WMD. John Kerry: An unpatriotic idiot."60 responses total.
Haha - I liked the byline - "Unpatriotic Idiot!"
What's the livejournal username?
zionicman
Re #2: kevinjdog Overall it's mostly just random ramblings, but the link to that article caught my eye.
dull( that's right DULL) your thread is liberal proganda. The WMD issue wasn't
inflated you fucking moron. Go buttfuck your brother.
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THAT was an intellectual arguemnt, uh huh.
In the school of iconoclasm, you flunked out of kindergarten, man. Go home.
Case #32, why ascii and room temperature IQs don't mix.
Absence of proof is not proof of absence. What do you folks make of the gas centrifuge parts buried in a nuclear scientist's back yard, parts that were supposed to be declared and destroyed under the UN resolutions?
Absence of proof is more likely to mean absence than presence in this case.
So where did all the chemical weapons that Iraq admitted they had go? Do you remember Sarah Connor's weapons stash in Terminator 2? It was the size of a shipping container, and buried in the desert. A single shipping container could contain enough nerve gas to wipe out thousands of people, and it could be hidden in much the same way as the cache in Terminator 2, invisible to the naked eye somewhere in a nation the size of the state of California.
I don't know where the weapons are. Apparently neither does the Bush administration, despite their prewar claims.
There are any number of possibilities, the most frightening of which
is that they were lost or misplaced, something that we've already seen happen
with breakaway Soviet republics and fissionable materials. It's possible some
were used and not owned up to. It's possible some were sold.
It's a valid question, but it doesn't avoid the touchy situation that
we're still unable to prove the allegations we went to war for. Since we went
to war without UN approval, and damaged our ties to many European nations to
do so, we really do have the burden of proof.
Since the "throw out the professional intelligence analysis standards and proclaim every cheap fabrication or biased rumor we can get our hands on as hard evidence" scam is now an open secret, since guarding the most critical WMD-related sites wasn't something our military bothered to do when looters were hauling off records, equipment, etc., since made-out-to-be-a-huge- threat-to-America-with-his-WMD's Saddam never bothered to use 'em against our invasion forces, since there's *still* miserably little evidence of Iraq actually having meaningful quantities of serious WMD's, and since swarming-with-Islamic-terrorists-and-has-plenty-of-100%-real-and-tested- nuclear-weapons-but-their-dictator-kissed-Bush's-ass Pakistan is called a "close friend" and rewarded with $billion$, i see an extremely strong case that Bush & Co. never had any real interest in or concerns about any Iraqi WMD's...*EXCEPT* as a sham issue convenient for suckering the public into supporting a war that Buch & Co. wanted to fight for other, probably far less honest, legitimate, or honorable reasons.
It certainly doesn't look like the US effort to search for WMD was well thought out. The mere fact that civilians were able to loot a well-known nuclear site that we knew about in advance suggests we didn't have our act together. We've also apparently failed to adequately track the paper trail, and aren't treating the scientists especially well.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/06/sprj.irq.uranium/index.html "WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A former U.S. diplomat said Sunday he told the Bush administration that Iraq had not tried to buy uranium from Niger in the late 1990s to develop nuclear weapons. "Former Ambassador to Gabon Joseph Wilson told NBC's "Meet the Press" he informed the CIA and the State Department that such information was false months before U.S. and British officials used it during the debate that led to war. "During his State of the Union address in January, two months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, President Bush accused Iraq of trying to buy "significant quantities of uranium" from an unnamed African country. He cited British intelligence, which had published a similar report in September 2002. ""If they were referring to Niger when they were referring to uranium sales from Africa to Iraq, ... that information was erroneous and ... they knew about it well ahead of both the publication of the British white paper and the president's State of the Union address," Wilson said. ..."
""If they were referring to Niger..." says it all. "If" is a might pwerful word. Storage facilities don't need to be big, nor do they need to look like storage facilities. I know here in the united states of a supply officer in a national guard unit that had NG 3equipment in his basement in several trunks because the NG had run out of storage facilities. I know of equipment in every organization I have worked with that nobody knew we had, or could not find equipment we were supposed to have half the time. I know the GAO thinks the U.S. Customs Service had a range built in Detroit for federal firerams training, but no one here ever saw it get built. They say it was built because they budgeted the $200,000 dollars for it in 1988. So the lack and confusion of communications, the fact that soldiers didn't recieve orders that someone thought they had, that equipment cannot be found, and that proof is rather sketchy doesn't prove anything so far. The war is still being fought over there, and will be for years to come. And in the end we may or may not find those things we are looking for in the way of WMD.
I am amazed at the incompetence of Bush and Blair. Any politician worth thier salt would either have found the incriminating evidence or planted some of their own long ago. Modern politicians - I spit on them . . . pah!
One would presume they're working on it. Blix and his inspection team
have already been kicked out and aren't being allowed to resume their job.
The first step, making sure that whoever "finds" incriminating evidence is
on our payroll, is already down.
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Iraq was ordered to destroy those weapons, Todd. It's actually possible they were destroyed. I suspect that the real problem is that your sense of reality has been damaged by watching too much Fox News.
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I, for one, never really doubted that Iraq had WMDs before the war. I believed Bush when he said they were ready to be used within 45 minutes. I was as surprised as anyone when they not only weren't used against our troops, but failed to turn up. But our intelligence services shouldn't be surprised by this sort of thing; they should KNOW what the situation is. So either the intelligence was distorted, or our intelligence services were horribly incompetant. Either way, there should be an investigation to find the problem and fix it. I'm inclined to think that quite a bit of distortion went on, since we already know Bush presented fake documents about Iraq's nuclear program as being genuine. But there was probably some incompetance involved, too.
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Don't forget that 9/11 happened on Bush's watch, not that wimpy Bill clinton's pacifist 8 years.
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Donald Rumsfeld once had a friendly meeting with Saddam. What's your point?
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Wasnt it the Bush Administration that gave the Taliban millions of dollars just a few months before 9/11?
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Bush Sr. had prior knowledge of al Quaeda, too, so?
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Saddam played a masterfull shell game with the *issue* of WMD. He could end up bringing down another Bush with his tactics.
s/masterful/masterfull
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Bin Laden was the #1 suspect in any unattributed bombing since the
Reagan administration. Those cheezy Nostradamus books were listing him as
a possible "antichrist" in the eighties. C'mon.
And when Clinton did fire cruise missiles based on intelligence about Bin Laden's whereabouts, he was accused of trying to distract people from his affair with Monica. The same people who criticized him for acting then are now criticizing him for not doing enough. I think the Iraq war will be a rallying cry for the recruiting of more terrorists, but because it'll take a few years for that to become apparent it will probably be blamed on the next President instead of on Bush. It may be useful as a distraction, though -- maybe the terrorists will be too busy attacking our troops in the area to plan attacks on U.S. soil.
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Yes, he did, or tried to. It was about 4 or 5 years ago as I recall it. That's when I first heard of Osama bin Laden.
Yeah, didn't he end up hitting a non-terrorist site in northern Africa somewhere?
The missile(s) hit the Somalian chemical plant they were aimed at. Third-party examination of the site failed to reveal the evidence of chemical-weapon production that was the justification for targetting that particular bin Laden enterprise.
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Re #41: I was thinking of the one where he was accused of attacking "empty tents in the desert", actually, but that's another one. 'Course nowadays we're not supposed to question things like lack of evidence of chemical weapon production.
empty tents and chemical plants that made asperin should be proof of how good our intelligence operation is.
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So can pencil lead, apparently.
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Pencil lead = graphite. I just dont much like to use them words that contain "ph", they are kind of creepy.
On IRC I occasionally name myself ph.
Creep!
I'm not sure if graphite is used in nuclear weapons themselves, but it's used as a moderator in some nuclear reactor designs.
Re #51: AFAIK, nuclear weapons use materials like beryllium for neutron reflectors; they have no use for moderators like graphite. The reactors which *produce* weapons-grade Pu use it, though.
Yeah, that makes sense. I remember that the early reactors in the U.S. were basically big piles of graphite blocks.
A-yup, the "squash court reactor" at the University of Chicago (wonder what that area is now, and if you could find it using a scintillation counter to find neutron-activated materials?) was a natural-uranium, graphite-moderated "atomic pile". The nomenclature tells a great deal about the physical form, no? The N reactor at Hanford and the Soviet RMBK's were not terribly different in many respects.
<jaklumen lives not far from the deactivated N reactor>
(re#54: The site of the "squash court" is currently a campus library. One presumes that only geeks are exposed to the radiation.)
Which library is it exactly? Might be fun to traipse through it.
re#57: The one with the mushroom cloud statue out front.
I was kind of hoping that this library had a name and a street address to identify it. Sculpture tends not to be indexed well.
I thinks its called the Regenstein or something like that and it is west of Woodlawn on 57th I thinks. I know where it is exactly I jest can't tell you exactly.
You have several choices: